If You Want Your Country Back, Start With This

Senate Democrats have introduced legislation to scale back some of the worst abuses of both the Patriot Act and the FISA legislation from last year. Obama Administration officials were noncommital.

At hearings in the House and Senate, the officials repeatedly said they had no position yet on legislation that Democrats have introduced that would tighten standards and oversight of surveillance tools authorized under laws including the USA Patriot Act.

"We are trying to figure out whether the provisions that are suggested there will work for us as is, or perhaps with modifications," David S. Kris, assistant attorney general for national security, said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday on whether to renew a trio of Patriot Act powers set to expire Dec. 31.

Those provisions allow investigators to use "roving wiretaps" to monitor suspects who may be trying to escape detection by switching cellphone numbers; obtain from third parties the business records of national security targets; and track "lone wolf" suspects who may not belong to a terrorist group but may be planning attacks.

I'm surprised they've even gone to the level of noncommital. Executives generally want to retain the power handed to them.

But it took a non-lawyer Senator named Al Franken to explain in plain English why the roving wiretap statute offends the conscience.

Franken, who opened by acknowledging that unlike most of his colleagues in the Senate, he’s not a lawyer, but according to his research “most Americans aren’t lawyers” either, said he’d also done research on the Patriot Act and in particular, the “roving wiretap” provision that allows the FBI to get a warrant to wiretap a an unnamed target and his or her various and changing cell phones, computers and other communication devices.

Noting that he received a copy of the Constitution when he was sworn in as a senator, he proceeded to read it to Kris, emphasizing this part: “no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

“That’s pretty explicit language,” noted Franken, asking Kris how the “roving wiretap” provision of the Patriot Act can meet that requirement if it doesn’t require the government to name its target.

Kris looked flustered and mumbled that “this is surreal,” apparently referring to having to respond to Franken’s question. “I would defer to the other branch of government,” he said, referring to the courts, prompting Franken to interject: “I know what that is.”

Yes, it is "surreal" that some politician would dare look to the Founding documents for guidance when determining whether the roving wiretaps statute violates civil liberties. I'm no originalist, but I don't think there's a ton of wiggle room in "the persons or things to be seized."

The truth is that, for all the pretty talk about exigent circumstances and "the war on terror" and the need to conduct investigations in secret, almost all Patriot Act "sneak and peek" requests, where warrants could be obtained to conduct secret searches without telling the subjects, had nothing at all to do with terrorism, but standard-issue federal drug cases. The mission creep here is obvious, and it's true on national security letters and roving wiretaps as well.

I'd be willing to overlook the regular-grade racism and general ugliness of the tea party crowd if they'd actually take a look at these examples of government overreach, and work with civil libertarians on the left to roll them back. The combination could be potent. Of course, the teabaggers aren't libertarians, they're glibertarians, who adored this kind of stuff in the Bush years when they were fighting "terrism."

Professional Jealousy

Because Glenn Beck had the foresight to get out in front of an anti-government movement that does not fall neatly along left-right lines, movement conservatives are lashing out at him:

Beck added that McCain would be worse than Obama:

"I think John McCain would have been worse — [laughs] How about this? I think John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama. How’s that?"

Beck’s opinion elicited a fierce and angry response from right-wing radio host Mark Levin yesterday. “To say [McCain] would be worse is mindless, mindless, incoherent as a matter of fact,” Levin said on his radio show. He then suggested Beck is playing politics: “I don’t know who people are playing to. I don’t know why they’re playing to certain people.”

Levin never mentions Beck by name (he refers to Beck as “the 5 pm’er” because Beck’s show airs at 5 pm on Fox News). He concluded with this final dig at Beck:

"I think there’s enormous confusion and positioning and pandering. It may be entertaining, but from my perspective, it’s not. It’s pathetic."

Levin's right, to an extent. Beck has no coherent worldview, and his de facto leadership of the Ron Paul movement - which he came to very suddenly after expressing contempt for it - is nothing short of opportunistic. And it's killing his competition - Joe Scarborough, Peter Wehner, The American Spectator, even Rush Limbaugh. They're jealous of his attention, his opinion leadership. The fact that the knives came out after the TIME cover story is not coincidental.

But there's something a little more interesting at work. While Beck is a mess from an intellectual standpoint, and his bashing of Republicans is little more than cover, at least a part of the movement he's positioned himself at the front of doesn't have a worldview that falls into any ideological box. Sure, corporate forces aligned with the movement GOP are trying to co-opt it and steer it to business-friendly ends, and the protest audience is as variegated as any would be on the left. But there's an element in there that is not easily defined:

In one important sense, the "tea party" movement is similar to the Obama campaign for "change": it stays sufficiently vague and unspecific to enable everyone to read into what they want, so that people with fundamentally irreconcilable views believe they're part of the same movement.

But all that said, there are some identifiable -- and plainly valid -- underlying causes to these protests that are neither Republican nor Democratic, or even left or right. That's when conventional political language ceases to be useful.

Is opposition to the Wall Street bailout (supported by both parties' establishments) left or right? How about the view that Washington is inherently corrupt and beholden to the richest corporate interests and banks which, through lobbyist influence and vast financial contributions, own and control our political system? Is hostility towards Beltway elites liberal or conservative? Is opposition to the Surveillance State and endless expansions of federal police powers a view of liberals (who vehemently opposed such measures during the Bush era but now sometimes support or at least tolerate them) or conservatives (some of whom -- the Ron Paul faction -- objected just as vigorously, and naturally oppose such things regardless of who is in power as transgressions of the proper limits of government)? Liberals during the Bush era continuously complained about the doubling of the national debt, a central concern of many of these "tea party" protesters. Is the belief that Washington politicians are destroying the economic security of the middle class, while the rich grow richer, a liberal or conservative view? Opposition to endless wars and bankruptcy-inducing imperial policy generally finds as much expression among certain quarters on the Right as it does on the Left.

I don't think, in the end, that it's supposed to make sense. Politics has a tribal component and is waged much like sports fans wage their battles against one another. There will always be a sizable audience for a polemicist, whether viewed as partisan or non-partisan, especially when his or her attacks always seem to fall on the Democratic occupant of the White House. But I think Beck's unpredictability, as well as his reaches into the depths of wingnuttery - wait until the Christian conservatives figure out Beck chose to be a Mormon - frighten the establishment in the GOP. They tolerate him when he's whipping up a frenzy against Obama, but he could just as easily call to break up the banks - whatever he thinks will make him a ratings point - and suddenly the clean ideological lines break down.

Now, if there was a coherent Democratic Party which would argue for the virtues of government and its role as a protector of individual liberty, equality of opportunity and the common good, the ideologies of the parties would be a little cleaner, and the DC establishment wouldn't be such an inviting target. In a way, Democrats have brought this on themselves. They invented a Glenn Beck by failing to make the case for government themselves. And as a result, distrust of government is rising.

Beck's Changing Rhetoric

Mitt Romney went to the Values Voters Summit and slammed the bailouts this weekend, after offering them support not just at the time, but at the Conservative Political Action Conference back in February.

So what. Mitt Romney flip-flopped on an issue? Call the Guinness people, I think he's actually set the record now.

No, the real interesting trip down memory lane today is that Glenn Beck favored the bailouts a year ago, when TARP was being debated in Congress:

But these are anything but normal times. I thought about it an awful lot this weekend, and while it takes everything in me to say this, I think the bailout is the right thing do.

The “REAL STORY” is the $700 billion that you’re hearing about now is not only, I believe, necessary, it is also not nearly enough, and all of the weasels in Washington know it.

Now THAT is an interesting reversal. Before his appearance on Fox News and in everyone's hearts, Beck ran a Morning Zoo-type radio show and had an unremarkable stint on CNN Headline News. He certainly hadn't latched on to any wave of discontent with federal spending or libertarian economic theories. He repeatedly called Ron Paul "a crackpot on so many issues" and prefaced every discussion of him by saying "I don't agree with Ron Paul on everything--not by a long shot." Here's Beck calling Ron Paul supporters terrorists:



"It's really not the way I would go, tying in my movement with a historical terrorist attack, especially in post-9/11 America."

This is the guy who put together a rally on September the 12th.

Beck saw a movement stirring on the furthest reaches of the right and got out in front of it. Before that he was pretty firmly behind his President in bailing out the top banks.

The difference is that now, the political energy on the right is with the teabaggers, and it makes sense to Beck to capitalize on that energy. But he has nothing approaching a coherent worldview. Whatever gets the most eyeballs.

I really hope that libertarians take a look at the guy who has appointed himself the public face of their movement.

...Here's a Paul supporter video that has the very clips of Beck supporting the bailout:



... This is amusing, Beck claimed on his show today that he hated Bush for those bailouts which he initially supported. I think this shows that the truth about his changing stories is coming out and he's trying to pre-empt the criticism.

"Now, I Hate The Left, Believe Me. But..."

I just listened to a good bit of Barack Obama's OFA session, and I think I can now pinpoint what has been irking me lately. He got up there and tried to rebut all the misinformation about what the bill would do. In fact, he said exactly what Matt Yglesias pre-butted this morning:

I think that if someone gets sick in the United States, that person ought to be treated without being subject to a citizenship test. I think that abortion is a legitimate medical procedure. And ultimately I think health insurance should be directly provided by the government. Interestingly, the one thing that doesn’t get a majority is the thing that’s actually a bad idea—killing grandma.

This reminds me of something that’s bothered me throughout the health care debate. The president’s only real allies and advocates are, you know, serious liberals. People who think that people born in Mexico are human beings but fetuses are not. And most of all, people who believe in government-provided health insurance. But when we man the barricades for the president’s plan, we’re in a weird situation. Obama gets accused of wanting a single-payer system. Then I have to say “no! no! he doesn’t! that’s a slander . . . not there’s anything wrong with single-payer.” It’s a damn dirty lie to say that the government will fund abortion services, but really the government should fund abortion services.

This just deflates a lot of people, the same people who could be counted on to rally for a policy they support. We knew all along that the right would fearmonger and scare people and make up whatever lies served their purpose regardless of the reality. Pre-compromising bills to shield oneself from those charges makes absolutely no sense.

There's this inherent, reflexive self-loathing among establishment "liberals" that turns off people who unabashedly call themselves liberal. Take a look at this article by Joe Klein, an article whose subject is that Republicans have become a nihilist party, and how long he takes punching hippies before getting to his point:

Given the heinous dust that's been raised, it seems likely that end-of-life counseling will be dropped from the health-reform legislation. But that's a small point, compared with the larger issue that has clouded this summer: How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? And another question: How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?

I'm not going to try. I've written countless "Democrats in Disarray" stories over the years and been critical of the left on numerous issues in the past. This year, the liberal insistence on a marginally relevant public option has been a tactical mistake that has enabled the right's "government takeover" disinformation jihad. There have been times when Democrats have run demagogic scare campaigns on issues like Social Security and Medicare. There are more than a few Democrats who believe, in practice, that government should be run for the benefit of government employees' unions. There are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection. There are others who mistrust the use of military power under almost any circumstances. But these are policy differences, matters of substance. The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus — Senator Russ Feingold in the Senate, Representative Dennis Kucinich in the House, to name two — are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don't retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.

It is a very different story among Republicans.

He goes on, of course, but Klein clearly felt he could not get away with a strident article about Republican insanity without saying "Hey, look, I think liberals are the scum of the earth too, don't get me wrong, but..." It's like a facial tic.

I saw the President today call those who believe government should not be involved in anything at all "reasonable people" with whom we could have a principled argument. Unless we're arguing about whether or not they should use roads, police, fire departments, libraries, and the judicial system, then no, that is not a reasonable line of argument. Here's a reasonable line of argument, from Jesse Jackson Jr., and it's so bitterly partisan, I know, but in the absence of this argument you have the President of the United States giving anti-government cranks a legitimacy they simply don't deserve.

Reverend Jackson and I were talking this morning about health insurance reform. He said ‘“Jesse, sum up this public option thing for me.’ I heard the President give an analysis that I think appropriate: Federal Express, UPS, DHL, the private option. The public option: email, the post office. If you want to pay your bill, sending it overnight for $30, choose the private option. But if you want to mail your mail like most of us do, WITH A STAMP (applause and laughter) use the public option…. The post office offers competitive overnight mail options. And those of us who are not interested in overnight mail can go the slow route, 2-3 days. That’s just fine for me. The post office is universal. It reaches the rural areas. It reaches the urban areas. It reaches where DHL, and UPS, and Fedex will not go. And so in the barrios and the ghettos and the trailor parks of our nation, for the uninsured in our nation, in order for us to save our health care system, we need a legitimate, real public option! (Cheering and applause.)

Instead of this message, we have a President talking about working constructively with people who have said out loud they want to deny any health care bill.

Now some would say that the nation as a whole is not all that liberal, and we have to find common ground because legislation is the art of the compromise, etc., etc. ad nauseum. What never gets discussed is the role of long-term messaging. People are falling for right-wing lies about government-run health care because they're been told for decades that government is evil, with no countervailing message from the other side. Those who resist these lies, the most strident supporters of a health care overhaul in the abstract, are being told to accept half a loaf, that doing reasonable things, like allowing a public option to provide the same medical services that 90% of all private insurance companies provide, is a damn dirty lie, are told to compromise and compromise, are actually told that we cannot have a government insurance option because it would be too popular. You really don't have to get very far from that to a statement like "You don't matter, go away, we don't want you." It's happened before.

And don't you dare, ever, add anything like morality into the individual actions of lawmakers.

It would be, for instance, very uncouth to say that a coal-state senator who opposed climate change legislation was literally consigning thousands of people to death in order to protect hometown interests. That's a very mean thing to say. Senator so-and-so doesn't want to kill people, he just wants to be reelected. But that's what he's doing. He has constituents and polls and pressures. Similarly, a lot of the congressmen who are opposing health-care reform are, again, ensuring that tens of thousands of people will die from inadequate access to health care. But you're not supposed to say that [...]

...no one ever has to make those arguments directly because these debates take place at a high level of abstraction. That's how you get weird situations wherein a congressman who has spent two decades enriching industry and voting to cut Medicaid and welfare can be run out of office because he crossed an ethical line and had an affair or took a kickback. The moral dimension is entirely absent in discussions of policy, as if we've all signed some agreement admitting that the cost to civility would be too great if we took the implications of each vote seriously.

Apparently Obama made something of a moral argument yesterday, calling health care "a a core ethical and moral obligation," saying that “These struggles always boil down to a contest between hope and fear,” and likening back to when FDR was called a socialist, and JFK and LBJ the same for trying to pass Medicare. But that's coming a bit late, and little of that was on display today.

The bottom line is that, until progressives rallied behind the public option this week, the air was out of the balloon. The base of supporters are energizing this debate, and they will reward any lawmaker that reflects their values and actually seeks to follow through on their promises. They now represent the last, best hope for real health care reform. And they won't cotton to being kicked around, dragged through the mud, or played as pawns any longer. 2012 lies in the balance.

And He Oughta Know

Bob Barr wrote the Defense of Marriage Act, which passed Congress and was signed into law by Bill Clinton in a particularly disappointing moment. Now Barr, who is a born-again libertarian, wants the law that he wrote repealed.

I've wrestled with this issue for the last several years and come to the conclusion that DOMA is not working out as planned. In testifying before Congress against a federal marriage amendment, and more recently while making my case to skeptical Libertarians as to why I was worthy of their support as their party's presidential nominee, I have concluded that DOMA is neither meeting the principles of federalism it was supposed to, nor is its impact limited to federal law.

In effect, DOMA's language reflects one-way federalism: It protects only those states that don't want to accept a same-sex marriage granted by another state. Moreover, the heterosexual definition of marriage for purposes of federal laws -- including, immigration, Social Security survivor rights and veteran's benefits -- has become a de facto club used to limit, if not thwart, the ability of a state to choose to recognize same-sex unions.

Even more so now than in 1996, I believe we need to reduce federal power over the lives of the citizenry and over the prerogatives of the states. It truly is time to get the federal government out of the marriage business. In law and policy, such decisions should be left to the people themselves.

In 2006, when then-Sen. Obama voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment, he said, "Decisions about marriage should be left to the states." He was right then; and as I have come to realize, he is right now in concluding that DOMA has to go. If one truly believes in federalism and the primacy of state government over the federal, DOMA is simply incompatible with those notions.

There you have it. That is what consistent conservatism looks like. Instead of screaming "states rights!" only when it suits him, Barr is practicing what he preaches. His motives may not be exactly the same as mine, but the underlying principle actually is - on issues of self-determination those in a community have the ability to decide for themselves rather than have a decision thrust upon them. There is room for a progressive-libertarian alliance around these core civil liberties issues, and I would expect to see it reach a critical mass every now and again. As for this particular case, the right thing to do would be to repeal DOMA.

My Interview with Bob Barr

You may know that Bob Barr has arrived at Netroots Nation. He bought a one-day pass and decided to mingle with the assembled conventioneers. And he drew a crowd. I first spied him when Kate Sheppard of Grist was interviewing him about his environmental policies (a lot of "we don't know if man is causing global warming, we need further study, etc). All of us wanted to talk to him, but we didn't quite know what to ask. But after a couple of minutes it hit me, and my good buddy clammyc lent me his voice recorder and I sidled up to Barr to ask my first question.

Me: Rep. Barr, do you believe the impeachment of President Clinton was a good deterrent to the expansion of executive power and the establishment of the rule of law for the executive branch?

answer on the flip...

Barr: (chuckling) Good Lord no!

Me: So do you regret your role in the impeachment of President Clinton as House manager?

Barr: No, having public officials adhere to and be answerable to the rule of law is very, very important. What distresses me greatly is that Congress has not done, in the case of this President, what they should have done. And that is to inquire into what this Administration has done with regard to breaking the laws, on the electronic surveillance of people without warrants, the improper use of US Attorneys, etc.

Me: Would you have endorsed the impeachment articles that were referred to the House Judiciary Committee last week?

Barr: I'm testifying this Thursday before the House on some of these issues, not in the context of impeachment, but in the context of the rule of law and the separation of powers. So we will be getting into some of these things. But I think it would make no sense at this point to do impeachment--

Me: At what point would it have made sense? What year would it have made sense?

Barr: You're not going to let me answer a question!

Me: I'm sorry, I'm just trying to follow up.

Barr: Go ahead, ask your question.

Me: Well, you're talking about a timeline, that it wouldn't make sense 6 months before the end of the President's term to begin an impeachment inquiry...

Barr: We're getting into the heart of a Presidential campaign. Anything that Congress would do at this point would be seen as totally political, and probably from their standpoint be counter-productive, because the other side would rally around the President, and possibly hurt the other side in the election.

Me: I have one final question. Do you feel that the impeachment of President Clinton, in effect, poisoned the well of the practice of impeachment, and always made it a political act, so that the current executive can always count on the fact that it would be seen as political to call for accountability in this fashion?

Barr: Impeachment is always going to be somewhat political, you are never going to get away from that. One of the things that I learned, and what I wrote about in my book, is that when I filed in November of 1997, the very first inquiry of impeachment, none of us knew anything about Monica Lewinsky. That didn't come up until three or four months later. The basis of which I believed it was necessary and appropriate had nothing to do with that, it had to do with national security matters, improper campaign donations from foreign sources and so forth. But even had we moved in that direction, the Republicans didn't want to, that would have been seen as political. You're never going to get away from that. That's why it's so important in any impeachment to lay your groundwork, marshal your evidence, have those Congressional hearings first, rather than reaching your conclusion first.

Audio is coming in a moment, I'll update.

UPDATE: Audio (it'll show as soon as it's processed):



I think the intellectual bankruptcy of this argument speaks for itself, so I won't say much. Barr believes that the Clinton impeachment did nothing to strengthen the rule of law vis a vis the executive branch, but he thinks he was right to do it because having public officials adhere to the rule of law is important. He thinks that the impeachment he managed was important and necessary, but wouldn't currently do it with Bush because it would be seen as political. He talks about adherence to the Constitution but quite literally makes a timeline excuse for implementing a Constitutional check. And then he endorses the concept of fishing expeditions. I appreciate Barr's work on FISA and other matters, but this was self-protective blather, and mindless blather at that. To me it was instructive. But I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

Barr!

Great piece on Libertarian Presidential candidate Bob Barr, who's sick of the GOP Establishment and running on a platform of limited government. Barr has a built-in audience with the Ron Paul crowd, and if he taps into them he can cause a stir. I don't agree with him on a bunch of issues, but there are points of convergence on civil liberties, making us strange bedfellows. Bob Barr, of course, is strange bedfellows with the Bob Barr from Congress:

And some of its own members are asking how they ended up with Mr. Barr, who at the Libertarian Party convention in Denver last month squeaked by with the nomination only after six raucous rounds of votes.

“There certainly are still those,” Mr. Barr said, switching to the third person, “that may view Bob Barr as somewhat of a Johnny-come-lately.”

While libertarian philosophy generally bows to the rights of the individual — and against government intervention — Representative Barr voted for the USA Patriot Act; voted to authorize the war in Iraq in 2002; led the impeachment charge against President Bill Clinton in 1998; and introduced the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.

So there's, you know, that. If Paul were running in this space, with his more consistent record, he'd get 5%. I don't know about Barr.

Bob Barr

I suppose I should say something about Bob Barr's run for the White House. It's quixotic, of course, but it's nice to see such windmill-tilting designed to attract Republicans than Democrats. I don't share a whole lot in common on fiscal issues with a libertarian like Barr, but I do believe he's been on the right side of a number of civil liberties issues over the last few years and could capture some of that Ron Paul magic, which is a non-trivial amount of Republican votes, as Josh Marshall has said. In races out West like New Mexico and Montana and Alaska and Colorado, where his brand of libertarianism will play, that number of votes could actually be determinative.

Dana Milbank wrote a story on Barr's National Press Club kickoff event yesterday, and clearly there's enough difference with John McSame's policies for Barr to make a spirited effort in this race.

"What's your problem with McCain?" one of the reporters asked after Barr's announcement speech.

Barr turned to his campaign manager, former Ross Perot adviser Russ Verney. "How long do we have here, Russ?"

Time enough, evidently.

Barr took issue with McCain's Iran policy. "I'm not going to go around making up songs about such a serious matter as going to war with a sovereign nation, as Senator McCain did," the former congressman said, tut-tutting McCain's "Barbara Ann/Bomb Iran" episode.

He quarreled with McCain's Iraq policy. "These troops need to be brought home," he offered.

He ridiculed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, which, he said, means McCain "cannot ever lay legitimate claim, at least with a straight face, to . . . being labeled as a conservative."

He put down McCain's plan to do away with pet-project earmarks, claiming it "would make barely a drop in the bucket with regard to the national debt, the deficit."

And he disparaged McCain's fiscal policy, saying "there are some legitimate questions that have been raised over whether Senator McCain is simply a Johnny-come-lately to the modest tax cuts."

I don't agree with Barr on all of that, but I agree on far more than I might expect (particularly the earmark thing, why can't more politicians say that? It's supposedly in their interest to hang on to earmarks, after all). And that strain of conservatism that agrees with all of this is more robust that anyone might expect. These Ron Paul acolytes are still fighting to take over the GOP convention - it's like 1968 only nobody is paying any attention to it. These people are looking to embarrass Senator McCain on the national stage and impact the party platform - they're not going to run back to him in November. One choice word from Paul and they'd all get on the Bob Barr train. This bears watching.

We Can't Do Anything

Conservatives say that government is the problem, and then they go out and prove it. Today's examples include women's health:

For the first time since the Spanish influenza of 1918, life expectancy is falling for a significant number of American women.

In nearly 1,000 counties that together are home to about 12 percent of the nation's women, life expectancy is now shorter than it was in the early 1980s, according to a study published today.

The downward trend is evident in places in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine. It is not limited to one race or ethnicity but it is more common in rural and low-income areas. The most dramatic change occurred in two areas in southwestern Virginia (Radford City and Pulaski County), where women's life expectancy has decreased by more than five years since 1983.

The trend appears to be driven by increases in death from diabetes, lung cancer, emphysema and kidney failure. It reflects the long-term consequences of smoking, a habit that women took up in large numbers decades after men did, and the slowing of the historic decline in heart disease deaths.

There's an effort to cast this as a consequence of personal responsibility, but the geographic locations here say to me it's a problem of access. There are plenty of low-income areas in the cities where people eat like crap and lead unhealthy lifestyles, but there are support systems for the poor that have been built up out of necessity over the years. Some of those heath facilities are melting away, but in the rural areas, they never had them to begin with.

The example of how these guys have no idea how to start from scratch can be seen in Iraq, five years after the initial invasion, where basic services STILL aren't up to snuff:

BAGHDAD — Even as American and Iraqi troops are fighting to establish control of the Sadr City section of this capital, the Iraqi government’s program to restore basic services like electricity, sewage and trash collection is lagging, jeopardizing the effort to win over the area’s wary residents.

For weeks, there have been reports that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is preparing to move ahead with a multimillion-dollar program to rebuild the southern swath of Sadr City, which is currently occupied by Iraqi and American troops.

But almost a month after American and Iraqi forces pushed into the area, there are no signs of reconstruction. Instead, the streets are filled with mounds of trash and bubbling pools of sewage. Many neighborhoods are still without electricity, and many residents are too afraid to brave the cross-fire to seek medical care. Iraqi public works officials, apparently fearful of the fighting, rarely seem to show up at work, and the Iraqi government insists the area is not safe enough for repairs to begin.

This isn't a situation where you can call for patience. We're talking about five years now. The Administration set up the economic and reconstruction model in Iraq as a kind of libertarian fantasy where the market spontaneously works; and the results were about what you'd expect.

By the way, when this laissez-faire attitude doesn't work, the immediate effort is to cover it up.

Yesterday marked the opening day of a class action lawsuit brought by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans against the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), arguing “that failure to provide care is manifesting itself in an epidemic of suicides” among veterans. The VA denies the charges, pointing to increased resources devoted to mental health.

Today, CBS News reports that the VA apparently concealed veteran suicide statistics, and fed the news organization faulty data for a story on the issue. The VA told CBS that there were 790 attempted suicides in all of 2007. Yet shortly after, the VA’s head of Mental Health, Dr. Ira Katz, wrote in an e-mail to the VA’s top media adviser that there were “about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our medical facilities.”

The e-mail exchange shows that the VA hoped to keep the statistics out of CBS’s hands:

From: Katz, Ira R.
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 11:27 AM
To: Chasen, Ev
Subject: FW: Not for the CBS News Interview Request

Shh!

Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see at our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?

From: Chasen, Ev
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 11:40 AM
To: Katz, Ira R.

I think this is something we should discuss among ourselves, before issuing a release. Is the fact that we’re stooping them good news, or is the sheer number bad news? […]

I'll tell you, I don't know that this is fixable until conservatism is seen as the exact cause of these failures and gets totally discredited.

The Ron Paul Blind Spot

Glenn Greenwald was initially a conservative. He fully admitted that in his first book. Now his views are generally associated with the left, but his takes on civil liberties and a generally non-interventionist foreign policy have a place in the Libertarian Party as well. Given that I fully understand his appreciation of Ron Paul, who as I've said is attracting so much attention because he is the only one out there offering a real critique of US foreign policy, not just as it relates to Iraq but in totality (Edwards and Obama have actually done this to an extent as well, but they're not highlighting it in the same way).

But his long screeds against anyone who dares to bring up the more unseemly parts of Paul's platform is kind of bizarre. You don't just get to pick pieces of somebody's policies when you elect somebody, and Paul comes with the paleoconservative foreign policy views AND the destruction of Medicare, the Education Department, Social Security, and practically every other social program AND the frankly weird belief in the building of a NAFTA Superhighway AND the desire to nullify birthright citizenship AND the strong anti-abortion record (which kind of upsets the whole "individual freedom" thing) AND the free coinage and abolition of the Federal Reserve AND the openly racist statements that appeal to white supremacists AND the Defense of Marriage Act. It's a whole ball of wax. And while I think nobody discounts the importance of Paul's voice in the debate, making points that would otherwise go ignored about Iraq and foreign policy forced into the national debate, these other troubling aspects of his candidacy are not off-limits.

Ezra Klein responded to Greenwald here. I really don't think they disagree all that much. But Greenwald is, I have to say, being fairly petulant. And Dana Goldstein has more.

Paul-mentum

Ron Paul equaled John McCain's take for the third quarter in fundraising. Yet one is seen as the "comeback kid," the other as an unimportant fringe candidate. Someone want to explain that one?

It's also very evident that the qualities Ron Paul exhibits in 2008 are of a piece with the ones that led McCain to victory in New Hampshire in 2000. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there's clearly only one maverick in the Republican field, one guy who is running against the accepted wisdom of the party. He represents an extreme strain of libertarianism and isolationism that the GOP has completely abandoned. That may not play with a base that still largely accepts George W. Bush as a decent President, but in an anti-tax Northeast state in a Republican primary? Paul could honestly win it if Romney continues his free fall. What we know is that he'll have the money to compete.

Don't Sleep On Ron Paul

I didn't see the Republican debate last night, but from press reports and liveblogs I got a sense of it: they all want to kill the terrists, cut taxes, and make nervous jokes about Fred Thompson to mask their fear. But there seems to be one thing that a lot of people are missing. Yes, Mike Huckabee got to defend the honor of Republicans while condemning the war, which is likely to play well, and certainly was more brave than Mitt Romney, who called the war a mess in a town hall meeting and last night declared the escalation to be "apparently working."

But Ron Paul is TAILOR MADE for a state like New Hampshire, whose motto should actually be "Get Off My Lawn" as much as "Live Free Or Die." This is why he actually got the biggest cheers of the night no matter what the newspapers reported. It's a state full of cranks and "principled tax evaders" like the couple that's been holed up in their compound for months, a couple that Paul may or may not have compared to Gandhi. It's a state that has turned sharply against the Iraq debacle, a state which has always been moderate enough on social issues to boo proposals to ban gay marriage like they did last night, and a state whose independent voters can participate in either the Democratic or Republican primary. Things like this happen in New Hampshire.

Before Paul became an antiwar hero, his support consisted largely of libertarian activists--people like Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party's 2004 presidential nominee. Badnarik refuses to get a driver's license (even though, he conceded to me, "I have my car operational") and warns against anyone who might try to force a smallpox or anthrax vaccination on him. ("You bring the syringe, I'll bring my .45, and we'll see who makes a bigger hole.") Badnarik recounts rallying support for Paul at a recent conference of the Free State Project, a group of libertarians who have relocated to New Hampshire in the hope of concentrating their power and more or less taking over the state government. "I asked how many people would drive without a license and not pay income taxes, and three-quarters raised their hands," Badnarik recalls. "I'm choking up. I've got my heart in my throat. And I said, 'We need to do something--and Ron Paul's campaign is the shining star. We need to contribute the full two thousand dollars now. Tell all your friends.'"

In the first quarter of 2007, Paul raised more money in New Hampshire than McCain or Giuliani.

So Ron Paul will have a lot of support in the first-in-the-nation primary. And when I say a lot, I mean 10%, which is stratospheric for a fringe candidate who happens to be looney tunes. And that will completely change the complexion of that race. I don't think it'll die when he doesn't register in Iowa, either, because he'll have the money to compete in the Live Free or Die state. I don't know who will suffer from Paul's stand in New Hampshire, but it's an element of the Republican race that shouldn't be denied.

Calls For Police State Meet With Deafening Silence From Libertarians

I knew that it was a matter of time that someone would take the lesson from the bumbling terror cell plots in the UK that we need to look at everyone continually at every waking moment. Little surprise that it was Joe Lieberman (Lieberman - CT), who advocated for a police state this morning on ABC:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said Sunday he wants to “more widely” use surveillance cameras across the country.

“The Brits have got something smart going in England, and it was part of why I believe they were able to so quickly apprehend suspects in the terrorist acts over the weekend, and that is they have cameras all over London and other of their major cities,” Lieberman said.

“I think it’s just common sense to do that here much more widely,” he added. “And of course, we can do it without compromising anybody’s real privacy.”

Before you laugh and scoff that this is the work of a crackpot, remember that this is the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in the Senate.

Look, Britain's CCTV did not stop any terror attack, quick thinking by law enforcement combined with embarrassingly little knowledge of science on the part of the would-be bombers did. They simply don't prevent crime, and that's not even their object. It couldn't possibly be their object unless you wanted to hire a million or so people to be official government watchers. Detection and prosecution is their object, and in this case, I think the British were able to apprehend people in Glasgow, for example, because the guy ran out of the car on fire. The British have grown more comfortable with having 4 million CCTV cameras in their country, though there are critics. In American, we have a little thing called the Fourth Amendment which would potentially disallow unreasonable searches. It's ingrained in the American character to be mindful of their own privacy and resist efforts to take it away. So calling for a "Big Brother" setup in America is fairly nutty and potentially illegal. In other words, perfect for someone like Lieberman to call for.

You would think that this would alarm the libertarians that populate the Republican Party and particularly the conservative blogosphere. But we've learned over the past several years that, as long as you're taking away civil liberties in the name of fighting really dumb terrorists, libertarians will nod in assent or mumble uncomfortably about something else, like how that guy in line at the convenience store with the turban looked a little suspicious. Outside of this mild criticism at RedState, pretty much nobody on the right has anything to say about the chair of the Senate committee on Homeland Security calling for blanketing the country with surveillance cameras. This includes the Ole Perfesser, who yesterday got all hyped up about "Big Brother" scanning your driver's license when you buy beer, and who in the past has waged a one-man jihad against traffic cameras. Somehow, Joe Lieberman openly pining for CCTV nationwide isn't rousing much interest. Of course, it has nothing to do with robots, so maybe that's to be expected.

We have a continuing threat from terrorism (in many ways due to our bungling in international relation), but not one that requires the stripping of all of our civil liberties enshrined in the fabric of this republic. There used to be a lot of constitutionalists that understood that. Not these days, because they've become so shell-shocked and scared from 9/11 PTSD that they are willing to gladly surrender to a de facto police state in America.