Month: January 2006

If you still believe that the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib were a result of a few "bad apples on the night shift", and were not formal military policy, condoned from the highest levels, this online discussion may help. It’s also quite clear that abuse of this kind is going to continue – because the president wants it to. The McCain Amendment does not apply to him, as he has so clearly stated. He is above the law. And intends to stay that way.

An appreciation of George Galloway’s latest excrescence.

They may have something to teach us.

Here’s an interesting take:

"I saw Brokeback Mountain over the weekend, and I can see why it will have a broad appeal. Although it’s about gay cowboys, which most people cannot directly relate to, it’s also about a man being trapped in a marriage when he would much rather be off doing something else, with the result that he is absent from the marriage in all the areas that count. That is something lots of men can relate to."

Don’t give Concerned Women for America any ideas, ok?

No, it’s not a new reality show for budget geeks. It’s just one of those routine, boring, tedious, and completely terrifying graphs showing exactly how dire our fiscal situation is. You know the Bush-Rove drill by now: deficits don’t matter. If you’re still drinking their Kool-Aid, browse through this. One factoid: since Bush took over, we have doubled our unfunded fiscal liabilities to $43 trillion. Can you imagine what Republicans would be saying if Al Gore had done that?

The extremely cute and immensely funny son of Norm and Midge – or J. P. Normanson, as he was known at the Washington Times – has lucked out. Douglas Coupland, an old friend, has immortalized him. Or a version of him. Frank Foer exults, as well he might.

I saw the movie "Transamerica" last Friday. It’s a confused film in tone and direction but worth it for Felicity Huffman’s superb, wry, ground-breaking performance. I’ve long believed that gay rights and transgendered rights are logically separate issues; but that doesn’t mean I don’t strongly support removing any barriers that keep trans-gendered people from living their lives as fully as anyone else. For many trans-gendered men and women, that means gender reassignment surgery at some point. Such a reassignment is not mere cosmetics; it’s a profound medical procedure necessary for their mental health and personal flourishing. I see no reason why it should not be granted the same status under the law as other medical procedures; and it’s dismaying to find out that the IRS still doesn’t take such procedures seriously enough.

From Howie Kurtz’s column this morning:

"Rebel-in-Chief" is filled with "empty puffery," writes [Conservative Book Club] Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Rubin. Barnes is too favorable toward "all those things that Bush does to drive traditional conservatives to despair" in a way that "call[s] into question his own understanding of conservatism … Fred Barnes isn’t doing the president – or the country – any favors by celebrating his worst political tendencies."

Ouch.

This is certainly the best defense I’ve yet read of why the 1978 FISA law could do with an overhaul, given the advance of information technology. No doubt Karl Rove is already performing rhetorical calisthenics. What the op-ed doesn’t do convincingly, however, is explain why the Bush administration, after 9/11, couldn’t have asked Congress to amend the law to make surveillance of al Qaeda more efficient and effective. Ms Toensing’s answer: the Dems would engage in "political posturing" and then this:

To have public debate informs terrorists how we monitor them, harming our intelligence-gathering to an even greater extent than the New York Times revelation about the NSA program. Asking Congress for legislation would also weaken the legal argument, cited by every administration since 1978, that the president has constitutional authority beyond FISA to conduct warrantless wiretaps to acquire foreign intelligence information.

Please. We live in a democracy. Debating the government’s ability to tap Americans’ own phones without warrants is integral to any meaning of that word. And the final argument is completely circular. If the government’s ability to tap phones without a warrant is due to "a constitutional authority beyond FISA," why bother explaining the rest? The truth, sadly, is that the Bush administration could have gotten Congress to fix FISA but decided to ignore the legislative branch. It has acted in this case as it has acted throughout the war: contemptuous of criticism, dismissive of democracy, and impervious to correction. And that’s one reason why we haven’t had as much success as we might have hoped for. The president is always hailing the value of democracy abroad. One of these days, he’ll find something good to say about it at home.