Bush has spread his filth from Bagram and Abu Ghraib and Guantanomo all the way back home to the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Watch the girl holding the flower — not violent, not impeding in any way the slow march of the cops, anonymous behind their beetle masks — but merely holding out a flower.

Watch the vicious little shit in blue amuse himself by spraying her in the face with pepper spray. Now watch the same cowardly torturer, still safe and unthreatened behind his armor and his gun, as he delivers another long dose of agony, this one even more gratuitous, on the bare back of the helpless girl as she retreats in pain.

And be proud you’re an American.

We have unquestionably descended into a true fascist state. Amy Goodman, the journalist all of us in the left blogosphere admire and respect, along with a large group of other peaceful protesters exercising their right to free speech were arrested in the last few days in St. Paul, Minnesota. Video of the Nazi fascist goons arresting our journalist friend appears below. Glenn Greenwald has more on the many stories.

I suppose the feeling that I have now is that which some Germans felt on the night of Kristallnacht. We now know that they will come for the liberals first. Weep for what your country has become. And call your Senators, Congresssman, and elected officials tomorrow. The descent into hell has just begun. Who will be next?

[UPDATE: As recommended on the Democracy Now website in their news release, I just called the Mayors office to speak to Chris Rider from Mayor Coleman’s office at 651-266-8535. I got an answering machine which stated that the mailbox was full. I then called the Ramsey County Jail to ask about the status of the arrested peaceful protesters and to demand the immediate release of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and all the other peaceful protesters in the County jail. After a long wait after being put on hold, I finally spoke to someone who did not identify herself. After briefly inquiring about the journalists, the person at the jail curtly said “Amy has been released”. I then asked "What about the other peaceful protesters”. At that point, the person who answered the phone hung up the phone in my face.

I urge everyone to keep making those inquiries requested by Democracy Now, even if you have to wait till late into the night to get through, and continue the pressure tomorrow. We have stood by too long and let this country descend into a state of fascism. The Communist Chinese who we heard so much criticism about from our mainstream media during the Olympics have no reason to change their ways. The example being set in this country shows not only a denial of the right to peacefully protest, but there is a crude violence shown by our own law enforcement that even the Chinese rarely engage in. The only thing the Chinese can learn by our example is to be teach their own law enforcement officials to engage in even more cruelty than they are currently familiar with. The video speak for itself. I don’t even need to tell you this. You can see it with your own eyes.

Update II: More photos of the goons in action at Open Left. The horror show seems to be spreading thoughout the net. This story will unquestionably make the history books. If not in this country, in other foreign countries to prove we are indeed a fascist state.

When the rest of the world sees the photos and videos, American will never again be respected anywhere in the world, not that most of the respect we once had has been destroyed in the last eight years already. But we MUST document this horror to the rest of the world. It is the only way to have any chance at all of preventing it from ever happening again.

Chalmers Johnson is trying to warn us about the dangers of privatizing the functions of the intelligence community. Most of these are direct or indirect results of the complete lack of accountability. And of course that’s the main reason for privatizing government functions. It’s like a Limited Liability Corporation, or LLC, the goal of which, surprisingly, is to limit liability.

The proponents of privatization are unlikely to admit to a wish to avoid accountability. To some extent they’ve repressed the evidence of their selfishness and papered over the resulting gap with platitudes and ideologies. Instead they’ll claim that the value of efficiency trumps other considerations, then try to convince us that private enterprise, motivated solely by profit, can operate more efficiently than government, that insurance companies can provide better health care for less money than Americans count on from Medicare.

Only the simple-minded, the self-deluded, and the dishonest can employ such an argument. Efficency is not even a value, let alone a value that trumps human wants, far less human needs. At best, efficiency is a tool that helps in certain circumstances. Qualities like compassion and courage are values; they always help. Efficiency is a tactic for improving the accountant’s bottom line. Life, I hope, is more than that. Community certainly is.

In addition, the claim is false. Corporations have the same costs as government, plus they need profit. At best, by paying employees less, a corporation might produce an equal product for an equal price. But where’s the value in pressuring wages to drop? (Answer: in the CEO’s pockets.)

So the argument is both false and dishonest; but what can they do? No honest, intelligent argument can be made on that side. Like Bertrand Russell’s philosophers, they adopt positions they’re drawn to, but they don’t sell them on that basis.

Every philosopher, in addition to the formal system which he offers to the world, has another, much simpler, of which he may be quite unaware. If he is aware of it, he probably realizes that it won’t quite do; he therefore conceals it, and sets forth something more sophisticated, which he believes because it is like his crude system, but which he asks others to accept because he thinks he has made it such as cannot be disproved. The sophistication comes in by way of refutation of refutations, but this alone will never give a positive result; it shows at best that a theory may be true, not that it must be. The positive result, however little the philosopher may realize it, is due to his imaginative preconceptions, or to what Santayana calls “animal faith.”

Animal faith that we’ll find something to justify doing what we planned to do all along.

Finally, and most crucially, in the current undeveloped state of human consciousness, people fall for this argument that efficiency is meaningful. So it continues to be used.

As a libertarian socialist, I argue that government is not the solution. No centrally controlled system can adapt fast enough, or be flexible enough, to handle all localities and customs; people in the community are best equipped to decide what that community should do. The states that united a couple centuries back took it as given that the central, federal, government would deal only with those issues that affected everyone. Unfortunately, in today’s globalized world that includes just about everything.

But government is also not the problem. Anarchists can believe that a perfect world would omit government and coercion, and still advocate for a strong federal role in daily life in the United States of the twenty-first century. We have an aspirational goal of dumping government, but humanity’s not ready for that. Yet.

The problem, instead, is unaccountable entities. Government is so huge that it’s difficult to influence. Indeed, if your home is expropriated under the eminent domain doctrine, government seems completely unaccountable. But if you take the historical view, the population can influence American government over time. We’ll influence the hell out of it this fall, when we hand all the federal levers to the Democrats. (Just what we need, another generation of wimps.)

So what does this lack of accountability effect? Well, for starters, we’re talking about a $55 billion intelligence-community budget — that we know of. There’s a good chance it’s ten billion more than that when all details are in. Most likely, especially given the connection to the Bush family, which has been raiding the public coffers for at least three generations, a huge chunk of each year’s budget is simply stolen. Who’d know?

Johnson quotes David Bromwich, a political critic and Yale professor of literature, from the New York Review of Books:

The separate bookkeeping and accountability devised for Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and similar outfits was part of a careful displacement of oversight from Congress to the vice-president and the stewards of his policies in various departments and agencies. To have much of the work parceled out to private companies who are unaccountable to army rules or military justice, meant, among its other advantages, that the cost of the war could be concealed beyond all detection.

When we move the action to private entities, we not only end up with a lot of corruption. We also make it easier by orders of magnitude to penetrate our national intelligence community. As Johnson says, if you’re a foreign agent wanting to plant a mole, just get someone hired by CACI or SAIC or Blackwater; it’s much easier than being vetted by the CIA.

This, in other words, is not simply outsourcing, as if a help desk had been moved to Bangalore.

It is important that the intrusion of unelected corporate officials with hidden profit motives into what are ostensibly public political activities not be confused with private businesses buying Scotch tape, paper clips, or hubcaps.

The wholesale transfer of military and intelligence functions to private, often anonymous, operatives took off under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and accelerated greatly after 9/11 under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Often not well understood, however, is this: The biggest private expansion into intelligence and other areas of government occurred under the presidency of Bill Clinton. He seems not to have had the same anti-governmental and neoconservative motives as the privatizers of both the Reagan and Bush II eras. His policies typically involved an indifference to — perhaps even an ignorance of — what was actually being done to democratic, accountable government in the name of cost-cutting and allegedly greater efficiency. It is one of the strengths of Shorrock’s study that he goes into detail on Clinton’s contributions to the wholesale privatization of our government, and of the intelligence agencies in particular.

The result, Johnson says, is that war based on a President’s whim or planted information, or a failure to prevent an attack, is much more likely than it would have been with the normal, obvious approach of keeping the professionals working on the job. As Johnson says, if you’re working for a company that needs to get the next contract, your approach is different than if you work for the government, and your job is to keep the government informed. Two different goals.

It just gets sadder and sadder. Here is the highest legal official in the land, God help us:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Congress should explicitly declare war against al Qaeda to make clear the United States can detain suspected members as long as the conflict lasts, U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said on Monday…

Hey, kids, I know! Let’s declare war on the Mafia! The president can lock all of ’em up but one and that way the war would never end and we’d never have to let ’em out and there wouldn’t be any more loan sharking except wait a minute, then we’d have to declare war on Visa too so forget about the Mafia and how about we declare war on the ACLU instead? I mean, you know, now that wars don’t have to be with a, like, country anymore.

Cool, dude! Then we could lock up the UN and the DNC and the Harvard Faculty Club and People for the American Way and the Carter Center and the United Auto Workers and all those Friends of Bill, and, and…

Oh, hell, it’s all just too depressing. This guy is a former federal judge and the attorney general of the United States. How pathetic is that?

The Times brings us another routine story from the new American gulag. For not the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really ashamed of my country. (Video of Michelle Obama here.)

Edmund Burke: “For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

So when Mrs. Villegas went into labor on the night of July 5, she was handcuffed and accompanied by a deputy as she was taken by ambulance to Nashville General Hospital at Meharry. Cuffs chaining her foot to the hospital bed were opened when she reached the final stages of labor, Mrs. Villegas said…

The phone in her room was turned off, and she was not permitted to speak with her husband when he came to retrieve their newborn son from the hospital on July 7 as she returned to jail, she said.

As Mrs. Villegas left the hospital, a nurse offered her a breast pump but a sheriff’s deputy said she could not take it into the jail, Mrs. Villegas said…

“There is a perception that she was treated different from other inmates, and it just is not true,” Ms. Weikal said. “Unfortunately the business of corrections is that families are separated. It’s not pretty, it’s not understandable to a lot of people.”

She said that it was standard procedure to bar medical equipment like a breast pump from the jail.

Perhaps you heard that the Senate today decided not to investigate whether the Bush administration and the telecommunications companies broke eavesdropping laws.

Fortunately, the honorable Democrats — and I come here to praise them — managed to negotiate a relatively acceptable bargain in exchange for complete capitulation with respect to their Constitutional duties: they extracted from the Republican minority a solemn statement of agreement that despite this administration having got away with intentionally violating the letter of the law, some future administration would follow a new law. I mean, it could happen.

Remaining Americans are, I claim, outraged. Is there anything the Democrats stand for, other than “We’re not Republicans”? “We’ll argue on the Congressional floor for several extra hours before we give away your civil liberties”?

How about, “There are some things a President could do to get impeached, but for the life of me I can’t think of one”?

What’s next? Will some sycophantic Democrat want to attach the formal title of Augustus to the Oval Office? Shall we all be forced to kowtow upon approaching the Imperial presence of a man who presided over the dollar’s 41 percent drop against the euru?

We want Congress to stand up for our freedom, but they keep caving in to fear mongering! Help the ACLU spell it out for them.

The ACLU is preparing to challenge the unconstitutional FISA Amendments Act in court and protect your right to privacy.

In addition, the ACLU will be taking out a full-page ad in a major national newspaper announcing the lawsuit and expressing outrage at this abandonment of our Constitutional principles. Their goal is to run an ad containing the names of tens of thousands of Americans who believe in the Constitution and want Congress to hear our message loud and clear: next time, stand up for our rights.

Sign the ACLU’s ad. Remember the old adage that you can’t use tact with your representatives in federal government; they’re hogs, and you have to hit them over the snout with a two-by-four.

Our representatives will not save us. We must save ourselves.

Now that Barack has made plain that he intends to continue Bush policies, by breaking his promise and voting to immunize the telecoms and to ensure no investigation of this administration’s crimes, can anyone explain why they would vote for him?

Update: Perhaps I should explain that I expect people can find reasons to vote for Obama. I should have said, can anyone explain why they still consider Obama to be a bringer of change? And after he promised to join Senator Dodd in a filibuster some months back, then reversed that position and helped to cover up Bush administration crimes, how can he can expect us to believe his other commitments, few though they be?

As Senator Feingold said, “This bill is not a compromise. It is a capitulation.”

From McClatchy Newspapers:

WASHINGTON — U.S. border agents are copying and seizing the contents of laptops, cell phones and digital cameras from U.S. and foreign travelers entering the United States, witnesses told a Senate subcommittee Wednesday.

The extent of this practice is unknown despite requests to the Department of Homeland Security from the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution and several nonprofit agencies.

The department also declined to send a representative to the hearing. Subcommittee Chairman Russ Feingold, D-Wis., said Homeland Security had told him that its “preferred” witness was unavailable Wednesday…

(Ed. note: Wednesday was his day in the reading room.)

Chris Dodd is mad as hell and he isn’t going to take it anymore. In a speech yesterday, the senator from Connecticut started out attacking Bush’s plan to issue a get-out-of-jail card to the telecom companies who helped Bush to spy illegally on us all.

But he went on to attack Bush’s contempt for the entire rule of law, which exceeds even that of Richard Nixon. Here are excerpts, but do read or listen to the whole magnificent screed here.

So, why are we here? Because, Mr. President – it is alleged that giant telecom corporations worked with our government to compile Americans’ private, domestic communications records into a database of enormous scale and scope.

Secretly and without a warrant, those corporations are alleged to have spied on their own customers – American customers.

Here’s only one of the most egregious examples. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Clear, first-hand whistleblower documentary evidence [states]…that for year on end every e-mail, every text message, and every phone call carried over the massive fiber-optic links of 16 separate companies routed through AT&T’s Internet hub in San Francisco — hundreds of millions of private, domestic communications — have been…copied in their entirety by AT&T and knowingly diverted wholesale by means of multiple “splitters” into a secret room controlled exclusively by the NSA…

A prisoner at Guantanamo — to take one example out of hundreds — was deprived of sleep over 55 days, a month and three weeks. Some nights, he was doused with water or blasted with air conditioning. And after week after week of this delirious, shivering wakefulness, on the verge of death from hypothermia, doctors strapped him to a chair — doctors, healers who took the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm”— pumped him full of three bags of medical saline, brought him back from death — and sent him back to his interrogators…

The New York Times reports that the White House and the Democrats have agreed on a rewrite of the wiretapping rules. It’s not entirely clear why anyone cares to take the trouble. Everyone knows the administration has been ignoring the existing rules; why would a rewrite make a difference?

Perhaps the most important concession that Democratic leaders claimed in the proposal was a reaffirmation that the intelligence protocols are the “exclusive” means for the executive branch to conduct wiretapping operations in terrorism and espionage cases. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had insisted on that element, and Democratic staff members asserted that the language would prevent Mr. Bush, or any future president, from circumventing the law. The proposal asserts that “that the law is the exclusive authority and not the whim of the president of the United States,“ Ms. Pelosi said.

In general, rewriting the law to emphasize to those who knowingly violated it in the past that the law must be obeyed is an ineffective means of making the point.

The Democrats are letting the telecoms off the hook for activities the companies knew were illegal; the precedents were clear. In exchange for this immunity the Democratic, I hesitate to say leadership in this context, can depart grasping the idea that this reaffirmation will constrain a President when the first affirmation did not. It seems to be a textbook case of doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

Or alternatively, perhaps the Democrats have no problem with warrantless wiretapping and torture and illegal wars as long as it’s the Democrats in power at the time. All power corrupts, said John Emerich Edward Dahlberg, and he was right.

If you worked long hard hours and years to reach the upper atmosphere of Congressional leadership for your party, it’d be hard to think in terms of the American empire ending. It’d be hard to realize that there is an American empire to begin with; as Chomsky says, you can’t reach a position of power in the US government without believing that the country is unique in history in acting purely from altruistic motives.

That’s abroad, of course; domestically, it’s devil take the hindmost. In the current case, as so often in recent years, the hindmost is the American public. This is somehow more grating now that we have Democrats controlling Congress. In 2006 we took the reins from the Republicans, too corrupt, incompetent, and downright evil to live with any more, and handed them to the Democrats, who promised, as all parties do in such circumstances, to restore dignity and truth to the institution and to assert the rule of law.

Hah! In fact, they’ve repeatedly capitulated. As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the only real accomplishment the Democrats had to show for taking control of Congress was refusing to cave on telecom immunity. Now they’re caving on that too.

I just bought a couple Cindy Sheehan for Congress buttons.

From BBC News:

Sweden’s parliament has approved controversial new laws allowing authorities to spy on cross-border e-mail and telephone traffic.

The country’s intelligence bureau will be able to scan international calls, faxes and e-mails…

“By introducing these new measures, the Swedish government is following the examples set by governments ranging from China and Saudi Arabia to the US government’s highly criticised eavesdropping programme,” said Peter Fleischer, of Google.

Chávez Goes Over the Line, and Realizes It reads the headline in today’s Times. Substitute Bush for Chávez and the sentence loses all meaning. For Heaven’s sake, Hugo, try to be a little more presidential and a little less democratic.

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela started this month as the most prominent political supporter of Colombia’s largest rebel group and a fierce defender of his own overhaul of his nation’s intelligence services. But in the space of a few hours over the weekend, he confounded his critics by switching course on both contentious policies.

In doing so, Mr. Chávez displayed a willingness for self-reinvention that has served him well in times of crisis throughout his long political career. Time and again, he has gambled by pushing brash positions and policies, then shifted to a more moderate course when the consequences seemed too dire…

The law would have forced judges in Venezuela to support the intelligence services and required citizens to cooperate with community-monitoring groups, provoking widespread fears that the government wanted to follow Cuba in creating a societywide network of informants whose main purpose was to nip antigovernment activities in the bud.

I’ve seen bits and piece of this before, but Christopher Ketcham has gathered them all under one roof in Radar magazine. Here are a few teasers from his long article; do read the whole thing.

It’s scary stuff, and the Department of Homeland Security is a scary outfit. Joe Lieberman’s brainchild, this product of multiple bureaucratic miscegenation has become the gold standard for incompetence, carelessness, callous indifference, and paranoia posing as prudence.

Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary…

In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million contract to establish “temporary detention and processing capabilities” for the Department of Homeland Security…

According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year…

If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people…

If Main Core does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its likely home. “If a master list is being compiled, it would have to be in a place where there are no legal issues”—the CIA and FBI would be restricted by oversight and accountability laws—”so I suspect it is at DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such restraints.” Giraldi notes that DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists and has been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic security…

Bush and his people are filth. More from the Washington Post on the cesspool they have made of the Department of Homeland Security. Go read it all.

“After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and after the Bush administration assumed a tough new stance on immigration in its campaign against terrorism, the Justice Department still sounded wary about drugging deportees. In March 2002, a Justice lawyer laid out two options. One choice, he wrote, was to “seek a court order … in every case where the alien’s medication is not therapeutically justified.” The other choice was to create a regulation to grant immigration officials explicit permission to sedate deportees, perhaps including safeguards that would give people a warning that they might be medicated — and a chance to object.

Top immigration officials chose neither. Instead, in May 2003, just after ICE was created, they internally circulated a new policy: “[A]n ICE detainee with or without a diagnosed psychiatric condition who displays overt or threatening aggressive behavior … may be considered a combative detainee and can be sedated if appropriate under the circumstances.”

The Immigration and Naturalization Service, as it used to be called, was previously the lead standard for dysfunctional government agencies. By comparison even the FBI was efficient.

Then came the Homeland Security Act of 2002, legislation of a stupidity so stunning that even George W. Bush, in a rare divgation into common sense, at first opposed the measure.

But Senator Joe Lieberman (Likud-CT) shepherded this bureaucratic camelope into law. The old INS disappeared into the bowels of the new Department of Homeland Security, where part of it was reborn as a miscarriage called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

This new monstrosity, created from the conflation of racism and xenophobia with the paranoia of Bush’s “war on terror,” appears to be even more cruel, more indifferent, more sluggish, less accountable and more of a cause for national shame than its unfeeling predecessor.

The Washington Post has exposed the mess to daylight in a shocking series of articles by reporters Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein. This is the kind of thing that newspapers can still do better than any other institution we have. Here’s a good place to start, and I hope you will.

Let’s say you’re in favor of letting the states legalize abortion and and drugs and same sex marriage if they want to. And you favor an immediate start to our withdrawal from Iraq. And you think the telecom companies should be punished for warrantless wiretapping. And you hate the Patriot Act for its gutting of civil rights. And no matter what the Creep from Crawford thinks, you think habeas corpus belongs in the Constitution after all.

Folks, have I got a candidate for you! He’s an Iowan born and bred. He went to high school in Iran. He’s a former CIA spook and federal prosecutor. Plus he’s a proud member of both the NRA and the ACLU.

Ladies and Germs, let’s hear it for the only candidate who’s really got your back — Big. Bob. BARR!

What less can you expect from a court once headed by a GOP hack who got his start by intimidating black and Hispanic voters in Arizona? Rehnquist would be proud of today’s ruling.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.

In a splintered 6-3 ruling, the court upheld Indiana's strict photo ID requirement, which Democrats and civil rights groups said would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots. Its backers said it was needed to prevent fraud…

The case concerned a state law, passed in 2005, that was backed by Republicans as a way to deter voter fraud. Democrats and civil rights groups opposed the law as unconstitutional and called it a thinly veiled effort to discourage elderly, poor and minority voters — those most likely to lack proper ID and who tend to vote for Democrats.

Nothing new, but the Washington Post has assembled in one spot the ludicrous bungles which are the crown jewels of Bush’s domestic “war on terror.” For pathetic results like this we have let our constitution be gutted and our civil rights be trashed.

In the excerpt below, notice the practiced ease with which the FBI suggests to its befuddled suspect a scheme that would position the Bureau as terror’s number one enemy — something for Congress to think about, come budget time. Actually a terrorist with the brains of a zucchini would be smart enough put the hopelessly incompetent FBI at the top of his list of places not to bomb.

Batiste confided, somewhat fantastically, that he wanted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, which would then fall into a nearby prison, freeing Muslim prisoners who would become the core of his Moorish army. With them, he would establish his own country.

The FBI informant, under bureau guidance, refocused Batiste on what he said was bin Laden's plot — to bomb FBI offices in several U.S. cities.

…to figure this Bush program out. So the Headless Nail has done it for you:

The Bush administration is quietly but firmly trying to set in place the capability to monitor, intercept, and analyze all visits to federal government web sites. It's called the Einstein program, which no doubt has the old civil libertarian and FBI target spinning in his grave.

Once such a system is pounded into place, it becomes, like me, a headless nail in the bureaucratic machinery. Both of us are almost impossible to pull out. So here's what you have to look forward to:

If you visit any government web site, the government could monitor your visit, know all of the pages you have seen, and capture and analyze any information you send or receive — all in real time. It would be like having your very own Big Brother, looking over your shoulder at your very own screen.

And taking notes as you surf.

This program, known as “Trusted Internet Connection” would require that all federal agencies access the web through portals approved and controlled by the Department of Homeland Security.

At each portal, DHS would install an “intrusion detection system” — Einstein. Details about Einstein are sketchy, but it will capture at least all traffic flow, source and destination IP information, and data sent or received.

In all probability this electronic gatekeeper would allow Homeland Security to spy on government employees too, which will be handy for tracking down whistleblowers.

The ostensible reason for the program is, of course, protecting us against terrorist hackers. DHS officials won’t say much about how they will use this capability, so you’ll just have to trust them when they say that the “program is not intended to collect information that will be retrieved by name.” [italics added]

But then neither did the DHS intend to force airline passengers to remove nipple rings with pliers. Nevertheless that is exactly what its agents did to a woman in Lubbock last month. By the time even the best of intentions reaches the bottom rungs of a huge bureaucracy, the result can defy logic and common sense. To say nothing of common decency.

Although the Administration wants this program in place by June (unlikely for technical reasons), DHS has not provided the legally-required Privacy Impact Assessment for the project. So we don’t know what personal information will be collected, how it will be used, or what (if any) safeguards against spying on citizens will be required.

All government web sites are required to post privacy policies, and in my experience government webmasters take this responsibility seriously. Under the Bush plan, these protections would become meaningless, as DHS would position Einstein between the citizen and the government site.

Note that the Einstein program does not require the cooperation of any private partners (such as phone companies or ISPs) and is not subject to any routine judicial supervision — helpful if you want to avoid any embarrassing leaks or disclosures about how it is actually being used.

In summary, the Bush Administration proposes to acquire a powerful new domestic electronic spy network, and citizens are supposed to trust the good intentions of Bush's DHS and Justice officials that these powers will not be misused. Domestic political opponents, whistleblowers, and ordinary citizens who don’t want the government spying on their web visits will be forgiven for their skepticism.

There has been a remarkable consistency among George W. Bush’s attorneys general in one respect. All three of them have openly argued for breaking the law and have proceeded to do so on a daily basis.

Here is Michael Mukasey, currently taking his turn as our nation’s chief law-breaking officer:

Also Thursday, Attorney General Michael Mukasey told lawmakers he will not open a criminal investigation into the CIA’s use of waterboarding on terror suspects.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers asked Mukasey bluntly whether he was starting a criminal investigation since Hayden confirmed the use of waterboarding.

“No, I am not, for this reason: Whatever was done as part of a CIA program at the time that it was done was the subject of a Department of Justice opinion through the Office of Legal Counsel and was found to be permissible under the law as it existed then,” he said.

Mukasey said opening an investigation would send a message that Justice Department opinions are subject to change.

“Essentially it would tell people, ‘You rely on a Justice Department opinion as part of a program, then you will be subject to criminal investigations ... if the tenure of the person who wrote the opinion changes or indeed the political winds change,’” he said. “And that’s not something that I think would be appropriate and it’s not something I will do.”

This last paragraph might sound reasonable to someone unfamiliar with the law: Gee, officer, the Justice Department said it was okay. Go give them the ticket.

But under the law it is not okay at all. Mukasey’s own Justice Department will ship you off to jail if that’s the best excuse you can offer for committing a felony. And they do it every day.

Wayne Uff explained the process for us several months ago, as former attorney general John Ashcroft’s was doing his best to let our largest telecomunications companies off the hook for the illegal wiretapping they did at George W. Bush’s request.

Uff, a retired federal prosecutor himself, makes an argument that may seem counterintuitive to the layman. It is, however, the law, and the law is what Torture Boys Ashcroft, Gonzales and Mukasey swore an oath to uphold.

In this article former Attorney General John Ashcroft defends immunity for the telephone companies who turned over wiretap information without warrants in reliance on the government’s say-so that it was legal. Ashcroft argues that:

Longstanding principles of law hold that an American corporation is entitled to rely on assurances of legality from officials responsible for government activities. The public officials in question might be right or wrong about the advisability or legality of what they are doing, but it is their responsibility, not the company’s, to deal with the consequences if they are wrong.

Small problem: he’s wrong on the law. Companies that deal with the government in fact are not entitled to rely on promises made by government officials, and it is common for companies to lose major legal cases despite the fact that they relied on what they believed to be valid advice from government officials.

There are hundreds if not thousands of these cases out there. And, it is very common for the citizen who relies on an erroneous representation by a government official to get to get the shaft, high and hard. Here’s just one that I found in a minute on Google:

As to “actual authority,” the Supreme Court has recognized that any private party entering into a contract with the government assumes the risk of having accurately ascertained that he who purports to act for the government does in fact act within the bounds of his authority. Fed. Crop Ins. Corp. v. Merrill, 332 U.S. 380, 384 (1947); accord CACI, Inc. v. Sec’y of the Army, 990 F.2d 1233, 1236 (Fed. Cir. 1993) (“A contractor who enters into an arrangement with an agent of the government bears the risk that the agent is acting outside the bounds of his authority, even when the agent himself was unaware of the limitations on his authority.”). ....

But even if the Secretary of the Air Force himself had said to the recruiters that they could and should promise free lifetime medical care to aid in recruitment, those promises would be a nullity because, as shown below, the pertinent regulation provided to the contrary.

And, even on fairness, the rule that the letter of the law governs – and not the flawed interpretation of a government official – has much to recommend it. One of the rationales for this rule is that “The People” passed the laws, and it is the people’s law that governs, not the imperfect officials who may mistakenly interpret the law. It is not fair to force the people to abide by the perhaps twisted and erroneous interpretation of their laws by the imperfect individuals who hold office temporarily. It is not the people’s fault that their laws were misinterpreted by an official, and it is not fair to penalize the people for the mistakes of public servants. Remember the old saw about ours being a government of laws, not men? This is exactly what is meant: actions aren’t made lawful by the president’s saying they are lawful; actions are lawful if they are within the law.

Just sayin’.

Froomkin allows as how Attorney General Michael Mukasey and National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell are pissed, and they have reason to be. They’ve written a letter to Congress, letting those uppity SOBs know that the Maximum Leader will destroy them in a cable TV smack-down if they threaten to act like a co-equal branch of government, or presume to defend the civil liberties of Americans, widely known as a scummy and untrustworthy lot. They write:

Hugely profitable multinational corporations who respond in good faith to an obviously illegal request for assistance by public officials bent on destroying the Constitution should not be held liable for their actions…

Duh! How would they maintain their profit margins, and keep their executives out of jail, if they were forced to follow the law? After all,

…S. 2248 would afford retroactive liability protection to communication service providers that are believed to have assisted the Government with intelligence activities in the aftermath of September 11th.

They didn’t actually assist the Government, and the obviously illegal requests began before 9/11; but you fell for the Cheney administration’s PR. Since you believe it, you’ve gotta let the telecoms off the hook for their illegal activities. If you don’t, it would cut into what everyone in the world knows are the main motivators for American military activity around the globe: corporate profits.

Day by day Bush and Cheney drag our nation’s honor — and our own — further down into their sewer:

OTTAWA (Reuters) — Canada’s foreign ministry has put the United States and Israel on a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured and also classifies some U.S. interrogation techniques as torture, according to a document obtained by Reuters on Thursday…

The document — part of a training course on torture awareness given to diplomats — mentions the U.S. jail at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where a Canadian man is being held…

“The United States does not permit, tolerate, or condone torture under any circumstances,” said a spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy in Ottawa.

As a former spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Laos, I offer this spokeswoman my sympathy and this advice: quit while you still know you’re lying; I did, and it didn’t hurt at all.

Another rough beast slouches towards Washington to be born. Rendition, it seems, is turning into a two-way street.

The complete essay from which this comes is by Anthony Piel, former counsel of the World Health Organization. It is from The Lakeville Journal. (If asked to log in, feel free to use remnant as userid, with the password jeromehd.)

A Kent resident friend who is a reader of The Lakeville Journal has put forward the following interesting and unexpected question: Does the United States have the right to kidnap U.S. or foreign citizens abroad with a view to “rendering” them to the United States for trial in U.S. courts? …

Although perhaps desirable, bounty hunting was not yet in vogue for corporate fraud or tax evasion, as the SEC, FTC and IRS had not yet been invented. Nor had the terms “homeland security,” “unlawful enemy combatant” or “extraordinary rendition” yet been coined. Those are a more recent U.S. invention. The question is, is this kind of “cowboy” style justice still the law of the land?

A Sharon friend, who is also a folk singer, recently forwarded me a perfectly astounding quotation from Edward R. Murrow that was broadcast over the BBC in February, 1946, as Murrow left Britain after years of covering World War II from there. Said Murrow: “I believe that I have learned the most important thing that has happened in Britain during the last six years.”

No, Murrow wasn’t speaking of routine courage, or the Blitz, or the Battle of Britain, or El Alamein, or Normandy — important as those facts and events were. He was speaking of the continued British respect for democracy and human rights, in spite of the war. Murrow cited two particular examples, excerpted here:

“Do you remember that while London was being bombed in the daylight the House devoted two days to discussing conditions under which enemy aliens were detained on the Isle of Man? Though Britain fell, there were to be no concentration camps here.”

“Do you remember that two days after Italy declared war an Italian citizen, convicted of murder in the lower courts, appealed successfully to the highest court in the land, and the original verdict was set aside? There was still law in the land, regardless of race, nationality or hatred. Representative government, equality before the law survived.”

Future generations who bother to read the historical record will see that in Britain, during the greatest war of all time, there was no retreat from basic human rights and principles. Isn’t it telling that today our U.S. Supreme Court should have to be even considering whether “detainees” in the so-call “war” on terrorism have the right to fair trial, to habeas corpus, to counsel, or even the right not to be tortured in violation of national and international law?

Surely, this is not our “finest hour.” Compared with our British friends in wartime, how far have we fallen? How far have we yet to fall?

Here is former attorney general John Ashcroft on why telecommunications companies should pay no penalty for breaking the law when people like him ask them to:

At the outset, it is critical to understand what the immunity provisions the administration and Congress have negotiated actually do. This is not “blanket immunity,” as it is sometimes caricatured by its opponents. The Senate bill would confer immunity in only two limited circumstances: if the carrier did not do what the plaintiffs claim; or if the carrier did do what the plaintiffs claim but based on explicit assurances from the highest levels of the government that the activities in question were authorized by the president and determined to be lawful.

And here is Hermann Göring’s defense attorney, Otto Stahmer, arguing that the activities in question … Oh, forget it.

Rudy Giuliani’s old pal, Judge Michael B. Mukasey, is having a harder time than anyone thought before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Late in life, he is learning that when you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

Fear of opening the door to criminal or civil liability for torture or abuse, whether in an American court or in courts overseas, appeared to loom large in Mr. Mukasey’s calculations as he parried questions from the committee this week. Some legal experts suggested that liability could go all the way to President Bush if he explicitly authorized waterboarding …

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the committee’s top Republican, said at a hearing Wednesday that any statement by Mr. Mukasey that waterboarding is torture could fuel criminal charges or lawsuits against those responsible for waterboarding.

“The facts are that an expression of an opinion by Judge Mukasey prior to becoming attorney general would put a lot of people at risk for what has happened,” Mr. Specter said.

Exactly so, Arlen. Sadists who knowingly order and/or allow the infliction of illegal and medieval torture belong in jail. The list includes, but is by no means limited to, George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, John Yoo, I. Lewis Libby, Jr., John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden.

It also includes the low level bullies who actually carried out their orders. Following illegal orders is itself illegal, as we should have learned from Nuremberg.

Administrations come and, though it sometimes takes forever, they go. Individuals last a bit longer; but arguments outlive us all.

Consider, for example, the argument between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists that caused the English Civil War in 1642, leading to the execution of King Charles I and the exile of his son, later Charles II. Apparently the historical knowledge required to make useful comparisons was insufficiently widely distributed. (Unfortunately Decline and Fall would not be published for 135 years.) What were they thinking, not killing the kid? Mercy and regicide don’t mix. Not that the alternative always succeeds, mind you; but you gotta start somewhere.

In American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips talks about the connections between the English Civil War and the American one. New England, after all, was favored with lots of Puritans, who were generally sympathetic to Cromwell’s Roundheads. Many New Englanders shipped back to England to fight against Charles I.

Big Men in the Southern states, on the other hand, expected the privileges their patrons back in England had of owning and ordering, and basically living in a Cavalier fashion (how else?). The Province of Carolina, for example, was named after the headless king. It was granted to eight supporters by Charles II when he regained the throne. (One of whom, Lord Shaftesbury, employed a secretary named John Locke.) Most of the Southerners who returned to England to fight in the Civil War were Royalists. They tended to believe in centralization of power, since they were in the center. Unfortunately we’re not able to do a controlled experiment in this regard, but had their quarters been swapped for those of their slaves, they might have thought differently.

The conflict, in other words, was inherent in the soul of the United States from long before it became an independent political entity. Monarchy or Parliamentarianism? You’re either with us or against us.

Which adds a bit of back story to the current conflicts between Congress and the White House over whether, despite Tony Snow’s ruling, Congress has, and will execute, Constitutional oversight responsibilities with respect to the executive branch.

Kanye West might be right, though it seems to me that Shrub cares more about money than skin color; he and Snoop seem to be cool with each other, for example. But I can name one black person George Bush does care about: John Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and the only member who was involved in the Congressional fight to get documents from the Nixon White House. Then there’s Henry Waxman, neither the most beautiful Representative nor the most riveting speaker, but something of a progressive Javert. John Dean says Waxman “may be the nation’s most diligent and vigilant member of Congress”. That, beloveds, is truly what the Founding Fathers intended, Federalist Society be damned.

In the Senate, the White House faces Patrick “Go Fuck Yourself” Leahy, who just might harbor a bit of resentment against the Cheney administration’s imperial style. And Leahy, like Waxman, was elected to Congress for the first time in November, 1974, three months after Nixon resigned.

“This is a further shift by the Bush administration into Nixonian stonewalling and more evidence of their disdain for our system of checks and balances,” said [Leahy]. “Increasingly, the president and vice president feel they are above the law — in America no one is above law.”

The question now is what to do about the obvious facts — namely, that the President and the Vice President, among others, have committed serious crimes, in my view including war crimes and crimes against humanity, and violated their Constitutional responsibilities.

There’s an X-Files episode about Mulder and Scully going to Texas on an investigation, and filing reports afterward. Their reports are quite different, and the episode shows flashbacks from both points of view. It’s one of their silliest; the scene with Mulder explaining that it’s surprisingly difficult to shoot out the tires on an RV making circles in a parking lot is great. It’s filmed in black-and-white, and includes a sheriff who Mulder recalls as a country bumpkin with buck teeth and Scully recalls as a southern gentleman of whom Mulder is jealous.

Turns out the town is infested with the undead. Our heros realize this when, as a result of ordering pizza, they wake up with their shoelaces tied and the pizza uneaten. Aha, says Mulder, vampires.

When they finally get the scoop, they realize the sheriff is also a vampire. The vampires, it seems, have learned to live in relative peace with the surrounding community by keeping their heads down and only feeding in ways that the locals can dismiss as religious visions or alcohol-induced fantasies. The sheriff, realizing he’s got a sympathetic audience in the FBI agents, confesses, and apologizes for the pizza-delivery boy: “He never got the concept of low-profile.”

Which, I assert, is a metaphor for government. Like vampiring, government resembles typography and refereeing; when it’s done well, it’s unnoticeable. In a basketball game, where calls make much more difference than in baseball, football, soccer, or tennis, the best referees are quiet: they call all the blatant stuff and let the dinky stuff go, and they do so in a relatively even manner. This is what people want when they petition for referees to “let the players decide the game”.

Problems arise when one side adopts a consistent strategy of not simply pushing the envelope of the rules but openly flaunting its refusal to obey them. How then can a fair referee “let the players decide the game”? Inadvertent rule violations are one thing; cheating is another, and the nature of things in such cases is that the “activist” referees control the outcome. And we saw how well that worked in 2000.

The question now is, God help us, what the Supreme Court will do if the dispute over subpoenas arrives there. I doubt there’s any pro-Monarchist position that couldn’t attract Scalia and Thomas, and probably Alito. But I think, for now, that the rule of law might hope to get five votes. We’re very likely to get Kennedy, who’s often called The Swing Vote; and we might even get Roberts on the issue of separation of powers, an area in which the Court has historically guarded its prerogatives, and where the Chief Justice’s own power and prestige are affected.

Thorsten Veblen describes another kind of vampire in his Theory of the Leisure Class. The Wikipedia entry notes, among other things, that Veblen’s critique is more radical than that of Marx, who grants the superiority of capitalism over feudalism. Veblen doesn’t; he considers capitalism to be the modern manifestation of primitive tribal behavior, in which status is the highest value.

In Veblen’s view, the development of human society grew from the prehistoric search for necessities, specifically food. At first, everyone brought back what they found, and everyone ate. Then some people realized that they could intimidate others, or attack them and steal their take, and avoid the hard work of gathering.

Over time, this “leisure class” did less and less real work. They preferred hunting to gathering. Hunting generates food when it’s successful, but it burns a lot of calories with uncertain results. They might occasionally raid neighbor tribes and bring back booty that was useful to everyone, thus provoking Paleolithic blowback. Which in turn creates the requirement for a constant vigil to protect the home land.

The leisure class concentrated on two things:

• Warfare, manufacture of the associated weapons and propaganda, and rules to restrict the knowledge of weapons
• The development of various forms of status to differentiate the two classes

There are several natural results of this social structure, such as endemic warfare and lies, and the endless struggle for alpha-dog status. (“Think I’ll buy me a football team.”)

Veblen argues that status quickly dissociated itself from utility, to the point that one can now determine the status of an activity largely by judging its usefulness: the more useful it is, the lower its status. Think farming versus bond trading. Even activities that might seem to have useful side effects, such as the physical fitness required to play football, can be masquerades, according to Veblen, who considers that the “relation of football to physical culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight to agriculture”.

Thus he derives the concept of conspicuous consumption, consuming more than you need: if you can waste, you must have a lot, so waste indicates high status. Once you’re consuming as much as you can, you want people to know it, otherwise you don’t get the status points.

Next there’s conspicuous leisure. If you can sit on the porch and wave as the neighbors leave for work, you’re higher status than they are. Then comes vicarious consumption — your dependents are also wasteful — and vicarious leisure — your servants sit on the porch and wave.

Veblen proceeds to apply this viewpoint to a variety of society’s oddities, often with comic effect. You can tell, he says, that society affords God very high status by looking at the number of people employed for his vicarious leisure. He has a stretch of about two pages on why dogs are higher status than cats that is hilarious. In his view, hunting is an expression of the right of the leisure class to do whatever useless thing strikes its fancy. The fox hunt, for example, is certainly not done for the sake of calories, and that inefficiency is a hallmark of status. The more useless, the higher the status.

He must have been pretty popular at cocktail parties back in 1899 with that kind of line.

So when I catch myself having Nixon flashbacks, I remind myself: yes, this is really a new version of the same battle. Yes, this is a battle that’s apparently endemic to American life. Yes, it even goes back three and half centuries to the English Civil War. And, okay, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s what humans have always done. We’ve also always killed each other. Doesn’t mean we can’t stop.

We’re not seeing replays from the Nixon years randomly. This struggle’s been going on for centuries. Should the United States have an all-powerful executive, kinda like a pope or, here’s an idea, a king? Or should we elect, say, a legislature or a parliament to make the rules?

It comes down — surprise! — to the rich and powerful few against the meek and voiceless many. And the rich are way richer now, compared to the rest of us, than they were only a decade or two ago. Maybe, after all, we should just return to a feudal society and admit the rich will always control us. Feudal serfs, after all, were assured food, clothing, and health care, such as it was, by the lord’s need for laborers at the next harvest. We peasants had some value. (Especially after the Black Death, when the number of laborers dropped in Europe dropped by about a third in a year and a half. Good times!)

Alternatively, we could shoulder our burdens as citizens and try to emulate the founders, or rather to realize their highest statements of ideal. We are many, and we have recently found new ways to organize and to make ourselves heard.

There is much to do. War still rages in Iraq, there is still great poverty in the richest nation in history, and many of our citizens are without health care. Past generations of Americans have surmounted obstacles more difficult than these. It is our turn.

It’s possible that we’re on the verge of a new flowering of democracy in America — of all places! — arising from the abuses of the Cheney administration.

But if so, the first step is to confront the abuses and the lawbreaking head-on. I don’t mean that we’re ready to confront our own national nature as couch-potato bullies; that’ll have to be put off. At a minimum, though, we must accept that our government can be hijacked by people whose actions, whatever their statements or even intentions, are destructive to the point of criminality.

And that this affects us all.

The President and the Vice President command, and to some extent control, the entire federal bureaucracy, including what amounts to a private army in the CIA, and a huge and nearly unaccountable intelligence community with an unknown budget. I haven’t read everything written by the founders, but I have yet to encounter anything I could interpret as countenancing a President’s private army or an unaccountable spy network. This, it seems to me, is exactly what they were rebelling against. And exactly how things happened in Rome.

In this continuing argument, I’m reminded of the judgement of Lazarus Long:

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

I’m basically a libertarian in that I don’t want government to tell me what to do. But I also think we can do things collectively that we can’t do alone: schools, roads, hospitals, moon shots, cures for cancer. What do we call the entity that executes our wishes in this collective fashion? I think the word is government, but I’m not stuck on that.

I’m also a socialist in that I think our collective actions should have the goal of increasing the common wealth. And it seems to me that a big part of our common wealth is our heritage of participatory government.

If we fail to confront the blatant law-breaking by the President and the Vice President in some institutional way, we will take a big step down Rome’s path. Probably we can’t impeach both Bush and Cheney before the 2008 election. But we should try.

And there’s no statute of limitations on war crimes.

The facts in the account that follows come from a column in today’s New York Times by Jim Dwyer, hidden behind that paper’s pay-per-view wall. (As a personal note, I marched in the same demonstration as the Curleys — one of my pictures is below — and can testify that the event was remarkably peaceful.)

On August 31, 2004, Bob Curley of Philadelphia and his 17-year-old son, Neal, were arrested while marching to protest the Republican National Convention in New York City.

They were arrested by Mayor Michael Bloomberg — proximately by his police of course, but the officers were following his orders and he continues to support the grotesque civil rights violations committed by his agents on that day.

The Curleys were held overnight and fingerprinted, like more than a thousand other peaceful marchers illegally jailed by the “peace” officers. Bob Curley was allowed one phone call, which he made to his home.

The number was secretly registered on a log that police spies had set up for that purpose.Then the Curleys, like almost all of their equally innocent fellow detainees, were released. The charges against the detainees were later dropped or thrown out of court.

Dwyer’s column ends as follows and if you can read it without the bejesus being scared out of you, why then you belong in some different country entirely. Putin’s Russia should do.

In September 2005, Neal Curley began studies at the University of Chicago. Soon afterward, the City of New York served a subpoena on the school demanding “a complete copy of the application and all related materials, including essays and short answers submitted by Neal Curley.”

Walter Pincus reports today that the administration wants some revisions to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Why? They’ve been ignoring it anyway.

Naturally the lead request is for the authority to spy on more people. (Are there more?) But we quickly get to the heart of the matter: the revisions would

• Let the government keep “unintentionally”-gathered information unrelated to the purpose of the surveillance, if it “contains significant foreign intelligence.” Whatever that is; after all, they already keep anything that indicates threats of death or harm.
• Force telecom companies and email providers to coöperate with investigations.
• Protect the companies from being sued. This protection “would be applied retroactively to those companies that coöperated with the government after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

There are a lot of signs in recent days that the administration knows it’s been caught, and is desperately trying to cover up as much of the proof as possible before the adults arrive, a lá Weird Science.

Or in another laugher, anyone remember Fawn Hall of The Iran-Contra Scandal? Her “Sometimes you have to go above the law” was a classic, which her intellectual heirs are still banging out. And her paper-shredding was effective enough to muddy the waters as to exactly what felonies had been committed, and how many times, thus avoiding what would likely have been serious time for several of the main perpetrators. At least one of whom now works in the White House.

Emails were found, of course, and Bush administration veterans from the Iran-Contra operation like Elliott Abrams apparently recently met to discuss how to get away with it the next time. (According to The New Yorker, they agreed on these axioms: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the CIA has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office.”)

My guess is a lot of those five million emails the administration and the RNC think they “lost” will turn up in a true above-board inspection of all the relevant servers and backups. That would spell deep-dish sheep-dip cherry-stone pie for kr@whatever-outside-address-still-works.com. (Or would it? Certainly he must have a getaway plan…)

The Democrats smell blood on the issue of politicizing the US attorney positions and its connection to the whole corruption theme they’ve ridden recently. It seems nearly certain that there’ve been violations of the Presidential Records Act, probably intentional; and that in itself is enough to provoke suspicion from a Congress that sees its popularity rise as it asserts itself more.

The White House, as even Novak says, is hunkered down and in denial. For those of us who grew up with Nixon in the Oval Office, it’s just like old times. Except that now a much larger percentage of the population is pissed off, and the President is a big-oil Republican instead of a big-oil Democrat.

Iraq, health care, and climate change are bound to be three of the top handful of issues in 2008. That’s not a list many Republicans will enjoy addressing. At some point in the fairly near future most Republicans will have to jump ship if they expect to survive the next election.

As an old spokesman myself, I’d like to applaud Elaine Driscoll for a particularly inspired job of turning lemons into lemonade:

The department stopped using its 13 pepper-spray guns after a shot from one killed the Emerson College student, Victoria Snelgrove, 21, of East Bridgewater, Mass., in October 2004. The police were using the weapons to disperse the crowd after the Red Sox won the American League Championship. Ms. Snelgrove was hit in the eye with a pellet while waiting for the crowd to clear so that she could get her car from a garage.

Elaine Driscoll, a police spokeswoman, said Thursday that the weapons, FN303 pellet guns, would be melted down and made into sewer caps.

Once again, a selection from Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951), a work praised by Dwight Eisenhower. The author was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1983. It also happens to be the one book Mrs. Batard has recommended to friends more than any other (not that she’s a fan of either Reagan or Eisenhower).

...An American’s hatred for a fellow American (for Hoover or Roosevelt) is far more virulent than any antipathy he can work up against foreigners. It is of interest that the backward South shows more xenophobia than the rest of the country. Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their way of life.

....

Fanatic Christianity puts its imprint upon the ancient world both by gaining adherents and by evoking in its pagan opponents a strange fervor and a new ruthlessness. Hitler imposed himself upon the world by promoting Nazism and by forcing the democracies to become zealous, intolerant and ruthless. Communist Russia shapes both its adherents and its opponents in its own image.

Thus, though hatred is a convenient instrument for mobilizing a community for defense, it does not, in the long run, come cheap. We pay for it by losing all of the values we set out to defend.

Who wrote the passage below? No, you’re wrong. For the answer, click here.

The administration’s interest in all e-mail is a wholly unhealthy precedent, especially given this administration’s track record on FBI files and IRS snooping. Every medium by which people communicate can be subject to exploitation by those with illegal intentions. Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records, read our medical records, or translate our international communications.

Think you’re no threat and minding your own business? Well, do you know all the Transportation Authority regulations by heart? Just asking.

The federal government has inflated the “No Fly List” to 200,000 names. but the list has nabbed more members of Congress than it has terrorists. US Senator Edward M. Kennedy and US Representative John Lewis have been inconvenienced by it, and anyone named David Nelson is likely to face a major interrogation each time he flies. Federal officials make it very difficult to correct the list, thus tormenting citizens who are guilty of nothing more than having a name resembling a name suspected sometime by some government official.

Hundreds of disruptions have occurred at American airports since Sept. 11 after security breaches set off fears of terror attacks. The subsequent lockdowns boosted local television news ratings. Though no terrorists have been apprehended, thousands of Americans have been arrested at airports for violating Transportation Security Administration regulations or other rules. [emphasis mine]

If interested, #s 1–9 can be found at SPIIDERWEB™. Just do a Google search on that site for feeling secure?.

Bushco still doesn’t have the totalitarian power it wants, but they have the solution.

U.S. citizens suspected of terror ties might be detained indefinitely and barred from access to civilian courts under legislation proposed by the Bush administration, say legal experts reviewing an early version of the bill.

A 32-page draft measure is intended to authorize the Pentagon’s tribunal system, established shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks to detain and prosecute detainees captured in the war on terror. The tribunal system was thrown out last month by the Supreme Court.

According to the draft, the military would be allowed to detain all “enemy combatants” until hostilities cease. The bill defines enemy combatants as anyone “engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners who has committed an act that violates the law of war and this statute.”

Legal experts said Friday that such language is dangerously broad and could authorize the military to detain indefinitely U.S. citizens who had only tenuous ties to terror networks like al Qaeda.

“That’s the big question … the definition of who can be detained,” said Martin Lederman, a law professor at Georgetown University who posted a copy of the bill to a Web blog.

…

The administration’s proposal, as considered at one point during discussions, would toss out several legal rights common in civilian and military courts, including barring hearsay evidence, guaranteeing “speedy trials” and granting a defendant access to evidence. The proposal also would allow defendants to be barred from their own trial and likely allow the submission of coerced testimony.

…

The landmark court decision countered long-held assertions by the Bush administration that the president did not need permission from Congress to prosecute “enemy combatants” captured in the war on terror [hence the use of the term “indefinitely” in the first paragraph] and that al Qaeda members were not subject to Geneva Convention protections because of their unconventional status.

“In a time of ongoing armed conflict, it is neither practicable nor appropriate for enemy combatants like al Qaeda terrorists to be tried like American citizens in federal courts or courts-martial,” the proposal states.

The draft proposal contends that an existing law — passed by the Senate last year after exhaustive negotiations between the White House and Sen. John McCain [snip], R-Ariz. — that bans cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment should “fully satisfy” the nation’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions [which Dim Son negated via signing statement — ed]. [emphasis mine]

Now come with me to the future under Bushco if this legislation is passed.

You receive the following letter under the Jewish-American Relief Fund for Lebanon Refugees letterhead:

Dear Concerned Citizen;

We are the Jewish-American Relief Fund for Lebanon Refugees. We are upset by the horrible conditions found among the Lebanese people displaced by the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces). Our homeland is causing hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians to flee their homes in fear.

We don’t want to take up much of your time. All we ask is that you donate what you can to help us help those suffering. They have nothing now, so anything you can spare will be happily accepted. We are sure you will be as generous as you can.

Our organization is a duly licensed charity and all donations are tax deductable.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Sincerely,

Seymour A. Dershowitz
Senior Director
Jewish-American Relief Fund for Lebanon Refugees
PO Box 3032
Atlanta, GA 30329

You think to yourself, hey that’s nice of them. I suppose I can kick in a couple bucks. And these people really do need help. So you contribute.

Unfortunately the Jewish-American Relief Fund for Lebanon Refugees is a front organization for Hizballa and you just contributed arms money to a terrorist group. But you say, it’s Jewish-Americans seeking relief money. Welcome to “enemy combatant” land, sucker.

That’s why you all should be screaming and hollering (same thing?) at your congress critters and tell them to stop Bushco and their brown shirts. If this goes on, you’ll shortly see political opponents identified as “enemy combatants” and indefinitely incarcerated. Mark my words. It’s a damn slippery slope.

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June 12 is Loving Day. No, that isn’t Valentine's Day Part II or some Hallmark-invented holiday.

But it is about romance, or one romance in particular, that of Virginians Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, who fell in love and had a wedding in Washington, D.C. When they came home to Virginia to set up housekeeping, they were arrested and sentenced to a year in jail.

Why? What crime did they commit? And why would I toast a couple of jailbirds?

They broke Virginia’s antimiscegenation law, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which required the racial registration of each newborn and forbad marriage between a “white person” and a “nonwhite person.” It included the “Pocahantas exception”: A person who was no more than one-sixteenth Indian could qualify as an official white person. In that same year, compulsory sterilization legislation enabled the state to sterilize anyone it considered not smart enough to reproduce. There is no evidence that any state legislators were sterilized as a result, just some poor people.

That seems shocking now but was common in the 1960s. My own uncle had to turn down a job transfer to Georgia because his interracial marriage would have been declared null and void and he could have been prosecuted for “living in sin.”

But Richard and Mildred had some gumption, as some people did back then, and they appealed their conviction all the way to the Supreme Court. On June 12, 1967, that law was held to be contrary to the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

I’ve known, slightly, the famous Renee and Demetrius since the days of the Dean blog, and they discussed their 19-year marriage yesterday to draw parallels between Loving v. Virginia and Republican attempts to enshrine bigotry in the Constitution by blocking gay and lesbian marriages. I thank them for their wisdom and insight, salute them on their upcoming anniversary, and join them in hoping that my friends who are lesbian couples will soon have the right to legal marriage, just like mine.

Happy Loving Day!

The most dangerous man in America is not George W. Bush, or even Dick Cheney, but Donald Rumsfeld. He stood out for his malevolence even among the Nixon crew, and age has not withered nor custom staled his infinite sliminess. Let Jim Hightower give you the details and be afraid, be very afraid. A lot can happen between now and the midterms.

“A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.”

Cadet Honor Code

Please note that it doesn’t say anything about Freedom of Speech.

Thanks to the New York Times Select for pointing me to an intriguing website run by a group of West Point graduates who are against the War in Iraq. The Institution, according to this New York Times article (no free link) is trying to shut down the graduates’ website based on the fact that the Institution filed for a trademark on the use of the word “West Point” a few years ago. We should point out to those comtemplating going to West Point — Beware! The Institution might not let you lay claim to being a graduate if they don’t like your ideas or your politics at any point in the future.

It might be wise to choose another institution of higher learning rather than go to West Point. If you can’t speak freely about who you are and where you’ve been, it seems to me that one must ask the question: Is West Point really worth all that? It does appear that you must give up one of your Four Freedoms if you decide to attend West Point.

It sure doesn’t seem to me that the West Point Honor Code is all it’s cracked up to be.

The Republicans are probably right that a majority of Americans can be frightened into preferring taps on their phones to another 9/11. But that consensus depends on the theory that there’s a connection between the two. Problem is, the facts appear to be otherwise.

This is the administration that, if you take the whistleblowers seriously, had at least one message pinpointing the day on which Al Qaeda intended to attack, but failed to make translations in time. FBI management appeared to be more interested in maneuvering for larger budgets than in ensuring timely translations. In fact, according to Sibel Edmonds that’s a serious understatement — she was explicitly told not to keep up with the translations, to help prove that they needed more people. She was also aware of personal connections between translators and some of the FBI’s high-value targets. This was not simple corruption; it was at least the intentional creation of weakness. As anyone familiar with the JFK story knows, you don’t have to cause an assassination; you just get out of the way, and it happens. Larger scale, same deal.

The people who missed the needle are now calling for a bigger haystack.

The most likely use of the biggest database in history, reportedly 312 terabytes (approximately 220,000 CD-ROMs) is to track political dissidents. This administration is comfortable with tricks like using fake Secret Service agents to make people leave a Bush audience because they had a Kerry sticker on their car.

Here’s a perfect example of the real threat posed by Bush’s track-everybody approach:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

[…]

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

I find it difficult to believe that the Cheney administration will get any significant benefit from the database regarding the search for terrorists. Data mining seems to me to be best suited for data that’s scattered because it’s disorganized. But if the subjects of the search are aware they’re being searched for, and are working to frustrate the search, I don’t think data mining is going to be nearly as effective.

To put it bluntly, I doubt that fighting terrorism is the point of collecting all this data; it is at most the excuse.

I’m much more ready to believe that a government in which Rove still has a great deal of influence would subvert the democratic process and avoid legislative and judicial oversight to screw its political enemies. For one thing, this is Rove’s signature. For another, there are several Nixon- and Reagan-era dirty tricksters in the administration (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Elliot Abrams, Negroponte); and if anyone knew how to cheat the public out of its Constitutionally guaranteed control of the government, it was the unitary-executive types who supported Nixon and Reagan. I half-expected someone to propose that the American Senate should take a cue from the Roman version and deify Reagan.

But we muddled through, and I expect we will again.

Political Critic points out that it’s only us old timers that the government is spying on these days. The youngsters, which means anybody under 40, get a free ride.

As it turns out, this NSA spy program only pertains to land based phone lines. Cell phone calls are not being included in this database. That means that all the calls you make on your cell are not traced....well, at least not this way.

So not only is the government conducting another unlawful spy programs, they are also going about it in the completely wrong manner. The government claims that these phone records are being obtained to protect the nation against terrorists. However, terrorists are usually young people. Most young people use cell phones exclusively.

I, for one, haven't used a landline in years and I'm in my early 30’s. Many people younger than me have never even had a land line. Who uses landlines? Your parents, that’s who.

So the U.S. government is obtaining phone records of old people. Good job! They are missing most of the people in their teens and 20’s and a good chunk of the thirtysomething crowd. That’s a pretty large gap, don't you think? It sounds like quite an effective program.

I don't have the breakdown of the percent of population that uses cell phones versus landlines, but it is fairly clear that the 18-34 year old crowd has already moved significantly in the direction of wireless.

Of course, the braindead mainstream media has failed all day long to point this out. It’s up to the bloggers to show that the government is not only unethical, but completely stupid too.

These phone records won’t find a terrorist any more than they could before. It will simply be an exercise in futility and a complete waste of taxpayer dollars.

Down in Coral Springs, Florida at the Park Springs Elementary School it looks like McCarthyism is back with a vengeance and this time the students are being taught in real life what being “blacklisted” means. This time the person blacklisted is a ten year old child. Principal Camille Pontillo wins our Joe McCarthy impersonator award for bringing McCarthyism back into our schools with a vengeance:

The principal at a Coral Springs Elementary school has banned a 10 year old student from performing an anti-war song critical of President Bush as part of her school talent show. Park Springs Elementary principal Camille Pontillo says the song is inappropriate and too political, and a district spokesperson says it’s her call.

Thanks to mousemusings for the hat tip. In case you want to hear the song performed by an adult, here’s a link to a live video of the performance. I’d say it’s entirely appropriate for the younger members of society.

I like the Raging Grannies’ rationale for their presentation: “grandmothers are a core American value, as patriotic as mom and apple pie,” which links elderly ladies who bake cookies with dissent, free speech, and antiwar protest. Hey, Nancy “Donut-Hole” Johnson gets a pass on taking money from Abramoff and DeLay and on rubberstamping every nasty Bush policy that comes down the pike on account of her grandmotherliness, so let’s associate this positive trait with the Bill of Rights.

And here’s their anthem, sung to the tune of “God Bless America”:

GOD HELP AMERICA,
WE NEED YOU BAD!
’CAUSE OUR LEADERS
ARE CHEATERS
AND THEY’RE MAKING THE WORLD REALLY MAD.
CLIMBING MOUNTAINS,
CROSSING OCEANS
AND INVADING FOREIGN SOIL...
GOD HELP AMERICA,
NO BLOOD FOR OIL!
GOD FORGIVE AMERICA,
NO BLOOD FOR OIL!

There’s nothing in this story to suggest that humans are next. Besides, this isn’t about Big Brother, I would suggest that it’s all about little farmers vs. huge corporate farms. Our sweet Mabel the cat doesn’t like it too much either, and when she doesn’t like something, she means serious business.

Big brother will be watching your Animal Farm.

At least that’s the grim Orwellian scenario some see outlined in a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) plan to electronically tag and track all United States livestock.

The program, known as the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), would include farms and other places where livestock are kept — from hobby farms and homesteads to slaughterhouses, veterinarians' offices and fairground exhibitions. NAIS aims at tracking animals and premises exposed to disease within 48 hours of an outbreak.

As early as this fall, the first phase of the plan — premises identification — could become mandatory for Vermont farmers and livestock owners.

[…]

“…we have many constitutional issues,” [Doug] Flack said of NAIS.

Should the government be able to come take your animals when there is little evidence of disease other than proximity? Is it being implemented legally? Is it even constitutional to track the movements of private property with the aid of a computerized system?
“Livestock animals are legally a form of personal property. It is unprecedented for the United States government to conduct large-scale computer-aided surveillance of its citizens simply because they own a common type of property,” writes New York lawyer Mary Zanoni. “Surveillance of small-scale livestock owners is like the government subjecting people to surveillance for owning a couch, a TV, a lawnmower, or any item of personal property.”

Flack drew a comparison to the Red Scare and the culture of fear seen in Sen. Joseph McCarthy's time. He said that fully-implemented NAIS would also turn vets, feed store operators and slaughterhouses into police for the system. “Basically to turn us in or not do business with us,” Flack said. “This is an extremely serious thing. It's about as bad as it gets.”

Are you buying phone or internet service from AT&T? If so, I suggest reconsidering your choice.

AT&T provided NSA eavesdroppers with full access to its customers’ phone calls, and shunted its customers’ internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against the company.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF’s lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.

Know me something I don’t tell.

Ain’t it grand to read about our history on the internet? Alas, conservative writers like Mencken are indeed Gone with the Wind.

In 1918, The journalist H.L. Mencken, who himself fell under government suspicion for his German descent and unabashed love of German culture, commented on the folly of trading fundamental liberties for security. He wrote of the Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “clear and present danger” opinion:

“In the three Espionage Act cases (before the High Court), one finds a clear statement of the doctrine that, in war time, the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment cease to have any substance, and may be set aside by any jury that has been sufficiently inflamed by a district attorney itching for higher office. … I find it hard to reconcile such notions with any plausible concept of liberalism. … If I do not misread his plain words, he was actually no more than an advocate of lawmakers. There, indeed, is the clue to his whole jurisprudence. He believed that the law-making bodies should be free to experiment almost ad libitum, that the courts should not call a halt upon them until they clearly passed the uttermost bounds of reason, that everything should be sacrificed to their autonomy, including, apparently, even the Bill of Rights…”

It’s good to see something like a public debate taking place on the issue of American leadership in the world, and the harm done to that position of leadership by policies of the Bush administration.

It’s an indication of lame-duckism, I believe; Bush no longer has the same power to punish those who think out of line. Rove continues to threaten, and his threats are taken seriously; but the more he has to threaten, the more obvious his weakness becomes. These guys are on the way out, and they don’t scare people