Wow!  Well put, Jamison, well put!

Not to denigrate Mr. Sensenbrenner's exceedingly large ego and very conservative politics, but I think it'd probably be more accurate to change the line "known as an especially cantakerous conservative" to "known as the biggest jerk on Capitol Hill", especially now that Tom Delay is leaving town.

If history serves as any guide, the President will probably express regret for this incident sometime in January 2009.

An interesting new statistical argument has been rolled out recently to help buttress conservative claims that all is well in Iraq and the violence and death there is actually not as bad as say the statistics from several major American cities.  While not as clever as Brit Hume comparing U.S. casualties in Iraq to homicide rates in California, this argument was first advanced by Rep. Steve King (R-IA), pride of Storm Lake, IA who I'm certain knows more about price supports for corn than foreign policy, and then moved along by Rush Limbaugh and a host other right wing commentators.  The argument goes something like this:

I happened to catch Rep. Steve King, a Republican of Iowa, on C-span last week and he rattled off some startling figures that demonstrate how off-base journalists are when it comes to reporting on the war in Iraq. According to Mr. King, the violent death rate in Iraq is 25.71 per 100,000. That may sound high, but not when you compare it to places like Colombia (61.7), South Africa (49.6), Jamaica (32.4), and Venezuela (31.6). How about the violent death rates in American cities? New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina was 53.1. FBI statistics for 2004-05 have Washington at 45.9, Baltimore at 37.7, and Atlanta at 34.9.

You see Rep. King is trying to make the point that the news media is just blowing things out of proportion when they "dwell" on massive suicide bombings, dead and wounded Americans and Iraqis, sectarian violence, or even waves of execution style deaths happening in Iraq, but its interesting how he picks his statistics.  I would think that if you're going to talk about aggregate national violent death statistics (homicides? suicides? what are we talking about?)  it doesn't make sense to compare them to homicide rates in individual major U.S. cities, does it?  Wouldn't you want to compare say the rate of violent deaths per 100,000 of Baghdad to that of Washington D.C. instead of D.C. to the entire country of Iraq so that maybe you were dealing with the same thing or category?  That seems pretty logical but I'm not sure it advances the purposes of Rep. King and others. 

Now what if we do compare Baghdad to D.C.?  I don't have any current death rate statistics for 2006 but if you look at Washington D.C. homicide statistics through April of this year you'll find there were 47 homicides.  Now let's look at numbers from Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. The number of violent deaths in Baghdad from January to March 2006 was 3,472 deaths.  Now lets add another 1,091 deaths in April and you have a total of 4,563 violent deaths in Baghdad to 47 in our nation's capital over the same time period.  If we adjust for the fact that Bagdad has 10 times more people and multiply the D.C. numbers by 10 then if D.C. was Baghdad we would see 470 deaths at this point, not 47.  Where does that leave us?  I might be wrong but by my calculations the D.C. violent death rate is roughly 9.4 per 100,000 and Baghdad's is about 91.26 per 100,000 through the month of April.  Seems like a big difference to me?

I'm not sure it gets any better if we compare New Orleans to Haditha or Baltimore to Tikrit but I'll guarantee that if hundreds are killed everyday in bombings in Baltimore or the bodies of fifty people with bound hands, killed execution style, were dumped everyday only blocks away from the White House that 1.) the media would cover it extensively, 2.) most people would move far away from any of those places until that type of extreme violence ended, and 3.) most of the rest of the world would be wondering what the hell is going on in the U.S.?

Laura Rozen asks a good question:  If the GOP leadership on Capitol Hill is so worked up over the FBI raid on Rep. Jefferson's office, why the hell aren't congressional committees going into action threatening both Justice and the FBI with oversight hearings or introducing legislation cutting budgets, etc?  Either they're not as concerned as they've said or they really don't have any idea how Congress works and what their role is in the whole scheme of things and thus don't know how to express Congressional perogatives anymore.  After the past six years of much greater abuses of power by the executive branch its quite amazing to see Bill Frist and Denny Hastert so worked up over this.

Looking for more confirmation that the White House has run out of foreign policy ideas?  Well, look no further: MSNBC is reporting that the new buzzword in Washington foreign policy circles is "containment", but what that means in the real world is anybody's guess.  Whereas it made sense as policy in the post-war bi-polar world of mutually-assured destruction that was the Cold War, in its current usage "containment" seems more an attempt to invoke the purpose, and fear, of the Cold War period for a considerably less dangerous, yet more complicated international environment.  For instance, does drawing all U.S. troops in Iraq into a number of large superbases really "contain" ongoing sectarian violence in Iraq or merely remind one of the ill-fated U.S. Marines sent to Beirut with no mission other than establishing a U.S. presence in the midst of chaos?  Surely, those bases keep Iran in check?  Only if you believe that Iranian tanks are sitting ready on the edge of some Middle Eastern "Fulda Gap" waiting for the word to cross two or three countries to get to Israel...but that would fly in the face of the known fact that Iran's military is considerably weaker than either the U.S. or Israeli armies.  Nope, the Iranians make waves by supporting terrorist groups like Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad.  Missle defense shield over Europe?  Sounds great but twenty years of failed tests and no workable system in the foreseeable future really isn't gonna cut it.  Where were we going with this again?

We had a bit of server trouble, but we have returned.

Its painful to look at the transcript to Homeland Security chief Chertoff's press conference today because its pretty obvious nobody in the White House talked to DHS about the details of the President's new border control strategy or how it should be implemented before he went on TV last night.

 Our double secret correspondent just saw Scooter Libby leave his lawyers at Patton Boggs only a few minutes ago.  Does this mean an indictment for Rove?  Cheney going down?  Only time will tell.

Okay, so we do a crappy job of providing pre and neo-natal care to all Americans and we have the highest infant mortality rate among industrialized nations, but what to do?  While some might suggest reforming the health care system, moving towards universal coverage, or putting more money into programs targeting poor and at-risk pregnant women, the federal government has instead decided to set guidelines saying women need to think about and take care of themselves as if they were always on the verge of being pregnant.....oh, and doctors should always treat all women as if they might get pregnant.  Of course this applies whether the women plan to get pregnant or not, because obviously the problem with high infant mortality rates is all these unplanned pregnancies and not the fact that over 17 million women in this country have no health insurance or put off seeing doctors because they can't afford to.  Christ, these truly are strange times we live in.

This is making the rounds, but enforcing the border with Mexico has been such a priority for this administration, that they proposed adding an additional 10,000 border agents in last year's budget and then decided not to because of "budget constraints".  Extending capital gains and dividend tax cuts to the tune of $70 billion...ah, no problem!

This headline should probably read: Bush to base: "I hear you!" 

This is called motive.

Bush breaks the magical 30% barrier.

President Bush and others assure me that they are not trolling through my personal life.  No listening in or taping my phone conversations, they're just keeping track of when, where, who and how often I'm calling anyone, and gosh darn-it it doesn't appear that person has to be in a foreign country after all. 

Man, does that make me feel better!  How about you?

Oh yeah, I forgot to put in one of the best lines from that USA Today article about how the NSA's unwillingness to offer firmer legal justification for participating in the surveillance program left the Qwest lawyers so uneasy.  It goes something like this:

 The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

Yep, the NSA was afraid that neither the FISA courts or the Justice Department would say what they were doing was okay so they refused to go that route.  Really makes you feel confident about the whole venture doesn't it? 

I'm trying to figure out if the lesson to this sad tale is to keep massive government surveillance programs as secret as possible for as long as possible and then slowly watch embarrassing details slip out and hope nobody cares, or just be open about them from the get go?  Maybe its just that old adage that just because you have the capacity to do something doesn't always mean that you should... it'll be interesting to see what other surprises await?

Jon Aravosis goes after CNN national security correspondent David Ensor for saying no laws have been broken because its likely that both the government and the telecommunications companies legally vetted everything before proceeding with creating the world's largest database of US domestic telephone calls affecting tens of millions of American citizens. 

While I'm sure Ensor thinks he's acting the responsible dispassionate veteran reporter in poo-pooing growing outrage over the extent of the NSA program, if he looked a little closer at the USA Today article he'd see that one company, Qwest, did have major legal concerns and they even went so far as asking the NSA to have the Attorney General's office offer a legal finding authorizing the turning over of their phone records.  When NSA refused to do that or provide your typical FISA court order, Qwest refused to cooperate. 

Me thinks a much more interesting story would look at how much effort the other companies went to to explore the legal ramifications of their cooperation in this program before they said yes to the NSA?

Are you among the tens of millions of Americans whose calls are being tracked by the NSA? Are you using AT&T, Verizon or BellSouth? The president today said, “Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates.” Tens of millions of us are in Al Qaeda???

 

I quote from my favorite book:

 

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" (Amendment IV of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution).

 

Check it out, it's good readin'!:

 

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.billofrights.html

 

--E.

Rep. Jerry Lewis, (R-Redlands), Chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, sucked into the Cunningham bribery probe.  This one could get way big, if the DoD's own criminal investigator is to be believed.  According to him,  

      "This is much bigger and wider than just Randy 'Duke' Cunningham.  All that has just not come out yet, but it won't be much longer and then you will know just how widespread this is."

Its always the scandal you never expected that takes you down.

Today's USA Today reported that the NSA is recording the existence of almost every telephone call in America.  I can tell you that the lawyers are gonna have a field day with this one.  Every divorce lawyer in America is salivating at the opportunity to take a good look at all of those calls cheating spouses have made over the years.  Expect subpoenas to fly soon for data related to particular numbers.

Plunging poll numbers and a well-deserved reputation for ineptitude and suddenly every little thing the Bush people do wrong makes news; like sanitation workers finding official White House papers giving every detail of the President's recent trip to Florida in the regular old trash.

HUD secretary Alphonso Jackson tells a national minority real estate consortium meeting in Dallas that he prevented a prospective minority contractor from getting a contract after that contractor told him, "I don't like President Bush."

Update (5/10/06): HUD spokesperson:  Whoops, he was just kidding.  Story didn't actually happen but was a hypothetical example.  Broader message or what he meant: You better kiss the President's ass if you want me to give you money.  While this contradicts previous HUD explanations, that's the story.  There, it's all better now, right? 

The New York Times Magazine put out an article over the weekend called "Contra-Contraception" about the evolving religious conservative movement against contraception.  Its a very interesting piece but one exchange between the author and a state legislator from Illinois really caught my attention:

Ron Stephens is both a pharmacist and a Republican state legislator in Illinois, one of the states that are currently battlegrounds between pharmacists who claim the right to refuse to fill prescriptions for emergency contraceptives and women's and civil rights groups that argue that pharmacists must fill all prescriptions presented to them. Stephens not only supports the pharmacists' right of refusal but he also refuses to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception himself. He does, however, fill prescriptions for the birth control pill. When I asked him recently to explain his thinking on the two drugs, he said: "It's the difference between stopping a pregnancy from happening and ending a pregnancy. My understanding of the science is that the morning-after pill can end a pregnancy, whereas birth control pills will make a woman's body believe she is already pregnant so that the egg will not be fertilized." And what if studies show that, in fact, both drugs can prevent implantation? "Everyone has their natural prejudice," Stephens replied. "I'm going to understand it my way, and the issue is that you should not be forced to do something you believe is immoral."  (emphasis mine)

Yes, whereas most people are able to change their minds or reevaluate their position when confronted with inconvenient facts or glaring contradictions, Rep. Stephens has a "natural prejudice" and will always "understand it (his) way" so don't even bother arguing with him.  Problem? Birth control pill and morning after pill are basically the same thing, they both prevent the ovaries from inconveniently releasing an egg thus preventing any chance of fertilization, or pregnancy. 

Now, if you want to argue about timing or that one is a stronger dose or marketed differently than the other, that's fine, but people like Rep. Stephens want to have it both ways.  Attacking a very widely used and popular choice of contraception, like the pill, is a political loser, but keep Plan B off the shelf and you help restore the value of unwanted pregnancy as a cautionary tale; ie. women should be punished for having sex not geared towards procreation.  While you'll never be able to convince Rep. Stephens that Plan B is not the same as an abortion, the contradictions in the way these two products are treated by and large suggests this is more about women controlling their reproductive life versus the people who think that just promotes promiscuity. 

Wow, I just flipped to the Washington Post and it appears Porter Goss is abruptly stepping down.  Seems like only a few months ago there was a lot of praise coming out of the White House for the job he was doing exerting political control over the CIA and after seeing the number of experienced people who left the Agency since the start of his tenure he must have been making headway.  Anyway, its kinda strange that no one mentioned that he's been somewhat implicated in the poker party/prostitution ring at the Watergate?

Pondering the recent Spanish Star-Spangled Banner controversy I have to agree with Atrios that we indeed are "living in stupid times."  Let's leave history out of this faux controversy, which doesn't bode well for the outraged, and look at those hoping to exploit some sort of immigrant backlash.  I know a lot has happened in the last five years, but don't you think that the President when asked to make a statement might also mention that his 2000 campaign regularly pandered to the Hispanic vote by, yes, singing the national anthem in Spanish at campaign events or that that particular campaign spectacle was so popular that Jon Secada performed the national anthem in Spanish at the first Bush inaugural and somehow nobody thought it was a big deal?  

Lesson:  Okay to use national anthem to pander to ethnic group you hope will help you get elected, not okay to use national anthem to pander to ethnic group if its suddenly a big political issue that offends the more conservative and nativistic element of your political base in an election year.  Who knew?

Kudos to Think Progress for being all over this.  Too bad somebody in the mainstream media couldn't have done a little more research on this instead... although I guess CNN's Ed Henry has finally asked the question.

 

Update (5/4/06): I meant to do this sooner, but the Washington Post looked into it yesterday and it appears Jon Secada sang "America, the Beautiful" in Spanish at the inaugural.  On everything else, the White House communications people seems to have "CRS" disease.