ChezLark

As reported by the Washington Post, the President’s warrantless wiretapping program is getting a certain measure of scrutiny: an “oversight” board, serving “at the pleasure of the President“, reporting to the President, and run as part of the Executive Office of the President, was briefed about the wiretapping program after having been stonewalled for more than a year:

After a delay of more than a year, a government board appointed to guard Americans’ privacy and civil liberties during the war on terror has been told the inner workings of the government’s electronic eavesdropping program.

Members say they were impressed by the protections.
[...]
“We found there was a great appreciation inside government, both at the political and career levels, for protections on privacy and civil liberties,” said [Alan] Raul, author of a book of privacy and civil liberties. “In fact, I think the public may have an underappreciation for the degree of seriousness the government is giving these protections.”

…which brings us to today’s meme: Thoughtful People have Examined the Warrantless Wiretapping Program and found it to be OK, so there is No Reason to Worry. A good example of this meme being propagated is available at this Red State post:

The hysteria surrounding this program might finally start receding, as long as these remarks get some significant play. After all, having a former Clinton aide wish he could reveal more about a secret program to reassure people of the good work done by it rather than to torpedo the Bush administration should raise some eyebrows among the paranoid. Former Reagan counsel Alan Raul went even further, telling John Solomon that he believes that the public underestimates the level of concern and dedication for civil liberties in the federal government.

There are (at least) three things wrong with this meme:

1. The most important problem with the wiretapping program is that it appears to be illegal, and in fact has been ruled illegal by a federal judge (a ruling that is being appealed). Opining that the program is carefully run, or even highly respectful of privacy and civil liberties, is beside the point. In this country, we value the rule of law, and that means the President doesn’t get to do whatever he wants, even if he thinks it would be Good Policy to ignore certain federal statutes. Those respectful of the rule of law should oppose illegal government action, even if they think it is For the Best, and instead push to have the laws changed.
2. The White House and right-wing pundits dispute whether the program is, in fact, illegal. Fair enough, although it’s hard to tell one way or the other, since the details of the program are classified, and the government has actively fought any judicial review whatsoever. Regardless, in our system of government, it is not the job of politicians to rule on whether a governmental action is legal or not; that is the job of judges, and the reason why the judiciary is a completely independent branch of government. So, to the extent that the review board is purporting to offer a legal opinion (which is not even clear from coverage), their analysis is of little or no value, not least because it is utterly non-binding.
3. The Thoughtful People offering opinions about this program were hand-picked by the President and report to him, so it’s hard to take them seriously in the first place. This underscores again why the judiciary is a separate branch of government: disputes over the legality of government action are meant to be resolved by a dispassionate arbiter.

Glenn Greenwald has a good formulation of Problem #1 (bold is mine):

The heart of the matter is that the president broke the law, deliberately and repeatedly, no matter what his rationale was for doing so. We do not have a system of government in which the president has the right to violate laws, even if he believes doing so will produce good results. . . .

The NSA eavedsdropping scandal, as its core, is not an eavesddropping scandal. It is a lawbreaking scandal . . .

Anonymous Liberal has a good formulation as well (bolds are mine):

The fundamental issue here is not what sort of privacy protections the NSA program does or does not provide; the problem is that the NSA program does not comply with the law.
[...]
FISA, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, requires that the government seek warrants (either prospectively or retroactively) from a specialized court when conducting surveillance of U.S. citizens. This prohibition is categorical, and the Bush administration has no legal justification for disregarding it [...]. This is a BIG DEAL. A constitutional system of government cannot tolerate a chief executive who operates outside of the law, even if, in doing so, he implements policies that [oversight board member] Lanny Davis thinks are swell. There is no ‘Lanny Davis exception’ to the rule of law.

I’ll toss in a bonus point about this kind of comment:

While board members were impressed, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee urged colleagues on Monday not to approve legislation formally legalizing the NSA program until Congress gets more answers.

“Formally legalizing”, here, is a weasely phrase. As I’ve pointed out before, the White House can’t have it both ways: if Congressional action is necessary to legalize the NSA program, then it’s currently illegal. If, as the White House insists, the current program is perfectly legal because the President has the power to ignore statute, then Congressional action is not only unnecesary, it’s utterly pointless.

Every time the White House urges Congress to legalize their actions, they are declaring that what they’re doing right now is illegal. This is not a difficult point to grasp.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

We had a snow day today. A storm dropped a couple inches of snow on Seattle last night, and it froze hard overnight, so we all woke up to streets coated in ice and snow. Seattle isn’t exactly equipped to deal with snowy weather, since it very rarely snows here, so schools and businesses were closed today, and the Department of Transportation told people to stay home if they could.

Tonight, it looks like we might be set to break some temperature records, as the low is forecast at 18F for Seattle. This might not sound to impressive to people living in the northern states or Canada, but it’s pretty darn cold for Seattle.

I took some pictures this morning of all the ice and snow lying around, and have started running them at chromalark. Here’s the first:

It looks like two more days of snow and ice and then we might be out of the woods; it’s supposed to be cold and clear tomorrow, with another storm coming through in the evening. Then, temperatures get back above freezing and it’s back to endless rain.

Newsweek is running an article by Jon Meacham, which appears on MSNBC under the page title “Meacham on Thanksgiving, Church and State”. The article’s subheading reads:

Though intrinsically religious, Thanksgiving was proclaimed by Abraham Lincoln as a day that all citizens could celebrate. What this day tells us about a country of both the faithful and nonbelievers.

As an ongoing opponent of religious ceremony and language by public officials, I was interested. I regret to report, though, that as an analysis of the religious nature of Thanksgiving, this article is utterly content-free. Consider:

The most fervent secularist, however, could justifiably argue that just because religion is prevalent does not mean that governments, particularly governments founded on liberty of conscience, should cater to the religious to the exclusion of the nonreligious. Why not have governments stay out of religious affairs altogether? The secular argument for this is obvious, and there is a strong theological argument for such a view. “Put not thy trust in princes,” advised the Psalmist, and Jesus told Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.” The dissenter Roger Williams believed that “the garden of Christ’s church” should not be contaminated by “the wilderness of the world.”

OK, so the idea that government should just butt out of the religious domain is “justifiable”, “obvious”, and supported not only by secularists, but by theologians as well. So, what of it?

But neither view has ever prevailed.

Oh.

The article then goes on to catalogue that politics in the US have always been tinged with a particular brand of non-sectarian religion. Here, “non-sectarian” means that the singular diety that our politicians continually evoke could possibly, if you squint, be understood to be the God of any of a handful of monotheistic mainstream religions. Assuming, of course, that you momentarily forget that the Old White Man issuing the invocation is invariably Christian, and almost invariably some flavor of Protestant.

With one flip sentence, the article leaves the question of whether this is right in the dust, and never returns to it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: elected officials, when speaking in their official capacity, should simply leave religion aside. It is not acceptable for civil servants, in discharging their responsibilities, to promote any particular religion, or religion in general.

Georgie, in particular, should knock it the hell off. As per usual, his Thanksgiving Proclamation was laced with religious imagery:

As Americans gather with family and friends to celebrate Thanksgiving Day, we give thanks for the many ways that our Nation and our people have been blessed.
[...]
Today, many of these courageous men and women are securing our peace in places far from home, and we pay tribute to them and to their families for their service, sacrifice, and strength. We also honor the families of the fallen and lift them up in our prayers.
[...]
On this Thanksgiving Day, and throughout the year, let us show our gratitude for the blessings of freedom, family, and faith, and may God continue to bless America.

Listen, Preznit: your Proclamation claims to address all Americans, so it should, you know, actually do so. Even among those Americans fervently giving thanks this year for the fact that you shipped tens of thousands of our young people overseas to die in a pointless war, not all of them are “lifting up” anybody “in their prayers”, because they don’t pray. You know this, and yet you choose to cite the ceremonies of the religious majority, under pretense of addressing everyone.

Why mention prayer at all? If you feel like using the opportunity of a public holiday to slip in Yet Another Righteous Mention of your failed war effort, why not just leave it at “tribute” and “honor”?

You call on all Americans to “show our gratitude for the blessings of freedom” and “family”, but also of “faith”. Well, not all of us are grateful for the “blessings of faith”. In fact, some of us wish you had a little less “faith” about what’s right for this country, and a little more, you know, reasoned thought.

Why can’t you just leave God out of it?

Dammit!

This interactive map by the Cato institute, showing botched SWAT raids and other misuses of paramilitary force by US police departments, is deeply troubling.

Being President got you down? Unpopular? Panned by scholars and pundits? No problem — just build and massively fund an institute with the express purpose of rewriting history:

He may be a certified lame duck now, but President Bush and his truest believers are about to launch their final campaign - an eye-popping, half-billion-dollar drive for the Bush presidential library.
[...]
The half-billion target is double what Bush raised for his 2004 reelection and dwarfs the funding of other presidential libraries. But Bush partisans are determined to have a massive pile of endowment cash to spread the gospel of a presidency that for now gets poor marks from many scholars and a majority of Americans.

The legacy-polishing centerpiece is an institute, which several Bush insiders called the Institute for Democracy. Patterned after Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Bush’s institute will hire conservative scholars and “give them money to write papers and books favorable to the President’s policies,” one Bush insider said.

Ignorance is Strength.

The BBC has a brief article about a different type of male pill that may prove viable:

Scientists are working on a contraceptive treatment which would stop men ejaculating sperm.
[...]
Several other male contraceptives, given as injections, implants or patches are under development. Most are based on hormones which trick the brain into switching off hormone production.

The treatment being developed at King’s acts by preventing the longitudinal muscle in the vas deferens contracting to propel sperm out of the penis.

The drugs designed to treat schizophrenia and high blood pressure stopped men ejaculating were found to have this effect over a decade ago.

As I understand it, this is in contrast to the “standard” approach to making a Male Pill, which is to fiddle with hormones in order to shut down sperm production alltogether:

Scientists have developed an easy-to-use contraceptive pill and hormone patch for men.

A three-month course of the pill used in combination with the hormone patch reduces the number of active sperm to zero.

However, once men stop taking the pill patch their sperm counts return to normal.

The “standard” approach is a progesterone-testosterone hormone mix.

Happy (American) Thanksgiving to you and yours. I have such a preposterously huge mound of things to be thankful for in my life, it would be neither politic nor practical to list them all here. Instead, here’s hoping you are enjoying time with friends and family this day.

I like this quote from a commenter at The Online Photographer, about who uses traditional (”wet”) darkroom to produce photographic prints anymore:

I also teach a photo class or two at a university. Like I tell my students, the darkroom is pretty much for artists, cranks and wierdos. I consider myself part of all 3 catagories, but I have not made a silver print in nearly a year.

Progress marches ever onwards.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible to propagate this meme with a straight face, but I guess truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

As CNN reports, US Airways kicked six Muslim imams off a flight because they made the other passengers nervous:

US Airways said Tuesday it is investigating the removal of six Muslim imams who were passengers on a Monday flight heading to Phoenix, Arizona.

The clerics, who had been in Minnesota for a national imams conference, were guilty of nothing more than “flying while Muslim,” according to a national Muslim advocacy group.

The alert was raised after the men performed their normal evening prayers in the airport terminal before boarding Flight 300.

A passenger who had seen them pray passed a note expressing concern to a flight attendant, US Airways spokeswoman Andrea Rader told The Associated Press.

The complaining passenger “thought the imams — who were speaking in Arabic and English — had made anti-U.S. statements before boarding and ‘made similar statements while boarding’.” The Imams deny this.

Anyway, the FBI went over the whole plane with sniffer dogs, re-examined the imam’s bags, interviewed people, etc, and nothing seemed amiss. The plane took off three hours late, minus the imams, who ran into more trouble:

Shahin [one of the imams] told the AP that when he went back to the airport Tuesday morning, he was told by a ticketing agent his payment for the flight had been refunded. He said the agent told him that neither he nor the other imams could purchase tickets from US Airways.

So far, so reprehensible.

Let’s check in with the Right Wing for their take on the matter, courtesy of Front Page Magazine:

Shahin has complained that he was “humiliated” and that the way the imams were treated was “terrible.” Indeed. It is terrible. It is terrible that he and the other imams who were taken off the plane, as well as other Islamic leaders in America, have allowed those who commit violence in the name of their religion to do so unimpeded and unchallenged. It is terrible that these and other Islamic scholars have responded only with vilification when asked about the teachings of their faith that promote violence, instead of with honest dialogue and attempts to reform those teachings. It is terrible that, if they were indeed removed from the plane for praying, they are among those who have allowed their religion to become so associated with violence that American citizens on an airplane become alarmed at the sight of Islamic prayer.

In a sane world, officials would tell the imams that if they’re upset about being taken off the plane, they should redouble their anti-terror efforts in the Muslim community in the U.S. – which are sorely deficient in any case. They would ascribe their inconveniencing to the sacrifices that are incumbent upon all of us during wartime. But instead, they are compared to Rosa Parks, and it is likely that their canonization is just beginning.

Osama bin Laden, who predicted after 9/11 that soon many more planes would be falling out of the skies, is no doubt enjoying the spectacle.

So, let’s review:

• When airline passengers get nervous about being on the same flight as Muslims, even if those Muslims have done nothing wrong, this reaction is the fault of the Muslims for not doing something about all the Muslim terrorists. Because obviously, all the Muslims hang out together and the ones on the plane could have, say, told their terrorist friends to knock it off.
• If we kick Muslims off planes for no particular reason, their reaction should be “I’m so ashamed that I didn’t do more to prove myself worthy of riding on airplanes. I will go redouble my anti-terror efforts.”
• Getting kicked off a plane is just one of the “sacrifices that are incumbent upon all of us during wartime.” Well, assuming you’re Muslim, that is. We white people don’t like being kicked off planes.

That is all.

Taunting kids with water?

Gee, I can’t imagine why the whole Hearts and Minds thing failed…

Those crazy Japanese…