by TChris

In February 2002, the president said that there were thousands of al Qaeda terrorists "still roaming around" and "we're going to be steady and relentless until we achieve the objective of getting the al Qaeda killers and bringing them to justice." Having failed to attain that objective, the president has flip-flopped, essentially declaring victory in the war against al Qaeda.

The White House today released an updated version of its plan for combating terrorism that focused more on decentralized networks of extremists than on Al Qaeda ...

Osama bin Laden is evidently no longer a person of great interest to the president.

by TChris

A father wants his son to be free.

My son, Fawzi, was a schoolteacher in a region near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border before he was captured by bounty hunters. I'm told that he now lives alone in a cell at Guantanamo; our only contact with him consists of outdated letters with whole sections blacked out. The anguish is endless for families that have been kept in the dark for over four years while their husbands, sons and brothers suffer in a secret world.

His request is simple: if his son committed a crime, put him on trial.

My son is not a terrorist. He was, in fact, a great admirer of American political values and legal principles before he was kidnapped and sent to Guantanamo. Our family is nonetheless willing to undergo the ordeal of trial and judgment, if only the U.S. government would allow it to happen.

Corrente Wire excerpts a terrific article in Foreign Affairs that poses the rarely asked question:

If it is so easy to pull off an attack, and the terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it?

Is the war on terror a scam?

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

In a contemptible manuever, the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism, cynically sacrificed its principles to enable Joe Lieberman to again falsely cry antisemitism. The Murdoch-owned New York Post was the media vehicle for this despicable ploy:

A string of anti-Semitic rants about Sen. Joe Lieberman have popped up on the liberal MoveOn.org's open forum Web site, drawing criticism from the Anti-Defamation League.

. . . "We recognize that Action Forum is an open forum intended to foster the free flow of ideas," ADL head Abraham Foxman said in a letter dated Aug. 31 to MoveOn, which supported Lamont in the Democratic primary against Lieberman. "Nevertheless, since such profoundly offensive content is appearing on a board clearly linked to MoveOn.org, we believe you should assume some responsibility to respond to this hateful content," Foxman wrote in the letter, which was forwarded by Lieberman's campaign.

Foxman's ploy was almost certainly done at the behest of the Lieberman campign. The Foxman letter came 12 days AFTER Move On had removed the comments:

Katie Couric begins her nightly newscast at CBS this evening. I'm going to tivo it as I'll probably be at the jail when it airs and won't get to see it until I return home tomorrow.

For those of you who watch tonight, what did you think?

I hope it's a success. Break a leg, Katie.

I'm off to Omaha for court. I'll be stopping in to post from the airport and hotel, but there's proably a lot going on I'll miss. Here's a place to weigh in. Happily, I think this is my only trip for the next month.

Please be patient with the comments. The site is being rebuilt as we speak, and should be complete by the end of the week. Until Friday, I'll be hand-approving comments as I have time to log in to the site.

I've always wondered why people think America is better off with Saddam Hussein out of power in Iraq. I can appreciate (although I don't accept at face value) the argument of those who think it's better for Iraqis that he is gone, but for Americans? I never have gotten the connection.

I was channel surfing very late last night in Aspen and caught Bill Maher on Larry King Live from Friday night. Even though it was way past time for bed, I listened.

KING: Are we better off with Saddam gone?

MAHER: We are not better off. We were never better off because Saddam was actually a bulwark against terrorism. He would never have allowed al Qaeda in Iraq. And I know people say oh, yes, there was al Qaeda. Yes, there was a few al Qaeda in the northern part of the country, which he did not control.

KING: He didn't like bin Laden, right?

MAHER: He hated bin Laden. So the world certainly is not better off without Saddam. And I don't know if even Iraq is better off without Saddam.

You ask the people in Iraq now. Because you know, we're running out of things that Saddam did that we don't do like torture, rape. About the only one left is mass graves. So in a lot of ways we are Saddam except for one thing, he at least had control of his country.

That sounds about right to me. Your thoughts?

The New York Times reports that Republicans will abandon immigration reform in favor of concentrating on anti-terror laws.

With Congress reconvening Tuesday after an August break, Republicans in the House and Senate say they will focus on Pentagon and domestic security spending bills, port security legislation and measures that would authorize the administration's terror surveillance program and create military tribunals to try terror suspects.

"We Republicans believe that we have no choice in the war against terror and the only way to do it is to continue to take them head-on whether it is in Iraq or elsewhere," said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the majority leader.

I smell a rat. I wouldn't put it past Sensenbrenner to sneak the worst parts of H.R. 4437, which passed the House but not the Senate, into new legislation tagged as national security legislation. To get around what they call "amnesty" they'll just leave out the guest worker provisions.

by TChris

As fall political campaigns begin to capture the attention of voters, the days after Labor Day will give Democrats the opportunity to discuss the many ways in which life for workers can improve if Republicans are reduced to a minority status in the federal legislature. (Some changes would likely encounter a presidential veto, but that problem can be remedied in another two years.)

• Democrats can protect retirement income by saving social security from privatization. And by eliminating the $90,000 income cap on social security payroll taxes, Democrats can make the Social Security Trust Fund solvent while assuring that high income wage earners pay the same percentage of their earnings to FICA as does the average worker.

• Democrats can roll back the most punitive provisions in the Republican-enacted bankruptcy "reform" legislation, while reforming chapter 11 bankruptcy law to make it more difficult for corporations to weasel out of the commitments they made to employees in collective bargaining agreements.

• Democrats can increase the minimum wage.

by TChris

Who works on Labor Day? Baseball players and a ton of other people. Those who aren't stuck at work can read the official (i.e., boring) History of Labor Day at the Department of Labor's website. The Department of Labor, you will be reassured to see, is "in the 21st century." The rest of the administration should try to catch up.

Livelier versions of Labor Day's origin can be found here and (surprisingly) here.

If you aren't working today (or if you're at work but slacking), here's a place to converse.

by TChris

It's difficult to discern a legitimate federal interest in an investigation of "possible attempted arson to a police car during [a] demonstration" in San Francisco. Nonetheless, because "the San Francisco Police Department receives some federal funds," federal prosecutors claim to have a need to subpoena blogger-journalist Josh Wolf before a federal grand jury. Wolf took some video of the demonstration, and federal prosecutors want to compel him to surrender the tape.

The real reason this prototypical state crime is being investigated in federal court:

While California has a state shield law that generally protects news reporters from disclosing materials, there is no federal shield law.

Wolf was held in contempt on August 1 for refusing to share the tape with a grand jury. On Friday, the Ninth Circuit granted a stay pending Wolf's appeal of the contempt finding, releasing Wolf after a month in custody.

Using a federal grand jury to investigate "possible attempted arson to a police car" is a huge waste of federal resources. Aren't there any serious federal crimes to worry about in the Bay area?

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

A few weeks ago in my post What Obama Needs To Learn, I wrote:

[T]hat is FDR's lesson for Obama. Politics is not a battle for the middle. It is a battle for defining the terms of the political debate. It is a battle to be able to say what is the middle. . . . FDR governed as a liberal but politicked like a populist. When LBJ rightly and to his everlasting credit removed one of the Dem pillars of paranoia - racism, the GOP co-opted populist racism, added the Jeffersonian notion of government and institutional hatred, throw in a dash of paranoid Red scare, now terrorism scare, and you get political victories. The lesson of Hofstadter is to embrace liberal governance and understand populist politics. It may sound cynical, but you must get through the door to govern. Lincoln knew this. FDR knew this. Hofstadter knew this. I hope Obama can learn this.

A debate about populism has been ongoing among some very smart folks. Brad DeLong has been in the middle of it, in particular in debate with Paul Krugman:

I am, as I said above, a reality-based center-left technocrat. I am pragmatically interested in government policies that work: that are good for America and for the world. My natural home is in the bipartisan center, arguing with center-right reality-based technocrats about whether it is center-left or center-right policies that have the best odds of moving us toward goals that we all share--world peace, world prosperity, equality of opportunity, safety nets, long and happy lifespans, rapid scientific and technological progress, and personal safety. The aim of governance, I think, is to achieve a rough consensus among the reality-based technocrats and then to frame the issues in a way that attracts the ideologues on one (or, ideally, both) wings in order to create an effective governing coalition.

I am a Big Tent Centrist Dem so that sounds good to me as a matter of policy. But what about the politics? I think populism is critical to Democratic politics. I'll discuss Delong's views and other matters related to populism, as policy and politics, on the other side.