Sherry Chandler

Eugene Debs did appeal his conviction under the Espionage Act, all the way to the Supreme Court. But it was a thoroughly conservative court that counted among its number Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Here is Ernest Freeberg on Holmes, from Democracy’s Prisoner:

He was a steely-eyed pragmatist who thought of the law as an expression of the majority’s will to power. Truth, as he famously put it, was determined by “the majority vote of that nation than can lick all others.” A Civil War veteran who had been wounded in battle, Holmes believed that the majority had a primordial right to defend itself by drafting men and sending them to the front. “No society had ever admitted that it could not sacrifice individual welfare to its own existence,” he wrote. “If conscripts are necessary for its army, it seizes them, and marches them, with bayonets in thier rear, to death.” [p. 123]

__________

I was musing this morning about what it is that makes me want to post this information, what I think the take-home message is.

One part of it is, as Holmes makes clear in this quotation, power will always protect itself, especially in time of war. And we will always need citizen watchdogs over government power. That belief is what makes me more Jeffersonian than not.

Another part is that these things are cyclical. These battles have to be fought over and over again. Which, I suppose, is the nature of life itself. Yesterday morning as I mopped up after one of our aging cats whose arthritic back makes it hard for him to hit the litter, I found myself whining that I am really tired of losing the same battles over and over again. But life is like that. And so is democracy. (Or even a republic.)

Some good things came in the aftermath Wilson’s repressions. For one thing, the American Civil Liberties Union was born and though they’ve been known to anger both sides, conservative and liberal, they have done good work for nearly a century in protecting our individual freedoms.

The last part is my desire to share this very good book with you. Though I got a little bogged down in the chapters about the legal niceties of Debs’s trial and appeal, for the most part I’ve found this glimpse of our history fascinating. And it’s good to have a human face to put on Eugene Debs, who has been hardly more than a name and a few quotable quotes in my universe.

“My heart cries out,” Helen Keller wrote to Debs when she heard the news that his appeal had been denied. “I should be proud if the Supreme Court convicted me of abhorring war, and doing all in my power to oppose it. . . . The wise fools who sit in the high places of justice fail to see that in revolutionary times like the present vital issues are settled, not by statutes, decrees and authorities, but in spite of them.”
— quoted in Ernest Freeberg, Democracy’s Prisoner (Harvard, 2008)

When Eugene V. Debs was sent to prison in 1919, activists on the left thought there would be a great uprising and general strike of American workers. This did not happen, but the government was so in fear of it that they secreted Debs through the back roads from Cleveland to the West Virginia State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Moundsville. They were in fear of mass demonstrations along the main routes.

The instrument used to send Debs to prison was the Espionage Act of 1917. Although the title of the act is at least more sensible than the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, which has to be one of the most insulting acronyms of all times, it was just as repressive. The Espionage Act, quoting Wikipedia, made it illegal

• to convey information with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies. This was punishable by death or by imprisonment for not more than 30 years
• to convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies and whoever when the United States is at war, to cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or to willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States. This was punishable by a maximum $USD 10,000 fine (almost $170,000 in today’s dollars) and 20 years in prison.

Pay particular attention to those words “with intent.” That meant that the speech did not have to have results, only “intention.”

The Act was the second prong of Woodrow Wilson’s two-pronged attack on widespread domestic dissent against his war policies. The first prong was the Committee on Public Information, which spread pro-war propaganda. A cynical person might call these two “prongs” misinformation and repression. Both are, I suppose, always a temptation for governments in wartime and are not particularly unique to the Bush administration.

Like U.S.A. PATRIOT, the Espionage Act addressed a real internal threat, in this case, German spies, saboteurs, and agitators. According to Freeberg:

Provisions of the new “spy bill” that targeted thesse activities were uncontroversial, though in the end they proved futile. During the war, the Justice Department did not convict a single German spy or saboteur under the Espionage Act. [p. 46]

So, I suppose, the Bush administration is not unique in this ineffectiveness either. (Speaking of which, the latest from the military commission trial.)

Provisions in the bill to control domestic speech were not at first well received, especially by the major newspapers, which argued, as they did not long ago, that they were already self-censoring and that surely nobody would really think a newspaper would publish information that would aid the enemy.

Perhaps caught off guard by this barrage of criticism, proponents of the bill implored their fellow lawmakers to trust the president’s good intentions. “If we cannot give our Executive power,” Senator Overman complained, “then God help this country.” The best reply to that line of argument came from New York’s freshman congressmen Fiorello La Guardia. “The law admittedly makes the president a despot,” he scoffed, “but with the comforting assurance that the despot about to be created has the present expectation to be a very lenient, benevolent despot.”

Love those New York legislators.

The censorship provision was defeated. But, also included within the bill was

. . .a provision that would give the postmaster general the power to deny mailing privileges to any publication “advocating or urging treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law of the United States.” . . .the “mailability” clause gave an indirect, but potentially broader, censorship power to Wilson’s postmaster, a conservative and crotchety Texan name Albert Burleson. The bill would allow him to punish a paper, not for revealing sensitive military secrets, but for using a tone that struck him as “treasonous.” With little debate and perhaps unintentionally, Congress was granting the Post Office what one historian has called “virtual dictatorial control” over the nation’s journals and newspapers. [p. 49]

Burleson used that power to put many Socialist, pacifist, and union newspapers out of business.

Protestors also were able to defeat the “disaffection” clause that made it illegal to “willfully cause or attempt to cause disaffection in the military.”

Harriet Thomas, a leader of the Women’s Peace Party, startled the committee when she told them, “It seems to me that under this act I would be liable to imprisonment for life, or a more drastic penalty, perhaps, if I should say that I would rather my sons be shot for refusing to go out and kill and bear arms against a supposed enemy of this country.” A congressman interrupted her to ask, “Then you do not honor your citizenship of this country?” Thomas stood her ground. “I feel I have a right to interpret my loyalty to my own country in my own terms of citizenship, and according to my own conscience, and I do not need any bill to tell me what my love of country shall represent.”

At that point, several on the committee told her that, once the Espionage Act passed, she would no longer have a right to make those kinds of provocative statements. “If your speech goes to the point of being treasonous,” one scolded her, “you are denied that right, and you ought to be.” Another exasperated congressman summed up the government’s position this way: “People should go ahead and obey the law, keep their mouths shut, and let the Government run the war.” [p. 50]

More and more familiar.

Gilbert Roe called the law “so indefinite that it simply becomes a vehicle for oppression.” He also said

“If you pardon the statement, I hardly see how it would be safe to say the Lord’s Prayer if this bill becomes a law. When we pray that our trespasses might be forgiven as we forgive those who trespass against us, I think it might be construed that we were praying for the forgiveness of our enemies, the Germans.” [p. 52]

When the law was passed, it dropped “disaffection.” But “with intent” was enough to get Debs,

The text of Deb’s seditious speech is here. He delivered at a picnic in Canton, Ohio on June 16. 1918. It took him a couple of hours to deliver it. People stayed to listen.

A little bird tells me — tweet, tweet — that my favorite writer of short stories, Jim Tomlinson, will have a second collection out from the University Press of Kentucky sometime next spring.

This is very welcome news, especially as I am just now rediscovering the American short story as a wonderful art form. And Jim is one of our best practitioners. If you haven’t read his first collection, Things Kept, Things Left Behind (Iowa, 2006), give yourself a treat.

The collection will be published as one of Univ Press’s Kentucky Voices series. Working title: Nothing Like an Ocean: Stories.

from Gregor Mendel and the Cats

Up the monastery wall, the brewery’s yeast-scent
huffles. And the dusty cat, stretched high
over warm stones, swings her blunt snout this way
and that, yeastward and monkward, from
release to salvation. In the bright sun
her irises, like shutters, close,
leaving just a strip of liquid glint, the pupil’s
vertical box.

I am sleepless today, the cats of my childhood
mewling all night, their phantom shapes
alit on my ceiling. Cat backs, stretched, flexed,
cat tails in counterpoint. Such mystery,
to be of the body perpetually …

— Linda Bierds

This poem is from Linda Bierds’s First Hand (Putnam’s, 2005) of which Bierds says in her “Author’s Note and Acknowlegments:”

As they trundle through the centuries, swaying this way and that, from wonder to foreboding, the poems in this book rest most frequently at the inscape of science. It is there, in that innermost space lit by the nature of human achievement, that their interest and questions lie, their praise and disquietude.

An inquiry such as this, which moves from third-century-B.C. theories of buoyancy to twenty-first-century biochemistry, must acknowledge what are for many the global and spiritual implications of a science increasingly adept at creating, extending, and annihilating life. To help me with that task, I turned to the character of Gregor Mendel, whose work on the hybridization of peas forshadowed genetic cloning. …”

Bierds’s biosketch at Poets.org reads in part:

Because her poems are often laden with historical references and challenging language, Bierds is often described as a difficult and overly-intellectual writer. In an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Bierds responds to the notion of obscurity by saying: “In grade-school classrooms, there’s this notion that a poem is similar to a mathematical problem and that it has a solution. That’s very off-putting to people. They remember back to fifth or sixth grade and how they didn’t ‘get’ poetry then and probably never will. But they did get it, just in a different way. Much of the reputation that ‘poetry is difficult’ comes from this mistaken thinking that a poem has one answer.”

I do find these poems difficult but the fault is mine entirely, in my ignorance of science. On the other hand, while I seldom “get” a whole poem in the way the teacher might have liked, I often find passages like the one quoted above that are just exquisite, and very clear and simple.

Edward Byrne in Valparaiso Review says of First Hand:

Presenting Gregor Mendel as a primary subject in her poetry, Bierds provides readers with a persona representative of the conflicted scientist, whether historic or contemporary, seeking to unlock mysteries of the physical world while maintaining a vigorous faith in the mysteries of the spiritual world. By extension, this poetic persona and his actions also show evidence of the intrinsic clash — often attendant and sometimes inevitable — between a search for knowledge and a trust in one’s religious beliefs, a pair of pursuits at constant risk of incompatibility with each other for inquisitive people who maintain a great faith.

…

Elsewhere, in “Gregor Mendel and the Cats,” Mendel speaks of painting blue the backboards of the monastery’s bookcases. The poem discloses Mendel’s thoughts on the importance of using the mind (“We are minds here,” he begins) as well as the body (“And hands,” he continues), stretching one’s intellect for both practical knowledge and imaginative purposes.

In talking about the poem “Sunderance,” Byrne leads me to hope I am not the only reader not quite learned enough to keep up:

At times, comprehending archival information in Bierds’s poetry does demand a greater degree of active intellectual involvement, perhaps even firsthand research, by readers. Nevertheless, while searching for information is sometimes required for a full understanding of clues embedded within the content of the poems in each of Bierds’s books (and may be a contributing factor that hinders her ability to attract a larger audience), when engaging in the process one can achieve a certain amount of satisfaction and delight, not to mention enlightenment about some lesser-known facets of historical events or individuals.

Bierds’s wanderings in scientific history takes her from Mendel to Newton back to Galileo, forward to Hedy Lamar and on to James Watson and Dolly the cloned sheep, with a detour to some fishermen stranded on breaking ice near St. Petersburg. Oh yes, and Marie Curie makes an obligatory appearance who is paired with the artist Paul Cadmus, working on a WPA project.

When a genetic scientist uses the term expression, s/he is referring to the action of a gene in the production of a protein or a phenotype, the gene expresses itself. When a poet speaks of expression s/he has something perhaps more lyrical in mind. In First Hand, Bierds shows us how to experience both kinds of expression firsthand.

From Lisa Levy, An Original Adventure, in The Believer:

…Hardwick’s genius was not limited to private letters [Ed note: These would be the private letters her husband Robert Lowell made public in his confressional poetry]. She too got to create herself, as a novelist, a teacher, and, most powerfully, as a critic. The bones of her biography are a classic fish-out-of-water tale, a Kentucky belle in the big city, but Hardwick was more like Walt Whitman tending the wounded in the Civil War hospital than Scarlett O’Hara at the Twelve Oaks barbecue—after all, she had a husband who needed constant bandaging (straitjacketing, really). Nevertheless she was a Southerner in the north; even though Hardwick didn’t put much stock in the idea that we “all are linked naturally to their regions,” as she wrote in her novel Sleepless Nights (1979), she does think “it is not true that it doesn’t matter where you live.” New York was hers, as Nights makes abundantly clear. Jim Lewis observes in his tribute to her on Slate.com that she was “one of the last survivors of a group of extraordinary women, many from the West or the South, who redefined the American essay: Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and M.F.K. Fisher, all from California, Mary McCarthy from Seattle.” She certainly harbored geographical ambitions. Her New York Times obituary recounts one from an interview in 1979: “My aim was to be a New York Jewish Intellectual. I say ‘Jewish’ because of their tradition of rational skepticism; and also a certain deracination appeals to me—and their openness to European culture.” Thus it is a bit twisted that though she floated among the Rahvs and the Kazins, the man she married was the deepest indigo of Boston blue bloods; and the analytical quality she associated with Semitism was not totally absent, but not dominant, in Robert Lowell, casually nicknamed “Cal” (for Caliban and Caligula, and for his tendency toward decadence and excess) by his prep-school chums. Yet anyone who ever read a word she wrote knows she did not suffer in silence. Hardwick remade herself as a New Yorker, but her feeling that she was never of the world she lived in, neither a real Jewish Intellectual nor at home with the Cabots and the Lodges, helped her find an original voice.

Hardwick died last December 2. Here is her obit from The Guardian:

Elizabeth Hardwick, who has died aged 91, was for nearly half a century a prominent figure in New York’s literary and cultural life. She was probably best known for her essays and her autobiographical novel Sleepless Nights (1979). But she was also famous for the company she kept. With her then husband, the poet Robert Lowell, she was one of the group of left-liberal intellectuals who founded the New York Review of Books in 1963. Her friends included such writers as Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Roth, as well as influential figures in the publishing world such as Philip Rahv and Jason Epstein.

Hardwick came to New York from the hinterlands. She was born into a large family in Kentucky, a southern border state that tends to produce literary sensibilities very different from those that flourish in the deep south. Her father was a left-leaning blue-collar worker who ran a plumbing and heating business. No doubt it contributed to her alienation from the mint julep school of southern writing that she was a city girl, from Lexington.

After graduating from the University of Kentucky and taking an MA in English, Hardwick moved to New York, where she studied briefly at Columbia University and set up as a freelance writer.

Here is her bibliography at the New York Review of Books.

And her bio at the KyLit site.

Obviously my interest here is the Kentucky connection, but I must wonder whether Hardwick would have wanted every biosketch to begin with a description of her marital long-suffering. Nothing I’ve read about her convinces me that she was of the long-suffering school of women so there must have been more to the marriage than her service to the great man.

Here is a snippet of op-ed from Steve Bell, a British cartoonist who offended me mightily with his lampoons of Hillary Clnton a few weeks back. He is writing in The Guardian:

So should we tread warily, lest we are misunderstood? Of course we should. Cartoonists are some of the most painstaking, careful, shy and sensitive people on earth, yet we do play with fire, toying with other people’s (and of course our own) most deeply held beliefs and most cherished illusions. Is it possible to go too far? Of course it is? Should we go too far? Of course we should. That’s what makes our job so interesting. There’s no better feeling than, having taken a risk in a drawing, seeing the thing in print and knowing it works. The converse is also true, which is why I work in a bunker on the south coast.

When I first saw a tiny thumbnail of the offending Barry Blitt New Yorker cover I thought, for a fleeting moment, that I could understand why Obama supporters would be so pissed off. After all, here was a drawing depicting the worst possible caricature of their man: a smug Muslim and his gun-toting black-power wife who would burn the flag in the Oval Office beneath a portrait of Osama bin Laden. But then, surely that’s the point? If you take it that literally you literally turn yourself into an idiot (though not quite a psycho). I didn’t think it looked a particularly good drawing, but I couldn’t judge from a thumbnail.

Now, having seen the full image (along with unimaginable numbers of idiots and psycho-paths worldwide), I can say that I rather warm to it. I look at it, and it works, for me anyway.

I particularly like the expression on Michelle’s face. Cartoons don’t work as shopping lists of points to be made with labels tacked on to clarify things for the culturally deprived. Too much cartooning operates on that level, especially in the US. Cartoons need to be disturbing, and they should also dare to ask questions. People in the US aren’t generally fools (even though the fools have been over-represented of late, particularly in the current administration), though some may be a little over-literal, and these are not always the psychos. Not so long ago I drew a cartoon of Obama as rifle-range target, and received a torrent (OK, a very heavy trickle) of emails, mostly from concerned liberal supporters asking me if I really wanted him dead.

I am probably going to get myself into trouble for saying this but, while I wasn’t particularly amused by the New Yorker cover (I am not the best audience for satire as my satiric husband will tell you), I am not ready to join a letter-writing campaign to protest it. Liberals seem to deal in “stern letters” of protest and see where that has gotten us.

Instead, I invite you to view this David Horsey cartoon. And this from Kentucky’s own Joel Pett.

The Curious George parody of Obama is racist; this New Yorker cover is not. (Thanks to BoGardiner for reminding me.)

See also The Poor Man.

From the BBC News:

A videotape of a detainee being questioned at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay has been released for the first time.

It shows 16-year-old Omar Khadr being asked by Canadian officials in 2003 about events leading up to his capture by US forces, Canadian media have said.

The Canadian citizen is accused of throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier in Afghanistan in 2002.

He is seen in a distressed state and complaining about the medical care.

The footage was made public by Mr Khadr’s lawyers following a Supreme Court ruling in May that the Canadian authorities had to hand over key evidence against him to allow a full defence of the charges he is facing.

Mr Khadr, the only Westerner still held at the jail, was 15 when he was captured by US forces during a gun battle at a suspected al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.

During the 10-minute video of his questioning in Guantanamo a year later, he can be seen crying, his face buried in his hands, and pulling at his hair. He can be heard repeatedly chanting: “Help me.”

You can view the video at the link.

Link from Jeralyn at TalkLeft.

Scanning the comments there gives some indication of what a controversial issue this is. For myself, I think the boy was a child when he was taken prisoner and should never have been kept for six years at Guantanamo Bay as though he were a major terrorist, without even the rights of the Geneva conventions. I don’t think we should have held any prisoners in that way but it’s particularly egregious in this boy’s case. I’m not so naïve as to think that 15-year-old boys can’t be dangerous. But we do not treat children that way.

For three decades or so now, I’ve been very concerned about the way children have been turned into warriors of hate for various guerrilla or resistance or rebel or terrorist groups. They are children and very maleable. To turn them into killers is possibly the worst crime I can think of. I am appalled that our government has exacerbated the crime against this child.

As for whether the events recorded on this tape amount to torture, that is not even a conversation we should be forced to engage in.

of the Great Flydini!

Hattip to Charlie Hughes.

It’s Saturday night. I have a glass of merlot. Time to unwind!

Or maybe there’s some hope after all, according to Paul Krugman:

But the vote was bigger than the theatrics. It was the first major health care victory that Democrats have won in a long time. And it was enormously encouraging for advocates of universal health care.

Ostensibly, Wednesday’s vote was about restoring cuts in Medicare payments to doctors. What it was really about, however, was the fight against creeping privatization. Democrats finally took a stand — and, thanks to Senator Kennedy, seem to have prevailed.

The story really begins in 2003, when the Bush administration rammed the Medicare Modernization Act through Congress, literally in the dead of night. That bill established large de facto subsidies for Medicare Advantage plans — plans in which Medicare funds are funneled through private insurance companies, rather than directly paying for care.

Since then, enrollment in these plans has been growing rapidly. This has had a destructive effect on Medicare’s finances: the fastest-growing type of Medicare Advantage plan, private fee-for-service, costs taxpayers 17 percent more per beneficiary than Medicare without the middleman. It also threatens to undermine Medicare’s universality, turning it into a system in which insurance companies cherry-pick healthier and more affluent older Americans, leaving the sicker and poorer behind.

…

In previous years, payments to doctors were maintained through bipartisan fudging: politicians from both parties got together to waive the rules. In effect, Congress kept Medicare functioning by expanding the federal budget deficit.

This year, the Democratic leadership decided, instead, to link the “doctor fix” to the fight against privatization and offered a bill that maintains doctors’ payments while reining in those expensive private fee-for-service plans.

…

Here’s how it will play out, if all goes well: early next year, President Obama will send his health care plan to Congress. The plan will face vociferous opposition from the insurance industry — but the Medicare vote suggests that this time, unlike in 1993, Democrats will hold together.

Unless Democrats win even bigger than expected, however, they won’t have the 60 Senate votes needed to override a filibuster. What the Medicare fight shows is that the Democrats could nonetheless prevail by taking their case to the public, daring their opponents to stand in the way of health care security — so that in the end they get some Republicans to switch sides, and get the legislation through.

A lot can still go wrong with this vision. But the odds of achieving universal health care, soon, look a lot higher than they did just a couple of weeks ago.

From the ACLU:

WASHINGTON – Today, in a blatant assault upon civil liberties and the right to privacy, the Senate passed an unconstitutional domestic spying bill that violates the Fourth Amendment and eliminates any meaningful role for judicial oversight of government surveillance. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was approved by a vote of 69 to 28 and is expected to be signed into law by President Bush shortly. This bill essentially legalizes the president’s unlawful warrantless wiretapping program revealed in December 2005 by the New York Times.

“Once again, Congress blinked and succumbed to the president’s fear-mongering. With today’s vote, the government has been given a green light to expand its power to spy on Americans and run roughshod over the Constitution,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This legislation will give the government unfettered and unchecked access to innocent Americans’ international communications without a warrant. This is not only unconstitutional, but absolutely un-American.”

The FISA Amendments Act nearly eviscerates oversight of government surveillance by allowing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to review only general procedures for spying rather than individual warrants. The FISC will not be told any specifics about who will actually be wiretapped, thereby undercutting any meaningful role for the court and violating the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

The bill further trivializes court review by authorizing the government to continue a surveillance program even after the government’s general spying procedures are found insufficient or unconstitutional by the FISC. The government has the authority to wiretap through the entire appeals process, and then keep and use whatever information was gathered in the meantime. A provision touted as a major “concession” by proponents of the bill calls for investigations by the inspectors general of four agencies overseeing spying activities. But members of Congress who do not sit on the Judiciary or Intelligence committees will not be guaranteed access to the agencies’ reports.

The bill essentially grants absolute retroactive immunity to telecommunication companies that facilitated the president’s warrantless wiretapping program over the last seven years by ensuring the dismissal of court cases pending against those companies. The test for the companies’ right to immunity is not whether the government certifications they acted on were actually legal – only whether they were issued. Because it is public knowledge that certifications were issued, all of the pending cases will be summarily dismissed. This means Americans may never learn the truth about what the companies and the government did with our private communications.

“With one vote, Congress has strengthened the executive branch, weakened the judiciary and rendered itself irrelevant,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “This bill – soon to be law – is a constitutional nightmare. Americans should know that if this legislation is enacted and upheld, what they say on international phone calls or emails is no longer private. The government can listen in without having a specific reason to do so. Our rights as Americans have been curtailed and our privacy can no longer be assumed.”

In advance of the president’s signature, the ACLU announced its plan to challenge the new law in court.

“This fight is not over. We intend to challenge this bill as soon as President Bush signs it into law,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. “The bill allows the warrantless and dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international telephone and email communications. It plainly violates the Fourth Amendment.”

You can donate here.

And then there’s this from the Baltimore Sun:

With Congress on the verge of outlining new parameters for National Security Agency eavesdropping between suspicious foreigners and Americans, lawmakers are leaving largely untouched a host of government programs that critics say involves far more domestic surveillance than the wiretaps they sought to remedy.

These programs - most of them highly classified - are run by an alphabet soup of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. They sift, store and analyze the communications, spending habits and travel patterns of U.S. citizens, searching for suspicious activity.

The surveillance includes data-mining programs that allow the NSA and the FBI to sift through large databanks of e-mails, phone calls and other communications, not for selective information, but in search of suspicious patterns.

Other information, like routine bank transactions, is kept in databases similarly monitored by the Central Intelligence Agency.

“There’s virtually no branch of the U.S. government that isn’t in some way involved in monitoring or surveillance,” said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian and fellow at the National Security Archives at The George Washington University. “We’re operating in a brave new world.”

…

“You don’t have to look far into history to know that when the government, any government, is given secret authorities, that those authorities are ultimately abused,” said Mike German, a former FBI agent who is now policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “You don’t even have to attribute bad motives to anyone. In an intelligence officer’s zeal to protect the country, they often will overstep their bounds.”

In part to assuage privacy concerns, the Department of Homeland Security has established a privacy czar to ensure that the technologies and programs initiated by the federal agency do not erode privacy laws or violate civil liberties.

Read the rest. Somehow I don’t have a lot of faith that our own little caesar for privacy will have much success.

Or, you could just read Lance, who sees what we’ve all been seeing for a while now, The bad guys are going to get away. The movie isn’t supposed to end like this:

They’re going to ride off into the sunset, their saddle bags stuffed with loot, whooping and hollering and laughing at the marshalls who can’t get their boots in their stirrups to get on their horses to ride after them. They’re going to live out their lives on the other side of the Rio, safe and fat and happy in their haciendas, surrounded by friends and fawning servants and beautiful senoritas with roses in their hair playing the guitar and singing ribald songs about limp-dicked Democrats.

George Bush probably doesn’t even know he’s loathed and despised and he probably won’t ever know. He’ll always be in the company of flatterers and sycophants who will assure him over and over again that he was a great President and he saved the country from the terrorists and children will be singing songs about him for the next three hundred years.

Dick Cheney and Karl Rove know they are hated by all decent people, but they think decent people are chumps and saps and to be hated by them is a sure sign of success.

Update: I received this e-mail from Chris Dodd, entitled “A Heavy Heart”:

Yesterday was a sad day for the United States Senate.

It is my hope that the courts will undo the damage done to the Constitution.

But let us stand tall, knowing that by working together we were able to make wiretapping and retroactive immunity part of the national discourse these last number of months.

We came together – all of you, Senator Feingold, bloggers like Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald, organizations like the EFF and ACLU, and untold hundreds of thousands of Americans who simply wanted to make sure that this one, last insult did not happen with ease.

I’m sorry we weren’t successful.

I just hope I’m lucky enough to have you by my side in the next fight, whatever that may be.

Thanks for all you’ve done.

Chris Dodd