COURTS, WHAT COURTS???

In the controversy  over secret government interception of phone calls and e-mails, the President and his administration say.."Not to worry”, the courts check these things and would not allow any excess."

I disagree and I suspect the media have been misled here. The administration always refers here to “the courts”, plural, when I suspect the correct word is “court” singular..and by that they mean the FISA Court alone.

FISA stands for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act..and is the court that oversees it. First of all, it is a secret court. It meets in secret, and while records are kept they are never made public. Second, ONLY ONE SIDE APPEARS IN COURT..the government. If the FBI sought a warrant against you, you would never be told, you would not be allowed to appear in court with your lawyer, and state your case.

Now it’s easy to argue, as the U-S does, that “we can’t let you know we are moving against you, that would alert you to stop whatever it is we suspect  you’re doing.” But others will argue that by that approach all the protections of our laws built up over centuries have been thrown out..as they have.

No appeals may be taken to any other court (which doesn’t even know of the FISA Court rulings), except the FISA Review court. It took 24 years for the first decision of the FISA Court to be reviewed, and we don’t know what the decision was.

What we do know is that in the first 33 years of this court, the government won 33,800 cases it brought before the court, only 7 were turned down, although some of those government wins were  “modified”..whatever that means.

Not content with losing 7 cases, Congress in its wisdom modified the Act to allow the Justice Dept to issue its own warrants without court approval, so long as it told the court about it within 72 hours.  That wasn’t enough for the Bush administration which from 2002 to 2005 began secret surveillance on U-S citizens covered by the act WITHOUT going to the Court at any time.  When the news media made this public (and that’s a “leak.”) one FISA judge resigned in protest. But only one.

But the record of the government before this court is even worse…in 2002 the Court broke its own silence to say that in “more than 75 cases” the administration (Bush Two again) had given the Court “erroneous information” (that’s lying folks) upon which to base the Court’s decisions.

If there ever was a  “Heads I win, tails you lose” situation, this is it. The Court, the law, and the dice are loaded against the American citizen. And we have NO idea after thirty some years whether these Court decisions have worked..or not.  That’s secret ,too, and if the government revealed the answers that would be breaking the law.

Citizens, be very, very skeptical when your government says.."not to worry, the courts are looking after you.”

I'm just sayin'...

A BIT OF THIS…AND A BIT OF THAT

A BIT OF THIS…                 

That funny word, sequester is going to haunt us more and more and come back to haunt politicians of both parties more and more.

A few examples...AP stories about  Meals on Wheels and Head Start being cut back in various towns, and just when they are most needed.  It wasn’t all the military being cut; as critics pointed out, there is some real damage to be done by the sequester approach, and as predicted, on those of us least able to afford the cuts.  Whatever happened to the government’s responsibility of providing a “safety net” for these people? 

And BTW, wasn’t the ‘safety net” something the Great Spirit of the modern Republican Party came up with…I mean… Ronald Reagan? Not that today’s House Republicans seem to remember who started the shift to their control in Washington,

And out west, as fires rage in one of  the worst burning seasons on record, federal officials have pointed out, thanks to sequester, they are 500 fire fighters and 50 planes shy this year, compared to the forces they had to fight fires last year…and the flames roar on…

AND A BIT OF THAT…

Writing in the New York Daily News last week, Richard Clarke, a respected counter-terrorism expert, who served under 3 presidents of both parties, had this comment:

“The argument that this sweeping search (PRISM and NSA eavesdropping) must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing.”

I'm just sayin'...

WHAT DID BEN FRANKLIN KNOW???

Remember that nice guy in the Verizon commercials a few years back...a guy-next-door type going around the country always asking “Can you hear me now?”              

He’s been absent from our screens for a while, but the Chattanooga Times-Free Press brought him back with a vengeance recently in a political cartoon..he’s holding a newspaper with the headline “Verizon and NSA surveillance," as he asks.."Can they hear me now?”

Can they ever!

Not only hear but intercept; phone calls, e-mails and bank checks…and in some cases, letters. The President says.."No one is listening to your phone calls.”  Mr. President, I respectfully disagree. You can’t say that with a bureaucracy as big as ours and with the technical capability of ours. Remember that private (!) who gave 200,000 pages of our secrets to Wikileaks? No one thought he could do that either.

The President says we need to have a public debate on whether to give up a few of our freedoms for more security.  Mr. President, I agree…but the very secrecy your administration has imposed means the public has not gotten the absolutely essential information we need to hold such a debate…and make a wise decision.

You, and others in government, seem to be saying “Trust us.” No way, sir..not when your Director of National Intelligence lies to Congress, just as your former IRS Commissioner did.

A free society trusts the people to make the final decision. Trust us a lot more, and government agencies a lot less and maybe we’ll get out of this morass.

Remember what Ben Franklin knew:

“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”

I'm just sayin'...

AM I A STICK IN THE "MUD?”

All my life I have had this argument with people who say “Change is Good.” No, it isn’t. Good change is good—there are some bad changes. You have to apply some judgment.

Example, Joseph-Beth. Do I want to go to a bookstore and buy baby clothes? No!

But the new owners (and the original owner got in trouble by expanding at least once too much....bad change) say their surveys show otherwise. So they put in a clothes section near the kids books. Sensible—to them.  But that space could have been used for the great travel & maps section they once had...or more books. (If I want  kids clothes I’ll go to a kids clothes store. Betcha it  doesn’t have books.)

Another example:   the weather channel. The old two minutes of “weather on the eights” is gone. Now it’s one minute, if that, and often misses the “8” mark...robbing me of important local weather information I need. (I’m not talking about the channel’s excellent expanded coverage of severe weather, but the day-in, day-out reports. It was one of the things that attracted me in the first place...I could count on two minutes of local weather info every 8^th minute, but no more!  As a result, I depend more on the local TV channels..which, BTW, often have been more accurate in their 5 day forecasts.  Now I watch the Weather Channel less because of its bad and needless change.

And the movies. I love movies, especially at the Kentucky Theatre.  I missed “Mud” there twice, but a friend got me to go to one of the multiplexes to see it. And I remembered all the reasons I don’t like the multiplexes: zillions of commercials. (Hey, my career was in commercial broadcasting. I know how important commercials can be. But if  there’s one I don’t like---and there are many—I can change the station. Not in the theater where I am a captive audience, which I dislike).  Oh, yes, and too many previews of coming attractions..including one for a film.. "Coming in the Fall.” Not even a date to remember if I wanted to see it.

Or the much too steeply angled steps for we old farts…making use of the handrail is vitally important..the world’s stickiest handrail. Don’t they ever clean these?

The picture was fine; I recommend it…just see it when next it comes to the Kentucky.

OK, I don’t like change..at least  not these  changes..so I guess I am an old stick in the mud..but you’re stuck with me, such as I am.

I'm just sayin'...

MEMORIAL DAY 2013

This isn’t Memorial Day of course; it’s a manufactured holiday, courtesy of Congress,so we may have a long weekend, which combat veterans seldom got..which maybe shows the true state of our concern for our “Greatest Generation” and those who came after them.

 

As World War Two was ending, the finest writer radio ever had, Norman Corwin, wrote

“14 August”, the day Japan surrendered. At the very end of this CBS special, his script

paid tribute to those veterans who won that war for us. I have no permission, either from

CBS or Mr. Corwin’s estate, to repeat these words for you…but I hope they will accept

them as the tribute I wish to pay them for airing these stirring words, and through them

to pay tribute to our veterans ,too.

America has just learned WW2 is over, and, slightly edited,  Mr. Corwin writes:

“All is accounted for

Except the farmer’s boy,

And the mill hand who lived near the canal,

And the young men from the city block where the gutters fry in summer.

One lies with an ocean across his chest at the bottom of an Arctic deep,

Another sleeps with sand in his eyes where he fell on a beach in Palau.

The bones of the fisherman rest in the clay far from the rocks of Maine,

And the miner’s kid is under the ground of China.

…They’ve given their noons to their country,

They’ve trusted their girls to you.

They are face to face with an ally’s earth

For a bunch of tomorrows.

Remember them in the fall of the year

When frost airbrushes the withering leaf,

And the silo is fat as a bearing woman,

And the cleats of the backfield dig up gains to the praise of the stadium,

When the number-one goose says it’s time to go, and the flock points a V to the south.

They’ve given their seed to the fifty states,

Their football tickets to you,

The shirt on their back is a worm-cut rag

For a bunch of tomorrows.

Remember them in the sleeting months

When the sap stands still in the veins of the tree;

When the skating girls eddy like snow on the rink,

And the storm window hooked on the prairie farmhouse mutters in the gale out of

Idaho.

They’re dead as clay for the rights of men,

For people the likes of you,

And they ask that we do not fail them again

Tomorrow, tomorrow”

To Special Session Or Not To Special Session

I received a letter from my state representative recently recounting her work in the General Assembly just past and asked if there were any issues on my mind. Here is part of my reply:

1---I object to spending an estimated $300,000 of taxpayers’ money for a special session on a matter—legislative redistricting—that could have been handled in a regular session.

2—Even more, I object to the way this is handled..protecting one’s turf (unless your name is Kathy Stein) rather than a non-partisan approach, as I believe some 16 states do, considering geography, citizen interests, and population. This issue is much too important to be left to those with such a strong personal interest..a conflict of interest in the extreme…in this matter. We need now, for the next time if not this year, to set up a commission of population and geography specialists to recommend a map that would go into effect unless over-ruled by a 2/3s vote of each chamber.

3—we need public hearings on proposed maps before they are finally voted on. The House has taken two years already, and should allow for voters’ comments on maps that vitally affect their districts before final passage.

I got a reply indicating, between the lines, the die was cast for this year---as indeed it is—but maybe something could be done next time (ten years down the broad.)  We shall see.

Besides an “incumbent protection bill”, which these maps are, lawmakers hope you and I will have such short memories we will forget their egregious behavior…but the time to start setting up a non-partisan commission to do this vital job is NOW..whether for the next election or the ones after the next census reports.

I find it of more than passing interest the Lt. Gov has just  said the administration has no interest in a special session to overhaul our tax code..as one more blue ribbon commission’s report urging action gathers dust, somewhere in the governor’s office. That might be a special session worth calling.

I'm just sayin'...

UNFINISHED BUSINESS FROM CARROLLTON

We’re Number One!

Yes, Kentucky, 25 years ago, had the worse DUI accident in the nation..when a drunken driver, on the wrong side of the interstate, crashed into an old school bus, converted to church use. The fire that resulted, plus the impact, killed 27 people. I hope you have been reading and watching the stories on this.

The driver served prison time and is now out..presumably still driving. The 27 are still dead, their families and friends still suffering...and the survivors continue to relive that nightmare.

The anniversary stories cited improvements since then, and there are important ones. Buses have more and better escape exits. Aisle widths are better. Fuel tanks have been moved and are better protected from impact. Church buses are supposed to be inspected more and checked for safely (though I have my doubts the state agency charged here does it often enough or well enough in our present economy).

All well and good…BUT…are there fewer drunken drivers on our highways? I doubt it. Are there fewer people driving on suspended licenses? I doubt it. Are there fewer people driving without licenses at all? I doubt it. (On at least two occasions over several years I watched people come into a Lexington courtroom, surrender their driver’s license for various offenses, leave the courthouse, get in a car, and drive off. A recent national story told how very infrequently states are enforcing anti-texting laws…and many, many drivers admit they text while driving.

We all know better, but we do it.

DUI laws need stronger enforcement, and I am persuaded from reading too many news reports it is the judges at the heart of the problem. They are just too lenient on people. Maybe we should have a large picture of the mangled school bus from Carrollton in every courtroom where drivers appear.

Cars of people who have lost their license to drive need to be marked so enforcement people will know to check them. Maybe something like the yellow bumper NASCAR uses for rookies is what is needed...maybe, but surely something.

And why haven’t most schools insisted on seatbelts for buses? Then, when they are sold to churches, the seatbelts will go along. There were none in the Carrollton buses, the aisles were narrow, there was just one escape exist available after the crash, and it was in the rear where seats were piled with baggage ,coolers,  etc..in violation of safety rules.

May a Carrollton never happen again, but Kentucky has a long way to go before the chances of that horrible event’s being repeated are slim…and none.

I'm just sayin'...