December 20, 2005 by lonbud
Le Fait Accompli
For reasons known only to themselves, many of the nation’s 100 senators remained in Washington, DC yesterday evening, ostensibly going about the business of the Legislative branch, while their counterparts in the House of Representatives adjourned for the year. After the winter recess, one might reasonably question why any of them should bother returning for the 2nd session of the 109th Congress, given that President George W. Bush has effectively rendered their work meaningless.
American government as it was envisioned and proscribed at the nation’s founding — and was for the most part practiced during the ensuing 200 plus years — ended with the presidency of William J. Clinton and the 106th Congress. Mr Bush, the first president ever installed by order of the Judicial branch, ushered in a new era in the nation’s history — and has in five short years remade the entire structure and balance of power in American government.
Aided by a cabal of likeminded hegemons in both the Legislative and Judicial branches, Mr. Bush has assumed the perogatives of an all-powerful Chief Executive, whose vision and methods are subject to no oversight or regulation from within, nor to criticism from without his office. This radical transformation of the government is unprecedented in the history of nations and has come about virtually unchallenged by a compliant press and a sonambulant public.
As Steven Stills wrote during a time when Americans were more passionate about ideas such as Liberty and Justice for All,
“there’s battle lines being drawn and nobody’s right when everybody’s wrong.”
At this point, Mr. Bush has laid down the gauntlet. He has virtually dared the Congress and the People to either impeach him or get out of the way and let him handle the problem of terrorism as he sees fit.
Henceforth, remember: all calls may be monitored for quality assurance. You should be receiving your very own copy of the lyrics to “Onward Christian Soldiers” soon.
Michael Herdegen - December 28, 2005 @ 6:00 pm
You’ve made several declarative assumptions, but haven’t attempted in the slightest to determine their veracity.
Is that an example of the kind of intellectual ability that you wish our hoi polloi to possess ?
If so, then you are what you think that I am, just less self-aware.
…were you home-schooled by geniuses…
Not exactly, but close enough.
…or were you a product of some expensive prep school?
LOL
I guess maybe you are just extra special.
Yes, I am.
[T]hat attitude is exactly why the Republican Party is doomed to remain the party of small-minded, sneering elitists who believe they are “to the manor born”.
And that is relevant to me in what way ?
Speaking of small-minded, sneering elitists, you’ve been very insistant that American adoptation of the metric system would produce a wonderous result of some sort, but you have yet to explain how or why.
Absent a logical explanation for such, the desire to get rid of the olde English system is simply elitist twaddle – “small-minded”, one might say.
Well, if you succeed in keeping the masses ignorant…
Assuming that such is an objective of mine, I need do nothing to achieve it – the masses are quite happy to maintain a state of ignorance all by themselves, no oppression needed.
Let us consider the ramifications of Dr. Jon D. Miller’s conclusions, presented by Bubbles upthread:
Now, why should that be ?
Is it because 3/4 of Americans don’t get a formal education ?
No, there are only a handful of children who don’t have an opportunity to be educated, by the state or by another party.
Perhaps it’s because there aren’t many non-technical sources for scientific information ?
No, the cable news channels are filled with health and science stories, newspapers print pages of the same stories on a daily basis, the Web has a million free articles available about any and every scientific find or theory, and there are literally dozens of magazines devoted exclusively to reporting on health or science issues in non-technical terms, including Scientific American, Popular Science, Discover, Prevention, and Longevity, to name but a very few.
Also, there are a half-dozen cable networks devoted exclusively to informational television.
So, we have a blizzard of information available, and most of those resources are also available for free, even to penniless people, at public libraries.
Therefore, if the problem isn’t one of supply, it must be one of demand.
3/4 of Americans are either incapable of understanding scientific subjects, or they are simply uninterested in understanding them.
Try asking a professional educator if all of her students have been potential geniuses, or whether most of them learned enough to get by, and no more.
Your kumbayah fantasies notwithstanding, the vast majority of people have no burning desire to be highly educated, and those that do have tremendous resources at their disposal, regardless of what shortcomings their schools might have, or have had.
If we spent half of the U.S. GNP on providing the Library of Congress on DVD, and a tutor, to every American student, we still wouldn’t produce a generation of Einsteins, not even a generation of Mark Steyns.
Michael Herdegen - December 28, 2005 @ 7:13 pm
Here’s a good look at how the sainted institution which is being unfairly smeared by benighted crackpots like myself and Ambassador Bolton actually operates:
Mr. Sevan, I Presume
Congressional investigators find an Oil for Food figure hiding in plain sight.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
[All emph. add.] At the United Nations, as a year of many scandals draws to a close, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been trying to stuff some big unanswered questions down the memory hole–with mixed results. No, I’m not talking only about the files Mr. Annan’s former chief of staff shredded during the Oil for Food investigation. […]
Hanging over all this is another mystery that despite the magnitude of the question seems of strangely small concern to the secretary-general: What has become of the former head of the U.N. Oil for Food program, Benon Sevan? […]
In the matter of the shredded U.N. files, which Paul Volcker’s probe into Oil for Food described as being of “potential relevance,” Mr. Annan during his press conference last week unilaterally revised the Volcker findings to say the destruction of these files “did not impede the work of the commission, so do let that go.” […]
Which brings us to Mr. Sevan, the longtime U.N. staffer to whom the secretary-general entrusted from 1997 through 2003 the running of Oil for Food. That blew up into the biggest scandal in U.N. history–involving billions in graft and smuggling, a global network of kickbacks to Saddam Hussein, payoffs by Saddam meant to bribe members of the U.N.’s own Security Council, and assorted instances of alleged bribes to U.N. officials. One of those officials, allegedly, was Mr. Sevan himself, who while running Oil for Food took some $147,000 in payoffs from Saddam’s regime, according to the Volcker committee. […]
Mr. Sevan skipped town in mid-2005, shortly before Mr. Volcker weighed in with his allegations on Aug. 8 of this year. Since then the U.N. has said that Mr. Sevan, despite the allegations against him, is entitled to collect his U.N. pension–which a spokesman for Mr. Annan confirmed to me again this week is “untouchable.” The U.N. will not give out any information on Mr. Sevan’s current location. […]
[I]nvestigators for Rep. Henry Hyde’s International Relations Committee are now prepared to add some illuminating details–starting with their encounter with Mr. Sevan himself, less than three months ago, in Cyprus. As it happens, they were not expecting to find Mr. Sevan in person. They went to Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, trying to track down details of the case, including the fate of Mr. Sevan’s deceased aunt, Bertouji Zeytountsian. By Mr. Sevan’s account to Mr. Volcker, this aunt, while living in Nicosia as a retired government worker on a pension, had sent him funds totaling some $160,000 during the last four years in which he was running Oil for Food, 1999-2003. The day after the U.N. investigation into Oil for Food was announced, in March, 2004, Zeytountsian fell down an elevator shaft in her Cyprus apartment building. A few months later, she died.
Mr. Hyde’s investigators decided while in Nicosia to have a look at the elevator shaft. On Oct. 14, a Cypriot police official showed them the way to the building. There, printed plainly on a mailbox at the entrance to the apartment block, was the name not of Mr. Sevan’s aunt, but of Benon Sevan himself. […] [T]he investigators went up to the eighth-floor apartment where the aunt had lived. They knocked, and the door opened. There stood Benon Sevan. As one of the investigators describes it, Mr. Sevan came to the door “in shorts, no shirt, and sandals, smoking a cigar.” Apparently everyone was surprised to come thus face-to-face. Mr. Sevan was polite but did not invite them in. They chatted across the threshold. He told the congressional investigators to address all questions to his lawyers, saying, “My conscience is clear.” The investigators turned to go, and, as one of them recounts, as they headed for the stairs, Mr. Sevan told them, “You can take the elevator. It’s fixed now.”
The U.N., however, remains broken. This account of Mr. Sevan living in plain sight in Cyprus, as recently as October, raises even more questions than those Mr. Annan tried to duck at last week’s press conference. Why has Mr. Annan […] remained so serene about the alleged deeds of Mr. Sevan, which touch massively on U.N. integrity, or lack of it, at the core? One of the virtues of the U.N. is supposed to be that it is an institution with global access, run by a secretary-general whose phone calls will be answered by national authorities world-wide. And while the secretary-general himself has no powers of law enforcement, he commands at least some attention–if he wants to–from those who do.
Does he want to?
The same Kofi Annan who had no qualms about pronouncing “illegal” the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s corrupt and murderous regime has met Mr. Volcker’s findings about Benon Sevan with such bland responses as his statement last week: “We have all looked at the report and drawn the right lessons from it”…
Tam O’Tellico - December 29, 2005 @ 8:26 am
Michael has the answer to all our problems:
Get rid of liberals
Get rid of Muslims
Get rid of taxes
Get rid of Social Security
Get rid of the U.N.
Get rid of parents
Get rid of education save the 3 R’s and turn schools into recruiting offices
(for details on the last two, read the excerpt below)
(my final comments follow)
From: csmonitor.com
by Tom Regan
In a struggle over military recruitment of students, school boards across the US are starting to give parents more detailed opt-out information. As efforts by US military recruiters to meet regular goals are beginning to show some positive results, more school boards across the country are taking steps to give parents of high school-aged students detailed information about how they can withhold their children’s personal information from the military.
Much of the dispute over recruitment revolves around a provision of the “No Child Left Behind Act”, which stipulates that any school receiving federal funds must give the military information on high school juniors and seniors. The act says high schools must notify parents that they can make a request to prevent military recruiters from obtaining their children’s contact information. [informed with a form letter that never mentions military reruiting and that is designed to deliberately obfuscate — I know, I read it three times and still consented to the opposite of my intent]
But notification does not have to be made individually, according to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. The notification can be included in a mailing, student handbook, or another method that is “reasonably calculated to inform parents.” In several states, parents of high school children are pressuring their school boards to do a better job of letting parents know that they have this option.
In Ohio, the Dayton Daily News reported Tuesday that in one school district, more than 1500 parents signed the opt-out forms after a parent convinced the local school district to more actively notify parents of their options. Yet at other schools in the same area, not a single parent decided to use the opt-out provision.
The Canyon Courier of Evergreen, Colorado, late last month reported on how parent Richard Waltzman, a military veteran and antiwar protestor, prodded the local school board to make a change in its notification policy. Previously, administrators sent letters about the policy home with students. Now the board has begun mailing parents of high school juniors a copy of the rules about recruiting and an opt-out form. It will also hand out the same materials to parents each fall at school registration.
District Superintendent Cindy Stevenson said that although the district’s previous procedure was legal and “exceeded best practice,” community members prompted the change.
“We responded to a segment of the community that wanted to make sure these letters got home,” Stevenson said. “It wasn’t a response to all of the community, but to a segment of the community.”
The Illinois Association of School Boards recently decided to push for a change in federal law “so parents don’t have to write a letter to keep high schools from sharing their teens’ contact information with military recruiters.” The group says it would prefer to see the system work the opposite way – that parents who are interested in a military career for their children can notify the school district. [makes sense to me]
The Lexington Herald-Leader of Kentucky reported Tuesday that while many people in the state support the military’s recruitment policies, more than a few parents express concern about some of the tactics recruiters use. [like calling sixteen year-olds at home without notifying parents] School districts in the area are also considering more active notification of parents about their right to opt-out.
Writing in The American Enterprise Online, Brooks Tucker, a major in the Marine Corps Reserve and a Wall Street financial advisor, blames recent problems with military recruiting partially on “antiwar factions within public schools.”
But parent John Schneider, writing last week in The Baltimore Sun, points out that “regardless of one’s position on the Iraq war, few parents would feel that they do not belong in all relevant discussions of their child’s welfare and future.” He writes that even the military has had some questions about some recruiters’ tactics, holding a one-day recruiting moratorium last spring to address “misconduct by recruiters.” Mr. Schneider also says he was dismayed by the lack of knowledge many school administrators in his area of Maryland had about the opt-out program.
But Schneider writes that he is most concerned by the June 23 admission of the Pentagon that it “had created a database containing information on millions of high school and college students ages 16 to 25.” Schneider says that “this database was created without the requisite announcement and public comment period required by the 1974 Privacy Act.” [I’m shocked and awed]
The Lexington Herald-Tribune reported Tuesday on one of the primary tools that the military has to create this database, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (or the ASVAB). The ASVAB … is a standardized test, prepared by the military, that is given annually to many high school juniors and seniors across Kentucky and the rest of the country. By one estimate, near 1 million US high school students took the test last year.
_____
Apparently, I am not alone in my disgust with the underhanded and deceptive tactics of Bush and the chickenhawks. But I’m sure Michael will dismiss all this as “anecdotal evidence” and conclude their remains vast unwavering support for Bush’s misunderestimations and deceptions.
On the other hand, maybe people are just damned sick and tired of being lied to and being dragged into a suspect war by men who were too gutless to go themselves.
Worst of the worse is Dick Five-Deferment Cheney, who dares disparage the patriotism of a true warrior like John Murtha. That vile canard is even more disgusting and ludicrous than the attack on John Kerry’s patriotism by Karl Rove and the Slime River Krew. Those who serve earn the right to hold any opinion they choose, those who don’t should show a little deference.
I said it before, and I’ll say it again — when it was my turn to serve, I didn’t because I was designated 1-Y, which I cheerfully accepted. But had I been drafted, I most likely would have gone to Canada and sang folk songs, too. But at least I have the guts to admit the truth about myself instead of hiding behind a pack of lies and self-decpetions like Flyboy Bush, Kommandant Cheney and the rest of this gutless bunch.
Don’t expect me or my seventeen year-old son to support the fantasy and the idiocy of these liars, fools and cowards.
harshmoon - December 29, 2005 @ 2:26 pm
Ugh. Arg. Liberals are miserable, is it just me? You think they would be happy because they do sit around singing Kumbaya with one another (in Canada). But they’re not. Generally speaking, I don’t encounter happy liberals. Why? I kinda miss them. When I go out socially (few and far between these days, I work hard), I can leave it all at the front door. I don’t go out as a conservative planning to talk about what a bunch of rot-gutless apes the liberals are, including Murtha, and that isn’t what happens. I just go out for a good time. The liberals can’t leave it at the front door. They determine who their friends are, they determine what they say, they determine their whole world view on the basis of it, and that’s why they’re miserable. The pursuit of happiness is something that has escaped them. And I maintain it’s because they know that they’re in the minority and they know that their thinking is odd and irrational on many things. Can that truth be admitted? I doubt it. I wouldn’t trade places with liberals today because they live a lie. They’re not intellectually independent. Look at when one of them strays what happens to them. I don’t want thought control determining what I have to think and do, and I don’t want this kind of discipline determining who I have to run around with, who I can like and not. I don’t want any part of that. I don’t want to get rid of the liberals, they can be fun and very entertaining, I just miss the happy ones. Be happy Tam, have a drink and support the fantasy. Cheers!
Tam O’Tellico - December 29, 2005 @ 4:40 pm
Half-mooned, sorry all us unhappy liberals are upsetting you blithely ignorant conservatives. Sorry your party life is getting you down ’cause we’re not guffawing at the gallows. Maybe you can get invited to one of those royal jams, where it’s considered cool to show up in Nazi uniforms replete with swastikas — that’s always good for a laugh.
Maybe you should sign up with Michael and exterminate all us unhappy liberals. But if you’re concerned about being entertained, you might want to reconsider. Without liberals there will be no more books, TV, movies, music, art or theater.
I realize that no books is no big deal to Bush and his bosom buddies, but I’m sure you and he would miss Desperate Housewives if it was gone. All you’ll have left to watch is old Charlton Heston movies. How about Soylent Green? Now there’s a conservative’s wet dream.
Okay, technically there would be a few books by fascistas like Little Orphan Annie Coulter. But fess’ up, after five minutes, she’s about as interesting as Howard Sterno. But not to worry, you and Michael can be content to stay home and count your money. Accumulate enough, and even Annie might deign to date you. A liberal can’t help but wonder if a romantic encounter with the ice queen might result in frostbite of your private parts. Talk about a cold bitch with NO sense of humor —
Speaking of which, when’s the last time you saw a Conservative comedian? That’s right, no more liberals, no more comedians. But it’s liberals that don’t know how to have fun, right?
Yeah, conservatives like Crooked Dick Cheney are a hoot, alright, I’m sure he’s a real card at parties. He just hasn’t figured out how to smile let alone laugh out loud in public. Bet he does laugh, diabolically, when he’s sitting home thinking about how he raped and pillaged the public with all those no-bid Halliburton contracts or when the CIA sends him the Black-Ops tapes of torture victims. Yeah, he’s a real fun guy, alright.
If liberals don’t seem happy at the moment, it’s because we’re not. It’s just no fun watching seventy years of social and environmental progress being systematically destroyed by Baby Bush and the NeanderCons so they can accumulate all the wealth and trickle down on the rest of us. And when it all goes to hell, you clowns can just sit back and count your ill-gotten capital gains free from any guilt or social responsibility. Maybe with Conservatives it’s just a case of no sense, no feeling.
Meanwhile us dour liberals have to feel guilty about amassing great wealth while all around us people are suffering. But that’s not the reason we’re not happy.
We’re not happy because there’s a war going on with lots of people still dying long, long after our slap-happy warrior decked himself out in a flight suit (safely out of the line of fire, of course) and declared victory. We’re not happy that he’s getting Religious fruitcakes all excited about taking over the country. We’re not happy about having our votes counted by Diebold and countered by the Supremes. We’re not happy that exit polls are used to judge voter fraud in the Third World, but not in good old Amerika. We’re not happy that dead bodies are still piled up in the streets of New Orleans. We’re not happy that our grandchildren our being burdened with debt to pay for this profligate presidency. We’re not happy that he has yet to veto a single spending bill or any other bill in five years as President — now that’s leadership for you. We’re not happy that our schools are being turned into recruiting centers. We’re not happy that the richer are getting richer and having their taxes cut to boot. We’re not happy that Tom DeLay has run the House like his personal piggy bank. We’re not happy that half of Congress — the Republican half — has been bought and paid for by Jack Abramof. We’re not happy that Karl and his frat-boy buddies think it’s cool to expose covert agents whose spouses disagree honestly with the administration. We’re not happy about being spied upon by our own government. We’re not happy about being called traitors whenever we disagree with anything these clowns think they’re entitled to ram down our throats. We’re not happy about being lied to over and over and over again.
In short, we’re not happy with BushCo and the 51 million Americans who were too stupid to see all this coming in 2000, and we’re even more unhappy with the 58 million who were too stupid to even realize that it had happened in 2004. We won’t be happy until this gang of pathological liars, illiterates, thieves, torturers, and neo-nazis has been sent down the road to the prisons they’ll soon call home. Absent a Presidential pardon, that is.
Half-mooned, if you want to understand how we feel, just try to remember how unhappy you were when Bill Clinton was President for eight years. Can you remember how Conservatives whined and moaned and moved heaven and hell to get him impeached over a blow job? Republicans are so sex-starved they don’t the difference between a blow-job and blowing up a country like Iraq. And apparently they don’t care, either, as long as they can make hay or money off either one.
For eight years we had to put up with your whiny shit, now it’s your turn. Difference is, we had to put up with your shit even though Clinton was a fairly conservative President, even though investors did quite well under him, and even though he left office with the first budget surplus in a very long time. Now that’s conservative – but still you whined ceaselessly.
Talk about chronically and needlessly unhappy, conservatives wrote the book. Hey, maybe you can you get Annie to autograph a copy for me.
Tam O’Tellico - December 29, 2005 @ 9:10 pm
Michael always wants numbers, so here you go on Abramof and the Party of the Pig Trough. Read ’em and weep for America:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aBTFEkGJUbSI&refer=us
Tam O’Tellico - December 29, 2005 @ 9:40 pm
More numbers for Michael:
How can the metric system be an improvement over good olde American primitive inch/pound system left over from the width of the king’s finger? You have got to be kidding, or simply trying to get My Pet Goat. Well pet this:
Please sum these fractions:
1/2
3/32
1/57
2/19
5/23
7/16
1/128
Now divide by 3/8
Or would you prefer these:
.07
.15
.19
.23
.74
.36
and divide by .25
Or how about we spend the rest of the day converting from farenheit to centigrade and back again just to stay in practice?
Or should we ask the average citizen the number of pints in a quart and quarts in a gallon?
Or should we ask them to convert from oz to pounds to tons and back again?
Are we having fun yet? How about some more numbers? How about $125 million? That’s what it cost us when we lost a satellite for failure to convert from one system to the other.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-10/09/006r-100999-idx.html
Fact is, most U.S. industries saw the advantages long ago and converted to the metric system, it is only the general public that remains inch-pounded thanks to a govt that seems to think like the Catholic Church which used the latin mass for centuries to keep the masses in the dark, or like the Muslim schools that that teach students to memorize phrases in a language they don’t even understand through use the rote learning Michael finds so useful. Ditto for standardized testing promoted by NCLBA which teaches kids to memorize facts useful only for standardized testing. Oh, well, at least politicians will be able to point to all those improved test scores even if none of their constituents know how to think any better than a Bush voter.
I could go on, but if Michael is serious about the wonders of the inch/pound system, I can’t see the point or the value of trying to educate him further. Maybe he should take up welding.
harshmoon - December 29, 2005 @ 9:57 pm
How is it that your boy, Bill Clinton, has inherent power coming from the Constitution, but when it comes to George W. Bush, a bunch of hick, hayseed liberals in the House and the Senate can trump his inherent authority? Care to try to explain this? What has Bill Clinton shown you that would make you think he’s honorable? Here’s a man who during the 2004 campaign was everywhere he could be heard in Europe, denouncing this country and this president. I wonder how Democrats feel, one of their staunchest allies now in their whole campaign that Bush lied is Saddam Hussein. Saddam and the Democrats, inseparable, ladies and gentlemen, when it comes to the policies of this country.
Why do you actually feel guitly about amassing great wealth while all around us people are suffering? Come on, what a load of crap. I’m curious to your responce non the less..
Michael Herdegen - December 29, 2005 @ 10:39 pm
Tam, you seem to be having a bad week.
Hope your New Year’s better.
Michael Herdegen - December 30, 2005 @ 3:30 am
Robert Fogel was awarded, along with Douglass North, the Nobel Prize in economics in 1993 for their pioneering work using statistical analysis to study economic history.
Interview:
Robert Fogel: The U.S. is going to be the technological leader, probably through the end of the 21st century. Maybe China will catch up in some directions and maybe it will cede them in some directions like stem cell research, but, we still have a huge, advantage in terms of investment and in terms of human resources in these areas. The country remains devoted to a policy of heavy investment in science especially in the biomedical sciences and in science in general.
Nick Schulz: So you’re still optimistic about the United States with respect to technology and the future?
Robert Fogel: I picked the right century to be born in, and my grandchildren have also picked the right century. It’s not only the 20th, but the 21st will be American Centuries in terms of scientific heights that we scale and in terms of the success of our economies.
Michael Herdegen - December 30, 2005 @ 5:55 am
Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal and Lincoln Anderson of LPL Financial Services recently pointed out that the latest Census data show that, far from shrinking or losing ground, the middle class in America has become a good deal richer.
“Back in 1967,” they write, “the income range for the middle class [that is, the third of five quintiles] was between $28,800 and $39,000 (in today’s dollars). Now that income range is between $38,000 and $59,000.” In 1967, one family in ten had an income of more than $75,000 (in 2004 dollars); today, it’s one in four.
Tam O’Tellico - December 30, 2005 @ 8:10 am
Since this blog has devolved into an appeal to competing authority figures, Ray Kurzweil points out that the numuber of US graduates engineers last year was approx 53,000 — down from 60,000 the previous year — while China graduated over 300,000. That wouldn’t seem to be a powerful indicator of are continued dominance over the long haul.
There is no question that for the moment, and probably for the forseeable future, America’s intellectual elite can compete with the best and the brightest anywhere else in the world. But as Michael likes to point out, the rest of our citizens are receiving an education fit only for fry cooks and welders.
BTW, Mikey, I’m still waiting for you to turn in your math homework.
Tam O’Tellico - December 30, 2005 @ 8:28 am
Our Traditional Units Nightmare
One of the best arguments for using the International System (SI) is the alternative—the chaotic collection of confusing, illogical non-SI units we use in the United States. This measurement mess means that we Americans are ignorant of much of the quantitative information we encounter. We can’t use it, relate it to other information, or calculate with it. It’s just a bunch of arbitrary numbers.
More than 300 non-SI units are listed alphabetically in the link below. They’re used in various businesses, industries, trades, sports, and scientific fields. We may have some understanding of those we work with—even if we can’t define them—but most of these units are just meaningless names. Sometimes, the same name for several unrelated units! Look at all the units called “ton.” Do you know the difference between a short ton, displacement ton, refrigeration ton, nuclear ton, freight ton, register ton, metric ton, assay ton, or ton of coal equivalent?
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/traditional.htm
Advantages of Metric over Imperial/USA systems
The metric system is a relatively modern system (just over 200 years old) which has been developed based on scientific principles to meet the requirements of science and trade. As discussed above, the Imperial and USA systems have evolved without any such constraints, resulting in a complex set of measurements that fit everyday life in a simple agricultural society but which are unsuited to the requirements of science and modern trade. Consequently, the metric system offers a number of substantial advantages:
* Simplicity. The Metric system has only 7 basic measures, plus a substantial number of measures using various combinations of these base measures. The imperial system (prior to the UK converting to metric) and the USA system have over 300 different measures (see http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/traditional.htm), of which many are ambiguous. For example, there are eight different definitions of ton (including the ‘short ton’ and the ‘long ton’), all of which differ in weight. There are also eight different definitions of barrel, five different definitions of bushel, three different definitions of mile (international, nautical, and US Survey). The USA gallon is smaller than the Imperial gallon, and all measures which are multiples or subdivisions of the gallon (e.g. pint, quart) likewise are inconsistent between the USA and the UK. Not only are the USA and UK pints different in size, but there are also differences between ‘dry pints’ and ‘liquid pints’.
* Ease of calculation. All the units in the metric system are multiplied by 10 (to make larger units) or divided by 10 (to make smaller units). For example a kilometer is 1000 meters (10 * 10 * 10). It’s nearest equivalent is a mile which is 5280 feet (8 * 10 * 22 * 3; based on the calculation that a mile is 8 furlongs, 10 chains to a furlong, 22 yards to a chain, 3 feet to a yard). Although complex calculations can be done using the Imperial or USA system, almost all calculations can be done easier and faster in the metric system.
* International Standard. With the exception of the USA, all major countries have converted to the metric system (although in some countries, such as the UK, the conversion to metric is not yet complete). Consequently, for any international communication (trade, science, etc.) the metric system is the most widely used and accepted.
http://www.france-property-and-information.com/imperial-system-and-history.htm
Tam O’Tellico - December 30, 2005 @ 9:41 am
Let’s set aside your math assignment for the moment, students, and turn to another subject that used to be routinely taught in secondary schools, but that has alas fallen from fashion in favor of rote memorization of answers to standardized tests — let’s examine elementary logic.
Let’s begin with the analogy, a logical device similar to the literary device called a simile (which you would know if your local school board thought poetry was useful in training you to be a better welder):
“My love is like a red, red welding rod—”
Oops, sorry about the Baudelaire, that’s only for wildly wanton liberal students in Advanced Poetics.
Here’s an example of an analogy, which besides being obviously disingenuous, is so thin you can see through it, and so weak as to be unworthy of refutation.
M: As to the 4th Amendment, it’s my understanding that what was occurring wasn’t phone tapping per se, but instead a monitoring of traffic flows – who was calling whom, where, and when. That’s analogous to watching pedestrian flows on a public street.
(And I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in welding.)
Here are some examples of powerful analogies or similes:
Expecting Bush to limit himself to terrorists if he is given total access to his wiretapping toy is like expecting my son to limit himself to one hour of video games absent parental supervision. Frankly, wise parents just don’t expect children to limit themselves.
Letting Dick “Halliburton” Cheney dispense no-bid contracts is like hiring Willie “that’s where the money is” Sutton to guard a bank. And letting Dick the Deferred decide torture limits is like screwing a ten-dollar whore or using a condom with a hole in it — it may solve an immediate need, but is it really worth the long-term risk?
Expecting Rumsfeld to end the Iraq War is like expecting Schubert to finish his symphony (for those of you whose local school boards thought music appreciation was a useless extravagance, that would be Franz Schubert and his Unfinished Symphony).
I could go on, but I fear this lesson may already be too taxing for untutored minds.
Note to Half-Mooned: This is a liberal attempt at humor, feel free to have yourself a great big belly laugh, it might do you some good.
Tam O’Tellico - December 30, 2005 @ 10:17 am
Okay, one more, I just can’t resist:
Expecting George Bush to lead the nation in the event of a real catastrophe is like — well, it’s like appointing Mike Brown to head FEMA.
Tam O’Tellico - December 30, 2005 @ 11:09 am
Half-Mooned:
Here’s a link for you to contact some hot liberal leaning chicks:
http://www.actforlove.org/
Meantime, never bring a knife to a gunfight.
Tam O’Tellico - December 30, 2005 @ 11:26 am
Bill Clinton? Once more into the breeches:
If you think Bill Clinton disses W, you should hear Jimmy Carter — he positively loathes W’s policies, and despises him personally for his false piety. One can hardly imagine Jimmy calling the US Constitution “just a god-damned piece of paper.” And whatever you think of Carter as President, he clearly knows the difference between talking and walking, something which Bush just as clearly does not.
Personally, I find George so ignorant and incompetent as to be beneath contempt or disrespect – sort of like he and Momma Babs feel about the rest of his subjects. Maybe that attitude goes back to his school days – apparently he never cared much for his subjects back then either.
As for my personal views of Clinton, I have expressed them many times in this forum, but let me recap in terms simple enough even for you.
Bill Clinton, like Richard Nixon, was a man of rare intellectual gifts who squandered his chance to change the world because of his personal peccadilloes. Unlike Richard Nixon, Clinton’s sins did not undermine our constitutional democracy or involve million-dollar secret slush funds.
As I said before, Conservatives spent more than a decade and a helluva lot of time and money playing Gotcha with Clinton, and the best they could come up with was that he was lecher and liar. Well, as far as we know, none of his conquests died of ecstasy, and none of his lies got anybody killed.
That he was relentlessly pursued for his sexual escapades, and hounded to the point of impeachment by moral lightweights like Newt and the Nitwits, was the height of hypocrisy, a hypocrisy which voter’s resented and expressed in the next election which led to Newt’s resignation, to be followed (almost, but not quite) by the now-all-but-forgotten Rep. Bob Livingston, R-La., now known only as the speaker who never was.
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/1998/12/21/livingston.html
Livingston was then replaced by the present ample occupant of the office, Dennis Hastert, known even to his fellow Repubs as Lardass. Denny continues the long Repub tradition of appointing fatass figureheads to that post, while real power is held by majority whips like Tom “the Indians best-friend” DeLay.
Keep in mind, however, that after the eventual impeachment of both W and Crooked Dick in the Halliburton Scandal, Denny “let New Orleans rot” Hastert will be our next President, and fellow Ohioan and the recently resigned-in-disgrace fraud-loving CEO of Diebold, Wally “No-Tell” O’Dell, is destined to be his first political payback appointee.
This whole sorry Clinton episode could have been settled with censure, a punishment fit for the crime, a punishment I and most Americans would have supported. But the Republicans wanted revenge for Nixon, regardless of how they damaged the nation.
In any case, I’d say Clinton and Nixon paid dearly for their sins, unlike some recent Presidents who weren’t or aren’t held to the same standards. Clinton’s prevarication was a much lesser violation of the law than the Iran-Contra whoppers told by Ronald Reagan. Yeah, I know, Ronnie was too busy with his astrologer to know what was going on in the next office.
And if Michael is correct and W is never made to answer for his part in going to war based on suspect (at least) intelligence, exposing covert agents, transferring the US treasury to Halliburton, abandoning New Orleans, violating the Geneva Conventions, or illegal wiretapping thousands of American citizens, he, too, will have escaped impeachment for his sins, any one of which is far greater than Clinton’s lying about a blow job.
On the whole, I suspect history will be much kinder to Clinton than to W, but it is still too soon to know for certain. What I do know is that I voted for Clinton once, but did not do so a second time. God, how I wish Conservatives could have been as astute when it came to W.
Michael Herdegen - December 30, 2005 @ 8:00 pm
[T]he numuber of US graduates engineers last year was approx 53,000 — down from 60,000 the previous year — while China graduated over 300,000. That wouldn’t seem to be a powerful indicator of are continued dominance over the long haul.
China’s looming talent shortage (free, reg. req.)
Diana Farrell and Andrew J. Grant
So, essentially, China is churning out vast quantities of low-quality grads, hardly the mark of a “world-beater”, and certainly nothing for America to fret about – especially since the cream of the Chinese student crop comes to America for higher education, anyway, and many stay.
Of course, it won’t always be that way, and China will eventually routinely produce high-quality engineers, and have a mature economy in which low-wage, low-skill assembly jobs aren’t the mainstay of the economy – just as Japan did between 1945 and 1980.
However, they haven’t even set foot upon that road yet, much less started to overtake the U.S.
Our Traditional Units Nightmare
“Nightmare” ?!? LOL Hyperbole at its finest.
How many people know the difference between a short ton, displacement ton, refrigeration ton, nuclear ton, freight ton, register ton, metric ton, assay ton, or ton of coal equivalent?
Very few.
How many people need to know ?
Very few.
Yes, the metric system is simple to learn, and arbitrary systems are complex, but that in and of itself is no proof that use of the metric system by any nation’s general population confers any kind of advantage.
Because so many nations HAVE adopted the metric system, the world has been running a kind of test or field experiment, with America the Archaic as one of the control group.
Results ?
Ye Olde America leads the world in scientific research, exploration of space, size of economy, rate of economic growth among the G-7&1/2, and desire among the world’s population to attend our elite Universities.
Yup, that there metric system certainly has lit a rocket under its users, eh ?
You argue that Americans are all potential nuclear engineers, held back only by the failures of our educational system, but ALSO that we’re a bunch of ignorant hicks, too stupid to see the obvious advantages of adopting metrics.
Well, the metric system IS simple, which is elegant, but beyond that it confers NO ADVANTAGE to societies that use it among the general population.
I note that all American sub-cultures that could benefit from using the metric system, such as the military and the scientific community, ALREADY DO use it.
But is there any advantage to the average American thinking that the distance from Colorado Springs to Denver is 120 km, instead of 70 miles ?
No.
Michael Herdegen - December 30, 2005 @ 8:19 pm
[A]s Michael likes to point out, the rest of our citizens are receiving an education fit only for fry cooks and welders.
Largely because most of our citizens choose to BE fry cooks and welders.
You haven’t addressed the question of why the average American adult doesn’t overcome any deficiencies that might have existed in her earlier education.
As listed up-thread, the resources available at little or no cost to the average American are nothing short of mind-boggling…
But the average adult American chooses not to take advantage of them.
Your real beef isn’t with me, it’s with human nature.
The world could easily be a Utopia – if humans were willing to make it so.
We aren’t.
I have hopes that it will not always be so, but I also expect to be long dead by the time that it actually happens.
What we can do now, at this moment, in this time, culture, & reality, is to make incremental changes that work TOWARDS the ultimate goal, with the understanding that we will never see The Promised Land – to leave the world fractionally better than we found it.
Tam O’Tellico - December 30, 2005 @ 10:03 pm
The Orwellian explanation offered by President Bush justifying his right, nay duty, to do whatever he and he alone determines is necessary to maintain our national security reminds me of a true story from my childhood.
A friend of my parents had a terrible problem with a rat infestation, and after availing himself of every standard remedy, he decided in total, blind frustration and rage to take matters into his own hands. He sent his family off to his mother’s house and sat up at night with a flashlight taped to a twenty gauge shotgun. Any rat who dared venture out into the open was met with a shotgun blast.
While this desperate solution did reduce the rat population somewhat, it wasn’t what you’d call a perfect solution. Needless to say, rats splattered with a twenty-gauge leave behind an awful mess. And while the flashlight was effective on rats dumb enough to sit in one place long enough for him to get a shot off, it didn’t work so well on rats who remained on the run. Some escaped to live and breed again, and the “solution” left gaping holes in the walls of the man’s house. It is not stretching things to say that it looked like it belonged in a war zone.
Unfortunatlely, the holes in the walls not only gave the rats even easier access, but it rendered the structure uninhabitable because the wicked Michigan winter wind whipped in through the holes bereft of drywall, siding and all the other essentials of a normal existence. But strangest of all in this strange but true tale was that the neighbor went around for years afterward bragging about how manly he had behaved in addressing the rat problem.
And some people don’t believe in deja vu.
Michael Herdegen - December 31, 2005 @ 12:32 am
Funny. And tragic.
But such is life.
President Bush justif[ies] his right, nay duty, to do whatever he and he alone determines is necessary to maintain our national security…
Perhaps you’ve been busy with other things, and haven’t noticed, but Bush is hardly “alone” in the course he’s taken.
Not only are there many members of his administration who agree with his decisions, but there are also a significant number of members of the opposition party who agree, as well as possibly 60% of the American public, depending on what polls one likes.
At the very least, 40% or more of the public is on-board, and perhaps two-thirds of Congress.
Fortunately, we’ll be having a vigorous national debate about it in the upcoming eleven months, capped off with a national referendum, so we won’t have to wait long to see if Bush has misread the public’s wishes vis-a-vis goals and methods.
Tam O’Tellico - December 31, 2005 @ 11:58 am
Well, let’s continue that debate here.
Granted, a fine line must be drawn between security and privacy, and some of us are ambivalent about exactly where that line should be drawn. But those of us who did not vote for this President, and have since been witness to events that only confirm are worst suspicions, are not ambivalent about the ability of this President and his cronies to make such fine distinctions.
Ambivalence may be why the publisher and editor of the NY Times sat on this story since before the 2004 election. At the very least, their reluctance to publish such profoundly disturbing news ought to put to rest the absurd notion that the NY Times was or is out to get Bush.
While ambivalent patriotism is one possible explanation for this failure; there are other far less palatable explanations. Conspiracy theorists might be tempted to suggest that the publisher and editor are closet conservatives posing as liberals while secretly supporting the re-election of Bush. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr, a closet NeoCon and another paid press plant of the Bush administration — now there’s a front-page story for you!
On the other hand, maybe there is something to that notion. After all, I remember when the NY Times splattered Whitewater and MonicaGate all over its front pages and helped make Al Gore a laughingstock candidate for claiming to have “invented the Internet” (which he never actually did) and claiming that he and Tipper were the models for Love Story (which they may well have been).
But such is the stuff of fantasy and farce. Fact is, the NY Times is an equal opportunity offender with little regard for which politician’s oxymoron is being Gored. That’s what the news is supposed to do except when the news is a propaganda organ like fairly imbalanced FOX.
But there is a more plausible and possibly more unsettling explanation for the NY Times apparent complicity with the Bush administration in this sorry episode. I know I’ll be accused again of Anti-Semitism, but the Times has long exhibited a pro-Israel slant, and I can’t help but wonder if that doesn’t color the paper’s editorial stance much more than its supposed liberalism.
As for the I-Spy policy itself, apparently at least a few Americans have no ambivalence and profoundly disagree with administration policy, else they would not risk their careers and prison to reveal what is obviously extremely sensitive, eyes-only classified information.
One thing you can bet the farm on, it won’t take the administration nearly as long to ferret out these leakers as is has to learn the identity of the Plame Gang.
But given the wide-open insistence on Black-Ops by this administration, the leakers are risking far more than their careers, they’re risking life and limb. Were I one of them, I’d be watching my back, hiring a food-taster and installing a remote starter on my vehicle. You probably think I’m kidding. I’m not. Can anyone doubt Cheney would have the slightest qualms about ordering a hit on someone he suspected had leaked such information?
It wouldn’t surprise me if Dark Dick had a torture chamber in his office closet that he used regularly and personally. Clinton may have been fond of fellatio, but Dick strikes me as an S & M kinda guy.
You see, Michael, those of us on this side of the Great Divide are far more concerned about the enemy among us than we are about the enemy over there. We are old enough to remember the lessons of the last century, and we see this “savior” as being frighteningly similar to the one that arose to “save” Germany in the Thirties.
This leader uber alles shares the same misspent youth with the attendant self-perceived lack of recognition and appreciation of his gifts; he arouses the same unfathomable charismatic response in the masses; he holds the same disdain for intellectuals; he uses the same distorted logic and the same inflammatory rhetoric; he shares the same xenophobic world view, and he favors the same “shoot first and ask questions later” solution to complicated geo-politics.
Hell, they both had/have the same fascination with cowboys. Who knows – maybe in a previous life they spent time together on Brokeback Mountain.
And Cheney-Himmler comparisons are even more chilling.
Now, you are free to disagree — at least until our Constitution is completely suspended — but the evidence is growing with each new revelation that I am right and you are wrong. But as I’ve said before, I take NO satisfaction in that Pyrrhic victory.
While we still have some semblance of a democracy, I would hope that those on yuor side of this debate would accept that the line between security and liberty is better drawn by the many, rather than by the few. Certainly, we can’t afford to have it drawn by the President and a few cronies, cronies who disagree only in that they advocate even harsher, more police-state policies.
Michael Herdegen - December 31, 2005 @ 2:47 pm
I see that you have a rich fantasy life.
[T]hose of us on this side of the Great Divide are far more concerned about the enemy among us than we are about the enemy over there.
Yes, that’s the basis for the divide in the first place.
For instance, there were always those during the Cold War who were convinced that the real danger came from democratically-elected American leaders, and not from the brutal tyrants who terrorized the East.
[Bushitler] favors the same “shoot first and ask questions later” solution to complicated geo-politics.
Geo-politics isn’t necessarily complicated.
A lot depends on how subtle is the point that you’re trying to make.
Afghanistan and Iraq were bald declarations, and their messages were received loud & clear.
I would hope that those on your side of this debate would accept that the line between security and liberty is better drawn by the many, rather than by the few.
Yes, and that line will be redrawn by “the many” in Nov. ’06.
I happen to believe that it won’t vary much from where it was before Nov., but that’s a long way off, so you’ll have time to dream, before you’re disappointed.
Tam O’Tellico - January 1, 2006 @ 7:00 am
Should I assume from your “the voters will decide” philosophy that you believe Clinton was wrongfully impeached? Well, on that you and I can agree. In any case, whatever the outcome of the ’06 midterms, I hope in the long run we’re not all disappointed if and when the Dream dies.
Meantime, at least one other citizen, who has considerably more experience and personal insight into these matters than either of us, agrees that Bush is way out of line. In fact, he states categorically, something legalistas are usually loathe to do — that Bush has committed and even admitted to an impeachable offense.
While the messenger in this case may be problematic, his arguments are sound:
George W. Bush as the New Richard M. Nixon: Both Wiretapped Illegally, and Impeachably
By John W. Dean
FindLaw.com
Friday 30 December 2005
On Friday, December 16, the New York Times published a major scoop by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau: They reported that Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on Americans without warrants, ignoring the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
It was a long story loaded with astonishing information of lawbreaking at the White House. It reported that sometime in 2002, Bush issued an executive order authorizing NSA to track and intercept international telephone and/or email exchanges coming into, or out of, the U.S. – when one party was believed to have direct or indirect ties with al Qaeda.
Initially, Bush and the White House stonewalled, neither confirming nor denying the president had ignored the law. Bush refused to discuss it in his interview with Jim Lehrer. Then, on Saturday, December 17, in his radio broadcast, Bush admitted that the New York Times was correct – and thus conceded he had committed an impeachable offense.
There can be no serious question that warrantless wiretapping, in violation of the law, is impeachable. After all, Nixon was charged in Article II of his bill of impeachment with illegal wiretapping for what he, too, claimed were national security reasons. These parallel violations underscore the continuing, disturbing parallels between this Administration and the Nixon Administration – parallels I also discussed in a prior column.
Indeed, here, Bush may have outdone Nixon: Nixon’s illegal surveillance was limited; Bush’s, it is developing, may be extraordinarily broad in scope. First reports indicated that NSA was only monitoring foreign calls, originating either in the USA or abroad, and that no more than 500 calls were being covered at any given time. But later reports have suggested that NSA is “data mining” literally millions of calls – and has been given access by the telecommunications companies to “switching” stations through which foreign communications traffic flows.
In sum, this is big-time, Big Brother electronic surveillance.
Given the national security implications of the story, the Times said they had been sitting on it for a year. And now that it has broken, Bush has ordered a criminal investigation into the source of the leak. He suggests that those who might have felt confidence they would not be spied on, now can have no such confidence, so they may find other methods of communicating. Other than encryption and code, it is difficult to envision how.
Such a criminal investigation is rather ironic – for the leak’s effect was to reveal Bush’s own offense. Having been ferreted out as a criminal, Bush now will try to ferret out the leakers who revealed him.
Nixon’s Wiretapping – and the Congressional Action That Followed
Through the FBI, Nixon had wiretapped five members of his national security staff, two newsmen, and a staffer at the Department of Defense. These people were targeted because Nixon’s plans for dealing with Vietnam – we were at war at the time – were ending up on the front page of the New York Times.
Nixon had a plausible national security justification for the wiretaps: To stop the leaks, which had meant that not only the public, but America’s enemies, were privy to its plans. But the use of the information from the wiretaps went far beyond that justification: A few juicy tidbits were used for political purposes. Accordingly, Congress believed the wiretapping, combined with the misuse of the information it had gathered, to be an impeachable offense.
Following Nixon’s resignation, Senator Frank Church chaired a committee that investigated the uses and abuses of the intelligence derived from the wiretaps. From his report on electronic surveillance, emerged the proposal to create the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The Act both set limits on electronic surveillance, and created a secret court within the Department of Justice – the FISA Court – that could, within these limits, grant law enforcement’s requests to engage in electronic surveillance.
The legislative history of FISA makes it very clear that Congress sought to create laws to govern the uses of warrantless wiretaps. Thus, Bush’s authorization of wiretapping without any application to the FISA Court violated the law.
Whether to Allow Such Wiretaps Was Congress’s Call to Make
No one questions the ends here. No one doubts another terror attack is coming; it is only a question of when. No one questions the preeminent importance of detecting and preventing such an attack.
What is at issue here, instead, is Bush’s means of achieving his ends: his decision not only to bypass Congress, but to violate the law it had already established in this area.
Congress is Republican-controlled. Polling shows that a large majority of Americans are willing to give up their civil liberties to prevent another terror attack. The USA Patriot Act passed with overwhelming support. So why didn’t the President simply ask Congress for the authority he thought he needed?
The answer seems to be, quite simply, that Vice President Dick Cheney has never recovered from being President Ford’s chief of staff when Congress placed checks on the presidency. And Cheney wanted to make the point that he thought it was within a president’s power to ignore Congress’ laws relating to the exercise of executive power. Bush has gone along with all such Cheney plans.
No president before Bush has taken as aggressive a posture – the position that his powers as commander-in-chief, under Article II of the Constitution, license any action he may take in the name of national security – although Richard Nixon, my former boss, took a similar position.
Presidential Powers Regarding National Security: A Nixonian View
Nixon famously claimed, after resigning from office, that when the president undertook an action in the name of national security, even if he broke the law, it was not illegal. Nixon’s thinking (and he was learned in the law) relied on the precedent established by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Nixon, quoting Lincoln, said in an interview, “Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional, could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the Nation.”
David Frost, the interviewer, immediately countered by pointing out that the anti-war demonstrators upon whom Nixon focused illegal surveillance, were hardly the equivalent of the rebel South. Nixon responded, “This nation was torn apart in an ideological way by the war in Vietnam, as much as the Civil War tore apart the nation when Lincoln was president.” It was a weak rejoinder, but the best he had.
Nixon took the same stance when he responded to interrogatories proffered by the Senate Select Committee on Government Operations To Study Intelligence Operations (best know as the “Church Committee,” after its chairman Senator Frank Church). In particular, he told the committee, “In 1969, during my Administration, warrantless wiretapping, even by the government, was unlawful, but if undertaken because of a presidential determination that it was in the interest of national security was lawful. Support for the legality of such action is found, for example, in the concurring opinion of Justice White in Katz v. United States.” (Katz is the opinion that established that a wiretap constitutes a “search and seizure” under the Fourth Amendment, just as surely as a search of one’s living room does – and thus that the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirements apply to wiretapping.)
Nixon rather presciently anticipated – and provided a rationalization for – Bush: He wrote, “there have been – and will be in the future – circumstances in which presidents may lawfully authorize actions in the interest of security of this country, which if undertaken by other persons, even by the president under different circumstances, would be illegal.”
Even if we accept Nixon’s logic for purposes of argument, were the circumstances that faced Bush the kind of “circumstances” that justify warrantless wiretapping? I believe the answer is no.
Is Bush’s Unauthorized Surveillance Action Justified? Not Persuasively
Had Bush issued his Executive Order on September 12, 2001, as a temporary measure – pending his seeking Congress approval – those circumstances might have supported his call.
Or, had a particularly serious threat of attack compelled Bush to authorize warrantless wiretapping in a particular investigation, before he had time to go to Congress, that too might have been justifiable.
But several years have passed since the broad 2002 Executive Order, and in all that time, Bush has refused to seek legal authority for his action. Yet he can hardly miss the fact that Congress has clearly set rules for presidents in the very situation in which he insists on defying the law.
Bush has given one legal explanation for his actions which borders on the laughable: He claims that implicit in Congress’ authorization of his use of force against the Taliban in Afghanistan, following the 9/11 attack, was an exemption from FISA.
No sane member of Congress believes that the Authorization of Military Force provided such an authorization. No first year law student would mistakenly make such a claim. It is not merely a stretch; it is ludicrous.
But the core of Bush’s defense is to rely on the very argument made by Nixon: that the president is merely exercising his “commander-in-chief” power under Article II of the Constitution. This, too, is a dubious argument. Its author, John Yoo, is a bright, but inexperienced and highly partisan young professor at Boalt Law School, who has been in and out of government service.
To see the holes and fallacies in Yoo’s work – embodied in a recently published book – one need only consult the analysis of Georgetown University School of Law professor David Cole in the New York Review of Books. Cole has been plowing this field of the law for many years, and digs much deeper than Yoo.
Since I find Professor Yoo’s legal thinking bordering on fantasy, I was delighted that Professor Cole closed his real-world analysis on a very realistic note: “Michael Ignatieff has written that ‘it is the very nature of a democracy that it not only does, but should, fight with one hand tied behind its back. It is also in the nature of democracy that it prevails against its enemies precisely because it does.’ Yoo persuaded the Bush administration to untie its hand and abandon the constraints of the rule of law. Perhaps that is why we are not prevailing.”
To which I can only add, and recommend, the troubling report by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, who are experts in terrorism and former members of President Clinton’s National Security Council. They write in their new book The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right, that the Bush Administration has utterly failed to close the venerable loopholes available to terrorist to wreak havoc. The war in Iraq is not addressing terrorism; rather, it is creating terrorists, and diverting money from the protection of American interests.
Bush’s unauthorized surveillance, in particular, seems very likely to be ineffective. According to experts with whom I have spoken, Bush’s approach is like hunting for the proverbial needle in the haystack. As sophisticated as NSA’s data mining equipment may be, it cannot, for example, crack codes it does not recognize. So the terrorist communicating in code may escape detection, even if data mining does reach him.
In short, Bush is hoping to get lucky. Such a gamble seems a slim pretext for acting in such blatant violation of Congress’ law. In acting here without Congressional approval, Bush has underlined that his Presidency is unchecked – in his and his attorneys’ view, utterly beyond the law. Now that he has turned the truly awesome powers of the NSA on Americans, what asserted powers will Bush use next? And when – if ever – will we – and Congress – discover that he is using them?
_________
You and I may not not care much for the ethics of Citizen Dean, but he is hardly a raving liberal, and I dare say he has had as much practical experience with these issues as anyone.
As I’ve stated here before, I do not advocate Bush’s impeachment for that would leave us with President Cheney, and even worse nightmare . I dare not contemplate such a disaster as the Amerika-Halliburton merger.
Tam O’Tellico - January 1, 2006 @ 7:20 am
All the following facts were documented in the Seventies by the Church Committee:
Between 1960 and 1974, the FBI conducted half a million investigations of so-called subversives, without a single conviction, and maintained files on well over a million Americans. The FBI tapped phones, opened mail, planted bugs, and burglarized homes and offices. At least 26,000 individuals were at one point catalogued on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in the event of a “national emergency.” Hoover was particularly obsessed with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, which he thought was influenced by communists. The FBI proceeded to undermine the civil rights movement, planting agents among the Freedom Riders (and also the Ku Klux Klan). Hoover put spies into the ranks of labor activists and of Democratic Party insurgents during the 1964 presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, the CIA began spying domestically. The Agency planted informants of its own within the United States, especially on college campuses. Between 1953 and 1973, they opened and photographed nearly a quarter of a million first-class letters, producing an index of nearly 1.5 million names. Under something called Operation CHAOS, separate files were created on approximately 7,200 Americans and over 100 domestic groups. In 1964, the CIA even created a secret arm called the Domestic Operations Division, the very name of which flew in the face of its legal charter. Back then, there were no “communications problems” between the two agencies.
______
I for one have no desire to see the Executive Branch return to the “good old days”, when Presidents Democratic and Republican used the FBI and the CIA not only as national security tools, but also as a domestic political operations. And back then we didn’t have the sophisticated spying tools available to us now.
You can’t possibly believe that Bush/Cheney/Rove are above such behavior. Holding the executive branch answerable to Congress and the Courts, at the very least to the more-than compliant FISA provisions, is an absolute if we intend to prevent a de facto dictator in this country.
Michael Herdegen - January 1, 2006 @ 7:23 pm
Should I assume from your “the voters will decide” philosophy that you believe Clinton was wrongfully impeached?
Holding the executive branch answerable to Congress and the Courts […] is an absolute if we intend to prevent a de facto dictator in this country.
You can see how those two statements are DIRECTLY contradictory, yes ?
In any case, I am FOR a complete and thorough, (although possibly classified and closed to the general public), investigation of what the President did and authorized.
I just suspect that, in the end, the admin’s arguments about Presidential authority during times of conflict will carry the day.
Tam O’Tellico - January 1, 2006 @ 10:01 pm
I suspect the President will carry the day, too, if the investiagation is carried out by the present Congress.
However, there are signs that things are changing due to criticism in the polls and from Conservative pundits. If Bush is undone, the real pressure will come, just as it did with Nixon, not from the Left but from the Right. And there are a great many traditiional Conservatives from Pat Buchanan to George Will that are not happy with the palace having been turned over to the red-headed stepchildren of the Republican Party.
Michael Herdegen - January 1, 2006 @ 10:07 pm
If Bush is undone, the real pressure will come, just as it did with Nixon, not from the Left but from the Right.
Which is what made it so shameful that so few Democrats were willing to call for Clinton to step down.
The Left prizes power above all.
Tam O’Tellico - January 2, 2006 @ 3:46 pm
M: The Left prizes power above all.
Are you seriously suggesting the Right is made up only of do-gooders who would never do anything untoward to maintain power — like, say, gerrymandering Texas or taking bribes from fat-cat lobbyists?
Ney, Ney, Ney.
Methinks, you jest, else you are guilty of self-deception far greater than Clinton’s. And if I were you, I would stay away from the Clinton affair. Republicans should be embarassed for so badly overplaying their hand in that sorry episode — but that would require Republicans to show remorse somewhere besides in front of a judge or jury.
Fact is, many Democrats denounced Clinton’s actions and called for his censure. But like a majority of Americans, they did not call for his impeachment because they did not believe that punishment fit the crime. Democrats, obviously much more honest about their sexual habits, know that if lying about sexual misdeeds constituted high crimes and misdemeanors, the halls of Congress would be empty tomorrow.
But maybe Republicans really aren’t getting any on the side. What’s far more likely is that only Rabid Right fanatics or politically motivated party hacks think it’s reasonable to use a sledgehammer to swat a fly on the window.
Speaking of hammers, Tom the Hammer DeLay may be the real reason damned few Republicans have spoken up about Bush’s many abject failures; they were understandably scared shitless by the big, bad DeLay/RNC machine.
But now that the Hammer is about to be nailed, the timid are beginning to recover their voices. They may not be geniuses, but they can count to 11 and know that trouble looms on the horizon. And that’s provided the Iraq War goes well and that there are no new exposes or revelations — a slim and none chance with this administration.
But even if the Repubs don’t know how to figure out the difference between a blow job and a blown war, most Americans do. And even Bush supporters will reluctantly have to acknowledge reality when it slaps them in the face. That was true for Nixon voters who excused the break-in at the DNC, but found it impossible to ignore the obscenity-laced basement tapes with their admission of a million-dollar hush/slush fund.
As John Dean pointed out, Bush has already admitted his guilt even if he won’t acknowledge it, and he tried to justify it with the same excuses that didn’t work for Nixon. While it’s probably true that most Americans condone illegal wire-tapping for security purposes, that is only in the abstract, and surely it isn’t only liberals who are being tapped, given the data-mining proclivities of this imperious pretender and his pack of PavRovian mad dogs. Once people find out that the tap, tap, tapping is at their chamber door, their support will disappear faster than Bush at the first sign of danger.
Bush may be able to tap his way out of this obvious crime, and he may be able to skate on PlameGate. But if any hard evidence surfaces about going to war for illegitimate reasons or ferrying billion-dollar no-bid contracts to Cheney’s former employer, that constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors even a diehard like you might have to acknowledge.
Michael Herdegen - January 2, 2006 @ 7:33 pm
Are you seriously suggesting the Right is made up only of do-gooders…
No, but as you say, the Right is willing to turn on those who cross whatever line there is.
The Left is not.
Marion Berry. Clinton. Byrd. Kennedy. Doesn’t matter what these guys do, as long as they win, right ?
Democrats, obviously much more honest about their sexual habits, know that if lying about sexual misdeeds constituted high crimes and misdemeanors…
I participate in this forum in part because I feel that we’re adult enough here to avoid game-playing, and just lay out what we see, feel, and want.
Otherwise, what’s the point ?
Given that, is the above REALLY how you see the Clinton deal ?
I thought that you were no fan of his, that you saw the difference between hiim lying to the American public about it, and lying under oath about it.
Haven’t you posted in the past that if he’d just come clean, it would have blown over ?
Except, of course, that Jones would have won her lawsuit…
Which she ended up doing anyhow.
Tam O’Tellico - January 2, 2006 @ 10:02 pm
This is no game – or at least there’s none on my part. You will have to answer for yourself.
As far as I’m concerned, Clinton was a cad who exhibited extremely poor judgment, a fully grown man who couldn’t keep his hands to himself or his pecker in his pants. I do not excuse or condone his behavior, but I do find it hypocritical that so many of those who shouted loudest were equally guilty of such sins — Bob Livingston and Newt Gingrich among them.
I suppose I could have held my nose about a fifty-something so-called adult behaving like a randy teenager, but Clinton’s sins also demonstrated a lack of judgment, given that he had been exposed before and that so many Conservatives were so obviously out to get him. Even that I might have forgiven had he had the sense to tell the truth or simply stonewalled and said his sex habits were no one else’s business. But lying about it was the final straw for me, not so much because of the perjury, but because that constituted a colossal lack of judgment since any fool should have known that such a lie could not stand.
Of course, I had expressed my disgust and disappointment with Bill Clinton long before that by not voting for him a second time. But apparently, a large number of voters did not share that disgust since they re-elected him knowing what a cad he was. Why? It’s the economy, stupid. And that must have been all that mattered to a lot of Conservatives, as well.
But as disgusted as I was and am with the man, I am still able to make the distinction that while his lying under oath was a crime, it did not rise to “high crimes and misdemeanors” by any stretch of the imagination, except for the overwrought imaginations of this whose minds have been twisted by a need to take revenge for President Nixon, whose crimes clearly did rise to that level.
It is long past time for the Right to own up to the truth: Nixon and Clinton both disgraced the office, but Nixon’s crimes were impeachable and Clinton’s were not, censure was more than sufficient. Until the Right owns up to that truth, they will remain pouty little bous in the eyes of an American public that doesn’t seem to have any problem drawing such grown-up distinctions.
Actually, anyone with a half-open mind can and should do so; allow me to illustrate: If George W. Bush knew about the Plame affair, but did not instigate it, or if he knew nothing in advance, but dragged his feet about getting to the bottom of the affair, he should be censured, but certainly not impeached. If as he has apparently admitted, he authorized illegal wiretaps, he should be censured and in the future be held to a higher accounting than the very flexible FISA court standards. But if he lied about the intelligence used for the Iraq War – and that will surely be an almost impossible case to prove – he should be impeached and the sooner the better.
As you are a reasonable man, I’m sure you will agree with all the particulars presented herewith.
lonbud - January 3, 2006 @ 9:58 am
Laying the discussion out in terms that depict the battle between good and evil as one in which Republicans and Democrats, or conservatives and liberals, or capitalists and communists, or buddhists and hindus, or christians and jews, or christians and muslims, or christians and pagans, or pro-lifers and pro-choicers, or rich and poor, or educated and ignorant, or bacchanalians and prudes, or short and tall people occupy one side or the other of the divide misses the point entirely.
Each individual human on the planet, regardless of race, creed, color, national origin, sex, or sexual orientation possesses elements of both goodness and of evil, feels and acts upon yearnings toward the light and upon the attractions of darkness.
If everyone understood and heeded the wise commandment attributed to Jesus of Nazareth, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” we’d all have a much easier time sorting out the inequities of Life.
I also subscribe to the wisdom of attending to now. What’s past is gone, tomorrow’s yet to come. This moment holds the promise to do what’s left undone.
With respect to American polity this moment pretty much means the mid-term elections later this year, at which time we’ll see just how far we as a nation have come in recognizing where we are at in balancing our yearning toward the light and our attraction to the dark.
Michael Herdegen - January 3, 2006 @ 2:43 pm
Hey, Abramoff’s pleading guilty !!
Hopefully he’ll sing like a bird.
I don’t understand why he’s even still alive.
I guess that’s one of the differences between reality and Hollywood.
Tam O’Tellico:
As you are a reasonable man…
Well, the validity of that statement has been hotly debated here, but I think so…
Very few of my positions are based on an absolutist view of the world, although I do believe that, both as a society and as individuals, we should be more proactive and activist with regards to the evils of the world, which strikes some as being related to fundamentalism.
…I’m sure you will agree with all the particulars presented herewith.
Not completely, but close enough.
lonbud:
Speaking of the past, I see that you were correct about Gore, that there were some scenarios under which he could have won a Florida re-count.
Ironically, however, Gore’s team did not request a re-count under terms which would have brought him victory.
If ALL ballots were counted, including ones which were incompletely marked, and ones which had MORE than one candidate marked, then Gore would have won.
However, the Gore team was only seeking a re-count of the “undermarked” ballots, and not the “overmarked” ones, possibly because it would have been more tricky, politically and legally, to get such a request approved, and the nightmares surrounding divining a voter’s intent when they’ve voted for more than one person…
In any case, counting only the properly marked ballots, and the “undermarked” ones, Gore loses.
I’ve said this before, but I don’t doubt that it was the intent of both the nation’s voters, and of Florida’s voters, to elect Gore.
I just disagree that the SCOTUS decided the election.
It was primarily the fault of Florida voters, who misunderstood how to properly fill out their ballots in large enough numbers to swing the election.
While that happens in every election, this time the race was so close that it mattered.
Secondly, on 12 Nov. ’00, the Florida Legislature signalled their intent to certify Bush Electors to be sent to the Electoral College, and that trumps whatever the vote count would have been.
Each individual human on the planet, regardless of race, creed, color, national origin, sex, or sexual orientation possesses elements of both goodness and of evil, feels and acts upon yearnings toward the light and upon the attractions of darkness.
That’s probably true, but we must recognize that culture and society profoundly affect which we choose, and whether we can openly express our choices.
Democracies allow freedom of expression, to greater or lesser degrees; dictatorships, totalitarian regimes, Marxist states, monarchies, and theocracies have a very poor record in that regard.
Some men in fundamentalist Islamic cultures might feel that women are getting a raw deal, but what can they do about it ?
In some places, even treating women as equals, at an individual level, will get him killed or imprisoned.
That’s why our Iraqi adventure is so important.
We didn’t go in just to depose an unfriendly dictator, and replace him with a friendly one, nor did we act to secure Iraq’s oil reserves to ourselves, although none of this would have happened if their were no oil in the Middle East.
By transforming Afghanistan and Iraq into democratic capitalist states, however imperfectly, we create beacons of freedom within the Middle East, and opportunities for greater happiness and achievement for ALL who reside within those nations.
Further, it puts enormous pressure on the rest of the totalitarian governments of the Middle East, even those which are fairly benevolent, to liberalize, and share their power more equitably.
In a best-case scenario, within a few decades ALL Middle Eastern nations will join Israel in the “free, democratic, prosperous nation” club.
In a middle-case scenario, most nations and governments will have liberalized somewhat, there will be less oppression, and more opportunity and prosperity.
The worst-case scenario is…
Nothing changes, in the long run.
So, we can hardly lose.
If everyone understood and heeded the wise commandment attributed to Jesus of Nazareth, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” we’d all have a much easier time sorting out the inequities of Life.
In the specific instance to which you refer, we, as modern people, can see the inequity of killing someone for adultery, especially if we only kill one of the adulterers.
However, in the larger context, since we are ALL sinners of one type or another, if we truly did wait for someone “without sin” to cast the first stone, i.e., to deliver justice, then we’d be at the mercy of the worst among us.
The best we can hope for is to put the least-sinful in charge of justice, and hope for the best.
As an aside, in some Islamic societies that use Sharia law, women are still being killed for adultery, or even for BEING RAPED.
Honor killings of women for some bizarre infraction of their putrid “laws” are common in Islamic societies, even for such offenses as not marrying the person that the woman’s father chooses.
Harkening back to my thought about being “more proactive and activist with regards to the evils of the world”, and to my thoughts about what we’re doing in Iraq, you can see that my belief is that the sooner we clean out the Islamic fundamentalist nest of vipers, killing whomever we have to in order to accomplish such, the better off both Islamic societies and the world will be.
After all, who is the West fighting in “the War on Terror” ?
Islamic peoples? No, most Islamic people, cultures, and societies don’t really care what the U.S. and the rest of the West is up to, as long as it doesn’t affect them.
We’re fighting fundamentalist Muslims, who want to estabish a global Caliphate, and rightly see the West as an impediment to such.
It doesn’t really matter that their vision is insane and doomed, as long as they’re willing to kill and die for it.
The easiest way to cut the fundamentalists off at the knees is to reshape the societies from which they spring, so that people who might be drawn to their vision have other, more benign, opporunities with which to make their mark.
Once Islamic societies have something to lose, they’ll stop putting up with messianic jerks.
I also subscribe to the wisdom of attending to now. What’s past is gone, tomorrow’s yet to come. This moment holds the promise to do what’s left undone.
Wise words.
Unfortunately, not widely followed.
The whole “New Year’s Eve Resolution” tradition speaks to it. Any day can be the start of healthy new habits; all it takes is to throw off the shackles of past habit.
With respect to American polity this moment pretty much means the mid-term elections later this year, at which time we’ll see just how far we as a nation have come in recognizing where we are at in balancing our yearning toward the light and our attraction to the dark.
What would be an outcome which would indicate that we’re turning towards the light ?
lonbud - January 3, 2006 @ 10:30 pm
Well, maybe it’s just the new year and an effect of my trying to see things through new eyes, but I daresay that was one of, if not the most reasonable, comity-filled post you’ve ever made here, Michael.
I hope it portends a meeting of the minds that may obtain among our society at large. It seems clear the drawing of lines and taking of sides has done none of us much good.
As for Mr. Gore, it is no great surprise that his “people” did not ask for the kind of re-count that would have gained him Florida’s electoral college votes. He and they were 100% to blame, in my opinon, for the election’s having been close enough to put it in the hands of Florida’s voters in the first place. And in the spirit of attending to the now instead of dredging up the past, that’s all I intend to ever say about it in this forum again.
While none can argue with the proposition that cutting off radical fundamentalists at the knees and establishing democratic governments, however imperfectly, where ever they can be established is good and not evil, I believe the American people were entitled to a much more open and honest round of debate than the Bush administration allowed as to both the wisdom and the cost of taking upon ourselves that role in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Pretty clearly, doing what we did in Afghanistan, given the nature of the Taliban, and the presence of Bin Laden and Al Quaeda in the country, would have been supported by the great majority of Americans no matter the length or nature of the debate. And from this remove, it is most likely best that we did what we did there sooner rather than later.
I still believe the Bush administration failed the U.S., and the world, on two fronts thereafter, however.
One, they gave up on Bin Laden and chose instead the fools’ gold prize of Saddam.
Two, they refused to allow the debate over going to war in Iraq to become one about the wisdom or costs of trying to transform that nation into a beacon of freedom within the Middle East.
Some here tried to call the spade a spade but Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, even Mr. Powell refused to entertain the notion, stating unequivocably and at length how our “adventure in Iraq” was not about nation-building. It was only and ever supposed to be about WMD and preventing Saddam from inflicting immediate and catastrophic harm on the U.S., or Israel, or some other of his neighbors.
The debate such as it was, was presented to the American people and the world as one of what to do with a ticking bomb.
And that was a lie.
We’re fighting fundamentalist Muslims, who want to estabish a global Caliphate, and rightly see the West as an impediment to such.
It doesn’t really matter that their vision is insane and doomed, as long as they’re willing to kill and die for it.
Does the fact that we are willing to kill and die for our vision make us somehow less insane or doomed? I ask you. My belief is that a vision of true goodness requires a willingness to not kill and die. But that’s just me.
Once Islamic societies have something to lose, they’ll stop putting up with messianic jerks.
Our society, as you are so fond of pointing out, has more to lose than any in the history of mankind, and yet we have put up with messianic jerks since its very founding. Funny, that.
What would be an outcome which would indicate that we’re turning towards the light ?
In my view, the election of candidates who value peace over war, the environment over industry and economic development, public health over private property, and long-term security over short-term profit would indicate a turning toward the light.
I am hopeful, though not holding my breath just yet.
Michael Herdegen - January 3, 2006 @ 10:45 pm
Gary Farber at Amygdala has a great post about what the NSA was doing, and why the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was bypassed: His hypothesis is that they’re doing wide-spectrum data mining, they can’t select out which intercepts they’re pursuing ahead of time, and they’re just sucking in everything for automated analysis.
Then he provides these quotes, source unclear, all emphasis mine:
There’s much more, plus a dozen links to more info and backround, so go check it out: Amygdala
Michael Herdegen - January 3, 2006 @ 11:21 pm
Does the fact that we are willing to kill and die for our vision make us somehow less insane or doomed?
The insanity and doomedness of their vision doesn’t directly relate to their willingness to use and incur violence, it’s due to the goals and aims of the vision itself.
Who but they wish to be forced to return to the 7th century ?
Our vision is about peace, happiness, and expanded opportunity, theirs is about forced worship and subjugation, as well as removing what we consider to be basic human rights from half of the world’s people.
I agree that it’s ironic that we both have to use violence to achieve our ends, but they force us to play their game – al Qaeda won’t stand for elections as a political party.
My belief is that a vision of true goodness requires a willingness to not kill and die.
I too look forward to the day when all humans seek victory for their social visions through the ballot box and the courts, but until the world’s thugs lay down their arms, peace comes from superior firepower.
Punks don’t refrain from burgling homes because they respect the dwellers’ philosophies of compassion, they do so (when they do so) because they fear the police and incarceration. While we’re lucky enough in the U.S. to have the ultimate enforcement authority of the state well-hidden, it’s just as true for America as it was for Mao’s China that policing/public order and government authority ultimately rise “from the barrel of a gun”.
What if America’s response to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 was to do…
Nothing ?
Is it your belief that America would have been more respected in the world, that there would have been less future rampaging by those who still seek power and fortune at the point of a sword ?
In my view, the election of candidates who value peace over war, the environment over industry and economic development, public health over private property, and long-term security over short-term profit would indicate a turning toward the light.
Hard to argue with that, although of course the Gordian Knot’s in the details.
lonbud - January 4, 2006 @ 12:26 am
Dubya certainly won’t want to call Gary Farber for the defense at his impeachment hearings.
Thank you, Michael, for the link; I hope people will check out Amygdala and attempt to wrap their minds around the extent of the totalitarian threat posed by people who think and act as do the rangers of BushCo.
As to Al Qaeda, Pearl Harbor, and the Gordian Knot, we need to keep clear on the distinction between the threat posed by those who trained under Bin Laden and the one posed by those who killed and repressed for Saddam.
Both may rightly be called heinous and evil. The former posed and acted as actual threats to America; the latter did not.
There is no point in wondering if America’s response to Pearl Harbor had been nothing — for the threat was real, the enemy identifiable.
The enemy revealed on 9/11 was likewise reasonably easy enough to describe, if not to pin down.
My point is that the adventure in Iraq has been an excursion in the weeds; one unnecessary, far too costly, and ineffective for the purpose of taking out radical Islam at its knees.
Michael Herdegen - January 4, 2006 @ 5:56 am
The point of asking about Pearl Harbor was not to directly compare that attack to 9/11, or even to the Iraqi Ba’ath Party.
It was poorly phrased, because many people have compared 9/11 to Pearl.
The point was to illustrate that although “a vision of true goodness” might involve “a willingness to not kill”, WE CANNOT CONTROL the “and die” part.
Many times, the choices we have are to kill, or to die, not “kill and be killed”, or “not kill and not die”.
“Kill or die” is not the set that WE choose, it’s the set that is thrust upon us by those who DO choose it.
Now, the true believer might choose to die, rather than to kill, but if all good people felt that way, then the only relief from evil that we’d find would be to die. The shape of society would be dictated by the most ruthless among us.
Tam O’Tellico - January 4, 2006 @ 8:17 am
The point is…
We are by law not a Christian nation, and therefore not legally bound by Jesus teachings. And just as with Pearl Harbor, this nation had every legal right to pursue the perpatrators of the 9-11 attack, including Saddam Hussein — if it could be proven, instead of assumed or invented, that he was part of that plot.
But it begins to look more and more as though rather than Pearl Harbor, the Iraq War was based on another Gulf of Tonkin. To my mind, the Downing Street Memo makes it pretty clear that that was the case. Now you may argue about the meaning of the word “fix”, but such arguments take on the same rancid air as Clinton’s arguments about the meaning of the word “sex”.
Tam O’Tellico - January 4, 2006 @ 9:05 am
As for our good Christian values, Americans do have much to be proud of such as our sacrifices in the Great Wars, the Marshall Plan and our generosity to other nations facing disaster. In the long run, our willingness to die for the good of others and to share our bounty — such Christ-like expressions of our faith — is what might have won us the war for the world’s hearts and minds, the kingdom on earth of which Jesus spoke.
But unfortunately, it isn’t working out that way, and something far different from the kingdom on Earth is at hand. The faith and the nation are now under attack not only from Islamic Fundamentalists, but from Christian Fundamentalists. Those who don’t understand this, better wake up before it’s too late.
I have many times raised the issue of the Christian Right because they are so far removed from Jesus’ teachings. They are habitually and unquestioningly in favor of war and against foreign aid. It’s as though they are not even aware that Jesus taught pacifism and communism. In these parts, they are still trying to get the Ten Commandments displayed in the county courthouse, but as good Christians, they instead should be insisting they be posted inside every military transport, tank and humvee. Wonder how that would sit with Imam Pat “Kill a commie for Christ” Robertson and his ilk?
I also find it ironic that their divorce rates are so high. One suspects that must be substantially caused by adultery, the “sin” that can get a woman killed in some Islamic countries. I wonder, do Muslims have a verse equivalent to “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”?
For my part, I find Fundamentalist Christians to be at least as potentially dangerous to our way of life as Fundamentalist Muslims. As I’ve said many times before, if you liked the Ayatollan’s Iran, you’ll love Jerry Falwell’s Amerika. Given another Ayatollah Bush that awful reality may not be far down the road.
The Founding Fathers understood all this, and they knew that a theocracy is not about religion; it is about power. And despite all the phony moralistic spoutings of the hard-hearted hard-headed hardcore, what we are witnessing is an attempt to preserve power by a male-dominated, privileged elite. The New Pharisees, Bush, Cheney, DeLay and Abramof, et al, show no evidence of moral compunction. They do not value co-operation or the truth; they do not respect due process or the rights of the individual. That is true whether the individual is a terrorist or an ordinary citizen.
Jesus’ brother James understood them well. It’s easy to talk a good game, he said, but — “ye shall know them by their fruits.”
Tam O’Tellico - January 4, 2006 @ 2:54 pm
Proving that you don’t even have to tap phones to destroy freedom, there’s this item from the “one man, one vote; one crook, bad joke” file. Please note that the RNC spent more than $722,000 defending this outrage. Imagine how many hungry people that might have fed instead.
“James Tobin, a former RNC regional coordinator, was convicted in federal court on 12/16 of two telephone harassment charges for helping to jam phones of New Hampshire Democrats during Election Day 2002. The RNC had spent more than $722,000 to provide legal support for Tobin. There is also a civil suit pending. Former state executive director Chuck McGee has already completed a seven-month sentence for his role in the scheme. Allen Raymond, formerly head of GOP Marketplace LLC in Virginia, has pleaded guilty for his efforts to jam the phones.”
Tam O’Tellico - January 4, 2006 @ 5:16 pm
On the continued doublespeak and “Above the Law” stance of the man who would be king:
Bush Could Bypass New Torture Ban
By Charlie Savage
The Boston Globe
Wednesday 04 January 2005
Washington – When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief. After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a “signing statement” – an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law – declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.
“The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief,” Bush wrote, adding that this approach “will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.”
Some legal specialists said yesterday that the president’s signing statement, which was posted on the White House website but had gone unnoticed over the New Year’s weekend, raises serious questions about whether he intends to follow the law.
A senior administration official, who spoke to a Globe reporter about the statement on condition of anonymity because he is not an official spokesman, said the president intended to reserve the right to use harsher methods in special situations involving national security.
“We are not going to ignore this law,” the official said, noting that Bush, when signing laws, routinely issues signing statements saying he will construe them consistent with his own constitutional authority. “We consider it a valid statute. We consider ourselves bound by the prohibition on cruel, unusual, and degrading treatment.”
But, the official said, a situation could arise in which Bush may have to waive the law’s restrictions to carry out his responsibilities to protect national security. He cited as an example a “ticking time bomb” scenario, in which a detainee is believed to have information that could prevent a planned terrorist attack.
“Of course the president has the obligation to follow this law, [but] he also has the obligation to defend and protect the country as the commander in chief, and he will have to square those two responsibilities in each case,” the official added. “We are not expecting that those two responsibilities will come into conflict, but it’s possible that they will.”
David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit.
“The signing statement is saying ‘I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it’s important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me,’ ” he said. “They don’t want to come out and say it directly because it doesn’t sound very nice, but it’s unmistakable to anyone who has been following what’s going on.”
Tam O’Tellico - January 4, 2006 @ 5:25 pm
Addendum:
Bush and Michael claim the President has the right to do whatever he thinks is correct as long as he invents a “national security” connection — no matter how tenuous. That is power I am not willing to grant any President except under the direst immediate circumstances.
And even if that was the case immediately after 9-11, it is not the case now. There is no reason to grant such dangerous powers, especially to a President who has consistently proven himself unworthy of trust. Such power can only be granted to a man who is the equivalent of Plato’s philosopher-king, and we haven’t seen such a man in America for some time — maybe since Lincoln.
If we adopt a chicken-little mindset that the sky is falling and will continue to fall for as far as we can see into the future (as we have been told so often), and if we in our irrational fear grant such powers, we will turn America into a police state for as far as we can see into the future. We will be safe only so long as we surrender our freedom to Leader, and only he will decide when the danger ends. Wanna guess when that will be?
How ironic — Bush seems to has failed to bring democracy to Iraq, but he is succeeding in bringing dictatorship to America.
Tam O’Tellico - January 4, 2006 @ 5:42 pm
Speaking of irony, how ironic that Indians seem to be at last winning a battle with the Washington power elite — not that Indian tribes come out of the Abramof Affair smelling like a rose. Before this is all over, I predict that Bill Clinton will get dragged into this for he and his friends nefarious activites where tribal funds were concerned.
But all this palefaces in comparison to decades long direlection by the Dept of Interior, direlection that had the Dept held in contempt of federal court for some time. Here’s more on the story:
The Catholic Reporter
Issue Date: September 30, 2005
MISMANAGED INDIAN TRUST IS A SCANDAL
By PATRICIA POWERS
The extended Bruno family, members of the Potawatomi tribe, tended large gardens of vegetables and fruits and raised chickens, hogs and cows. On Sundays the whole family attended the Sacred Heart Catholic Mission just down the road. [Then oil was discovered on the 80-acre homestead near Shawnee, Okla.] Lease agreements were arranged with oil producers, wells were dug, and pumping began in 1939. But family members say Grandpa Bruno never knew how much oil and gas were being taken out of his land or how much money he was due from their sale” (TIME, Jan. 26, 2004).
Most low-income people have no assets, but many American Indians are land rich and dirt poor. Since their land holdings either contain resources, produce revenues from timber sales or gas/oil production, or are leased for farming or ranching, this is a curious anomaly. The explanation lies in the Allotment Act of 1887, which required revenues generated from Indian trust land to be managed by the federal government. Although the government has collected about $13 billion for people with Individual Indian Money accounts, it is unable to show how much it paid out to them. A bank without full accounting records would be shut down. A trustee pilfering private funds would be in jail. Congress has documented but ignored this scandal since 1915.
Elouise Cobell of the Blackfeet tribe grew up in a home with no electricity, running water or telephone. She remembers her parents and grandparents puzzling about royalty checks that were less than expected and ones that did not arrive. How could they determine what profits or proceeds they should be receiving without proper financial statements? And there was no recourse, such as changing banks or appealing to banking regulators, as there would be with a private bank.
As tribal treasurer, Ms. Cobell filed a class action suit in 1996 to obtain an accounting of the 11 million acres held in trust for individual Native Americans. Since then, Federal Judge Royce Lamberth, a Republican appointee, has ruled that the government is accountable and must pay interest on monies owed because the Department of the Interior flagrantly mismanaged Indian trust funds and neglected its fiduciary duties.
The century of stalling meant the money owed increased exponentially and no administration wants to pay the billions back on its watch. Thus, both the Clinton administration and the current Bush administration tried to derail the Indian trust fund lawsuit. A Jan. 26, 2004, editorial in The New York Times called the refusal to pay half a million Native Americans what is rightfully theirs “a continuing shame.” Compared to a scandal of comparable size such as Enron, the federal government’s egregious conduct has been hidden from the public.
The injustice is of such momentous moral, legal and financial importance that Indians took out a May 10 advertisement in The Washington Post appealing to the American people for help. In it, Elouise Cobell explains, “This is our land and our money. This is not an entitlements program. … Millions of dollars of taxpayer funds are paid to private attorneys to defend the misconduct of government officials in this litigation. At the same time, the government retaliates against anyone who attempts to clean up this scandal — including the federal judge. … Tell President Bush and Congress that it is time to stop this scandal and remove this stain on our nation’s honor” (www.indiantrust.com).
For humanitarian reasons, this appeal cannot be ignored any more than pleas of hurricane victims could be cold-shouldered. For contractual reasons, this debt cannot be ignored any more than a debt owed to England or Japan could be brushed off. This is real money owed to real people.
Detaining Indian families in poverty by refusing to give them their money is an ethical matter. Native Americans are too small a group to obtain justice on their own. The religious community must demand redress before more Indian elders die without receiving a penny. There is an off-budget Claims Judgment Fund to use when the government makes mistakes or is held liable. With a plan to tap that fund, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., have introduced the Indian Trust Reform Act of 2005 to return billions and to prevent future mismanagement.
Patricia Powers serves on the Friends Committee on National Legislation (www.fcnl.org), a Quaker lobby in the public interest that has existed since 1943.
Michael Herdegen - January 4, 2006 @ 10:32 pm
[T]he RNC spent more than $722,000 defending this outrage. Imagine how many hungry people that might have fed instead.
About 1,500 families.
Tam O’Tellico - January 4, 2006 @ 10:39 pm
Or dinner for a dozen Congressional fat-cats.
lonbud - January 5, 2006 @ 1:03 pm
Great link to the Heifer site, Michael. It should be pointed out that such a gift wouldn’t only feed those 1500 families for a single sumptuous meal, it would give them an opportunity to feed themselves for many meals to come.
The mindless greed and waste endemic to our much-ballyhooed society is enough to make a grown man cry.
Tam O’Tellico - January 5, 2006 @ 7:29 pm
lonbud, your are not alone; grown men are weeping in the mountains of West Virginia, too.
Little did I know that my recent post Canary in a Coal Mine would be so tragically prophetic, especially tragic since such “accidents” are so often preventable — if management cared about safety concerns. As the NY Times reported, the operators of the Sago mine did not:
“The mine, with more than 270 safety citations in the last two years, is the latest example of how workers’ risks are balanced against company profits in an industry with pervasive political clout and patronage inroads in government regulatory agencies. Many of the Sago citations were serious enough to potentially set off accidental explosions and shaft collapses, and more than a dozen involved violations that mine operators knew about but failed to correct, according to government records. Sadly, in the way mines are often run, the $24,000 in fines paid by the Sago managers last year constituted little more than the cost of doing business. In the Appalachian routine, miners balking at risky conditions down below can quickly forfeit their livelihood if they have no union protection.”
Such callous disregard for the safety is one reason the mining industry has the awful reputation it richly deserves. Were it not for the efforts of unions that insist on safety measures, things might very well be as bad or worse than they were in the “good old days” before unions. For Michael’s benefit, here are the statistics:
“From 1911 through 1997, approximately 103,000 miners died at work. During 1911-1915, an average of 3329 mining-related deaths occurred per year among approximately 1 million miners employed annually, with an average annual fatality rate of 329 per 100,000 miners.”
As I suggested in my previous piece, the death of unions, a death of a thousand blows, but one certainly hurried by Ronald Reagan and the Supply-Side Trickle-Downers, will see the working class inexorably dragged down into the pits again and left for dead in the capitalist jungle.
Want proof? For starters, the minimum wage has remained stagnant for the longest period in its existence. Meanwhile, executive compensation has reached its highest ratio in history. For a telling expose of what that ratio means, read In Search of Excess, by Graef S. Crystal.
I dont’ know whose quote it is, but it has stayed with me: “Communism is the exploitation of man by man; captitalism is the opposite.”
Michael Herdegen - January 6, 2006 @ 2:38 pm
The mindless greed and waste endemic to our much-ballyhooed society is enough to make a grown man cry.
On that point we are in complete and total agreement.
Tam O’Tellico:
As you are no doubt aware, part of the problem with the coal mining industry in general, and coal miners’ unions in particular, is that coal has become much less important to America, and consequently, fetches LESS MONEY.
Since 1900, MOST coal mining companies have gone out of business, and many fewer miners are working in the field. Still, 27% of miners belong to a union, which is double the percentage for the American workforce as a whole.
Further, NOTHING prevents coal miners, miners in general, or West Virginians from moving to where the livin’ is easier.
If you like to live in West Virginia, fine, but why should I care if you’re struggling to get by ?
In America, people live where they do BY CHOICE, and are free to move anytime they please.
Having said that, however, maybe there’s a reason that the down-trodden coal miners of West Virginia stay ?
Could it be because THEY’RE VERY WELL PAID ??
Nationally, the average earnings of nonsupervisory workers in coal mining are over $ 53,000/yr.
That’s higher than the median wages of people in management, or with college degrees :
Persons employed full time in managerial, professional, and related occupations had the highest median weekly earnings. For men, the median was $1,056 while for women it was $755.
Median weekly earnings for college graduates, total: Men $1,089, women $809
In West Virginia in particular, the median annual income for people in blue-collar mining jobs is $ 39,000, whereas the 2004 Median Household Income for West Virginians was $33,300.
[T]the minimum wage has remained stagnant for the longest period in its existence.
Here’s why.
[T]he working class [will be] inexorably dragged down into the pits again and left for dead in the capitalist jungle.
Ahhhh…. No.
By 2030, the American GNP will probably be around $ 20 trillion (+/- 10%), in today’s dollars, and require a workforce of at least 170 million people.
However, by that time 90%+ of the 78 million Baby Boomers will have retired, and only about 50 million new American-born workers will have entered the workforce, leaving a shortage of 45 million workers.
The effects will begin to be apparent in 2015, or sooner.
Results ?
Massive immigration, vastly increased automation, poorer customer service, and jobs for anyone with a pulse.
Not necessarily great jobs, since education will become increasingly important, but living-wage jobs, and anyone with any kind of ambition, educated or not, will do well.
lonbud - January 6, 2006 @ 9:05 pm
All that trenchant statistical analysis predicting boom times ahead misses the point that, no matter how much or how little you pay them, putting people into working conditions in blatant violation of safety laws and regulations is criminal. The owners of the Sago mine should be stripped of their last dime and sent to prison for the rest of their lives.