Category: Politics

The New York Police Department has been slapped for its “operational ignorance” and its threat to constitutional rights.

Charging he had lost confidence in the NYPD’s methods of investigating political activity, a federal judge yesterday restored limits on the department that he had lifted only five months ago.
[In February the judge had agreed to ease the rules restraining police surveillance and interrogation excesses out of concern about heightened threats to security. The original rules have come to be known as the Handschu agreement. Handschu was the first listed plaintiff in a 1971 lawsuit which succesfully charged that the Police Department’s so-called Red Squad harassed political advocacy groups.]
Blasting the department at its highest levels, Senior U.S. District Judge Charles Haight reversed his March ruling in which he had accepted the Police Department’s assertion that terrorism concerns justified an easing of the restrictions.
Haight said he changed his mind after the disclosure that on Feb. 15 the police had arrested 274 people protesting the war in Iraq and questioned them about their political beliefs, entering their responses on what the department called a “demonstration debriefing” form.

Remarkably, the NYPD seems to believe nothing has really changed in the guidelines they must observe.

At a news conference yesterday, [Police Commissioner Ray] Kelly said that Haight’s ruling would “not change any modification made by the judge … For me, the important thing is the modification … continues to stand.”
Chris Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union said of Kelly’s statement, “I don’t know what the commissioner means since the judge clearly ordered that new restrictions will be added to the court order governing the department’s surveillance.”
The judge’s ruling did not specify what restrictions would be imposed in initiating a probe.

Neither the Newsday story nor the NYTimes account leave us with any clear understanding of the impact of the judge’s ruling yesterday.

Yesterday, Judge Haight did not impose new restrictions on the police in the wake of the interrogations, which first came to light after the New York Civil Liberties Union received complaints from protesters. Nor did the judge decide the issue of whether the interrogations violated the protesters’ constitutional rights.
But he said he would formally incorporate the recently eased rules into a judicial decree, to make clear that lawyers could return to court and seek to hold the city in contempt if they believed that a violation of the rules also violated an individual’s constitutional rights. [from the Times]

Israeli yesterday passed legislation which was designed to clarify the requirements of citizenship, to assure the purity of Israeli blood and to clarify the position of Palestinians in the Jewish state. Ok, I deliberately described the law in language closely patterned on that which is used to describe the notorious 1935 Nazi Nuremberg racial laws, but the reference and the impact of this act is extraordinarily important for the people affected by its abomination, and in fact for the entire world.

JERUSALEM, July 31 — The Israeli Parliament voted today to block Palestinians who marry Israelis from becoming Israeli citizens or residents, erecting a new legal barrier as Israel finished the first section of a new physical barrier against West Bank Palestinians.
. . . .
Opponents called [the marriage law] a racist measure that threatened to divide thousands of families or force them out of Israel. Roughly 1.2 million of Israel’s 6.7 million citizens are Arabs, and they are far more likely than Israeli Jews to marry Palestinians.
“It cannot be that because of the actions of one, or 10, or 20, that a population of one million will be punished,” said Ahmad Tibi, an Israeli-Arab member of Parliament. He called the law “blacker than black.”
Also today, Israel solicited construction bids to build 22 new homes in a settlement in the Gaza Strip. A new peace plan, the road map, calls on Israel to freeze settlement construction, but Israel says it must keep building to accommodate “natural growth.”

Building walls around enclaves of inferior peoples, keeping them out of Jewish society and ultimately out of Jewish territory, and finding Lebensraum in what was formerly a Palestinian ghetto. Today’s Israelis have had good teachers, but this horror was no more inevitable than that of Nazi Germany.

Anything smaller than an SUV is just plain un-American, says the Senate.

Washington – The Senate yesterday easily rejected an amendment to require the nation’s car makers to boost the gasoline efficiency of their vehicles.

And Trent Lott (who certainly knows something about trying to overcompensate for a man’s feelings of inadequacy) says, about DaimlerChrysler’s tiny Smart car, one of the most brilliant automotive designs of our time, “Don’t make the American people drive that little runt of a car.”
In fact, contrary to the commercially-cultivated prejudices of the American consumer who will never feel, or in fact be, safe even in a Bradley tank, the Smart is one of the safest cars ever designed. DaimlerChrysler’s site in the UK describes the design [click onto “safety”] here.
In fact I’m just crazy about the car, and my affection has little to do with its ability to withstand impacts – other than the impact of its own delicious appeal. If it sounds like I’m marketing this beautiful little car and its entire way of life, I am. The more people in the U.S. know about its virtues the sooner I may be able to drive one here.
Well, I can dream.

infectious image from the Brazilian site, Carsale

In today’s The New York Times Magazine “The Ethicist” delivers the last word on behalf of New Yorkers who have just about had it with the assault of those infernal machines – and specificallly, the continuing outrage of on-street parking.

Two of my neighbors are in cahoots. When one pulls his car out of a spot, the other is always parked directly in front or behind and moves his car just enough to take up two spaces, so no other car can squeeze in. When the first car returns, the other moves back, restoring parking spots for both. Is it ethical for them to save spaces for each other, instead of leaving one for another parking-deprived New Yorker? Joseph A. Moskal, New York
If either of them were ethical, they wouldn’t use private cars in Manhattan, a city with excellent public transportation. Why should the non-car-owning majority allow the car-owning minority to store their private property, i.e. cars, on public property at no charge? Why should my every walk to the store be akin to a stroll through a parking lot? Why should that majority be subject to the many costs and risks to health and safety attendant on the private car? I’m sorry: could you repeat the question?

AP image via dKos
Am I bad? When I saw this image, it didn’t occur to me that the story was about desecration. I thought only of the outrageous presumption; it’s his, so he can write whatever he wants on it, no?

Need a lift, Lefty cynics? Look at Mark Morford’s upbeat column today. I’ve been feeling it in my bones myself for a while, thinking at first it was the humidity. Things are happening. Although Morford warns it’s not yet time for delicious plates of schadenfreude, we and the administration now know “Shrub’s numbers are down.”

This is what happens when it’s all a house of cards.
This is what happens when you build your entire presidency on an intricate network of aww-shucks glibness and bad hair and cronyism and corporate fellatio and warmongering and sham enemies and economy-gutting policies and endless blank-eyed smirks that tell the world, every single day, whelp, sure ’nuff, the U.S. is full of it.

An elected lawmaker was shot dead today during a City Hall Council meeting in one of the most tightly guarded buildings in the most tightly guarded city in the most tightly guarded nation of the world.
We are told that New York has tough gun control laws, yet much of the rest of the country does not. There is no wall around New York.
We believe that New York is open to and loved by people from around the world, yet much of the rest of the country fears and hates those unlike themselves. Because of its importance as a symbol, New York has been and continues to risk being the primary target of a world angry with our disastrous foreign political and economic policy.
Today’s deaths were not the work of a terrorist, but the circumstances which made them possible would work for anyone determined to wreak even the same or much greater havoc in another location tomorrow.
We could spend trillions (although we never will), but we still wouldn’t have security in our streets, our places of work, even our great monuments and institutions. The world can’t offer perfect security, but we would do far better, and at far less psychological, social and monetary cost, if we prevent easy access to firearms and if we begin to relate to the rest of the world with intelligence and justice.
We cannot continue to shoot each other to make us safe from guns, just as we cannot continue to bomb people to avoid the bombs of others.
And from Barry just now: “We don’t believe in prevention, only punishment.”

“Who’s Unpatriotic Now?” asks Paul Krugman today. He’s writing about the White House’s appalling manipulation of the media, which means the manipulation of all of us of course, also the intelligence services, and, yes, the military, including every last young man or woman still at home or in danger abroad. “Support our boys,” indeed!
Someone should finally ask “Why are they doing this?” any day now, but those who never bought the sales pitch and the lies in the first place already know perfectly well why. The wars were created in order to distract us all from the administration’s domestic schemes, both their cynical successes and their miserable failures, and to finally secure the entire world for the same narrow purposes. These are wars for security indeed, the security of corporate America.
To illustrate dramatically the lengths to which Bush and his people will go to protect their inventions, Krugman ends his Op-Ed essay with the news, shockingly not reported anywhere else in the NYTimes today, but easily found elsewhere, that administration officials have disclosed the identity of a C.I.A. operative, Joseph Wilson’s wife.

Mr. Wilson is the former ambassador who was sent to Niger by the C.I.A. to investigate reports of attempted Iraqi uranium purchases and who recently went public with his findings. Since then administration allies have sought to discredit him — it’s unpleasant stuff. But here’s the kicker: both the columnist Robert Novak and Time magazine say that administration officials told them that they believed that Mr. Wilson had been chosen through the influence of his wife, whom they identified as a C.I.A. operative.
Think about that: if their characterization of Mr. Wilson’s wife is true (he refuses to confirm or deny it), Bush administration officials have exposed the identity of a covert operative. That happens to be a criminal act; it’s also definitely unpatriotic.
So why would they do such a thing? Partly, perhaps, to punish Mr. Wilson, but also to send a message.
And that should alarm us. We’ve just seen how politicized, cooked intelligence can damage our national interest. Yet the Wilson affair suggests that the administration intends to continue pressuring analysts to tell it what it wants to hear.

The article in Newsday today reminds us that in uncovering her name, including her maiden name, and her security position, the administration officials responsible may have endangered the career of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Palme, “and possibly the lives of her contacts in foreign countries.”

. . . .
“If what the two senior administration officials said is true,” Wilson said [He has quite properly refused to confirm his wife’s employment.], “they will have compromised an entire career of networks, relationships and operations.” What’s more, it would mean that “this White House has taken an asset out of the” weapons of mass destruction fight, “not to mention putting at risk any contacts she might have had where the services are hostile.”

Sure sounds like the Constitutional definiton of treason, especially as understood by the gung-ho Radical Right: “treason n the offense of attempting to overthrow the government of one’s country or of assisting its enemies in war”

Ajax drags Cassandra from the Palladium before the eyes of Priam (Roman wall painting, Pompeii, House of Menander)
He’s back. I posted something from Sheldon S. Wolin just two months ago, but since he just may be our Cassandra I thought another hearing was in order.
If the administration hasn’t changed in the interim, perhaps the country has. In May Wolin’s words were found in the lefty [by U.S. standards] Nation. This month they appear in a mass-circulation daily, Newsday. Excerpts:

No administration before George W. Bush’s ever claimed such sweeping powers for an enterprise as vaguely defined as the “war against terrorism” and the “axis of evil.” Nor has one begun to consume such an enormous amount of the nation’s resources for a mission whose end would be difficult to recognize even if achieved.
Like previous forms of totalitarianism, the Bush administration boasts a reckless unilateralism that believes the United States can demand unquestioning support, on terms it dictates; ignores treaties and violates international law at will; invades other countries without provocation; and incarcerates persons indefinitely without charging them with a crime or allowing access to counsel.
. . . .
In institutionalizing the “war on terrorism” the Bush administration acquired a rationale for expanding its powers and furthering its domestic agenda. While the nation’s resources are directed toward endless war, the White House promoted tax cuts in the midst of recession, leaving scant resources available for domestic programs. The effect is to render the citizenry more dependent on government, and to empty the cash-box in case a reformist administration comes to power.
Americans are now facing a grim situation with no easy solution. Perhaps the just-passed anniversary of the Declaration of Independence might remind us that “whenever any form of Government becomes destructive …” it must be challenged.

[image from VRoma]

And then there was one, or two.
We love Al Sharpton and Denis Kucinich both, but it’s Al who goes straight to the point.
The question was gay marriage. Everyone else avoided logic and the plain issue of fairness and human or civil rights, and not least the nature of the secular state.
Senator John Edwards of North Carolina and Senator Bob Graham of Florida didn’t bother to show up for a candidates’ forum sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign in Washington yesterday. Five of the seven who did come by equivocated. It seems that they variously believed that boy-girl marriage deserves the same respect for its historical, cultural or religious roots as once commanded by slavery, child labor, male overlordship, the divine right of kings, religious crusades, heretic- and witch-burnings, among other pillars of our civilization.
Kucinich and Sharpton are both reported by the NYTimes to have supported gay marriage unambiguously, but yesterday Al captured the moment with his forthrightness.

“That’s like asking me, ‘Do I support black marriage or white marriage,'” Mr. Sharpton said, to thunderous applause, when the moderator, Sam Donaldson of ABC News, asked if he supported gay marriage.

Sharpton’s the only candidate who is a member of the clergy. The directness which has always described him becomes him handsomely here, and it shames his rivals competing for the votes of obsessive religious zealots.