I continue to have a lot of lingering fear and anger over the new FISA overhaul and its implications for the future, but amidst it all I have nagging questions over the role in the process and in the debate of our Senior Senator, Patrick Leahy.

Why? Simply that I can’t reconcile why Leahy, for whom concerns over civil liberties has been a signature issue (last year, he was the Vermont ACLU’s Civil Libertarian of the Year), has been disturbingly dualistic on this bill.

And if a glance at the soundbites in play in Barlow’s recent report on the issue has you thinking he hasn’t been, you haven’t been paying close enough attention.

It’s been odd to see the legendarily powerful Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee so disrespected by Majority Leader Reid, first during the Senate’s first stab at a FISA overhaul that would’ve given retroactive immunity to the telcos, at which time Reid broke with protocol and gave primacy to the Intelligence Committee version which included immunity, effectively rolling over Leahy. Sure, there was the formality of giving the Judiciary version a hearing, but its defeat under that schema was clearly a foregone conclusion. Then there was the case of this most recent bill that did pass, fastracked by Reid right onot the floor when a trip through Leahy’s committee would surely have been in order, given its sweeping change to the court system. It’s all begged the question – was Leahy treated so poorly by Reid because he really is not the power broker that we’ve all been assuming he is?

Or, in the final analysis, was he just not moved strongly enough by what he disliked about the bill to do everything he could to scuttle it in light of what he did like about it?

 We’ve taken Leahy to task for speaking in glowing terms of the policy work done on the bill by the likes of Rep. Hoyer and Sen. Rockefeller, who – more than any other two lawmakers – are responsible for the continuing return (and eventual success) of this legislation despite repeated defeats and public marginalization of the underlying issue. The matter was dead, dead, dead – but they brought it backed and pushed it through with very little resistance. While Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold are being praised for their filibuster attempt, many activists seem to have forgotten that Dodd and Feingold had previously intended an Hollywood-style, talk-it-to-death-on-the-floor filibuster – the prospect of which had Majority Leader Reid rightfully concerned about public embarrassment and backlash.

To get a sense of what Leahy really thinks, rather than give him a pass as the traditional media have, lets look at what he actually said. This from Barlow’s article (emphasis added):

Leahy noted that (Sen. Barack Obama) and he had worked together on some provisions when the bill was before the Senate Judiciary Committee and that they both supported the underlining procedural changes.

“We agreed on the FISA changes, but split on the immunity issue,” Leahy said.

And earlier from his press release that opposed the bill, based solely on the immunity provisions:

With respect to the surveillance authorities, I believe the bill represents an improvement over the flawed legislation passed the Senate earlier this year.  I applaud Representative Hoyer and Senator Rockefeller for their diligent work in negotiating this package.

Leahy voted in all the right ways on the floor; for all the amendments that would have delayed retroactive immunity, against cloture and against final passage. But to listen to Leahy, what he was working against was retroactive immunity. But the fact is, immunity was far from the only issue in play in the bill. From the ACLU’s public statement announcing their long-shot attempt to overturn the law:

“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.

And again, it is this part of the new law that Leahy repeatedly has spoken in support of. Still, by loudly trumpeting his resistance to the retroactive immunity portion of the bill, he has left the impression that he is on the side of civil libertarians in this matter. From the sound of it, he isn’t.

Anti-FISA overhaul pointman Glenn Greenwald argues that the retroactive immunity is the more egregious part of the law, as it codifies the Congress’s disinterest in/refusal to respect the laws of the land. This Congress has been worse than ineffective in maintaining the rule of law (worse, in this matter, than the previous GOP led Congress). Not content with its own complacency, it has now added complicity by affirmatively stepping in to interfere with the courts as rulings seemed to be going against the Administration. Here’s George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley on this weekend’s edition of NPR’s On the Media:

We did have one of 3 branches that was functioning – the judicial branch – was in fact looking into the legalities of the programs and exploring the possible injuries that had been done to citizens. what congress effectively did was it shut down that last branch…

…Look what happened: there were 40 lawsuits that were succeeding in court – they just had a ruling by a court that this entire program was unlawful. what was congress’s response? They changed the law and terminated all 40 lawsuits.

But this “lawless society paradigm” argument is still an abstraction. That’s not to minimize it at all, but simply to state that an assessment of its impact will vary from interpretation to interpretation. The rest of the bill, though, is another, more tangible and quantifiable story. As to going forward and the prospect for monitoring any future abuses, Turley has this to say:

The law also allows the president to engage in warrantless surveillance and makes the process very very easy – theres no reason for him to repeat exactly what he did before. Its like solving bank robberies by taking all the doors off the bank. So we really aren’t likely to see telecoms prosecuted because the congress created a law that is almost impossible to violate.

This is the feature of the law that Leahy has no problem with.

It’s very, very hard for me to see how one can support a change to the law that, as the ACLU says “violates the Fourth Amendment and eliminates any meaningful role for judicial oversight of government surveillance” and still consider themselves – or be considered by others – a champion of civil liberties. In light of this, its harder to give Leahy a pass for his sponsorship of the notorious USA PATRIOT Act, or to simply write it off as a case of temporary, post-9/11 insanity. Taken with his support of this wholesale disembowelment of the 4th Amendment, one wonders in there aren’t two Leahys, one a staunch defender of civil liberties, and the other, a force in favor of their congressional trampling. It leaves one to wonder which one may appear during any given debate.

It’s frustrating, and its something we should keep in mind if, as many are suggesting, Leahy may opt not to run for re-election in 2010. He will inevitably be used as the standard in picking a replacement in any Democratic Primary, and we should remind ourselves that – as good as he has been for Vermont and the nation – we can, and should, always be striving to do better.

The Burlington Free Press continues to cover the Vermont Yankee cooling tower story, but here's an interesting point.

 The company reported a leak Friday in a pipe in one of the cooling towers. Spokesman Rob Williams said Saturday that the second cooling tower, which collapsed last year, also showed damage.

Williams didn't mention damage to the second cooling tower to a reporter Friday, though that information was in a preliminary report produced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Now you might find this hard to believe, but there is actually a code of ethics for PR people. It includes the following proposition:

DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION

To build trust with the public by revealing all information needed for responsible decision making.

Guidelines

A member shall:

• Be honest and accurate in all communications.

• Act promptly to correct erroneous communications for which the member is responsible.

One specific example given is lying by omission.

Now, if a PR person knows that there is damage to two cooling towers, and discloses to the public that there is damage to only one of them, has this principle been violated?

UPDATED–For people who don't have an advanced degree in counting funny. 

You may have caught Tax Commissioner Tom Pelham on VPR Friday. He was being interviewed about this wekend’s sales tax holiday, and he was asked about the impact on the state budget, and whether we can really afford it. For one thing, it turns out that the state is actually going to have to make payments to the eight towns that have local options sales taxes. Thus, not only is the state forgoing tax revenues, we are sending checks, out of tax revenues we aren’t getting, to make up the taxes the towns are missing. So the next time you're talking to your friends who live in Burlington, South Burlington, or Williston, tell them to thank you for your contribution to their town budget.

In this discussion, Pelham says that the accepted cost estimate of this tax holiday is $2 million. When you look at how the calculated this figure, however, you have to question it.

Pelham  looked at last years receipts from the sales tax during the third quarter.  He took the total amount and divided it by the number of days in the quarter.  He then considered the cost to be this daily average times two. 

 
Also, buried in the interview was this line: “The State of Vermont is in very good fiscal health.”

 
You heard that right. We’re laying off employees, we’re cutting hundreds of jobs, we’re making people who want Catamount health care wait because we’re not filling those positions, and what’s the state of the Vermont budget?

Let me repeat that: “The State of Vermont is in very good fiscal health.”

Hey, do you think maybe it's time for a governor who will actually do something to help the Vermont economy? 

…and sets Times Argus /Rutland Herald newspapers straight on facts about Entergy’s Vermont Yankee.No not about the safety problems ,but about the unexpected $750 million profit that might be misconstrued as a windfall .Although this is published online today I can only hope that was written before Fridays cooling tower malfunction.

Just the facts, please, on Vermont Yankee

We seek nothing more than having all the facts on the table and ultimately to facilitate a sound, balanced decision for Vermont. At stake is whether nuclear power should continue to be part of our energy supply in the state of Vermont……

..References in the recent Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus article referring to these revenues as “windfalls” and Vermont Yankee as “a cash cow” are slanted terms that serve no purpose other than to cloud the discussion.

Heaven forbid that the public think that Entergy of New Orleans  is actually making money ,alot of money here in Vermont.Rise up Commissioner O’Brien and defend them protect them from potential taxes.Because truly it’s in the goodness of their hearts to provide Vermonters with power almost too cheap to meter . http://www.timesargus.com/apps…

From the ACLU blog:

If you have a problem with school officials strip searching 13-year-olds for Advil – or if you care about the government’s standards for informant use and invasive searches – you can take relief in yesterday’s ruling by a full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled 6-5 that students cannot be strip-searched based on the uncorroborated word of another student who is facing disciplinary punishment.

“A reasonable school official, seeking to protect the students in his charge, does not subject a thirteen-year-old girl to a traumatic search to ‘protect’ her from the danger of Advil,” the federal appellate court wrote in today’s opinion. “We reject Safford’s effort to lump together these run-of-the-mill anti-inflammatory pills with the evocative term ‘prescription drugs,’ in a knowing effort to shield an imprudent strip search of a young girl behind a larger war against drugs.”

Stop for a moment and consider: this was a 5 to 4 6 to 5 decision.

And then consider this: every law passed by our governments in the name of fighting the emotion of terror or whatever under the guise of such as a “PATRIOT Act” was first tested and perfected under Nixon’s war on the American people often euphemistically referred to as the “drug war”.

Whether it’s the degradation and elimination of our civil liberties, increased big government police powers or the “right” of our governments to use deadly force against citizens innocent of any crime or more … it all started with Nixon’s war (supported with alacrity by Democrats and Republicans alike for decades) on us.

What concerns me is the aforementioned 5 to 4 decision may be more more indicative of a final drift away from the type of thinking that showed some common sense and respect for our constitution and us as individuals.

An aside and a previously unanswered question: when has any of our governments given up, voluntarily or otherwise, police powers once these police powers been assumed? And how many 13 year old girls need to be strip searched over Advil before we decide to change this?

There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who think it’s perfectly reasonable to strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of bringing ibuprofen to school, and the kind who think those people should be kept as far away from children as possible. The first group includes officials at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, who in 2003 forced eighth-grader Savana Redding to prove she was not concealing Advil in her crotch or cleavage.

(The School Crotch Inspector, Fighting the Advil menace, one strip search at a time, Reason Magazine, 04/02/08)

Count me in with the latter.

( – promoted by odum)

sent on Thursday July 10

Tonight’s WCAX broadcast included a piece on the new population / demographic data from the Census Bureau. The reporter said, “The census estimates showing anemic growth are reflected in another reality. Vermont’s work force is shrinking — down by 2000 in just the last year alone. Without some kind of upturn, that points to stagnation in Vermont’s economy.”

I’m afraid Mr.Potter is confusing cause and effect and does not understand the data.

First, the “workforce” is not the “labor force” and the “labor force” is not population.

The “workforce” is only those who are “employed”, which includes the self-employed and those working without pay in family businesses. This is not the same as jobs. The number of “employed” Vermonters has declined by 5,400 in the last year. It is the “labor force” that has declined by 2,000, not the workforce.

Note: The number of jobs during the same period is flat. This is not great news but illustrates the sometimes confusing difference between the “workforce” and jobs.

Second, the “labor force” (a term of art for the Census Bureau) only includes those who are working and those who have looked for work in the last four weeks. Not surprisingly, when the job market goes south, many people who want and need work stop looking until circumstances improve. If so, they are no longer considered part of the “labor force” (curious how people can be made invisible). Thus, the “labor force” may decline even though the working age population increases.

In any case, the decline in the “labor force” has nothing to do with population.

The number of Vermonters ages 18 to 64 has increased by over 7,000 during the last five years (estimated to be over 405,000 in July 2007).

In addition, many Vermonters age 65 and over continue to work.  National data shows that labor participation rates for older Americans have grown considerably in the last 15 years (34% of men and 24% of women ages 65 – 69 work).

Bottom line: There is no shortage of potential workers; only a shortage of jobs.

The report quoted the Vermont Commerce Secretary Kevin Dorn that “this is just further validation of what Governor Douglas has been saying for years now,” Dorn said, “which is, we’re faced with a declining work force. And what does that mean for our future economic development in this state.”

It is not “validation” – it is just spin. This is a convenient excuse for the failures of this administration. The number of working aged Vermonters is growing. The “labor force” and the “workforce” have declined because we’re in a recession and because there aren’t enough decent jobs. This has been going on for quite some time and has nothing to do with population changes.

It is disturbing that major media outlets do not seek information and perspectives from independent economists and other analysts. With respect, Kevin Dorn is not an economist or a demographer. He is a paid appointee of a governor running for re-election who has not lived up to the promise of Jim = Jobs. Why not contact the Legislature’s economist and get another perspective? When did it become sufficient for a journalist to quote an administration official (during a campaign for goodness sake) without any “balance”. And shouldn’t reporters get a better handle on the data before tackling such important subjects?

Viewers and readers deserve better.  

There is something the Governor of our state of Vermont is really good at. It’s taking a very unfortunate occurance and turning it into political gain. In a small state like ours, big news like our first amber alert had everybody concerned. Everyone watched, everyone waited, what would be the missing girls fate?

Then a disappearance turns into one families horror, and a statewide travesty. A convicted sexual predator, was released into the public on probation by our department of corrections. Released after completing the sex offender treatment program, where he was a “model inmate” and hailed as a success. Apparently the program doesn’t work, after his release he reportedly begins molesting a nine year old, and within a couple years effectively stalked and hunted his own niece. The abrupt and tragic end to her life is a testament to the failure of our state corrections and sex offender treatment program.

Here we are in an election year and a hot button issue lands in Governor Douglas’s lap. So what does he do, he picks it up and runs with it. Now he’s talking about civil confinement, the death penalty, and even chemical castration. Do I disagree, hell no!! This is one of the few instances where I actually agree with the governor. I don’t think we can ever go far enough with regards to protecting our kids.

However, there is nothing I hate worse than people who use tragedies for political gain. This is exactly the card Douglas is playing now. He is not calling a special session of the legislature because “”If I thought for a minute that the legislative leaders would embrace a serious package of reforms that we have talked about this afternoon, I’d have them here tomorrow,” Douglas replied. “Their past action does not give me a lot of confidence that in the aggregate they are prepared to take these steps.”” (BFP 7/11/08)

This is playing politics pure and simple. If the legislature were to meet, and pass the reforms he talks about, than the issue would go away. But this is an election year, and he can’t let it go away. He needs to keep beating this drum right thru November so he can sound tough on crime and make the Democratic legislature sound weak on crime. If the legislature is weak on crime, than his opponent who led that legislature is also weak on crime. It’s the forked tongue that Douglas speaks with that spews a whole lot of BS.

Governor Douglas, get off your butt and call a special session or get off the high horse. Take steps now to solve this obviously important issue before another kid gets hurt. Otherwise the failure here won’t just be corrections released someone who was a danger to the public. It will be a failure of the governor to protect the people, and more importantly kids, of his state.  

Here’s a great still from an actual news broadcast the other night:

Now that’s some good teevee.

cross-posted on iBrattleboro.com:

“We need leaders to speak out forthrightly to end the war in Iraq and for the need to bring our troops home immediately. We also need new leadership to address the critical threat to the loss of our democratic rights and freedoms. Americans’ rights are being threatened by our own government who seem to believe they are above the law…

“We need to be a country that adheres to the principles of international law, constitutional rights and humane principles of fairness, honesty and mutual respect. Equal rights for all needs to be reinforced and practiced better.

“Corporate-occupied Washington needs to be challenged vigorously by weeding out the influence of money and corporate power and fighting for America’s forgotten lower and middle-classes. Corporate welfare and the corrupting influence of money in American politics needs to cease. Citizens’ rights and powers need to be enhanced and protected. Poverty needs to be eliminated and a more equitable system of housing, health care, education and work needs to be implemented…

“New proposals should include offering a national health plan for all Americans, and that it be offered as a right and not just a privilege of class or employment…

“The arts, athletic and sports activities and culture need to be a more essential part of America as well. The United States also needs to become more self-sufficient in its manufacturing capacity and agricultural production and less dependent on foreign customers. Heavy spending in the defense industry needs to be reduced, especially on high technology planes, tanks, ships and weaponry, while better support of the needs of soldiers during and after their time of service should be a high priority.

“Better and more diplomacy, fairer foreign and economic policies and the elimination of special interest influence should be the guiding principles of our nation. Self-interest actions or policies, at the expense of fairness, honesty and mutual respect and human decency should be a thing of the past.”

Any guesses?

McCain struggles to answer why men can get Viagra covered by health care insurance, but women cannot get contraception covered.

If anything can create a gender gap for Obama it is increasing awareness of McCain’s inability to understand the issue of reproductive freedom and how men and women are treated differently. Not just on the abortion issue, but in terms of contraception and women’s health care generally. There is a double-standard here that must be addressed and McCain just doesn’t get it.

Oh, and I’m thinking there are a lot of bad puns out there on this one…