NB Extra

The December 21st edition of Today featured a rather alarmist report by Andrea Mitchell about domestic spying. The story, complete with requisite pictures of Abu Ghraib, aired at 7:15AM. It started off with Katie Couric's ominous introduction. She stated that with regard to spying, "some are wondering if Americans are losing their civil rights in the process.

But while most urged the paper to better explain what went into the decision-making process, others praised the Times' journalistic effort and stressed that the onus should be on what the Bush administration is doing, not the paper.

...Some noted a weariness over the paper continuing to be hammered for its actions, while others were angry that people were ignoring the fact that the paper broke a major story and continued to break others.

Others say that the powerful journalism underlying this latest controversy should be the issue, not the related elements.

"Today, on the Internet and elsewhere, some people including many who are partisan political operatives, concentrated not on the key questions of the overall story but on the documents that were part of the support of the story."

Pick at random an urban planner, environmental activist or mainstream media journalist, then ask him or her what is the most significant cause of suburban sprawl and odds are excellent that the answer will include the automobile.

Cars give people freedom to move about at will and one of the first things they do is their autos to flee the central city's congestion, pollution, noise and alienation.

Where do they end up? Living in a suburban development, of course, with a yard to mow, flowers, a backyard for the kids to play in, privacy from nosy neighbors, two cars in the garage and rest of the usual features of a typical home.  It's the American Dream, right?

According to our modern day "experts, however, suburban sprawl naturally follows because all those people who fled the central city to live in the suburbs still have to have services provided by grocery stores, schools for the kids , churches for the family, bowling alleys, restraunts and, sooner or later, offices to work in, plus roads to get there.

It's with a convenient indignation that the New York Times goes after Bush for something they would have you believe is illegal. The dishonesty of the Times calling this new or as they put it "a sea change" is shameful. Was the NY Times brain dead when they published this article about Bob Barr and other republicans trying to make this very practice accountable to congress? In 1999? When Bill Clinton was in the White House?

Since the Times can't seem to do any research on their own, I'd like to juxtapose two articles. The opening of the Times article and a section from the (now archived) Catching Americans in NSA's Net by the Baltimore Sun, published ten years prior.

New York Times
December 15, 2005
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 Baltimore Sun
December 12, 1995
...the basic rules set by Executive Order 12333, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and a few court decisions are as follows: NSA can intercept any communication -- phone call, fax, electronic mail, etc. -- as long as at least one end is in a foreign country.

In his article, “Iraq insurgents say election truce won’t last”, Fadel al-Badrani offers the reader a view from the insurgents’ side of the war. According to al-Badrani, “secular insurgents and Islamist militants” (AKA Islamofascists) plan to resume attacks against US troops and Iraqis that cooperate with the United States. Politicians, such as Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafair, Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, are also listed as targets.

Al-Badrani, an Iraqi journalist working for Reuters, was able to obtain quotes from leaders of the insurgent groups, such as “Muhammad’s Army” and the “Islamic Army”. Leaders called the attacks part of their “holy war”. The leader of Muhammad’s Army promised that “the coming days will be tough on the Americans and their supporters in the Iraqi Army.”

[NY TIMES STORY]

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Transcript follows.

Today's Chicago Tribune story on a group protesting Republican Congressional efforts to curb social spending identifies Rev. Jim Wallis as a "Christian activist."  The article reports he is a leader of "a Christian social justice group" and speaks of "Wallis and other progressive religious leaders." 

It would be more accurate to describe Wallis as an activist liberal Democrat.  He's long been a force within the Democratic party and, as noted in the Weekly Standard, has a " 35-year history of effectively pacifist, anti-capitalist, pro-socialist positions. With the exception of abortion and family values, the political issues that animate him today are the direct descendants of those that launched him into a career of activism back in his student days, when he and his friends were being tear-gassed protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam, in the heyday of the New Left."

“Failure to get a consensus constitution spells doom for our policy in Iraq. So what is the plan, Mr. President? That is still lacking.”

After saying that means participation by the UN, NATO, and Iraq’s neighbors, Biden added:

“If this time next year nothing has changed concerning in terms of our success rate, we will be out of Iraq. The American people will not sustain this.”

But the worse error in Senator Biden’s remarks, as compared to America’s own constitutional history, was his claim that to be successful, Iraq had to write a “consensus constitution,” acceptable to its neighbors. Is the Senator totally ignorant of recent history? Money, fighters and weapons are leaking into Iraq across its borders with Iran and Syria. Just today, Americans captured a tanker truck that came in from Iran which concealed thousands of forged ballots for the current Iraq election.