McClatchy’s Matt Stearns on the debate surrounding U.S. policy towards Iran:
Taking military action against Iran could put President Bush on a collision course with Congress, leading Democrats and a Republican lawmaker cautioned Friday following Bush’s threat of unspecified consequences for alleged Iranian meddling in Iraq.
It’s been the consensus for months among the Democrats who hold the majority that Bush must get congressional authorization before any military strike.
But the authorization would be no easy sell. Two knowledgeable U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because intelligence on Iran is highly classified, said that the administration so far doesn’t have “smoking-gun” evidence that could be used publicly to justify an air attack.
Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he expects the administration to request authorization before taking action.
“I doubt the President could or would do so without coming to Congress,” he said.
Right, because if there’s one thing we’ve seen from the Bush gang, it’s a willingness to respect congressional authorization, confirmation, and notification, particularly on matters of foreign policy and national security.
More U.S. cities will soon have more cameras watching more Americans.
The Department of Homeland Security is funneling millions of dollars to local governments nationwide for purchasing high-tech video camera networks, accelerating the rise of a “surveillance society” in which the sense of freedom that stems from being anonymous in public will be lost, privacy rights advocates warn.
Since 2003, the department has handed out some $23 billion in federal grants to local governments for equipment and training to help combat terrorism. Most of the money paid for emergency drills and upgrades to basic items, from radios to fences. But the department also has doled out millions on surveillance cameras, transforming city streets and parks into places under constant observation.
How much surveillance are we talking about here? Thanks to generous homeland security grants, St. Paul, Minn., will have 60 new cameras for its downtown; Madison, Wis., will have a 32-camera network; and Pittsburgh is adding 83 cameras to its downtown. Those are just from announcements regarding big cities over the last month.
And what about smaller towns? They’re getting in on the fun, too.
Recent examples include Liberty, Kan. (population 95), which accepted a federal grant to install a $5,000 G2 Sentinel camera in its park, and Scottsbluff, Neb. (population 14,000), where police used a $180,000 Homeland Security Department grant to purchase four closed-circuit digital cameras and two monitors, a system originally designed for Times Square in New York City.
“Being able to collect this much data on people is going to be very powerful, and it opens people up for abuses of power,” said Jennifer King, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies privacy and technology. “The problem with explaining this scenario is that today it’s a little futuristic. [A major loss of privacy] is a low risk today, but five years from now it will present a higher risk.”
George Will takes Senate Dems to task today for their opposition to Leslie Southwick’s nomination to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. In the process, Will plays a little fast and loose with the facts.
[B]ecause [Southwick] is a white Mississippian, many liberals consider him fair game for unfairness. Many say his defect is “insensitivity,” an accusation invariably made when specific grievances are few and flimsy.
Obama, touching all the Democratic nominating electorate’s erogenous zones, concocts a tortured statistic about Southwick’s “disappointing record on cases involving consumers, employees, racial minorities, women and gays and lesbians. After reviewing his 7,000 opinions, Judge Southwick could not find one case in which he sided with a civil rights plaintiff in a non-unanimous verdict.” Surely the pertinent question is whether Southwick sided with the law.
First, the notion that Dems oppose a judicial nominee because he’s white is ridiculous, even by Will’s standards. Second, Will is missing the point of the 7,000-case example.
As Emily Bazelon recently explained, during Southwick’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked Southwick to name an example of an unpopular decision he made in which he favored the little guy — “a poor person, or a member of a minority group, or someone who’d simply turned to the courts for help.” Southwick couldn’t name a single case.
Will’s argument is that Southwick’s concern as a jurist should be for the law, not the downtrodden. Perhaps. But in hearing 7,000 cases over several years, Southwick’s reading of the law seemed remarkably one-sided — he always favored powerful interests. What a coincidence that the law was so consistently on their side.
Bazelon added, “Southwick voted ‘against the injured party and in favor of business interests’ in 160 of 180 cases that gave rise to a dissent and that involved employment law and injury-based suits for damages. When one judge on a panel dissents in a case, there’s an argument it could come out either way, which makes these cases a good measure of how a judge thinks when he’s got some legal leeway. In such cases, Judge Southwick almost never favors the rights of workers or people who’ve suffered discrimination or been harmed by a shoddy product.”
Opposition to Southwick’s nomination has nothing to do with him being “a white Mississippian.” Will surely knows better.
Mitt Romney got the win he wanted out of the Ames Straw Poll, but it came at a high price — more than $400 per vote (nearly eight times the cost per vote for second-place finisher Mike Huckabee). That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Saturday Roundup.
Fans of the “All Muck is Local” feature on TPM Muckraker will enjoy the latest edition, featuring a wild story out of West Virginia. In 2002, State Senator Oshel Craigo (D-W.Va.) was defeated by Lisa Smith (R), thanks in large part to accusations that Craigo was under a federal investigation for falsely filing a campaign finance report. Charges were never brought, but it didn’t matter — the rumors sunk his campaign.
As it turns out, the same time his Republican challenger was making accusations of criminal wrongdoing, she was also apparently committing tax fraud and submitting false campaign finance statements. She was later indicted — but was briefly declared mentally unfit for trial.
It’s quite a story. Take a look.
In describing the resent FISA “revisions,” Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter gets shrill.
I hate to sound melodramatic about it, but while everyone was at the beach or “The Simpsons Movie” on the first weekend in August, the U.S. government shredded the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the one requiring court-approved “probable cause” before Americans can be searched or spied upon. This is not the feverish imagination of left-wing bloggers and the ACLU. It’s the plain truth of where we’ve come as a country, at the behest of a president who has betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution and with the acquiescence of Democratic congressional leaders who know better. Historians will likely see this episode as a classic case of fear — both physical and political — trumping principle amid the ancient tension between personal freedom and national security. […]
Democrats obtained a sunset clause that requires the whole thing to be reauthorized in six months. But real damage has been done. At a minimum, we have suspended the Fourth Amendment for the time being.
That sums things up quite nicely, actually. In related news…
* Anonymous Liberal explains why the new FISA law is even worse than it sounds.
* The Washington Post offers a fascinating tick-tock account of how the legislation was proposed, debated, and passed.
* The New York Times editorial board accuses the Bush White House of intentionally keeping the details muddled so as to mislead lawmakers and the public.
* And Kevin Drum wades through the details to discover that there is “virtually no oversight on NSA’s data collection at all.”
The LAT had an interesting item today, speculating about whether presidential candidate Fred Thompson will follow Senate candidate Thompson’s style, and campaign in his favorite prop.
Thompson was the front runner for the GOP nomination [in the late spring of 1994], but Rep. Jim Cooper, his presumed Democratic opponent, had a big lead in the polls, greater name recognition and a lot more money. Thompson was in the doldrums.
“He was a very unhappy candidate,” said political consultant Tom Ingram, who masterminded the campaign. “He was complaining about all the Republican events — the coffees and teas and chicken dinners. So I said, ‘What would you like to do?’ ”
Thompson, the son of a used-car dealer who had grown up in modest circumstances, told Ingram he would like to get a truck and drive around the state meeting people. Up to that point, Thompson had been tooling around Tennessee in a Lincoln Town Car. “So why don’t you do that?” said Ingram.
As the piece explained, Thompson hopped in an old red pickup and won voters over with his folksy charm, accentuated by the prop.
Now, the LAT includes some perspectives from Thompson detractors, who characterize the actor/lobbyist/senator as a “phony,” and the truck as a cynical “gimmick,” but as long as this story continues to circulate, it’s probably worth reminding folks of the details. The problem isn’t just that Thompson drove an old red pickup as a shameless ploy; it’s that he didn’t really drive the old red pickup at all.
Way back in 1996, Michelle Cottle explained the reality.
True story: it is a warm evening in the summer of 1995. A crowd has gathered in the auditorium of a suburban high school in Knoxville, Tennessee. Seated in the audience is a childhood friend of mine who now teaches at the school. On stage is Republican Sen. Fred Dalton Thompson, the lawyer/actor elected in 1994 to serve out the remainder of Vice President Al Gore’s Senate term (when Gore’s appointed successor retired after just two years). The local TV stations are on hand as Thompson wraps up his presentation on tax reform, in the plain-spoken, down-to-earth style so familiar to those who have seen him in any of his numerous film and television performances.
Finishing his talk, Thompson shakes a few hands, then walks out with the rest of the crowd to the red pickup truck he made famous during his 1994 Senate campaign. My friend stands talking with her colleagues as the senator is driven away by a blond, all-American staffer. A few minutes later, my friend gets into her car to head home. As she pulls up to the stop sign at the parking lot exit, rolling up to the intersection is Senator Thompson, now behind the wheel of a sweet silver luxury sedan. He gives my friend a slight nod as he drives past. Turning onto the main road, my friend passes the school’s small, side parking area. Lo and behold: There sits the abandoned red pickup, along with the all-American staffer.
Thompson didn’t even drive the thing — as Kevin Drum recently noted, “Basically, he just drove the thing the final few hundred feet before each campaign event, and then ditched it for something nicer as soon as he was out of sight of the yokels.”
Expect to hear quite a bit more of this in the coming weeks, after Thompson makes his announcement.
The Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon caused quite a stir a couple of weeks ago with an NYT op-ed, co-written with Ken Pollack, on U.S. “progress” in Iraq. The piece immediately became The Most Important Opinion Piece Ever, at least as far as Bush and his supporters are concerned.
The two, who recently returned from an eight-day visit to Iraq, argued that U.S. forces are “finally getting somewhere in Iraq.” O’Hanlon and Pollack added that they were “surprised by the gains” they saw, and now believe there’s a potential for “sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.”
The White House, GOP presidential candidates, and the rest of the GOP establishment embraced the op-ed as gospel — and proof that any talk about troop withdrawal is premature. After all, the right said, O’Hanlon and Pollack work for the “liberal” Brookings Institution, and are “critics” of the war.
Within a few days of the NYT op-ed being published, the two started backpedaling just a bit, conceding the lack of political progress in Iraq, which was, of course, the original point of the surge. O’Hanlon shed additional light on his perspective in a fascinating interview with Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, which was published today.
The whole thing is worth reading, but Glenn emphasized a point that was omitted in the original Times piece, and went largely unmentioned in the ensuing coverage: O’Hanlon’s and Pollack’s perspective was shaped in large part by what the Pentagon allowed them to see.
GG: The first line of your Op-Ed said: “viewed from Iraq where we just spent the last eight days interviewing American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel…” How did you arrange the meetings with the Iraqi military and civilian personnel?
MO: Well, a number of those — and most of those were arranged by the U.S. military. So I’ll be transparent about that as well. These were to some extent contacts of Ken and Tony, but that was a lesser number of people. The predominant majority were people who we came into contact with through the itinerary the D.O.D. developed.
It’s a very informative interview. Be sure to take a look.
The Post is starting us off right this week with a story about PACs that do little but raise money to raise more money and keep the staff employed — which leads to an analysis the Posties did of ex-everything-and-nothing Linda Chavez’s network of political action committees with names like “Republican Issues Committee, the Latino Alliance, Stop Union Political Abuse and the Pro-Life Campaign Committee.”
Here’s the key passage …
Of the $24.5 million raised by the PACs from January 2003 to December 2006, $242,000 — or 1 percent — was passed on to politicians, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal election reports. The PACs spent even less — $151,236 — on independent political activity, such as mailing pamphlets.
Instead, most of the donations were channeled back into new fundraising efforts, and some were used to provide a modest but steady source of income for Chavez and four family members, who served as treasurers and consultants to the committees. Much of the remaining funds went to pay for expenses such as furniture, auto repairs and insurance, and rent for the Sterling office the groups share. Even Chavez’s health insurance was paid for a time from political donations.
“I guess you could call it the family business,” Chavez said in an interview.
The Post notes that this is not illegal: a political has-been may under current election law run a network of political rip-off operations to squeeze money from witless ideological compatriots. You can look it up.
But this left me wondering: how did they manage to burn through that money? With simple arithmetic even I can manage we can see that well under half a million dollars went to anything that can be considered “political action”, as in political action committee. And that leaves over $24 million raised over 4 years. So $6 million a year on operating expenses and salaries for Chavez, her husband and sundry offspring.
The answer? Oddly enough not all that much of that money seems to have gone to Chavez and her husband and sons. Evidence turned up by the FEC suggests that the telemarketing solicitation firm they contracted with kept as much as 95% of the money raised on the PACs’ behalf.
In other words, the PACs, rather than being cash cows for the Chavez clan, seem mainly to have been in the business of making money for the telemarketing firm. So where’d they get their money? For their own salaries, the Chavez family relied mainly on their nonprofits like One Nation Indivisible and Stop Union Political Abuse.
Along the way there were apparently many sojourns into unwitting parody — as when one mailing from a Chavez anti-union PAC concluded: “If we stop now, the terrorists win.”
As a special bonus, the article includes a thumbnail sketch of the the ups and downs of life in the capital for Chavez and husband Christopher Gersten.
It seems that as the Reagan-Bush years were winding down and the air whizzed out of the Chavez publicity balloon, the family fell on somewhat hard times. After Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, Chavez and Gersten were running a Mexican restaurant in the DC suburbs “with Chavez taping television interviews on politics during the day and working the cash register at night.” The restaurant went broke. But as luck would have it, as Gersten recalls, that was around the time the “partial birth abortion” crusade picked up steam.
So as the eatery was tanking, Chavez and Gersten rode the partial-birth wave into financial security in the phony PAC and nonprofit racket. First there was the Institute for Religious Values, then the Pro-Life Campaign Committee. By the time the Bush years rolled around, they were operating a one family Keiretsu of public policy bamboozlement.
Give this article a read. It’s the kind of thing that should make these two embarrassed to ever show their face in Washington again. But that’s not how it works down there.