Month: June 2013

Let’s open this thing up already

by digby

One of the most laughable comments the NSA program supporters have been making is the one insisting that the FISA court is “transparent.” It’s rulings are secret as are the government’s interpretations of the law and those rulings. If that’s what we call due process these days, we might as well just officially institute a Star Chamber and call it a day.

Members of congress think it’s pretty ridiculous too. Greg Sargent reports:

Today, I’m told, a bipartisan group of Members of Congress will introduce a bill in the House that would compel the declassification and release of these opinions. The bill is a companion House version to the Senate bill — spearheaded by progressive Jeff Merkley and Tea Partyer Mike Lee — that would do the same.[…]

There is no telling how many members of Congress will end up supporting declassification. Currently there are roughly a dozen Senators on board with the Merkley-Lee proposal. And Schiff says he expects that many more Representatives — from both parties — will join his proposal. But the question remains: How many members of Congress — how many Democrats in Congress — are willing to support this step? This push will seriously test just how far the alliance between the libertarian right and civil liberties left can go.

Meanwhile, it seems clear that Obama himself could declassify the opinions if he wanted to. As noted here yesterday:

To his credit, Obama has said that concerns about the secrecy shrouding these programs are “legitimate,” and has promised to push for more public disclosure. Voicing support for the declassification and release of key FISA opinions would be a good place to start, and would help bring about the “debate” Obama says he wants. Alternatively, if there is some reason why this is not a good idea, the President should tell us what it is.

Schiff adds: “In the interim, we’d like to see the administration act on its own to declassify these opinions to the maximum degree possible.”

I’m going to take a wild guess and assume they will not do that unless the congress insists. Certainly the court doesn’t want to do it. Spencer Ackerman reports:

In March, the presiding judge of the Fisa court, Reggie Walton, wrote to Wyden and Udall to inform them that he “would not anticipate” releasing many of the court’s opinions, given their “fact-intensive nature”.

I’m also going to guess we’ll get pages full of black marks if they do it.

But even if we see their rulings, the problem is really much bigger than that:

These [FISA] documents are often compared to the warrants the government ordinarily needs for searches of Americans. But they’re dramatically different from a conventional search warrant. A warrant is supposed to “particularly” describe who will be targeted by a search. It will typically include a suspect’s name, as well as the address to be searched or the phone number to be wiretapped.

The documents released by the Guardian don’t look like that at all. The first document is nine pages long and explains in some detail the factors the NSA uses to determine whether a potential surveillance target is a “US person”—if the answer is yes, then the agency cancels the planned surveillance. The second document, also nine pages, describes what the NSA does if it accidentally collects the private communications of Americans.

These documents look more like legislation than search warrants. They define legal concepts, describe legal standards to be applied and specify procedures for NSA officials to follow. For example, the second document states that “a person known to be an alien admitted for permanent residence loses status as a United States person if the person leaves the united States and is not in compliance with 8 USC § 1203 enabling re-entry into the United States.”
But rather than being drafted, debated and enacted by Congress, the documents were drafted by Obama administration lawyers and reviewed by the FISC.

Congress is much better equipped than the courts to review this kind of quasi-legislative proposal. It has thousands of staffers and can spend months debating the details of a proposal. Members have the power to call witnesses and to amend legislation if it’s not to their liking. And they debate in public, giving academics, public interest groups and members of the general public an opportunity to point out flaws and suggest improvements.

In contrast, the FISC has only 11 members and a limited staff. In most cases it hears testimony only from the government, and only in secret. It must make decisions within 30 days. In principle it has the power to modify proposed orders, but it lacks the manpower and expertise to exercise this power effectively. The FISC’s secretive review process leaves no meaningful opportunities for third parties to point out flaws in the government’s proposal and suggest alternatives.

And once the courts sign off on these general targeting procedures, no one outside the executive branch performs the function traditionally performed by the courts: double-checking that the government actually follows the rules. The government has some internal oversight mechanisms, but no one in the judicial branch verifies that the individuals the government targets for surveillance are actual foreigners, as the law requires.

Considering the technology we’re talking about does any of that strike you as as a good idea? Nobody knows anything really, except the law enforcement and national security people. It’s see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

Maybe it’s all on the up and up. But this system does nothing but raise suspicions that it isn’t. It’s very hard to see why they need to keep everything so buttoned up at the same time that we have thousands of people in various parts of the government and outside contractors with snooping capability that virtually nobody understands. They seem to be more than willing to take the risk that our privacy will be invaded. What they are adamant about is not letting the American people know what their government is doing officially. I find that troubling.

Let’s hope the congress can get something done on this. But I see that the usual authoritarians have started to gather their forces and are pushing hard to bring their colleagues in line. And it will probably work on some of them.

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ICYMI: Colbert’s sweet tribute to his mom

by digby

The Colbert Report
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One of the things I like so much about Stephen Colbert is his clear humanity. I don’t think he could pull off his schtick if it didn’t come through.

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Whatcha gonna do about the haters?

by digby

For those who are interested in the internal dynamics of the GOP and how it’s dealing with immigration reform, I think this piece at Down With Tyranny gives some important details. (Reprinted in full with Howie’s permission.)

Threats Of Primaries By GOP Racists Make It Harder For Non-Southerners To Back Popular Mainstream Positions

As soon as Jim DeMint took over the already right-wing Heritage Foundation, he made sure it would be even more extreme and, especially, more racist. Their first big effort under his regime was to put out a phony “study” claiming immigration would cost American taxpayers gazillions of dollars– or, to be more “exact,” 6 trillion dollars. No doubt, South Carolina’s former KKK senator brought the figure with him and asked the propagandists at Heritage to write a justification of it. the KKK senator from Alabama, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was so sold on the Heritage nonsense, he demanded the professional and nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirm it. The report, as we mentioned yesterday, didn’t go the way Beauregard expected. Instead of DeMint’s $6 trillion deficit, it “estimates that in the first decade after the immigration bill is carried out, the net effect of adding millions of additional taxpayers would decrease the federal budget deficit by $197 billion. Over the next decade, the report found, the deficit reduction would be even greater– an estimated $700 billion, from 2024 to 2033.”

This is bad news for Republicans who prefer to keep their racism and bigotry under cover. It’s not going to matter for the real crazies– mostly in the South– whose overt appeal is racism anyway, your Steve Southerlands (R-FL), Patrick McHenrys (R-NC), Louie Gohmerts (R-TX), Tom Prices (R-GA), Alan Nunnelees (R-MS), Steve Stockmen (R-TX), Virginia Foxxes (R-NC), Rob Pittengers (R-NC), Steve Scalises (R-LA), Tom Rices (R-SC), Trey Gowdys (R-SC), John Micas (R-FL), or Bob Goodlattes (R-VA). But what happens to the Republicans who were looking for a legitimate fiscal excuse to vote against comprehensive immigration reform– the ones who want to maintain a veneer of not being pawns to the racist yahoos who run their party?

It puts “mainstream” Republicans like Chris Gibson (R-NY), Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ), Charlie Dent (R-PA), Michael “Mikey Suits” Grimm (R-NY), Chris Smith (R-NJ), Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA), Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Pat Meehan (R-PA), Tom Petri (R-WI), Jon Runyan (R-NJ), Mike Turner (R-OH), Tom Reed (R-NY), Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ), Richard Hanna (R-NY), David Joyce (R-OH), Leonard Lance (R-NJ), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Dan Benichek (R-MI), Dave Reichert (R-WA), Jim Gerlach (R-PA)… in a bind. The immigration bill turns out to be a gigantic deficit-reduction plan– both in the short term and in the long term! Their constituents are different from the die-hard racists in the backward parts of Texas, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. The voters in these districts may not appreciate racism as a raison d’etre for refusing the solve a pressing national problem. Of course, on the other hand, there is an overt threat to these congressmen. Either vote NO on immigration reform, or face a well-financed primary.

And if you won’t think primaries by radical extremists are real enough to scare the hell out of Republicans, look what’s already happening to high profile Tea Party Senator Marco Rubio. During an interview the other night on WMAL, anti-Hispanic sociopath Allen West, who has the ability to raise millions of dollars from fellow extremists, said he will look into a primary challenge against Rubio.

“That’s a pretty heavy lift, because you’re talking about running against a sitting senator, and then, of course, that creates that schism that the other side would love to see happen,” said West, who appeared as a guest co-host on WMAL’s Mornings on the Mall Wednesday. West was pressed further by WMAL’s Larry O’Connor, who asked him directly if he would rule out a challenge against Rubio. 

“Chirping… chirping… chirping…,” replied West with a chuckle, before elaborating with a more direct response. 

“If I see people that are not taking our country down the right path, if I see people that are not standing up for the right type of principles, and putting their own party politics before what is best for the United States of America,” West indicated he might make a run.

Rubio, who rode a wave of Tea Party momentum to the Senate in 2010 in the same election that sent West to the House, has fallen out of favor with some Republicans because of his support for the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” immigration reform bill. West told WMAL he has a “lot of concerns” about the measure himself.

…But will he attempt to make that point as a Senate candidate against Rubio?

“We’ll see what happens down the pike,” said West. “God will set my feet on the right path.”

And if you doubt Heritage and other far right extremist groups have the clout to mount effective primaries against mainstream Republicans you’ve probably never heard of Heritage’s venal Conservative Action Project, which Lee Fang has exposed in his new book, The Machine. 

The Heritage Foundation’s most audacious move to harness the conservative movement has been its role in crafting the Conservative Action Project– a strategy committee that meets at the Wednesday morning breakfast hosted by the Family Research Council. This is the same meeting that rivals Norquist’s Wednesday morning planning meeting and is closely connected to the aggressively ideological Weyrich Lunch. The Conservative Action Project is actually part of a broader plan set forth by Heritage vice president Becky Norton Dunlop, a point person for Heritage’s sprawling external affairs program. Throughout her career, Dunlop had spun through the revolving door of working in various Republican administrations on both the state and federal level, a corporate PR firm, and multiple conservative nonprofits, including Heritage, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, and the Virginia Institute for Public Policy. A committed conservative, Dunlop was once asked how to spread conservative ideas at a panel discussion hosted by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. “How do you maintain liberty?” Dunlop replied, “Well, at the end it’s at the cartridge box if you can’t win at the ballot box.” She then smiled and said that her response was probably too “extreme” for her audience of international right-of-center donors. 

As the Heritage Foundation’s “chief ambassador” to the movement, Dunlop helps the American Conservative Union plan its annual CPAC convention, the largest annual gathering of conservatives. Philanthropy Roundtable, Dunlop and her external affairs team also organize multiple events to bring corporate donors and conservative foundations together, and she organizes regional and President’s Club events. Dunlop sits on the boards of over half a dozen other organizations, from the Phillips Foundation, which disburses grants to young right-wing journalists, to the Family Foundation of Virginia, a religious right powerhouse in the state, to the American Conservative Union itself. 

Despite Dunlop’s impressive set of official responsibilities, her most important duty is not revealed on her profile page on the Heritage Foundation website. Behind the scenes, Dunlop serves as the president of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive right-wing committee that has brought together key Republican officials, Christian right eaders, and wealthy right-wing donors to set the conservative agenda since 1981. Although she had been a director for the CNP for many years, according to tax disclosures filed with the IRS, Dunlop appeared to take the reins of the organization in 2008. Called the “most powerful conservative group you’ve never heard of” by ABC News, the CNP is still critical to the conservative movement, and deeply entwined with Heritage and other prime players of the conservative movement. 

Initially organized by fundamentalist preacher Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind Rapture-genre series, the CNP is credited with cementing the role of the religious right within the modern Republican Party. The CNP initially hosted Pat Robertson, the televangelist owner of a network of different Christian media companies, Moral Majority Founder Jerry Falwell, LaHaye, and theologian Cleon Skousen, an influential thinker within the religious right who wrote that white slave masters were the real victims in the antebellum South. Some of the first wealthy businessmen included in CNP were Amway’s Richard DeVos and oilman Charles koch. Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese eagerly embraced the group and served as a direct link between the CNP and the Reagan White House. 

In addition to Republican Party officials, the religious right, and wealthy donors, CNP members include representatives from the conservative media infrastructure, libertarians, and many neoconservatives. Although the CNP has never allowed the press access to its events, it is widely known that the group hosts several meetings a year to allow Republican leaders to consult with movement conservative types. According to Bob Barr, the Republican lawmaker who spearheaded the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, Barr met with the CNP to hone “our message and focus” around the impeachment effort at a CNP meeting in 1997, well before Clinton made his claim that he did not have “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky. In his memoirs, Barr said the CNP members were in “near universal agreement” that impeachment was necessary because of Clinton’s “abuses of power” concerning “national security.” However, CNP continued to support the impeachment when it transformed into a crusade against Clinton’s claims about his sexual improprieties. 

In 1999, George W. Bush reportedly gave a speech to the CNP promising to only appoint pro-life judges, which in turn helped guarantee the support of CNP members and solidify Bush’s nomination in the Republican primaries. Although little is known about the activities of CNP events, many have speculated about the degree to which CNP used its influence within the Bush administration. Salon’s Ben Van Heuvelen has noted that the rise of the private military contractor Blackwater, now known as Academi, might have stemmed from the fact that Blackwater CEO Erik Prince’s parents Edgar and Elsa Prince were prominent donors to the CNP and its affiliates, especially the Family Research Council. Prince family members met regularly with prominent Bush administration war planners, like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Bremer, through the CNP. 

John McCain kowtowed to the CNP in a speech shortly after locking up the GOP nomination in 2008, but still struggled to gain their trust. “I want to look you in the eye and tell you that I won’t let you down,” pledged McCain to the group of evangelicals and donors in his March 2008 address to the group. According to the New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick, several audience members in the CNP crowd said that McCain made “little impression” despite his pandering. James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and many social conservatives simply did not trust McCain, and viewed his acclaimed “maverick” streak as a liability to the movement. According to the New York Times and The Nation’s Max Blumenthal, CNP officials finally pledged their support to the McCain campaign– and in turn the support of tens of thousands of evangelical churches organized by CNP members, various right-wing front groups owned by CNP members, and other conservative organizations– only after McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Heritage can put a lot of resources behind targeting mainstream Republicans who are looking towards independent swing voters. The GOP base is still predominantly racist, bigoted and unable to think beyond the latest rants on Hate Talk Radio. But in many districts outside of the South, that’s not enough to win elections. Look at the report from the new Iowa Poll for example.

Steve King, one of the most viciously anti-Hispanic xenophobes in Congress spent Wednesday lying about immigrants and about the reform bill. And King is backed by Iowa’s increasingly senile Senator Chuck Grassley. But 54% of their state’s voters approve of the Senate bill with a path to citizenship. 68% of Democrats approve and 54% of independents approve. True, just 44% of Republicans approve but only 48% of Republicans are opposed. The only demographic group that is against immigration reform are the elderly– 65 years or older– and even in that case, 48% approve but only 40% oppose. The rest are unsure.

They’ve got a problem. TPM reported yesterday that a fairly large rump is pushing back hard on the idea that the Republicans must embrace some kind of immigration reform (and soften their tone when talking about women) because it’s a buncha crapola:

“What an idiot,” Washington state Republican Chairman Kirby Wilbur said Tuesday of Sen. Lindsey Graham’s recent comments on the matter. Graham, R-S.C., said that without “immigration reform” along the lines the Senate is weighing, “we’re in a demographic death spiral as a party.”

“The pathology report of the death of the Republican Party is grossly overstated,” Wilbur said. Republicans must do better jobs of messaging and finding voters, but they should not overreact to Romney’s relatively narrow loss to Obama, he said. Obama won 51 percent of the popular vote to Romney’s 47 percent but defeated the Republican by a wide margin in the Electoral College, 332-206.

I think there really is a passing chance they may tank immigration reform. They are certainly setting it up as a huge challenge to their dominance. If millions of lives weren’t at stake it might even be fun to watch.

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Politico covers for Republican heartless incompetence again

by David Atkins

It’s becoming old hat at this point to mock Politico’s peculiar brand of “reporting,” but Jake Sherman’s article about the failure of the farm bill deserves a special golf clap. Remember that the normally bipartisan farm bill failed because a bunch of hyperconservatives insisted on adding an amendment to make awful cuts to food stamps–and then over sixty of those Tea Party Republicans still voted against the bill because the cuts to food stamps weren’t big enough.

Predictably, most the House Democrats refused to vote for the bill because of the cuts to food stamps. So the bill failed in the House, largely because of the heartlessness of the GOP caucus, particularly its most extreme wing. So how does Politico handle the story? By treating it as a he said, she said story in which GOP and Dem leadership each accuse one another. Seriously:

Someone in House leadership screwed up again.

The defeat of the farm bill — after both parties were privately bullish it would pass with large margins — shows, once again, how massively dysfunctional the House and its leadership has become. And it plainly reveals that a bipartisan rewrite of the nation’s complex and politically charged immigration laws are a pipe dream in the House, at least for now. Preventing a government shutdown and debt limit fight are not far behind.

For decades, the farm bill has been a beacon of bipartisanship in an increasingly rough-and-tumble chamber. The defeat of Thursday’s version was propelled by the adoption of Florida GOP Rep. Steve Southerland’s amendment to institute work requirements for recipients of food stamps. Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) spoke on behalf of the amendment, indicating his support.

But passage of that amendment doomed the broader bill. Thursday’s episode illustrates in real time that Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) standard for passing immigration reform will be a massive challenge. Bipartisanship is a process fraught with pitfalls in the House, and leaders in both parties can’t rally their troops to follow them, as 62 Republicans joined 172 Democrats to vote against the bill. Republicans had 171 of their members voting ‘yes,’ and Democrats had 24 in favor.

People involved in the farm debate, irate at the sudden defeat, say the House is plainly not working. Someone’s vote count was off. Someone’s political antennae were frayed. Someone miscalculated the stiff resistance from the rank and file.

I suppose the bloodlessness of that reporting is seen by some in the journalistic community as a pinnacle of unbiased, purely informative journalism. But it isn’t. Treating everything in politics as a horse race without values or context is intentionally misleading and uninformative. The reader is left without any sense of why the bill failed, or what they can do to help make things better, or whom to vote for next time to further policies that fit their values. Instead, it’s just a tut-tutting about bratty politicians who just can’t cooperate to pass bills–as if bipartisan passing of bills were somehow intrinsically the greatest possible good, without passing judgment on the actual content of said bills.

Politico isn’t just useless journalism. It’s actively harmful journalism.

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“It’s open season to bully Christians”

by digby

Hey jerks, be more tolerant of my intolerance:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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“I will be a good American”

by digby

This piece by Walter Kirn in The New Republic hasn’t received the attention it deserves. He talks about how he made a decision to “get over it”, as some silicon valley baron said we must,  and stop worrying about privacy:

All of this happened just a couple of days ago, but already I feel different, like a new person in a new world. I feel mature, realistic, reconciled. I feel less isolated and less anxious. I plan, from now on, to go about things differently and acknowledge the new order.

I will keep my opinions to myself online.
I will keep my opinions to myself when speaking to anyone who goes online or who speaks to anyone who goes online.

I will speak on the phone only to people who keep their opinions to themselves, and hang up on them if they don’t.

I will buy nothing online or with a credit card or in a store that keeps electronic records of its sales or in a store that uses security cameras that I am not absolutely proud to own, and absolutely happy for everyone to know I own.

I will pay my taxes to the last penny, and then I will pay a penny more, just to be safe.

I will donate to good causes, conspicuously.

I will donate to both major political parties, conspicuously.

I will, at least once day a day, be it online or on the phone or in the company of someone who goes online or speaks on the phone, condemn our enemies and support our leaders.

I will obey the laws, all the laws, even the dumb ones, even the ones that seem unenforceable, and I will associate only with those who also obey them.

I will smile even when I feel troubled, and when I notice others acting troubled, I will tell them to smile, to get over it.

I will always, when given the option, push Allow.

I will hide nothing.

But I will conceal everything.

I will be a good American.

It’s probably a good idea.

It’s too late for the likes of me, of course. But even so, I think about saying things I wouldn’t have thought about before. Seems prudent …

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Republican Rebranding, Part XXIX: sexual orientation discrimination edition

by David Atkins

Louie Gohmert talks about discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace:

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, said on Wednesday that he wasn’t “aware of exactly which one you’re talking about” when a reporter asked him about his position on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, but his attempt to dodge the question was probably more revealing than a simple yes or no answer.

After it was explained to him that the measure would prohibit discrimination in hiring and employment practices based on sexual orientation and gender identity, Gohmert told a reporter from ThinkProgress: “Who wants to go talking about sexual orientation when they’re working? Good grief.”

With Gohmert, the “evil vs. stupid” question usually comes out in favor of both.

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Ari Melber on the FISA Court:”I’d say it’s pretty rubber stampy”

by digby

Ari Melber delivered a good rant yesterday about President Obama’s somewhat bizarre comments claiming that his surveillance programs are “transparent.” It’s hotter than we usually see on TV:

Melber hit Obama for conflating what the NSA’s telephonic monitoring programs target with the electronic communications monitoring program, PRISM, when he said that the FISA courts have overseen every federal request. He said that PRIMS nets 3 billion pieces of intelligence from computers in one month.

“Potentially 35 billion pieces in a year,” Melber said. “There aren’t 35 billion court orders for that.”

Later, Melber slammed Obama for saying the NSA’s process of obtaining intelligence is transparent because they go through the FISA courts.

“No,” Melber shot back. “You cannot invoke a secret court for transparency.”

“It’s not transparent. That’s why it meets in secret,” he continued.

Melber mocked the notion that the FISA courts were independent because they have almost never denied a request from the federal government to monitor a suspect. “I’d say that’s pretty rubber stampy,” Melber observed.

He linked this to the fact that Justice Roberts appoints every FISA judge. “This secret court now has one of the most monolithic, one party, right-wing benches in American history,” Melber declared. He said that changes can and should be made, but power-hungry politicians and profitable surveillance companies would oppose any changes to that system.

I have a feeling Toure needed the fainting couch after that one …

Criminalizing male sexuality

by digby

I get a fair amount of this sort of thing in email from disgruntled men who are unhappy at being held to account for their boorish, violent and opportunistic behavior toward women.  But it’s rarely quite this crude:

Conservative commentator James Taranto, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on Monday night, detailed a set of allegations of sexual assault in the military before concluding that they amounted to a “he-said/she-said dispute” that only revealed “a political campaign against sexual assault in the military that shows signs of becoming an effort to criminalize male sexuality.” All of it, he argues, amounts to a “war on men.”
[…]
Taranto’s greivances — which are simply against a changing culture that is starting to hold men accountable for treating women like objects — came through in his piece. And they had nothing to do with McCaskill’s, or Helms:

It’s fair to say that Capt. Herrera seems to have a tendency toward sexual recklessness. Perhaps that makes him unsuitable to serve as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. But his accusers acted recklessly too. The presumption that reckless men are criminals while reckless women are victims makes a mockery of any notion that the sexes are equal.

What’s worse, Taranto followed up his op-ed with an appearance on Wall Street Journal’s video channel, where he argued that “female sexual freedom” is responsible for a “war on men,” and that war is embodied in allegations of sexual assault. During that interview, he also said that a woman alleging assault and a man denying it “differed… on whether she consented.” Taranto also cast doubt on the report because someone present “didn’t even hear this going on.”

“What does female sexual freedom mean?” Taranto added, “It means, for this woman, that she had the freedom to get drunk and get in the back seat of a car with this guy.”

I guess the transcribers left off the last part: … get in the back sear of a car with this guy and not be raped. There’s no double standard and it has absolutely nothing to do with “female sexual freedom.” The guy had the very same right to get drunk, get in the back of a car and not be raped. In fact, everyone has a right to do pretty much anything and not be raped.

This idea of what constitutes consent is very difficult for some people, usually men, to understand. I don’t know why. It’s very simple: every person’s body belongs to them. They do not ever give it away simply by being in a position in which another person wants it and so they have to give it.

Trying to root out rape and sexual harrassment in he military is only “criminalizing male sexuality” if you assume that men are all naturally prone to rape and sexual harrassment. That says more about the person saying it than it does about men in general, the vast majority of whom treat women as human beings not rape objects.

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Checks and balances for dummies

by digby

Brian Beutler has published a fascinating look at the congressional oversight system and how it (doesn’t) work. I urge you toe read the whole thing to catch the full flavor of just how dysfunctional the committees are and how they often end up knowing less than they started:

Depending on which elected official you asked this week or last, the revelation that the NSA regularly collects U.S. phone records, and can easily access some private content like emails and chat transcripts from Internet companies, was either no big deal, an enormous shock to the conscience, or an “I told you so” moment.

For most members who don’t serve on one of the secretive intelligence committees and aren’t among the four highest ranking officials in Congress, the scope if not the existence of the programs came as a surprise. Those members weren’t prohibited from receiving official briefings about classified collections programs. But even if they took unusual interest in the issue, they had to seek out information, without easy access to the subject-area knowledge required to decipher what they’d learned, or the authority to share it with their staffs or other elected officials. The administration didn’t volunteer information, and these members’ generally don’t have aides with top-secret security clearances, let alone expertise in signals intelligence.

But even though intelligence committee members, along with the top four bipartisan legislative leaders, had much more detailed knowledge about all intelligence matters than most members, they too have differing accounts about the scope of these programs, the accuracy of the stories written about them, and even their own ability to conduct oversight of the NSA and the country’s most secret surveillance activities.

This is not an accident. The system is obviously designed to obscure rather than reveal. And I would guess a lot of that is because the security apparatus doesn’t trust certain people in congress and wants to ensure they do nothing that could impede them.

I’m reminded again of this little anecdote that The Hill oddly stuck on the end of an article last week:

Disputes between senior intelligence officials and members of Congress over who was told what, when, have been going on for years.

During the Reagan administration there was a fierce debate between administration officials and senators about whether Congress was informed about the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors.

Gary Schmitt, an AEI scholar who served as Democratic staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee from 1982 to 1984, said then-CIA director William Casey had told members of the committee about the covert action but couched it in such a way as to minimize notice.

“The mining was mentioned but it was mentioned in the context of a very long briefing that Casey was giving and it was done in passive voice and in such a way as to make it sound like an ongoing program,” he recalled. “It was a case of writing it in such a way as to obscure the fact that the agency was directly involved in the mining.”

This and a secret court that’s been hamstrung by the congress and filled with a bunch of right wing throwbacks is what is being represented as transparency and oversight. Pardon me for being a little bit suspicious that it might not be on the up and up.

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