Politics

President Bush doesn’t think the current Patriot Act is good enough. In an attempt to “close loopholes” in the original legislation, he’s proposed three very frightning changes, examined here by Robyn Blummer of the St. Petersburg Times:

Bush wants three additional powers from Congress.

First, he wants to give the Justice Department the authority to confiscate records and compel testimony without review by a court or grand jury.

[…]

Second, Bush wants to chip away at the right to bail. …he wants passage of the “Pretrial Detention and Lifetime Supervision of Terrorists Act of 2003,” a bill that would keep people accused of a whole range of new crimes behind bars pending trial by making those crimes presumptively “no bond” offenses.

[…]

And third, Bush wants to expand the reach of the federal death penalty by making it applicable to “domestic terrorism.”

Under the Patriot Act, the crime of “domestic terrorism” couldn’t be more broadly written. Any criminal act intended to influence the government through “intimidation or coercion” involving “dangerous acts” qualifies. Aggressive protesters of all stripes from Greenpeace activists to abortion foes could easily fall within this definition, opening the door for politically motivated executions.

Bush also wants the death penalty for those convicted of providing “material support for terrorism,” a law that can be violated even when people think they are giving money to a charity and don’t know the group is a designated terrorist organization.

Put simply, Bush wants to finalize the process of turning America into a police state, where the slightest suspicion of dissent could land you in jail without bail, and possibly on death row.

(via TalkLeft, via Atrios)

Kookaburra has an interesting wrap-up of President Bush’s visit to Australia posted on his site. While it’s certainly no surprise, apparently Bush’s visit was heavily stage managed to make sure he got the most possible accolades, and the fewest possible questions…

Every aspect of the visit was stage managed to ensure that John Howard controlled it for maximum political gain. Simon Crean managed a single 20 minute audience with George Bush, despite more Australian’s voting for his party than John Howard’s in the last election. (Howard is in government as the leader of a coalition between his Liberal Party and the National Party).

Alan Ramsay (of SMH) in commenting on the exclusion of Crean, “…the Opposition Leader was left out in mugsville. He was not included in the welcome at Canberra airport, in the farewell, in the ceremony at the War Memorial, or in the barbecue at the Lodge, the only social occasion Bush would agree to. Even the press gallery was represented at the lunch by its president, Malcolm Farr of The Daily Telegraph. But not the Leader of the Australian Opposition. If nothing else, you’d have thought protocol if not manners might have extended an invitation to Crean.”

Lord knows we can’t have our President actually have to face questions about what he’s doing to the world — he might slip up and accidentally tell the truth.

I’d never heard this before, but it turns out that Dr. Seuss spent a couple years as a political cartoonist — and there’s a website that collects all of his published political cartoons.

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991) was a life-long cartoonist: in high school in Springfield, Massachusetts; in college at Dartmouth (Class of 1925); as an adman in New York City before World War II; in his many children’s books, beginning with To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street (1937). Because of the fame of his children’s books (and because we often misunderstand these books) and because his political cartoons have remained largely unknown, we do not think of Dr. Seuss as a political cartoonist. But for two years, 1941-1943, he was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM (1940-1948), and for that journal he drew over 400 editorial cartoons.

Looking through them, it’s fascinating how dated some of the cartoons are, while others seem just as relevant today. Neat stuff.

(via Mike Wedland)

The list of who voted which way in the just passed “Partial Birth” Abortion Ban bill is available online.

Of the two states I pay the most attention to, both (Republican) Senators from Alaska (Murkowski and Stevens) voted Yea, while both (Democratic) Senators from Washington (Cantwell and Murray) voted Nay. Add one more reason to the list of reasons I prefer living here in Washington these days…

(via Tina)

Required reading for the day: The Stovepipe, by Seymour M. Hersh in the New York Post. A mind-bogglingly astounding account of how shoddily intelligence was treated by our government in order to bolster their claims against Iraq. Lies, falsehoods, ignored warnings, emphasized inconsequentials, fabricated documents, and a fair amount of blind incompetence all contributed to moving us into the mess we’re in now.

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered.

The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went on, was that the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq’s nuclear-weapons programs, were far more accurate than the C.I.A. estimates. “Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,” the official said. “If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board.”

There were, of course, good reasons to worry about Saddam Hussein’s possession of W.M.D.s. He had manufactured and used chemical weapons in the past, and had experimented with biological weapons; before the first Gulf War, he maintained a multibillion-dollar nuclear-weapons program. In addition, there were widespread doubts about the efficacy of the U.N. inspection teams, whose operations in Iraq were repeatedly challenged and disrupted by Saddam Hussein. Iraq was thought to have manufactured at least six thousand more chemical weapons than the U.N. could account for. And yet, as some former U.N. inspectors often predicted, the tons of chemical and biological weapons that the American public was led to expect have thus far proved illusory. As long as that remains the case, one question will be asked more and more insistently: How did the American intelligence community get it so wrong?

(via Kos)

This is truly a masterful piece of writing — from an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Concerned about the appearance of disarray and feuding within his administration as well as growing resistance to his policies in Iraq, President Bush – living up to his recent declaration that he is in charge – told his top officials to “stop the leaks” to the media, or else.

News of Bush’s order leaked almost immediately.

Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he “didn’t want to see any stories” quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.

Worthy of The Onion, only from a real newspaper. I love it.

(via Mathew Gross)

The love story of Trevor Hughes and his fiancee began in an elementary school in the Himalayan foothills.

They were “global nomads.” He was a diplomat’s son. She the daughter of missionaries. They lived in Asia, attended school together, fell in love and want to get married in June.

But when Hughes’ fiancee, a German national, tried to visit him on a six-month tourist visa Monday, she was detained in Atlanta, handcuffed, jailed–even stripped of her diamond engagement ring.

Then, after 20 hours without food, she was put on a plane and shipped back to Stuttgart.

“This isn’t the America I fought for,” said Hughes, who served in the Navy and U.S. diplomatic corps. “You don’t expect that from a great country like ours.”

— Land of the Free?: Turned away at the border

(via Cory Doctorow)

Our dear Pres. Bush is apparently having some difficulties with the task of narrowing down just who in his staff would have been so underhanded as to leak Valerie Plame’s name and CIA affiliation to the press. However, we can help!

President Bush told the press on Tuesday that he doesn’t “have any idea” whether the senior administration officials who blew a CIA operative’s cover will ever be found. But if he just asked his staff to sign a legally binding affidavit confirming that they weren’t involved, and referred anyone who wouldn’t to the FBI, it’s possible he could flush out the perpetrators in a day. To date, the President hasn’t even discussed this matter with his staff.

We’ve already done the President’s homework for him by writing the affidavit. Now let’s show him how easy it is for innocent people to legally declare their innocence. You can sign the affidavit and send it to the President in under a minute by filling out the form…

(via Lane)