Miscellanea
September 26th, 2007, 9:21 am · Post a Comment · posted by fsherman
An assortment of political odds and ends:
•The Washington Post reported Sept. 21 that Homeland Security is gathering and storing information on air travelers—people who aren’t suspected, accused or charged with anything—down to who they visit, what they carry with them and even what books they’re reading on flights. One man’s file, for example, including a note that he’d carried a book “Drugs and Your Rights.”
DHS spokesman Russ Knocke’s response: “We are completely uninterested in the latest Tom Clancy novel that the traveler may be reading (but) If there is some indication based upon the behavior or an item in the traveler’s possession that leads the inspection officer to conclude there could be a possible violation of the law, it is the front-line officer’s duty to further scrutinize the traveler.”
This is the same logic Bush supporters use to explain why eavesdropping without warrants is no big deal: Of course they’re not interested in what someone says to their mother! They’re only interested in phone calls about serious criminal matters!
And the logic is flawed in both cases, because there’s no way to know in advance that someone’s having an innocuous conversation, or reading a harmless book: If the government doesn’t check, it can’t be sure.
That’s why we have warrants, to make sure the government doesn’t spy or collect information on us without good reason. Because the temptation to watch us “just in case” we’re doing something wrong or in order to “connect the dots” is always going to be there. Never mind that gathering information on law-abiding travelers doesn’t connect any dots, it just provides more dots.
And I don’t for a minute trust whoever gathers and joins these dots to make sensible inferences from what people read, unless it’s someone carrying “Osama bin Laden’s Secret Plan for Total World Domination.” Police departments have listed Quakers and soup-kitchen managers as subversives, and used Homeland Security funding to spy on Greenpeace (which is nonviolent) and in one case, a vegetarian protest outside a Heavenly Ham. What would they make of someone traveling with a book critical of Bush?
•Some lobbyists fighting the Hometown Democracy Amendment, which requires major changes to growth and land-use plans be approved by public vote, have taken to claiming the amendment is the work of “big developers” out to turn land-use rules over to “special interests and their slick lawyers,” in the words of former legislator John Thrasher.
So an amendment that calls for a public vote on future development is some kind of plot by developers? Wow that would be pretty devious … but it’s also nonsense. OK, it’s a flat out lie.
I’ve heard plenty of rational arguments pro and con about the amendment. Wouldn’t it be nice if those shaped the outcome of the vote and not these kinds of cheap tactics?
•Sen. Mel Martinez explained recently that he refused to vote for the Webb Bill — which would have required the military give the troops home leave as long as their most recent deployment — because it would be a slap in the face to the troops to say they needed more time away from the battlefield.
Putting in all those long months in Iraq, Martinez said, “is a testament to their courage, to their valor, and their sense of duty to their country. I think we would demean their service if we were to say to them that there had to be a parity between the time in service out of the country and the time at home.”
I have read arguments that the added home leave might be a bad for practical reasons, but apparently the senator thought he was better off claiming that maintaining the current grind of deployments is his way of supporting the troops.What an insult it would be to say they might want more time spent with their spouses and children!
Of course, Martinez also said it’s a bad thing to have troops sent on 15-month deployments, but he isn’t proposing anything that would change that.
•Back in 2004, two Texans, Jeff and Nicole Rank, attended a Fourth of July Bush speech wearing anti-Bush T-shirts (”Regime change begins at home.”). When they refused to remove them, White House staff had them handcuffed, photographed, fingerprinted and jailed for trespassing for several hours, even though the event was public and taxpayer-sponsored.
Last month, the government paid $80,000 to the Ranks to end their lawsuit over the incident.
Which is good: The Ranks didn’t do anything wrong other than exercise their free speech, and neither Bush nor any other elected official has a right to ban people for confronting them with criticism.
But it’s also bad: $80,000 of public money paid out because White House staff were afraid of exposing their boss to someone who didn’t agree with him?
