This Week In Tyranny
Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 07:44AM No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Eight individuals on the right side of history (via):
- Russ Feingold
- Dick Durbin
- Jon Tester
- Tom Udall
- Jeff Bingaman
- Bernie Sanders
- Daniel Akaka
- Ron Wyden
- Michael Hayden
- Porter Goss
- George Tenet
- John Deutch
- R. James Woolsey
- William Webster
- James R. Schlesinger
The Judicious Use of Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts (JUSTICE) Act would reform the USA PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendments Act and other surveillance authorities to protect Americans’ constitutional rights, while preserving the powers of our government to fight terrorism…reforms include more effective checks on government searches of Americans’ personal records, the “sneak and peek” search provision of the PATRIOT Act, “John Doe” roving wiretaps and other overbroad authorities. The bill will also reform the FISA Amendments Act, passed last year, by repealing the retroactive immunity provision, preventing “bulk collection” of the contents of Americans’ international communications, and prohibiting “reverse targeting” of innocent Americans.I could see repealing retroactive immunity being a huge fight. Who knows if there’s some kind of double jeopardy-type effect attaching to a grant of retroactive immunity that prevents (or largely limits) its rollback. It’s part of the reason opponents objected to it so fiercely in the first place, and now kind of smacks of an attempt to unring the bell. I am neither a lawyer nor political strategist, but at this point maybe the most realistic option would be forcing the discovery process the now-nullified lawsuits would have produced. Since the telecoms are now immunized they would have precious little legal ground to object. In any event, I always thought they may have been most afraid of the PR apocalypse that full discovery would have produced. A legal judgment against them may be relatively small in comparison. And by the way gentlemen, it would have been lovely to see this fighting spirit back when Harry Reid was disregarding Chris Dodd’s hold on the FISA bill.
Spencer Ackerman wonders why all those Constitution lovers in Washington last weekend have nothing to say about the Patriot Act being extended:
You’d think the prospect of Obama making the sorts of claims of far-reaching executive authority that Bush made would trouble the teabaggers, especially when Glenn Beck and the rest talk about restoring the constitution and shit, but they’re more concerned about restoring the parts of the constitution that would make Obama three-fifths of every other president.I have to admit I was wrong about conservatives. When Bush kept pushing the bounds of executive power further and further I thought the right would howl with fury the first time a Democrat exercised those same powers. Nope. They’re fine with it. As it turns out there may be actual principle involved here and not simple expediency. Go figure. Live and learn. That the principle is the belief in ever more grants of unaccountable power to an increasingly authoritarian Commander In Chief is another matter.
Prairie Weather pointed me to a mysterious near-doubling of the intelligence budget. The least Dennis Blair could have done is given it an upbeat name like Cash For Dunkers.
I’ve posted multiple times about fusion centers so just consider this the latest in a series: “the Department of Homeland Security announced Monday that it would give so-called local and state ‘fusion centers’ access to classified military intelligence in Pentagon databases.” This is obviously bad, right? Is anyone out there applauding the militarization of law enforcement?
David Hume Kennerly is evidently from the Dogma 95 school of photography:
Newsweek’s objective in running the cropped version was to illustrate its editorial point of view, which could only have been done by shifting the content of the image so that readers just saw what the editors wanted them to see. This radical alteration is photo fakery. Newsweek’s choice to run my picture as a political cartoon not only embarrassed and humiliated me and ridiculed the subject of the picture, but it ultimately denigrated my profession.This from the comments section is good too: “Historically, cropping has been considered a cardinal sin by the vast majority of professional photographers.” Oh get over your precious selves already. You decided how you wanted to frame it when you took it. The editor decided to frame it differently when it ran. I can understand airbrushing people out, Photoshopping people in, distorting images to make them look bigger or smaller, I understand how that is deceptive. Cropping? Give me a break.
Some economics links. First, this post struck me as few others have in summing up the deep and global nature of the financial crisis. Maybe it’s the picture, maybe it’s the remote location, I don’t know. Something about it seems essential. Then let’s go from the sublime to the ridiculous (via). And the ridiculous to the outrageous. That last link is a long article, so be warned. I’m so disgusted at this point that I could only skim it. (I know, I know - I’m shirking my civic duty by not getting the fullest understanding possible of our malefactors of great wealth.)
If you can possibly manage it please spare no effort to be born into wealth:
The association of wealth with virtue necessarily requires the free marketer to play down the role of class. Arthur Brooks, in his book Gross National Happiness, concedes that “the gap between the richest and poorest members of society is far wider than in many other developed countries. But there is also far more opportunity … there is in fact an amazing amount of economic mobility in America.” In reality, as a study earlier this year by the Brookings Institution and Pew Charitable Trusts reported, the United States ranks near the bottom of advanced countries in its economic mobility. The study found that family background exerts a stronger influence on a person’s income than even his education level. And its most striking finding revealed that you are more likely to make your way into the highest-earning one-fifth of the population if you were born into the top fifth and did not attain a college degree than if you were born into the bottom fifth and did. In other words, if you regard a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence or hard work, then you are economically better off to be born rich, dumb, and lazy than poor, smart, and industrious.
UNPACKING JANE: Each of the last two weeks I’ve excerpted from Mayers’ coverage of John Walker Lindh’s case. The first covers Lindh’s mistreatment, the second the eagerness of the government to prevent details from surfacing. On page 98 she reports on the price of such treatment:
Clearly, Lindh’s attorneys also thought there were risks, since they accepted a guilty plea and a twenty-year sentence. One major factor was that, after the indictment, prosecutors added a subsequent count, charging Lindh with committing a felony while carrying grenades. This charge alone carried a thirty-year minimum sentence. His lawyers thought the twenty-year plea was the best they could do. But one of Lindh’s attorneys, Tony West, later criticized the deal as unjust. “It’s part of the change in approach to law in this country, to prevention,” he said. “You can detain people without evidence, make allegations, then develop the evidence later. If you have no evidence, you drop the charges. The only problem is, you’ve destroyed someone’s life in the process.”As long as that theory is ascendant I don’t want to hear any guff about how liberals are running the country.
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