Letters to the Editor
Jim White
Published Letters: 1088 Editor's Choice: 15
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The GAO report shaves off the fuzz
[Read the article: Gen. Petraeus' fuzzy math]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Figure 4 in the GAO report provides a very clear and compelling picture of the violence in Iraq. Two points emerge.
1. In every year, violence peaks in September and October. It could be argued that the August lull in violence each year, most likely from the extreme heat, is then followed up by renewed effort once the weather permits freer movement.
2. The long term trend for violence is ever higher. No independent person can look at this figure and come away with any conclusion other than one in which the longer we stay, the more the violence increases. The "surge" time highlighted in the figure shows absolutely no impact from this strategy.
Choosing to provide the Petraeus report in early September is most likely an intentional move to take advantage of the normal lull in August. However, the chart clearly indicates that each year's August lull is higher than the previous year's violence level.
http://salonmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o1/pdf/GAO_report.pdf
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At least one branch of our government still understands the Constitution
[Read the article: National Review's new tough guy, Mark Hemingway]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]News flash from AP:
NEW YORK - A federal judge struck down parts of the revised USA Patriot Act on Thursday, saying investigators must have a court's approval before they can order Internet providers to turn over records without telling customers.
U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said the government orders must be subject to meaningful judicial review and that the recently rewritten Patriot Act "offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers."
Woo-hoo! I look forward to Glenn's response.
link:http://tinyurl.com/2b248j
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Wow!
[Read the article: Judge strikes down Patriot Act provision]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dan Eggen has a longer article on the judge's decision. NSL's are outlawed entirely! From the article:
But Marrero wrote that "in light of the seriousness of the potential intrusion into the individual's personal affairs and the significant possibility of a chilling effect on speech and association--particularly of expression that is critical of the government or its policies--a compelling need exists to ensure that the use of NSLs is subject to the safeguards of public accountability, checks and balances, and separation of powers that our Constitution prescribes."
He ruled that only some of the NSL provisions were unconstitutional, but found that it was impossible to separate those provisions from other parts of the law. He therefore struck down the FBI's ability to issue NSLs altogether.
Marrero delayed enforcement of his order for 90 days to give the government a chance to appeal. Justice spokesman Dean Boyd said the department is "reviewing the decision and considering our options."
Link: http://tinyurl.com/2dwl37
This will make the next 90 days even more interesting. I think the judge's assumption that the government will be eavesdropping on critics of government policy is especially interesting.
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Last one, I swear
[Read the article: National Review's new tough guy, Mark Hemingway]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Perversion
The hijacking of America's values for political advantage -
Yet another Vietnam parallel?
[Read the article: The Iraq debate: Caving in before it begins?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Will Christopher Dodd be the next Mike Gravel? Gravel acted as a single Senator to filibuster the extension of the draft to support the Vietnam war. Will Dodd filibuster any funding that doesn't have a set time for withdrawal? Would enough Senate Democrats be crazy enough to side with the Republicans to end such a filibuster?
I will be watching this situation very carefully. My choice of candidate to support for the Democratic Presidential nomination will rest in large part on how the the current candidates vote and position themselves on this issue over the next few weeks.
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Karen M
[Read the article: National Review's new tough guy, Mark Hemingway]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]An Op-Ed in today's NYTimes is relevant to some of the points you have been making in this thread. Susan Faludi provides a preview of her upcoming book "The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America":
A defining aspect of this cultural re-engineering was the upending of a gender history that had proved deeply humiliating to men. Time and again, leaders and militias had failed to protect and redeem women and their children. Of female colonists seized in New England and taken to Canada from 1689 to 1730, more than a quarter — and a whopping 60 percent between the ages of 12 and 21 — never came home.
Early American male defenders had suffered the further mortification of hearing female captives (Mary Rowlandson among them) disparage their protective efforts gone awry or, worse, recount how they managed to defend themselves. Rowlandson negotiated shrewdly with her captors and named her own ransom. Hannah Duston, abducted as she lay in bed recovering from childbirth (while her husband fled), escaped after killing a family of Indians with a hatchet and taking their scalps.
In response to this shame, the new model exaggerated iron-clad valor on the part of white men and crinoline helplessness on the part of white women. Thus was born the dime-store melodrama in which manly heroics always save the girl in jeopardy.
Faludi then goes on to point out how the response to 9/11 mirrored this response to the attacks on the early colonists:
Unfortunately, by replicating the Colonial war on terrorism, 9/11 invited us to re-enact the post-Colonial solution, to bury our awareness of our vulnerability under belligerent posturing and comforting fantasy.
Like the cultural imagineers before them, our post-9/11 press, entertainers and political spin doctors set to work to prop up our sense of virile indomitability — “the return of the manly man” and a reconstituted “John Wayne masculinity” were on every media lip, as the triumphs of torture-prone Jack Bauer heroes were on every TV.
I think I'll be buying this book.
Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/opinion/07faludi.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1