Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Madder Still

Jane reports on Richard Morion pollster for the Washington Post actually had the temerity to write this drivel yesterday in an online chat:

Naperville, Ill.: Why haven’t you polled on public support for the impeachment of George W. Bush?

Richard Morin: This question makes me mad…

Seattle, Wash.: How come ABC News/Post poll has not yet polled on impeachment?

Richard Morin: Getting madder…

Haymarket, Va.: With all the recent scandals and illegal/unconstitutional actions of the President, why hasn’t ABC News / Washington Post polled whether the President should be impeached?

Richard Morin: Madder still…

[…]

[W]e do not ask about impeachment because it is not a serious option or a topic of considered discussion –witness the fact that no member of congressional Democratic leadership or any of the serious Democratic presidential candidates in ’08 are calling for Bush’s impeachment. When it is or they are, we will ask about it in our polls.

Jane points to this Media Matters report:

A January 1998 Post poll conducted just days after the first revelations of Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky asked the following questions:

“If this affair did happen and if Clinton did not resign, is this something for which Clinton should be impeached, or not?”

“There are also allegations that Clinton himself lied by testifying under oath that he did not have an affair with the woman. If Clinton lied in this way, would you want him to remain in office as president, or would you want him to resign the presidency?”

“If Clinton lied by testifying under oath that he did not have an affair with the woman, and he did not resign, is this something for which Clinton should be impeached, or not?”

Morin was the Post’s polling director at the time, and he wrote the January 26, 1998, article reporting the poll results.

I just have to expand on this a little because this is a truly unbelievable example of media bias. In an impeachment story in the Washington Post written the same day as the poll was released, January 26, Ruth Marcus breathlessly reported:

In the whirlwind five days since the story first broke, nothing has been conclusively proven about the truth of the allegations that Clinton had an affair with Lewinsky, urged her to lie about it in an affidavit in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, and then lied about it himself under oath when questioned by Jones’s lawyers.

But it is a measure of the political and legal explosiveness of the allegations that they immediately provoked discussions of impeachment, a prospect raised the morning the story broke by former presidential adviser George Stephanopoulos and discussed at length on yesterday’s TV talk shows.

It was discussed on all the talk shows because useful idiot George Stephanopoulos brought it up five days before and the Republican Borg immediately fanned out across the airwaves and pretended that this sexual affair was a threat to the Republic. And the Washington post ate it up with a spoon, sending out their pollster post-haste to take the public’s temperature on this trumped up piece of tabloid garbage.

Today, the same pollster gets mad when people bring up the idea of impeachment in the context of a hugely unpopular president lying about national security. He gets madder still at regular Americans who annoy him with mass e-mails which he obviously considers less legitimate than a gaggle of paid GOP shills marching in lockstep on Press The Meat. This, even though the current polling already shows that 52% of the public believe that Bush deliberately misled the country on Iraq and 56% think that it is very important for congress to question the Bush Adminstration about the way the intelligence was used. (Clinton had a 59% approval rating in that 1998 poll.)

Media Matters asks:

Please explain WHY a question asking if President Bush should be impeached if he lied to the country about war is “biased”.

Please also explain how this is consistent with polls the Post ran — under your direction, I might add — in 1998 asking whether then-President Clinton should be impeached if he had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Do you now believe those questions you asked — and reported on — throughout 1998 were “biased”? If so, do you believe you and The Post owe Clinton an apology?

Why does The Post think it is appropriate to raise the spectre of impeachment when there is a Democratic president, but not when there is a Republican in office?

Because the beltway press corps has conditioned itself to respond only to Republicans. They’ve trained themselves not take Democrats seriously, either the rank and file who inconvenience them with e-mails they do not want to read, or the leadership they simply disdain. Unpopularity obligates them to criticize Bush at least mildly, but the relief they feel when his numbers edge up a bit is palpable. They don’t seem to know this about themselves.

And although they will likely continue to choose to avert their eyes, impeachment is on the table.

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Adults Wanted

by digby

Kevin Drum has a whole bunch of good posts up today discussing the right wing reaction to the spying scandal. A more reprehensible group of moral and intellecutual cowards I have never seen.

There are the typical lies and obfuscations to which we’ve all become accustomed, of course, such as selectively citing passages of Supreme Court opinions that actually came to opposite conclusions and purposefully misconstruing Clinton and Carter’s executive orders to imply that they had done the same thing. That’s just par for the course.

But there are two things about this that do chap my hide and they are related. The first is that for 40 years — and certainly for the last 25 since Reagan became president — we have had to listen to endless blathering about how the Republicans want to “get the government out of your lives.” “If someone says ‘we’re the government and we’re here to help you’ you should run.” Rugged individualist Republicans, taking care of their own, not looking to the state to solve their problems like the betwetting girly men and manly girls on the left.

During the 90’s the atmosphere was redolent with militia fevered, anti-government rhetoric that echoed throughout the right wing message infrastructure. Here’s a snippet of the zeitgeist of the Gingrich revolution:

My books, such as Circle of Intrigue, Big Sister is Watching You, and Project L.U.C.I.D., tell the absolute truth about the evil powers of intimidation. It documents the crimes and schemes of the black-hooded, jackbooted thugs of the BATF and many other federal Gestapo, alphabet agencies. This hidden elite constitute the true Nazis. In fact, as fascists, they are worse than Nazis. They are “CommuNazis!”

Once upon a time, America had law enforcement of which it could be proud. No more. Today, the BATF, CIA, FBI and other federal bureaucracies continue to drag the good name of law enforcement through the gutter. As my friend, Officer Jack McLamb, recently said in a World of Prophecy interview, “The scum of law enforcement has risen to the top.”

“The problem,” says McLamb, “is that God is gone from government.”

These were extremists, to be sure, but the language on the floor of the congress often echoed this kind of thinking. Tom Delay, for instance, called the EPA the “Gestapo of government … a bunch of jack-booted thugs.”

They won elections in the west and the south by swaggering around extolling the blessed Bill Of Rights and the need to keep the federal government at arms length because Real Men and Women don’t need no Democrat sissy nanny state and her Big Brother taking away their rights.

9/11 changed everything. Suddenly the he-men of WalMart and the NRA leaped into Big Brother’s arms and shrieked “save me, save me! Do what ever you have to do, they’re trying to kill us all!” They now look to Daddy Government not to discipline the children, but to check under the bed for them every night, reassure them that the boogeyman won’t hurt them and then read them a nice bedtime story about spreading freedom and democracy. It turns out that underneath all this swaggering bravado, the Republicans aren’t the Daddy party — they’re the baby party.

This article in the Boston Globe from yesterday (via Maha in this terrific post) gets to what I think is the central problem with this country’s response after 9/11; the alleged super-hawks who were leading this country wet their pants with fear and behaved like frightened children:

In march of 1933, Franklin Roosevelt, facing the crisis of the Great Depression, said in his inaugural address that ”the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

The fear people felt then was not nameless, unreasoning, nor unjustified, as Roosevelt well knew. In fact, his address went on to say that ”the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone . . . Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.”

What Roosevelt meant was that fear can distort judgment and cloud the mind’s ability to perceive right turns from wrong turns in the road to safety.

[…]

The Bush administration’s predilection to torture was clearly a result of mind-clouding fear caused by the greatest terrorist attack in history on Sept. 11th, 2001. The same can be said of the excesses of the Patriot Act, and, too, the decision to use the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens without benefit of warrant as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The Bush administration has shamelessly used fear to get its way. Both the president and vice president have tried to picture a withdrawal from Iraq as resulting in an Al Qaeda takeover of Iraq, and an Al Qaeda-led Caliphate stretching across the Muslim world. In reality al Qaeda hasn’t the remotest chance of taking over Iraq, not with 80 percent of the population either Kurdish or Shi’ite, and a timely end to American occupation might sooner lead to an Iraqi-Sunni disenchantment with foreign terrorists.

Of course, the right has traded on fear for so long that we can hardly remember a time when they didn’t. If it isn’t the commies, it’s the hippies or the ATF or the terrorists. And as Kevin points out they make these ridiculous decisions over and over again because they are essentially afraid of their own shadows:

The fact is, superhawks always claim their programs are vital to American security, and they almost always turn out to be wrong. We didn’t need to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II, we didn’t need Joe McCarthy’s theatrics during the Cold War, and we didn’t need COINTELPRO during the Vietnam War. And when the Church Committee outlawed the most egregious of our intelligence abuses in the 70s, guess what happened? The Soviet Union disintegrated a decade later. Turns out we didn’t need that stuff after all. America is a lot stronger than its supposed defenders give it credit for.

This idea that we are living in a unique time that calls for special measures is what they always say. (And this current fantasy about the unique threat that proved our oceans couldn’t protect us is particularly rich considering they fearmongered a communist threat of total annihilation for decades.) Often cooler heads are able to quell the worst excesses (like the fervent belief that we needed to launch a tactical nuclear war against the commies) and satisfy the right wing’s other ongoing paranoid fantasy — the left as a fifth column — with silly, wasteful surveillance of animal rights groups or Quakers or former Beatles (along with pernicious surveillance of their partisan opponents.)

They are rhinestone cowboys who are scared to death and don’t know how to contain their fear. So they lash out at their domestic political enemies, who they can bluster about and pretend to be tough, while hiding behind the military uniforms of their Big Brother and Preznit Daddy (which is a real stretch when it comes to Junior.)

The fact that they continue to win elections as being the tough guys perhaps says more about our puerile culture than anything else. They lash out like frightened children and too many people see that as courage or resolve.

Violent Islamic fundamentalism is a serious problem, not an existential threat. And it’s a difficult problem that requires adults who can keep their heads about them when the terrorists put on their scary show, not big-for-their-age eight year olds staging a temper tantrum.

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Christmas Morning

Thank you all so much for your kind contributions. I am quite overwhelmed. All I want now for Christmas is well … Fitzmas. I knew the readers and writers of the left blogosphere were top shelf, super smart, generous and kind. What I didn’t realize was how brave you are: you must realize that the NSA Shift Supervisor assigned to this blog is harried beyond belief today tracking all those transactions, some of them from …. overseas. Merry Christmas, NSA supervisor.

Special thanks to the Mensches Who Saved Christmas, my fellow bloggers who linked to my post yesterday and sent readers over here, some of whom said “I’ve never read your blog, but here’s some money anyway, because (fill in the blank) told me I should.” Now that’s clout. Democrats take heed:

Jane at Firedoglake, Jeralyn at Talk Left, TBOGG, The Cunningrealist, Dave at Seeing the Forest, Kevin at Catch, A Tiny Revolution, Kevin at Lean Left, Fallen Monk and various commenters were kind enough to put out the word on the their blogs and in comment threads throughout the blogosphere. (Perhaps others who I failed to catch as well.) It’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me. And I mean that.

And thanks especially to Atrios, my blogfather, for using his valuable real estate to exhort readers to send me turkee. There are Democratic candidates out there who envy me today.

Thanks also to Sean-Paul over at the Agonist and Jake and Ellwood’s dad, who heard my plaintive cry and bought ads. Kos and Jerome too. Click through, people. It’ll be worth your while.

I will be sending you all individual thanks, of course, but there are quite a few of you so it will take a little time. (High class problem, eh?) I will also compile all the great advice and criticism about the site and will take it into account as I contemplate a redesign. Thanks for taking the time to let me know your thoughts and sending me your great graphic ideas. And thanks also to my pal (you know who you are) for insisting that I do this even though I was reluctant.

Finally, many of you requested a snail mail address and here it is:

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

Checks can conveniently be made out to Digby’s Hullabaloo, as well. I have also been reliably informed that some of the Paypal problems may be related to stale old cookies. A few people have said that they had better luck when they cleared out their cache.

Thanks again for all of your donations and especially your kind words. They mean more to me than you will ever know.

d

Update:

More Mensches Who Saved Christmas:

John at Crooks And Liars

My good friend Peter Daou

Ian at BopNews

Da Man: James Wolcott

The fabulous Julia!

Matt at MYDD

Sadly No

The Moquol

The great Tom Tomorrow

Low and Left

Pastor Dan at Street Prophets

Three Bulls

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Stocking Stuffer Request

While everybody has their credit cards out buying a “secret Santa” moustache mug for their most hated colleague at the office, I wonder if some of you might want to throw a little cash my way while you’re at it? For reasons I haven’t figured out, this blog is doing miserably at selling blog-ads. Indeed, if it weren’t for my friend Michael Shaw at BagNews notes (whose great graphics make any blog look better than it already does) I would have no ads at all today. During the biggest shopping season of the year, no less.

I do not know how others sell blogAds on their blogs. I belong to the
“Advertise Liberally” blog-ad network which is designed to sell across the liberal spectrum. I don’t think my problems are because my ads are too expensive. I charge what everybody else charges. There have been some months that I collected a few sheckles and they really came in handy. But now, not so much.

I don’t have the kind of regular community that a lot of the more popular bloggers have (although I would argue that my commenters are among the sharpest in the blogosphere) but my traffic is within the top 20 of all liberal blogs, which isn’t bad for a solo blogger like myself. I’ve won awards, even. But one week shy of my third anniversary and I’m back to doing this for free. I may be a raving leftist, but I have to live in this capitalist world.

There is an element of the Bataan death march to daily blogging when you do it for three years running. I write slowly and do a lot of research and reading, so it takes more time than is readily evident. Every minute of it is fun, of course, but it’s still ridiculous. In fact it’s so much fun that I would never expect to make serious money doing it. Life could not possibly be that sweet. But I can’t justify doing this without any compensation at all either. I wish to gawd that I were an eccentric billionaire who blogs psuedonymously in order to see how the little people live. Unfortunately, that is very far from the truth. (Look at it this way. If I were an eccentric billionaire, I could afford to buy my own bandwidth instead of blogging for free on blogspot, right?) No, sad to say, like most people I have those boring financial needs — for things like shelter and food. And books. And MaxCat Senior in chicken and lamb flavor. In a blogging world where money is to be made, I just can’t justify to myself that I would do it for free. I can’t justify to my family that I continue turn down work for no other compensation either.

I’ve never asked for money on this blog before, and I will probably not ask again.(As you can gather, this embarrasses the hell out of me, which is why I’m rambling like a lunatic.) But, if you like what I do and have gotten something out of what I’ve written these past three years, a couple of bucks in the tip jar (in the left column over there) would be very greatly appreciated.

Oh — and if you don’t have any extra money, you could do me a big favor by just clicking on the ads I run. (I suspect that part of my problem is that I don’t get much click through.) So, if you want to support me but you don’t have any extra change (which I completely understand) just use my page to check out the ubiquitous blog ads. In fact, go over right now and click on BagNews notes and read what he is saying today. You won’t regret it.

And Happy Hollandaise to everyone.

digby

Update: And many, many thanks to the folks who have thrown me a tip already this year, a couple of you more than once. I am very grateful.

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Crying Wolf

by digby

Can someone please tell the Republicans that even if the NY Times had printed the NSA story next month instead of last week that there would not have been a great swelling of Bush love over the Iraqi elections last week?

The reason the story didn’t capture the public’s imagination is not because the other one stepped on it; it’s because we’ve heard it all before. The public has lost count of how many of these “milestone elections” have taken place. Each time, we are supposed to have a big group hug and congratulate ourselves for our great generosity. And then each time shit starts blowing up again in Iraq almost immediately.

The American public can hardly keep its attention on its own elections. Getting all excited about Iraqi elections that happen every few months and don’t seem to mean anything just isn’t going to interest them. The proof is in the pudding. Either the violence stops or it doesn’t. Either we get out or we don’t. The magic of the purple finger wore off months ago.

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Countering The Threat

by digby

Glen Greenwald takes the time to rebut Hewitt’s ridiculous argument that
United States v. United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan et al gives the president the power to wiretap Americans at will, when the case actually does the exact opposite. Apparently, the right blogosphere is chattering about this absurd claim like a bunch of drunken magpies.

I have nothing to add except to point to my post yesterday, when I referenced the same case, to point out again the great irony in the fact that the author of that opinion was Lewis Powell, the man who inspired the Great Republican Political Machine.

Powell was not some bleeding heart liberal. He believed that the nation was under serious threat from the New Left:

William Kunstler, warmly welcomed on campuses and listed in a recent student poll as the “American lawyer most admired,” incites audiences as follows:
“You must learn to fight in the streets, to revolt, to shoot guns. We will learn to do all of the things that property owners fear.”2 The New Leftists who heed Kunstler’s advice increasingly are beginning to act — not just against military recruiting offices and manufacturers of munitions, but against a variety of businesses: “Since February, 1970, branches (of Bank of America) have been attacked 39 times, 22 times with explosive devices and 17 times with fire bombs or by arsonists.” Although New Leftist spokesmen are succeeding in radicalizing thousands of the young, the greater cause for concern is the hostility of respectable liberals and social reformers. It is the sum total of their views and influence which could indeed fatally weaken or destroy the system.

A chilling description of what is being taught on many of our campuses was written by Stewart Alsop:

“Yale, like every other major college, is graduating scores of bright young men who are practitioners of ‘the politics of despair.’ These young men despise the American political and economic system . . . (their) minds seem to be wholly closed. They live, not by rational discussion, but by mindless slogans.” A recent poll of students on 12 representative campuses reported that: “Almost half the students favored socialization of basic U.S. industries.”

A visiting professor from England at Rockford College gave a series of lectures entitled “The Ideological War Against Western Society,” in which he documents the extent to which members of the intellectual community are waging ideological warfare against the enterprise system and the values of western society. In a foreword to these lectures, famed Dr. Milton Friedman of Chicago warned: “It (is) crystal clear that the foundations of our free society are under wide-ranging and powerful attack — not by Communist or any other conspiracy but by misguided individuals parroting one another and unwittingly serving ends they would never intentionally promote.”

But nonetheless, he still didn’t believe that the threat was so overwhelming that you needed to discard the constitution and give the president dictatorial powers. He had another idea:

The overriding first need is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival — survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.

The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation’s public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself. This involves far more than an increased emphasis on “public relations” or “governmental affairs” — two areas in which corporations long have invested substantial sums.

A significant first step by individual corporations could well be the designation of an executive vice president (ranking with other executive VP’s) whose responsibility is to counter-on the broadest front-the attack on the enterprise system. The public relations department could be one of the foundations assigned to this executive, but his responsibilities should encompass some of the types of activities referred to subsequently in this memorandum. His budget and staff should be adequate to the task.

But independent and uncoordinated activity by individual corporations, as important as this is, will not be sufficient. Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.

Clearly, they listened and created the most formidable national political machine in this country’s history.

And despite his clear antipathy to everything that the left stood for, Powell went on to rule in the above cited case that the president did not have the unilateral power to eavesdrop on American citizens, no matter what “national security” reasons were cited. Guys like him understood that protecting America meant protecting the constitution above all. The Federalist Society? Not so much.

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The President’s Program

by digby

Well now. Bush personally called the publisher and the editor of the NY Times in to the oval Office to get them not to publish the wire tapping story. Here’s Jonathan Alter in Newsweek:

I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.

The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference. His comparison to the damaging pre-9/11 revelation of Osama bin Laden’s use of a satellite phone, which caused bin Laden to change tactics, is fallacious; any Americans with ties to Muslim extremists—in fact, all American Muslims, period—have long since suspected that the U.S. government might be listening in to their conversations. Bush claimed that “the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy.” But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a “shameful act,” it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab.

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.

We know that Cheney was intimately involved with this what with his closed briefings to certain members of congress and all. But this is the first of these scandals that really lands right on Bush’s desk. It’s his baby. This one’s personal.

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TIA

Check out the handwritten letter from 2003 that Jay Rockefeller just released which completely obliterates the ridiculous defense that members of congress “approved” this action.

He makes it clear that he has very serious reservations about this program and says that since he is not a technician or a lawyer, and is prohibited from speaking with staff, experts or colleagues, he cannot properly evaluate this program.

He evokes Poindexter’s TIA.

And he concludes with this:

I am retaining a copy of this communication in a sealed envelope in the secure spaces of the Intelligence Committee to ensure that I have a record of this communication.

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Efficiency Expert

Atrios and First-Draft have posts up highlighting one of the most egregious explanations for the NSA spying from this morning’s briefing by Gonzales and NSA chief General Hayden: they didn’t ask congress for permission because they were told by “certain” congressmen that they couldn’t get it passed.

Gonzales:…We’ve had discussions with members of Congress, certain members of Congress, about whether or not we could get an amendment to FISA, and we were advised that that was not likely to be — that was not something we could likely get, certainly not without jeopardizing the existence of the program, and therefore, killing the program. And that — and so a decision was made that because we felt that the authorities were there, that we should continue moving forward with this program.

That’s not Brownie It’s not even Karl Rove. That’s the Attorney General of the United States talking.

But there’s more:

Q General, when you discussed the emergency powers, you said, agility is critical here. And in the case of the emergency powers, as I understand it, you can go in, do whatever you need to do, and within 72 hours just report it after the fact. And as you say, these may not even last very long at all. What would be the difficulty in setting up a paperwork system in which the logs that you say you have the shift supervisors record are simply sent to a judge after the fact? If the judge says that this is not legitimate, by that time probably your intercept is over, wouldn’t that be correct?

GENERAL HAYDEN: What you’re talking about now are efficiencies. What you’re asking me is, can we do this program as efficiently using the one avenue provided to us by the FISA Act, as opposed to the avenue provided to us by subsequent legislation and the President’s authorization.

Our operational judgment, given the threat to the nation that the difference in the operational efficiencies between those two sets of authorities are such that we can provide greater protection for the nation operating under this authorization.

Q But while you’re getting an additional efficiency, you’re also operating outside of an existing law. If the law would allow you to stay within the law and be slightly less efficient, would that be —

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALEZ: I guess I disagree with that characterization. I think that this electronic surveillance is within the law, has been authorized. I mean, that is our position. We’re only required to achieve a court order through FISA if we don’t have authorization otherwise by the Congress, and we think that that has occurred in this particular case.

Yes, the Bill of Rights is hell on efficiency. We really should do something about that.

They knew they were circumventing the law as written, that the congress would not agree to change it and they used a very dicey theory of presidential infallibility in wartime. They are saying that the president is re-authorizing “his program” every 45 days solely so that shift supervisors don’t have to waste time with paperwork.

The original NY Times article said:

Several senior government officials say that when the special operation first began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the N.S.A. The agency can choose its eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from Justice Department or other Bush administration officials. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president.

I find that interesting, don’t you?

In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it.

For the first time, the Justice Department audited the N.S.A. program, several officials said. And to provide more guidance, the Justice Department and the agency expanded and refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether probable cause existed to start monitoring someone’s communications, several officials said.

Now, what do you suppose these “concerns” were all about?

Here’s a hint:

Those involved in the program also said that the N.S.A.’s eavesdroppers might need to start monitoring large batches of numbers all at once, and that it would be impractical to seek permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first, according to the officials.

I would guess that these large batches of numbers were very large indeed. So large that it would be “inefficient” go to the FISA court and seek permission after the fact.

I would further guess that these large batches of numbers include a whole shitload of Americans who have nothing to do with al Qaeda. And since they had to suspend some areas of the program in 2004, I would suspect that those numbers include some people who are of interest to the administration for reasons other than terrorism.

If I were one of those “shift supervisors” (especially if I was one who had worried about John Kerry becoming president) I’d get myself a lawyer.

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Passion Of The Cowboys

by digby

Will “Brokeback Mountain” play in Plano? In the movie’s first weekend in the Dallas suburb where the 2004 Mel Gibson film “The Passion of the Christ” earned some of its biggest grosses, the answer appeared to be yes.

After setting a record for the per-theater average for a dramatic movie in limited openings in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, critically acclaimed “Brokeback Mountain” faced its next obstacle as Focus Features expanded the so-called gay cowboy movie to strategically selected smaller cities.

The movie, directed by Ang Lee and starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two ranch hands who develop an enduring emotional bond, “Brokeback Mountain” took in an additional $2.36 million in its first foray outside those three metropolitan cities, rising to No. 8 at the box office, Focus Features estimated Sunday. Its 10-day total is $3.3 million.

The closely watched debut in Plano, Texas, “was a revelation about the accessibility of this movie,” said Focus head of distribution Jack Foley. “This is not gay-dependent. Attendance at those theaters indicates the film has the attention of suburban moviegoers.”

It was the first time since Disney’s animated “Pocahontas” in 1995 that a movie in fewer than 100 theaters cracked the top 10 box office ranking, according to tracking service Nielsen EDI Inc.

Real America watches “Desperate Housewives” and drinks Starbucks and votes Democratic some too. Keep your eye on what people actually do, not what they tell some pollster they think. Popular culture is an excellent window through which you can view how people actually think and live. Right wing evangelical Christians are not a monolith, even in the red states. It’s a mistake to assume they are.

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