Citizen's Rent 2005

End of Hiatus

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Hello loyal readers! I'm coming off hiatus and I'm starting fresh.

This URL now hosts Citizen's Rent content from its inception in 2004 and 2005. For new posts, head over to the new and improved Citizen's Rent at http://kbonline.typepad.com/citizensrent. And if you're a fellow blogger with a link to this site, I'd be grateful if you'd update the link there.

Remedial Instruction for Bush

So I read in the Washington Post today what are the Bush team "lessons learned" from the last year. Before we look at those lessons, let's look at the the instructional material they had to work with.

• Spectacular failure in the effort to privatize social security
• Shocking incompetence responding to a natural disaster, Katrina, for which we had ample warning - after four years of justifying everything on the basis of making us safer
• An exploding deficit and an out of control budget
• A popularity rating so low that a rise to 47% is cause for celebration
• An economy that looks good on paper (the wealthy's tax returns that is) but hasn't translated into wage stability or increases
• The continued presence of over 160,000 American troops in Iraq, with no end in sight, a rising death toll, and Congress restless to finally exercise a bit of oversight
• The beginnings of a real anti-war movement, growing loss of support for the war in Iraq (a clear majority of Americans), and the call for troop withdrawal from a career Marine, Rep. Murtha
• The 9/11 commission assessment that we are no more prepared today than we were prior to 9/11 to prevent or respond to a terrorist attack
• A continuing investigation into the outing of a covert CIA agent which just might result in the indictment of Bush's own deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove
• Indictment of the Vice President's chief of staff for perjury, lieing to the FBI, and obstruction of justice
• The disclosure that the adminstration/Pentagon/CIA is running secret prisons in other countries where prisoners are held secretly and interrogated, some say tortured
• The reality that the administration didn't have the muscle necessary to prevent the McCain anti-torture amendment from passing
• The constant barrage of questions here at home and across the world, asking about US treatment of detainees
• The revelation that Bush authorized, unilaterally and in secret, the wire tapping of US citizens with no warrant or court review
• The appellate court's rejection of their position on Jose Padilla and their efforts to hold him without charges as an enemy combatant and to try him in a military court where he would not receive the rights constitutionally granted to American citizens
• The loss of support from the religious right that forced Bush to withdraw Harriet Mires' nomination to the Supreme Court
• The inability to get Congress to renew the Patriot Act

Now that's largely off the top of my head. No doubt, I missed a few major and untold minor problems that the adminstration faced in 2005. So what have they learned? According to the Washington Post, it's this:

1. Big initiatives like privatizing social security can't be done during a time of war
   Nice, the way they make this about the war and not about the complete dishonesty of declaring a financial crisis and then proposing a wholesale restructuring of the program such that it doesn't deal with the alleged financial crisis. No surprise that they failed to mention the total unity of the Democrats in Congress or that the expensive 50+ city campaign for privatization was dished only to approved insiders. They might have learned that preaching to the choir is no way to convince the country to risk its most successful social program. Or that the American people are smarter than they think. Or that big initiatives require bi-partisan support.
2. It's not enough to offer assurances of victory in Iraq. The American people actually want a true accounting of how things are going and a real plan for winning.
   And yet, we still don't have a plan beyond "as they stand up, we'll stand down". We got one speech with "things haven't gone as smoothly as we hoped" type of language, but still no-one has been held accountable for the grave mistakes made and still we deplete our armed services who fight and sometimes die without the equipment they need to do so as safely as possible. Here are some good Iraq related lessons: Equip the troops. Don't lie to the American people. Take responsibility and hold people accountable. Don't say support the troops and then blame commanders for how the war is going, the troop levels, or the slow pace of training Iraqis. Learn to question your idealogical conventional wisdom, especially if it leads you to risking American lives. Learn the value of internal debate and engage in it. Oh - and stop taking five week vacations when our military is fighting a war and you're the commander in chief - it just doesn't look good. There's so many more lessons to be learned - but I'll leave them to the Juan Cole's among us to point out.
3. Anger at Bush subsides somewhat when he takes responsibility.
   Now that's a good lesson. BUT, it's not enough to say your responsible, you actually have to be responsible. Firing Michael Brown at FEMA was a good start. But that's not enough, especially with the recent reports that the Dept. Homeland Security is disfunctional at best and may impede our ability to respond to a domestic crisis.
4. You can't do anything dramatic unless you have 60 votes.
   The right way to say this is: "If you're going to make major and substantive changes in the way the government operates and interacts with its citizens, the changes must be bipartisan."

These are the four lessons identified in the WaPo article that the Bush administrion has learned. That's it. And that's not enough. Not given the wealth of material they had to use as a basis for learning their lessons. If they were a class in school, they'd be given a "not proficient" mark and deemed to be part of the failing population of what might be a failing school.

So lit's time for a bit of remediation - what "lessons learned" did they miss?

Cross posted at DailyKos.

Operation Flabbergasted: Bush Defends Illegal Spying on US Citizens

Originally posted by Smintheus at DailyKos.

(I know I'm on hiatus, but this is too important to ignore because I'm busy elsewhere.)

This cannot stand. In ordering the NSA to spy secretly on America, George Bush has: overturned United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, which prohibits domestic spying by the NSA; violated the federal act which created the FISA court to oversee covert domestic investigations; and trampled upon the Fourth Amendment guarantee against warrantless searches. It cannot stand for a day, much less a month while Congress is in recess.

On Friday, when Sen. Specter said he'd make investigating the allegations a top priority in January, it was barely possible to pretend that they might be false. But by Saturday's radio address, when Bush defended his policy and insisted it would continue, we had entered a full-blown constitutional crisis. George Bush would love for Congress to back down from a fight next week, to go home grumbling "Wait until next year."

Operation Flabbergasted We cannot let that happen. We have to ensure that by Monday, all hell has broken loose in D.C.

Every Senator needs to know there'll be jolly hell back home if they don't demand Bush stop it now. The MSM needs to be discussing the `constitutional crisis.' There has to be a plan immediately to make this happen. I've got one.

We know that domestic spying by the NSA is Orwellian. We don't need to wait for panels of experts to declare the obvious, that Bush's policies violate the Fourth Amendment in the most fundamental way. Further, it is clear that the White House is panicking over the implications of this leak, very much as the Reagan White House panicked when the Iran Contra story broke and they thought impeachment might be looming. Bush's radio address manages to be both offensive and defensive at one and the same time (it reminds one of the cornered Richard Nixon).

We also know that significant numbers of Senators and journalists are utterly fed up with the Bush administration's record on civil liberties. Some are positively spoiling for a fight (if you don't believe me, check out the grilling Terry Moran gave Alberto Gonzales about torture on Nightline Thursday). So we also know that it's entirely possible for us, at this moment, to drive this issue home once and for all, if we can mount a worthy campaign.

The only campaign that would be worthy of this issue, in my opinion, will be one that produces the biggest fire-storm that Washington has ever seen. If we do not attempt to take back our country now, then when?

We need both coherent goals and effective methods to make this happen. There is little time to lose. Fortunately, as we've shown in the past with internet-based campaigns, things can be organized extremely quickly if people are willing to do their part.

GOALS

As far as possible, our declared goals must be as clear, straightforward, plausible, and uncontroversial as possible. I have no illusions that it will be easy to achieve these goals; George Bush and friends stonewall almost as a matter of course. But our declared goals must throw into stark relief the illegality of the administration's policies and the nature of the constitutional crisis.

I propose that we ask each U.S. Senator to demand that President Bush:

• immediately reverse this directive on domestic spying
• promise to desist in the future from warrantless spying on Americans
• cooperate fully with a bi-partisan investigation of the policy
• release the texts of the directives along with the legal opinions they were based on
• identify to the Senate all residents of the US who were targets of unconstitutional spying

METHODS

The most important things that need to be done are to

• build an ad hoc network to promote this campaign, to include blogs, activist groups, grassroot organizations, local and state Democratic Party organizations, and some media darlings like Randi Rhodes
• contact Senators to make the above requests
• contact journalists covering Washington to alert them to the campaign and to request full coverage of the constitutional crisis that the President has provoked

I've arranged them in the order that they need to be addressed. We will want to have the main outlines of a network in place by late Sunday, if we are to get the word out far and wide on Monday to inundate Senate offices with calls, emails, and faxes demanding action.  We can easily wait until Sunday to begin advancing along the second and third prongs of this strategy. I'll post another diary Sunday afternoon on those subjects (and a third on Monday morning), once this one gets off the ground.

I'm dedicating this first diary to the issue of developing an internet-based network of support for this campaign. When I conceived my "Awaken the Mainstream Media" campaign back in May, it took me days of writing emails and phoning around to create such a network. It worked, but it took more time than we have in this instance. If Kosmopolitans want to see this work, then they'll have to step forward to volunteer to post about this on their own blogs, and to help to contact others who can be roped in to support us.

To reiterate: In this first diary, I'm asking people to step forward to take charge of some part of the bigger problem of getting the word out quickly and connecting people into the effort. You can do that in many ways. For example, start a thread (or a separate diary, linked in a thread) asking people to identify which blogs they'll contact; or which radio hosts; or local grassroots organizations; etc. Identify something that nobody has spoken for, and take charge of it. Above all, we need to make the jump beyond the internet to organized groups with their own membership lists.

I'll have a lot more to say in the second and third diaries about what kinds of arguments and evidence would be useful in calling/writing Senators and journalists.

So who do you know? Who do you read, or listen to? Whose email lists are you on? What local mailing/phone lists can you enlist to get the word out to put pressure on the Senate? What part of this can you help to organize by Sunday afternoon?

Seem like a lot of work? It is. Now keep your eye on the prize.

UPDATE: Read this editorial at the NYT on Bush and the Fourth Amendment

{President Bush] secretly and recklessly expanded the government's powers in dangerous and unnecessary ways that eroded civil liberties and may also have violated the law.

In Friday's Times, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau reported that sometime in 2002, President Bush signed a secret executive order scrapping a painfully reached, 25-year-old national consensus: spying on Americans by their government should generally be prohibited, and when it is allowed, it should be regulated and supervised by the courts. The laws and executive orders governing electronic eavesdropping by the intelligence agency were specifically devised to uphold the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.

But Mr. Bush secretly decided that he was going to allow the agency to spy on American citizens without obtaining a warrant - just as he had earlier decided to scrap the Geneva Conventions, American law and Army regulations when it came to handling prisoners in the war on terror....

Let's be clear about this: illegal government spying on Americans is a violation of individual liberties, whether conditions are troubled or not. Nobody with a real regard for the rule of law and the Constitution would have difficulty seeing that. The law governing the National Security Agency was written after the Vietnam War because the government had made lists of people it considered national security threats and spied on them. All the same empty points about effective intelligence gathering were offered then, just as they are now, and the Congress, the courts and the American people rejected them.

This particular end run around civil liberties is also unnecessary. The intelligence agency already had the capacity to read your mail and your e-mail and listen to your telephone conversations. All it had to do was obtain a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The burden of proof for obtaining a warrant was relaxed a bit after 9/11, but even before the attacks the court hardly ever rejected requests.

The special court can act in hours, but administration officials say that they sometimes need to start monitoring large batches of telephone numbers even faster than that, and that those numbers might include some of American citizens. That is supposed to justify Mr. Bush's order, and that is nonsense. The existing law already recognizes that American citizens' communications may be intercepted by chance. It says that those records may be retained and used if they amount to actual foreign intelligence or counterintelligence material. Otherwise, they must be thrown out.

President Bush defended the program yesterday, saying it was saving lives, hotly insisting that he was working within the Constitution and the law, and denouncing The Times for disclosing the program's existence. We don't know if he was right on the first count; this White House has cried wolf so many times on the urgency of national security threats that it has lost all credibility. But we have learned the hard way that Mr. Bush's team cannot be trusted to find the boundaries of the law, much less respect them.

Mr. Bush said he would not retract his secret directive or halt the illegal spying, so Congress should find a way to force him to do it. Perhaps the Congressional leaders who were told about the program could get the ball rolling.

This is fairly tough, coming from the NYT: "cannot be trusted to find the boundaries of the law, much less respect them." This is going to get rougher.

Hiatus

For those loyal readers still returning to see if I'm posting... my apologies for the disappearing act.

I'm on hiatus until the new year but I promise to return with gusto.