Lubbock Left

I’m seriously geeking out over the newly-launched Recovery.gov website, both for historical-political reasons and for web design reasons. It’s a beautiful website with video, interactive charts, drag-able timeline, blog, contact form, and all sorts of goodies. It’s like someone turned on the light after being in the dark for eight years.

I mean, look at this gorgeousness:

I feel the same way I do when a movie I’ve been wanting to see finally arrives in theaters, or when a band I like is going to play a show in town.

If reform can be a pop culture phenomenon, then it’s this.

http://recovery.gov

More for posterity than anything else, here’s another exhasutive list of 125+ failures of the Bush Administration.

In the future, copies of these lists will be folded into origami shoes and thrown at GWB’s presidential library.

The race for Lubbock County Commissioner Precinct 3 is heating up. Perennial Republican candidate Frank Gutierrez is running against Democrat Gilbert Flores for the seat. Neither candidate is the incumbent; the office is currently held by Democrat Ysidro Gutierrez.

However, there’s a problem:

Frank Gutierrez’s signs, seen above, are illegal and misleading.

The signs are illegal because the word “For” does not appear between the name of the candidate and the office sought. This is necessary since Frank Gutierrez is not the incumbent.

The signs are deliberately misleading because Frank Gutierrez is a Republican, not a Democrat. Nowhere on the sign does it say that he is a Republican, and the sign has the word “Democrats” in big letters. Precinct 3 is a heavily Democratic precinct, and Frank Gutierrez is likely trying to pass himself off as a Democrat.

Lubbock County Democratic Party Chair Pam Brink held a press conference two weeks ago to address this issue, and she indicated that Gutierrez had a week to remove the signs before the Party filed an official complaint with the TEC. Two weeks later, the signs are still up.

I hope the Party has filed the appropriate complaint.

Raw Story has a great article about a recent planning conference for how to prosecute members of the Bush Administration for war crimes. Conference organizer Lawrence Velvel explains:

The ‘Bush war crimes conference,’ according to its organizers, is a “throwback to the framers of the constitution,” which aims to establish “necessary organizational structures” to pursue those guilty of war crimes “to the ends of the Earth.”

“The framers didn’t trust the federal government either,” said Velvel. “And oddly enough, over the years and decades, a strong distrust of government was once a Republican position. It was, at least, in theory. And then Bush came along and there’s this, well, my country, love it or leave it in the GOP … But now, you have people on the other side of the spectrum taking that very position.

“This is a conservative idea, to hold conferences and then take action to take power. Liberalism has been made fun of as mere self expression. I was very impressed by the desire in this group to take action.”

Of course, Vincent Bugliosi was there. His latest book is excellent.

Even our leaders need to understand that if they lie to the American people and violate basic standards human rights then they will be held accountable in our system of justice.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an interesting project that collects biographical information of those imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.

Here’s a taste:

“They would say they were taking me to isolation for three days, and then leave me there for three months,” Najib said. “Then they would bring me back to a cell, and three or four days later take me back to isolation. . . . I would say, and this is a guess, I spent 15 days a month in isolation.”

As a result, Najib, who was arrested by U.S.-backed northern alliance soldiers in November 2001 after he’d driven a load of Taliban fighters to surrender, was jailed at Guantanamo for more than four years.

This facility’s short life will be a black mark on our history. Reading the individual stories of the detainees really drives that point home.

Mother Jones Blog reports that a very convenient chunk of White House emails from the start of the Iraq War are missing completely:

The White House acknowledged in a court filing last night that it no longer has backup tapes of email from between March 1 and May 22, 2003, a period that includes the beginning of the Iraq war.

Meredith Fuchs from the National Security Archive comes to the logical conclusion of this dance of the missing emails:

“I honestly think they are just trying to run out the clock, and then it’s a huge mess. Maybe the court’s going to act quickly and we’ll get better preservation. That’s what we’ll hope for at this point.”

The Bush Administration legacy will be “hang on until we’re out of office and scandals can’t hurt us.”

Lubbock’s most accessible elected official is having another town hall meeting tonight at 6:00p.m. at Parsons Elementary (56th & Elgin). The meeting is for District 3 residents, but all are welcome. I’ve heard that there may be candidates for non-city positions there to speak as well.

Be there or be square!

Sometimes one picture says it all.

The Lubbock County Judicial Branch has released its 2006 statistical report, entitled CourTools Report II: Continuing Accountability through Measurement (pdf). This is the second year that Lubbock County has provided detailed accountability for their court system, and I applaud them for continuing this effort.

The CourTools reports track ten measurable areas of court performance:

1. Access and Fairness
2. Clearance Rates (outgoing cases vs incoming cases)
3. Time to Disposition
4. Age of Active Pending Caseload
5. Trial Date Certainty
6. Reliability and Integrity of Case Files
7. Collection of Monetary Penalties
8. Effective Use of Jurors
9. Court Employee Satisfaction
10. Cost Per Case

The first section of the 2006 report details the progress in each of the above ten areas. The second part, beginning on page 20, offers strategies for improvement in each of the ten areas.

I’m still reading through the report myself, but I wanted to take a minute to promote it here. Accountability is great, but only if citizens take the time to process the information that open government provides.

Very depressing news about a woman, alleging gang rape by her fellow KBR employees, who may have no legal recourse in the United States:

KBR Told Victim She Could Lose Her Job If She Sought Help After Being Raped, She Says

A nonprofit organization to help citizens in similar situations has been set up.

I hope that Jamie Leigh Jones gets her day in court (and not just private arbitration).