Smile!
“The N.S.A. is believed to have gone beyond legal boundaries designed to protect Americans in about 8 to 10 separate court orders issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to three intelligence officials who spoke anonymously because disclosing such information is illegal. Because each court order could single out hundreds or even thousands of phone numbers or e-mail addresses, the number of individual communications that were improperly collected could number in the millions, officials said.”

Smile!

“According to the reporter who first broke the NSA wiretapping story, there is no proof the agency has scaled back its interception of the personal phone calls and email messages of American citizens as promised by the Obama administration or even that it is being straight with Congress about its activities… one NSA analyst was even found to have been reading the private email of former President Bill Clinton.

Risen told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann the next day that he knew of no other cases like the Clinton incident but that many NSA analysts had been abusing their powers in other ways. ‘It sounded like, from the former NSA analyst that we interviewed, that it was rare to access the emails of celebrities or famous people,’ Risen stated, ‘but that it was fairly routine, according to him, for people to access the emails of girlfriends or wives or other people that they might know.’”

Smile!

Not a soul in Congress has added their support to a congressional surveillance inquiry for three weeks.

CNN International: “Sanford spending holiday weekend with family in Florida”

The poor dear. If he weren’t such a policy hypocrite on marriage, I’d give him a break.

If the reports are true and Sarah Palin is set to resign as Governor of Alaska, then surely she cannot be in the running any longer for a 2012 Republican Party presidential spot. If her level of experience was unsatisfying to the nation’s voters, six more months of time in office (mostly spent on the national speakers circuit) won’t change that. Unless Palin pulls a Perot and changes her mind before actually resigning, she’ll have nothing new to bone up her scanty resume for the presidency… unless you count a tourist trip to Little Diomede Island to go look at Russia.

Palin’s reason for resignation — that she has tired of the “political blood sport” of being Governor of Alaska and had tired of the critical attention focused upon her — leads me to wonder: if the McCain-Palin ticket of 2008 had won election, how long would she have wanted to stick around in Washington, DC?

Happy 4th of July - almost. In a little bit less than 10 hours from now, the 233rd anniversary of the United States of America will begin. This year, Independence Day falls on a Saturday, but the Congress of the United States of America has been observing the significance of July 4th all week, by shutting down and doing nothing.

That’s what the American Revolution was all about, after all: No vacation without representatives.

In March of 2008, Adam Davidson of NPR revealed the massive increase in “Suspicious Activity Reports” to monitor the purchasing and financial transactions of you and prominent “politically exposed persons,” without a warrant, to uncover evidence of precrime. Here’s Davidson’s description of how Suspicious Activity Reports work in the age of Homeland Security:

Banks monitor every transaction. Every one, no matter how small…. “Your transaction is being transferred to the bank and it will be loaded into our transaction monitoring system and we will actually add this transaction together with several other types of transaction that you’ve done recently.” The software is checking to see if maybe that $4 is part of a pattern…. The report goes to a bank’s compliance officer, listing all recent suspicious transactions. Every transaction is given a numerical score…. The computer makes the score based on who is making the transaction, where does he come from, who is he associated with, what else is he up to. Every bank customer has, somewhere, in some computer database, a risk assessment score…. It also checks a bunch of lists. Are you on a terror watch list? A list of criminals?… A PEP — banks really do use that term — is anybody with political power. That means a Nigerian General, a U.S. Senator, or say the Governor of New York. And any PEP — any Politically Exposed Person — is monitored more carefully…. The Patriot Act forced banks to more closely monitor suspicious activity.

Remember Eliot Spitzer, Governor of New York? He was brought down politically after — without any evidence, without a warrant — his extramural, extramarital activity was brought to light through government collection and analysis of, yes, Suspicious Activity Reports.

Since then, I’ve been tracking the Department of Treasury’s twice-annual reports of these Suspicious Activity Reports (also known as SARs). The SAR Activity Review By The Numbers report has been issued twice a year — once in the fall and once in May or June — since 2003, with trend information extending back to 1996. Here’s a representation of the available data as of the release of the last By The Numbers report in November 2008 during the waning days of the Bush administration:

You can see why the trends are important to follow; since the passage of the Patriot Act the volume of Suspicious Activity Reports filed with the government has ballooned. Notice the asterisk for 2008 — the November 2008 report, of course, could not include all data for 2008, but only data on reports up through June 2008. The figure for 2008 was a preliminary extrapolation. To get full data on the volume of SARs for 2008, we’d have to wait for the regular By The Numbers report, scheduled to be released in May or June of 2009.

May and June of 2009 have passed, and as you can see here (as of today, July 2) there is no new report available.

Candidate Barack Obama ran for president on the pledge that his administration would champion transparency in government. When federal snooping on the financial activity of everyday Joes and “Politically Exposed Persons” goes undisclosed, that does not strike me as “transparent.”

Did I mention that at the end of this year, a number of provisions of the Patriot Act will expire unless they are renewed by Congress? Continued public disclosure of Suspicious Activity Report trends would complicate this renewal. When information about Patriot Act surveillance is swept quietly under the carpet, renewal of the Patriot Act’s provisions is made that much simpler.

Mother Davis looks at the accounts of her America’s third party, as she notices a particular deficit and remarks,

The Green Party of the United States is formally centered around ten “key values”, but operationally, much of the Green Party’s identity is focused on celebrity. There are plenty of good Green Party activists who are building their party from the local level up. However, every now and then, the Green Party as a whole gets tripped up in the sticky stories of individual personality.

This week, the Green Party’s personality trap has been sprung by Israel’s seizure of a boat of activists bringing humanitarian relief to the Gaza Strip. The boat contained last year’s Green Party candidate for President, Cynthia McKinney. The capture of Cynthia McKinney has created a pivotal moment in which the Green Party can demonstrate a commitment to communicating in an effective way to recruit new members, or that it understands nothing more than its own troubles.

Cynthia McKinney is a member of the Green Party, but she is not the head of the Green Party, and she was not acting on behalf of the Green Party in joining the independent relief mission on board the ship Spirit of Humanity. Yet, Greens in the US have seized upon this event with a special fervor, writing articles and engaging in activism at a rate we haven’t seen since Election Day 2008.

Activism is good, but activism ought to be focused on what will get results. What results will a Green Party obsession with Cynthia McKinney’s experiences on a boat lead to? Cynthia McKinney will get some attention, and perhaps the ship Spirit of Humanity will be freed. Perhaps some people will think about Gaza and Israel for a few moments more than they otherwise would. In the large scale, however, these events are not the most important issue of the day.

I don’t think that the story is without merit. There’s reason to believe that Israel’s actions in seizing the boat and its passengers could have violated international law. The situation in Gaza is an important foreign policy issue, and deserves some attention.

However, I don’t believe that the Green Party’s tenacious coverage of this story is called for. Green media has become obsessed with the story of Cynthia McKinney’s capture in a way that it hasn’t been focused on any issue all year - and there have been plenty of issues that Green Party writers ought to have been communicating about, but weren’t.

I’m worried that the Green Party is focused on McKinney’s adventure not because of the story itself, but because McKinney is a prominent Green politician. There are plenty of other stories of comparable magnitude that Green Party media hasn’t discussed at all, because there were no Green Party politicians involved.

I’m extremely sympathetic to the ideals that the Green Party purports to hold. I am not very sympathetic to the Green Party’s whining about its own troubles, and otherwise talking about itself all the time. If the Green Party wants to be taken seriously, it needs to become less self-referential, and learn to tell the stories that progressive Americans in general will respond to.

Taking the green shade off her office lamp,
Mother Davis

Really. Which is worse: that Maine Republican candidate for Governor Les Otten has pretty obviously copied President Barack Obama’s website theme…

… or that President Barack Obama has pretty obviously copied from the Republican Party platform on warrantless surveillance, state secrets, torture, the imbalance of power and anti-gay discrimination?

You read that right. Over the weekend five people were arrested on charges related to the practice and coverup of U.S. government torture, and three of those people were jailed.

What did these five people do? They stood on the sidewalk outside the White House protesting the practice and coverup of torture by the U.S. government, and for that they were arrested on June 28. Three were sent to jail.

In the meantime, no one actually involved in the government conspiracy to commit torture has been jailed or even charged with a crime.

Coming upon my car this afternoon in the Short North neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio, I found this magnet affixed to my car. I didn’t put it there.

What an odd activity, and what an odd time to engage in it. I mean, hey, this is a swing state and all, but really, we’re three and a half years out from the next presidential election. I’m still twisting my brain trying to figure out how this came to pass. Did a supply of Barack Obama car magnets being shipped into the state in preparation for the next election cycle fall out of a cargo plane on the way to the airport, wafting down across the city? Was some ex-Obama supporter looking for a place to put her old car magnet but uncomfortable with the idea of a trash can? Am I a sleepwalker nursing some suppressed joy at the Obama policy record? Or is this a freak convergence of billions of infinitesimal quantum probabilities, leading to the spontaneous generation of an Obama magnet out of nothing but the arrested decay of virtual particles?

Or is it you? Did you do it, you rascal, you?

A new report from That’s My Congress reveals that of the 79 members of the LGBT Equality Caucus in the House of Representatives, less than half support two-thirds or more of the caucus’ slate of 12 pro-LGBT bills.

The LGBT Equality Caucus describes its work in the Congress as “the extension of equal rights, the repeal of discriminatory laws, the elimination of hate-motivated violence, and the improved health and well being for all regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression.” 79 Representatives have indicated their symbolic support for these ideals by signing up as caucus members, but support beyond symbolism for laws that would actually make those changes is highly variable.

The following are, nominally speaking, members of the LGBT Equality Caucus. But in practice, they haven’t taken the effort to support any more than a quarter of the LGBT policy slate this year. These are the weakest members of the caucus:

Rep. Xavier Becerra of California supports just 3 out of 12 pro-LGBT bills. Bills to which Rep. Becerra has failed to lend his support: H.R. 1616, H.R. 1913, H.R. 2262, H.R. 2625, H.R. 2709, H.R. 3017, H.Con.Res. 92, H.Res. 308, and H.Res. 433

Rep. Niki Tsongas of Massachusetts supports just 3 out of 12 pro-LGBT bills. Bills that Rep. Tsongas has not lent support to: H.R. 1616, H.R. 1913, H.R. 2262, H.R. 2517, H.R. 2625, H.R. 2709, H.Con.Res. 92, H.Res. 308 and H.Res. 433

Rep. Edolphus “Ed” Towns of New York supports just 3 out of 12 pro-LGBT bills. Bills to which Rep. Towns has failed to lend his support: H.R. 1913, H.R. 2262, H.R. 2517, H.R. 2625, H.R. 2709, H.R. 3017, H.Con.Res. 92, H.Res. 308, and H.Res. 433

Rep. Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania supports just 3 out of 12 pro-LGBT bills. Bills that Rep. Murphy has not lent support to: H.R. 1024, H.R. 1616, H.R. 2262, H.R. 2517, H.R. 2625, H.R. 2709, H.Con.Res. 92, H.Res. 308, and H.Res. 433

Rep. Ellen Tauscher of California supports just 2 out of 12 pro-LGBT bills. Bills to which Rep. Tauscher has failed to lend support: H.R. 1616, H.R. 1913, H.R. 2262, H.R. 2517, H.R. 2625, H.R. 2709, H.R. 3017, H.Con.Res. 92, H.Res. 308, and H.Res. 433

Ellen Tauscher has some excuse for her meager legislative performance; knowing that she was to be appointed as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security (a post she’ll be taking up next week), perhaps she has focused more on her future job than the one she was actually elected to. But what are these other four members of Congress thinking? Why did they even bother to sign up as members of the LGBT Equality Caucus in the first place? Did they think that nobody would notice their actual performance?

If you find that your representative is on this list of underperforming members of the LGBT Equality Caucus, then review the caucus’ slate of legislation for yourself. Find the bills you think are especially important (this is essential; we’ve found we don’t agree with all of the bills ourselves). Then click on your representative’s name to get his or her contact information and make a call to advocate for a little more consistency in Washington, DC.

A weekend political strategy challenge: Explain why U.S. Representative Michael Arcuri decided to put this photograph of himself on his official congressional web site.

The news has emerged that President Barack Obama is considering an executive order to impose a system of indefinite detention without trial in the United States of America. The New York Times interviewed Obama administration officials to uncover the reasons why:

At the heart of the issue are more than 200 men being held at Guantánamo, in some cases for years. Initially, the administration had hoped that most could either be sent back to their home countries or tried in criminal courts in the United States. But emptying the prison has proved politically difficult.

Officials acknowledge that they have had trouble persuading other countries to accept detainees, and it now appears that some detainees — as many as several dozen — are unlikely candidates for criminal trials because of legal issues, including having evidence against them that was obtained by coerced interrogations.

Legislation remains an option, officials said, but the possibility of an executive order, which would bypass Congress, seems to indicate that the administration fears it may be unable to reach an agreement with lawmakers on a new detention system to replace Guantánamo.

Got that? Let’s rephrase: the Obama White House wants to issue an executive order to detain people because it doesn’t believe a judicial trial would convict the people it wants imprisoned and it doesn’t believe that the sort of legislative bill it wants would pass Congress.

Remember your high school American civics class and the lesson on the checks and balances of power distributed between three coequal branches of government? When Barack Obama was a candidate a year ago, he told us he remembered that lesson, too. He told us that change doesn’t come from the top down, but from the bottom up. He told us that he had read the Constitution and taught the Constitution and believed in the Constitution. He told us he’d restore judicial review to detainees and the right to a fair trial. He told us he’d restore human rights and civil rights for individuals. He told us he’d restore due process and rule of law, not rule by edict.

Now that he’s President, and he doesn’t think he’ll get the outcome he wants on individual cases from the legislative and judicial branches, he’s decided he’s going to overrule judicial power, to overrule Congress’ power of legislation, to overrule the Constitution itself. Rather than deal with the pesky separation of powers, Barack Obama will issue his personal edict that in America, there is no more right to a speedy, public trial by impartial jury. Under Barack Obama’s presidential declaration, Barack Obama will be judge, Barack Obama will be jury, and Barack Obama will be jailer. There are names for a person who feels desperately that unless he controls every aspect of a situation, it will all turn out wrong. “Micromanager” is a polite one. “Control freak” is more blunt. “Tyrant” is usually the one we use in politics.

Does this remind you of anyone? Does it remind you of George W. Bush? Does it remind you of Dick Cheney? It should. The Obama administration has adopted the kingly aspirations of the Bush administration. History tells us that it’s a bad idea to let control freaks and tyrants grab the crown, or to fashion a crown for themselves when none exists.

I expect some of you are thinking right now that this really isn’t such a big deal, that it can’t be such a big deal, because Barack Obama seems like such a nice fellow. Besides, you might be thinking, President Obama is just doing what he has to do to clean up after the messes of the Bush administration, to deal with the aftermath of leftover detainees. He’ll resolve the issue of the Guantanamo detainees, you’re thinking, and then we can move forward without looking backward to the dawn of a new bright and shiny day where we all hold hands on the hillside and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony and buy the world a Coke and keep it company…

… well, hold on there, Sheila. Read what the Washington Post reports, after speaking to Obama administration officials, about the plans for this executive order:

Such detainees — those at Guantanamo and those who may be captured in the future — would also have the right to legal representation during confinement and access to some of the information that is being used to keep them behind bars…. One administration official said future transfers to the United States for long-term detention would be rare.

Did you notice the word “future” there? Funny word, “future”: it usually refers to what somebody’s planning to do next.

Today I attended a demonstration against Ohio budget cuts to libraries; it has garnered print and video coverage by professional journalists. There were perhaps two hundred people there.

I can’t tell you how many people showed up for demonstrations in eight cities as part of Torture Accountability Day. I can’t tell you because despite multiple searches I cannot find a single journalist’s report on any of today’s multiple Torture Accountability protests.

Ohio State Representative Ted Celeste made an appearance before a crowd of hundreds of Ohioans in front of the Statehouse building at noon today. In his speech, he reiterated the importance of a robust public library system in the state.

A transcription of his remarks:

Libraries rock!

You know, these are really very difficult times the state’s facing. My colleagues and I are trying to find a way to balance the budget, and in this kind of effort you expect everyone to give a little bit. And so it’s important for everyone to share the pain, but not to have libraries to go down the drain.

I want to tell you, you all have made an enormous impact. I have received 28,000 emails in the last 24 hours! I hope you’re sending copies of some of those e-mails to the governor, and the president of the Senate, and the speaker of the House, and telling them how important this is — because your message will be heard. Know that we’re talking to our colleagues in the House. My other colleagues in the House have heard your message loud and strong. Know that we’ll be there, fighting for libraries. We appreciate everything that you’re doing. My biggest thanks go to our libraries.

If State Rep. Celeste’s remarks about conversations within the Statehouse are accurate, then it sounds like the momentum is swinging toward the restoration of state funds for Ohio’s public libraries.