Not Exactly A Christmas Present...

But it gladdens the heart, nevertheless. Via Atrios comes this quote from Barrons about the Snoopgate:

Surely the "strict constructionists" on the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary eventually will point out what a stretch this is. The most important presidential responsibility under Article II is that he must "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." That includes following the requirements of laws that limit executive power. There's not much fidelity in an executive who debates and lobbies Congress to shape a law to his liking and then goes beyond its writ.

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.

It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law.

Notice the I-word? It is now mentionable in public discourse. So I'm not the only one who thinks that Bush should be impeached. Especially after we learn that he might have been hoovering data from all sorts of places for his NSA spying program:

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.
...
Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

For the benefit of NSA I will mention here that this week I'm not calling my mom the usual time. Christmas, you know. I will be calling her a day earlier but we will still talk about her cat as usual. I hope that this saved some taxpayer money.

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!

I wanted to do a dreamy snowscape picture postcard of the dogs wearing their white furry Christmas collars with jingle bells but the dogs said not only no, but hell no.
They are not Christian dogs, more like animist ones, and they hate the furry collars because other dogs in the dogpark attack them and make fun of them and then need to be whupped back into obedience. Just kidding on the last part. No dog in its right mind would ever try to make fun of Henrietta; she is thirteen years old and the queen of any dogpark she goes to (unless there is a fourteen year old dog present).

Hank is doing very well for the time being, too. And I have opened most of my presents already! The nice thing about being an adult is that there is nobody who can tell me not to open my presents before Christmas, so I open them the minute they arrive. I have already eaten all the chocolate, for example, and my fridge door is full of poetry I made with the set someone (smooch!) sent me. It will produce a lot of bad poetry for this blog in the future though I have to translate it first.

Now for some holiday fun! Guess what the Republican National Committee's website said today? You got it. It said "Happy Holidays". With a picture of a tree, too. I hope that O'Reilly's eyes bulge out and never pop back in.

Then there is a new scientific study of tinfoil hats, well worth reading. Turns out that the tinfoil doesn't really protect us from government surveillance. But my tinfoil helmet does keep you from reading my thoughts so the aluminum foil is not completely wasted.

I wish you all the most wonderful Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and so on that you can possibly imagine. My wishes don't make much real difference but I am also sending some snake energy your way. Ptuih! It's useful when you have to argue a wingnut next time. It will also turn your eyes bright green.

Love and kisses

Echidne

Tweety Gets Honors!

Chris Matthews got the Misinformer Of the Year award from Media Matters for America! He is called Tweety because he looks like Tweety. See for yourself:





This is a part of his accomplishments:

Part 1: Bush sometimes "glimmers" with "sunny nobility." On MSNBC's Hardball, during a discussion with Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley of the effects on President Bush and his administration of the investigation into the leak of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame, Matthews said "[S]ometimes it glimmers with this man, our president, that kind of sunny nobility." [Hardball, 10/24/05]

Part 2: "Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs ..." Insulting the majority of Americans who hold an unfavorable opinion of President Bush, Matthews exclaimed on Hardball: "Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs, maybe on the left," adding, "I mean, like him personally." [Hardball, 11/28/05]

Part 3: Matthews praised Bush speech as "brilliant" even before it was delivered. Before Bush had even delivered his November 30 speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, Matthews used variations of the word "brilliant" twice to describe it, while deriding Democratic critics of the Iraq war as "carpers and complainers." [MSNBC live coverage, 11/30/05]

Part 4: Bush "belongs on Mount Rushmore." Recounting his experience at a White House party, Matthews said that he "felt sensitive" during his interactions with the president, adding: "You get your picture taken with him. It's like Santa Claus, and he's always very generous and friendly." He continued: "I felt like I was too towel-snappy with him," explaining that Bush had noted his "red scarf" and remarked that he looked "preppy." During the same show, Matthews stated: "If [Bush's] gamble that he can create a democracy in the middle of the Arab world" is successful, "he belongs on Mount Rushmore." [Hardball, 12/16/05]

He is in love with the president! Too bad that George is already married. And too bad that Tweety is supposed to be a journalist.

Susan Faludi's Backlash

She is the feminist of the day on this blog. Faludi's Backlash is a good book to read, even this many years later, if not for the subject matter itself (the 1980's backlash against feminism of the previous decades) then for the pattern that Faludi makes visible, a pattern that is equally visible today.

Faludi is like an archeologist who carefully and painstakingly uses a tiny brush to sweep away at what looks at first just ordinary dirt, but which gradually reveals an ancient mosaic or a statuette or a cuneiform tablet, though in her case it is the structure of anti-feminism, the connections between the right-wing foundations, the radical clerics and the whacko scientists and writers. The sheer mass of evidence she goes through is awe-inspiring and though her writing is not without errors on the whole her accuracy is impressive.

And what is this pattern, this rare cuneiform tablet of antifeminism? To appreciate the totality you need to read Faludi's book. But certain major parts of the pattern repeat themselves so often that I can write about them without having checked the book for several years.

The first one is something I find hard not to call a media conspiracy. What else would it be when some poorly made or nonexistent study is suddenly hailed and celebrated in every single type of media, without fail, and when the only obvious reason for this hailing and celebrating is that the results don't bode well for uppity women of some stripe? Faludi's example is of a study which argued that middle-aged women have a greater chance of being the victims of terrorism than of finding a man to warm their bed. I still hear this one on the internet! The study was utter crap, but this didn't stop it from being discussed on television and masticated in the print media. For here was the proof, finally! Women who waited to marry to have careers would end up sad, lonely and barren! Yippee!

The media conspiracy that Faludi discussed has appeared several times since. It is always about uppity women and always implies that feminism has failed. Not the society, not the men or the women with power, nope. It is just that women on their very own, with their own little heads, have decided that feminism was the Big Bad Wolf.

And just as in the example in Backlash, the new media conspiracies are always shown to be made up. But by the time corrections pour in the media is looking for a new pearl to string to the necklace of feminism's downfall, and all the writers and pontificators are far too busy to point out the errors and biases of the previous one. We have Faludi to thank for spotting this pattern. Once you see it you can always recognize it, and you will, too, when the next pearl rolls out.

A second part of the pattern is the distinction between the public statements of anti-feminists and their private lives. Faludi gives us several examples of people whose public voices are very different from their private choices. Today we have Patrick Buchanan as an example of this pattern. A man who writes with great concern about the falling white birth rates in this country has no children of his own. But he is not a woman so this fact appears not to count against him in the public eye.

The "do as I say, not as I do" anti-feminists are a dime a dozen, of course. Consider Caitlin Flanagan (now a writer for New Yorker but previously for the Atlantic Monthly) who loves to heap scorn on mothers who have jobs or careers. That she is a mother with a career doesn't seem to slow down her acerbity one bit.

I suspect that many such anti-feminists are publicity hounds, raising a wetted finger to test the societal winds and sniffing out the biggest money bags. After all, it is hard to get rich from criticizing the strong and the powerful. Much easier to smooth the fears of those who hate the recent changes in societal gender roles.

The third aspect of anti-feminism Faludi revealed for me was the astonishingly low number of famous anti-feminists. If they seem to be everywhere, both then and these days, it is because the media gives them access like no feminist can ever dream to have. But in reality the number of these fanatics is quite low, though they are a tightly-knit group and extremely well-funded, too. Several of the conservative donors hate feminism which makes finding money for the publication of anti-feminist statements a walk in the park.

Now I feel depressed that so little has changed since Faludi's Backlash was first published. Some things have changed, true, but for the worse. What hasn't changed is the covert assumption that anti-feminism is decent and presentable in the mainstream media but that feminism is wild and feral and best kept outside it.

Poor, Misunderstood Mitt

Mitt Romney, the governor of the sinful Massachusetts, is sulking in a corner because the local media treat him horribly, horribly, you hear! Like this

''The Boston media will be intent on trying to show that I have changed positions and moved right," the governor said. ''It does that distorting effort on a regular basis. It will also ignore those positions that are inconsistent with that view."

Romney created a stir in July when he said that his views on abortion had ''evolved and deepened" since becoming governor and described himself for the first time publicly as ''prolife." He also said that the nation's laws should be changed to reflect that abortion is wrong. In the interview yesterday, he said he has always maintained that he would not change the abortion laws in Massachusetts and has kept that promise.

He also said that in 2002 he made clear he opposed the legalization of same-sex marriages and civil unions, positions he has touted in speeches to GOP groups around the country.

''The truth is that those are the positions I espoused during my campaign, and I have worked entirely consistent with those positions," he said.

I thought that the wingnuts had the concept of truth as unchanging, eternal and embodied in whatever comes out of the mouth of George Bush. No way would Mitt have been elected to run Massachusetts if his uttered opinions then had been what they are now.

A red spot in a blue state, indeed. That is how Mitt has described himself. More like a bad case of acne.

I Got Tagged

By scout prime. The idea is to give seven answers to a bunch of questions, like "Seven Things To Do Before I Die" and so on. It's such a nice compliment to be tagged, and I so admire the people who can answer all those questions. I can't. If I try I veer from silliness to feeling real anxiety about what the correct answer might be. And then there is the one about "Seven Books I Love"! What if I hurt the feelings of all the other books by just picking out seven?

And what about my privacy? Will my dear readers learn more than I intended from my lists? No. I can't do it. Sorry. I'm an intensely private person, intensely so, and also a very boring one. I have no idea what I want to do before I die, except not to suffer much. And perhaps to have a cleaner house. The Nobel Peace Prize is not going to come my way. I have accepted that disappointment.

But I do love reading the lists other people write: all those movies and books and wonderful witty sayings! Love them. To read, that is.

So instead of the expected answers I will just give one exhortation:

To Thine Own Self Be True.

Agents Provocateurs?

French is the one language I don't speak, but you get the gist of the headline, I hope. The New York City police officers have been playing a little game with protesters:

Undercover New York City police officers have conducted covert surveillance in the last 16 months of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident, a series of videotapes show.

In glimpses and in glaring detail, the videotape images reveal the robust presence of disguised officers or others working with them at seven public gatherings since August 2004.

The officers hoist protest signs. They hold flowers with mourners. They ride in bicycle events. At the vigil for the cyclist, an officer in biking gear wore a button that said, "I am a shameless agitator." She also carried a camera and videotaped the roughly 15 people present.

Beyond collecting information, some of the undercover officers or their associates are seen on the tape having influence on events. At a demonstration last year during the Republican National Convention, the sham arrest of a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders.

Bill the Big Boa used to be a hippie snake. He was around during the Nam era and knows all about smoking pot. He pitied my naivete in thinking that this article presented new news. Supposedly all cool cats know that this is what the police does, they try to start fights so that the journos can then label the protesters as violent and the myriad spying organizations can then spy on all the vegans and Catholic Workers. Because an agent provocateur started fights.

Now this is what Bill the Big Boa says, not what I say. I'm not sure what to say here. I can see his logic and have not been offered an alternative.

Meanwhile, in Kuala Lumpur

Marriage laws are being altered to be more favorable for men. Now, these are already laws based on a stringent interpretation of Islam so they began by being more favorable for men than for women. But further changes are being considered, and these changes have angered many local women's groups:

The five points which have drawn the women group's ire are:

# THE right of a husband to claim a share of his existing wife's property upon his committing polygamy;

# MAKING polygamy easier for men;

# FORCING a wife to choose either maintenance or division of joint property upon a husband's polygamous marriage;

# ENHANCING the husband's rights to divorce; and

# ALLOWING a husband to get a court order to stop his wife from disposing of her property.

The motion passed the lower house of the parliament but got into more trouble in the upper house, especially with many women Senators. Those belonging to the ruling party were, however, told to vote for the changes whether they liked them or not. Sounds like the same principle as in the proposed changes, doesn't it?

A Nice Scolding

Judge Michael Luttig is part of the three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which was asked to consider the request by the Bush administration to transfer Jose Padilla from military to civilian law custody. The panel denied the request and gave the administration a sharply worded statement:

The government's behavior, Luttig said in conclusion, has "left the impression that the government may even have come to the belief that the principle in reliance upon which it has detained Padilla for this long time, that the President possesses the authority to detain enemy combatants who enter this country for the purpose of attacking America and its citizens from within, can, in the end, yield to expediency with little or no cost to its conduct of the war against terror -- an impression we would have thought the government likewise could ill afford to leave extant.

"And these impressions have been left, we fear, at what may ultimately prove to be substantial cost to the government's credibility before the courts, to whom it will one day need to argue again in support of a principle of assertedly like importance and necessity to the one that it seems to abandon today.

Nice, huh? Of course the wingnut take on this would be to remove this activist commie judge immediately and replace him with someone who has been born again and regards Bush as the second incarnation of the Christ.

See how I'm trying to post mostly nice things right before Christmas? Ho ho ho.

The Perils Of Obesity

Pinko Feminist Hellcat tells us what happens to an obese white woman who visits a certain physician in New Hampshire: She is threatened with a horrible fate! She might have to date a black man!

Yup. Because only black men like plump women and no white woman in her right mind would want to date a black man. And not having anybody to date is of course the worst thing a woman could possibly imagine as the consequence of obesity.

There is so much wrong with this story. Hellcat does a good job in taking it apart in terms of racism and misogyny. But I was also struck with the arrogance of a physician who thinks it is his right to give speeches like this to his patients, to second-guess what might make them scared, to attribute his own bigotry to them. Not to mention the whole obesity vs. illness issue.

Good News

I planned to do a regular series on good news but I have been remiss on that because of the gloomy aspect of my divinity. But the latest sinus treatment works. It works! That counts as the first piece of good news though only to me. It lets me stay awake a bit longer to surf the net in search for that elusive goodness. Here is today's catch:

First, the federal judge has decided that Intelligent Design does not belong in the science classroom in Dover, Pennsylvania. Atrios links to a wonderfully angry local editorial. Though this is unlikely to be a final victory for the powers of sanity, rationality and devilry (as the opposition would have it) it counts as temporary good news.

Second, the Senate Democrats:

blocked a bid to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, handing President George W. Bush a defeat on a top domestic priority.

The drilling provision is attached to the $453 billion defense budget for fiscal 2006, which passed the House Dec. 19. Democrats, with help from some Republicans, used a procedural tactic known as filibuster to block consideration of the bill.

The 56-44 vote fell 4 votes short of the three-fifths margin needed to cut off debate. Republicans have 55 seats in the 100-member Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist met immediately after the vote with Republican Ted Stevens of Alaska, who sponsored the oil-drilling provision. The provision ``has to come out,'' said Republican Trent Lott of Mississippi, a former majority leader. ``Now we have to go on.''

Very good news, at least for the time being. The moose can lope around for a few more months.

Third, a judge with ethics has resigned:

A federal judge has resigned from a special court set up to oversee government surveillance, apparently in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program on people with suspected terrorist ties.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson would not comment Wednesday on his resignation, but The Washington Post reported that it stemmed from deep concern that the surveillance program Bush authorized was legally questionable and may have tainted the work of the court.

I don't necessarily want to have his children but I could take him out for a nice Indian meal. To show approval.

Add any good news for today you know about.

Getting Worried Yet?

Another new agency has been created for surveillance purposes:

The Pentagon's newest counterterrorism agency, charged with protecting military facilities and personnel wherever they are, is carrying out intelligence collection, analysis and operations within the United States and abroad, according to a Pentagon fact sheet on the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, provided to The Washington Post.

CIFA is a three-year-old agency whose size and budget remain secret. It has grown from an agency that coordinated policy and oversaw the counterintelligence activities of units within the military services and Pentagon agencies to an analytic and operational organization with nine directorates and ever-widening authority.

There are so many of these spying units that I've lost count. It stands to reason that there won't be enough real terrorists for all of them. What happens when they realize this? Will some of them start spying on people unrelated to any kind of terrorism or violence? And how will we ever get rid of all these spying organizations when their creators are gone?

Our wingnut friends tell us that those with clear consciences have nothing to worry about and that we should not criticize the president's belief that he is above the law. This sounds to me like something the fathers of the old Soviet Union used to argue. No, the correct attitude here is worry, for once we have the spying infrastructure it will be used. And who knows, maybe one day its existence will look like a threat to today's wingnuts. Political fortunes change, you know.

Marshmallows

David Brooks's columns are like marshmallows. They look all pink and puffy and chewable but if you do chew them you experience nothing but a puff of rather unpleasant smelling air. You may notice that I don't like marshmallows, and I don't like Brooks's columns, either, partly because I'd be better at his job which is pretending to be a sociologist studying the good America (wingnuts) and the evil latte-sipping America (moonbats). At least I know how to read statistics and how to make studies seem to support a particular point of view. Brooks just makes up things out of pure air. Or foul-smelling air, mostly.

Recently Brooks went on air and said this about immigration to the United States:

BROOKS: This is important. This is important -- it's not racist -- when the immigrants -- Listen, I'm for pretty open immigration. But when the immigrants come, they come with a culture of criminality. It's out of control, and I can see people wanting to put the system in control.

Culture of criminality! Do you think that Brooks has ever looked up United States in those pesky international statistics about crime rates and murders and rapes? It is quite difficult to enter this country with a higher culture of criminality than the one awaiting here, actually, though it can be done.

If you found the above paragraph insulting to Americans everywhere consider how Brooks's comment comes across to us immigrants. We are coming in with the intention to ravage and to pillage?

Here is my whole criminal life in this country:

I once got a parking fine, because the meter was broken. I put in fifty cents for a ten minute parking which required a dime, but the meter didn't budge. I left the car there anyway because it was my birthday and I was picking up the cake and people were waiting. I got fined and paid it. Even though the real criminal was the parking meter. But Brooks would probably blame my antecedents for the whole incident. The culture of criminality creeping in here, in the ominous shape of immigrant goddesses.

The Gray Lady On Her Knees?

The Los Angeles Times finally answers the question I have posed a couple of times on this here blog: when, exactly, did the New York Times know about Bush's illegal spying on American Citizens. I was curious if this story was being sat on while we were doing the re-electing of George Bush.

Now my curiosity has been slaked. The NYT could have published the story before the 2004 elections. But the LA Times article makes this revelation into the best he-shaid-she-said quasi-objective bullshit:

The Times report has created a furor in Washington, with politicians in both parties and civil libertarians saying that President Bush was wrong to authorize the surveillance by the National Security Agency without permission from a special court.

Bush and his supporters have fired back, saying that the eavesdropping was needed to protect Americans after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. On Monday, the president called the public reports on the once-secret surveillance "shameful."

Politicians, journalists and Internet commentators have feverishly aired the debate over the timing of the New York Times story in the last four days — with critics on the left wondering why the paper waited so long to publish the story and those on the right wondering why it was published at all.

Conservatives suggested the Times had timed the story to persuade members of Congress to oppose reauthorization of the Patriot Act, the federal law that granted the government sweeping surveillance powers.

They also charged that the newspaper wanted to short-circuit good news for the Bush administration — Iraq's high-turnout, relatively violence-free elections.

See how everything is now a question of opinion? The timing of the story hurts the wingnuts, too! Somehow we are forgetting the fact that the New York Times KNEW over a year ago that the president was spying on American citizens and didn't tell the American citizens. If there were true security reasons for not publishing the story then, have these reasons now evaporated?

Nah. The Gray Lady was scared and fawning on this administration which employs Karl Rove to keep people quiet. They only came out with the story because one of their reporters was going to talk about it in a forthcoming book. This and the Judith Miller debacle may well spell the end of the Gray Lady. Too bad. At least they employed the most inane opinon columnist in the whole world: David Brooks.

Be Afraid!

The FBI has found it worthwhile to monitor such frightening organizations as the Catholic Workers:

One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a "Vegan Community Project." Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group's "semi-communistic ideology." A third indicates the bureau's interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

The enemies are everywhere, and only George Bush stands between us and an utter apocalypse.

An Announcement

There will be no Christmas this year. Some of you will feel sad about this, but many of you will stand up, throw away the brooms and the dustclothes and rejoice in the knowledge that no in-laws will arrive in a few days' time. Yet others will have the yoke of lists and wrapping paper and cards miraculously disappear, leaving them free. For there will be no Christmas this year.

As you may have heard from Bill O'Reilly, a war was declared against Christmas by the evil leftist. And they won. Christmas has been killed, the weapons of mass destruction it has harbored will no doubt be found soon, and the masses of people it has tortured over the years with excessive ham and turkey and nuts and eggnog and bills upon bills are all now freed! A new air of freedom is marching on. The elves at Santa's workshop have unionized and will no longer have to work overtime towards the end of the year. The reindeer have been released into the wilderness.

Jesus's birthday is moved to a more temperate time of the year. The festivals of this time of the year have been returned to their original owners: the druids, who will also have the rights for commercial campaigns from now on. For there will be no Christmas this year.

Jonathan Alter on Snoopgate

Snoopgate isn't really an adequately nasty name for this latest scandal but it must do for now. Alter's article is brilliant:

Dec. 19, 2005 - Finally we have a Washington scandal that goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power. President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn't agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We're seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. 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.

Now isn't that cute? The president having a chat with the top brass of the New York Times? I would like to know if they had another similar talk right before the 2004 elections, to postpone the publication of their little bomb until after the elections. And I would like to know if that little talk led to the supposed Bush victory. Just imagine what might have happened if we had learned about the Snoopgate before the elections!

Well, perhaps nothing would have been different. Sometimes I despair over the apathy of the American voters. But it seems very wrong to me for the Times to have sat on this article for one full year, very wrong indeed.

I wish to apologize for harping on this one topic. But it is a very important topic and deserves a lot of harping.

From My Mailbag

This might interest you:

December 19, 2005



The Honorable James F. Sensenbrenner, Jr.

Chairman

House Committee on the Judiciary

2138 Rayburn House Office Building

Washington, DC 20515



Dear Chairman Sensenbrenner:



We, the undersigned Members of the House Judiciary Committee, write to urge you to convene hearings as soon as possible to investigate the President's ordering the National Security Agency (NSA) to engage in espionage of persons inside the United States without obtaining court-ordered warrants authorizing these searches.



On December 16, the New York Times reported that since 2002, the NSA has monitored international telephone calls and email messages of hundreds and possibly thousands of people inside the United States without warrants pursuant to an order of the President of the United States. Yesterday, the President confirmed that he secretly ordered the NSA, whose mission is to conduct foreign surveillance, to engage in domestic spying by intercepting the communications of American citizens and terrorist suspects inside the United States without obtaining warrants.



The December 16 New York Times report states that, even according to its own officials, such domestic espionage is unprecedented in the NSA's history. It is apparent that such domestic surveillance violates section 1802(a) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, 50 U.S.C. § 1802(a). That law permits electronic surveillance of communications without a court order only if the Attorney General certifies that (1) these communications are exclusively between or among foreign powers; and (2) there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party.



The Administration even temporarily suspended the program last year because of concerns about its legality.

Chairman Specter has already stated that the Senate Judiciary Committee will conduct hearings concerning this matter, and we ask that you, too, convene hearings to investigate why the President circumvented the system established under current law, which permits him to seek emergency warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to conduct domestic surveillance. It is imperative we understand the legal authority upon which it is claimed these activities are based and the scope of the activities undertaken.



Sincerely,





Zoe Lofgren (D-CA)

Rick Boucher (D-VA)

John Conyers, Ranking Member (D-MI)

Howard L. Berman (D-CA)

Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)

Robert C. Scott (D-VA)

Melvin L. Watt (D-NC)

Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX)

Maxine Waters (D-CA)

Martin T. Meehan (D-MA)

William Delahunt (D-MA)

Robert Wexler (D-FL)

Anthony D. Weiner (D-NY)

Adam B. Schiff (D-CA)

Linda T. Sanchez (D-CA)

Chris Van Hollen (D-MD)

Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL)

On Music And Happiness

The president of Iran has banned Western music, including classical music, from Iran's state-run television:

Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has banned all Western music from
Iran's state radio and TV stations — an eerie reminder of the 1979 Islamic revolution when popular music was outlawed as "un-Islamic" under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Elsewhere, presidents spy on their own people, the climate is warming and AIDS strides like the Evil Prince across continents.

On the other hand, happiness makes us successful and happy....:

Happiness, rather than working hard, is the key to success, according to research published today. Cheerful people are more likely to try new things and challenge themselves, which reinforces positive emotion and leads to success in work, good relationships and strong health, say psychologists.

The findings suggest that happiness is not a "feelgood" luxury, but is essential to people's wellbeing. What is more, happiness can also extend across an entire nation, with people in "happy" nations being more likely to have pro-democratic attitudes and a keenness to help others.

I don't really believe that it's possible to study happiness like that, because the very definition of happiness is hard to compare across people and there are too many problems in trying to assign causality this way. But there is a lot to be said for plain simple respect towards human beings. That is a good basis for happiness or joy or at least a peaceful life. Respect towards AIDS sufferers would make us work harder to guarantee treatment for every one of them. Respect towards the American people would stop illegal spying on their lives. Respect towards the Iranian people would let them listen to Beethoven or Mozart when they are tired and need refreshment.

But respect is not the flavor of this decade. Rather, fundamentalism is the new black. Fundamentalism makes me very unhappy, as you may have noticed if you have read this blog before. Fundamentalism may well be the main reason I write publicly.

But I would write for myself anyway, because it makes me happy, because I feel an internal wind, a breeze of something that flows through me, not from me, and I happily go along with it and interpret what it feels like in my writing. It's like opening some mysterious gate to a world that can't be described, though happiness is as good a term as any for it.

Music can do the same thing: pick us up and take us away, make us larger and more open, calm us and nurture us.

Is that why it must be banned? When will these fundamentalist weirdos feel happy? When we all are nothing but little machines controled by some central authority, whether god or not?

The Spying Will Continue

So we are told by George Bush. He states speed as the reason:

U.S. President George W. Bush said he has the constitutional authority to approve eavesdropping on American citizens and foreign nationals in the U.S. to protect Americans from the threat of terrorism.

``To save American lives we must be able to act fast,'' the president said in a news conference at the White House. The surveillance ``has been effective in disrupting the enemy.''

Telephone calls and e-mails have been monitored in about 500 instances since October 2001, according to an administration official, who spoke on the condition on anonymity.

But this excuse doesn't wash, because the law allows the secret court to be contacted up to three days after the spying has commenced. So there was never any delay to begin with.

No, the reason why Bush insists on this policy must lie elsewhere. Several hypotheses float around the blogosphere, from just arrogance to the idea that Bush has been spying on people the court would never allow: other politicians or journalists or members of the armed forces. Or the wingnuts that make up his base.

Bush is asking us to trust him in this. I have a lot of trouble trusting a president who has been caught lying so many times.