From the Buffalo Beast, the 50 Most Loathsome People in America. This is unbearably hilarous. But in case you thought you were laughing with everyone, check out no. 9:

9. You

Charges: You believe in freedom of speech, until someone says something that offends you. You suddenly give a damn about border integrity, because the automated voice system at your pharmacy asked you to press 9 for Spanish. You cling to every scrap of bullshit you can find to support your ludicrous belief system, and reject all empirical evidence to the contrary. You know the difference between patriotism and nationalism -- it's nationalism when foreigners do it. You hate anyone who seems smarter than you. You care more about zygotes than actual people. You love to blame people for their misfortunes, even if it means screwing yourself over. You still think Republicans favor limited government. Your knowledge of politics and government are dwarfed by your concern for Britney Spears' children. You think buying Chinese goods stimulates our economy. You think you're going to get universal health care. You tolerate the phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques." You think the government is actually trying to improve education. You think watching CNN makes you smarter. You think two parties is enough. You can't spell. You think $9 trillion in debt is manageable. You believe in an afterlife for the sole reason that you don't want to die. You think lowering taxes raises revenue. You think the economy's doing well. You're an idiot.

Exhibit A: You couldn't get enough Anna Nicole Smith coverage.

Sentence: A gradual decline into abject poverty as you continue to vote against your own self-interest. Death by an easily treated disorder that your health insurance doesn't cover. You deserve it, chump.

Yes, You are largely responsible for the way the country is today, since You voted for George W. Bush twice!

[Via kottke.org.]

Posted by Mark at 6:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Via Daily Kos comes a story of a president who doesn't respect the legislature in his country.

The story is of course about George W. Bush. Most of Congress left for the Christmas holidays, but they're still in session. Every day, a member of the House and the Senate conduct pro forma sessions that sometimes last less than a minute. No business gets conducted at a pro forma session, but Congress is still technically in session. This has been occurring to prevent Bush from making temporary recess appointments to federal benches. Recess appointments are emergency presidential appointments that can be made when Congress is out of session. They do not require Senate confirmation. A recess appointment lasts until the next Congress convenes.

The pro forma sessions have had the advantage of preventing a "pocket veto." When a president receives a bill from Congress, he can do nothing to it in addition to signing it or vetoing it outright. If, after ten days of sitting on the president's desk (Sundays excepted), Congress has not adjourned, then the bill becomes law. However, if Congress adjourns during those ten days, then the bill is pocket vetoed. (See U.S. Const. art. I, § 7.)

President Bush has refused to sign into law H.R. 1585 [PDF], a defense spending bill that contains a provision that would allow victims of Saddam Hussein to make claims in Iraqi courts. The bill contains other good provisions that Support Our Troops, so the president does not want to outright veto it or, perhaps, draw attention to the nefarious reasons why he's vetoing it. Neither does he want to sign it into law with that provision in place. If he does nothing, it would constitute a pocket veto.

At least, in reality it would. President Bush lives in a universe of his own in which he is the "decider." He has reserved for himself, in various signing statements, powers of interpretation that are traditionally (and legally) given to other people. Now, he has decided that Congress's pro forma sessions don't constitute being in session.

Furthermore, Bush has immediately defined terms in the debate by suggesting that, if Congress were to take him to court to have the court determine that he's lost his mind, such litigation would be "unnecessary." This is the latest in a string of statements he has made that are contemptuous of Congress attempting to exercise any power that involves regulating him, his agenda, or his office (even though such powers are explicitly granted to Congress in the Constitution).

As justification for his decision, he cites The Pocket Veto Case, 279 U.S. 655 (1929). (And, yes, the real name of this case is "The Pocket Veto Case.") At issue in 1929 was whether or not "adjournment" in the Constitution meant any interim adjournment of Congress (including a recess), or the final adjournment of a Congress. The Supreme Court disagreed that "the word 'adjournment' as used in the constitutional provision refers only to the final adjournment of the Congress. The word 'adjournment' is not qualified by the word 'final'; and there is nothing in the context which warrants the insertion of such a limitation."

Furthermore, as to whether or not an adjournment of Congress prevents the president from returning the bill, the Supreme Court said that it did. Since the House from whence it came was not in a position to receive his "objections" and "enter the objections at large on their journal," there would be no way for the president to fulfill the obligations required of him to satisfy a completely constitutional veto (no Congress in session means no one to receive his objections and no one to enter anything into a journal). This is the definition of a pocket veto.

Even though he cites The Pocket Veto Case, the issue at hand now has nothing to do with the definition "adjournment" and whether such adjournment prevents the president from "return[ing]" the bill to Congress. It has everything to do with whether or not Congress has adjourned. It would be difficult to prove that Congress is not currently in session, since it is clearly in session as far as all definitions go. (Were it not in session, then the president would be able to make those recess appointments.) Furthermore, he claims that he is vetoing the bill, and yet at the same time, he claims that he cannot -- and is not -- vetoing the bill outright. This makes no sense.

Were this to go to a court, I hope that any competent judge would rule that Bush's refusal to veto the bill (and his subsequent, explicit invocation of the "pocket veto") does not constitute an actual veto. Moreover, it would be hard for such a judge to rule that Congress is not in session, pro forma though it may be. One of the commenters at Daily Kos suggested that Democrats would relent -- as they always do, for some reason -- instead of actually filing suit. I really hope this doesn't happen. Democrats really should stop letting themselves be beaten up and come back for more. This is like watching a Lifetime movie (except, in the Lifetime movie, the woman usually ends up killing the abusive husband).

Posted by Mark at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's not that I don't like Ron Paul. I think he's a good senator, but it remains to be seen whether or not he will make a good president. As I have written before, Paul is definitely a libertarian, and while he may own Rudolph Giuliani in presidential debates, that doesn't mean that he would make a good president.

Ron Paul was debating the other day with SEDHE Villain of the Forever candidate Glenn Beck about abolishing the income tax. It's funny to watch Beck say that he agrees with Paul, and then proceed to disagree with him. Beck, of course, is a Christian conservative who believes that the government should be fiscally conservative and dictate morality. Paul is a fiscal conservative who also believes that the government shouldn't dictate morality. Beck, it seems, doesn't understand how someone can be in favor of small government and a government that doesn't care whether or not you are gay (even though Ron Paul does care if you're gay; see above link). But that's a writing for another day.

The problem with Ron Paul is that, while he wants to eliminate the income tax, he really has no plan for replacing it with anything. Paul's answer to this is just to make the government smaller. But there are a lot of government programs that are good -- like Medicare and Medicaid -- that would suffer from Ron Paul's idea of a bare-bones government.

Paul's website mentions nothing about his desire to destroy the IRS and the Federal Reserve. There are vagueries about returning to the Constitution (whatever that is supposed to mean in this case -- unless the sixteenth amendment isn't part of the Constitution?) and lowering taxes, but nothing to indicate the nature of his position. How many Ron Paul supporters know what he really thinks? You certainly wouldn't gather that from his web site. The Internet loves Ron Paul for saying what he thinks, but even on the Internet, he doesn't say what he really thinks. He reserves that for television.

Posted by Mark at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency denied the petitions of seventeen states, including California and New York, to set their own vehicle emissions guidelines. California had passed legislation enforcing tougher emissions standards, but federal law requires states that wish to have different guidelines get a waiver from the EPA before enforcing those guidelines. The EPA dragged its feet for over a year, prompting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to file a lawsuit against the EPA, demanding that it make a decision.

In denying the petitions of seventeen states, the EPA said that it didn't want confusion over a "patchwork" of different state emissions laws. This argument is bogus and assumes that there are no other regulations that consist of a "patchwork" of state laws. Automobile manufacturers would not have to worry about different laws; instead, they would manufacture vehicles that met the strictest of the state regulations. Have you ever noticed that your Little Debbie Snack Cakes contain a seal that says they were approved by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture? Here's an example of a "patchwork" of state laws that, somehow, an entire industry has managed to negotiate. Oh, pity the incompetent auto manufacturers!

Baked goods sold in Pennsylvania must pass more rigorous examination than baked goods sold in any other state, or nation-wide. Rather than complain to the federal government that Pennsylvania's laws would result in a "patchwork" of baked goods regulations, bakeries that sell products nationally instead opted to make their products to the specification of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, the strictest of the state laws. The auto industry, unfortunately, is used to coddling by the government, and as such, will have nothing of "innovation."

The article from The New York Times also hints at a back-room deal between the Bush administration and auto manufacturers. Auto manufacturers mysteriously dropped their antagonism for the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, leading some to suspect that the administration traded this EPA ruling for support of the energy bill. As the Times notes, California has received fifty EPA waivers since 1970.

Gov. Schwarzenegger has faced off against killer robots, killer aliens, and Danny DeVito (twice!). President Bush is of no concern. That's why he, along with the governors of the other states that wanted their own emissions standards, is suing the EPA. Schwarzenegger claims that the fedreral energy bill doesn't go far enough toward addressing the issue of global climate change.

This ruling isn't particularly surprising, given that the Bush administration had to be taken to court (in Massachusetts v. EPA) before it would enforce the nation's laws; namely, laws regarding carbon dioxide emissions, which the EPA didn't consider a "pollutant."

Posted by Mark at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

10:15 AM PST -- I arrived at the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) an hour before my flight was to leave. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that this is the holiday travel season, and four million other people were waiting in line just to check in. United’s policy is that no one -- no one! -- can board a flight with checked luggage within 45 minutes of departure. I had missed the deadline by five minutes due to the length of the check-in line. Thankfully, a handy customer service telephone was at the kiosk, and I spoke to someone in Darkest Africa who told that I would be unable to check in, since it was less than 45 minutes before the flight. I told him that I knew that now, was there anything he could do to put me on another flight? He said that it would be $50 to put me on standby to Chicago. “Great,” I said. “I’ll complain later.” He said I would have to talk to a ticket agent to be put on standby.

I flagged down one of the few ticket agents that are employed anymore to stand behind the self-check-in e-ticket kiosks. I labored under the impression that the man from Darkest Africa had somehow used the power of technology to patch my problem through to the nearest computer terminal. No such luck. I explained my problem to the ticket agent, who did the best she could to assist me. Seriously, SFO was a mad-house. The main security checkpoint at Terminal 3 (the United terminal) had a line going all the way down the terminal. What no one apparently knew was that there was another security checkpoint with a much shorter line. Why no one funneled all that traffic down there is a mystery to me. Such are the ways of airlines and airports.

Ticket agent lady put me on standby to a flight to Chicago. My original itinerary was from SFO to Las Vegas to Chicago to Cleveland. San Francisco and Chicago are both United hubs, so I would have ended up in Chicago no matter what.

1:00 PM PST -- The next flight to Chicago was at 9:45. At 9:45, we were informed that the flight was full and there were no standby seats available. Our standby information would be rolled over to the next Chicago flight, at 10:45. So we hauled ourselves to another gate. I noticed that I was in the same boat as two men and a woman. The man at the gate for the second Chicago flight said that the flight had been overbooked (note the interesting use of language here; in the past, it was called “oversold,” but that terminology places the agency on the airline for selling too many seats; when it’s called “overbooked,” it’s the customers’ fault for booking more seats than there are available, those nasty customers!). Don’t expect any first-class upgrades, he said. I asked him what my chances were of getting a seat on standby. “Not good,” he replied. The woman who was standing by on the previous flight said that she arrived at the airport two and-a-half hours before her flight was supposed to leave. And she still didn’t make the flight. She blamed “traffic control” in the ticketing area. What that meant was that she apparently stood in line for an hour and-a-half as time ticked by and her flight closed. She attempted, she said, to get the attention of a ticket agent -- or something -- to let her move up in the line, but no one did anything. The ticket agent only chided her for not arriving four hours early. She went to the customer service center at Gate 80 to see what they could do. I went there, as well.

I was told at Gate 80 that there was nothing she could do. All the flights for all the airlines were full for today; indeed, they were overbooked for today. My best bet, she said, would be to wait on standby for the rest of the day. I accepted this and went back to the 10:45 flight, where there was still the possibility that there might be seats.

No dice. The flight was totally full. I got rolled over to the next Chicago flight, which left at 11:30. The woman from the previous flights, who told me she was an ER nurse and had no problem dealing with patients spurting blood and as a result didn’t understand how they could mess up the logistics down at the ticket counter, got a flight at 2:00. It all depends on who you talk to, she said. I decided that I would wait for the 11:30 flight, and if nothing panned out, I would go to a different ticket counter.

Perhaps in an attempt to weed out the chaff, the 11:30 flight to Chicago changed gates three times. It was fairly easy to tell where the flight had moved, though. Just look for the unhappy mob milling about outside one of the gates. As expected, 11:30 came and went with no space on standby. I walked to the Gate 80 customer service center and found that the line was snaking down the terminal. I looked for another customer service center, figuring the one at Gate 80 wasn’t the only one in this terminal.

Found it! At Gate 76, which is sort of in a separate wing of Terminal 3, there was a smaller -- but no less able -- customer service center. Thank God for lazy people. I spoke to Sylvia . I explained how I had missed the cutoff by five minutes, how I had been placed on standby, and how three flights had come and gone with no standby space. Sylvia understood and took the time to help me out. She searched all flights for all airlines at all airports for today and said that they were booked. All of them. So she searched some more. She met with partial success: there were spaces on flights to Chicago, and there were spaces on flights from Chicago to Cleveland, but never at times that worked with each other. I had two options: I could fly to Los Angeles International (LAX), then to Washington/Dulles International (IAH), and then to Cleveland. The flight to LAX was at 8 PM, so I would have to spend the night in LAX. Or, she said, I could fly from SFO to Chicago O’Hare (ORD) at 2 PM and then fly from ORD to Cleveland at night. Maybe. Only problem was that the 2 PM flight from Chicago was delayed until 9 PM. It was displayed on all the departure screens, but curiously, the delay was not in her system. She found out only when I told her.

While we were haranguing, the spot on the LAX flight disappeared. She booked me on the 2 PM flight to Chicago, which is really a 9 PM flight to Chicago. I would have to spend the night in Chicago and then get on a 7:15 AM flight to Cleveland the next morning. There was a 4:15 PM flight to Chicago, and I probably wouldn’t make any flights out of Chicago by the time that came in, but she said I could check. She put me on standby for the 4:15 flight.

And now I’m waiting for the 4:15 flight. Admittedly, it was my fault that I got there late. I didn’t think that checking in at 7:45 would be such an ordeal -- in fact, I arrived at the check-in kiosk only five minutes late -- but I accept that. At the same time, United has proven once again that its logistics system is crazy, as it permits flights to be solidly overbooked, and during the holidays. The airlines have complex computer programs that guess how many people won’t show up for a flight and they then sell an equivalent amount of tickets beyond the capacity for a given flight. There is no room for error. Unfortunately, during the holiday travel season, things are tight and I wonder how many extra flights United is flying during this time.

I appreciate the hard work of Sylvia in trying to get me on a flight, even though she fully understood that it was my fault for being late. Rather than give me a bogus answer of, “Keep waiting on standby,” she helped me until she found me a way to get to Cleveland. When dealing with customer service people, I always stress that it’s better to be calm and amiable than angry, frazzled, and demanding. Customer service people have the power to give you what you want, and if you treat them like a fellow human being, they will go beyond the call of duty to help you, as another human being. Become demanding, though, and they will treat you the same way, not like a human being but like the belligerent “customer” that you are. If I hadn’t found her, I would still be trying to fly standby. One of the men from the original standby flight finally got a standby ticket to Chicago, but of course, that was only the beginning of his problems. He would be flying standby out of Chicago, as well. I think the only reason I even got a spot on the 2:00 flight was because it moved to 9:00, and undoubtedly several people changed theirs to the 4:15 flight to Chicago, freeing up space on the 2:00 flight. I’m grateful for that; I’ll take a red-eye. I’d sit behind any number of crying babies at this point.

6:00 AM CST -- I spent the rest of the day hanging out with this woman I described before -- whose name I don’t know. I know that she lives in Arcada and works as an ER nurse. We walked around the airport and watched as the line outside Gate 80’s customer service center grew quite long, and went so slowly that people started sitting down in line. We talked about how we would hate to be those customer service people, that today would have been a great day to call in sick.

Our flight to Chicago went well; both of us slept. Once we got to Chicago, we went our separate ways, as our connecting flights were in different concourses. It’s interesting having these one-time friends, these people whom you talk to freely, even though you met them only a few hours ago, and then leave behind, never to see again. Such is the way of the airport.

I’m in Chicago right now, waiting for my connection in Cleveland to leave at 7:35 AM CST. I have a boarding pass in hand, with a seat assignment and everything. I tried to sleep in the terminal, and for a while, it was quiet. I picked what I thought was a shady spot, but it was right next to the major security check-in area. At about 4:15, a whole bunch of TSA screeners gathered there to talk. I slept through it, anyhow. The airport is something I usually think of as running 24 hours. But it doesn’t run 24 hours; the security areas were closed off, all the shops were closed, and only the Christmas music coming through the speakers and the occasional recording warning that taxis can’t solicit rides were signs that any human beings lived there once.

The security line in Chicago, even at 6:15, doesn’t look that long. The problems in San Francisco seemed to be a Perfect Storm of little things. The man who finally got on the standby flight at 9:00 said that a flight to Boston changed to a smaller plane, forcing about 100 people to fly standby. Since they were already booked on a flight, and it was the airline’s fault that they weren’t booked anymore, they got priority when standby seats became available. This is one of the reasons why we had such a hard time finding standby seats.

7:57 PM EST -- I got into Cleveland right on time: 10:00 AM EST. Then I got home and took a nap.

Posted by Mark at 4:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sure, the Bush administration has taken us thirty years backward in terms of surveillance, privacy, environmentalism, and science. It fights hard against enforcing the nation’s environmental laws, even going to the Supreme Court to argue that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and shouldn’t be regulated by the EPA. It supports wrong-headed scientific opinions -- like the president’s stem cell policy and his endorsement of abstience-only education -- that are based not on science, but on the religious beliefs of a few people in positions of power. Is there anything else the Bush Time Machine can do? Turns out there is. The magic word is “secrecy.”

Let’s go back to a time when the earth and Dick Clark were young. The year was 1972 and agents of the president were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC. The break-in to the hotel was the first in a series of revelations collectively called the “Watergate scandal” that exposed the government’s role in illegal activities that ranged from surveillance to information leaks. Over the course of two years, America learned that not only was the government engaging in illegal activities against its own citizens, but it was actively covering up those activities through a combination of legal maneuvering, plausible deniability, and -- when all else failed -- the paper shredder.

The Watergate scandal resulted in a number of changes to the way government operates. The Office of Special Counsel was created to serve as an independent investigatory arm. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) prohibited the executive from spying on Americans without a warrant. The Presidential Records Act placed the National Archives in charge of the paper being shuffled around the White House: it would decide what would be classified or declassified, shredded or preserved for posterity. United States v. Nixon declared that executive privilege could not be asserted in criminal investigations. The Nixon administration tested the limits of government accountability and oversight, and perhaps thanks to Nixon, we have laws on the books preventing those same abuses from happening again.

Until now. Wiretapping, leaking, and cover-ups have become fashionable again with the Bush administration. And it has little to do with the War on Terr’ and a great deal to do with the mindset of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who see transparency as a threat to their power. Let’s not forget that Bush fought vehemently against a committee to investigate the events of September 11, 2001. As the administration engages in surveillance for surveillance’s sake, so too does it engage in opacity for opacity’s sake.

The Bush/Cheney penchant for hiding information from the public they serve is not about national security. Recall that, in 2001, Cheney met with several unknown persons in order to churn out the the president’s energy policy. The energy policy was fossil fuel-centric, leading groups like the Sierra Club to sue the administration. They smelled the influence of energy company executives and wanted to know for sure with whom the vice president had met. The administration asserted executive privilege, and the Supreme Court agreed.

Fast forward to 2007, when the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Harriet Miers and Karl Rove to find out how much they knew about the firing of US attorneys. The administration sent a friendly letter stating that it would be asserting executive privilege. The Judiciary Committee held both Miers and Rove in contempt, but that would prove to be pointless. It is the US attorney for the District of Columbia who files contempt charges, and the Justice Department -- then under the control of President Bush via Alberto Gonzales -- ordered the DC attorney not to file contempt charges. Problem solved! This is one of the reasons why Gonzales resigned: the public soon began to understand that he did whatever the president did, without question, regardless of its legality. By virtue of his being president, Bush could never break the law.

In that case, what was at issue was not national security information. It was the potential embarrassment of having the nation learn that what we suspected all along was true: the US attorney firings were politically motivated. The administration tends to cover up things that could be potentially embarrassing, as it attempted to do when the Jack Abramoff scandals hit the streets in 2006. Bush insisted that Abramoff may have visited the White House a few times, but refused to relinquish the White House visitor logs to prove it. The logs were normally kept by the Secret Service, but Bush ordered them sent to the White House and then destroyed. It soon became policy to destroy White House visitors logs rather than keep them. It is plain that there is no national security interest here, nor any executive privilege claim. The White House simply didn’t want anyone to know who came calling and then use that information against the executive branch. All that changed yesterday, when a federal court judge ruled that, despite what Bush may have ordered, the White House visitor logs are Secret Service records, and as a result, the National Archives has control over them.

Earlier this year, the National Archives’ investigative office complained that the president and vice president were not complying with an executive order signed by President Clinton regarding declassification of executive documents. Bush and Cheney were deciding for themselves what documents would remain classified; in fact, the authority to declassify presidential documents rests with the National Archives. The fear here was that, perhaps, the National Archives would declassify documents that did not contain information damaging to national security, but did contain information damaging to Bush and Cheney. Cheney refused to allow the inspector to even enter his office. He then asserted that he did not have to be in compliance with the law because the vice president’s office was not part of the executive branch. Bush also jumped on the bandwagon and insisted that the Office of the President was exempt from the order. We all had a good laugh for about a week, and then Bush and Cheney relented after the House of Representatives threatened to cut the Office of the Vice President out of the executive branch’s budget, since he wasn’t a member of that branch. The scary part of that week was that Bush and Cheney weren’t joking -- they even entered the realm of irreality to prevent oversight, so much was their desire to prevent anyone from knowing what was going on.

And it will continue into the future. Bush has signed orders keeping his own records, and those of his father, sealed until far into the future. The Bush conceit of secrecy is obviously an attempt to save his own behind. Whenever a scandal arises, cover it up! And if someone causes a scandal, leak something! Valerie Plame learned that the administration plays hardball with its critics. At the same time, though, it keeps information close to its chest. The attitude is reminiscent of the Nixon administration, where G. Gordon Liddy occupied an office in the basement with the name “Plumber” on the door. It was Liddy’s job to plug leaks (hence the title “White House plumber”), but it was also his job to strategically make leaks. The worlds of Nixon and Bush collided on a Fox News show where Liddy had the audacity to insist that it was okay for the Bush administration to leak Valerie Plame’s CIA status. This from a man who has the moral high ground because he went to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. President Bush is a man deeply concerned about his legacy. With any luck, history will look back on him as the man who unearthed Richard Nixon and wore his skull around as a Halloween mask.

Posted by Mark at 5:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A few years ago, Vice President Cheney articulated his theory of security, which he called “the one percent doctrine.” He said that we should treat a one percent chance of a terrorist attack as though it were a one hundred percent chance of a terrorist threat. It makes for a great bumper sticker, but as a security method, it’s terrible. Because there is an economy of time and space, we can only worry about the things that are most likely to hurt us. This is why we’re more afraid of shark attacks than falling space debris. To inflate a 1% chance of something happening into a 100% chance of something happening is ludicrous beyond ludicrous. And yet, it seems to inform the way the Bush administration deals with risk assessment. Sometimes. It’s hard enough to translate such a stupid theory into intelligible foreign policy, but what makes matters worse is that the Bush administration only adheres to this doctrine when it’s politically expedient.

So Iran might have nuclear weapons, right? Maybe. But it may also be enriching uranium for civilian power generation, which is permitted under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. One of the only reasons that we think Iran might be enriching weapons-grade plutonium is its secretiveness. Iran refuses to let anyone from any international watchdog agency inspect its facilities to ensure that it’s complying with non-proliferation agreements. This could be because it’s actually making nuclear weapons, or it could be because it doesn’t want the international community to see its massive human rights abuses. It also doesn’t want to lose face and be seen as capitulating to foreign powers. The same was true of Iraq: as it turns out, Saddam didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction, but his secretiveness was because he didn’t want UN weapons inspectors to see the massive human rights abuses and because he wanted to appear powerful in front of his subjects. When you’re a dictator, you need to appear all-powerful, lest your subjects think they can overthrow you.

Half of the problem with Iran is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Both he and President Bush can agree that “compromise” is a euphemism for “being a wuss.” Even if Iran isn’t developing nuclear weapons, Ahmadinejad certainly behaves as though it is. Two weeks ago, there was about a 50-50 chance that Iran was secretly developing nuclear weapons, not enriching uranium for civilian power generation. With the release of last week’s national intelligence estimate and the revelation that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003, those odds have changed. Still, though, the Bush administration has latched on to any language it can in the NIE to support its case for war with Iran. The president has said that the NIE actually supports his position, since it says there is a “moderate” agreement among all sixteen US intelligence agencies that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons ambitions. In the Bush mindset, that means there is still a chance that Iran may be developing nuclear weapons. For Bush, any probability of something happening must be treated as though it is certainty. He’s the eternal optimist.

Unless it comes to something the president disagrees with. Take global warming. For five years, President Bush refused to believe that global warming was happening and that it was caused by human beings, despite a consensus in the scientific community that it really was happening, and humans really were causing it. When it came to global warming, the man who ignored any contrary opinions about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was suddenly a multilateralist, willing to entertain all points of view. He didn’t want to make decisions too hastily, since there were still some dissenters on the global warming front. (Actually, there were hardly any at all.) The reason that Bush was loathe to believe in global warming was the solution to the problem: cut down greenhouse gas emissions. That meant cutting down fossil fuel use, spending money developing cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels, and possibly cutting greenhouse gas emissions by cutting industrial production. All of these activities are directly at odds with Bush’s personal and professional constituencies: namely, energy companies. The second solution -- spending money on alternatives -- has the double whammy of both costing energy companies revenue from fossil fuels and requiring them to spend money on technological innovation when they would rather just call up the government and have Congress pass laws exempting them from new requirements or forcing new markets to behave like old ones. They’re used to this, and they’re not going to like having to engage in actual change. Bush may have lost some cherry board of directors and/or consulting jobs.

When it came to global warming, a 1% chance that it wasn’t true was treated as a 100% chance that it wasn’t true. Let’s not be too hasty. After all, we’re only talking about the planet. It was probably the film An Inconvenient Truth that, more than anything else, catalyzed popular support for a serious look at the damage humans are doing to the environment. Hence Bush’s cold shoulder toward Al Gore when the latter won the Nobel Prize: it was Gore, whom Bush defeated in 2000, who forced the president’s hand in admitting something that he didn’t want to. Like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Saddam Hussein, Bush doesn’t want to be seen as capitulating on anything. Changing one’s mind is a sign of weakness, even if you were wrong the whole time. No matter how wrong your course may be, it is more important to continue on that course than it is to change to the correct course. Only sissy girls and John Kerry change their minds in the face of new information. Even if Bush rides his horse straight into quicksand, at least they’ll say that he never wavered. He’s dead now, but that’s not the important part.

The one percent doctrine leads to paranoia, which is a hallmark of dictators. Paranoia leads to civil liberties abuses, like warrantless wiretapping and torture. Everything else takes a back seat to the probability that there will be a terrorist attack, which is necessarily one hundred percent at all times. It’s a great doctrine for keeping a populace in a state of constant fear, and using that fear to get whatever you want. Warrantless wiretapping? You got it! US citizens being denied habeas corpus? As long as it will keep me from being blown up! And while we’re at it, let’s spend billions of dollars to create a government department second only in size to the Defense Department that manages to bungle security while at the same time vacuuming up taxpayers’ money. What’s even worse is that the Bush administration itself doesn’t adhere to its own one percent doctrine -- unless, of course, there’s an election to be won or money to be made.

Posted by Mark at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s amazing what privacy a simple wall can afford. Once you’re out of sight of someone else, everything you do becomes secret. No one else knows that you’re picking your nose, not washing your hands after you use the bathroom, or walking around in your underpants. Privacy, though, doesn’t extend only to those things we’d rather people not find out about. Privacy exists as an end unto itself. There’s no reason why people need to know what television shows we watch, even if those shows are innocuous network programming. At its most important, the idea of privacy allows us to engage in conduct that hurts no one but ourselves. For a person who has been born and raised in a democratic country such as ours, the idea that external forces would care about our opinions or our sexual habits is mind-boggling. Part of what keeps a dictatorship in power, though, is controlling the private lives of its citizens and ensuring that those citizens aren’t thinking things or doing things that the dictator might see as a threat to his power. When privacy has no foes to grapple with, its existence goes unnoticed. But when privacy comes up against someone trying to peer into someone’s window or listen on someone’s phone, we find out how effective our society’s privacy laws are.

For the last six years, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and their friends at the National Security Agency have been spying on U.S. citizens for no other reason than those citizens may have been making phone calls to foreign countries that are associated with terrorism. This should immediately evoke rebuke from people who understand the necessity of privacy: why does the Bush administration need to know whom I’m calling? Yes, there’s a chance that I could be calling a terrorist compatriot in Saudi Arabia and working on plans to destroy a national landmark, causing millions of dollars in damage and thousands of lives. But there’s an equally good chance that I could be calling my poor, sick Saudi grandmother. Who is to know?

Prior to 1978, no one really knew. Despite the government’s insistence that the president’s ability to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance is a no-brainer, the history of foreign intelligence surveillance in this country shows that notion to be an outright lie. The Supreme Court upheld and reversed itself at least twice over the issue of warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance. President Nixon believed that, as president, he had carte blanche to conduct surveillance on whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Over the course of two years, Church Committee pounded out several volumes of testimony regarding intelligence abuses, leading to 1978’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA codified and put into plain terms where, when, and how the executive could conduct foreign intelligence surveillance, which is defined as surveillance of foreign persons within the United States. Despite what Joe Klein may think, no one needs a warrant to conduct surveillance outside the United States upon foreign targets. Within the United States, the government is bound by normal warrant requirements if it wishes to conduct surveillance on “United States persons” within U.S. borders.

And yet, FISA wasn’t enough for the Bush administration. In 2005, we learned that the administration had been conducting warrantless wiretapping, in the process potentially capturing the communications of “United States persons” – defined in FISA as U.S. citizens or nationals – something that is expressly forbidden under FISA. Realistically, though, we don’t know what communications had been captured, since the program was secret. Our privacy laws failed us because our leader decided that FISA was too cumbersome, and therefore, used an as-yet undiscovered “inherent” authority to overstep the law and do things his way. Welcome to the Sinatra administration.

A year later, we found out that the administration had asked several U.S. phone companies to help it in its spying. “Would you please turn over customer records to us?” it said. “Well, why not?” they replied – all of them except Qwest Communications, which looked at the government’s request and said, “Gee, this looks like it invades our customers’ privacy and could open us up to litigation. No thanks; we’ll pass on this one.” But the other phone companies gleefully complied with the administration’s request. AT&T even built a secret room in its San Francisco substation where government agents could monitor Internet traffic. AT&T even wrote a program that could search voice and data records for particular keywords, assessing whether or not the results were actually relevant to terrorism. All of this without a court order; the phone companies did this voluntarily.

In the end, Qwest Communications may have done the right thing. The phone companies definitely did break several privacy laws, and now they’re the objects of several lawsuits. As it turns out, phone companies can’t give away information to people who ask for it, not even if they really, really want to help, in the same way that a Boy Scout helps an old woman cross the street. No, unlike that boy scout, phone companies must be compelled – by a court order, signed by a real, live federal judge, who has looked at actual evidence and determined that, yes, these records are necessary in order to prosecute a crime – to give up that information.

But spying may have taken a new turn. The New York Times reported Saturday that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has been monitoring phone calls between the United States and Latin America in an attempt to find information about drugs. The same article says that the government wanted access, in 2001, to Qwest’s most localized phone switching equipment, which “could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order.”

To what end?

While it may be easy to understand why the federal government would want to monitor calls overseas – it’s where our enemies are, after all – it’s much more difficult to understand why the government needs to spy on individual neighborhoods. Perhaps it wants to see if Wally and the Beaver are meeting to buy heroin from Dobie Gillis and Maynard G. Krebs. Is it concerned that Ward is running a tax-evasion ring with Fred McMurray and Sheriff Andy Taylor? (Note: I couldn’t remember offhand who Fred McMurray’s character was in My Three Sons, but who remembers that, anyway?) Spying on individual neighborhoods is no less illegal than conducting warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance, but it is a whole lot more sinister. Which brings us to the question of the week: “To what end?”

Spying is supposed to serve a logical end, beyond merely just spying. It’s almost as though listening to other people’s phone conversations is something they do in Quantico just for giggles. “Can you believe that Donna Reed is having a lesbian affair with June Cleaver?” No one’s worried about whether or not there’s a KAOS agent living undercover in Anytown, USA. They’re more fascinated that there can be such a thing as “identical cousins.”

The mundanities of our everyday lives are just as deserving of protection as our seditious political opinions, our heathen sexual orientations, and our union memberships. In some ways, discovering that the government has been listening in on our gossip is more disconcerting than if it were listening in on our conference calls to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. It means that the government is willing to do things without a reason. It doesn’t make any sense. It means that we don’t know what to do if we want to put our heads down and comply with what we’re told. This is another facet of dictatorships: capriciousness. In a dictatorship, a person can be arrested for any reason, at any time, even if the person were objectively doing nothing wrong. "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged,” said Cardinal Richelieu. The trouble with the attitude of “Si no te metías con nadie, nada pasó” is that it presumes that the state intelligence apparatus behaves rationally and won’t arbitrarily prosecute, imprison, or execute someone just to “make an example” of him. In a democracy, keeping your head down and your mouth shut keeps the government out of your hair; in a dictatorship, there’s no guarantee that complying with the law will keep you alive and out of prison.

For this reason – and others – privacy is valuable in itself. It prevents the government from making up reasons why you should be prosecuted. It keeps democracy honest, and when privacy breaks down, tyranny seeps in, especially when things of no importance suddenly become a matter of great importance to the government. “The excruciating minutiae of everyday life,” as Elaine from Seinfeld called it, is our business and no one else’s. Michael Hayden, stay away from my underpants.

Posted by Mark at 8:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richard D. Erlich

In Robert Redford's film Lions for Lambs, Tom Cruise's Senator Jasper Irving demands of Meryl Streep's reporter Janine Roth, "Do you want to win the War on Terror? Yes or no?"

It's an important question. It's also a trick question.

As most peaceniks or military wonks will tell you (given a chance), terror is an emotion and terrorism is a tactic, and the phrase "war on terrorism" is a figure of speech.

Trust me on terrorism as a tactic, and an old and widespread tactic: state terror answered with popular terrorism goes back at least to the early stages of the repression of Jewish customs under the Selucid Empire in the second century before the Christian era, answered by an insurgency led initially by the Jewish patriot Mattathias and, after his death, by his sons, notably Judah, "the Hammer" (the Maccabees, celebrated in the minor Festival of Hanukkah).

According to the First Book of the Maccabees, one royal decree ordered death for any women who had their sons circumcised, with death also "for their families and those who circumcised them; and they hung the infants from their mothers' necks" (1.60-61). The response to such decrees, the story continues, included an act of defiance in which Mattathias kills a collaborating Jew and "the king's officer who was forcing them to sacrifice" (2.23-25), possibly to King Antiochus as the god Baal Shamin. Then Mattathias "and his sons fled to the hills" (2.28), "and all who became fugitives to escape their troubles joined them and reinforced them. They organized an army, and struck down sinners in their anger," i.e., Jews who accepted Greek culture, "and lawless men in their wrath; the survivors fled to the Gentiles for safety" (2.43-44). The Maccabees and their followers won often enough and cemented enough popular support to move from guerilla warfare to open warfare and, eventually, victory, and respectability.

In the 20th century of the Christian era, terrorism was also used, at least occasionally, in the struggles for national liberation from occupiers ranging from the Nazis to the British to the earlier-annexed Boers/Afrikaners to the French and Americans: from occupied Yugoslavia to Ireland and England, to Palestine and to what was the Union of South Africa, to Algeria and Indochina.

So terrorism is a tactic – old, well-established, and nasty – and we can't literally make war against a tactic.

So let's rephrase Senator's Irving's question. I'll suggest, "Do you want to live in a world without terrorism?"

It might be a world without terrorism because no one wants to commit terrorism, or it might be a world without terrorism because no one dares: a world so well policed that terrorism is impossible.

I would like a world without state terror and non-governmental terrorism, a world where all large disputes could be resolved peacefully, or, a distant second best, with totally professional militaries fighting highly limited, set-piece battles, far from civilian populations.

Such a world would be a large step toward utopia. And with that comes a problem.

How does one get to where no groups have grievances so grave they are willing to try to right them by killing people? How does one get to a peaceful utopia peacefully? In a world of limited resources and rapidly-growing populations, in a world of nations large and small, ethnic groups, and tribes, how do you allow only current states to use lethal violence? Would it be right to limit some right to violence only to established states?

(If you celebrate the Fourth of July and the American Revolution, you should think carefully before denying violence to independence movements.)

I don't know how to get to even a modest utopia; I do know that 20th-century attempts to build immodest utopias led to such horrors as the Nazis and Stalinists, Cambodia under Pol Pot and his murderous followers.

Real-world utopianism can lead to a dystopia, to a bad world. We'd get to dystopia more directly and much faster in moving to where people might want to commit terrorism, but couldn't.

For a world kept by force totally free of terrorism, we'd need, I think, police states on a world-wide scale. For a USA free from the threat of terrorism, we'd need, I think, a totalitarian police-state here and endless "police actions" abroad.

So to "Do you want to win the War on Terror? Yes or no?" I think we should reply, No, not if you mean by victory another bloody adventure in utopia-building, or Zero-Tolerance through dystopian near-zero freedom.

For other alternatives, I'll go to the 2002 formulation of an old-fashioned Republican: retired US Air Force Lt. General and National Security Advisor to Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft. With a lot of effort, international cooperation, courage, and common sense, we can "win the war on terrorism" in the sense that "we can break its back so that it is a horrible nuisance and not a paralyzing influence on our societies" ("Remarks by Brent Scowcroft at the U.S. Institute of Peace Conference on America's Challenges in a Changed World," September 5, 2002).

Short of terrorists with nukes or, far less likely, effective biological weapons of mass death, terrorism is horrible when it happens, but unlikely to happen to most of us. Never for the victims and their families and friends, but as a social/political issue, terrorism for Americans outside of Iraq and Afghanistan is still mostly "a horrible nuisance." If we show some courage, we won't be terrorized, and the threats we face can be minimized.

So toughen up, my fellow Americans; for the foreseeable future, that is the one possible and tolerable victory.

Richard D. Erlich is an Emeritus Professor in English, now living in Ventura County, California.

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Here's the story: a wealthy, elderly single woman wants to sell her million-dollar luxury condo. She puts it on the market for a while, but since the housing market is going into the tank, she doesn't get what she wants for it. So she puts it on Craigslist -- or, more accurately, her realtor puts it on Craigslist -- in the hope that someone will rent it. Her plan is to rent it out for a year, then come back and sell it. From what we can tell, neither she nor the realtor has ever rented before. These are people with multiples of millions in the bank; why should they ever have experience renting a place? They own!

And in we step, into the Park Bellevue Tower, an exorbitant name for an equally exorbitant place. We found the place online and, as far as we can tell, we were the only people who called to inquire about it. The realtor -- who is the building's realtor -- didn't put any pictures on the Craigslist posting. To those who know how Craigslist works, this is a capital offense, as posts without pictures don't get looked at.

The Park Bellevue Tower (or PBT to those for whom living there constitutes normalcy) is a twenty-five story luxury condominium tower on the shore of Lake Merritt. Lake Merritt is a large-ish inland lake on the west side of Oakland (but it's not in West Oakland!). The lake is close to several neighborhoods that contain a lot of interesting things to see and do, and places to eat: Lake Merritt, which contains those things immediately around the north shore of the lake; Grand Lake, home of the Grand Lake Theatre; Lakeshore, where a new Trader Joe's just opened up; Park Ave., the location of another cool movie theatre, the Parkway Speakeasy; and Downtown, which is just what it sounds like it is. The good part about living where we live is that we are within walking distance of a lot of things. Emeryville just wasn't a walking town. Certainly it was possible to walk to places like Trader Joe's or Bay Street, but the city wasn't designed for it.

Our apartment is quite large, with marble-looking floors in the halls, kitchen, and bathrooms and hardwood floors in the bedrooms. Hardwood floors always sound like a draw when you're looking for a new home. They don't get as disgusting as carpet can, they look nice, and they're easy to clean. They're also easy to scratch. Living with hardwood floors requires that you cover with a rug the areas occupied by your furniture. After all, you wouldn't want to scratch those floors. By the time you're done covering everything up, you don't get to see your hardwood floors because they're covered with rugs. The hardwood floor then becomes no better than an Old Masters painting you keep locked up in a safe. It's a thing you have, not a thing you enjoy. It's hard to enjoy a hardwood floor, especially when people are constantly becoming anxious about scratches. Normally, I wouldn't worry about scratches (after all, it's a freaking floor, and scratches are going to happen -- you may as well become uptight about your luggage getting scratches), but this isn't our house, and the security deposit looms like a thundercloud over the hardwood floor.

Ultimately, I had qualms about living here. I still do. It's not the kind of place I would have looked at, nor is it the kind of place I would have moved into on my own. The "luxury condo tower" is not my kind of place. I don't like having to take an elevator eighteen floors up and down (even though we're on floor 19, there's no floor 13 out of superstition). I don't like being greeted by a friendly doorman every day. He makes it feel as though it's not my home. I would never have a doorman at my house. The whole place feels prefabricated and sterile. There's an exercise room and a pool on the sixth floor. Why would anyone ever leave? It's like a gated community, which I think some people would really like. I am not one of those people. I will take my chances with the outside world if only to have easy access to the outside world. I am not afraid of the outside world. There are some people who are, though, and for them this building is a boon.

Another of my friends lives in what used to be a small mansion on the other side of the lake. The mansion has since been divided up into four apartments, two on the second floor and two on the first. She lives in one of the apartments on the second floor and has a small living room, kitchen, and bedroom. She also has a set of stairs that leads to the attic, which is carpeted and has dormer windows looking to the outside. I love this apartment. I wish I lived there. I would make my room upstairs in the attic and turn the bedroom into an office. It's not so small that it is oppressive; nor is it so large that it feels empty. PBT feels empty. If I had millions more dollars, I would stuff it with as much stuff from Pier One or World Market as I could (which is what the previous occupant did) just to make it seem more cozy. But my friend's apartment comes cozy at no additional charge. That is the place where I want to live. The only thing missing is a porch where I can sit on warm summer nights or cool winter nights. It would be a place where I didn't have to walk past a doorman every day or take an elevator eighteen floors up.

I first nicknamed this place American Psycho tower because it's exactly the kind of place where Christian Bale's character from the film might have lived. It's a luxury condo that overlooks the lake. It's insulated from the dangers posed by the Real World. To live here means that You Have Arrived. But now that I've arrived, I'd much rather leave.

Posted by Mark at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've written in this space before about how I think the Unifying Theory of Advertising doesn't work on the Internet. There are too many ways in which a user can ignore or outright disable ads. This cuts down on the number of people who view the ads, and in turn, how many people buy the stuff featured in the ads.

Read/Write Web today takes issue with the advertising technology at the heart of Facebook's potential $15 billion valuation (based on Microsoft paying $240 million for a 1.6% stake).

The problem, writes Alex Iskold, is that "people are not coming to Facebook to click ads." Ignoring for a moment the other half of Iskold's thesis -- that Facebook isn't capable of delivering relevant ads that people want to click on -- we're left with a problem that could bring down Web 2.0.

I've said it before: people don't like advertising. They tolerate because they have to, and whenever they can easily get around it, they do. Advertising is reaching a saturation point, and it won't be long before people, fed up with constantly being marketed at, abandon forums that contain advertising in favor of forums that don't. If Facebook becomes too ad-oriented, it runs the risk of alienating its users at worst, and losing revenue from users who don't buy the products advertised. Once the revenue goes down, then ad-based social networking sites -- which are most of them -- will find themselves in the unemployment line right behind Web 1.0.

Posted by Mark at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By a vote of 51% to 49%, Venezuela's constitutional reforms were defeated today.

While there were some good constitutional reforms [en español], like changing the workday from 8 hours to 6, and the work week from 40 hours to 36. But there were more bad reforms, such as:

• President Chavez would be allowed to run for re-election an unlimited number of times;
• The Central Bank would be stripped of its autonomy;
• President Chavez would have control over foreign currency reserves;
• The army would be changed from a "professional" apolitical force to a "popular, anti-imperialist" force (with no mention of its being apolitical);
• The army would be permitted -- and required -- to engage in internal civilian policing;
• High-ranking military officers would be promoted by President Chavez only (as opposed to President Chavez, in concert with the National Assembly)

I have railed against Hugo Chavez before because I feel that he has many dictatorial tendencies.

My friend Alberto suggested that constitutional re-writes in Latin America are not always necessarily bad, since it is often the case that constitutions in that region are written unilaterally to serve the interests of a small group of people. As a result, it may end up that re-writing the constitution is a good thing, since it purges the corruption of previous leaders. While I grant that, the 1999 Venezuelan constitution was definitely not written unilaterally. Half of the articles came from Chavez himself, while the other half of the articles were the result of submissions made by the people. Quite literally, Venezuelans wrote in with their suggestions for constitutional articles. It would be difficult to argue that the 1999 constitution was typical of these dictatorial Latin American constitutions. As a result, I feel confident in saying that a good number of these 2007 reforms are unilateral and unnecessary. There was no corruption that needed to be removed.

Fortunately, the Venezuelan people -- though by a slim margin -- recognized that these reforms were unnecessary and questionable. Why does Chavez need to run for president indefinitely? Why would the military suddenly not be apolitical? And why on Earth does the military need to engage in civilian policing? All of these things can be found in autocratic states, and while Chavez professes democracy (indeed, he claimed that his was the most democratic country in the world), we must judge Chavez against himself, and when we do that, we find that he does not live up to his own standards.

It's also interesting to note that, when facing Chavez supporters, they immediately assume that anyone who is against Chavez is necessarily a neoliberal American imperialist who believes everything the Bush administration says. Chavez himself thinks this. Strangely enough, he has as black-and-white a vision of the world as President Bush does. Whereas President Bush once said that "you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists," Chavez labels anyone who disagrees with him a "traitor." With Chavez, there is no room for debate and no room for nuance. If you disagree with his policies, then you not only disagree with -- and hate -- him, but you also hate Venezuela and necessarily want to see it taken over by the American empire. Does this sound familiar?

Good work, Venezuela!

Posted by Mark at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)