Magpie

Saturday, May 20, 2006

The FEMA follies continue.

Nine months after Hurricane Katrina hit the US Gulf Coast, thousands of people whose homes were destroyed or made uninhabitable are still living in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Since Day 1, those trailers have been a matter of controversy and complaint. Besides being a lousy place to live, they're costing the government far more than would better accomodations, such as Katrina Cottages. FEMA trailers are unlikely to survive floods or high winds, and the propane tanks that usually come with the trailers have caused a number of explosions.

But, as they say, that's not all, folks.

The Sierra Club says that thousands of people living in FEMA trailers may be getting exposed to dangerous levels of formaldehyde, a chemical that is known to cause cancer. So far, the environmental group has tested for formaldehyde levels at 50 trailers. Test results are available for 32 of the trailers and all but two of the tests showed unsafe levels of airborne formaldehyde.

Based on these results, the Sierra Club is asking for a congressional investigation.

"We started doing this testing because people were getting sick, having nosebleeds and having constant coughs," said Mississippi Sierra Club spokeswoman Becky Gillette. "The government is making people sick. They are putting people back in harm's way...."

Formaldehyde is a widely used industrial chemical. The colorless, pungent gas can irritate eyes, nose and throat, and cause difficulty breathing and nausea at levels above .1 part per million in the air, officials say.

It is also known to cause cancer in the upper throat, the International Agency for Research on Cancer said.

"It is important that we don't discount these symptoms," said Mary DeVany, a certified industrial hygienist. "Almost all of the concentrations that we measured were 10 to 100 times higher than the worst smog levels in Los Angeles."

FEMA, of course, says that the Sierra Club is overreacting and that the formaldehyde is 'no ongoing risk' to trailer residents.

Given FEMA's recent track record, I wouldn't bet on that.

Via AP.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:53 AM | Get permalink

Here we go again.

One of the lessons that most of the world has learned from Dubya's Iraq adventure is that you don't invade a country and overthrow a government without having a coherent plan for what to do when you're in charge. Iraq's descent into violence, sectarianism, and economic disaster should make this obvious to anyone.

Unless, of course, you're Dubya.

Welcome to the USA. Now go home.

Obviously not content with having dragged the US into a disaster in Iraq, the prez is getting ready to drag the country into another one — but this time, a bit closer to home.

President Bush's planned deployment of National Guard troops to the Mexican border would last at least two years with no clear end date, according to a Pentagon memo obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

The one-page "initial guidance" memo to National Guard leaders in border states does not address the estimated cost of the mission or when soldiers would be deployed.

Let's see:

No clear end date.
No estimate of the cost.
No clue about actual troop deployment.

And let's not forget the fact that Dubya's plan to deploy the National Guard to the Mexican border is coming at the same time as the GOP-controlled Congress is passing its own plan for building the that lovely border fence. These actions are pissing off both Mexico and other Latin American countries, at a time when US relations with that part of the world are already at a low point.

You're doing a heckuva job, Dubya.

Via AP.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:43 AM | Get permalink

So, is Dubya really just like Hitler?

Despite the frequency with which Dubya is compared to the Nazi dictator, claims about how the US is on the road to fascism tend mainly to show that the person making the claim knows little or nothing about fascism, let alone how this ideology was practiced in Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany. Instead, fascism is a conventient bogeyman to throw up whenever the current regime in Washington commits another of its many abuses of power.

As almost-a-historian (no, you can't ask me when I'll be finished with my master's thesis), wildly innacurate claims about how close the US is to fascism are really irritating — especially since there's a good case to be made that Dubya's US has a lot of the features of classical fascism of the Italian or German sort. Over at Majikthise, Lindsay offers a lot of useful information for the ideologically impaired in this thoughtful and well-crafted post about how the actions and policies of Dubya's administration match up with the kind of fascism that was practiced in the 1930s in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany.

I'm NOT saying that we have a fascist government in America today. The United States is a democracy, we still have a free press, and the armed forces haven't acquiesced to the one-man rule of George W. Bush. I'm not claiming that it's inevitable, or even especially likely, that America will eventually become a full-blown fascist state. I'm certainly not saying that anyone in power today is consciously striving to create a full-fledged fascist dictatorship on the model of Mussolini's Italy or Franco's Spain. What I am saying is that the Bush administration has embraced many of the key mutually-reinforcing ideological tenets of Fascism: militarism, imperialism, corporate statism, state-sponsored religion, male dominance, irrationalism, and mass propaganda....

For whatever reason, Fascism and modern [US] Republicanism share a set of ideas that has enduring appeal, especially when combined as an ideological package. I have attempted to show how these tendencies are mutually reinforcing and self-perpetuating. It is a mistake to ask how far fascism has "crept up" on us. Instead, we should be focusing on how unchecked militarism and corporate statism are already undermining our freedom, regardless of whether these fixtures of American politics are harbingers of an even darker future.

Those excerpts only scratch the surface of Lindsay's post. Read the rest here, and be sure to check out the comments, too.

Via BOPNews.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:02 AM | Get permalink

The NSA is better than a magic 8-ball.

Since they've been listening to everything said over the phone in the US since 2001, all the stuff they know should make them better at solving problems than Dear Abby, right?

Q: Should I be worried about this red bump on my arm?
A: You should be more worried about the lump on your kidney....

Q: I'm interviewing with AT&T, can you put in a good word for me?
A: Already taken care of.

Q: Where did I leave my keys?
A: Inside pocket of your gray jacket (it's hanging in the front closet).

There's more at Dear NSA. Make sure to read the Privacy Policy (heh) and the Terms & Conditions at the bottom of the page.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink

Friday, May 19, 2006

Mulch. Ugh.

Sorry for the slow posting today, but that evil pile of mulch that got delivered a few days ago sucked up all my time again today. This time, a housemate and I had to move around half a truckload of mulch from the street to the backyard in order to beat an impending rainstorm. We won, but the 30 or so wheelbarrow loads that I moved myself have turned my brain into mush.

The lesson I've learned is that mulch — even when more or less dry — is very heavy.

I'm hoping that my brain will be back soon and that I'll get some posts onto Magpie by this evening. Stay tuned.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:56 PM | Get permalink

Black-White relations in the US.

A very concise history.

I did it all myself!

You can see the rest of the story here.

Via The Sideshow.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Ignorant, proud of it, and not afraid to shove her ignorance down other peoples' throats.

I was going to make this one of my 'No comment' posts, but I realized that there was no way I could restrain from commenting on the activities of a Chicago-area woman named Leslie Pinney.

Pinney is a school board member for Northwest Suburban High School District 214, and she's pushing to get seven books taken off the high school reading list for next year. According to Pinney, the books are full of lews school board member Leslie Pinney is leading a push to get seven books bumped from required reading lists next year, saying they are full of lewd language and graphic sexual references.

I'm sure you're wondering which books she's talking about, so here's the list:

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent by Julia Alvarez
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan

While most of these books have are works of fiction that are frequently the targets of religious fundamentalists, the last two — Freakonomics and Botany of Desire — are best-selling non-fiction books, and I found their presence on Pinney's list puzzling. Apparently Pinney objects to Freakonomics because it makes the argument that murders go down in the US when abortion is legal. And the Botany of Desire gets on her shitlist because, in its discussion of the relationship between humans and plants, one of the plants used as an example is marijuana.

But Pinney doesn't object to the abortion or marijuana stuff because she read the books, mind you. In fact, she hasn't read any of the books that she finds so objectionable.

"I don't know if I would want to," she says.

Instead of reading the books, Pinney went out on the internet and found excerpts. And it's on the basis of those excerpts — likely cherry-picked and out of context quotes like these at the the website of the fundamentalist culture-warrior group Culture Campaign — that she finds the books unsuitable for teenage readers.

Basically, Pinney doesn't have to read a book to know it's unfit for young minds. All she needs is for someone else to tell her that it's unfit. And on that basis — acting as a public official — she's willing to try to impose her own ill-informed, narrow-minded views on the children of others. And it's people like her that are trying to make moral decisions for the entire country on issues like abortion, contraception, sexuality, civil rights, and immigration.

It's a great future they have in store for us, isn't it?

Via LISNews.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:11 PM | Get permalink

The big divide in US politics.

Despite what the major parties think, it's not between Democrats and Republicans. According to a new book by Canadian pollster Michael Adams, the real political divide is between people who vote and people who don't.

Adams' conclusions are reported in a new book, American Backlash which is reveiewed by Barbara McLintock at The Tyee. His conclusions are based based on extensive polling in the US, carried out by the Environics Research Group between 1992 and 2004. (In 2003, earlier data from this polling was the basis for a book on the differences between US and Canadian attitudes toward politics, culture, and religion. See this earlier Magpie post for more info.)

What all this polling found is that difference between Democrats and Republicans pale before the gap between people who vote and people who don't. And, says Adams, the attitudes of young adults who are alienated from politics altogether are even more extreme than those of nonvoters as a whole. What unites all the nonvoters is the three main values that drive them:

Risk-taking and thrill-seeking
Status-seeking
Darwinism and exclusion

While Adams sees all these values has worrisome, he's most concerned about the last one on the list. The people whose lives are driven by Darwinism and exclusion, he says, see 'brutal competition as a natural, exhilarating, and even cleansing condition for human coexistence — a dog-eat-dog world in which winners win by any means necessary, including violence, and losers get what they deserve — and are unworthy of sympathy or help.'

But, over the 12 years that polling was done, the most noteworthy change in the values held by people in the US was the increased acceptance of violence. From McLintock's review of the book:

[Acceptance of violence] and those values that support it, are certainly not the dominant values among American citizens at this time — but they are the values that are growing in acceptance faster than any others. And they are growing fastest among young people. When those aged 15 to 20 were asked to agree or disagree with the statement, "It's acceptable to use physical force to get something you really want," a full 38 per cent agreed. These values are also espoused by much higher numbers of the politically disengaged than by either Republicans and Democrats.

The over-all conclusion, Adams suggests, is that Republicans and Democrats both believe in the same over-arching vision. They believe that the state is a valuable tool to improve life for all citizens, that citizens have a responsibility to their community and to the larger society, and that the democratic process will lead to the best possible outcome for the largest possible number of citizens. They disagree, in fact, only on the details — the details of how much the state should provide help to the poor or tax relief to businesses, how much and what sort of aid should be given to developing countries, how far changes should go to guarantee principles like gender equity and equal treatment for immigrants.

The politically disaffected, on the other hand, do not share this vision. They see political life as corrupt or ineffective or both, and have become convinced that the only person you can or should depend upon is yourself in this "survival of the fittest" culture. [Emphasis mine]

And that vision, this magpie would submit, is the end result of the attack on liberal values that the US right has conducted for the past 30 years, in their successful campaign to gain political power.

You can read Barbara McLintock's full review of American Backlash here. Her comments on what Adams' findings may mean for Canadian politics are particularly interesting.

Penguin Canada's webpage for American Backlash is here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:58 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

It's Carnival of Feminists time again!

It seems that only yesterday the Carnival of Feminists was but a wee sprite, but time does fly. Today, the Carnival is up to its 15th edition — and quite the edition it is!

If you're unfamiliar with the Carnival of Feminists, it's a twice-monthly compendium of the best fenminist posts from around the web. This time around the Carnival's hosted and compiled by Holly at Self Portrait As, and you can read it in its entirety here.

As usual, though, I have some Carnival excerpts for you, this time from the section, 'Motherhood and Reproductive Rights':

Sunday was Mothers Day in the US. History News Network provides a history of the War against Mothers Day, which actually "originated to celebrate the organized activities of women outside the home."

Paula Martinac of Dementia Blues ("Funny/sad ruminations by a baby boomer on having two parents with dementia") writes about mother/daughter friendships: "maybe there is a generational thing going on - that baby-boomer mothers have fostered different relationships with their daughters than they had with their own mothers. Indeed, maybe there's a healthier and more enlightened approach to parenting among baby boomers that allows daughters to grow into adult friends. Imagine that!"

Miliana encourages some very reductive scientists trying to determine, based on a sampling of 29 graduate students at UC Santa Barbara, how women determine whether a man will be a good long- or short-term lover and/or father, to Put The Theory Down Gently and Back Away From This Idiocy Slowly....

And, did you know? Russia's population is in decline. Commenting on a plan by Mad Vlad Putin to encourage Russian women to bear more babies, Twisty Faster asks, "Gosh, was there ever a social crisis that couldn't be solved by governmental commandeering of women's uteruses?"

Apparently not. Because meanwhile, back in the US, embarrassed by the appalling child mortality rate (seven deaths per 1,000 lives births, a rate higher than that of almost all industrialized nations) in the world's richest, greediest country, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has issued new federal guidelines asking that "all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves -- and to be treated by the health care system -- as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon." Rebecca Traister of Salon's Broadsheet offers a spot-on analysis of this astonishing article in the Washington Post. As Traister points out, the crappy infant mortality rate has something to do with our crappy healthcare system, and has a racial component: "The infant mortality rate among black women is 13.5 per 1,000 live births, as compared with 5.7 for white women." But hey! Someone has an idea! Instead of fixing broken healthcare and economic systems, let's tell women to think of themselves as wombs with legs, all the time....

There's a ton more, on a variety of subjects, if you go look at the rest of the 14th Carnival over here.

The 16th Carnival is coming up on Wednesday, June 7th, and it will be hosted by Welcome to the Nut House. So far, no theme has been announced. To nominate a post, — and it's definitely okay to nominate one of your own — use this submission form at the Blog Carnival home page.

And if you want to keep posted on what's up with the Carnival of Feminists in general, bookmark the home page.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:30 PM | Get permalink

Those bad poll numbers are really getting to Dubya's administration.

Because the search for Osama bin Laden is heating up again, in obvious hopes that he'll be captured in time for Dubya to parade him in front of voters before November's election.

Via Asia Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:24 PM | Get permalink

In case you're not feeling sufficiently paranoid.

At The Sideshow, Avedon Carol reminds us that Dubya's administration reportedly hired the former head of the KGB as a homeland security consultant back in 2003.

I did some poking around and traced the story about Primakov and Homeland Security back to a March 17, 2003 article by Al Martin. (While the original doesn't appear to be online any more, it's been reposted in a number of places, including here.) I haven't found independent confirmation of Martin's story, but given the Dubya administration's track record regarding national security, I have little trouble believing that Primakov really did get his gig at the Homeland Security Department.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:27 AM | Get permalink

Very interesting indeed.

If I'd had a brain yesterday, I would have posted about a very interesting development in the NSA phone database story: Both Verizon and BellSouth have denied providing phone records to the NSA. Along with AT&T, these two companies had been named by USA Today as having provided the feds with records on millions of domestic phone calls.

My first response to those denial was that the telecoms were lying to protect their corporate asses. My second response was that, not only were they lying, but they had made sure that no records existed to show their participation in the NSA spying program. Today, a stories at Salon and Think Progress seem to show that my instincts were right.

While searching through Whitehouse.gov a week or so ago, Salon's Tim Grieve may have figured out why the telecoms denied helping the NSA: a May 5, 2006 'Memorandum for the Director National Intelligence' in which Dubya gave National Intelligence Directory John Negroponte 'the function of the president under section 13(b)(3)(A) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (15 U.S.C. 78m(b)(3)(A)).'

No, Grieve didn't have a clue as to what that power was, either. Luckily Judd Legum at Think Progress dug a bit into the section of the Securities Exchange Act in question. It turns out that this section deals with whether a company that cooperates with the government on a 'national security' matter has to report that activity.

With respect to matters concerning the national security of the United States, no duty or liability under paragraph (2) of this subsection shall be imposed upon any person acting in cooperation with the head of any Federal department or agency responsible for such matters if such act in cooperation with such head of a department or agency was done upon the specific, written directive of the head of such department or agency pursuant to Presidential authority to issue such directives....

What that legalese means is that, after a company cooperates with the feds in some national security endeavor, the president can waive the part of the Securities Exchange Act that normally would have required the company to report that activity.

If you don't already see where this is going, I'll spell it out:

May 5: As the controversy over the NSA's illegal wiretapping program heats up, Dubya issues a memorandum giving National Intelligence Director John Negroponte the power to let companies who cooperate in national security matters hide the public record of that cooperation.
May 10: USA Today publishes its story about the NSA's database containing records of billions of domestice telephone calls. According to the story, AT&T, BellSouth, and Verizon willingly provided call record data for that database.
May 15/16: Several days after the USA Today story, Verizon and BellSouth deny that they cooperated with the NSA.

A person could easily conclude that the administration either had advance notice of the USA Today article or was worried for other reasons that the existence of the NSA database was about to become public. To prevent this, Dubya gives Negroponte the right to let companies that cooperated with the NSA hide their participation. (By doing so, incidentally, Dubya makes it possible to deny any connection to the cover-up: 'I didn't tell the companies they could do that. It was Negroponte, acting without my knowledge.') With presidential authorization, Negroponte tells Verizon, BellSouth, and AT&T that they don't have to publicly report that they gave phone records to the NSA. Finally — surprise! — Verizon and BellSouth deny helping the NSA, and USA Today is looking like it reported something that wasn't true.

Of course, only someone who was really paranoid would believe that the administration would engineer such a scenario.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:37 AM | Get permalink

Don't worry.

I'm not sick and I didn't go on an unannounced hiatus.

The reason there were no posts yesterday is still sitting on the street in front of the Magpie roost: A huge pile of hemlock mulch. I spent a big part of the day moving wheelbarrow loads of mulch from the street to the back yard, and was just way too tired to do any posting afterwards.

The rest of the mulch can stay put. On to business as usual!

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:23 AM | Get permalink

Monday, May 15, 2006

Hey! It's an article about Murray Waas, not by him.

US News has a very interesting interview with investigative reporter Murray Waas of the National Journal. Waas has been responsible for some of the best reporting on the involvement of the White House in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Probably the most important information in the interview is that Waas is about to come out with another Plamegate article, this time about 'the level of knowledge among high-level administration officials about attempts to discredit [former ambassador Joseph] Wilson and when they knew about it.'

But my favorite part of the interview is this:

Before joining National Journal you were a longtime freelance investigative journalist. With what authority did you gain access and make sources in a town that's all about connections?

A guy working for Ken Starr was very upset when I was writing stories about his office during Whitewater. He wanted to know how I was doing my reporting and where I was getting my information. I was trying to convince him not to be threatened — told him I'm just a writer sitting in my home talking to you on a $19 Radio Shack Princess phone. Later I felt bad I didn't say something about democracy and the right to know. But six months later they said the same thing: "Where do you derive your authority?" At that point I had thought about it a lot, and I said "from the Constitution of the United States." So I had my Jimmy Stewart moment.

Nice, huh?

Via Atrios.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:59 PM | Get permalink

'There's the guy that's been standing motionless behind the president for the last 8 years.'

'What makes him think he could be president?'

That's Al Gore, talking about himself in a campaign video by Spike Jonze that we didn't see in 2000.

I don't which political consultant or campaign manager made the decision not to use this video. After seeing it, though, I do know that their decision probably cost Gore the election. You can't watch Gore talking informally and interacting with his family without changing your mind about what he's like, and what he might have been like as president. And given that this magpie is not the world's biggest fan of Al Gore, that's a big endorsement.

Via The Sideshow.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:05 PM | Get permalink

Got a warrant?

A big magpie welcome to everyone who's arrived here via The Sideshow! (And thanks to Avedon Carol for the link.)

After you read this post, I hope you'll take a look at some of the other posts here (like this one on how Dubya has made it possible for Verizon and BellSouth to turn your phone records over to the NSA and then have no record that they did the deed). Hopefully, you'll want to come back and visit again.

I suppose it was inevitable that someone would move in to make a buck off all the anxiety caused by revelations about how the government is spying on everyone. Sure enough, today we bumped into the opportunity to buy this doormat (left) currently being marketed by Target's online operation. Given how Target has restyled itself in recent years to be the Hipster Central of mass retailing, the doormat has the proper ironic pedigree.

From Target's ad copy:

A little defensive, are we? Then plunk this straight-to-the-point doormat on your front stoop. Sure to make visitors laugh, the simply designed and worded mat reads: Come back with a warrant....

Given the doormat's US$ 15.99 pricetag, this magpie will take a pass — especially given that Target is little better than Wal-Mart in terms of how it operates. Besides, not buying the doormat will give me one more thing to look for at garage sales.

Via The Consumerist.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:11 PM | Get permalink

Given everything else we know about how the feds are monitoring phone calls.

It shouldn't be any surprise that the government is tracking the phone numbers that news organizations are calling.

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

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. [Emphasis mine]

I suppose there's some small consolation in that, according to ABC's sources, the content of reporters' calls isn't being recorded. But then, the government has routinely lied about the extent of their domestic phone surveillance, so that assurance probably isn't worth a plug nickel.

Via ABC News' (US) The Blotter.

More: Consitutional lawyer Jack Balkin suggests that a lot of journalists must be making calls to al-Qaeda. A short, catty post worth clicking the link for.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:44 AM | Get permalink

Peeling back the skin of the onion.

And, as each layer is revealed, things in Dubya's US will be worse than we imagined.

That's some of what intelligence historian Matthew Aid had to say in a very interesting interview with Salon's Kim Zetter. Here's an excerpt:

Having studied the NSA and its history extensively, were you surprised and concerned to discover that, since 2001, the agency has been amassing a database of phone records, and possibly other information, on U.S. citizens?

The fact that the federal government has my phone records scares the living daylights out of me. They won't learn much from them other than I like ordering pizza on Friday night and I don't call my mother as often as I should. But it should scare the living daylights out of everybody, even if you're willing to permit the government certain leeways to conduct the war on terrorism.

We should be terrified that Congress has not been doing its job and because all of the checks and balances put in place to prevent this have been deliberately obviated. In order to get this done, the NSA and White House went around all of the checks and balances. I'm convinced that 20 years from now we, as historians, will be looking back at this as one of the darkest eras in American history. And we're just beginning to sort of peel back the first layers of the onion. We're hoping against hope that it's not as bad as I suspect it will be, but reality sets in every time a new article is published and the first thing the Bush administration tries to do is quash the story. It's like the lawsuit brought by EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] against AT&T -- the government's first reaction was to try to quash the lawsuit. That ought to be a warning sign that they're on to something.

I'll tell you where this story probably will go next. Notice the USA Today article doesn't mention whether the Internet service providers or cellphone providers or companies operating transatlantic cables like Global Crossing cooperated with the NSA. That's the next round of revelations. The real vulnerabilities for the NSA are the companies. Sooner or later one of these companies, fearing the inevitable lawsuit from the ACLU, is going to admit what it did, and the whole thing is going to come tumbling down....

Judging by the USA Today article last week [the NSA] found a way to get around those FISA restrictions and the Justice Department.

The USA Today article doesn't cover how the NSA convinced all of the phone companies to cooperate. Did General Hayden [former NSA director and current nominee to run the CIA] pick up the phone and call the CEOs? Or were they presented with National Security letters saying you will turn over all your records to us and keep it quiet within your organization? But it does seem clear that the Justice Department was excluded from all of this, or at least the parts of the Justice Department that would normally have some oversight over this.... I think they feared that if they passed it down to other departments that might have some purview over the program they might have encountered a stream of objections.

It's all coming out now in dribs and drabs, but when it all becomes clear, we'll find out that the key oversight functions -- those functions that were put in place to protect the rights of Americans -- were deliberately circumvented. Key components of the Justice Department that would have rightly objected to this were never consulted or told about the program. Alberto Gonzales when he was the White House counsel knew about it, as did Attorney General Ashcroft and his deputy, but outside of that I don't think there were many others who knew all the details.

The more that comes out about how Dubya's administration is really doing things, the more I'm reminded about the revelations that came out during and after the Watergate investigation. Back then, we on the left knew that Nixon's goons were spying on activists, but we didn't realize how much spying was going on, and how much that surveillance crossed the line into harassment and entrapment. We knew that Nixon and Kissinger were carrying out a secret foreign policy, but we didn't really know about the magnitude of the bombing of Laos and Cambodia, and we didn't know for a fact that the US had largely organized the bloody coup against Chilean president Salvador Allende. We knew that the government was listening to phone calls, but we had no idea that the NSA had been monitoring all international commmunications for decades.

It took years to unpeel the onion of Nixon's administration, and that onion turned out to have far more layers than even the most paranoid leftist conspiracy monger would have believed in, say, 1970. Like Aid suggests, we're undoubtedly just peeling back the outermost layer of Dubya's onion. The real horrors are still ahead.

The full interview is here.

[Paid sub or ad view req'd]

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:11 AM | Get permalink

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Connecting the dots in Dubya's border plan.

When the news broke that the prez was thinking about sending the National Guard to the Mexican border to deal with the 'immigration crisis,' I wasn't at all surprised — but I couldn't figure out why. Today, I went poking through the Magpie archives to see what I could find and, sure enough, I'd posted on April 23 about how Dubya's new chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, planned to save the prez's sorry political ass. Here's a quote from a Time magazine article that's now behind the pay firewall:

1. Deploy Guns and Badges.

This is an unabashed play to members of the conservative base who are worried about illegal immigration. Under the banner of homeland security, the White House plans to seek more funding for an extremely visible enforcement crackdown at the Mexican border, including a beefed-up force of agents patrolling on all-terrain vehicles (ATVs).... [Says a proponent of the plan:] "Think of the visuals. The President can go down and meet with the new recruits. He can go down to the border and meet with a bunch of guys and go ride around on an atv...." [Emphasis mine]

So the plan Dubya will announce in his big immigration speech tomorrow will involve sending lots of guns to the border in hopes that he can get his approval rating out of the low 30s (or high 20s, depending on what poll you trust).

Of course, I'm not the only blogger smart enough to remember the 'Bolten plan,' so I wandered out onto the internets to see who else was connecting the same dots that I was. Very quickly, I found this post by georgia10 over at Daily Kos, which adds yet another dot to the Dubya policy line:

So only now--when the President has hit 29% and W-brand Republicans are freaking out--has the President decided to send more guns to the border in another one of his carefully orchestrated photo-ops. Will anyone in the media bring up the fact that the President has refused to fully fund the border patrol?

Officially approved by Bush on Dec. 17 [2005] after extensive bickering in Congress, the National Intelligence Reform Act included the requirement to add 10,000 border patrol agents in the five years beginning with 2006. Roughly 80 percent of the agents were to patrol the southern U.S. border from Texas to California, along which thousands of people cross into the United States illegally every year.

But Bush's proposed 2006 budget, revealed Monday, funds only 210 new border agents.

The shrunken increase reflects the lack of money for an army of border guards and the capacity to train them, officials said.

There wasn't enough money to fully fund the border patrol with 10,000 agents in his budget, but there was more than enough money available to keep giving the wealthiest Americans their tax cut.

There you have it. The President's priorities, in black and white.

We'd just add that the president also doesn't seem to care that the National Guard is already over-stretched because of all the Guard members who are serving in Iraq. This deployment has affected the Guard's ability to respond to natural disasters — remember how most of the equipment that the Mississippi and Lousiana Guard needed to help during Hurricane Katrina had been sent to Iraq? Obviously, the White House isn't at all worried about making this problem worse.

And, of course, that big supporter of our troops who lives in the White House definitely doesn't care about whether Guard members get off the plane from Iraq and step onto another one that will take them to the border. After all, one desert is pretty much like another, isn't it?

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:23 PM | Get permalink

What are the Hebrew words for 'racism' and 'apartheid'?

Both words would be very handy in describing the Israeli High Court's decision to uphold a law barring Palestinians who marry Arab Israeli citizens from living in Israel with their spouses.

To understand what was at stake here, you need to remember that — depending on whether you count East Jerusalem into the total — between 15 and 20 percent of Israel's citizens are Arabs. (But not necessarily Muslim; many Arab Israelis are Christian.) While these Arab Israelis nominally have the same rights as Israelis of Jewish background, the reality is that the country's laws distinguishes between the two groups in a number of ways. One of these is a 2002 amendment to Israel's Citizenship Law, which forbids 'family unification' in marriages when one spouse is an Israeli Arab and the other is a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza. That amendment was supposedly a one-year emergency measure to protect 'national security,' but it has been extended every year since then. By today's 6-5 vote, the High Court has turned back a challenge to that amendment.

Israel's Chief Justice, Aharon Barak, sided with the minority on the bench, declaring: "This violation of rights is directed against Arab citizens of Israel. As a result, therefore, the law is a violation of the right of Arab citizens in Israel to equality."

Muad el-Sana, an Israeli Arab lawyer who is married to a Palestinian woman from the West Bank town of Bethlehem and works for Adalah, one of the agencies bringing the case, declared: "This is a very black day for the state of Israel and also a black day for my family and for the other families who are suffering like us. The government is preventing people from conducting a normal family life just because of their nationality."

Wile the court had granted el-Sana's wife, Abir, a university lecturer, a temporary injunction preventing her deportation, Mr el-Sana said the high court's ruling would make it almost impossible for the couple and their two children, aged 2 years and five months, to continue living together. Their individual petition said that he has no right to live in Bethlehem and she has no right to live with her husband in the Negev.

Mohammed Barakeh, a prominent Arab Knesset member on Sunday said the ruling "gives racism a shady alibi." He added: "The fact that the ruling was opposed by several of the judges is a ray of light that does not illuminate the darkness of the court's decision and the Knesset's legislation." [Emphasis mine]

Via UK Independent.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:34 PM | Get permalink

Is it any wonder that the Democrats keep losing national elections?

As long as there are party bigwigs with attitudes like the ones Adam Nagourney describes here, how could the GOP possibly lose?

Even as Democrats are doing everything they can to win, and believe that victory is critical for future battles over real issues, some of the party's leading figures are also speculating that November could represent one of those moments.

From this perspective, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world politically to watch the Republicans struggle through the last two years of the Bush presidency. There's the prospect of continued conflict in Iraq, high gas prices, corruption investigations, Republican infighting and a gridlocked Congress. Democrats would have a better chance of winning the presidency in 2008, by this reasoning, and for the future they enhance their stature at a time when Republicans are faltering.

Indeed, some Democrats worry that the worst-case scenario may be winning control of Congress by a slim margin, giving them responsibility without real authority. They might serve as a foil to Republicans and President Bush, who would be looking for someone to share the blame. Democrats need a net gain of 6 seats in the Senate, and 15 seats in the House. "The most politically advantageous thing for the Democrats is to pick up 11, 12 seats in the House and 3 or 4 seats in the Senate but let the Republicans continue to be responsible for government," said Tony Coelho, a former House Democratic whip. "We are heading into this period of tremendous deficit, plus all the scandals, plus all the programs that have been cut. This way, they get blamed for everything."

Mr. Coelho quickly added, "Obviously, from a party point of view we want to get in and do things, but I'm talking about the ideal political thing."

Right, Tony. I'm sure that people who are unemployed because their job just went overseas, or who have to deal with Dubya's inane Medicare drug 'benefit,' or who are dealing with a crippling educational loan burden, or who have a family member arrested on trumped-up terrorism charges by ~~Dubya's Gestapo~~ Homeland Security don't really care whether they have to deal with another two years of GOP government. I'm sure they can all put their lives on hold until the Dems win in 2008.

These 'party leaders' should all get a f'ing life.

Via NY Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:06 PM | Get permalink

'Gas is down to 19 cents a gallon and the oil companies are hurting.'

President Al Gore addresses the nation about the current problems facing the country. [QuckTime]

President Gore speaking from the Oval Office.

But only on Saturday Night Live, unfortunately.

Via YouTube.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:18 PM | Get permalink

The NSA can hear you now.

Once again, political cartoonist John Sherffius nails it.

Wrong number

[Cartoon © 2006 John Sherffius]

The full-sized cartoon is here. You can see more of Sherffius' cartoons over here.

Via Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:44 AM | Get permalink

Karl Rove indicted?

Hot on his Friday story that Rove had already told the White House that he expected to be indicted by the Plamegate grand jury, Jason Leopold is now reporting that Rove has indeed been indicted.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing Karl Rove.

During the course of that meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning.

Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, did not return a call for comment. Sources said Fitzgerald was in Washington, DC, Friday and met with Luskin for about 15 hours to go over the charges against Rove, which include perjury and lying to investigators about how and when Rove discovered that Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert CIA operative and whether he shared that information with reporters, sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said.

It was still unknown Saturday whether Fitzgerald charged Rove with a more serious obstruction of justice charge. Sources close to the case said Friday that it appeared very likely that an obstruction charge against Rove would be included with charges of perjury and lying to investigators.

According to Leopold, there will be an official announcement of the indictement sometime this week.

Leopold's report of Rove's indictment has not yet been confirmed by any other source, however.

You can read the full story here.

Via Truthout.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:27 AM | Get permalink

I bet he'll do a heckuva job at the CIA, too.

So is ex-NSA chief Michael Hayden really is the right man to head the CIA at this critical moment in our nation's history?

The Daily Show totally nails Dubya.

Via YouTube.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:20 AM | Get permalink