I don’t know much about McCarthyism, but just from listening to a short NPR blurb about the FBI’s proposed guidelines that could target people based on race and ethnicity alone, I’m beginning to think more about what it was.

First, the FBI’s proposal from WIRED:

The Justice Department is considering establishing a new policy that would allow the FBI to target Americans for investigation even in the absence of evidence or other compelling indications that the person was breaking a law, according to the Associated Press.

The policy, being considered as part of the attorney general’s guidelines to the FBI, would allow the agency to conduct racial profiling — potentially singling out Muslim- and Arab-Americans — and to open preliminary terrorism investigations against targets simply on the basis of patterns established through data mining public records and other information.

The agency would be allowed to profile targets based on their race and activities, such as travel to the Middle East or any other part of the world associated with terrorism. But race would be only one factor in the decision to open an investigation.

How about leaving dissenting opinionated comments on a conservative blog run by someone like, oh, say, Rush Limbaugh?

When would they take effect:

The new guidelines would be put in place before the presidential administration changes next January.

How convenient.

The DOJ claims that nothing new would really be going on:

Targeting a person based on race, of course, would seem to be a clear violation of civil rights. A DoJ official told the AP that the guidelines wouldn’t really give the FBI any more authority than it already has to create “threat assessments” of individuals. A DoJ spokesman added that the guidelines cannot authorize any activity that is unconstitutional or prohibited by statute.

USAToday has a thorough piece here:

Critics say the presumption of innocence is lost in the proposal. The FBI will be allowed to begin investigations simply “by assuming that everyone’s a suspect, and then you weed out the innocent,” said Caroline Fredrickson of the American Civil Liberties Union.

…

The changes would allow FBI agents to ask open-ended questions about activities of Muslim- or Arab-Americans, or investigate them if their jobs and backgrounds should match trends that analysts deem suspect.

FBI agents would not be allowed to eavesdrop on phone calls or dig deeply into personal data, such as the content of phone or e-mail records or bank statements, until a full investigation had been opened.

The guidelines focus on the FBI’s domestic operations and run about 40 pages long, several officials said. They do not specifically spell out what traits the FBI should use in building profiles.

Perhaps the best re-branding of a concept (think, “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony”):

Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the guidelines are part of a “harmonizing” process that will not give the FBI more authority than it already has.

Spoken like a true spokesman. Having worked in that OPA, I can just imagine.

What can be and is being done to halt or inhibit the proposed guidelines?

Although the guidelines do not require congressional approval, House members recently sought to limit such profiling by rejecting an $11 million (euro7 million) request for the FBI’s security assessment center. Lawmakers wrote that it was unclear how the FBI could compile suspect profiles “in such a way as to avoid needless intrusions into the privacy of innocent citizens” and without wasting time and money chasing down false leads.

The denial of money could limit the FBI’s use of profiles, or “predictive models and patterns of behavior” as the government prefers to describe the data-mining results, but would not change the guidelines authorizing them. The guidelines would remain in effect until a new attorney general decided to change them.

Courts across the country have overturned criminal convictions when defendants showed they were targeted based on race. Racial profiling generally is considered a civil rights violation, and former Attorney General John Ashcroft condemned it in March 2001 as an “unconstitutional deprivation of equal protection under our Constitution.”

President George W. Bush also has condemned racial profiling as “wrong in America,” and in a December 2001 interview he had harsh words for an airline that refused to let one of his Secret Service agents board a commercial flight. The agent was Arab-American. “If he was treated that way because of his ethnicity, that will make me madder than heck,” Bush said.

Madder than heck, eh?  Waterboarding - does that make you madder than heck too?

Ugh.

What’s also amazing to me is that, with all the complaints you hear about from John McCain and others re: we need tort reform to keep down lawsuits and losses to business and to keep down insurance medmal rates and out of control jury awards, can you think of any sector that will do better if such guidelines are approved than the legal profession?

To wit:

Martin Redish, a constitutional and civil rights scholar at Northwestern University School of Law, said courts probably will give the FBI a lot of leeway in deciding how to open national security investigations.

“But it’s a very fine line to be drawn when the basis of the investigation is dominated by the ethnic background of the subject,” Redish said. “And when the investigation results in harassment, you have a serious constitutional concern.”

Think I’ll go read up on McCarthyism.

So he will retire.  Seriously.  I want to start a petition to send him.  What a selfish, greedy rattafratta…not to mention boycott Clear Channel.  From the Seattle Times:

The AM-radio host will be paid about $400 million to continue serving up his daily dose of conservative patter through 2016. His $50-million-a-year paycheck represents a raise of about $14.4 million a year over his present contract, which was paying him $285 million over eight years and was set to expire in 2009.

…

Limbaugh said he would earn about $38 million annually under the deal, in addition to a “nine-figure” signing bonus.

“I’m not retiring until every American agrees with me,” Limbaugh, 57, said on his radio program Wednesday.

As for Clear Channel, you can view info about the corporate governance at Business Week.

But the motherlode is at their website: not too diverse there, now, are they?

Executive Officers

	Mark Mays Chief Executive Officer Clear Channel Outdoor Learn More >
	Randall Mays Chief Financial Officer Clear Channel Outdoor Learn More >
	Paul Meyer Global President and Chief Operating Officer Clear Channel Outdoor Learn More >

Global Officers

	Michael Hudes Global Director - Digital Media Learn More >
	Rocky Sisson Global Director - Sales & Marketing Learn More >
	Tony Jarvis Executive Vice President – Global Research Learn More >

Corporate Officers

	Jonathan Bevan International Chief Financial Officer and Director of Corporate Development Learn More >
	Augusto Claux Regional President - Latin America Learn More >
	Rickard Hedlund Regional President - Northern & Eastern Europe Learn More >
	Gene Leehan Regional President - Western U.S. Learn More >
	Hubert Janvier Regional President - Southern Europe Learn More >
	Bryan Parker Executive VP - Real Estate - Americas Learn More >
	Barry Sayer Regional President - UK, Ireland & Africa Learn More >
	Tim Stauning Regional President - Eastern U.S. Learn More >
	Mark Thewlis Regional President - Asia Pacific Learn More >
	Kurt Tingey Executive VP - Chief Financial Officer - Americas Learn More >
	Laura C. Toncheff Executive VP - General Counsel - Americas Learn More >
	Charlie Turner Executive VP - Operations - Americas Learn More >

Did you that Bono wrote an introduction for The Book of Psalms? Yes, that Bono. Well don’t just sit there furrowing your brow, go check it out at The Carnival of Ohio Politics #124.And after you check that out, be sure to read all the submissions this week from new contributors, on new topics and with new ways of thinking about old ideas that could appeal or incite anyone.And have a great, safe July 4 on behalf of all the co-editors at the Carnival. 

The Media Line provides information about today’s attack, quotes from family members of the attacker, East Jerusalem residents, bystanders and Israelis. The group that is claiming responsibility, The Free Men of the Galilee organization, was behind the shooting of seminary students in Jerusalem earlier this  year.

Hamas says that it’s “the natural result of continuing Israeli aggression and crimes against our people in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem…”

What do you think would happen in the US if Native Americans started to commit acts of terror for the same reason?

In Iraq, aren’t the US military and Iraqi government forces regularly attacked as “the natural result” of continued occupation? And yet many Americans - John McCain among them - seem to be a-okay with our military efforts to attack back, yes?

How do we justify telling another country not to attack back when that’s what we’re promoting - and we caused the situation (in Iraq) in the first place?

Here is a series of photos from the attack.

In my first draft of this post, I ended it with, “So, what would you do?” But as I looked for the most current information on the numbers dead and injured, I found this Ha’aretz column that places a very fair and accurate context on today’s event and yet still ends with the following:

This is what I don’t yet want to admit: that for all these years, in 2008 no less than in 1902, what a critical mass of Palestinians want most, perhaps even more than statehood, may be as simple as the vile thrill of vengeance, as straightforward as nothing more than seeing Jews dead and gone. 

Those deadly sins just can’t get a rest.

Something’s gone terribly wrong. From the New York Times (thank you Linda Greenhouse for naming and respecting the blogger, with no ridiculous, ad hominem adjectives attached to references of him):

It turns out that Justice Kennedy’s confident assertion about the absence of federal law [”that capital punishment for child rape was contrary to the “evolving standards of decency” by which the court judges how the death penalty is applied”] was wrong. 

A military law blog pointed out over the weekend that Congress, in fact, revised the sex crimes section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 2006 to add child rape to the military death penalty. The revisions were in the National Defense Authorization Act that year. President Bush signed that bill into law and then, last September, carried the changes forward by issuing Executive Order 13447, which put the provisions into the 2008 edition of the Manual for Courts-Martial.

Anyone in the federal government — or anywhere else, for that matter — who knew about these developments did not tell the court. Not one of the 10 briefs filed in the case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, mentioned it. The Office of the Solicitor General, which represents the federal government in the Supreme Court, did not even file a brief, evidently having concluded that the federal government had no stake in whether Louisiana’s death penalty for child rape was constitutional. 

The blog? Written by Dwight Sullivan and called the CAAFlog. The post? “The Supremes dis the military justice system.” The NYT says that Louisiana says that it’s not sure that it will take advantage of the 25 day period during which they could file a request for a reconsideration.  But the U.S. Department of Justice? It’s declining comment. (For the record, the USDOJ didn’t file anything in this case, according to the NYT article:

evidently having concluded that the federal government had no stake in whether Louisiana’s death penalty for child rape was constitutional. 

Over to Scott or Jeff who can parse this much better than me (well, I could try, but they are a much better resource). Now what do the presidential candidates say? What do they suggest?What if we find out that other justices did know this and discounted it?What do you think? 

Ohio News Now will be carrying it here at 1pm today (E.S.T.):

ZANESVILLE, Ohio — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is to announce plans to expand President George W. Bush’s program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and support some ability to hire and fire based on faith.

Obama is scheduled to unveil his approach to getting religious charities more involved in government and anti-poverty programs during a tour and remarks on Tuesday afternoon.

The event is scheduled to begin at about 1 p.m.  Watch it live on ONN.  If you’re not near a TV set, watch it on 10TV.com and ONNTV.com.

I suspect there are some Ohio bloggers there because I believe the event was closed to the public but open to the press, though not 100% sure on that. I’ll try to live-blog it.

Okay - people who are rabid Obamamaniacs - what is up with this?  And he does it in Ohio?

Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans to expand President Bush’s program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and — in a move sure to cause controversy — support some ability to hire and fire based on faith.

Obama was unveiling his approach to getting religious charities more involved in government anti-poverty programs during a tour and remarks Tuesday in Zanesville, Ohio, at Eastside Community Ministry, which provides food, clothes, youth ministry and other services.

More concerning:

Obama’s support for letting religious charities that receive federal funding consider religion in employment decisions could invite a protest from those in his own party who view such faith requirements as discrimination.

Obama does not support requiring religious tests for recipients of aid nor using federal money to proselytize, according to a campaign fact sheet. He also only supports letting religious institutions hire and fire based on faith in the non-taxypayer funded portions of their activities, said a senior adviser to the campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity to more freely describe the new policy.

I’ve called for Governor Ted Strickland to shut his faith-based and community initiatives office down and I’ve wanted the same at the federal level.  The executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State agrees:

Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, criticized Obama’s proposed expansion of a program he said has undermined civil rights and civil liberties.

“I am disappointed that any presidential candidate would want to continue a failed policy of the Bush administration,” he said. “It ought to be shut down, not continued.”

According to the article at NPR, the Obama campaign has consulted a former Bush administrator for the office, David Kuo, “a conservative Christian who was deputy director of Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives until 2003 [who]… later became a critic of Bush’s commitment to the cause…”

More specifics from the story (which seems to have a copy of whatever Obama said or is to say in Ohio today):

Obama proposes to elevate the program to a “moral center” of his administration, by renaming it the Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and changing training from occasional huge conferences to empowering larger religious charities to mentor smaller ones in their communities.

Saying social service spending has been shortchanged under Bush, he also proposes a $500 million per year program to provide summer learning for 1 million poor children to help close achievement gaps with white and wealthier students. A campaign fact sheet said he would pay for it by better managing surplus federal properties, reducing growth in the federal travel budget and streamlining the federal procurement process.

Like Bush, Obama was arguing that religious organizations can and should play a bigger role in serving the poor and meeting other social needs. But while Bush argued that the strength of religious charities lies primarily in shared religious identity between workers and recipients, Obama was to tout the benefits of their “bottom-up” approach.

Okay cooler heads and more invested Obama fans -’splain this to me.

Hattip to Andy Carvin’s tweet.

UPDATE: Here’s the take at Plunderbund and at Progress Ohio (including links to the policy overview).

From California State Assemblywoman Gabrielle Holt:

The RJC held its annual summer celebration at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, Air Force One Pavilion. Over six hundred people attended this incredible event. The evening began at 5:00 pm with a reception and tours of Air Force One. What a magnificent airplane. Following the reception was a sit down dinner.

The dinner program began with patriotic songs. We overlooked the beautiful hills of Simi Valley as we sang tribute to our country. Rabbi Isaac Jeret, from the Palos Verdes Peninsula’s Temple N’er Tamid , gave a heart rendering invocation. Featured speakers included Roger Wicker, US Senator from Minnesota, Josh Mandel, Ohio State Representative and Marine veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq, Steve Poizner, California Insurance Commissioner, Ron Nehring, California Republican Party Chair, and concluded with a very inspiring presentation by Dennis Prager, talk show host and author.

More about Dennis Prager and Roger Wicker.

Usually the request for submissions goes out through e-mail, and I’ve done that already.  But I also figured that since that list seems to have remained more or less the same number for a while, maybe there are blog readers who aren’t aware of the Carnival and might consider contributing.

You can read past editions of the carnival here if you’re not familiar with them.

The righthand sidebar at the site shows you how something like 70 different blogs, from literally everywhere along the political spectrum, have participated in the carnival over the last 12 months and we’re always hoping more new bloggers will participate.

If you are interested in being a part of the carnival, you can send up to three links, each week, to the carnival address (OhioPolCarnival[at]Gmail[dot]com) by 9pm that Tuesday evening (unless the editor of the week notifies you otherwise - like for a holiday or other exception).

The co-editors include me, Ben Keeler of Keeler Political Report, Lisa Renee Ward of Glass City Jungle and Scott Piepho of Pho’s Akron Pages.

If you have any questions, or suggestions, please feel free to e-mail me, any of the editors, or the e-mail for the carnival.

And thanks - feel free to spread the word.

You can read Barack Obama’s speech given today in Missouri on the topic patriotism here.

I’ve been privy to a lot of discussion related to strategizing in regard to Hillary Clinton supporters who just can’t pull the lever for Obama, Hillary Clinton supporters who say that they will pull the lever for GOP candidate John McCain, stay home or write in Clinton, and people claiming or posing as Hillary Clinton supporters who never were and are in fact Republicans who are trying to convince the disaffected Clinton supporters that there is in fact a groundswell of Clinton supporters who will vote for McCain.

But this article on Bloggasm raises this confusion over what people do with disappointment to a new level:

“At first I [blogger whose Blogspot blog was flagged as possible spam blog] thought it was just this random thing with Blogger’s spam bots,” she told me in a phone interview. “I thought that perhaps in their looking across the blogger universe, that I got accidentally flagged somehow. Stuff like that happens.”

But a short time later Snedeker received an email from another blogger claiming that a number of anti-Obama blogs had been “hacked” that same night. After some digging it became apparent that several Blogspot accounts had been shut down because of similar spam issues, and nearly all of them had three things in common: Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, all were anti-Barack Obama, and several were listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama website.

A “Flag Blog” link sits at the very top of every free Blogspot account. If a person finds objectionable content on a Blogspot site or suspects it’s publishing spam, he or she can click on the link and it will send a notice to Google requesting “human review.”

I spoke to several of the bloggers who had accounts locked and every single one was convinced that it was Obama supporters who had flagged the blogs in some kind of concerted effort to silence them. But when I asked for specific evidence of this, most simply pointed out that only anti-Obama blogs were targeted — a fact that is certainly suspicious but not especially conclusive.

The incident highlights the often-contentious relationship between online Hillary and Obama supporters. Popular sites like Digg.com have consistently posted anti-Hillary links and popular liberal blog Daily Kos experienced a “boycott” a few months ago when several Hillary supporters left the site.

Sigh.  I fail to see how any of this can have a positive impact, period.  It feels like a major distraction to those of us who have limited time and a single objective: get a Democrat in the White House. (more…)

From the Chicago Tribune:

The message will be that love of country is not defined only by such traditional measures as serving in the military or tracing one’s ancestors to the Mayflower. Patriotism, he and his supporters will say, can be reflected in living the American dream, which in Obama’s case means rising as the Hawaiian-born son of a Kenyan father and Kansan mother to professional and political prominence.

…

“It’s more about the ongoing narrative that he has told throughout this campaign,” said a senior adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It is an ‘only in America’ story.”

…

As part of the patriotism theme, Obama also is expected to speak this summer near the Punchbowl National Cemetery in Honolulu, where his grandfather, a World War II veteran, is buried.

Obama’s first general-election ad, a 60-second biography launched earlier this month, foreshadows the patriotism theme, with images from his life story accompanied by his own words about what being an American means to him.

The speech will be given at noon today, E.S.T.

UPDATE: Washington Post reports that the speech will be at noon EST.

Not sure yet on link for watching but I would guess CNN etc. will have it.  Here’s the AP announcement:

The Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign says he will talk about “what patriotism means to him and what it requires of all Americans who loves this country and want to see it do better.”

The speech in Missouri Monday comes in the run-up to the July 4 holiday and as Obama seeks to reassure voters about his commitment to the country as well as to counter questions about his patriotism. He’s recently started wearing a flag pin on his lapel.

I may try to live-blog it but I’m not sure I’ll be around a computer or television.

For more about whether some isn’t enough or is too too much of something, read this debate at BlogHer about Obama and Ralph Nader’s “talking white” comment.

Sure, this article in the Plain Dealer today is intended to focus on the cronyism and nepotism among Cuyahoga County Recorder Frank Russo-related individuals at the county’s recorder’s office.

But when I opened this pdf to check out who was who, the main thing I noticed was how many women with the title of “office assistant” or “senior office assistant” make less than even the lowest paid male counterpart who was listed as an office assistant. I also thought, how many office assistants does an office usually have?

From the NYT article tomorrow on Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films (think of Ohio’s own Cliff Schecter), I realized that Reverend Rod Parsley and Family Feud’s Richard Dawson appear to have been separated at birth:

Freaky, eh?

From the New York Times:

Jeff Strabone of Brooklyn now signs credit card receipts with his newly assumed middle name, while Dan O’Maley of Washington, D.C., jiggered his e-mail account so his name would appear as “D. Hussein O’Maley.” Alex Enderle made the switch online along with several other Obama volunteers from Columbus, Ohio, and now friends greet him that way in person, too.

…

“I am sick of Republicans pronouncing Barack Obama’s name like it was some sort of cuss word,” Mr. Strabone wrote in a manifesto titled “We Are All Hussein” that he posted on his own blog and on dailykos.com.

…

New Husseins began to crop up online as far back as last fall. But more joined up in February after a conservative radio host, Bill Cunningham, used Mr. Obama’s middle name three times and disparaged him while introducing Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, at a campaign rally. (Mr. McCain repudiated Mr. Cunningham’s comments).

The practice has been proliferating ever since. In interviews, several Obama supporters said they dreamed up the idea on their own, with no input from the campaign and little knowledge that others shared their thought.

Some said they were inspired by movies, including “Spartacus,” the 1960 epic about a Roman slave whose peers protect him by calling out “I am Spartacus!” to Roman soldiers, and “In and Out,” a 1997 comedy about a gay high school teacher whose students protest his firing by proclaiming that they are all gay as well.

The friend I’ve known the longest, since we were four years old, and I always used the other’s last name as our second (or third) middle name.  She’s Italian Catholic and so had a confirmation name, so she had five names, but I had four.  We did it as a sign of how close we were to each other and each other’s family.  It is a wonderful, warm memory.

I don’t think I’ll be adding Hussein to my name, but I can understand the appeal for those who are doing it.  Cute, very cute. I like those kinds of symbolic efforts.