The Treason Card

The Treason Card: "The nature of the right-wing attack on The New York Times — an attack not on the newspaper’s judgment, but on its motives — seems to have startled many people in the news media. After an editorial in The Wall Street Journal declared that The Times has what amount to treasonous intentions — that it ‘has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it’ — The Journal’s own political editor pronounced himself ‘shocked,’ saying that ‘I don’t know anybody on the news staff of The Wall Street Journal that believes that.’

...

Over the last few months a series of revelations have confirmed what should have been obvious a long time ago: the Bush administration and the movement it leads have been engaged in an authoritarian project, an effort to remove all the checks and balances that have heretofore constrained the executive branch.

Much of this project involves the assertion of unprecedented executive authority — the right to imprison people indefinitely without charges (and torture them if the administration feels like it), the right to wiretap American citizens without court authorization, the right to declare, when signing laws passed by Congress, that the laws don’t really mean what they say.

But an almost equally important aspect of the project has been the attempt to create a political environment in which nobody dares to criticize the administration or reveal inconvenient facts about its actions. And that attempt has relied, from the beginning, on ascribing treasonous motives to those who refuse to toe the line. As far back as 2002, Rush Limbaugh, in words very close to those used by The Wall Street Journal last week, accused Tom Daschle, then the Senate majority leader, of a partisan ‘attempt to sabotage the war on terrorism.’"

(Via Martini Republic.)

Israel's failed-state strategy

Israel's failed-state strategy | Salon.com : "The day's battles continued the cycle of violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians that has simmered for months but exploded during the past two weeks. Israel's grossly disproportionate response to a tit-for-tat Palestinian guerrilla raid during which two Israeli soldiers were killed and a third abducted has pushed the impoverished Gaza Strip to the edge of a humanitarian crisis, smashed the barely functioning Palestinian Authority, and threatened the Middle East's fragile peace. The actions of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert seem intended to create a failed state in Gaza and the West Bank, thus rendering the Israeli claim that 'we have no one to talk to' a self-fulfilling prophecy and allowing Israel to continue with its unilateral, annexationist policies, free of the need to even pretend to negotiate.

This shortsighted 'strategy,' which both the United States and, to a slightly lesser degree, the strangely docile Europeans have signed off on, is a recipe for continued hatred, extremism, bloodshed, injustice and festering grievances. Unless Israel and its patron summon the wisdom to take the long view and hammer out an agreement that will give the Palestinians a viable state, rather than simply trying to smash them into submission, the world's most dangerous conflict will continue to rage, with dangerous consequences for all."

(Via Salon.)

Why Conservatives Can't Govern

AlterNet: Why Conservatives Can't Govern: "Bush's presidency and Congress are imploding, not despite their conservatism, but because of it.

Search hard enough and you might find a pundit who believes what George W. Bush believes, which is that history will redeem his administration. But from just about everyone else, on the right as vehemently as on the left, the verdict has been rolling in: This administration, if not the worst in American history, will soon find itself in the final four. Even those who appeal to history's ultimate judgment halfheartedly acknowledge as much. One seeks tomorrow's vindication only in the context of today's dismal performance.

About the only failure more pronounced than the president's has been the graft-filled plunder of GOP lawmakers -- at least according to opinion polls, which in May gave the GOP-controlled Congress favorability ratings in the low 20s, about 10 points lower than the president's. This does not necessarily translate into electoral Armageddon; redistricting and other incumbency-protection devices help protect against that. But even if many commentators think that Republicans may retain control over Congress, very few think they should."

(Via AlterNet.)

NEA to Challenge 'No Child Left Behind'

NEA to Challenge 'No Child Left Behind': "An overwhelming majority of delegates from the nation's largest education union approved a plan Monday to aggressively lobby Congress for reform of the No Child Left Behind Act.

The National Education Association has fought to change the measure since its beginnings in 2001, but this is the union's most organized effort to date, said Joel Packer, the NEA's policy manager on the act.

'We're moving from just being critics to saying this is our own vision,' Packer said. 'It is very powerful because it's the voices of classroom teachers.'

In an hourlong discussion, only three of the 9,000 members of the union's Representative Assembly argued against the lobbying effort. They said the law was too flawed to fix and wanted the union to focus on repealing it."

(Via Salon.)

NSA Had Domestic Call Monitoring Before 9/11?

Slashdot | NSA Had Domestic Call Monitoring Before 9/11?: "'Bloomberg is reporting that, according to documents filed in the breach of privacy suit on behalf of Verizon and BellSouth, the NSA asked AT&T to set up its domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Could it be that they were intending to monitor domestic calls (and internet traffic) all along, and the 'Global War on Terror' was just a convenient excuse when they got caught?'"

(Via /.)