Politics

From metafilter: When Ron Paul email spam started hitting inboxes in late October, UAB Computer Forensics Director Gary Warner published findings on the spam’s textual patterns and the illicit botnet used to spread it – findings which were picked up by media outlets and tech websites like Salon, Ars Technica, and Wired Magazine’s “Threat Level” blog, the latter in a set of followup posts by writer Sarah Stirland: 1, 2, 3. The Ron Paul fan response was swift and decisive: clearly the botnet was the work of anti-Ron Paul hackers trying to discredit his campaign, and Rudy Giuliani had paid Stirland (and not UAB Computer Forensics) to do a smear piece – as claimed by a YouTube video pointing to posts on RudyGiulianiForum.com. Thus proving, once again, that the Ron Paul campaign’s greatest liability is not so much his far-right conspiracy-driven antifederal libertarianism, but rather the spittle-flecked anger of his own noisiest supporters.There are definitely a lot of nuts among Ron Paul’s supporters. Meanwhile, he raised $3.8 million yesterday (apparently a number revised downward from $4.3 million) in the largest one-day online political fundraiser ever. Intrade currently shows Paul as the third most likely GOP nominee, after Giuliani and Romney. A few other Ron Paul-related blog posts that I realize I’ve neglected to mention here, from Dispatches from the Culture Wars: “Is Ron Paul a Dominionist?" Argues that Paul appears to have much in common with some theocrats. “Sandefur on Ron Paul” Doubts that Paul is a dominionist, but suggests he might be a Thomas DiLorenzo-style neo-confederate who thinks we don’t even need a federal government (in which case he wouldn’t really be the supporter of the Constitution that he seems to be) and that the U.S. Civil War wasn’t about slavery (which is pernicious nonsense). I also just came across this story, which says that Paul would like to see the U.S. Constitution amended to remove the subject of abortion from the purview of the courts, which is yet more anti-constitutional insanity. ...

And boy, are they crazy. (Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa says that Ecuador will not be renewing the U.S.’s lease of the Manta Air Base on his country’s Pacific coast when it expires in 2009. U.S. officials say the base is essential for anti-narcotics operations. Correa says he will be happy to reconsider if the U.S. allows him to open an Ecuadoran military base in Miami. “If there’s no problem having foreign soldiers on a country’s soil, surely they’ll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States,” he told a reporter in Italy. (Via Distributed Republic.)

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars presents some of the evidence that Clinton’s presidency differed in degree, not kind, from Bush’s: If you despise the Bush administration for weakening constitutional protections, zealously increasing executive authority and weakening the checks and balances inherent in our constitutional scheme, preferring secrecy to accountability, being in the pocket of big business and sending American troops on one foreign military adventure after another, you should recognize that the Clinton administration that preceded this one differed only by degree, not kind, on those matters. And there is little reason to believe that a second Clinton administration would be all that much better.The book All the President’s Spin, by the folks who ran the Spinsanity.com blog during Bush’s first term, makes a similar point about how Clinton managed the media. It was under Clinton that we got not one but two attempts to censor the Internet with the Communications Decency Act. On the other hand, there were far fewer American lives lost in military action and we did get the export controls on encryption loosened, so that users of PGP didn’t become criminal exporters of munitions just by carrying a laptop to another country. In a conversation last week, a friend of mine suggested that Hillary Clinton will win the presidency and will demonstrate her military hawkishness by doing something like invading Syria, and will end up making followers out of the right-wingers who currently hate her, ultimately sending us further down the road towards fascism and complete disregard for the rule of law. ...

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office last night arrested Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, owners of the Phoenix alternative newspaper New Times, for publishing a story under their bylines which revealed the contents of a grand jury subpoena received by the paper. Revealing the contents of a subpoena is a misdemeanor. Lacey and Larkin, who have long battled with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and County Attorney Andrew Thomas, wrote a story about the subpoena because they considered it an attack on the freedom of the press. The subpoena demanded records relating to all visitors to the New Times website over the last four years, including information about what websites they visited prior to the New Times website (i.e., referral URLs)–essentially, the request is for the complete website logs for the newspaper’s website for the last three years. It also demanded reporters’ notes and any other documents pertaining to stories about Arpaio for the last three years. Lacey and Larkin wrote that they believed their article to violate the law, but they published it as a form of civil disobedience in order to challenge the unconstitutional abuses of Arpaio, Thomas, and prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik. The trigger for the events which led to the subpoena (and the apparent event of interest given the dates in the subpoena) appears to be a New Times article from July 8, 2004 which commented on Arpaio’s commercial real estate investments and ended with Arpaio’s home address, but the paper’s criticism of Arpaio for mismanagement, inmate deaths, and grandstanding in front of TV cameras goes back many years more. Sheriff Joe used to have a dialup Internet account with Primenet, my former employer. At one point one of his assistants, Lisa Allen, contacted Primenet to attempt to get information about a subscriber who had left a critical comment on his website, without a subpoena. We declined to provide such information without a subpoena. UPDATE (October 19, 2007): County Attorney Andrew Thomas has announced that he has dropped the charges against New Times and dismissed special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik. UPDATE (November 13, 2007): New Times ran an October 25 followup story. UPDATE (October 28, 2008): It has come out that the order for Lacey and Larkin’s arrest was given by Arpaio’s chief deputy David Hendershott, whom Arpaio allowed to retire so he could receive a $43,000/year pension, and hired him back as a civilian at his same $120,000/year salary. Hendershott now makes $177,486/year working for Arpaio. ...

CIA Director (and former head of the NSA) Gen. Michael Hayden is unhappy with CIA Inspector General John Helgerson’s work uncovering abuses at the CIA, so he’s ordered his own investigation of the IG, including an examination of the office’s confidential files. That’s sure to put a chill on employee cooperation with or reporting of abuses to the IG’s office.

The Goldwater Institute will be giving Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Muslim turned atheist author of the book Infidel, its 2007 Goldwater award at an event in Phoenix later this year. I plan to attend and will report here afterward.

The Carpetbagger Report discusses how many of Rudy Giuliani’s friends have been accused of being criminals: A prominent Texas Republican has sued Rudy Giuliani’s law firm and a close friend and partner of Giuliani’s, Kenneth Caruso, alleging that Caruso, the firm and others “schemed and conspired to steal $10 million.” J. Virgil Waggoner, a Houston businessman and philanthropist, filed the previously unreported suit in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan in July. He alleges that Caruso, his former lawyer, conspired with Waggoner’s investment adviser to cover up the disappearance of $10 million Waggoner invested through a Caribbean bank, the British Trade & Commerce Bank. ...

In today’s New York Times: When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency. ...

In an interview with Beliefnet, Arizona Sen. John McCain said that the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation: A recent poll found that 55 percent of Americans believe the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation. What do you think? I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation. But I say that in the broadest sense. The lady that holds her lamp beside the golden door doesn’t say, “I only welcome Christians.” We welcome the poor, the tired, the huddled masses. But when they come here they know that they are in a nation founded on Christian principles.Apparently he, like Rep. Ron Paul, missed the fact that the only reference to God in the U.S. Constitution is the reference to the “year of our Lord” in the date. The Constitutional Convention voted not to open with prayers, Article VI says that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States,” and the First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The Constitution establishes a democratic republic with a strong separation of church and state by comparison to other nations. The Bible, by contrast, speaks of theocratic political systems with rule by priests and kings. In 1797, the Senate unanimously ratified and President John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11 of which began with the words “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” (This treaty was quickly violated by Tripoli, and the renegotiated treaty of 1805 did not contain this article, but the important point is that this language was approved by the entire Senate and the President in 1797.) ...