Yet another tragic mine accident. The Senate looks poised to pass some mine safety improvements, but I believe prospects for getting through the House GOP are less clear.
--Matthew Yglesias
I was, obviously, distressed by reports that the Iranian government was going to force that country's non-Muslim citizens into wearing Nazi-style yellow stars and so forth. Those reports, however, appear to have been simply made up.
Late Update: Which is not to deny that the Islamic Republic is a bad place with a bad government.
--Matthew Yglesias
As a post-9/11 security measure, the Coast Guard has stepped up its inspections of ships trying to land and deliver cargo at our ports. Naturally, even if your ship isn't smuggling any terrorists or illegal contraband or what have you, this causes some somewhat pricey inconveniences. Consequently, the Coast Guard has started forewarning ships that they're going to be inspected in order to reduce the delay. Which is fine. Unless, of course, the ship you're inspecting actually does have some mischief taking place on board in which case the warning stands a good chance of tipping off the malefactors. After all, advance notice sort of undermines the point of random inspections.
Cargo and port security is all messed up. I like the GreenLane Maritime Cargo Security Act and even Heritage has some nice things to say about it.
--Matthew Yglesias
Michael Hayden is not only keeping tabs on all your phone calls, but stands in defense of cruel, degrading, and inhumane interrogation techniques. It's a seamless culture of lawlessness.
--Matthew Yglesias
The good news is that in an almost shocking outbreak of common sense, "A House appropriations subcommittee yesterday approved a foreign aid budget for next year that would reverse the deep cuts President Bush proposed for international family planning programs he himself once described as among the best ways to prevent abortion." The bad news is that the same committee will be scaling back the already scaled-back Millenium Challenge Corporation, one of just a tiny handful of worthwhile ideas to have come out of this administration so far.
--Matthew Yglesias
Mike McCurry's takeaway from his catastrophic effort to spin the blogosphere: blogging is "a primal scream in the darkness." Like the scions Bourbon Restoration he's remembered everything and learned nothing. People disagreed with McCurry about the net neutrality issue because people disagree about issues. People got so mad at him precisely because of this kind of patronizing attitude. He was peddling flimsy arguments as if it never occurred to him that the blogosphere is full of people who know a lot about the internet and could handle a grown-up argument (see a non-flimsy, though ultimately unpersuasive, anti-neutrality piece if you're interested).
One of the most neglected aspects of the blogosphere, in my opinion, is that precisely because it's (mostly) composed of people who aren't professional journalists, it's composed of people who are professional doers of something else and know a great deal about what it is they "really" do. Consequently, the overall network of blogs contains a great deal of embedded knowledge. The consensus that emerges from that process can, of course, be mistaken but even though the most prominent people expressing that consensus may not be experts in the subject at hand (the most prominent bloggers tend to be generalists), the consensus will almost always be grounded in some kind of well-informed opinions. If you want to push back on that, in other words, you'd better know what you're talking about and not treat your audience like a pack of mewling children.
--Matthew Yglesias
Did the telephone companies hire a third party "scapegoat" to feed the NSA's database? Turns out that's a growing industry.
--Paul Kiel
Dennis Hastert, accounting wizard: "Well, folks, if you earn $40,000 a year and have a family of two, you don't pay any taxes. So you probably, if you don't pay any taxes, you are not going to get a big tax cut." Bet a lot of people would be happy if this were actually true.
Late Update: Folks are writing in to say that a married couple with two children would not, in fact, pay any federal income tax. Just, you know, all kinds of other taxes. Fair enough, but that's obviously not the same as saying a family of two doesn't pay any taxes, at least under standard uses of the word "any." I mean, under this construal Hastert's trying to justify a tax cut that gives a giant share of its benefits to the rich with the rationale that . . . the tax he's trying to cut is disproportionately paid by the rich.
Later Update: Now I'm getting other accounts indicating that a married couple with two children would pay federal income tax after all. Some correspondents indicate that this may depend on whether or not you live in a state with a state-level EITC. Others are also noting that a married couple with two kids is what we ordinarily call a "family of four" rather than a "family of two." Be all this as it may, the point remains the same -- families of two or four making $40k pay taxes, plenty of taxes, and if Hastert doesn't know that he desperately needs to get out more.
--Matthew Yglesias
"I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties," Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) remarked at yesterday's Hayden confirmation hearings, "but you have no civil liberties if you are dead." This comes via Dave Weigel and nicely encapsulates at least three different pieces of horribly misguided rightingery.
First off is the sheer cowardice of it. Sure, liberal democracy is nice, but not if someone might get hurt. One might think that strong supporters of civil liberties would be willing to countenance the idea that it might be worth bearing some level of risk in order to preserve them.
Second is just this dogmatic post-9/11 insistence on acting as if human history began suddenly in 1997 or something. The United States was able to face down such threats as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany without indefinite detentions, widespread use of torture as an interrogative technique, or all-pervasive surveillance. But a smallish group of terrorists who can't even surface publicly abroad for fear they'll be swiftly killed by the mightiest military on earth? Time to break out the document shredder and do away with that pesky constitution.
Last, there's the unargued assumption that civil rights and the rule of law are some kind of near-intolerable impediment to national security. But if you look around the world over the past hundred years or so, I think you'll see that the record of democracy is pretty strong. You don't see authoritarian regimes using their superior ability to operate in secret and conduct surveillance to run roughshod over more fastidious countries. You see liberalism prospering -- both in the sense that the core liberal countries have grown richer-and-richer and in the sense that liberal democracy has consistently spread out from its original homeland since people like it better. You see governments that can operate in total secrecy falling prey to crippling corruption. You see powers of surveillance used not to defend countries from external threats, but to defend rulers from domestic political opponents.
The U.S.S.R., after all, lost the Cold War, not because we beat them in a race to the bottom to improve national security by gutting the principles of our system, but because the principles underlying our system were actually better than the alternative. If you don't have some faith the American way of life is capable of coping with actual challenges, then what's the point in defending it?
Late Update: Reader S.L. reminds me that Patrick Henry had some thoughts on a related subject.
--Matthew Yglesias
Promised troop reductions in Iraq not so promised anymore; Rumsfeld explains that people criticize him because he's "done a lot" of stuff.
--Matthew Yglesias
Hey, don't knock our $22 million contract with scandal-prone Shirlington Limousine Company, says DHS. In case of a terrorist attack, we're counting on those limos to get our officials to safety.
--Justin Rood
Greetings, I'll be your guest blogger for the next week or so. You may remember me from such guest blogging gigs as the last time I did this, the time before that, or even my blog at TPM Cafe which, obviously, you all should be reading.
In addition to the various TPM Media landmarks referenced below, I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday yesterday, leaving the heady days of early twentiesness behind in favor of the stable sobriety of the mid twenties. The United States Congress, meanwhile, seems to be heading in the opposite direction and embracing adolescent stunts in lieu of policymaking: "the Senate yesterday voted to make English the 'national language' of the United States, declaring that no one has a right to federal communications or services in a language other than English except for those already guaranteed by law." So the only services people will have a legal right to obtain in non-English languages will be the ones they . . . have a legal right to obtain in non-English languages? Good times.
If you'd like to get in touch, drop me a line at myglesias at gmail. English is preferred, though my French is pretty good and I can usually discern the meaning of writing in your other romance languages. All replies, however, will be strictly in English.
--Matthew Yglesias
Bad news: Top Air Force officials are said to be under FBI investigation for improper contract awards. Good news: Through his lawyer, Duke Cunningham says he's ready to cooperate! This and other news in today's Daily Muck.
--Justin Rood
Well, that's it for me. It's been an exciting year for us here at TPM. In a couple weeks, we'll celebrate the first anniversary of TPMCafe. And TPMmuckraker has now been up and running for more than two months. We even work in a bona fide office. Next month we're going to get our new 2006 election tracking 
blog up and running at TPMCafe.
Thank you to all the readers of each of our sites for helping us make this possible. And I want to particularly thank those of you who chipped in for our two fundraisers to launch those two new sites. It means a great deal to me. And I hope you're enjoying the sites your contributions have made possible.
I'm going to step away for a week. Sit on a beach with my wife. Hopefully recharge my batteries and clear my head.
Matt Yglesias is going to take over for me here at TPM while I'm away.
--Josh Marshall
Manchester Union-Leader tonight ...
The former Chairman of the Republican National Committee remembers telling someone at the White House that he had decided to have the RNC pay the legal defense bills for convicted phone-jamming conspirator James Tobin, but he can’t remember who.Ed Gillespie told the New Hampshire Union Leader yesterday he informed the White House after he decided to authorize payment.
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Gillespie told its reporter that he had “informed the White House, without seeking formal approval, before authorizing the payments.”
Gillespie told the Union Leader the two accounts were “consistent” because he decided to authorize the payments before telling the White House and actually authorized the payments after telling the White House.
Chronology's a bitch.
--Josh Marshall
Here's a topic I'd like to know more about.
As you may know, Vice President Cheney's daughter Elizabeth is the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. She also has the title of "Coordinator for Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiatives." Basically that means she's in charge of democratizing the Middle East.
She has a budget of, I believe $75 million, for bringing about 'regime change' in Iran.
I also noticed this recent aside in The Nelson Report in which Chris Nelson wrote that his sources "say [Undersecretary of State Nick] Burns has been fighting an apparently losing battle with Undersecretary for non-proliferation Bob Joseph on a variety of issues, and that Vice President Cheney’s office seems to be sponsoring the hiring of exceptionally large numbers of political appointees, not career FSO’s, to staff the to-be-created Iran democracy projects to be run out of State."
Bob Joseph, in case you don't remember, was the NSC staffer in charge of brow-beating the CIA's Alan Foley into letting the White House use the bogus Niger uranium claim in the president's speeches.
But back to the Cheneys.
Elizabeth Cheney recently went on an open-ended maternity leave. But I am still curious to know what happened or is happening with that money. Vice President Cheney is clearly deeply involved in packing that outfit with political appointees. So given all that's happened in recent years I think this operation needs some real scrutiny.
Supporting dissidents in countries with repressive regimes is a good thing. But if your goal is to get the regime to fall in the next twelve or eighteen months you're probably going to go in for more traditional agitprop and destabilization methods. And how much trust do you have that any operation in which Dick Cheney is calling the shots would have any idea who to support or what to do in a country like Iran anyway? I mean, after things worked out so well in Iraq and all.
My understanding is that the majority of this $75 million has gone to radio program type stuff like Voice of America's Persian language service. That's normally good stuff, though the Bush administration has so politicized and boondoglized VOA and related services that its effectiveness is probably questionable. We've spent a lot of money on Radio Sawa, for instance, a pop music and news station aimed at the young of the Arab World. But a recent State Dept IG report said it had little influence and parents didn't want their kids to listen to it because "because its broadcasts contained such poor Arabic grammar."
(We may not be pro-Palestinian; but we're pro-Philistine! A little Near Eastern archeology and history humor there for you.)
If all that weren't enough there's the issue of cronies and pay-offs. I'm sure there are plenty of whack-jobs who've gotten run out of Iraq but have equally grand ideas about how to slick things up in Iran. And those guys have mortgages to pay. So maybe they could be set up with some contracts to get to work on Iran. Don't forget that before his high-flying days came to an end our friend Mitchell Wade -- briber of Duke Cunningham -- was trying to angle for some of the democratize Iran money. Who knows. Truly anything is possible. But given the folks calling the shots, my confidence level is just not that high.
Given the mix of potential bad-acting, incompetence and cronyism, I'm not even sure what to call this. But for lack of a better word let's call it agitpork. Who's getting it? And what are they doing with it? I think there are folks out there who know. And we'd like to hear from you. Your anonymity will, of course, be protected.
--Josh Marshall
ABC's Brian Ross: Air Force Chief of Staff, Gen. T. Michael Moseley, and his predecessor, Gen. John Jumper, are the subjects of a new FBI contracting probe.
It's everywhere.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader BW snarks in (subject line: "Jumping the Shark") ...
With their new ad anti-global warming ads, I think we can safely call May 18, 2006 the day the oil companies lost it completely.BIG OIL - Jumping the Shark while there are still sharks left to jump.
See some of the ridiculousness here.
--Josh Marshall
Everything's just fine with that $22 million Shirlington Limo contract, the Homeland Security Department's contracting official confirms. That's the Limo company reportedly implicated in Hookergate. Nothing to see here.
Update: Maybe there's something to see after all -- the latest DHS boondoggle, a $208 taxi ride.
--Justin Rood
Rudy ...
Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor considered a potential 2008 candidate for president, headlined a fundraiser Thursday for former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed in his run for Georgia lieutenant governor.The two politicians were effusive in their praise for one another as they entered the Atlanta fundraiser just before noon.
"I just want to say I believe Rudy Giuliani is one of the finest leaders in not only the Republican Party but in either party," Reed said.
Giuliani responded: "We're here to get you elected. It would be a great thing for Georgia."
--Josh Marshall
I think Atrios is right. These commercials being run by CEI against Al Gore's new movie are so comical I think they'll probably boost ticket sales.
We just got a PR email from CNSNews.com, which I guess is so independent that they're sending out an email flacking a TV ad run. (Technically, I guess they're flacking their story about the ads. But it's hard to tell.)
But the subject line says it all: "Pro-Emissions T.V. Ads Counter Gore Film."
Pro-emissions? Didn't know anyone was pro-emissions? I have this image in my mind of connoisseurs with their noses by a muffler. Nice bouquet? Mmmmm. Bahrain 1974.
--Josh Marshall
The FBI left Dusty Foggo's house with bank records, vacation pictures, and cuban cigars. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
So many shocking developments in one evening.
NYT: "The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders."
Even on the downward side of the mountain, all the cronies get a taste.
I guess Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrup Grumman bid so it can seem like a competitive process when Halliburton gets the contract?
--Josh Marshall
Shocking, ain't it?
BaltSun: "The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project -- not because it failed to work -- but because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency's surveillance powers, according to several intelligence officials."
The shelved program ...
*Used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.* Identified U.S. phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy.
* Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency.
* Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records.
--Josh Marshall
Who's crazy enough to think we should actually be talking to the Iranians?
--Josh Marshall
Annals of the War on Terror.
It seems the whole security clearance process is shutdown indefinitely at the Pentagon because Steve Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and the Office of Personnel Management can't work out a silly billing dispute.
That means that anybody new we hire to do national security related work can't start because they can't get their clearance.
--Josh Marshall
Not just it'd be funny it weren't so tragic, but genuinely funny.
From US News ...
Some Bush administration officials are unhappy with the consensus intelligence community assessment that Iran could attain a weapons capability sometime between 2010 and 2015, based on assumptions about its ability to overcome technical problems. More-hawkish officials view the CIA, scorched by criticism over its exaggerated reports on Iraqi nuclear efforts, as timid on Iran, and Vice President Dick Cheney is said to have recently criticized the intelligence assessment in private as "too cautious."
I'm sure glad this isn't going to be handled anything like last time.
Next up, what about the Cheney family's private slush fund for Iran work?
--Josh Marshall
Why did Secret Service logs only show two Abramoff visits to the White House? Paul Kiel solves the mystery.
--Justin Rood
Art Brodsky brings us the latest from the senate on the battle to save the Internet and Net Neutrality. Definitely give this a read to see what you can do today.
--Josh Marshall
Ralph Reed is running for Lt. Gov. in Georgia. But he can't run fast enough to escape his Abramoff gambling money past.
--Josh Marshall
Kevin Phillips brings out the big cannons to take on Robert Rubin's new 'Hamilton Project'.
--Josh Marshall
Big oil astroturf group, Competitive Enterprise Institute, launches the new attack on Al Gore.
Personal Note: I remember watching on Crossfire years ago CEI sachem Fred L. Smith explaining how global warming was actually a good thing because of all the cool new crops we could grow.
Late Update: The good folks at ThinkProgress have found the 1992 Crossfire in question. And they've got the actual quote.
--Josh Marshall
Given what I do, I'm constantly receiving books from publishers. And they're almost all about contemporary politics. All I really read though is history. And in most cases as far from anything contemporary as I can get. (I'm actually going to try to start doing reviews of some of these like I used to on the site.) Right now I'm reading 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West. Admittedly, you know how it's going to end. So that eliminates a certain element of dramatic tension. But I'm finding it a pretty good read. Peter Heather's new Fall of the Roman Empire was also quite good, though again, you sort of know how it's going to end. And I'm also going back and reading C.V. Wedgwood's Thirty Years War.
But I'm going to need a few good books to read soon. So I'm looking for some recommendations. Good thick works of history, compelling narratives, distant places or the distant past. If you've got a good book to recommend, please let me know.
--Josh Marshall
Hurt feelings and paranoia on K Street. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
I think this may
have gotten lost in the shuffle. But Cunningham briber Mitchell Wade really does appear to be becoming a gold mine of information for federal prosecutors.
His cooperation may even rival Jack Abramoff's in the number of players he helps bring down.
As Paul Kiel reported yesterday, in recently filed court documents, prosecutors and Wade's attorneys jointly asked the judge in Wade's case to delay his sentencing indefinitely because his cooperation seems likely to "continue for quite some time." They don't even want to discuss a sentencing date when the parties next meet in August.
It sounds like it could take going on two years for Wade to get through all the cooperating he plans to do.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader CM reminds us that phone companies are spooky places ...
I'm certainly as mystified as anyone about the turn the USAT story has taken, though I do agree that the telcos' statements are probably parsed exceedingly fine -- and probably turn on the meaning of terms such as "provided" and "customer phone data." Voice service was never my rice bowl, but I'm not convinced that letting NSA run SS7 taps to pull CDRs wouldn't skate past their chosen verbiage.However, as far as security clearances go, the answer is simple: telcos are filled with former intelligence community types doing engineering and software development. During my time as a consultant for CLECs (on data, not POTS, service), I worked with many ex-NSA employees and former CIA employees and contractors -- their backgrounds suited them for the kind of intensive, real-time sorting and processing of the large volume of data telcos produce. (At one company, we had so many ex-Community and NASA architects that we could have started our own orbital remote-sensing project.) Any of them could easily qualify for codeword clearance and read into the NSA program/s, even if company higher-ups could not.
As long as we're on the subject, I'm getting hints that the third party scenario mentioned below is where we're headed.
--Josh Marshall
ABC's Ross sticking by his story, says the FBI is using National Security Letters to scrutinize reporters' phone records ...
Federal law enforcement sources say the National Security Letters are being used to obtain phone records of reporters at ABC News and elsewhere in an attempt to learn confidential sources who may have provided classified information in violation of the law.The FBI says its request for reporters' phone records are made in compliance with the law.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader DV has an interesting and good point in the post below.
For all the shilly-shallying, Verizon does appear to come right out and deny they gave any customer records to the NSA.
So what gives?
I think I've got the answer: they're lying.
No, I don't have any inside information to confirm that claim. But common sense is a marvelous thing.
If you own a business and someone accuses you of an offense that goes to the heart of your responsibility to your customers, do you wait a week to deny it? I doubt that very much.
Now, I don't know that they're lying in a precise, semantic sense. In fact, I suspect they're not. There must be some way in which what they're saying is technically true. But if it were more than technically true, they would have said it and said it more emphatically last week, before a bunch of lawsuits got filed.
USA Today's statement in support of the story is not quite as vehement as I might have expected. But they're clearly sticking by their story.
My hunch is that there's some third party involved here, a subcontractor, a private vendor, perhaps another government agency. And because of that their claims are technically true. Or, maybe, they allowed the NSA to take the data (a variety of technical means suggest themselves) rather than 'providing' it to them. Who knows.
Over at the CBS house blog, Vaughn Ververs has a post up entitled "A Story Slipping Away?" in which he suggests that, with the two denials, "there appears enough here to start wondering about the accuracy of the original USA Today story."
But I think Ververs may be ignoring the clincher nugget of information. Qwest was reportedly asked but refused. Verizon says they were never even asked. And through his lawyer, the then-CEO of Qwest confirms that he'd rebuffed the NSA request. What interest would he have in lying about that?
Unless Qwest is the phone service provider of choice for North American jihadists, I think that means Verizon's credibility is very much in doubt.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader DV ...
Like you I'm a cynic and skeptic by nature. I, too, tend to believe the telcos care parsing their words very carefully. Yet, regardless of the talk of no contracts or agreements they still say they have not turned over customer records to the NSA. If they did, why would they say so flatly that they hadn't? No one seems to care anymore if the government says one thing and does another; it's pretty much the norm by now. But Verizon and Bell South have a lot to lose if they're caught in a lie this big. They will no doubt lose business and maybe a lot if irate customers see them making such bald faced lies. They enjoy somewhat of a good reputation, especially compared to the government. Would they really gamble with that by lying about what they've given the NSA?Just curious what your thoughts are.
Yours?
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader FZ bemoans the fact that he doesn't have the Verizon security clearance: "Some of the phone company mumbo-jumbo suggests that the reason we can't be told what the telco-NSA connection is really about is because the information is classified. So are we ordinary dopes out here supposed to assume that these phone company spokespeople have some kind of national security clearance that allows them to deal with top-secret material that we are not qualified to know about?"
--Josh Marshall
More on the telco mumbo-jumbo.
This CNN story says Verizon has denied having a "contract" with the NSA to turn over customer data. Contract? Is this about synergies? The Verizon statement itself said there was no "agreement." But same difference, I think. Did we think Verizon got a small ownership stake in the NSA?
This is nice too ...
As the President has made clear, the NSA program he acknowledged authorizing against al-Qaeda is highly-classified. Verizon cannot and will not comment on the program. Verizon cannot and will not confirm or deny whether it has any relationship to it.
Why do I feel like this is like a grade schooler who's suddenly gotten a Junior G-Man Secret Decoder Ring?
I'll buy the idea that what the NSA is doing with this data is highly classified. The notion that what the telcos are giving to the NSA is classified strikes me as a bit rich.
I'll leave it to some telco experts to decipher the terminology and conceptual messiness that I'm sure underlies this mumbojumbo. But I'm sure that if the USA Today story was really false in any normal, reality-based sense of the term they would just say so and not resort to all the gobbledygook and parsing. And if they'd been in a position to deny it they wouldn't have waited like, what, a week to get around to it?
--Josh Marshall
A number of TPM Readers have flagged stories in which at least a couple of the major phone companies are denying giving customer data to the NSA. Without going into too many details, each of these 'denials' appears to be couched in terms of 'contracts' and 'agreements' and other vague and, I suspect, intentionally misleading terms. I think they did just what USA Today said they did. They're just coming up with non-denial denials to fuzz up the issue. And they're a bit hard to unpack for those of us not sufficiently steeped in the legal and technological particulars of the telecom industry.
--Josh Marshall
DHS officials try in vain to figure out the president's new immigration policy.
--Josh Marshall
Against it before they were for it. Six months ago Secy. Chertoff said using National Guard on the border would be "horribly over-expensive and very difficult."
--Josh Marshall
Congress chieftains to DOJ corruption investigators: Yo, get a warrant! That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Josh Marshall
After more than a little trying I think I've finally gotten a handle on this immigration debate. Or at least the president's slice of it, which goes by the name of 'comprehensive immigration reform'. If I understand this right, 'comprehensive' reform is reform that's so comprehensive that it reforms the thing in question in every way possible at the same time.
So, for instance, comprehensive sex reform -- which, given how things are going in Washington, could be just around the corner -- would mean expanding abstinence education and reducing the number of sexually active teenagers while also fulfilling the universal dream of teenagers everywhere to get laid.
More prosaically, comprehensive military reform would involve replacing all soldiers with robots while increasing the Army's size by five divisions and reorganizing the force structure around sub-divisional units.
Politics and policy make for strange bedfellows, especially when it's all politics and no policy.
--Josh Marshall
A bit more on Brian Ross's reporting on the government snooping through reporters' phone records as part of their leak investigation. TPM Reader ME, in an email this evening, cut to the heart of the matter. In a criminal investigation, which a leak investigation can be, investigators can look into all sorts of private information -- phone records, financial records, travel records. They can subpoena you before a grand jury and on and on. We have only to consider the on-going Fitzgerald investigation or, even more to the point, Fitzgerald's earlier but less well known investigation into suspect Muslim charities.
If this is all we're talking about, it's not news. Indeed, the Justice Dept. has fairly detailed guidelines for federal prosecutors when they must subpoena and otherwise investigate members of the press (See 28 CFR 50:10 "Policy with regard to the issuance of subpoenas to members of the news media, subpoenas for telephone toll records of members of the news media, and the interrogation, indictment, or arrest of, members of the news media.").
But in his report Ross doesn't seem to be talking about subpoenas in the course of a conventional criminal investigation. He appears to be referring to something more on-going. And the investigators also seem to be using legal methods at least nominally intended for use in counter-espionage or counter-terrorism. In this case, so-called National Security Letters, the use of which was dramatically expanded by the Patriot Act and has grown by more than 100 fold since 9/11. (This November 2005 article in the Post describes how FBI field supervisors can issue NSLs on virtually anyone, often for the most seemingly trivial contacts with persons of interest.)
Given the Bush administration's self-servingly indulgent definition of the War on Terror, I don't doubt that they would define finding leakers as a subdivision of fighting terrorism, or for that matter scrutinizing political opponents.
We need to know more about what Ross is talking about.
It seems of a piece with the administration's record of abuses of power. But what we know is too vague.
Late Update: According to this AP story, the FBI says that it routinely scrutinizes the phone records of government workers in leak investigations. That doesn't seem too surprising.
The FBI spokesman interviewed by the AP said Ross's report was 'misleading' (AP's word, not his) about scrutiny of journalists. But he doesn't seem to say precisely how. Then this ...
"Where the records of a private person are sought, they may only be obtained through established legal process," [FBI spokesman] Carter said.The FBI can seek warrants and subpoenas from judges and grand juries, either through traditional courts or a secret court established for espionage and terrorism investigations. The bureau also has the power to seek subscribers' telephone and Internet records without approval of a judge or grand jury in espionage and terrorism cases by issuing a National Security Letter.
The FBI sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents through those letters, the Justice Department said last month.
Again, this is the rub. Ross's report said they were using NSL's. Are they?
The FBI spokesman doesn't seem to deny it.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader FZ on the Bush fisc: "An amusing aspect of Bush's speech was his line, a couple of times at least, about how he will be asking Congress "to fund" this or that immigration initiative. Fund--with what? In olden days, when a president told the nation he wanted Congress to fund a project or program, it actually meant something. Now, it's just a way of saying: Add it to the tab, borrow some more from China. For years he has told Congress to cut taxes. To hear him now, knee-deep in deficits, calling on Congress to "fund" something is hilarious."
--Josh Marshall
Weird ...
BellSouth Corp., the No. 3 U.S. local telephone carrier, on Monday denied turning over customer telephone records to the National Security Agency (NSA) on a large scale as part of the NSA'scall-tracking program to detect terrorist plots....
BellSouth said in a statement on Monday that it did not have a contract with the NSA, which is tasked with eavesdropping on foreign communications and protecting U.S. government communications.
"Based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA," BellSouth said in a statement.
--Josh Marshall
Yep, they are scrutinizing journalists phone-records.
According to ABC's Brian Ross ...
The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking reporters’ phone records in leak investigations.“It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration,” said a senior federal official.
The acknowledgement followed our blotter item that ABC News reporters had been warned by a federal source that the government knew who we were calling.
Ross's report is still awfully murky. But it suggests that the FBI is using new provisions of the Patriot Act which allows for the expanded use of so-called National Security Letters. As Ross explains, "the NSLs are a version of an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government."
In rule of law terms, I guess there's some extremely mild solace to be taken in the fact that the administration has apparently deigned to follow the law in this case. But a police state law still gets you a police state.
This is what the Patriot Act is being used for. In a free society, law enforcement goes before independent magistrates. Apparently we're now beyond that.
--Josh Marshall
FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps: "Recent news reports suggest that some – but interestingly not all – of the nation’s largest telephone companies have provided the government with their customers’ calling records. There is no doubt that protecting the security of the American people is our government’s number one responsibility. But in a Digital Age where collecting, distributing, and manipulating consumers’ personal information is as easy as a click of a button, the privacy of our citizens must still matter. To get to the bottom of this situation, the FCC should initiate an inquiry into whether the phone companies’ involvement violated Section 222 or any other provisions of the Communications Act. We need to be certain that the companies over which the FCC has public interest oversight have not gone – or been asked to go – to a place where they should not be."
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader BS chimes in on the president calling in the troops: "Just read your morning post about the National Guard and JB’s clever response. It’s obvious I’m sure, but I think the exit strategy is directly tied to exit polls. In other words, the Guard deployment is temporary because they will be brought home sometime in early November 2006. Just as the orange terror alerts in NYC and Washington amazingly disappeared after November 2004. The National Guard is being called in to deal with a political emergency."
--Josh Marshall
I don't know if other news outlets are picking this up or if ABC's Brian Ross is going to do a follow-up to put more flesh on the story. But far and away the most important story out there right now is Ross's report that claims that the administration is scrutinizing journalists' phone records to find out who their sources are.
Only a major news organization will have the clout to do it. But someone needs to run this to ground, either to find out more details or to disprove it. If it's true, it puts us a big notch further down the creeping police state road. And we already passed the toll booth a while ago.
If anybody sees press follow-ups on this or knows anything more about it, please contact me.
Late Update: I'm told there's going to be more on this story tonight on ABC World News Tonight.
--Josh Marshall
Major announcement due imminently from Rep. Bill Jefferson (D-LA).
Late Update: Jefferson's office is telling us the congressman is "not resigning." We're standing by to hear just what it is he's saying.
It's Late But We're Still Updating Update: Here's Rep. Jefferson's statement.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader JB checks in ...
"The White House is now saying the troops would only be temporary. But temporary until when? I guess just until there aren't any more illegals trying to come across the border from Latin America."In other words, you're suggesting the White House doesn't have an exit strategy from getting the troops out of ... our own country?
Sounds about right.
--Josh Marshall
I guess it's time once again to restate our policy on paid advertisements. We do not accept or reject ads based on their political content. It's as simple as that. And it's a good policy. For more details, see our original statement of the policy from November 2003 and our restatement of the policy from October 2004.
--Josh Marshall
Do members of Congress have more to fear from Jack Abramoff... or Mitchell Wade?
--Paul Kiel
So I guess the sacking of Porter Goss had nothing to do with Hookergate.
From Newsweek ...
Foggo's troubles may help to explain Porter Goss's sudden departure from the agency earlier this month. According to sources close to Goss and the White House, who would not be named talking about private conversations, administration officials had been pressuring Goss to get rid of Foggo. But Goss resisted. It was a risky stand to take. For months, former and current intel officials had privately complained to the White House that the CIA was suffering under Goss's poor management. Goss's resistance to firing Foggo, despite the investigation closing in on him, made top administration officials, including National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, lose faith in Goss's judgment.
This was obvious on day one, notwithstanding the 'turf war' spin. That's not to say they're aren't struggles over power and institutional precedence in the IC. But Goss went down because of Foggo's role in Hookergate and the Wilkes-Cunningham investigation.
--Josh Marshall
Isn't this the other shoe dropping?
The piece is written in a roundabout sort of way. But if I understand it, Brian Ross is reporting at ABC news that the US government is tracking the calling patterns of political reporters to further their leak investigations.
If that's true, then I think we can set aside any pretense that administration policy on all manner of electronic surveillance isn't being brought to bear on political opponents, media critics, the press, everybody.
I think part of the issue for many people on the administration's various forms of surveillance is not just that some of activities seem to be illegal or unconstitutional on their face. I think many people are probably willing to be open-minded, for better or worse, on pushing the constitutional envelope. But given the people in charge of the executive branch today, you just can't have any confidence that these tools will be restricted to targeting terrorists. Start grabbing up phone records to data-mine for terrorists and then the tools are just too tempting for your leak investigations. Once you do that, why not just keep an eye on your critics too? After all, they're the ones most likely to get the leaks, right? So, same difference. The folks around the president don't recognize any real distinctions among those they consider enemies. So we'd be foolish to think they wouldn't bring these tools to bear on all of them. Once you set aside the law as your guide for action and view the president's will as a source of legitimacy in itself, then everything becomes possible and justifiable.
--Josh Marshall
Michael Scanlon, a lifeguard no more. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
I guess I'm going to have to write something about the president's -- what is it, the 35th televised prime time address in the last year or so? -- speech on immigration Monday 
night. But all I can make of this plan to help guard the border with soldiers is that it's one more example that there is simply no gambit too craven or silly for this president not to resort to it.
My reading and reporting attention hasn't been focused on the immigration debate. But am I wrong to think that the president simply couldn't square the circle between the corporate cheap-labor forces who fund his campaigns and the cultural conservatives who supply his voters? Growing out of that failure, this 'militarize the border' hokum is the policy announcement equalivent of crawling under his desk and screaming "Help!"
Shazam! Wonder twin powers ... anything. It's like a primal scream.
The White House is now saying the troops would only be temporary. But temporary until when? I guess just until there aren't any more illegals trying to come across the border from Latin America.
And why are soldiers -- national guard or regular army -- better at managing border patrol than, well, border patrol? In part this is like it was during Katrina -- the president's inability to get anything to work by the normal civilian means leads him to claim that the problem is that there's not a big enough role for the military. But perhaps the truth here is that bringing in the military is the only way his advisors can think of to create an illusion of decisiveness and power in his current state of political impotence.
Mocking this stunt gives it too much credit. I think Atrios is right when he says that this idea is so stupid that it's unlikely there's really even a plan to do it. Just an gimmick to help the president get through whatever new bad news is about to pop.
--Josh Marshall
Andrew Sullivan just published an email from a reader who says it'll be Al Gore in 2008 for the Democrats, not Hillary. I could see it. I could totally see it.
I don't think Hillary is anywhere near as strong as she looks or as people seem to think she is. And Gore would be formidable.
--Josh Marshall
