The Green[e]house Effect: a Weblog

The Bushies: Slow Company Men in a Fast Company World

Writing in the latest New Yorker about the Harken-Halliburton administration’s economic team, James Surowecki points out that since senior White House advisers have little to no experience dealing with competition, we should hardly expect them to get free-market religion now.

Almost none of the C.E.O.s on the Bush team headed competitive, entrepreneurial businesses. The majority of them, in fact, made their bones in protected or regulated industries, where success depends on personal lobbying and political maneuvering. Bush himself, of course, built a small fortune on family connections, finagling a spot on the board of Harken Energy, and securing a publicly financed stadium for the Texas Rangers. Dick Cheney, meanwhile, got the top job at Halliburton almost solely because of his political connections. His successor there, David Lesar, has said, “What Dick brought was obviously a wealth of contacts.” Wealth of contacts, indeed: under Cheney, Halliburton expanded internationally, gained $1.5 billion in subsidies from the U.S. government, and added a billion dollars in government contracts.

Greatest Hits Weekend

This being my last major stretch of downtime before the election, I plan to make like a radio station and kick back while you treat yourselves to well-aged content. But you’ve only had a blog for two months, you say? Well, that problem has an easy enough remedy: my e-mail archives, where I’ve got great writing busting out all over. I’ve changed all names to protect the innocent.

A Triumph of the Flying Biscuit
To: Tricia Johnson
From: Greg Greene
Subject: A triumph of the flying biscuit—
Cc: Josh Steiner
Bcc:
X-Attachments:

Trish, I believe that I’ve bested the Flying Biscuit. A bold boast, you say? You’re absolutely right. And considering this week’s earlier culinary setback, who would have expected me to have reached that pinnacle so soon?

But there I am, savoring the memory of this morning’s coup — a batch of biscuits that held moisture with the gentle embrace a mother might give her newborn, but kept their crisp composure on the outside; that browned perfectly without betraying so much as a hint of a scorch or a singe; that rose up with an ineffable lightness that made them a beauteous and heavenly sight to behold. [Why, I thought I heard the angels themselves singing hosannas in praise! Or maybe it was the lack of sleep.]

As the sweet mysteries of life reveal themselves to me — whatever that nonsensical phrase means — I can stand here and gaze out upon the world in blissful satisfaction. I may never match this feat again, but I can walk on to that great festival in the sky serene in the knowledge that at last I’ve found a biscuit so close to perfect that the authority in charge up there will come a-calling on me for the recipe. [Or sue me for misappropriation of trade secrets.]

Fireworks at 8 p.m., then cocktails for an hour. Best—
Greg Greene =,

Make My Funk the P₂Fu₃Nk

It’s a holiday weekend. So why blog politics when we can talk about the Periodic Table of Funk?

[Link courtesy of Unbillable Hours.]

How Not to Join the God Squad

The 11th District Republican primary runoff in Georgia is coming down to the wire, with both candidates triple-dog-daring each other about who can sound the more arch-conservative. Yesterday, though, one candidate took the game a dare too far.

Phil Gingrey, a state representative from Cobb County, earned the enmity of local gay groups this year by sponsoring a “Defense of Scouting” bill during the legislative session. More people in the district live in the hinterlands than the Atlanta suburbs, and observers think Gingrey’s stance may help him garner votes in rural areas.

Gingrey opponent Cecil Staton, flustered by that prospect, decided to do his utmost to neutralize the issue. How? By selling himself as a “minister and a man of faith” fighting to keep a clandestine “supporter of homosexuals” out of Congress.

Only one wee small problem with that gambit: one look at Staton’s record makes him look way more down with the Village People than Gingrey ever has. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution decided to prove as much in the morning paper.

In 1997, Staton led a group that broke away from a Macon church in the Southern Baptist Convention to start a church that joined the Alliance of Baptists. The alliance affirms gay members and its churches have ordained many gay and lesbian ministers, according to Jeanette Holt, associate director of the alliance.

Staton said he was unaware of the organization’s tolerance of gay ministers and he does not believe the group had the same policy when he joined. “The issue of homosexuality was not an issue for that congregation and had nothing to do with my membership in the congregation,” he said.

William Merrell, vice president for Southern Baptist Convention relations, said the Alliance of Baptists is considered to be the most liberal of Baptist denominations.

“Most of the people I know who left the Southern Baptist Convention for the Alliance of Baptists despise Southern Baptists,” Merrell said. “Anyone who has left the convention in protest is being disingenuous to say they are friendly to Southern Baptists.”

Staton, who moved from Macon to Rome this summer to run for Congress, refused this week to say where he now attends church.

“I don’t want my church affiliation to be an issue in this campaign,” he said. “I’m not going to politicize my choice of where to go to church.”

Highland Hills Baptist Church in Macon said Staton is an active member there.

The church is affiliated with both the Southern Baptist Convention and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a moderate denomination that opposes the “purposeful” hiring of gay missionaries and staffers.

Better luck next time, Cecil.

A Web Site for the Times

The title? MLBFU. Bad design, frivolous lawsuit — but what an apt name.

Plus ça change . . .

[Former Sen. Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.)] has an uncanny knack of finding exactly the right word. When the conversation at lunch turned to American foreign policy, he called it “haphazard.” That is better than 3,000 words from Henry Kissinger.

— David Broder, “Mr. America,” The Washington Post, Mar. 21, 1999, @ B7.

Not to Brag or Boast, But . . .

. . . I just heard today that my old stomping grounds, the Indian Springs School, made Worth magazine’s list of the top feeder schools to the Ivies. We came in a few notches below the world-beating Thomas Jefferson High School, a public school in northern Virginia, but who cares when we can claim bragging rights for the entire state of Alabama?

I annoyed my guidance counselor and turned Yale down for Virginia, for what it’s worth — but gosh darn it, I’m in a mood to feel my oats about this. We are the champions, my friends . . .

Cynthia: the Sequel? [cont’d]

I just checked the web site of the Georgia secretary of state’s office for information on qualification deadlines for elections. It turns out that the last date for qualifying as a write-in or third-party candidate came three weeks ago, on Aug. 5.

But wait, how about the write-in option? Going through with it would mean signing up with the secretary of state’s office by . . . Sept. 3.

Let’s cross our fingers and hope she doesn’t make any announcements next week.

Bush in Iraq: On Whose Authority?

I spent much of yesterday champing at the bit to get my $.02 in on the Bush administration’s dizzyingly elaborate explanation of how the President can fight Iraq without asking Congress. [For those who missed the news, long story short, it boils down to this: “because I said so.”] I ran out short on time to pen down any thoughts, but as it turns out, law professor Jeff Cooper has weighed in with a more thorough post than I would have bothered to write. My favorite paragraph:

A straightforward consideration of the Constitution and prior resolutions of Congress . . . suggests that the administration needs to obtain congressional approval before initiating a war against Iraq. A clever lawyer, no doubt, could formulate counterarguments in support of presidential action without congressional approval. But on a matter as serious as war, it would be inappropriate to rely on clever lawyering rather than an act of Congress.

The Chariots Roll On

The U.S. Olympic Committee dumped Houston and Washington on Tuesday, nixing their chances of hosting the 2012 Summer Games. Some living in the two cities woke up with sore feelings about it today, and having lived in Atlanta during the runup to the 1996 Olympics, I can understand.

I don’t have much to say about Washington getting the brush-off due to foreigners who might veto D.C. as a proxy vote against an unpopular America, except that — sad to say — the committee probably had a point. As for Houston, though, I’ve only had one question all along: how did it make it this far?

The IOC did the dull downtown thing with Atlanta in 1996, and hated it, hated it, hated it. Dick Pound, then an IOC executive from Canada, slagged the town from one end of the city limits to the other. IOC chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch, meanwhile, could only find it within himself to call that Olympiad “most exceptional games” — not only short of his standard “best games ever” accolade, but also not even a compliment.

After that experience, the crowned heads of the IOC have no stomach for staging another stateside Olympics cum urban-renewal project. New York and SF would stand as a direct refutation of the Atlanta model. Houston would have been its carbon copy. The USOC was wise enough to understand that, and consequently cut Houston out.

Sorry it had to happen, Houston, but the key to getting the games now is to be a great city first. [Or to kvetch for long enough, like China. =, ] Build light rail, create some street life and a good walkable environment, and who knows — maybe in a decade or two, Houston will be ready to give the Games another try.

[Adapted from a comment @ Charles Kuffner’s Off the Kuff.]

Oh, So That Explains It

“Barr’s just gooder.”
— campaign advertisement, Bob Barr for Congress, August 2002

“[South Carolina], long the doormat of SAT rankings, passed Georgia this year, bringing finger-pointing and promises of change from embarrassed state officials in Atlanta. Only the schools in the District of Columbia scored lower this year on the college entrance exam.”
— “SAT scores land Georgia in 50th place,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Aug. 28, 2002

That’s just badder.

Tell It, Bill

The [Memphis] Commercial Appeal: “Clinton gives ‘em the spirit in home state.”

“The Republicans campaign on ideology and resentment,” he told about 400 people at the West Memphis Civic Auditorium. “They’re good and the rest of us are bad. They spent $70 million of your money to prove I was a sinner, and you could have told ‘em that for free.”

[Link courtesy of Avedon Carol.]

Cynthia: the Sequel?

I have no intention of turning this into a single-issue blog. But . . .

Some careful observers found an odd note over the weekend on Cynthia McKinney’s campaign site. It read:

Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney is going through all the letters and e-mails asking her to continue the struggle, to run again, to run for the US Senate.  Shortly, there will be an announcement on this button — more to come.

That cryptic message sparked plenty of talk come yesterday, as you might expect, about the smackdown Zell Miller would put on her — with relish — if she tried. But if you read the note again, you might notice something.

She didn’t say anything about skipping the Senate race in 2002.

Georgia Democrats were counting on Cynthia — why, I don’t know — to boost black turnout come the general election in November, when Sen. Max Cleland (D) leads the ballot. Well, now she’s toast, and when she needed help this summer, most state Democrats were too busy raising money or making tee times to bother.

So Cynthia’s an angry woman. [Not that she wasn’t plenty angry already.] And she has two assets to her name: time on her hands, and an ego to feed.

With a write-in campaign, she could make use of both — and torpedo Democrats’ chances of holding the Senate in the process.

The GOP already has Cleland in its sights as one of the senators it wants to take down. The Bush administration handpicked a candidate, Rep. Saxby Chambliss, and festooned him with cash and endorsements before the primary campaign even started. [Bushes, brushing off the will of the voters — gosh, never heard that one before.] Cleland’s approval ratings beat 60 percent, but pundits expect the Republicans to wallpaper the state with radio and TV ads to get their man into office.

Suppose Cynthia, heartened by those calls and e-mails she mentioned, decides to take to V103 one September morning and jump into the race. Who does she hurt? Well, Republicans deserted their own primary last week for the chance to toss McKinney out on her ear. Don’t expect a sudden groundswell of love there.

Cleland, on the other hand, thought he needed all those McKinney voters come November to help him out. What if some of those McKinney voters — 20 percent, maybe — show up to vote for her?

Then those votes come directly out of Cleland’s hide, that’s what. In a close race — and putting Cleland’s popularity and heroic personal history aside, most everyone expects a close race — those votes will count.

McKinney won about 50,000 votes last week. A one-fifth swing to McKinney in the general election would cost Cleland 10,000 votes — and that only covers votes in McKinney’s former district. We haven’t even gotten to the 4 million other residents of the Atlanta media market.

In 1996, Cleland won by only 30,000 votes.

Making matters worse, Georgia’s Democrat-controlled state government eliminated runoffs for statewide general election candidates after Sen. Wyche Fowler (D) lost his seat in late 1992. If Cleland falls even a whisker behind Chambliss, it won’t matter whether Chambliss hasn’t edged his share of the vote above 50 percent. He’ll win anyway.

Considering that McKinney promised in her concession speech that “[she] will not help the Republicans,” the irony here is so thick you could chew it. Running a kamikaze campaign against Cleland would help Republicans get the one thing they most dearly want: control of the Congress. Yet McKinney is so blunderingly self-absorbed that she just might plow ahead anyway.

For the sake of the party, she’d best not do that. Cynthia, from one Democrat to another: sit down and shut up.

More About SouthPAC

Let me turn the floor over to the Jonathan C. Hamilton, a true gentleman and one of the leaders of SouthPAC:

Dear Fellow Democrat,
With one quick minute of your time right now, you can help to build a better America by helping Democrats retake control of the House of Representatives in Washington. Eight years of venomous, partisan control by Republicans is
enough. Republicans are digging into their deep corporate pockets in a desperate attempt to hang on to their slim majority. Democratic candidates need your help.

The Southern Democratic Political Action Committee (SouthPAC) is currently raising funds to support Southern Democratic candidates in key races that are going down to the wire this fall. Southern Democrats are key to retaking the House, with their platform of common sense solutions for a better South, and a better America.

Make a difference today. Log on to www.southerndemocrats.org to contribute securely online to help support this effort. It only takes a minute to click and give. If 100 individuals who receive this message give just $50 each, that represents $5,000 to fund get-out-the vote efforts and last
minute campaign advertising. If 100 individuals give just $100 each, that is $10,000. If 500 give $100, that is $50,000. That’s the power of individuals working together to impact elections and improve our representation in Washington.

Encourage others to make a difference, as well. Forward this message to all of your Democratic friends around the country and encourage them to get involved. Also read answers to frequently asked questions about this effort. Together, we can make a difference and help the Democrats retake the House.

Many thanks—
Southern Democratic Political Action Committee

Let’s take a moment here to think about the difference you and I, with just a little effort, can make this fall. All we need to retake the House for the Democrats is six more seats. Six. Four of those, as I said earlier today, can come from Georgia. One more could come from Tennessee. Another from Alabama.

The battle for Congress is happening right here, in the South, today. This is where you can make yourself count. This is where you can change this country for the better.

Think of how much better you’ll feel waking up in the morning without having to worry that no one’s keeping an eye on John Ashcroft. Think how much better you’ll feel knowing that Congress won’t blow our retirement security on more tax cuts for the wealthy or on more corporate welfare. Think how much better you’ll feel with a Congress led by people who treat better health care as a goal, not a slogan.

Think how much worse you’ll feel if you wake up on the first Wednesday in November wondering how that day ended two years farther down the road.

Tired of what you’re seeing from Washington? Then do your part to change it. Lend Southern Democrats a hand. Give today.

For more information or to make a contribution, visit SouthernDemocrats.org.

A Special Announcement . . .

Joining the Green[e]house keiretsu today: SouthPAC, an political action committee that a good friend of mine has had under development since we were fresh law school grads in 1998. The group, just launched, plans to mount a full-throttle effort this fall to raise funds for moderate Democratic candidates around the South. Among its spotlight races you’ll find key battleground campaigns in the Democrats’ efforts to retake the House of Representatives.

Expect the site to become an even richer and informative resource over the weeks to come. For now, though, SouthPAC has one paramount goal — to help Southern Democratic candidates gain more seats this November. Do your part and give — or shop — today.

Getting Ready to Rumble

With Labor Day fast approaching, the time when we can block thoughts about the fall elections from our minds has just about run out. [Not that I could do that if I tried. =, ] At the prompting of a friend, I’ve taken a look at two races in Georgia with huge implications for the Democrats’ chances of retaking the House.

Thanks to the ‘max-black’ reapportionment of Georgia’s congressional districts in 1991 — in layman’s terms, max-black was a Bush pére-era push to create Republican seats in Congress by forcing states under the Voting Rights Act to form as many districts as possible where black voters were 65 percent or more of the total — Georgia’s congressional delegation from a 9-1 Democratic majority in 1990 to an 8-3 Republican majority in 1994. Georgia Dems have been sore about that outcome ever since, and with litigation forcing the state to redraw the districts throughout the 1990s, by this year state politicians were fed up with taking instructions from Washington.

Gov. Roy Barnes capitalized on that frustration, drawing a new congressional plan and suing the U.S. Justice Department before the attorney general could meddle. The district court validated the plan in April — paving the way for a rebalanced delegation where the seats would go 7-6 to the Democrats.

If the voters go along, that is. In two districts, they might not.

• In Georgia’s 11th District, once the home to Bob Barr, Roger Kahn squeaked through a slash-and-burn campaign last week against Buddy Darden, a former congressman ousted in the GOP sweep of ‘94. Kahn’s negative advertising turned off many Democrats, and that could hurt the party’s chances against the probable Republican opponent, state Sen. Phil Gingrey.
• The 3rd District campaign looks like another possible dogfight, with former Macon mayor Jim Marshall (D) lined up against Calder Clay, a Macon area county commissioner. Clay has a super-conservative record — he poses with a rifle on his campaign web site, and he won the Ga. Right to Life endorsement on a platform with no exceptions for rape and incest. His fundraising prowess, however, makes him a contender — at the end of June, he had more than $600,000 on hand.

  Although Bush won the district in 2000, in its new configuration Democratic voting performance beats 50 percent. Call it a tossup.

Stuart Rothenberg of Roll Call lists that matchup, along with the 11th District race, in his ‘Dangerous Dozen.’ Count on the Republican congressional committee to load up Gingrey and Clay’s coffers this fall to make those campaigns dangerous indeed.

Creationism à la Carte

Teachers should teach ‘all sides of an issue’ instead of just evolution.

So says a spokesman for the Cobb County (Ga.) Board of Education, which voted last week to consider allowing “discussion of disputed views” on the “origin of the species.”

In the interest of getting all sides out there, I’ve compiled a handy desk reference for Cobb teachers to use whenever this pesky ‘evolution’ business comes up:

• Samoans believe the god Tagaloa created earth, sky, water and man by splitting rocks.
• Hindu and Shinto peoples both say that heaven and earth came from breaking eggs, but don’t quite agree on what happened after the eggs cracked. Hindus say Brahma made heaven from one half of the egg and earth from the other, you see, while the Shinto say earth came from the yolk, the heavens from the white.
• Norse myth tells of a giant, nursed by a cow, who birthed offspring under his left arm, but died at the hands of a god created while the cow licked an ice block. Thank god — um, Odin — that he felt guilty enough to cover his tracks, or else he might never have come up with the idea of using evidence from the crime scene to create the universe.
• According to John Travolta and his fellow Scientologists, a few Thetan spirits struck up a joint venture to build the universe. Dastardly evil-doers barged in, though, wiping their memories and forcing the good businessmen to spend their lives in — ack! — bodies.
• Finally, Nuwaubian legend has it that their leader, ‘Dwight York,’ came from the planet Rizq in the Illyuwn galaxy. He’ll head back there next year after a long vacation with the Earthlings, but not before he picks 144,000 people to ride back on the spaceships with him.

Did that leave anyone out? Send your suggestions to the members of the Cobb County school board at 514 Glover St., Marietta, Ga. 30060. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to hear from you. =,

Caught in the Middle

Guess who I found out lives in my humble neighborhood, where the grass everywhere but the golf course looks crispy-fried brown?

Denise Majette. And Cynthia McKinney.

Think I ought to have them both over to grill out together?

I’ve got just the recipe for ‘em, too. Think this would go over well with people fresh off the campaign cocktail party circuit? =,

Tilting Against Windmills

As an environmentalist, I live according to some principles: recycle when possible. Use as little as necessary. Leave nature as good as you found it. Weaving ideas like those into everyday life has given me a sense of personal virtue, but over time I’ve also grown more and more convinced that, with a little education, other people might get to the point where conservation is as much second nature for them as it is for me.

Coming to environmentalism through politics, though, makes me ever ready to compromise. Not that I want to sell out the whales, mind you — though that might not be such a bad idea. Still, I’ll take a few roads for more trains and car-pool lanes, or a smaller increase in fuel-economy standards in return for more production of hybrid cars — anything that, over the long haul, advances the cause.

That’s just me, though. I compromise because I’m in it to win. Making environmental gains can be a pain, though, because of the people strictly in it for moral purity.

Like these guys. A three-company consortium wants to build a wind farm to generate 60 megawats of electricity on a hill in eastern Pennsylvania, but some activists up in arms over the project want to stop it until someone conducts an independent study of the windmills’ effects on migrating birds.

There’s only one thing: the local Audobon Society already says that only a few birds migrate through the area of the farm — and that the mills shouldn’t hurt them.

Pennsylvania sits atop tons of sooty, dirty coal, which utilities there have burned to fuel their power grids for years. Coal burning causes smog and acid rain, and generates pollution so dense that it can waft through other states. Compared with that, windmills are a godsend — they don’t consume resources and they don’t smoke up the atmosphere. The company behind the Pennsylvania project went one better, looking for endangered habitat and moving a few turbines around to protect some scarce breeds of trees.

So let’s look at the balance sheet. The consortium gets to turn a profit on clean power, Pennsylvanians get better air to breathe, and nature gets some attention to sensitive habitat. That’s a textbook win-win outcome. Compare that prospect with Dick Cheney’s nostalgia for smokestacks and uranium, and you have to wonder: why would anyone risk this project with a struggle over hypothetical birds?

Purity is great, but taking environmentalism to the masses means politics. And politics works better when people learn to take yes for an answer.

A Comment on Comments

After all the blackouts this week, my comment server, eNetation, looks pretty much down for the count. If I don’t see improvement in three days, expect me to strip it altogether or replace it with a new link.

I know the service is free, which means I’m getting what I paid for . . . but still — if you promise me a service, I at least expect it to work. Call me old fashioned. =,

Apple Makes the Fur Fly

A little bored Friday night, I ducked out of my place about 10 o’clock to take a gander at the release party for the new Apple operating system, Mac OS X 10.2 — known to the wonks as Jaguar. Sounds like a blowout idea for a Friday night — look at the wicked new operating system, whoooooo! — but my geek side has to get out and stretch every once in a while.

I figured on running into just a small crowd there, so I didn’t drive in any big hurry. A monster traffic snarl on the Downtown Connector forced me to cut through Midtown, which was so packed last night that I lost 20 minutes. I just rolled with it, though, and finally made it into the parking lot at Lenox Square at about 11:10.

The store had opened 50 minutes earlier at 10:20, so by then, I figured, the MacHeads had crashed through and filtered out, just leaving a few stragglers. Since I got a parking spot right by the mall door — how often does that happen? — that idea sounded about right. So I locked up the car, walked past the Pepsi machine to the automatic doors, went around the scrolling ad banner column in the corridor, then heard a murmur. That’s nothing huge, I thought, just another day in the mall, right?

A few steps further, and I’d change my tune. Apple had a wee-bit of a line.

Strike that — it had a hell of a line.

It looked like more than I’d seen since the opening day of ticket sales for the Olympics, in fact. It went halfway through the mall, four abreast — from the FAO Schwarz at the middle upper-level entrance to the Crate & Barrel at the front, across to the Anthropologie, then all the way back to the gates of Apple-palooza.

This for a cardboard box with two CDs?! Hoo, boy — this could take a while.

Thinking I’d seen it all, I wound up commiserating with a guy down from New York on business who’d just wandered in on a lark. He was fun enough, but the kind of guy Michael Lewis might have called a ‘Big Swinging D—k’ — loaded with equipment and toys and unafraid to let the world know it. A family lined up behind us a minute later, though, out of breath and sounding crestfallen about seeing a long line after four traffic jams.

Four?!

“Well, we came in all the way from Columbia, S.C., to get here. We left at 7 o’clock.”

Now I’d seen it all.

They got a show, though, for all the trouble — laptops whirring away, strange haircuts and body piercings everywhere, free mousepads flying, digital cameras clicking, Mac journalists asking everyone how long they’d stay in line. Hot as it was without mall air conditioning after-hours, it was a hoot — check the pictures along with this story to get a sense of what a spectacle it was.

Still, for me it was too much — after a week of late nights and politics, lining up just to get into a store seemed silly. By midnight I’d only worked my way up to the Corner Bakery just before the Crate & Barrel, and after that I still had half a line to go. I needed to go to Kinko’s, and bedtime called — so I called it quits.

That means no Jaguar for me, at least not yet. What a party last night, though. Something tells me Steve Jobs and the boys are going to be hitting the sauce by the time they finish counting the money.

If the Press Covered Every Race Like Majette-McKinney . . .

I had planned to spend a few lines swatting down the widespread cant about the McKinney defeat ushering in a new era of black-Jewish tension — spare me, please — but Wyeth Ruthven does it more brilliantly than I’d even thought to.

TOM EDSALL’S MAD LIBS: I took the liberty of replacing key words and phrases from today’s hand-wringing post mortem about the McKinney-Majette race. . . .

Hey, don’t let me spoil it for you — head on over to see it yourselves. It’s well worth a read.

Is the Justice Department Above the Law?

A post this morning at Eric Olsen’s site, Tres Producers, about a recent article at Publishers’ Weekly caught my eye — once again, Ashcroft’s boys are having trouble letting go of information.

A group led by the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers and the PEN American Center has sent a letter of support to House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R., Wis.) and Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.), the Committee’s ranking Democrat, protesting the Justice Department’s refusal to reveal how many times it has taken information from bookstores and libraries under the Patriot Act, passed last October as an amendment to the existing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

In June, the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the Justice Department asking 50 questions about the use of the Act. On July 26, Assistant Attorney General Daniel Bryant replied in a letter that the requested information was confidential and would be turned over only to the House Intelligence Committee. The House Judiciary Committee has legal responsibility for overseeing the Patriot Act while the House Intelligence Committee does not. . . .

The issue is of particular interest to booksellers. Section 215 of the Patriot Act grants the FBI the ability to demand that any person or business immediately turn over records of books purchased or borrowed by anyone suspected of involvement with “international terrorism” or “clandestine activities.” The act includes a “gag order,” preventing a bookstore or library from discussing of the matter with anyone or announcing the matter to the press. A bookstore may phone its attorney at the time of the request, but it can be done only as an afterthought, as the information must be supplied to the FBI immediately, or the employee risks arrest. . . .

Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, told PW Daily, “We’re all in the dark here because of the gag provision as to how many subpoenas or court orders have been issued. No one will tell you if there’s a few or a thousand that have been issued. It’s likely to scare people to hear that the Justice Department is fighting not to reveal the number.” He added, “We’re not asking for details, we just want to know a number.”

Olsen cut straight to the point with this comment:

Again we see a near-paranoid aversion to divulging any information to anyone from John Ashcroft’s Justice Department - a condition that only leads others to a similar state of paranoia in others, with or without cause. Why give so-inclined people the opportunity to let their imaginations run wild? When people perceive a pattern of unwarranted secrecy, they suspect the worst.

As if to confirm that very point, The New York Times turned up a story today that told us, well, the worst. The headline: “Secret Court Says F.B.I. Aides Misled Judges in 75 Cases.”

The opinion by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was issued in May but made public today by Congress, is stinging in its criticism of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which the court suggested had tried to defy the will of Congress by allowing intelligence material to be shared freely with criminal investigators. . . .

The opinion may be important in documenting why the F.B.I. was hesitant last summer to seek court authority to search the computer and other belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in the Sept. 11 attacks. . . .

Officials have previously acknowledged that at the time of Mr. Moussaoui’s arrest, the F.B.I. was wary of making any surveillance requests to the special court after its judges had complained bitterly the year before that they were being seriously misled by the bureau in F.B.I. affidavits requesting surveillance of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group. . . .

In essence, the court said that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department were violating the law by allowing information gathered from intelligence eavesdrops to be used freely in bringing criminal charges, without court review, and that criminal investigators were improperly directing the use of counterintelligence wiretaps.

In fairness, I have to say that most of the abuses happened when Clinton was president. A senior judge credited Ashcroft a few months ago for bringing the problems under control. Still, if the department felt at all chastened by the ruling, you couldn’t tell it from this statement:

“We believe this decision unnecessarily narrowed the Patriot Act and limits our ability to fully utilize the authority that Congress provided us,” said Barbara Comstock, the Justice Department spokeswoman, referring to the U.S.A. Patriot Act, the broad antiterrorism law that Congress passed after Sept. 11. The act makes it easier for prosecutors to use information gathered from intelligence wiretaps.

Let’s get this straight. A court tells you that your investigators ran amuck with the authority they had . . . and you answer by complaining that the court refused to grant them even more? Sorry, that doesn’t compute.

Unless you’re at the Justice Department, that is, where the words to live by — for outsiders, that is — seem to be: “[t]rust. Why verify?” Justice claims that the court stands athwart the express will of Congress, but when Congress asks how often a small part of the Patriot Act gets used, pfffft! mum’s the word. Justice says it prefers oversight by the intelligence committees, which meet in secret — but say, hasn’t the FBI put those committees under investigation for supposed leaks of information from . . . the Justice Department? Ummm, who’s overseeing whom?

Democracy, people always taught me, means that the people and the laws hold the government to account. The Justice Department, with its constant flouting and stonewalling of Congress, seems to have no patience for popular oversight. The same department contends that courts have no right to even ask how government decides to throw a citizen in jail for the indefinite future. So if neither people nor the courts have the authority, in Ashcroft’s eyes, to bring Justice to heel, then who can?

I don’t mind having people in government enforce the law, of course. I just wish I knew whether those people bother to obey it.

It Never Ends . . .

Seen on a yard sign by the Pep Boys yesterday while driving the morning commute:
“Sold Out. Denise Majette. Republican.”

Gotta love that wit. =,

But that ended up in my rear-view mirror, along with Cynthia McKinney’s career in Congress — so why get mad now?

Holy Mary, Mother of G-d . . .

. . . did I really just see these?!

Come One, Come All

Another player in the Majette landslide: Indian-Americans. According to The Times of India:

[W]hen she began talking about the imminent breakup of India because of its ‘17 different separatist movements,’ . . . the Indians of Georgia lost it for her and banded together.

One prominent activist sent out an e-mail to 3400 Indian-Americans in the area reporting her remarks (under the subject line “‘Balkanisation of India’ advocated by Rep. Cynthia McKinney”) and urging them to work for her opponent, a local judge named Denise Majette.

Led by a prominent dotcommer in the area, they were soon holding fund-raisers for Majette, who like McKinney is also African-American. They chipped in with $20,000, although much larger sums came in later from Middle East groups — the Jews backing Majette and Arabs and Muslims supporting McKinney.

Indian-Americans contributed in other ways too. Several volunteers worked full week for Majette’s campaign. She was invited as the chief guest for an Indian-American beauty pageant. A motel owner turned his electronic billboard next to the main highway into her campaign sign.

It was much after the Indian-American effort began that the Jewish lobby rolled into town. But the two sides joined hands for a phono-thon and pooled other resources for the campaign.

I met the dot-communard at Majette’s victory party last night, so this has the ring of truth. And it’s heartening, really — after all this time, it turns out McKinney really was a uniter, not a divider. Too bad for her that she did all her uniting on the wrong side. =,

[Link courtesy of The Brothers Judd.]

If Only the Dems Would Use These . . .

Someone at Blah3.com needs to come out from underground and get a job as a campaign consultant, because they’ve whipped up some of the best poltical ads I’ve seen all year. Watch them and laugh — and pass ‘em on.

Note: You know, it just hit me that some visitors from the National Review might consider this just a tad offputting. But hey — as Lyle Lovett would say, “I love everybody.” Y’all have fun, now, y’heah?

Landslide!

It’s a beautiful day, ladies and gentlemen. To see why, just read these primary results:

• U.S. House of Representatives, Georgia - District 4 (Democratic)
  Denise Majette: 58%
  Rep. Cynthia McKinney: 42%.
  173 of 174 precincts counted.
• U.S. House of Representatives, Georgia - District 12 (Democratic)
  Charles Walker: 33%
  Ben Allen: 14%
  Tony Center: 13%
  Merwyn Scott: 11%.
  233 of 234 precincts counted.
• State House of Representatives - District 44 (Democratic)
  State Rep. Billy McKinney: 48%
  John Noel: 47%
  Patrick Stafford: 5%.
  All 28 precincts counted.

You read that right: Cynthia McKinney, a 10-year incumbent, lost her primary by 16 points. Life couldn’t get any sweeter than this.

Whoooooo-haaaah!

I promised never to play the Soup Dragons unless Cynthia McKinney, her dad, and her old chief of staff went down in defeat on the same night.

Well, last night McKinney got whupped, her ex-staff chief was stomped, and a relative unknown forced her dad into a runoff.

Lucky me — I almost hit the trifecta! Good enough. All together now: “love me, hold me — love me, hold me . . . “

Hey, Tim: mind if I also put on some Jesus Jones? =,

Posted by Greg Greene at 02:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack