Feingold: “I mean, you seem like a nice ordinary Joe. Would you want that cowboy doofus and his NSA goons unilaterally deciding to listen in on your phone conversations? Because the fact is, the president cannot make up authority and legislative power when it isn’t there. He’s President. He’s not King George Bush.”* Footlocker sales clerk: “Of course he isn’t. A King might presume to tell us when it’s okay
December 20, 2005
December 20, 2005
Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) expresses his rage at the Bush adminstration’s pretensions to monarchical power to a sales associate at his local Footlocker store
December 20, 2005
Outrage delayed? (UPDATED to include FISA Court Review link; UPDATED AGAIN to include response from James Robbins)
Via Newsbusters, a David Burnham NYT story from November 7, 1982: “COURT SAYS U.S. SPY AGENCY CAN TAP OVERSEAS MESSAGES” 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. Because the
December 20, 2005
Scenes from the WAR ON JESUS: “Anti-Wal-Mart agitprop”
From the Washington Times: Inside a South Florida Wal-Mart last Thursday, union-sponsored protesters handed out empty, gift-wrapped boxes to children and made them cry, according to multiple witnesses—and it appears that the arrests of two of the protesters may have been part of a grand strategy designed by Big Labor-backed WakeUpWalMart.com. Yet despite internal WakeUpWalMart.com communication—obtained exclusively by this columnist—indicating that the union-funded front instructed its protesters to test police
December 20, 2005
“Germany frees killer of U.S. diver”
From CNN: A Hezbollah militant sentenced to life in Germany for murdering a U.S. Navy diver during the 1985 hijacking of a U.S. jetliner has been freed, officials said. The German government denied on Tuesday the release was related to the freeing of a German hostage in Iraq. Mohammed Ali Hamadi was released Thursday and allowed to return to his native Lebanon on the next day, after qualifying for parole
December 20, 2005
NSA kerfuffle: redux (UPDATED and UPDATED AGAIN 10:25 PM MT)
Drawing on remarks from both the President and the Attorney General yesterday—and on the responses I was reading around the blogosphere—I began to suspect that the divisions we’re seeing in the debate over executive authority to authorize domestic surveillance is a function not merely of politics, but also of the paradigm through which one choses to view the authorization itself. Those who are committed to the civil / criminal paradigm—while
December 20, 2005
My third brief conversation with Tucker Carlson’s trademark bowtie
Me: “If Tucker were a tree, what kind of tree would he be…?” Tucker Carlson’s bowtie: “Who cares? If Tucker were a tree, that’d free me to be off helping some half-drunk teen in a rented tux score a handjob at a Prom after party. But I don’t have that kind of luck, now do I?”