Lilies of the Field

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I’ve lost track of how many billions of dollars have been spent on Hurricane Katrina. But because the world is what it is, it’s a certainty that some people are getting rich. And some people aren’t.

Manuel Roig-Franzia wrote in today’s Washington Post,

The come-on was irresistible: Hop in the truck. Go to New Orleans. Make a pile of cash.

Arturo jumped at it. Since that day when he left Houston, more than two months ago, he has slept on the floors of moldy houses, idled endlessly at day-laborer pickup stops and second-guessed himself nearly every minute. …

… Arturo, a dour Mexican from Michoacan who did not want to disclose his last name for fear of deportation, stands at the nexus of the post-Hurricane Katrina labor crisis in New Orleans. A city desperate for workers is filling with desperate workers who either cannot find jobs or whose conditions are so miserable, and whose salaries are so low, that they become discouraged and leave.

Why would this be true? There’s a bunch of money, there’s work that needs to be done, there’s a whole mess of people — legal workers — who are out of work and need paychecks. Why are these elements not coming together harmoniously?

Part of the equation, we are told, is that the illegals are willing to take jobs that the native-born are unwilling to do. But let’s look:

At a New Orleans town hall meeting in Atlanta, displaced black civil rights activist Carl Galmon complained: “They’re bringing in foreign workers from South America, Central America and Mexico, paying them $5 an hour sometimes for 80 hours a week. They are undercutting the American labor force in New Orleans.”…

…For those who find work, conditions can be abominable, with laborers such as Rico Barrios and his wife, Guadalupe Garcia, slashing through the cough-inducing mold on walls in flooded Lakeview with only thin masks to shield their lungs, even though she is pregnant. “It’s hard,” said Barrios, who is from Mexico City, his face glistening with sweat.

Call me crazy, but seems to me that if some contractor offered a living wage and safer working conditions — proper masks come to mind — and helped workers find housing, then I bet they’d get plenty of applications. These contractors are getting billions in federal contracts. It’s not like these are startup companies operating at a loss until they get products on the shelves. They’re being paid to provide a service.

Seems to me the law of supply and demand would push those paychecks up a little higher. Why would anybody in America be expected to ruin their health for $5 an hour?

Roig-Franzia interviewed a number of bureaucrats and contractors who called for a change in the law so that “guest workers” like Arturo could be brought into the country legally. But I keep thinking that if the goal is to bring New Orleans back to life — which may not be the goal the Bush Administration has in mind, but let’s pretend — wouldn’t it make sense to be sure some of those billions of federal dollars were used to pay decent wages to a whole lot of American citizens who need jobs? Who would then turn around and use their wages to buy groceries and shoes and toasters and thereby help retail businesses get back on their feet?

Whenever you hear some well-manicured white guy say “our people won’t take the hard jobs, so we have to bring in foreign workers,” what he’s really saying is that “our people” aren’t desperate enough to be exploited like slaves.

In fact, according to this article in last week’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a whole lot of native-born Americans are hard at work cleaning up after Katrina:

Drivers from across the country have come to cash in on the cleanup.

“We ain’t getting rich, but we’re working seven days a week,” said Tommy Whitley, who arrived from St. Augustine, Fla., three months ago. “They’re supposed to let us go home a couple of days before Christmas.” …

… A subculture of entrepreneurs has sprung up in response.

Hundreds of homemade signs advertising cleanup and “home gutting” services are nailed to power poles, bearing phone numbers like “1-888-AID-MOLD.”

Some of these workers are working for contractors. But one suspects a lot of enterprising Americans went into business for themselves because they wouldn’t take $5 an hour.

I know the big shots are always going to try to maximize their personal profits by getting labor as cheaply as they can. But I can’t believe we’re even talking about bringing in foreign workers to work for $5 an hour. This is insane.

They Hate Our Freedoms

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Mouthpieces for the VRWC are warning darkly that challenges to the President’s powers will not be tolerated. They are calling for an investigation … of the New York Times. It is legal for the executive branch to secretly authorize spying on citizens, because the White House says so.

Bottom line: Righties hate our freedoms.

Today’s Self-Parody Award goes to the blog Let Freedom Ring, which proudly displays the blurb “The blog where pursuing liberty is everything.” You guessed it — the blogger declares that Bush has the power to wiretap without oversight, and the “leakers” at the New York Times need to be investigated.

I’m listening to the Usual Bobbleheads on ABC’s This Week, however, and even Cokie, Sam, George, and George et al. understand that Bush is engaging in a dangerous usurpation of power. They are assuming Bush meant well by it but is in the wrong nonetheless. When these boneheads get a clue, you know the Right is experiencing a massive talking point failure.

What’s more interesting to me is that the wiretap story has sucked all the air out of the Iraqi election story. We’ve not been reduced to absolute despotism, yet. So do your bit and write your representative and senators to let them know you believe the Constitution still applies.

Today the argument turns on whether the president acted legally or illegally. Bloggers across the spectrum are becoming “expert” in all manner of statutes they probably never heard of before yesterday. And some have resorted to, um, revising the statutes to be sure Dear Leader’s acts remain within legal bounds. Blogger Glenn Greenwald writes,

Defenders of the Bush Administration are resorting to outright distortions and deliberate falsehoods about the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA) in order to argue that the Administration’s warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens complies with the mandates of that statute. To do so, they are simply lying — and that term is used advisedly — about what FISA says by misquoting the statute in order to make it appear that the Administration’s clearly illegal behavior conforms to the statute.

This is a real case study in how total falsehoods are disseminated by a single right-wing blogger who is then linked to and approvingly cited by large, highly partisan bloggers, which then cause the outright falsehoods to be bestowed with credibility and take on the status of a conventionally accepted talking point in defense of the Administration.

A blogger named Al Maviva wrote a staggeringly dishonest post which he said was based upon what he called a “little legal research” concerning FISA. He then proceeded to deliberately mis-quote the statute in order to reach the patently false conclusion that “the President probably does have the power to order NSA to monitor suspects, without a warrant, in terrorism cases.”

This post was then cited and linked to, in some cases with approval, by several large conservative bloggers, and thereafter wormed its way up to the conservative motherload of Internet traffic, Instapundit, who approvingly linked to it. I have no doubt that — thanks to law professor Instapundit and these others Administration defenders — tens of thousands of people (at least) have now read this “legal analysis” defending the legality of the Administration’s conduct which is based on a glaringly unethical distortion of the language of FISA.

Wow, righties lied. That’s like, so, what they always do.

[Update: John Cole of Balloon Juice, who ran a correction to the Al Maviva link, says I called him a “liar.” Well, not specifically, but I can see why he might have taken offense. I apologize to John Cole. We have all been duped from time to time. I don’t apologize to Al Maviva, however. And this blog has long chronicled the pattern of misdirection and misinformation that typifies rightie “political discussion.”]

Greenwald, an attorney, continues to explain what the statute actually does say. Put simply, “the Administration engaged in surveillance in clear and deliberate violation of FISA.” See also Laura R.

The question is, why? From an editorial in today’s Washington Post:

Mr. Bush said yesterday said that the program helped address the problem of “terrorists inside the United States . . . communicating with terrorists abroad.” Intelligence officials, the Times reported, grew concerned that going to the FISA court was too cumbersome for the volume of cases cropping up all at once as major al Qaeda figures — and their computers and files — were captured. But FISA has a number of emergency procedures for exigent circumstances. If these were somehow inadequate, why did the administration not go to Congress and seek adjustments to the law, rather than contriving to defy it? And why in any event should the NSA — rather than the FBI, the intelligence component responsible for domestic matters — be doing whatever domestic surveillance needs be done?

The obvious answer is that the NSA surveillance served some political agenda. I strongly suspect (i.e., am damn sure) that if all the facts were known, we’d find out that some surveillance was conducted on Bush critics and political opponents, not enemies of the U.S.A.

A few quick points:

First, several rightie bloggers are comparing the New York Times “leak” of the FISA violations with the Bush Administration leak of Valerie Plame’s classified status. If the latter was wrong, so is the former, they say. But the morality of the acts depend on whose interests are served — the powerful, or the people? When the powerful use “leaks” to manipulate the news and mislead the people, that’s wrong. But when a newspaper uncovers illegal activity by the powerful, that’s why there is a First Amendment.

Second, no one is saying that the government should not conduct surveillance on possible terrorists. That’s not the issue. The issue is that Bush usurpsed a power that law and the Constitution do not give him.

Third, Democrats should use this episode to remind voters that conservatives don’t believe in a right to privacy.

See Doctor Who at Kos, Avedon, and Billmon for more.

Heck of a Job

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A story to appear in tomorrow’s New York Times says that a study of more than 260 Louisianans who died during Hurricane Katrina or its aftermath “found that almost all survived the height of the storm but died in the chaos and flooding that followed.”

The results are not necessarily representative of the 1,100 people who died in the storm-ravaged part of the state. The 268 deaths examined by The Times were not chosen through a scientific or random sample, but rather were selected on the basis of which family members could be reached, and which names had been released by state officials.

Nonetheless, the study represents the most comprehensive picture to date of the Louisiana victims of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee failures. The Times conducted more than 200 interviews with relatives, neighbors and friends of the victims, and culled information from local coroners and medical examiners, census data, obituaries, and news articles.

It’s a heartbreaking thing to read. One suspects some of those people could have been saved had there been halfway adequate response.

Looking the Other Way

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Be sure to read Harold Bloom’s essay in The Guardian — “Reflections on an Evening Land.” Although in places it reminds me why I didn’t major in English lit, the essay makes vital points —

At the age of 75, I wonder if the Democratic party ever again will hold the presidency or control the Congress in my lifetime. I am not sanguine, because our rulers have demonstrated their prowess in Florida (twice) and in Ohio at shaping voting procedures, and they control the Supreme Court. The economist-journalist Paul Krugman recently observed that the Republicans dare not allow themselves to lose either Congress or the White House, because subsequent investigations could disclose dark matters indeed. Krugman did not specify, but among the profiteers of our Iraq crusade are big oil (House of Bush/House of Saud), Halliburton (the vice-president), Bechtel (a nest of mighty Republicans) and so forth.

All of this is extraordinarily blatant, yet the American people seem benumbed, unable to read, think, or remember, and thus fit subjects for a president who shares their limitations.

This made me think of yesterday’s Risen-Lichtblau article in the New York Times:

Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search. One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the legality of the program. But nothing came of his inquiry. “People just looked the other way because they didn’t want to know what was going on,” he said.

That’s pretty much our situation in a nutshell. We look the other way. We don’t want to know what’s going on.

This past week news media made a Big Bleeping Deal out of the fact that President Bush uttered the words “As President, I’m responsible for the decision to go into Iraq,” as if this marked some new era of presidential candor. But look at the context — the paragraph in which the fleeting moment of candor appeared —

When we made the decision to go into Iraq, many intelligence agencies around the world judged that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. This judgment was shared by the intelligence agencies of governments who did not support my decision to remove Saddam. And it is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As President, I’m responsible for the decision to go into Iraq — and I’m also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we’re doing just that. At the same time, we must remember that an investigation after the war by chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer found that Saddam was using the U.N. oil-for-food program to influence countries and companies in an effort to undermine sanctions, with the intent of restarting his weapons programs once the sanctions collapsed and the world looked the other way. Given Saddam’s history and the lessons of September the 11th, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision. Saddam was a threat — and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power. (Applause.) We are in Iraq today because our goal has always been more than the removal of a brutal dictator; it is to leave a free and democratic Iraq in its place.

— he’s still not admitting to a mistake. He’s still claiming he did the right thing. And he’s still pretending the world at large agreed with his decision, when it most definitely did not.

The fact that Bush could have (somehow) obtained a second term, even after it was obvious he had taken us into a costly and unnecessary war that could easily have been avoided, is an obscenity. It’s obscene that so many people in the media and in politics continue to cover his ass and treat him with respect. And it’s obscene that Americans accept him as president. I sincerely believe that earlier generations would have stormed the White House bearing buckets of hot tar and bags of feathers, never mind sit quietly by and watch him be inaugurated for another term.

Earlier Americans would have been outraged. Today’s Americans sit placidly and watch as their betrayal is televised.

And, constitutionally speaking, it is not the President’s responsibility to decide to invade another country. That’s Congress’s responsibility. But who reads the Constitution any more? That’s so, like, pre-9/11.

“What has happened to the American imagination if we have become a parody of the Roman empire?” Bloom asks. I think he’s giving us too much credit; we’re too prudish to parody the Roman empire. I think we’ve become only a parody of ourselves, which is far more pathetic. Just cruise around the Right Blogosphere and notice the imagery — fierce bald eagles, the Liberty Bell, minutemen — and then look at the opinions presented: The president was right to authorize wiretaps of citizens in secret. If you aren’t doing anything illegal you should have nothing to worry about.

How is it that a rich, spoiled, pampered frat boy with an affected Texas accent, who never worked a day in his life and used family connections to avoid service in Vietnam, became the heir to Andy Jackson? If that’s not parody, I don’t know what is.

Although we might yet go the way of the Romans. Historians tell us that as Rome fell, the Romans themselves scarcely noticed it was happening. Even as the barbarians were literally at the gates, individual Romans went ahead with their personal business with no concern that their way of life was about to end. They didn’t see it coming. And they didn’t see it because of end of Rome was unthinkable. Today the true believers in American exceptionalism cling to the idea that the virtues of our American republic are so unassailable as to justify any depravity done in America’s name. The notion that America could be in the wrong, much less fall from grace as The Land of the Free, is unthinkable.

Beware of what is unthinkable. Just because something is outside your imagination doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

The exceptionalists are in power, and those of us who see the fall coming are dismissed as “looney lefties.” I sometimes feel as if I’m watching a train wreck that I’m powerless to stop.

“Even as Bush extolled his Iraq adventure, his regime daily fuses more tightly together elements of oligarchy, plutocracy, and theocracy,” Bloom writes. Today in the New York Times, Scott Shane writes that “A single, fiercely debated legal principle lies behind nearly every major initiative in the Bush administration’s war on terror, scholars say: the sweeping assertion of the powers of the presidency.” Does that make Bush our Julius Caesar? Ol’ Julius would be insulted, I believe.

Of course, in Caesar’s case, the Senate eventually took matters into their own hands and, um, deposed him. With extreme prejudice. I wouldn’t look to our current lot in Congress to be quite so principled. The question is, is it too late for a strong and unified opposition to Bush to arise? Is it too late for Congress to take back its proper authoritiy and demote the Emperor back to being a republican (small R) president? If not (even better) a citizen?

Also commenting on the Bloom essay, Stirling Newberry writes “I do not believe there is an American decline that is inevitable.” However,

I believe that catastrophe is inevitable, that is we will not change direction until checks bounce and people can’t get gasoline. But we are nearer to that than people know. I saw my first gas lines in America in 30 years recently, the shadow of shortage is held at bay by European recession and the strategic reserve. The rich and powerful are pumping oil as fast as they can, because they feel the noose tightening around them. They can feel that if there is an economic tumble now, then who knows where the rebellions will lead.

America has been very foolish indeed, and it has suffered in its arts and letters as it has suffered politically – for the same reason. We are corrupt, and everything is about being attached to the revenue stream. Being attached to the stream of money is the only sign of success we care about, because it is the only one that matters. Read any composer biography, it will be a list of “who cut the check” and how many checks have been cut. As if composers were whores, known for who they serviced.

This reality is passing, because of the many problems of a prostitute society, a certain emptiness that comes with the first light of day is among them. People who could be successful in the world of fighting to get to the teat have given up on it. Yes, I can understand those much older than I being disappointed, there was so much more possible than seems to have occured. It was that very fear of disaster which kept the older generation on the straight and narrow. It was the loss of that fear that allowed the Republicans to raid the savings accounts and produce a generation of fat falsity.

Yet “The whole modern world is running out of value,” Stirling continues, and there is no reason we can’t make a course correction and adjust to new realities.

Perhaps the Democratic Party is not yet ready to take power, but this weakness is a paradoxical strength: when a leader comes who is capable of taking the White House, and governing the nation, with a following to match his vision – the rest of the party will fall into rank and file, because there will be no other alternative. Parties, as Wilson reminded us in his first inaugural, are instruments of the greater purpose of the nation.

So it will be now, when America has finally lost hope in false promises, and finally reaches the moment where the river of oil and corruption can no longer provide enough affluence for enough Americans, we will change, and move in a new direction.

Personally, I think we’re tottering on the edge. Fall one way, and we’ll become a corrupt and bloated plutocracy of exploitation, limited opportunity, and abased civil liberties. Fall the other way, and maybe we’ll no longer be the World’s Only Superpower, or the Richest Sumbitches on the Planet, but we’ll still have the Constitution and civil liberties, and (eventually) our self-respect. Certainly we’re leaning toward the former, but I don’t think the latter is yet lost to us.

Patriot Act Update

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See Charles Babington, “Senate Deals Setback to Bush on Patriot Act” at the WaPo web site:

Backers of a proposed four-year extension of the USA Patriot Act failed to shut off Senate debate today, preventing a vote on the matter and dealing a setback to President Bush on a major issue involving anti-terrorism efforts and civil liberties.

The Democratic-led filibuster drew enough Republican support to keep the president’s allies from gaining the 60 votes needed to end debate in the 100-member chamber. The 52-47 vote will require the White House and congressional leaders to seek another way to deal with the scheduled Dec. 31 expiration of key aspects of the law.

Apparently, today’s news about 4th Amendment violations had an impact:

In today’s Senate debate, several lawmakers cited a New York Times report disclosing that Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in the United States, despite previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying.

September 11 Cancelled the Bill of Rights

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The blogosphere is having a full-blown war over Bush’s unilateral deletion of the 4th Amendment from the Bill of Rights. (See New York Times story here; my comments here.)

Nearly to a blogger, righties are saying damn the Constitution.

One of the High Priestesses of Totalitarianism herself, Michelle Malkin, dismisses those of us who are concerned about a clear violation of the 4th Amendment as “civil liberties Chicken Littles.” “The real headline news is not that President Bush took extraordinary measures to protect Americans in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,” she wrote, “but that the blabbermouths at the Times chose to disclose classified information in a pathetically obvious bid to move the Iraqi elections off the front pages.”

And, of course, the other reason the Times pushed this non-story, according to Malkin, was to promote James Risen’s book about the CIA and the Bush Administration, to be published by The Free Press in January 2006.

One big flaw in this theory is that The Free Press is an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is the publishing operation of Viacom Inc. It has no ties to the New York Times (although it does publish Wall Street Journal Books). So there’s nothin’ in it financially for the New York Times. Ergo, no compelling reason for the Times to push the book, which isn’t mentioned in the story, anyway.

And the same story appears in the Washington Post, by Dan Eggen. Does Eggen have a book coming out, too?

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns & Money has a good one-paragraph summation of the rightie position.

You’ll like this: Malkin writes,

Civil liberties extremists pretend there are no tradeoffs, no costs, to putting legal absolutism over national security.

Civil liberties extremists? Legal absolutism? What Bush signed off on was a bleeping violation of the 4th Amendment!

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Ain’t no exceptions provided for. The federal government does not have the authority to spy on citizens without a warrant. End of story.

Update: See also — a John Bolton connection? At Kos, Susan G writes, “This is about the very foundations of democracy: Is the government our servant or our master? And is the president, who is elected to execute our laws, allowed to suspend them?”

“Bush Folded”

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Peter Wallsten writes in today’s Los Angeles Times (“McCain Held All the Cards, So Bush Folded”):

The agreement reached Thursday on legislation prohibiting the inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists in U.S. custody marked a rare capitulation by a president who campaigned for reelection based on his self-styled resolve when it came to the war on terrorism.

But it was also a recognition that, 13 months after a solid victory at the polls that seemed to put Bush’s White House in position to make transformational policy changes, the president is approaching his highest priority — fighting terrorism — from a position of political weakness.

Continue reading →

This Way to the Gulags II

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James Risen and and Eric Lichtblau report in today’s New York Times that President Bush once again violated the Bill of Rights for the sake of “security.”

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

Let’s see …

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

So how is monitoring emails and telephone calls without a warrant not a bare-assed end run around the 4th Amendment?

The Times says “Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.”

Get this:

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

“Administration officials are confident that existing safeguards are sufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.” What safeguards? Oh, the same ones that prevent the feds from engaging in torture, operating “black site” prisons, and holding Jose Padilla for 3 1/2 years without bringing charges (see 6th Amendment), just because? Yeah, I’m reassured.

“The number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands over the past three years.” And includes a lot of Bush’s political opposition, no doubt.

Several officials said the eavesdropping program had helped uncover a plot by Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker and naturalized citizen who pleaded guilty in 2003 to supporting Al Qaeda by planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches.

That’s actually funny, if you think about it. It’s not like a crew could sneak up to the Brooklyn Bridge sometime when no one was around and start blowtorching.

What appeared to be another Qaeda plot, involving fertilizer bomb attacks on British pubs and train stations, was exposed last year in part through the program, the officials said. But they said most people targeted for N.S.A. monitoring have never been charged with a crime, including an Iranian-American doctor in the South who came under suspicion because of what one official described as dubious ties to Osama bin Laden.

Post 9/11 it can’t be all that hard to get warrants if you’ve got any probable cause against somebody. So what’s wrong with getting warrants? Somehow, we limped through all previous wars and even the Cold War without going this far.

“The eavesdropping program grew out of concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks that the nation’s intelligence agencies were not poised to deal effectively with the new threat of Al Qaeda and that they were handcuffed by legal and bureaucratic restrictions better suited to peacetime than war, according to officials.” Then streamline the bureaucracy. Don’t run the Constitution through a shredder.

At an April hearing on the Patriot Act renewal, Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., “Can the National Security Agency, the great electronic snooper, spy on the American people?”

“Generally,” Mr. Mueller said, “I would say generally, they are not allowed to spy or to gather information on American citizens.” President Bush did not ask Congress to include provisions for the N.S.A. domestic surveillance program as part of the Patriot Act and has not sought any other laws to authorize the operation. Bush administration lawyers argued that such new laws were unnecessary, because they believed that the Congressional resolution on the campaign against terrorism provided ample authorization, officials said.

Seeking Congressional approval was also viewed as politically risky because the proposal would be certain to face intense opposition on civil liberties grounds. The administration also feared that by publicly disclosing the existence of the operation, its usefulness in tracking terrorists would end, officials said.

The legal opinions that support the N.S.A. operation remain classified, but they appear to have followed private discussions among senior administration lawyers and other officials about the need to pursue aggressive strategies that once may have been seen as crossing a legal line, according to senior officials who participated in the discussions.

Yeah, who needs those pesky checks and balances? The executive branch needs to have unfettered power to do whatever it wants. That’s the American way.

Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search. One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the legality of the program. But nothing came of his inquiry. “People just looked the other way because they didn’t want to know what was going on,” he said.

This is the path to totalitarianism, you know.

Oliver Willis writes,

There are going to be some folks who say “no big deal”, because in their world it would be okay for the entire CIA to go inside someone’s rectum because the president waved his hands around and said “terrah”. It’s so hard to care anymore.

He’s right. I noticed a number of rightie blogs — some of the same ones who are excited about how we’re bringing “democracy” to Iraq — are busily making excuses for the Bushies. Like we’re too cool to need the Bill of Rights any more.

In the comments to this blog post, someone actually wrote — “If you aren’t doing anything illegal you should have nothing to worry about.” That’s right; the classic line uttered by toadies to totalitarianism throughout history. The lessons of history don’t apply to us, though, because we’re America.

Not any more.

See also: Monitoring books but not guns.

This Way to the Gulags

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National Journal Hotline reports:

MA. Sen. John Kerry said last night that if Dems retake the House, there’s a “solid case” to bring “articles of impeachment” against President Bush for allegedly misleading the country about pre-war intelligence, according to several Dems who attended.

Be still, my heart. But wait …

Kerry was speaking at a holiday party for alumni of his WH ’04 bid. … Kerry Comm. Dir. David Wade, in an email, said his boss was joking.

Damn you, Kerry.

Wade: “Is it really a story that, with a smile on his face and to ensuing laughter, at a Christmas party for his hardest working troops who are still working to win in 2006, a Democrat joked about why these diehard Democrats needed to keep dreaming of a Democratic Congress? Impeachment jokes in Washington are as old as Don Rumsfeld and as funny as Dick Cheney is gruff. Only the truly humorless would say bah humbug to the rarest of partisan red meat.” Wade said Kerry often asks this question: “How are the same Republicans who tried to impeach a President over whether he misled a nation about an affair going to pretend it does not matter if the Administration intentionally misled the country into war?” More Wade: “Good luck finding a Democrat in America who disagrees…”

Predictably, some rightie bloggers commented on this, disregarding the “it was a joke” caveat. Hyenas all. The Republican National Committee actually issued a “response,” saying “For one of the leaders of the Democrat party to begin a push for presidential impeachment, in seriousness or jest, on the eve of the Iraq elections is both foolish and shortsighted.”

It was a bleeping joke. Unfortunately. But you’ve got to watch what you say about Dear Leader.

What, you think this is America? Not any more.