Copy That

Apparently in response to criticism by the right over journalist Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing blog, the Washington Post caved and hired a right-wing blogger, Ben Domenech, to write a blog called, "Red America."

There was a great outcry on the left, since no equivalent "Blue America" blogger was hired, but even more significant was the fact that the left-wing blogs found persistent, clear evidence of plagarism by Domenech throughout his journalistic career, evidence that even those on the right who persist in making claims between an al Qaeda-Iraq link before 9/11 couldn't ignore.

As a result, it appears that Domenech has resigned today.

Personally, I find it particularly ironic that, given the fact that one of the arguments against the left is that it has no ideas compared to the right, Domenech apparently stole a lot of his material from Salon.com, a left-wing site.
- posted by Joshua @ 3:09 PM (0) comments

 
Glad to See That the Vice-President Doesn't Live in A Bubble or Anything

Ever wonder where Vice President Cheney got the idea that Iraq was involved with al Qaeda in 9/11, or that we'd be treated like "liberators" in Iraq, or that the insurgency was in its "last throes"?

Why, from only watching Fox News, apparently.

The Smoking Gun has obtained a document listing Cheney's downtime requirements for his hotel rooms. And one of the requirements is that "All televisions tuned to FOX News (please let advance know if it is satellite or cable television)."

What, he can't use a remote control? (I guess they figure it's not a good thing for Cheney to be pointing anything at a TV, given his shooting accident). God forbid if he happened to surf onto CNN for a split second. He might actually get some unbiased news. (I can't quite figure out why they need to know if it is satellite or cable TV, however.)

I also see a microwave, which I hope Cheney doesn't get too close to with his pacemaker.

Bubble, anyone?
- posted by Joshua @ 8:23 PM (0) comments

 
White House Directly Involved in the Tobin Phone Jamming Scandal?

Despite claiming that it is not a Republican scandal, the RNC has been paying the very expensive legal bills (for Williams & Connolly attorneys) racked up by former Bush-Cheney New England Campaign Head James Tobin, recently convicted of illegally jamming the phones of the NH Democratic Party's get out the vote drive on Election Day 2002. Since the bills have been upwards of several million dollars, the question has always been out there as to why the RNC, headed by Ken Mehlman, would pour money down that hole. We may have our answer.

The Union Leader in New Hampshire is reporting that:

In the days before and after the state Republican Party’s 2002 Election Day
phone-jamming scheme, the man who now chairs the Republican National Committee was the White House director of political affairs.

And a Democratic-affiliated advocacy group says that court records show Ken
Mehlman’s office received more than 75 telephone calls from now-convicted
phone-jam conspirator James Tobin from Sept. 30 to Nov. 22 of that year.

Hmmm. It's probably worth considering in tandem with this piece of information too, reported by the Union Leader on March 3:

Federal prosecutors reportedly intend to indict a fourth person in the
jamming of Democratic get-out-the-vote telephone lines in 2002.

WMUR-TV reported Wednesday that an indictment is expected at the end of
the month.

I can't wait to see where this one is going. And perhaps someone should ask Bill Frist, who headed the RSCC in 2002, whether he knew about the phone jamming plan as well.
- posted by Joshua @ 5:15 PM (0) comments

 
So Much For Collegiality...

A catfight broke out at the Supreme Court today.

Today's Supreme Court opinion in Georgia v. Randolph addresses whether the consent of one co-occupant, over the objection of a physically present co-occupant, permits a warrantless entry by police to seize evidence. The Court, in a 5-3 Souter decision (Justice O'Connor participated in the initial argument, but her vote (or that of Justice Alito for that matter) was irrelevant to the outcome of the case), held that it did not. The majority consisted of Souter, Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg and Kennedy, while Roberts, Scalia and Thomas dissented.

Whether or not you are interested in Fourth Amendment law, this opinion is worth a read because the liberals and conservatives got into an intellectual brawl. Souter and Roberts, who wrote the primary dissent, go back and forth attacking each other.

Souter takes a shot at Roberts in footnote 4:

In the dissent's view, the centuries of special protection for the privacy of
the home are over. The principal dissent equates inviting the police into a
co-tenant's home over his contemporaneous objection with reporting a secret,
post, at 13-14 (opinion of Roberts, C. J.), and the emphasis it places on
the false equation suggests a deliberate intent to devalue the importance of the
privacy of a dwelling place. The same attitude that privacy of a dwelling is not
special underlies the dissent's easy assumption that privacy shared with another
individual is privacy waived for all purposes including warrantless searches by
the police.

Damn, S!

Then, in footnote 8, Souter notes that Roberts took issue with the fact that the majority had not addressed the constitutionality of a search involving a third person (only two people were involved in Randolph). Souter dismisses Roberts' concerns by derisively noting "We decide the case before us, not a different one."

Take that, Chief!

Roberts fights back, spending a fair portion of his dissent arguing over a point essentially irrelevant to the Court's holding. He disputes whether Souter's assertion is accurate that a person who is told to enter a home by one occupant but instructed not to enter by another would then leave and choose not to enter. However, later on in the opinion, Roberts himself engages in his own assumption about human behavior:

Under the majority's rule, there will be many cases in which a consenting
co-occupant's wish to have the police enter is overridden by an objection from
another present co-occupant. What does the majority imagine will happen, in a
case in which the consenting co-occupant is concerned about the other's criminal
activity, once the door clicks shut? The objecting co-occupant may pause briefly
to decide whether to destroy any evidence of wrongdoing or to inflict
retribution on the consenting co-occupant first, but there can be little
doubt that he will attend to both in short order.

Roberts then goes on to take explicit issue with the holding itself:

Rather than draw such random and happenstance lines--and pretend that the
Constitution decreed them--the more reasonable approach is to adopt a rule
acknowledging that shared living space entails a limited yielding of privacy to
others, and that the law historically permits those to whom we have yielded our
privacy to in turn cooperate with the government.

Near the end of his dissent, Roberts throws another punch:

Perhaps one day, as the consequences of the majority's analytic approach become
clearer, today's opinion will be treated the same way the majority treats our
opinions in Matlock and Rodriguez--as a "loose end" to be tied up.

Smack!

Just when you think the fireworks are over, Justice Stevens decides to concur solely to take a gratuitous pot shot at originalism. Stevens observes that:

In the 18th century, when the Fourth Amendment was adopted, the advice would
have been quite different from what is appropriate today. Given the
then-prevailing dramatic differences between the property rights of the husband
and the far lesser rights of the wife, only the consent of the husband would
matter. Whether "the master of the house" consented or objected, his decision
would control. Thus if "original understanding" were to govern the
outcome of this case, the search was clearly invalid because the husband did not consent. History, however, is not dispositive because it is now clear, as a matter of constitutional law, that the male and the female are equal partners. Reed v. Reed, 404 U. S. 71 (1971).

In your face, Justice Scalia!

Not one to take anything lying down (not even if he's duck hunting with the Vice President), Justice Scalia writes a separate dissent not to address Souter's majority opinion, as he joins Roberts' dissent, but solely "to add these few words in response to Justice Stevens' concurrence." Scalia responds that "Justice Stevens' attempted critique of originalism confuses the original import of the Fourth Amendment with the background sources of law to which the Amendment, on its original meaning, referred."

He goes on to argue that Stevens' celebration of female equality is undermined by the Court's decision:

Finally, I must express grave doubt that today's decision deserves Justice
Stevens' celebration as part of the forward march of women's equality. Given the
usual patterns of domestic violence, how often can police be expected to
encounter the situation in which a man urges them to enter the home while a
woman simultaneously demands that they stay out? The most common practical
effect of today's decision, insofar as the contest between the sexes is
concerned, is to give men the power to stop women from allowing police into
their homes--which is, curiously enough, precisely the power that Justice
Stevens disapprovingly presumes men had in 1791.

Whap!

And what about Thomas, you might ask? He separately dissents to argue that no search actually took place so the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply. (Sigh.)

After reading an opinion like this, I wonder even more about Justice Breyer's recent public comments that, "Under Roberts, closed-door conferences on cases now before the court are more open and free-flowing."

But the best news about this opinion is, in the midst of all the vitriol and back-and-forth, Justice Kennedy silently placed himself with the majority on the left. And I think that should take some wind out of the sails of those on the right who have been triumphantly celebrating the Roberts and Alito confirmations. Without Tony, they can't count to five.
- posted by Joshua @ 8:12 PM (0) comments

 
Some People Say...

Well, it's only taken five years, but the press has finally caught on to Bush's use of fictional "straw men" in his speeches to make his positions seem reasonable:

Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and
not worth another dime or another day," President Bush said recently.

Another time he said, "Some say that if you're Muslim you can't be free."

"There are some really decent people," the president said earlier this
year, "who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health
care ... for all people."

Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such
assertions.

When the president starts a sentence with "some say" or offers up what
"some in Washington" believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical
retort almost assuredly follows.

The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In
describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or
substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual
position.

He typically then says he "strongly disagrees" - conveniently knocking down
a straw man of his own making.

Bush routinely is criticized for dressing up events with a too-rosy glow.
But experts in political speech say the straw man device, in which the president
makes himself appear entirely reasonable by contrast to supposed "critics," is
just as problematic.

Because the "some" often go unnamed, Bush can argue that his statements are
true in an era of blogs and talk radio. Even so, "'some' suggests a number much
larger than is actually out there," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the
Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington
University in St. Louis, views it as "a bizarre kind of double talk" that abuses
the rules of legitimate discussion. "It's such a phenomenal hole in the national
debate that you can have arguments with nonexistent people," Fields said. "All
politicians try to get away with this to a certain extent. What's striking here
is how much this administration rests on a foundation of this kind of stuff."

Bush has caricatured the other side for years, trying to tilt legislative
debates in his favor or score election-season points with voters. Not long after
taking office in 2001, Bush pushed for a new education testing law and began
portraying skeptics as opposed to holding schools accountable.

The chief opposition, however, had nothing to do with the merits of
measuring performance, but rather the cost and intrusiveness of the proposal.

Campaigning for Republican candidates in the 2002 midterm elections, the
president sought to use the congressional debate over a new Homeland Security
Department against Democrats. He told at least two audiences that some senators
opposing him were "not interested in the security of the American people." In
reality, Democrats balked not at creating the department, which Bush himself
first opposed, but at letting agency workers go without the usual civil service
protections.

Running for re-election against Sen. John Kerry in 2004, Bush frequently
used some version of this line to paint his Democratic opponent as weaker in the
fight against terrorism: "My opponent and others believe this matter is a matter
of intelligence and law enforcement."

The assertion was called a mischaracterization of Kerry's views even by a
Republican, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Straw men have made more frequent appearances in recent months, often on
national security - once Bush's strong suit with the public but at the center of
some of his difficulties today. Under fire for a domestic eavesdropping program,
a ports-management deal and the rising violence in Iraq, Bush now sees his
approval ratings hovering around the lowest of his presidency. Said Jamieson,
"You would expect people to do that as they feel more threatened."

Last fall, the rhetorical tool became popular with Bush when the debate
heated up over when troops would return from Iraq. "Some say perhaps we ought to
just pull out of Iraq," he told GOP supporters in October, echoing similar lines
from other speeches. "That is foolhardy policy." Yet even the speediest plan, as
advocated by only a few Democrats, suggested not an immediate drawdown, but one
over six months. Most Democrats were not even arguing for a specific troop
withdrawal timetable.

Recently defending his decision to allow the National Security Agency to
monitor without subpoenas the international communications of Americans
suspected of terrorist ties, Bush has suggested that those who question the
program underestimate the terrorist threat. "There's some in America who say,
'Well, this can't be true there are still people willing to attack,'" Bush said
during a January visit to the NSA.

The president has relied on straw men, too, on the topics of taxes and
trade, issues he hopes will work against Democrats in this fall's congressional
elections.

Usually without targeting Democrats specifically, Bush has suggested they
are big-spenders who want to raise taxes, because most oppose extending some of
his earlier tax cuts, and protectionists who do not want to open global markets
to American goods, when most oppose free-trade deals that lack protections for
labor and the environment.

"Some people believe the answer to this problem is to wall off our economy
from the world," he said this month in India, talking about the migration of
U.S. jobs overseas. "I strongly disagree."

- posted by Joshua @ 6:00 PM (0) comments