Apparently some people don’t understand the difference between a leak that is solely intended to hurt someone as an act of political retribution — i.e., Valerie Plame — and a leak that is intended to blow the whistle on a violation of the law. Let me try to put this simply: the first is a dangerous abuse of power. The second is an attempt to prevent a dangerous abuse of power.

There. Wasn’t that easy?

I’m glad we had this little talk.

Sorting through this one could take all day, and I’ve got deadlines. But I’ll be interested to see the fact checking on this:

We were listening to (Osama bin Laden). He was using a type of cell phone, a type of phone, and somebody put it in the newspaper, that this was the type of device he was using to communicate with his team, and he changed … and this is before they attacked us by the way.

Somebody with Lexis/Nexis needs to do some digging and see if there was actually a newspaper article sometime before 9/11 about the type of phone Osama bin Laden was using, or if Bush just pulled that one entirely out of his ass.

…Update via an alert reader below. The punchline: the paper was the Washington Times.

The Commission footnote (chapter 4, no. 105) refers to a front page
story in the Washington Times on August 21, 1998 entitled “Terrorist
is Driven by Hatred for U.S., Israel,” by Martin Sieff, and to
interviews with several intelligence community officials.

That Washington Times story stated in passing that “He [bin Ladin]
keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones and
has given occasional interviews to international news organizations,
including Time magazine and CNN News.”

“There was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the attack of 9/11,” Bush said. “I’ve never said that and never made that case prior to going into Iraq.”

Yes, he really said it.

Tangentially related cartoon here.

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

“This is really a sea change,” said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. “It’s almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches.”

Story here.

Remember right after 9/11, when the Bushies went on a massive power grab and the right wingers assured us it was all good, nothing to worry about? The government may have abused its authority, spied on its own citizens, in some distant, half-forgotten era, but rest assured, it would never ever do so now, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a crazy tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy nut. It’s the “things are different now” syndrome, also known as the “refusing to learn from the mistakes of history” syndrome, wherein any such abuse is safely relegated to a less enlightened time, and therefore cannot possibly be repeated.

Until it is.

WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn’t know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.

“This is incredible,” adds group member Rich Hersh. “It’s an example of paranoia by our government,” he says. “We’re not doing anything illegal.”

The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups.

* * *

Still, the DOD database includes at least 20 references to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons. Other documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities. One DOD briefing document stamped “secret” concludes: “[W]e have noted increased communication and encouragement between protest groups using the [I]nternet,” but no “significant connection” between incidents, such as “reoccurring instigators at protests” or “vehicle descriptions.”

The increased monitoring disturbs some military observers.

“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s at those protests, the descriptions of vehicles at those protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented,” he says. “I think it’s the beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military.”

* * *

“Some people never learn,” he says. During the Vietnam War, Pyle blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring and infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests when he published an article in the Washington Monthly in January 1970.

The public was outraged and a lengthy congressional investigation followed that revealed that the military had conducted investigations on at least 100,000 American citizens. Pyle got more than 100 military agents to testify that they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens — many of them anti-war protestors and civil rights advocates. In the wake of the investigations, Pyle helped Congress write a law placing new limits on military spying inside the U.S.

But Pyle, now a professor at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, says some of the information in the database suggests the military may be dangerously close to repeating its past mistakes.

“The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again,” he says.

August has a few select quotes from the deathless prose of renowned champion of morality and virtue, Tommy O’Malley Bill O’Reilly.

Had a little downtime due to a server hiccup. Things should be back to normal now.

It’s getting to the point that I probably won’t be able to get signed prints out in time for the holidays, so I’m going to stop taking orders after tonight. If you’ve been planning to order one as a gift, you need to get that done today — they won’t be available again until January.

I was watching the news last night, while my daughter sat at the computer, e-mailing friends.

It looks like the execution will go forward…

"Execution? They’re going to kill somebody?"

Her voice was amused — not by the prospect of execution, but by what she was certain was her own ignorance. She had just heard a word that she knew, but one relegated to old books, nothing to do with her world. She stared, waiting for me to explain what the word really meant, because obviously it couldn’t mean what she thought. It had a new meaning, right?

I hate trying to explain these things. Yes, we kill people. Some people think that when others commit horrible crimes, they have no right to live, and so the government kills them.

She wanted to know how. Or she asked, anyway. I could tell she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know. I think she was afraid I was going to tell her they were crucified, or placed on a mountaintop to be devoured by vultures. When one horror from your storybooks turns out to be true, why not all of them? Do we still drown witches? Are the caves full of dragons?

I didn’t have to tell her that this was wrong. Before I had a chance to start ranting about state-sponsored murder, I could see that one more piece of her trust in the world had fallen away. And I wondered if that was just my over-protected daughter, or it’s everyone’s first reaction. We think there’s some instinctive desire for vengeance that law and civilization help us overcome, but I wonder if there is not also an instinctive recoiling from vengeance, like the one I saw on my daughter’s face last night. A deep-seated understanding that if killing is wrong, killing a killer is also wrong. I don’t know, but I wonder if we have it all turned around. People don’t have to learn not to be vengeful; they have to bury their natural compassion.

Later in the evening, I heard Tucker Carlson complaining that the biggest problem with the death penalty was that the concept of the state antiseptically killing people was so horrible that it actually made you feel compassion for a monster like Stanley Williams. I was fascinated, watching him struggle with the compassion he admitted to feeling. He couldn’t handle it. He tried every which way to make it disappear. I remembered that it was Carlson who conducted one of the most disturbing interviews George Bush ever gave:

Bush’s brand of forthright tough-guy populism can be appealing, and it has played well in Texas. Yet occasionally there are flashes of meanness visible beneath it. While driving back from the speech later that day. Bush mentions Karla Faye Tucker, a double-murderer who was executed in Texas last year In the weeks before this execution, Bush says Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. “Did you meet with any of them?” I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. “No, I didn’t meet with any of them” he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. “I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions like “What would you say to Governor Bush?”

“What was her answer?” I wonder.

“Please” Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation “don’t kill me”.

I must look shocked – ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush – because he immediately stops smirking. “It’s tough stuff”, Bush says, suddenly somber, ‘but my job is to enforce the law.” As it turns out, the Larry King-Karla Faye Tucker exchange Bush recounted never took place, at least not on television. During her interview with King, however, Tucker did imply that Bush was succumbing to election-year pressure from pro-death penalty voters. Apparently Bush never forgot it. He has a long memory for slights. (Talk Magazine, September 1999)

Carlson ended up arguing — although he seemed to be embarrassed to find himself saying this — that it would be better if the families of the victims could stab the murderer to death than have the state do so cleanly and efficiently. He didn’t believe what he was saying. He said himself that he might back down if called on that. The call for direct vengeance let him pose as a tough guy. Compassion is frightening. Safer to refashion yourself as a monster, even if — unlike Bush — you’re bright enough, and morally astute enough, to recognize that that’s what you’re doing.

I haven’t read much of what’s been written about Stanley Tookie Williams. Maybe, like Tucker Carlson,  I was a little afraid of the compassion I knew would well up. I’m not afraid of seeing the humanity in someone capable of committing monstrous acts. I’m afraid of the feeling of helplessness that attends seeing that humanity, and not being able to do a thing to save it.

But I was also put off by the tone of the coverage. Two Sundays ago, the LA Times ran side by side op-eds.

He’s a murderer. He should die

Governor, let Tookie live

They both ran under a larger headline that set the tone: SHOULD WE KILL THIS CRIP?

I can’t even tell you that I hated the pro-killing piece and appreciated the pro-life one. I hated both. I hated the whole idea of the front page of the editorial section debating whether a man should live or die. Debate a school bond. Debate the justice of a war. Debate the death penalty, even. But for Christ’s sake, don’t ask people to sit in their comfortable rooms on a Sunday morning and turn thumbs up or thumbs down. Should he live or should he die? Jesus or Barabbas?

I believe in redemption. But do not ask me to judge another person’s redemption. I can’t do it. No one can, although some people think they can:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did not just reject Stanley Tookie Williams’ request for clemency, he aggressively attacked the central element of the former gang leader’s case: Williams, he said, had never really reformed.

Over the last decade, Williams had become famous based on his account of how he went from a gang leader to an anti-gang crusader who had written books aimed at steering young people away from crime. That life story was at the heart of Williams’ request for clemency.

Schwarzenegger rejected it entirely, suggesting Williams’ redemption claim was " hollow."

***************************

"Stanley Williams insists he is innocent, and that he will not and should not apologize or otherwise atone for the murders," Schwarzenegger wrote. "Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption."

The idea that Arnold Schwarzenegger, of all people, could judge someone’s atonement unworthy and unconvincing is not the most obscene part of this whole spectacle, but it is certainly one of the more grotesque elements.

Even Steve Lopez, one of the LA Times’ better columnists, who often writes movingly of poverty, crime, and race, and who witnessed Williams’ execution, and described it as a "macabre spectacle in a nation that preaches godly virtue to the world while resisting a global march away from the Medieval practice of capital punishment, " fights off belief in redemption:

Nothing I saw made me feel any differently about Williams, the Crip co-founder whose legacy is terrorized neighborhoods and a chorus of weeping mothers.

His anti-violence books and speeches were too little, too late, and the methodologizing of him was as unconvincing as the Nobel nominations.

I understand that. There are far more blatant examples of the horror of capital punishment. Cory Maye remains on death row for what was clearly an act of self-defense. Ruben Cantu, executed a decade ago in Texas, was almost surely innocent. But I have to disagree with Atrios that cases like Maye’s make better arguments against the death penalty than Williams’. You can nitpick around the margins of the death penalty by pointing out its injustice, its fundamental racism, but you end up focusing people’s attention on trying to make a profound wrong more right. In order to really understand why the death penalty is wrong, you need to be brave enough to look not just at innocents killed, but at the guilty, at the worst, most indefensible people on death row. The problem with Stanley Williams’ case is not that he committed such heinous crimes, but that it is far too easy to recognize the humanity that continued to dwell behind the monster, and began to emerge when it had the chance to do so. Randy Paul has a thought-provoking post up about another case where we learned that people capable of great evil can also be capable of great good. Most of the time whatever humanity is still in there is damn well hidden. As Richard Pryor said, "Thank God we got  penitentiaries!" I think in many ways murderers like Stanley Williams and Karla Faye Tucker are far more threatening to people who believe in capital punishment than the kind of criminal who brandishes his supposedly irredeemable nature, or even than the wrongfully accused. It’s far easier to tell yourself that something isn’t done right than that it shouldn’t be done at all.

The Supreme Court gave us a brief respite from the death penalty, which ended with the execution of Gary Gilmore in 1977. I remember that execution very well because of something I’d never witnessed before — criminal groupies. Every single person I knew at the time who supported capital punishment also admired Gary Gilmore, because he said flat out that he was a monster and deserved to die. He was the first person executed after Furman v. Georgia temporarily wiped away all the states’ death penalty laws primarily because he refused to fight for his life. This is what you have to believe if you support capital punishment: Monsters are monsters and they know it. (If they seem not to, they must be faking us out, and we have to be tough and not be swayed.) People who loved capital punishment loved Gary Gilmore for supporting their myths. They despised Stanley Williams not, primarily, because of his crimes, but because his life challenged that myth.

I don’t know if the redemption is real or fake. I know there are many people who can’t face the prospect that it might be real, because realizing that the capacity for good and the capacity for evil dwell in the same body is too difficult to face. But to really challenge capital punishment, you have to force people to face it.

Okay, let me get this straight — Fox News held a Titanic-themed “holiday” party?

Is this somebody’s way of admitting that they’re stuck on board an ideological sinking ship?

Granted, the exercise may be getting a little tiresome, but this Fox News webpage really does make the point rather overwhelmingly.

Until they change it — and once they do, here’s a screengrab saved from 8 pm PST 12 Dec 2005 — there are no fewer than seven uses of the word “Holiday” or “Holidays” to refer to, yes, the holidays.

Number of uses of the word “Christmas”: zero.

So, to any remaining nutjobs who still don’t understand that “Happy Holidays” is just a nice thing to say (not to mention good business) in a society that welcomes people of all faiths, you have your orders from the man himself: when Bill O’Reilly tells you not to patronize businesses that use “Happy Holidays” instead of Christmas… change the damn channel.

PS — even the graphic in the upper right, the one you click to buy stuff from the Fox News store, contains the name “fnshop_holidays2″. Geez. It’s like Christmas just doesn’t even exist for these infidels.

UPDATE: And Fox News has added a field goal! It’s Holidays 10, Christmas 0.

UPDATE AGAIN: Holy crap, it’s actually 11-0. I missed another one. There are at least eleven different uses of the word “holiday” on that single page of the Fox website.

What is this, Spinal Tap? Fox News: Our Hypocrisy Goes To Eleven.