Bloggers are noting that today on Meet the Press Tim Russert asked U.S. Senator Barack Obama about a remark a private citizen, Harry Belafonte, had made.
Once before he asked a guest about a remark Harry Belafonte had made. That time he asked Colin Powell.
Alito isn’t even on the Court yet and the Los Angeles Times has a report showing that the fight is already underway. The article begins:
Taking direct aim at Roe vs. Wade, lawmakers from several states are proposing broad restrictions on abortion, with the goal of forcing the U.S. Supreme Court — once it has a second new justice — to revisit the landmark ruling issued 33 years ago today.
The bill under consideration in Indiana would ban all abortions, except when continuing the pregnancy would threaten the woman’s life or put her physical health in danger of “substantial permanent impairment.” Similar legislation is pending in Ohio, Georgia and Tennessee.
Today is the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
A good column on the Google subpoena and the inability to find Osama bin Laden from Maureen Dowd. She begins:
I don’t like the thought of Dick Cheney ogling my Googling.
Because what I’m Googling, of course, is Dick Cheney. I have to constantly monitor how Vice Voyeur is pushing the federal government to constantly monitor millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls, e-mail notes and Internet searches.
If you want to know why the Grim Peeper is willing to turn this country into a police state to take his version of democracy to other countries, just do a Google search under “antiterrorism,” “government snooping,” “overreaching” and “fruitcake.”
It was hard to know which story yesterday was scarier: Osama bin Laden, still alive and taunting the U.S., or the Justice Department’s trying to force Google to turn over a suspiciously broad array of information on millions of users’ searches and Web addresses, supposedly to investigate online crime involving pornography.
As you know, the President nominated Judge Alito to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. I have stated that I would like this nominee be a moderate, and someone whose views are generally consistent with those of Justice O’Connor on many of the important issues. This nominee will be replacing a justice who cast the deciding vote on numerous cases that upheld the broad application of laws guaranteeing the rights of women, minorities, and disabled people. Please be assured I will keep your comments in mind as I thoroughly scrutinize Judge Alito’s record to ensure that policies and values that have made this country great are not undermined.
United States Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) in email to NewMexiKen
In light of federal subpoenas for Google search information (and the fact that Yahoo! and MSN complied with similar subpoenas), Wired News explains:
How does a search engine tie a search to a user?
If you have never logged in to search engine’s site, or a partner service like Google’s Gmail offering, the company probably doesn’t know your name. But it connects your searches through a cookie, which has a unique identifying number. Using its cookies, Google will remember all searches from your browser. It might also link searches by a user’s IP address.How long do cookies last?
It varies. Yahoo sets a cookie that expires in June 2006. A new cookie from Google expires in 2036.What if you sign in to a service?
If you sign in on Google’s personalized homepage or Yahoo’s homepage, the companies can then correlate your search history with any other information, such as your name, that you give them.Why should anyone worry about the government requesting search logs or bother to disguise their search history?
Some people simply don’t like the idea of their search history being tied to their personal lives. Others don’t know what the information could be used for, but worry that the search companies could find surprising uses for that data that may invade privacy in the future.For example, if you use Google’s Gmail and web optimizing software, the company could correlate everyone you’ve e-mailed, all the websites you’ve visited after a search and even all the words you misspell in queries.
What’s the first thing people should do who worry about their search history?
Cookie management helps. Those who want to avoid a permanent record should delete their cookies at least once a week. Other options might be to obliterate certain cookies when a browser is closed and avoid logging in to other services, such as web mail, offered by a search engine.
There’s more. Follow the link.
Key quote: “If you are doing any search you wouldn’t print on a T-shirt….”
In an outstanding essay, much of which is excerpted here, Mark Morford asks “What do the bitter neocon nominee and the amazing Oscar-bound film have in common?”
Witness, won’t you, the confluent forces, the twin streams of conflicting culture represented by the amazing “Brokeback Mountain” movie phenomenon, a spare and sad and highly controversial little indie-style flick that is shaking up the homophobic community and raking in the Golden Globes and which now seems a shoe-in to win an Oscar or four, as compared and contrasted with, say, the humorless, depressing, dry-as-death Samuel Alito Supreme Court nomination. Oh yes, we have a match. Do you see it?
Look closer. On the one hand, here is the astounding reach and power of this rare and striking little film, an emotional tinderbox of a movie that, in the wrong hands or with the wrong marketing or if it had been off pitch by just this much, could have very easily been trashed and quickly dismissed, would have hobbled the careers of two up-and-coming hunk actors, been mocked across the board and demonized by the religious right as revolting gay propaganda, the source of all ills, proof of the existence of the devil himself.
Of course, the latter is still happening (isn’t it always?), but the amazing thing is, no one seems to care. The screech of the right’s homophobes is being easily drowned out by the fact that this astonishing, pitch-perfect film is now considered a movie that, quite literally, changes minds. Shifts perceptions. That moves the human experiment forward and makes people truly think about sex and gender and love and not in the way that, say, “Pride & Prejudice” makes you think because that kind of thinking is merely sweet and harmless, whereas “Brokeback” slaps bigotry and intolerance upside its knobby little head and induces heated discussions of the film’s dynamics and politics and ideas of love over a bottle of wine and some deep curious sighing.
That’s one side. On the other hand, here we have this relentless neocon spiritual death wish, as evidenced by the imminent appointment of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, yet another dour white male judge who, by all evidence, will do everything in his power to keep America’s spiritual, humanitarian and sexual progress — you know, the exact kind of universal awareness illuminated by intensely intimate movies like “Brokeback” — locked in the ironclad box of anti-women, anti-gay, power-über-alles conservative thinking for the next three decades or more.
Of course you may say: Oh please, this is just silly, no way is there a direct connection between Alito and “Brokeback.” I mean come on, one’s just a heartbreaking gay love story and one’s a massive disheartening political maneuver and they simply have no direct correlation in this world as we know it and to draw a correlation is to, well, make stuff up.
To which I say: You are right, but only a little. Of course Alito is not about to be appointed to deflect “Brokeback”‘s message per se, but rather, he is being installed in general reaction to, in attack on, in preparation for what “Brokeback” and its ilk represent. Which is, of course, the aforementioned awakening, the shift, the movement toward something new and different and open. Do you see?
This is the ever-present push-pull of the culture. This is how we stumble toward the light, gasping and bleeding and with painful rope burns on our wrists. After all, there is no progress forward — intellectual, spiritual, sexual or otherwise — without a concomitant blood-curdling scream from the power brokers and the religiously terrified to hold it all back. Change brings fear. Sexuality brings confusion. For every person who has his rigid homophobic ideology shattered by “Brokeback”‘s emotional hammer, there is a confused neocon who redoubles his efforts to replant it.
The Bush administration, seeking to revive an online pornography law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, has subpoenaed Google for details on what its users have been looking for through its popular search engine.
Google has refused to comply with the subpoena, issued last year, for a broad range of material from its databases, including a request for 1 million random web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period, lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department said in papers filed Wednesday in federal court in San Jose, California.
AP via Wired News [emphasis added]
First they came for the porn users, but I was not a porn user — so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat — so I did nothing. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew — so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left who could stand up for me.
Kevin Drum tells us about a new study of the gender gap:
Ken Hilton is a New York statistician who has studied gender differences in school achievement and concluded that the reason more girls go to college than boys is because girls have way better reading skills. In the New Republic this week, Richard Whitmire investigates:
Combine Hilton’s local research with national neuroscience research, and you arrive at this: The brains of men and women are very different. Last spring, Scientific American summed up the best gender and brain research, including a study demonstrating that women have greater neuron density in the temporal lobe cortex, the region of the brain associated with verbal skills. Now we’ve reached the heart of the mystery. Girls have genetic advantages that make them better readers, especially early in life. And, now, society is favoring verbal skills. Even in math, the emphasis has shifted away from guy-friendly problems involving quick calculations to word and logic problems.…Ninth grade is where boys’ verbal deficit becomes an albatross that stymies further male academic achievement. That’s the year guys run into the fruits of the school-reform movement that date back to the 1989 governors’ summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Democrats and Republicans vowed to shake up schools. One outcome of the summit is that, starting in ninth grade, every student now gets a verbally drenched curriculum that is supposed to better prepare them for college. Good goal, but it’s leaving boys in the dust.Read the whole thing — quickly and fluently if you’re female, slowly and laboriously if you’re male — to find out what he thinks we ought to do to fix this.
From Daily Kos: Cheers and Jeers.
Here’s one of the six exchanges between George Bush and Benjamin Franklin (others longer, but better):
Bush: The fact that somebody leaked this program [of illegally spying on Americans without a warrant] causes great harm to the United States. There’s an enemy out there.
Franklin: Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Beats Per Minute has the latest on New Orleans.
Beats Per Minute is written by Vernon who identifies himself: “I’m Dineh and I’m a physician living in New Orleans. I grew up on the Navajo Reservation in northeastern Arizona. Although I now live in the Louisiana, I also consider the Navajo Reservation my home.”
Bottom line is, there were many who thought as Alito allegedly did, [at Princeton] nearly forty years ago now. Many. Whether they admit it or not. Given my political slant, I’m not wild about Alito. But fair’s fair. Judge him on his jurisprudence and judicial philosophy. On statements like this: “I think we should look to the text of the Constitution, and we should look to the meaning that someone would have taken from the text of the Constitution at the time of its adoption.”
Which means, I assume, the Second Amendment applies to flintlocks only.
The following day after his wife’s anguish, how do you think Alito expressed his sympathy for her at the end of the hearing—which obviously was a grueling ordeal for her?
I’d figure he would wrap his arms around his wife and give her a reassuring hug to tell her that this was all behind them now. Maybe a kiss on the cheek and then they would file out together amidst the crowd and the cameras. How about even a knowing glance? Nope, Strip-search Sammy turned hurriedly away from his wife without acknowledging her presence and bolted for the door as fast as he could leaving her behind in his wake. Was it a possible indication that she was in her proper place after all?
NewMexiKen assumed all along that Alito’s wife was crying for the same reason any sane woman would cry: Fear that Alito will end up on the Supreme Court and help undermine a generation of gains for women’s rights.
On the news last night, the 2006 federal deficit was revised upward to $400 billion. But as usual, this is without the very real $200 billion or so we’re borrowing from the Social Security surplus. So the real deficit this year is now projected at $600 billion or so, nearly a quarter of the federal budget.
Got that? For every four dollars Uncle Sam is spending, three come from taxes and one is borrowed from your children. (Well, from the Chinese and Saudis, too, but it is your children whose future will be weighed down with the debt.)
What we voters need is a new slogan for this fall’s election: “No incumbent left behind”
Throw all the rascals out.
Or at least some are. AMERICAblog bought those of Gen. Wesley Clark.
All we needed was General Clark’s cell phone number and our credit card, and 24 hours later we had one hundred calls the general made on his cell phone in November. The calls included a number of calls to Arkansas, to foreign countries, and at least one call to a prominent reporter at the Washington Post.
“Frankly, it would be more comforting if Judge Alito gave individuals the same benefit of the doubt in his courtroom that he’s asking from this committee on Vanguard, CAP, the unitary executive and women’s privacy.”
So, do I understand this correctly? If you have been nominated to an important position of public trust — let’s just say Supreme Court Justice — the idea is to go before a Senate committee and obfuscate your positions and background. The reason you do this I guess, is so that some of the people’s elected representatives won’t have a reason to vote against you.
Do I have it right?
Do you suppose that is what the Framers intended in Article II of the Constitution when they wrote “and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate”?
It’s enough to drive you to tears.
According to this report in The New York Times, and elsewhere, yesterday Senator Biden’s questions (to use the term loosely) were three times as wordy as Judge Alito’s responses.
In NewMexiKen’s recent drive through California I noticed a number of California penitentiaries I hadn’t remembered hearing about during my 12 years living in the state (but not since 1985). It occured to me that prisons were a growth industry. In her 2003 book, Where I Was From, Joan Didion confirms this impression and explains. Two excerpts:
The California Correctional Peace Officers Association is the prison guards’ union, a 29,000-member force that has maintained for some years now the most effective lobbying operation in Sacramento. In the 1998 election cycle, for example, the union funneled over two million dollars to Grey Davis’s gubernatorial campaign and another three million dollars to various other candidates and propositions. … Don Novey refers to those who consider the need for new prisons an arguable proposition as “the other element.” He gave $75,000 to the opponent of a state senator who had once spoken against a prison bond issue. “If Don Novey ran the contractors’ union,” a Republican strategist told the Times, “there’d be a bridge over every puddle in the state.” The prison guards were in California the political muscle behind the victims’ rights movement. The prison guards were in California the political muscle behind the 1994 “three strikes” legislation and initiative, the act that mandated a sentence of twenty-five years to life for any third felony conviction, even for crimes as minor as growing a marijuana plant on a windowsill or shoplifting a bottle of Ripple. The prison guards were the political muscle that had by the year 2000 made the California corrections system, with thirty-three penitentiaries and 162,000 inmates, the largest in the western hemisphere.
Incarceration was not always a growth industry in California. In 1852 there was only San Quentin, by 1880 there was also Folsom. During the 104 years that followed, a century during which the population of California increased from 865,000 to 25,795,000 people, the state found need for only ten additional facilities, most of them low or medium security. It was only in 1984, four years after Don Novey took over the union, that the new max and supermax prisons began rolling online, Solano in 1984, “New Folsom” (a quarter mile removed from “Old Folsom”) in 1986, Avenal and lone and Stockton and San Diego in 1987, Corcoran and Blythe in 1988, Pelican Bay in 1989, Chowchilla in 1990, Wasco in 1991, Calipatria in 1992, Lancaster and Imperial and Centinela and Delano in 1993, Coalinga and a second prison at Blythe in 1994, second prisons at both Susanville and Chowchilla in 1995, Soledad in 1996, a second prison at Corcoran in 1997.
It was 1993 when the California Department of Corrections activated its first “death fence,” at Calipatria. It was 1994 when the second “death fence” was activated, at Lancaster, carrying a charge of 650 milliamperes, almost ten times the voltage required to cause instant death. … It was also 1994 when standardized testing of reading skills among California fourth-graders placed them last in the nation, below Mississippi, tied only with Louisiana. It was 1995 when, for the first time, California spent more on its prisons than on its two university systems, the ten campuses of the University of California and the twenty-four campuses of California State University.
Maureen Dowd in Saturday’s Times:
Doing the math, you’ve got to figure that the 12 wise men and one wise woman had about 30 seconds apiece to say their piece to the president about Iraq, where vicious assaults this week have killed almost 200 and raised U.S. troop fatalities to at least 2,189.
It must have been like a performance by the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which boils down the great plays and books to their essence. Proust is “I like cookies.” Othello raps that he left Desdemona “all alona, didn’t telephona.” “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” condense into “The Idiodity.” “Henry V” is “A king’s gotta do what a king’s gotta do,” and “Antony and Cleopatra” is “Never get involved in Middle Eastern affairs.”
Beyond taking a class picture ringed around Mr. Bush’s bizarrely empty desk – a mesmerizing blend of “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Last Supper” and a “Sopranos” ad – the former secretaries of state and defense had to make the most of their brief colloquy with W.
…Sure, he has A.D.D. But he just spent six straight days mountain-biking and brush clearing in Crawford. He couldn’t devote 60 minutes to getting our kids home rather than just a few for a “Message: I Care” photo-op faking sincerity?
Bush allowed five to 10 minutes for interchange with the group.
We must spare no effort to raise the general level of health in this country. In a nation as rich as ours, it is a shocking fact that tens of millions lack adequate medical care. We are short of doctors, hospitals, nurses. We must remedy these shortages. Moreover, we need–and we must have without further delay–a system of prepaid medical insurance which will enable every American to afford good medical care.
President Harry S. Truman, 57 years ago today in his State of the Union Address
Kevin Drum has posted this information about the coal mine where 12 miners died:
How bad was the accident and injury rate at the Sago Mine? Terrible. The national average for mining accidents (non-fatal days lost) in 2004 was 5.66 per 200,000 manhours worked. The Sago Mine, which was owned by Anker West Virginia Mining Co. at that time, had an accident rate of 15.90. In 2005, Sago’s accident rate increased to 17.04, and 14 miners were injured.
According to Paul Kiel at the TPM Cafe:
The best piece of reporting this morning on the Abramoff plea is from the Post. As to how many members of Congress Abramoff will finger, the Post does not equivocate: six. In addition to those six “House and Senate members,” Abramoff “will provide evidence about congressional staffers, Interior Department workers and other executive branch officials, and other lobbyists.”…
The prosecution’s strategy so far seems to be to obtain guilty pleas from lobbyists and staffers in order to prosecute members of Congress….
“I always had a soft spot for Daschle even though he was still bringing knives long after it had become a gun fight.”
Atrios leading into a discussion on this from The Washington Post:
The Bush administration requested, and Congress rejected, war-making authority “in the United States” in negotiations over the joint resolution passed days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to an opinion article by former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) in today’s [December 23rd] Washington Post.
Daschle’s disclosure challenges a central legal argument offered by the White House in defense of the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. It suggests that Congress refused explicitly to grant authority that the Bush administration now asserts is implicit in the resolution.
Here’s the Daschle piece: Power We Didn’t Grant.
Talking Points Memo notes that “[A]s near I can tell there hasn’t been a single one since election day.”
Even if we concede that the President may exercise special powers in wartime, wouldn’t we actually have to be at war for those powers to apply and doesn’t Article I of the Constitution require that Congress declare war?
Congress hasn’t voted a Declaration of War since 1942.
Update: Kevin Drum has more on this.