Civil Liberties
revere | February 6, 2008There are a few issues where Progressives and Conservatives agree on and one is the importance of privacy. It's a core American value. Congress understands this and required the Bush administration to set up a Board to insure the alleged "War on Terror" wouldn't be an all purpose excuse for trampling on constitutional rights. Even Joe "I'm really a Republican" Lieberman wanted it. The result?
The Bush administration has failed to nominate any candidates to a newly empowered privacy and civil-liberties commission. This leaves the board without any members, even as Congress prepares to give the…
mikethemadbiologist | February 1, 2008Because they don't understand stuff. To wit, Mike Allen in The Politico:
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs surveillance of telephone calls and e-mail traffic of suspected terrorists, expires on Friday. After that, any monitoring that's currently authorized could continue, but no new surveillance could begin.
Actually, what is set to expire is the Protect America Act ('PAA'). The reason the PAA is set to expire is that the retroactive immunity provisions for law-breaking companies in the new PAA are opposed by the Democrats, but the Republicans refuse to pass a…
mikethemadbiologist | January 24, 2008If you think that preventing Bush from granting retroactivity immunity for the telcos is a good thing, you might expect Democratic presidential candidates to demonstrate leadership by filibustering the bill. Or maybe not:
Bush is about to get his number one priority through Congress, a move that could be stopped by Edwards, Obama, or Clinton, especially the latter two. This is the move to implement retroactive immunity for telecom companies who spy on Americans and violate core constitutional principles.
All that is required to fight this is for Clinton or Obama to put the glare of the…
mikethemadbiologist | January 19, 2008I happy to see that others are coming around to the idea that the abortion debate is ultimately about the establishment of religion (italics mine):
She [Keenan] was saying more that the people in the mushy middle feel like they're in a moral quandary about abortion, because it's all mixed up with various other issues about sex, commitment, self-image, family, ickiness, and other touchy subjects and thus most people refuse to really think the issue through and come to the correct conclusion: Anything so complex and personal should be a matter of personal conscience. The term "moral complexity…
mikethemadbiologist | January 17, 200861% of women who have abortions already have children. So much for the 'irresponsible slut' propaganda. By way of Jill at Feministe, I found this Guttmacher Institute report (italics mine):
The majority (61%) of U.S. women who have abortions are already mothers, more than half of whom have two or more children. In many cases, women choose abortion because they are motivated to be good parents. Women who have no children want the conditions to be right when they do; women who already have children want to be responsible and take care of their existing children.
"We found that consideration of…
revere | January 15, 2008Today is Martin Luther King's birthday. It is a holiday in the US but has a universal meaning. Because I am powerfully moved by music I could only commemorate it with music. There are three songs in the two videos that follow. The first is the great Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit. The "strange fruit" were the bodies of black men who had been lynched and were swinging from southern (and some northern) trees. It was not so long ago. I was alive then. A reminder. Then the page turns. A song of energy and hope and purpose. It keeps me going through the times I feel so very tired and wonder…
revere | January 15, 2008Most of us read the Federal Government pandemic flu plan as having two components: the first is procurement of vaccines and antivirals for stockpiles and sale to states at a discount; the second is to leave everything to the locals. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sees it differently and they may well be right. They see the federal pandemic flu plan as containing a covert but not subtle command and control law enforcement core. Whatever you think of the ACLU (and I confess to be ambivalent because they caved in to McCarthyite enemies of civil liberties in the 1950s; they have since…
mikethemadbiologist | January 11, 2008The sound you're hearing is the heads of everyone who cares about civil liberties going BOOM! According to the AP, the telephone companies cut off the FISA wiretap programs when they weren't paid on time:
Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.
A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.
In at…
mikethemadbiologist | January 8, 2008In most cases, assuming that the Bush Administration is up to no good and plans to do the exact opposite of what it claims to be doing is a good first principle (unless you have a "kick me" sign staple gunned to your ass). The CDC alerting passengers that they were seated near a symptomatic TB patient is not the slippery slope of tyranny, but a responsible public health response. At firedoglake, there is an idiotic post about the CDC's response to a person infected with TB on an airplane:
TB on planes: another excuse to restrict our civil liberties? You heard it here first....
This is great…
mikethemadbiologist | December 18, 2007Since torture seems to be under discussion by the A-list bloggers, I want to follow up on a point Helmut made in his Congressional testimony about torture. Simply, it is this: if torture is truly used as an interrogation technique, and not to fulfill a psychological need or as terrorism, it can not be an isolated event--it must be systemic and routine.
Take the case the pro-torture advocates constantly raise, the Jack Bauer scenario, where if torture were not used then TEH EVIL TERRORIST will level Los Angeles in five minutes and twenty three seconds*. Oh, I forgot: BEEP, BEEP, BEEP!
Are…
mikethemadbiologist | December 16, 2007...not 9/11. The Bush Administration spied on American citizens without court orders before Sept. 11, 2001. And it didn't stop the attacks (italics mine):
In a separate program, N.S.A. officials met with the Qwest executives in February 2001 and asked for more access to their phone system for surveillance operations, according to people familiar with the episode. The company declined, expressing concerns that the request was illegal without a court order.
While Qwest's refusal was disclosed two months ago in court papers, the details of the N.S.A.'s request were not. The agency, those…
mikethemadbiologist | December 2, 2007Michael Kinsley sums up the ethical inconsistency of the Blastocyst Liberationists:
Third, although the political dilemma that stem cells pose for politicians is real enough, the moral dilemma is not and never was. The embryos used in stem-cell research come from fertility clinics, which otherwise would discard them. This has been a powerful argument in favor of such research. Why let these embryos go to waste? But a more important point is, What about fertility clinics themselves? In vitro fertilization ("test-tube babies") involves the purposeful creation of multiple embryos, knowing and…
revere | November 26, 2007What's the big deal about putting a few bad guys into "stressful" positions (assuming you know for sure they really are bad guys)? You call that torture? Waterboarding maybe is torture (we aren't sure about that yet; requires some study***), but stressful positions and a love tap or two? Give me a break:
Source: Waiting for the Guards, Amnesty International
So what's the big deal? This was straight out of the CIA interrogation manual. No pretense we don't do it.
This video is also not play acting:
In order to make the film, the directors put the actor into a stress position for six hours…
mikethemadbiologist | November 16, 2007NARAL just doesn't get it: when NARAL supports Republicans or Democrats who, by undermining Democratic initiatives, weaken the Democratic Party, NARAL is strengthening those who oppose legal and safe abortion.
It's as if the NARAL leadership is afflicted with a severe case of Compulsive Centrist Disorder. While the Democrats might not be stalwarts for safe and legal abortion, the Republicans have enshrined the Fetish of the Fetus. Supporting those who hurt the Democratic Party is supporting those who want to outlaw abortion, plain and simple. How can NARAL not get that?
revere | November 13, 2007Being private isn't the same as being anonymous according to the Bush administration. So what does privacy mean, according to Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence?
Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information.
[snip]
"Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety," Kerr said. "I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of…
mikethemadbiologist | November 11, 2007The WarDefense Department claims that 'only' 30,000 U.S. servicemen have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that number is a gross underestimate:
On Veterans Day, politicians will praise the 30,000 troops "officially wounded" in action in Iraq and Afghanistan as if this "statistic" were some kind of "fact." In doing so, they'll harm the men and women who carry the burden of our nation's defense in today's very dangerous world.
That 30,000 number is a fantasy.
Here's the truth about the human cost borne by the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as shown by data from the U.S. Department…
mikethemadbiologist | November 10, 2007Rightwing nut David Horowitz just finished celebrating Islamofascist Awareness Week. One of the goals of Horowitz's exercise is to intimidate faculty and students into political correctness*. A while back, while reading Hanna Rosen's God's Harvard, this description of how one faculty member at Jesus mill Patrick Henry College**, Bob Stacey, was fired for teaching those heretical philosophers Kant and Plato struck as the kind of campus Horowitz would like:
Just before class, someone pointed out the window, where you could still see the outlines of last night's moon. "Please take your seats…
revere | November 7, 2007I know there are readers here who will say this is the "price of freedom" or some such nonsense. But give me a break. The father-in-law of a Swede didn't want him to travel, so he dropped a dime on him to the FBI, saying he had links to al Qaeda:
When the husband refused to stay home, his father-in-law wrote an email to the FBI saying the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda in Sweden and that he was travelling to the US to meet his contacts.
He provided information on the flight number and date of arrival in the US.
The son-in-law was arrested upon landing in Florida. He was placed in handcuffs…
mikethemadbiologist | November 4, 2007Instead of focusing on partial drowning interrogation during the hearings for the attorney general, John Dean tells us what Congress should be doing. From Talking Points Memo:
Nixon's Attorney General had been removed (and was later prosecuted for lying to Congress) - a situation not unlike Alberto Gonzales's leaving the job under such a cloud. Nixon was under deep suspicion of covering up the true facts relating to the bungled break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate, not to mention widespread rumors that he had engaged in abuses of power and corrupt…
revere | October 31, 2007I am a strong supporter of privacy and civil liberties. But I confess I don't get the opposition to this rule, just promulgated by FDA on an expedited basis, without going through public comment:
In a public health emergency, suspected victims would no longer have to give permission before experimental tests could be run to determine why they're sick, under a federal rule published Wednesday. Privacy experts called the exception unnecessary, ripe for abuse and an override of state informed-consent laws.
Health care workers will be free to run experimental tests on blood and other samples…