Kudos to Barney Frank

Last night on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olberman, Rep. Barney Frank broke ranks with almost the united rest of the Congress (both houses) to support the FBI search of the offices of Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana.

I will say, as an aside, I understand that only a Democrat could have said this, because any Republican congressperson who stood up and defended the search would have opened themselves up to charges of partisanship, since with all the recent scandals involving Republicans, only a Democrat gets thus investigated. So I understand that there may be the odd Republican here and there who also disagrees but finds it prudent to remain quiet.

However, back to Rep. Frank. On the show, he touted the hypocrisy of the Congress to essentially support various sorts of warrantless searches of ordinary Americans (in the Patriot Act's provisions for warrantless National Security Letters and in their failure to show any real oversight or interest in the various NSA wiretapping scandals which have become public in the last few months) and then turn around and cry foul when a properly executed warrant-to-search is utilized on one of their own.

Apparently the Congress feels that they are no longer ordinary citizens, subject to the same rights and restrictions the rest of us are.

According to Congressman Frank, the justification most in Congress are using for claiming the FBI search was improper is some little known clause in the Constitution which grants members of Congress immunity from prosecution for things said on the floor of the Congress. What this means is that if, during the course of debate, a Congressman slanders someone, they can not be held accountable for it. While this may sound problematic, I can understand why. Congressional session is generally open, and Congressmen are as human as the rest of us and can make mistakes or possess faulty information. Imagine how much more slowly Congress would work if they were no longer willing to openly debate things, because any small mistake, slip of the tongue, or worse, true negative statement against someone with deep legal pockets, might lead to having to defend themselves on charges of slander.

Nevertheless, as Congressman Frank points out, it's quite a stretch to extend this protection to cover the offices of Congress people, of either political party. In his words, "I gotta tell ya, my office has never made a speech" on the floor of Congress or elsewhere.

Now, the underpinnings of some on the Left's complaint is the apparent selective enforcement, given the Abramoff scandals and others on the Right, this sort of tactic is only used when a Democrat is the target, and if a reasonable case can be made that this was politically targetted (and I'm not saying that it can be), that's definitely worth looking in to.

But so far, no one has presented me with any argument that justifies any Congress, particularly this one, so carefree when it comes to our privacy and civil liberties, crying foul because they've been subjected to oversight.

Liam.

The Formation of George W. Bush

Sorry I've been lax in posting for a while.

I was on vacation for a week, which is part of it. I was too disgusted to want to focus on politics for a while after hearing the news of the apparent intentional murder of innocent Iraqi's by a group of U.S. Marines. I'm following the story, but I just can't work up the energy to talk about it.

And, of course, it's starting to look like maybe the Congress and the American People are starting to wake up to the oligarchic, theocratic plans for this country's future that seem apparent in the philosophies and actions of the Bush Administration. That, alone, made it feel less necessary to vent every day, because if people already know, then there's no need to keep telling them.

However, I just came across this post on the Huffington Post that gives some information about the childhood of our President. Information which, if true, makes a very good argument that he is a very broken individual, and one who would deserve our pity and our help if he were not at the helm of the ship of state.

Bad childhood episodes have been known to emotionally "break" people, or make them other than they would have been with a healthy upbringing. Some grow up to be alcoholics and drug abusers, and if one such is in your family or your sphere of friends, it is good to do all you can to support them in trying to break their addictions. However, if that person is employed as a school bus driver, your first order of business HAS to be to get them removed from that position, endangering as it is to the students and the other drivers on the road.

That's how I'm feeling about President Bush right now. If the facts as presented in that piece are true, then I have nothing but sadness for him, and for poor little boy George. And once he's no longer in a position where his personal demons are a threat to us all, I will be happy to support him in any therapeutic endeavor that he chooses to undertake.

But right now, he's driving the bus, and my children are riding to school. Right now, his troubles are secondary.

Liam.

P.S. If you have any reason to doubt the facts presented in the article I linked to, please share them. I have no particular source of verification, and if the truth is different from that presented, by all means speak up!

Death Row

Tonight, I watched an episode of a show on the Showtime network called "Penn & Teller's Bull____". This is a show whose premise was wonderful in the first two seasons. Since then (we're now in season four) it has declined dramatically.

The premise is that entertainers Penn & Teller examine and debunk some of the "bull____" of daily American life. They began, in the first two seasons, with shows that tended to have good science to back up their position. One episode that I quite enjoyed was on bottled water. They presented a lot of evidence, such as the fact that government regulations for water purity are stronger for tap water than they are for bottled in many areas. They tested water quality. And then they found a fancy restaurant willing to let them play a bit, and they got an actor to play the fake position of “Water Steward”, and set up a fake water list (like one normally sees for wines), and had people trying these various exotic waters... which were in fact all filled from a hose in the back of the restaurant. Most of the restaurant patrons swore they could taste the difference, expressed preferences for one over another, and definitely said they preferred the $5/glass "exotic" water they'd chosen over the free tap water at the table.

So, you'll understand why I've become disillusioned with this show in the latter two seasons (3 and 4), when they seem to have run out of issues for which they can present hard fact, and instead are choosing morality issues, for which their arguments are less based on debunking fact and more based on careful choosing of which side they label as "experts" and which they label as "whack jobs".

The episode I watched tonight was on the death penalty, and they chose to present the pro-death penalty argument as "bull____", and their argument boiled down almost uniquely to the moral merits of the argument "killing is wrong".

The sick thing is, I agree with them, but not at all for the reasons they present. I have no moral qualms what so ever about putting to death a person who wantonly and willfully rapes and kills a child (just as one particularly heinous example). Adolph Hitler, Slobodan Milosevich, Saddam Hussein; each was guilty during his rule (if history is accurate) of mass killings, and I not only wouldn't have a problem with having any of them put to death, I wouldn't be particularly offended if they were subject to a slow, painful, agonizing, torturous death. (How's that for an argument by someone who doesn't support the use of torture in war time?)

The reason not to have a death penalty is simple: Human beings make mistakes. Until there's a way to determine with 100% accuracy all of the circumstances surrounding the commission of a death-warranting crime (including absolute proof of the identity of the guilty party or parties and absolute knowledge of any extenuating circumstances), and until there's a way to make sure the statutes are applied fairly in all cases (no selective prosecutions based on race, income, standing in the community, etc), it's simply not reasonable to kill anyone.

One statistic presented on the show (as a straw man by one of the pro-death penalty arguers) was that "some have said that there are over a hundred innocent people on death row". He knocked this straw man down quite vehemently by stating that his own research indicated there were maybe 20 or 25 tops. Really? Have we sunk so far from the ideals of "better for 10 guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be wrongly imprisoned" to "Ah well, it's only 20-25 people out of thousands on death row that we're going to kill incorrectly. That's acceptable collateral damage." Probably not so much if you're one of the 20-25 people.

And the simple fact is, we can't KNOW how many innocent men are on death row. We know it happens, there are documented cases of people being released after a long death row stay when DNA evidence exonerated them and convicted another party. This particular show presented the case of one man who was on death row for five years, in spite of the fact that he was in prison for car theft at the time that the murder for which he was convicted occurred. He was freed when it was determined that the two witnesses on whose testimony his conviction was largely based were lying, because they themselves were the killers. Even after this new evidence came out, it took two years for the wrongfully convicted man to be taken off of death row. And the kicker is that the prosecution apparently knew all along that he had been in prison at the time of the murder, so they'd known that he was innocent. But they had a pretty good case against him nonetheless (hoping the public defender wouldn't find that information), and so they prosecuted. (For those who are wondering, the wrongfully convicted man was white, not that it matters).

It really doesn't matter what the percentage is of people wrongly on death row. We should abolish the death penalty for the guilty in order to protect the innocent in the same way we provide for basic required standards of proof which occasionally grant rights to the guilty, not so that we can afford comfort to the guilty, but so that we can ensure that the innocent get a fair trial.

Anything else is a barbaric disregard for innocent human life that is antithetical to the core philosophies of our society.

Liam.

P.S. For those who are still struggling with how I can be against torture but not against torture, there are two reasons:

1. Because torture isn't necessarily practiced upon those who are guilty of any crime other than that of following nationalistic pride or dictatorial terror in carrying out the orders of superior officers. Torture is generally carried out on those who are caught, which is more often the grunts, the low level officers, and perhaps the innocent civilians in the area. It is rarely practiced upon the generals, and just about never on the political leaders of the enemy.
2. And because I don't believe our grunts, low level officers and innocent civilians should be subjected to torture if captured in war time, and it's kind of hard to take the high road and be incensed at the torture of our soldiers if we're doing it to theirs.

Legality, Shmegality

Last night, while writing about the second NSA telephone-related program to come to light, I couldn't find this link to the USAToday story which brought it to everyone's attention.

Now that I'm correcting that, I want to highlight a couple of passages:

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as "product" in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

Remember this, when they tell us that the justification and use of this database is solely to combat terrorism.

But here's the kicker, for anyone who claims that the program is legal:

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

As I said in the earlier article, this means that the NSA, under the direction of the President, feels that when the court which specifically has jurisdiction over whether a program is legal or not may not find in their favor, that the proper course of action is simply not to ask.

They knew that the program might not be legal, so they skipped over asking the FISA court, or even President Bush's own Attorney General, then John Ashcroft, and in so doing, ENSURED that the program was not legal.

Keep all of this in mind, the next time the Republican spin machine talks in dismissive and ridiculing terms about Democratic proposals to investigate, censure or even impeach President Bush. These are high crimes which rise to, and possibly even above, those which got Richard Nixon almost impeached, and certainly more odeous and damaging to the nation than a little on-the-side sex with an intern. Republicans do not have the high moral ground here, no matter how they try to spin it. If impeachment proceedings can be brought against a sitting President over a personal failing not affecting his job, and one which none of the actual victims of his actions have chosen to file suit about or even speak ill of publicly, they can (and should) most certainly be brought against a President who increasingly feels that the powers of the Legislative and Juciciary branches are subservient to his own.

Liam.

Just after I posted that last...

Just after I posted that last entry, I came across this from ABC News' blog.

I talk on this blog a lot about being wary of new powers granted, even if the stated purpose is noble, because they can and will eventually be misused.

In this case, the Patriot Act. Most defenders of the Act point to it as a vital and necessary tool in the war on terror. More than one such defender has told me that if I'm not a terrorist, I have nothing to fear from the Patriot Act, or that it's okay with them that the Patriot Act infringes on some of our freedoms, because it's only there to help fight terrorism.

Well guess what: The FBI is using at least one aspect of the Patriot Act to go after non-terrorists. In this case, it's to track down leakers of classified information. That tracking of calls to and from ABC news that I mentioned in the previous blog entry? It seems it's the result of an FBI "National Security Letter", which allows the FBI to subpoena usage records from telephone companies, ISPs, libraries and similar places without a warrant or a judge's review.

So much for the law being in place to fight terrorism. No chance for a judge to look at the leak in question and determine whether it was a true, illegal, damaging-to-national-security leak or a case of patriot whistle-blowing, exposing an illegal activity which deserved to be exposed. No oversight at all, the FBI can just demand and recieve the information.

Oh, and here's the most insideous part of the whole thing: It's very difficult to challenge the Constitutionality of this law in court. Wanna know why? There are two facts which combine to make it so:

1. Traditionally, the courts have not allowed just anyone to file a challenge to a law. In most cases, the Courts will only hear such a challenge by someone who has been affected (and can reasonably claim that it was wrongfully so) by the law.


2. The National Security Letter portion of the Patriot Act makes it illegal for the entity served with the NSL to disclose the nature of the records they had to give up or even tell anyone that they have been served with one.

So, you can only challenge the law if it affects you, but there's no way for you to get reliable evidence that the law has been used against you.

We really are watching our civil liberties eroding away like a pencil in the hands of a toddler who has just discovered the electric pencil sharpener.

And the hell of it all is, it really is starting to feel like no one cares. No one loves what this country stands for enough to stand up FOR it. In fact, the rats most fervently clinging to the sinking ship accuse those of us who DO care of being the ones who hate America.

Liam.

Another NSA program.

By now, although I never got a chance to blog about it, I'm sure we've all heard about the second NSA program, this time the one that is illegally collecting a massive database of all telephone calls made by everyone in the country (or at least everyone except QWEST customers, since QWEST recognized that the law strictly prohibited them from giving out that information without a court warrant).

So many little aspects of this, it's amazing anyone still seriously believes that President Bush is honoring his oath to uphold the Constitution (you know, the one he took both times he was sworn into office?)

How scary is it that the first program is what we got AFTER the NSA pushed back. Cheney and Bush reportedly argued for domestic wiretapping in the early days of the program, and NSA lawyers came back and told them it simply wasn't legal, so they SETTLED for only international calls.

Or that when QWEST pushed back on the second program, and asked why the NSA didn't get a warrant from the FISA court, they were essentially told that the NSA didn't want to go that route, essentially because the FISA court might say no. What a revolutionary idea, the next time I want to do maintenance on my house that I'm not sure is within the zoning laws, I'll simply not ask first!

And then there's former NSA employee Russell Tice, who reportedly says that he has testimony for Congress about aspects of NSA behavior that we haven't heard of, that NSA employees know is blatantly illegal, but is going on anyway.

There's the fact that the Department of Justice late last week rolled up their investigation of the whole matter, after the NSA denied Justice Dept lawyers security clearance sufficient to let them (the lawyers) review information on the program. Excuse me? Does anyone else see an inherent flaw in the system, when the NSA gets to evade oversight by simply refusing to grant security clearance to the overseeers?

And today, there's news from ABC that their phone records are being scrutinized in an effort to identify leakers of classified information. Now, they say right in the article that they aren't sure whether this is being undertaken under the second NSA program or whether there are warrants for the information, but let's just review some things we know about this Administration:

1. They appear to believe that anything they do is legal, since they are headed by the President.
2. They appear to believe that invoking the phrase "September the 11th" justifies anything they want to do.
3. They have no qualms about releasing sensitive information (see Valerie Plame) on political opponents if it suits their needs.

These are not people who should have a massive database of our telephone calls in hand. Who among us has never made a telephone call they would rather remained private? Statistics state that 30-50% of married people have an affair at some point in their lives. If you're one of them, did you call your affair regularly when your spouse wasn't home? Lots of people make calls they'd want to remain private relating to drug use (calling a supplier, or frequent calls to Narcotics Anonymous), alcoholism (AA), gambling addiction (Gambler's Anonymous) etc.

When, in this country, did we give up the right to speak out against the government? And if we haven't, is it really fair that, in the process of writing this blog, the White House could attempt to discredit me by leaking some of my more embarrassing call history (which I'm not going to detail here, but as an entirely hypothetical, suppose I make a habit of calling phone sex lines, or have a long history of calls to suicide hot lines, or make regular calls to a local club for cross-dressing enthusiasts). Should my ability to speak out against what I perceive to be the wrong-doings of our Government be hampered by the threat that someone will sift through this large, apparently illegal database of calls, find the 10 most publicly embarrassing calls, and release them to the public? And is it right that the best reason I don't have to fear such exposure is simply because there are probably a total of 10 of you out there who will ever read these words?

It's not just THAT they're doing these things, it's that they're doing them almost entirely without oversight or legal authorization, which just increases the chance that someone may put this database to further illegal use in the manner I have described.

We, as a nation, need to wake up and recognize that we don't have civil liberties to protect the terrorists, we have civil liberties to protect OURSELVES. Don't fall for the fallacious argument that you have nothing to fear if you are not a terrorist. Just because terrorism is the justification for the program doesn't mean that it won't ever be used for other purposes, or that those of us who are not terrorists therefore have nothing to fear.

Liam.

Culture of Corruption

Washington D.C. is a culture of corruption. I don't use the term "culture" in the sense of "society", I use it in the sense of "a medium in which a disease or bacterium grows". It is a veritable petri dish of self serving back room deals and political wrangling, and it's all because of an age old truism: Power Corrupts.

The thing is, because of the very nature of the power corruption principle, those who HAVE the power are the ones most likely to be corrupt. Not because they are less moral or more corruptible, but because they have the corrupting influence and the power to make their own agendas come true.

The sad part is that neither party has shown themselves to be free of this influence, which is why I so often argue that the country is best off when different groups (political parties, whatever) control the different branches of government.

But all of what I've just written is self obvious to just about anyone who has ever stood in a voting booth staring at the switches wondering if it will really make any difference, and then metaphorically held their nose while pulling one of the levers. So why do I write it?

Because I'm getting sick of BOTH sides' arguments about the Jack Abramoff scandals going on right now, and it gives me the opportunity to put some things out there for everyone to look at. Two important facts which contradict what each side is trying to say:

1. The Jack Abramoff scandal is ENTIRELY a Republican scandal. The closest ties anyone can point to between Abramoff and any member of the Democratic party is that some people who were clients of Abramoff also donated money to some Democrats. The money was not DIRECTED by Abramoff, there does not appear to have been any quid pro quo with/for Abramoff or his clients for those donations. There is just coincidental business dealings. Claiming this particular scandal is bipartisan is like saying that if a teacher is caught selling the answers to a final exam to a student, that therefore EVERY student in the class is implicated in the cheating scandal. After all, they ALL took the same test, right? The fact is, right now the Republicans control just about everything. There is no power for the Democrats to do anything, there is no real reason for anyone to try to bribe them. Plus, Abramoff was part of the “K Street Project”, a project by which lobbyists were told by members of the Republican majority that they would lose their access to Republicans if they did any business with Democrats.


2. On the other hand, this doesn't mean that Democrats are the party of nobility, even if at the moment (for lack of corrupting power and/or opportunity) they are not involved in any major scandals. One has only to look back at the Newt Gingrich era Congress to see that. In the early 90's, the Democrats held a long standing majority in the Congress, and there was some clear evidence of corruption among the Democrats. Newt and is fellow Republicans sold themselves as the party of morality. Heck, President Bush even ran in 2000 on a platform of restoring honor and dignity to the White House (and how's that going, anyway?). But back to Newt and company, they crafted the “Contract with America” and did everything they could to hold themselves up as paragons of virtuosity and light, and yet it took them hardly any time at all to become corrupt themselves. Gingrich himself turned out to be having an extramarital affair with an intern at the same time he was lambasting the President at the time for... an extramarital affair with an intern.

What we learn from this is simple, but also important: "Power Corrupts" is more than just a tired slogan, it is a factual and measurable phenomenon. Like any disease or disorder, some are more susceptible to its influence than others, but most people will succumb to one extent or another.

Which is why we need self interest to coincide with national interest, and why I implore everyone to, in the absence of a real, moral, honest person running for office (almost an impossibility in today's political atmosphere), always vote for the party that's out of power.

Checks and balances are VITAL to keeping our country strong and good. Self interest seems to be all that keeps most of our elected officials checking and balancing. So as long as they consider themselves and "the other guys" to be enemies, we can rely on their sense of self interest to keep the other guys on their toes.

And that, cynical as it is to say it, is really all that keeps our country strong.

Liam.

Logic and Argument

There's a word that you learn if you take a "Logic and Argument" class: tautology. It essentially describes a situation that is true by definition and needlessly repetitive. For example, all blue toys are blue. The statement is true, it is obvious, and it doesn't bear stating because you've restricted your set of objects under consideration by the very attribute you wish to consider. Your conclusion ("they're all blue") conveys no information because you already removed from consideration anything that might dispute it ("all blue toys are...").

I wrote a short story on this topic some time back, in which a religious cult defended the truth of its crazy beliefs by saying that no serious scholar of the cult lore disputed the beliefs of the cult... but over the course of the story it becomes clear that their definition of "serious scholar" is one who affirms those beliefs and precludes any doubters.

And that's what is happening today on Fox News. I heard someone make a statement that "No one except far left liberals seriously disagrees with the Bush Administration." However, if you pay close attention, you'll note that they DEFINE as "far left liberal" anyone who questions the Bush Administration in anything.

Case in point, last week's brief news splash about Ray McGovern, a 27 year veteran CIA analyst (retired from the Agency) asking questions of Donald Rumsfeld which a lot of people would like to hear answered. As a former CIA analyst, he's in a position to know the extent to which the CIA was and was not involved in some of the intelligence decisions which have been made regarding Iraq, and he chose to ask about some of those, and like clockwork the Fox spin machine ground into high gear and began painting him as an ultra-liberal.

The fact is, many Right Wing pundits spend a good portion of their time defining as "far left wing" anyone who disagrees with them and the Administration. This makes any such assertion about the character of those who criticize the President a tautology.

In effect, what they've done is take the statement "Everyone who disagrees with the Administration disagrees with the Administration" (a clear tautology), then defined the term "ultra liberal" as "someone who disagrees with the Administration", and ended up with "Everyone who disagrees with the Administration is an ultra liberal."

So many words, so much air time, so little actually said. I guess that's what they mean by "Fair and Balanced".

Liam.

Interesting Juxtaposition

It turns out that Mary O. McCarthy (according to a news report I heard on the radio this morning), ousted as the source of several leaks from the CIA, worked in the Inspector General's office, the same office that's now investigating allegations of CIA personnel participation in the "Poker and Hookers" parties in the Duke Cunningham scandal.

There have been several articles noting that the evidence against Ms. McCarthy is thin, she herself denies the charges, many of her co-workers say it's not behavior which she would likely have engaged in, and it looks like no actual charges are going to be brought.

Speculation is that she may have been thrown under the bus to get a more friendly investigator on the scandal, who might have been more willing to sweep it under the rug. This might also explain why the same Bush Administration that's made such a hew and cry about charging leakers (even those in the media who publish those leaks) with treason hasn't bothered to actually file any charges against Ms. McCarthy. If they do that, there will be public scrutiny into her firing and some of this may come out.

Just speculation, but it fits the facts and it certainly wouldn't be out of character for this President or this White House.

Liam.

No Hillary in '08

Fresh faces. Fresh ideas. Idealism instead of corruption. That's what this country DESPERATELY needs.

We need someone new and different to step up, from either party or as an independent, and take our country back to where it was before it got shunted onto the wrong track for 8 years and then came completely off the rails for these last 6.

One of the severe symptoms of the decline and fall of our political system is Fox News, a "news" organization as blatantly partisan as the Right Wing (falsely) accuses the rest of the news media of being.

And so you'll understand how any politician getting into bed with Fox News immediately shows their colors as being more about the politics than about the good of the nation.

The latest of these is no less than Hillary Clinton. According to this article on MSNBC.com, Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox News) has agreed to host a fundraiser for Mrs. Clinton's re-election campaign.

I honestly have no idea what any of these people are thinking. Perhaps Murdoch (who doesn't do anything not calculated for maximum return on investment) sees the political tide shifting and believes his fortunes will do better thrown in with the liberals for a while. Or perhaps Hillary isn't the flaming left-wing moonbat the right so often portrays her as.

Regardless, this pairing of political strange bedfellows can't help but look bad for all parties involved. And so if for no other reason (and there are many), in my book this puts Hillary firmly in the "wouldn't be any better than Bush" category.

Next?

Liam.

What's A Law or 750 Between Friends?

I've blogged before about the dangers of the Unitary Executive Theory and the idea that the President can engage in "Executive Activism(1)" by issuing so-called “signing statements” with bills as he signs them into law.

The Constitution clearly gives the power to enact laws to the Legislative Branch of government (aka the Congress). The President's approval and signature is one of the important checks and balances we have (as are the Congressional override of a veto and the Judicial review of a challenged law), but they do not grant to him the power to alter those laws or make them say other than what the Congress intends.

And we all know about the few cases that have gotten lots of coverage, such as Bush asserting in his signing statement that the Congressionally passed anti-torture law doesn't apply to him. But apparently (at least according to this article) he has actually done so 750 times during his Presidency thus far.

And as if the sheer scope of it isn't bad enough, by doing this the way he has, President Bush has found a way to circumvent the veto override by Congress, which in itself is blatantly unconstitutional. Here's how: In a normal Administration, if a President does not agree with all or part of a law crossing his desk, he vetoes that bill. Indeed, through the United State's history up through President Clinton, Presidents have vetoed 2550 bills and have been overridden 106 times. Of those 2550 vetoes, 1484 were explicit (sent back vetoed) and 1066 were so-called "pocket vetoes" (in which the President doesn't send the bill back, he just doesn't sign it within his 10 day window, a Presidential version of the better-known Congressional trick of not confirming Presidential nominees to various positions without explicitly voting them down).

So in those 2550 vetoes (and certainly in the 1484 explicit vetoes), the Congress had the ability to override the veto. Even in the pocket vetoes, the Congress had the power to resubmit the law. If the Congress felt strongly enough about a bill, it became law, binding on everyone (INCLUDING the President) until and unless successfully challenged up to the Supreme Court.

Not so with President Bush. He has yet to veto a single bill. Instead, by simply altering the meaning of bills through the use of “Signing Statements”, President Bush has taken away the Congressional power (Constitutionally mandated) to override him when they disagree with his opinion of their bill.

Prior to George W. Bush, the last President who didn't issue a single veto was James Garfield, elected in 1881, but he can be forgiven this oversight because he was shot and killed less than 9 months into his first term. Prior to HIM you have to go back to Millard Fillmore (1850-1853) to find a full-term President who vetoed no bills.

To give you an idea of how often the veto has been used recently, here are the veto counts for each President in office during my lifetime (total plus regular/pocket breakdown): Johnson 30 (16/14). Nixon 43 (26/17). Ford 66 (48/18). Carter 31 (13/18). Reagan 78 (39/39). G.H.W. Bush 44 (29/15). Clinton 37 (36/1). That's an average of almost 9 vetoes per year.

Bush has asserted that he can ignore all or part of 750 bills that have been signed into law under his terms thus far. And he has the nerve to rail against activist JUDGES.

(All stats come from this report to Congress.)

Liam.

(1) The Right Wing talking point has been to define the term “Judicial Activism” as Judges "making law from the bench" and "usurping the Congressional jaw-making power", then it is just as clearly "Executive Activism" when the President (Executive Branch) does the same.

A Quote from Hardball w/ Chris Matthews

(Apologies for caps, they were cut and pasted directly from the source).

I mentioned this the other day, but here's the direct quote from Hardball, along with some additional information from Friday's Countdown With Keith Olbermann.

First, the quote: INTELLIGENCE SOURCES SAY VALERIE WILSON WAS PART OF AN OPERATION THREE YEARS AGO TRACKING THE PROLIFERATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS MATERIAL INTO IRAN. AND THE SOURCES ALLEGE THAT WHEN MRS. WILSON'S COVER WAS BLOWN, THE ADMINISTRATION'S ABILITY TO TRACK IRAN'S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS WAS DAMAGED AS WELL.

Friday's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" (also on MSNBC) reported additionally that according to Scooter Libby's defense team, between the time Libby first spoke with Judith Miller (about Plame) and when he gave the same information to Matt Cooper, the CIA warned him (Libby) of the implications of outing Valerie Plame.

The defense theory is that the since he'd ALREADY spoken with Judith Miller, this sets up an "I didn't know any better" defense, although since Libby has been charged with making false statements instead of with the leak itself, it's hard to see how that would be relevant. Also there's the tiny detail that if this exonerates him in the discussion with Miller, it implicates him all the more seriously in his later discussion with Cooper.

But why would the CIA bother to warn anyone, if she was not covert and if there would be no damage to the release of the information?

Liam.

He's Right, I Can't Think of a Better One

According to a German newspaper (and reported on MSNBC and here at ABC.com), President Bush was asked in an interview over the weekend what the best and worst moments were of his Presidency so far. Worst was predictable, both for its repetitive nature in his public speech but also because to say anything else would have been an insult to America: 9/11.

When he got to the best part, though, he reportedly said "You know, I've experienced many great moments and it's hard to name the best. ... I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound perch in my lake."

Perhaps a joke, perhaps an indication that he's becoming tired and longing for more time fishing and less in office. Or perhaps he really can't think of anything better.

Very Presidential of him. I join 65% (according to the latest polls) of my fellow American's in wishing him a speedy return to his lake.

Liam.

World War III

According to President Bush, the fighting back by the passengers on Flight 93 was "the first counter-attack to World War III" according to this article in an Australian newspaper.

Obviously, I don't know the reliability of the source, not being Australian. But it is worth considering whether our President honestly believes he is leading us into World War III.

Liam.

Network Neutrality

Another story out of Snopes.com (among others, but most people I know trust Snopes, so I'll include their link) and others involves a debate going on in Congress as to whether the concept of Internet "Network Neutrality" should be codified in law.

This is vitally important legislation for anyone who is reading this and everyone else who uses the Internet.

The basic idea of Network Neutrality is that networked computers (like the Internet) work on the basis of "packets" of data, and no packet is given priority over other packets. Thus, if I choose to jump on the internet to go check out Sprint.com, the parts of the Internet which pass through AT&T's hardware (using bandwidth for which AT&T has been paid) are not given lower priority in order to discourage people from checking out an AT&T competitor.

That's somewhat of a simplification, but that's basically what it boils down to. If such legislation is not passed, there are several expected results.

First, a number of Voice over Internet (VoIP) services such as Vonage are expected to suddenly find that their internet traffic no longer travels quickly enough to make for usable real-time conversations. This is because large portions of Internet traffic travel through the hardware and equipment of the large telecom companies, who don't particularly like the competition.

Second, some large companies have already started talking about charging a fee to users for priority handling of their information packets. But here's the key: They're not talking about charging this fee to you and me, we're already paying for our Internet access. No, they're talking about charging this fee to the people on the other end of our communications.

Imagine it this way: Suppose you picked up your telephone to call someone in another state (someone who lives in a region served by a different primary telephone company), and you found that you could no longer connect to that person, or could only connect at traditionally low-usage hours of the day, because the person at the other end of the call hadn't paid a fee to your telephone company for priority handling of their calls.

That's very much akin to what has already been proposed on a limited basis by AOL and Yahoo with regard to e-mail: If Network Neutrality is not made law, AOL and Yahoo have announced plans to offer "priority handling" of e-mails from companies who have paid a fee to AOL and Yahoo. That means if you have an AOL or Yahoo e-mail address, mail addressed to you may be artificially delayed if it comes from a source that was unwilling to pay AOL or Yahoo for priority handling. In spite of the implications of the name "priority handling", this is in fact an artificial slow down of everyone else. Sort of like how USPS mail suddenly started taking longer once next-day or second-day service started costing more, or how FedEx or UPS ground shipment virtually always takes about a week, whether the box was shipped from across the globe or just across town.

It's just a matter of time before the Telcos decide to do something similar, trying to charge a fee for "priority handling" of packets passing through their equipment, attempting to extort additional money from the people on the other end of the line.

Worse than that, suppose some owner of a part of the Internet infrastructure decides to strongly support one party over the other. Just for the sake of argument, suppose AT&T were to be strongly liberal in philosphy, and were to decide to slow down access to FoxNews.com and Free Republic.com and prioritize traffic to HuffingtonPost.com and MoveOn.org. How slow do you have to make some sites before the majority of people won't bother to wait? Do you really want your access to information filtered so that you can only get reasonable speeds when you're accessing the information your ISP wants you to have?

Network Neutrality has never been a law before, but it has been the unspoken rule of the Internet. Telecom companies and major Internet service providers are trying to change that. We can't let them.

Please, call your Senators and Representatives. Write to them. Write letters to the editor. Don't let the face of the Internet as we've all come to know and love it be so radically changed for the worse.

Liam.

Special Treatment, Different Reactions

The rich and the powerful get different treatment. It's infuriating and it's wrong, but we all know it. From Kennedy's Chappaquiddick to Laura Bush's fatal crash in High School, from Dick Cheney shooting a friend in the face and not being tested for alcohol or even interrogated by police until the next morning to this week's crash by Rep. Patrick Kennedy and not being given a sobriety test, it unfortunately happens all the time. When there are questions of alcohol being involved (to my knowledge there was no such allegation in the future Laura Bush's case), by the time the story becomes public and public outcry can demand an investigation, the body of the person is question has had time to dispose of any incriminating evidence (alcohol) and so the person gets off scot free while the investigation centers on WHY no test was done.

All of this infuriates me (and for the record, I don't buy the whole "Ambien, I don't recall any of this" story from Rep. Kennedy. Sure, Ambien has had reports of people engaging in activities while under its influence, but it seems too convenient an answer).

But one thing that's infuriating me all the more is reading the various reactions to the case. Kennedy is (as will surprise no one) a Democrat. Cheney is a Republican. And the number of partisan people who can't see past the partisan politics of it all to recognize the similarity is making me angry.

Initially, I noticed the Republican apologists, the same ones who made light of the Cheney incident (such as Bill O'Reilly, who said the Cheney shooting story "affected no one", and Sean Hannity, who tried to portray the story as a partisan attack by Democrats which was really no big deal), turning around and getting all in a huff because this was another Kennedy Democrat thinking he was above the law and getting away with it.

On the other hand, I've noticed some people who were all over the Cheney incident trying to give Kennedy a pass. Granted, no one was injured by Kennedy in this case, but they might have been if he was driving under the influence. No one died as a result of Cheney's mishap, but they might have.

In both cases, the men in question may have been engaging in illegal activity involving the use of alcohol. Is there any proof? No, and that's why people on BOTH sides of the aisle should be outraged about BOTH stories. If you or I, Joe Average citizen were to accidentally shoot someone in the face, or be pulled over for driving erratically and crashing into a barrier, you'd better believe there'd be a sobriety test administered before we even had time to ponder what we'd just done. We'd be questioned by police immediately and probably taken to the police station for questioning.

It's annoying, but as I say, it happens all the time. If one is going to comment on each case, and is to have even a shred of credibility, one simple can not let party affiliation affect your reaction and your outrage and what are essentially two very similar cases.

Liam.

(Note, for those who will inevitably say I'm engaging in partisan behavior for only providing a link to the Laura Bush story, it's because the rest have gotten national attention. Few will dispute that they occurred, while I've had people tell me the story of the then Laura Welch is apocryphal. So I have presented a link to the Snopes.com page on the story, just for reference.)

Plame Redux

A lot of press ink lately has been given to the topic of Iran. One of the oddest issues of the whole discussion is the wildly different opinions of the various experts on how soon Iran can have a nuclear weapon. The Administration claims they might have one already or are on the verge of having one. Other experts report that they couldn't have a workable model for 8 to 10 years.

The fact is, no one knows. But we have learned recently (reported yesterday on Hardball with Chris Matthews and today on Countdown with Keith Olberman, both on MSNBC, among other places) one of the reasons our intelligence information on the topic is spotty, and it comes back to the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson.

You see, it turns out that Mrs. Wilson's undercover task at the time her cover was leaked to the press by the Administration was... gathering intelligence regarding Iran's WMD capabilities. Yep, that's right, the same Administration that decries leaks of classified information (especially when those leaks expose illegal or immoral behavior on the part OF the Administration) destroyed some of our best information gathering in the field. And they did it not for some noble purpose, but in a petty attempt to smear Joe Wilson for having the audacity to tell the American public information which has since turned out to be true (there was no credible evidence that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger), and in fact more and more of the facts seem to point in the direction of the Administration knowing those claims were dubious at best when they made them.

Now, before someone tries to claim that I'm spinning Mrs. Wilson as some sort of super agent, remember that when she was outed, the CIA was forced not only to remove her from covert duty, but to roll up anything which her outing might have compromised, for example, “Brewster Jennings & Associates”, the CIA front company for Plame Wilson and any number of her colleagues.

So... vital intelligence on Iranian nuclear capabilities lost forever in order to discredit inconvenient (but true) information about Iraq and Saddam Hussein. A vindictive, spiteful act by an inept Presidential Administration, and now we don't know how much of a threat Iran really is.

And they say the leak of the illegal NSA wire tapping program is the one that hurt America.

Liam.

Introduction to Civics

It seems that the President and the Senate need a refresher coarse in basic civics. There are several steps which are required in order to pass a bill into enacted law.

Step one: Both houses of Congress pass some form of the legislation.

Step two: There are invariably differences in the House and Senate versions of the bill, and so a conference committee works out a combined version of the bill and report on their combined version back to both houses of the Congress.

Step three: The Conference report (and hence, the new version of the bill) must then be approved by both houses of Congress.

Then, and only then, can the bill go to the President for signing into law.

But somehow, that critical step three was omitted from the budget bill earlier this year. Both bills passed narrowly, but the Senate bill contained drastic cuts to student loan programs and Medicaid that did not exist in the House bill. There was a very real risk that there wouldn't be sufficient support to pass the combined bill (which included the cuts), so House Republicans took the highly improper step of certifying that the Senate bill was identical to the House bill (even though it wasn't), thus skipping the conference committee and removing the ability for House members to vote on the final version of the bill.

This means that the bill as sent to President Bush never passed the House of Representatives. Which means the President could not legally sign it into law or start implementing it. Nevertheless, President Bush (knowing all of this) signed it anyway, and his Administration has since begun implementing all aspects of the new law.

Representative John Conyers and others have taken the unusual step of filing suit against the President over this bill. Read about it in Conyer's own words here.

By the way, contrary to what the Administration apologists are saying, this suit is not because of a typo in the House bill. Free Republic is having a field day claiming that the only difference between the two bills was a typo in the House bill, making the law suit frivolous. In spite of this spin, the differences in the budget cuts to Medicaid and Student Loan programs are significant, and not some mere typographic error.

Liam.

Interesting.

According to this article from ABC News, we had lots of chances to take out terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and chose not to do so.

It's odd how often Republican false-or-misleading talking points about Democrats end up bearing striking similarity to their own actions. In this case, it's the well worn chestnut that President Clinton was offered Osama bin Laden and he turned it down (never mind that the story has not been verified by any reputable source, or that the aspects of it which ARE verified fact are hardly as clear cut as the meme would have us believe). That story doesn't seem to be terribly true, and yet here we have President Bush with almost a whole year's worth of having Zarqawi in our sights, and expressly chosing not to pull the trigger.

Just keep this in mind, the next time someone trots out that "we could have avoided all of 9/11 if Clinton had simply taken bin Laden when the offer was made". Ask for some proof. And then remember this when al-Zarqawi continues to be at the heart of American deaths.

Liam.