Magpie

Saturday, June 3, 2006

Conjuring up the terrifying spectre of same-sex marriage.

Dubya is doing it again, hoping that he can stem the erosion of his political base, and scare people into voting Republican this November.

In his radio address earlier today, the prez threw a big bone to his diminishing right-wing base by coming out four-square in favor of amending the Constitution to bar same-sex marriages. Here's a big chunk of the address, so that you can appreciate Dubya's pandering to the religious right in all of its homophobic, pandering awfulness:

The threat to the nation.
[Photographer unknown]

Marriage is the most enduring and important human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith. Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and a wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society. Marriage cannot be cut off from its cultural, religious, and natural roots without weakening this good influence on society. Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all.

In our free society, people have the right to choose how they live their lives. And in a free society, decisions about such a fundamental social institution as marriage should be made by the people -- not by the courts. The American people have spoken clearly on this issue, both through their representatives and at the ballot box. In 1996, Congress approved the Defense of Marriage Act by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate, and President Clinton signed it into law. And since then, voters in 19 states have approved amendments to their state constitutions that protect the traditional definition of marriage. And today, 45 of the 50 states have either a state constitutional amendment or statute defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. These amendments and laws express a broad consensus in our country for protecting the institution of marriage.

Unfortunately, activist judges and some local officials have made an aggressive attempt to redefine marriage in recent years. Since 2004, state courts in Washington, California, Maryland, and New York have overturned laws protecting marriage in those states. And in Nebraska, a federal judge overturned a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

These court decisions could have an impact on our whole Nation. The Defense of Marriage Act declares that no state is required to accept another state's definition of marriage. If that act is overturned by activist courts, then marriages recognized in one city or state might have to be recognized as marriages everywhere else. That would mean that every state would have to recognize marriages redefined by judges in Massachusetts or local officials in San Francisco, no matter what their own laws or state constitutions say. This national question requires a national solution, and on an issue of such profound importance, that solution should come from the people, not the courts.

I'm going to leave aside the fact that all of this is just posturing because — in the unlikely event that both houses of Congress pass the amendment by a two-thirds majority — there's no chance that two-thirds of the states will ratify it.

And I'll leave aside wondering how Dubya reconciles this comment:

In our free society, people have the right to choose how they live their lives.
with the fact that he's pushing a constitutional amendment that will keep millions of lesbian and gay citizens from being able to choose to live their lives as marrried couples.

Instead, what I want to talk about is the prez's insistence that 'decisions about such a fundamental social institution as marriage should be made by the people -- not by the courts.' Since Dubya isn't a student of history and doesn't read books, I'm sure he has no clue that the current debate over same-sex marriages is far from the first time the the people of the US have had to decide what kind of marriages are allowed and what kinds aren't. For much of the country's history, the 'will of the people' was that miscegenation — marriages between partners of different races — should be legally forbidden. Anti-miscegenation laws go all the way back to 1661, when the Virginia colony passed a law barring interracial marriages. By the early 20th century, 38 states had laws against marriages between blacks and whites, and some states also barred marriages between whites and Native Americans or other 'nonwhite' people.

Anti-miscegenation laws started getting taken off the books after the Second World War, but some states (mostly, but not all, in the South), didn't legalize interracial marriages until forced to by the US Supreme Court's 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia, in which it ruled that anti-miscegenation laws violate the 14th Amendment. Here's how Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded the Court's decision:

"Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."

In Loving v. Virginia, the Supremes tossed out centuries of US and English colonial law, which had made it impossible for interracial couples to marry. The Court didn't care that most people in the country probably would have supported anti-miscegenation laws, and it certainly didn't care that most Virginians were in favor of their state's ban on interracial marriages. What mattered to the justices was the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equality under the law of all US citizens. Denying the 'fundamental freedom' of citizens to marry violated that guarantee. While there's no way to know whether Chief Justice Warren would support same-sex marriages if he were alive today, ith few changes, Warren's conclusion could easily be used to make the constitutional case for overturning any legal obstructions to same-sex marriages.

So here we are in 2006, and the current president is blowing off the Supreme Court's conclusion in Loving, that laws governing marriage have to meet the same constitutional test as any other laws. Dubya knows that the proposed amendment banning same-sex marriages isn't going to go anywhere, but he's still willing to whip up public sentiment against those marriages and — more importantly — against 'activist' courts and judges that insist that the rights guaranteed by the Constitution apply to everyone, even if they're a gay man or a lesbian.

Given Dubya's insistence that what the people want is more important than what the law requires, this magpie would love to know what the prez thinks of the Loving v. Virginia ruling. Does he think that the Supremes were just another bunch of activist judges when they tossed out Virginia's ban on interracial marriages? Does he think that the Court should have deferred to the majority of Virginians who supported the ban? Does he think that the Loving decision should be overturned, just like he thinks Roe v. Wade should be tossed out?

Inquiring magpies want to know, and some journalist should put those questions to the prez sometime after he makes his big speech against same-sex marriage on Monday. (Helen Thomas, are you reading this?]

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:13 PM | Get permalink

Curious GWB raps.

Comin' right at you from the land of the brave and sorta kinda free.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:16 AM | Get permalink

Friday, June 2, 2006

Watch your back!

That's the one-sentence summary of Paul Krugman's latest NY Times column, in which he warns secretary Henry Paulson that Dubya is going to use him to cover his presidential butt.

Moreover, if past experience is any guide, you won't be pressured just to spin on the administration's behalf, you'll be pressured to lie.

Look at what happened to Edward Lazear, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers. Last month Mr. Lazear and another member of the council published an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal containing this astonishing assertion: "The president's tax cuts have made the tax code more progressive, which also narrows the difference in take-home earnings."

Now, you can play games with the meaning of the word "progressive," but by any measure the Bush tax cuts have made differences in after-tax earnings wider, not narrower. And just like that, any credibility that Mr. Lazear, a well-regarded academic without a prior reputation as a political hack, may have brought to the job was gone.

What will they ask you to lie about? Maybe you'll be asked to declare that we're on track toward a balanced budget. Or maybe you'll be asked to lie about environmental policy. Some of the administration's right-wing supporters opposed your selection because you are known as a supporter of action against global warming, so the political types might want you to throw them a bone by endorsing the administration's failure to do anything about the threat.

Right now, you're being flattered. You have a natural urge to be a team player. But if you play the game your new bosses want you to play, your credibility with the public will evaporate in no time at all. And when you're no longer useful to your new friends, you'll be tossed aside.

If you're a NY Times subscriber, you can read the full column here, behind the pay firewall. Otherwise, we suggest heading over here.

The usual big Magpie thank you to the Peking Duck.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:11 PM | Get permalink

More on the killings at Ishaqi.

Earlier, we posted about reports of another massacre committed by US troops in Iraq. This time, it was at the town of Ishaqi and a video obtained by the BBC show that 11 people, including five children, were killed.

On today's edition of Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed Knight Ridder's Matthew Schofield, who was the first reporter to obtain a copy of the Iraqi police report that accused US troops of being responsible for the deaths in Ishaqi. Here are some excerpts from the interview transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain exactly what you know at this point?

MATTHEW SCHOFIELD: Well, the story, as you and Juan just outlined it, pretty much goes through the basics of the story. We've talked quite a bit further in the last couple days with people surrounding the story. But what we have is a divergence on the story between the two -- there are two accounts. There?s a U.S. military account, and then there?s an Iraqi police account of what happened.

As you know, the U.S. military account is that after showing up and getting into a shootout to get into this house, the house collapsed during the shootout. People were killed either in the shootout or by the collapsing house. They left. They found four bodies and left. They found this suspect. They arrested him. And that's pretty much that story.

The other story is that the house was standing when the U.S. troops went in. They were herded into one room -- eleven people herded into one room, executed. U.S. troops then blew up the house and left.

We were talking with the police officer who was first on the scene earlier today. He explained the scene of arriving. He said they waited until U.S. troops had left the area and it was safe to go in. When they arrived at the house, it was in rubble. I don't know if you've seen the photos of the remains of the house, but there was very little standing. He said they expected to find bodies under the rubble. Instead, what they found was in one room of the house, in one corner of one room, there was a single man who had been shot in the head. Directly across the room from him against the other wall were ten people, ranging from his 75-year-old mother-in-law to a six-month-old child, also several three-year-olds -- a couple three-year-olds, a couple five-year-olds, and four other -- three other women.

Lined up, they were covered, and they had all been shot. According to the doctor we talked to today, they had all been shot in the head, in the chest. A number of -- you know, generally, some of them were shot several times. The doctor said it's very difficult to determine exactly what kind of caliber gun they were shot with. He said the entry wounds were generally small and round, the exit wounds were generally very large. But they were lined up along one wall. There was a blanket over the top of them, and they were under the rubble, so when the police arrived, and residents came to help them start digging in, they came across the blankets.

They came across the blankets. They picked the blankets up. They say, at that point, that the hands were handcuffed in front of the Iraqis. They had been handcuffed and shot. And the Iraqi assumption is that they were shot in front of the man across the room. They came to be facing each other. There is nothing to corroborate that. The U.S. is now investigating this matter, along with the Haditha matter. That's kind of where we stand right now....

AMY GOODMAN: You know, these stories are coming out one after another. The Haditha report, now the Navy launching a criminal investigation. This report that you have made, coming out of Balad. This is the week that President Bush is launching another sort of offensive, where he goes out and speaks to the public about the good-news stories that are coming out of Iraq and really going after the media, saying they choose only the negative stories. Your response?

MATTHEW SCHOFIELD: Well, if you?re looking at these two stories as isolated incidents of times when Iraqis believe Americans have gone out of control and killed people, that's missing the mark by a wide margin. This is commonplace everyday Iraqi belief. The belief over here is that this is happening all the time. What's different in these cases is that there is some level of credence given to it by U.S. investigations into the matter, by police reports.

In the county next to -- in the province next to Balad is Diala. Diala has officially named this "the year of the cop," because they're very pleased with the progress Iraqi police have been making, and they want to highlight the increasing professionalism of the police. What's going on in Balad is the police are going through their investigation, and they are targeting -- they are targeting Americans as the perpetrators in this. It's very similar to any crime, I suppose, at that level. And they're going about their business. And when we talk to them, they're saying, "Listen, we don't have any axe to grind here. This is just the way we're doing our work."

Now, if Bush wants to come out and say that we're ignoring the good news, I think there is, on the other side, an effort to ignore the depth of the bad news here.

You definitely should go read the whole interview.

The latest I've read about Ishaqi is that, in Baghdad, US Lt Gen William Caldwell has made a statement on the Ishaqi killings. The only copy of the statement that I've found is behind a firewall, so I can't tell you what he said. The speculation was the Caldwell would deny that the US had murdered the 11 Ishaqi civilians, which would be in line with a Pentagon statement earlier today that US troops were following their rules of engagement in Ishaqi.

Given the foot-dragging and denial that the US military went through in the months after the Haditha massacre, I'm not particularly optimistic that the Pentagon will be telling us the truth about what happened at Ishaqi any time soon.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:38 PM | Get permalink

A really expensive cat toy.

As ~~mauled~~ played with by one of the cutest cats ever. Video here.

Via MetaFilter.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:04 AM | Get permalink

If you're not already scared about surveillance, you should be now.

In an attempt to dramatically increase the degree to which the government can track what people are doing online, Dubya's administration has asked major internet providers and phone companies to start keeping detailed records of which websites their customers are visiting and who they are communicating with via email. Plus the feds want those records kept for two years.

According to reports in both the LA Times and NY Times, this request came during a meeting that US attorney general Alberto Gonzales and FBI director Robert Mueller in two meetings held with privacy experts and with representatives of America Online, Microsoft, Google, Verizon, Comcast and other companies. One meeting was on May 26, the other on June 1.

From the LA Times story:

[The government request] follows disclosure this year that the Justice Department had solicited potentially billions of online search queries from some of the same companies and that the National Security Agency had requested calling records of virtually all U.S. customers.

Gonzales and Mueller asked Google Inc., Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and other companies to preserve the data at a May 26 meeting, citing their value to investigations into child-pornography distribution and terrorism. Internet companies typically keep customer histories for only a few days or weeks.

The Justice Department said Thursday that it was not seeking to have e-mail content archived, just information about the websites people visit and those with whom they correspond.

Beyond law enforcement, though, the trove also could be available to lawyers arguing civil lawsuits — including divorce cases and suits against people suspected of swapping copyrighted movie and music files online. Privacy advocates fear the user histories could be exploited by criminal investigators conducting inappropriate exploration or pursuing minor cases.

"This is not simply limited to kiddie porn or terrorism. It's a real break with precedent," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Data retention is open-ended. The government is saying, 'Keep everything about everyone and we'll sort it out later.'"

From the NY Times story:

An executive of one Internet provider that was represented at the first meeting said Mr. Gonzales began the discussion by showing slides of child pornography from the Internet. But later, one participant asked Mr. Mueller why he was interested in the Internet records. The executive said Mr. Mueller's reply was, "We want this for terrorism."

At the meeting with privacy experts yesterday, Justice Department officials focused on wanting to retain the records for use in child pornography and terrorism investigations. But they also talked of their value in investigating other crimes like intellectual property theft and fraud, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, who attended the session.

"It was clear that they would go beyond kiddie porn and terrorism and use it for general law enforcement," Mr. Rotenberg said.

The feds' request for online records is hardly an isolated action. Just off the top of our head, we could think of these other things that Dubya's administration has been doing to curtail privacy and civil liberties:

Under the Patriot Act, the feds can search your house and possessions without a warrant and without telling you.
Also under the Patriot Act, the feds can find out what books you've been reading at the library, and they don't have to tell you about that, either. Plus the library can't say a peep about whether the feds have come a-prowling.
Dubya has slapped the label 'enemy combatant' onto US citizens and claimed the power to hold them indefinitely, without charges or trial.
The NSA is collecting records on all of your phone calls, and very possibly listening in on some of them — all without warrants.

I know I've missed some other stuff — as I said, those are just the ones that come off the top of my head. Feel free to add to the list in the comments.

As Rachel Maddow noted this morning on her Air America radio program, the water in the pot is certainly boiling now. All of us frogs better start taking notice or we're going to get cooked.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:20 AM | Get permalink

Wasn't one massacre enough?

As the White House scrambles to control the political damage from the killings by US Marines of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha last November, the BBC reports that US troops may have killed 11 civilians in Ishaqi this past March.

Map showing Ishaqi

The US military had previously said that four people were killed during a military operation in Ishaqi, an account diputed at the time by Iraqi policy who said that US troops had deliberately shot and killed 11 unarmed people. A video obtained by the BBC appears to contradict the US account of the events in Ishaqi.

The US authorities said they were involved in a firefight after a tip-off that an al-Qaeda supporter was visiting the house.

According to the Americans, the building collapsed under heavy fire killing four people — a suspect, two women and a child.

But a report filed by Iraqi police accused US troops of rounding up and deliberately shooting 11 people in the house, including five children and four women, before blowing up the building.

Two dead Iraqi children after the 'incident' at Ishaqi.
[Image: BBC]

The video tape obtained by the BBC shows a number of dead adults and children at the site with what our world affairs editor John Simpson says were clearly gunshot wounds.

The pictures came from a hardline Sunni group opposed to coalition forces.

It has been cross-checked with other images taken at the time of events and is believed to be genuine, the BBC's Ian Pannell in Baghdad says.

US military authorities told the BBC that they are investigating the Ishaqi killings. Given the military's apparent attempts to ignore and then cover up the massacre at Haditha, I'm not holding my breath waiting for the results.

Veteran Mideast journalist Chris Allbritton has some comments about how seriously the video should be taken:

Now, just because a Sunni group supplied this video doesn?t mean it should be discounted. Greeted with skepticism, yes, discounted, no. The group that brought the Haditha video to our attention at TIME was a Sunni NGO opposed to the American presence, and Haditha looks to be exactly as they described it: a massacre. Also, it makes absolute sense that a Sunni group would be the messenger. Thanks to the rampant sectarianism, only Sunni groups can operate in Sunni areas, and they?re bearing the brunt of the violence from the U.S....

But, also, this is what happens when democracies go to war in a media age: The innocents &#!51; or aggrieved — take their case to the American people. If their own government won?t protect them, perhaps the people that elected the government that put their government in place will. It?s a vain hope, I know, but what else do they have left?

You can watch the BBC's story about the Ishaqi video here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:02 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, June 1, 2006

Did the GOP steal the 2004 presidential election?

Robert F Kennedy Jr says 'Yes!', and he marshals an impressive amount of information to back that claim in this article in Rolling Stone.

[Illustration: Matt Mahurin/Rolling Stone]

While I didn't notice any blockbuster revelations in the article, I'm not sure that was what's needed now. Instead, what Kennedy did very well was to bring together the disparate threads that are involved in deciding the question of whether fraud occurred in 2004, and then tie them together in a way that's easy to read. And, importantly, which makes it clear why the questions about Dubya's re-election are not ancient history.

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. "We didn't have one election for president in 2004," says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. "We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities."

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004 -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes. (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots. And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

Kennedy's full article is here. Some very interesting charts are here (although I wish Rolling Stone had provided them in a larger size).

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:18 PM | Get permalink

Spyin' on the spies.

If there's that the world's wiretappers and spies like to keep more secret than what they do at work, it's what they do when they get together at a conference. Wired recently sent Thomas Greene off to see what he could find out about the ISS World conference — the annual gathering of companies that sell the high-tech paraphernalia that's used by corporations and repressive (and allegedly not-so-repressive) governments to eavesdrop on the rest of us. Not surprisingly, the conference doesn't allow journalists in the door. Despite that, Greene had no problem getting info while drinking at the hotel bar with conference attendees, or getting a group of friendly attendees to let him make a copy of the oh-so-secret conference CD-ROM — which, of course, contained nothing at all worth calling secret.

Oh, and Greene did manage to get by the door guards and into the conference.

In the bar that night, things got interesting. A group of men associated with the Pen-Link and Lincoln electronic surveillance systems came in. I exchanged small talk with them for a bit, then moved to their table. Although I had identified myself as a journalist, an enthusiastic reseller of the equipment decided to hold forth. We drank a great deal, so I won't name him.

"I'm not much concerned about wiretaps in America and Europe," I'd been saying to one of the Pen-Link engineers, "but I wonder if it bothers you to consider what this technology can do in the hands of repressive governments with no judicial oversight, no independent legislature."

Our man interrupted. "You need to educate yourself," he said with a sneer. "I mean, that's a classic journalist's question, but why are you hassling these guys? They're engineers. They make a product. They don't sell it. What the hell is it to them what anyone does with it?"

"Well, it's quite an issue," I said. "This is the equipment of totalitarianism, and the only things that can keep a population safe are decent law and proper oversight. I want to know what they think when they learn that China, or Syria, or Zimbabwe is getting their hands on it."

"You really need to educate yourself," he insisted. "Do you think this stuff doesn't happen in the West? Let me tell you something. I sell this equipment all over the world, especially in the Middle East. I deal with buyers from Qatar, and I get more concern about proper legal procedure from them than I get in the USA."

"Well, perhaps the Qataris are conscientious," I said, "and I'm prepared to take your word on that, but there are seriously oppressive governments out there itching to get hold of this stuff."

He sneered again. "Do you think for a minute that Bush would let legal issues stop him from doing surveillance? He's got to prevent a terrorist attack that everyone knows is coming. He'll do absolutely anything he thinks is going to work. And so would you. So why are you bothering these guys?"

"It's a valid question," I insisted. "This is powerful stuff. In the wrong hands, it could ruin political opponents; it could make the state's power impossible to challenge. The state would know basically everything. People would be getting rounded up for thought crimes."

"You're not listening," he said. "The NSA is using this stuff. The DEA, the Secret Service, the CIA. Are you kidding me? They don't answer to you. They do whatever the hell they want with it. Are you really that naïve? Now leave these guys alone; they make a product, that's all. It's nothing to them what happens afterward. You really need to educate yourself."

The whole article (which you'll find here) is fascinating reading. But if you only read part of it, go to the last page and read the bottom half for Greene's take on the entire surveillance 'industry.'

You can see the public web pages for the ISS World Conference here.

Via Boing Boing.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:15 PM | Get permalink

Don't bother the White House abou trivial stuff like nuclear smuggling.

Swiss Radio reports that US authorities are hindering a Swiss investigation into an international nuclear smuggling network. The Swiss asked Washington for assistance a year ago, but so far haven't got any reply to their request.

The Swiss investigation concerns the nuclear smuggling network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the principal scientist behind Pakistan's nuclear bomb. Pakistan is a key ally in Dubya's 'war on terror,' which may have just a teensy bit to do with the lack of cooperation from the White House.

Washington's failure to respond to "multiple" Swiss appeals was revealed last week by former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright....

"It is difficult to understand the actions of the US government. Its lack of assistance needlessly complicates this important investigation," said Albright, who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.

The Swiss Federal Prosecutor's Office said it still expected a response to its requests for assistance....

The Swiss authorities have arrested three men from the same family — Friedrich, Urs and Marco Tinner — on suspicion of helping to supply gas centrifuge parts for use in Libya's nuclear weapons programme between 2001 and 2003. Gas centrifuges are a vital element in the production of weapons-grade material.

Urs Tinner is said to have supervised the production of more than 2,000 centrifuge parts in Malaysia. A German-registered freighter carrying components from Malaysia to Libya was intercepted in autumn 2003.

Swiss authorities are investigating whether the men broke Swiss legislation on war materials by knowingly contributing to the production of nuclear weapons....

Albright told a US House of Representatives committee that the Libyan authorities had "greatly assisted" Switzerland in its legal requests, allowing a visit to Tripoli to interview witnesses last month.

He added that law enforcement agencies in the Far East and in South Africa had also cooperated with Swiss prosecutors.

Libya is cooperating with the Swiss investigation, but not the US?

Obviously Dubya's administration is too busy contemplating nuclear strikes on Iran and builidng bunker-busting nuclear weapons to worry about illegal trafficking in nuclear material. It's not like that stuff has any practical use or anything. I mean, if terrorists were like to want nuclear material, I'm sure the White House would be right on top of things.

There's more on this story here at Daily Kos.

Via swissinfo.

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

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

The banner formerly known as star-spangled.

The latest from political cartoonist John Sherffius.

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 5:16 PM | Get permalink

Dubya's administration gives under-30s the shaft.

It's about to get much harder for college students (and their parents) to pay their education costs. On July 1, the interest rates for federally backed Stafford and PLUS student loans will be taking going up two points, which works out to an increase of about 40 percent for students and 30 percent for parents. Currently, the interest on loans to students is 4.7%; in July, that rate will be 6.8%. Similarly, parents who are now paying 6.1% interest on education loans will be paying 8.5% in July.

These increases are another example of how Dubya and the GOP-led Congress are making low and middle-income families pay for the escalating budget deficit, instead of taxing corporations and the wealthy. In order to help rein Dubya's deficit in, Congress voted earlier this year to eliminate the current variable-rate loans and replace then with cheaper (for the feds, anyway) fixed-rate loans. The new fixed-rate loans will add to the crushing debt burden that the average student acquires while getting a college education.

All of this is a good introduction to an interview that AlterNet's Laura Barcella recently did with Tamara Draut, the author of the book Strapped. In that book Draut looks at how government policies since the late 1970s have made it much harder for students and young adults to enter — or keep from falling out of — the middle class. Largely under the influence of supply-side economists, the feds and states have retreated from the post-World War 2 promise of cheap or free higher education, while at the same time failing to ensure the creation of an adequate number of full-time jobs that pay a living wage and come with benefits.

Here's part of the interview:

LB: Can you give us a brief overview of why exactly "getting ahead" has gotten so much harder for young people today?

TD: Today's generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings are experiencing the fallout of a three-decade-long shift in our culture and politics. A generation ago, three factors helped smooth the transition to adulthood. The first was the fact that there were jobs that provided good wages, even for high school graduates. A college degree wasn't necessary to earn a decent living. But even if you wanted to go, it wasn't that expensive, and grants were widely available.

The second was an economy that lifted all boats, with productivity gains shared by workers and CEOs alike. The result was a massive growth of the middle class, which provided security and stability for families.

Third, a range of public policies helped facilitate economic mobility and opportunity: a strong minimum wage, low college tuition and generous financial aid, major incentives for homeownership and a solid safety net for those falling on hard times. Simply put, the government had your back. This world no longer exists. The story of what happened is well-known.

As the nation's shift to a service-based economy accelerated, the new economy dramatically changed the way we lived and worked. Relationships between employers and employees became more tenuous, as corporations faced global competitors and quarterly bottom-line pressures from Wall Street. Increasingly, fringe benefits like health care and pension plans were only provided to well-paid workers. Wages rose quickly for educated workers and declined for those with only high school degrees, resulting in new demands for college credentials.

As most families saw their incomes stagnate or decline, they needed two full-time incomes just to stay afloat, creating new demands on working parents. Getting into the middle class now required a four-year college degree, and even that was no guarantee of the American dream.

While adults of all ages have endured the economic and social changes brought by post-industrialization, today's young adults are the first to experience its full weight as they try to start their adult lives. But the challenges facing young adults also reflect the failure of public policy to address the changing realities of building a life in the 21st century. Government no longer has our back. As young adults today are working to get into the middle class, they're being hit by a one-two punch: The economy no longer generates widespread opportunity, and our public policies haven't picked up any of the slack....

LB: How have the Bush administration's policies affected the lives of Generation X (and Y) for better or -- more likely -- for worse?

TD: The policies of the Bush administration and Congress have made the future look even grimmer for young people. The soaring national deficit and debt will be our burden to pay. Three rounds of tax cuts have further constrained our nation's ability to get serious about shoring up our investments in education and health care. Most recently, Congress made major cuts to financial aid for college, including raising the cost of federal student loans. The Bush administration has taken the creed of selfish individualism to new heights -- and the public good has suffered as a result.

A comparison of my experience as a young adult certainly bears out Draut's thesis. After I graduated from high school, I was able to attend community college almost for free. As I recall, the fees were about US$ 180 per year, which was not very much money even by 1970s standards. When I transferred to a public university, I paid all of $1800 per year in fees, almost all of which was taken care of by state and federal grants and scholarships. I did have to take out a small federal student loan, on which I paid (I believe) 1.5% interest.

Even before I had my community college degree, the minimum wage jobs I worked were sufficient to allow me to move away from home into a series of shared houses and apartments, and to live at a decent — although somewhat frugal — standard. Quickly, though, I was able to get a union job with the telephone company, where even my starting wage was almost twice the minimum.

At the end of my college years, I'd worked myself up to the top of the phone company's pay scale, which allowed me to live by myself and save money besides. And I was able to pay my small student loan burden off ahead of time.

Since then, as Draut points out, the miminum wage has dropped through the floor, good jobs — especially for young people without a college education — have almost disappeared, and student grants have been replaced by high-interest student loans. I have no idea how anyone under 30 can survive under these conditions, let alone get ahead.

You'll find the full interview with Tamara Draut here. I recommend it highly.

Via St Petersburg Times and AlterNet.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:32 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

A commencement address worth reading.

This one was given by former Nation editor Victor Navasky on May 25 at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Navasky kept his address short, covering five topics quickly. Here's the fourth one:

I come before you in my capacity as an officially certified danger. I am pleased to report that when one David Horowitz, one-time lefty but now a hardcore neoconservative, recently published his book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, I made the cut. I really don't feel that I earned it, and I regret that he is not more of a scholar--he got most of his facts wrong, not just about me but about his 100 other subjects as well--but I will say that I was flattered to be included. I feel about it the way Lee Hayes, a member of that wonderful folk-singing group from the 1950s, The Weavers, felt about what happened during the McCarthy era. He said, "If it wasn't for the honor of the thing, I'd just as soon not have been blacklisted."

Getting blacklisted is not always something that is within your control, so I can't advise you on how to get on a blacklist. But I can remind you that there are two themes in American history: the theme of freedom, of liberty, of free speech, of Thomas Paine and Jefferson and the First Amendment, the Bill of Rights and all the other good things we were taught in civics and social studies classes. The other is the theme of repression and intolerance, and it goes all the way back to the Alien and Sedition Acts, to the raids on radicals during and after World War I, the internment of the Japanese in World War II, the so-called McCarthy era (I say so-called because it began before the senator from Wisconsin appeared on the scene and its legacy lasted long after he drowned in alcohol) and most recently to the suspension of the rights and liberties of Muslims and other suspected terrorists in the post-9/11 period; and the broad-brush attempt on the part of the Administration and its supporters to portray dissent as disloyalty, dissenters as traitors.

This latter development, part of the misnamed "war on terrorism," places an extra burden on you but an opportunity as well.

In my view, the "war on terrorism" is misnamed because real wars are won and lost. The so-called "war on terrorism"--which is held forth as the reason for the suspension of our rights and liberties--almost by definition can't be won. If Saddam Hussein is sentenced to death and executed and Osama bin Laden is picked up tomorrow, there will still be a car bombing the day after. What it means is that if the powers that be have their way, the suspension of our rights and liberties will be perpetual.

Yes, terrorists pose a serious problem, but it is important also to recognize that in the long history of counter-subversion, the counter-subversives invariably do more damage than the subversives they set out to disable. My advice: Use your prestige and where relevant your scholarship, your powers of analysis and persuasion to stand up to unjust authority.

Like I said at the top of the post, it's worth your time to read all of Navasky's address — it's a pretty good pep talk for all of us. You'll find it here.

Via The Nation.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:45 PM | Get permalink

What happens when you deliberately try to kill your PC?

18 days of this.

Prelaunch: I ask friends and relatives to forward me their nastiest-looking spam. In response, I start getting emails from my mom with discomforting subject lines like "Dating for kinky people!" I disable all my firewalls and virus-protection software.

Day 1: I click on Viagra come-ons, Chinese-language ads, and anything else I can point my cursor at. "Gain" spyware, "MORE SIZE!" enticements, and Free Smut Club offers pop up every few minutes — a decent start. But I crave viruses. Frustratingly, Yahoo Mail refuses to open the dozens of dubious attachments I've forwarded to myself.

It gets much worse.

Via Wired.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:15 PM | Get permalink

South Dakotans to vote on abortion ban repeal.

Opponents of South Dakota's draconian new abortion law have apparently collected enough signatures to put a measure repealing that law on the November ballot. The South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families says it has collected almost 38,000 signatures on a petition calling for a vote on the abortion law — more than twice the number required to get onto the ballot. While those signatures still have to be validated, there's little doubt that the abortion ban will go to the ballot.

The group's petition also has another important effect: Once the signatures are certified, the state is barred from implementing the new abortion law on July 1 as scheduled. That law, passed by the legislature in March, bans all abortions, including those when the pregnancy is caused by rape or incest. Doctors who perform abortions could receive a US$ 5,000 fine and a five-year prison terms. That law was passed as a deliberate challenge to the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, in the hopes that the new Court majority would vote to make abortion illegal again.

Via Reuters.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:02 PM | Get permalink

She's here, she's queer ...

... and she's a costumed super-hero???

Gotta love those heels, eh?

DC comics has confirmed that the character Batwoman is about to make a comeback as a 'lipstick lesbian' who fights crime afterhours. The straight version of Batwoman was last seen when she was killed off in 1979.

Batwoman — real name Kathy Kane — will appear in 52, a year-long DC Comics publication that began this month.

In her latest incarnation, she is a rich socialite who has a romantic history with another 52 character, ex-police detective Renee Montoya....

The new-look Batwoman is just one of a wave of ethnically and sexually diverse characters entering the DC Comics universe.

Others include Mexican teenager Blue Beetle — who replaces the character's previous white incarnation — and the Great Ten, a government-sponsored team of Chinese superheroes.

Regular characters Firestorm and The Atom, meanwhile, have been reinvented as black and Asian heroes respectively.

The characters are part of a wider effort to broaden the make-up of comic-book creations in line with society as a whole.

While this magpie's all in favor of lesbian superheroes, what's with Batwoman's heels? I mean, crimefighting is a tough enough gig without risking your life every time you try to run.

From BBC, via Pam's House Blend.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:33 PM | Get permalink

What the Supremes' whistleblower decision really means.

Here's part of constitutional lawyer Jack Belkin's take on the Court majority's ruling that the on-the-job speech of government employees is not protected by the First Amendment:

In the original decision in this line of cases, Pickering, the Court suggested that one reason for protecting employee speech is that employees, by their position and expertise, might have information and perspectives that would be particularly valuable contributions to the public in deliberation about public issues. Not all employees would, of course, but enough would that protecting employee speech would leverage their knowledge and expertise.... The Pickering test, as originally conceived, sought to promote the spread and diffusion of valuable information from people who would have reason to know about government policies and whether they made sense or were inefficient, unwise, corrupt, or illegal.

The problem with this vision was that it ran headlong into the government's interest in preserving workplace harmony and managerial efficiency. No employer likes an employee who makes him or her look bad, and this almost always causes strife within the workplace, since the employee who complains is almost always suggesting that someone else did a bad job, was corrupt, or in [LA County prosecutor Richard] Ceballos's case, acted illegally.

Instead, the Court has retreated to a vision of employee speech cases where employees are protected only where they are least likely to be in a position to know what they are talking about ...

After Ceballos, employees who do know what they are talking about will retain First Amendment protection only if they make their complaints publicly without going through internal grievance procedures. Although the Court suggests that its decision will encourage the creation and use of such internal procedures, it will probably not have that effect.... Hence employees will have incentives not to use such procedures but to speak only in public if they want First Amendment protections (note that if they speak both privately and publicly, they can be fired for their private speech). However, if they speak only publicly, they essentially forfeit their ability to stay in their jobs, first because they become pariahs, and second, because they have refused to use the employer's internal mechanisms for complaint (mechanisms which, if they used them, would eliminate their First Amendment rights). In short, whatever they do, they are pretty much screwed. So the effect of the Court's decision is to create very strong incentives against whistleblowing of any kind. (Another possible result of the case is that employees will have incentives to speak anonymously or leak information to reporters and hope that the reporters don't have to reveal their sources). {Emphasis mine]

Belkin's full post is well worth reading. You'll find it here.

Via Belkinization.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:08 PM | Get permalink

Dubya's latest Supreme Court appointments are starting to pay off.

And we hope that all of those Democratic and 'moderate' GOP senators who voted to confirm Roberts and Alito are really happy with the fruits of their spinelessness.

Today, those two new members of the Supremes flexed their muscles in an important decision limiting the legal protections for government whistle-blowers. On a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that government employees are not protected by the First Amendment when carrying out their official duties — even if they are speaking out to expose alleged wrongdoing by the government. According to the Court's majority, anything a government employee says while carrying out their job is, in effect, a government pronouncement. Because of this, the government has the right to keep employees' speech consistent with government policy and needs.

Today's ruling came in a the case of Garcetti v. Ceballos, in which LA County prosecutor Richard Ceballos sued his employer (former LA County district attorney Gil Garcetti) for demoting him after he'd written a memo in which he argued that a sheriff's deputy had lied when asking for a search warrant. Ceballos argued that this memo should have been protected speech, since the question of whether the Sheriff's office tells the truth when asking for warrants is a matter of public concern. And, said Ceballos, the DA's office acted wrongly when it retaliated against him by demoting him and denying promitions. On the other hand, district attorney Garcetti argued that Ceballos' memo was not protected speech. Since Ceballos wrote that memo in his capacity as an employee of the DA's office — not in his capacity as a citizen — the First Amendment didn't apply.

When the case went to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, that court sided with Ceballos, ruling that the DA's office had illegally retaliated against him for exercising his free-speech rights. Today, however, the new majority on the US Supreme Court tossed that earlier ruling away.

It's worth looking at part of the majority opinion to see how far the Court's right wing have gone in their gutting of First Amendment protection of the speech of government employees:

The controlling factor in Ceballos' case is that his expressions were made pursuant to his duties as a calendar deputy.... That consideration — the fact that Ceballos spoke as a prosecutor fulfilling a responsibility to advise his supervisor about how best to proceed with a pending case — distinguishes Ceballos' case from those in which the First Amendment provides protection against discipline. We hold that when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline....

Ceballos did not act as a citizen when he went about conducting his daily professional activities, such as supervising attorneys, investigating charges, and preparing filings. In the same way he did not speak as a citizen by writing a memo that addressed the proper disposition of a pending criminal case. When he went to work and performed the tasks he was paid to perform, Ceballos acted as a government employee. The fact that his duties sometimes required him to speak or write does not mean his supervisors were prohibited from evaluating his performance. [Emphasis mine]

Do you see what the majority is saying? When you go work for the government, you leave your right to free speech at the door. If you have the temerity to point out wrongdoing to your employer — or even to disagree with your employer — you're not protected by the First Amendment. While the Court doesn't forbid you from speaking out, it also gives your employer the right to fire you or to retaliate in other ways.

Nice, huh?

You can get a sense of the questionable basis for the majority's opinion by the fact that all four of the minority justices either wrote or joined in dissenting opinions. [All emphasis is mine]

From the dissent of John Paul Stevens, in which he challenges the majority's notion that you can draw a line between the protected speech of a citizen and the unprotected speech of an employee — especially in the case of 'unwelcome speech' that 'reveals facts that the supervisor would rather not have anyone else discover':

[Public] employees are still citizens while they are in the office. The notion that there is a categorical difference between speaking as a citizen and speaking in the course of one?s employment is quite wrong. Over a quarter of a century has passed since then-Justice Rehnquist, writing for a unanimous Court [in Givhan v. Western Line Consol. School Dist.], rejected "the conclusion that a public employee forfeits his protection against governmental abridgment of freedom of speech if he decides to express his views privately rather than publicly...." We had no difficulty recognizing that the First Amendment applied when Bessie Givhan, an English teacher, raised concerns about the school?s racist employment practices to the principal.... Our silence as to whether or not her speech was made pursuant to her job duties demonstrates that the point was immaterial. That is equally true today, for it is senseless to let constitutional protection for exactly the same words hinge on whether they fall within a job description. Moreover, it seems perverse to fashion a new rule that provides employees with an incentive to voice their concerns publicly before talking frankly to their superiors.

From the dissent of Stephen Breyer, in which he essentially accuses the majority of crafting a legal nuclear weapon to solve a nonexistent problem:

Like the majority, I understand the need to "affor[d] government employers sufficient discretion to manage their operations...." And I agree that the Constitution does not seek to "displac[e] ... managerial discretion by judicial supervision...." Nonetheless, there may well be circumstances with special demand for constitutional protection of the speech at issue, where governmental justifications may be limited, and where administrable standards seem readily available — to the point where the majority's fears of department management by lawsuit are misplaced....

The respondent, a government lawyer, complained of retaliation, in part, on the basis of speech contained in his disposition memorandum that he says fell within the scope of his obligations under Brady v. Maryland, 373 U. S. 83 (1963). The facts present two special circumstances that together justify First Amendment review.

First, the speech at issue is professional speech — the speech of a lawyer. Such speech is subject to independent regulation by canons of the profession. Those canons provide an obligation to speak in certain instances. And where that is so, the government's own interest in forbidding that speech is diminished....

Second, the Constitution itself here imposes speech obligations upon the government's professional employee. A prosecutor has a constitutional obligation to learn of, to preserve, and to communicate with the defense about exculpatory and impeachment evidence in the government's possession.... So, for example, might a prison doctor have a similar constitutionally related professional obligation to communicate with superiors about seriously unsafe or unsanitary conditions in the cellblock.... There may well be other examples.

Where professional and special constitutional obligations are both present, the need to protect the employee's speech is augmented, the need for broad government authority to control that speech is likely diminished, and administrable standards are quite likely available. Hence, I would find that the Constitution mandates special protection of employee speech in such circumstances.

And this part of a dissent by David Souter (in which he was joined by Justices Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) is especially worth noting:

This ostensible domain beyond the pale of the First Amendment is spacious enough to include even the teaching of a public university professor, and I have to hope that today's majority does not mean to imperil First Amendment protection of academic freedom in public colleges and universities, whose teachers necessarily speak and write "pursuant to official duties."

I'd also point to something else that indicates the political nature of today's whistleblower decision. The Court originally heard arguments in this case last fall, while Sandra Day O'Connor was still a justice. However, the Court reheard the case early this year, so that O'Connor's replacement — arch-conservative Samuel Alito — could take part in the ruling.

My reading is that Chief Justice Roberts knew that if O'Connor had participated in the ruling, the decision would have gone the other way, and affirmed Ceballos' First Amendment rights. Instead, Roberts held the case over until O'Connor's replacement was confirmed, ensuring a Court majority in favor of rolling back free speech.

So will the goddamn Democrats stop being so nice and accommodating about Dubya's judicial appiontments now?

Via Paper Chase.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:27 AM | Get permalink

Monday, May 29, 2006

Poison ivy comes a-creepin' around.

And it'll be creepin' around even more as the global climate warms.

According to a study done at Duke and Howard universities, the higher carbon dioxide (CO2) levels expected from from global warming will make poison ivy grow faster and cause the plant to produce higher levels of the allergenic chemical urushiol, which causes the rashes and itching that poison ivy is infamous for. When scientists created conditions in a test forest similar to those expected by 2050, the poison ivy plants in the forest grew three times as large as usual in the CO2-rich air. They also produced a more far allergenic form of urushiol than do plants grown at current CO2 levels.

The future just looks brighter and brighter, doesn't it?

Via AP. (Thanks to On Topic for giving me the itch.)

More: news@nature.com has a much better story about the effects of increased carbon dioxide on poison ivy and similar noxious plants.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:47 PM | Get permalink

You know how everyone's supposed to look more attractive when you're drunk?

Well, here's empirical proof. Watch and learn.

Via The Consumerist.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:52 PM | Get permalink

Bad ideas never go away.

At least not in Dubya's administration, anyway.

Back in early March, we posted about a hare-brained Pentagon plan to replace the nuclear weapons on Trident missiles with conventional warheads. That way, said military planners, the US could deliver big 'conventional' bombs anywhere in the planet in less than an hour. As we noted back then, this plan seemed to have more to do with the military's being able to keep a fleet of Trident subs that have had litte purpose since the Cold War ended than it does with any real need to be able to drop bombs hither and yon on quick notice.

As we also noted, Pentagon planners seem to be ignoring the fact that it would be impossible for a hostile nation to tell the difference between a nuclear Trident launch and a non-nuclear one. Which, of course, means the Pentagon is also ignoring the possiblility that a hostile nation could decide to launch nukes of its own, just to be 'safe.'

/Which missile has the nuke?

Does the Trident on the left have the nuke? Or is it the one on the right?
And if you can't tell, what makes the Pentagon think anyone else can?
This magpie had hoped that the Pentagon's plan for revamping Trident missiles had died the death that such an idiotic idea deserved. But no!

According to the NY Times, not only is the plan still alive, but the Pentagon is pushing hard on Congress to get funding to start work on the new Trident warheads. And, apparently not satisfied with the stupidity of the earlier version of the plan, the Pentagon is now saying that each Trident submarine will carry both nuclear and non-nuclear versions of the Trident missile. And, even worse, it appears that when one of those non-nuclear missiles is launched, it will be extremely difficult to do so from a location where the missile's trajectory won't point toward Russian territory — even though its actual target is not actually in Russia. A reasonable person might think that the risk of making the Russian military think their country is under nuclear attack provides more than enough reason to scrap the proposed Trident program. But, as is so often the case under Dubya's administration, there seems to be a shortage of reasonable persons in the Pentagon high command.

The Russians, for their part, seem to have little interest in facilitating Congressional approval of a new American weapons system. During his recent trip to Russia, General Cartwright sought to explain the rationale for program to Gen. Yuri Baluyevski, the chief of the Russian General Staff.

"The things that I tried to talk to him about were the common issues that we face — the fact that terrorists and organizations are getting capabilities that are significant and are likely to stay on a trend that could be associated with weapons of mass destruction," [US strategic command chief] General Cartwright said.

After that discussion, General Baluyevski continued to stir up opposition to the plan. "As our American colleagues often tell us, these missiles could be used to kill bin Laden," he told reporters earlier this month. "This could be a costly move which not only won't guarantee his destruction but could provoke an irreversible response from a nuclear-armed state which can't determine what warhead is fitted on the missile."

I'm with General Baluyevski on this one. And I really have to wonder whether those guys in the Pentagon are deliberately trying to start a nuclear war. Why on earth else would you want to build a weapons system that could so easily cause an 'accidental' nuclear exchange?

As I said back in March, the plan for non-nuclear Trident missiles needs to be dumped into the dustbin of history. Very quickly.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:31 PM | Get permalink

On calling a liar a liar.

According to economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, that's the word that we all should be using to describe the paid minions of the energy industry who are trying to discredit the science showing that global warming is a serious problem. In a column about the smear campaign run against a leading climate scientist, Krugman suggests that there's no point in playing nice when the fate of the planet is at stake.

A brief segment in "An Inconvenient Truth" shows Senator Al Gore questioning James Hansen, a climatologist at NASA, during a 1989 hearing. But the movie doesn't give you much context, or tell you what happened to Dr. Hansen later.

And that's a story worth telling, for two reasons. It's a good illustration of the way interest groups can create the appearance of doubt even when the facts are clear and cloud the reputations of people who should be regarded as heroes. And it's a warning for Mr. Gore and others who hope to turn global warming into a real political issue: you're going to have to get tougher, because the other side doesn't play by any known rules.

What happened to Hansen was that he got swift-boated. University of Virginia scientist Patrick Michaels and others backed by the energy industry lied about Hansen's findings about global warming in order to make it look like he'd exaggerated the dangers of climate change. And these critics made their charges against Hansen despite almost unanimnous scientific evidence showing that he was right.

John Kerry, a genuine war hero, didn't realize that he could successfully be portrayed as a coward. And it seems to me that Dr. Hansen, whose predictions about global warming have proved remarkably accurate, didn't believe that he could successfully be portrayed as an unreliable exaggerator. His first response to Dr. Michaels, in January 1999, was astonishingly diffident. He pointed out that Dr. Michaels misrepresented his work, but rather than denouncing the fraud involved, he offered a rather plaintive appeal for better behavior.

Even now, Dr. Hansen seems reluctant to say the obvious. "Is this treading close to scientific fraud?" he recently asked about Dr. Michaels's smear. The answer is no: it isn't "treading close," it's fraud pure and simple.

Now, Dr. Hansen isn't running for office. But Mr. Gore might be, and even if he isn't, he hopes to promote global warming as a political issue. And if he wants to do that, he and those on his side will have to learn to call liars what they are.

If you're a NY Times subscriber, you can read the full column here, behind the pay firewall. Otherwise, we suggest heading over here.

Another big Magpie thank you to the Peking Duck.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:05 AM | Get permalink

Burying the real story. Again.

Journalist Chris Allbritton points us to the final paragraph of this NY Times story about the looting of one of Saddam Hussein's Baghdad palaces.

But the palace still retains its aura of mystery. Tucked away on the undamaged side is a largely secret communications project that Lucent [Technologies] is carrying out for the Iraqi Interior Ministry, said Frank Gay, a Lucent program director. A Lucent employee who refused to give even his first name let a reporter and photographer peek into the room where people worked quietly at laptops. "There's nothing to see," the employee said, hustling his guests on. [Emphasis mine]

As Allbritton asks: What kind of communications project? Why is it secret? Are people — including members of the press — being listened to?

I'd also ask the question that Allbritton leaves unspoken: If electronic eavesdropping is going on, does the information gathered wind up at the White House and Pentagon?

Inquiring magpies want to know.

Via Back to Iraq.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:31 AM | Get permalink

'If you're going to tell people the truth, you'd better make them laugh or they'll kill you.'

UK comic Robert Newman carefully follows that advice from George Bernard Shaw in his stand-up show, 'History of Oil.' Some Memorial Day viewing for your enjoyment and edification, over here.

Don't mess with the US dollar, Mr Chavez

Don't mess with the US dollar, Mr Chavez

Robert Newman explaining the connection between the price of oil, the US dollar, the Euro, and why Venezuela president Hugo Chavez is on the Dubya administration's hit list.

Via MetaFilter.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:02 AM | Get permalink

Sunday, May 28, 2006

It's just like we all thought: Cheney really is president of the US.

VP Dick Cheney is even more of the power behind Dubya's throne than many had thought. According to former administration officials, Cheney's office routinely reviews congressional legislation before they get to Dubya, looking for provisions 'that Cheney believes would infringe on presidential power.'

Cheney gets ready to take another bite out of the Constitution

Cheney gets ready to take another bite out of the Constitution

This information comes from a new story by the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage, who earlier broke the news about Dubya's use of more than 750 signing statements — more than all previous presidents combined — to get around laws that he doesn't feel like following. Former officials in the Justice Department and White House told Savage that Cheney's chief of staff David Addington is the main person responsible for all those signing statements. You might remember Addington as the author of the 2002 Justice Department memo that told Dubya that he could authorize interrogators to use torture on 'enemy combatants.'

Addington has used his vetting of congressional legislation to flag provisions that conflict with VP Cheney's expansive theory of presidential power, under which the Congress has little authority to limit the actions of the president. According to Savage's sources, Addington's power of review has led to what amounts to prior censorship by the authors of legislation: Very little that conflicts with Cheney's views on presidential power now makes it into proposed laws in the first place.

Mainstream legal scholars across the political spectrum reject Cheney's expansive view of presidential authority, saying the Constitution gives Congress the power to make all rules and regulations for the military and the executive branch and the Supreme Court has consistently upheld laws giving bureaucrats and certain prosecutors the power to act independently of the president.

One prominent conservative, Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School, said it is "scandalous" for the administration to argue that the commander in chief can bypass statutes in national security matters.

"It's just wrong," Epstein said. "It is just crazy as a matter of constitutional interpretation. There are some pretty clear issues, and this is one of them."

Laurence Tribe , a prominent liberal at Harvard Law School, said: "Nothing in the text and structure of the Constitution, or Supreme Court precedents, supports the Bush-Cheney assertion that Congress cannot limit or direct what government officials may or must do."

Nonetheless, Bush has demonstrated that he is willing to put his legal team's claims about his authority into action. Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush authorized the military to eavesdrop on Americans' international phone calls without a warrant, bypassing a surveillance law that requires warrants.

Savage's article contains much more information on Cheney's theories on presidential power, on his earlier attempts to put those theories into operation, and how Cheney's office has instigated Dubya's use of signing statements. You can read the full story here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:22 PM | Get permalink

More bad news from that cesspit called Guantánamo.

The UK-based legal rights group Reprieve says that more than 60 of the prisoners held by the US at Guantánamo were under 18 when they were sent there. At least ten prisoners were only 14 or 15 years old when they arrived.

Reprieve's information contradicts assurances given by Washington to the UK government that no minors have been held at Guantánamo.

British officials last night told [the Independent] that the UK had been assured that any juveniles would be held in a special facility for child detainees at Guantanamo called Camp Iguana. But the US admits only three inmates were ever treated as children — three young Afghans, one aged 13, who were released in 2004 after a furore over their detention.

The row will again focus attention on the Bush administration's repeated claims that normal rules of war and human rights conventions do not apply to "enemy combatants" who were al-Qa'ida or Taliban fighters and supporters. The US insists these fighters did not have the same legal status as soldiers in uniform.

Clive Stafford Smith, a legal director of Reprieve and lawyer for a number of detainees, said it broke every widely accepted legal convention on human rights to put children in the same prison as adults — including US law.

"There is nothing wrong with trying minors for crimes, if they have committed crimes. The problem is when you either hold minors without trial in shocking conditions, or try them before a military commission that, in the words of a prosecutor who refused to take part, is rigged," he said. "Even if these kids were involved in fighting — and Omar is the only one who the military pretends was — then there is a UN convention against the use of child soldiers. There is a general recognition in the civilised world that children should be treated differently from adults...."

The latest figures emerged after the Department of Defense (DoD) in Washington was forced to release the first ever list of Guantanamo detainees earlier this month. Although lawyers say it is riddled with errors — getting numerous names and dates of birth wrong — they were able to confirm that 17 detainees on the list were under 18 when taken to the camp, and another seven were probably juveniles.

In addition, said Mr Stafford Smith, they had credible evidence from other detainees, lawyers and the International Red Cross that another 37 inmates were under 18 when they were seized. One detainee, an al-Jazeera journalist called Sami el Hajj, has identified 36 juveniles in Guantanamo.

The Pentagon, of course, has issued the usual sort of carefully worded denials:

A senior Pentagon spokesman, Lt Commander Jeffrey Gordon, insisted that no one now being held at Guantanamo was a juvenile and said the DoD also rejected arguments that normal criminal law was relevant to the Guantanamo detainees.

"There is no international standard concerning the age of an individual who engages in combat operations... Age is not a determining factor in detention. [of those] engaged in armed conflict against our forces or in support to those fighting against us."

I should probably open a betting pool for guessing how long it will be until the Pentagon confirms Reprieve's numbers.

Via UK Independent.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:37 AM | Get permalink

Yes, we're only talking about a single blogger here.

But you just know that he's not the only right-winger in the country who feels like this.

Via Suburban Guerilla.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:10 AM | Get permalink

How Mr Rogers saved public broadcasting.

The year was 1969 and the Public Broadcasting Service had just been born. PBS had asked Congress to fund its initial two years at US$ 22 million, but President Nixon's budget proposed only US $ 9 million. This would have effectively strangled the new public television network in its cradle.

A US Senate subommittee held hearings on the PBS appropriation in May 1969, and Fred Rogers — yes, that Fred Rogers — testified on behalf of public broadcasting. The rest, as they say, is history — and you can watch Rogers make that history here [QuickTime] or here [Windows Media], courtesy of Crooks and Liars.

Mr Rogers visits the Senate

Mr Rogers tells senators about his neighborhood, 1969.

From an account of Rogers' testimony that appeared in the History of Education Quarterly in 2003:

[The] highlight of the hearing appears to have been Rogers' fifteen-minute testimony and his dialogue with the subcommittee chair, Senator John O. Pastore, a Democrat from Rhode Island. Rogers spoke with his familiar quiet passion about the social and emotional learning young children need to grow up as confident and constructive members of society, and how alternative television programming such as the Neighborhood could help nurture these qualities in children?especially by contrast to other messages children were receiving from popular culture and media. Pastore, who had not previously seen any of Rogers' work, indicated he was now anxious to view the program, told Rogers that what he heard gave him goosebumps, and that the impact of Rogers' testimony was "I think you just got your twenty million dollars." Congressional appropriations were made two years in advance; counting forward to 1971, PBS funding increased from $9 million to $22 million after the Pastore committee hearings.

Rogers' testimony on behalf of PBS shows how powerful and effective an honest, heartfelt statement can be when important issues are at stake. Those of us in the US who oppose Dubya's administration should take note if we have any intention of winning the struggle for the soul of the country. Democratic candidates and their handlers should really take note if they have any intention of winning. Period.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:29 AM | Get permalink