Politics

It must be Joe Biden’s (D-Del) week for attacking civil liberties. This time round, he’s sponsoring a bill that would criminalize raves. It’s already a felony to knowingly house and profit from a drug enterprise; OK, I have no real issues with that other than my general feelings about the War on Drugs (which are negative). However, extending that law to cover people who throw raves seems sketchy — yes, there are going to be drugs at raves. But there have also been drugs at every rock concert I’ve ever been to in my life. You can’t hold promoters responsible for drug use in the culture; they didn’t create the culture. ...

Time to go to the the assassination strategy, apparently. Rumsfeld has reportedly given the U.S. Special Ops command direct orders to go after the top leadership of al Qaeda, under their own guidance rather than under the authority of Central Command. It makes a sort of sense, for a country traumatized by civilian deaths; now is probably the best time to switch to an assassination strategy, because we’re so aware of collateral damage (and are finding out that we inflict quite a bit ourselves). ...

Judge Gladys Kessler just ruled that the federal government must release the names of everyone who’s been arrested and detained in the course of the September 11th investigations. I can’t find the decision itself online, but I’ll keep an eye out for it.

So this I just don’t get. Say you’re John Ashcroft, and you come up with a plan to do such and such. You properly sponsor a bill to allow the appropriate federal department to carry out that plan (among other plans; it’s a big bill). The House takes a look at the legislation and modifies the portion of it dealing with your clever plan. They feel you should not carry out your plan. ...

I’m not a huge Salon fan, but they have the occasional strong article. Today, there’s a very good discussion of the Left Behind series (original). (If you haven’t seen them, they’re the Christian apocalyptic series of books which is selling like hotcakes.) The article is a good primer on the nature of the books, and is pretty fair. It doesn’t mention that the Left Behind comic books are the best selling comic books in the US right now, but I’ll go ahead and mention it for them. It’s more important, and more interesting, to discuss the author’s connection to conservative politics without making too much of it, and the article does that.

There’s a popular belief that the media is liberal. Interestingly, the media is apparently more likely to label a liberal politician as liberal than they are to label a conservative politician as conservative. Geoffery Nunberg did a study on this. It’s not clear to me that this proves anything; you could say that the qualifying adjective (in this case, liberal) only needs to be used when the subject noun is not mainstream. That’s kind of what Nunberg is saying. I don’t know if I believe it, though; you could also say that the liberal media is calling attention to the fact that politicians with admirable policies are liberal. ...

Andrew Sullivan has a couple of entries in the last few days discussing a NYT piece on Colin Powell. Doesn’t seem like rocket science to me. Does Powell disagree with Bush a lot? Yes, obviously. Is Powell well-liked? Yes. Is the article slanted? Oh, sure. But really. When I read “a Republican administration supposedly eager to demonstrate its commitment to compassionate conservatism,” it is fairly obvious to me that the author, Todd Purdum, is implying that the administration is not actually eager to commit to compassionate conservatism — they just want to look like they are. Powell (Purdum thinks) symbolizes compassionate conservatism, and thus his presence in the administration indicates a committment which isn’t actually there. ...