Bush has got to hit bedrock soon. A good quarter of the population would stay on his side even if he was photographed on the White House lawn sawing up Laura's corpse with a chain saw, and jamming the parts into Hefty bags. But how strongly that 25% will back him, and for how long, remains to be seen. (Here)

5.15.2006 "Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling"

5.15.2006 Reach Out and Tap Someone The Progress Report

Because the program is being conducted domestically without a court order, the telcos may be liable for tens of billions of dollars for carrying out illegal actions. The call-tracking program could violate the Stored Communications Act which applies a $1,000 penalty (plus attorney's fees) for each customer "aggrieved by any violation." The telcos may also have violated the Communications Act, possibly subjecting them to fines levied by the Federal Communications Commission. AT&T is already the subject of a class-action lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which alleged in January that the company had given the NSA direct access to the records of the more than 300 million domestic and international calls and a huge volume of Internet data traffic. The lawsuit asked a court to halt the collection. The Justice Department told the court late last month it would seek to dismiss the case under the state secrets privilege

So what we got was a drug program set up to serve the administration's friends and its political agenda, not the alleged beneficiaries. Instead of providing drug coverage directly, Part D is a complex system of subsidies to private insurance companies. The administration's insistence on running the program through these companies, which provide little if any additional value beyond what Medicare could easily have provided directly, is what makes the whole thing so complicated. And that complication, combined with an obvious lack of interest in making the system work, is what led to the disastrous start-up.

All of this is, alas, terribly familiar. As John DiIulio, the former head of Mr. Bush's faith-based initiative, told Esquire, "What you've got is everything and I mean everything being run by the political arm." Ideology and cronyism take complete precedence over the business of governing.

And that's why when it comes to actual policy as opposed to politics, the Bush administration has turned out to have the reverse Midas touch. Everything it gets its hands on, from the reconstruction of Iraq to the rescue of New Orleans, from the drug benefit to the reform of the C.I.A., turns to crud.

5.14.2006 "Par for the Corps -- A Flood of Bad Projects" By Michael Grunwald

Then the Corps failed to protect New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, despite spending more in Louisiana than in any other state. Last month, the Corps commander acknowledged that his agency's "design failure" led to the floodwall collapses that drowned New Orleans. So why isn't everyone asking questions about the Corps and its patrons in Congress?

Somehow, America has concluded that the scandal of Katrina was the government's response to the disaster, not the government's contribution to the disaster. The Corps has eluded the public's outrage -- even though a useless Corps shipping canal intensified Katrina's surge, even though poorly designed Corps floodwalls collapsed just a few feet from an unnecessary $750 million Corps navigation project , even though the Corps had promoted development in dangerously low-lying New Orleans floodplains and had helped destroy the vast marshes that once provided the city's natural flood protection.

Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?
...
It’s the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press’s exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That’s where the buck stops, and if there’s to be a witch hunt for traitors, that’s where it should begin. ... If Democrats — and, for that matter, Republicans — let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.

5.12.2006 "Further Thoughts on the Lawfulness of the Newly Disclosed NSA Program Marty Lederman

After a bit more reflection, and as explained below, I think it's safe to say that at least some of the statutory arguments against the program might not be as strong as they first appeared -- depending on the particular details of the program, which we of course do not know. But at least two other statutory objections appear to remain very formidable.

5.16.2006 Cenk Uygur: "They Knew It Was Illegal"