Playing Politics

How much longer are we going to put up with politicians playing politics with the so-called "War on Terror"?

The current power base (yes, that's "the Republicans" to you and me) has turned playing politics with terrorism into an art form, even to the extent of accusing anyone who calls them on their behavior as being the one playing politics.

The latest example comes from RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman, whose latest letter to the faithful tries to equate the censure resolution with playing politics, and refers to the "calls of Democrats who would censure and impeach the President for fighting the terrorists."

Let's be clear: those of us who support ensuring that the President follows the laws of this country are NOT opposed to his fighting the terrorists. Not one bit. We'd be offended if he did any less.

But there is very real reason to believe that this President has broken the law, reason which would be much more apparent to many of the Republican faithful (and much less to many of the Democratic faithful) if this were President Clinton behaving this way.

However, the fact that some people view the "facts" shaded through their politics doesn't change them. There IS good reason to believe the laws of this country have been broken, not because the job couldn't be done within the system, but for the convenience of a President whose ego won't allow him to accept that he's constrained by the restrictions placed upon the rest of us.

That's all this censure resolution is about. If we had a Congress doing their job, it would be an impeachment hearing in order to determine whether the law was in fact eggregiously broken. Actually, if we had a Congress doing their job, it might never have come to this, because by now we'd have had real investigation into things and real checks placed on an overreaching President.

That is not playing politics. That's ensuring that in this land of freedoms and liberties, everyone from the top down plays by the rules. Last time I checked, that's one of the Constitutionally mandated jobs of the Congress.

Liam.

[Note, this was originally a response I wrote to someone who supports President Bush and seems to think he can do no wrong. My wife suggested with a few minor modifications (such as removing identifying information), it would do well to be posted here, so here it is. -- Liam]

Why does it seem like the Administration apologists' response to disagreeing with the WAY something is done is to claim the disagree-er disagrees with it BEING done?

Let me give an example: I think people should drive safely and obey the speed limit. I also absolutely believe people should go to work and earn money so they can pay their bills, support their families, etc. But I believe they should obey reasonable traffic laws and sane driving behaviors in the process of getting there.

The argument over the warrantless wiretapping issue of late is NOT over whether we should be engaging in national security programs. If the argument of those of us who don't like THIS PARTICULAR program is like my saying I think people should drive safely and sanely, then the Republican talking point reaction is like claiming I'm against people being able to work and to support themselves.

President Bush does absolutely have a mandate to protect this country. But he must do it within the law. Violating the Constitution and the core principles of this country in order to save it is like locking your child in the basement and never letting them out so as to make sure no one ever hurts them.

There is a certain fallacy to the Right Wing opinion about what it means that Bush is the President, as if that puts him above oversight by the Congress. Our government was set up to have three EQUAL branches of government, each set up in a different way and each an effective check/balance over the others. The point was to make it as difficult as possible for any one group to manage to wrest control over the government.

I would point out that even if you believe that President Bush is a good and noble man of principle (a point on which we will simply have to disagree), keep in mind that the shifts of power we give him will continue on to the next President and the next and the next. Pick a President you don't think was moral and/or ethical. Clinton, perhaps, or Nixon, or perhaps a future elected hypothetical corrupt President, and imagine those same powers in THAT President's hands. Before arguing in favor of expanded powers for the President and decreased oversight by the other branches, realize you are not simply handing that to the current Administration, but to all who come after.

That's why the signing statements are so odious. Previous Presidents have used them, but generally to clarify some point of law or other, or to make some historically significant statement on the occasion of the signing of the law. No other President has used them to anything like the extent President Bush has, nor has any previous President so frequently referenced the “Unitary Executive” theory in his signing statements, a theory which holds that the President alone is responsible for the behavior of the President, and that anything the President does is legal because he did it.

To really buy into the Unitary Executive theory, you have to believe that President Clinton was entirely on legal grounds when he had his affair with Monica Lewinsky. In fact, you have to believe that Impeachment itself is an invalid section of the Constitution if by definition the President can not disobey the law. The President's job, according to the Constitution, is the faithful execution of the laws enacted by Congress. You hear all this talk of Judicial activism and the complaint that Judges are “making law” instead of enforcing it. The President's signing statements are exactly the same thing: An attempt to co-opt the Congressional power of law making as set out in the Constitution. Note that Bush is the first President in recent history to (so far) not have vetoed a single piece of legislation. Part of that may be because he has an ideologically similar Congress, but part is because he feels that issuing a statement saying that he doesn't believe the law applies to him makes him exempt from having to follow it, be it a law against torture or a law requiring certain oversight of use of certain Patriot Act powers. He's usurping Congresses law-making role. Arguably, he's asserting a way of accomplishing the line-item veto for himself, even though such a targeted veto power has already once been found unconstitutional by the Judiciary. Any part of a law he doesn't like, he just says "I don't feel obliged to follow this part of this law" and thinks that's just peachy.

Keep in mind that the framers of the Constitution considered Congress to be the primary (first among equals) branch of government, which is why they set it down on paper first (Section 1) and the President second (Section 2). The President is not, and can not be allowed to be above the law, nor above oversight. No one, not one human being is above being corrupted, at least a little bit, when they know they won't be caught. It may be small things (if you knew there were no police out on the road on a given day, wouldn't you drive a bit faster?) or big, but anyone handed a power and no chance of being caught if they misuse it will at least be TEMPTED to do so.

[The original author to whom I was responding] asserts that if the President had to get permission before the wire tapping, NY might be a big grave yard right now. However, that argument misses several facts.

1. According to recent reports, in all of the wiretapping that's gone on, almost no useful information has been gotten, no terrorist plots foiled.
2. There was plenty of warning in the FBI and elsewhere (including at least one Presidential Daily Briefing) before 9/11 that an attack like the one we suffered was impending, so it wasn't lack of knowledge that allowed it to happen.
3. Most importantly, the FISA law allows for RETROACTIVE warrants. When a legitimate argument can be made for speed, the warrant may be applied for up to 72 hours AFTER the search or wire tap. Indeed the whole flap is not because of the wire tapping, it is because he didn't get permission either before or within 72 hours, as the FISA law both allowed and required that he do.

What the warrant requirement accomplishes is not the slowing down of the process (as the President would have us believe), but the assurance that the President is only spying on suspected terrorists and not on political rivals, anti-war protesters or anyone else he's not legally allowed to spy on. If he's not misusing his power, why does he object to oversight? And if he IS misusing his power, all the more reason the rest of us need to INSIST on oversight.

As to [the original author's] view of this President personally, and of his having been chosen by God, again we'll just have to agree to disagree. For me, I know that in just about every state that had the new electronic voting machines (particularly those made by Diebold) there were widespread instances of irregularities. Machines going down and when they came back up, suddenly there were many more votes for Bush. Machines reporting more votes for Bush than were actually cast in total in those districts. Vote counts which, for the first time in the history of exit polling, were more than the statistical margin-of-error off from the exit poll results. And every single documented irregularity just HAPPENED to favor President Bush over Senator Kerry. Someone chose President Bush, but it wasn't God, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't the voters either. Do you really believe the God that sent His only Son to teach us not to hate or kill or covet what our neighbors have would support a President who had (as more and more evidence comes in to support) started a first-strike war on a country that was no threat, determined to go to war while insisting to the country and the world that he was trying every diplomatic strategy available?

You have trust and faith in this President. I think you're blind to his obvious failings and faults. We'll have to agree to disagree on that point, but nevertheless, I don't understand how a President who is playing by the rules has anything to fear from Constitutionally mandated oversight, and the more someone tries to avoid the same scrutiny every one of his predecessors had to endure, the more we should demand it.

Finally, I want to point out something regarding Germany in the late 1930s. Hitler was coming to power, and he had lots of popular support. After the war, people asked “How could the German people, most of whom are good, moral people, have supported that? How could they have let that happen?” And the truth is that they didn't SEE it happening. They couldn't believe it was true. No one wanted to believe it was true.

Do I think George Bush is Hitler? No, of course not. But our government was set up the way it was specifically to prevent someone like Hitler from amassing power and being able to perpetrate heinous acts before anyone realized what he was up to. We should all be exceedingly concerned any time that system which was so well thought out and has served us so well for 230 years is tampered with, either by asserting an unprecedented level of Presidential power or with talk of taking the judiciary down a peg. The balance of powers is a delicate thing, carefully placed. Too much shifting of weight and the whole thing could topple over.

Liam.

Great Quote

I heard a great quote today. I wish I remember who said it and who they said it to. If I can find it, I'll post attribution.

The quote was to a Senator who was waving a Bible around and asking why there was any question of making gay marriage legal, when the Bible clearly said homosexuality was wrong.

The response was "Senator, when you took office, you put your hand on a Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."

I think this is an important distinction, and one which is far too often lost. No one is saying you can't be Christian, if that's what you choose to be, or Jewish, Muslim, atheist, Hindu, agnostic or Branch Davidian. But in becoming an elected official of this country, you set that aside and with regard to fulfilling your duties, you uphold the Constitution, whether you personally agree with all of it or not.

It's simply a matter of courtesy. Since you wouldn't want an Islamic elected official passing laws taken from the Koran and trying to enforce them on you using your tax dollars, don't do likewise to those who do not share your religion.

It isn't an attack on Christianity. You're still free to worship exactly as you like. You just have to keep it out of your political office. If you can't do that, or are unwilling to, then you are unfit to hold the position and you should leave it.

UPDATE: The quote in particular was from Constitution Law Professor Jamie Raskin, testifying on March 1, 2006 regarding Maryland's proposed gay marriage ban. Interestingly, however, it may not have originated there, as comedian Bill Maher is quoted on April 1, 2005, with respect to the Terri Schiavo case, "Does George Bush remember that he put his hand on the Bible to uphold the Constitution and not the other way around?" (Thanks to snopes.com for the details)

Liam.

Down the Drain...

Down the drain go our rights and liberties, one by one, and like the Germans in the time of Hitler's ascendancy, very few Americans seem to believe that it's happening. So many people seem to either think it can't be that bad, somehow trusting in the system to protect us when that system is being actively circumvented, or believe in the mistaken notion that giving up a few liberties is perfectly acceptable in the post 9/11 world, because after all, it's only the terrorists who have something to fear, right?

So all I can do is keep pointing out news articles like this one, from the AP (and posted on Yahoo).

According to the Justice Department, even legally privileged conversations such as Attorney-Client or Doctor-Patient conversations are open to surveillance. These are conversations for which no court would ever issue a warrant, because such information is legally recognized to be privileged. But not to the DoJ, they figure it's all just hunky dory.

And, they say, they have no compunctions against using information they gained through the program in court prosecutions. Their argument essentially boils down to "it's OK because we say it is", although the longer form is that because the program is legal (their assertion, absolutely not universally accepted), that therefore any evidence gathered through its use is also legal for use in court.

And as so often happens with these articles, they bury the most scary part at the tail end, as a kind of throw away. All throughout the article, the program is characterized as a foreign intelligence and surveillance program, involving at least one end of the conversation taking place outside of the U.S.

And yet, at the end of the article, it says: The department also avoided questions on whether the administration believes it is legal to wiretap purely domestic calls without a warrant, when al-Qaida activity is suspected. The department wouldn't say specifically that it hasn't been done.

If they refuse to state categorically that it hasn't been done, you may almost certainly rest assured that it HAS been. Fourth amendment be damned, if we want to assert suspicion of terrorism, who the hell are you to tell us you have rights?

Honestly and truly, our last hopes remain with the next election and the one beyond it, either next time (electing a Congress that takes advise and, more importantly, consent seriously) or in the Presidential election (including an election free of obvious fraud and serious questions as to the true will of the people).

If we don't reign in the Presidency, and soon, we're going to end up a monarchy. Let us all remember that the Framers of the Constitution considered the Congress, not the President, to be the preeminent branch of our government. Indeed they establish the Congress in Article 1 of the Constitution, waiting until Article 2 to introduce the President.

Congress needs a spine and the guts to stand up to the President and remind him that he is not the sole leader of this country, and that he does not have unlimited power.

Liam.

Katherine Harris update

A few days ago, I posted this article wondering what prompts a person to spend everything they have on a Senate race, when the best possible outcome for them would be to win and then earn a salary which would require them to hold the seat for something like 70 years to earn back the money spent.

Well, it turns out Ms. Harris was not being entirely up front with us. While she was playing drama queen and emotionally telling the Fox News audience that she was putting "everything I have" on the line, and Sean Hannity was playing her up to be some kind of conservative hero for taking one for the team, the fact is that the $10 million she's putting "on the line" consists solely of the money left to her by her father, not the millions of additional dollars she already had before her father passed away. She's played some tricks, like putting some of the assets into her husbands name, but the fact is that she's NOT, as she's trying to claim, putting "everything" on the line. She's just another rich person trying to by an election, and trying to spin it in such a way that she'll resonate with the poor people.

Oh, and it gets better. Because she's currently polling at about 2/3s the number of votes her main competitor gets, she makes herself out to be this tragic figure, putting all this money on the line and won't you all please vote for her, because otherwise she'll have risked it all in vain? But in fact, she is saying she's going to save this particular $10 million for a late-in-the-game media blitz. Which means that if by the end of the campaign she's so far behind she realizes she can't win, she just changes her mind and keeps her money. If she's so far ahead that she doesn't NEED the media blitz, then she decides not to spend it and keeps the money.

In reality, the only way in which she ends up spending the money is if she's pulled herself to the point that it's a reasonably close race and the extra media time has a really good chance of making the difference... after which she still has more money remaining than most citizens of this counry will earn in their entire lives.

Just a big old stinking pile of BS, wrapped in the guise of a poor tragic woman putting it all on the line for her beliefs.

I guess with the culture of lies that is the hallmark of the current Administration and a significant fraction of the upper levels of the Republican party today, I shouldn't be surprised.

Liam.

Friday Dump

Traditionally, news that government doesn't want people to notice is released late on Friday. It's referred to as a Friday Dump, and it operates on the hope that instead of being front page news the next morning, all the best reporters will have gone home for the weekend, and so the news will trickle out slowly, and by the time the regular reporters are back on Monday, it has become an old story, thus avoiding full coverage.

One such story this week (seen here on Yahoo) involves a supposed leak of American invasion plans by Russia to Saddam Hussein in the days before we launched the current war.

Now, it is fairly common knowledge that in the age of bloggers and 24 hour news networks, the Friday Dump is no longer as successful a strategy as it once was. It's also a widely known and recognized technique.

So, I ask myself, what is there about this story that the Administration doesn't want people to be talking about? It just doesn't seem like that damaging a story to the President or the Administration.

So here's my guess, and we get to see over the next week or two whether I'm getting good at figuring out Rovian politics or whether I've missed the boat on this one:

My guess is that they actually WANT this story out there, but they want to make it APPEAR as though they don't. Further, my guess is that this story will then be cited, within the month, as further proof that Saddam Hussein had sufficient time and warning to get the WMDs out of his country before we arrived. This will allow the Administration to make a possibly credible sounding argument that there actually were such weapons and possibly take back some of the support he's lost as some people begin to see him as decisive and visionary again.

Now, I want to stress, this is not NEWS. This is merely my guess. But I'm in a mood to play the "how good are my guesses" game, and the best way I can do that is to post this now, so that if my guesses are good, there are people who will have read this before it happened. If not, well, it's still a fun game for a Friday evening.

Liam.

Presidential Malfeasance

Today, I have signed into law H.R. 3199, the "USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005," and then S. 2271, the "USA PATRIOT Act Additional Reauthorizing Amendments Act of 2006." The bills will help us continue to fight terrorism effectively and to combat the use of the illegal drug methamphetamine that is ruining too many lives.

The executive branch shall construe the provisions of H.R. 3199 that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch, such as sections 106A and 119, in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive's constitutional duties.

The executive branch shall construe section 756(e)(2) of H.R. 3199, which calls for an executive branch official to submit to the Congress recommendations for legislative action, in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to recommend for the consideration of the Congress such measures as he judges necessary and expedient.

GEORGE W. BUSH

THE WHITE HOUSE,

March 9, 2006.

This is the full text of "President's Statement on H.R. 199, the 'USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005'", otherwise known as the signing statement President Bush issued along with his signing of the Patriot Act reauthorization.

One of the very few aspects of the reauthorization that has made civil libertarians even moderately comfortable is the increased oversight required in the use of the powers thus granted. As increasing numbers of people (even among his own party) have begun to recognize that handing the President a blank check may be a mistake, even if he has the best of intentions, the renewed Patriot Act contains provisions to correct at least some of that problem, requiring the Administration to brief Congress regularly on certain aspects of his use of Patriot Act powers.

So we focus on this part of the signing statement: The executive branch shall construe the provisions of H.R. 3199 that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch, such as sections 106A and 119, in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive's constitutional duties.

This is legalese for "Thanks for reauthorizing these powers, I spit on your oversight", one of the clearest examples yet that this President feels he is above the law, and that restrictions placed on him by the laws of the country, the Congress, and even the Constitution itself are not valid.

When is he going to realize that President does not equal Monarch? And when are the last paltry few of his supporters going to realize that he's dangerously amassing power and claiming authority in direct contradiction to the best interests of the nation and its citizenry?

(Tip of the hat to this article.)

Liam.

The Important Things in Life

Every once in a while, it's important to step back and look at the really important things in life.

Today, that is Liam. (Not me, the younger one).

Tomorrow, Liam turns 13 weeks old. Today, he gave me a great present. Those who know me know I am an avid singer. I love singing to/with the kids and all four of the older ones generally enjoy my singing and often like to sing with me.

Liam... isn't really making much noise yet. Not surprising, he is only just reaching three months old. He's only just starting to learn that he can make noises through his mouth instead of back in his throat through his nose.

So, I came home, and he was in a happy mood. He looked at me and grinned, which is a present in itself, all the more so because he's been a bit wary of me since Sunday, when I shaved my winter beard into my rest-of-the-year van dyke (what most people mistakenly call a goatee), and this is the first time since then that he's looked directly at me and smiled. (The first time he saw me on Sunday, he cried. Since then, he'll smile but not look at me, or look at me but get a concerned look on his face.)

So anyway, since he was in such a good mood, I sat down with him and started singing to him. The Alphabet song, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Londonderry Aire (Danny Boy) and Puff the Magic Dragon. Shortly into the first song, he started cooing along with me. As I continued to sing, he continued cooing, clearly trying to move his mouth with mine and attempting as best he could to modulate his tone.

He's a baby, of course, so it takes quite a leap of faith to call what he was doing "singing", and yet I'm going to take that leap. I could see in his eyes that he was watching me, enjoying me, trying to do everything I did, and just as pleased as pie that he was making noise. I'm not sure he knows that there was any difference between his singing and mine.

I'll go back to ranting about politics later, perhaps even later tonight. For right now, I'm just going to sit and enjoy the first time my baby boy ever sang with me.

Liam, the elder.

Lying by Omission is Still Lying

I want you to read this carefully, those few percentage out there who still support this President, and still believe against all evidence that he doesn't lie.

He held a town hall type meeting today, and for the first time I'm aware of in a very long time, the audience was not pre-screened and regular American citizens were actually allowed in.

One of the people there, an older gentleman, asked a question which contained this:

...you said there were three main reasons for going to war in Iraq: Weapons of mass destruction, the claim that Iraq was sponsoring terrorists that attacked us on 9/11, and that Iraq had purchased nuclear materials from Niger. Now all three of those turned out to be false...

The President, in his response, said:

First, if I might correct a misperception, I don't think we ever said, at least I know I didn't say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein. We DID say that he was a state sponsor of terror. ... I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks on America.

It's that last sentence that's really telling. "I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks on America." Why, pray tell, would you be very careful not to state something, unless you were trying very carefully to give the opposite impression? You are "very careful" not to explicitly say something for one of two reasons: Because you want someone to believe it with plausible deniability, or because you honestly don't want the wrong impression out there. When poll after poll showed (and continue to show, to some extent) that large numbers of American citizens believed that Iraq was involved in 9/11 and the Administration did no more to disabuse people of that notion than to make sure that their wording was careful to never explicitly CONFIRM it, it makes it quite clear that their agenda was not about the truth.

If you're working a logic puzzle, those sorts of hair splitting arguments may come into play. But in point of fact, trying very hard to tie the two events together in the minds of American citizens is not truthful, if you know it isn't true, even if you never explicitly say that it is.

There hasn't been a speech yet given by any top Administration official that involved Iraq in which 9/11 was not invoked. Some of the speeches stop only just technically short of the line of actually saying Hussein was involved in 9/11.

Whether he ever explicitly said it or not, this is word parsing just as bad as that President Clinton engaged in, when he said his answer depended on what the definition of "is" is.

Liam.

Interesting Study

I admit, I probably shouldn't post a link to this study, because it clearly appeals to the wrong aspects of my personality. I remind myself that it is not conservatives or conservativism that I dislike, it is the current neo-conservative cabal that has seized control and is making a mockery of America and everything Republicans have stood for traditionally.

That said, the study is apparently the second study to find that whiney, insecure children who run often to the teacher to tell on misbehaving classmates are much more likely to grow up to be Conservatives, while confident, self-reliant kids generally grow up to be Liberals.

On the other hand, I was a bit more of the whiney, insecure child than the confident, self-reliant one, and yet I'm certainly not solidly conservative, so perhaps the study is a batch of bunk.

Still, it's interesting, and entertaining to think of many of the corrupt members of our current leadership as whiney little tattling children.

Liam.

What Makes Somone Do This?

I have to wonder what motivates someone like Katherine Harris.

People paying for their own political campaigns is not a new story, but usually those who do it have more money than they know what to do with. We can debate at another time the merits of a billionaire "buying" a race by spending a small fraction of his or her vast holdings. On the one hand, it gives them an unfair advantage, but on the other hand it frees them from being beholden to donors.

However, Katherine Harris is facing a huge uphill battle. She's in a race for a Senate seat in which she is trailing by 20 percentage points behind her main rival (48% to 28%). Her solution? She has just announced that she's sinking her entire personal fortune of $10 million (largely comprised of money she recently inherited from her father) into this campaign.

What can she possibly be thinking? This isn't a woman who has hundreds of millions of additional dollars. This is a woman who will have NOTHING if she loses this campaign. But it's not even a gamble, because she'll have NOTHING if she *WINS* the campaign except a Senate seat at a salary which (last I checked) is somewhere around $150,000/year. At that rate, she'll have to hold the job for almost 70 years in order to earn back the money she spent to get the seat.

And of course that all assumes that $10 million will be enough to overcome such a huge deficit in popularity.

The sad part about the whole story is to listen to her speak, she seems to have delusions of grandeur. On the day she announced her candidacy she called it a historic day because a woman was beginning a Senate campaign. She talks as though she has a groundswell of support that's going to sweep her into a Senate seat and then wash across the country, righting wrongs and fighting evil, and unlike the rhetoric of more polished politicians, she seems honestly to believe it's true.

I simply can't understand what there is about a seat on the Senate which is worth spending that much money for, when it's all you have.

Liam.

Please, in the name of heaven, don't let this be true...

A disgusting article from Knight Ridder. The story notes that such claims are not out of the ordinary, but that this one is unusual in that the sourcing is more reliable.

The story is that U.S. troops lined up 11 people and executed them, because one of them (a visitor in the house) was a member of al Qaeda. The dead included a 75 year old woman and five children ranging from 6 months to 5 years old.

The sad part is that the Military doesn't dispute the deaths of the 10 innocents along with the one al Qaeda, they simply claim that in the firefight the house was so badly damaged that it collapsed on the 11 people. Witnesses (including the local police who were willing to be named, which is what makes the story unusual and more credible) say that in spite of the official story, troops made their way into the house BEFORE it collapsed, lined up all inside and shot them.

I hope it isn't true. I have a sneaking suspicion it is. We'll probably never know.

Liam.

Warrantless WHAT?

As you may have noticed, I've been silent for the last week. Every day it gets worse, every day there is more reason to believe we're being lied to and our country is in deep and dire straits... and I got kind of tired of shouting into the wind, so I took a break.

It's not that there's been nothing to talk about. A week ago, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor gave a speech in which she likened the attempts by some to quash the judiciary to the beginnings of a dictatorship, and said some things which ought to scare the pants off of anyone who still respects the Constitution and the principles of freedom on which this country was based.

Since that time, news has circulated that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has talked about an increase in death threats to judges since the neoconservatives started rattling the cages of the insane and making inflammatory statements about how acting as a check on otherwise unchecked power was "judicial activism". Apparently an unprecedented number of judges are now requesting federally funded security in their homes.

There have been several stories about various surveillance undertaken by the FBI and other governmental agencies against anti-war groups, groups which have no ties to terrorism or terrorist groups, groups which simply oppose pre-emptive war based on false premises.

There was a great piece this past week about how some governmental agencies are now saying they will refuse to comment any more to any news organization which does not agree to give said agency advance copies of the story for "fact checking"... as though further muzzling of the already anemic free press is the solution to any of our problems.

Another story last week involved the Administration's justification of pre-emptive warfare, which has gotten little play but which reads astoundingly like something paranoid old Adolph Hitler might have come up with. The world got together and shut him down (eventually). We may be the biggest kid on the block right now, but that doesn't mean the smaller kids couldn't work together to take us down.

And through all of this, I just shook my head ruefully, unable to even motivate myself to write about them, because it's just so much more noise. As if the whole plan of the current leaders is to overwhelm us with so many unthinkables that eventually we shut down and stop paying attention.

But tonight, there's a story from US News and World Report which I can't not write about. You can read it here.

Basically, at the same time the White House concocted its theory that the President had the authority to order electronic surveillance without legally required warrants, they apparently also decided that the President ALSO had the authority to order physical searches similarly withour warrant.

It is unclear as yet whether this authority has actually been used or whether they merely decided they had it if they wanted it, but it is CLEARLY illegal.

You can argue, if you like, that the electronic wire tapping is a gray area, perhaps not included in the Fourth Amendment. Physical searches, on the other hand, there is simply no way to dance around. If the President believes he has such power, and if he has ordered such searches, he is absolutely in violation of the Constitution.

Let's all remember why warrants are required: It isn't to protect the rights of the guilty, it is to make sure the rights of the INNOCENT are not infringed. And the reason there can't be exceptions for certain types of criminals or certain "extenuating circumstances" is that the warrant process is specifically to ensure what types of searches are justified when. If you create even one loophole in the law, you create a pathway for abuse, because if the President can use an assertion of terrorist association as justification for going around the law, then we have only the President's word, because no one else will necessarily ever oversee the search and ensure that it really WAS for terrorist grounds, or that it was conducted properly and within the law.

Watch this story. Let's see how it unfolds. But it should scare the crap out of any patriotic American that the Administration even asserted such authority, even if they never actually used it. And does anyone seriously believe that this administration especially would go to the lengths of asserting an authority and then NOT using it?

Liam.

An Interesting Article

I'm not saying I believe it, but it's interesting in one of those "Hmmmm. Worth a few brain cycles considering" sort of ways, this site is a long article written by someone considering how the Biblical Book of Revelation may be not so much coming true, but being used to justify our policies in the Middle East.

Worth a read. In the same way that a thought provoking novel may be worth a read, even if you don't ultimately end up agreeing with it.

Liam.

One Liners

I have noticed a trend, amongst both parties, to label a person with a oneliner that they uttered (maybe, maybe not)with no context...

I got this in my email yesterday from the Republican Party.
It's time to find out who the leader of the Democrat Party really is.

Is it Howard Dean, who compares the United States to Iran? Or John Kerry, who worries about American soldiers terrorizing women and children in the dead of night? Or Hillary Clinton, who has likened the Republican management of the House of Representatives to that of a plantation?

And we all know the one about Gore (who claimed to have invented the internet). None of these statements fairly represents the people that they are attached to. I'm not claiming that it is one sided (But the Neo-Conservatives are much better at getting the word out, therefore sealing a reputation). Democrats might want to do the same thing, but there simply is no effective machine in place to get the word out.

It wouldn't annoy me so much if it weren't so darn effective. This is another reason that I felt the need to distance myself for the time being with the Republican Party. We are talking commandment time. It isn't quite Bearing False Witness, but it is close. Spreading a title, especially if it isn't fitting and representative, is wrong.

Did Kennedy really kill his girlfriend on purpose?
Who is so stupid that he can't spell Potato?
Why would anyone claim to have invented the internet, does he have delusions ofgrandeurr?
Why is Hillary so angry?
Did Kerry risk his life for his country, or was he a coward?
Who had sex with which intern?

Honestly, I've bought into the titles myself. I've believed that Gore was delusional, Kennedy was a murderer, Hillary was a lesbian, Kerry was (maybe) a fraud. Now, I have learned to take a step back, not to buy into this wrong. I challenge everyone else to do the same, don't buy into these titles. They aren't honest.

Not a Terrorist, but I still have something to fear...

I've been thinking more about what bothers me so much about warrantless spying on American citizens, when we're assured that this program is only in place to catch potential terrorist threats. There is, of course, the obvious (and somewhat abstract and theoretical) “Because it violates our privacy and the freedoms we're supposed to have as Americans”, but that argument doesn't hold much weight with the “I'd rather be safe than completely free” crowd.

I've come up with two arguments which I think demonstrate the very real risks involved, even to those who aren't terrorists. Well, to be fair, my wife came up with one of them, I came up with the other (and to be COMPLETELY fair, the one I “came up with” is an expansion on the germ of an idea I read elsewhere).

My wife's point is this: Warrantless spying, when American citizens are on one or both ends of the conversation, runs the very real risk of violating some privileges which are supposed to be above the law: Attorney Client privilege, Doctor Patient privilege, even Pastor/Priest/Rabbi/etc confessional privilege with members of their congregation. All three are protected and privileged conversations, and all three are things which no one but those expressly involved have any right to be part of. And all three are places where you might want to discuss privately things which are not illegal or damaging to anyone, but which you still wish to remain private.

Who needs the NSA having a record that you had a bout with depression or had hemorrhoid surgery? Why should the government have access to the knowledge that you had impure thoughts about your neighbor's wife? What business is it of anyone's that you've decided to leave all of your assets to one child, because you feel the other one has been a sorry excuse for an offspring? And you may ask “Where's the harm?”, but if you don't think it's secret information, then why have the three privileged classes of communication? It's not information that anyone has any right to, but if you happen (for example) to be politically inclined and decide to run for office, do you really want the incumbent against whom you are running to possibly have access to the fact that you had plastic surgery and regularly confess to the sin of masturbation? Couldn't that information, if made public, harm you, whether it represents illegal activity or not?

The second point is, I think, even scarier. As you may have noticed in the news recently, the Federal Government has been trying to get Google to turn over records of all searches done in a certain period. Initially, the request does not ask for IP addresses or any identifying information, but the request was made in order to track down pornographers, and the request was made under one of the powers of the Patriot Act. Remember, this is the same Patriot Act whose proponents insisted that opponents were being silly, because the Act was only to give the Government power to chase down terrorists and protect Americans. And now that same Act is being used to chase down purveyors of pornography.

So what, you ask, I'm against Pornography anyway? Yes, but the point is that the powers, once granted, will not remain unused, and will not be used only for what they were initially granted for. Today it's terrorism and maybe pornographers. Then maybe they decide to go after mass murderers, trying to identify them by their pattern of web searching. Then maybe they start going after drug users, based on drug-related searches. And then some enterprising politician, knowing he's got all of these secret Patriot Act powers, decides to search for seditious behavior, or maybe the legal but publicly embarrassing internet porn history of his political rivals. Imagine a modern-day Joe McCarthy with access to people's personal web search history.

Every ten years, the Census department goes around and counts us all, and we're asked to fill out a form with all sorts of personal information. We're assured that it will be used only for statistical purposes and that none of it will be released outside of the Census department attached to us in any way. It's supposed to be illegal for any Census collected data to be released to anyone else, and yet there is evidence that the Census information was key in helping to round up Americans of Japanese descent during the second World War. According to one site I found, Census-gathered information is routinely used in urban areas to detect “illegal two-family dwellings” and evict people from their homes. Supposedly secret information misused, and this is all PUBLIC, open to scrutiny and oversight.

And so the argument that warrantless wire-tapping is no risk to anyone with no terrorist leanings is simply not credible. Governments at all levels have repeatedly shown a marked inability to follow through on promises. Taxes passed on the basis of their being earmarked for one program then get spent on something different. “Debt Ceilings” are raised so often, it's a farce to even claim they have any legitimacy at all. And again, these are all public and overseen flauntings of the rules.

Both the Patriot Act and the NSA spying program may have been initiated with the best of intentions. The originators of both may honestly never have intended for them to be used except to protect Americans from another 9/11 style attack. But both have insufficient safeguards to ensure the powers thus granted are only used for the purposes for which they were enacted, and the spying program doesn't even have the benefit of any oversight at all, so we have only the word of the Administration and the NSA that they are only spying on terrorists, and only on international calls. If it's that easy to violate rules and regs when there IS oversight, what chance is there that a completely secret program with no one looking over will remain pure?

The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions. This is not a road which I wish to see paved. I have no wish to make it any easier for us to get to that destination than it absolutely has to be.

Liam.

Some Thoughts On the Veto

I was doing some research on the Internet into the Veto power and how it has been weilded, and I think it is enlightening to put President Bush's lack of veto into perspective.

The Presidents over my lifetime (or at least, those I can remember) used the veto as follows (Count of Vetos / Years in office / Approximate average vetos per year)

Nixon: 43 / 5.5 / 8
Ford: 66 / 2.5 / 26
Carter: 31 / 4 / 8
Reagan: 78 / 8 / 10
Bush I: 44 / 4 / 11
Clinton: 37 / 8 / almost 5

So, what does it mean when a President with over five years in office hasn't issued a single executive veto? I can think of several possibilities, none of them good for the country.

Most likely, it's a symptom of the lack of checks and balances these days. If the Congress never sends him anything he isn't going to like, nor ever counters his will, then he has no need to ever veto anything. If this is the case, it means that Congress has rolled over on its advise and consent role.

It could also be that the President hasn't seen fit to veto anything because he prefers to assert his independence of Congressional regulation via signing statements. If this is the case, it means that the President honestly believes he is above the law, and so has no problem signing into law bills with which he disagrees, because he feels free to simply disregard them at his whim.

It could also be that the President is afraid of conflict, big on posturing about how tough he is on terrorists and what a big guy he is, but otherwise afraid of authority and the possible strife that a veto might bring. Obviously, having a wimp for a President isn't the best thing for the nation.

There are other possibilities, but I can't think of one that doesn't signal huge danger for the nation and its citizens.

Oh, and how much power does the threat of veto even have any more from this President? He has, in recent times, twice vowed to whip out his veto pen, and neither time has he actually done it. And now he's threatening again, with regard to the Dubai Ports deal. Dollars to donuts he still won't do it.

Liam.

Reminder to Republican Bush Supporters: He's Not One Of You!

More than anything else, what is the one quality that defines the conservative movement, or at least by which it defines itself in order to get support? Fiscal responsibility.

And so this article from the New York Times reminds us quite clearly that Bush is no conservative, at least in this respect.

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the Bush budget will RAISE the deficit by $1.2 trillion in the next 10 years, and $35 billion this year alone.

How are those numbers reached? Simple. Bush's tax cuts (largely for the wealthy), if passed as budgeted, will cost $1.7 trillion over those same ten years. Meanwhile, the budget reductions Bush has targetted will save about half a trillion over that same time period.

Add in the proposal to partially privatize Social Security, and you can add another $312 billion over those ten years.

One of the differences between this report and the rosey projections that come out of the White House? The now habitual tactic of never BUDGETING for war funding. So far this year, we've added $92 billion in "supplemental spending" to the war effort, not a penny of which was listed in the official budget numbers. And of course although we seem poised to strike at Iran (at least, the rhetoric about Iran now sounds eerily similar to what was being said about Iraq prior to that war), no money is budgetted for that.

Also, keep in mind that a lot of Bush's budgeted tax cuts come from services to veterans. While saying that Democrats and other war opposers don't support the troops, this Administration has quietly been cutting funding for veterans services, so the brave men and women over there, risking their lives and (for those who return) the very real risk of permanent physical and psychological damage come home to find they can't even get the support they were promised as veterans of war.

Amazing how Bush's budget cuts largely come from the poor and middle classes (public education, community development block grants, low income housing, child support enforcement against deadbeat parents, etc), while the tax cuts go largely to the wealthy and the corporate.

But regardless, don't believe it when Bush says he's on a pace to reduce the deficit. His current budget, when not looked at sideways, squinting on a foggy day, proves it.

Liam.

Tragically Mis-informed Military

A recent Zogby poll reports that 72% of U.S. troops in Iraq think that the conflict should end within this calendar year. Of those, 29% favor immediate withdrawn, 22% said within six months, and 21% said by the end of the year.

These results have been fairly widely reported, but what has not been as widely reported are a few of the sadder statistics:

85% of the troops polled believe that the mission is mainly "to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks".

77% also believe that a main reason for the war was "to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq."

That's sickening. A link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda has been pretty much disproven, no one seriously thinks Hussein had anything to do with 9/11, and the al Qaeda presence in Iraq has largely arrived to help the insurgency against us, that is to say, arrived in Iraq since Hussein was removed from power.

Our military is over there fighting, and they've been lied to about why they're doing it.

In the words of Charlie Brown... my stomach hurts.

Liam.

"No one could have anticipated..."

Breaking News...

AP is reporting today on a series of videos shot over the four day period PRIOR TO landfall of Hurricane Katrina. Excerpts from the tape CLEARLY show President Bush talking about all of the FEDERAL resources ready to be brought to bear if the levees fail to hold back the water. Then FEMA Director Michael Brown is seen the day before landfall talking about how in his gut he thinks it's going to be a bad one, discussing all of the concerns he has, and specifically mentioning his concerns about the Superdome, the same Superdome they later claimed they weren't aware was having problems.

I first learned about it tonight on "Countdown with Keith Olberman", but you can read an AP article about it on Yahoo by following this link.

Tapes. Showing that the President and everyone at the top levels of his Administration knew what was likely coming. And yet as recently as yesterday, Bush has still been saying in interviews that no one could have forseen what happened.

Anyone still want to defend this guy? If so, you're in the minority. Recent polls have his approval numbers at a 34%, the lowest of any President since Richard Nixon. And daily, we learn more of why.

Liam.