Paul Soglin: Waxing America

Tom Reynolds - Now on Your Tiny Screen! The Complete Uncensored, Unvarnished Story!

On Tuesday, we told you about the great confrontation between Wisconsin State Senator Tom Reynolds and the public.  It turns out that Watchdog Milwaukee had the entire matter nailed down on May 10th, including the one hour podcast of Reynolds trying to shut down public discourse.

Reynolds says NO to recording his public hearings

This is great stuff. Eat your heart out Orson Wells.  Drama, plot, character development (well, not everyone), great ensemble cast. Five stars and a thumb up.

No Cameras Allowed at Wisconsin State Senator Tom Reynolds' Town Hall Meeting at the Wauwatosa Public Library

From the Spice Boys, who hit a home run:

Reynolds not ready for his close-up

It all started routinely enough. Reynolds, as he had several times in the past, reserved the Firefly Room at the Wauwatosa Public Library for a town hall meeting on May 9. A handful of people showed up, and it was business as usual - until Jennifer Morgan, a former auto mechanic, walked in with her camera.

Yikes! ...

When the freshman senator saw Morgan filming, he cut a constituent off mid-question.

..."That would not be allowed," Reynolds said. He added a moment later, "All right, we're not going to allow that here."...

...Reynolds and Morgan continued their spat as the camera rolled, with the senator repeating that he would not allow filming in the public library and Morgan charging Reynolds didn't believe in the Constitution.

,,,"I decided I would go and videotape him to see how off the wall he really was," said Morgan, a self-described lefty.

  ...He (Reynolds) was wrong, dead wrong, when he banned her from taping his public meeting.

"That's not OK - that's absolutely not OK," declared head librarian Mary Murphy. "If there is a further violation, he will not be able to use the Firefly Room."

Murphy also took Reynolds to task for claiming that he could restrict access to the public gathering.

Jennifer Morgan appears to be an ordinary citizen who innocently thought free speech was alive and well in Wauwatosa. Thanks to her, and to the Spice Boys for sharing her story.

Sensenbrenner: My Rights Come First - Screw You

The title of the hearing says it all:

          Reckless Justice: Did the Saturday Night Raid of Congress Trample the Constitution?"

WASHINGTON — House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner said Tuesday he will summon Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller before his panel to explain their decision to raid a lawmaker's office for the first time in history...

...Calling the decision to authorize the raid "profoundly disturbing," Sensenbrenner signaled that he would not be among the lawmakers backing off their criticism of the Bush administration. ..

...While not defending Jefferson, Sensenbrenner made clear his opposition to the raid on constitutional grounds, titling Tuesday's hearing "Reckless Justice: Did the Saturday Night Raid of Congress Trample the Constitution?..."

It is tragic and unfortunate that Congressman Sensenbrenner does not understand that the Patriot Act which he supports and that the Bush-NSA spying on Americans which he ignores, are just as egregious Constitutional violations.

Congressman Sensenbrenner is absolutely 100% correct about this. I wish he would be as correct the rest of the time.

Bush: I Answer To No Courts, No Constitution, No Laws

Yesterday we remorsefully thought of Yossarian in Catch-22:

"They don't have to show us Catch-22," the old woman answered. "The law says they don't have to."

"What law says they don't have to?"

"Catch-22."

Today we get confirmation that 1984, Brave New World, and all the horrific futuristic tales of the ultimate in state secrecy have arrived in the United States:

White House Invokes Privilege in Spy Cases By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press Writer

The Bush administration has asked federal judges in New York and Michigan to dismiss a pair of lawsuits filed over the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, saying litigating them would jeopardize state secrets...

...National Intelligence Director John Negroponte invoked the state secrets privilege on behalf of the administration, writing that disclosure of such information would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to national security...

...For decades, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been required to seek court approval before using electronic surveillance on Americans. That was not done by the NSA in the program at issue, but President Bush has said the eavesdropping was made legal by a congressional resolution passed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks... (emphasis added).

In Richard Nixon we had a president who acknowledged that the Constitution limited his powers.  To accomplish his goals he used stealth, cunning, and the darkness of night to violate the law and subvert the Constitution.

In George W. Bush we have a president who knowingly and openly declares that the Constitution is an inconvenience to be trampled when he sees fit. Even secret courts like the FISA court, torture in Iraq and Guantanamo, the suspension of trials for American citizens, does not quench his thirst for totalitarianism.

Now he uses the ultimate defense of his powers, "My secrets are too important to allow them to be reviewed." These are not secrets about the locations of weapons, or terrorists.  These are secrets about ordinary Americans.

These are very dangerous times.

NSA + DOJ + FCC = Catch-22.

What?" Yossarian froze in his tracks with fear and alarm and felt his body begin to tingle. "What did you say?"

"Catch-22," the old woman repeated, rocking her head up and down.

"Catch-22. Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing..."

..."Didn't they show it to you?" Yossarian demanded, stamping about in anger and distress. "Didn't you even make them read it?"

"They don't have to show us Catch-22," the old woman answered. "The law says they don't have to."

"What law says they don't have to?"

"Catch-22."

Right-Wing War on Mother's Day

Starting with the right-wing efforts to crush gays and lesbians, the Wisconsin wing-nuts have had quite a year since Mother's Day 2005. Here are just a few of the right-wing assaults on mothers' interests.

• The attack on virtually everyone who is not a straight male or female crushes every mother. A mother's love knows no bounds when it comes to sexual preference or orientation of their children. Mothers know that every child deserves to grow up in a loving environment. A bigoted attack on any mother's child is an attack on every mother.
• The sons and daughters of 823 American mothers lost their lives in Iraq in the past twelve months. Tens of thousands more mourn the loss of grandsons, the loss of the sons and daughters in coalition forces, and the many Iraqi sons and daughters killed or wounded. Mothers know the meaning of sacrifice.  They also know the meaning of waste.
• Right-wing wacko religious leaders offered the prospect of plagues on innocent children: Pat Robertson Warns Pa. Town of Disaster.
• While mothers teach understating and tolerance, some wing-nuts savagely attacked the Catholic Church and the Pope: On Homos and the Pope

The man the Roman Catholic Church claims was the first pope was married (I Cor. 9:5)! Here again, the Roman Church is teaching a false doctrine and wresting the Scriptures (II Pet. 3:15-18). Will you believe God’s Word or trust your eternity to a church which legislates and upholds a doctrine of devils?

• NSA Spying. If there is one sacred unwritten law in this country, it is the right of a mother to snoop and spy on her children without a court order or a warrant. This privilege bestowed on all mothers regardless of the age of their children has been violated repeatedly by the Bush Administration, which examines phone records, goes through dresser drawers and closets, looks under the bed, and, of course, turns pants pockets inside out.  Domestic surveillance by the Bush administration violates the rights of every last mother out there.

Unless You Are a Qwest Customer, Your Phone Company Is Giving Your Phone Records to the NSA

Don't you love it when the TV detective picks up the phone and calls a buddy at the telephone company to get the records that catch the bad guy?  And when the bad guy is confronted with the 10 calls he made to the victim the night of the murder, the confession is only a commercial away?  Of course, this old plot ploy is only one of a number of Classic Constitutional Violations that are staples of the TV (and film, too) detective genre that we all know and love.

Well, you are the bad guy whose Constitutional rights are probably being violated now.  Thursday''s USA Today reported that three out of four of America's remaining mega-size phone companies are compiling your phone call records for examination by our friends at the NSA, as part of the Bush administration's War on the Constitution.

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

Of course, Bush has minimized all this, saying it was limited to international calls of people actually suspected of terrorist links.  Not so:

The NSA's domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA's efforts to create a national call database.

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. "In other words," Bush explained, "one end of the communication must be outside the United States."

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans.

There is a hero: Qwest.

Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants....

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

Seth Zlotocha over at In Effect muses:

Why would the FISA court -- which has only rejected 4 out of over 20,000 applications to come before it since it was established in 1979 -- deny the NSA's request for a court order?

Just a hunch here, but maybe it's because the program is unconstitutional.

You think?

With this one story, USA Today makes up for years of lightweight show-biz coverage. We all owe it our thanks.  Score one for USA Today and zip for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

- Barry Orton

Channeling Jessica McBride

I asked Wisconsin's Jessica McBride, of McBride's Media Matters to do a guest column. Here it is:

The MSM dominated by gay, one-legged Puerto Rican women who believe in peace, continues to pick on George Bush.  Just look at this article form the Buddhist controlled Los Angeles Times. (They ought to call it the Laos Angeles Times):

Bush, GOP Approval Ratings Find New Lows

You would think they had nothing better to do than provide a mouthpiece for Hollywood subversives when they could have gone with something more accurate like:

Bare Majority of Orange County Still Supports Bush

........................................................................................................................

Well, that's what you expect from people who don't own apartments.  Then look at this lead which was probably written by a lesbian from Sarah Lawrence with the assistance of a nun or two. East Coast Journalism programs really should not be part of the United States, or at least, people who read should not be allowed to vote.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's approval ratings hit a series of new lows in an AP-Ipsos poll that also shows Republicans surrendering their advantage on national security -- grim election-year news for a party struggling to stay in power.

We all know that the AP was behind the Waukesha elections last week and Ipsos, well that stands for International Pro Socialist Organization of Steelworkers, and you don't need ME to tell you what THAT means.   Anyway the use of the word is grim is nothing more than a lie. In fact I can't even find it in my dictionary.
........................................................................................................................

Democratic leaders predicted they will seize control of one or both chambers of Congress in November. Republicans said they feared the worst unless the political landscape quickly changes.

Notice how they cleverly associate the word 'chamber' in a positive sentence with the word Democrat. The Chamber of Commerce is very Republican and the word belongs to us.  A subtle form of propaganda designed to make the uniformed reader think that Democrats are pro-business. 

........................................................................................................................

Just 36 percent of the public approves of Bush's job performance, his lowest-ever rating in AP-Ipsos polling. By contrast, the president's job approval rating was 47 percent among likely voters just before Election Day 2004 and a whopping 64 percent among registered voters in October 2002.

This is the kind of deception that really pisses me off (Did I say that?). They talk about voters who were registered in October 2002.  That is a totally meaningless number. Many of those people are dead or don't speak English or lived in New Orleans. More important, over half of them come from left wing cities like Los Angeles, New York, Madison, Portland and Waukesha, so they shouldn't be counted to begin with.

Also note the clever use of the number 36 percent at the beginning of the sentence and the association with 'approves.'  The nasty Spanish speaking editor could have just as easily said that 36% disapproved Bush's performance instead of 36% approve(s) his performance.  Probably a Sandinista friend of Jim Rowen.  You know his father wrote for the Washington Post?  And for a really long time.

Another thing.  If they didn't like that idea, they could have turned the numbers around so it read "63 percent of the public approves..."

........................................................................................................................

By comparison, Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan had public approval in the mid 60s at this stage of their second terms in office, while Dwight Eisenhower was close to 60 percent, according to Gallup polls. Richard Nixon, who was increasingly tangled up in the Watergate scandal, was in the high 20s in early 1974.

This is another slimy trick used by CNN, the BBC, CIA, CBS, PBS, and Reuters.  See how they cleverly compared Bush to popular Presidents?  They just as easily could have compared him to unpopular Presidents like Grover Cleveland when it was revealed he was the father of an illegitimate child. 

And of course the Nixon analogy never holds up because he was a crook; that really stinks- a very, very unfair comparison.

........................................................................................................................

As bad as Bush's numbers may be, Congress' are worse.

This is reminiscent of some of the worst writing I see in some of my students, usually the ones from Madison West High School or relatives of Bill Christofferson.  Do you see what they did?  The news about Congress is worse than the Bush poll numbers and that is buried deep down in the story.  There are more members of Congress, some of them are even Democrats, and they mention it below the fold!

........................................................................................................................

Just 30 percent of the public approves of the GOP-led Congress' job performance, and Republicans seem to be shouldering the blame.

I have come to expect this since former editors from Pravda, Izvestia and the Daily Cardinal now staff the Style section of the LA Times. They blame the Republicans, not the Democrats.  Clearly Democrats share half the blame for the public's distain of Congress.

........................................................................................................................

"He's in over his head," said Diane Heller, 65, a Pleasant Valley, N.Y., real estate broker and independent voter.

Everything is wrong with that quote. First, notice they did not provide a statement of support for Bush. Secondly, Heller is from New York and we don't count their votes anyway. Thirdly, Heller is clearly a part of the peace movement, given that she admits to be an independent voter. Lastly, I have it on good authority from Ralph Ovadal that real estate brokers in Pleasant Valley sell to gays, Catholics, and vegetarians, and even sometimes, people who are all three.

..........................................................................................................................

One of those advantages is a political map that is gerrymandered to put House incumbents in relatively safe districts, meaning Democrats have relatively few opportunities to pick up the 15 seats they need to gain control.

The most important element of the story is in the last paragraph. They wait until the end to acknowledge the power and importance of Tom DeLay's successful plan to make sure we keep control of Congress, even if we are the minority party.  It is just like these descendents of radicals and subversives like Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Peter Zenger to put the good news at the end.

So there.

(Anyone know where I can get a good gardener, cheap? And I found a great place to get my nails done.  Give me a call and I'll tell you their address.  They only take cash. If you are lucky, you may run into Jim Sensenbrenner there.)

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(OFFICIAL WAXINGAMERICA LEGAL DISCLAIMER: THIS IS A FIRST AMENDMENT-PROTECTED PARODY.)

Libbygate; Cheneygate; Bushgate, Watergate October 28, 2005 Repost

Libbygate; Cheneygate; Bushgate, Watergate October 28, 2005 Waxingamerica

I know,  Scooter Libby has not been tried and found guilty, but humor me for a moment.

Since the reign  of Richard Nixon, the pundits have attached a 'gate' to every scandal that came along.  None of theses transgressions, perhaps with the exception of Iran Contragate, deserved to be placed in the same class with Watergate.

Finally we have treachery and crime, of Nixonian proportions. Reaching up into the White House where confidants of the President and the Vice President committed treasonous acts and shredding, trampling , and desecrating the Constitution we have the Bush ignobility to measure against Nixon.

Once again a President is marching down a dangerous path pursuing an unpopular war, fertilized by lies and deception.  The American people no longer buy the nonsense that things are going well.

The Administration, watching support rapidly deteriorating in the center is targeting enemies who question the War.  Is it Vietnam or Iraq?  No that is no the question.  The questions for the President and Vice President are What did they know and When did they know it?

The question for the American people is, "How much more of this is going on?"

Libbygate; Cheneygate; Bushgate, Watergate October 28, 2005 Waxingamerica

I know,  Scooter Libby has not been tried and found guilty, but humor me for a moment.

Since the reign  of Richard Nixon, the pundits have attached a 'gate' to every scandal that came along.  None of theses transgressions, perhaps with the exception of Iran Contragate, deserved to be placed in the same class with Watergate.

Finally we have treachery and crime, of Nixonian proportions. Reaching up into the White House where confidants of the President and the Vice President committed treasonous acts and shredding, trampling , and desecrating the Constitution we have the Bush ignobility to measure against Nixon.

Once again a President is marching down a dangerous path pursuing an unpopular war, fertilized by lies and deception.  The American people no longer buy the nonsense that things are going well.

The Administration, watching support rapidly deteriorating in the center is targeting enemies who question the War.  Is it Vietnam or Iraq?  No that is no the question.  The questions for the President and Vice President are What did they know and When did they know it?

The question for the American people is, "How much more of this is going on?"

Censure Hearing on Friday. What Will Herb Do?

The Senate Judiciary Committee members are going to have an interesting session Friday. Those identified as moderates in both parties will determine the outcome.  While we know where Chairman Specter is coming from, the position of our Senator Herb Kohl is up in the air. This is a chance for the senior senator to lead and change the course of human events.

Senator Sets Hearing on Censure of Bush

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: March 25, 2006

WASHINGTON, March 24 — The Senate Judiciary Committee has set a hearing for next Friday on the call by Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to censure President Bush for his approval of a program to allow electronic eavesdropping without warrants.

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the panel, said he had decided to schedule the session after Mr. Feingold, in a television interview, pressed for hearings on the censure proposal...

...Mr. Specter said his intent was not to use the session as a political forum but to explore issues surrounding the proposed censure. He said he believed the proposal was baseless.

Now we know what Specter said when the issue first arouse: Arlen Specter Gaps Truth: Can Go Either Way on Bush-NSA, While NY Times Sputters

In the understatement of the century (yes, its only five years old) Specter told the Associated Press:

           There is no doubt that this is inappropriate.

Inappropriate? Inappropriate is belching at the dinner table or barfing on some foreign dignitary.  Inappropriate is the behavior of most teenagers at least three times a day

I am not worried about Specter.  He signaled last December that he would collapse on this one. He is a lost cause and will only do the right thing if they find the smoking gun in Bush's hand.

I am worried about Senator Herb Kohl.  He knows these issues, he knows that Bush usurped the law, and he will have to break the 'gentleman's agreement' on this one. He cannot remain part of the inner circle of the Senate and serve freedom at the same time this week.