...Carlyle Capital invested in triple-A rated mortgage debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and like other investment vehicles it had leveraged its capital aggressively, borrowing $31 for every dollar of equity. As of February, it had $21.7 billion worth of assets in its investment portfolio. But as those investments lost value, creditors demanded that it put up more and more money in margin calls. A $150 million line of credit from its parent, the Carlyle Group, was not enough to keep it out of trouble as lenders demanded more collateral to back up their loans.
By Wednesday, it had already defaulted on about $16.6 billion of debt and some lenders started to liquidate assets. Talks to halt liquidations and revive the fund’s finances failed Wednesday night after the value of collateral declined further, prompting additional margin calls worth $97.5 million.
The announcement sent shudders through Asian and European markets as investors fear more funds, even those investing in highly-rated assets, could run into trouble. Banks are calling in loans or ask for more collateral as the value of assets backed by mortgage-securities continue to decline.
The collapse of talks between Carlyle Capital and some of its lenders, which include Bear Stearns, Bank of America, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, shows that a plan earlier this week by the Federal Reserve to back some assets like private mortgage bonds has not stopped banks from demanding more collateral....
Global stocks tumbled and the dollar fell further Thursday as the effects of Federal Reserve efforts to restore liquidity to financial markets faded and the investment fund Carlyle Capital succumbed to the credit crisis.
Carlyle Capital said it expected its lenders to "promptly" take over all its assets after talks with banks to refinance the fund failed. Its shares plunged more than 70 percent in Amsterdam, taking their loss for the past two weeks to more than 90 percent.
The Nikkei 225-stock average fell 3.3 percent, the Hang Seng index plunged 4.8 percent, and the S&P/ASX 200 declined 2.3 percent.
The dollar fell to as low as ¥99.78, a level it had not reached since 1995, while the euro rose to a new record of $1.5623.
Reuters reports that Carlyle Capital -- an affiliate of Carlyle Group that counts former President George H. W. Bush among its advisers -- can't pay back the $16.6 billion it owes banks. So its lenders are taking possession of its assets to try to recoup some of the money they lent. Interestingly, it said that the only assets held in its portfolio as of Wednesday were U.S. government agency AAA-rated residential mortgage-backed securities (MBSs). If these securities are indeed worth their AAA rating, I wonder how much of a "haircut" those lenders will take.
This latest collapse is evidence of two viciously destructive cycles in the global credit markets which government policy decisions are making even worse. The first cycle is driving down the stock market, setting inflation on fire, and hammering the dollar -- which is down 68% since 1/19/01 -- as the economy slows. The second cycle is reinforcing a chest-clutching decline in the value of the $6.1 trillion MBS market:
* The Bernanke call. As I've posted, this means that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's moves mark a ceiling below which the market keeps falling. The basic idea is that when the stock market falls, the Fed responds by flooding the market with money -- interest rates have fallen from 5.25% to 3% and are likely to hit 1% and then there's the "Term Auction Facilities" like this week's $200 billion month long swap of government securities for MBSs. The lower rates and added money spur inflation -- oil (+357% since 1/19/01), food prices rise (e.g., milk prices +12% in 2007) and gold futures hit $1,000 -- but do nothing to solve the basic problem -- which is to recapitalize banks. The market falls on the announcement of a new credit market problem, such as Carlyle's default, and the cycle begins anew.
* The MBS liquidation tumble. This vicious cycle ls driving down MBS prices with stunning speed. Sentiment is broadly negative and news of missed margin calls at large highly leveraged funds only elevates fear of a vicious cycle of more forced selling at deep loss, collateral shortfalls, and more missed margin calls. Today's announcement by Carlyle Capital is an example of this cycle in action.
Unfortunately, these two vicious cycles reinforce each other. The MBS liquidation tumble drives down the value of the very collateral that the Bernanke call is using in its latest effort to stop the credit crunch. The market will fall as a result and banks' MBS portfolios will have an even lower value than they did before. This will create a need for even more capital which they may try to raise by selling other, more liquid, assets.
[In other words, the value of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages is going to fall as well, making them less secure, and since they're basic parts of every mutual fund, it will hit a whole lot of small investors in the pocketbook. Mortgages are usually a conservative choice for investors because theoretically they *know* that X amount of money will be paid in on a schedule, so they're reliable. Not so much these days with the problems with refinancing and the "market fluctuations" that are driving up the interest on some loans, so much that people are defaulting on payment.]
Meanwhile, with the labor market heading south, people will find themselves squeezed between the rising prices of gasoline and food, their inability to borrow money, and their employers' unwillingness to pay them enough to keep up with their rising costs. This is reflected in an NBC/WSJ poll in which respondents said that they are worse off than they were four years ago.
It seems to me that the solution is for banks to write off all the bad assets and raise capital. (After writing this I read in today's Wall Street Journal that Nobel laureate Myron Scholes has made a proposal along these lines). I don't know why this is not happening, though several possibilities come to mind: there is not enough capital out there to refill their coffers, nobody knows how much those bad assets are worth, and/or the government does not want to be seen as bailing out the banks.
Sometimes society is faced with a choice between bad and worse. This is such a time.
Why am I interested in this? Well, it looks like a remarkable mistake being made by some very important people, and unlike Eliot Spitzer's zipper difficulty it will negatively affect many people's lives. The Carlyle Group has connections. Interestingly, their webpage is not loading today at http://www.thecarlylegroup.com. However, I have some links from articles I wrote a few years ago about them. This one from 2003 looks at the Carlyle Group's war profiteering. This 2002 article from The Nation looks at it as 'crony capitalism.' Who are the cronies?
...Under the leadership of [Frank] Carlucci, a former CIA deputy director who was Defense Secretary in the Reagan Administration, Carlyle has become the nation's eleventh-largest defense contractor, a major arms exporter to Saudi Arabia and Turkey, one of the biggest foreign investors in South Korea and Taiwan, and a key player in global telecommunications, wireless, real estate and healthcare markets. Since 1987 it has invested $6.4 billion in 233 transactions, with a rate of return of 36 percent on its completed investments. Carlyle currently has $12.5 billion invested....
...That's where Carlyle's global network of statesmen and former officials comes in. [Former President George H.W.] Bush is Carlyle's senior adviser on Asia and makes his money by giving speeches at Carlyle's investment conferences. [James} Baker, who was Bush's Secretary of State, is Carlyle's senior counselor and a member of the firm's Asia, Europe and Japan advisory boards. John Major, the former British prime minister, was named chairman of Carlyle Europe last year. Carlyle's advisory boards are peppered with corporate executives from Boeing, BMW, Toshiba and other big multinationals, and men of influence like former Bundesbank president Karl Otto Pohl, former Thai prime minister Anand Panyarachun and former US ambassador to Japan (and former Speaker of the House) Thomas Foley. Carlyle's new asset management group is run by Afsaneh Beschloss, the former treasurer and chief investment officer of the World Bank.
By hiring enough former officials to fill a permanent shadow cabinet, Carlyle has brought political influence to a new level and created a twenty-first-century version of capitalism that blurs any line between politics and business. In a sense, Carlyle may be the ultimate in privatization: the use of a private company to nurture public policy--and then reap its benefits in the form of profit. Although the fund claims to operate like any other investment bank, it's undeniable that its stable of statesmen-entrepreneurs have the ability to tap into networks in government and commerce, both at home and abroad, for advance intelligence about companies about to be sold and spun off, or government budgets and policies about to be implemented, and then transform that knowledge into investment strategies that dovetail nicely with US military foreign and domestic policy....
Now, I'm not a financier or economist; I can't give you chapter and verse on all of this. But I'd be very interested to learn more about what's going on and how it's going to affect all of us.
...By early evening, Carlyle Capital, a publicly traded affiliate of Carlyle that is incorporated on Guernsey, an island in the English Channel, was preparing an announcement that it could not meet the banks' demands. Carlyle Capital would collapse, and its investors would lose $900 million -- including Carlyle Group executives who owned 15 percent of the company.
The demise of the fund is a shock to the private-equity giant, long proud of its record of returning an average of 26 percent, net of fees, to investors of nearly 60 funds. Carlyle Group manages $81 billion in assets for unions, pensions, endowments, individuals and foreign governments. In the past two years, it returned $18 billion in profits and equity to its clients.
Carlyle Capital is now a blot on that record. The company's business was to borrow money to buy mortgage-backed securities, and to make money on the difference between the firm's borrowing costs and what it earned on the interest paid on the bonds.
Its stock closed at 35 cents a share yesterday after the fund defaulted on more than $16 billion in assets. The shares have dropped 93 percent since Tuesday....
Many investors think Carlyle Capital is only the tip of the iceberg. Drake Management's three hedge funds, with nearly $5 billion under management, recently suspended investor redemptions as it considers liquidating its assets. Nuveen Investments, purchased last year by Chicago private-equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners, faces lower profits and slower growth because of higher borrowing costs brought on by the credit crunch.
Peloton Partners, a hedge fund based in London, was forced to liquidate its funds recently, and Thornburg Mortgage, a big U.S. lender, failed to meet margin calls by lenders last week. Citigroup is committing $1 billion to shore up its hedge funds.
Analysts said the fear is that the banks will move more aggressively to seize assets from troubled funds, triggering a cycle that will make it difficult for funds to meet margin calls....
This is what a reordering of the world economy looks like in real time.
Don't think of yesterday's economic news as discrete events. They are small pieces of a much bigger reversal in a series of imbalances that made Americans feel richer than they were and created unsustainable distortions in the world economy that are now righting themselves.
Americans are consuming less, and their houses and other assets are becoming less valuable. Painful as they may be, in the long run, both trends must happen to restore sustainable growth. But in the short run, they are wrenching changes that are probably causing a recession.
The weaker U.S. economy, combined with low interest rates due to Federal Reserve rate cuts, has made traders around the world less inclined to buy dollars. Thus, the value of a dollar fell below 100 yen yesterday for the first time since 1995, and slumped to a new low against the euro. Unpleasant as that is for people planning European vacations, it should help cushion the blow to the economy by making U.S. exporters more competitive.
On the way up, a worldwide boom of cheap credit fueled consumer spending, kept the U.S. economy strong and artificially boosted the prices of real estate and other assets. Now the reverse is happening. Lenders made too much money available, taking on too much risk for too-low interest rates. The pullback is reflected in yesterday's other big business news, the default of Carlyle Capital, a fund operated by District-based private-equity giant Carlyle Group.
The Carlyle fund had increased its returns by borrowing money from banks to buy securities backed by mortgages. When the value of those securities fell and lenders demanded more collateral, lenders took control of the fund and began dumping its assets into a market that was already swimming in such securities.
Simultaneously, the lessening availability of credit is causing consumers to spend less. That causes lenders to be more cautious, making the credit problems more severe. It is what leaders of the Federal Reserve call an "adverse feedback loop."
There was clear evidence yesterday that Americans are spending less. The Commerce Department reported that retail sales fell 0.6 percent in February, a sign that consumers are bringing their spending more in line with what they can afford after a decade of spending beyond their means. Auto dealers and restaurants took the biggest hits, as people delayed purchases of new cars and saved money by eating in.
This pullback by consumers and reduction in credit availability are behind the increase in home foreclosures that RealtyTrac announced yesterday. The 60 percent jump reflects the fact that U.S. assets are becoming less valuable, making consumers poorer. With home prices down 8.9 percent in the past year (according to the Case-Schiller index), the dollar lower and stock prices down, we aren't as rich as we thought we were.
"The distress we are seeing in the credit markets, the pullback in consumer spending, the retreat in the dollar -- these are really all part of the same story," said David A. Rosenberg, chief economist at Merrill Lynch. "We had a dramatic overextension of credit and consumption growth for a long time."
In economics textbooks, such a rejiggering of economic forces happens in a nice straight line. In practice, it happens haltingly, with world markets on edge, day after day. Days like yesterday, full of jangled nerves and creeping panic.
Washington policymakers are trying to keep this adjustment of the world economy as orderly as possible, trying to prevent the economic undertow from hurting too many Americans.
In a survey released yesterday by the Wall Street Journal, 71 percent of economists said they thought the economy was in recession.
The Bush administration and the Federal Reserve stress that they're not trying to prevent fundamental adjustments. Home prices need to come in line with fundamentals, as do spending and savings rates. Credit needs to become available at prices commensurate with risk.
"It's by no means all bad that the U.S. is slowing down," said Adam S. Posen, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "Because at some point we've got to repay all the debt we have accumulated."
So policymakers have adopted strategies that don't stand in the way of that repricing. For example, this week the Fed agreed to let Wall Street firms obtain up to $200 billion worth of ultra-safe Treasury bonds in exchange for spurned mortgage debt, an effort to bring stability to that market. But it has refused to buy those mortgage assets outright, which would prop up their price.
The Bush administration has supported various proposals to make it easier for people to refinance into government-insured mortgages and has enacted a stimulus program to bolster consumer spending in the second half of the year by sending tax-rebate checks to 130 million Americans. But it has vehemently resisted proposals through which the government would buy mortgage debt.
"I've never seen a government be able to circumvent the business cycle in a capitalist economy, but at the same time, the government is going to pull out all the stops to minimize the instability," Rosenberg said. "The grim reality is that recessions are a part of life. It's like surgery. You don't feel good as you get out of the operating room, but inevitably there's a healing process and things get better."
When I moved to the DC area, nearly two decades ago, I was sharing a house with Peace Corps returnees and Capitol Hill temps and aides. One of the things we did one night, as a matter of mutual safety, was to compare notes on chickenhawks so we'd know who to avoid. These chickenhawks had nothing to do with war. These chickenhawks were Congressmen and highly placed officials who had a taste for backing pages and aides into a corner and feeling them up, or going further than that. They had all the power, the pages and aides had none, and they got away with it because nobody wanted to complain and chance losing a prestigious (if low-paying) job at the start of their government career.
It wasn't a secret who was a chickenhawk, not among staff and temps. The small group of us made sure we all knew who they were and how to avoid them. And, overall, we were a group that might not interest a chickenhawk because the youngest of us was 22, the oldest in his late 40s. Since that time, the chickenhawks whom I was aware of have left Congress but that doesn't mean they're all gone. The Foley scandal is proof of that.
There's so much out there on this that I'm going to try to put it in some sort of order and context, just to sort out what we do and don't know. (Not all paragraphs will have links -- but all of the detail below will come from stories linked on this page.) If any of the people involved are your representatives, I urge you to phone their offices and make your feelings about this situation known to them. (They may turn off the fax or ignore email, but they have to answer the phone.) And, because only a fragment of voters are even online, talk about this with other people you know who vote (or those who don't who might be inspired to vote to get the incumbents out of office.) Don't let it be buried under the rug:
A little background: Congressional pages are high-school-aged kids, usually from families with some connection to Congress, who get to run errands and do very minor clerical work for Congressmen as a way to learn more about how our government works. These are not interns, who are college-aged or just out of grad school, usually age 21-25 or so. These are high school kids.
...This fear of retaliation from today’s take-no-prisoners Republican power structure in Washington has been a little-noted subtext to the stories about Foley’s sudden resignation on Sept. 29 over his e-mails to pages since 2003.
The congressional pages who received the “creepy” e-mails “didn’t do anything beside telling other pages about it,” said Matthew Loraditch, 21, who runs the U.S. House Page Alumni Association’s Internet message board. Loraditch, a senior at Towson University, explained that three of the former pages have refused to comment, citing fear of long-term damage to their ability to land jobs. [Washington Post, Oct. 2, 2006]
Fear of retaliation also has limited the willingness of adult Republican staffers from commenting about the Foley case.
“One House GOP leadership aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, conceded that Republicans had erred in not notifying the three-member, bipartisan panel that oversees the page system,” the Washington Post reported.
Politics of Fear
In a very perverse way, the story of the e-mails and the pages does represent one of the fundamental lessons of working in today’s one-party Washington: Whether in politics, intelligence or journalism, avoid doing or saying anything that offends powerful Republicans....
So, in the context of Washington political/media society, which has cowered in fear before the Bush administration and its aggressive right-wing allies for years, it shouldn’t be surprising that bright high school students who go to Washington to serve as congressional pages would catch on to the most pervasive message of all:
In a one-party political system in which power in concentrated in a few hands, it is not wise to offend the people in charge, even when one of them is writing you sexually offensive e-mails.
(More examples of abuse of power in the pursuit of political and personal gain are quoted at the link.) More on that here from the Washington Post.
Among the many depressing aspects of the downfall of Mark Foley--who has now done the inevitable checking-into-rehab thing--is that a number of young people could have blown the whistle on this deceptive congressman in recent years, but didn't.
The Washington Post tracked down a couple of them. Former page Patrick McDonald said that at a 2003 reunion he learned of sexual messages that Foley sent three or four ex-classmates and thought, "if this gets out, it will destroy him."
Matthew Loraditch says he has known for years about the "creepy" messages the Florida Republican sent three of his 2002 classmates. But no one wanted to come forward. "You take down a Congress member, and you can't end up trying to do something later," Loraditch said.
Now I don't want to come down on 16-year-old kids (though some are now as old as 21) who must have been intimidated by the whole thing. Indeed, the power imbalance between a big-shot member of Congress and a lowly page is part of what makes this infuriating.
But did they really think that if they told the outside world that the co-chair of the Exploited Children's Caucus was sending them, or their friends, graphic sexual messages, that their future careers would be ruined? That they would be washed up in politics? Isn't it more likely that they would be hailed as brave for doing the right thing...
Of course, the kids who didn't say anything were just part of a cone of silence that protected Foley. The question now is to what extent House Republican leaders stayed under that cone when they should have been taking action....
Now, thanks to this WashPost report , we learn that the FBI had some of the e-mails in July and failed to launch an investigation. Did no one take this seriously?
By the way, did Denny Hastert think that reading a statement before the cameras and then refusing to take questions was going to promote the appearance of openness?...
I mentioned yesterday that the St. Petersburg Times (and, we now learn, the Miami Herald[)] obtained last fall the earlier, milder e-mail from Foley to a 16-year-old, asking for a picture, but did not publish a story. Florida blogger Bob Norman unloads on the Times:
"This explanation is incredible. They didn't print the 'accusations' because the underaged congressional page who was complaining that a congressman was flirting with him on-line didn't want his name published? I can't tell you how pathetic is. They had the e-mails, they knew who the page was, what his name was, and verified he worked on Capitol Hill. But because the kid didn't want his young life thrown into absolute turmoil and chaos, they wouldn't go with the story and they let an obvious sexual predator continue to stalk the halls of Congress.
"Thank God that Brian Ross and ABC News had more sense."
This Wall Street Journal editorial isn't about Foley, but it's not unrelated, either:
"Republicans have many explanations for their paltry record, some of them even accurate. The troubles in Iraq sapped Mr. Bush's support, dividing Republicans while uniting Democrats who saw a chance to regain power this fall. Hurricane Katrina blew away whatever hope there was of spending restraint and changed the national conversation from GOP priorities. And Tom DeLay's ethical troubles, and eventual ouster as Majority Leader, created a leadership vacuum.
"Yet none of this excuses the more fundamental problem, which is that too many Republicans now believe their purpose in Washington is keeping power for its own sake. The reform impulse that won the House in 1994 has given way to incumbent protection. This is the root of the earmarking epidemic, which now mars every spending bill and has become a vast new opportunity for Member corruption. This is also part of what corrupted felons Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, Jack Abramoff, Tony Rudy and Michael Scanlon. Power for its own sake also explains the House GOP's decision to join Senate Democrats in killing serious reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, despite $16 billion in accounting mistakes or fraud. The Members are in bed with the housing subsidy lobby . . .
"It is no credit to the performance of Republicans in this Congress that their best argument for re-election is the wartime flaws of their opponents."...
Here's the latest statement from Dale Kildee (D-MI), the (only) Democrat on the House Page Board, and he is furious:
In my 21 years as a Member of the House Page Board, every decision has been made on not just a bi-partisan basis but on a non-partisan basis, with our main concern always being the safety and wellbeing of the young teenagers who serve the U.S. House as pages.
I was outraged to learn that the House Republican leadership kept to itself the knowledge of Mr. Foley's despicable behavior toward the House Pages.
I am now equally outraged to learn that Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced today that there will be changes in the policies of the House Page program. Once again, I was not informed of the meeting today, nor was I consulted in any way about any proposed changes.
And once again, the House Republican leadership is following the same pattern of unilateral decision-making that caused this problem in the first place in the Mark Foley issue. Speaker Hastert's announcement this afternoon is yet another example of the House Republican leadership being more concerned with finding political cover for themselves than with the safety and wellbeing of the House pages.
You know, this is a very basic issue. The House leadership knew about -- and covered up for -- a child sex predator inside their very building. There's no goddamn "spin" that's going to make that go away. And in talking with other parents, I have to tell you -- anyone who is a parent is out for blood on this one. We can "disagree" over whether or not America should torture prisoners. We can "dispute" whether or not the President should be allowed to classify American citizens as "terrorists" based only on his own say-so, and lock them away without evidence or trial. We can "argue" over whether or not Tom DeLay's money laundering and the money laundering that has a goodly portion of the rest of the Republican House locked in ongoing scandal and indictment was only accidentally criminal, or astonishingly criminal.
But in the end, at the end of it all, you don't FUCKING COVER UP FOR A CHILD SEX PREDATOR. No. Matter. What.
What part of that do these people still not understand? I'm straight-up serious, here -- how do you get to the point where you are that depraved, that you think a man soliciting sexual information and meetings from sixteen year old kids over the internet -- and meeting them in person -- is "just another scandal"? Tony Snow? Brit Hume? Any of you folks, you wanna take that one on?
Hastert had better figure out damn quick that the rest of the country isn't messing around on this one. I don't know exactly how he got his GOP-style version of "morality" so twisted and decomposed that even this doesn't faze him, but he had better at least have the common sense to stand the hell out of the way.
Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act (SAFETY) of 2006 - Amends the federal criminal code to prohibit: (1) financial transactions that facilitate access to, or the possession of, child pornography; (2) the operation of a child exploitation enterprise; and (3) the use of deceptive wording or images to deceive persons, including minors, into viewing obscene material on the Internet.
Increases criminal penalties for: (1) registered sex offenders who commit a felony offense involving a child; and (2) activities involving the sexual exploitation of children and child pornography.
Amends the Victims of Child Abuse Act of 1990 to: (1) increase monetary penalties for willful failure of electronic communication service providers to report child pornography; and (2) impose new penalties for negligent failure to report.
Requires commercial website operators to place warning marks prescribed by the Federal Trade Commission on web pages that contain sexually explicit material.
Includes within the definitions of racketeering activity and money laundering the crimes of child pornography and child sexual exploitation. Expands civil remedies for victims of sex crimes against children.
Establishes in the Department of Justice an Office on Sexual Violence and Crimes against Children.
Authorizes additional (not less than 200) U.S. attorneys in FY2007 to prosecute crimes relating to the sexual exploitation of children.
Directs the Administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to increase the number of Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces.
Directs the Attorney General to make grants to states, local governments, Indian tribes, and nonprofit organizations to establish and maintain programs for the prevention of sexual offenses against minors.
Amends the USA PATRIOT Act to increase funding for regional computer forensic laboratories.
Foley also sponsored H.R. 4905, which provides for registration of sex offenders and notificaiton of their whereabouts; H.R. 3132, the Children's Safety Act of 2005; and H.R. 2423, to improve the national program to register and monitor individuals who commit crimes against children or sex offenses, all of which are in the House Judiciary Committee.
...The ultimate irony in this scandal is that up and until he got caught, Mark Foley was doing everything right—at least as far as the GOP’s base is concerned. Religious conservatives don’t seriously believe that gay men to become straight; they don’t believe in “ex-gays” anymore than still-gays do. (Wanna stop a straight person from making the ex-gay argument? Ask him if he’d let his daughter marry one.) They want us to be closeted, like Mark Foley, a single man and a public figure who refused to answer direct questions about his sexuality one way or the other. (Has any straight man ever refused to reveal his sexual orientation?) Just like Mark, the GOP’s base want all of us to deny who we are, to go without intimate adult relationships, to live our lives alone, and to refuse to answer all direct questions about our sexuality. To the GOP, Mark Foley was a good homo.
Which is probably why the GOP leadership was only too willing to cover-up for Foley. Foley had been covering-up for them for years—covering up his sexuality—so why shouldn’t they return the favor? So what if closet cases tend to act out in sexually inappropriate ways? A few raped altar boys and skeeved out congressional pages are a price the gay-haters are willing to pay if it means fewer out homos....
A new toll-free hotline has been installed for pages, former pages and their families to report incidents. How many will dare to use it? Will their calls reporting abusive situations be treated with the casual disregard that Foley's subjects found?
Blunt and other GOP leaders are quick to express outrage and call for investigations of Foley now that the story has been exposed, but where is the investigation of their handling of the matter when it was first brought to their attention? Why did they not at the time alert the three-member bipartisan panel that oversaw the page system? Where are the explorations of their connections to Foley? Roy Blunt's poltical action committee donated nearly $5,000 to Foley this year alone. Foley gave a thousand dollars to the gubernatorial campaign of Blunt's son, Matt Blunt.
The Republican response to charges that they should have acted forcefully and much earlier has been a weak excuse: they knew only of the initial emails, not the instant messages. That evasion is exposed and quashed by a reader at Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, and given emphasis here:
There's a weak excuse emerging from Republicans for Foleygate - they might have known about the e-mails to Rep. Alexander's page, but they never knew about the explicit IMs. Too much of the media coverage right now is centering on that question, as if knowledge of the IMs is the only way to show the leadership was remiss.
But that's irrelevant, and here's why: Once ABC got hold of the e-mails, it took them one day to flush out the IMs. That's what an actual investigation looks like. The Republican leadership simply didn't want to know how bad the Foley situation was. That's just as morally negligent as if they had started digging and found the IMs.
Roy Blunt's connections to the disgraced Foley demand an accounting of his role in the coverup of the Foley scandal. At least one Republican has shown the courage to call for a full accounting of the leadership:
Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, said any leader who had been aware of Mr. Foley’s behavior and failed to take action should step down. “If they knew or should have known the extent of this problem, they should not serve in leadership,” Mr. Shays said.
In a meadow near Windsor one fine day in 1215, King John, under pressure from disgruntled nobles, affixed his royal seal to the Magna Carta, clause 39 of which provided:
No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
The War on Terror is often framed as a clash between western champions of modernity and the medieval mindset of Salafis. Yet these days our own commitment to even medieval guarantees of due process often seems, at best, half-hearted. As The Washington Post reported on Sunday, the Pentagon and CIA are developing "long term solutions" for terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay and various CIA facilities whom the government intends neither to release nor, due to lack of evidence, to try in court. Proposals include the construction of "Camp 6" (a belated sequel, perhaps, to Slaughterhouse Five), a $25 million prison to house 200 people. Indefinitely.
Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations committee, has already distanced himself from the idea, agreeing with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) that "some modicum of due process" is required before even foreigners are imprisoned for life. Yet with details still maddeningly vague at this stage, nobody seems entirely sure yet just what makes a modicum.
The Supreme Court's ruling in Rasul v. Bush this summer established that detainees at Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray have a right to some sort of review of their designation as enemy combatants. Most of the 550 prisoners (a term the administration continues to reject—"detainees," please) still held at Guantanamo have since been affording such a hearing. Two have been recommended for release. This indicates either that the military did a remarkably good job of filtering when, prior to the Court's decision, it released some 200 prisoners deemed of little intelligence value, or that these "combatant status review tribunals" have a distinctly marsupial character. In November, Washington, D.C., Disctrict Court Judge James Robertson ordered a halt To the trial by tribunal of Salim Ahmed Hamdn, alleged to be Osama bin Laden's chauffeur, repudiating "the government's argument that the President has untrammeled power to establish military tribunals," and some 50 other detainees have filed challenges to the review process, alleging that it fails to provide due process.
Civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate, who writes about the rights of detainees in a January reason cover story, suspects the government may attempt to sidestep the controversy by "plunging into one of the glaring loopholes in the Supreme Court's decision. The Court's ruling in Rasul turned on its finding that, despite being located on Cuban soil, Camp X-Ray is de facto under the "complete jurisdiction and control" of the United States. That leaves open the possibility, says Silverglate, that a U.S.-sponsored prison on foreign soil, over which another government exercised greater nominal control, might escape such scrutiny. And if the 9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act, passed by the House of Representatives this fall, is any indication, legislators are eager to make it easier for the Director of Homeland Security to render aliens into the hands of foreign governments, whether or not they have any connection to the country to which they're being sent....
We decided long ago, at least when it comes to domestic justice, that there are abysses into which a free society will not stare, even at the cost of assuming significant risk. But when those same risks come clothed in the words war and terror, we become suddenly timorous, fearful of holding ourselves to even dramatically watered down evidentiary standards lest we release one guilty man along with 10 innocents.
We are at war. But even wars have rules, and even prisoners of war are supposed to be tried for war crimes or, at war's end, released. The rules are trickier now: Absent the prospect of signing a treaty for cessation of hostilities with a denationalized radical ummah, the war isn't over until we say so. For practical purposes, if the government has its way, that will mean we assume the power to watch men, so long as they're foreigners, grow old and die in a cage, either here or abroad, without affording them even the mildest presumption of innocence. If we genuinely believe that freedom is "God Almighty's gift to each and every person in the world," we must step back from that abyss.
I've been thinking back to that Camelot time, before Bush, before 9/11. One thing stands out for me as the most broad-ranging change from that time: the loss of the unobserved life.
Unless you live in the countryside, several miles from a village, it is probably impossible now to have a private life, a life in which what you do is your affair. I'm not talking about the habitual gossip that is at the core of social matters in small towns, but the relentless mechanical gathering of observation and fact by government that is now connected from the lowest to highest levels. Even in the countryside, if you use the public library, you risk government observation of your choice of reading material, without your consent or knowledge. If you write mystery novels and want to do research on various methods of killing people, or historical events that involve explosion or subterfuge, you might be better off finding a friend who owns a lot of books than going to the hitherto sacred realm of the public library and doing legitimate research -- better off, that is, if you treasure your privacy.
Run a stop sign in Idaho, and your license plate is captured along with your photo, and easily accessible in Florida where you didn't pay a parking ticket. Try to disappear from a bad marriage (for whatever reason) by moving out of state and show up on some security camera elsewhere, which makes you easily trackable by anyone with access to the photo. Your phone is tapped, including your cell phone, by faceless government workers and machines that store everything you say, regardless of context -- "It's da bomb!" as well as "Oh, that performance bombed" could easily be triggers these days to start recording -- without your consent or knowledge. Your every keystroke can be captured by software such as this, whether you're writing reports or answering email, or answering a silly online poll or planning a family reunion.
I'm not arguing with the genuine law-enforcement purpose involved here. I'm looking at this from the other direction, from the viewpoint of a private person. In all this haste to capture information on people, whether it's personally tagged or simply abstracted into a database, there's little to no consideration of what is being lost here -- the integrity of personal privacy, the simple liberty of the unrecorded life. Instead, we have the presumption of wrongdoing implicit throughout everyday life, replacing the presumption of innocence before proven guilt.
Back then, during Camelot, on a nice spring day I could take a book down to the National Mall and sit on a park bench under an elm tree. I could watch people playing frisbee on the lawn, or running, or walking their dogs. I could practice sketching the red sandstone Smithsonian Castle or the other beautiful buildings in the area. Now? Depending on the status of the alert level, if I were to sit there sketching I'd be inviting a visit from the nearest FBI agent to ask my designs upon the safety of that building. But there's no reason to go there now to sit, with the grass blocked by fences to keep people from using it, and the constant awareness of security cameras everywhere. It's like trying to be private in the middle of a Peeping Toms convention. Tourists, of course, don't notice a thing; they think this is normal, or at least within the definition of normal that they ascribe to DC or any other largish city, when it isn't normal at all.
If I walk down the street now in any city, surveillance cameras watch me and record my every movement from one place to another, block to block, storefront to storefront. Suppose I want to check my wallet to make sure I have enough change to get a cup of coffee at the sidewalk stand. I can't see all the cameras; there's no way for me to know exactly who's looking over my shoulder. How do I check my money (a legitimate private activity) without letting unknown people see some or all of the numbers on my credit cards? With the rise in credit card fraud in this country, why hasn't anyone asked how many people have been looking over the shoulders of the people whose identities are stolen? And, with the recent consolidation and coordination between departments from the local village cop all the way to the FBI and CIA, there's an awful lot of people who have access to all this information.
Suppose, as I'm walking down the street, I'm talking with a friend about a personal issue; what guarantee do I have that what I say isn't being picked up by microphones, or captured on camera by someone who is skilled at lipreading? Perhaps we were talking on the street because there was nowhere else to speak privately enough, in terms of family and friends and colleagues -- because offices are under surveillance now as much as streets are, and there's no way to know if one or more of those cameras is aimed at your urban apartment's windows. How private are our words? When even washrooms are surveilled, how much privacy do we have in our most despairing moments?
It's no wonder the stress level in DC and elsewhere in this country has gone sky-high. What ordinary people need these days is a way off the merry-go-round, a space in which they can be themselves without the stress of being watched, without constantly feeling the unknown eyes on the back of the neck. I can count on one hand how many people I know who are not on antidepressants or mood enhancers, and have a few fingers left over, and I can't help thinking that this constant observation, this sense of always being at the wrong end of the microscope, is contributing to the everpresent stress.
I suppose the question has to be asked: how much do you trust the police? My answer is that I don't know them. There are a lot of police out there -- nine or so organizations that I can think of offhand, with varying and overlapping jurisdictions, such as DC cops, Montgomery and Arlington and Prince George's county police, state troopers in Maryland and Virginia, National Park police, military police at the Pentagon, Capitol Police, security details at official buildings and so on. I don't know the vast majority of them. I have no idea how seriously they take their sworn oaths to uphold the law. I have no idea whether they can be trusted not to use what they see to their personal advantage on days when people's charge card numbers are easily seen, or how often they might tune in to private conversations of private individuals for their own amusement. I've been told it happens. I don't like thinking that my life is someone else's Truman Show.
The thing is, it's not just something that happens in DC now. It's something that happens where you are, wherever you are. Flashpasses allow vehicles to be tracked wherever they go on major roads. Traffic observation cameras can make sure your whereabouts are known in Kansas and Arizona as much as in Michigan or Minnesota or Connecticut. Wherever you are, you can be found without even using a charge card. It's probably a little more likely in the west than in the east in some ways, because the cities are more recent and the technology is newer, so there's less difficulty in upgrading from minimal to maximal surveillance. Don't think that because you're out in the country you entirely escape this; it's possible to zoom in on Google Earth and see which roofs were repaired in the neighborhood, and that's just the publicly available photos. I understand the resolution on some of the photos we don't see is so good that these letters I'm writing onscreen could be read.
And with the Cheney-Specter surveillance bill that would allow anyone to be spied on officially for up to a year without warrant, what guarantee is there that someone didn't break into your house and install a few bugs and cameras without your consent or knowledge, just because you sat on the subway or bus next to someone they consider suspicious?
So where do you go on a bad day, when you want to be by yourself, when you want not to have official voyeurs cataloguing and chronicling your every move? When you can't go to many public parks without having every footstep recorded? How far is this kind of technology going to erode simple private liberty? Are you certain you aren't being watched now, as you read this, wherever you are? What places are left in which one might be able to live quietly without the ever-present consciousness of being the object of attention of official and faceless voyeurs, whose motives and rules are largely unknown and whose integrity and lack of malice toward those who are observed may be questionable?
The standard reply to all of this, of course, would be to accuse me of being unpatriotic, and a danger to the safety of the entire country. But that's missing the point. I've already conceded, above, that there are valid security issues here. What I'm concerned about are the civil losses. When government at any level undergoes a taking, such as condemning land for public use, it is supposed to provide compensation for what is taken. Through the unvarying and omnipresent eyes of cameras government has taken the liberty of our privacy, the integrity of our ability to live our lives quietly outside of the public eye -- something that was unquestionably ours until six years ago. We have no recourse for seeking compensation; what compensation could there be, for so great a loss?
9/03/2006 11:59:00 AM
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Remembering where we came from, this time around
The United States has an extremely short view of history. Much of this may be due to people forgetting just what went on before 1776, and concentrating on the enormous changes that occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Often now, though, people's 'long view' barely stretches back to World War I a century ago. I don't see this happening in other countries. France has no trouble thinking back to Charlemagne or the Romans. In Ireland, I was asked if I wanted to see Clontarf, where the Vikings were pushed into the sea in 1040 --"Don't worry, we've cleaned it up a bit since then". In some cities in Switzerland, the "new" bridge is 600 years old and the old bridge is 2,000 years old; the new one is timber, the old one is stone and both are used daily. A lot of the houses in other countries were built before 1492 and are still lived in, and that's not even counting the millennia of history of India and China.
So it comes as no surprise that a lot of Congressional representatives and Senators have forgotten where they came from, where their families came from, how they arrived here and how they made their way to their current situation.
In the broadest sense, everyone in this country is a child of immigrants. If you want to take a slightly less broad sense, consider that a lot of the people who came here in boats, above or below or between decks, pushed around the people who were already here to the point that very few are living on their ancestral land. And it wasn't uncommon for the people who were already here to have done a bit of that as well. Some of the five nations that made the original Iroquois Confederacy moved down into what's now New York from the St. Lawrence Valley hundreds of years ago, dislodging the Erie people who moved west and the Neutral Nation who were absorbed into the westernmost Iroquois tribe, the Seneca -- and even older tribes and nations whose names I don't know. A lot of people today tend to forget this, as they drive or walk or live in places whose original names were given by people in cultures that don't exist any more, or that are little remembered. Everyone knows about the beer that made Milwaukee famous; who knows what "Milwaukee" means? Or Chilicothe? Or Alabama? Or Oregon?
Here's how it was, all the way along: people were here, living their lives, and new people came and lived with them. Some of the people who were here already didn't like it and tried to push the newcomers around -- and because the people who lived here longer generally had more money, they sometimes pushed pretty hard, with riots and deaths, and sometimes with whippings and stonings, and sometimes with burning people out, and sometimes with ignorance and bigotry and sometimes with prejudicial laws. But over time, the people who had just arrived somehow became the people who were already there, and someone else new came in who had to face what the people-who-were-already-there-at-that-point would do. And onward it went.
Where I grew up, the kids of the old-line Dutch and German and English families, whose great-great-great grandparents had arrived here in the early 1800s, tried to lord it over the Polish and Irish and Italian and Central European and Hispanic kids; the black kids generally were outside that scuffle because their ancestors had been here a long time, too, and their families were as working-class as the rest of us newcomers. I remember that kind of hostility going on through high school, as if the culture your family came from or the amount of time your family had been living in the school district made any difference in how well you'd do on the chemistry final. There were a few gangs, but they were interracial and turf-based, more concerned with looking cool in their denim jackets and picking up girls at the bowling alley that they were with history; they also got into fights with the gangs from the other towns, once after a brawl in a spectacular car crash that changed a lot of people's lives. This was just outside a city where the local mob A Team and B Team a few years later were knocking off players on the opposite teams with car bombs. It wasn't easy being Italian in that city for a long time. (As you may guess, I see racism as a subset of bigotry, because some of the nastiest bigotry I've ever seen was between people who shared skin color but not cultural background and beliefs.)
Think about the current Administration, and think about Congress, the House and the Senate. How many of the people who were elected or appointed to these positions come from families whose parents arrived in this country during the 1900s, during the immigration of Germans and Italians and Poles and Central Europeans and Jewish refugees of all countries from Nazi camps, and Vietnamese and Cambodians and Chinese and Laotians and Indians? Not to mention the immigration of war brides (and eventually children) from every country where US troops went? How many of the officials' parents arrived here during the 1800s, mostly from Europe, fleeing the potato famine or the Napoleonic wars or the revolutions of 1848? How many of their ancestors fought in the US Civil War? How many fought in the Mexican War of the 1840s, or the War of 1812? How many were here for the Revolution -- or were pushed out to Canada as Tories, losing land and possessions but keeping their lives, and might have moved back to get jobs in Chicago or New York a few decades later when the Industrial Revolution made the American cities a drawing point for labor? How many had ancestors who were here from the start, either arriving in the first ships or meeting the ships? Or, in the Southwest, ancestors who always lived in that area, under whatever government or ruler, until wars resulted in border lines drawn that divided families and someone had to decide which way to go? Chances are that the vast majority of our elected officials come from familes who didn't get off the first boat at Plymouth Rock; chances also are that anyone whose family has been in some parts of this country for more than a century and a half has ancestors who were here five hundred years ago as well, not that most people realize this. And all of these people, from whatever place, however long ago, have become part of what we know as America. What we think of as Middle America, the culture of the Great Plains, inland from the more obvious international influences that affect coastal cities and states, grew out of a combination of influences from German, Scandinavian, English, Scottish, Mennonite and other cultures. It's becoming seasoned now in some places by an influx of refugees from Southeast Asia; within another generation, that too will change. Just because it changes more slowly than on the coast does not mean it does not change at all.
Why should this matter, in terms of how they do their jobs? It shouldn't, and most times it doesn't. Whether I agree with their positions on the issues or not, the majority of our legally elected officials are intelligent, capable people. But the one place it does matter is when they try to make laws about immigration, and forget who they themselves are and where they came from. This time around the wheel, if you don't remember where your family came from, someone might remind you. I suspect that many of the members of Congress who want to close the door are acting a lot more like the Chili Boys and the Riga Boys drawing lines around the local bowling alley. But make no mistake: the current immigration discussion fighting its way through Congress has very, very little to do with the actual security of this country, and much more to do with two other things: the desire of neoCon Republicans to impose their will on everyone else, including the paranoid xenophobia they share with some Administration officials that want to see this country turned into a totalitarian state.
The other -- largely unacknowledged -- reason that the Republicans don't want more immigrants is the historical fact that immigrants tend to vote liberally, with the Democrats or whatever other party wanted to enlarge the social safety net and give them a place to be at home. Republicans are scrambling to continue to control Congress in the face of rising public disapproval of Administration policies, and if they lose control of either Senate or House the political landscape may well undergo a sizeable earthquake.
...With ultimate approval of the Senate committee bill unlikely, the most attractive alternative outcome would be for the immigration issue to blow up in the face of hot-headed congressional Republicans who want to build a Berlin Wall along the U.S.-Mexican border and catapult as many illegal aliens as possible back across it. You'd think they were in possession of some latter day version of the Zimmerman Telegram.
An exploding immigration debate would, unfortunately, barely singe many of the House Republicans who forced through a mean-spirited joke of an immigration bill late one night in December on a largely party-line 239-182 vote. Nary a trace of a guest-worker program, supposedly a non-negotiable demand by Bush, appears in the House bill.
Many of the House bill's supporters come from crassly gerrymandered seats that allow them to stake out the most reactionary position without much fear of voter retribution. "Very white representatives in very safe Republican districts," noted Alan Hoffenblum, himself a Republican political consultant in Los Angeles.
A stalemate on immigration could be less attractive for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., who has expressed determination to all but personally string barbed wire atop a new border barrier from Brownsville to San Diego. Another Frist flop would perfectly bookend a year-long run of political miscalculation by the grasping 2008 presidential prospect that began with his butting into the Terry Schiavo case.
What would the Republican right, whom Frist has been trying to smarm up to, think if the mighty leader cannot deliver on his border-blocking promise? They'll think what some already think of Frist: not much.
Frist has tried to play a legislative game of chicken on immigration, saying he would call up this week his own intemperate proposal if the Judiciary Committee did not produce a bill.
But now that the committee has, Frist must decide if it's dangerous for his political health to allow a final Senate vote on a bill that would be likely to draw a majority of Democrats and just enough Republican votes to ensure passage.
Republicans who point with assurance to national polls that show growing anti-immigrant sentiment may need to be reminded that there were similar polls in California in the mid-1990s when Republicans rallied behind Proposition 187, a measure to deny state services to illegals.
The measure passed but was thrown out in a court challenge. Of more partisan importance, Republicans have never recovered their footing in the nation's most populous state.
"Republicans in Congress better beware," said California consultant Hoffenblum.
Hispanics can interpret the anti-immigrant message as "unless you look like us and talk like us we don't want you to vote for us," Hoffenblum said.
The angst in Congress contrasts sharply with largely joyous pro-immigrant demonstrations around the country, prompting political scientist Sherry Bebitch Jeffe of the University of Southern California to remark on the political effects of the debate that so many conservatives have been demanding: "It energizes the Democratic base and splits the Republican base."...
I have not heard yet whether one of the most insidious bits of the immigration reform has been removed from the House or Senate bills: the section that would say that children born in the US of illegal immigrants would not be US citizens. If anyone hears anything on that, please comment.
I suspect that when talk is raised on 'detaining' illegal immigrants -- such as the thousands of illegal Chinese immigrants that China doesn't want back -- this is where those secret detention camps may come into use. I hate that my country is trying to turn itself into the USSR with its gulag archipelago. Damn it, we're supposed to know better than that.
3/29/2006 10:23:00 AM
Monday, March 20, 2006
So, what will life be like without the Fourth Amendment?
...Our effort to take America for Christ is now a peculiar cultural artifact, a curiosity gathering dust on the shelf of early 20th-century history. We built triumphant monuments to our importance. At the Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C., a prime, front-pew seat features a plaque marking where the President of the United States should sit when he attends—not unlike churches in Constantinople that once featured imperial boxes for the emperor to ride his chariot into without having to dismount. But Caesar's seat goes empty these days, even with a Methodist President.
This is not to denigrate monuments from a more triumphant age of mainline Protestantism—many such places still do fine ministry. But church influence on politics is fickle. "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's," our Lord says. The last people in the world who want to be caught dead pledging allegiance to the wrong Lord ought to be evangelicals.
I expect you'll amen this general warning, but let the preacher step on a few toes. I understand why you support the war on terror, for instance—to defeat evildoers, to spread democracy. But remember that a just war in the Christian tradition, according to many theologians, requires penance by its wagers—not celebration. Christians ought to be the most eager repenters around.
I know you are used to being a persecuted minority, but isn't it time to drop the inferiority complex, rule graciously, and love your enemies, even if they are liberal? I know politics makes strange bedfellows, but do you really want to be allied with foul-mouthed know-it-alls on AM radio or with politicians who don't care a lick about Jesus?...
...These people are absolute lunatics; they have had a complete break with reality. And any elected official who supports this categorical balderdash about the judiciary “overruling” god is committing treason, plain and simple. They are quite literally betraying a fundamental principle upon which this nation was founded as laid out in the Constitution, which they swore to uphold. I’m tired of pussyfooting around this bullshit. They’re angling for a theocracy, and that’s patently unacceptable. Cornyn, Brownback, DeLay, and any of their godshill compatriots who support this bullshit need to be immediately censured and removed from Congress if they cannot commit to upholding the separation of church and state as they are required to do....
Meet the four horsemen of the Constitutional apocalypse: Republican Senators Mike DeWine, Olympia Snowe, Lindsey Graham, and Chuck Hagel. "Apocalypse, what hyperbole!" you say. But how else to label the fact that these four Senators will bring to the Senate a billowing white flag of surrender, and a crown for their King?
Yesterday, these four Senators introduced the "Terrorist Surveillance Act of 2006." The bill would legalize the President's crimes. It would allow this Congress to rubber-stamp the administration's violation of FISA and the Fourth Amendment by condoning warrantless spying. According to their ass-backwards approach to oversight, the President can continue to spy on Americans without a warrant for 45 days. After 45 days, the President has three choices:
1. "Stop" the spying: Because naturally, we can trust this government to cease and desist on demand, given its amazing track record of self-restraint; 2. Ask the FISA court for a court order: Because naturally, this President has shown great respect for the FISA court process and would dutifully follow Congressional directives when it comes to applying for a FISA order; or 3. Inform the Intelligence Sub-committee: Because, of course, the President has proven he can be trusted to follow the law and notify intelligence activities about warrantless spying. The bill is co-sponsored by four so-called "moderates" in order to hide its radical and catastrophic nature. What these four extremists accomplish with their bill is to amend the Constitution unilaterally--without the consent of the states--by nullifying the Fourth Amendment. Warrant? Reasonable cause? Psssh. Remnants of a pre-9/11 world, my friends.
Their bill, by making congressional notification optional, also effectively repeals the National Security Act of 1947, which requires the President keep the House and Senate Intelligence Committees "fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities." If the administration does chose to inform the Intelligence Sub-Committee, the members on that committee cannot disclose any abuses they may learn of. They can't order the government to stop the spying and they can't hold the government accountable for any abuses. Their mouths are sealed shut. Their hands are bound with inaction. They can do nothing but serve as audience for an all-powerful King. As Senate Judiciary Chairman Specter commented, this bill lets the administration "do whatever the hell it wants." And this is "oversight"? The sadder question that needs to be asked is is this America anymore?...
You want to do your good deed for the day? Contact your Senators and tell them to reject the DeWine bill and go for censure. You can find your Senators' contact information here at http://www.senate.gov, listed by state.
Why am I so hot on this issue? Several reasons: Drilling will have permanent -- as in thousands of years -- ecological consequences, including ruining the breeding grounds for the Porcupine caribou herd, which migrates from ANWR to the Yukon and back every year. The Gwi'itchin people in the Yukon are some of the last of the caribou people -- they hunt caribou to survive, and if the herd does not come, they will starve. It would not be outside of bounds for Canada to look unkindly upon the US if its residents' wellbeing is threatened. Do we really want our longtime northern neighbor on the other side in a war? I'd rather avoid that if possible. I'd rather keep the untouched ANWR untouched, a place for animals and for the people whose ancestors lived there, not ruin it for the sake of three months' worth of oil.
3/20/2006 02:57:00 PM
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Requiescant
Twenty years ago I was working on the copydesk of a small Western NY daily newspaper, taking the news from the city and regional editors and making and remaking the front page of the local section. The editor who usually did this had been promoted, and I was filling in until someone else could be named. We did four editions a day -- for nearby Pennsylvania, for the rural county east of us, for our own county and for the city itself -- so it could be complicated work. Stories would be written and edited for one or another edition, but might carry over with the same or a different headline, or might have to be cut to size to fit a different newshole on the next edition. Headlines would be written and sized to fit a space, then rewritten for another space. Every time it was a jigsaw puzzle with no perfect answer, 120 column inches that had to be filled, piece things together how I might.
The managing editor had decided that for once we all should have access to history as it happened -- we were not allowed to have radios at our desks -- so she wheeled out the small television she kept in her office to let us see and hear the Challenger launch. Local school districts had been doing special projects on space because teacher Christa MacAuliffe was aboard, and I was pleased to see the women astronauts as well, all ready to go.
The narrator -- I don't know who, or which station, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't someone well known -- was out at the viewing range with the MacAuliffe family and the families of the other astronauts. That was a set of bleachers well over a mile away from the launch site, in the bright clear sunshine with the crystal blue sky in the background. Then the audio on the tv gave out, someone in Sports said something rude and someone else replied, and the managing editor brought out a radio and turned it on to the corresponding station so we were still getting the same audio.
I had worked briefly in radio a few years earlier, and had at one point qualified as a third-class radio engineer (a level that doesn't exist now). One of the rules that had been impressed on me was the FCC regulation against dead air -- no more than three seconds should go by without something being said or done, because air time was expensive.
We all stopped editing and writing as the launch began. The reporters left their desks to get a better view. Even the sports department, on the other side of their low wall, stood and leaned on the wall to get a good view over the heads of the seated editorial staff.
The countdown. The launch.
We watched the plume of white smoke rise against the blue. The narrator's voice fell silent.
The plume split into a flower with half a dozen petals that began to fall back to earth, dark bits at their edges.
No sound of voices, not from the narrator, not from those of us in the room.
Ten seconds. A minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. A stammer and more silence.
"I'm not sure what we just saw..." the narrator began, as the horrified relatives next to him stared in shock.
But that two minutes of silence had told me, without anyone else saying a thing. Challenger had exploded, and so had the lives and dreams of everyone involved with it. And nobody was left alive.
The managing editor looked over at the slot editor, in charge of the front page. "Get ready to remake." He nodded, and got up to go talk to the composition staff, who did manual paste-up, to ask them to take apart the front page for the AP stories that were already clattering through the wire.
And we all went back to work. The editor wheeled the television quietly into her office again, took away the radio, and we did our jobs, without the usual chatter and jokes.
About 15 years ago, when bulletin boards were still fairly big and nobody'd heard of blogs, I spent a lot of time reading posts on a board that discussed current events and recent history, and one of the other posters said he'd seen the unofficial background report on the Challenger disaster that wasn't being released. He posted it anonymously to the board, and I read what he posted. It was scans of official-looking papers, with some bits blacked out. It discussed what could be determined from the wreckage that had been found. The NASA investigators could tell from the different bits of wreckage which panel it had been, in front of which person, and what had been done. Switches had been thrown, and various sorts of emergency buttons had been pushed. They'd known. They'd tried to stop what was happening, to shut down that engine. They'd tried to eject, in the hope that an emergency chute would be protection against a mile-deep drop. At the end it had been lightning fast, but there had been two minutes before that, when they'd known.
And for a week, all I could see wherever I looked was crystal blue sky and a white smoke flower with dingy tips to its petals, getting bigger and bigger.
After 9/11, I walked outdoors and stared up at the deep blue sky, unstreaked by contrails or smoke, and wished for rain, snow, fog, hail -- anything but a clear blue sky betokening disaster. Even now, if there are no clouds anywhere, the back of my throat gets dry and my stomach is uneasy.
1/28/2006 08:42:00 PM
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
The Christian Coalition has plans for '06; what will you do?
This link takes you to the Christian Coalition's Agenda for 2006. Let me paraphrase them to reduce the level of jargon and add some context: 1. Require broadcasters to carry Christian programming on cable and satellite media; currently, cable services 'bundle' stations, which means that subscribing to X also gets you A, B, C and Y. There is a move on to go to an a la carte system, which would mean the low-audience Religious Right televangelists would see a huge shrinkage in their audience. Requiring "Christian" programming is an attempt to prevent consumers from being able to choose what they want to see; it also affects "Christian" programming advertising dollars, as advertising fees are based on audience size.
2. Confirm Alito and anyone else Bush nominates.
3. Make permanent the 2001-2003 tax cuts on the wealthiest sector of Americans (who will never have to balance bills to pay and food to eat) so that the burden of taxes falls more heavily on the middle class and the poor.
4. Pass the "Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act", to give further rights to the unborn over those who are already here, trim away at women's right to abortion and choice over what happens to their own bodies, and extend the opinions of the minority to rule the many.
5. Pass "broadcast decency enforcement" legislation to impose Religious Right views on all broadcast programming, regardless of the views or desires of the rest of Americans.
6. Support legislation "stopping religious discrimination against Christians in the military", which appears to allow chaplains to evangelize for the Religious Right instead of doing their actual job of offering aid and comfort to any member of the military who asks it. Check back on what happened at the Air Force Academyfor more details.
7. Passing the "Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act", which would keep relatives who are not parents from taking a minor across state lines for an abortion. (I have written about this in the past, as this is an upgrading of Texas legislation; the Texas law made no exception for girls who were impregnated by family members or whose parents are in jail. Other family members were to be arrested and charged with felonies if they attempted to help the girl; so were any friends or others who might offer her a ride to a clinic. Molly Ivins also wrote about this.)
8. Passing HR 235, "Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act", which effectively removes churches and religious organizations from the IRS restrictions on involvement in direct political activity. Tax-exempt religious organizations are forbidden to endorse a specific candidate now, or provide a venue for direct political activity, though they are allowed to hold discussions of issues.
9. Passing in the Senate a House bill "protecting the 10 Commandments" by prohibiting the use of funds to enforce a US District Court ruling from the Southern District of Indiana in January 2005. (I don't have more info on this, but I suspect it's similar to the Ten Commandments issue in Alabama.)
10. Remove RU-486, the morning-after pill, from the market "until there is an investigation", again interfering with women's Fourth Amendment rights to the ownership of their own bodies.
The President of Christian Coalition of America, Roberta Combs said, "There is so much unfinished business which needs to be addressed during the Second Session of the 109th Congress. However, the most important business in January will be ensuring that Judge Samuel A. Alito is confirmed as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, since that -- along with the successful confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts and other U. S. Circuit Court judges -- will determine the course of American culture for at least a generation. The 2004 election has shown that America has become more conservative and concerned about the deterioration of the culture and Americans want a change. Christian Coalition will devote whatever resources are necessary to confirm President Bush's Supreme Court nominees, including Judge Alito, and his other nominees to the Circuit Court of Appeals."
Now you know what's coming. Take note. Talk among yourselves (yes, you in the back seats, too) and make plans. What can you do to preserve your rights and civil liberties in the face of these planned assaults against your civil rights and civil liberties? Think about it -- and go do something. It's not a great secret any more, is it?
If you want to do just one small thing, pick one of these issues, find out everything you can on it, and spread the word where you are, among the people you know. Word of mouth in this country, off the Internet, is powerful; a study a few years ago showed that most people in the US are two Bacon-degrees at most away from anyone else in the US.
(A Bacon-degree comes from the 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' game, in which one figures out how many people one would have to go directly through to link a specific person with the actor Kevin Bacon, who has apparently worked with nearly everyone. My own Bacon-degree is two, as I worked as an extra (without lines) in a Chris Rock movie, and Chris worked with Kevin on Saturday Night Live's 25th Anniversary.)
1/18/2006 01:02:00 PM
The Christian Coalition has plans for '06; what will you do?
This link takes you to the Christian Coalition's Agenda for 2006. Let me paraphrase them to reduce the level of jargon and add some context: 1. Require broadcasters to carry Christian programming on cable and satellite media; currently, cable services 'bundle' stations, which means that subscribing to X also gets you A, B, C and Y. There is a move on to go to an a la carte system, which would mean the low-audience Religious Right televangelists would see a huge shrinkage in their audience. Requiring "Christian" programming is an attempt to prevent consumers from being able to choose what they want to see; it also affects "Christian" programming advertising dollars, as advertising fees are based on audience size.
2. Confirm Alito and anyone else Bush nominates.
3. Make permanent the 2001-2003 tax cuts on the wealthiest sector of Americans (who will never have to balance bills to pay and food to eat) so that the burden of taxes falls more heavily on the middle class and the poor.
4. Pass the "Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act", to give further rights to the unborn over those who are already here, trim away at women's right to abortion and choice over what happens to their own bodies, and extend the opinions of the minority to rule the many.
5. Pass "broadcast decency enforcement" legislation to impose Religious Right views on all broadcast programming, regardless of the views or desires of the rest of Americans.
6. Support legislation "stopping religious discrimination against Christians in the military", which appears to allow chaplains to evangelize for the Religious Right instead of doing their actual job of offering aid and comfort to any member of the military who asks it. Check back on what happened at the Air Force Academyfor more details.
7. Passing the "Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act", which would keep relatives who are not parents from taking a minor across state lines for an abortion. (I have written about this in the past, as this is an upgrading of Texas legislation; the Texas law made no exception for girls who were impregnated by family members or whose parents are in jail. Other family members were to be arrested and charged with felonies if they attempted to help the girl; so were any friends or others who might offer her a ride to a clinic. Molly Ivins also wrote about this.)
8. Passing HR 235, "Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act", which effectively removes churches and religious organizations from the IRS restrictions on involvement in direct political activity. Tax-exempt religious organizations are forbidden to endorse a specific candidate now, or provide a venue for direct political activity, though they are allowed to hold discussions of issues.
9. Passing in the Senate a House bill "protecting the 10 Commandments" by prohibiting the use of funds to enforce a US District Court ruling from the Southern District of Indiana in January 2005. (I don't have more info on this, but I suspect it's similar to the Ten Commandments issue in Alabama.)
10. Remove RU-486, the morning-after pill, from the market "until there is an investigation", again interfering with women's Fourth Amendment rights to the ownership of their own bodies.
The President of Christian Coalition of America, Roberta Combs said, "There is so much unfinished business which needs to be addressed during the Second Session of the 109th Congress. However, the most important business in January will be ensuring that Judge Samuel A. Alito is confirmed as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, since that -- along with the successful confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts and other U. S. Circuit Court judges -- will determine the course of American culture for at least a generation. The 2004 election has shown that America has become more conservative and concerned about the deterioration of the culture and Americans want a change. Christian Coalition will devote whatever resources are necessary to confirm President Bush's Supreme Court nominees, including Judge Alito, and his other nominees to the Circuit Court of Appeals."
Now you know what's coming. Take note. Talk among yourselves (yes, you in the back seats, too) and make plans. What can you do to preserve your rights and civil liberties in the face of these planned assaults against your civil rights and civil liberties? Think about it -- and go do something. It's not a great secret any more, is it?
If you want to do just one small thing, pick one of these issues, find out everything you can on it, and spread the word where you are, among the people you know. Word of mouth in this country, off the Internet, is powerful; a study a few years ago showed that most people in the US are two Bacon-degrees at most away from anyone else in the US.
(A Bacon-degree comes from the 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' game, in which one figures out how many people one would have to go directly through to link a specific person with the actor Kevin Bacon, who has apparently worked with nearly everyone.)
1/18/2006 01:02:00 PM
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
What deity asks this of us?
I have been looking for some time, and can't find the original quote by some at-this-time-nameless politician alleging that the reason the war is going so badly is that the American people have not been called to 'sacrifice' enough in its support.
I would like to find out who said that so I can shove it down his throat sideways, so to speak.
Anyone who thinks Americans aren't sacrificing for this war is unobservant in the extreme. The military is not sending unattached 19-year-olds overseas, as we did in Vietnam; instead, it is ripping apart families and communities to send members of the reserves who are parents, who are grandparents in some cases. Families are being impoverished because the breadwinner is making scanty military pay for months and years on end. Military bases are feeding the families of reservists out of soup kitchens and community cupboards to keep some of them from starving. People are losing their homes, and that's not even taking into account the military families among the millions who lost even more to Katrina and Rita and other more or less natural disasters this year. I'm not even going to get into the other 'sacrifices' of exported jobs, lost salaries and pensions and reduced expectations that have taken this country from a profitable economy to a struggling one in little more than five years.
The families of these reservists are asked to bear the cost of providing armor to protect their loved ones in battle, despite the fact that the military in all its branches has a larger part of the national budget than any single civilian department or program, including Medicare/Medicaid. (We don't see that so easily because it's hidden in the federal budget documents, but you can check this in the Federal Budget Appendix at your local library -- at least for the last year, before the Government Printing Office completes its move to send public documents only to specific documentary libraries.) In World War II, the best of what was available was sent to the front lines to protect the soldiers, but the military is too cheap to buy armor to protect its people now.
More than that are we being asked to sacrifice by this Administration, and it makes me look more closely at the meaning of 'sacrifice'. Something that is being given up or foregone is not necessarily a sacrifice, even if it is difficult or costly. A sacrifice *specifically* is something valuable -- often to the point of life and death -- that is being given to propitiate a deity. This is religious terminology, nothing else. Let me draw an example from the fiction of a different war: Melanie Hamilton's donation of her wedding ring to be sold to save the South's soldiers was a sacrifice, because for her it meant saving her husband and she took Ashley Wilkes as her religion above all. The widowed Scarlett O'Hara Hamilton's donation of her ring at the same time in the same circumstances meant nothing the same, as it had nothing to do with her faith.
When the Bush Administration asks for sacrifices, who is its deity? Is it the God of Battles, under whatever name may be wished? Is it George Bush? Who is being propitiated and pleased by these sacrifices? Who benefits? In what way do those who make sacrifices benefit from them, if any? Who is the god we are being asked to serve?
I said above that we are being asked to sacrifice more than our people, our families and the welfare of our communities, and so we are. We are being asked to sacrifice the Bill of Rights. We are being told that "for our own good", as if we were babies or incapable of understanding, we are to be deprived of ever-increasing shares of our freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to believe or not believe in any religion as we wish, freedom to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. Americans are being told to surrender their right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". We are being told that habeas corpus, the only right specifically spelled out in the Constitution, doesn't apply to us any more. We are told that we can be arrested and held without the right to an attorney, without being told what charges are placed against us, without contact with the outside world, and that this can go on indefinitely and we can be abused and tortured while in this custody. We are told we have no right to privacy or security from the intrusion of government into our personal affairs. We are told, in short, to sit down and shut up or else we won't like what happens.
Sitting down and shutting up are not the provinces of Americans who understand the rights guaranteed to them in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And I already don't like what's happening.
Let me quote further:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
We have other rights, and we have not as a people willingly surrendered the rights guaranteed to us since the time of George Washington.
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Another analogy of another organization: the Roman Catholic Church resides in all of its members around the world, whom the Second Vatican Council called the people of God, not only in the hierarchy residing in one square mile of land called Vatican City or the administration that is centered there. Similarly, We the People is all of us, not just the elected and appointed officials, not just the Bush Administration. We are the ones responsible for establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves. We are the ones who will have to deal with this if we want to continue to secure liberty for ourselves and our posterity, and sacrificing those liberties and rights is not the way to do it.
A true sacrifice must be made willingly for it to be valid as a religious offering. A true sacrifice cannot be extorted from someone, or taxed away, or stolen, or removed by force. A sacrifice must be given freely, and intention is involved. Many of our servicepeople, on active duty and not, are offering their lives as a sacrifice for what they see as the sacred task of protecting the country, and I don't mean at all to disrespect that. They're doing the same thing that was done at Valley Forge and Yorktown and Gettysburg and Guadalcanal and Anzio and Omaha Beach and Ie Shima and Tet and Da Nang and Kuwait and many other places.
Do we intend to sacrifice our rights as Americans, the specific liberties and guarantees that have distinguished this country for more than two centuries? Are we so willing to let go of the hard-won rights and liberties that took eight years of battle against Britain to secure and another four years a generation later to protect? This country went to war with itself less than a century after it was formed, in order to spell out more precisely the meaning of 'citizen' and the rights of free citizens, in a war over the ideas that defined our relationships to one another personally and politically. We have continued to redefine those rights in the last century, in four major wars, in the progressive and labor movements and the civil rights movement and the women's movement and the gay rights movement, and each time these rights and liberties and protections have been enlarged so that, as the late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Texas said, 'We the People' now applied to her in ways that it did not apply when the words were first written. We have not, as a country, finished defining for ourselves who we the people are; it is part of our national work.
How can we the people of the United States allow anyone to strip us of the civil rights, civil liberties, personal rights and freedoms that are guaranteed to us by the country's living founding documents? Can we find a way to refuse to make this deepest and most drastic sacrifice? And if we do not do this -- if we do not find a way to keep our freedoms and rights for whom so many spent their lives -- can we still call ourselves Americans?
1/17/2006 01:11:00 PM
...1. Cut all the prefatory material. It just sounds like a political speech. We already understand that whatever issue you've chosen to focus on is important, that various studies and statistics exist to demonstrate that importance, that your constituents are deeply concerned about it, and that you've been seriously dedicated to it for a long time.
2. Don't waste any time buttering up the nominee with statements about how much you respect his accomplishments and the great institution of the court. And don't say ploddingly obvious things like the fact that the nomination is for a lifetime position.
3. Don't ask about an issue that might come before the court when you know damned well the nominee is just going to say he can't answer the question because it might come before the court. And if you do happen to ask one, just move on. Don't ham it up dramatizing how frustrated you are.
4. Start with a forthright statement about what you want to hear the nominee talk about. Convince me, from the moment you open your mouth, that you are seeking something from him, not that you think it's great that the spotlight is on you. Ask something direct and force yourself to ask it in one minute.
5. When the nominee responds in legal terms, don't act irritated, as if he's being evasive. Interact with him about the interpretation of law, if you can, even if you risk sounding like a student talking to a professor. Don't retreat into wondering aloud about whether he has a heart or what he's like as a man as opposed to a judge.
6. Don't lecture the nominee. Don't preen. And don't cry....
I would ask Judge Alito:
In the United States, we draw a pretty clear line between the way we police those inside and those outside the county. As international terrorism has become more of a threat, our domestic agencies have been forced to look beyond our borders and our intelligence agencies have begun to look within. There are longstanding policies in place separating agencies we think of as domestic—the FBI, the local police, and even the national guard—from those agencies that pursue our enemies abroad—the CIA, the NSA, the Marines. Do you think that this is a worthy distinction? Does it hamper our ability to protect ourselves? How much would the dissolution of that distinction in turn dissolve liberties that you believe we should hold dearly?...
At this moment in American history, it would be hard to find a worse Supreme Court nominee than Samuel A. Alito Jr. His ideology captures everything extremist about the Bush administration. If confirmed, Alito would serve as Bush's enabler. He would give Bush effective control of all three branches of government and the hard-right long-term dominance of the high court. His confirmation or rejection will depend on the gumption of the Senate Democratic leadership and independence of a few Republicans.
Alito, who would replace the moderate Sandra Day O'Connor, has never hidden his ultra-conservative views. Given the administration claims of an extra-legal presidency, what's most disturbing is the handy convergence of Alito's own conception of executive power and that of Bush.
Citing the wartime powers of the president, Bush has asserted his right to ignore the legislative mandate of Congress in allowing the military to torture prisoners, the government's prerogative to spy on Americans without a court warrant, to treat not just foreigners but US citizens as ''illegal enemy combatants" who lose the constitutional rights of criminal defendants, and to incarcerate such persons indefinitely. Soon, some prisoners at Guantanamo will have been behind bars longer than any German POW during all of World War II.
Presidents do have extraordinary wartime powers, but this president asserts a state of permanent warfare, implying permanent erosion of liberty and democracy. Last week, signing a bill banning torture in interrogations that was forced on him by senior Republican senators, Bush asserted a concept never imagined by the Constitution's framers or permitted by any court -- a ''signing statement" claiming his right to interpret a law in his own fashion and to disregard aspects of it that he doesn't like.
It takes an independent judiciary to balance needs of liberty against claims of executive power in national emergencies. But Alito's views of the imperial presidency are almost perfectly in sync with Bush's....
...But do the legal arguments of the Administration supporters hold water? Not so much. Glenn Greenwald has a superb post today calling on those shilling for the Administration to put up or shut up. I want to join Glenn's call: What limits, if any, are you saying the President has?
Does this utter lack of limits apply solely to this, particular Preznit? Or would you be comfortable with a...say...President Hillary Clinton being able to spy on anyone she likes without ever having to justify her agenda or probable cause or with Congress having no oversight responsibilities or right thereto? (Not that I'm saying Hillary is going to win the Dem. nomination, but she does seem to be the GOP bogeyman du jour.)
If you wouldn't be comfortable with Hillary wielding the magic Presidential sceptre and spying on anyone she likes whenever she likes for whatever purpose she likes, what makes you think that George Bush gets to do so without any check and balance?
Lest everyone get the impression that all Republicans support this unconsitutional, Fourth Amendment snubbing by the Administration, think again. According to the WSJ, libertarian conservatives are steamed. There are a number of people on both sides of the political divide who understand this question very clearly: is it loyalty to a particular man and the maintenance of power for your political party as your sole focus of existence? Or does the liberty and law embodied in our Constitution, our laws, our history mean more than a petty, craven, illegal power grab?
So, which is it? Do you honor the Constitution and our nation's laws? Or is loyalty to the President, no matter his actions and their repurcussions on the Republic, more important? I await a thoughtful response along with Glenn.
And should anyone wonder whether I am against surveillance altogether, the answer is an emphatic no. Surveillance is an important, and very useful, tool. I have gone before a judge any number of times with police investigators to obtain warrants, without which investigations into crimes would not have been able to be solved. But surveillance is also a very powerful weapon, to be used with caution -- which is why oversight is required by a third party who can provide that caution when an overzealous actor might not be thinking clearly. No one, not even the President of the United States, should be given absolute power. (Read the Federalist Papers again, if you need a refresher on why this is.)...
...So the problem for [Sen. Charles] Schumer isn’t that George Bush broke the law here and claims that he has the right as a wartime President to act contrary to laws generally. No, that’s much too strident, conflictual and clear. He can't say that. The problem is merely that it’s a "tradition" to talk first with Congress before the President "changes" the law.
What does any of this even mean? George Bush didn’t "change" the law. A President doesn’t have the ability to "change" a law. There is no such thing in our system of Government as a President "changing" a law. That’s the whole point. A President can only do one of two things to a law – he can abide by it, or he can break it. And George Bush broke the law, but Charles Schumer, for some reason, is afraid to say so.
So what he does is dress up his statements in all sorts of apologetic, half-hearted statements working at cross-purposes – with his one chance to talk about the President's law-breaking and to tell the public why this is a scandal that matters, Schumer first talks about how the left-wing of his own party needs to be condemned, that the President of course needs heightened tools on terror, that we need hearings to look into this more, that the problem here is that the President should have abided by "tradition" and come to the Congress and we need an "arbiter".
Is any of that supposed to move any one to outrage, or even interest? If the Democratic leaders themselves don’t take seriously the premise that George Bush broke the law and that he literally insists that he has the power to do so, why should the American people take it seriously? ...
...1. Cut all the prefatory material. It just sounds like a political speech. We already understand that whatever issue you've chosen to focus on is important, that various studies and statistics exist to demonstrate that importance, that your constituents are deeply concerned about it, and that you've been seriously dedicated to it for a long time.
2. Don't waste any time buttering up the nominee with statements about how much you respect his accomplishments and the great institution of the court. And don't say ploddingly obvious things like the fact that the nomination is for a lifetime position.
3. Don't ask about an issue that might come before the court when you know damned well the nominee is just going to say he can't answer the question because it might come before the court. And if you do happen to ask one, just move on. Don't ham it up dramatizing how frustrated you are.
4. Start with a forthright statement about what you want to hear the nominee talk about. Convince me, from the moment you open your mouth, that you are seeking something from him, not that you think it's great that the spotlight is on you. Ask something direct and force yourself to ask it in one minute.
5. When the nominee responds in legal terms, don't act irritated, as if he's being evasive. Interact with him about the interpretation of law, if you can, even if you risk sounding like a student talking to a professor. Don't retreat into wondering aloud about whether he has a heart or what he's like as a man as opposed to a judge.
6. Don't lecture the nominee. Don't preen. And don't cry....
I would ask Judge Alito:
In the United States, we draw a pretty clear line between the way we police those inside and those outside the county. As international terrorism has become more of a threat, our domestic agencies have been forced to look beyond our borders and our intelligence agencies have begun to look within. There are longstanding policies in place separating agencies we think of as domestic—the FBI, the local police, and even the national guard—from those agencies that pursue our enemies abroad—the CIA, the NSA, the Marines. Do you think that this is a worthy distinction? Does it hamper our ability to protect ourselves? How much would the dissolution of that distinction in turn dissolve liberties that you believe we should hold dearly?...
At this moment in American history, it would be hard to find a worse Supreme Court nominee than Samuel A. Alito Jr. His ideology captures everything extremist about the Bush administration. If confirmed, Alito would serve as Bush's enabler. He would give Bush effective control of all three branches of government and the hard-right long-term dominance of the high court. His confirmation or rejection will depend on the gumption of the Senate Democratic leadership and independence of a few Republicans.
Alito, who would replace the moderate Sandra Day O'Connor, has never hidden his ultra-conservative views. Given the administration claims of an extra-legal presidency, what's most disturbing is the handy convergence of Alito's own conception of executive power and that of Bush.
Citing the wartime powers of the president, Bush has asserted his right to ignore the legislative mandate of Congress in allowing the military to torture prisoners, the government's prerogative to spy on Americans without a court warrant, to treat not just foreigners but US citizens as ''illegal enemy combatants" who lose the constitutional rights of criminal defendants, and to incarcerate such persons indefinitely. Soon, some prisoners at Guantanamo will have been behind bars longer than any German POW during all of World War II.
Presidents do have extraordinary wartime powers, but this president asserts a state of permanent warfare, implying permanent erosion of liberty and democracy. Last week, signing a bill banning torture in interrogations that was forced on him by senior Republican senators, Bush asserted a concept never imagined by the Constitution's framers or permitted by any court -- a ''signing statement" claiming his right to interpret a law in his own fashion and to disregard aspects of it that he doesn't like.
It takes an independent judiciary to balance needs of liberty against claims of executive power in national emergencies. But Alito's views of the imperial presidency are almost perfectly in sync with Bush's....
...But do the legal arguments of the Administration supporters hold water? Not so much. Glenn Greenwald has a superb post today calling on those shilling for the Administration to put up or shut up. I want to join Glenn's call: What limits, if any, are you saying the President has?
Does this utter lack of limits apply solely to this, particular Preznit? Or would you be comfortable with a...say...President Hillary Clinton being able to spy on anyone she likes without ever having to justify her agenda or probable cause or with Congress having no oversight responsibilities or right thereto? (Not that I'm saying Hillary is going to win the Dem. nomination, but she does seem to be the GOP bogeyman du jour.)
If you wouldn't be comfortable with Hillary wielding the magic Presidential sceptre and spying on anyone she likes whenever she likes for whatever purpose she likes, what makes you think that George Bush gets to do so without any check and balance?
Lest everyone get the impression that all Republicans support this unconsitutional, Fourth Amendment snubbing by the Administration, think again. According to the WSJ, libertarian conservatives are steamed. There are a number of people on both sides of the political divide who understand this question very clearly: is it loyalty to a particular man and the maintenance of power for your political party as your sole focus of existence? Or does the liberty and law embodied in our Constitution, our laws, our history mean more than a petty, craven, illegal power grab?
So, which is it? Do you honor the Constitution and our nation's laws? Or is loyalty to the President, no matter his actions and their repurcussions on the Republic, more important? I await a thoughtful response along with Glenn.
And should anyone wonder whether I am against surveillance altogether, the answer is an emphatic no. Surveillance is an important, and very useful, tool. I have gone before a judge any number of times with police investigators to obtain warrants, without which investigations into crimes would not have been able to be solved. But surveillance is also a very powerful weapon, to be used with caution -- which is why oversight is required by a third party who can provide that caution when an overzealous actor might not be thinking clearly. No one, not even the President of the United States, should be given absolute power. (Read the Federalist Papers again, if you need a refresher on why this is.)...
...So the problem for [Sen. Charles] Schumer isn’t that George Bush broke the law here and claims that he has the right as a wartime President to act contrary to laws generally. No, that’s much too strident, conflictual and clear. He can't say that. The problem is merely that it’s a "tradition" to talk first with Congress before the President "changes" the law.
What does any of this even mean? George Bush didn’t "change" the law. A President doesn’t have the ability to "change" a law. There is no such thing in our system of Government as a President "changing" a law. That’s the whole point. A President can only do one of two things to a law – he can abide by it, or he can break it. And George Bush broke the law, but Charles Schumer, for some reason, is afraid to say so.
So what he does is dress up his statements in all sorts of apologetic, half-hearted statements working at cross-purposes – with his one chance to talk about the President's law-breaking and to tell the public why this is a scandal that matters, Schumer first talks about how the left-wing of his own party needs to be condemned, that the President of course needs heightened tools on terror, that we need hearings to look into this more, that the problem here is that the President should have abided by "tradition" and come to the Congress and we need an "arbiter".
Is any of that supposed to move any one to outrage, or even interest? If the Democratic leaders themselves don’t take seriously the premise that George Bush broke the law and that he literally insists that he has the power to do so, why should the American people take it seriously? ...
...1. Cut all the prefatory material. It just sounds like a political speech. We already understand that whatever issue you've chosen to focus on is important, that various studies and statistics exist to demonstrate that importance, that your constituents are deeply concerned about it, and that you've been seriously dedicated to it for a long time.
2. Don't waste any time buttering up the nominee with statements about how much you respect his accomplishments and the great institution of the court. And don't say ploddingly obvious things like the fact that the nomination is for a lifetime position.
3. Don't ask about an issue that might come before the court when you know damned well the nominee is just going to say he can't answer the question because it might come before the court. And if you do happen to ask one, just move on. Don't ham it up dramatizing how frustrated you are.
4. Start with a forthright statement about what you want to hear the nominee talk about. Convince me, from the moment you open your mouth, that you are seeking something from him, not that you think it's great that the spotlight is on you. Ask something direct and force yourself to ask it in one minute.
5. When the nominee responds in legal terms, don't act irritated, as if he's being evasive. Interact with him about the interpretation of law, if you can, even if you risk sounding like a student talking to a professor. Don't retreat into wondering aloud about whether he has a heart or what he's like as a man as opposed to a judge.
6. Don't lecture the nominee. Don't preen. And don't cry....
I would ask Judge Alito:
In the United States, we draw a pretty clear line between the way we police those inside and those outside the county. As international terrorism has become more of a threat, our domestic agencies have been forced to look beyond our borders and our intelligence agencies have begun to look within. There are longstanding policies in place separating agencies we think of as domestic—the FBI, the local police, and even the national guard—from those agencies that pursue our enemies abroad—the CIA, the NSA, the Marines. Do you think that this is a worthy distinction? Does it hamper our ability to protect ourselves? How much would the dissolution of that distinction in turn dissolve liberties that you believe we should hold dearly?...
At this moment in American history, it would be hard to find a worse Supreme Court nominee than Samuel A. Alito Jr. His ideology captures everything extremist about the Bush administration. If confirmed, Alito would serve as Bush's enabler. He would give Bush effective control of all three branches of government and the hard-right long-term dominance of the high court. His confirmation or rejection will depend on the gumption of the Senate Democratic leadership and independence of a few Republicans.
Alito, who would replace the moderate Sandra Day O'Connor, has never hidden his ultra-conservative views. Given the administration claims of an extra-legal presidency, what's most disturbing is the handy convergence of Alito's own conception of executive power and that of Bush.
Citing the wartime powers of the president, Bush has asserted his right to ignore the legislative mandate of Congress in allowing the military to torture prisoners, the government's prerogative to spy on Americans without a court warrant, to treat not just foreigners but US citizens as ''illegal enemy combatants" who lose the constitutional rights of criminal defendants, and to incarcerate such persons indefinitely. Soon, some prisoners at Guantanamo will have been behind bars longer than any German POW during all of World War II.
Presidents do have extraordinary wartime powers, but this president asserts a state of permanent warfare, implying permanent erosion of liberty and democracy. Last week, signing a bill banning torture in interrogations that was forced on him by senior Republican senators, Bush asserted a concept never imagined by the Constitution's framers or permitted by any court -- a ''signing statement" claiming his right to interpret a law in his own fashion and to disregard aspects of it that he doesn't like.
It takes an independent judiciary to balance needs of liberty against claims of executive power in national emergencies. But Alito's views of the imperial presidency are almost perfectly in sync with Bush's....
...But do the legal arguments of the Administration supporters hold water? Not so much. Glenn Greenwald has a superb post today calling on those shilling for the Administration to put up or shut up. I want to join Glenn's call: What limits, if any, are you saying the President has?
Does this utter lack of limits apply solely to this, particular Preznit? Or would you be comfortable with a...say...President Hillary Clinton being able to spy on anyone she likes without ever having to justify her agenda or probable cause or with Congress having no oversight responsibilities or right thereto? (Not that I'm saying Hillary is going to win the Dem. nomination, but she does seem to be the GOP bogeyman du jour.)
If you wouldn't be comfortable with Hillary wielding the magic Presidential sceptre and spying on anyone she likes whenever she likes for whatever purpose she likes, what makes you think that George Bush gets to do so without any check and balance?
Lest everyone get the impression that all Republicans support this unconsitutional, Fourth Amendment snubbing by the Administration, think again. According to the WSJ, libertarian conservatives are steamed. There are a number of people on both sides of the political divide who understand this question very clearly: is it loyalty to a particular man and the maintenance of power for your political party as your sole focus of existence? Or does the liberty and law embodied in our Constitution, our laws, our history mean more than a petty, craven, illegal power grab?
So, which is it? Do you honor the Constitution and our nation's laws? Or is loyalty to the President, no matter his actions and their repurcussions on the Republic, more important? I await a thoughtful response along with Glenn.
And should anyone wonder whether I am against surveillance altogether, the answer is an emphatic no. Surveillance is an important, and very useful, tool. I have gone before a judge any number of times with police investigators to obtain warrants, without which investigations into crimes would not have been able to be solved. But surveillance is also a very powerful weapon, to be used with caution -- which is why oversight is required by a third party who can provide that caution when an overzealous actor might not be thinking clearly. No one, not even the President of the United States, should be given absolute power. (Read the Federalist Papers again, if you need a refresher on why this is.)...
...So the problem for [Sen. Charles] Schumer isn’t that George Bush broke the law here and claims that he has the right as a wartime President to act contrary to laws generally. No, that’s much too strident, conflictual and clear. He can't say that. The problem is merely that it’s a "tradition" to talk first with Congress before the President "changes" the law.
What does any of this even mean? George Bush didn’t "change" the law. A President doesn’t have the ability to "change" a law. There is no such thing in our system of Government as a President "changing" a law. That’s the whole point. A President can only do one of two things to a law – he can abide by it, or he can break it. And George Bush broke the law, but Charles Schumer, for some reason, is afraid to say so.
So what he does is dress up his statements in all sorts of apologetic, half-hearted statements working at cross-purposes – with his one chance to talk about the President's law-breaking and to tell the public why this is a scandal that matters, Schumer first talks about how the left-wing of his own party needs to be condemned, that the President of course needs heightened tools on terror, that we need hearings to look into this more, that the problem here is that the President should have abided by "tradition" and come to the Congress and we need an "arbiter".
Is any of that supposed to move any one to outrage, or even interest? If the Democratic leaders themselves don’t take seriously the premise that George Bush broke the law and that he literally insists that he has the power to do so, why should the American people take it seriously? ...
..."The president has, I think, made up a law that we never passed," said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.).
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he intends to hold hearings. "They talk about constitutional authority," Specter said. "There are limits as to what the president can do."
Senate Democratic leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) also called for an investigation, and House Democratic leaders asked Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) to create a bipartisan panel to do the same....
Bush and other administration officials have said congressional leaders have been briefed regularly on the program. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said there were no objections raised by lawmakers told about it.
"That's a legitimate part of the equation," McCain said on ABC's "This Week." But he said Bush still needs to explain why he chose to ignore the law that requires approval of a special court for domestic wiretaps.
Reid acknowledged he had been briefed on the four-year-old domestic spy program "a couple months ago" but insisted the administration bears full responsibility. Reid became Democratic leader in January.
"The president can't pass the buck on this one. This is his program," Reid said on "Fox News Sunday." "He's commander in chief. But commander in chief does not trump the Bill of Rights."
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement Saturday that she had been told on several occasions about unspecified activities by the NSA. Pelosi said she expressed strong concerns at the time....
Several lawmakers were not so sure. They pointed to a 1978 federal law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which provides for domestic surveillance under extreme situations, but only with court approval.
Specter said he wants Bush's advisers to cite their legal authority for bypassing the courts. Bush said the attorney general and White House counsel's office had affirmed the legality of his actions.
Appearing with Specter on CNN's "Late Edition," Feingold said Bush is accountable for the program, regardless of whether congressional leaders were notified. "It doesn't matter if you tell everybody in the whole country if it's against the law," said Feingold, a member of the Judiciary Committee....
Former Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, not known for liberal or progressive views, has blasted Bush's secret spying program by blaming the National Security Agency who conducted it.[T]he protections under the Fourth Amendment expressly given to us as a free people hang in the balance with this blatant disregard for the Constitution and Bill of Rights; it directly violates the precise requirements of the law.
...Its Directorate of Field Activities (DX) "assists in preserving the most critical defense assets, disrupting adversaries and helping control the intelligence domain," the fact sheet said. Those roles can range from running roving patrols around military bases and facilities to surveillance of potentially threatening people or organizations inside the United States. The DX also provides "on-site, real time . . . support in hostile areas worldwide to protect both U.S. and host nation personnel from a variety of threats," the fact sheet said.
This is just one illustration of the growth of Pentagon activities in the United States and abroad as part of the terrorism fight. Last week, news accounts revealed that President Bush authorized secret eavesdropping on Americans with suspected ties to terrorist groups.
Another CIFA directorate, the Counterintelligence and Law Enforcement Center, "identifies and assesses threats" to Defense personnel, operations and infrastructure from "insider threats, foreign intelligence services, terrorists, and other clandestine or covert entities," according to the Pentagon.
CIFA manages the Pentagon database that includes Talon reports, consisting of raw, unverified information picked up by the military services on suspicious activities that could involve terrorist threats. The Pentagon acknowledged last week that the Talon database contained reports on peaceful civilian protests and demonstrations that should have been purged long ago under Defense Department regulations.
A third CIFA directorate, Behavioral Sciences, "has 20 psychologists and a multimillion-dollar budget," and supports both "offensive and defensive counterintelligence efforts," according to a government biography of its director, S. Scott Shumate. Shumate was the chief operational psychologist for the CIA's counterterrorism center until 2003. His group has also provided a "team of renowned forensic psychologists [who] are engaged in risk assessments of the Guantanamo Bay detainees," according to his biography.
A Pentagon official said none of Shumate's team members questions detainees as part of helping produce threat reports, though they may relay questions to the interrogators.
A former senior Pentagon intelligence official, familiar with CIFA, said yesterday, "They started with force protection from terrorists, but when you go down that road, you soon are into everything . . . where terrorists get their money, who they see, who they deal with."
He added, noting that there had been no congressional oversight of CIFA, that the Defense Department is "too big, too rich an organization and should not be left unfettered. They rush in where there is a vacuum."
A former senior counterterrorism official, also familiar with CIFA, said, "What you are seeing is the militarization of counterterrorism."...
...KATE MARTIN, CENTER FOR NATIONAL SECURITY STUDIES: The law couldn't be any more clear. You can only wiretap an American if you have a warrant.
ARENA: Such a warrant can be approved by a secret intelligence court housed in the Justice Department, and the eavesdropping is usually done by the FBI. But government sources with knowledge of the program say the president's order bypasses all of that in the interest of getting intelligence more quickly. JEFFREY SMITH, FORMER CIA COUNSEL: The administration bears a heavy burden to prove that that was really the case. In my experience, the court was -- particularly after the passage of the Patriot Act, the foreign electronics surveillance court -- was very responsive to requests for warrants.
ARENA: Administration officials will not confirm the change or deny it, creating an uproar on Capitol Hill.
SEN. EDWARD KENNEDY (D), MASSACHUSETTS: They tell us, "Trust us; we follow the law." Give me a break....
Daily Kos discusses the Bybee Memo, which Bush used to justify violating the constitution.. . . [The Constitution's] sweeping grant vests in the President an unenumerated Executive power . . . The Commander in Chief power and the President's obligation to protect the Nation imply the ancillary powers necessary to their successful exercise....
...And the Bybee memo, and likely the Yoo memo, that provided the legal justification for the warrantless surveillance, also rely on dishonesty about the Constitution and about Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist Papers. I'll explain below the fold....
For example, the Bybee memo states that:
The President's constitutional power to protect the security of the United States and the lives and saftey of its people must be understood in the light of the Founders' intention to create a federal government "cloathed with all the powers requisite to the complete execution of this trust." The Federalist No. 23.
But what does Federalist 23 actually say?
THE necessity of a Constitution, at least equally energetic with the one proposed, to the preservation of the Union, is the point at the examination of which we are now arrived.
This inquiry will naturally divide itself into three branches the objects to be provided for by the federal government, the quantity of power necessary to the accomplishment of those objects, the persons upon whom that power ought to operate. Its distribution and organization will more properly claim our attention under the succeeding head.
The lie of Bybee and Yoo is obvious. Federalist 23 is not speaking of Presidential power. It is speaking of the power granted the federal government. To cite Federalist 23 as support for a claim of Presidential power over the Congress and the Courts is to flat out lie....
(Seriously -- be careful where you pull out your credit cards or bank cards. Someone you don't know may be writing down the info for use later in a little identity theft. You don't know who's on the other side of all those security cameras in public places that are supposedly there for our safety. After all, with America's identity being stolen, whose identity is really safe?)
12/19/2005 12:46:00 PM
McCain looks like an independent instead of a neoCon, and talks like an independent in the Goldwater style, but if you look at his votes in the past year he's been supporting the Administration regardless of what he seems to say when Bush isn't looking over his shoulder. I suspect that this visit to the White House indicates that McCain is being seriously groomed as the next Republican presidential candidate -- and why not, when the previous fair-haired boy was Sen. Bill Frist, who could not get his foot out of his mouth with both hands and a forklift.
Passage of McCain's ban makes McCain look very good across the board. It makes him more attractive politically to the military (because if we ban torture, it becomes harder for others to torture our soldiers), to civil libertarians, and to people of faith in many denominations who have been horrified and sickened by the events at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. However, I haven't been able to find the full text online of what was passed, so I could look at the wording and see if it has any actual force. I'd hate to think this was all a bit of ineffective window dressing to make McCain look good and enhance his chances at the presidency in three years.
Human rights groups that praised a proposed ban on mistreating terrorism suspects warned on Friday that another provision lawmakers inserted in a final defense bill could lead to abuse at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
But Sen. Lindsey Graham, chief sponsor of the language affecting detainees held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba, rejected that. He said interrogators who mistreat prisoners would not be granted immunity from prosecution for violating the ban.
On Thursday, President Bush reluctantly signed off on a proposal to bar cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of terror suspects in U.S. custody. Sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the ban and accompanying provision would standardize interrogation tactics for U.S. troops.
With that agreement reached, House and Senate bargainers worked Friday toward completing a bill setting Pentagon policy and another $453 billion in a wartime spending measure that includes $50 billion for the Iraq war. Congress hopes to send both to the president's desk within days, possibly Saturday.
Under legislation the Senate passed last month, military panels deciding whether to indefinitely detain terror-war suspects held at Guantanamo Bay would have been barred from considering evidence obtained through "undue coercion."
During Senate-House negotiations to write a final bill, lawmakers scrapped that and inserted language saying the military panels should review whether any information was obtained through "coercion" and assess the value of that information.
Graham, R-S.C., called the language a "check-and-balance system to look at the quality of the evidence" when panels are considering whether to continue holding an enemy combatant.
But human rights groups say the language could encourage interrogators to mistreat detainees because it does not explicitly bar the panels from relying on information gained from coercive interrogation techniques to keep someone detained indefinitely.
Elisa Massimino, the Washington director of Human Rights First, called the change "a grave mistake," given that "no civilized court in the world today considers evidence that was gleaned as a result of torture or cruel and inhuman treatment."
The change "intentionally and effectively undermined" the McCain ban and "could contribute to further abuses," added Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch....
Friday, December 16, 2005
It's the time of year for the annual plea:
If the Concatenation has interested you, or helped you, or shown you something you didn't know before, please consider clicking on the donation button in the upper left and contributing a little something toward the cost of keeping things running -- such as for ISP fees. I deeply appreciate every dollar you contribute. Money contributed goes to support both this blog and Twistedchick's Free Speech Zone, the Concatenation's sister publication, which features links to news and commentary as many days of the week as I can manage it (which is most of the time).
If you liked the Concatenation but are as strapped for money as I generally am, have a blessed and happy holiday season -- with whatever holiday(s) you celebrate -- and consider dropping a little change my way when things look up.
More on the filibuster here from the LA Times, and ABC News, and Bloomberg, and Time. Since the White House rejected the Senate's proposal to extend the Act for three months while its provisions could be adjusted to allow for protection of civil liberties, it is possible that it may well be ended altogether.
I am considering the Republicans' loud cries of disaster as if they were the pealing sounds of the Liberty Bell -- because they are. This vote has dealt a blow to Bush's attempts to restrict Americans' liberties; it has dealt a blow to the neoCon urge to control every aspect of citizens' lives until they strangle us with secrecy. There are plenty of other laws out there that can be used to fight terrorism -- and in fact the Patriot Act has not been used to fight terrorism but to increase government interference and surveillance in the lives of ordinary law-abiding citizens, to increase the neoCon stranglehold over the government, and to cover up actions taken in secret that should not be allowed without review.
...Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.
"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches."
Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.
According to those officials and others, reservations about aspects of the program have also been expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters. Some of the questions about the agency's new powers led the administration to temporarily suspend the operation last year and impose more restrictions, the officials said.
The Bush administration views the operation as necessary so that the agency can move quickly to monitor communications that may disclose threats to the United States, the officials said. Defenders of the program say it has been a critical tool in helping disrupt terrorist plots and prevent attacks inside the United States.
Administration officials are confident that existing safeguards are sufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, the officials say. In some cases, they said, the Justice Department eventually seeks warrants if it wants to expand the eavesdropping to include communications confined within the United States. The officials said the administration had briefed Congressional leaders about the program and notified the judge in charge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret Washington court that deals with national security issues.
The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.
Dealing With a New Threat
While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it say the N.S.A. eavesdrops without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands since the program began, several officials said. Overseas, about 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at one time, according to those officials....
Mr. Bush's executive order allowing some warrantless eavesdropping on those inside the United States - including American citizens, permanent legal residents, tourists and other foreigners - is based on classified legal opinions that assert that the president has broad powers to order such searches, derived in part from the September 2001 Congressional resolution authorizing him to wage war on Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, according to the officials familiar with the N.S.A. operation.
The National Security Agency, which is based at Fort Meade, Md., is the nation's largest and most secretive intelligence agency, so intent on remaining out of public view that it has long been nicknamed "No Such Agency." It breaks codes and maintains listening posts around the world to eavesdrop on foreign governments, diplomats and trade negotiators as well as drug lords and terrorists. But the agency ordinarily operates under tight restrictions on any spying on Americans, even if they are overseas, or disseminating information about them.
What the agency calls a "special collection program" began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said.
In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said.
Under the agency's longstanding rules, the N.S.A. can target for interception phone calls or e-mail messages on foreign soil, even if the recipients of those communications are in the United States. Usually, though, the government can only target phones and e-mail messages in the United States by first obtaining a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which holds its closed sessions at the Justice Department.
Traditionally, the F.B.I., not the N.S.A., seeks such warrants and conducts most domestic eavesdropping. Until the new program began, the N.S.A. typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions in Washington, New York and other cities, and obtained court orders to do so...
Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to someone in Afghanistan.
Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court....
Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search. One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the program's legality. But nothing came of his inquiry. "People just looked the other way because they didn't want to know what was going on," he said.
A senior government official recalled that he was taken aback when he first learned of the operation. "My first reaction was, 'We're doing what?' " he said. While he said he eventually felt that adequate safeguards were put in place, he added that questions about the program's legitimacy were understandable.
Some of those who object to the operation argue that is unnecessary. By getting warrants through the foreign intelligence court, the N.S.A. and F.B.I. could eavesdrop on people inside the United States who might be tied to terrorist groups without skirting longstanding rules, they say.
The standard of proof required to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is generally considered lower than that required for a criminal warrant - intelligence officials only have to show probable cause that someone may be "an agent of a foreign power," which includes international terrorist groups - and the secret court has turned down only a small number of requests over the years. In 2004, according to the Justice Department, 1,754 warrants were approved. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can grant emergency approval for wiretaps within hours, officials say....
Notice that the rationale for this spying on Americans is contained in legal opinions that are classified so that you and I are not allowed to read them. We can have no idea whether they are based in solidly grounded law or simply the specious musings of someone wishing to legitimize the current President's every whim for control of the public.
We cannot rest on our laurels, even though there's room for rejoicing at the moment about the Patriot Act. Keep the pressure on your Senators about this, and keep an eye on the House, where the neoCon Republicans have a far stronger hold. For the moment there is nothing that can be done about presidential orders, other than to expose them to the light so we can all see what the man in the oval office is trying to do under the table and behind our backs in the dark.
12/16/2005 03:49:00 PM
Thursday, December 15, 2005
The Patriot Act renewal and your civil liberties.
The Patriot Act: I have heard both today and tomorrow for when the Senate is to argue -- possibly filibuster -- the Patriot Act renewal, and the issues of civil liberties and invasion of personal freedom involved. I suspect the vote itself may have been put off for Friday because of the impending storm -- it is snowing outside as I write this, which means that everyone in DC will be panicking and heading for home soon. And, as I check C-Span, Sen. Arlen Spector presenting the conference report on the Patriot Act and discussing the possibility of making a three-month extension on it. As far as the official floor schedule is concerned, nothing else is scheduled for today.
Sen. John Sununu (R-NH) is saying that if the Senate does not achieve cloture (ending debate and calling for a vote) tomorrow, we would have no Patriot Act, indicating that the Senate did not think this was an important piece of legislation. "Anyone that would be willing to oppose a temporary extension .. is either behaving irresponsibly or they are arguing that the law actually isn't as important as they previously suggested." He's going on to talk about how there is no current 'meaningful review' of national security letters -- which allow government to get your financial records and library records and other info without your knowledge.
Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) is talking about the inherent unfairness of the secrecy of national security letters -- where people aren't allowed to see the letter, hear the charges being made against them, or possibly even call a lawyer.
Sen. Spector gives the impression that allowing someone to call a lawyer in those circumstances without reporting the lawyer's name to the FBI first is a great concession to the cause of civil liberty, instead of a Constitutional civil liberty.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) is talking about how concerned he and others are about the secrecy provisions that skew the law away from the civil liberties of Americans. He's concerned about a chilling effect on the right to call an attorney.
Sen. Ken Salazar, (D-Colorado) is talking about the Fourth Amendment right of people to be secure in their persons, houses and papers. He is reading from editorials from conservative newspapers opposing restrictions on civil liberties. (Spector remonstrates with him for reading the editorials, saying they're not necessary to tell him about civil liberties.)
More senators have spoken; now they're at lunch and will be back at 2:15 p.m.
Your rights and civil liberties are in play now -- if you haven't called your Senator, do it as soon as possible. Your phone call counts up to the point when they vote -- and we don't know when that will be.
USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 - (Sec. 2) Amends the USA PATRIOT Act to require an order granting roving surveillance authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), if the nature and location of each of the facilities or places at which the surveillance will be directed and the identity of the target are not known, to include sufficient information to describe a specific target with particularity.
Requires an order approving electronic surveillance, where the nature and location are unknown, to direct the applicant to provide notice to the court (within 10 days after the surveillance begins) of: (1) the nature and location of each facility; (2) the facts and circumstances relied upon to justify the belief that the surveillance target is using such facility; and (3) a statement of any proposed minimization procedures that differ from those contained in the original application or order that may be necessitated by a change in the facility at which the surveillance is directed.
Directs the Attorney General to fully inform the House and Senate Judiciary Committees (currently limited to the Intelligence Committees) on a semiannual basis concerning electronic surveillance under FISA, including regarding the number of applications made for electronic surveillance orders and extensions where the nature and location of each targeted facility are not known.
(Sec. 3) Makes the authorization of an order for electronic surveillance or a physical search for up to 90 days applicable only to surveillance targeted against a foreign power who is not a U.S. person. Limits to one year an order (or extension) for the use of pen registers and trap and trace devices where the applicant has certified that the information likely to be obtained is foreign intelligence information not concerning a U.S. person.
(Sec. 4) Requires the Attorney General, on an annual basis, to submit to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees a report containing: (1) the number of accounts from which the Department of Justice (DOJ) has received voluntary disclosures of customer communications or records under provisions authorizing disclosure of the contents of electronic communications in emergencies involving immediate danger of death or serious physical injury; and (2) a summary of the basis for voluntary disclosures to DOJ where the pertinent investigation was closed without the filing of criminal charges.
Permits a wire or electronic communications service provider to disclose customer records to a governmental entity if the provider, in good faith, believes that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure without delay. (Current law permits disclosure if the provider reasonably believes that such an emergency justifies disclosure.)
(Sec. 5) Limits the authority to delay notice of the issuance of a search warrant to circumstances where providing immediate notice of the warrant may: (1) endanger the life or physical safety of an individual; (2) result in flight from prosecution, the destruction of or tampering with evidence, or intimidation of potential witnesses; or (3) otherwise seriously jeopardize an investigation. Requires such delayed notification to be issued within seven days (currently, within a reasonable period) after execution, or on a later date if the facts of the case justify a longer delay. Permits the period of delay to be extended by the court for good cause shown, subject to the condition that extensions only be granted upon an updated showing of the need for further delay and that each additional delay be limited to periods of 90 days or less, unless the facts of the case justify a longer period.
Requires, within 30 days after the expiration or denial of a warrant authorizing delayed notice, the judge to report to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts: (1) that a warrant was applied for; (2) that the warrant or extension was granted, modified, or denied; (3) the period of delay authorized by the warrant and the duration of any extensions; and (4) the offense specified in the warrant or application.
Requires the Director of the Administrative Office, each April, to transmit to Congress a complete report concerning the number of applications filed, granted, and denied for warrants and extensions authorizing delayed notice.
(Sec. 6) Requires: (1) an ex parte order for a pen register or trap or trace device for foreign intelligence purposes to direct that, upon the applicant's request, the provider disclose specified information to the federal officer using the device; and (2) the Attorney General to fully inform the House and Senate Judiciary Committees regarding uses of such devices.
(Sec. 7) Modifies requirements for access to business records for foreign intelligence and international terrorism investigations. Requires that applications include a statement of facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that items sought: (1) are relevant to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a U.S. person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities; and (2) pertain to a foreign power or agent, are relevant to the activities of a suspected foreign agent, or pertain to an individual in contact with such an agent. Directs the judge to enter an ex parte order approving the release of records or tangible things if the judge finds that the statement of facts in the application establishes reasonable grounds to believe that the items sought are relevant and pertinent. Requires that the order: (1) describe the items with sufficient particularity; (2) prescribe a return date which will provide a reasonable period of time for items to be made available; (3) provide clear and conspicuous notice of nondisclosure principles and procedures; and (4) not require the production of anything that would be protected under the standards applicable to a subpoena issued in aid of a grand jury investigation.
Prohibits making an application for an order requiring the production of library circulation records, library patron lists, book sales records, book customer lists, firearms sales records, or medical records containing personally identifiable information without the prior approval of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Prohibits disclosing that the FBI has sought or obtained tangible things pursuant to an order other than to: (1) persons to whom such disclosure is necessary to comply with such order (currently, to those persons necessary to produce the tangible things); (2) an attorney to obtain legal advice or assistance in responding; or (3) other persons as permitted by the Director. Requires an order to contain notice of the nondisclosure requirements.
Establishes procedures for challenging the legality of an order or any disclosure prohibition. Requires the development and issuance of procedures for the review of petitions.
Requires the Attorney General's semiannual reports to the Intelligence Committees regarding requests for the production of tangible things to be sent to the Judiciary Committees also. Requires the Attorney General, each April, to report to Congress on the number of order applications made, granted, modified, and/or denied and the number of such applications for orders involving the production of: (1) tangible things from a library; (2) tangible things from a person or entity primarily engaged in the sale, rental, or delivery of books, journals, magazines, or other similar forms of communication; (3) records related to the purchase of a firearm; (4) health information; or (5) taxpayer return information.
(Sec. 8) Authorizes a provider who receives a request from the Director of the FBI for subscriber and toll billing records information or electronic communication transactional records to seek a court order to modify or set aside the request, with the grounds for challenging the request stated with particularity. Authorizes the court to modify or set aside the request if compliance would be unreasonable or oppressive or would violate any legal right or privilege of the petitioner.
Authorizes the provider to challenge the nondisclosure requirement and the court to modify or set aside such requirement if there is no reason to believe that disclosure may endanger U.S. national security, interfere with a criminal, counterterrorism, or counterintelligence investigation, interfere with diplomatic relations, or endanger the life or physical safety of any person. Provides that the government's certification that disclosure would do those things shall be treated as conclusive unless the court finds that the certification was made in bad faith. Authorizes the Attorney General to seek enforcement of a request in U.S. district court if a recipient refuses to comply.
Permits restricting the disclosure of information in proceedings consistent with the requirements of the Classified Information Procedures Act. Permits disclosure to an attorney to obtain legal advice or to persons as necessary to comply with the request. Prohibits any attorney or person notified of the request from disclosing that the FBI has sought or obtained access to information or records.
(Sec. 9) Terminates on December 31, 2009: (1) USA PATRIOT Act provisions regarding roving wiretaps and business records (restores amended or modified provisions as in effect on the day before the effective date of such Act); and (2) a provision of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA) regarding individual terrorists as agents of foreign powers(continues any particular foreign intelligence investigation that began before the date on which that extension ceases). Repeals the sunset of: (1) provisions of IRTPA redefining "agent of a foreign power" to include persons who engage in international terrorism; and (2) provisions modifying the prohibition against providing material support to terrorists.
(Sec. 10) Authorizes the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts to establish such rules and procedures and take such actions as are reasonably necessary to administer their responsibilities under FISA.
Requires the Attorney General's annual report to the Administrative Office and Congress to include the number of emergency employments of electronic surveillance and subsequent orders approving or denying such surveillance. Requires similar reporting to the House and Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees regarding: (1) the number of emergency physical searches authorized and subsequent orders approving or denying such searches; and (2) the number of pen registers and trap and trace devices authorized by the Attorney General on an emergency basis and subsequent orders approving or denying their installation.
For the sake of reference, here are two articles on how laws are made in Congress, by the House parliamentarian and by the Senate parliamentarian. Think of it as the view of each chamber on how things are done. It's worth your time to look these over so that you will better understand what is going on.
Do what you can, while you still can. Find your Senators' phone numbers at http://www.senate.gov .
12/15/2005 12:46:00 PM
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
A Christmas wish list for all of us
What I'd like for Christmas, and for the New Year -- a wish list in no particular order.
-- I'd like to see Americans getting involved with their government at all levels. I'd like to see more Americans who feel disenfranchised by the current Administration running for public office -- I don't care if it's dogcatcher or village clerk, it's important. I'd like to hear from people about how their willingness to get involved in even a small way in their local government is making a difference. I'd like to hear from the people who read this, about what they're doing in their home communities.
A longtime friend of mine ran for town supervisor in the town we both grew up in this year; I am so proud of her for getting involved and being willing to get out there and fight for what she believes in. She defeated a neoCon incumbent (yes, it can be done!) on a platform that stressed open government and responsiveness to the community. It was a nasty, dirt-throwing campaign, and the vast amount of dirt was aimed at her -- but she won and got 25% more of the vote than the incumbent. If this can be done in traditionally Republican Western New York, it can be done elsewhere. These days neoCon Republicans are all the way down to the local level -- if we want to get them out of office, we're going to have to work at it from the bottom up. It can be done -- but only if we are willing to take the first step and find out how to get involved, and then take that second step and do something.
Not everyone can run for office, though it would be wonderful if we all could -- but nearly anyone can make it a point to attend the local town board/village board/city council/township/borough meeting once a month and find out first-hand what's happening. Yes, it can seem to be boring -- but don't let the monotone fool you. That's your tax money being spent, and your lives being affected by the decisions made there. Don't you want to have a say in what's done with your life? Go, see what's going on, and then tell me about it. I'd love to know if the issues in South Bend are the same as the ones in Tacoma or Memphis or Bradford Township.
-- I'd like to have people who are literate, educated and broad-minded volunteer to serve on library boards and run for school board positions. I'd like to have them willing and able to explain exactly why children -- all of us -- need to be exposed to the broadest range of ideas in order to be educated. I'd like them to be able to say loudly that being American means that no one group's religious ideas take precedence over any other group's views when it concerns what the general public reads, listens to, and sees. I'd like the public libraries -- and the governments that fund them -- to be staunch supporters of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of thought and expression. I'd like full funding for library programs and purchases, and no cutbacks in interlibrary loans.
-- I'd like to see the arts and music back in schools; failing that, I'd like to see more community-based art and music programs for children and young people, and for adults as well. It doesn't take that much money to get a bunch of people together with sketch pads and pencils, or watercolors and paper, or sheet music and someone who knows the music a little. I'd like to see these made available at the same time as foreign language classes -- language, art and music all use the same part of the brain, and working with one of them makes it easier to learn another. And think how much more beautiful our communities would be if we were out there together painting the buildings that need a new coat of paint, or making music together.
-- I'd like to see more willingness to nurture curiosity and imagination in schools and beyond, rather than imposing stock answers, in schools. Good schools do this already, at whatever level of funding -- but we all could use more training in critical thinking as well as in formal logic. I'd love to see someone apply Boolean logic to political speeches and show up the disjunctures and illogic that are rampant throughout Administration propaganda. For example, "some" does not equal "all"; tax breaks that help "some" don't help everyone, and then we can look more closely at the "some" who are helped.
-- I'd like to see our national parks and federal lands remain national and not sold, parceled off, or turned into advertisements for major corporations. I want to be able to take my friends' grandchildren and great-grandchildren to see the same things I saw as a child. I want them to know there are still wild areas in this country, still wolves, still bears, still wild horses and burros and condors and polar bears. I'd like to see people respect the wilderness we have left, and learn to walk through it or camp in it without being intrusive. I'd like to see people being willing to take care of the green spaces in their communities and keep them from being filled with condominiums; we need these green spaces to keep our sanity.
-- I'd like to see more research done on beneficial pharmaceutical compounds from marijuana and other plants, especially those used in traditional medicine from many cultures. While we're at it, I'd like everyone in the US to have health care, because taking care of public health benefits all of us. I'd like to see more intelligent, practical talk in the public forum about how people can take care of their health without spending a lot of money, about what options they have and what can be possible.
-- I'd like to see women treated as equals with men, as adults, in all areas of life. Women should be able to say no and have that respected; they should be able to choose whether to have children; men who oppose this should not have the power to interfere in their personal medical choices. Women who do the same work as men should have the same pay and benefits, no difference. I'd like to see affordable, high-quality child care for anyone who needs it, as well as societal acknowledgment that women raising children are doing a difficult and necessary job. And that goes for men raising children, too.
-- I'd like to see full citizenship rights for every American citizen regardless of sex, gender, preference, race, religion, color, ancestral background, location, income or health. Every citizen should be equal under the law with every other citizen, without preference, in courts, in voting, in daily life. I'd like to see an end to the military recruiters on campus -- they can recruit anywhere else, but as long as they refuse to allow gay citizens to serve they should not be allowed at universities. I'd like to see a more intelligent and less biased discussion of immigration, brought into the arena of human dignity and the right to work and to bargain collectively for better conditions, and away from hate speech and fear. Everyone in this country is a child of immigrants -- everyone. The only difference is how long ago those immigrants arrived, be it a century or four centuries or four hundred centuries, and who met them when they arrived. We are all the descendents of people who came from somewhere else, even though some of us would like to ignore that.
-- I'd like to hear about how people are experimenting in their lives, taking chances, and what they are doing to help themselves and others to have better lives. I'd like to hear about inventions, pilgrimages, journeys, studies, creations and explorations.
-- I'd like to hope that government that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people will not perish from America during this Administration. I'd like to be able to believe that individuals still have a voice in this country, that corporations are not running the government, and that the American military will be able to withdraw from Iraq without invading any other countries for no good reason.
12/13/2005 04:58:00 PM
Friday, December 02, 2005
Panis et circenses in Americum hodie est.
I have been thinking for some time about my gut-deep dislike of so-called 'Reality TV' shows, but it wasn't until a friend mentioned her views against them that I could put into words the reasons why I hate them:
Reality TV is the contemporary American version of Roman circuses.
People are stripped of their humanity, humiliated, made to endure trials in a rigged system, all for the entertainment of an uncaring crowd. Ordinary human kindness is considered a weakness; it's back to kill or be killed, and whether that death is the white death of public humiliation or the red death of blood is only a matter of degree. But fights to the death in the Coliseum were at least honest; many 'reality' shows are scripted, down to the last turn of a head or tear on a cheek, robbing them of even that shred of reality. Then there are the 'swap' shows, such as the one where two families exchange wives for a week or two, and the resulting familial chaos is filmed for the entertainment of the crowd. This shows the least desirable attributes of all the people concerned, and exposes them to ridicule without any pretense of allowing privacy when one or another family member is distressed. And there are the 'dare'-type shows, which are as close a reversion to the arena as so-called family television might allow. Get buried in maggots? Stay in a cage with rats? Be imprisoned underwater? The line between human choice in accepting challenges and an unwitting acquiescence to being tortured stretches very thin at times. At best, such treatment of human beings is an attempt to turn them into objects of scorn; beyond that it often becomes outright cruelty and dehumanization. Can anyone really consent to be part of this sort of abuse without losing part of his or her humanity? Where is kindness, generosity or compassion shown in these shows, other than to be ridiculed?
For those of you who didn't study Latin or Roman history, let me offer a brief overview (that I'm sure someone with more knowledge will correct in the comments): During the Roman republic, contests of skill and prowess between warriors were not uncommon, and were ritualized to a degree, but weren't made matters of public spectacle. Wild animals might be sacrificed publicly to the appropriate deity, for instance, but that occurred at the deity's temple or holy place of worship, not in a public arena. It was only with the rise of the empire -- and the resulting large population of disposable slaves from conquered territories -- that Rome as a whole embraced the concept of public gladiatorial combat and animal fights as a means of pacifying the crowd. That was when the Circus Maximus and the Coliseum were built to house such events, when a subculture of gladiators and trainers and animal hunters grew to satisfy the unending desire for blood on the sand. The audience at the events had the ability to vote on whether defeated fighters should live or die -- thumbs up, thumbs down -- but the emperor had the final say.
You've seen some of this in the movies, of course, watered down in 'Ben-Hur', a little more strongly in 'Spartacus' and in 'Gladiator' -- but you didn't see what was behind it unless you also watched shows like 'I, Claudius' and its sequel, in which it was made quite clear that the reason for all of this public bloodshed was to keep the general public pacified and distract them from what was happening in their government. Roman emperors ruled with an iron fist and divine right -- they were considered gods, after their deaths, which made it harder to go against them during their lives because their whims were law, and they were the heads of the official state religion. Exile to the provinces was the best you could hope for if you offended the emperor, and that might come with an assassin to take care of you permanently if the current emperor thought you might cause more trouble. If there was any great belief in the essential innocence of humanity, it existed under a thick overlay of the worst traits that humans can show, wrapped in the most careful political maneuvering possible. Torture was commonplace and was required for some kinds of interrogations to ensure the accused was telling the truth.
(Bear in mind -- early Christians were executed not for believing in one god, but for apostasy for not taking part in the official state religion. They were considered mad heretics. It wasn't uncommon for a Roman to have a devotion to one particular deity -- but that Roman had to also pay lip service to the fact that other deities were honored, and take part in that honor in whatever way was considered proper -- burning incense, eating meat from animals sacrificed to the deities recognized by the emperor and so on. When the empire encompassed the entire Mediterranean and beyond, the list of those recognized deities grew very long. What offended Diocletian and the other emperors was the idea of Christians overturning that entire list in honor of a deity whose portrait they didn't want to see carved into a marble statue along with all the rest; the idea of an invisible god who could not be portrayed was a threat.)
The America we live in has, at times, been considered to be growing into an empire -- this has been said ever since the Spanish-American War in 1898 -- but only recently has its leadership begun to ally itself with an all-but-official religion, the Reconstructionist or Dominionist form of Protestantism. This version of Protestantism is heavily laced with dualistic Calvinist doctrines of the fallibility, sinfulness and innate wretchedness of mankind as a counterpoint to the glorious attributes of deity. And, as in Roman times, those who do not accept this version of religious belief are to be persecuted until they convert. Since Reconstructionists advocate changes in American law to embrace the nastier penalties in the Old Testament, it would not be surprising to see them attempt to legislate death for homosexuality, stoning for adultery or for teens who mouth off at their parents, and so on.
It's no secret that the Religious Right section of the Republican Party takes the credit for keeping George Bush in office. It's also no secret that James Dobson, Jerry Falwell and others from far-right religious organizations are consulted before policy decisions are made. But the 'official religion' goes further. When Bush says his actions are divinely guided, it's not the same as when Jimmy Carter talks about his faith. Jimmy Carter's faith includes working with Habitat for Humanity to personally hammer nails into boards and build houses for people who need them. There is no evidence anywhere that George Bush's faith includes doing anything for anyone who really needs help -- what used to be considered ordinary charitable Christian works, such as feeding the poor, clothing the naked, helping those without shelter to find homes, healing the sick and visiting those in prison -- which is why in the above discussion I've not used the word 'Christianity' to describe Reconstructionist beliefs. Bush may well not be an avowed Reconstructionist, but he has never gone against their views in his programs, which makes him their ally in the creation of a theocratic empire with himself at its head. Later Emperors weren't shy about having the Praetorian Guard get rid of anyone who attempted to protest their actions (and this was paid for with tax money from Roman citizens); Bush isn't shy about making sure the audiences for his tax-supported speeches are filled only with Republican supporters, while anyone who appears to diverge from this orthodoxy is ejected by people claiming to be the Secret Service.
During the last five years Americans have lost large sections of their rights to free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable or unwarranted search and seizure, and have had their right to vote abrogated by all-but-outright theft of their votes through rigged voting machines. More restrictions are on the way. The wealthiest three percent of the country's population -- the people who will never ever have to worry about making a small paycheck stretch to cover the bills and the Christmas presents, or even to cover food, housing and fuel at the same time -- grows wealthier every day on the backs of the poor, while the rest of us work hard and scramble to make ends meet. Trust me, that three percent doesn't include a lot of people watching "American Idol" or "Wife-Swap". And why should they? They're the ones getting all the bread they want, while the rest of us are consigned to the circuses.
The circuses support the Reconstructionist-Calvinist views of sin -- they show people at their worst, all the time, without the possibility of redemption or salvation, and the common currency is ridicule and scorn. There is no room there for real religion, for compassion, for kindness, for gentleness or innocence or goodness -- and I mean that without regard to denomination or creed.
The most insidious factor in the fad for 'reality' television programming is its ability to change common culture for the worse. By portraying mental cruelty, humiliation and dehumanization as if these things were unimportant, reality television programs the public to accept such things as the way things should be -- which is a lie. This is the sort of reprogramming of the human mind that paves the way to accepting the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as unimportant, rather than as a betrayal of basic American values and as violations of the Geneva Conventions. I doubt that it's a coincidence that the networks that are most involved in 'reality' shows are ones whose owners contributed heavily to Bush's re-election. They have nothing to lose by using their programming (which they regard as secondary to persuading people to buy things from their advertisers) to subtly enforce the Administration's anti-human-rights values.
There's no entertainment here; there's only ritualized public humiliation and cruelty. If consenting adults want to play out those games in private, that's their business; I don't believe I have to participate. And when this so-called 'entertainment' is portrayed as the latest thing in popular culture, that sends up a big red flag to me that says it's meant to be a distraction. Like Michael Jackson's various lawsuits, it's just another red herring to draw our attention away from the loss of our liberties, the predatory activities of elected officials whose major efforts go toward enriching themselves at the country's expense, and the continuing loss of American lives in a war we were deceived into entering.
12/02/2005 08:42:00 PM
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Losing paradise again
Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel To torture the timber and stripmine the land They took it away till the land was forsaken And wrote it all down as the 'progress of man'. -- John Prine, "Paradise"
Your government at work, fellow Americans. You think that's just a song?
...Under the existing law, a mining claim is the vehicle that allows for the extraction of so-called hard-rock metals like gold or silver.
Under the House bill passed Friday, for the first time in the history of the 133-year-old mining law individuals or companies can file and expand claims even if the land at the heart of a claim has already been stripped of its minerals or could never support a profitable mine. The measure would also lift an 11-year moratorium on the passing of claims into full ownership.
The provisions have struck fear through the West, from the resort areas of the Rockies like Aspen and Vail here in Colorado, to Park City in Utah, which are all laced with old mining claims. Critics say it could open the door for developers to use the claims to assemble large land parcels for projects like houses, hotels, ski resorts, spas or retirement communities.
And some experts on public land use say it is possible that energy companies could use the provision to buy land in the energy-rich fields of Wyoming and Montana on the pretext of mining, but then drill for oil and gas.
"They are called mining claims, but you can locate them where there are no minerals," said John D. Leshy, who was the Interior Department's senior lawyer during the Clinton administration. Mr. Leshy said the legislation "doesn't have much to do with mining at all."
"It has to do with real-estate transfer for economic development," he said.
But supporters of the bill, including Representative Jim Gibbons, Republican of Nevada, argue that critics like Mr. Leshy are missing the point of the legislation, and that allowing more mine-claim lands to be purchased would be an economic boon to rural communities that often struggle in the boom and bust cycle of mining. "Not only is this rhetoric false, it is an affront to the rural American families whose livelihoods depend on sustained economic development," Mr. Gibbons said in a written statement.
Debate over the bill, with its echoes of the West's old and thorny relationship with mining, has created some strange bedfellows. In Montana, hunting and fishing groups have rallied to fight the measure, fearing that it could reduce public access to treasured trout streams. The Jewelers of America, a trade group for retailers, has denounced it as well, fearing a backlash by consumers.
In Colorado, one question centers on the "fourteeners," as the state's string of 14,000-foot peaks are known. Public access to three of the peaks about two hours from Denver was closed this summer by owners of mining claims who - unbeknownst to most hikers - control sections of popular trails to the summits. Hiking groups are concerned that if those sections can be expanded by the owners, many more mountains could be closed.
Many major environmental groups, meanwhile, seemed distracted during the buildup to Friday's vote, though some, like the Wilderness Society and Earthworks, lobbied heavily against the changes in the mining law.
But with limited political capital to spend, many of the groups concentrated this fall on getting Republican support for eliminating from the House version of the spending bill those provisions that would have opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, known as ANWR, to energy exploration.
The Sierra Club and other lobbying groups were successful in that battle and on another provision that would have allowed new offshore drilling. But their credit was apparently used up when the mining provisions arose....
And in Tennessee, residents are fighting back against stripmining mountaintops in the North Cumberland Mountains. I have seen that kind of mining at work in southwest Pennsylvania, where the mountains are ripped apart and left to the elements above the towns. It's ugly, as ugly as greed can be; the irony there is that the next mountain over held a wind farm, towering windvanes harnessing power from the air without harming the land.
...Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.
The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.
One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.
The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Much of the contents of the September 21 PDB were later incorporated, albeit in a slightly different form, into a lengthier CIA analysis examining not only Al Qaeda's contacts with Iraq, but also Iraq's support for international terrorism. Although the CIA found scant evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the agency reported that it had long since established that Iraq had previously supported the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization, and had provided tens of millions of dollars and logistical support to Palestinian groups, including payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.
Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.
On November 18, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said he planned to attach an amendment to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill that would require the Bush administration to give the Senate and House intelligence committees copies of PDBs for a three-year period. After Democrats and Republicans were unable to agree on language for the amendment, Kennedy said he would delay final action on the matter until Congress returns in December.
The conclusions drawn in the lengthier CIA assessment-which has also been denied to the committee-were strikingly similar to those provided to President Bush in the September 21 PDB, according to records and sources. In the four years since Bush received the briefing, according to highly placed government officials, little evidence has come to light to contradict the CIA's original conclusion that no collaborative relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
"What the President was told on September 21," said one former high-level official, "was consistent with everything he has been told since-that the evidence was just not there."
In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties, and they cited the possibility that Iraq might share chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack against the United States.
Democrats in Congress, as well as other critics of the Bush administration, charge that Bush and Cheney misrepresented and distorted intelligence information to bolster their case for war with Iraq. The president and vice president have insisted that they unknowingly relied on faulty and erroneous intelligence, provided mostly by the CIA.
The new information on the September 21 PDB and the subsequent CIA analysis bears on the question of what the CIA told the president and how the administration used that information as it made its case for war with Iraq.
The central rationale for going to war against Iraq, of course, was that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons, and that he was pursuing an aggressive program to build nuclear weapons. Despite those claims, no weapons were ever discovered after the war, either by United Nations inspectors or by U.S. military authorities.
Much of the blame for the incorrect information in statements made by the president and other senior administration officials regarding the weapons-of-mass-destruction issue has fallen on the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.
In April 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a bipartisan report that the CIA's prewar assertion that Saddam's regime was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons program" and "has chemical and biological weapons" were "overstated, or were not supported by the underlying intelligence provided to the Committee."...
Although the Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 commission, pointed to incorrect CIA assessments on the WMD issue, they both also said that, for the most part, the CIA and other agencies did indeed provide policy makers with accurate information regarding the lack of evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.
But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.
"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002.
The next day, Rumsfeld said, "We have what we consider to be credible evidence that Al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts with Iraq who could help them acquire … weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities."
The most explosive of allegations came from Cheney, who said that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, had met in Prague, in the Czech Republic, with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, five months before the attacks. On December 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press: "[I]t's pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in [the Czech Republic] last April, several months before the attack."
Cheney continued to make the charge, even after he was briefed, according to government records and officials, that both the CIA and the FBI discounted the possibility of such a meeting.
Credit card and phone records appear to demonstrate that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va., at the time of the alleged meeting, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials. Al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence official with whom Atta was said to have met in Prague, was later taken into custody by U.S. authorities. He not only denied the report of the meeting with Atta, but said that he was not in Prague at the time of the supposed meeting, according to published reports.
In June 2004, the 9/11 commission concluded: "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."
Regarding the alleged meeting in Prague, the commission concluded: "We do not believe that such a meeting occurred."
Still, Cheney did not concede the point. "We have never been able to prove that there was a connection to 9/11," Cheney said after the commission announced it could not find significant links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. But the vice president again pointed out the existence of a Czech intelligence service report that Atta and the Iraqi agent had met in Prague. "That's never been proved. But it's never been disproved," Cheney said.
The following month, July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in its review of the CIA's prewar intelligence: "Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al-Qaeda."
One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made statements that contradicted what they were told in CIA briefings might have been that they were receiving information from another source that purported to have evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from a covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the September 11 attacks by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.
Feith was a protégé of, and intensely loyal to, Cheney, Rumsfeld, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and Cheney's then-chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. The secretive unit was set up because Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Libby did not believe the CIA would be able to get to the bottom of the matter of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties. The four men shared a long-standing distrust of the CIA from their earlier positions in government, and felt that the agency had failed massively by not predicting the September 11 attacks.
At first, the Feith-directed unit primarily consisted of two men, former journalist Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, a veteran of neoconservative think tanks. They liked to refer to themselves as the "Iraqi intelligence cell" of the Pentagon. And they took pride in the fact that their office was in an out-of-the-way cipher-locked room, with "charts that rung the room from one end to the other" showing the "interconnections of various terrorist groups" with one another and, most important, with Iraq, Maloof recalled in an interview.
They also had the heady experience of briefing Rumsfeld twice, and Feith more frequently, Maloof said. The vice president's office also showed great interest in their work. On at least three occasions, Maloof said, Samantha Ravich, then-national security adviser for terrorism to Cheney, visited their windowless offices for a briefing.
But neither Maloof nor Wurmser had any experience or formal training in intelligence analysis. Maloof later lost his security clearance, for allegedly failing to disclose a relationship with a woman who is a foreigner, and after allegations that he leaked classified information to the press. Maloof said in the interview that he has done nothing wrong and was simply being punished for his controversial theories. Wurmser has since been named as Cheney's Middle East adviser....
What's the penalty for the Administration when it lies to the country in order to lead us to war? What's the penalty for lies that result in the death of thousands?
Whether the American public knows it or not, we have returned to the time of England's King John Lackland, a time when anyone can be locked up for any reason, and tortured if the ruler wishes. Where is the rule of law instead of title? Habeas corpus is dying in the United States; has anyone noticed?
Four years ago, President George W. Bush quietly assumed dictatorial powers with a secret executive order granting himself the right to imprison anyone on earth indefinitely, without charges or trial or indictment or evidence, simply by declaring them an "enemy combatant," on his say-so alone. This week, the assemblage of bootlickers and bagmen that befoul the U.S. Senate voted to codify the core of this global autocracy under the pretense of curtailing it.
With great self-fluffing fanfare, the Senate passed two measures ostensibly designed to stem the flood of torture and tyranny issuing from the White House. But the twinned amendments to a military spending bill have the curious effect of canceling each other out: The anti-torture measure leaves Bush's tyranny intact, while the anti-tyranny measure will allow torture to continue unabated. This switcheroo, we are told by one of the scam's sponsors, "will re-establish moral high ground for the United States," The Washington Post reports.
But what can we actually see from this lofty moral promontory? We see that all foreign captives in Bush's worldwide gulag have now been stripped of the ancient human right of habeas corpus. They will not be allowed to challenge "any aspect of their detention" in court -- until they have already been tried and convicted by a "military tribunal" constituted under rules concocted arbitrarily by Bush and his minions. Only then, after years of incarceration without rights or legal protection, will they be given access to a single federal appeals court that can review their conviction -- subject to the usual "national security" restrictions on challenging evidence gathered by secret means from secret sources in secret places. Remarkably, the Supreme Court is expressly prohibited from any jurisdiction whatsoever over any aspect of gulag captivity, The Washington Post reports. And of course, Bush can simply skip the tribunal and keep anyone he pleases chained in legal limbo until they rot. Neither of the ballyhooed amendments affects this raw despotism.
Meanwhile, U.S. citizens can also be arbitrarily imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial. But for now, any Homelanders caught in Bush's net can at least appear briefly in court prior to their conviction, where they will enjoy a "judicial process" that Stalin or Saddam would have loved: Bush officials present the judge with a piece of paper declaring that the prisoner is one bad hombre, but all the evidence against him is classified and nobody can see it -- especially the prisoner, The Washington Post reports. And that's it. The captive is then plunged back into the gulag, to be disposed of according to Bush's whim. Again, this medieval mechanism of tyranny was left untouched by the Senate's actions. ...
On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.
Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.
It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.
The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon....
As you think of the things for which you're thankful, remember that the things I write about won't change unless you get involved in your government, from the local area on up. You want to change the world? Get started where you are, with some of the things for which you're not as thankful. Find one thing that you want to see different, one small thing, and do something about it. The road to anywhere you want to go is one step ahead of your feet.
11/24/2005 08:40:00 AM
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
not with a bang but a backfire
The more I hear about General Motors laying off 30,000 people, the stranger it feels. Weird, in a sort of inevitable way, as if the basic framework of the universe were rusting slightly.
You might say I grew up in the midst of GM; my father was a senior tool engineer in the design shop at Rochester Products, where the engines were designed. He worked on every engine built from the mid-1950s to when he retired in the 1970s, and when the designers and model makers couldn't reconcile the demands of the model with the manufacturing process Dad would bring home the prototype and re-engineer it in the basement on the drill press, by hand. He'd get it down to where everything fitted to the thousandth of an inch, or whatever measurement they were doing, and take it back in to the plant where what he'd done was replicated and put on the assembly line so that the workers could put together engines that would do what the designers expected. If it said Chevy or Oldsmobile on it, he worked on it.
Despite his arguments with designers who had little knowledge of metallurgy or the history of the internal-combustion engine, he wanted me to be an engineer also. One of the biggest fights we had came after I'd taken a bank of aptitude tests from a psychologist, who had concluded that I should go into journalism, theatre or music, perhaps social science, but definitely not engineering. It was a fair assessment; engines bored me, and why wouldn't they when I'd spent hour after hour sitting behind the wheel so I could shift into second or third or reverse on command as he did some inexplicable thing to whatever was moving around under the hood. But when I got out of high school, I worked on the assembly line for the summer before college, and that was different.
There's a culture that grows up around manufacturing, and I'm not talking about ethnicity. This is something else. It's a kind of unspoken knowledge, the bone-deep knowing that people are making things with their hands to make a living, and that these things they make matter in the everyday world. People start with sheets of metal or odd-shaped chunks of steel or aluminum and the metal moves down an assembly line and at the end of that there's an engine or a lock mechanism or an exhaust system or a door that wasn't there before. It's a way of participating in creation, even if it's on a time clock and a routine, and it gives people a different view of the world than when everyone is only creating things written on paper or blinking on a screen and filed away at the end of the day. I have been missing that kind of hands-on culture ever since I moved to the DC area 16 years ago, because what people make here is policy and issues and ideas, all of which are important, but none of which you can hold in your hand at the end of the day and know that the world is a little different because you went to work. Policy and issues are indirect; they often affect millions of unknown people far more than they affect the few who work to make them. And when the only industry is on paper, there's less respect for people who work with their hands on wood and steel and vinyl and aluminum and plastics, who start with things that don't look like much and end up with the appliances and vehicles we use every day. There's less respect for hardworking hands-on people and less respect for the things they create.
Henry Ford set his pay scales so his employees could buy his company's cars, and this echoed through the industry. When the people who build a product also buy it and make it part of their lives, the feeling is different than when Random Joe Public goes to the showroom or the used-car lot and puts down money. Random Joe Public doesn't know that the reason that the section under the door used to rust out too fast was because of the design of the rocker panels. Random Joe Public doesn't know that the employees who bought cars where this happened told people higher up and the word got up to the design shop and the panels were redesigned and treated differently to make it harder for them to rust in cities that use lots of rock salt on the roads in the winter. Random Joe Public doesn't know that his own car came down the assembly line on a specific day, and that his friends and co-workers helped build it for him, just as he helped to build cars for them.
All over America, the culture I grew up with is fading, with the demise of steel plants and auto factories. There are long lists of reasons why these places are closing, starting with the refusal of company owners to create vehicles with alternative fuel or higher mileage and going on to the changes in the materials used -- often as not, these days, parts and frames are aluminum instead of steel, with lighter weight and lower cost but less longterm strength. It's not impossible to break a transmission made of aluminum simply by pushing the shifter hard if it gets stuck; I did it a few years ago. That wouldn't happen with steel; it wouldn't have broken a tooth off the gear in the first place.
What I see that will be broken now are cities and towns where thousands of people who have had good jobs -- many of them the only jobs they may have ever had, because manufacturing plants take people longterm -- will have no work in places where the company they worked for was the major employer in the area. Twenty years ago, when one of the big mills south of Buffalo went dark, the small city where it was located lost 35% of its workforce. That's more than a third of its families without income, more than a third of the children in the school now eligible for food stamps and free lunches -- at least those weren't in question back then from federal budget cuts -- and still the property taxes and school taxes to be paid. The effect of the layoffs splashes out to cover service industries and retail as well. Who's going to go out to dinner if there's a struggle just to put food on the table? Forget about dry cleaning if you're not going to work, or about that new addition to the house or the new furniture. And forget those big ideas about Christmas presents. Nearly every business suffers when the biggest company in town closes its doors. At least with GM, it's not so likely that they'll forget their obligations to pensioners; the company itself is still there even if some of the plants are not, though I doubt their retirement packages are as good as they used to be. But a lot of people may be taking early retirement anyway; there's not much of a market for older employees who know tool steel or platemaking inside and out, not the market that there used to be. The choices often come down to early retirement on less money than the family really needs or moving to find a job somewhere else, if there is one. That's hard to do when thousands of people with similar qualifications hit the industrial job market at the same time.
Twenty years ago, when there weren't enough jobs going around, the universal panacea was retraining for computer work -- but in the last five years the Administration has allowed millions of computer jobs to be exported to India and elsewhere, the kind of jobs that people would have been training for. Where will the people who have been laid off go now? What industry, what company, what way of life will they find? And what will remain of hands-on culture in this increasingly paper-driven society?
11/22/2005 10:37:00 AM
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Your online right to speak freely needs to be protected
Daily Kos urges us to support House Resolution 1606, which comes up for a vote today. It has to do with how political speech is regulated. The idea is to keep the Internet exempted from the category of "public communication" (which is regulated) and reserved as private speech, which enjoys First Amendment freedoms.
...Let me tell you what the bill does:
* This all started when Congress passed McCain-Feingold, which didn't mention the Internet at all -- and this was in 2002. * So the FEC, in passing its regulations to implement the law, explicitly said "none of the anti-coordination rules apply to the Internet". * The pro-regulation lobby sued, arguing that this went beyond the FEC's authority, because the spirit of McCain-Feingold meant that Congress really wanted to regulate such activities. * They won, and the district court ordered the FEC to regulate. They've been working on that since March, and for a lot of reasons, there is a better than decent chance that they'll now get it wrong.
...As I've written in the Washington Post, this temporary exemption reflects our best opportunity to keep the political blogosphere free from burdensome regulation as the 2006 elections approach. We simply cannot trust the FEC to get it right, in regulating a medium which they do not entirely understand and for which the harms they are seeking to prevent are wholly theoretical.
(The fact of the matter is this: if an entity had a million dollars to spend in support of a candidate, why would they ever spend it on the Internet and not television or print? The whole point of this medium is that it doesn't take money to reach people; it takes ideas.)
Our fundamental argument is this: with the FEC about to receive a number of new members who aren't familiar with the record, and with the 2006 elections soon approaching, now is not the time to force the Federal Election Commission to start regulating in an area which caused no problems of corruption in 2004. While precisely-tailored regulations would be wonderful, the truth is that it's only through this kind of significant carve-out that anyone will feel comfortable speaking out on and supporting federal candidates through the Internet without the fear of investigation, subpoena and complaint. It is the only way to be sure that group blogs, incorporated blogs, and blogs that accept advertising from or speak with candidates are protected in their activities....
Title: To amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to exclude communications over the Internet from the definition of public communication.
4/13/2005--Introduced.
Online Freedom of Speech Act - Amends the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to exclude communications over the Internet from the meaning of public communication subject to the Act.
Full text:
Online Freedom of Speech Act (Introduced in House)
HR 1606 IH
109th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 1606
To amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to exclude communications over the Internet from the definition of public communication.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
April 13, 2005
Mr. HENSARLING introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on House Administration
A BILL
To amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to exclude communications over the Internet from the definition of public communication.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Online Freedom of Speech Act'.
SEC. 2. MODIFICATION OF DEFINITION OF PUBLIC COMMUNICATION.
Paragraph (22) of section 301 of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (2 U.S.C. 431(22)) is amended by adding at the end the following new sentence: `Such term shall not include communications over the Internet.'.
If you want to continue to see unregulated free speech on politics on the Internet, you might consider contacting your Congress(wo)man now on this bill.
11/02/2005 10:46:00 AM
Is That Legal reviews the White House's talking points on Alito, which includes the official planned responses to anticipated attacks. Read it and arm yourself for the future. Note the stress on states' rights, which is a ploy; this Administration may talk Southern, when it benefits them, but don't believe for a moment that if federal laws are overturned that the states will get more rights. This is, after all, the Administration that ran on a "small government" platform and then turned around and created the Department of Homeland Security to keep an eye on all of us.
Wash. Post: Alito swings to the right. And from Think Progress, Alito's view of America. No, this isn't Halloween any more, that was yesterday. This is real and this is what he wants to do. Note the women-and-children-as-man's-property opinion in Doe v. Groody, 2004
...It's clearer to educate people about what "strict constructionism" really means in practical terms. Former Whitehouse Council John Dean dredged up this definition from a memo by William Rehnquist to Dick Nixon:
A judge who is a "strict constructionist" in constitutional matters will generally not be favorably inclined toward claims of either criminal defendants or civil rights plaintiffs--the latter two groups having been the principal beneficiaries of the Supreme Court's "broad constructionist" reading of the Constitution.
"In other words, concludes Dean, to Rehnquist "strict constructionist" has nothing to do with adherence to the intent of the framers when interpreting the constitution. It just means screwing the little guy to benefit law enforcement or discriminators.
More to the point, a strict reading of the Constitution effectively puts the kibosh on some popular expectations of what government should do.
Look at the Bill of Rights. The 10th amendment says "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
So strict constructionism means saying 'bye bye' to Social Security. 'So long,' Equal Opportunity Commission. 'Ciao' to most of the EPA (except that which is directly related to interstate commerce).
And for our friends on the right, 'hasta la vista' to the federal death penalty and 'adios' to things like the Patriot Act. Oh, and every war since WWII - the last time Congress declared - have been illegal.
Let's challenge not only this one right-wing judicial tyrant but also the whole straw man argument that's been fueling these fights since the nomination of Clarence Thomas.
Seeing the Forest discusses leaving Rove in place to put forth a politics of personal destruction. Really, why is Rove still there? Could it possibly be true that when Rove walks into the Oval Office, Bush is the one with the notepad and pen taking notes and taking orders? Or is it that Rove knows a really good supplier for whaver Bush craves (and I'm stopping the hypothesizing at Jim Beam, though you can take it where you want) and Bush doesn't want to lose his source?
Why are armed National Guard troops making New Orleans a ghost town? Could it be that they've been told to keep out poor people so the landlords can raze the Ninth Ward?
... Dr. Arjun Sengupta, the United Nations Human Rights Commission Special Reporter on Extreme Poverty, visited New Orleans and Baton Rouge last week. He toured the devastated areas and listened to the evacuees still in shelters and those living out of town with family.
Dr. Sengupta described current conditions as “"shocking" and "gross violations of human rights." The devastation itself is shocking, he explained, but even more shocking is that two months have passed and there is little to nothing being done to reconstruct vast areas of New Orleans. "The US is the richest nation in the history of the world. Why cannot it restore electricity and water and help people rebuild their homes and neighborhoods? If the US can rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq, why not New Orleans?" ...
Why is an 8-year-old girl skipping school to go hunting and killing a 200-lb (probably about two-year-old) black bear so worthy of praise by the Washington Post? She's not in a survival situation, hungry and cold, so that it would be reasonable to kill it for food and clothing. It was minding its own business, not attacking her or anyone else, so self-defense wasn't involved. There's really no reason for this. I don't object to hunting when there is clear need -- but that's not what's going on here.
Be aware, this is a move carefully calculated to do several things:
-- take attention away from the continuing investigation into Karl Rove and others, in the next phase of the Plamegate investigation. -- replace Sandra Day O'Connor, who started on the right and moved to the center, with someone who is farther to the right and whose track record indicates he'll stay there. -- appease the neoCons, James Dobson and the others of the Religious Right by giving them someone who has a long history of extreme conservative views, and who has been in the judiciary long enough to have a genuine track record and some degree of competence. -- get rid of Roe v. Wade by putting a fifth strong neoCon voice on the court. In getting rid of abortion rights, he will also be striking a blow at the right to privacy, at the availability (and possibly the existence) of contraception (and I mean all of it, not just Plan B), and at any other bit of law that the Religious Right or the neoCons deem to be not following their self-sanctified viewpoint. -- put his imprint on the Court for the next 30 years or so, as Alito is 55 years old. (Roberts is 50.)
But there's more.
I think one of the reasons for the original choice of Harriet Miers was that she was meant to cement into place a judicial foundation for the kind of imperial presidency that blurs the boundary dividing a constitutional presidency from actual dictatorship. (Consider the Patriot Act, the unilateral decision -- without the Senate's agreement -- to go to war, the executive orders that have flowed in every direction from the Oval Office since 2000.) Since Miers failed to be confirmed, and since Bush has never been known to change his mind about what he wants, the selection of Alito says to me that he still wants to continue in this direction. Bush wants power, the kind that nobody can overrule, and he's probably feeling particularly vulnerable now that Scooter Libby has been indicted and Rove is still under the magnifying glass. Bush doesn't really have to worry about getting the laws he wants passed by the neoCon Congress, which has enacted judicial reform by indemnifying the gun manufacturers and dealers; it has taken those cases out of the courts, restricting the people's right to seek redress and the court's traditional role in providing it. In doing this, it has also set a precedent for restricting more kinds of legal cases from the courts.
So, now. Bush has effective control of the Executive and near-perfect control of the Legislative branches; all he needs is the Judicial in order to put any neoCon ideology in place as the law of the land -- at least until the 2006 election. Do you see what I see? Lots of hard-right bills coming out of committee, lots of big precedent-setting cases decided in order to set neoCon-favorable precedents, and not to overturn unjust laws or add to Americans' freedoms or enforce their rights.
Many of the greatest changes to the law that have occurred in the past century have come when cases have been appealed all the way through the system, from the local court through the state and federal system to the Supreme Court. Three examples: Brown vs. Board of Education, which ended legal segregation in schools, and US vs. Miranda, which gave us the Miranda warnings when people are arrested, and Roe v. Wade. Argue as you will about cases that are brought up from lower courts, but it seems to me that the majority of cases that come up that way have resulted in enlarging the rights of Americans, not restricting them. The more cases are restricted from federal jurisdiction, the less chance of constructive changes to the law as a whole.
The current neoCon Republicans seem intent on restricting the rights of Americans to seek redress for their injuries or to petition peaceably for their rights -- both of which actions are rights allowed by the Bill of Rights. The current incarnation of the Supreme Court, already heavily leaning toward the Republican view of matters, takes tiny steps in its decisions and avoids making any decision that actually has anything to do with a larger Constitutional view of the case. Instead, it chips away at rights, chips away at the law. Alito fits right in there. He has been described as "an activist conservatist judge", like Scalia.
Do we really need another Antonin Scalia, whose anti-Constitutional views are well known, on the highest bench in the land? Scalia has spoken out against stare decisis, the rule of precedent from case law, and has called the Constitution a 'dead document', one that he says must only be read as its authors would have understood it -- although its authors well understood the proper role of case law and the reasons that the understanding of documents and laws develops over the decades rather than staying moribund. If Alito shares his views in this, we may be in for very difficult times if he is confirmed. The Senate Judiciary Committee should be prepared to ask him about this.
...Which brings us back to the Supreme Court. In some ways, the Marcavage controversy recalls a 2001 ruling by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that is sure to be dusted off by journalists if its author, Circuit Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., is nominated to the high court by Bush. Alito -- dubbed "Scalito" by detractors because of his supposed affinity with Justice Scalia -- is on most short lists of potential Bush appointees.
In the 2001 case, the 3rd Circuit struck down on First Amendment grounds the anti-harassment policy adopted by the State College Area School District in Pennsylvania. The policy, which prohibited harassment on the basis of "one's actual or perceived race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, disability or other personal characteristics," had been challenged by two children who said they feared it would get them into trouble if they gave voice to their religious belief that "homosexuality is a sin."
The 3rd Circuit overturned the policy because, in Judge Alito's words, "there is no categorical 'harassment exception' to the First Amendment's Free Speech Clause." Alito's opinion also cited a 1969 decision in which the Supreme Court upheld the right of public-school students in Iowa to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. In that ruling, Alito noted, the justices had said that students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."
Balancing the First Amendment rights of students with the right of their gay classmates to be free of hurtful harassment is a complicated challenge (unless one believes either that there are no gay or lesbian adolescents, or that, if there are, they can be scared straight.) But, as liberals often say in other contexts, freedom of speech comes at a price.
Whether or not Judge Alito and his colleagues struck the right balance in the State College schools case, the ruling illustrates the tension between two values usually lumped together as "liberal" -- a generous reading of the First Amendment and solicitude for victims of discrimination. If Alito or someone with similar views is nominated to the Supreme Court, it will be interesting to see how the "liberal press" deals with that perplexing phenomenon.
The question the article doesn't answer: was he against restricting hate speech because of First Amendment considerations, or because the students being harassed were gay? More on it here.
This How Appealing link describes Alito's role in a corporate case at the appeals level that Alito joined in reversing.
...In his dissent, Third Circuit Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr., provides us with this memorable benefits quote:
Observing that ERISA’s minimum standards for vesting and accrual differ, the majority concludes that “the Fund was required to credit DiGiacomo with ‘all years of service’ in computing his accrued pension benefits.” Maj. Op. at [[9]]. The majority seems to assume that ERISA also required the Plan to include all of his accrued benefits in the calculation of his pension, but ERISA says nothing of the kind. As the Supreme Court explained in Central Laborers’ Pension Fund v. Heinz, accrual is simply “the rate at which an employee earns benefits to put in his pension account.” 541 U.S. 739, 749 (2004). Accrued benefits, in other words, are like chalk marks beside the employee’s name. They are conditional rights that do not become “irrevocably his property” until they vest. Id. Only then do they become “legally enforceable against the plan.” ERISA § 3(19), 29 U.S.C. § 1002(19). Prior to vesting, accrued benefits can be, and in this case were, forfeited under the terms of a participant’s plan.
In a footnote, the majority directly responded to Alito's analogy to "chalk marks" and stated:
To borrow Judge Alito’s helpful analogy, see dissenting opinion at 2, DiGiacomo’s 10.5 years of accrued benefit credit might be equated to chalk marks beside the employee’s name, but they are not necessarily erased merely because related marks in a separate category for vested benefit credits have been lost due to a break-in-service....
...Samuel Alito Jr., 54. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Known as "Scalito," or little Scalia, he is considered less blustering than the big guy, but liberals will undoubtedly balk at his abortion record. In 1991, he dissented from a decision to strike down Pennsylvania's spousal notification provision--a decision the Supreme Court later upheld in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the decision that reaffirmed Roe v. Wade. What should be far more troubling to Senate Democrats, however, is Alito's 1996 dissent from a decision upholding the constitutionality of a federal law prohibiting the possession of machine guns. Applying the logic of the Constitution in Exile for all it's worth, Alito insisted that the private possession of machine guns was not an economic activity, and there was no empirical evidence that private gun possession increased violent crime in a way that substantially affected commerce--therefore, Congress has no right to regulate it. Alito's colleagues criticized him for requiring "Congress or the Executive to play Show and Tell with the federal courts at the peril of invalidation of a Congressional statute." His lack of deference to Congress is unsettling....
You want to protect your Constitutional rights? Pick up your telephone Monday or Tuesday
I wrote a while back about HR 3035 and S 1088 -- the Streamlined Procedures Act of 2005, which was introduced more or less simultaneously in the House and Senate. It has been on hold for a while, because of the number of people who have spoken out against the bill to their legislators. Now, it's back, and the Senate Judiciary Committee is to hold hearings on it on Wednesday, Oct. 26. This is an attempt to push it through when they think we're so busy looking at Harriet Myers' inadequacies that we won't notice they're trying to make our Constitutional rights less adequate as well.
The Streamlined Procedures Act was originally designed to "reduce the backlog" of appeals cases arising from death-penalty convictions. (There is no backlog.) This bill removes from federal courts the jurisdiction to hear death-penalty and other appeals arising from cases in state courts. In other words, if someone is given the death penalty in a state-level court, he could no longer appeal the conviction to the US. District Court of Appeals. As a result of this bill, people who have been sentenced because of procedural technicalities or sentencing errors would not have another chance to appeal. The bill would forbid the federal court from hearing capital cases altogether. As a further result, more executions of people on Death Row would result in states that execute people; it is virtually certain that some of these people would be innocent and wrongly killed. Historically, federal appeals courts have been the forum in which people who were condemned based on technicalities or inadequate, incomplete information were able to bring their cases forward and receive justice. This is in accordance with the principle of judicial review, which has for more than 200 years allowed ordinary Americans to bring their cases to successively higher courts and ultimately to the Supreme Court wihout any legislative bar. This would no longer be the case if the Streamlined Procedures Act becomes law.
Here's the summary of the bill, from thomas.loc.gov:
Streamlined Procedures Act of 2005 - Amends the federal judicial code to revise the law and procedures for habeas corpus petitions.
Denies or restricts the jurisdiction of federal courts to hear habeas corpus petitions that: (1) have been procedurally barred in a state court; (2) are based upon errors in sentences or sentencing ruled as harmless error by a state court; (3) pertain to capital cases; or (4) challenge the exercise of a states's executive clemency or pardon power.
Revises deadlines for filing appeals to federal courts of state habeas corpus decisions.
Revises procedures for mixed habeas corpus petitions (petitions bringing claims exhausted and unexhausted in state court) to require petitioners to describe how they have exhausted each claim in state court. Requires unexhausted claims to be dismissed with prejudice.
Limits the ability of habeas corpus petitioners to amend petitions or modify or add additional claims.
Requires any period in which a petitioner does not have a habeas corpus petition pending in a state court to be charged against the one year limitation period for filing a federal habeas corpus petition from a state court decision.
Requires requests for financial support for petitioners in a habeas corpus proceeding to be decided by a judge other than the judge presiding over such proceeding. Requires any amount of financial support authorized by a judge to be publicly disclosed.
Extends crime victims' rights to federal habeas corpus proceedings arising out of a state conviction.
Habeas Corpus habeas corpus n. Law A writ issued to bring a party before a court to prevent unlawful restraint. [Med. Lat., you should have the body]
The basic premise behind habeas corpus is that you cannot be held against your will without just cause. To put it another way, you cannot be jailed if there are no charges against you. If you are being held, and you demand it, the courts must issue a writ or habeas corpus, which forces those holding you to answer as to why. If there is no good or compelling reason, the court must set you free. It is important to note that of all the civil liberties we take for granted today as a part of the Bill of Rights, the importance of habeas corpus is illustrated by the fact that it was the sole liberty thought important enough to be included in the original text of the Constitution.
HR 3035 is sponsored by Rep. Daniel E. Lungren, with no cosponsors. S 1088 is sponsored by Sen. John Kyl of Arizona, with three cosponsors: Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Georgia; Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa; Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, Utah.
You want to do a good deed for yourself, your family, your friends and your country? Before Wednesday, contact your Senators and the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to oppose the Streamlined Procedures Act. Here, from their websites, are contact numbers and links for Judiciary Committee members:
Republicans: Arlen Specter, committee chairman, Pennsylvania; http://spector.senate.gov, 202-224-4254 Orrin G. Hatch, Utah; http://hatch.senate.gov. Tel: (202) 224-5251 Fax: (202) 224-6331 Charles E. Grassley, Iowa -- also, cosponsor of the bill; http://grassley.senate.gov phone (202) 224-3744 Jon Kyl , Arizona -- sponsor of the bill; http://kyl.senate.gov tel: 202-224-4521 fax: 202-224-2207 Mike DeWine, Ohio; http://dewine.senate.gov Phone: (202) 224-2315 Fax: (202) 224-6519 TDD: (202) 224-9921 Jeff Sessions, Alabama; http://sessions.senate.gov phone (202) 224-4124 - fax (202) 224-3149 Lindsey Graham, South Carolina; http://lgraham.senate.gov phone (202) 224-5972 John Cornyn, Texas; http://cornyn.senate.gov; Tel: 202-224-2934 Fax: 202-228-2856 Sam Brownback, Kansas; http://brownback.senate.gov (202)224-6521 Tom Coburn, Oklahoma ; http://coburn.senate.gov phone: 202-224-5754 Fax: 202-224-6008
Democrats: Patrick J. Leahy, ranking Democratic member, Vermont; http://leahy.senate.gov, (202) 224-4242 Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts; http://kennedy.senate.gov, phone 202-224-4543, fax 202 224-2417 Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Delaware; http://biden.senate.gov Phone: 202-224-5042 Fax: 202-224-0139 TDD: 202-224-5652 Herbert Kohl, Wisconsin; http://kohl.senate.gov Phone: (202) 224-5653 Fax: (202) 224-9787 Dianne Feinstein, California; http://feinstein.senate.gov phone 202-224-3841 Russell D. Feingold, Wisconsin; http://feingold.senate.gov phone (202) 224-5323 TDD (202) 224-1280 Fax (202) 224-2725 Charles E. Schumer, New York; http://schumer.senate.gov Phone: 202-224-6542 Fax: 202-228-3027 TDD: 202-224-0420 Richard J. Durbin, Illinois; http://durbin.senate.gov phone (202) 224-2152 fax (202) 228-0400
...S.1088 Would Result In Incarcerated Persons Who Have Had Their Constitutional Rights Violated Never Getting Their Day In Federal Court.
Since 1976, when capital punishment was resumed in some states, federal habeas corpus proceedings have been the principal means by which the federal courts have forced the states to adhere to constitutional standards for the imposition of the death penalty. Those standards are essential if capital punishment is to be administered in a fair and nondiscriminatory manner. Constitutional jurisprudence in this area can be arcane and complex – as a result, state trial courts often fail to interpret federal law governing prisoners’ claims correctly. In addition, in many states, trial court judges are subject to tremendous political pressure to uphold convictions, no matter how egregious the constitutional violations might be - including claims of actual innocence. Thus, in many cases federal habeas corpus proceedings become the court of last resort for state prisoners with claims ranging from whether adequate legal counsel was provided to indigent (and often minority) defendants, to whether an innocent person may have been convicted wrongly. As the Framers so accurately predicted, Article III federal judges are the ones who uphold the federal Constitutional rights of those least likely to able to defend themselves against the state. If legislation such as S.1088 is enacted, the wrongfully convicted will be sent to their deaths without ever having an opportunity to establish their innocence in front of a federal judge.
This legislation would require state prisoners to litigate their federal claims in state court at the same time as they litigate any state claims regarding their incarceration. Under current law state prisoners are required to exhaust all state court remedies before pursuing federal habeas corpus claims in federal court. Presently, if a prisoner begins federal habeas proceedings before state litigation is complete he or she can postpone consideration of federal claims during state proceedings and continue federal litigation after exhausting state remedies. S.1088 would require federal courts to dismiss federal claims that are brought to court before the state court process is exhausted. There are many examples of persons incarcerated in state prisons who were exonerated after filing federal habeas claims prior to the completion of their state litigation; Thomas Goldstein’s story is just one example:
In 1980, Thomas Goldstein was wrongfully convicted of murder in Long Beach, California and sentenced to 27 years to life. Prior to this, Goldstein had never been convicted of any crime. He is a native of Kansas and a Vietnam Veteran. The prosecution’s case against Goldstein was based on one eyewitness, who reported seeing Goldstein run from the scene, and the “snitch” testimony of one Edward Fink, who claimed Goldstein confessed to him when the two were housed together while Goldstein was in jail awaiting trial. Goldstein, acting as his own attorney, obtained records on Fink from a lawyer representing another inmate convicted based on Fink’s testimony. He then used that information to file a new habeas petition in federal court. The court was sufficiently persuaded by Goldstein’s pleadings to order an evidentiary hearing and appointed an attorney to represent him.
The investigation by Goldstein’s attorneys revealed the prosecutor had allowed Fink to provide false testimony against Goldstein and then failed to disclose to the defense that Fink had been promised special treatment in exchange. Goldstein’s attorneys then went back to the eyewitness, who told them that he had never been sure about his identification, but had been pressured by the police to pick Goldstein. The federal district court granted Goldstein relief and the Ninth Circuit affirmed, ordering Goldstein’s immediate release. In 2004, after 24 years in prison, Thomas Goldstein finally walked out of prison, a free man.
If S.1088 had been in effect when Goldstein filed his federal habeas corpus petition it would have been denied, as he had failed to exhaust all of his federal claims in state court first. Goldstein had no money for an attorney and filed his claims in federal court himself. After appointing an attorney, the federal court gave him additional time to return to state court to exhaust his federal claims. The California Supreme Court, however, refused to even review the case, issuing a “postcard” denial. Goldstein’s attorneys then returned to federal court -where he was promptly granted relief. If S.1088 had been the law, Goldstein would have been forever barred from having a federal court consider his claims because as an indigent pro se defendant, he was not familiar with the exhaustion requirement of § 2254. Denied access to the federal court, Thomas Goldstein would have been an innocent man possibly serving a life sentence for a crime he did not commit.
There are three exceptions to the exhaustion of state remedies requirement under the bill: cases that involve a new, retroactively applied, rule of constitutional law decided by the Supreme Court; a factual predicate that could not have been previously discovered; and factual claims established by clear and convincing evidence that no reasonable jury could have found the petitioner guilty[1]. In addition, the petitioner must establish that denial of relief would be contrary to clearly established Supreme Court constitutional precedent.
None of these exceptions provide any real hope to a wrongly convicted prisoner. First, it is extremely rare for the Supreme Court to hand down opinions that apply retroactively. Also, requiring petitioners to establish that recently discovered facts could not have been uncovered during a trial under the due diligence standard will continue to result in innocent people remaining in prison. In many cases, facts, which create the basis for a federal claim, may be discovered years after state court review has begun or concluded. This aspect of the bill will foreclose the opportunity for many incarcerated people to prove their innocence. Many wrongful convictions are the result of inadequate appointed defense counsel at the trial stage. Under this standard an incarcerated person who discovers new facts to support his innocence, which his ineffective trial lawyer did not uncover in the early stages of the case, would be barred from presenting the evidence to a federal court. Therefore, these cases will not qualify for federal habeas relief and innocent people could be executed or remain in prison for a crime many years after their innocence has been proven....
... What it does, in effect, is curtail the federal role in policing constitutional violations in state criminal justice systems using the venerable mechanism of habeas corpus. Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) has moderated some of the worst provisions, but this bill is beyond rehabilitation. If it passes, the chances that innocent people will be executed will go way up.
Even after Mr. Specter's efforts, the bill creates onerous procedural hurdles for convicts. It tries to speed up habeas corpus proceedings by making it easier for convicts to lose their right to appeal to federal courts. For example, if a convict fails to raise an argument in state court, federal courts will have no jurisdiction over the claim even if there was a good reason for the failure. If he filed a claim in federal court before going to state court, that claim would be thrown out and lost forever. Supposed exceptions for cases of actual innocence are so narrow as to be useless. And the bill would allow states to race petitions through the courts if they can convince the attorney general that they have an adequate system for providing lawyers in post-conviction proceedings.
Why the radical change? We see no reason. Nor does the Judicial Conference, the administrative arm of the federal judiciary. Like a national organization of state-court chief justices, which came out against the bill this summer, the Judicial Conference made clear that it "does not believe" in "the need for a comprehensive overhaul of federal habeas jurisprudence." Indeed, if anything, federal rules are too strict. Around the country, concerns about potentially irreversible miscarriages of justice have led state legislatures to take a hard look at their death penalty systems. Congress itself passed important legislation not too long ago to encourage states to improve the quality of lawyers they provide capital defendants. This bill would more than undo that progress.
...THE SENATE Judiciary Committee is scheduled to take up the Streamlined Procedures Act of 2005 this week. This legislation, ostensibly designed to make the justice system more efficient, is a Trojan horse whose transparent purpose is to strip the federal courts of virtually all of their jurisdiction to review state criminal court proceedings.
Essentially, the legislation would eviscerate the role of the federal courts in ensuring that innocent people are not mistakenly convicted of crimes and that state courts do not send people to prison in violation of their constitutional rights. It would restrict habeas corpus rights, which are enshrined in the Constitution, date back to the Magna Carta and guarantee that you can go to a court and tell a judge that you are being held illegally.
Why is this the role of the federal courts? Although most state courts and prosecutors are committed to the highest expression of justice, it is unfortunately true that sometimes that ideal is honored more in the breach than in observance. Historically, it is the federal courts that have provided the necessary corrective action when state courts fail.
The Streamline Procedures Act only allows for federal review of convictions based on new proof of what the bill calls "actual innocence." It would not, for example, allow for review where a defendant was convicted on the basis of perjured testimony or other fabricated evidence, or when a conviction was tainted by racial bias in jury selection.
And even when there is new evidence of innocence, under this proposed law a person could still be denied a hearing if he or she could not sufficiently explain why the evidence was not discovered earlier. In other words, no matter how compelling the evidence of innocence might be, the courthouse doors would be closed because the proof came too late.
I am one of more than 50 former prosecutors who have written to the Senate Judiciary Committee to express concern about the legislation.
Why do so many of us care so much about the provisions of this bill? Because, as prosecutors, we had a moral and professional obligation to see that every person convicted of a crime was afforded a fair trial. A conviction by any means is not justice.
At the very heart of the American criminal justice system is the bedrock principle that every person charged with a crime should receive a fair trial. All else is simply procedure. A fair trial means an honest trial, properly conducted with honest evidence. Anything less is neither justice nor American. Ensuring the right to a fair trial is what gives prosecutors the moral authority to do their jobs, to strike strong blows but fair ones. We cannot allow "due process of law" to be reduced to a mere platitude....
The problem of Harriet Miers can be summed up easily.
If the Republicans are divided enough not to approve her, the Democrats don't have to use the filibuster against her. Her candidacy might self-destruct on its own. If it does not, there's a slim-but-possible chance (very slim, like a piece of paper in the wind) that she might not be quite as neoCon and Religious Right as the other nominees that Bush has considered in the past.
If the Republicans put down her nomination, disapprove it without the Democrats being involved, many of them will do it because they don't see her as neoCon enough. Then they would press for someone like Priscilla Owen, or someone else whose views line up congruently with those of Antonin Scalia, who is so far to the right that he's falling over the edge of the flat earth he posits.
So. One way we all get a largely unknown justice with no experience on the bench, with no great experience elsewhere that might fill in a lack elsewhere on the Court, with no history except as Bush's yes-girl.
The other way we are likely to get a hardcore neoCon, a filibuster, possibly a down-vote, and then another hardcore neoCon that the Democrats may not be able to filibuster away.
Yes, it's easy to sum up. It's not easy to consider, or to solve the equation.
10/17/2005 10:03:00 PM
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Lessons from Katrina, if anyone's listening
1. Emergency communication is vital, and it has to reach everyone in the area to be effective. Do not rely on only one or two or three methods or media. If necesary, go out there on foot with bullhorns and megaphones. Speak however many languages are needed to get the information out.
2. People who have money will evacuate an area with their own transportation. People who do not have money for individual transportation must either take public transportation, walk out, or stay put. People who are not in physical condition to walk out of a city in midsummer in a hurricane aren't going to try. Therefore, keep the fracking public transportation open as long as possible. Add more buses. What about Amtrak? Where were the trains? Where, for the love of everything, was the last remnant of the City of New Orleans train when it was needed to take people north faster than the winds could blow the storm in? In all the discussion of evacuation, I didn't see anyone talk about trains.
3. There has to be an emergency plan -- go here, do this, use these resources. There has to be a backup emergency plan -- when we run out of X, we use Y; when L doesn't work, go to M. Everyone in the city has to know what the emergency plan is. There should be rehearsals, and seminars, and talks, and public posters. This isn't scare tactics -- it's education. People have to know what to expect, what they can do to help, what they can do to stay out of the way. This has to be public knowledge.
4. We have to get back to teaching simple survival techniques in school, and providing survival classes taught by public health organizations, local nature groups or community colleges. They should include how to create shelter for yourself in an emergency, how to make a fire without matches and cook over it; what to include in emergency supplies for yourself and your family; what kind of food that is salvaged can be cooked and what should not be touched (there are fish washing up everywhere from the ocean and some of them might be good for dinner and some might not); what sorts of wild and cultivated plants in the area are edible; how to make sure you have drinkable water that won't make you ill; how to take care of minor illnesses and accidents in the absence of doctors or emergency care; how to deal with the local area's wild animals if they show up in or around where you're living; what you can use to make yourself clothes if you only have what you're standing up in.
This is the kind of thing that people used to grow up knowing a century ago. How many of the people of New Orleans or Mobile know how to do any of these things? Much of this information is location-specific, regional. For example, a class in wild food taught in Boston isn't likely to help someone living near a mangrove swamp unless it's designed for that ecosphere and not just for the northeastern woodlands.
5. Organize local neighborhood emergency response groups. Decentralize the response to the emergency but keep all lines of communication open so that at any time people who are in charge of local areas can keep track of what's happening and let elected officials and the Guard know what's going on, who needs help, who can provide local assistance. In this situation, where everyone was told to leave, if there had been local response teams set up we would have a better idea who left, who stayed, and who needs special rescue. This could have been done. As far as I know, it wasn't.
How many days ahead did we know that this storm was coming? How long did we have for everyone to figure out what they were doing? How much time would it have taken for someone who lives in a neighborhood to go around to ten or a dozen houses to make sure nobody's left behind, and to let someone else know who could pass that info along to people doing rescues? Even if some of the information didn't get through, even if some of it was lost in transmission, wouldn't we be better off than we are now?
6. On the state and federal level, it's not enough to have to rely on FEMA and the whims of the current Administration for money. We need to work out mutual aid agreements among states without involving the fed, because it's to everyone's benefit to do so. This is a matter of common sense, common and mutual welfare. To some degree this happens now, but it wouldn't hurt to have more of it. If local towns and villages can agree to cover each other's fires and emergencies depending on where the fire houses are rather than where the town lines are, can't we do something like that with larger governmental entities?
8/31/2005 06:40:00 PM
Friday, August 26, 2005
Evangelical legislators, military base closings, and the way of the world.
If you read only one link from this post today, read this one: Grooming politicians for Christ. This is what's behind a great deal of the Religious Right effort on Capitol Hill, and that affects you directly regardless of where you live.
...Nearly every Monday for six months, as many as a dozen congressional aides — many of them aspiring politicians — have gathered over takeout dinners to mine the Bible for ancient wisdom on modern policy debates about tax rates, foreign aid, education, cloning and the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
Through seminars taught by conservative college professors and devout members of Congress, the students learn that serving country means first and always serving Christ.
They learn to view every vote as a religious duty, and to consider compromise a sin.
That puts them at the vanguard of a bold effort by evangelical conservatives to mold a new generation of leaders who will answer not to voters, but to God.
"We help them understand God's purpose for society," said Bouma, who coordinates the program, known as the Statesmanship Institute, for the Rev. D. James Kennedy.
At least 3.5 million Americans tune in to Kennedy's sermons, broadcast from Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Since 1995, the unabashedly political televangelist has also reached out to the Beltway elite with his Center for Christian Statesmanship in Washington.
The center sponsors Bible studies, prayer meetings and free "Politics and Principle" lunches for members of Congress and their staffs, often drawing crowds in the hundreds.
The Statesmanship Institute, founded two years ago, offers more in-depth training for $345.
It's one of half a dozen evangelical leadership programs making steady inroads into Washington.
The most prominent is Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va., an hour's drive from the capital. The college was founded five years ago with the goal of turning out "Christian men and women who will lead our nation with timeless biblical values." Nearly every graduate works in government or with a conservative advocacy group.
The Witherspoon Fellowship has had similar success, placing its graduates in the White House, Congress, the State Department and legislatures nationwide. The fellowship brings 42 college students to Washington each year to study theology and politics — and to work at the conservative Family Research Council, which lobbies on such social issues as abortion and same-sex marriage.
Such programs share a commitment to developing leaders who read the Bible as a blueprint.
As Kennedy put it: "If we leave it to man to decide what's good and evil, there will be chaos."...
On this night, the topic was bioethics. As the students unwrapped deli sandwiches and brownies, prominent bioethicist Nigel M. deS. Cameron praised them for thinking about the "great questions of the day" through the prism of faith.
Too often, he added — to a few startled looks — "Christians are not noted for using their brains."
In an hourlong lecture, Cameron argued that Christians must move beyond denouncing abortion to see the "moral outrage" in other common practices, such as paying Ivy League students to donate eggs in the quest for a perfect baby.
"Taking human life made in God's image may not be as bad, from God's point of view, as making human life in your own image," said Cameron, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. "Our humanity, warts and all, is what we have been given to steward. It's not to be manipulated."
When Cameron called for questions, one student tentatively raised his hand to ask about embryonic stem cell research — specifically, the use of "spare" embryos, frozen in fertility clinics. "Under current practice, they're going to be discarded" unless they're used for research, he said. "What do we say about that, as Christians?"
Cameron did not hold back.
"They're going to die anyway, right?" he said, indignant. "We don't apply the same principle to death row inmates. They're going to die anyway, so why can't we get some use out of them? We'd be able to do some fascinating experiments.
"The principle of manipulating human life to get experimental benefit," Cameron said, "that is a very, very serious line to cross."
The philosophy animating Cameron's lecture — that federal law should be based on biblical precepts — troubles the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
"This nation was founded specifically to avoid the government making religious and theological decisions," Lynn said. "We are not to turn the Holy Scriptures of any group into public policy."
Kennedy counters that evangelicals have every right to put up candidates who vote what they believe to be God's will — and let voters judge them.
To which Lynn responds, with exasperation: "He says that because he knows in a majority Christian country, the Christian view is going to be expressed by more voters. They have no problem imposing their biblical worldview on every American."
Evangelical conservatives acknowledge that's their goal.
And they now have a systematic plan for achieving it....
Ministers such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson jumped headlong into politics. They succeeded in helping to elect conservatives, starting with President Reagan. "But things haven't changed very much," said Robert D. Stacey, chairman of the government department at Patrick Henry College.
"Our candidates tick off the right policy positions, but it turns out, once they're in office, they're willing to compromise an awful lot — not just to bend but to break," he said. "Now, religious conservatives are saying they want the real thing."
To develop such steadfast politicians, evangelicals are building on decades of work by nonprofit groups such as the Leadership Institute and Young America's Foundation, which train conservatives in grass-roots activism, effective campaigning, even how to launch a right-wing magazine.
The new evangelical initiatives reach out to the same up-and-coming leaders, but put them through courses that sound a lot like a seminary.
"If you're clinging to conservatism just because you like conservatism, you don't put yourself on the line for your beliefs," Stacey said. "Your positions need to come from something deeper and more meaningful."
That message resonates with Jessica Echard, 23, who completed the Statesmanship Institute last year.
Growing up in rural West Virginia, Echard believed passionately in her church's teachings against abortion, but thought little about such issues as economic policy or foreign trade.
The institute gave her a framework for evaluating those topics.
Now the director of the Eagle Forum, a conservative lobbying group founded by Phyllis Schlafly, Echard says Jesus would approve of a call for lower taxes: "God calls on us to be stewards of our [own] money."
She dips into the Bible to explain her opposition to most global treaties, reasoning that Americans have a holy obligation to protect their God-given freedom by avoiding foreign entanglements.
"The Scripture talks of taking every thought and making it captive to Christ, and that's what the Statesmanship Institute helps us do," Echard said.
Like other evangelical training programs, the institute avoids endorsing any party or position. Lecturers this year include a Democratic congressman and a Republican who says the Lord inspired him to buck President Bush by demanding a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq.
Homework includes readings from the Bible — but also from Nietzsche, Engels, Machiavelli and Henry Kissinger.
"We don't tell our students what to think," Roller said.
Yet professors also make clear that "there absolutely is an objective truth," in the words of Paul J. Bonicelli, academic dean at Patrick Henry College.
Hannah Woody, for instance, came away from the institute's seminars confident that abolishing the Department of Education is not just a Republican goal, but also a Christian imperative.
The Bible gives parents — not some distant bureaucracy — the primary responsibility for raising children, said Woody, 26, who hopes to one day run for governor in her home state of North Carolina. (For now, she's working as a legislative assistant for a Republican congressman from Kansas.)
Kennedy offers a similar take on education policy in the gilt-edged, leather-bound Bible his staff delivers to each new member of Congress. In an introductory essay, Kennedy quotes Scripture to explain God's views on taxes, capital punishment, gay rights and a dozen other issues. Most of the policy prescriptions he finds in the Bible dovetail neatly with the Republican agenda.
That focus on legislative victory disturbs some evangelical leaders, who would prefer to work on spreading Christian values throughout society.
"Too many programs start with the idea that if we [enact] right-wing, conservative policies, we'll change America and God will be pleased," said Ryan Messmore, who runs a leadership academy aimed at helping young Christians share their faith through the arts, the media and other professions.
But to Rep. Walter B. Jones, a North Carolina Republican, it's clear the institute is "doing the Lord's work."
The nation needs more politicians who take their cues from God, not Gallup, or "our morality will crumble," he warned. "We won't recognize America."
Roller shares that fear. So he ended the recent class on bioethics with a plea: "Heavenly Father, we pray you will help us to know how we should respond to these issues."
The students answered as one: "Amen."...
I know all of you reading this have views on religion that are all over the place, and that's as it should be. However, I'm suggesting right now, as I've suggested in the past, that if you don't take a little time somewhere along the line to find out what the Religious Right's views are, to read the same Bible verses and understand where they're coming from, you will have a much harder time refuting their arguments. Their arguments can't be defeated just by saying, "well, they believe in God so they're idiots." That kind of ad hominem attack just makes you look stupid when the issues at stake are abortion, stem cell research, war, the economy and so on. Anyone who is going to be facing down someone who is coming from this sort of Evangelical viewpoint has to know as much about that viewpoint as possible -- and be able to use the holes in that thinking to push alternatives.
Think of it as homework in creative, practical civics -- you're finding ways to make your priorities the ones that matter when decisions are made. Think of it as practical anthropology or philosophy, if you want. The point I'm trying to make is that the people who think like this aren't just up in the White House and the Capitol -- they're on your town board and village board, your city council and county legislature. The effects of this kind of thinking are out there, all the way down the line, in decisions that have been made based on a literalist, ahistorical reading of a collection of sacred writings written during a thousand-year period in several different language, not one of which is the language in which it's being read by the people making those decisions.
You don't have to agree with any of it, and you probably don't -- but if you want to continue having the chance at making your own choices in this country you're going to have to know enough to debate this worldview and present your own. If not, you stand likely to lose what you have to people who will be very glad to tell you exactly how you should run your life, and how they'll do it for you because you're not responsible enough to make your own decisions.
I don't say these things to scare you. I say them because that's what I see out there, and it would be irresponsible of me not to let you know.
...The unanswered questions of consequence that might be asked, if there were a responsible Congress to pose them, are many, extending from Iraq to Iran, from public diplomacy to intelligence, and to the fate of our military.
On Iraq: Why was it necessary for the Bush administration to impose an arbitrary deadline on the drafting of the Iraqi constitution, the single most important document for a new Iraq? The constitution appears to undermine the administration's commitment to a unitary state and to democracy, and enshrines Islamic law as a basis of governmental legitimacy. Why didn't the administration allow the Iraqi communities to attempt to arrive at acceptable compromises on their own timetable?
Recent reports, including in the Washington Post, document the growth of sectarian militias that engage routinely in abductions, assassinations and other violence against domestic opponents. In many towns and cities, these militias have supplanted or run national security and police forces. What plans does the administration have to contain or disband them? Are there any plans for integrating these militias into national security forces so that they lose their sectarian identity and command structure? If there are no such plans, what analyses has the administration done to determine the future effectiveness of an Iraqi national security force in this environment?
On the U.S. military: Retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey, reflecting the views of many senior officers, has stated that "the wheels are going to come off" the military in Iraq in 24 months and that the Reserve and National Guard systems are approaching meltdown. What is the administration's strategy for ensuring combat readiness and preparedness? Are the various conflicting statements by administration and military commanders on the withdrawals of some troops dictated by this meltdown or by some assessment, not yet publicly articulated, of the security conditions in Iraq?
Gen. Schoomaker, the chief of staff of the Army, has declared that U.S. troops may be stationed in Iraq for at least four more years. Where will these troops be found?
As of May 2005, the U.S. military has plans to build four large bases in Iraq -- each designed to hold a brigade-size combat team, aviation units and other support personnel -- that have the air of permanence. Does the administration intend to establish these as permanent U.S. bases? What is the long-term strategy behind their construction? How will the current levels of U.S. forces in the region extended over a period of six years affect other potential security contingencies?
On Iran: When asked about military action, President Bush has stated that all options are on the table regarding Iran. Has the administration drawn up military options? What are the assessments of military analysts of likely outcomes in exercising such options?
The administration has emphasized that Iran is a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction, a major supporter of terrorism, and a notorious violator of human rights. Recent reports in the press have documented that Iran is the principal funder of the leading Shiite political parties and militias in Iraq. Iran has also expanded its influence in Lebanon through Hezbollah's gains in legislative elections. What assessments has the administration made about Iran's response to any U.S. military action against it?
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has declared he would not support such an action. Which allies have agreed to support the administration's military option in Iran? What responses has the administration planned to deal with a military action against Iran within international bodies including the United Nations Security Council and NATO?
On U.S. intelligence: Has the administration commissioned a National Intelligence Estimate for military options against Iran? Has the new director of national intelligence John Negroponte assured the intelligence community that its objectivity and integrity will be protected from any political pressure? Will the DNI prominently raise caveats from intelligence analysts where there are disagreements? Will any new NIE be shared with the Congress in a timely fashion before any debate of any action is undertaken?
The administration has used Republican members of the House of Representatives in the past to attack senators of both parties for raising serious questions about the administration's policies. (Rep. Duncan Hunter's attack on Sen. John Warner for conducting hearings on Abu Ghraib is a notable example.) Will the president take steps to ensure that the oversight responsibilities of the Congress are not compromised or inhibited? Will he make every effort to inform his political aides that they are not to interfere with the congressional oversight process so that information and analysis are not twisted by political criteria?
On oil: The president recently signed an energy bill that provided no new measures for lessening U.S. dependence on foreign oil. In the absence of a commitment to achieve more energy independence, what measures does the administration propose to Arab nations to guarantee a steady supply and stable price of oil? The administration's advocacy of opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration would have only a marginal and transient impact. What conservation measures does the administration propose?
On U.S. alliances: A number of member states in the coalition involved in the Iraq war and occupation have withdrawn their troops. Has the administration drawn up plans for our military to fill these gaps now and in the future? What policies does the administration plan to create a more cooperative environment, especially within the Western alliance? Does the president plan to consult fully with our historic allies on military options in the future? Has the administration shared its military options involving Iran with key allies? If the administration does not plan to change its policies on extra-legal actions, such as going to war without advance consultation, how does it propose to strengthen our traditional alliances? With Iran and Iraq under the sway of Shia fundamentalism, how does the administration plan to encourage the cooperation of other Arab nations in the region?
On public diplomacy: Longtime Bush political aide Karen Hughes has recently been confirmed as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Two previous appointees have resigned this post in frustration. With U.S. prestige at an all-time low throughout the world, according to several polls conducted by independent organizations such as the Pew Trust and the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Institute, what policies does the administration plan to change to reverse this trend?
Given that the draft Iraqi constitution enshrines Shiite Islamic law restricting the rights of women, how does the new undersecretary explain the administration's acquiescence in such an obviously undemocratic development? How does the undersecretary explain the administration's goal of spreading democracy in the Middle East given that the process of constitution drafting in Iraq has alienated secular Iraqis, Sunnis and Kurds and aligned the U.S. with the dominant Shiite factions heavily influenced by Iran? In pursuing its stated goal of democratization the administration has particularly focused on Sunni-ruled nations -- Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria. What does the undersecretary offer as incentives to these nations in the light of the administration's failure to protect Sunni and women's rights in Iraq?
The Pentagon continues to block a federal court order to publicly release photographs and videotapes of torture committed at the Abu Ghraib prison. The president has threatened to veto the military appropriations bill if an amendment sponsored by three Republican senators, John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Warner, that would outlaw torture and abuse of prisoners is attached. How does the administration foresee any change in the international perception of the U.S. image if it continues to follow these policies?
The president's policy has involved his abrogation of U.S. adherence to the Geneva Conventions that protect prisoners against torture. Will the administration pledge to comply with these conventions in the future? Will the administration permit the International Red Cross unfettered access to all prisoners under U.S. supervision?
These are only some of the pressing questions that might be asked by members of Congress. The Republican Congress has left a vacuum of responsibility. Raising these matters would not merely foster necessary public debate. It would stir to life the legislative branch and begin to show what an energetic Democratic majority might do on the public's behalf....
Why should you care? Here's one way to think of it: Arlington County is the second most prosperous (and second smallest) county in the country; the first is Manhattan (yes, it's a county as well as a borough). Money problems in Arlington means money problems in much of the metro DC area, since funding comes from there for Metro and other shared services. When people with jobs leave, the services and businesses they've used have hard times -- and since the exodus involves people who are concentrated in specific areas, those areas are likely to become economic dead zones for a while. Less taxes means fewer services. What services? Let's talk about the county hospital, the school district, highway maintenance. One of the ways that Arlington makes its budget balance is by putting cops out there to write speeding tickets; if you're driving in the area, consider not speeding as a kindness to your bank account.
Yes, the area needs to diversify -- no argument. My neighborhood is full of people who work for the government, doctors who work at Walter Reed, and consultants who work for the military. Personally, I'd love to see some small manufacturing move into the area, as there are few if any businesses involved in creating products that aren't either computer-related or paper reports. I doubt that will happen, though. But forcing an area to diversify by removing high-paying jobs elsewhere is like telling someone to change their clothes by stripping them naked in the winter. The change isn't all for the good, and it's going to result in hard times at first.
At least the Pentagon isn't picking up its five sides and innumerable offices and moving away ... yet.
I realize the stated goal of all this moving is decentralization to diminish the effects of a bomb or strike against them -- but I don't think there's been enough appreciation for what this will do to the regions affected. It's not as if all of the metro DC area weren't already fitted with a permanent target overhead, as anyone with common sense would see. But the mere fact that neoCons who would prefer to decentralize to the point that we get back to the military status of the 1870s -- and economic status, and community status -- makes me extremely concerned.
8/26/2005 03:07:00 PM
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Awake! Awake! Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! Awake!
I want to talk tonight about a subject near and dear to your pocketbook and your livelihood: taxes. Specifically, HR 25, the inappropriately named "Fair Tax Act of 2005". (full text link, but you will have to click on the internal links to see details)
What does it do? It repeals federal (but not state) income tax, payroll taxes, estate and gift taxes. Instead, it would impose a 23% sales tax on pretty much everything, including both goods and services. However, there are exemptions listed (without detail) for businesses. But why should I hide the details? I'm not the government.
SUMMARY AS OF: 1/4/2005--Introduced.
Fair Tax Act of 2005 - Repeals the income tax, employment tax, and estate and gift tax. Redesignates the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 as the Internal Revenue Code of 2005.
Imposes a national sales tax on the use or consumption in the United States of taxable property or services. Sets the sales tax rate at 23 percent in 2007, with adjustments to the rate in subsequent years. Allows exemptions from the tax for property or services purchased for business, export, or investment purposes and for State government functions.
Sets forth rules relating to: (1) the collection and remittance of the sales tax; and (2) credits and refunds. Allows a sales tax rebate for certain families, based on family size and income.
Grants States the primary authority for the collection of sales tax revenues and the remittance of such revenues to the Treasury. Sets forth administrative provisions relating to: (1) the filing of monthly reports and payments of tax; (2) accounting methods; (3) registration of sellers of goods and services responsible for reporting sales; (4) penalties for noncompliance; and (5) collections, appeals, and taxpayer rights.
Directs the Secretary of the Treasury to allocate sales tax revenues among: (1) the general revenue; (2) the old-age and survivors insurance trust fund; (3) the disability insurance trust fund; (4) the hospital insurance trust fund; and (5) the Federal supplementary medical insurance trust fund.
Prohibits the funding of the Internal Revenue Service after FY 2009. Establishes in the Department of the Treasury: (1) an Excise Tax Bureau to administer excise taxes not administered by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and (2) a Sales Tax Bureau to administer the national sales tax.
So. It gets rid of the IRS after 2009. It establishes an excise tax bureau. It requires states to collect the tax.
What it doesn't do is get rid of state or local taxes.
The result? You and yours will be paying 23% more for everything. How much are you paying in income tax, after you deal with exemptions? Imagine adding that back into your bank account -- then slap a 23% tax on everything you buy in your everyday life -- and yes, that is likely to include gasoline as well, which has state and local taxes now but not a whole lot of federal tax even at nearly $3 a gallon.
Big business? Won't be paying. They're exempt. Who buys more, you or big business? Don't answer that. Oh, there's a sales tax rebate for "qualified families" that appears to be equal to the tax rate plus the poverty level. In other words, if you get poor enough you're not supposed to starve. And the definition of a "qualified family" is extremely narrow:
SEC. 302. QUALIFIED FAMILY.
`(a) General Rule- For purposes of this chapter, the term `qualified family' shall mean 1 or more family members sharing a common residence. All family members sharing a common residence shall be considered as part of 1 qualified family. `(b) Family Size Determination- `(1) IN GENERAL- To determine the size of a qualified family for purposes of this chapter, family members shall mean-- `(A) an individual, `(B) the individual's spouse, `(C) all lineal ancestors and descendants of said individual (and such individual's spouse), `(D) all legally adopted children of such individual (and such individual's spouse), and `(E) all children under legal guardianship of such individual (or such individual's spouse). `(2) IDENTIFICATION REQUIREMENTS- In order for a person to be counted as a member of the family for purposes of determining the size of the qualified family, such person must-- `(A) have a bona fide Social Security number; and `(B) be a lawful resident of the United States. `(c) Children Living Away From Home- `(1) STUDENTS LIVING AWAY FROM HOME- Any person who was a registered student during not fewer than 5 months in a calendar year while living away from the common residence of a qualified family but who receives over 50 percent of such person's support during a calendar year from members of the qualified family shall be included as part of the family unit whose members provided said support for purposes of this chapter. `(2) CHILDREN OF DIVORCED OR SEPARATED PARENTS- If a child's parents are divorced or legally separated, a child for purposes of this chapter shall be treated as part of the qualified family of the custodial parent. In cases of joint custody, the custodial parent for purposes of this chapter shall be the parent that has custody of the child for more than one-half of the time during a given calendar year. A parent entitled to be treated as the custodial parent pursuant to this paragraph may release this claim to the other parent if said release is in writing.
In other words, depending on the local definition of marriage, same-sex couples won't be included. Same goes for non-citizens without Social Security numbers.
There are also taxes listed for imports and exports, about which I know little.
So, what's the status of this monstrosity? It's sponsored by Rep. John Linder of Georgia, and has 37 cosponsors, most of them the usual suspects -- Roscoe Bartlett, Tom DeLay, Jeff Flake, Trent Franks, Robert Ney, Don Young among them. All of them with high Christian Coalition approval ratings, I have no doubt. The bill is currently in the House Ways and Means Committee. There's a corresponding Senate bill, S. 25, same text, sponsored by Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia (do you see a pattern here?), with no cosponsors, which has been read twice and referred to the Committee on Finance. These bills have been in those committees since January, just waiting.
This is, in other words, the big bad wolf that's sitting in wait until Congress resumes in September.
HR25, the bill that will present us with a new federal sales tax system to replace our current income tax system, is not "fair" in any sense of the word. It's overall purpose is to advance capital growth. This would be a boon to capital and a disaster for labor. So, to improve the tax system that was made a monstrosity by loopholes favoring Big Business, it is proposed that we substitute a tax system that is even more favorable to Big Business. Although the bill takes care of the poor (somewhat), it shifts the major tax burden to the Middle Class. HR25 will eventually destroy the Middle Class.
You can see the bias towards capital up front in Section 2, Congressional Findings, where it lists reasons for the new bill. In addition to the usual fairness, raising standard of living and other innocuous reasons, it lists:
will promote savings and investment will promote economic growth will increase investment will enhance productivity and international competitiveness Nowhere does it say anything about workers. You'll notice, however, that "investment" is mentioned twice. This means capital. Economic growth, productivity and competitiveness are all related to capital, as well. So the purpose of the legislation is to enhance "capital formation," which corporate lobbyists have been promoting for years. They say that capital formation will lead to wage increases. Not necessarily. The more capital you have, the more automation you may buy to replace workers. The more capital you have, the more plants you may establish and downgrade employee benefits. The more capital you have, the more deals you may make with foreign countries to outsource your labor.
The bill itself calls for a sales tax on all consumption. One tax for all who buy stuff. This means the tax system is no longer graduated. If it's not graduated it is not fair. The government supplies a great deal more services to business than it does to workers. The government supplies financial, legal, social, political, diplomatic and even military aid to business. The guy working in a factory may get some help from OSHA, Social Security (which will be destroyed by this legislation) and other agencies, but much less than any businessman.
Now for the consumption tax itself. One tax rate is used for buying all articles and services. Those on bottom of the income pile will pay more than they do now, while those living on capital will pay less. In addition, as I said before, the poor will spend more of their income than will the rich, thus increasing their total tax expenditures more.
It's true that HR25 takes care of the poor. So we should compare results for the rich as against those who are in the Middle Class. Since most in the Middle Class work for a living, the division is between people who depend on work and people who depend on capital.
First capital. No investment is taxed. Social Security is no longer a cost. Consumption is taxed at a low rate. Buying wholesale is not taxed; a businessman can acquire plenty of goodies this way. Anything bought for a business purpose is not taxed; the definition of "business purpose" may include a lot. What a beautiful life! Tiny taxes!
Now Middle Class. No more Social Security. Pay tax on everything. Pay higher tax than the rich guy. Tough to build a nest egg by investing. Devastating tax burden!...
And oh, by the way, it eliminates the Social Security tax. Farewell, Social Security, without even enabling legislation.
I'm not asking you to write your Senators and Congresspeople about this one. I'm telling you to phone them. Phone their local offices and their Washington offices. Phone and leave messages and tell the people who were elected to represent *you* that you don't want higher taxes under the guise of simplification. Take a look at how this will affect you and think hard about it.
And here's the kicker: 23% is what it will be the first year. It's supposed to be recalculated for following years based on an arcane formula. There's nothing to keep it from being 45% the second year -- which is, coincidentally, the percentage that most reputable economists have estimated as what would be needed to sustain current government services if such a tax were to be instituted.
Think about it. The first year's rate is only half of what would really be needed. This means half of government's services would be eliminated, and half of the people (at least) who provide them would be laid off. How many people work for the federal government? Which departments? Well, the neoCons don't like Social Security (we knew that already), they don't like Health and Human Services or Medicare or Medicaid, they don't like to spend money to preserve the environment so there goes the EPA. They like the military, they like guns. They don't like maintaining infrastructure, like roads and sewers and utilities, so don't expect things to work well for long if this goes through.
(Remember, state taxes will still exist. Local taxes will still exist.)
In basic economic theory, taxes such as this are regressive. They don't encourage people to buy goods and use services and create more goods. Instead, they force people to buy less-expensive goods that don't last as long, because that's what they can afford, goods they have to replace more often. If they can afford to replace them. Canada has a 15% value added tax. How often do people buy new cars, fridges and other expensive consumer goods? Not as often as in the US, I'm pretty sure, even at the same income levels. Now add nearly 10% on beyond that. (And don't forget state and local taxes.)
If this bill is passed, do not expect the struggling American economy to get through it without disastrous inflation, and recession leaning toward depression.
This is the bill that the neoCons have wanted to pass for years, because it destroys the federal government by starving it to death. Never mind that people need health care, clean air and water and land. Never mind that the economy will not easily get through this. This bill is proposed by people who think the ideal society is that of the robber barons of the 1880s, with themselves as the barons.
And it has been sitting there under the national radar for months. It's time to let people know what may happen in September when this comes out of committee.
Pass this along. Tell people. Call your Senators. Call your Congress(wo)man. If your own representatives are sponsoring this economic coup, contact others who are not and tell them that your own elected officials do not represent your views. (Yes, if you live in DC, do this also. You pay taxes, don't you? DC residents already have a 10% sales tax, higher than most states.) This is no time to say "my voice doesn't count." If your voice isn't loud enough in opposition to this, stand on a box or get a megaphone. Write a letter to your local newspaper -- and if your representative is one of the people supporting it, name him in the letter and say you don't agree and why. Write a letter to a larger paper -- any large national paper will do -- and, again, talk about what your life would be like if this bill becomes law and the tax is enacted.
This is your life -- your economy -- your future at stake. It's in your best interest to get out there and say how you want it to be. Do you want it to be highly taxed and lose any chance at saving money? Isn't this something to fight for?
8/18/2005 06:29:00 PM
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
One woman, in a ditch with road kill and rattlesnakes, while Bush ignores her from four miles away
We are told by society that one person doesn't really make a difference, that you have to be in a group to matter and that the best group to be in is the one with the most political power and wealth.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
When one person of conscience acts, everyone else notices and the world shifts a little.
Cindy Sheehan's son died in Iraq, in the military. She wanted to speak to President Bush about this, as mothers of dead soldiers have asked to speak with presidents for more than 200 years.
Bush, who is on vacation, said no.
She decided to wait him out -- in Crawford, Texas. In the hot sun by the side of the road. Since last Saturday.
When Cindy Sheehan got off her bus in Crawford around 11:40 a.m., she was greeted with applause and swarmed by reporters. Some of the meda covering the event, along with The Iconoclast, were ABC, CNN, CBS, and AFP (French form of AP).
One man carrying a sign, Allen Goodwin from South Florida, commented that he is for peace, "but Bush isn't." His sign reads "Somebody lied."
Currently, a bus provided by Veterans for Peace is taking about a dozen members, including Cindy Sheehan, to the checkpoint in front of President Bush's ranch. Sheriff's Department Captain Kenneth Vanek said prior to departing to lead the caravan, "As long as y'all work with us, we'll work with y'all."
Following the bus is a train of automobiles, numbering about 15.
Sheehan said she is prepared to go to jail if necesssary, but is expecting a peaceful confrontation.
The McLennan County Sheriff's Department is acting as the escort to the checkpoint.
With the arrival of Sheehan's bus, there were at least 50 people present, from Code Pink Austin, Veterans for Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Iraqi Veterans Against the War, and Gold Star Families for Peace, which is Sheehan's group.
Among those present, rumors of pro-war, anti-protest protestors perhaps arriving later were voiced.
In all, about a dozen law enforcement officers were on the scene near the Peace House. No Secret Service personnel had been identified. More later....
We've got about 50-something people walking on the side of the road, in a ditch, all the way up the mile to the Bush ranch. At the first checkpoint, the police ordered them to not walk on the roadway, but in the medium-tall grass along the right side of the road where it is about 10 ft. wide in places, three feet deep. They are kind of straddling the roadway.
There appears to be another checkpoint up ahead, with another car in the middle of the road.
Now two big white dogs are coming out to great them. I don't know what kind of dogs they are.
It's really hot, humid, with people sweating....
We are at the second checkpoint and the sheriff's department has told the protestors to get off the road. They've been walking on the road, breaking their part of the bargain.
Some are now sitting, waiting for Bush to come out. Now more are sitting down.
One Veterans for Peace protestor asked police officers for water because it's a hundred degrees.
Now the protestors are reciting The Lord's Prayer in unison.
(moments later)
Now Cindy Sheehan is shouting that Bush's mother ought to be ashamed of him. She's proud of her child who died in Iraq.
I now see Secret Service out here.
Protestors are saying that one of their rationales for not getting off the road was that the media was on the road. A police officer said that the media was just following them, but the media is still on the road, with cameras, booms, microphones.
Some protestors are still sitting, but more are now standing.
They are now chanting "No Justice, No Peace." "George Bush is a war criminal." "Downing Street memos prove it." "Billion dollars a week for war."
Chanting again, people on left saying "Had enough," people on right saying "Stop the war," going back and forth.
Police now telling media to get on the other side of the road and to not disrupt traffic.
Abbe thinks the media are responding to Sheehan because of her strong stand. "I'm not leaving until Bush just simply comes out and talks to me," says Abbe in a respectful impersonation of Sheehan's message. "She will not leave until they put her in jail, until she sees the President, or until he leaves Crawford for the summer," says Abbe. "And she is very intelligent."
When Robert and Abbe arrived at the camp about 4:00 this afternoon, folks had just moved off a "triangle" of grass at the request of police and were camped down in a "ditch area" with cows and field for as far as the eye could see. Press reports put the group five miles from the President's ranch, but Jim Harrington of the Texas Civil Rights Project says that if the media get to stand within a half mile of the ranch, so should the protesters. Legal help is another thing people are giving.
Later in the evening black suburbans started whizzing past. A stream of maybe 25, coming down the road, one after the other, about a minute apart, with government tags. Soon after that overhead came the presidential helicopter with a three helicopter escort, buzzing past the camp and over to the Western White House. But the impressive action was down in the ditch among the small band of resolute activists who have flung themselves together for this circle of courage and tears....
...She and her fellow protesters have been kept well away from Bush; they were stopped four miles from the entrance to the Bush Ranch, because they walked on the roadway rather than in the tall grass in the bar ditch beside it. The McLennan County Sheriff ordered the demonstrators to stop because they broke “their part of the bargain.”
The protesters had reasons for not walking in the ditch, although non-Texans could hardly know what they are. Rattlesnakes come to mind first, but the Great State of Texas’ Department of Transportation rarely mows country roads, and never ever picks up road-kill. It’s probably a safe bet that a middle-aged woman from Vacaville, California wore tennis shoes (bad) and shorts (really bad) for her stroll through aforementioned bar ditch.
Texas has some really interesting flora with very descriptive names: spear grass, devil’s claw, bull nettle. Some of the fauna can be rather unpleasant as well, including red wasps, scorpions, chiggers, and horse flies. Of course, if Ms. Sheehan must make a scene, the least she can do is walk in the ditch in 100-degree heat and not complain.
The Sheriff claims to be concerned that the protest was disrupting traffic; however representatives of the news media were only ordered off the road when the demonstrators were stopped.
There are two forces operating here. First, the sheriff sets up a requirement for protesters to walk where a sensible person would not walk, where common sense dictates that one is safer on the right-of-way than in the grass. Second, after the protesters failed the requirement, as law enforcement officers knew they would, the protest was stopped, and the media was out-waited for the story.
There are no main-stream media stories about Cindy Sheehan in today's news. The media went away, rather than cover the story that the president of the United States left this mother of a dead soldier waiting for answers on the side of the road in the Texas sun in August.
My question to the Commander-in-Chief of the United States military forces: do you really need the combined might of armies, Secret Service, and local sheriff's deputies to protect you from having to face one grieving mother standing by the side of the road?
On Wednesday August 3, President Bush issued a statement in which he made the deaths of American soldiers a key reason for remaining in Iraq:
"We have to honor the sacrifices of the fallen by completing the mission. [So that] the families of the fallen can be assured that they died for a noble cause."
Within minutes, Cindy Sheehan responded:
"We want our loved ones' sacrifices to be honored by bringing our nation's sons and daughters home from the travesty that is Iraq IMMEDIATELY, since this war is based on horrendous lies and deceptions. Just because our children are dead, why would we want any more families to suffer the same pain and devastation that we are? We would like for him to explain this 'noble cause' to us, and plan to ask him why Jenna and Barbara are not in harm's way, if the cause is so noble. If he is not ready to send the twins, then he should bring our troops home immediately. We will demand a speedy withdrawal." (for the full account of this exchange, go here.)
In response to his attempt to frame the deaths of more and more soldiers in Iraq, Cindy stole the ball right out of the President's hands. That is to say, she stole "honor" from the President's statement and turned it into the kick-off statement of her protest against the President's policy to stay the course in Iraq.
As the President defined it, "honor" was inaction. To "honor" our fallen soldiers, in the President's view, was to follow blindly the will of a President.
In the way he phrases it, the President has become expert at confusing the idea of "honor" with the idea of "continuing to fight." But in fact, President Bush's definition of "honor" is clear linked to the idea of "completing the mission," not fighting. And since the "mission" or policy in Iraq was conceived, launched and directed in secrecy, nobody will ever know when the "mission" is complete unless the President says so. Hence, "honor" in President Bush's view, is really about giving in completely to his will. To be "honorable" is to not ask questions. If you question me, then you are not honorable. If you criticize my policy, then you are not noble. That is the President's logic.
Cindy Sheehan's initial demand from the President was little more than a request that he define the lofty terms that he uses when he notes the deaths of American soldiers. What is "noble"? What is "honor"?
But rather than just asking for a new definition, she stole the ball--in this case the words "honor" and "noble"--and relocated it to a more visceral, meaningful context: the anguish of America's families.
In Cindy's statement, she defined "honor" as action. She argues that to be "honorable" is to learn from the deaths of our children and to bring them home. One cannot honor our children, she argued, by continuing to pursue a policy that was forged on untruths and deception.
She then built on this initial redefinition by linking the phrase "noble cause" to the idea of the family. This is the most powerful part of Cindy's statement.
If the President's cause is so noble America's families should sacrifice more and more of their children, Cindy asked, why hasn't he asked his children to serve in Iraq?
It's a question that has been asked time and time again of the President, but when asked by a mother who has lost a child in Iraq, this time it had incredible power.
Cindy's tactic of stealing the ball is a valuable lesson to everyone who cares about ending the War in Iraq.
Overall, Cindy launched her protest by redefining key terms that the President has been using to his advantage over the past few news cycles. Because of Cindy Sheehan, the President can no longer use "honor" and "noble cause" in his statements....
The more I think about it, the more Bush's "pipe down" to critics of Gonzales looks like a put-up job. Nothing gets done by neoCons without the full agreement of Karl Rove, who runs Bush, and Cheney, so let's eliminate right now the idea that the White House didn't know people were going to say things about Gonzales. Think of it, rather, as a bit of a shell game to keep us occupied and keep us from noticing what's really going on. No way is the Architect of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the man who fed death sentences to Bush to sign as governor, inadequately neoCon, even if his actions in a Texas abortion case, In Re Jane Doe, might make some of the Religious Right itch a bit. (The Yellow Line has some other samples of opinions, and where they're coming from. Since this is so, where's the criticism coming from and why?
Bush is famously loyal to people he knows, so he may well be sincere when he says he doesn't like people picking on his friends. However, his 'friend' is playing in the world's biggest sandbox, and doesn't need him to run interference. There's no way this isn't planned.
I can envision three possible outcomes of this situation:
1. This may be a way for Bush to concentrate attention on "people who don't like my friend" instead of on Gonzales' actions and opinions and the concerns they may raise about his possible behavior on the Court. In that case, it could be a way of repositioning Gonzales as a moderate in the public view. Result: Gonzales gets nominated.
2. This may be a way of floating a trial balloon to see what opinions are raised and by whom, as if the general public and the various political factions were simply focus groups. In that case, it might be a way of seeing what issues rise to the top, and how persistent various factions are in pursuing them. Result: the nominee may or may not be Gonzales, but the nominee will be someone whose position on the issues raised suits Bush better than any other.
3. This may be a total dog-and-pony show, something to get our attention away from what is really happening elsewhere. It's certainly taking media attention away from Guantanamo, isn't it? And from Iraq, and from Abu Ghraib, and from the soldiers who are dying from suicide bombs and inadequate truck armor every day. It's taking attention away from inadequate medical care for veterans, from the mishandling of the budget and Social Security and the environment. The amount of news space being filled by Bush saying "don't pick on my good buddy" is taken away from every other issue, at a time when news space is at a premium anyway. Result: regardless of whoever is nominated, someone's doing the dirty behind the scenes and we will not know what or why or how it affects us until later.
...This agreement shows that China and Russia are alarmed by U.S. power, and concerned by what they perceive as unilateral U.S. efforts to exploit its current superiority. Although neither country wants to get into a direct test of strength with the U.S., the agreement is in part a signal that Washington should not ignore their legitimate interests. As Chinese president Jiang Zemin put it, this treaty will "enhance efforts to build a multipolar world and establish a fair, rational international order." He means a world where the U.S. cannot simply impose its preferences on others. We should therefore expect to see Russia and China coordinate their own policies in ways that will limit our own freedom of action....
Now, I'm no expert on international affairs, but when I see an alliance between two large countries in Asia it makes me wonder how other Asian countries might react, in particular Japan. In the treaty at the end of World War II, Japan was demilitarized and is now forbidden to have its own army or navy; their sending military support to Iraq after 9/11 was a huge issue. There's been a bit of a push by the Bush Administration to rebuild military power in Japan, and I can't help thinking that it is as much in reaction to anything China and Russia might do as it is to North Korea, which is fiercely militaristic and hostile but is also in many ways a terribly poor country. I don't doubt North Korea's hostility and willingness to battle, but I do doubt its ability to actually support military action -- whereas we all know that both China and Russia don't have the same problems. Also, neither China nor Japan has forgotten Japan's incursions into China in the 1930s, including the Rape of Nanking, and hard feelings exist all over the place about the events of that time up through World War II even if they're currently smoothed over under smiles and politeness.
Maybe I'm just stirring the tea leaves and seeing a thunderstorm or two -- but I put the thoughts out there for you to consider.
7/05/2005 04:16:00 PM
Friday, June 03, 2005
Theocracy imminent in Ohio
The Ohio Restoration Project is a Dominionist move to install religious law instead of civil law in the state of Ohio, with recruitment for support through conservative churches.
What's involved? Let's look at the website itself. When you read the following excerpt, please remember that the buzzwords like freedom and harvest and spiritual warfare may mean something different to the people for which it was written:
Today, there is intense spiritual warfare for the heart, soul, and direction of America. A generational harvest of changed lives weighs in the balances.
The Stewardship of our Citizenship is crucial to this hour. The Sacred Trust of Freedom has been purchased with a purpose. From America’s beginning, the Mayflower Compact openly declares that our forefathers were birthing this nation for “the advancement of the Christian faith.” All 50 of our state constitutions acknowledge and give honor to the Lord. The declaration of Independence declares that we are "endowed by our Creator, with certain inalienable rights." With only 5% of the world's population, God has blessed the United States with nearly 40% of the world's wealth. Now more than ever, we are convinced that God has blessed this nation with resources to share the light of God's Word with a world lost in darkness. America has had a mission to share a living Savior with a dying world.
During the past 50 years, that mission has come under heavy spiritual warfare. Recently, the birth pains have increased in frequency and intensity. The forces of hell understand Biblical prophecy better than most people sitting in the pews on Sunday morning. The intensity of the warfare for the heart and soul of America is escalating:
--Teaching creation in our public schools has become a federal lawsuit. --Biblical definitions of marriage are being tragically altered by some judges who think they are smarter than God and begin to legislate secular dogma from the bench. --American universities have become the arteries of spiritual toxic waste. --“Homosexual marriages” are being paraded in 50 states --In some cities, abortions nearly outnumber births --HIV and sexually transmitted diseases will kill more Americans than every war this country has ever fought. --Secularists have hijacked our culture--one year at a time. --Denominational bigotry, division within the Body of Christ, and apostasy have weakened the voice of Biblical reason. --Around the globe, ministers of the Gospel are being threatened with “hate crimes” legislation.
With so much of world history weighing in the balances, it's not enough to simply make moral observations and diagnose the culture. “Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness” has become our course of action. In the months to come, the Ohio Restoration Project seeks to ignite hundreds of thousands of “candles” of influence and light in the public arena. The Hinges of History are moving on our watch. Ohio stands at the critical crossroads to America’s future leaders.
By God's design, for such a time as this, Ohio is truly at the “heart of it all!”
Thank you for caring and making a difference.
America Has a Mission to Share a Living Savior With a Dying World
Let's examine this a little; it's a fine example of what I'd call Protestant Latin -- it has its own coded message, which isn't obvious in English. What exactly does the 'Stewardship of our Citizenship' mean?
One is a steward of what is given by God, as in the Parable of the Talents, where the wealthy man gave talents to his servants. What this tells me is that this group sees American citizenship not as something that a person has because of being born here or naturalized (regardless of religion), but as a result of belief in God, and something that can be taken away again -- in the parable, the servant who did nothing with his 'talent' but store it had it taken away and given to the most profitable of the other servants. The servant whose talent was taken away from him was told to leave the property, also. What does this say about the group's ideas about those of us who don't share their views? It tells me that these people think that Americans who don't believe in the same way they do should not be considered citizens, and might have their citizenship removed. These are dangerous, dangerous words if you value your American citizenship. Nobody, by law, has the right to take your citizenship away from you for the sake of religion at this point.
It's a reasonable thing for the Puritans to thank God in the Mayflower Compact -- because they believed they were leaving England because of religious persecution. That was their story. That isn't necessarily the story of everyone else who's come over the water. Note the quotation from the Declaration of Independence, rather than from the Constitution. Dominionists look to the Declaration as THE founding document, and consider the Constitution to be a 'dead document', meaning only what it meant in 1783 when it was written, as Justice Antonin Scalia keeps saying (in contradiction to 230 years of constitutional law and case law.)
Next comes an appeal to what's called the Prosperity Gospel -- the social Darwinist idea that if you're wealthy, God has blessed you, and if you're not wealthy, God has cursed you. Very simple, very Old Testament, and very opposed to Jesus' words about the poor being blessed and dear to God, as stated in the Sermon on the Mount. These 'resources' are to be used, this group says, 'to share the light of God's Word', in other words, active evangelism. Not for sheltering the poor, not for feeding the hungry, not for healing the sick, but for evangelizing the state.
Then come the words 'America has a mission to share a living Savior with a dying world.' That's an interesting phrase. First, it designates America as specially ordered to do this. By whom? Who is speaking on behalf of God in this? How is the sharing going to be done? I'm going to skip over the reference to a living Savior, as that's a standard bit of wording in nearly every denomination, and go to the end of the sentence: "a dying world". This is a Dominionist phrase, and it assumes that the world will end and be destroyed *soon* so that God will create an entirely new world to replace it. This is apocalyptic speech, seeking out the End Times. Let me point out again that even the Bible says that only God knows the day and the hour of the end of anything and everything -- not a church, not a preacher, not anyone else. Nobody knows. And there are a lot of nasty words against false prophets who try to make money off of people's beliefs in there, too.
The next paragraph starts with the idea that this "mission" to evangelize America (or America's not-quite-equally respected citizens) is longterm but has run into difficulty in the past 50 years or so. This tells me that whoever wrote this is not familiar with American history or economic history, or even its religious history, and is not concerned with or interested in the Bill of Rights or the Constitutional freedoms that citizens are supposed to be guaranteed. The group is interpreting changes in civil law as demonic attacks against religious goals. This, again, is apocalyptic and Dominionist language -- the translation might be, "In the past 50 years, those other people are doing things that get in the way of what we think should be happening, so they're all being influenced by the Devil and demons." What's this demonic action that's been going on? Among other things, civil rights and civil liberties, freedom of choice, the right to privacy and the ability to bargain collectively -- in other words, modern life.
Check their list of examples and look at the way it's slanted.
--"Teaching creation" becoming a "federal lawsuit". This can be considered as an attack on separation of church and state, as well as criticism of publicly funded education free to all, i.e. not under their religious control.
-- "Biblical definitions of marriage" being altered by "secular dogma". This is a demand to hold the law of the Bible as higher than the Constitution or American law. Which Biblical law? Whichever ones they say should be there. Usually that's the long list of requirements in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, except for the specific ones that Jesus opposed. (Though I haven't noticed any Evangelicals being stoned lately for wearing a cotton-polyester shirt or undergoing ritual purification for eating shrimp cocktail.) Also, note the "Biblical" in the phrase. It doesn't say one man-one woman. It could mean one man and a harem and concubines; that's certainly in the Bible also; although St. Paul said that each bishop should have only one wife, it says nothing about the congregation's marital situation. Does anyone else here see a hint of 'The Handmaid's Tale' in this?
-- "spiritual toxic waste" -- this is an attack on intellectual freedom within universities. It's anti-intellectual as well; it's saying that Christians who attend universities that are not specifically affiliated with a church of the proper denomination will lose their faith and be poisoned and damned by their education. This is a statement of fear that they will lose their influence over people with univeristy educations, who have presumably been trained in logic and will see the holes in their arguments. It's promotion of ignorance as holy.
-- Homophobia here as well as lies. "Homosexual marriages" aren't being 'paraded' in all 50 states; do all states even have Pride Day parades? It's slamming the existence of gay people in stable unions, as if this were a threat to them. The threat is not spiritual, though, it's influence and money; the underlying idea here is that the existence of same-sex marriages and unions shows that another way of life *can* exist that is different that what this group says a marriage should be. It's trying to say that everyone has to be the same in order for things to be right, and that's a lie. The existence of something different that works threatens the group's influence; the idea that people who are in same-sex unions might receive the same benefits as hetero marriages makes them worry that their money is going to 'unholy practices.'
-- Another lie. There are fewer abortions -- and fewer out of wedlock children being born -- than a decade ago; the number is steadily dropping. In some states it's nearly impossible for a woman to exercise free choice. This is just made up out of whole cloth without any statistical basis.
-- There are several false assumptions in this: that HIV and STDs are incurable and fatal, when the truth is that the majority of STDs can be either cured or controlled with drugs and when HIV research is helping people live longer; that the number of people who are affected fatally outnumbers the death toll in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the border wars, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, Grenada, the Kuwait war and the current Iraq war, not to mention the other skirmishes here and there. Another non-statistic without proof. There's also the unspoken inference that all these diseases happen to other people, not the people from this particular group -- so the efforts to cure these illnesses is wasted money because it doesn't benefit *them*. And all this is supposed to be the result of "immorality", not of microbes. Very Old Testament thinking, very judgmental and sin=sickness.
--'Secularists' hijacking culture one year at a time -- this is yet another slam against anyone "not Us". This is also a slam against other ethnicities, against anyone not considered "middle American", against immigrants and against people of nonChristian religions -- Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists -- who work and think and act without regard to this group's view of Christian society. In other words, the society they live in isn't entirely circumscribed by their particular church.
-- This criticism of denominational differences is as old as the hills; this time the point to be made comes from four words: bigotry, apostasy and Biblical reason. They're saying that other denominations have strayed from the Pure Straight One Way that They Alone Follow, that these other denominations aren't receptive to this group's views, that because of this they are apostate -- no longer to be considered Christians. I can interpret 'Biblical reason' in a lot of ways, but will summarize it as being whatever this group considers reasonable, whether it is or not. (Usually anyone who cites "Biblical reason" doesn't have a lot to back up what he says other than taking a long string of Bible verses out of context.)
-- This last one is interesting -- "around the globe" ministers are threated with "hate crime" legislation. "Hate crime" legislation is an American term. What this means is that Muslim countries don't want proselytizing Evangelicals telling them how to do things, and have passed laws against them -- but that America is being blamed for this , somehow. There's no respect here for other people's religions, even for other religions that stem from the Book, or whose revered ancestors include Abraham, Isaac or Jacob, e.g. Judaism and Islam. There's also not a lot of understanding that some countries have established religions, such as the Lutheran Church in Germany or the Catholic Church in Austria or Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka, and that these countries don't want Protestant Evangelicals coming in to preach. Again, it's a case of "they don't want to let us do what we want, so they're bad and evil."
Add it up. When's the last time in US history when things went the way this group wants? The Gilded Era, when what was gilded was the mirrors and trim on the homes of the robber barons, and your ancestors and mine were working 14-hour days in factories and mills, 7 days a week, no benefits, no health care, no OSHA checking to make sure work could be done safely.
After the list, we return to the sense of apocalyptic doom, "world history weighing in the balances" being an unsubtle reference to the Last Judgment and the return of Christ as judge. In the next sentence, lighting candles refers to the saying of not putting one's candle under a bushel but putting it on a high place to light the whole house -- but the following sentence widens the meaning by saying that the candles "of influence and light in the public arena" aren't confined to households. This is a call for Evangelical Protestant activism in government. The "Hinges of History" phrase recalls Jesus' words in the Apocalypse of John: 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock...", with the idea that history will open up and let Jesus in to run things -- and it's all supposed to start happening in Ohio.
This makes Ohio in essence the Promised Land, "at the heart of it all." What this tells me is that the Ohio Restoration Project isn't aimed just at Ohio. Ohio is the first step, the foothold in the heartland. If this group gets a grip in Ohio, it will spread to other states, just as the state initiative to let pharmacists get away with not filling prescriptions they "object to for religious reasons" has spread from one state to others.
Let's look again at that list of issues. The 'marriage' issue is hostility to same-sex marriage and to a thorough education in human sexuality that would include disease prevention and birth control. The 'right-to-life' issue includes opposition to women having any choice over what happens to their bodies, and against privacy of health-care records. It is likely also anti-contraception and pro-Viagra; the more children, the more to be indoctrinated. Educational choice means student vouchers so that the government funding for public schools is diverted to private religious schools, which is a violation of separation of church and state and which would cause serious financial problems for public school districts. Taxes means getting rid of taxes for things they don't want to support, like social services, health care, retirement and most levels of federal government. The major 'employment' issue is anti-unionism, because the concept of workers freely choosing to associate as a group and demand fair pay, safe working conditions and fair treatment simply terrifies the neoCons who think they might lose money if they did the right thing and paid a fair wage.
This is a recipe for ideological Evangelical fascism. This is a strategy for an Evangelical fascist coup, taking over the government. It has nothing to do with Jesus. It has everything to do with influence and the greed for power, as well as the insistence that everything Must Be Done Their Way Or Else.
And you know what? That's not just my conclusion.
The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told the Times that Johnson's efforts could potentially be more harmful to the body politic than the efforts of televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
"This represents a new wave in organizing on the part of conservative evangelicals," Lynn said. "From my standpoint, as someone who doesn't agree with their conclusions, this is a more dangerous model."
What can you do about it? If you're inside Ohio, do your best to find out what's happening and support the rights you cherish at the state and local level. Don't let yourselves be shouted down or undercut by this group. Get active, find out the issues and write some letters to let your legislators at all levels know that you're there, that you don't agree with these people's views, and that you support legislation that agrees with *your* views. Go to a town meeting and make a brief speech. Do what you can to stave off this concerted effort to take away your Constitutional rights, to remove American law and to install a theocracy.
If you're outside Ohio, watch very carefully within your own state and listen to what your neighbors say about what happens in church. Is some group trying to enlist the conservative pastors in your area in their own right-wing political action? What's the reaction to that?
And if you are running across any of this in action, feel free to comment here about it. We all have much to lose if a fascist religious party takes control of any one state and installs its ideology there.
6/03/2005 01:52:00 PM
Monday, May 23, 2005
Will tomorrow see the end of the United States of America as written in the Constitution
[Sen. Minority Leader Harry] Reid has bought a 90-second ad this evening to present the Democratic position to the American people. It will air tonight as follows: WRC (DC) 7:58 P.M. WJLA (DC) 7:57 P.M. WTTG (C) 7:57 P.M. CNN 8:00 P.M. CNNHN 8:00 P.M. FoxNews 7:50-7:55 P.M. Part of his message in the ad:
Unfortunately, some Senate Republicans are trying to give President Bush power no president has ever had -- the ability to personally hand out lifetime jobs to judges -- including the Supreme Court, without consensus from the other party. This abuse of power is not what our founders intended. It's wrong for one political party -- be it Republicans today or Democrats tomorrow -- to have total control over who sits on our high courts and rules on our most basic rights.
As for the key undecideds: Arlen Specter: (Pennsylvania) DC Office: 202-224-4254 Philadelphia Office: 215-597-7200
Pittsburgh Office: 412-644-3400
John Warner: (Virginia) DC Office: (202) 224-2023
Richmond Office: (804) 739-0247
Norfolk Office: (757) 441-3079
Mike Dewine: (Ohio) DC Office: (202) 224-2315
Cleveland office: (216) 522-7272
Columbus office: (614) 469-5186
Chuck Hagel: (Nebraska) DC Office: (202) 224-4224
Omaha Office: (402) 758-8981
Remember, be courteous. And ideally, calls should come from constituents.
I think at this point I don't need to tell you how important it is that the minority party not lose the use of the filibuster, the only tool usable against dictatorship by the majority. Are we clear on that? The Senate should not house a dictatorship that wields power at the behest of the President. The separation of powers should divide the Congress from the Executive branch and should divide both of them from the Judiciary. That's how it's supposed to work. That's how it has worked for 230 years. There is no reasonable excuse for changing it now. The reasons Senators want to change it is to curry favor with the unelected Religious Right for political purposes in the next election. Are we clear on that? If there's only one party, and nobody is allowed to go against it, or to speak against it, or to express their views, or to have a legal opinion that doesn't follow party ideology -- that's not democracy. It bears a far stronger similarity to Stalin's USSR. That is not what this country is supposed to be about.
If any of these people listed behind the cut represent you and you have not previously called them, please make one phone call tonight. If you have already called, thank you. If you are a believer in any form of higher power or deity, please consider praying that those who vote in the Senate tomorrow may be guided by the best interests of the United States as a whole and by tradition, and not by the greed of the neoCons in the Republican Party.
When Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist accuses Democrats who oppose Owen and Brown of wanting to “kill, to defeat, to assassinate these nominees,” he transforms political rhetoric into an apocalyptic vision that is better suited to Bible class than the floor of the Senate. What’s behind his passion is naked ambition. He wants to be president and he’s courting the religious right. The scary part is that this over-the-top wooing of God-obsessed Christians is embraced by a growing number of Republican senators, all apparently sincere in their religiosity and some, like Frist, with presidential aspirations.
Stripping Senate Democrats of their right to filibuster judicial nominees is a prelude to a broader assault on the judiciary known as “court stripping.” Alabama Republican Richard Shelby last year introduced The Constitution Restoration Act of 2004 to acknowledge God as the sovereign source of law and threaten judges with impeachment should they uphold separation of church and state. Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore appeared with Shelby at the press conference announcing the legislation. Moore is now touring the country with the granite block depicting the Ten Commandments that he was ordered to remove from the state court house.
Shelby reintroduced the bill in March of this year when the Terri Schiavo case was in the headlines. His press secretary says the two events were unrelated, yet if anything like Shelby imagines comes to pass, it would turn our constitutional democracy into a theocracy. The legislation says no court has jurisdiction to rule on issues surrounding God, the flag, separation of church and state and establishment of religion. The wording is broad enough to remove from civil law all matters of personal status, like whom you can marry and issues related to child custody and child support. “We’re lulled into thinking it’s too ridiculous to pass,” says Judith Lichtman with the National Partnership for Women & Families. “But it’s the genius of the right to make what is really radical accepted in the mainstream.”...
What Shelby and his backers are really after is gay marriage. If the Constitution Restoration Act of 2004 were law, the Massachusetts Supreme Court could not have ruled that two people of the same sex can marry. “They’re doing in a sense what Iraq is trying to do,” says Lichtman, “make religious law supreme and not reviewable by any court, least of all the Supreme Court.” She adds that while Jews have to speak up, along with Muslims and Buddhists, this is a fight within Christianity because it refers to an orthodoxy and a very new and strict construction of the Bible that trumps everything else, including civil law.
The Senate debate over Bush’s judicial nominees follows a series of events that attack and diminish the judiciary as a coequal and independent branch of government. In the Schiavo case, serious issues about the end of life and the role of the state were hijacked by right-wing fundamentalists. The Republican-appointed judge in Florida who refused to open the case to federal intervention needed security because of threats to his life. And after a wave of courthouse violence, Texas Republican John Cornyn said on the Senate floor that he wasn’t sure there was a cause and effect, but he could understand how people get so upset. Republican Rep. John Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced he would hold hearings on federal court budgets, suggesting there is more than one way to rein in judges and that is to starve them into submission....
***!!!***
Think about that last wording -- 'starve them into submission'. Did you think you'd ever hear that sort of language from one branch of American government talking about another? And think about the concept of putting religious law above civil law, which is what this serves. The Religious Right wants to run this country; the neoCons are willing to run it into the ground to get what they want.
We may be living through the demise of Constitutional government in this country. Tomorrow may determine how this country will be governed and by whom for the rest of our lives. It all depends on how a handful of people vote on something technical and procedural -- and from that comes everything else.
5/23/2005 07:56:00 PM
