Considerettes

Why would George W. Bush look to sidestep the FISA court? After all, they virtually never delay or reject wiretap requests.

Well, until after 9/11, that is.

Government records show that the administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court’s approval.

A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than from the four previous presidential administrations combined.

This doesn’t speak to the legality of the issue, but it does point out an explanation for Bush’s actions. The Left may wish to frame this as a brave court seeking to limit the actions of a man with dictatorial tendencies. It fuels their pre-conceived notions about Dubya and the programs legality, but does little beyond that. The resignation of one of the FISA judges 4 years after the program started, but 1 day after the story broke in the media, does about the same thing.

The media, of course, has been playing up this angle. In the article above, their source is James Bamford, “an acknowledged authority on the supersecret NSA”, who compares this to the “bad old days” of Nixon. You’d tend to think, based on the coverage, that anyone who’s anyone thinks this is completely illegal. You’d be wrong.

Enter Cass Sunstein. Well actually, he can’ t really enter, since the media has virtually shut him out of their coverage to this point. Cass Sunstein is a self-described “liberal” laws professor at the University of Chicago to whom the media goes when they need a quote on Constitutional law. This post at Redstate.org has background on how often he’s been to go-to guy (see the comments on Lexis-Nexis searches). However, all of a sudden the media has ignored his views on this constitutional topic. Why? Perhaps it’s because his opinion doesn’t fit the media’s angle on the story. From his interview on Hugh Hewitt’s show:

HH: […] First, did the authorization for the use of military force from 2001 authorize the president’s action with regards to conducting surveillance on foreign powers, including al Qaeda, in contact with their agents in America, Professor?

CS: Well, probably. If the Congress authorizes the president to use force, a pretty natural incident of that is to engage in surveillance. So if there’s on the battlefield some communication between Taliban and al Qaeda, the president can monitor that. If al Qaeda calls the United States, the president can probably monitor that, too, as part of waging against al Qaeda.

HH: Very good. Part two of your analysis…If…whether or not the AUMF does, does the Constitution give the president inherent authority to do what he did?

CS: That’s less clear, but there’s a very strong argument the president does have that authority. All the lower courts that have investigated the issue have so said. So as part of the president’s power as executive, there’s a strong argument that he can monitor conversations from overseas, especially if they’re al Qaeda communications in the aftermath of 9/11. So what I guess I do is put the two arguments together. It’s a little technical, but I think pretty important, which is that since the president has a plausible claim that he has inherent authority to do this, that is to monitor communications from threats outside our borders, we should be pretty willing to interpret a Congressional authorization to use force in a way that conforms to the president’s possible Constitutional authority. So that is if you put the Constitutional authority together with the statutory authorization, the president’s on pretty good ground.

This interview is chock full of information and analysis you won’t find in the mainstream media news coverage of this. Why isn’t this getting out? Note the bolded parts below (my emphasis).

HH: Professor Sunstein, have you ever been contacted by mainstream media about this controversy?

CS: A lot. Yeah.

HH: And have you spent a lot of time trying to walk the reporters through the basics?

CS: Yes.

HH: Who’s contacted you, for example? The New York Times?

CS: Well, I wouldn’t want to name specific ones. It’s a little bit of confidentiality there, but some well known ones. Let’s just say that.

HH: Let me ask. Have you been quoted in any papers that you’ve seen?

CS: I don’t think so.

HH: Do you consider the quality of the media coverage here to be good, bad, or in between?

CS: Pretty bad, and I think the reason is we’re seeing a kind of libertarian panic a little bit, where what seems at first glance…this might be proved wrong…but where what seems at first glance a pretty modest program is being described as a kind of universal wiretapping, and also being described as depending on a wild claim of presidential authority, which the president, to his credit, has not made any such wild claim. The claims are actually fairly modest, and not unconventional. So the problem with what we’ve seen from the media is treating this as much more peculiar, and much larger than it actually is. As I recall, by the way, I was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, and they did say that in at least one person’s view, the authorization to use military force probably was adequate here.

HH: Do you think the media simply does not understand? Or are they being purposefully ill-informed in your view?

CS: You know what I think it is? It’s kind of an echo of Watergate. So when the word wiretapping comes out, a lot of people get really nervous and think this is a rerun of Watergate. I also think there are two different ideas going on here. One is skepticism on the part of many members of the media about judgments by President Bush that threaten, in their view, civil liberties. So it’s like they see President Bush and civil liberties, and they get a little more reflexively skeptical than maybe the individual issue warrants. So there’s that. Plus, there’s, I think, a kind of bipartisan…in the American culture, including the media, streak that is very nervous about intruding on telephone calls and e-mails. And that, in many ways, is healthy. But it can create a misunderstanding of a particular situation.

The media is simply not telling both sides of the story, and even according to a liberal professor it’s due partially to the media’s “reflexively skeptical” view of President Bush; a view that, in turn, causes their coverage to be “pretty bad”. According to Sunstein, this is a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the media (one might say “myopic zeal’). Instead of getting both sides, the coverage has been heavily tilted to the “WATERGATE!” side of the ledger. Of course, when the media only gets one side of the story, it almost inevitably gets the liberal side. This provides the talking points the Left then uses ad infinitum, and later exculpatory revelations are ignored. (Much like the latest news about deaths from Katrina. I think we’re still waiting for that apology from Kanye West.)

Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with the media being a group of professional skeptics; in a sense that’s their job. However, as has been noted, EOs and policies by previous administrations that were very nearly the same as this one were buried by the same media that is taking this story and shouting it from multiple rooftops. Their skepticism is quite selective, as is the Left’s outrage over this. Those on the Left may wish to make the argument that the media is simply being cautious of the actions of a man who would be king, but since the recent UCLA study that showed how leftward the media tilts, that bias must be taken into consideration first, long before trying to apply some sort of megalomania to Bush himself.

Journalists journal, right? They like to believe themselves to be playing things down the middle, but here’s yet another example in a long line of examples to demonstrate they aren’t nearly there.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out and Blogger News Network. Comments welcome.)

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Merry Christmas, y’all. See you in a few days.

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In regards to the NSA wiretapping, one of Clinton’s own Associate Attorney General, John Schmidt, agrees that this is “consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents”.

The president authorized the NSA program in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. An identifiable group, Al Qaeda, was responsible and believed to be planning future attacks in the United States. Electronic surveillance of communications to or from those who might plausibly be members of or in contact with Al Qaeda was probably the only means of obtaining information about what its members were planning next. No one except the president and the few officials with access to the NSA program can know how valuable such surveillance has been in protecting the nation.

In the Supreme Court’s 1972 Keith decision holding that the president does not have inherent authority to order wiretapping without warrants to combat domestic threats, the court said explicitly that it was not questioning the president’s authority to take such action in response to threats from abroad.

Four federal courts of appeal subsequently faced the issue squarely and held that the president has inherent authority to authorize wiretapping for foreign intelligence purposes without judicial warrant.

In the most recent judicial statement on the issue, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, composed of three federal appellate court judges, said in 2002 that “All the … courts to have decided the issue held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence … We take for granted that the president does have that authority.”

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Thanks to NewsBusters for digging this up:

COURT SAYS U.S. SPY AGENCY CAN TAP OVERSEAS MESSAGES

By DAVID BURNHAM, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (NYT) 1051 words Published: November 7, 1982

A Federal appeals court has ruled that the National Security Agency may lawfully intercept messages between United States citizens and people overseas, even if there is no cause to believe the Americans are foreign agents, and then provide summaries of these messages to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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The Wall St. Journal, on the constitutionality of NSA wiretapping, and how the Founding Fathers would have seen it:

What we really have here is a perfect illustration of why America’s Founders gave the executive branch the largest measure of Constitutional authority on national security. They recognized that a committee of 535 talking heads couldn’t be trusted with such grave responsibility. There is no evidence that these wiretaps violate the law. But there is lots of evidence that the Senators are “illegally” usurping Presidential power–and endangering the country in the process.

The allegation of Presidential law-breaking rests solely on the fact that Mr. Bush authorized wiretaps without first getting the approval of the court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. But no Administration then or since has ever conceded that that Act trumped a President’s power to make exceptions to FISA if national security required it. FISA established a process by which certain wiretaps in the context of the Cold War could be approved, not a limit on what wiretaps could ever be allowed.

The courts have been explicit on this point, most recently in In Re: Sealed Case, the 2002 opinion by the special panel of appellate judges established to hear FISA appeals. In its per curiam opinion, the court noted that in a previous FISA case (U.S. v. Truong), a federal “court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue [our emphasis], held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information.” And further that “we take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.”

So much for all these congresscritters (and lefty bloggers) immediately assuming that this is some sort of treasonous act worthy of impeachment. What we have here is adjusting strategy to meet a new enemy while staying within Constitutional boundaries and current law. Our Founders had the right idea; in a time of war, requiring decisions by committee will work against us. At the same time, they didn’t make the President a king or a dictator; he still has to abide by prescribed limits. Given what we know so far–the briefings and concerns and even the temporary suspension–it appears that this administration was very sensitive to those limits.

This is all notwithstanding a Clinton-appointed judge who was on the FISA court resigning today, instead of anytime in the past year. If he was so deeply concerned over this surveillance,why did he wait until the story broke? Sounds more political than personal to me.

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The 10 Commandments can stay in a Kentucky court house.

The county display the ACLU sued over included the Ten Commandments, the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Star Spangled Banner, the national motto, the preamble to the Kentucky Constitution, the Bill of Rights to the U. S. Constitution and a picture of Lady Justice.

Writing for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Richard Suhrheinrich said the ACLU’s “repeated reference ‘to the separation of church and state’ … has grown tiresome. The First Amendment does not demand a wall of separation between church and state.”

Suhrheinrich wrote: “The ACLU, an organization whose mission is ‘to ensure that … the government [is kept] out of the religion business,’ does not embody the reasonable person.”

The court said a reasonable observer of Mercer County’s display appreciates “the role religion has played in our governmental institutions, and finds it historically appropriate and traditionally acceptable for a state to include religious influences, even in the form of sacred texts, in honoring American traditions.”

Just to remind some folks, Jefferson wrote “separation of church and state” in a personal letter to the Danbury Baptists. He was speaking for himself, and was not present when the First Amendment was debated.

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While those on the Left rage on…

It continues to amaze me that anyone can continue to justify this crap. We have a President, and an administration that continues to defecate on the Constitution and people who are suppossed to be SUPER Patriots, continue to act as apologist for it. Sorry guys, this one definately does not pass the smell test, and as more details become available, and more constitutional lawyers, NOT HACKS weigh in on the matter, it looks worse and worse…billripped.jpg

I am going to ask the question again, and I am sure it will be ignored by the trolls who respond to this post… WHERE does Bush’s powers as a “War Time President,” end?

…Drudge puts it all in perspective.

CLINTON ADMINISTRATION SECRET SEARCH ON AMERICANS — WITHOUT COURT ORDER

CARTER EXECUTIVE ORDER: ‘ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE’ WITHOUT COURT ORDER

Bill Clinton Signed Executive Order that allowed Attorney General to do searches without court approval

Clinton, February 9, 1995: “The Attorney General is authorized to approve physical searches, without a court order”

Jimmy Carter Signed Executive Order on May 23, 1979: “Attorney General is authorized to approve electronic surveillance to acquire foreign intelligence information without a court order.”

WASH POST, July 15, 1994: Extend not only to searches of the homes of U.S. citizens but also — in the delicate words of a Justice Department official — to “places where you wouldn’t find or would be unlikely to find information involving a U.S. citizen… would allow the government to use classified electronic surveillance techniques, such as infrared sensors to observe people inside their homes, without a court order.”

Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick, the Clinton administration believes the president “has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches for foreign intelligence purposes.”

Secret searches and wiretaps of Aldrich Ames’s office and home in June and October 1993, both without a federal warrant.

The Left’s outrage has to take this into consideration. Bush’s EO dealt with phone calls to foreign countries from people who were in a terrorists little black book (and cell phone and computer). Clinton’s even extended to solely domestic locations. Their outrage over this EO and the Plame affair would just begin to have a shred of credibility if they were just as outraged then as they are now.

But I’ll bet most of them were happy when Ames was captured.

(Cross-posted at Redstate.org. Comments welcome.)

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Clayton Cramer, on the Dover “Intelligent Design” trial:

It was a controversial idea of human origins–one that offended many people because of its implications for their religious beliefs. The idea had some worrisome baggage far beyond the area of biology. It scared the people in charge of the society, enough so that they felt a need to prohibit it from being taught in public schools.

Whoops, sorry. He’s talking about the Scopes trial. Follow the link for an interesting comparison of the two.

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Syria helping out a friend in need.

Syria has signed a pledge to store Iranian nuclear weapons and missiles.

The London-based Jane’s Defence Weekly reported that Iran and Syria signed a strategic accord meant to protect either country from international pressure regarding their weapons programs. The magazine, citing diplomatic sources, said Syria agreed to store Iranian materials and weapons should Teheran come under United Nations sanctions.

“Just stash them next to the ones from Hussein.” This gives a little more credence to the idea that Saddam hid his WMDs there as well.

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Incestuous pedophilia, the musical.

Around the holidays, the biggest challenge for many theater companies is convincing audiences to care about yet another staging of “A Christmas Carol.” This season in Atlanta, however, Actor’s Express wants to stir up buzz about a less familiar property — namely, a pedophile musical.

The Express has already started pushing “Love Jerry,” a new tuner written and composed by Megan Gogerty that follows the tortured story of Jerry, who develops a sexual relationship with his nephew while trying to stay friends with the boy’s father.

I’m not sure how someone can see this and not realize the cultural pit we’re slipping down into. This is the start of the normalization of pedophilia (and incest; a two-fer). Doesn’t matter that it’s “delicate” and “heart-wrenching”; the point is that the behavior isn’t condemned.

In “Love Jerry,” there’s no question what’s going on, yet Gogerty refrains from demonizing the title character. She focuses instead on the entire family’s attempt to comprehend what’s happened.

This moral grayness makes the play even trickier to market, yet it’s also what convinced Express artistic director Jasson Minadakis to produce it. He says he “absolutely believes” in the show and is continually “shocked by how powerfully it expresses itself.”

Apparently, the theater-going audience that Gogerty is trying to reach is no longer shocked by the act itself, so Minadakis is left with trying to shock people with “moral grayness”. They’re trying to move these things from the “wrong” category to the “gray” area. That’s shocking. It’s not surprising, but it is shocking.

To some, however, this may indeed be surprising. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwik, from last year:

The problem with the slippery slope argument is that it depends on inexact, and sometimes hysterical, comparisons. Most of us can agree, for instance, that all the shriekings about gay marriage opening the door to incest with children and pedophilia are inapposite.

An appeal to only the legal angle begs the question. Normalizing this will ultimately mean more of it, especially the way “privacy of my own bedroom” is used by those trying to normalize homosexual marriage.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Diane Glass, also from 2004, approached this from the same angle:

Which brings us to the inevitable “what about the children” argument. What’s stopping us from going down the slippery slope toward pedophilia? Well, the fact that only adults can marry. Problem solved.

For some, that’s simply a discriminatory statute just waiting to be “reformed”.

Kevin Drum, from 2 years ago, railing on Rick Santorum:

Santorum’s main beef relied on a “slippery slope” argument: if the government can’t ban gay sex, then it also can’t ban incest, bigamy, or adultery. This reminds me of why I dislike slippery slope arguments so much: they rely on the unspoken assumptions that (a) all arguments will eventually be followed to their most extreme conclusion, and (b) there are people whose ultimate goal is to gain acceptance of those extreme positions.

And yet here we stand, with an arts crowd looking to give a boost to some of the very things that Drum didn’t think was anywhere down the slope at all.

The surprise for these and others appears to be that a different set of people may, in fact, be responsible for pushing pedophilia and incest into the mainstream of society than were responsible for giving homosexual marriage a kick-start. It doesn’t really matter that some same-sex marriage advocates didn’t want to see incest normalized, frankly. The main argument against same-sex marriage was “where does it end?” When the line is pushed to a new distance, it’s now much shorter distance to other targets, and the folks waiting at those other targets are very happy you helped them out. Your protestations against their targets mean nothing to them, while they use your same arguments to work for what they want. You’ve done most of their work for them, and now all they have to do is nudge things a little more with a play here and a book there and an outed celebrity to sign autographs.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out, Blogger News Network, and Redstate.org. Comments welcome.)

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Those who made so much hay about low poll numbers for the President will now, of course, get quiet.

Bush’s overall approval rating rose to 47 percent, from 39 percent in early November, with 52 percent saying they disapprove of how he is handling his job. His approval rating on Iraq jumped 10 percentage points since early November, to 46 percent, while his rating on the economy rose 11 points, to 47 percent. A clear majority, 56 percent, said they approve of the way Bush is handling the fight against terrorism — a traditional strong point in his reputation that nonetheless had flagged to 48 percent in the November poll.

This coincides with elections in Iraq and the push-back by the administration over pre-war intelligence. So, again, the polls mostly measure how well one side or the other is getting their word out. Add to that the results of the UCLA media bias study, and you’ll see why those poll numbers have a tough time climbing. The MSM is mostly reporting the liberal PR, which, fortunately, can’t completely obscure the good news.

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The 2005 Gererosity Index is out. As Michael Medved points out, the top half of the list is fully populated with “red states”, while all but 1 of the bottom quarter of the list are “blue states”. His conclusion:

The reason GOP states are so much more generous is both obvious and profound: conservatives view compassion as a personal responsibility, but liberals tend to see it as the government’s job. One approach leads to individual commitment, while the other encourages the belief you can best help others by leaving it up to tax collectors and bureaucrats.

Not to mention that those tax collectors and bureaucrats suck out around 75% of the money passing through them. This also highlights the divide in this country between those who look to government first to solve all the ills of society and those who are busy doing something about them (or personally supporting those who are).

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out and Redstate.org. Comments welcome.)

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Marc at Hubs & Spokes has hard evidence that the President is again trying to destroy the wall separating church and state.

Heh heh.

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This just in; Media is biased!

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper’s news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

“I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican,” said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study’s lead author. “But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are.”

Regarding Drudge, later on in the report it’s noted that Drudge is graded based on the bias of the stories he links to, which lean left. This overbalances his personal conservative tilt, but he doesn’t do as much writing of his own as he used to years ago. So overall, the media is liberal.

This isn’t news to the “reality-based community” (a term the Kos folks like to assign themselves, even though they’ve called the media “conservative”). This is simply yet another in a long, long line of evidence that conservatives have a tougher time getting their message out in the media.

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

Heh, and Markos of Daily Kos calls the media the “Right Wing Noise Machine”. But when 18 of 20 top media outlets lean (or fall over) left, it’s points out the wishful thinking on his part.

Of the nightly news shows, I find these results interesting.

The most centrist outlet proved to be the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” were a close second and third.

“Our estimates for these outlets, we feel, give particular credibility to our efforts, as three of the four moderators for the 2004 presidential and vice-presidential debates came from these three news outlets — Jim Lehrer, Charlie Gibson and Gwen Ifill,” Groseclose said. “If these newscasters weren’t centrist, staffers for one of the campaign teams would have objected and insisted on other moderators.”

The fourth most centrist outlet was “Special Report With Brit Hume” on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “Nightly News” to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found.

“If viewers spent an equal amount of time watching Fox’s ‘Special Report’ as ABC’s ‘World News’ and NBC’s ‘Nightly News,’ then they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news,” said Milyo, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

I find it interesting that folks who get outraged over Brit Hume don’t recognize the same bias in ABC or NBC. And (no surprise here) CBS is even farther to the left. Is “Special Report” biased to the right? I’m willing to admit that it is. It uses contributors and sources that ABC, NBC and CBS completely ignore, based on the political stance. Rush Limbaugh often says that he doesn’t need to be balanced by a liberal because he is the balance that’s required for all the liberal opinionating out there (often disguised as news). Fox is far more centered than Limbaugh, of course, but they do have a rightward tilt that helps to balance the whole picture. But by the way they describe it, lots of folks on the left seem to think that Fox is much farther to the right than CBS is to the left. This study puts all of this in perspective.

When folks who say that Fox needs more liberal contributors start acknowledging that the rest of them need more conservative ones, that’s when I’ll start taking them seriously. Eric Alterman, call your publisher.

More thoughts and analysis can be found at “Oh, That Liberal Media”, and Technorati shows all the blogs covering this.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out, Blogger News Network and Redstate.org. Comments welcome.)

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This just in; hurricanes are no respecters of persons!

The bodies of New Orleans residents killed by Hurricane Katrina were almost as likely to be recovered from middle-class neighborhoods as from the city’s poorer districts, such as the Lower 9th Ward, according to a Times analysis of data released by the state of Louisiana.

The analysis contradicts what swiftly became conventional wisdom in the days after the storm hit — that it was the city’s poorest African American residents who bore the brunt of the hurricane. Slightly more than half of the bodies were found in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, with the remainder scattered throughout middle-class and even some richer districts.

“The fascinating thing is that it’s so spread out,” said Joachim Singelmann, director of the Louisiana Population Data Center at Louisiana State University. “It’s not just the Lower 9th Ward or New Orleans East, which everybody has heard about. It’s across the board, including some well-to-do neighborhoods.”

The “conventional wisdom” was only conventional among those ready to blame Bush for everything they could, including supposedly purposely destroying the levies. This was blatant exploitation of a tragedy for political gain that hit all economic levels.

Question: Will the same people that trumpeted the Katrina conventional “wisdom” as “proof” that Bush “hated” blacks recant and acknowledge that this new revelation, at the very least, says nothing about Bush’s racial views? I’d hope that it may even bring them to reconsider the whole presupposition that Bush is racist, and question previously accepted conventional wisdom. Will Kanye West apologize, even a little? I hope so, but my breath I holdeth not.

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