Month: December 2006

Aid And Comfort

by digby

So the White House is having a little fit that some Senators are going to Syria. I guess they feel their diplomatic efforts have been so successful that they can’t take a chance of anyone mucking things up:

The White House on Thursday stepped up its pressure on senators who are engaged in direct talks with Syrian leaders, saying their trips to Damascus risk undermining U.S. efforts to encourage democracy in the Middle East.

[…]

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow suggested Thursday that just by engaging Syrian President Bashar Assad in diplomatic dialogue, visiting senators could dilute Washington’s hard-line approach, even if they adopt the administration’s language.

“The Syrians have been adventurous and meddlesome in Iraq and in Lebanon and working against the causes of democracy in both of those countries,” Snow said.

On Wednesday, the administration criticized Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) shortly after he met with Assad in Damascus.

On Thursday, Snow extended that criticism to two other Democratic senators, Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, and a Republican, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

All of them are planning visits to Damascus, the Syrian capital, in coming weeks.

[…]

Snow said that Nelson had been told before he met with Assad of the administration’s displeasure with his plans and that his public comments should serve to notify Dodd, Kerry and Specter of the White House’s opposition to their meetings in Damascus.

“The Syrians should have absolutely no doubt,” Snow said, “that the position of the United States government is the same as it has been, which is: They know what they need to do. They need to stop harboring terrorists. They need to stop supporting terrorism in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere.”

He said that regardless of the message delivered by the senators, “the Syrians have already won a PR victory” because the visits were “lending … legitimacy” to the Assad government.

That’s interesting. And it makes you wonder why they never said anything about this guy after 9/11. (Yes, it’s that time again):

Evidence of Rohrabacher’s attempts to conduct his own foreign policy became public on April 10, 2001, not in the U.S., but in the Middle East. On that day, ignoring his own lack of official authority, Rohrabacher opened negotiations with the Taliban at the Sheraton Hotel in Doha, Qatar, ostensibly for a “Free Markets and Democracy” conference. There, Rohrabacher secretly met with Taliban Foreign Minister Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, an advisor to Mullah Omar. Diplomatic sources claim Muttawakil sought the congressman’s assistance in increasing U.S. aid—already more than $100 million annually—to Afghanistan and indicated that the Taliban would not hand over bin Laden, wanted by the Clinton administration for the fatal bombings of two American embassies in Africa and the USS Cole. For his part, Rohrabacher handed Muttawakil his unsolicited plans for war-torn Afghanistan. “We examined a peace plan,” he laconically told reporters in Qatar.

To this day, the congressman has refused to divulge the contents of his plan. However, several diplomatic sources say it’s likely he asked the extremists to let former Afghan King Zahir Shah return as the figurehead of a new coalition government. In numerous speeches before and after Sept. 11, Rohrabacher has claimed the move would help stabilize Afghanistan for an important purpose: the construction of an oil pipeline there. In return, the plan would reportedly have allowed the Taliban to maintain power until “free” elections could be called.

The idea was outlandish and even provocative. Though he is a member of the same ethnic tribe as the Taliban leadership, the 87-year-old exiled former king—who lost his throne in 1973—is known not for his appreciation of democracy, but for his coziness to Western corporate interests. With good reason, he was considered a U.S. puppet by the Taliban.

After Taliban-related terrorists attacked the U.S. last September, Rohrabacher associates worked hard to downplay the Qatar meeting. Republican strategist Grover Norquist [he was there too — ed] told a reporter that the congressman had accidentally encountered the Taliban official in a hotel hallway.

But that preposterous assertion is contradicted by much evidence:

•Qatari government officials who told Al-Jazeera television on April 10, 2001, that Rohrabacher sought the meeting in advance and that they had assisted in the arrangements. Muttawakil said he agreed to the meeting “on the basis of allowing each party to express their point of view.”

•The congressman himself told other Middle Eastern news outlets that his discussions with the Taliban were “frank and open” and their officials were “thoughtful and inquisitive.” Hardly a casual chat in the hallway.

•Similarly, in an interview with Agence France-Presse, Rohrabacher’s entourage described the meeting as “a high-level talk.”

What’s remarkable is not only Rohrabacher’s attempt to rewrite history after Sept. 11, but there’s also his glaring naivete, evident in his bungling assessment of the Qatar meeting. One member of his entourage, Khaled Saffuri, executive director of the Islamic Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based group that partially bankrolled Rohrabacher’s trip, said he was impressed by how “flexible” Taliban officials appeared. Rohrabacher came away equally impressed. He announced he would travel to Afghanistan to work out details with the Taliban.

But Rohrabacher was out of his league. In the Afghan capital of Kabul the next day, Muttawakil presented Rohrabacher’s plan to the Taliban. Mullah Omar immediately issued a statement denouncing American efforts to orchestrate a new Afghanistan government. “The infidel world is not letting Muslims form a government of their own choice,” he declared.

Try to imagine what would have happened if it had been a Democrat who did such a thing. (Yes I know, ropes and pitchforks come to mind.)

Despite his secret meetings with the Taliban, and despite the fact that Rohrabacher is one of Jack Abramoff’s best friends and biggest defenders, and despite the fact that his office has been involved in one of the most sordid child molestation cases in Orange Country history, Rohrabacher has been re-elected three times since 9/11.

I don’t know if the government has allowed him to travel to Iraq or Afghanistan after what he did. But he certainly travels in the best circles.

Raiders Of The Lost Wingnuts

by digby

I think if there is one thing I find more infuriating than anything else in politics it’s obvious, phony spin that fools no one but which everybody nonetheless pretends is normal discourse. It’s insults the intelligence.

Here’s an example. Last night the Lehrer Newshour did a report on the meat packing immigration raids. They quoted Michael Chertoff at the big press conference saying:

Now, this is not only a case about illegal immigration, which is bad enough; it’s a case about identity theft and violation of the privacy rights and the economic rights of innocent Americans.

It’s so beautiful to see one of the architects of America’s new police state suddenly so concerned about the privacy rights and economic rights of innocent Americans, don’t you think? He’s keeping the babies safe and at the same time looking out for our rights, which is so inspiring. I feel like singing “We Shall Overcome.”

Gwen Ifill then interviewed his adorable crony and (former head of the joint chiefs of staff) Dick Myers’ completely unqualified daughter Julie, who is now head legal counsel for DHS. (Even Holy Joe opposed her!)

JULIE MYERS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Yesterday’s actions, however, were about ICE enforcing the law. Each and every one of the individuals that were arrested yesterday on administrative charges was using a stolen, a real Social Security number of a U.S. citizen.

We took appropriate action; we behaved appropriately. And until the law changes, we’re here to enforce it.

GWEN IFILL: I was confused about the identity theft argument. There were 1,200, almost 1,300 people arrested; 65 of them — maybe 5 percent of them — were charged with identity theft. Yet that was the emphasis today at your news conference about why this whole thing was being pursued. Was that the main impetus for this raid, this series of raids?

JULIE MYERS: Well, this action started as a worksite enforcement action. And as it was noted in your initial segment, it was the largest worksite enforcement action we’ve ever had.

GWEN IFILL: Enforcing what, immigration laws or…

JULIE MYERS: Enforcing immigration law. But what we’re finding is that a number of people who are here illegally, working illegally, they used to use just phony documents. And now they’re using real documents, documents of U.S. citizens who in many cases may not know they’re being used. And that’s providing real harm to these U.S. victims.

There was an example this morning about a victim who was pulled over and was arrested because someone who was working at a Swift plant had been using his Social Security number and got a criminal record under his name. These people have gone out, they’ve gotten telephone bills under their fake identities, and all sorts of problems.

GWEN IFILL: Is this an organized ring which has been trying to do this, that has been selling this stolen information, or is this just something which has sprung up over time?

JULIE MYERS: In the Swift instance, we actually found a number of different document vendors and document rings, and it’s very important to us that we track down those rings and prosecute those individuals.

Last month in Minnesota, we tracked down one that was actually providing U.S. birth certificates for individuals from Puerto Rico and Social Security cards, and they were all ending up for individuals who then went to work at the Swift plants.

Even Ifill seems a little non-plussed and she’s usually right with the program. There is only one reason to spin this like this. They are trying to create a belief among the American people that there is a big problem with Mexicans stealing their identities. They are going out of their way to create a more substantial and identifiable sense of victimhood and in the process are stoking resentment and racism. I don’t know if they’ve focus-grouped this or if they’re operating purely on instinct, but it’s going to hit the primitives hard: “Mexicans are trying to steal my life!!!!”

I don’t doubt that there is some identity theft going on. But it is not rampant and it’s not going to affect average white Republicans named Bubba. (It’s far more likely that it would hit Mexican Americans named Ricardo.) By making it the major emphasis of the story and conflating it with the fact that they arrested more than a thousand undocumented workers who spend their days up to their knees in blood and sinew so that we can enjoy our cheap hamburger, they betray their real agenda. Right wingers just don’t feel alive if they aren’t being victimized by somebody or other.

It reminds me of the old “Saddam had WMD and ties to Al Qaeda” dodge. They don’t come right out and say it. But look for polls to reflect the idea that identity theft is mainly perpetrated by illegal immigrants very soon.

To be clear, I think identity theft is a very serious problem. As a major privacy advocate I’m all for enforcement of the laws against it. But the problem is huge and getting bigger in the US not because of illegal immigration but because of con artists and nasty relatives. By trying to turn this into an immigration problem they are misleading the public and unfairly targeting the immigrats with something that most of them don’t even know exists.

The good news, however, is that even though the Mexicans are stealing their lives, there are now available a whole bunch of those great jobs working with cow and pig guts all day so they can improve their lives and get rich like all the Republicans promise them! Is this a great country or what?

More on the raids from FDL, here.

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Oiling The Hinges

by digby

Glenn Greenwald offers a fascinating anatomy of a small wingnut feeding frenzy today as he recounts the breathless, overwrought coverage on the right wing blogs (and National Review) of the bizarre story that the Clinton Administration had spied on Princess Diana. He had earlier noted when the story first broke that the conservatives instantly formed the theory that this somehow invalidated liberal arguments against the illegal spying. (I guess it’s logical that conservatives would think that legally spying on British royalty in Paris without a warrant is the same as illegally spying on an American citizen in Cincinnati without one. They love the idea of monarchy.)

Anyway, read Glenn’s post to see just what horses asses these wingnuts made of themselves over this silly story — which was revealed today to be complete nonsense. But Glenn asks some interesting questions and brings up some points about this whole thing that are worth discussing a little bit more:

What kind of judgment do these people have that they have been running around for the last several days all but accusing the Clinton administration of lawbreaking and dark eavesdropping plots? That, of course, led to the standard campaign to start heaping all the blame on Hillary and her amoral, monstrous quest for political power.

Fox News linked to York’s National Review original article, touting it as a story suggesting the need for a “Clinton probe” over wiretapping. Between the multiple National Review items (York, Frum, McCarthy), Instapundit, Kaus at Slate, the Fox link, not to mention all the right-wing blogs linking to them how many people were subjected to this completely baseless innuendo, all of which was designed to suggest that Bush’s eavesdropping is unnoteworthy because Clinton did worse and/or that Hillary illegally bugged poor Princess Diana all for selfish political reasons, etc.

It was so obvious from the beginning that there were gaping holes in the story and that the “sources” for it were extremely unreliable. York even prefaced his article with this acknowledgment: “The first thing to remember in trying to evaluate reports that U.S. intelligence services wiretapped Princess Diana is that British press accounts can be notoriously unreliable.”

But that isn’t good enough. In fact, that makes it worse. Gossip columnists pass on rumors. Responsible, credible analysts, political pundits, and journalists do not. And they certainly don’t spend day after day, like Kaus did (with Reynolds cheering on every word) building one scurrilous accusation after the next based on chatter.

Actually they do. This is how the rightwing noise machine operates under the Clinton Rules. If it had turned out that this story had even some vague basis in fact, it would only have been a matter of days before the entire machinery of the Entertainment Industrial Complex would have cranked up to join in the irresponsible speculation.

I believe this reaction is an emotional thing as much as a political tactic. They are drawn like moths to flame at any slight suggestion of a sleazy, nefarious and hopefully sexy story about Democrats, particularly the Clintons. Perhaps it’s pavlovian by now — they went to that well so often and with such fervor for eight long years that they no longer have control of their own impulses. But the focus and intensity and sheer joy they obviously feel in pursuing these trivial, irrelevant stories and then pumping them up into fables and allegories rich with hidden meaning and messages of great import, is a sight to behold. When the mainstream press joins in you have a frenzy of epic proportions.

This is how it will be if we have a Democratic president. The right likes it this way. And it works for them. Knowing that the public can’t avert their eyes any more than they can avert their eyes from a car crash or Britney Spears, they exhaust them with these stories, creating a feeling almost of overindulgence, like too much chocolate mousse. The resultant sick feeling they then project on to the person in office. They called it “Clinton fatigue” last time. In fact, it’s just that concept that they are conjuring with this Diana story — showing the folks that if Hillary wins the presidency we’ll be face first in that mousse again.

The truth is that we will be in it no matter who is president. These people are trained to fetishize these small stories so they can make Democrats seem frivolous and small. It’s a game to them, sure, and they love it more than any other kind of political combat, but it’s also a very successful tactic. They tie the Democrats in knots and keep the Kewl Kidz distracted and amused. It’s what they do best.

They’re a little bit rusty so they are oiling up the hinges with this silly Diana story. This is only the beginning.

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Good For Only One Thing

by digby

The Republicans (and some Democrats) have made a fetish of describing the warrantless surveillance programs as necessary to catch terrorists before they hit. They can’t tell us anything about what these programs actually do — it’s quite clear there is more to it than “listening in on the phone calls of terrorists.” One of the things that most people agree upon is that it includes some sort of datamining and I suspect that when this is explained to some of these congressmen and Senators, their eyes glaze over in the same way they do when anybody talks about the intertubes. They are, to be kind, very easily hoodwinked with technobabble.

But what if it were determined that the entire premise was flawed?

One of the fundamental underpinnings of predictive data mining in the commercial sector is the use of training patterns. Corporations that study consumer behavior have millions of patterns that they can draw upon to profile their typical or ideal consumer. Even when data mining is used to seek out instances of identity and credit card fraud, this relies on models constructed using many thousands of known examples of fraud per year.

Terrorism has no similar indicia. With a relatively small number of attempts every year and only one or two major terrorist incidents every few years—each one distinct in terms of planning and execution—there are no meaningful patterns that show what behavior indicates planning or preparation for terrorism.

[…] Without patterns to use, one fallback for terrorism data mining is the idea that any anomaly may provide the basis for investigation of terrorism planning. Given a “typical” American pattern of Internet use, phone calling, doctor visits, purchases, travel, reading, and so on, perhaps all outliers merit some level of investigation. This theory is offensive to traditional American freedom, because in the United States everyone can and should be an “outlier” in some sense. More concretely, though, using data mining in this way could be worse than searching at random; terrorists could defeat it by acting as normally as possible.

Treating “anomalous” behavior as suspicious may appear scientific, but, without patterns to look for, the design of a search algorithm based on anomaly is no more likely to turn up terrorists than twisting the end of a kaleidoscope is likely to draw an image of the Mona Lisa.

Tim F. At Balloon Juice points out the political implications:

As the civil liberty debate rages, even our extreme authoritarians couch their arguments in terms of benefit relative to cost. If the benefit doesn’t exist then wannabe autocrats like Newt Gingrich plainly have no leg to stand on. The only remaining support would have to come from these programs’ side benefits, primarily the existence of a detailed dossier on the personal life of every American citizen. That should come in handy in case any priest becomes, as one departed ruler might put it, a bit turbulent.*

This is an authoritarian dream come true. Here they have the means to root out anyone who steps outside the norm, who doesn’t conform to mainstream standards of behavior. Someone, perhaps, like this dirty hippie who was a bit of a flake and worked on strange machinery in his garage. (Pssst. He’s half Syrian, too.)

The right invented the term useful idiot to describe those who were being used and manipulated by the commies. They are today behaving as useful idiots for the Islamo-fascists” they profess to hate. If you really wanted to destroy America you wouldn’t stop at trashing the constitution or taunt them into useless wars. You’d also hope that the nation would shut down the iconoclastic individuals who tend to be artists and entrepreneurs and “outliers” as the article suggests. That could eventually destroy the vibrancy of the culture and the dynamism of its economy. These religious extremists think in terms of centuries and I’m sure they are quite pleased with the pace of their project so far.

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Whiplash

by digby

It’s amazing to realize that Lucianne Goldberg’s offspring gets paid good money to write things like this in the Los Angeles Times.

Following on this new hagiography of free-market guru and all around successful leader Augusto Pinochet, Goldberg bizarrely implies that “the left” is agitating for an Iraqi Fidel, and argues that Iraq would be better off with an Iraqi Pinochet instead. He actually says, “if only Ahmad Chalabi had been such a man.”

After all, Pinochet may have tortured and killed his political opponents for years, but it all came out ok in the end after he left office. Meanwhile, we on the left allegedly worship Castro en masse, who’s also killed thousands, and his country is still poor and unfree. So the left must cry uncle. Or something. (No word on where eastern Europe plays into this new “theory” of rightwing dictator superiority. Last I looked, the ex-commies of the eastern Bloc were doing even better than Chile.)

Anyway, Jonah wonders which kind of torturing tyrant the Iraqis would prefer us to install, which is downright democratic of him, when you think about it:

I ask you: Which model do you think the average Iraqi would prefer? Which model, if implemented, would result in future generations calling Iraq a success? An Iraqi Pinochet would provide order and put the country on the path toward liberalism, democracy and the rule of law. (If only Ahmad Chalabi had been such a man.)

Now, you might say: “This is unfair. This is a choice between two bad options.” OK, true enough. But that’s all we face in Iraq: bad options. When presented with such a predicament, the wise man chooses the more moral, or less immoral, path. The conservative defense of Pinochet was that he was the least-bad option; better the path of Pinochet than the path toward Castroism, which is where Chile was heading before the general seized power. Better, that is, for the United States and for Chileans.

I bring all this up because in the wake of Pinochet’s death (and Jeane Kirkpatrick’s), the old debate over conservative indulgence of Pinochet has elicited shrieking from many on the left claiming that any toleration of Pinochet was inherently immoral — their own tolerance of Castro notwithstanding.

Right. Never mind that Allende was a socialist, not a communist, and never mind that he was democratically elected. Oh, and never mind that he wasn’t torturing his political opponents with electrodes strapped to their genitals or dropping them alive from helicopters!

Never mind either that this entire discussion of “bad options” and comparing Iraq to Castro and Pinochet is stupid; the bad options are between chaos, civil war, and religious dictatorship which have absolutely nothing to do with any of the bullshit that Goldberg is nattering on about.

Sorry bub. Support for Pinochet’s mass killing and torture is inherently immoral. And justifying your support because the Chilean economy is doing better than Cuba’s is just plain disgusting. This is what has become of the grand neocon experiment in Iraq: phony rhetorical battles with leftist ghosts of thirty years ago. It would be sad if it weren’t so sick.

I should point out that Goldberg does mention the torture. After listing Castros many sins, here’s what he says:

Now consider Chile. Gen. Pinochet seized a country coming apart at the seams. He too clamped down on civil liberties and the press. He too dispatched souls. Chile’s official commission investigating his dictatorship found that Pinochet had 3,197 bodies in his column; 87% of them died in the two-week mini-civil war that attended his coup. Many more were tortured or forced to flee the country.

Right:

Sexual abuse, including rape using animals, burns from cigarettes, welding torches and acid, ripping off fingernails with pliers, immersion in water, cooking oil or petroleum, and being forced to watch other detainees, often family members, being tortured.

This partial list of torture methods used under the Chilean dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) also includes beatings, mock executions, lengthy detentions with blindfolds or hoods, electric shock to the genitals and other sensitive parts of the body, as well as the bursting of eardrums using loud noises. The descriptions are contained in a report presented Wednesday to Chilean President Ricardo Lagos by a special commission that spent a year gathering testimony from 35,000 torture victims.

Here’s more:

Among other things, the former commander of the armed forces is charged with having — jointly with others and in purported performance of official duties — intentionally inflicted severe pain or suffering on:

•Marta Lidia Ugarte Roman, by suspending her from a pole in a pit; pulling out her finger nails and toe nails, and burning her;

•Meduardo Paredes Barrientos, by systematically breaking his wrists, pelvis, ribs and skull; burning him with a blowtorch or flamethrower;

•Adriana Luz Pino Vidal, a pregnant woman, by applying electric shocks to her vagina, ears, hands, feet and mouth, and stubbing out cigarettes on her stomach;

•Antonio Llido Mengual, a priest born in Valencia, Spain, by applying electric current to his genitals and repeatedly beating his whole body;

Some forms of torture included the employment of a man with visible open syphilitic sores on his body, to rape female captives and to use on them a dog trained in sexual practices with human beings.

Who can argue that rape by dogs is a small price to pay for free markets thirty years from now? Let’s hope the Iraqis are so lucky.

Jonah indoubtedly thinks that Pinochet and his henchmen were just blowing off steam. And as for the wonderful Chilean outcome, perhaps Jonah should ask himself how healthy a country can be when it is still, after 30 years, trying to exorcise the demons that were unleashed under Pinochet. Chile is still traumatized and will remain so until everyone who lived under that cruelty is dead.

But they do have free markets.

And here’s the odd part. All these glowing tributes to Pinochet see Chile as a great right wing success story. But they have a socialist feminist president today— a woman whose father was tortured to death by Pinochet and who was herself, along with her mother, tortured before she was exiled. Do you supose she agrees that Pinochet was a blessing for her country?

Finally one observation that makes me wonder what possesses the LA Times to publish this guy. He concludes his article with this:

But these days, there’s a newfound love for precisely this sort of realpolitik. Consider Jonathan Chait, who recently floated a Swiftian proposal that we put Saddam Hussein back in power in Iraq because, given his track record of maintaining stability and recognizing how terrible things could get in Iraq, Hussein might actually represent the least-bad option. Even discounting his sarcasm, this was morally myopic. But it seems to me, if you can contemplate reinstalling a Hussein, you’d count yourself lucky to have a Pinochet.

Have you ever read anything so muddled in your life? It makes Kaye Grogan sound coherent.

First, there’s this alleged “newfound love for precisely this sort of realpolitik.” He uses Jonathan Chait’s essay* on bringing back Saddam as the basis for this, but he describes it as “Swiftian”, meaning he believes it was satire, presumably in the mode of “A Modest Proposal” which presented a horrifying option to an intractable problem in order to illuminate the lack of moral concern on the part of the ruling class. If that were so, then then it is not a “newfound love” but rather a “newfound disdain” or “newfound loathing” that Chait was displaying.

He then says that “even if you discount the sarcasm” it is “morally myopic.” Well, duh. If you “discount” the satire of “A Modest Proposal” you would be advocating cannibalizing children. Jesus. But Goldberg has just spent seven paragraphs telling us why you sometimes have to make such unpleasant decisions as Chait suggests so I don’t see why he, of all people, would consider Chait morally myopic. They agree.

Goldberg is a very confused person, which is a condition we are seeing a lot of among the right wing (and some very dizzy liberal hawks.) It’s amazing to see them switch abruptly from waving their purple fingers of democracy in everybody’s faces to serious public contemplation of installing a friendly dictator. They must be experiencing some kind of psychic whiplash.

* For the record, as I wrote before I don’t believe Johnathan Chait’s article actually was satire. As he explained later, it was actually a pretty straightforward proposition — that the US and Iraq might be better off if we installed a strongman. He suggests Saddam because he’s the guy who would scare the Iraqis straight in a hurry. I don’t know how Chait feels about Pinochet’s reign, but he is quite seriously entertaining the idea that we might be better off making a Pinochet omelette in Iraq. He and Goldberg are equally morally myopic on this topic.

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Blunderbuss Express

by digby

St. John wants to escalate the Iraq war and shut down the internet, too. What a guy.

Millions of commercial Web sites and personal blogs would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000, if a new proposal in the U.S. Senate came into law.

The legislation, drafted by Sen. John McCain and obtained by CNET News.com, would also require Web sites that offer user profiles to delete pages posted by sex offenders.

In a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday, the Arizona Republican and former presidential candidate warned that “technology has contributed to the greater distribution and availability, and, some believe, desire for child pornography.” McCain scored 31 of 100 points on a News.com 2006 election guide scoring technology-related votes.

[…]

Internet service providers already must follow those reporting requirements. But McCain’s proposal is liable to be controversial because it levies the same regulatory scheme–and even stiffer penalties–on even individual bloggers who offer discussion areas on their Web sites.

“I am concerned that there is a slippery slope here,” said Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “Once you start creating categories of industries that must report suspicious or criminal behavior, when does that stop?”

According to the proposed legislation, these types of individuals or businesses would be required to file reports: any Web site with a message board; any chat room; any social-networking site; any e-mail service; any instant-messaging service; any Internet content hosting service; any domain name registration service; any Internet search service; any electronic communication service; and any image or video-sharing service.

[…]

But the reporting rules could prove problematic for individuals and smaller Web sites because the definitions of child pornography have become relatively broad.

The U.S. Justice Department, for instance, indicted an Alabama man named Jeff Pierson last week on child pornography charges because he took modeling photographs of clothed minors with their parents’ consent. The images were overly “provocative,” a prosecutor claimed.

Right. Leave the definition of “child pron” in the eye of the wingnut and you’ve got the makings of a full-on witchhunt.

But what is most irritating about this latest absurd solution to a difficult problem is the fact that once again, you have idiots making policy about things of which they don’t even have a basic understanding:

The other section of McCain’s legislation targets convicted sex offenders. It would create a federal registry of “any e-mail address, instant-message address, or other similar Internet identifier” they use, and punish sex offenders with up to 10 years in prison if they don’t supply it.

[..]

“This constitutionally dubious proposal is being made apparently mostly based on fear or political considerations rather than on the facts,” said EFF’s Bankston. Studies by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children show the online sexual solicitation of minors has dropped in the past five years, despite the growth of social-networking services, he said.

A McCain aide, who did not want to be identified by name, said on Friday that the measure was targeted at any Web site that “you’d have to join up or become a member of to use.” No payment would be necessary to qualify, the aide added.

Yes. We’re all issued an e-mail address at birth so a registry of such addresses will definitely make it impossible for sexual predators to operate on the internet. Maybe we could have a permanent web-cam embedded in their foreheads so that we could watch them while they type, too. And it’s a good thing they’re targeting the sites where you have to “sign up” because that will certainly put a stop to it.

In this political climate, members of Congress may not worry much about precise definitions. Another bill also vaguely targeting social-networking sites was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives in a 410-15 vote.

No word on whether McCain and his fellow lawmakers are going to pass legislation making it illegal for politicians to pander to people’s fears with stupid, useless legislation while their own brethren are hitting on 16 year old pages.

Next year, Gonzales and the FBI are expected to resume their push for mandatory data retention, which will force Internet service providers to keep records on what their customers are doing online. An aide to Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, said Friday that she’s planning to introduce such legislation when the new Congress convenes.

Cathy Milhoan, an FBI spokeswoman, said on Friday that the FBI “continues to support data retention. We see it as crucial in advancing our cyber investigations to include online sexual exploitation of children.”

Who can argue with that? Maintaining information about what every American is reading and writing on the internet is necessary to keep children safe.

Other data,though, not so much. Remember this?

March 8, 2005

Dozens of terror suspects on federal watch lists were allowed to buy firearms legally in the United States last year, according to a Congressional investigation that points up major vulnerabilities in federal gun laws.

People suspected of being members of a terrorist group are not automatically barred from legally buying a gun, and the investigation, conducted by the Government Accountability Office, indicated that people with clear links to terrorist groups had regularly taken advantage of this gap.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, law enforcement officials and gun control groups have voiced increasing concern about the prospect of a terrorist walking into a gun shop, legally buying an assault rifle or other type of weapon and using it in an attack.

The G.A.O. study offers the first full-scale examination of the possible dangers posed by gaps in the law, Congressional officials said, and it concludes that the Federal Bureau of Investigation ”could better manage” its gun-buying records in matching them against lists of suspected terrorists.

F.B.I. officials maintain that they are hamstrung by laws and policies restricting the use of gun-buying records because of concerns over the privacy rights of gun owners.

Priorities, you know.

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Film Noir

by digby

In Modo’s hit piece today she quotes Obama saying something that I had to go look up to believe.

He said:

“We have a certain script in our politics, and one of the scripts for black politicians is that for them to be authentically black they have to somehow offend white people,” Obama said in an interview. “And then if he puts a multiracial coalition together, he must somehow be compromising the efforts of the African-American community.

“To use a street term,” he added, “we flipped the script.”

I’ve never heard of this script. Is it true?

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Removing The Stinger

by digby

Maureen Dowd does a spectacular Queen Bee Kill today of both Clinton and Obama, basically calling her a sexless schlub and him a metrosexual cipher. With her usual original insight she notes that Clinton is a woman and Obama is black and then ends the piece with this darling little observation:

So there is a second question, perhaps one that will trump race and gender. It’s about whether he’s tough and she’s human.

Told yah. Democrats are a bunch of bitches and girly-men — the kewl kidz are sharpening their claws to do the GOP’s dirty work for them again.

Via TPM, I see that Jeff Greenfield has responded to the blogosphere’s exasperation athis story comparing Barack Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mode of dress. Just as his fellow entertainer Rush Limbaugh always does, he claims he was joking and that bloggers are hotheads, trying to feed their blog beast with silly stuff like this.

I figured there was no way on planet Earth that anyone could possibly take such a presentation at face value. I was wrong.

Nobody that I know of was suggesting that he meant it at “face value” which I guess would be that Obama and Ahmandinejad’s similar mode of dress means that they have similar political views. What I criticized was the sub-text of such remarks and how these remarks are common right wing tools used to slander, demean and trivialize their opponents. The fact that Jeanne Moos also did a “funny” riff that day on Obama’s middle name “Hussein” (that was far more revealing of people’s bigotry than anything else) what you saw was this subtle theme emerging that implies both that Obama is superficial on the one hand (look at his GQ clothes!) and also somewhat exotic and foreign — not to be trusted. Enough “jokes” like this and over time people will develop an uncomfortable feeling about Obama’s “style” and his exotic name without even knowing that they have it or where it came from. That’s how these subtle themes work.

Greenfield even mentions the Daily Howler as one of the critical bloggers — the Daily Howler that wrote the book on the trivialization and character assasination of Al Gore with the very same shallow, schoolkid nonsense that Greenfield pulled on Obama, (which Greenfield implies are completely different things.) This thesis has been rigorously explored there and in the rest of the blogosphere and its conclusion is one of the reasons why the blogosphere has exploded. Far from being a little sideline we indulge in when we need some filler, it is one of the reasons we exist.

We have found, among many other things, that there is an obsession among the press corps with a very peculiar form of gender stereotypes which they affix to the political parties. This may be a function of what seems to be their terminal immaturity (and perhaps it has simply become reflex after all this time), but it is also part of a long term political strategy on the right to paint the Democrats as being odd, untrustworthy, hysterical, overly sensitive and soft — what neanderthals think of as traditionally negative female characteristics. Not only does this narrative feed into these negative sereotypes, which benefits traditonal power structures in general, it feeds into a positive male leadership archetype, which has been appropriated by the Republican Party. It is what allowed a halfwit, manchild to be elected as a “grown-up” while the real adult was derided as some sort of Blanche DuBois character who had lost his grip on reality. The kewl kidz laughed and laughed while the rest of stood there dumbfounded and paralyzed at this bizarre interpretation of reality. We aren’t paralyzed anymore.

Is it a sin, in and of itself, that Greenfield trivialized Barack Obama for his wardrobe and compared him to a holocaust denying psychopath? Not really. Is it a major goof for Jeanne Moos to simultaneously go out on the street and ask people if they think his “weird” middle name means that he can’t be elected? Probably not.

But you’ll have to excuse us hotheads for reacting strongly when we see these things because the last time the media decided to have “fun” and tell “jokes,” this way, enough people believed them that it ended up changing the world in the most dramatic and violent way possible. We are in this mess today at least partly because these people failed to do their duty and approached their jobs as if it were a seventh grade slumber party instead of the serious business of the most powerful nation on earth.

I don’t know what is wrong with them and their social construct that makes them so susceptible to this, or why they fail to see how this bias toward phony Republican machismo distorts political reporting, but it’s a big problem for this country. Whatever their psychological or political motivations, we cannot take the chance that these narratives will go unchallenged again. Bad things happen. Wars. Torture. Dead people.

Somebody in this culture has got to be the sober, factual, reality based journalists and it only stands to reason that those who are trained and paid to be sober, factual, reality based journalists would fill that role. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are very good at political humor. (Even Dennis Miller is funnier than Greenfield.) The late night comics do a great job at skewering politicians. Leave them to it.

Until the mainstream press recognizes the extent of their laziness and gullibility — or pay a price for their political bias — we will keep reminding them and their audiences of their transgressions even if that makes us thin-skinned hotheads who are trying to fill blogposts. We all have our jobs to do.

Update: Kevin Drum responds to Greenfield too.

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Collective Conscience

by poputonian

The founders of the United States dealt with negative societal forces in different ways. To control the power of government, they established three coequal branches: executive, judicial, and legislative. To ensure freedom of religion, they separated church and state. To reduce the power of the military, they placed it under civilian control. But the founders understandably missed one other major threat to society: the corporation. There is a reason why they didn’t foresee this threat. In their day, corporations were public charters that…

…could only exist for a limited time, could not make any political contributions, and could not own stock in other companies. Their owners were liable for criminal acts committed by the corporation and the doctrine of limited liability (shielding investors from responsibility for harm and loss caused by the corporation) did not yet exist. [Drutman essay: The History of the Corporation]

In short, if the corporation ever acted outside the public interest, the charter could be revoked, and many times it was. Interestingly, albeit unfortunately, the founders did not anticipate the need for a constitutional provision that would keep the public interest aspect of the corporation intact. Without such a constitutional provision to control the erosion of public interest, it was through the court system that the monied interests won the game. A google search will turn up the cases, one I believe was in Santa Clara, California in the 1860s, and at least one other in the state courts of New Jersey, where the courts gradually determined corporations weren’t people and thus shouldn’t be held responsible in the same way you might hold an individual responsible. [Ed. See in the comments iconoclast, justin, and rob for a superior explanation (and links) of how the corporation gained protections while limiting their liability.] The net effect was that anything close to a corporate conscience was stripped away and a runaway power was born, one that was incongruous with the founders’ intent to protect the public interest from private greed. From destruction of the planet to an inequitable distribution of wealth, we live every day with the residual negative impact of corporations that have no consciences.

What should we say about the political system? Does America have a collective conscience, or are we absolved, as individuals, of any responsibility as long as we can say we didn’t vote for George W. Bush? I’ll call the question one more time: If he as the head of our national entity committed crimes against the nation and humanity, and the crimes become known, is he allowed to ride out his term in office, or do we act to remove him? As the Nichols article I posted about below indicates, the founders put a safeguard in the Constitution to protect against elected “despots and tyrants”. The safeguard, mentioned six times, is the impeachment option.

As to the question of a collective national conscience, I received an email from a reader who I think eloquently expresses the importance of collective responsibility for Iraq, but who perhaps disagrees with me about the need to impeach. The email begins with a quote from my earlier post:

“In the eyes of justice and humanity, how do we — you and me — as part of a representative democracy, escape an equal share of responsibility for the carnage?”

This is exactly the key question.

My answer is a little different from yours. I think we have to push the country to accept things that you take as premises in your post. You’ve already accepted them, and so have I, but the nation as a whole hasn’t, and because of that, anything we do without accepting them is bound to be tainted.

We’re responsible for those deaths, and we’re living in a democracy. Everyone focuses on Bush’s refusal to accept responsibility for what he’s done, and that’s really important. But the same thing is necessary for the country as a whole.

This isn’t some abstract thing, or just a desire to see the nation do penance for its crimes. It affects the way we see the conflict now and our options.

This whole mess was caused by problems over here, in this country — our own inability to understand other culture, things that are broken in our political system, problems with our own press, the ease with which such an ugly war was sold to the public as a whole, etc.

But when we talk about what to do next, we take this patronizing attitude — the Iraqis have to learn this, or isn’t it unfortunate that they didn’t go through the enlightenment, or the Iraqi government has to learn that we can’t do it forever, they’ll have to step up and “take responsibility.” Like a suburban dad teaching a kid how to ride a bike, we’ll have to take off the training wheels.

As far as I’m concerned, we need to do two things. We need to internalize the reality of what’s happened — that our aggression caused these deaths, and that it caused the ongoing chaos.

And we need to take our obligation to our victims seriously. Right now, that means trying to structure policies so that as few Iraqis die every day as possible. The civilian death toll has to be the dominant metric.

A while back, I was thinking about whether or not bush lied to get us in to this war, or if he was just spinning very hard and went right up to the line. I think he lied, but I decided that it doesn’t really matter.

When 665,000+ people have been killed, what difference does a lie make, one way or another? To put it another way, if he didn’t lie, would things be better? The body count dwarfs conventional morality, and the ideas we have about right and wrong in our personal spheres don’t necessarily make much sense on the level where Bush is operating.

When this is over, Bush will probably have been responsible for more than a million deaths. Probably a lot more than a million. Does it matter if he lied, or if he’s censured or impeached? If he’s forced out of office six months early, and Cheney runs out the clock, will the dead come back? It would be a farce to say that justice had been done — what kind of justice can balance the books on a million deaths?

It doesn’t address the core problems — one of which is that people are still dying. The other core problem is that we are a paranoid, warlike country, and our public was willing to follow Bush down this path.

If you listen to the populist right on talk radio now, you’ll hear that they’re defiant, unbowed, totally delusional, and filled with hatred. And many millions of our fellow citizens listen every day, nod their heads, and say, “damn straight.” That’s what we have to try to fix, although I have to confess I have no idea of how to do it.

Listen to the debate about what to do now — there is absolutely no sense of shame in any of it. That’s what we have to fix. Our actions have lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and we are not ashamed.

I don’t want America to be as amoral as the modern corporation, and my belief is that if we don’t act within the provisions of the Constitution to impeach, that is exactly what we’ve become. If not through impeachment, where does the imprimatur come from that says the Iraq war was unjust and immoral? Will the national conscience be expressed through the “free” press? Ha! The “free” press is incorporated. On the other hand, as the above correspondent concludes, what real difference does impeachment make when compared to a million dead?UPDATE: See iconoclast, justin, and rob in the comments for a better explanation of the evolution of the corporation and the Santa Clara case in particular.UDPATE II: A mention also to Vast Left who provided a link to documentary of The Corporation … definitely one not to miss.

Freedom is Under Attack By Baby Huey

by digby

Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerilla finds a very forceful and persuasive plea in support of Net Neutrality:

“Freedom is under attack. Under attack by hysterical and well funded Christian psychotics, intellectually undernourished leaders who lie and manipulate information…”

It goes on. If you dare…

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