From Boing Boing, AT&T's new terms of service allow them to cancel your service if you criticize them. Under § 5.1, "Suspension and Termination":

Your Service may be suspended or terminated if your payment is past due and such condition continues un-remedied for thirty (30) days. In addition, AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes [...] (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries [emphasis mine].

Outraged? You should be. But AT&T, as a private company, isn't bound to honor the First Amendment; that affects only the government. However, as a "common carrier," AT&T may be bound by 47 U.S.C. 202(a), which prevents common carriers from making

any unjust or unreasonable discrimination in charges, practices, classifications, regulations, facilities, or services for or in connection with like communication service, directly or indirectly, by any means or device, or to make or give any undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to any particular person, class of persons, or locality, or to subject any particular person, class of persons, or locality to any undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage.

It sounds like AT&T's refusal to permit customers to criticize it constitutes "discrimination in practices." Any lawyers out there?

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It's a doozy. From Paul Krugman, we have the story of why President Bush loves outsourcing everything, from emergency management to the army. Krugman refers specifically to the recent Blackwater controversy in Iraq, in which the U.S. contract-security firm may have killed 8-20 Iraqi civilians without any reason. This is just business as usual for the Bush administration, which trumpets the virtues of the private sector over those of the government:

But it's also worth noting that the Bush administration has tried to privatize every aspect of the U.S. government it can, using taxpayers' money to give lucrative contracts to its friends -- people like Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, who has strong Republican connections. You might think that national security would take precedence over the fetish for privatization -- but remember, President Bush tried to keep airport security in private hands, even after 9/11.

The private sector has, in the last six years, entered many areas of the government, usually with anything but virtue. Remember 2005, when it was revealed that Halliburton subsidiary KBR overcharged the government for meals that were never delivered and laundry that was never washed -- or that never even existed?

The best way for rich investors to make money is to get government contracts. Here's how the process works, in my Handy Guide to Outsourcing the Government:

1. Get a friend of yours inside the government. In this case, we have Dick Cheney, formerly CEO of Halliburton (and who still receives a pension from them).
2. Have your friend (or your friend's cronies) appoint incompetent officials to positions of power in the hope that those officials will act as incompetently as you hope.
3. Wait for a major crisis to happen. Inevitably, the incompetent official will really screw something up.
4. Point to that official's failure as an example of why the government should not be in the business of doing whatever it was that official did. Explain that the private sector could have done it cheaper and more efficiently.
5. Outsource a previously government-run department to a private company; bonus points if it's run by that friend of yours. Triple Word Score if your friend's company gets a no-bid contract for unexplainable reasons.
6. Stand idly by as your friend's company overcharges the government for services it never provided, wastes taxpayers' money, and performs an even more incompetent job than the stupid plant did before.
7. Don't hold any hearings. Don't investigate. If journalists ask questions about why a company that is doing a terrible job is still receiving no-bid contracts, flat out don't answer the question. Or change the subject. Or say that you can't talk about it because "it's under investigation."
8. The problem will go away on its own. Your friend will leave the company, the company will be broken up, or purchased by another company, and you'll replace the incompetent officials with some mildly competent ones -- but not before you receive some sweet kickbacks from that friend of yours!

Next, from Philip Boffey, the use of the nasty "s-word." It was brought up repeatedly by opponents of the State Children's Health Insurance Program expansion. (The word is "socialism," by the way.) How are Republicans claiming that not expanding healthcare for uninsured children -- children! -- is a good thing? They're pulling the old Soviet ghosts out of the closet, dusting them off, and brandishing them with as much scare as a 50-year-old straw man can be brandished. Dana Perino, the president's spokeswoman, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, both used "socialized medicine" to refer to the SCHIP program. Expanding the program, they say, is just the Democrats' way of getting their foot in the door so that they can sneak Dr. Stalin and Dr. Castro in to perform unnecessary surgery on your right to pay way too much money to a private insurance company (and then spend the next six months in customer support hell as you try to explain that the surgery to remove your almost-exploded gallbladder really wasn't frivolous).

Boffey points out that, in making these arguments, Republican opponents (and they are all Republican) of SHCIP ignore the fact that we already have socialized medicine in this country, in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, and VA hospitals.

Your grandmother is being strangled by Karl Marx right now! Our boys in uniform are being slaughtered by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, who's been dressed up to look like Che Guevara! Except that millions of Americans use socialized medicine, and they aren't trying to topple the government and institute a dictatorship of the proletariat. Paul Krugman once observed that opponents of socialized medicine use hip surgeries as a benchmark for efficacy of medical treatment. The United States, he says, has the best record for hip surgery in the world. But what those opponents fail to note is that hip surgeries are, by and large, performed on the elderly -- the same elderly who are using Medicare. In their attempt, then, to prove that socialized medicine is not as good as "private" medicine, opponents of socialized medicine have only confirmed that socialized medicine is better than private medicine.

In the same way that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth propelled global warming from its status of "maybe it's not happening" to "we need to do something about this right now," so too has Michael Moore's Sicko brought government healthcare into the light. It's no longer a debate about whether or not we should have it, but when we're going to have it and what it will look like. This film single-handedly clued Americans into how broken, unfair, and stupid our medical system really is. The issue can no longer be shuttled back into the shadows by Republicans (like former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, whose family runs one of the nation's largest private hospital systems).

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I'm surprised it took this long! Earlier this week, conservative talk radio show host Rush Limbaugh called U.S. soldiers in Iraq who disagree with the American occupation "phony soldiers." His suggestion is, obviously, that real soldiers wouldn't disagree with the Iraq War. Limbaugh himself has never served in the military, as he received a deferment from going to Vietnam. Limbaugh frequently tells people that he received a deferment for a "football injury," but in fact, the deferment was due to an anal cyst. The cyst resembles Limbaugh himself.

For spending the last twenty years being a conservative hack, chickenhawk, hypocrite (especially when it comes to drugs!), blowhard, and all-around douchebag, Rush Limbaugh earns the title SEDHE Villain of the Forever.

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"What do you think of black universities?" a friend asked me the other day.

"I think they're fine," I replied stupidly. I wasn't stupid for thinking they're fine; I was stupid because I didn't really think about the question and thus gave a very simple answer. I had never before thought about historically all-black universities, like Howard University.

The all-black university was created in a time when both de facto and institutional racism prevented African-Americans from going to "regular" universities, which were inevitably populated by white men. Black students, owing to their having been schooled in sub-par schools (which were, again, institutionally devised thanks to Plessy v. Ferguson), didn't have the credentials to get into white universities. They also didn't have the family standing to get into a white university. With perhaps a few exceptions, there were no black Rockefellers or Carnegies.

And take a look at where black universities are: the South! Naturally, if there were deep-seated institutional racism to be found, it would be there. Merely living in the south, with its atmosphere of discrimination, prevented a black student from attending a white university. Thus were born the black universities, designed to give the black student in the south a chance at the education that was denied him because of his skin color.

I've brought up the issue of affirmative action before: is it really necessary to give black students extra help merely because they're black? Do they face that much hardship that they need help? Why not make scholarship opportunities need-based instead of race-based? She cites the example of rural Ohio, where people are as poor as the poorest southern blacks, but are denied scholarships because they aren't black. We both know wealthy black students who received scholarships to Miami University not because they had a need, but because they were black. Does being black qualify as a "need" on par with being poor? Moreover, is it just as racist to discriminate based on race -- but instead, denying opportunities to white students because they're white and haven't endured the hardships of being black?

To begin our analysis, let's go to University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), the first Supreme Court case of so-called reverse discrimination. Respondent Bakke had applied to the UC Davis medical school and was twice rejected. In both years, however, "special applicants were admitted with significantly lower scores than respondent's." Bakke sued, claiming "reverse discrimination." Both the trial court and the California Supreme Court agreed with Bakke that Davis' system violated the Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court did not completely invalidate Davis' system: it said that Davis could take race into account in admissions, but it could not use a strict quota system.

At the end of the day, the purpose of affirmative action is to correct historical wrongs. For hundreds of years, blacks were systematically removed from the mainstream of American life, putting them in situations that continue to affect them today: poverty, for one; discrimination, for another (witness the noose-hanging that precipitated the "Jena 6" incident).

But do these systematic problems affect wealthy black people? Are our wealthy (or even middle-class) black friends at Miami University in as much need as a poor white person? In terms of getting into college, "probably not" is the answer. The purpose of affirmative action is to equalize the playing field, but what are the stakes in the playing field? For college admissions, it's money; therefore, scholarships should be doled out based not on race, but on income. This means that any person who can afford to go to college will go to college, and any person who cannot will still go to college.

Now back to the all-black university. Are all-black universities necessary anymore? Again, "probably not" is the answer. The explicit racism that kept black students out of "white" colleges is gone; no (accredited) university today would dare refuse to admit an applicant because of his race. And yet, the black university remains an historical oddity. Some opponents of affirmative action might argue that there are all-black universities, but no "all-white" universities. Obviously, no one would ever accept the existence of an "all-white" university, but it's difficult to compare these two things. Black universities were created out of a particular historical moment; at no time in the history of the United States have white people ever been marginalized to the degree that they needed their own universities. Someone who wanted to be particularly smarmy might point out that, for most of our country's history, non-black universities were all-white universities. That person would be smarmy, but he would also be correct.

While the all-black university may no longer be necessary, there are still some stepping-stones necessary to help those who remain marginalized; namely, the poor. In business, of course, and in housing, being a racial minority is still a barrier to entry in some parts of the country, but by and large, I don't believe that being a racial minority is still a barrier to entering higher education.

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Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari to a Kentucky case challenging the legality of lethal injection. The suit was filed by two inmates in a Kentucky prison who are themselves on death row. The Supremes will have to decide whether or not lethal injection qualifies as "cruel and unusual punishment," which is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.

The Supremes also granted certiorari to an Indiana voter ID case. An Indiana statute requires voters in that state to present a government-issued photo ID before voting. Critics of the measure say it amounts to de facto disenfranchisement, as the kinds of people who would be unable or unwilling to obtain a photo ID are the kinds of people who would vote Democratic. The Fourteenth Amendment requires both state and federal governments to extend "equal protection of the laws" to all people in the United States. To deny someone the right to vote based solely on that person's inability to pay for a photo ID is most certainly not "equal protection."

The Court's term begins Oct. 1 with oral arguments in two cases, neither of which is terribly interesting. In Washington State Grange v. Washington Republican Party, petitioner Washington State Grange Party believes that Washington's "top-two" primary system (in which voters in a primary choose from between the two most popular candidates, regardless of political affiliation) is unfair because it allows a candidate to list which party he or she personally prefers (and, through that, allow voters to identify which party they are from).

The second case, Board of Education of the City of New York v. Tom F, involves whether or not a disabled child is entitled to tuition reimbursement under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act even if that child hasn't received special education from a public agency.

See? Boring. But better cases are coming this term! And, we'll get to see how far to the right the Roberts court will again swing.

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WASHINGTON -- The Associated Press reports that President Bush will pick Michael Mukasey, a retired federal judge and judicial advisor to the Giuliani campaign, as his nominee for Attorney General. I don't know very much about Mukasey, but he appears not to be a member of the Bush Good Old Boys Network. This is heartening news; with a Democratic majority in the Senate -- and with Republicans tired of Gonzales' cronyism -- Bush was forced to pick a nominee based not on his history with the president, but on -- what's that? His credentials?!

This is exactly what the Founding Fathers hoped for in writing the Constitution: that requiring the "advice and consent" of the Senate would mean that the president would have to compromise. For six years, the president and the Senate were the same party, so Bush could pretty much appoint whomever he wanted (unless the nominee was hilariously unqualified, as with Harriet Miers). Now, though, with Democrats in the majority, Bush is forced to actually pick a candidate that everyone will be happy with, and that kind of candidate is not someone who has been with Bush for the last fifteen years (cf. Gonzales, Miers, Karl Rove, et al.).

Mukasey seems eminently qualified. He first served as a U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1970s and was then appointed as a federal judge for the same district in 1987. He left that position in 2006, returning to the New York law firm he worked for from 1976 to 1987. He does not appear to have any strong ties to President Bush; or, at least, his ties aren't nearly as strong as Gonazles'. Let's hope Mukasey's tenure signals the end of Bush cronyism in Washington.

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From there "I shouldn't be surprised about this, but my mind is blown nonetheless" department comes this month's Rolling Stone feature story about the tremendous government waste in Iraq. The source of this waste is government contractors, who are given no-bid contracts independent of their qualifications. (A company called Custer Battles was awarded a $15 million contract, despite being in business for only a year, thanks to Mike Battles' political connections.)

Companies like KBR (formerly a Halliburton subsidiary) and Bechtel charged the government for services it didn't offer, and overcharged it for constructing shoddy buildings that were inhabitable. This is due largely to the "cost-plus" arrangement with private contractors: the more money they spend, the more money they make. Build a building that cost $100,000 in actual supplies and labor, charge the government $5 million, and then pocket not only that difference, but the 3% profit you're guaranteed on top of your spending.

Remember when Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, had $12 billion in cash delivered to Baghdad? Ostensibly it was to pay vendors and contractors. But of that original $12 billion, $8.8 billion -- or 73% -- is unaccounted for.

Not only is it the waste that's appalling, but it's the government's carefree attitude toward it; indeed, the government is allowing and encouraging such fraud to happen because it is deeply in bed with the contractors. Government official gives out cherry contracts; company profits; when government official leaves, he finds cherry job at company. And the cycle continues. Perhaps that person will once again join the government (as with Dick Cheney -- formerly Secretary of Defense, then CEO of Halliburton, now Vice President).

When our president says that he cares about the troops, he clearly doesn't. Let me make myself clear again: President Bush does not care about the welfare of the troops. He only wants meat to fight in his war. I'll leave you with my favorite quotation from the story:

What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

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Former New York governor Mario Cuomo has an op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times in which he discusses Congress' abdication of its authority to declare war. "Because the Constitution cannot be amended by persistent evasion, this constitutional mandate was not erased by the actions of timid Congresses since World War II that allowed eager presidents to start wars in Vietnam and elsewhere without a 'declaration' by Congress," he writes.

Art. I § 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress -- and only Congress -- the power "[t]o declare war." Since the Constitution is not a document of exclusion (meaning the only powers the government has are those that are explicitly delineated), no other branch of government may declare war. Over the last forty years, says Cuomo, Congress has begun to abdicate its constitutional authority to declare war, through legislation such as the War Powers Act, which allows the president to place troops in combat for up to ninety days without a formal declaration of war. It's arguable that this legislation is unconstitutional, as the Constitution does not allow Congress to delegate these powers to anyone else.

Cuomo's analysis of the possible constitutional showdown is very good: if Congress were to resist Bush's calls for war, Bush would take the issue to the courts. While it may seem dastardly for Bush to insist that he has powers that are exactly contrary to the powers given to him in the Constitution, he has done things before that are just as outrageous, such as insisting that both he and Vice President Cheney are not subject to laws governing declassification of documents in the executive branch.

While Cuomo believes that the conservative-leaning Supreme Court would back up a Bush assertion that he has the power to send troops to war, I find this hard to believe. It's very clearly stated in the Constitution that only Congress has the power to declare war, and for the Supreme Court to suggest otherwise would be reprehensible and even more of a blow to their legitimacy. Nevertheless, Cuomo is right in that Congress needs to start enforcing its own obligations, because Bush's executive branch -- the branch that selectively enforces the laws that he agrees with -- certainly won't.

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