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A New York Times editorial which nicely sums up my own views on our current President:

Bush and the trust gap

Domestic spying: After 9/11, Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the conversations and e-mail of people in the United States without obtaining a warrant or allowing Congress or the courts to review the operation. Lawmakers from both parties have raised considerable doubt about the legality of this program, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it clear last Monday at a Senate hearing that Bush hasn't the slightest intention of changing it.

According to Gonzales, the administration can be relied upon to police itself and hold the line between national security and civil liberties on its own. Set aside the rather huge problem that U.S. democracy doesn't work that way (em. added). ...

The prison camps: ... Last week, The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune reported that U.S. military authorities had taken to force-feeding prisoners who had gone on hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay to protest being held without any semblance of justice. The article said administration officials were concerned that if a prisoner died, it could renew international criticism of Guantánamo. They should be concerned. This is not some minor embarrassment. It is a lingering outrage that has undermined American credibility around the world (em. added).

According to numerous news reports, the majority of the Guantánamo detainees are neither members of Al Qaeda nor fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The military has charged only 10 prisoners with terrorism. Hearings for the rest were not held for three years and then were mostly sham proceedings (JMWG note: special proceedings were conducted swiftly and in bulk so as to create an illusion of due process in the face of constitutional challenges--these challenges also explain the three year wait, as cases involving detainees wound their way through the legal system, encountering motions to dismiss and similar government opposition at every turn).

And yet the administration continues to claim that it can be trusted to run these prisons fairly, to decide in secret and on the president's whim who is to be jailed without charges, and to insist that Guantánamo is filled with dangerous terrorists.

The war in Iraq: One of Bush's biggest "trust me" moments was when he told Americans that the United States had to invade Iraq because it possessed dangerous weapons and posed an immediate threat to America. The White House has blocked a congressional investigation into whether it exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq, and continues to insist that the decision to invade was based on the consensus of American intelligence agencies.

But the forthcoming edition of the journal Foreign Affairs includes an article by the man in charge of intelligence on Iraq until last year, Paul Pillar, who said the administration cherry-picked intelligence to support a decision to invade that had already been made. He said Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and heeded only the analysts who produced them. Incredibly, Pillar said, the president never asked for an assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion. (JMWG note: here is a link to the cited Pillar article, Intelligence, Policy,and the War in Iraq.)

...

Like many other administrations before it, this one sometimes dissembles clumsily to avoid embarrassment. (We now know, for example, that the White House did not tell the truth about when it learned the levees in New Orleans had failed.) Spin-as-usual is one thing. Striking at the civil liberties, due process and balance of powers that are the heart of American democracy is another.

I spoke with the director of the RI ACLU at Friday night's showing of Unconstitutional and will likely be doing some volunteer research with the organization this summer. Cool beans. There is plenty out there to research...

Movies:
Unconstitutional
I need to see this one again when the sound system doesn't involve a hand-mic resting next to some laptop speakers. Yeah, ouch.
La Dolce Vita ***1/2
Need more time to reflect (expect a large media update similar to the one in January sometime), but this was definitely an excellent movie. At first I thought it was disjointed, but despite the lack of any plot, per se, it all came together in a surprisingly wrenching strike against the empty culture of the upper class in mid-20th c. Rome. Forgive the mixed metaphor, but I'm feeling the call of lunch and work and don't care to edit.

Random Notes:
We got lots of snow. I was out there at 7:15 this morning clearing off the car and the lot around it. It was very pretty yesterday as it fell. My work with the RWU ACLU is rather mired right now in the bureaucracy of the IT department and SBA, and I'm not hearing anything on the radio front, which is frustrating. I'm also starting to get nervous for my midterm and paper in roughly two weeks. Hopefully I will be signing up for that 5k soon, so as to spur myself to better workouts, which tend to make me worry less but which I sometimes find difficult to justify in the face of more immediate academic concerns. Speaking of such things, off I go.