Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

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A very busy week.  First up:

Troubling indications are emerging that the government is building a massive, virtually oversight-free domestic surveillance apparatus that could be cataloging private information on untold numbers of innocent Americans all under the guise of fighting terrorism, a new report warns.

“Fusion centers” is the new phrase to watch out for, brought to you by the administration’s National Strategy for Information Sharing.  Considering the dishonest and Orwellian language they their allies have used in the past this is remarkably restrained language. 

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Senator Obama has promised to “review every executive order signed by President Bush” if elected.  That’s the kind of statement that could be an encouraging indication of his desire to roll back some of the excesses of the current administration or it could just be feel-good blather.  Not to seem cynical but I lean towards the latter.  Obama is a politician and therefore is sometimes willing to trade positions on issues for different reasons (e.g. his new willingness to consider offshore drilling).  I’m not critical of that in general (though there have been issues - FISA and the Iraq war in particular - where a line had to be drawn) and I’m sympathetic to the need to adjust.  But that also means, let’s not be naïve either. There will be a lot of pressure to go along and get along, let bygones be bygones, not litigate the past, not criminalize policy differences, etc.  A President Obama might be very tempted to let them be as a goodwill gesture to the authoritarians in Washington D.C.  Having all those expanded powers at his disposal would just be gravy I’m sure.

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I didn’t cover this in my post on Thursday but part of the problem with our current Attorney General is that the press either ignores him or publishes contemptible nonsense that focuses on his personal virtue and ignores the radicalism of his actions as AG.  For example, when the department he leads tries to keep challenges to the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) secret I don’t especially care that “[h]e doesn’t do politics, and he doesn’t do popularity contests. He doesn’t do flavor-of-the-month. He does law.”  Bullshit. 

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(The fact that so much attention is focused on officials’ private conduct and so little on the way their actions in office affect the people they represent is generally beyond the scope of Pruning Shears but when it bumps up against a topic here I like to point it out.  A lot of reporters are less concerned with what happens from 9 to 5 than what happens from 5 to 9.)

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I neglected to point this out last week, but just for future reference:  When I write with a low opinion of Cass Sunstein this is the reason why (via).

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From the “wouldn’t it be nice” file comes the news that “U.S. District Court Judge John M. Facciola ordered the Bush administration to locate the missing communications on portable devices and individual workstations.”  Even if all the emails existed on some combination of devices there probably isn’t a master list of all such devices, and even if there were how would Facciola’s order be enforced?  How would even a single device be certified as having been properly searched?

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Britain doesn’t trust us?  Why on earth not?

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Libby pointed to a report that the President is trying to marginalize the CIA.  More than any other agency the CIA has produced inconvenient analysis for the administration so it isn’t really a surprise that he wants to squash it like a bug.

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Glenn:

The court did note, in several places, that Congress likely has (again, at least in theory) the inherent authority to arrest and detain Executive Branch officials who refuse to comply with their Subpoenas. But they have demonstrated no appetite for exercising that power, and short of something truly threatening like that, it is difficult to envision Bush officials being meaningfully forthcoming in any Congressional investigation.

Here’s a comment I left at Marcy’s place this week on another topic:

Sorry, but this kind of crap is a waste of time. Congress needs to enforce existing violations of the law instead of trying to think of every loophole that a creative administration will dream up in the future. That’s a fool’s errand - the problem isn’t that the law is ambiguous, it’s that the administration is contemptuous of laws and the body that creates them. Every time they do one of these “let’s criminalize waterboarding again and then it will be really illegal” exercises they are playing into the administration’s hands. Don’t those guys get tired of being beaten like a drum?

Congress doesn’t need more laws.  It needs to take action.

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On a happier note, see here and here [WHOA!  Link broken! - Dan] (via) for two examples of signs of life in the GOP.  If Republicans in Congress are becoming willing to challenge the President we may have finally turned a corner.  Let’s hope it’s not just a summer mirage.

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Finally, a note on economics and politics.  John McCain has released a tax plan that is transparently false and it is being treated like a realistic proposal.  Let’s go back to the thoughts of a certain candidate for Senate on the election year reporting in 2000:

[I]n the second debate, Bush said, “By far, the vast majority of my tax cut goes to those at the bottom.” (Actually, only 13 percent of his proposed tax cut went to the bottom 60 percent.) Did the press say anything? No. Why? Because their attitude was, shrug, “He doesn’t know.”

When that is the starting point for economic policy reporting don’t be surprised if it leads to disastrous results.  Unless you are lazy or of below average intelligence there is no reason to give such dishonesty a free pass.