One provision would have made it clear that the president could order wiretapping without court supervision for 15 days after Congress approved the use of military force, as it did against al Qaeda. Current law allows such spying for 15 days without a judge's approval only when Congress issues a declaration of war.
Justice officials have argued more recently that the two types of declarations are legally equivalent.
I am no lawyer nor even a law student, but my layman's understand of things tells me that in the law specific phrases and concepts have specific meanings and can't always be interchanged. Though that doesn't mean the administration can't assert that things mean whatever they want it to mean, or atleast whatever they think the public might politically accept.
* At least some US soldiers are kidnapping the wives of men believed to be insurgents in an effort to leverage their husbands to turn themselves in. It's hard to tell from the article whether this practice is an example of isolated incidents on the ground or indicative of a more generally accepted method. Either way, I'm pretty sure it violates the words of the Geneva Conventions.
* NASA is trying to quiet one of its top scientists as he is speaking out against greenhouse emissions and their role in climate change. NASA's office of public affairs wants to "review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists." This is interesting too:
The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth "a different planet." The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.
What a coincidence, this happened soon after he directly criticized the administration. Hmmmm. That's strange.
* A conference is being held this week in Virgina about if there is a set of ethics for the espionage community, and if there is, what should it be. Sound like it would be damn interesting to attend, a real cross-section of moral philosophy and the nuts and bolts of geo-political trench warfare.
* The release of a video tape of two kidnapped Germans in Iraq is a sad reminder of not only how chaotic things seem to be over there, but also how helpless I feel in the face of it over here.
* This is everywhere over the liberal blogosphere, but I'll post it too. The Bush Administration has backed an Iran introduced motion to deny two gay rights groups a voice in the UN.
* It does seem that the Left blogosphere is not going to allow the Right Wing Noise Machine to be the only team in town working the media refs. Part of me recoils at playing with the fire of right wing tactics, part of me punches that other part of me and screams "it's about time we had our own watchers watching the watchers." I'm remind of something Todd Gitlin said in a recent Nation article about Campus Progress:
I asked the former president of Students for a Democratic Society, Todd Gitlin, now a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, for his thoughts about the trends on the new student left. "I think there's a desire for results, a hard-bitten realism," says Gitlin. "The primary goal is not some sort of symbolic display, or some sort of posture or attitude, but results. If that's what it means, then I applaud the turn to practicality. Today the far right is in charge, and I don't think you can create the possibility of broad-based radicalism until you defeat the far right. Put the center in power and then you have the possibility--or the luxury--of radicalism."
Seems to be the trend for Progessives at the moment. First we need to push back, then once we've gained our ground, we can advocate for the policies we think are better. Of course this involves many factors, including the battles over narratives in the news cycle and the battle for voters in elections. (sorry for the overuse of the war analogy, I know it's a sign of weak word choice.)
* Here's an article in The Post about some of the tensions between activist liberal blogs and more traditional Democratic insiders. My first impression is that the article creates the impression of the blogosphere as a monolithic entity, when really it is all kinds of people approaching things from all kinds of angles. I don't deny that there is coordination between some blogs on some issues, but I'd classify that as a case by case basis. In the instance of complaining about the choice of Tim Kaine to voice the Democrats pushback of the State of the Union, I definitely didn't see that as a unified criticism in the blogs, though there certainly was plenty of outcry. Also, the author of the article, Jim VandeHei, groups Code Pink in with the blogs because they use their website as part of their activism, but from what I can tell, they don't actually have a blog, and unlike most blogs, they are an organization brought together specifically for activism, while blogs are more like a citizen's group gathered at a local bar to discuss politics (see Drinking Liberally). A website is not the same as a blog, or at least, a blog is a specific kind of website. Most press discussions about blogs that I have read have not given the sense of blogs that I get from reading them. Perhaps the best discussion of the political potential for progressive blogs that I have read is this essay by Peter Daou, Kerry's point man on blog outreach and the creator of the Daou Report.
* And finally, in other news, Skye Friday triumphantly returns!
- Glitter
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