What's all the fuss about?

Thanks to talkingpointsmemo for directing attention to the following remarks by Barney Frank (link), a man with a history of getting it right:

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Madam Speaker, I disagree with the bipartisan House leadership criticism of the FBI's search of a Member's office. I know nothing specifically about the case, except that the uncontroverted public evidence did seem to justify the issuance of a warrant.

What we now have is a Congressional leadership, the Republican part of which has said it is okay for law enforcement to engage in warrantless searches of the average citizen, now objecting when a search, pursuant to a validly issued warrant, is conducted of a Member of Congress.

I understand that the speech and debate clause is in the Constitution. It is there because Queen Elizabeth I and King James I were disrespectful of Parliament. It ought to be, in my judgment, construed narrowly. It should not be in any way interpreted as meaning that we as Members of Congress have legal protections superior to those of the average citizen.

So I think it was a grave error to have criticized the FBI. I think what they did, they ought to be able to do in every case where they can get a warrant from a judge. I think, in particular, for the leadership of this House, which has stood idly by while this administration has ignored the rights of citizens, to then say we have special rights as Members of Congress is wholly inappropriate.

But even more appreciated is Josh Marshall's reminder to remember the context of the fuss by House leadership over the FBI search:

Earlier this month, we found out that the Duke Cunningham case was expanding and that the Duke case investigators were requesting documents from Congress as part of their probe into the roles of other members of Congress.

Read all about it here.

Democrats can do this!

Now here's a chance for Democrats to stand up and for god's sake take a position! It's an opportunity to aggressively promote an honorable idea and demand action that could save lives, restore some dignity to our image abroad, and couldn't possibly — at least so far as I can guess — hurt anyone.

Just talk to the guy, Mr. President!

Reporting from Tehran, Karl Vick and Dafna Linzer wrote in today's Washington Post that

Iran has followed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent letter to President Bush with explicit requests for direct talks on its nuclear program, according to U.S. officials, Iranian analysts and foreign diplomats.

The eagerness for talks demonstrates a profound change in Iran's political orthodoxy, emphatically erasing a taboo against contact with Washington that has both defined and confined Tehran's public foreign policy for more than a quarter-century, they said.
Link

Even before this latest communication from Mahmoud, Mid-East experts around the country were concluding that Mahmoud's long letter to Bush a couple of weeks ago should be taken as an opening for dialogue. Matt Stannard, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, reported that

[S]everal experts said, the United States should not simply ignore Ahmadinejad's overture. Even a similarly vague, philosophical response might open the door for further negotiations, first over Iraq, then over nuclear issues, they said. Link

As I said before, it's clear what any respectable U.S. President — let alone the Jesus so often invoked in Mahmoud's letter — would do.

C'mon, Big Guy! What's to lose?

Guest Ag Worker Program Already Exists!

But, of course, it requires that employers pay decent wages, provide free housing and three meals a day, keep records and, oh yes, first offer the jobs to U.S. citizens. Here are the high points:

H-2A Certification for Temporary or Seasonal Agricultural Work

The H-2A temporary agricultural program establishes a means for agricultural employers who anticipate a shortage of domestic workers to bring nonimmigrant foreign workers to the U.S. to perform agricultural labor or services of a temporary or seasonal nature. ... [T]he employer must file an application . . . stating that there are not sufficient workers who are able, willing, qualified, and available, and that the employment of aliens will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers. . . .

An agricultural employer who anticipates a shortage of U.S. workers needed to perform agricultural labor or services of a temporary or seasonal nature, may file an application requesting temporary foreign agricultural labor certification. "Temporary or seasonal nature" means employment performed at certain seasons of the year, usually in relation to the production and/or harvesting of a crop, or for a limited time period of less than one year when an employer can show that the need for the foreign worker(s) is truly temporary.
. . .

An employer who files an application for temporary foreign labor certification pursuant to H-2A regulations must meet the following specific conditions:

Recruitment: The employer must agree to engage in independent positive recruitment of U.S. workers. This means an active effort, including newspaper and radio advertising in areas of expected labor supply.
. . .

Wages: The wage or rate of pay must be the same for U.S. workers and H-2A workers. The hourly rate must also be at least as high as the applicable Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), federal or state minimum wage, or the applicable prevailing hourly wage rate, whichever is higher. The AEWR is established every year by the Department of Labor for every state except Alaska. Employers should consult with the SWA or the Department of Labor National Processing Center to determine what the rate is for their state.

If a worker will be paid on a piece rate basis, . . . If the piece rate does not result in average hourly piece rate earnings during the pay period at least equal to the amount the worker would have earned had the worker been paid at the hourly rate, then the worker’s pay must be supplemented to the equivalent hourly level.

Housing: The employer must provide free housing to all workers who are not reasonably able to return to their residences the same day. . . .

Meals: The employer must provide either three meals a day to each worker or furnish free and convenient cooking and kitchen facilities for workers to prepare their own meals. If meals are provided, then the employer may charge each worker a certain amount per day for the three meals.
. . .

Workers' Compensation Insurance: The employer must provide workers' compensation insurance where it is required by state law. Where state law does not require it, the employer must provide equivalent insurance for all workers. Proof of insurance coverage must be provided to the regional administrator before certification is granted.
. . .

Fifty Percent Rule: The employer must hire any qualified and eligible U.S. worker who applies for a job until fifty percent (50%) of the period of the work contract has elapsed.
. . .

Certification Fee: A fee will be charged to an employer granted temporary foreign agricultural, labor certification. The fee is $100, plus $10 for each job opportunity certified, up to a maximum fee of $1,000 for each certification granted.

Other Conditions: The employer must keep accurate records with respect to a worker's earnings. The worker must be provided with a complete statement of hours worked and related earnings on each payday. The employer must pay the worker at least twice monthly or more frequently if it is the prevailing practice to do so. The employer must provide a copy of a work contract or the job order to each worker.

But why subject yourself to all those picky rules and regulations — and expense — when you can cheat and get away with it?

Why those tamper-proof IDs won't work

Bush proposes to issue the ID cards just to foreign workers, no doubt to reassure Americans who oppose any hint of a national identity card. Yet it didn't take much thought to realize that tamper-proof ID cards for non-citizen workers won't work, because they would create a whole new problem, in that now every other citizen would be without proof of legality — short of carrying around a passport, I guess.

So it would have to be all or nothing, apparently.

I have no problem with the concept of a voluntary national tamper-proof ID card — voluntary in the sense that you could choose whether to have it at all, like a passport; you could use it to ease the way to employment (as Social Security numbers used to do), to board an aircraft, to cash a check, etc.

Or you could choose to have one and then choose not to carry it or to only use it sometimes. You would not be required to have it with you at all, and no one could demand you produce it -- it would just be useful, like a passport.

Maybe that's a solution.

The NSA Minefield

It all seems so simple: If you're innocent, why should you worry if the NSA knows who you talk to on the phone?

Back in the sixties I was lucky to work for Ernie Besig, at the ACLU Northern California office. Green as a cucumber, I told him I was really appalled at the ACLU's position that American Nazis should be allowed to promote their filthy anti-semitism with impunity. (See the 1934 ACLU statement, Shall We Defend Free Speech for Nazis in America?) Indeed, in 1977 and 1978 the ACLU did actively intercede on behalf of the Nazis when the village of Skokie, Illinois — a majority-Jewish community, including many Holocaust survivors — sought to prevent them from marching through town in fear of what outrage might bring.

Ernie turned it into a no-brainer for me: If we can deny the Nazis' the right to speak or march, then in the future someone will be able to deny those rights to us.

And so it is with collecting telephone call information: Bush and his NSA can assert, even perhaps truthfully, that they have no intention of violating the privacy of any one of us non-al Qaeda types, that our liberties will be "fiercely" protected. But if we allow it this time, how will we be able to stop it the next time, when some other President decides to listen in?

And that's not all there is to worry about. In a thorough and lucid description of just how data mining works, Matthew Stannard, writing for the SF Chronicle, includes this warning by security technologist Bruce Schneier:

But the problem with applying data mining techniques to terrorism, Schneier argued, is that terrorism is so rare, and the databases being mined are so large, that false positives are inevitable and often more common than truly accurate results.

And unlike using data mining to spot credit card fraud, where at most a false positive triggers a worried call from Visa to a cardholder and perhaps a temporary suspension of the card's use, a false positive in a terror investigation can put an innocent person in jail, he said.

How could a such a false positive happen? Well, here's one way:

Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called Chains. The concept is based on the idea that the number of acquaintances grows exponentially with the number of links in the chain, and so only a small number of links is required for the set of acquaintances to become the whole human population.

Got friends? Do they have friends? Who do those friends know? Who do friends of friends of those friends talk to?

This can't be allowed.

George and Mahmoud

Thinking about the U.S. and Iran — the George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad posturing, which is presently all that is really happening between the two countries — I can't help imagining them as two banty roosters, chests out, combs and wattles trembling as they circle and circle and glare at each other.

The banty rooster thing seems to be all they have in common (besides oddly similar faces); it's all about puffing out the chest and scaring the hell out of the other guy.

Now, I believe that only a really strong man can make moves that might appear "weak" and get away with it; without debating whether our President is strong, we can agree that he is our President, and that means he occupies a position of strength.

Mahmoud is not strong, by all accounts: even though elected he is still subordinate to a collection of mullahs. So he really, really needs to show his people that he is a leader who can get other leaders to take him seriously.

And we really need to persuade him that we can be friends and get along — something not likely to happen if all we do is scare the hell out of him.

So what to do? George should give a little. Show a little kindness. Appear to take him seriously. Say something reasonable and reasonably to be understood as statesmanlike. Like: "We could talk."

Patrick Kennedy should resign

The only right thing for this Congressman to do, now that he has checked himself into a rehabilitation program but not for the first time, is resign from office. It's his duty to his constituents, who are ill served because of his absences, and to his party, who must bear the burden of his reputation, and to his country.

The only right thing for the Democratic Party and its leaders to do is persuade him -- publicly if privately doesn't do it -- to resign. Now.

UPDATE on Moussaoui

The jury and I came to the same conclusion, though I will always wonder what his reaction might have been should they have decided on the death penalty.

I'm looking forward to hearing of their reasoning.