Talk about an awesome, awesome graph, showing how history managed to be made yesterday. (But of course, you can’t put too much on the “history was made” part, since whoever came out of the Dem contest, history would have been made.)
On one hand, we have Harriet Miers and Josh Bolton, one the one-time lawyer for the President of the United States and the other the former White House Chief of Staff. Both of them were allegedly involved in the White House’s firing of U.S. Attorneys who weren’t willing to follow along with efforts to discredit or damage Democratic politicians in their districts, and both ignored Congressional subpoenas to provide documents and testify about the dismissals.
On the other hand, we have Roger Clemens, the baseball pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, Toronto Blue Jays, Houston Astros, and New York Yankees. He was allegedly a user of performance-enhancing drugs during much of his baseball career, and gave testimony before a Congressional inquiry into the use of drugs in sports which was directly contradicted by his former trainer.
In what can be said to be one of the most poignant statements about what’s wrong with politics and justice in America, the Department of Justice has agreed to investigate whether Roger Clemens lied to Congress, but has refused to investigate Harriet Miers and Josh Bolton for not complying with Congressional subpoenas. The fact that our Executive Branch isn’t wiling to hold its own people responsible for abiding by the law is abhorrent; the fact that this is all taking place alongside the same Executive Branch spending its time on the private behavior of athletes competing in games is just the icing on the proverbial cake.
Tomorrow’s Chesapeake Primary day, the day when DC, Virginia, and Maryland voters turn out to help choose the next Presidential candidates — and with the tight race on the Democratic Party side, the primaries really matter quite a bit. Here in the District, 15 delegates will be allocated based on the primary results, as many as Delaware, Vermont, Alaska, and either of the Dakotas, which is sort of exciting for us here normally-unrepresented folks. Given that, though, wouldn’t you think that there would be even one small tidbit of information about the election on the Washington, D.C. homepage? Alas, there isn’t; you have to head over to the DC Board of Elections subsite, and if what you’re really after is the location of your polling place, head here to track that info down.
You might have seen the National Do-Not-Call Registry popping back up in the press recently — since the Federal Trade Commission opened the list in 2003, and numbers registered on the list expire after five years, there are a ton of numbers that’ll fall off the list next year unless people go and re-register them.
I discovered one annoying gotcha, though, related to how the FTC set up the online system for registering numbers and reporting violations of the list. Consider the following three bits of info:
What that means is that even if you’ve had your number on the list for years, if you re-register it, you’ll start a 31-day clock where you can’t report any violations. It’s pretty annoying, actually — but of course, it’s certainly not a reason you should avoid making sure your numbers don’t fall off the do-not-call list.
There’s nothing earth-shattering or heretofore-unknown about this Business Week article lambasting the pathetic state of the airline industry, but imagine how awful it’d be if a major news magazine had the following to say about your job performance:
When Marion C. Blakey took over at the Federal Aviation Administration in 2002, she was determined to fix an air travel system battered by terrorism, antiquated technology, and the ever-turbulent finances of the airline industry. Five years later, as she prepares to step down on Sept. 13, it’s clear she failed. Almost everything about flying is worse than when she arrived. Greater are the risks, the passenger headaches, and the costs in lost productivity. Almost everyone has a horror story about missed connections, lost baggage, and wasted hours on the tarmac. More than 909,000 flights were late through June of this year, twice the level of 2002.
Note that I’ve flown enough in the past few years to know that everything said in that intro paragraph is true, so I’m not saying that BW is being unnecessarily mean — my only point is that when something like that is published about you, you know that your failure has been a fantastic one. Of course, Blakey is leaving the FAA to become the head of Aerospace Industries Association (the trade association representing the manufacturers of airplane equipment), so she’ll go from the position of massively failing to lead the FAA to the position of lobbying on behalf of an aerospace trade group. I find that interesting, if only because she spent five years showing that she was unable to advocate for the needs of American air travelers on a federal level, and now she’s being given another chance to do exactly that on behalf of private industry. What makes anyone think she’ll be more successful?
Most of my (two or three) regular readers know I’m a huge Dahlia Lithwick fan, so it’ll come as no surprise that I think her latest missive is pretty freaking amazing. Stemming from when, in 2004, two West Virginians were thrown out of a state-government-sponsored event (attended by the President) when they deigned to show up with anti-Bush T-shirts on — and then were handcuffed, booked, and put in jail — Lithwick then takes a look at our current Administration’s history of preventing any dissenting voices from attending official White House events. She concludes with a look at the actual White House advance manual for such events, finding that it appears to have become the official policy of the United States to only allow those who are supportive of the Administration to be within earshot of the President. I guess, if nothing else, it explains how clueless Bush is that many of us out here disagree with him… but it’s a sad statement nonetheless.
I’ve got a few short takes today, to try to assuage my guilt for being a bit swamped these days (and also to get rid of a few of these tabs in my browser).
Remember the lawsuit Verizon filed against Vonage, threatening to bankrupt the upstart VOIP provider over technology the Baby Bell claimed was its own? It looks like Vonage might have finally rolled out workarounds to all the disputed tech, and also posted better-than-expected financials — which makes me pretty excited, being that I’ve been nothing but satisfied with our service from the company.
I’ve been slowly working my way through Jane Mayer’s amazing New Yorker piece on the CIA “black sites”, and it’s pretty clear that this is a must-read article for those who wish to learn how far our government has taken its torture of detainees in the all-important war on terror. The worst part of it is that at this point, there’s no question that what the public knows only scratches the surface, and that when tomorrow’s historians uncover the full details of this administration’s assaults on fundamental American liberties, we’ll either be aghast or will have long ago given up the right to express our outrage. (Let’s hope for the former.)
It’s amazing, but Apple really does look to be violating the script.aculo.us license on every single page that’s generated by the .Mac photo gallery. Either that, or they’ve struck some licensing agreement with the tool’s author, Thomas Fuchs — but seeing as how script.aculo.us is released under the extremely permissive MIT license, that’d seem unlikely for Apple to have done.
Cool — I hadn’t put two and two together, but Movable Type 4.0 is using Codepress to provide inline syntax highlighting in its template editors, and has extended the tool so that it recognizes all the Movable Type template tags. A long time ago, I bookmarked Codepress so that I’d remember to come back and take a look at it… looks like I don’t have to do that anymore. :)
Finally, this page might be dangerous for me. That is all.
What a shocker — Richard Carmona, the Surgeon General from 2002 through 2006, now acknowledges that the Bush Administration continually muzzled him on issues like stem cell research and contraception. In Carmona’s words:
The problem with this approach is that in public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science, or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds. The job of surgeon general is to be the doctor of the nation, not the doctor of a political party.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Thanks to the Los Angeles Times, we now know that despite President Bush’s proclamation that 30 months in prison was an “excessive” punishment for Scooter Libby, the Bush Justice Department has presided over the sentencing of 198 individuals convicted of obstruction of justice, and the average prison sentence received by those individuals was 70 months. I’d comment on this more if I thought it was needed, but that’s really a finding which speaks for itself.
In light of the President commuting Scooter Libby’s prison sentence yesterday, calling it “excessive”, I figured I’d link to the U.S. Supreme Court decision from two weeks ago which upheld the 33-month sentence of Victor Rita. Rita was convicted of perjury and making false statements — essentially, the same as Libby — and challenged the sentence as excessively harsh and unreasonable; the Court disagreed, saying that the sentence was well within federal sentencing guidelines and appropriate given the crimes of which Rita was convicted. Unfortunately for Rita, he isn’t a friend and confidante of Dick Cheney; I’d assume he’s pretty bitter about Libby walking around a free man…
Awesome — Cheney appears to believe that the Office of the Vice President is not a part of the Executive Branch. Does that mean that he’s also no longer the first in the chain of Presidential succession? We can only hope…
Andrew Sullivan has an entry over at The Atlantic Online that defies adequate excerpting — it’s a look at the Bush administration’s use of the term “enhanced interrogation” to describe the we-don’t-torture methods our country is using to extract information from the people we’ve rounded up and classified as terrorists. Most importantly, it’s also a historical look at how Nazi Germany coined the exact same (translated) term, to defend what turn out to be many of the exact same practices. And not to jump right to the punchline, the final paragraph of the piece is the anchor:
Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I’m not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture - “enhanced interrogation techniques” - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.
There’s little to no doubt that as a nation, we will look back on what happened to liberty and security in post-9/11 America with shame and embarrassment; I’m just anxious for that collective realization to sink in and lead to enough institutional change up top to allow us to right the wrongs of the past four years.
Jesus, as if there weren’t reason enough to think that our current White House has not one whit of respect for the rule of law, Dahlia Lithwick’s Slate column today about the attempt to coerce an ICU-bound John Ashcroft into certifying the legality of the NSA wiretapping program should be enough to cement that fact. It really does play like a Harrison Ford thriller — the acting Attorney General finding out that Bush’s Chief of Staff and the White House Counsel intended to take advantage of Ashcroft’s heavily medicate state and then racing, sirens ablaze, to the hospital to intervene, the President overtly being told that his program was illegal and then deciding to continue it despite that fact, the whole bit. The Post has more on the whole escapade, including a damning editorial and a piece about Alberto Gonzales refusing to retract a 2006 sworn statement that the NSA program had aroused no dissent or controversy within the Bush administration (leading to speculation that there are other surveillance programs we don’t know about).
While I don’t hold a lot of sympathy for those who have been willing to unquestioningly carry Bush’s water over these past six-plus years, I actually do feel a little bad for the rank and file Republicans — I suspect that their party will find it incredibly hard to avoid being defined for years to come by the abhorrent behavior, intransigent lawlessness, and reckless disregard for the truth that’s emanated from the Oval Office since 2001.
In a little-reported incident, the Chief of the General Services Administration Lurita Doan — the woman appointed by the Bush administration as head of the agency which directs $66 billion a year in U.S. Government procurement contracts — allowed the Deputy Political Director of the White House to come in and give an overtly political presentation to 40 GSA staffers, a presentation which included lists of Democrats the GOP is targeting in the 2008 election and Republicans who would need “defense” in order to hold onto their seats. (The presentation, in PDF format, is available from the House Oversight Committee website.) Worse still, people present at the meeting recall Doan standing up at the end and asking employees for ways in which the GSA could “help our candidates.” Video from her testimony in front of the House Government Reform Committee today is already online, and it’s amazing to watch her stammer “I don’t recall” and “it wasn’t my meeting” repeatedly. If I weren’t so cynical about our current government, I’d also say that the video provides a great view of her career dissolving, but given that our Attorney General is still in command of the DoJ despite being part of attempts to pressure U.S. Attorneys to engage in political prosecutions and then overtly lying to Congress about it earlier this month, Doan is just as likely to be the future recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Are you kidding me — John McCain, a man who is seriously considered as a potential Republican Presidential nominee isn’t willing to even commit to an answer as to whether condoms are capable of preventing the transmission of HIV?!? It’s behavior like this that is the perfect answer to all the people who keep telling me that their appreciation of McCain stems from his moderate stands and his maverick nature. When the truth comes out, though, he’s just another pandering mouthpiece for both his party and his President.
I admit to not paying much attention to the whole fracas around the Boston Police Department shutting down parts of the city to “disarm” what turned out to be guerrilla art marketing geegaws, but thankfully, a bunch of other have been doing so… and they’re thus now in a position to point out the overt idiocy of the Boston Police and prosecutorial machinery. First stop is Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s post, which puts this event in the context of another genius move by the BPD, the 2006 “bomb scare” arrest of a man who was protesting by reenacting the famous Abu Ghraib photo outside an Army recruiting center. Then comes Bruce Schneier, who reminds us that the only terrorizing that was done came at the hands of the BPD, not the artists; the devices were up for over three weeks in Boston, and over ten weeks in other cities, and all of a sudden the BPD decided that it had to panic and go apeshit. And finally, Wired’s John Browne with a look at the laws involved, concluding that the only way the Boston prosecutors will be able to fulfill their promise to throw the book at the artists is if they demonstrate both that they intended to instill fear and that anyone would reasonably believe the devices to constitute some threat… something that the whole up-for-many-weeks-without-incident thing probably contradicts. (some via the inestimable Rafe)
Seriously, I love that the New York Times wrote an article about the Capitol Hill house shared by U.S. Representatives George Miller and Bill Delahunt and U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer. (And we’re reasonably close neighbors!) It’s refreshing that the four roommates have to deal with the same mundane stuff that all roommates do — who gets the groceries, which people aren’t making their beds, who deals with the vermin — yet wake up in the morning and cross the street to serve as leaders of the Democratic Party in Congress.
The government has now officially put more thought into the design of Guantanamo’s court bathrooms than the charges against its prisoners.
Dahlia Lithwick has a great year-ending list of the 10 most outrageous U.S. civil liberties violations of 2006, and it’s a good’un.
Shannon and I are in London for the holidays, so in an effort to clear off some of the tabs in my browser, here are some of the things I’ve been hoarding in my bookmarks.
I promise I’m not going to be doing a play-by-play of election goings-on today, but I have to admit I find it fitting that the AP got the story of Rumsfeld resigning and the press called Montana for Jon Tester at pretty much the same moment that Bush walked out to the slaughter in his press conference. (Seriously, it’s hard to see this performance as anything more than him getting beaten about the head with a shovel, from my admittedly slanted read on it.)
And for my favorite part of the press conference: it’d have to be Bush claiming, when asked whether he’d support giving DC a voting representative in the House, that it was the very first time he’d heard of the issue. Are you f*!@ing kidding me?!?
What a terrific — and late — night last night was; until around 1 AM, Shannon and I sat firmly planted in front of the TV (tuned variously to CNN, NBC, and Comedy Central) and a laptop streaming a muted CNN via the SlingBox. I don’t hesitate at all to say that I’m excited about the returns, but in all honesty, I’m still trying to figure out the meaning of the Democratic House wave last night, and holding out on any Senate celebration until the results from Virginia and Montana are finalized. (But with 99.88% of the Virginia precincts reporting, Jim Webb’s unofficial lead is 7,132 votes, a number that’s four or five times higher than Bush’s end-of-the-count lead in Florida in 2000; in Montana, Jon Tester’s lead is a hair over 3,000.) By all reports, all the Virginia numbers that are being reported out so far do include all absentee voting; the only counting that’s left are the remaining boxes in three counties and some of the provisional ballots.
For those who (like me) were looking for raw explanations of the recount rules and processes in Virginia and Montana, a good starting point is this post over at TPM Cafe’s Election Central. A more fleshed-out version is that Virginia pays for a recount for a result in which the difference is less than 0.5% (there’s almost no way for this not to occur at this point), but the recount can’t even be requested until the election results are certified, something that won’t occur until the very end of November. In Montana, the state only pays for a recount if the margin is within 0.25%, and they’ll allow a candidate-financed recount if the margin is less than 0.5%. It looks, from the certified numbers and the votes that are still outstanding, that Montana’s final tally will finish either just within the 0.5% window or slightly higher than that, so we’ll see about that as well. And as I’ve read in about a dozen places today, the kicker to this all will be watching how the various players try to manipulate any recounts, and what comes of the investigations into election fraud that have already begun in Virginia.
Again, an exciting night, but the sobering reality is that it’s merely step one of a many-step process to right this ship, and there’s a lot the Democrats can do to screw this all up if they don’t start listening to the wiser voices within the party.
One brief update on the National Campaign for Fair Elections public service announcement: apparently, the organization is doing good work today! After calling the Putnam County elections bureau, the friend I mentioned in today’s earlier post also called NCFE and was told that they’d immediately put a lawyer in the voting precinct to make sure that they stopped incorrectly mandating identification before allowing registered voters to cast their ballots. Now that’s service.
With all the voting problems people are already reporting (just take a look at Josh Micah Marshall’s excellent Talking Points Memo for examples), I suspect the NCFE will be busy today.
After failing to make it to vote in the primary (I was attending on the peds oncology service, and couldn’t get out of the hospital in time!), Shannon and I woke up early squirrelly this morning and hustled our way to the polling station. Voting in DC is a bit weird; you vote for local races that have meaning, but the national races are for “shadow representatives” that functionally have as much relevance as a seamstress at a nudist colony. As a first-time DC voter, I had to show identification before I could vote, but interestingly Shannon was asked for her ID as well, and she’s not a first-time voter. (I also just heard from a friend in New York who was also barred from voting until he produced an ID, and is now pursuing an explanation from his county board of elections.) In any event, we slid our ballots into the electronic reader, ate a celebratory donut, and immediately started stressing about watching the returns this evening… here’s hoping for the sweeping repudiation of the Bush administration that’s been trending towards finality in the pre-election polls.
One public service announcement: if you have any problems voting (electronic voting machines that malfunction, officials that wrongly prevent you from casting a ballot, whatever), the National Campaign for Fair Elections has set up a toll-free hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE. The group has monitors and attorneys on-hand to help deal with problems as they arise, so it’s probably worth giving them a call with any issues.
Seriously, when will someone get enough of a backbone to challenge the idiotic continued usage of signing statements by our President? Yesterday, we had the top of the Executive Branch food chain explicitly state that he feels he has additional power to change Homeland Security’s privacy rule audits, and also that he can defy the rules Congress spelled out about the qualifications of any potential FEMA director. The arrogance is astounding — each statement says, “I know what the words of the law state, but even though I’ll sign my name to the law, I won’t abide by those words.”
The FEMA bit is plainly insane, because the text of the bill stated that any potential director of the agency had to have at least five years experience and a “demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security,” and Bush’s signing statement explicitly declares that he doesn’t intend to abide by those requirements. This is immensely galling, given FEMA’s performance during Katrina under Michael Brown, someone who clearly wasn’t qualified to have the job or manage an emergency. The text of the statement (emphasis mine):
Section 503(c) of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, as amended by section 611 of the Act, provides for the appointment and certain duties of the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Section 503(c)(2) vests in the President authority to appoint the Administrator, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, but purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the President may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office. The executive branch shall construe section 503(c)(2) in a manner consistent with the Appointments Clause of the Constitution.
Here’s my big question: what’s the actual difference between these signing statements and line-item vetoes? And if there isn’t any, didn’t our Supreme Court rule that the Constitution doesn’t allow for line-item vetoes? Will it take Congress changing party hands in order to get the body to stand up for its Constitutionally-vested power to define the laws that go before our President for signature?
From Talking Points Memo today (or maybe Wonkette, I have no idea who had it first) comes a photo that really hammers home the current mess in Washington:
(Yep, that’s Michael Brown to Bush’s right, and Mark Foley to his left.) If there’s a more representative image of this presidency out there on the wires, I certainly haven’t seen it; I’d think that it’d have to involve Jack Abramoff engaging in some sort of sex act with Bill Frist while Frist performs telemedicine on Tom DeLay.
When news of a detainee “compromise bill” started rumbling off of Capitol Hill, I was a bit suspicious that none of the media coverage contained even the slightest bit of detail about how the new legislation would deal with the major problems inherent in our current system of torturing them until they give us what we want. As the days have unfolded, I’ve read the daily paper anxious for more information, and been both surprised and alarmed that there wasn’t any. So when the U.S. House of Representatives approved the legislation yesterday, I was intrinsicly hopeful that perhaps they had details that sufficiently put to rest fears that we’d continue crapping all over the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles, and any other half-moral set of guidelines that dictate we as a nation shouldn’t be torturing people. Well, it turns out that that’s not quite the case — most lawmakers haven’t the foggiest clue which interrogation methods are currently used in our War on Terror, and none of them know what practices will be allowed or disallowed by the new legislation. (And yes, this includes John McCain, who apparently doesn’t actually give a crap about prisoners’ rights or standing up for what’s just.) As always, Dahlia Lithwick masterfully puts it into words, this time skipping the humor and going straight for deserved damnation.
For the five years since 9/11, we have been in the dark in this country. This president has held detainees in secret prisons and had them secretly tortured using secret legal justifications. Those held in secret at Guantanamo Bay include innocent men, as do those who have been secretly shipped off to foreign countries and brutally tortured there. That was a shame on this president. But passage of the new detainee legislation will be a different sort of watershed. Now we are affirmatively asking to be left in the dark. Instead of torture we were unaware of, we are sanctioning torture we’ll never hear about. Instead of detainees we didn’t care about, we are authorizing detentions we’ll never know about. Instead of being misled by the president, we will be blind and powerless by our own choice. And that is a shame on us all.
Update: Unsurprisingly, the Senate just voted to kill an amendment which would have guaranteed habeas corpus rights to all non-citizen detainees. (Yep, even good ol’ John McCain voted against it.) Let’s be very clear: this means that those detainees who aren’t U.S. citizens will have absolutely no venue in which to challenge their detention, meaning that there’s almost no way to review this abhorrent bit of the legislation once enacted. (Congress and the President decided to be generous to citizens — we all have been granted the kindness of military tribunals to which we can appeal our detention.) Far from fearmongering, that parenthetical statement is a particularly important bit of info, since the new law also gives the President and military pretty much sole authority over the definition of “enemy combatant”, meaning that it’s not exaggerated to say they can go so far as to declare American citizens on American soil as enemy combatants. As a result, our Congress is a hair’s breadth from ensconsing our Executive branch in virtually unfettered power to detain, interrogate, and permanently imprison anyone they so choose. Truly, completely shameful.
The New York Times now has part two of its series online on the miscarriage of New York State town and village justice. It’s as frightening as the first.
Tomorrow’s New York Times has a fascinating — and fascinatingly frightening — look at the abhorrent state of New York State’s town and village courts. 75% of the nearly 2,000 judges don’t have any formal legal training, and the state practices little to no oversight into how they run their “courtrooms” (a word deserving of the quotations, given some of the descriptions in the article). Misogyny, racism, and petty grievances take precedence over justice in a few of the towns the Times profiled, and disciplinary action is scarce to nonexistent. Let the article serve as a warning: never run afoul of the law in upstate New York.
Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins, posted a recap of his day as an election judge in Maryland on Tuesday, and it’s enough to make you wonder how a first-world democracy like the United States can behave like a banana republic when it comes to our election methodology. Avi’s precinct used the hideously insecure Diebold Accuvote-TS systems, and between technical problems, false security mechanisms, and a Diebold tech who had less than 24 hours of job experience and less than eight hours of training, Avi’s experience was disastrous. Given how fundamental voting is to the American way of government, it’s hard to concieve of a reason why Diebold and its machines are still present in elections. It’s pretty clear that an intermediate-level computer science student could develop a more reliable and secure system…
Now seems as good a time as any to dump a few links here that have accumulated in tabs in my browser over yesterday and today:
From the Department of the Totally Batshit Insane: the folks over at Move America Forward have an ad currently running on CNN trying to drum up support for somehow censuring Jimmy Carter. Ummmm…. what??!? Of course, it’s really not as odd as you’d think, given that Move America Forward is the thinnest-of-thinly-veiled Republican Party fronts, and claims as its “chief strategist” a man who was convicted of a $200,000 fraud. It’s hysterical to think that things have gotten so frantic within the GOP that they’re now haranguing Democratic ex-Presidents, and funnier still that Clinton isn’t really available to them as a punching bag these days.
And today, TPM Muckraker presents a big, huge, gargantuan reason why it should now be obvious how foolish it was that Congress was willing to allow U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to testify about the NSA wiretapping policy without having to be sworn to an oath of truthfulness. From details that are now leaking out of the NSA like a sieve, it turns out Gonzales was lying the whole time.
It’s particularly saddening to note that this news hit on the same day we’ve learned that our Department of Justice has dropped its investigation into the NSA wiretapping program because the government refuses to grant high-enough security clearances to the DOJ lawyers. It’s fascinating, really — we now have a government which has implemented programs in direct contravention of the rule of law, and is willing to use its ability to grant or deny security clearances as a way to prevent a lawsuit into that program. Exactly how far does this all have to go before the other branches of government put their collective feet down and say that this has clearly crossed the line?
Since a year or so ago, when Shannon pointed out my insane number of questionably old T-shirts, I’ve been on a pretty strict dire-need-only T-shirt diet. With that said, this is a shirt I’d happily add to my collection. (If you’ve been in a cave and don’t know what the shirt’s referring to, you can read the transcript of Stephen Colbert’s speech in front of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, and even watch the whole thing. It’s way worth it.)
If this doesn’t make you sad about the hell we’ve wrought with our nation’s supposed war on terror, then I’m not sure anything will. Might I ask what harm would come of us “repatriating” these nine men by offering them instant American citizenship? (Of course, who knows whether they’d take us up on it, being that our military and Executive has chosen to imprison them at Gitmo, without cause, for over four years.)
After last month’s forced resignation of Andy Card, today’s forced resignation of Scott McClellan and retooling of Karl Rove, and [future date]’s inevitable loss of the service of Donald Rumsfeld, this is complete genius. Especially the P.S.: “We want you to know it was a hard call whether to lose you or Karl. He really agonized over it.”
Awesome — Vice President Cheney threw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals home opener yesterday, and was resoundingly booed from the moment he stepped foot on the field through the moment he disappeared back into the dugout. (You can listen yourself here, although it’s Fox News, and the producers unsurprisingly muted the crowd for a few seconds in the middle before giving in and letting us hear the disapproval.)
Over at Slate, John Dickerson has a great article arguing that the most important point to focus on in the is-it-a-leak-if-Bush-authorized-it debate is that regardless of the answer, the whole situation makes clear how hypocritical our President is, and how little we can trust the words that come out of his mouth. (Remember, Scooter Libby’s grand jury testimony only confirms something that’s been discussed out in the open for a while now.)
Since the beginning of the Valerie Plame investigation, Bush has been firmly on-record as saying that leaks of information will not be tolerated. With quotes like “If there’s a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is,” “somebody in our government wanted to show off to his family, or her family, in between Christmas and New Year’s by leaking information in the press that he or she thought would be helpful to the government,” and calling the NSA wiretapping leak “a shameful act” that is “helping the enemy,” it’s hard to then argue that Bush’s choice to authorize his staff to leak information from the National Intelligence Estimate is anything but pure hypocrisy.
The sum of everything that we’ve learned about the Bush Administration — the deceit in the run-up to the war in Iraq, the approval of use of torture in our treatment of prisoners, the authorization of warrantless wiretaps of American citizens on U.S. soil (something the Administration is now saying it can do even if both participants in a phone conversation are within national borders!), the brazen lobbyist influence within the White House, and now the authorization from the Oval Office to use classified information for political ends — is so much worse than anything which occurred during Clinton’s eight years in office, and yet it was then that we as a nation found ourselves wrapped up in impeachment hearings. It’s all just stunning.
“Rep. Tom DeLay will drop out of his re-election race.” The bigger they are, the harder they fall…
If you have five minutes and 48 seconds to spare, it’s worth watching the clip of CBS News reporter Lara Logan’s interview on CNN’s Reliable Sources late last week. Journalists have been getting a lot of crap from the Bush Administration about being singlemindedly focused on the negative in Iraq; Logan does an amazing job of ruthlessly smacking down those claims, and doing so in a way that really highlights how everything truly is about the awful state of security in the country right now.
I would have done nearly anything to be at the Supreme Court for yesterday’s Hamdan v. Rumsfeld oral arguments. Alas, since I wasn’t there, I’m content reading Dahlia Lithwick’s recap of the discourse, and happy knowing that if her portrayal is correct, even the Justices are growing weary of the Executive’s attempts to create a new set of rules that require no checks or balances.
There are times when I’m disappointed in our nation’s leadership, and then times when I wonder how we, as citizens, can allow our current batch of leaders to remain in office for even one second longer. Today is one of the latter times, specifically after reading that Bill Frist has threatened to restructure the Senate Intelligence Committee if it deigns to vote to hold hearings on the Administration’s use of warrantless wiretaps. The Intelligence Committee has been unique since its inception in that the rules establish a much more balanced distribution of power between the two political parties, all in the name of establishing as nonpartisan oversight as possible of our government’s intelligence activities. In a letter yesterday to Harry Reid, the Minority Leader of the Senate, Frist threatened to rewrite those rules to prevent the investigation of Bush’s eavesdropping policy:
If we are unable to reach agreement, I believe we must consider other options to improve the Committee’s oversight capabilities, to include restructuring the Committee so that it is organized and operated like most Senate committees.
To me, this feels like another example of our current ruling party changing the rules to better allow their continued lawless and unethical ways. From mid-decade redistricting in Texas to protecting Tom Delay by changing the House ethics rules to redefining such basic notions as who is a prisoner and what comprises torture, the Republican party is showing that it’s willing to do literally anything it can get away with to perpetuate its goals. You’d figure that with Bush’s approval ratings swimming in the sewer, there would be more of an effort within the party’s ranks to behave better, but I guess that there are some addictions that are too difficult to give up cold-turkey.
Reason number 2,143 that our government shouldn’t be in the business of wiretapping people without warrants: Iyman Faris, a defendant who pled guilty to plotting to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, is now seeking to reverse his plea based in part on the fact that he was the target of warrantless wiretaps. In our current political and judicial climate, I doubt that the case will go very far, but it certainly feels plausible enough that authorities might have used evidence obtained in extralegal means to pressure a plea from Faris. To me, it all feels like an episode of Law & Order, with the corrupt cop leaving in his wake a trail of criminal appeals based on the invalidity of his testimony…
Over at the New Yorker, Jane Mayer has written what amounts to a must-read report on how the U.S. executive branch has come to condone cruelty and torture in its ongoing fight against terrorism. Alberto Mora, the recently-retired general counsel to the U.S. Navy, plays a large role in the article — he’s one of the few senior Pentagon officials who saw the shift in policy not just as dangerous, but as a violation of the most basic ideals of our country.
As [Mora] sees it, the authorization of cruelty is equally pernicious. “To my mind, there’s no moral or practical distinction,” he told me. “If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America -— even those designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants.’ If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles. It’s a transformative issue.”
No summary I could provide of the piece could do it the slightest bit of justice; it’s a long read, but well worth the time (if not the rise in blood pressure).
How predictable — Cheney is going to break his “I-shot-someone-in-the-face-chest-and-heart” silence today by talking to the Fox News crew. Meanwhile, the White House spent most of yesterday either ignoring questions about how the public was informed of the shooting or making jokes about it, and doctors have spent most of today debunking the migrating-birdshot reports (honestly, none of us here at my hospital can quite figure out how a 5-millimeter 2.4-millimeter chunk of metal would be able to travel through blood vessels and end up in the heart without first having to find its way through some 5-micrometer pulmonary capillary). This gets stranger and stranger…
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Vice President of the United States went and shot someone today. Unbelievable.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday in support of airport regulations demanding the display of identification by travelers — and in support of the existence of secret laws, laws that our government can prohibit people from scrutinizing yet can impose on those same people. (The decision, in PDF form, is here.) As reflected in my feelings back when the case (Gilmore v. Gonzales) was being argued, this is somewhat disappointing; it seems perfectly contrary to the ideals of our country for there to be laws whose words exist behind lock and key, but whose force exists in the lives of each of us.
This morning, while I was slowly waking up and surfing the web (totally uncaffeinated, since the reason I was awake was to wait for our grocery delivery, which contained the all-important milk for my coffee!), I read a news story that woke me up in a hurry by getting my blood boiling. The article is about Sam Beaumont, an Oklahoma rancher who, in 1977, met Earl Meadows, fell in love, and lived for over twenty years with the man and his three children. In 1999, Beaumont had a stroke, and Meadows cared for him until he died a year later. Beaumont’s will left everything to Meadows, but the state of Oklahoma invalidated the will because it had one too few witness signatures — and (as you’d expect) Oklahoma has no common-law rules that would allow for Meadows to remain the rightful inheritor. That left everything (their ranch, all the animals) being auctioned off with the proceeds being split among dozens of Beaumont’s cousins. Oddly, though, this is now a common-enough story that it alone is barely enough to enrage people, and isn’t what made my blood pressure explode — what did that was the fact that all the cousins are now suing Meadows for back rent on the property. (The relationship and controversy are among those profiled in the 2003 documentary Tying the Knot.)
Seriously, for all those out there who feel that gay people are going to hell, my rebuttal is that there’s a very special place in hell for people like those cousins, looking to actually profit from their bigotry and closemindedness (and for certain elected representatives of the fair state of Oklahoma who spout hate on the floor of the U.S. Senate).
Ours is a government of limited power. We learn in elementary school the concept of checks and balances. Those checks do not vanish in wartime; the President’s role as Commander in Chief does not swallow up Congress’s powers or the Bill of Rights. Given the framers’ skepticism about executive power and warmaking—there was no functional standing army at the beginning of the nation, so the President’s powers as Commander in Chief depended on Congress’s willingness to create and expand an army—it is impossible to find in the Constitution unilateral presidential authority to act against US citizens in a way that violates US laws, even in wartime. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently wrote, “A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.”
Elizabeth Holtzman penned a fantastic piece entitled “The Impeachment of George W. Bush” in this month’s issue of The Nation. Holtzman served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1973 to 1981, and was a member of the House Judiciary Committee that held hearings on the impeachment of Richard Nixon in 1974. In the piece, she makes a reasonably strong argument for how Bush has carried on in a way detrimental to both the office of the Presidency and the nation as a whole; I’d say that it’s worth a read no matter which side of the political fence you’re on (but of course, I know better than that).
Oh, great — two more government agencies appear to have been lapping at the warrantless search bowl for the past three years. According to David Kaplan over at U.S. News and World Report, the FBI and the Department of Energy have been performing radiation monitoring at over one hundred sites in and around the Washington, D.C. area, in many cases going onto private property without warrants in order to set up the surveillance equipment. It also looks like, at times, they’ve extended the program into Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York, and Seattle, and that many of the people who have been caught up in the surveillance have been U.S. citizens.
Seriously, what does it take for the people of this country to start caring about how power-hungry our government has become?
Since I pointed yesterday to Bruce Schneier’s piece on Bush’s use of the NSA for domestic spying, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also send you his way to read today’s piece on what the spying means for privacy rights, and for the idea of Presidential power. It feels to me like nobody’s stated the issues more clearly and forcefully:
The result is that the president’s wartime powers, with its armies, battles, victories, and congressional declarations, now extend to the rhetorical “War on Terror”: a war with no fronts, no boundaries, no opposing army, and — most ominously — no knowable “victory.” Investigations, arrests and trials are not tools of war. But according to the Yoo memo, the president can define war however he chooses, and remain “at war” for as long as he chooses.
This is indefinite dictatorial power. And I don’t use that term lightly; the very definition of a dictatorship is a system that puts a ruler above the law. In the weeks after 9/11, while America and the world were grieving, Bush built a legal rationale for a dictatorship. Then he immediately started using it to avoid the law.
This is, fundamentally, why this issue crossed political lines in Congress. If the president can ignore laws regulating surveillance and wiretapping, why is Congress bothering to debate reauthorizing certain provisions of the Patriot Act? Any debate over laws is predicated on the belief that the executive branch will follow the law.
Schneier’s piece is chock-full of legal analysis and precedent that demonstrates how illegal the wiretapping efforts of the Bush Administration are, and provides tons of links to other peoples’ analysis of the program and the Administration’s stated justifications for it. One link, to Scott Rosenberg’s view over at Salon, is also worth a read, for the first postscript as much as for the rest of it.
Add my voice to the chorus recommending that everyone read Bruce Schneier’s essay about the Bush Administration’s illegal use of the National Security Agency for domestic wiretapping. If you haven’t been keeping up to speed on this story in the past week, Schneier’s piece will catch you up, and help you understand how far across the line the Bush Administration has strayed.
The thing that makes me happy with the entire brouhaha over gay marriage is that it’s continuing to expose as total crap the notion that the institution of marriage should form the basis for granting hundreds of rights to specific people. (You know — a married couple gets to inherit each others’ possessions, make decisions for each other, gain custody of children, that sort of thing.)
For example, take the Manhattan Supreme Court Appellate decision from two days ago, saying that gay couples have no fundamental right to marriage. The panel of judges came to that conclusion after, in part, finding that marriage laws are based in their ability to ensure the production of children; their words are as follows:
Marriage promotes sharing of resources between men, women and the children that they procreate; provides a basis for the legal and factual assumption that a man is the father of his wife’s child via the legal presumption of paternity plus the marital expectations of monogamy and fidelity; and creates and develops a relationship between parents and child based on real, everyday ties. It is based on the presumption that the optimal situation for child rearing is having both biological parents present in a committed, socially esteemed relationship. The law assumes that a marriage will produce children and affords benefits based on that assumption.
No matter how you feel about this notion, if one takes it as true, why then should childless heterosexual couples be afforded any of the rights of marriage? Why should the courts deem them worthy of the title, and confer upon them those things that it excludes from homosexual couples simply because the latter cannot pair up to produce children? Parse it even further — what about couples that marry, intend to procreate, but find themselves unable to do so? Should their marriage certificate be revoked?
The remainder of that paragraph goes on:
It sets up heterosexual marriage as the cultural, social and legal ideal in an effort to discourage unmarried childbearing and to encourage sufficient marital childbearing to sustain the population and society; the entire society, even those who do not marry, depend on a healthy marriage culture for this latter, critical, but presently undervalued, benefit. Marriage laws are not primarily about adult needs for official recognition and support, but about the well-being of children and society, and such preference constitutes a rational policy decision.
Why, then, do married couples get to inherit each others’ belongings well after their children have left the nest? Why don’t we make each and every right that our various levels of governments grant married couples contingent on the production of the first child, and then terminate ‘em all as soon as a couple’s youngest child reaches the age of 18? Reason: because this is all complete horseshit, an attempt to perpetuate a social custom under the guise of something with greater meaning. Until we as a society can separate the notion of a couple making a commitment to each other from the idea that that commitment has some larger (mostly religious) meaning, we’ll continue to see dubious justifications like this coming out of our courts, and continue to commit injustices against those who happen to make a commitment to someone of the same gender.
I’m jealous of the people who’ll be able to (try to) go to tomorrow’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals hearing in Gilmore v. Gonzales; to me, it really is one of those court cases that might define liberty in America.
For those who don’t recognize the case title, Gilmore v. Gonzales is John Gilmore’s lawsuit against the government for being banned from flying without providing some form of identification. It was originally filed in 2002 (then named Gilmore v. Ashcroft), and was dismissed by the U.S. District Court in northern California on jurisdictional grounds; so far, the government has refused to even disclose the text of the law requiring identification for airline travel, and has requested sealing of all government evidence in Gilmore’s case. (The Ninth Circuit denied the motion to seal evidence, the DOJ asked it to reconsider, and the court has yet to rule on that motion.) To me, the notion that we have a government which claims that there are laws by which we must abide but which we cannot read is pretty offensive… we’ll see how the Ninth Circuit feels.
Yesterday, the GAO released the report from their investigation into how the Food and Drug Administration went about rejecting the application requesting over-the-counter status for the morning-after pill, and it’s even more damning than most thought it’d be. The GAO went through all 68 applications filed between 1994 and 2004 for conversion of a drug to over-the-counter status, and found that the FDA used entirely different criteria in its determinations on emergency contraception than it had on the other 67 applications. Likewise, the FDA had never before ignored the recommendations that came from its own internal scientific review committee, and top management had never before involved itself to the extent it did in the Plan B decision. And then, there’s my favorite part: there’s good evidence that the rejection decision was made by the same high-level management officials even before the scientific review committee concluded its work. It’s a shining example of politics getting in the way of healthcare; while the FDA has issued a statement questioning the integrity of the GAO’s investigative process, it’s pretty clear that that’s just the agency’s way of expressing its anger about being caught cheating. Sad.
I know I’m hardly alone in saying this, but Senator (and Dr.) Bill Frist is a total buffoon. Yesterday, His Buffoonery publicly stated that he’s actually less interested in what our government is doing inside secret prisons than he is in the fact that the public now knows about the existence of those prisons; he then went on to clarify that he’s entirely uninterested in what goes on behind the doors of the prisons, and worries that now that the secret’s out, our nation’s security is in even graver danger. (You know, because all the other bad shit our government is now known to have done to detainees wasn’t enough to drive people to hate us, and the secret prisons really are the tipping point.) Given that the second-in-charge of his party recently lobbied John McCain — the man who was tortured as a prisoner of war for the better part of a half-decade in Vietnam — to give up on his bill calling for a universal ban on the torture of people in U.S. custody, it’s not hard to see where Frist’s ethical roots get their nourishment. It makes me nauseated; I can only hope that it disgusts enough other people to bring about real change in the government of this country.
Update: oh, great, our Senate yesterday voted to strip detainees at Guantánamo Bay of their right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts, a right which was upheld by the Supreme Court in Rasul v. Bush last year. So not only does our government want the right to toture the shit out of the people we’re detaining in the war on terror, it also wants to remove their right to question their detention in the first place. How far can this country stray from its founding principles before the voting public decides to notice?
How funny — it looks like the folks who run FEMA’s internet services don’t have an email server designated for the organization (see for yourself here), meaning that any and all email sent to an @fema.gov address is bouncing back as destination unknown. Seeing as a bunch of the email addresses on FEMA’s contact page live at fema.gov, it’s not only embarrassing, it’s another small measure of how the organization doesn’t quite seem to know what it’s doing.
(For those of you who aren’t such internet geeks, the best brick-and-mortar analogy for this is that it’s as if FEMA doesn’t have a mailbox or mailroom — right now, from the internet, there’s no way to get email to the organization at all. And for those of you who are big internet geeks, you probably know that the relevant RFC says that if there’s no MX record for a domain name, mail transport agents should fallback to using an A record — but the machine that lives at the A record address for fema.gov doesn’t have an SMTP server running, so the fallback is also falling flat on its face.)
FEMA chief Michael Brown resigns. Now would be the time that we all react with abject surprise and astonishment.
It makes me sad to see that the same arguments in defense of Bush we now know to be patently, verifiably, completely false are still being trotted out by conservatives in an attempt to deflect post-Katarina blame back to the local level. Listening to the radio, reading weblogs, and watching television over the past two days, I’ve counted dozens and dozens of people who still continue to claim things like that Louisiana Governor Blanco never declared a state of emergency, that Bush pleaded with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Blanco to evacuate the area and that both local leaders refused, that Bush didn’t intervene earlier (read: stayed on vacation) because he knew that “liberals” would rip him for taking control from a female governor, and that everyone would have been saved had Mayor Nagin just gotten the people onto all those buses. It’s another example of people adapting evidence to beliefs, rather than the other way around, and it makes me wonder exactly what a conservative leader would have to get caught doing to get these people to acknowledge the existence of a problem.
That being said, I’m also willing to acknowledge that there are a number of conservatives who have proven to be more willing to take a more rational view of the situation. For me, the primary evidence of this is the continued freefall of Bush’s approval rating; there are also random experiences I’ve had over the past week that provide further evidence. (For example, the hosts of the morning radio show I listen to have sadly talked about their support of Bush in the past, but this week, they called him an imbecile, questioned his judgement, talked about his inability to acknowledge his problems, and generally gave him the respect they’d give a New York Yankee.) It feels like the post-Monica era in the Democratic party, although it feels like it’s taken a lot longer and required a lot more work to get here.
In the end, Bush is a lame duck President, and doesn’t need public support for reelection. The rest of his party isn’t so lucky, though, and I’m hoping that its continued (near-unanimous) defense of him and his decisions will help Americans recognize the depth of the problems that we now face as a result of the past five years, and help start to right the wrongs in the 2006 interim elections.
From the it’s-about-freaking-time department: Michael Brown has been relieved of duty as the head of the federal Katrina response. (CBS News also has the story, and it’s trickling into the other news outlets as we speak.) It’s stunning to me that it’s taken this long, but then again, this is the man that Bush himself said was doing “a hell of a job” as tens of thousands were stranded without food, water, shelter, or medical care. (He’s also the man who seems to have lied a bit about his past and, after graduating from an unaccredited law school, doesn’t seem to have done much of anything in the legal world.)
It’s not a surprise to me that our President’s reactions to the horrors along the Gulf Coast have seemed to be something less than heartfelt or imbued with empathy, and my personal opinion is that it’s pretty easy to reconcile that observation with the fact that the majority of people whose lives have been destroyed by Katrina appear to be black, underprivileged, and relatively dependent on the assistance of their government to recover from a tragedy of this scope. I guess I never fully understood how Bush acquired those values, though, but hearing about his mother’s take on the refugees in the Astrodome today, I’m pretty sure I get it now. (Crooks and Liars has the audio, as well.) I always thought that Barbara Bush was a stately woman, but apparently she’s also a bit of an elitist, and has a terrible perspective on one of the worst natural disasters to ever hit the United States.
Things that make me want to pull my hair out:
Things that make me happy:
I’ve added an MP3 of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s morning interview (transcript here) to my torrent server; it’s as worthy of your time as is Mary Landrieu’s interview. I’m with Anil, though — if I were looking for something to lessen my anger, this probably wouldn’t be the thing to help do that.
Today’s addition to my torrent server is the CNN video from yesterday’s conversation between Anderson Cooper and Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. (Thanks to the people at Crooks and Liars for capturing the video.) If you haven’t heard anything about the interchange, it’s worth reading the transcript (it starts about a third of the way into the show) — he essentially interrupts a bit of Congressional backpatting to explain what conditions in New Orleans are actually like, and calls her on the apparent lack of a more robust and forceful response by the national government. The gem of the exchange:
COOPER: Excuse me, Senator, I’m sorry for interrupting. I haven’t heard that, because, for the last four days, I’ve been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated.
Of course, the transcript doesn’t do nearly enough justice to the video.
It wasn’t until I saw the news about the Army soldiers being put “on alert” for possible deployment to the Gulf coast that I realized how much my anger about the post-Katrina horror had grown over the course of today. This afternoon, we’ve already heard that the evacuation of both the Superdome and Charity Hospital had to be suspended because of sniper fire, that people are literally dying in the Convention Center due to starvation and dehydration, and that efforts to get food and water to the stranded people have met with violence and total anarchy. Why are these troops merely on alert? Why aren’t they on planes and in convoys on their way to the region? Why aren’t we airdropping soldiers and entire crateloads of food and water into the Convention Center and Superdome, providing gunship escorts for the evacuation effort, and doing absolutely anything else it takes to restore even the most basic needs and dignities to all the people who are so desperately waiting for help? And then in bizzarro world, we have our President strumming a guitar with Mark Wills and our Secretary of State shopping it up and playing tennis with the celebrities in Manhattan, all while the mayor of New Orleans issues desperate pleas for help. (Does anyone else think that the response to Bush’s appearances over the past few days is going to eclipse the response to him sitting through a twenty-minute grade school reading lesson while the World Trade Centers were attacked?) I certainly hope that things get better in the next few hours and days, but it’s clear that our country wasn’t prepared for a catastrophe this great, and isn’t doing so hot trying to make up for lost time.
Trust me when I say that you should spend the few minutes it’ll take to read this transcript of a White Plains, NY court session. The quick background: appearing before U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon is Michael Maschio, a lawyer for Elektra Entertainment Group, and Patricia Santangelo, a woman sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for sharing copyrighted music. And to ruin the punchline of the transcript a little bit: the lawyer keeps trying to get the judge to endorse the jackassed way the RIAA attempts to force defendants to give in, and the judge will have absolutely none of it. My favorite little snippet:
MR. MASCHIO: It would be helpful to resolve this case if the defendant would put in, under oath, a denial in writing.
THE COURT: Fine. But I’m going to give her some time to find a lawyer.
MR. MASCHIO: That’s okay. We would just like — we think it’s appropriate for her to say, yes, I did this or, no, I did not do this under oath. The other thing is that —
THE COURT: First of all, you didn’t file a verified complaint, and she doesn’t have to file a verified answer. So she doesn’t have to do anything under oath.
MR. MASCHIO: Well, okay.
THE COURT: I’m going to give her 60 days to find a lawyer. And she’s not in default. And she will not be in default if there is no answer, because, right now, there is a general denial on the record for her. Okay?
MR. MASCHIO: Okay. The other thing, your Honor, I don’t know if you want to do this. I brought a consent scheduling order.
THE COURT: No. I don’t want to set a scheduling order. In fact, I don’t want anything to happen in this case for a while.
MR. MASCHIO: Okay.
THE COURT: I’m in no hurry to see this case resolved. So far, Mrs. Santangelo has raised enough issues, including the use of a screen name or an account name — not hers, but some other person’s — that suggests that she might have some really interesting defenses to this. And there are defenses that maybe even ought to be litigated. The whole concept of a young person using the parent’s computer access is bad enough, but if this name is not hers, she doesn’t pay for this account.
(Thanks go out to Mike Godwin — yes, that Mike Godwin — for the pointer!)
Well, isn’t this sad news: Ibrahim Ferrer died at the age of 78 today, having been in declining health for the past few months. Ferrer was one of the most recognizable lead voices of Buena Vista Social Club, and will likely always be one of my favorite musicians. Shannon and I were fortunate to get to see him at the Beacon in New York back in November of 2001, one of the more memorable concerts in my life. Sadly, our government didn’t see Ferrer in the same light, denying him a visa last year (calling it “detrimental to the interests of the United States” to let Ferrer into the country) and thus preventing him from accepting a Grammy award.
Ibrahim, you will be missed.
Reading the emails I’ve received about my Boy Scouts Jamboree post two days ago, I think I’m going to need to start including a section in my posts entitled “Arguments you might notice I’m not making”. For example, that Boy Scouts bit would contain the following list of things that I’m specifically not arguing:
If you’re looking to drop me a line refuting any of the above arguments, you can feel free to, but don’t expect me to put up a huge fight!
Reading about the fatal tragedy at the Boy Scout Jamboree, two things struck me. First of all, the death of four people in front of their entire troop really is a horrible tragedy, and given the way that it appears the four died, I can’t imagine it’ll be all that easy for some of the kids to recover from that. In an entirely different vein, though, I also realized that the Jamboree is taking place on federal land — the Army’s Fort A.P. Hill — which means that our government still feels it appropriate to give access, funding, and support to an organization that specifically excludes gay, athiest, and agnostic people. I honestly don’t understand how this can still be occurring.
Doing a little reading this evening about the state of our government’s Boy Scout support, I discovered a few interesting things. First, I learned that a judge in the Northern Illinois U.S. District Court issued a ruling earlier this month which bars government support of future Boy Scouts Jamborees. The decision is available (in PDF form) from the ACLU’s website; it contains a thorough description of how the Boy Scouts meet the standard of a religious organization, and as such, how explicit government support thus violates the Constitution’s prohibition of a link between government and religion. Seems logical to me, and would seem to put this whole issue to bed. Oh, if it we
