Well this is some pretty exciting news, isn’t it? The Bush administration’s favorite cardboard opponent, Arlen “Toothless Wonder” Specter, announced yesterday that after much struggle, he has finally wrestled an agreement from the White House to submit its “Terrorist Surveillance Program” to the FISA court for review.

I am not sure which is more ludicrous: the notion that Specter’s legislation is anything more than a rubber-stamp on the administration’s blatantly illegal warrantless wiretapping scheme, or that the media is treating it as some sort of big reversal by the President.

Let me make sure I have this straight…

• The bill must, according to the White House, be passed exactly as it currently drafted.
• The bill “acknowledges” the President’s Article II authority.
• Under the bill, the President voluntarily submits the program to the FISA court for review.
• This is a one-time thing, presumably not applicable to any other “surveillance” programs.

Yeah, way to go there, Arlen. That’s a pretty spectacular piece of legislation you’ve come up with.

What about the fact that the administration completely ignored the existing law in the first place? Their argument, of course, is that the FISA requirements were too cumbersome and outdated for this new-fangled War on Terror, and so they bypassed the law. I think I’ll try that next time I get pulled over for speeding… “Yes, officer, I’m aware that I was going 70 in a school zone, but you see, the speed limit is just too burdensome and it interferes with my ability to get to work on time, so I decided to ignore it.”

Now if only I could come up with some bogus interpretation of the Constitution that enabled me to do whatever the hell I want with no limits or oversight whatsoever.

I’ve picked up a few albums over the last week, so I figured it was time for a quick run-down. Some are new, some are just new to me…

The Subways, Young For Eternity – Came out in 2005, I just got it. I haven’t even had a chance to get through the whole thing. It’s decent guitar-based indie rock, with a bit of a punk edge. It’s not great, but it’s worth a listen.

Rainer Maria, Catastrophe Keeps Us Together – The title track is good and rather the catchy, the rest of the album… not so much.

Love Is All, Nine Times That Same Song – This record has been getting a lot of rave reviews, mostly, I imagine, because it sounds like a mixture of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the angular-punk stuff that seems to be all the rage of late. Listening to it, I get the same feeling as with Art Brut—I want to like it because there is a lot that’s good about it, but there is some rather grating stuff as well.

Boris, Pink – This album rocks the house. Boris is a Japanese noise-rock band, but in addition to thrash, screaming, and feedback, they also understand song structures. Get this album, turn it up really loud, and then wait for the neighbors to start screaming. You won’t be sorry.

Mission of Burma, The Obliterati – When Boris is not busy rocking the house, Mission of Burma are there to keep it going. These guys mop the floor with bands half their age—in a world where dinosaurs like the Rolling Stones and U2 are still dragging their rotting carcasses around the stage, it’s reassuring to see a group that has been around as long as MoB and can still kick ass.

Once again, I am reminded of why PBS is great.

A few nights ago, I finally got around to watching a Frontline episode I had downloaded. Entitled “The Dark Side,” it chronicled the machinations of Vice President Dick Cheney following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The story is not unfamiliar. Distrustful of the CIA and unhappy with the perceived diminishment of Presidential power since Watergate, Cheney used his formidable beaureaucratic skills and long relationship with Don Rumsfeld to exploit the attacks and the ensuing “War on Terror” to expand what he referred to as “the dark side” of the presidency. He populated the Bush administration with his own people and set up what amounted to his own intelligence operation separate from the CIA and the State Department. In so doing, he and Rumsfeld were able to out-maneuver the CIA and steer the inexperienced President in the direction of their long-standing goal of invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein. Along the way, they worked to expand the powers of the President, legal and otherwise, all in the name of fighting terrorists.

A sizeable chunck of this documentary is focused on the question of weapons of mass destruction, and understandably so. They were supposedly one of main reasons the US invaded Iraq, and as several people interviewed by Frontline point out, “Everyone thought Iraq had them.”

This assertion comes up fairly often in discussions about whether the war was justified, but it misses the point. Fine—let’s assume that it is true that everyone thought Iraq had WMD. Does that really matter?

By all rational accounts, these guys were looking to invade Iraq pretty much from the minute the planes hit the World Trade Center. That is the big problem here. Whether or not there really were weapons was entirely beside the point. It just as easily could have been “Saddam Hussein is working with evil space aliens to blow up the moon and knock the Earth out of its orbit,” and we would have had Dick Cheney showing up on Meet the Press every weekend repeating that assertion, insisting that we had good, multi-sourced evidence to prove it.

And no, the title of the post really does not have anything to do with the content. I just couldn’t resist.

Sorry.

It didn’t totally suck.

I will be discussing plot details, so if you have not seen the movie and do not want to know what happens, you probably ought to stop reading here.

There is probably no way any movie could have lived up to the hype and expectations surrounding Superman Returns. For one, this is Superman we’re talking about here—he’s up there with Mom, apple pie, and the Ford Mustang when it comes to sacred American cultural icons. For another, this film was, by all accounts, supposed to “save” the Superman franchise, erasing Superman III and Superman IV from our collective memory.

Still, though, one might expect that they would at least come up with a script that makes sense.

My main feeling coming out of the theater was that the filmmakers had started out with a list of set-piece ideas, neat scenes that they wanted to have, and then wrote a story around those scenes. Mind you, many of those scenes were pretty cool—Superman crashes to earth outside the Kent family farm, Superman saves a plummeting airliner and sets it down to wild applause in the middle of a baseball stadium, Superman walks into a hail of bullets from a chaingun, Superman lifts a continent from the ocean and hurls into space. All of that looked really neat.

Sadly, the story surrounding it made little to no sense.

All of the performances were good, but none of the characters really has anything to do. Lex Luthor’s plot makes little sense, and Superman’s foiling thereof even less. The first two-thirds of the film is spent on… what? I wasn’t really sure. “Build up” is not what I’m looking for, since it does not ever really build up to anything. Backstory? Maybe, but mostly, it’s just the characters wandering around expensive-looking sets and doing stuff that doesn’t seem to serve much real purpose.

Coming out of the theater, I did not feel as though I should demand my money back (it was only a matinee, after all), since there were decent performances, and I got to see Superman do cool stuff like save an airplane full of people and throw a continent into space. That does not make a good movie, though, and overall, this one was a disappointment.

You will have to forgive the brevity of this post, but I am still attempting to pick my jaw up off the floor.

While speaking to reporters in Chicago yesterday, the President offered up this insightful bit of analysis of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hamdan case:

“It didn’t say we couldn’t have done—couldn’t have made that decision, see?” Mr. Bush said at a news conference in Chicago. “They were silent on whether or not Guantánamo—whether or not we should have used Guantánamo. In other words, they accepted the use of Guantánamo, the decision I made.”

He then followed it up with this gem:

“I am willing to abide by the ruling of the Supreme Court,” the president said.

Willing?

WILLING?!

It’s the SUPREME FUCKING COURT, you ignorant, arrogant schmuck! AAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!

There was a story on NPR this morning about a lawsuit against Craigslist alleging that the site is in violation of the Fair Housing Act. According to the plaintiffs in the case, which is currently before the U.S. District Court in Chicago, Craigslist should be subject to the same rules as newspapers—newspapers cannot run a classified ad advertising a housing opportunity which is specific as to the race, gender, etc. of prospective buyers/renters.

In other words, ads on Craigslist that say, “I’m looking to rent to a Latino” or “We don’t like black people, so don’t bother” should not be allowed.

This issue strikes me as a particularly sticky one. I agree that discrimination is bad and should be discouraged. The Fair Housing Act was passed to address a clear and distinct problem, and these ads clearly violate both the letter and the spirit of the law. At the same time, it is not clear to me that holding a site like Craigslist liable for the content of the postings is a good thing.

The primary response from Craigslist seems to be “There are only 20 or so people working here, and we get 10 million posts a month, so we can’t be expected to monitor them all.” This tactic does not strike me a particularly good one, since a jury could reasonably respected to come back with, “That’s not our problem. You’re violating the law—hire more people or change your business model.”

The bigger problem here is that if Craigslist should be liable for the content of the postings on its site, then by the same argument, so should any site host or provider. Thus, we find companies like Google and Yahoo filing briefs in this case in support of Craigslist.

Here on my site, it seems pretty clear that I am responsible for the content of all the posts, since I write them all. If I were to add other registered users who could publish on the main page, there is conceivably an argument that as the owner and maintainer of the site, as well as the creator of their accounts, I am responsible for what I allow them to publish on the site. Beyond that, it gets pretty hazy. Am I responsible for comments and responses that are posted by non-registered users? Am I responsible for the content of sites that I link to? What about sites that might be linked to in comments and responses? And that is just on this simple little site, with only one author and a small group of readers.

As one interviewee in the NPR story pointed out, the phone company is not responsible for the content of the conversations that take place over its lines. If someone calls me up and says they hate me because of the color of my skin or my gender, I can’t sue the phone company for bringing that message to me. Given the dynamic and decentralized nature of a site like Craigslist, it makes sense to me that content posted there (and on other similar sites) should be handled in this same way. While I laud the motivations of those who seek to extend the Fair Housing Act to cover online classifieds, such a move would set a dangerous precedent.

Thanks to the jukebox at a local watering hole, I was recently reminded that while I have heard plenty of people go on about how great Tom Waits is, I have never actually listened to much of his music. In an attempt to remedy this situation, I have, in the last several days, acquired a number of his albums. As a result, I am now able to make the following assertion:

Tom Waits is great.

For fear of veering too far into territory better reserved for pretentious music critics, I’ll try to keep my analysis to a minimum. Between his distinctive gravelly voice and his sometimes bizarre, rusty-nightclub arrangements, Waits makes music that does not really sound like anyone else’s. On top of that, the lyrics… well, normally, I avoid beat poetry like the plague, but somehow it works here.

If you are not familiar with his work, I would recommend starting out with Rain Dogs (1985) and Bone Machine (1992). Waits’ earlier albums, while still excellent, tend to be a bit more traditional, at least in sound and structure, if not lyrically, and therefore are not quite as striking. Meanwhile, his records from the mid-Nineties on largely follow a path of greater experimentation which makes them a little more difficult to approach.

Long story short, if you have not done so already, do yourself a favor and get some Tom Waits albums.

I am sure we will hear a good deal of applause for the fact that the sacred institution of marriage in New York has been spared (for the time being, anyway) the ravages of judicial activism and the radical homosexual agenda.

Thank goodness. Otherwise, opposite-sex marriage would have been wiped out, as would, I am sure, life as we know it.

If you have not heard, the New York Court of Appeals decided today that the state constitution does not require that same-sex couples be granted the same rights as their traditionally married heterosexual counterparts. Now, they say, it is up to the state legislature to decide whether or not to change the statutes regarding marriage.

I’m not holding my breath.

While New York is mostly blue (at least the parts with all the people in them, anyway), the state legislative process is entirely rigged and ridiculously convoluted to the point that even though a majority of residents might favor the legalization of same-sex unions, it’s unlikely any such legislation will make it anywhere near the governor’s desk.

Aside from breaks for setting up the new laptop, getting Linux running on it, and my almost entirely Intarweb-free vacation, I have continued my new-found interest in reading comics.

Lately, I have been getting into 30 Days of Night, The Authority, and New Avengers. I finished DC’s Kingdom Come early last week (it was quite good), as well as Identity Crisis, which I found somewhat dissapointing, and have just started reading Planetary.

What have I learned from all this?

As with many other hobbies, there are a ton of comics out there—the volume is rather overwhelming at first. And if the sheer number of titles is not daunting enough, there is the additional problem that the two major publishers, DC and Marvel, have been putting out books about the same batched of characters for so long that the backstories are immensely convoluted.

While I think Marvel’s comics tend to be slightly more accessible than DC’s, both feature huge rosters of characters that have been running more or less constantly since the 1960′s and 70′s, have been killed and resurrected multiple times, and have existed in multiple iterrations in multiple universes. What’s more, many of the current storylines only make sense if the reader is familiar with a significant portion of this history.

Marvel has attempted to deal with this problem via its Ultimates line, which effectively retells the stories of most of its major characters (and many minor ones) from scratch. However, because they continue to publish books in the pre-existing timelines, all they have really done is to create yet another universe that must be somehow worked into the overall continuity.

DC, meanwhile, is on its second round of attempting to collapse all of its crazy universes. However, given that in their previous attempt (Crisis On Infinite Earths), readers needed an encyclopedic knowledge of nearly the entire DC history to understand what was going on and it still didn’t solve the problem, I don’t foresee this one doing it either.

All of which is to say, I wish the stories were better. In general, I have been more impressed with the smaller-name titles—books like Invincible, The Walking Dead, The Authority, etc. may still be from off-shoots of the big publishing houses, but they aren’t tied to the long-standing mythologies that burden DC and Marvel. In other words, they don’t have to resort to stuff like “What you didn’t know was that in Marvel Team-Ups #143, when Thor wasn’t in the room on page 12, he was actually off getting the magic amulet that he just used to get out of a jam…”

But one Republican close to the White House, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, predicted that Mr. Bush would ultimately abandon the idea of a path to citizenship.

That is from an article in the New York Times this morning titled “Bush Signaling Shift in Stance on Immigration.” And why wouldn’t he be? The racists and extremists upon whose votes the President relies are demanding nothing less than the deportation of undocumented immigrants and the walling-off of the Mexican border.

As the article goes on to point out, however, were Bush to suddenly come out in favor of the House version of the bill, it would kill any chances of the Senate passing it.

To his credit, the President has at least pointed out that deporting everyone currently in the country illegally would be “impractical.” Meanwhile, the majority of the Republican Party seems to have decided that rather than address the social and economic problems that motivate millions of people to risk their lives and break up their families to cross the border illegally and work crummy jobs for low wages, it is easier to promote stereotypes of lazy, freeloading, and possibly violent Mexicans and agitate for their forceful removal from the country.

It is difficult to imagine how this ends any way but badly for everyone involved. Given that the Republicans in the House, along with the right-wing crazies in the punditocracy, have fixated on this issue and are digging their heals in, it seems unlikely that the more moderate Senate bill will have much impact on any final legislation that crosses the President’s desk. In that light, the best that we can hope for is that all the infighting leads to no immigration legislation emerging from the Congress.

While that is a pretty crummy outcome to have to hope for, it strikes me as the least of the possible evils.

The other realistic outcome is that some sort of compromise is worked out, and by “compromise,” I mean that all the more moderate elements of the Senate version are abandoned for the more draconian House version, but the President can still claim it is bipartisan because Senate Democrats supported language that is no longer in the final bill.