Still going after all these years.
… on a community blog that gathers state level political news from around the country, the mellifluously named “Political State Report.” Greg is covering Georgia with all the skill, thoroughness and wit that he customarily brings to the Green[e]house Effect. Suggestion to Greg: ain’t nothing wrong with reposting your stuff from Polstate over to the home blog.
Reading Polstate is like reading the political pages of every decent newspaper all over the country, only a thousand times better.
NY Times: Lott to Resign as Senate Republican Leader. This leaves Bill Frist as a potential front runner for the leadership post.
Paranoid conspiracy thought: did Lott get pushed out so the White House could install a more friendly majority leader to push its agenda through the White House? What is Lott’s record with respect to Bush’s policies?
True confession: posting the “win without war” petition link has gotten me a ton of traffic over the next two days; mostly because I’m the number 2 hit for that search on Google and the number one hit exceeded his ISP’s traffic quota. So far there has been a minimal amount of feedback on the piece, though: no comments, two emails, one for and one against.
The one that didn’t like what I was doing—well, I hesitate to say this reader opposed the petition because it’s not apparent that the reader read it.
It is amazing to me how this was not a petition when Clinton went on his “little” bombing runs. It would do you and the people that think like you to realize that President Bush doesn’t want to go to war. We are dealing with a man that is providing weapons and funding to people that don’t want to hug us. They want us dead. Have faith in this President and believe he has evidence to support his position. He will release prior to any war action.
I have a brother, brother-in-law, and many friends that are active military and would definitely be called up. I would rather not go to war. However, they all volunteered are proud and willing to do what it takes to support their country. The victims and families of the WTC didn’t have that choice. Thank goodness our fore-fathers had a stronger backbone then you and the people like you. Thank goodness there was no Hollywood when this great country you live in and benefit from was founded!
Hmm. Last time I checked there wasn’t a reference to Hollywood in either the petition or in anything I wrote. Last time I checked, I didn’t suggest anything more radical than that President Bush let due process take its course. If I, and the signers of this petition, display a little cynicism about whether Bush has sufficient evidence to go to war and are reluctant to trust him without seeing it, I would argue it’s only a natural consequence of this administration’s reluctance to trust the American public with other information about its workings, such as the records of meetings with energy industry executives while creating the Bush energy plan. Or why Cheney is blasting big holes in the grounds of the Naval Observatory, in a residential and ambassadorial neighborhood.
Finally, my reader claims higher privilege by invoking friends and relatives on active duty. I have friends on active duty too, and I don’t presume to speak for them. But you might want to have a gander at the words of Lawrence Kida (son of a twice wounded WWII Marine) in the Seattle Times editorial page, who points out: “Can someone please explain to me why I am being told there is distinct proof of Iraqi involvement in ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ yet when the State Department is queried as to specifics, the reply is that the burden of proof rests on the government of Iraq?”
Esta hits two topics this morning that are near and dear to my heart: Trent Lott’s retraction of his idiotic statement saying the country would have been better off with a segregationist president and churches that are supportive of gay and lesbian rights.
The latter is particularly close to my mind right now, as we are in the process of trying to find a church home out here in Seattle. Lisa and I didn’t find too many Presbyterian churches in Boston and went Congregationalist there. Trying to find a Presbyterian church out here, I’m butting up against the growing divide in the denomination over gay rights. (There’s a really good history of the church’s positions on gays in ministry here; it doesn’t cover an amendment to the PCUSA constitution from last summer that is in the process of being considered by all the churches in the denomination.) I have too many gay and lesbian friends who are better Christians than I to consider membership in a church that would not accept them as a minister, elder, or deacon. Accordingly, I’m having to scrutinize each church’s website and weed out the ones that have taken actions such as joining the Confessing Church Movement.
I feel a little sick having to go through and do this, and tired of having to use this issue as a litmus test. But I feel I’ve been given little choice. These churches don’t represent the same faith I grew up in.
I’m generally skeptical about the usefulness of Internet petitions. However, I think the organizers of the petition to Let the Inspections Work at MoveOn.org have the right idea about how to make a petition useful. They’re taking out a full page ad in the New York Times on Monday, and they’ll be including the number of petition signatories in the ad.
Take a minute and go to the petition. I think the petition letter below and at the link sends a balanced message about the situation in Iraq:
TO: President Bush
CC: Secretary of State Powell and U.N. Secretary General Kofi AnnanSUBJECT: Please Let the Inspections Work
Dear Mr. President,
On October 11, the U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution on Iraq that authorizes you to use war as a last resort — if and only if diplomacy fails to accomplish the U.S.’s national goals.We are concerned that you found Iraq’s response “not encouraging” when the inspectors had only been at work for a week and so far had not encountered Iraqi obstruction.
In this context, we are also concerned by your Administration’s repeated attempts to frame Iraqi anti-aircraft fire within the no-fly-zone as a material breach of the resolution. As U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and other U.N. diplomats have pointed out, the resolution clearly excludes such events from its jurisdiction.
The United States has made a commitment to approaching the danger that Saddam Hussein poses through the international community. The resumption of the inspections regime is a triumph for the U.S., international law and multilateralism. But the United States will lose all credibility with its allies if it appears that it will go to war regardless of the inspections’ success. And by alienating and infuriating allies through unilateral action, the U.S. could throw the success of the campaign against terrorism into jeopardy.
Mr. President, it appears that your administration is looking for an excuse to go to war, when a peaceful and just solution may be at hand. We ask that you live up to your word and give diplomacy a chance.
We can win without war.
The only possible question that can be asked about the resignations of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey today is: what took so long? Did our president wake up this morning and say, “The economy is in the toilet. Guess I better do something”? Was that news to him?
I like the New York Times’ coverage best, including the list of O’Neill’s gaffes. “If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear is really very good.” Is that like saying, If you set aside unemployment, deficit spending, and recession, the economic record of the second Bush administration is really very good?
I should post a link to the other article that set me off this morning, also in the Washington Post: “In Terror War, 2nd Track for Suspects: Those Designated ‘Combatants’ Lose Legal Protections.” The Post is coming around to points that I started making last year:
…under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen’s home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it.
The article says that part of the debate is about who gets to declare someone an enemy combatant. The administration wants the power to reside solely in the president, with no checks save re-election. Says Solicitor General Theodore Olson: “Who will finally decide [whether the decision to designate someone an enemy combatant is a right or just decision]? Will it be a judge, or will it be the president of the United States, elected by the people, specifically to perform that function, with the capacity to have the information at his disposal with the assistance of those who work for him?”
Personally I think the Constitution has been pretty clear from the start that the job of the judiciary is to make the decision that the executive branch is acting rightly and justly. But then, what do I know? I’m just a Grouchy Blogger.
I have been deliberately not blogging about matters political, including our charming Attorney General Singin’ John Ashcroft, for a while. But the latest report in the Washington Post, that Ashcroft urged his staffers to deny FOIA requests, tipped me over the edge.
The story is bad enough. The Justice Department has in the past withheld data that it knew made its positions untenable, including enforcement of gun laws (Reno) and failure to prosecute terrorism cases (Ashcroft); now it’s implicitly promising its staffers that they will be shielded and supported if they decide to deny a FOIA request in part or whole, thus institutionalizing the denial of access to data that could prove it acted in error. The subtext is scarier. It is emblematic of the Bush Administration’s, and Ashcroft’s blatant disregard of the laws and Constitutional framing that they have sworn to uphold that Ashcroft has reversed the direction of the previous administration to consider all government information public unless there is a pressing need to keep the information secret. The author of the article, James Grimaldi, writes, “Justice Department bureaucrats, with Ashcroft’s blessing, are trying to muzzle the watchdogs.” It seems to me that that’s not all they’re trying to do.
John Ashcroft is conspiring, with the complicity of the Bush administration, to draw a dark cloak of secrecy over the workings of government. At the same time, he is lifting all the restraints that have kept our government from trampling the rights that our founding fathers fought for.
Now is the time to act. Write your congressman. If they’re a member of the Republican majority, maybe they’ll stop serving in Bush’s chorus long enough to think about what they’re signing up the country for. If they’re in the Democratic minority, maybe they’ll have an awakening of conscience and start acting like a principled, visionary opposition party.
But act. Before Bush and Ashcroft succeed in making dissent illegal.
Esta is doing her Thanksgiving blogging a day early, and gives thanks for a long list, including the keiretsu, our Pop-pop, and Parliament, among others.
I’m thankful too, for:
… of erosion of civil rights, strong arm international politics, and failure to respond intelligently to terrorism.
Of course, we remember what happened the last time the Republicans controlled both houses, right?
Biggest regrets so far:
Esta: Vote.
“If you don’t vote you’re a heinous wreck of a human being, and small children will point at you with horror and run away screaming.
Plus you won’t have the right to complain, and we all know that that’s no fun.
So vote.
Don’t make me tell you again.”
During my blogout yesterday, Larry Lessig argued his case against the Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998 in front of the Supreme Court. The case meaning what it does to the Net, there was a ton of coverage of various depth out there. My favorites include
Lots of interesting quotes abound, both from the actual arguments and from the commentary. For starters, Sandra Day O’Connor sums up the issues with the case when she says, “I can find a lot of fault with what Congress did…This flies directly in the face of what the framers of the Constitution had in mind, but is it unconstitutional?” (from the AP coverage).
Kwin seems to have the best summary of the entire arguments of both sides. He writes:
“Lessig has framed a very conservative argument. … Congress has retrospectively extended copyright — ie, granted term extension to existing (as opposed to new) works — numerous times. Doing so violates both of the constitutional limits on Congress’s copyright-granting powers.
“In addition, Lessig advances a second, separate argument that
extending the terms of existing copyright violates Freedom of Speech
protections under Article I, because the ‘restrictions on speech’ greatly outweigh any plausible societal ‘benefits.’ As I understand it, this test of restrictions/benefits is termed the ‘intermediate’
test under First Amendment law, and is the general test applied to
content-neutral regulation of speech.”
Kwin goes on to state that the Supremes challenged the first point mostly on what it would do to previous copyright term extensions (such as the 1976 extension), but essentially drilled the second point out of existence. This is going to disappoint a lot of the Internet folks who wanted a broader ruling about free speech from this case.
Kwin also writes,
“The one non-obvious tack Olson’s argument took was to continually emphasize that the ‘promot[ing] progress’ language wasn’t intended to apply just to authorship, but also to distribution. Making things widely available required that publishers have a strong economic interest in the copyright system. By implication, the 1998 law was intended to promote progress by strengthening publishers’ interest.”
This is an interesting argument and one that I didn’t see coming: argue that publishers really are adding value and as such are entitled to the same considerations as content creators. Justice Breyer aggressively questioned the economic rationale behind this point and asked whether the damage done directly and indirectly (by letting works fall out of circulation because finding the copyright holders would be too difficult) exceeded the “benefits” of the law.
It’s all fascinating. The fact that the Supremes implicitly acknowledged the real economic harm done by copyright extension and that the current practice of extending copyright without limits may violate the Constitution is encouraging. But I’ll leave it to Greg to do the legal handicapping.
more…
Greg points to the Al Gore speech and points out some interesting parallels between now and 1991, when the campaign was under way and Gore was part of a team hammering Senior about the economy.
Because of Greg’s link, I finally went back and read Gore’s speech. And I have to say, I’m actually pretty impressed. The speech echoes my thoughts of the past six months:
At this fateful juncture in our history it is vital that we see clearly who are our enemies, and that we deal with them. It is also important, however, that in the process we preserve not only ourselves as individuals, but our nature as a people dedicated to the rule of law …
What this doctrine does is to destroy the goal of a world in which states consider themselves subject to law, particularly in the matter of standards for the use of violence against each other. That concept would be displaced by the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States.
Follow up to my previous article: Greg reports that the Senate is sitting on Bush’s proposal to fight forest fires by giving the logging companies authority to clear old growth forests and immunity from enforcement suits under the National Environmental Policy Act. Tom Daschle has forced a “supermajority” vote to pass the bill, meaning that it won’t go anywhere for a while, if ever.
more…
…members of the Alabama GOP accused the Democratic governor there of wrangling an endorsement from Charlton Heston by taking advantage of his recent announcement that he had Alzheimer’s. I don’t know. According to the record, he was endorsed because of a strong pro-gun and pro-conservation record, Heston’s two hot buttons. The NRA is required by its charter, apparently, to give any candidate an endorsement who gets an A on their annual scorecard.
I don’t know if Heston was “grossly manipulated” by the Democrats, but I do think that State GOP Chairman Marty Connors (“a gross manipulation of Mr. Heston”) and Republican candidate Bob Riley’s campaign spokesman David Azbell (“you have got to wonder if people are acting in Mr. Heston’s best interests”) have together done more to destroy Heston’s political capital than his disease has.
more…