134.4 - Outrage of the Week: 2nd Circuit blocks stop-and-frisk fixes, removes judge

Outrage of the Week: 2nd Circuit blocks stop-and-frisk fixes, removes judge

We have a two-tier outrage this week.

Back in August, I was able to happily report that US District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin had delivered "a stinging and long-overdue smackdown" of New York City's racist stop-and-frisk policy which effectively racially profiled young black and Hispanic men as criminals, stopping them for things such as, to quote police reports, "furtive movements," which could include talking to someone on the street, or not talking to someone on the street, or looking at a cop, or not looking at a cop, or whatever else was convenient at the moment.

Tier one here is that two weeks ago, on October 31, in what a number of observers called a "stunning" ruling, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals blocked implementation of all of the measures she had ordered to remedy the city's unconstitutional practice, including the appointment of an independent monitor, requiring the lower court to hold “all proceedings and otherwise await further action” from the Appeals Court.

That is, the court allowed the city to resume and continue with stop-and-frisk until such time as it heard all the appeals about Judge Scheindlin's underlying finding that the practice violated the Fourth Amendment, which could take well into next year. Put more bluntly, the court in effect said "justice for people being unlawfully stopped and searched can wait until we get around to it."

That's bad enough, but the second-tier outrage is the one that really made legal jaws drop: The court removed Judge Scheindlin from the case, claiming she presented the “appearance of partiality" on the grounds of having run afoul of rules about "related cases," a rule under which cases that present the same essential issues can go before the same judge. What happened is that Judge Scheindlin declined a motion to re-open an old stop-and-frisk case but said that if the plaintiffs wanted to file a new case, she would regard it as related (and so take the case) because part of the argument what that the city had violated an order she herself had issued some time past.

But one, that is a totally legitimate application of the "related case" rule and two, no one had requested that she be removed from the case. As the Center for Constitutional Rights noted, the city "never once raised any legal claims of bias, even in its papers to the Court of Appeals." Removing Judge Scheindlin was something that the Second Circuit did entirely on its own, unprompted and unrequested.

David Cole, a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, called the court's action "unheard of."

A New York Times editorial called it "a bad ruling," "overreach," and "extraordinary."

Nancy Gertner, a law professor at Harvard Law School and a former US District Court judge, said it was the members of the Second Circuit, not Judge Scheindlin, who violated the rules of judicial conduct. She called the court raising issues not raised by any party to the case a “cheap shot.”

And Richard George Kopf, a sitting District Court judge in Nebraska, called Scheindlin's removal "bullshit" and the Second Circuit court's reasoning "laughable." It even, he says, invites speculation about "what else is going on."

Indeed it does. But even if that "what else" is not clear, one other thing is: This is an outrage.

Sources:
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/08/1211-good-news-stop-and-frisk-smackdown.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/breaking-stop-frisk-blocked-judge-removed-article-1.1503092
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/nyregion/court-blocks-stop-and-frisk-changes-for-new-york-police.html?_r=0
https://www.ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/stop-and-frisk-lawsuit:-court-of-appeals-stays-remedies,-reassigns-case-new-judge
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/nov/01/how-uphold-racial-injustice/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/opinion/a-bad-ruling-on-stop-and-frisk.html
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/11/03/judges-appearance-of-impartiality/which-judges-breached-the-rules
http://herculesandtheumpire.com/2013/11/03/a-cheap-shot/

134.3 - Poetic justice on Voter ID

Poetic justice on Voter ID

Another part of this assault on The Commons, of course, is Voter ID, the efforts across a number of states to make it harder and harder for certain voters - specifically, any sort of even vaguely liberal- or left-leaning voters - to cast ballots. It's all part of the plan.

Well, on the Voter ID front comes a little bit of poetic justice.

A new, restrictive voter identification law has just gone into effect in Texas. It's restrictive enough that it's under federal challenge as discriminatory.

It now develops that on November 2, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who has defended the law in court and is expected to be the GOPpers nominee for governor next year, went to register under the new law and, um, couldn't. At least not without a hassle. His name on his driver's license, which he presented as ID, reads Gregory Wayne Abbott - but his name on the voter rolls is listed as Greg Abbott, and that difference would have been enough to prevent him from voting. He had to sign an affidavit swearing that "Gregory Wayne Abbott" and "Greg Abbott" are both him.

What makes this particularly delicious is that under the original GOPper bill, an affidavit wouldn't have been enough: Instead, Abbott would have had to produce legal documentation of a name change - something he obviously would not have had since he hadn't changed his name.

The reason he could go the affidavit route is due to an amendment to that bill proposed by State Sen. Wendy Davis, who opposed the bill but bit manage to get this attempt to soften its impact through. Who is Wendy Davis? She's the woman who gained recognition with a 13-hour filibuster against a restrictive anti-choice bill - and is predicted to be Abbott's opponent in the governor's race.

That is, the likely GOPper candidate for governor next year would have been blocked from voting under a law he supported but for the effort of the likely Democratic candidate for governor next year, who opposed the bill he supported.

There is still the issue of the potential disenfranchisement of significant numbers of women whose names changed when they got married or divorced - which I have said before is, I believe, part of the point of the restriction. But just for the moment, let's appreciate the irony.

Sources:
http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2013/10/greg-abbott-will-need-affidavit-to-vote/
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/wendy-davis-outsmarts-texas-voter-id-law

134.2 - The attack on The Commons

The attack on The Commons

I have several times mentioned what I call The Commons. When I first brought it up about a year and a-half ago, I talked a bit about the history of the idea of some resource held in common by a community; traditionally, most often, it was common ground for farming or pasture and perhaps for fishing rights or the like. Eventually, that notion was shrunk by the economic interests of the powerful down to "the town common," often enough some small area of lawn in front of the courthouse - although Boston Common and Sheep Meadow in Central Park in Manhattan at least recall some larger significance.

But what I really was and am interested in is not so much a specifically economic commons of a shared resource but a philosophical Commons, a social Commons, of a shared societal space, the idea of a public sphere wherein all can participate, all have a stake, all have a part - and all have some responsibility. That space of socially shared and mutual duty, the space of what is or at least by rights should be equally available to all.

That idea of The Commons, the idea that there are common interests and mutual responsibilities between and among all citizens simply by virtue of being in the same society, and the related idea of a social contract between public and government, is under unrelenting and vicious attack by the right wing.

Now, it's true that this sense of The Commons has always been under attack from the elites of our society; indeed, that is likely true of the elites of any society. Such elites almost universally simply dislike the idea of all having a stake in, being a part of, that society and therefore deserving of sharing in its benefits - nor do they care for the idea of they themselves having responsibilities to others in that society other than those self-imposed ones of noblesse oblige, the true purpose of which is to demonstrate that elite's superiority.

Still, the intensity and range of the attack we are seeing now is for us here nearly if not totally unprecedented. Some years back, George "I'm what passes for an intellectual on the right" Will wrote in his syndicated column that - and this is an exact quote - "'Back to 1900' is a serviceable summation of the conservative goal." We seem to be well on our way to a time even before that.

And this is the point I want to emphasize. I know I have talked about this before, but it bears repeating from time to time. When we hear about this stupid law in one state or this other inane proposal in another or this absurd nonsense in Congress, we need to remember that these are not isolated incidents. It is not just innocent coincidence that so many things are being pushed so aggressively in so many places at so many levels. It is not a fluke. It is a conscious, coordinated, attack on the very idea that we are a society of interrelated, connected people, an attack on the very idea of "We, the People."

In fact, a report released the first of this month gives some sense of the scope and range of right-wing attack over the past two years on one area, that of workplace laws and workers' rights and protections.

The report was prepared by Gordon Lafer, a University of Oregon political economist who’s served as a policy adviser in the House of Representatives. The report, titled “The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011-2012,” covers how within just those two years:

- 15 states passed new laws restricting the ability of workers to unionize, limiting collective bargaining rights, and undermining existing unions;
- 16 states passed new restrictions and limitations on unemployment benefits;
- four states passed new restrictions on state minimum wage laws;
-two states restricted or repealed rights to sick leave; and
- four states reduced limitations on child labor, including a Wisconsin law ending limits on the number of hours 16-year-olds can work and an Idaho law letting 12-year-olds be hired for manual labor at their school for 10 hours a week, the latter with the avowed purpose of enabling schools to not hire adults who might want enough pay to live on.

Salon.com called those child labor laws "Newt's revenge" from the occasions he got cheers from audiences of slack-jawed yahoos by proposing that even children under 10 could be put to work.

And those weren't the only pre-1900 laws passed in that same two-year period:

- Michigan banned safety regulations covering repetitive motion injuries.
- Wisconsin banned compensatory and punitive damage suits over employment discrimination, which means that if they fired you illegally, even if you sued and even if you won, you couldn't even collect back pay.
- New Hampshire made it easier for companies to classify workers as “independent contractors” who lack the legal protections of employees, plus allowing those employers to contribute nothing to their Social Security or Medicare.
- Maine allowed employers to apply for employees to be considered disabled under a program that allows companies that hire the disabled to pay them less than minimum wage.

And those are just the ones that passed. Two states - Michigan and Indiana - passed so-called “right to work” laws, which are really "right to continue exploiting workers by blocking unions" laws, but attempts to do the same occurred in 17 more. A bill in Montana bill proposed to exclude tips from workers’ compensation calculations, meaning anyone injured on the job whose income partly came from tips would get less compensation. A proposal in Oklahoma would have required recipients of unemployment to do 20 hours a week of unpaid community service, which of course would also allow the state or local government to hire fewer people for actual jobs.

The one that got me the most, though, was a happily failed attempt in Florida to prohibit municipalities from passing any rules to address “wage theft.”

What's wage theft? It's when employers do not give workers the pay to which they are entitled. They don't pay for all the hours people have worked or they pay them less than minimum wage or they don't pay them overtime. There are numerous methods. They are all illegal - but employers aren't concerned since the chances of them getting caught are small and the chances of them facing serious consequences if they are, are minimal.

How big is wage theft? Lafer's report says that

[f]ully 64 percent of low-wage workers have some amount of pay stolen out of their paychecks by their employers every week.... In total, the average low-wage worker loses a stunning $2,634 per year in unpaid wages, representing 15 percent of their earned income.

Put another way: Total losses from gas station, convenience store, and bank robberies combined in 2009 was just under $57 million. Total value of wages stolen in 2008 is estimated at well over $185 million - over 3 times more.

But to the right wing in Florida, for an employer to steal wages from their employees is no crime. Again, happily that bill wasn't passed - but that doesn't mean it wasn't part of the overall landscape of the attack. And it doesn't mean it doesn't reflect the overall attitude that is driving the attack.

And in case you're still wondering about that, in case you're still thinking that this is coincidence, that it's not coordinated, not planned, in an interview with Salon.com Lafer noted the "cookie-cutter" nature of the bills pushed in various places, the echo-chamber nature of the arguments, the repetetive phrasing of the claims; that is, how the same arguments are pushed, the same claims made, for the same proposals no matter the differences in local conditions.

For one example, 11 states passed similar reactionary so-called "reforms" to public education, generally involving measures benefitting private, profit-oriented schools, cutting public education funding, and attacking teachers' unions, even though in the performance of their public schools, the ranking of those states among the others ranged from 4th to 41st.

“Basically,” Lafer said in that interview,

the most powerful lobbies in the country are in a concerted attack across the country, and also across a wide range of issues, acting in such a way that is going to make it harder for people in the country to make a decent living.

Which I've been saying for over a year and a-half, but it's nice to have some backup.

But I don't want to stop there because, again, all this is just one aspect of the attack. As another example, we have heard much about "the war on women." I have one objection to that, only one; in fact you probably should call it a quibble. It's this: the failure to recognize that the war on women does not exist in a vacuum; it is another aspect, another front, in the overall attack on The Commons, the overall attack on the concept of "We, the People."

A particular facet of this, of course, is the on-going assault on the right to an abortion, on the right to choose. This year has been no exception.

During the first six months of 2013, states adopted 43 provisions to ban abortion, impose medically unnecessary restrictions on providers or otherwise regulate the procedure into nonexistence.

But it's more than that, as some are coming to realize: The attack is not only on the right to an abortion, it's an attack on the right of a woman to retain her independent personhood the instant she becomes pregnant. It becomes an attack not just on the right of a woman to decide to end her pregnancy but on the right of a woman to make any decisions during her pregnancy.

According to the group National Advocates for Pregnant Women, since 2005 there have been 200 documented cases in which a woman’s pregnancy was a necessary factor in criminal charges brought against her. A majority of these involved women who were accused of using drugs during their pregnancies and so charged with "child endangerment" by frothing prosecutors claiming that any reference to "child" in a child endangerment statute must by definition include fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses.

I'm going to interject something here. These prosecutors and their frozen-smile defenders will say "We are doing this to protect the unborn child," a claim made starkly clear by the fact that many of these women have found themselves in court with no attorney - but with a court-appointed attorney to "protect the interests" of the fetus.

So let me say this: There is no such thing as an unborn child. Period. If it's not born, it's not a child. When you start routinely calling a tadpole an "unborn frog," a caterpillar an "unborn butterfly," and an acorn an "unborn oak tree," then you can call a fetus an "unborn child." And not before.

But getting back to the issue, I said a "majority" of cases involved women forcibly confined or criminally charged based on being suspected of using drugs, a practice, by the way, condemned by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Society of Addiction Medicine, and the American Psychiatric Association. But "majority" is by no means all.

Women also have been criminally charged because of miscarriages and stillbirths. In one example case from Iowa, a pregnant woman fell down a flight of stairs, called paramedics to check on the health of her fetus, and then expressed uncertainty about whether she should carry the pregnancy to term. She was charged with attempted homicide of the fetus. In Utah, a woman was charged with homicide based on a claim that her decision to delay having a C-section was the cause of one of her twins to be stillborn.

I'm going to cut myself off here both for time and because we're at a point where someone might say "In the one case, the economy, the move is for less government but in the other, the personal, it's for more government. How can these be parts of the same attack?"

The answer is simple in that in both cases the goal is the same: power. Domination. Control. The essence of which, ultimately, is "I have no duty to you but you have duties to me. So economically, you're on your own and I have no responsibility for your welfare. Socially, I will tell you how to behave." Just like the lord of the manor and his serfs.

"Back to 1900?" Hell, they're thinking "Back to 1600."

Sources:
http://www.epi.org/publication/attack-on-american-labor-standards/
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/31/newts_revenge_child_labor_makes_a_comeback/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/05/1253318/-Wage-theft-outstrips-bank-gas-station-and-convenience-store-robberies
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/31/the_rights_war_on_pregnant_women/

134.1 - Good news: Marriage equality advances in Hawai'i

Good news: Marriage equality advances in Hawai'i

Updated Let's start off very quickly with some good news.

Last week, I reported that Illinois was about to become the 15th state to recognize same-sex marriage. Turns out I may have been wrong - it may be the 16th state.

On November 8, Hawaii's House of Representatives approved a bill to legalize same-sex marriage, paving the way for anticipated final passage in the Senate sometime this week.

Governor Neil Abercrombie has indicated he would swiftly sign the measure into law - meaning that depending on schedules, Hawai'i could achieve marriage equality before Illinois does.

As currently drafted, the Hawai'i bill would take effect on December 2.

A year ago, only six states and the District of Columbia recognized same-sex marriage. Now, within weeks, there will be 16.

I also have good news about the growing protests, strikes, and civil disobedience aimed at Wal-Mart, actions that are starting to have an impact, but I lack the time to talk much about that today. More soon.

Update: The bill has passed in Hawai'i and Gov. Abercrombie has already signed it. So Land o' Lincoln will be #16. Which, when you think about it, is sort of appropriate.

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/09/hawaii-gay-marriage-bill_n_4245015.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57612238/hawaii-becomes-15th-state-to-legalize-same-sex-marriage/
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/06/breaking_california_wal_mart_workers_strike_today_following_stunning_florida_victory/
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/08/largest_wal_mart_civil_disobedience_ends_with_over_50_arrests/

Left Side of the Aisle #134

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of November 14 - 20, 2013

This week:

Marriage equality advances in Hawaii
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/09/hawaii-gay-marriage-bill_n_4245015.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57612238/hawaii-becomes-15th-state-to-legalize-same-sex-marriage/
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/06/breaking_california_wal_mart_workers_strike_today_following_stunning_florida_victory/
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/08/largest_wal_mart_civil_disobedience_ends_with_over_50_arrests/

The attack on The Commons
http://www.epi.org/publication/attack-on-american-labor-standards/
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/31/newts_revenge_child_labor_makes_a_comeback/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/05/1253318/-Wage-theft-outstrips-bank-gas-station-and-convenience-store-robberies
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/31/the_rights_war_on_pregnant_women/

Poetic justice on voter ID
http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2013/10/greg-abbott-will-need-affidavit-to-vote/
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/wendy-davis-outsmarts-texas-voter-id-law

Outrage of the Week: 2nd Circuit blocks stop-and-frisk fixes, removes judge
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/08/1211-good-news-stop-and-frisk-smackdown.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/breaking-stop-frisk-blocked-judge-removed-article-1.1503092
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/nyregion/court-blocks-stop-and-frisk-changes-for-new-york-police.html?_r=0
https://www.ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/stop-and-frisk-lawsuit:-court-of-appeals-stays-remedies,-reassigns-case-new-judge
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/nov/01/how-uphold-racial-injustice/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/opinion/a-bad-ruling-on-stop-and-frisk.html
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/11/03/judges-appearance-of-impartiality/which-judges-breached-the-rules
http://herculesandtheumpire.com/2013/11/03/a-cheap-shot/

Clown Award: Mike Rogers
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/31/1252139/-A-congressman-s-new-interpretation-of-the-Fourth-nbsp-Amendment
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131029/18020225059/mike-rogers-you-cant-have-your-privacy-violated-if-you-dont-know-about-it.shtml

And Another Thing 1: light sabers coming?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/27/new-matter-light-saber_n_3998082.html
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/30/star-wars-lightsabers-invented

And Another Thing 2: billions of Earthlike planets
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/04/earth-like-habitable-planets-kepler-space-video_n_4214758.html
http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-earth-like-planets-20131105,0,2673237.story#axzz2joZzLISO

Weekly reminder

We have reached a milestone.

As of November 5, at least 10,237 people had been killed by gunfire in the US since Newtown, at least 90 of them in Massachusetts.

133.6 - Clown Award: Sens. Chris Murphy and Diane Feinstein

Clown Award: Sens. Chris Murphy and Diane Feinstein

The previous bit leads us right into our other regular feature, the Clown Award, given for meritorious stupidity, where we have a tie. Two very deserving winners, both related to the spying.

The first big red nose goes to Sen. Chris Murphy, who has reacted to news about anger among European governments over NSA spying on their people and their leaders, up to and including at least one prime minister, by saying he's going to go to Europe to dish out some "tough love" and "make it clear" to Europeans that they need to "stay on board with us" because "it's really important for US national security interests."

In another words, "Hey, Europeans: Shut up." So says the clown Chris Murphy.

Our second big red nose goes to the NSA's enabler-in-chief in the Congress, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

This past week, she rejected the idea of clemency for Edward Snowden, claiming that if he had been a true whistleblower, he could have reported things to her committee privately.

Leave aside the fact that it's not up to Dianne Feinstein to define who is and who isn't a whistleblower - especially when the definition of the term refers to someone who "informs on another or makes public disclosure of corruption or wrongdoing," not someone who gives the secrets to the secrets-keepers.

Instead, just consider that when the leaks started to be revealed, Feinstein was out there claiming to all and sundry that she already knew all this stuff, that everyone should just not bother their pretty little heads because it was all under control and her committee was thoroughly briefed and kept informed and did strict oversight - so just what was it that Snowden was supposed to tell them if she already knew about it? Was he supposed to know in advance what the Committee did and didn't know?

Because it turns out that the Committee didn't know it all, or at least that's what Feinstein is claiming now about the spying on leaders of US allies. She has found out that the White House was keeping things from her and that the Director of National Intelligence and the Director of the NSA were lying to her Committee, which she knows only because of Edward Snowden - and her response was to repeat her charge that he is a traitor.

Now, that is a clown.

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/31/europe-nsa_n_4184284.html
http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/331183-feinstein-stands-by-labeling-snowden-a-traitor
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/03/edward-snowden-clemency_n_4209498.html
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/whistle-blower?s=t

133.5 - More on NSA spying

More on NSA spying

So, have you heard the latest on the listening? The listening, of course, being that done by the NSA, now busily defending every new discovery by invoking the magic talisman "9/11" as part of a conscious PR strategy. Literally: A master list of NSA talking points obtained by Al Jazeera America through a Freedom of Information Act filing has 9/11 references at the top of a listing of "sound bites that resonate," such as “I much prefer to be here today explaining these programs, than explaining another 9/11 event that we were not able to prevent.”

As I said last week, this is crappola: Despite claims that the previously-secret programs had stopped 54 terrorist plots, NSA Director Keith Starship Captain Alexander admitted last month in only "one or possibly two" of those cases did the massive spying make any difference and Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall said the NSA's dragnet of phone data "played little or no role" in those 54 cases.

But anyway, what's the new stuff? It's this: A week ago, the Washington Post reported that the NSA has secretly broken into the main links connecting Google and Yahoo data centers around the world. This gives them unrestricted access to everything - everything - moving through the networks of either of those internet giants.

And I do mean everything: The Post reports than an internal NSA document, dated January 9, 2013 and among those released by Edward Snowden, says that in the preceding 30 days, field collectors had processed and sent back over 181 million new records - ranging from “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, to actual content such as text, audio, and video.

The Post also says that when two Google techs were shown the image on the left, which came from a National Security Agency presentation on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” they "exploded in profanities."

I'm sure part of the reason for that reaction is that we've heard about PRISM, the NSA's program to tap into the servers of a number of internet corporations to extract data. However, that refers - at least hypothetically - to data the companies either willingly give up in response to a request or unwillingly in respose to an order from the secret FISA Court. You might well call the the front door: The companies knew about this (even though some tried to deny it or be evasive about it) and knew what was going on.

This new revelation, under a project called MUSCULAR, is then the back door. This is not someone at the front door looking for a donation, this is the sneak thief breaking in the back to steal whatever looks good to them; it's the embezzeler trying to suck out the goodies without you even knowing it's going on. Now, no, of course the data doesn't disappear from the Google or Yahoo cloud, it's just copied, but the image still works: Companies who thought they were cooperating with the feds have learned that their data is being ripped off behind their backs.

The data links being exploited, of course, are outside the US, where, thanks to the rigorous oversight of Congressional leaders and our carefully-crafted laws, the NSA can pretty much do whatever it dang well wants because after all, if the data is outside the US it must be about foreigners which makes absolutely no sense but don't worry because the NSA swears it doesn't ever ever ever spy on Americans nosiree honest to gosh.

And don't you feel better.

Sources:
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/30/revealed-nsa-pushed911askeysoundbitetojustifysurveillance.html
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/813055/nsa-talking-points.pdf
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/30/nsa_top_soundbite_push_911/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/11/1325-more-on-nsa-spying.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-glaser/america-as-economic-spy-n_b_4190948.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story_1.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/30/nsa_secretly_accessed_main_google_yahoo_data_center_links/

133.4 - Veterans' Day commentary: soldiers are not heroes

Veterans' Day commentary: soldiers are not heroes

The week this show is on includes Veterans Day, so this is the time I'm going to include my annual Veterans Day commentary. I have done this either on my blog or here - or both - for this will make it six years.

I have pretty much given up on worrying about how it will be taken. I've tried various ways to start, wanting to make sure that I say what I mean and only what I mean. But I've come to accept that there is no way that will not be misunderstood, either accidentally or, by some, deliberately. So I gave up trying to do anything other than say it outright. I regard it as an at least useful if not necessary counterpoint to the annual hyped praise of all things veteran, which too easily slides over into praise of all things military.

The thing is, November 11 has become so well-known as Veterans' Day that not many people remember that it was originally called Armistice Day. It was intended to commemorate those who died in World War I by an observation of the end of the war, which ended, at least on the Western front, on "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month." But after World War II, the US changed its day to Veterans' Day and over time it's become not a commemoration of those who have died in war but a celebration of anyone who's ever been in the military. It has slid from a commemoration of the dead and of peace, of the end of a war, to a promotion of militarism, to the "nobility of sacrifice," and to the "true patriots" - apparently the only true patriots, as they are given due unavailable to the rest of us.

This actually originally arose, what originally prompted it the first time I did this, was that I was (and still am) deeply disturbed by the increasing tendency among "progressives" to adulate all things military, and particularly disturbed by the practice of referring to soldiers routinely as "our heroes" or some similar formulation. And I will note right here that this may be the last time for this particular now five-year-old commentary because I don't feel as isolated a voice as I was on this and there is some pushback against the attitude I'm critiquing.

But the attitude still exists: Do a Google search on "soldiers our heroes" and you get over 1.1 million hits. It exists more on the right than on the left, but it still exists among progressives and that's what I'm really addressing. So let me be clear here: Soldiers are not "heroes." A "hero" is by definition someone who is in some way extraordinary, remarkable, worthy of emulation. It is at best a risky business to define someone as "extraordinary" simply by virtue of wearing a uniform and in fact it is potentially dangerous as it makes it too easy to slip into the militaristic attitude that what soldiers do goes beyond "necessary evil" or just necessary, beyond even honorable, to admirable, to something to celebrate, an attitude that makes it all too easy to promote additional enlistments, additional weapons, and even additional wars.

The root of this, I'm convinced, is that after years of the constant drumbeat from the right that those on the left are "soft" on "national security," that we aren't "tough enough," not ready enough to "do what's necessary" to "protect our way of life," we increasingly have decided to, if you will, fight on those terms; that is, we have absorbed the idea that we have to prove ourselves on "security" issues by proving that we're "tough."

Our means of doing this, a means that first appeared during the Gulf War back in 1990-91, was to declare loudly that "We support the troops!" That was our way into the national security debate, a way to (supposedly) oppose the war while, we declared, supporting the men and women sent to fight it. We would prove that we were as committed to the military and national security as the right, just, well, in a sorta different way.

A perhaps revealing example of that attitude came a couple of years ago during an interview with then-Senator and liberal hero of the month Jim Webb on "The Daily Show," the audience for which, both on-air and in-studio, has a well-known lefty tilt. Most of that interview was a discussion about Webb's bill to expand veteran educational benefits, under which, in return for three years in the military, soldiers would receive four years' tuition at their best state college plus the cost of books, plus a monthly stipend. At one point, when Webb said that the least we can do for our soldiers is give them the chance for "a first-class future," the audience burst into loud applause.

And I thought then, as I have since, would there be any chance, any chance at all, of that same sort of reaction if the same proposal was made on behalf of any other group? What if someone proposed paying for four years of college for, say, firefighters? Or cops? How about volunteers in VISTA (now AmeriCorps VISTA)? Or the Peace Corps? The latter two provide some educational benefits for those who put in their time, but nothing vaguely approaching four fully-paid years of college.

What about publicly-funded continuing education for doctors and nurses? Such continuing education is not only a good idea for health care professionals, it's often a requirement for maintaining their licenses to practice. And certainly having doctors and nurses who are up to date on the best knowledge and practice is beneficial to the public. So why not have public financing of that continuing education?

When it comes down to it, why not have public education, tuition-free, taxpayer-supported public education, right up through four years of college for anyone who can show themselves capable of meeting the educational standards for a college degree? Can you seriously imagine a studio audience bursting into spontaneous, enthusiastic applause for someone seriously proposing such an idea?

Why only soldiers? What does it say about us that the idea of paying soldiers' way through college gets ovations while the idea of anyone else getting the same benefit gets at best quizzical stares if not overt sneering rejections?

What it says is that we regard the work of soldiering as inherently more important, inherently more deserving of praise and reward, than the work of others, no matter what contributions they make or have made to society. And it means we regard the lives of soldiers as inherently more valuable than the lives of the rest of us. That is the attitude we progressives have been and are buying into by buying into the "our heroes" meme.

But if it was only things like veterans' benefits, it might not seem particularly important. I say that despite the fact that the amount of money involved in such benefits is not trivial, being something over $60 billion and the arguments for them often quite misleading: Many such benefits were instituted in the wake of World War II - personally, I think part of the reason was memories of the Bonus Army, which had been just 13 years earlier. The avowed purpose of those benefits was to make up for what those soldiers had lost in regard to their civilian careers as compared to those who had not been in the military. That is, they were to insure that soldiers did not wind up being penalized for having been soldiers. They were not intended to give soldiers a leg up over others (or "a first class future") and they most definitely were not presented as being a reward for military service. But that's what they have become over the years and that's how we continue to treat them.

I also want to make abundantly clear in case it's not or is willfully ignored that what I'm questioning here is not the right of veterans to get any medical care, rehabilitation, and counseling they need as the result of being wounded either physically or psychologically and the military's practice of giving soldiers less-than-honorable discharges precisely to avoid providing them with benefit is a moral disgrace. But, yes, veterans benefits are too generous to the extent that they become a reward for being in the military - such as veterans' preferences in civil service jobs - and especially when they refer to singling out veterans for opportunities such as for higher education that are becoming increasingly financially impossible for most of the rest of us.

Put another way, I do not object to or resent any veteran taking advantage of any benefits to which they are legally entitled: They are there to be used. But that is born of the general principle that I would advocate for the right of anyone to get any help which they truly need regardless of their let's call it prior employment history.

Put yet another way, I am opposed to soldiers getting benefits simply for having been soldiers when those benefits are not equally available to others with equal need and equal opportunity for personal advancement.

But even so, even again, if that's all there was to it, it still might not seem like a great big huge deal. But that's not all there is to it, not when we progressives have been trying to lay claim to national security chops by out troop-supporting, out Pentagon-embracing, the right, insisting that we're the ones who really support the troops, we're the ones who really support their brave courageous efforts and we look to prove it by undaunted adulation, by blandly treating, with no hint of hesitation, the phrase "have a lot of courage" and the word "soldier" as synonymous.

It was the Iraq War that really brought this out. We were the ones who loudly decried the lack of body armor for the troops and the lack of reinforced plating on military vehicles, accusing the right of "not supporting the troops" as much as we do because of that failure. But as Mark Twain pointed out in "The War Prayer,"

[i]f you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

In war, in combat, as long as the soldiers are there, there is an unavoidable trade-off: The more you wish for them to remain safe, the more you are wishing for them to kill others. That is what safety in combat means. The more we wished for them to return safely, the more we wished for Iraqis not to. The more we wished life for them, the more we wished death for others. The more we wished that American mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, didn't suffer the loss of a family member, the more we wished that Iraqi mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, did. That's what war means.

But we refused and continue to refuse to see that. So when we expressed "support for the troops" in Iraq by demanding we "give them the equipment to do the job" and "then come home safely" rather than simply and solely saying "get them the hell out," we offered a tacit - and sometimes not so tacit - endorsement of the killing. For the sake of the blessing of safety and life for our soldiers, we called down the curse of risk and death on Iraqis. When we declared support in terms of equipment rather than withdrawal, that is what we endorsed. In war, there is no other way.

Undoubtedly, there are those who were prepared to declare American lives inherently are worth more than Iraqi lives. Or Afghan lives. Or Pakistani lives. Or the lives of the people in the places where our drones strike. I was not and am not among them and I still like to think that I'm part of a movement that would say the same if it would only, to quote Twain again, "pause and think." But I suspect we have done neither.

The emotional embrace of soldiers as "our heroes," as some sort of disembodied ideal, has implications beyond the immediate ones, beyond as well the immediate experience of our recent and present wars. Within that embrace, it becomes easy to absorb, absorb so deeply that one is unaware of it, the idea that a veteran's take on military matters - and by extension, all of foreign policy - is inherently more valuable than that of others not by virtue of knowledge or logic or informed comment but simply by virtue of being a veteran. We regarded it (correctly) as a scandal several years ago when media outlets used retired generals who were actually Pentagon-trained PR flacks as "experts" on military and foreign policy questions - but an overlooked point is that the reason retired generals were so prominent in that number was that their status as military people gave them added credibility in the eyes of many viewers and listeners.

In our pursuit of "support the troops," we have fallen prey to that same attitude, one that regards the statements of w1ar veterans as more valuable, more telling, than those of non-veterans. It even has become fairly common to hear dismissive references to those who "never saw combat." At first, that was a legitimate argument, because it was directed against those derided as chickenhawks, those rightwingers who were eager for fights, ready for wars, provided they did not have to take part in them. But increasingly it has been used as an all-purpose putdown, even against those on the left who have criticized soldiers - as, I imagine, it would be directed against me (a non-veteran and a Vietnam-era draft resister) were my voice loud enough to attract the attention.

But the real danger is that as the attitude persists, it distorts our way of thinking, drops a magnet on our moral compass. In a bizarre mirror image of the fanatical right, during the Iraq War we refused to blame soldiers who committed  atrocities, or, more exactly, we refused to acknowledge them. We refused to blame those who shot civilians even when the attacks were clearly acts of vengeance; we downplayed the war crimes and the routine cruelties; we made excuses for those who shot the wounded or tortured prisoners; even when an official Pentagon report casually mentioned how a US soldier summarily executed a wounded fighter and shot another wounded, unresisting fighter twice in the back, we paid little notice - and if we did, it was usually to brush off complaints with that all-purpose "you've never been in combat" defense. "These things happen in war," we said.

Yes, they do. And "our heroes" were doing them. Which was and is, even as the deniers seemed incapable of recognizing it, the point. Just as the right tried to blame the individuals and exonerate the hierarchy, we wanted to blame the hierarchy and exonerate the individuals, to remove all their responsibility for their own actions. That is an idea we were supposed to have rejected nearly 70 years ago now; apparently, we haven't.

Soldiers are not heroes. They can be heroes, they can act heroically, they can do heroic things - but the act of putting on a uniform and agreeing to put your conscience in a lockbox for the next so many years does not make your life more important than others, it does not make your contributions more valuable than others, it does not make you more deserving of aid than others, it does not make your opinions and insights more worthy of respect than others, it does not exempt you from moral judgment. It does not make you a hero.

And we should not fall prey to hero-worship.

Sources:
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2012/11/veterans-day-2012.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_Day
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_veterans/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU-x1eAb9wU
http://www.military.com/benefits/veteran-benefits/veterans-employment-preference-points.html
http://warprayer.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials

133.3 - Outrage of the Week: House may kill ENDA

Outrage of the Week: House may kill ENDA

Updated The Outrage of the Week this week refers to something that, if you're like about 80% of the American public, you didn't even know was an issue. And House Speaker John Boner is against it.

"It" is the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA. ENDA would make it illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, adding to the list of illegal bases for discrimination that now consists of race, color, sex, nationality, religion, age, and disability.

ENDA is going to pass the Senate this week, having gotten past all procedural hurdles and attempted fillibusters. It actually passed the House back in 2007 but that was before the right-wing flakes got control of the place. And John Boner is against ENDA.

ENDA is popular, or at minimum accepted, among Americans. According to a poll on the topic, a heavy majority of registered voters - 68%, including even 56% of Republicans - support such a law. There is majority support in every single one of the 50 states. But John Boner is against it.

In fact, the idea of such a law is so well accepted that 80% of registered voters think it already is the law. But John Boner is against it. And that opposition, standing against the majority of Americans, the majority of Republicans, the majority of his own state, may well kill the bill. Again.

And that is an outrage.

Update: The Senate did pass the bill on Thursday by 64-32, with 10 GOPpers voting yes. Laws similar to ENDA already exist in 22 states. However, John Bonehead says the House may not even vote on it.

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/04/enda-vote_n_4214682.html
http://images.politico.com/global/2013/09/29/enda_poll_2013-09-08_natl_memo.html
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/11/07/senate-oks-gay-rights-bill-banning-discrimination/

133.2 - Good news: Third Circuit applies tougher standards to GPS tracking

Good news: Third Circuit applies tougher standards to GPS tracking

We also have some good news on the privacy front.

Last year, in the case US v. Jones, the Supreme Court ruled that for police to attach a GPS device to a car is a "search" under the Fourth Amendment. But it left open whether it was the type of search that requires a warrant and probable cause or whether "reasonable suspicion" was sufficient.

Well, two weeks ago, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, in US v. Katzin, ruled that the more stringent requirement, the one for a warrant, is the one that applies, finding that such devices fly in the face of the protections afforded citizens by the Fourth Amendment.

I also want to note here that except for the latest revelations about NSA spying, privacy is something I haven't talked about in while. I hope to remedy that over the next weeks because it's a far broader issue than even the NSA can encompass.

Sources:
https://www.aclu.org/national-security-technology-and-liberty/federal-appeals-court-rules-warrant-required-gps-tracking
http://translogic.aolautos.com/2013/10/23/courts-uphold-ruling-that-warrantless-slap-on-gps-units-are-un/

133.1 - Good news: Illinois approves same-sex marriage

Good news: Illinois approves same-sex marriage

Let's start, as we always like to do when possible, with some good news.

Illinois is about to become the 15th state to recognize same-sex marriages as the state House of Representatives passed a measure on Tuesday. The state Senate had already passed such a bill in February. Governor Pat Quinn has said all along that he would sign it. Same-sex Illinois couples could begin marrying June 1.

Legislatively, next up is Hawai'i, which could see a vote later this month.

A lot has changed since backers of same-sex marriage first began pressing the legislature to go beyond civil unions. In just the last roughly one year, marriage equality has come to Maryland, Maine, and Washington through voter referendums, to Delaware, Rhode Island, and Minnesota through legislative action, and New Jersey through court action (the legislature passed a marriage equality bill, but Christ Christie vetoed it). And court action to set a statewide standard could bringt it to New Mexico by the end of the year.

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/us/illinois-sends-bill-allowing-gay-marriage-to-governor.html
http://www.myfoxchicago.com/story/22697306/governor-quinn-talks-marriage-equality-pension-reform-re-election
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303482504579180243258359648

Left Side of the Aisle #133

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of November 7-13, 2013

This week:

Good news: Illinois approves same-sex marriage
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/us/illinois-sends-bill-allowing-gay-marriage-to-governor.html
http://www.myfoxchicago.com/story/22697306/governor-quinn-talks-marriage-equality-pension-reform-re-election
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303482504579180243258359648

Good news: Third Circuit applies tougher standards to GPS tracking
https://www.aclu.org/national-security-technology-and-liberty/federal-appeals-court-rules-warrant-required-gps-tracking
http://translogic.aolautos.com/2013/10/23/courts-uphold-ruling-that-warrantless-slap-on-gps-units-are-un/

Outrage of the Week: House may kill ENDA
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/04/enda-vote_n_4214682.html
http://images.politico.com/global/2013/09/29/enda_poll_2013-09-08_natl_memo.html

Veterans' Day commentary: soldiers are not heroes
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2012/11/veterans-day-2012.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_Day
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_veterans/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU-x1eAb9wU
http://www.military.com/benefits/veteran-benefits/veterans-employment-preference-points.html
http://warprayer.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials

More on NSA spying
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/30/revealed-nsa-pushed911askeysoundbitetojustifysurveillance.html
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/813055/nsa-talking-points.pdf
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/30/nsa_top_soundbite_push_911/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/11/1325-more-on-nsa-spying.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-glaser/america-as-economic-spy-n_b_4190948.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story_1.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/30/nsa_secretly_accessed_main_google_yahoo_data_center_links/

Clown Award: Sens. Chris Murphy and Diane Feinstein
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/31/europe-nsa_n_4184284.html?ref=topbar
http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/331183-feinstein-stands-by-labeling-snowden-a-traitor
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/03/edward-snowden-clemency_n_4209498.html
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/whistle-blower?s=t

Weekly reminder

As of October 29, at least 9,977 people had been killed by gunfire in the US since Newtown, at least 89 of them in Massachusetts.

132.5 - More on NSA spying

More on NSA spying

Recently, syndicated columnist Richard Cohen, who has an undeserved reputation as a liberal, declared that he had changed his mind about Edward Snowden. Initially, he recalled, he called Snowden “ridiculously cinematic” and “narcissistic” and certainly no whistleblower. Actually, he also said Snowden would be remembered as a "cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood" and called journalist Glenn Greenwald "vainglorious" but we'll, let that pass because last week, Cohen said "time has proved my judgments were just plain wrong." Which is not at all surprising for Richard Cohen, but still the admission is welcome.

One of things that changed his mind is that, while he still maintains that much of what Snowden revealed had already been leaked, still, quoting him, "my mouth is agape at the sheer size of these data-gathering programs."

Even those of us who say that no, this was not, as the smug pundits would have it, old news to be ignored can agree with the jaw-dropping part. And the gaping just increases by the day.

For one example, we've heard about the spooks tracking information about the phone calls made by millions of Americans. We've heard about them tracking internet usage and emails. Now it turns out they are also harvesting hundreds of millions of e-mail address books along with “buddy lists” from instant messaging services around the world.

According to documents among those released by Snowden, on a single day last year, a day described in the documents as typical, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected nearly 690,000 e-mail address books, a rate of over 250 million per year, plus a half-million more buddy lists on that same day.

That is, rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is just swallowing up a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Such address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information while inbox listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometime contain content, such as the first few lines of a message.

This would all be blatantly and transparently illegal if it were done domestically, but because these contact lists are gathered through secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or other services that control Internet traffic, it's all supposed to be just swell.

Except, of course, for the fact that data does not know borders and many large tech companies maintain data centers in various places around the world - so that, for example, an email from one US-based gmail account to another US based-gmail account could easily be routed through a server outside the US - and, one NSA offical said, when information passes through “the overseas collection apparatus, the assumption is you’re not a US person.”

Which means that although the collection takes place overseas, two senior US intelligence officials acknowledged to the Washington Post that it sweeps in the contacts of millions, perhaps tens of millions, of Americans.

It also came out recently that the NSA has engaged in massive spying on the phone systems of European nations.

A couple of weeks ago, the French newspaper Le Monde reported that last December, in that one month, the NSA recorded over 70 million phone calls in France.

And according to an account in the Spanish daily El Mundo on October 28, the NSA recently tracked over 60 million calls in Spain, again in the space of a single month.

The NSA targeted the personal cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, uncovered when the German paper Der Spiegel showed her NSA documents with her cellphone number written on them. Confronted about this, White House officials insisted that the US "is not monitoring and will not monitor" Merkel's calls but carefully dodged saying they hadn't done so in the past.

Thomas Oppermann, who heads a German parliamentary committee that oversees the country's intelligence service, says his panel was "deceived" by the US about its intelligence activities in Germany.

And it wasn't just Merkel. Der Spiegel had previously uncovered NSA activity against the offices and communications of senior officials of the European Union.

And it wasn't just Europe: Der Spiegel also reported that the NSA has been systematically eavesdropping on the Mexican government for years, including hacking into the public email account of then-president Felipe Calderón, an email domain also used by cabinet members and which contained, the NSA documents proudly declare, "diplomatic, economic and leadership communications."

The NSA also monitored current Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and others around him even when he was a candidate for president in the summer of 2012.

This came out not long after it was revealed that the US had been spying on Dilma Rousseff, the president of Brazil, along with her key advisors as the NSA told itself there were "high-value targets" among her inner circle.

In fact, the NSA monitored the telephone conversations of at least 35 world leaders after obtaining their numbers from an official in another department of the federal government.

However, there was one world leader who didn't seem upset by all the spying: British Prime Minister and all-around freedom-of-the-press-hating David Cameron, who has repeatedly attacked the revelations, most recently by claiming that critics of the massive spying programs have a "la-di-da, airy-fairy" view of the world, and now is threatening to "act" against newspapers - specifically, the Guardian - if they don't "demonstrate some social responsibility." That is, if they don't just shut up.

It could be that part of the reason for his attitude is that unlike the case of Angela Merkel, in fact unique among leaders, the White House says not only that it doesn't and won't spy on Cameron, but also that it never has.

To top this off with one of those "laugh so you don't cry" moments, a source described as "a senior administration official" told the AP on Monday that the White House is considering no longer spying on the heads of state of US allies but they haven't made up their mind yet.

The thing of it is, all this massive intrusion on the privacy of, all this spying on, literally scores if not hundreds of people around the world is not only morally and politically offensive and profoundly anti-democratic, it becomes self-defeating. The director of the NSA, Starship Captain Keith Alexander, has defended a policy of what he called "collect it all" by saying that you can't find a needle in a haystack if you don't have the haystack.

(He actually said “You need a haystack to find a needle,” which sounds like a koan, but I'm pretty sure we got his meaning right.)

The problem is, though, the NSA's approach is less like trying to find a needle in a haystack than it is trying to find a needle while throwing huge handfuls of hay over it. In fact, the NSA is collecting so much information that it has occasionally threatened to outstrip even its own massive storage capacity, so much so that at times the agency has had to issue “emergency detasking” orders - that is, to tell its own programs busily sucking up data to "Stop. Just ... stop."

Oh, and one of the things causing the NSA to choke on its own data? Spam. Kinda nice in an odd way to know they're getting screwed up by the same thing the rest of us are.

But one clear result of this glut, this plethora, of data is that these programs are just not nearly as good, not nearly as efficient, as they're made out to be.

The NSA and its defenders, echoed by the media, like to make grandiose claims the programs are key to, vital to, absolutely indispensible in, stopping terrorists. Back on June 18, the House Intelligence Committee held a hearing about NSA disclosures, during which Starship Captain Alexander claimed that on more than 50 occasions since 9/11 these programs have protected the US and our allies from terrorist threats across the globe, including more than 10 targeting the US.

But early in October, Alexander admitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that such claims are essentially vapor. Sen. Pat Leahy charged that the claim of thwarted attacks was "plainly wrong. ... These weren't all plots, and they weren't all thwarted." In response, Alexander conceded that the examples were "not all plots" and, significantly, also admitted there were only "one or possibly two" cases of terrorist activity that would not have been prevented "but for" the massive spying. Which easily leaves us to wonder if even that figure is exaggerated.

Our privacy is being stripped, our rights undermined, power is being concentrated in fewer hands, official secrecy is expanding dramatically - and no one, when they are actually pressed, can give us a single damn good reason why.

So it's nice to know that there is some pushback on this. First, internationally, Germany, France, Spain, the European Union, Brazil, and to a lesser extent Mexico are all royally ticked off. Domestically, there are some legislative attempts being made to at least begin - empahsize begin - to address some - emphasize some - of the worst aspects of this.

On that, remember that in terms of domestic spying, there are two primary issues. One is Section 215 of the so-called PATRIOT Act, the one call the TRAITOR Act. This is the section used to justify the massive phone spying. The other is Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which is what's used to justify the massive internet spying. There are some bills looking to go after Section 215, for example, by requiring that any warrant issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court must contain "specific and articulable facts" that the information is relevant to an investigation and the that the order "pertains to" an individual.

The are proposals to require the White House to release its legal justification for the spying. This to me is one of the most astonishing aspects of the whole business: The Bush gang and now the Obama gang claim they have the legal authority to do all the spying they are doing based on their own legal interpretation of the laws. Here's the kicker: That interpretation is secret and the White House has refused to release it. They say "we have to power to do this, the law says so." The public goes "uh, wait a minute, how do you get that from this," and they say "we won't tell you." Or, as Ring Lardner wrote in one of his stories, "'Shut up,' he explained."

There are also bills to change the FISA Court itself by requiring release of its findings and the manner of choosing its members. As of now, those members are chosen in secret by the Chief Justice - which right now means John "The Smirk" Roberts. There are a couple of proposals to make the process public and to spread around the authority.

Unfortunately, there is no bill in Congress with prospects of moving forward that tackles Section 702 of FISA, the section used for PRISM and other internet spying.

Some of the names attached to various of these bills are, in the Senate, Pat Leahy, Al Franken, Mark Udall, Ron Wyden, Jeff Merkley, Mike Lee, and Richard Blumenthal, and in the House, John Conyers, Justin Amash, Adam Schiff, Todd Rokita, Rick Larsen, Steve Cohen, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Jim Sensenbrenner, and Zoe Lofgren. You might make note both of those names - and of those names you don't hear in that list and maybe ask them why they aren't on it.

Potentially more important in the grander scheme of things is that there is also pushback in the streets. Last Saturday, October 26, thousands of people marched in Washington, DC under the banner of the Stop Watching Us coalition while "satellite" actions occurred in places like Austin, Chicago, and eight sites in Germany.

Billed by organizers as "the largest rally yet to protest mass surveillance", the march and rally was sponsored by an unusually broad coalition, everything from the ACLU, the Green Party, Color of Change, and Daily Kos to the Libertarian Party, FreedomWorks and Young Americans for Liberty. Left and right agree on little, but we can agree on privacy.

The rally included presenting to Congress a letter demanding an end to blanket data collection, a letter that now has over 585,000 names attached.

The best couple of sentence summation came in a statement from Edward Snowden, which was read to the crowd.

Today, no telephone in America makes a call without leaving a record with the NSA. Today, no Internet transaction enters or leaves America without passing through the NSA’s hands. Our representatives in Congress tell us this is not surveillance. They’re wrong.

Amen to that. And if you are not deeply offended and profoundly outraged and even frightened by all this, you really need to ask yourself what's wrong with you.

Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-edward-snowden-is-no-traitor/2013/10/21/f9d2ae5a-3a74-11e3-a94f-b58017bfee6c_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-nsa-is-doing-what-google-does/2013/06/10/fe969612-d1f7-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-collects-millions-of-e-mail-address-books-globally/2013/10/14/8e58b5be-34f9-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2013/10/france-summons-us-ambassador-over-spying-2013102183224174263.html
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/28/stop_watching_us_as_diplomatic_fallout
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/nsa-spying-allegations-germany_n_4154334.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/10/24/nsa-guardian-35-world-leaders_n_4159208.html?utm_hp_ref=uk
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/24/nsa-surveillance-world-leaders-calls
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-hacked-email-account-of-mexican-president-a-928817.html
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/21/206038/more-anger-from-mexico-over-us.html#emlnl=World_Newsletter
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/28/david-cameron-guardian-act_n_4170600.html?ref=topbar
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/10/25/david-cameron-angela-merkel_n_4162948.html?ref=topbar
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/28/usa-spying-cameron-idUSL5N0II2WQ20131028
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10401111/US-denies-spying-on-David-Cameron.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/28/nsa-spying-allies_n_4172164.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/10/1288-more-on-nsa-spying.html
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/15/crux-nsa-collect-it-all
http://warincontext.org/2013/07/21/how-big-is-the-nsas-haystack/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan
http://fair.org/home/see-spying-works/
http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/10/04/when-can-you-trust-the-nsas-claims-about-the-nsa/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/effs-cheat-sheet
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/26/nsa-stop-watching-us_n_4166640.html
https://rally.stopwatching.us/
https://rally.stopwatching.us/viewing-parties/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/26/nsa-rally-stop-watching-washington-snowden
https://optin.stopwatching.us/
http://rt.com/usa/stop-watching-us-rally-791/

132.4 - Outrage of the Week: Shopping while black

Outrage of the Week: Shopping while black

Now for our other regular feature, the Outrage of the Week.

Last week came news that Trayon Christian, a 19-year-old engineering student from Queens, is suing Barneys, an upscale men's clothing store in Manhattan. But that's not the Outrage of the Week. The reason for the suit is.

Christian had a work-study gig at the New York City College of Technology last spring. Once that was over and his paycheck was deposited, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. Christian, whose Facebook page shows him to be a fashion-loving teen, wanted a $350 Ferragamo belt of the sort worn by a favorite rapper, Juelz Santana.

He'd been to Barneys before but had never bought anything. Still, it meant he knew the store had the belt and right where it was. He got it, went to the counter, produced his debit are and ID, and the belt was his.

Maybe. He only got a block from the store when he was stopped by two NYPD plainclothes cops saying they'd gotten a call from someone at Barneys. Christian showed them his student ID and his drivers license. The cops told him his debit card was a fake.

They were asking him "How could you afford a belt like this? Where did you get this money from?"

Did I mention Trayon Christian is black?

He was handcuffed and arrested. He says he was held for two hours before he was released. Interestingly, the only part of his account the cops dispute is that they say he was held for less than an hour, as if that was the significant point. Which means the fact that he was handcuffed and busted because someone at Barneys and New York City cops couldn't believe that a young African-American man could have come by the money for an expensive belt legally doesn't seem to be in dispute. And that sort of blatant racism is nothing short of an outrage.

As a footnote, Christian brought the belt back to Barneys and got his money back, saying "I’m not shopping there again. It’s cruel. It’s racist.”

And so, as someone at DailyKos noted, as a result of its own prejudice, Barneys has lost a customer who is going to be an engineer probably pulling down 90 big ones in a few years. Which is, I suppose, a sort of poetic justice.

Sources:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/barneys-accused-stealing-black-teen-article-1.1493101
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/23/1250074/-Shopping-While-Black-Arrested-For-Buying-a-Belt

132.3 - Update 2: McDonald's McFails again

Update 2: McDonald's McFails again

Okay, out third updates starts with the fact that two weeks ago I gave a Hero Award to Nancy Salgado, a McDonald's cashier who makes $8.25 an hour after ten years with the company, who confronted the president of McDonald's USA over the poverty-level wages employees get.

Subsequently, she called the company's "McResource Line," which is supposed to help McDonald's workers with issues like child and health care. First she was told she didn't even qualify for the help because the McDonald's she works at is a franchise, not one owned directly by the corporation.

But the person on the phone went on to make helpful suggestions. Like get Food Stamps. Get Medicaid. Apply to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

In fairness to her, the woman on the phone was trying to be helpful within the constraints under which she worked, but the point is that McDonald's "help" for employees getting poverty-level wages is to tell them to have the federal government - that is, taxpayers - pick up the bill.

I wonder how Witless Romney and Maine Gov. Pepé Le Pew with their 47% feel about that.

Sources:
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/10/1306-hero-award-nancy-salgado.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/mcdonalds-food-stamps_n_4151647.html?ir=Business

132.2 - Update 1: Same-sex marriage

Update 1: Same-sex marriage

Three brief updates, two from last week and one from the week before.

First, in talking about how same-sex marriage rights have come to New Jersey, I mentioned the midnight weddings in Asbury Park performed by a retired priest.

The update is that the evening of that same day, that retired priest, Tom Pivinski, married Malcolm Navias, his partner of over 20 years. It was an interfaith service at their home and afterwards, they noted that the rings they have worn for 20 years can now legally be called wedding rings.

The second update is that I mentioned or at least intended to mention, that 8 counties in New Mexico allow same-sex marriages. This unusual situation can arise because the state constitution refers to marriage as a union of two people, neither expressly allowing for or denying same-sex marriage rights.

Well, after those counties began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, the state Supreme Court agreed to make a decision to settle the matter for the whole state. The court heard oral arguments on October 23.

What's astonishing here is how feeble the arguments against it have become. Jim Campbell, counsel for 12 GOPpers who sued to stop same-sex marriage, actually argued that the purpose of the marriage statutes was to encourage procreation.

Now, beyond the fact that at a time when population growth and resource depletion are genuine environmental concerns and so encouraging procreation would seem to be not the best idea, by Campbell's argument, not only same-sex couples but those beyond child-bearing years could not marry. Those who are infertile could not marry. Anyone who has had a vasectomy or a tubal ligation could not marry. Birth control should be illegal.

But it gets dumber. Campbell also argued that allowing same sex-couples to marry would "discourage" heterosexual couples from marrying and procreating. And he can say that because as everyone knows, the marriage rate among heterosexuals has just plummeted in states with same-sex marriage! Why, some of those states don't even do opposite-sex marriages any more!

I really wish that when he said that someone in the court had just said to Campbell "Discourage? Um, how?"

Justice Charles Daniels didn't do that, but he did note that marriage entails "many other benefits," most of which have "nothing to do with whether we have children." He mentioned tax benefits, inheritance and property rights.

A decision is expected by year's end. So it's possible - I emphasize possible - that soon New Mexico could make it fifteen states with marriage equality.

Speaking of which, I have to make a small correction. Last week I said that 14 state plus DC allow for same-sex marriage and six more recognize some form of domestic partnership or civil union, together covering 43% of the population of the US. I also said that 10 years ago that percentage would have been zero.

While that would be true for states with full marriage equality, it overstates the case when you include domestic partnerships and civil unions: New York City allowed domestic partnerships in 1998; California did so in 1999 and DC in 2002; Vermont had civil unions starting in 2000. So 10 years ago, the percentage was not zero. But just over 15 years ago, it was.

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/23/tom-pivinski-gay-interfaith-marriage_n_4149508.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/23/new-mexico-same-sex-marriage_n_4152503.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_union