In my professional life (such as it is) I am a 6 Sigma Black Belt. For those who don’t know (most of you probably) that is a process improvement project manager. One of the tenets of Six Sigma is that you have to design the process to meet the needs of the customer, whoever that is. It is simply summed up as starting with the end goal in mind. This is applicable and important when we are talking about politics as well.

In the middle of policy fights, it is easy to get narrowly focused on the minutiae of the policy itself, while losing sight of the overall goals. This is even more of a problem when one does not have an overall set of goals in the first place.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

As Congress takes up its work again this week I thought it might be a good time to take a step back and think about what we want America to look like in the future. This is not about short-term policy fights or goals, but what it is we are working towards in the ten to fifteen year time frame. Politics is about compromise, sometimes galling compromises which progress towards the overall goal. By knowing what each of our overall goals are, we can more easily determine if the compromises of today are actually worth having or must be resisted to the end.

The Supreme Court put off the execution of a Texas convicted person whose DNA evidence was never tested in the case against him. For once, it looks like the highest court in the land ruled in favor of an individual. Hank Skinner has been allowed to live for awhile, at least until all doubts are settled. That is a basic standard of justice.

Last week an explosive report on the fall of a Wall Street titan was released to relative silence in large outlets. Will they give it the attention and analysis it deserves, or will the recent tendency to miss big stories reassert itself?

For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.

The refusal of Obama and the Democrats to investigate and prosecute BushCo criminals.

Conspiracy Theories have become so prevalent in America. Why?

A Rant About the DOJ and the Rule Of Law

We have seen, to our horror, what happens when a White House politicizes purely legal decisions or allows politics into decisions making processes that are solely the purview of law. Government lawyers from every agency are all working for an administration that either believes in the Rule of Law or it does not. And every one of you has a stake in the ethics and integrity of the legal decisions made by this administration.
Maybe it’s time for a Comey style mass resignation plan.

As we hear one of the war criminals after another exculpate himself by insisting that they didn’t torture, they enhance-interrogated, the criminality of torture seems a principle that only the liberals appreciate. Today, one of our representatives is seeking to re-establish that quaint value of human rights that the right wing wants to dismiss without any other ‘value system’ than its own.

Rep. Reyes has introduced a bill that seeks to return our country to a system of values that once we took pride in. That bill would re-establish torture as a crime.

That was supposed to be us, right?

The Guardian has the story of a recent British high court decision to release previously withheld details about the torture of Binyam Mohamed:

In a ruling that will cause deep anxiety among the security and intelligence agencies, they rejected [British foreign secretary David] Miliband’s claims, backed by the US government, that disclosure of a seven-paragraph summary of classified CIA information showing what British agents knew of Mohamed’s torture would threaten intelligence sharing between London and Washington, and therefore endanger Britain’s national security.

One of the key paragraphs states that there “could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of Binyam Mohamed by the United States authorities“.

It seems we have a lot in common with Iran.