Various excuses for why I haven’t blogged much for the last five or six days. From Friday through Sunday I traveled away from news or internets, but the real fun happened when I came home and discovered that my genius party seems to have handed the keys of the kingdom to Alberto effing Gonzales. While unusually busy (I probably should not be taking this time right now…) it is hard to deny that I just don’t feel like blogging right now. Republicans don’t want my support, Democrats don’t appear to deserve it. Some third party might appeal to me if I trusted any one of them to run a bakery.
But hell, I never took an LSAT. Maybe I have it wrong. So rather than rant away like usual I will just propose the same test that ought to be applied to any new law enforcement power. Better informed parties can help me work out whether or not I should get worked up about it.
Call it the Grandma Test. Weasel politicians always frame new government power in terms of some bugbear (pedophiles, tarrists, teh ghey), but fine print rarely matches rhetoric. For example. The Church Commission showed quite clearly that feds will expand their brief to cover anything they think they can get away without triggering oversight and penalties.
So let’s dispense with the noise about who this bill is meant to target. If a fed wants to tap grandma’s phone, assuming she is alive and doesn’t merit such surveillance, what exactly will stop him? I want to know more than just the language on what kind of call can and cannot be tapped, although that obviously matters. Who approves of a tap? Who judges whether a tap has violated the law? What is the penalty for surveillance abuse and who administers it?
Preliminary reports suggest a pretty big gap between what the law claims to permit and what it actually allows. But then I remember how the Clenis-mad media considered Ann Coulter a legal expert. Maybe they got it wrong, honestly I hope that they did. So consider this an open invitation to clarify this law for me in terms of the Grandma Test. I will link any comment that seems well informed, particularly those which quote relevant portions of the law with context and precedent cases. If the debate isn’t settled quickly I might use interesting responses to nucleate a new post.
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Also, just for a lark we’re going to try a comment policy that John and I have talked about for a while. Attack arguments in whatever language you want but comments attacking people will be deleted. If you absolutely cannot live within those rules, or you think your great cause legitimizes poor behavior, choose some other thread.
Long time readers will remember that we tried this once before (pie!). Even though it didn’t work we made it impressively far considering the intentionally inflammatory post topic, and even then it might have failed only because I got tired of enforcing the rule.
I know that changing the commenting rules is a controversial topic. Rather than hijack my own post, I set up an open thread above for hashing out how you feel about it and why.