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Halting Illegal Spying on Americans
Almost seven years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, mainstream media and Congressional Democrats are finally beginning to defy President Bush’s illegal and unconstitutional program of spying on Americans.
During an astounding press conference on February 28, 2008, President Bush was jarred by the veteran and habitually-reserved CBS correspondent, Bill Plante, who asked point blank: “I know it’s unintended to spy on Americans, but in the collection process information about everybody gets swept up and then it gets sorted. So if Americans don’t have any recourse, are you just telling them when it comes to their privacy to suck it up?”
Stunned by the question, Bush delivered a condescending non-sequiter: “I wouldn’t put it that way, if I were you - in public. You’ve been around long enough.” (The President never disputed Plante’s premise that everyone’s information is vacuumed up by the government.)
Visibly angry, the President blamed everything on his favorite target - trial lawyers: “You cannot expect phone companies to participate if they feel like they’re going to be sued… class-action plaintiffs attorneys, you know - I don’t want to try to get inside their head; I suspect they see, you know, a financial gravy train - are trying to sue these companies. It’s unfair. It is patently unfair.”
Always willing to go to the mat to defend helpless phone giants, President Bush neglected to mention that the original lawsuits were brought by public interest lawyers like us and the ACLU, not class-action lawyers. This is only one of a series of untruths told by the Bush Administration about the largest domestic spying program in American history. Not least, as reported in this paper in January, the Bush administration took steps to monitor the calls of American citizens before 9/11, not after, as the administration has repeatedly asserted.
The President’s suggestion that it would be “patently unfair” to hold the phone companies liable represents a new low in this administration’s disregard of the law. Congress has long made it a crime for phone carriers to share a subscriber’s phone records with the government without a warrant or subpoena. Both the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Stored Communications Act provide for a minimum of $1,000 in damages for each violation of a phone subscriber’s privacy rights.
The Bush Administration never mentions that at least two phone companies refused to participate in the Administrations’ illegal attempts to access citizen phone records without court order. Qwest, under former CEO Joe Nacchio, refused to cooperate with the NSA’s spying program because the government would not certify that the program was legal. Michael Kieschnick, President of the Working Assets phone company, went further: “Working Assets believes that the warrantless monitoring of phone conversations ordered by the Bush administration is illegal and unacceptable… Working Assets would never, under any circumstances, give (let alone sell) records to the Bush administration without a warrant or court order.”
John McCain Wants America To Be In Debt Forever
"In the shorter term," said McCain, "if you somehow told American businesses and families, 'Look, you're not going to experience a tax increase in 2010,' I think that's a pretty good short-term measure."
So making permanent tax cuts that McCain originally voted against because he thought, correctly, that they were an unconscionable, budget-busting giveaway to the richest Americans, will now provide a short-term stimulus to the poor and working class as the economy goes into the tank.
McCain Embraces Hate Mongering MinisterThe McCain/Hagee story is growing, though still not as much as it ought to. My new friends from the Catholic League emailed earlier to advise that Bill Donohue was being interviewed for tonight's program of The Situation Room on CNN. Blogs at The Washington Post and ABC News today covered the growing scandal from the anti-Catholic bigotry perspective, with the latter actually featuring the unbelievably inflammatory You Clip -- found by Ann Althouse, which I posted yesterday and which is now being distributed by the Catholic League -- of a shirt-sleeved Pastor Hagee spewing the creepiest, most hateful bile imaginable about Catholicism ("This is the Great Whore of Revelation 17").
As The Post noted, Catholics United, a less reactionary group than the Catholic League, has now also denounced McCain's warm embrace of Hagee and demanded that he repudiate his endorsement. Thus far, it is Hagee's anti-Catholicism which is being featured -- largely because when Bill Donohue issues press releases, the media jumps to cover it. While that angle has substantial political ramifications -- Karl Rove identified the Catholic vote in 2004 as the most vital to the GOP's electoral successes -- the reality is that Hagee's hateful and twisted extremism extends far beyond that realm. In sum, John McCain has aligned himself with one of America's purest -- and most powerful -- haters, and that ought to be the story here.
Obama shows that dismissing slimy right-wing attacks is not difficult
By far, the most significant pattern in how our political discourse is shaped is that the right-wing noise machine generates scurrilous, petty, personality-based innuendo about Democratic candidates, and the establishment press then mindlessly repeats it and mainstreams it. Thus, nothing was more predictable than watching the "Obamas-are-unpatriotic-subversives" slur travel in the blink of an eye from the Jack Kingstons, Fox News adolescent McCarthyites, and Bill Kristols of the world to AP, MSNBC, and CNN. That's just how the right-wing/media nexus works.
Far more notable is Barack Obama's response to these depressingly familiar attacks. In response, he's not scurrying around slapping flags all over himself or belting out the National Anthem, nor is he apologizing for not wearing lapels, nor is he defensively trying to prove that -- just like his Republican accusers -- he, too, is a patriot, honestly. He's not on the defensive at all. Instead, he's swatting away these slurs with the dismissive contempt they deserve, and then eagerly and aggressively engaging the debate on offense because he's confident, rather than insecure, about his position:
About not wearing an American flag lapel pin, Obama said Republicans have no lock on patriotism.
"A party that presided over a war in which our troops did not get the body armor they needed, or were sending troops over who were untrained because of poor planning, or are not fulfilling the veterans' benefits that these troops need when they come home, or are undermining our Constitution with warrantless wiretaps that are unnecessary?
"That is a debate I am very happy to have. We'll see what the American people think is the true definition of patriotism."
Mark Halperin and the Republican Freak Show
Time magazine political analyst Mark Halperin (formerly of ABC and The Note) has a post up dispensing free advice to John McCain on how he can attack Obama. The pearls of wisdom dispensed include:
5. Make an issue of Obama's acknowledged drug use. 6. Allow some supporters to risk being accused of using the race card when criticizing Obama. ... 11. Emphasize Barack Hussein Obama's unusual name and exotic background through a Manchurian Candidate prism.
Aside from this being gratuitous and morally blinkered, I'm wondering what exactly Halperin thought the value-added of this post was. If he wants to be a campaign strategist for the McCain campaign (or any other for that matter), I'm sure he could get a job doing just that. But he's, in name at least, a journalist, with some basic responsibility to provide his readers with insight into the race. There's no insight in this list -- every attack he mentions has been made in the wingnut'osphere and in emails. So, really, what's the point? As far as I can tell it's mostly to burnish a reputation as being a savvy and unsentimental insider. If you were looking for artifacts to collect under the heading Why People Hate The Media, this would be at the top of the list.
Savage on Obama, "We have a right to know if he's a so-called friendly Muslim or one who aspires to more radical teachings"On the February 21 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage falsely asserted that Sen. Barack Obama is a Muslim, claiming that "[w]e have a right to know if he's a so-called friendly Muslim or one who aspires to more radical teachings." Savage made the comment while discussing a recent New York Times article that reported on Sen. John McCain's relationship with a telecommunications lobbyist. Savage dismissed the article and suggested that the media should be more concerned about "the Muslim connection to Obama." He continued: "Barack Hussein Obama. Father Muslim, grandfather Muslim. Nothing wrong with that. But we, the American people, being at war with radical Islam have a -- have a need to know just exactly what kind of Muslim he was exposed to, what kind of Muslim he is, what kind of Muslim teachings he's -- he's friendly to. We have a right to know if he's a so-called friendly Muslim or one who aspires to more radical teachings. That's something the media ought to be concerned about, not whether John McCain had an infatuation with a lobbyist 10 years ago." Savage went on to express concern that an unnamed "major reporter," who he said had spoken with him that morning, knew "nothing about Obama's Muslim background and the scandal that is behind all of that, that is raging on the Internet."
In fact, as Media Matters for America has noted, Obama is not a Muslim. The Obama campaign website states that Obama "has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ." Numerous media figures, including Savage, have repeated the false rumor that Obama attended a madrassa as a child. Savage has frequently attacked Obama, on one occasion falsely referring to him as "Barack Madrassas Obama."
McCain’s environmental rating 0The League of Conservation voters today rated Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)’s environmental record. McCain scored 0 percent in 2007 (24 percent lifetime) “due to missing all 15 votes scored, including the key vote on repealing tax giveaways to big oil — a measure that failed by only one vote.” The Sierra Club notes:
McCain was the only member of Congress to skip every single crucial environmental vote scored by the organization, posting a score lower than Members of Congress who were out for much of the year due to serious illnesses–and even lower than some who died during the term
