Reading the New York Times’ account of Tuesday’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee by former Deputy Attorney General, I have found myself repeatedly picking my jaw up off the floor.

In early 2004, the White House’s illegal domestic wiretapping scheme, which had been authorized by the President shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks, had just undergone an extensive review by the DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. John Ashcroft, then Attorney General, was in the hospital for emergency gall bladder surgery, leaving Comey as the acting Attorney General. Determining that the wiretapping program “did not comply with the law” (i.e., was it was ILLEGAL), Comey and the OLC decided that they could not sign off on the program.

According to the Times,

Mr. Comey said that on the evening of March 10, 2004, Mr. Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., then Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, tried to bypass him by secretly visiting Mr. Ashcroft. Mr. Ashcroft was extremely ill and disoriented, Mr. Comey said, and his wife had forbidden any visitors.

Mr. Comey said that when a top aide to Mr. Ashcroft alerted him about the pending visit, he ordered his driver to rush him to George Washington University Hospital with emergency lights flashing and a siren blaring, to intercept the pair. They were seeking his signature because authority for the program was to expire the next day.

Mr. Comey said he phoned Mr. Mueller, who agreed to meet him at the hospital. Once there, Mr. Comey said he “literally ran up the stairs.” At his request, Mr. Mueller ordered the F.B.I. agents on Mr. Ashcroft’s security detail not to evict Mr. Comey from the room if Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card objected to his presence.

Despite the pressure from Gonzalez and Card, Ashcroft refused their request to override the acting AG. The two then left, but later Comey was called to the White House and essentially given a work-over from everyone up to and including the President regarding his refusal to sign off on the whole scheme. Shortly thereafter, Bush agreed to changes in the program recommended by the DoJ.

I mean, seriously, where do you even start with something like this?

First, this surveillance scheme had apparently been running for three years before the Justice Department had a chance to determine whether or not it was even legal, which, as it turned out, it wasn’t.

Second, Comey was the Attorney General during Ashcroft’s medical leave. As Ashcroft apparently pointed out to Card and Gonzalez, he didn’t have the authority to overrule Comey’s decision even if he had been inclined to do so, which he was not.

Third, there’s the fact that the White House was apparently so desperate to avoid a legal ruling on its scheme that it was willing to disturb Ashcroft at night, in the hospital, where he was recovering from surgery.

Finally, this is John “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty; my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists” Ashcroft we’re talking about here. For the first half of the Bush presidency, Ashcroft was the poster boy for authoritarianism on the part of the federal government. Consistently deemed an unprecedented threat to Constitutional protections of citizens’ civil liberties, Ashcroft was a representative of the worst the Bush administration apparently had to offer in terms of heavy-handed anti-terror policies. Yet here we have a policy so far over the line that even he wouldn’t go along with it.

As an addendum, Marty Lederman provides some interesting analysis over at Balkanization of the events described in Comey’s testimony. Specifically, he takes issue with the Times’ (as well as other press outlets’) characterization of the President’s involvement. It’s definitely worth a read.

My apologies if you have experienced problems accessing the site within the last twelve hours. My router was having issues forwarding traffic to the server.

Hopefully, the problem should be resolved now.

There has already been a fair amount of comment around the Web regarding Tom Grubisich’s op-ed piece in yesterday’s Washington Post. In it, Grubisich bemoans the pseudonymity/anonymity granted to commenters on public web sites:

In any community in America, if Mr. anticrat424 refused to identify himself, he would be ignored and frozen out of the civic problem-solving process. But on the Internet, Mr. anticrat424 is continually elevated to the podium, where he can have his angriest thoughts amplified through cyberspace as often as he wishes. He can call people the vilest names and that hate-mongering, too, will be amplified for all the world to see.

To solve this problem, Grubisich suggests that any site that allows comments should require and validate that posters provide their real names, but grant pseudonymity on a case-by-case basis where it is merited:

If Web sites required posters to use their real names, while giving the shield of pseudonymity when it’s merited, spirited online debate would continue unimpeded. It might even be enhanced by attracting contributors who are turned off today by name calling and worse. Except for the hate-mongers, who wouldn’t want that?

Maybe the Washington Post has time to background-check all the people who post comments on their site, but I know I sure as hell don’t. And I only get two or three comments a month.

Then there is Grubisich’s insinuation that only hate-mongers are in favor of anonymous or pseudonymous comments. Aside from this statement being a thinly-veiled ad hominem attack on anyone who disagrees with him, Grubisich is just plain wrong. I’m not the first to say it, but it bears repeating—if it is not your full-time, paid job to write political commentary/analysis, it is wise to maintain some degree of anonymity. Moreover, if you lack the protection (legal, financial, and otherwise) afforded by working for a major media outlet, you would do well not to make your personal information easily available.

Of course, what Mr. Grubisich is really complaining about here is the ease with which readers can now express their dissatisfaction regarding the stuff he and other traditional journalists in papers like the Post. Sure, there has always been the “Letters to the Editor” option, but let’s face it—the percentage of the reading public with the time and inclination to actually sit down, type out a letter, and mail it to the newspaper is vanishingly small. On top of that, the newspaper then has complete control over which letters get published and which don’t.

Tim F. of Balloon Juice has, by my way of thinking, the best response:

As most of you know by now, former Washington Post editor Tom Grubisch published a cranky column today lambasting pseudonyms on the internets. Even if you grant Grubisch his central thesis – that pseudonymity lets people behave like absolute jackasses without worrying about real-life consequences – it is not that big a deal. Believe it or not we bloggers have dealt with the jackass problem since Usenet. They’re called trolls. When someone shows up at a site that you pay to host (say, washingtonpost.com) acting like a complete heel and violating to forum standards, ban them. I doubt I have as much tech savvy as whoever the Post has running their web operations and yet the principle never gave me much trouble. The only reason I can fathom for letting trolls run free is if you really need to illustrate the ravening online hordes and nobody else is that masochistic.

This analysis is dead-on. Grubisich approaches the issue of anonymous commenters as though it is a completely novel one. In fact, there is a wealth of evidence regarding how best to handle the real discussion trolls.

Grubisich’s proposed solution is actually to a different problem entirely, namely, the aforementioned issue that while the Intertubes in general have a time-tested method of dealing with criticism, Grubisich and his fellow journalists do not. In that light, how surprising is that his answer is an attempt to shut down web commenting?

With the endless array of wheels that are flying off the once dominant McCain campaign, the media and public have turned their uncritical gaze to the Presidential dreams of Rudy Giuliani. Now dissatisfied with the fake swagger and empty bravado of the current occupant of the White House, Republicans and not a few moderates are eyeing another practitioner of that art.

Today’s Times provides an excellent example of America’s Mayor in action:

Anyone who watched Rudolph W. Giuliani preside over ground zero in the days after 9/11 glimpsed elements of his strength: decisiveness, determination, self-confidence.

Those qualities were also on display over the months he directed the cleanup of the collapsed World Trade Center. But today, with evidence that thousands of people who worked at ground zero have become sick, many regard Mr. Giuliani’s triumph of leadership as having come with a human cost.

The gist of the story is that Giuliani usurped control of the cleanup effort from federal agencies and bypassed a host of worker-safety regulations in the interest of getting the job done as quickly as possible. While the job did, in fact, get done more quickly than originally predicted, the cleanup workers are now paying the price. The article goes so far as to quote an Army engineer saying “Giuliani acted like a ‘benevolent dictator.’”

Good, because if there’s one thing that America really needs right now, it’s a dictator.

I’ll admit that, while glued to the television on September 11, 2001, I was impressed by Giuliani’s take-charge performance at a seemingly endless series of press conferences. It was reassuring, especially given the bumbling escapades of one George W. Bush.

However, as I lived in Michigan at the time, pretty much all I knew of Giuliani was what I saw that day, and that he had apparently made Times Square safe for the Disney Store and MTV. Like most of the rest of the country (if current polling data is to be trusted), I had no idea that Giuliani attempted to postpone the NYC mayoral elections in order to stay in office past the end of his term. Also news to me was the fact that just after the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, Giuliani decided it would be a good idea to move the city’s emergency response center to… wait for it… the World Trade Center. Same goes for the laundry list of scandals both personal and public that plagued his career as mayor.

Way to go, Rudy.

Normally, I would say the idea that Giuliani is a suitable candidate for President is utterly laughable. However, this is the nation that elected the utterly inept George W. Bush to the office not once, but twice. The problem with Giuliani is that for most of the voting public, their entire knowledge of him is centered around 9/11.

The headline in this morning’s Washington Post:

Bush Told War Is Harming The GOP

Killing tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians? Stretching the U.S. military to the breaking point? Destroying American credibility at home and and abroad? Running up the federal deficit to insane levels?

Piffle.

What’s it take to get “moderate” Congressional Republicans to “get tough” with the White House? After six years of marching in lock-step with George W. Bush and his disastrously incompetent administration, it is finally dawning on this pack of lapdogs the that war is harming the Republican Party.

Well god, let’s get ourselves over to the Oval Office lickety-split and try talking some sense into this guy!

We are now to believe that this time, the Republicans are really serious. There are a few problems here, though. First, Republicans in the Senate and House have never once demonstrated the ability to act independently of the White House. Second, even if this time around, they really, really, REALLY mean it, there’s no indication that such a declaration woudld have any actual influence on President Bush.

Finally, this “frank conversation” may very well represent another step in the process of Republicans and conservatives attempting to pin all the blame for the ruinous foreign policy of the last six years on George W. Bush. While he and his administration are certainly to blame, so is the rest of his party and its supporters who have told the rest of us over and over again that even the slightest questioning of White House decisions and strategy is tantamount to treason.

Sorry guys, you don’t make up for the last six years with one tough-talking visit to the White House.

My friend David of BusinessWeek.com and Stuntbox has an article up on A List Apart.

It’s about giving presentations, and while targeted at designers, it’s a good read for anyone who has to present their ideas to a group.

You can find it here.

Yesterday, I was just finishing up reading Anonymous Liberal’s response to Andrew Sullivan’s concern that even now, radical Islamists are plotting catastrophically violent attacks on the United States, when, lo and behold, I see the following in the New York Times:

Six people have been arrested in a plot to fire grenades and kill scores of soldiers at a New Jersey Army installation, the United States attorney’s office in New Jersey said at a news conference today. Four of them were born in the former Yugoslavia, one was born in Turkey and one in Jordan, said a spokesman for the office, Greg Reinert.

“Allegedly they wanted to kill as many of the soldiers at Fort Dix as they could,” Mr. Reinert said.

It all sounds terribly dreadful, and we ought to be quaking in our boots, right? Already, right-wing sites are brimming over with commenters’ fevered dreams of jihadi armageddon. Clearly, the terrorists are constantly at work on new schemes to kill Americans, and we should not let our guard down, even for a second.

Then again, maybe not. I can predict with a fair degree of certainty that after an initial burst of news, we will hear nothing about this case. The government will flail about, looking for some justification for the early extravagant claims regarding the suspects’ plans. Eventually, it will turn out that the plot wasn’t very far along, or well-planned, or both, and this bunch will be convicted on a variety of comparatively minor infractions.

Terrorism is a risk, and there clearly are people and groups around the world who would like to see harm done to this country. However, when every single report that might possibly indicate a terrorist plot, no matter how vague or speculative, is blown up into a huge conspiracy by federal authorities, the media, and right-wing websites like Little Green Footballs and Michelle Malkin’s blog, these incidents get blown out of all sense of proportion. Fed a constant diet of headlines and rumor-mongering about shadowy and unstoppable Islamic terrorists, the public begins to think that maybe warrantless wiretapping and extra-judicial detentions aren’t such a big trade-off after all.

For a bit of balance, it is worth checking out the excellent Frontline documentary “The Enemy Within.” Originally aired in 2006, it follows up on a few of the FBI’a “big” terrorism busts after they dropped out of the headlines and attempts to answer just how big a threat is posed by the much-publicized domestic terror cells.

Under the headline “All profile, no courage,” Paul Mirengoff at the conservative Powerline takes the following shot at John Edwards’ plan to combat poverty:

I also wonder whether Edwards can explain (except by reference to political calculation) why he favors vouchers that would enable poor families to relocate but opposes private school vouchers.

I wonder whether Mirengoff can explain, except by reference to political calculation, why he can’t understand the difference between housing vouchers and school vouchers.

Were school vouchers simply the “freedom of choice” issue that their supporters are constantly trumpeting, Mirengoff might have a point. However, school vouchers would, in reality, be a means of diverting government funding to religious schools. As such, they represent a fairly major violation of the First Amendment. There is no such conflict with housing vouchers.

On top of that, because they provide a means of sending taxpayer dollars to private institutions, school vouchers would serve to de-fund the public school system. As Edwards’ plan calls for the ending of public housing, the only way it would be similar to school vouchers would be if the public school system were deliberately dismantled. While fringe elements of the conservative movement are no doubt advocating such a policy, no mainstream Republican has seriously suggested this course of action.

From this morning’s Washington Post:

Congressional leaders from both political parties are giving President Bush a matter of months to prove that the Iraq war effort has turned a corner, with September looking increasingly like a decisive deadline.

In that month, political pressures in Washington will dovetail with the military timeline in Baghdad. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, has said that by then he will have a handle on whether the current troop increase is having any impact on political reconciliation between Iraq’s warring factions. And fiscal 2008, which begins Oct. 1, will almost certainly begin with Congress placing tough new strings on war funding.

How many times do we have to go down this same road? The timeline of the Iraq was is littered with predictions such as this one. We are told time and again that the next few months are critical, that we’ll know by “the end of summer” or “come the first of the year” whether our strategy is working.

What exactly will be different in September? Gen. Petraeus will show up before Congress once again and will cite a series of unrelated statistics to make it appear we are on the verge of success in Iraq. The White House and its proxies will carpet-bomb the airwaves and newspapers with claims that the light is at the end of the tunnel, that we can’t cut and run just as we’re about to turn the corner. Congress will furrow its collective brow, explain that this is all very complicated and serious, disappear behind closed doors for a few days, and then solemnly declare that come spring there had better be clear signs of progress or else the President will have serious questions to answer.

At the same time, it is difficult to come up with a better suggestion as to how the Democrats should proceed. Lacking veto-proof majorities, they are left with trying to peel off enough of the President’s support among Congressional Republicans to get any sort of legislation passed. So far, relying on the bravery and independence of Congressional Republicans has been a fool’s errand.

However, what might be different come September is the plummeting approval ratings for both President Bush and the Iraq war.

The quote from Rahm Emmanuel in the Post article sums up the situation pretty well: “George W. Bush is hellbent on January 20, 2009, when he walks out of the door, leaving a box stamped ‘Iraq’ for the next president. The Republicans are hellbent on not going through the next election with Iraq tied to their ankles”

Will September actually be the end of the line for the President’s Republican support in Congress? I’ll believe it when I see it.

I’ve had this album for a couple weeks now, but held off on writing about it so as to make sure my opinion was more or less fully formed.

NIN is one of those bands whom I find it difficult to approach objectively. Pretty Hate Machine came out just before my freshman year of college—in other words, a time of no small emotional turmoil. As a result, that album struck a chord that it might not have had I encountered it at a different time in my life.

Reznor’s subsequent work was… varied. The Downward Spiral, while quite good, took his particular brand of insular misery about as far as it could go. The Fragile, an overindulgent double album was yet more of the same and signaled an artist stuck in a very deep rut. 2005′s With Teeth, with its shorter, *slightly* more accessible structure, seemed like an attempt to change direction. Unfortunately, that direction turned out to be something along the lines of Pretty Hate Machine, The Sequel, and ended up being just plain boring.

As has been pointed out in many reviews already, it comes as something of a shock to find Mr. Reznor putting out a new full-length album a scant two years later. Also surprising is the fact that it’s actually pretty damn good.

I would say this is probably Reznor’s best work since Pretty Hate Machine. Musically, he’s managed to update his sound in a way that was missing from With Teeth. That record sounded like it should have come out in 1995. This one, while still retaining a distinctive NIN sound with its layers of effects and electronics, has its feet planted squarely in the current musical and social climate.

Lyrically, Year Zero represents a huge change from previous Nine Inch Nails albums. Finally, we have an album that is not devoted to Reznor’s terrible luck in love and his resulting feelings of despair and helplessness. A political concept album of sorts, this record doesn’t hold any earth-shattering revelations, but it’s refreshing to hear Nine Inch Nails songs that look outward rather than inward.

It is hard to say whether Year Zero will win over many new fans, and I wouldn’t want to place any bets on whether it represents a new trend for Reznor. However, I’ve found it to hold up quite well to repeated listens and would definitely recommend checking it out.