This Is Not News

I was not a huge fan of Bob Barr during the Clinton impeachment. I disagreed with the case that he was making and I often disagreed with the way he made it. I have little doubt that my feelings were influenced by the belief that the process of investigations that led to the impeachment was a highly partisan affair. So I have to give Barr considerable credit, because it looks like he is applying the same standards to George W. Bush that he did to Bill Clinton. That’s very clear in this editorial from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he writes:

First, in the best tradition of former President Bill Clinton’s classic, “it-all-depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-is-is” defense, President Bush responded to a question at a White House news conference about what now appears to be a clear violation of federal electronic monitoring laws by trying to argue that he had not ordered the National Security Agency to “monitor” phone and e-mail communications of American citizens without court order; he had merely ordered them to “detect” improper communications.

This example of presidential phrase parsing was followed quickly by the president’s press secretary, Scott McLellan, dead-panning to reporters that when Bush said a couple of years ago that he would never allow the NSA to monitor Americans without a court order, what he really meant was something different than what he actually said. If McLellan’s last name had been McCurry, and the topic an illicit relationship with a White House intern rather than illegal spying on American citizens, I could have easily been listening to a White House news conference at the height of the Clinton impeachment scandal.

On foreign policy, domestic issues, relationships with Congress, and even their selection of White House Christmas cards and china patterns, presidents are as different as night and day. But when caught with a hand in the cookie jar and their survival called into question, administrations circle the wagons, fall back on time-worn but often effective defense mechanisms, and seamlessly morph into one another.

A level of consistency is a vital thing if we’re going to have a democratic society. It is much easier to have a healthy difference of beliefs if we have confidence that the other person truly believes what he is arguing, and a very good way to establish that is to know that the person will follow that belief to its reasonable conclusions even in different circumstances. This is not to say that we won’t ever get fuzzy around the edges and be inconsistent from time to time. And it doesn’t mean that beliefs have a one-size-fits-all application – it can be very possible that different responses are justified by the specific characteristics of superficially similar situations. But I think a lot of public officials could take a lesson from Bob Barr right now.

A federal judge appointed by George W. Bush has ruled that intelligent design can not be taught as science. The school board of Dover, Pennsylvania had tried to require science teachers to deliver a disclaimer about alleged gaps in the theory of evolution, and claimed that they were just putting forth another scientific theory rather than trying to cram religion into a science curriculum. Those claims were pretty fairly debunked at trial, to the point that the judge called the board’s decision “breathtaking inanity.” Various bloggers have already started dissecting the ruling; I like georgia10’s post over at Daily Kos.

One thing I find interesting about this whole debate is that in my Philosophy East & West classes, we’ve discussed the notion of intelligent design as a potential proof of the existence of God, right up there with the first-cause and ontological arguments. The particular essay we discuss in the class goes to great pains to suggest that if intelligent design is a valid argument, it is perfectly compatible with scientific theories regarding evolution, because evolution may itself be the mechanism by which God created human beings. (Granted, this requires a non-literal reading of the Bible or whatever scripture you prefer.) And the conversation fits perfectly inside a philosophy class. But I would never think that I’m qualified to go guest-lecture a biology class because I understand the teleological argument.

Of course, it should come as little surprise that Lore Sjoberg has his own theory to throw into the mix.

Following up on the warrantless wiretapping issue, it seems like more details are starting to circulate. I think maybe warrantless surveillance might be a more accurate description, since more than wiretapping seems to be in play. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo and emptywheel at Next Hurrah both have posts up trying to fill in some of the information that suggests that the government was trying to use new technologies to cast a wider net. The letter that Jay Rockefeller wrote to Dick Cheney, complaining that he could not get technical assistance from his staff to understand the scope of what was going on, also points in this direction.

Now, maybe this is the reason why FISA wasn’t sufficient. It’d be nice if someone in the Bush Administration would say so if that’s the case. But it seems to me that the issue of when and how to use new technology to observe people’s activity is precisely one that should be subject to some public deliberation by all of our leaders.

OK, so the New York Times comes out with a story that President Bush has authorized wiretaps and surveillance on American citizens without getting warrants. Only took them a year of sitting on the story to do so, but I’m going to let go of the fact that they’re late to the party and celebrate the fact that they got here at all. So in this report from ABC News, we see Bush saying the following in his weekend radio address:

The American people expect me to do everything in my power, under our laws and Constitution, to protect them and their civil liberties and that is exactly what I will continue to do as long as I am president of the United States.

Anyone else having a problem with the notion of warrantless eavesdropping being a protection of civil liberties? If you want to make an argument that curtailing our civil liberties is necessary to protect the rest of them, then OK, we can have that argument. But this is ridiculous.

The issue here isn’t whether we ever need to wiretap someone. The issue is that we’re supposed to have a system of checks and balances where there is some oversight when the executive branch decides to do something. As Josh Marshall has been tracking over at Talking Points Memo, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the government to start a wiretap and then get the warrant if speed is of the essence. I haven’t seen the explanation yet for why that system doesn’t work.

On Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room, former Republican Congressman Bob Barr expressed his amazement that current Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher was enthusiastically backing the president:

BARR: Here again, this is absolutely a bizarre conversation where you have a member of Congress saying that it’s okay for the president of the United States to ignore U.S. law, to ignore the Constitution, simply because we are in an undeclared war.

The fact of the matter is the law prohibits — specifically prohibits — what apparently was done in this case, and for a member of Congress to say, oh, that doesn’t matter, I’m proud that the president violated the law is absolutely astounding, Wolf.

ROHRABACHER: Not only proud, we can be grateful to this president. You know, I’ll have to tell you, if it was up to Mr. Schumer, Senator Schumer, they probably would have blown up the Brooklyn Bridge. The bottom line is this: in wartime we expect our leaders, yes, to exercise more authority.

Now, I have led the fight to making sure there were sunset provisions in the Patriot Act, for example. So after the war, we go back to recognizing the limits of government. But we want to put the full authority that we have and our technology to use immediately to try to thwart terrorists who are going to — how about have a nuclear weapon in our cities?

By the way, note how Rohrabacher snuck in that slam at Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer there. Schumer’s name appears nowhere else in the transcript. But Rohrabacher wants to be sure to tell us that if a Democratic Senator from New York had his way, the Brooklyn Bridge would have been blown up.

Barr claimed at the end of the segment that the alleged threat against the bridge “was bogus because it had to do with a group of idiots who were planning to dismantle it with blow torches.” But let’s put that aside for a minute. Let’s look at this notion that threats to security justify violating the law or the principles of the Constitution. Take that logic out to its conclusion, and we may as well torch both. An open society carries risks. It lets people move around, get together, talk to each other, procure equipment, make plans, and so on. To completely close off those risks, you have to stop being an open society. Is that a price we’re willing to pay? You can cut down your risk of being injured in a car accident by never getting into a car. Don’t own anything and you’ll never be robbed. But very few are interested in going to that extreme. They’re either willing to take the increased risk that comes from freedom and convenience, or they just don’t think about it.

I’m not saying I want complete freedom and anarchy. I’m willing to accept that we give up some degree of total freedom for the sake of our well-being. But in each case, the trade-off needs to be justified. And I haven’t seen a clear case of how warrantless wiretapping has prevented a threat to our well-being that couldn’t have been prevented by getting a warrant. The burden of proof is on the administration here.

And take one more look at Barr and Rohrabacher’s exchange. Rohrabacher says we need to expand the government’s power when we’re at war, and that we’ll go back to recognizing the limits of the government when the war is over. Barr points out that we’re in an undeclared war, so how will we know when it ends? Especially against an enemy as broad and vague as “terrorists.” Does anyone really think we’re going to eliminate every single one any time soon? Are we going to be at war for the rest of our lives?

ABC News reports tonight that the 9/11 Public Discourse Project Final Report on 9/11 Commission Recommendations has handed failing grades to the U.S. government on many points of its attempts to increase the nation’s security and stabilize other parts of the world. On page 3 of that document, however, I found this interesting:

Provide adequate radio spectrum for first responders – F (C if bill passes)
The pending Fiscal Year 2006 budget reconciliation bill would compel the return of the analog TV broadcast (700 Mhz) spectrum, and reserve some for public safety purposes. Both the House and Senate bills contain a 2009 handover date — too distant given the urgency of the threat. A 2007 handover date would make the American people safer sooner.

Could it be that the constant attempts to consolidate media ownership in America (link leads to an article I originally wrote in the Not News forums in May 2003) might be backfiring on the government itself? The thought that we’re waiting for the continually-delayed NTSC-to-HDTV cutoff date to take hold before doing anything about allocating emergency communications spectrum, or researching alternative communication frequencies or methods, is frankly ludicrous. That’s like saying we’re going to wait until ten million people are driving hybrid cars before we look at the problem of dependency on foreign fuel sources.

The problem lies with the FCC, and with the erosion of ownership regulations. The FCC continues to move the HD start date back because, and this isn’t a bad reason, the realization is sinking in that HDTV is not going to be something everyone can afford anytime soon. And of course, the major media companies are loathe to give up their chunks of the standard-definition broadcast spectrum, because they’re not going to be able to command the advertising sales figures they need to keep the doors open by broadcasting only to the narrow demographic of “people who have been able to afford an HDTV set.” And you better bet that the bigger these media conglomerates are, the more likely they are to have real lobbying power with Congress and the FCC that keep sliding the HDTV switchover date back…and back…and back. It’s not going to happen in 2007. I’ll be amazed if it happens in 2009.

We’ve backed ourselves into a commercial and legislative corner. And we’ve gambled part of our national security on a deadline that has been pushed back several times. The answer isn’t to force broadcasters to give up their frequencies, however – the answer was to find a more feasible, less pie-in-the-sky solution that wasn’t at the mercy of so many other uncontrollable forces.

So tonight on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Goran and Eames are trying to figure out who dropped a soda machine on a guy. They find a suspect, and then their attention turns to the suspect’s psychiatrist. The doctor was a military reservist who had served at Guantanamo Bay helping with the interrogations, and was so wracked with guilt that she came back home and tried to see if she could use the interrogation techniques in a therapeutic way. Instead she drove her patient to a psychotic episode. At one point during the investigation, we take a break from the crime-stopping so that Goran and Eams can have a slightly heavy-handed conversation with their superiors about whether such interrogation techniques are justifiable in war.

Nice little ripped from the headlines bit, especially when I see this headline that the Bush Administration is trying to find a compromise to Sen. John McCain’s recent Senate bill prohibiting the United States from using “cruel, inhumane and degrading” means of interrogation. I can not wrap my brain around the fact that we have to have this conversation. First there’s a moral argument – we should be better than the people we’re trying to fight. Then there’s the reciprocal treatment aspect – we don’t want to contribute to an atmosphere where our own servicepeople can be subjected to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment if captured. Plus the moral standing concerns – if we want to go preaching to other countires about how they behave, it behooves us to have our own house in order. And then there’s the whole question of whether tortue is even an effective means of interrogation anyway – if it just motivates people to tell the tortuers what they think they want to hear, it can produce as much false evidence as good leads. This article in the Washington Post tells of some of the mistakes that have been made in the CIA’s program to snatch up and interrogate suspects. I couldn’t help but be particularly struck by this passage:

The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls “erroneous renditions,” according to several former and current intelligence officials.

One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

I guess I should be careful with the grade book this term, huh?

Interesting discussion going on at Young Philly Politics about the local Chamber of Commerce’s efforts to drum up support for a reduction in the local business-privilege tax.

Now, I am not a tax expert. The city’s Tax Reform Commission did say that our system needs simplifying, which surprises me not at all, and that tax rates ultimately needed to go down in order to keep the city competitive. Ray at YPP seems to have some doubts about that, and I see where he’s coming from. Cities provide a certain critical mass of customers and workers that companies are always going to need to be around. But the suburbs do try to compete with the city. I live right near the border with Bucks County, and when we drive to one of the suburban malls we’re greeted by a “Welcome to Business-Friendly Bensalem” sign. And the city and commonwealth wind up providing huge incentives to companies on a case-by-case basis anyway, that maybe we wouldn’t have to provide if we had abetter system in the first place. So simpler and lower taxes are fine by me, if they’re affordable. And there’s the rub. Even the head of the Commission has pointed out that it isn’t cheap to run a city, and wonders where the city will find the money to pay for the Commission’s grand 10-year plan. It may well be that any tax simplification plans are going to have to turn out to be revenue neutral for the time being.

But the Chamber is clearly going great guns to try and get this particular tax cut enacted. It’ll be interesting to see how this fight turns out.

Thousands of dead soldiers and Iraqi civilians, billions of dollars in war debt, no clear exit strategy and no clear indication that we have done anything but further destabilize the region…but let’s quibble over words, shall we?

Back in high school the overall conservativeness of a suburban Catholic college prep school was occasionally broken up in interesting ways. One of them was my junior year course in Social Justice, taught by Ms. Lenie Schaareman, who was also the moderator of the World Affairs Club. She was someone firm in her convictions, willing to stand up for them, and not afraid to go against the tide. And so it should be no surprise that snotty high school students such as myself occasionally had a laugh at her expense. Sixteen-year-olds don’t really want to hear about how the World Bank and the IMF have affected international finance and the Third World economy. And we couldn’t quite understand why she was always going on about agribusiness.

Well, I’m a little older and a little wiser now. Globalization is a major buzzword and area of contention. I’m taking a Third World history course at the moment and trying to process the ways my buying habits ripple out to affect the world. (I have to in order to keep my Dewey merit badge.) And of course agribusiness crops up frequently. (Pun intended.) So I was happy to see Neil Sinhababu round up some links on the agribusiness issue over at Ezra Klein’s blog. There’s a good discussion in the comments, so check it out.

The state legislature pay raise that Pattie mentioned earlier this month has officially been repealed now that Governor Rendell has signed the repeal measure that legislators finally agreed on.

Philly-area blogger Above-Average Jane has started a series of posts detailing changes she’d like to see the legislature enact the next time they want to justify a pay hike. It’s a good series so far. I especially like the most recent post about making legislators’ votes more visible. I’ve talked about transparency from time to time on the old site, so it’s no surprise that I think it’s a good cause. But I think Jane makes the point very clear in this post.

Also, while I’m tossing out links to Philly bloggers, Smoke-Filled Room is a good round up of stories affecting better government in the city and state. There’s a lot of mention of city ethics reform and the pay hike, as well as a mention of a bubbling effort to revise the way Pennsylvania selects a Lt. Governor.