Ron Paul in last night's GOP debate

My buyer's remorse about contributing to his campaign has been greatly reduced, if not eliminated.

MR. GOLER: Congressman Paul, I believe you are the only man on the stage who opposes the war in Iraq, who would bring the troops home as quickly as -- almost immediately, sir. Are you out of step with your party? Is your party out of step with the rest of the world? If either of those is the case, why are you seeking its nomination?

REP. PAUL: Well, I think the party has lost its way, because the conservative wing of the Republican Party always advocated a noninterventionist foreign policy.

Senator Robert Taft didn't even want to be in NATO. George Bush won the election in the year 2000 campaigning on a humble foreign policy -- no nation-building, no policing of the world. Republicans were elected to end the Korean War. The Republicans were elected to end the Vietnam War. There's a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican party. It is the constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them.

Just think of the tremendous improvement -- relationships with Vietnam. We lost 60,000 men. We came home in defeat. Now we go over there and invest in Vietnam. So there's a lot of merit to the advice of the Founders and following the Constitution.

And my argument is that we shouldn't go to war so carelessly. (Bell rings.) When we do, the wars don't end.

MR. GOLER: Congressman, you don't think that changed with the 9/11 attacks, sir?

REP. PAUL: What changed?

MR. GOLER: The non-interventionist policies.

REP. PAUL: No. Non-intervention was a major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East -- I think Reagan was right.

We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us. (Applause.)

MR. GOLER: Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?

REP. PAUL: I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we're over there because Osama bin Laden has said, "I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier." They have already now since that time -- (bell rings) -- have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don't think it was necessary.

MR. GIULIANI: Wendell, may I comment on that? That's really an extraordinary statement. That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th. (Applause, cheers.)

And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that. (Applause.)

MR. GOLER: Congressman?

REP. PAUL: I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem.

They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over there. I mean, what would we think if we were -- if other foreign countries were doing that to us?

Notice that Giuliani misrepresented Paul's statement by quoting Goler's phrase about "inviting" the attacks of 9/11, and is lying when he says he's never heard the idea that the U.S. was attacked by al-Qaeda because of U.S. actions in the Middle East, such as having troops in Islam's holy cities. Paul later clarified on The Situation Room that he's not defending a position any different from that in the 9/11 Commission Report, that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is a significant factor in why the terrorists have attacked us. That's not blaming the American public or saying that they "invited" the attacks--leave that argument to Dinesh D'Souza and George W. Bush, who say they attacked us because they "hate our freedom," therefore let's do everything we can to take away that freedom.

(Transcript from Sheldon Richman's blog. More sophisticated analysis of Paul's position may be found from Tim Lee and Brian Moore at Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog, Jeff's Thoughts blog, and Andrew Sullivan--who also points out that Ron Paul and John McCain were the only two GOP candidates to condemn torture.)

Rove and Abramoff's former assistant seeking immunity to testify

Susan Ralston, who was personal assistant to Jack Abramoff before she was special assistant to the president reporting to Karl Rove, is seeking immunity in order to testify before Rep. Henry Waxman's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

With any luck, this will be sufficient to tie Rove to the Abramoff scandal and result in criminal charges against him.

Creationism, racism, and eugenics

The Panda's Thumb has dug up some writings by creationist zoologist William J. Tinkle (b. 1892, d. 1981), who was a co-founder and secretary of the Creation Research Society, which show his support for eugenics (references are to works cited in the PT article):

It is an excellent plan to keep defective people in institutions for here they are not permitted to marry and bear children.[8, p. 131]

[Scientists who are working at the task of improving the human race] would like to increase the birth rate of families having good heredity, while those people having poor heredity should not marry at all.[8, p. 131]

A careful reading of eugenic literature reveals that it may inculcate less respect for human life. In this way it runs counter to democracy, which stresses the worth and rights of the individual. The Bible teaches that life comes from God and that it is wrong to take that which one can not give. Unfortunately there are other programs also which destroy the idea of the sacredness of life. We refer to murder on the screen, war, and the teaching that man originated from, and still is, an animal. [emphasis PT's]

We mention these unfortunate results [i.e. Nazism and “misapplied” sterilization] as dangers only; not as objections to attempting to improve our race by application of known genetics principles. [11, p.143]

The fact that Tinkle, a creationist, advocated eugenics is another data point showing that eugenics cannot be blamed on evolution--people will find whatever excuses are available to endorse bigotry and racism.

Richard Trott, Tom McIver, and I have made the same point with other data in the Creationism and Racism FAQs at the Talk Origins website.

Hitchens on Falwell

I agree with most of what Hitchens says, though not the part about Falwell being a conscious fraud. Though Falwell has clearly lied from time to time, I'm not personally aware of evidence to support the claim that he was a thoroughly fraudulent charlatan.

(Via Pharyngula and Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

BTW, a must-read is Jerry Falwell's cat-killing story about his father.

UPDATE (May 18. 2007): More examples of Falwell lying may be found at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Attorney General blows off Congressional subpoena

The Senate Judiciary committee subpoenaed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to appear before them yesterday at 2 p.m. EDT with copies of all of Karl Rove's emails regarding the U.S. Attorney scandal.

He didn't show up.

Here's the letter from chairman Patrick Leahy and ranking member Arlen Specter to Gonzales, which includes this paragraph:

You ignored the subpoena, did not come forward today, did not produce the documents and did not even offer an explanation for your noncompliance. Your action today is in defiance of the Committee’s subpoena without explanation of any legal basis for doing so.

Hasn't the Bush administration already made it abundantly clear that it does not consider itself bound by the rule of law?

UPDATE: The Department of Justice has responded to the subpoena by producing a single Karl Rove email sent on February 28, 2007.

Ashcroft refused to reauthorize warrantless wiretapping program

There's now much discussion in the blogosphere about former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey's testimony before Congress. Comey related that in 2004, the warrantless wiretapping program had come up for reauthorization--the previous authorization was due to expire the following day. Comey, filling in for Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in the hospital for emergency gall bladder surgery, refused to sign Bush's order for reauthorization. Bush secretly sent his White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card to Ashcroft's hospital bedside to get his signature, but an aide to Ashcroft tipped off Comey. Comey rushed to the hospital, and obtained from FBI Director Robert Mueller a directive to Ashcroft's security staff to not remove Comey even if Gonzales and Card insisted upon it.

At the hospital, Ashcroft also refused to sign the reauthorization directive. Comey related that the entire senior staff of the Department of Justice, including himself and FBI Director Mueller, were prepared to resign over the issue. Had that happened--in an election year, no less--perhaps the outcome of that election would have been different.

Bush consulted directly with Comey and Mueller, and gave them assurances that the program would be modified to comply with Department of Justice recommendations, and Comey signed the reauthorization several weeks later. It's not clear whether it continued to operate without authorization for that period of weeks.

A Talking Points Memo reader comments:

When the warrantless wiretap surveillance program came up for review in March of 2004, it had been running for two and a half years. We still don't know precisely what form the program took in that period, although some details have been leaked. But we now know, courtesy of Comey, that the program was so odious, so thoroughly at odds with any conception of constitutional liberties, that not a single senior official in the Bush administration's own Department of Justice was willing to sign off on it. In fact, Comey reveals, the entire top echelon of the Justice Department was prepared to resign rather than see the program reauthorized, even if its approval wasn't required. They just didn't want to be part of an administration that was running such a program.

This wasn't an emergency program; more than two years had elapsed, ample time to correct any initial deficiencies. It wasn’t a last minute crisis; Ashcroft and Comey had both been saying, for weeks, that they would withhold
approval. But at the eleventh hour, the President made one final push, dispatching his most senior aides to try to secure approval for a continuation of the program, unaltered.

...

I think it’s safe to assume that whatever they were fighting over, it was a matter of substance. When John Ashcroft is prepared to resign, and risk bringing down a Republican administration in the process, he’s not doing it for kicks. Similarly, when the President sends his aides to coerce a signature out of a desperately ill man, and only backs down when the senior leadership of a cabinet department threatens to depart en masse, he’s not just being stubborn.

It’s time that the Democrats in Congress blew the lid off of the NSA’s surveillance program. Whatever form it took for those years was blatantly illegal; so egregious that by 2004, not even the administration’s most partisan members could stomach it any longer. We have a right to know what went on then. We publicize the rules under which the government can obtain physical search warrants, and don’t consider revealing those rules to endanger security; there’s no reason we can’t do the same for electronic searches. The late-night drama makes for an interesting news story, but it’s really beside the point. The punchline here is that the President of the United States engaged in a prolonged and willful effort to violate the law, until senior members of his own administration forced him to stop. That’s the Congressional investigation that we ought to be having.

Jacob Sullum at Reason observes that Tony Snow's response to Comey's testimony (quoted in the New York Times) amounts to "the administration's position is that the program was always legal, became a little more legal after the changes demanded by Ashcroft, and is even more legal now."

UPDATE (May 17, 2007): The DOJ says Gonzales has no desire to modify or retract his statement in Congressional testimony that the warrantless wiretap program raised no controversy within the Bush administration, even though that is clearly contradicted by the above account.

FURTHER UPDATE (May 17): TPM Muckraker has gotten to the bottom of why this came to a head on March 10, 2004. The program had to be reauthorized by the Attorney General every 45 days, which Ashcroft had been signing off on. In June 2003, John Yoo left his position as Deputy Director of the Office of Legal Counsel. On October 3, 2003, Jack L. Goldsmith was confirmed by the Senate as the Assistant Attorney General for the OLC, and on December 11, 2003, James Comey was confirmed as Deputy Attorney General. Comey was authorized to have access to information about the warrantless wiretap program, and he put Goldsmith to work reviewing "what [Goldsmith] considered shaky legal reasoning in several crucial opinions, including some drafted by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo," to quote The New York Times. Comey brought his evidence to Ashcroft a week before the reauthorization date, and they both agreed that it could not continue as it had been. Now that the been reviewed by lawyers in the DOJ for the first time, it was found to be severely problematic, and neither was willing to reauthorize it.

Bush reauthorized it on March 11, 2004 without Attorney General approval, which led to threatened resignations from Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller, and others, at which point parts of the program were suspended and a DOJ audit of the program commenced.

As TPM Muckraker summarizes:

The warantless wiretap surveillance program stank. For two and a half years, Ashcroft signed off on the program every forty-five days without any real knowledge of what it entailed. In his defense, the advisors who were supposed to review such things on his behalf were denied access; to his everlasting shame, he did not press hard enough to have that corrected.

When Comey came on board, he insisted on being granted access, and had Goldsmith review the program. What they found was so repugnant to any notion of constitutional liberties that even Ashcroft, once briefed, was willing to resign rather than sign off again.

So what were they fighting over? Who knows. But there’s certainly evidence to suggest that the underlying issue was was whether constitutional or statutory protections of civil liberties ought to be binding on the president in a time of war. The entire fight, in other words, was driven by the expansive notion of executive power embraced by Cheney and Addington. And here's the kicker - it certainly sounds as if the program was fairly easily adjusted to comply with the law. It wasn't illegal because it had to be; it was illegal because the White House believed itself above the law.

Kearny board of education member hasn't had enough controversy

Kearny board of education member Paul Castelli has apparently decided that the town hasn't had enough controversy over history teacher David Paskiewicz's misuse of the classroom as an evangelizing pulpit, and has gone public with a denunciation of the board's conciliatory statement from last week. The Observer reports:

“Matthew LaClair is absolutely not a hero,” Castelli said, referring to a statement the Board made last week that praised Matthew for standing up for his rights. “His parents are opportunists and it’s a combination of both Matthew and his parents. Though I leave it up to the people to decide for themselves, it’s pretty obvious that he (Matt’s father, Paul) did just as much speaking as his son did.”

In addition to seeing Matt as far from a hero, Castelli also said he was not convinced the Anti-Defamation League’s curriculum was what was needed. The ADL will soon be instructing students and teachers on the parameters involved in the separation of church and state.

“I would have been more comfortable if there had been more specifics as to what they would be teaching the students and teachers,” Castelli said. “It was really unclear what they were actually going to do.”

He also says the Board was never given a clear resolution to a Board-directed investigation into suspected harassment against Matthew.

Matthew claimed to have been harassed numerous times by classmates, including a death threat on his Myspace Web page — an incident that was investigated by the Kearny Police Department.

Finally, Castelli says that despite suspected closure in the matter with the agreement, he still feels the Board is susceptible to being named in a lawsuit, should someone (he didn’t mention anyone or entity specifically) decide to sue the LaClairs.

Who, and on what grounds, would someone sue the LaClairs? They've done nothing wrong--all they've done is insist that the board of education do the right thing about improper classroom behavior by a teacher whose initial defense was to deny what he had been recorded doing.

Castelli is also quoted at the Observer saying that he doesn't feel sorry for Matthew LaClair for receiving taunts and threats from classmates, stating (incorrectly) that "Throughout the ordeal, he was asked to identify the kids who had done these things to him, and not once did he identify anyone. How could anyone be expected to take action if they didn’t know whom they were taking action against? It wasn’t possible. And it wasn’t possible to feel sorry for someone unless they were willing to give up the information we needed to ensure a proper investigation took place." As the Observer points out, "Matthew has said it was impossible to identify possible threat makers because often, taunts would be hurled from within a large group of kids. Additionally, Matthew did identify, for police, the student who made the Myspace death threat against him several months ago."

Spying on the Homefront

Tomorrow night on PBS's Frontline is "Spying on the Homefront":

FRONTLINE addresses an issue of major consequence for all Americans: Is the Bush administration's domestic war on terrorism jeopardizing our civil liberties? Reporter Hedrick Smith presents new material on how the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program works and examines clashing viewpoints on whether the president has violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and infringed on constitutional protections. In another dramatic story, the program shows how the FBI vacuumed up records on 250,000 ordinary Americans who chose Las Vegas as the destination for their Christmas-New Year's holiday, and the subsequent revelation that the FBI has misused National Security Letters to gather information. Probing such projects as Total Information Awareness, and its little known successors, Smith discloses that even former government intelligence officials now worry that the combination of new security threats, advances in communications technologies, and radical interpretations of presidential authority may be threatening the privacy of Americans.

(Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation.)

CALEA compliance day

Today's the day that providers of VoIP and broadband Internet in the United States must comply with CALEA, mandating that they supply a way for law enforcement to eavesdrop on any communications carried over those mechanisms. I suspect many VoIP providers are in compliance but that fewer broadband Internet providers are, since the draft standard for CALEA for data over broadband Internet only came out in March. (And if you'd like to read the standard, it will cost you $164 for the PDF or $185 for a paper copy.)

Bob Hagen at the Global Crossing blog points out some free tools that can be used to protect your privacy.

Christian radio station's part in Catalina Island fire

The fire which raged across 4,200 acres of Catalina Island began near a radio tower for Christian talk radio station KBRT-AM. Three contractors working for the station were cutting steel antenna cable with a gas-powered circular saw, which ignited dry brush and quickly grew out of control.

Radio talk show host Tom Leykis, an atheist, observed on his show that this fire was started by men working for a Christian radio station, which he considered ironic. His first caller suggested that the contractors might have been atheists--as if that would have been a sufficient cause for a supernatural explanation of the fire.

The correct inference is that the laws of nature don't care about your religious beliefs--lightning rods protect whorehouses as well as churches (or better, when churches choose not to use them because it's interfering with God's will).