Musings Late on a Work Night

As my it is summer's end, my children from my first marriage have gone back to their mother's for the school year, a fact which always leaves me in a funk for a while, which is the reason for the latest dry spell on the blog.

However, there are a few recent items I wanted to touch on, and one possibility I wanted to muse over...

First, I think it's a hopeful sign that a federal judge has struck down the warrantless wiretapping program as unconstitutional, and I find it so sickening that the Administration can't find anything more valid to say about it than to reiterate the reasons why we'd want to wiretap, as though the fact that there are valid reasons to tap suspects' phones justifies doing it illegally. Let's just keep repeating: It's not that we're against tapping suspects' phones. We WANT you to tap suspects' calls. But in the process, we want you to do it legally, so that there is oversight, so that we can be sure that you're only tapping legitimate terror suspects' phones and not, for example, political rivals' phones

I, for one, applaud the judge for this ruling. By all means, President Bush, continue tapping terrorists. All the judge is saying is that you have the FISA court available to you. Remember that you're even allowed to file for your warrants retroactively, up to 72 hours later. Do it. Use the court. Protect us all WHILE you protect our rights, because protecting us while dismantling our rights isn't really protecting us, is it?

Oh, and I also find it funny that Administration apologists keep pointing to the British bombing plot of a few weeks ago as justification for the program, when in fact all of the wiretaps in that case were done WITH warrants, which only goes to prove MY side of the argument: That you can protect lives and fight terrorism WITHOUT breaking the law.

The Constitution is not "just a damned piece of paper". It is the document which you swore to uphold and defend when you took your oath of office, not once but twice. It is your first and foremost duty, and if you can't even do that, you do not deserve to hold your office.

Second, there's been a lot of discussion recently about different liquids and such being smuggled on to airplanes. We're no longer allowed to bring anything liquid, paste or gel through security or on to a plane (I know, my kids lost some sunscreen which they had packed in their carry-on, in spite of my suggestion otherwise). And now they're talking about outlawing women's bras filled with water and or gel. So here's the question bouncing around in my head tonight: could a breast implant be fashioned containing a sufficient quantity of liquid or gel explosive with a tiny detonator? It would seem that if a sports drink bottle can hold enough to blow up a plane (the plan, as I understand it), then two good sized breast implants ought to hold enough as well.

We don't x-ray people, and in our fashion-conscious society, far too many women feel the need to get breast implants for us to even pretend it would be reasonable to ban them from airplanes. The part of this that truly scares me is that it wouldn't take all that much effort for a medically trained terrorist (and I'm sure there must be some) to set up shop and implant explosives in unsuspecting patients, breast and buttock implants being only two of more obvious places. How much havoc could be wreaked this way, and how long would it take before we ever figured out where the explosions were coming from?

Ah well, on to the third and final item for tonight: Senator Elizabeth Dole of the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent out an e-mail today which makes me so mad I could spit, because it ascribes to the Democratic party virtually all of the motives and behaviors of the Republican party under President Clinton, while completely ignoring the fact that there are some serious issues regarding the current President's conduct which actually rise to the level of high crimes in ways that the Clinton behaviors (distasteful though they were) never actually did.

One quote from this e-mail: Liberal Democrats intend to take over the U.S. House and Senate this November and launch irresponsible, vengeful, investigations into the Bush Administration.

This one sentence contains so much that's incorrect. It relies on the current right wing talking point fallacy that oversight of the President is irresponsible. Five years after 9/11, we still have a rubber stamp Congress and regular attempts at power consolidation by the Administration. One of the jobs of the Congress is to investigate questionable activities by the President, even if they turn out to be legitimate, just to ensure that everything is on the up and up. So by advertising that one of the reasons to donate to Republicans is to stop these sorts of investigations and oversight, Mrs. Dole is effectively telling anyone who's actually thinking that she's asking for money to support allowing the Republican Congress to continue not doing their job.

In closing, I direct you to the latest article from factcheck.org. You may recall that during the 2004 Vice Presidential debate, V.P. Cheney pointed them out as a fair and independent site for political truth, and I have found them to be so, equally happy to point out the lies and fallacies of the left and the right. But the article to which I linked above takes issue with the same series of e-mails from the RNC that I'm talking about, so I thought it might be worth mentioning. Take a look at it. Please.

Liam.