Scott dismisses attorney for BP claims

Updated: Thursday, 10 Mar 2011, 6:39 PM EST
Published : Thursday, 10 Mar 2011, 6:38 PM EST
by Warren Elly

TAMPA - While they protested government cuts outside, inside the State House, the Governor was putting the budget axe right up front.

"Floridians have been encouraged to believe that government could take care of us, but government always takes more than it gives back," Rick Scott told the Legislature.

"Rick Scott looks at government as something that is essentially bad, and his goal is to minimize its role, absolutely, in Florida," University of Tampa political scientist Scott Paine said.

So whether it's refusing billions in Federal high speed rail money, or a million dollars from drug makers to start up a pain pill prescription database, the Governor's supporters say you can count on Scott to just say no.

"What happens is these bureaucracies get created," says Sharon Calvert of the Tampa Tea Party "and over time, they just wallow, and money becomes more to fund them, they get bigger and you can't get rid of them, even if the problem goes away."

The BP oil spill may be next. Lawyers say there are billions in damage claims unsettled in Florida, and the attorney appointed by the previous governor to represent the state's interest says Scott won't respond to his calls and letters about pursuing the state's claims against BP.

"I think it would be in the billions of dollars," Yerrid said. "It would have a substantial, if not a mitigating effect on our deficit. The money is there, there's a $20 billion fund that isn't close to being exhausted, and my question is, what are we doing about it?".

"This administration has decided not to retain the services of Mr. Yerrid. We will be pursuing claims in the future with the intent not to have to litigate," said Governor's spokeswoman Amy Graham.

U.T.'s Paine says Scott's view of limited government plays into what his plans are.

"It's fairly consistent with the notion that you just don't want government doing these things. In this case, its aggressively chasing after a corporation that arguably is liable for considerable damages and loss of income. But that's the government getting involved in extracting money from the private sector, and that's pretty inconsistent with Scott's perspective," Paine said.

http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/dpp/news/state/scott-dismisses-attorney-for-bp-claims-03102011

It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know

By NOAM COHEN
Published: March 26, 2011

A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.

But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.

The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.

Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones. Unlike many online services and Web sites that must send “cookies” to a user’s computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to sit back and hit “record.”

“We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” said Sarah E. Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University’s architecture school. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”

Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.

“At any given instant, a cell company has to know where you are; it is constantly registering with the tower with the strongest signal,” said Matthew Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who has testified before Congress on the issue.

Mr. Spitz’s information, Mr. Blaze pointed out, was not based on those frequent updates, but on how often Mr. Spitz checked his e-mail.

Mr. Spitz, a privacy advocate, decided to be extremely open with his personal information. Late last month, he released all the location information in a publicly accessible Google Document, and worked with Zeit Online, a sister publication of a prominent German newspaper, Die Zeit, to map those coordinates over time.

“This is really the most compelling visualization in a public forum I have ever seen,” said Mr. Blaze, adding that it “shows how strong a picture even a fairly low-resolution location can give.”

In an interview from Berlin, Mr. Spitz explained his reasons: “It was an important point to show this is not some kind of a game. I thought about it, if it is a good idea to publish all the data — I also could say, O.K., I will only publish it for five, 10 days maybe. But then I said no, I really want to publish the whole six months.”

In the United States, telecommunication companies do not have to report precisely what material they collect, said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who specializes in privacy. He added that based on court cases he could say that “they store more of it and it is becoming more precise.”

“Phones have become a necessary part of modern life,” he said, objecting to the idea that “you have to hand over your personal privacy to be part of the 21st century.”

In the United States, there are law enforcement and safety reasons for cellphone companies being encouraged to keep track of its customers. Both the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration have used cellphone records to identify suspects and make arrests.

If the information is valuable to law enforcement, it could be lucrative for marketers. The major American cellphone providers declined to explain what exactly they collect and what they use it for.

Verizon, for example, declined to elaborate other than to point to its privacy policy, which includes: “Information such as call records, service usage, traffic data,” the statement in part reads, may be used for “marketing to you based on your use of the products and services you already have, subject to any restrictions required by law.”

AT&T, for example, works with a company, Sense Networks, that uses anonymous location information “to better understand aggregate human activity.” One product, CitySense, makes recommendations about local nightlife to customers who choose to participate based on their cellphone usage. (Many smartphone apps already on the market are based on location but that’s with the consent of the user and through GPS, not the cellphone company’s records.)

Because of Germany’s history, courts place a greater emphasis on personal privacy. Mr. Spitz first went to court to get his entire file in 2009 but Deutsche Telekom objected.

For six months, he said, there was a “Ping Pong game” of lawyers’ letters back and forth until, separately, the Constitutional Court there decided that the existing rules governing data retention, beyond those required for billing and logistics, were illegal. Soon thereafter, the two sides reached a settlement: “I only get the information that is related to me, and I don’t get all the information like who am I calling, who sent me a SMS and so on,” Mr. Spitz said, referring to text messages.

Even so, 35,831 pieces of information were sent to him by Deutsche Telekom as an encrypted file, to protect his privacy during its transmission.

Deutsche Telekom, which owns T-Mobile, Mr. Spitz’s carrier, wrote in an e-mail that it stored six months’ of data, as required by the law, and that after the court ruling it “immediately ceased” storing data.

And a year after the court ruling outlawing this kind of data retention, there is a movement to try to get a new, more limited law passed. Mr. Spitz, at 26 a member of the Green Party’s executive board, says he released that material to influence that debate.

“I want to show the political message that this kind of data retention is really, really big and you can really look into the life of people for six months and see what they are doing where they are.”

While the potential for abuse is easy to imagine, in Mr. Spitz’s case, there was not much revealed.

“I really spend most of the time in my own neighborhood, which was quite funny for me,” he said. “I am not really walking that much around.”

Any embarrassing details? “The data shows that I am flying sometimes,” he said, rather than taking a more fuel-efficient train. “Something not that popular for a Green politician.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 26, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated Malte Spitz's partner in the mapping project. He worked with Zeit Online, not Die Zeit. Zeit Online is a sister publication of Die Zeit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/business/media/26privacy.html?_r=1

200,000+ march in London. This is a REAL Tea Party.

Sat Mar 26, 2011 at 11:47 AM EDT
by The Bigot Basher

Compare and contrast the Tea Parties across the Pond.

In America, the right wing became concerned about deficit spending on 20 January 2009. Astro turf groups were set up all over the US to encourage Klan retireees to support an agenda that would deliver no health care for them and higher taxes to pay for tax cuts for billionaires, along with cuts to the very social security system that most of them rely on.

Contrast that with the "Tea Party" now in the UK.

They are not supporting terrorist actions against the government.
They are not calling for the UK equivalent of second amendment solutions if they din't get their way.
They are not demanding to see the birth certificate of David Cameron.
They are not out demanding tax cuts for billionaires.

They are joining with the Trade Union movement and Government employees to fight and oppose the spending cuts so lovingly called "austerity measures" and so fully supported (supposedly) by their extreme equivalents across the pond.

More than two hundred thousand people are protesting the cuts. Estimates go as high as double that. The police are not reporting numbers.

They are not the "usual suspects" of rioting students or Labour Party activists.

There are people from all Parties, worried about the impact the cuts will have on their local services.

BBC reporter, Mark Easton blogged

A regiment of purposeful Gloucestershire ladies were making their way to a kitchen-table meeting. Over tea from a pot and cakes from a stand, they discussed the arrangements for tomorrow. They are planning to join the protest.

"I'm scared of going on a political march" says Chloe Lees, announcing that she has never been on a demo before.

"I don't want to be kettled. I refuse to pee in the street whatever the cause."

Nevertheless, the plans have been made and Chloe will be on a train tomorrow morning with her "Save The Libraries" placard.

"I'm taking my 74-year-old Mum," says Susan Caudron. "This is the only way to make a difference. Now we really have to get out there and show them how we feel."

Eighty-five-year-old Eugenie Summerfield adds her voice:

"I'm not fit enough to be there but I'll be with you in spirit. I'm so angry about what's happening, not just in Gloucestershire but all over the country. I'll be with you all the way."
There is authentic passion in the room. The tea-party in the Cotswolds is not politically motivated, but they have been roused by the threat to the users of familiar and well-loved public services.

What a contrast to the Koch funded lot in America, the only protest group in the World to demand more cuts in government spending (but only when a black guy is in charge).

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/26/960327/-200,000+-march-in-London-This-is-a-REAL-Tea-Party

Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here)

March 15, 2011

A Study Guide for Those Wishing to Know More

After watching the sudden and impressively well-organized wave of legislation being introduced into state legislatures that all seem to be pursuing parallel goals only tangentially related to current fiscal challenges–ending collective bargaining rights for public employees, requiring photo IDs at the ballot box, rolling back environmental protections, privileging property rights over civil rights, and so on–I’ve found myself wondering where all of this legislation is coming from.

The Walker-Koch Prank Phone Call Reveals A Lot, But Not Nearly Enough

The prank phone call that Governor Scott Walker unhesitatingly accepted from a blogger purporting to be billionaire conservative donor David Koch has received lots of airplay, and it certainly demonstrates that the governor is accustomed to having conversations with deep-pocketed folks who support his cause. If you’ve not actually seen the transcript, it’s worth a careful reading, and is accessible here:
http://host.madison.com/wsj/article_531276b6-3f6a-11e0-b288-001cc4c002e0.html

But even though I’m more than prepared to believe that David and Charles Koch have provided large amounts of money to help fund the conservative flood tide that is sweeping through state legislatures right now, I just don’t find it plausible that two brothers from Wichita, Kansas, no matter how wealthy, can be responsible for this explosion of radical conservative legislation. It also goes without saying that Scott Walker cannot be single-handedly responsible for what we’re seeing either; I wouldn’t believe that even for Wisconsin, let alone for so many other states. The governor clearly welcomes the national media attention he’s receiving as a spear-carrier for the movement. But he’s surely not the architect of that movement.

So…who is?

Conservative History Post-1964: A Brilliant Turnaround Story

I can’t fully answer that question in a short note, but I can sketch its outline and offer advice for those who want to fill in more of the details.

I’ll start by saying–a professorial impulse I just can’t resist–that it’s well worth taking some time to familiarize yourself with the history of the conservative movement in the United States since the 1950s if you haven’t already studied the subject. Whatever you think of its politics, I don’t think there can be any question that the rise of modern conservatism is one of the great turnaround stories in twentieth-century American history. It’s quite a fascinating series of events, in which a deeply marginalized political movement–tainted by widespread public reaction against Senator Joe McCarthy, the John Birch Society, and the massively defeated Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964–managed quite brilliantly to remake itself (and American politics) in the decades that followed.

I provide a brief reading list at the end of this note because many people from other parts of the political spectrum often seem not to take the intellectual roots of American conservatism very seriously. I believe this is a serious mistake. One key insight you should take from this history is that after the Goldwater defeat in 1964, visionary conservative leaders began to build a series of organizations and networks designed to promote their values and construct systematic strategies for sympathetic politicians. Some of these organizations are reasonably well known–for instance, the Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, a Racine native and UW-Madison alumnus who also started the Moral Majority and whose importance to the movement is almost impossible to overestimate–but many of these groups remain largely invisible.

That’s why events like the ones we’ve just experienced in Wisconsin can seem to come out of nowhere. Few outside the conservative movement have been paying much attention, and that is ill-advised.  (I would, by the way, say the same thing about people on the right who don’t make a serious effort to understand the left in this country.)

It’s also important to understand that events at the state level don’t always originate in the state where they occur. Far from it.

Basic Tools for Researching Conservative Groups

If you run across a conservative organization you’ve never heard of before and would like to know more about it, two websites can sometimes be helpful for quick overviews:
Right Wing Watch: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/
SourceWatch: http://www.sourcewatch.org
Both of these lean left in their politics, so they obviously can’t be counted on to provide sympathetic descriptions of conservative groups. (If I knew of comparable sites whose politics were more conservative, I’d gladly provide them here; please contact me if you know of any and I’ll add them to this note.) But for obvious reasons, many of these groups prefer not to be monitored very closely. Many maintain a low profile, so one sometimes learns more about them from their left-leaning critics than from the groups themselves.

I don’t want this to become an endless professorial lecture on the general outlines of American conservatism today, so let me turn to the question at hand: who’s really behind recent Republican legislation in Wisconsin and elsewhere?  I’m professionally interested in this question as a historian, and since I can’t bring myself to believe that the Koch brothers single-handedly masterminded all this, I’ve been trying to discover the deeper networks from which this legislation emerged.

Here’s my preliminary answer.

Telling Your State Legislators What to Do:
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)

The most important group, I’m pretty sure, is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which was founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and (surprise, surprise) Paul Weyrich. Its goal for the past forty years has been to draft “model bills” that conservative legislators can introduce in the 50 states. Its website claims that in each legislative cycle, its members introduce 1000 pieces of legislation based on its work, and claims that roughly 18% of these bills are enacted into law. (Among them was the controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law in Arizona.)

If you’re as impressed by these numbers as I am, I’m hoping you’ll agree with me that it may be time to start paying more attention to ALEC and the bills its seeks to promote.
You can start by studying ALEC’s own website. Begin with its home page at
http://www.alec.org
First visit the “About” menu to get a sense of the organization’s history and its current members and funders. But the meat of the site is the “model legislation” page, which is the gateway to the hundreds of bills that ALEC has drafted for the benefit of its conservative members.
http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Model_Legislation1

You’ll of course be eager to look these over…but you won’t be able to, because you’re not a member.

Becoming a Member of ALEC: Not So Easy to Do

How do you become a member?  Simple. Two ways.  You can be an elected Republican legislator who, after being individually vetted, pays a token fee of roughly $100 per biennium to join.  Here’s the membership brochure to use if you meet this criterion:

http://www.alec.org/AM/pdf/2011_legislative_brochure.pdf
What if you’re not a Republican elected official?  Not to worry. You can apply to join ALEC as a “private sector” member by paying at least a few thousand dollars depending on which legislative domains most interest you. Here’s the membership brochure if you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/am/pdf/Corporate_Brochure.pdf
Then again, even if most of us had this kind of money to contribute to ALEC, I have a feeling that membership might not necessarily be open to just anyone who is willing to pay the fee. But maybe I’m being cynical here.

Which Wisconsin Republican politicians are members of ALEC? Good question. How would we know? ALEC doesn’t provide this information on its website unless you’re able to log in as a member. Maybe we need to ask our representatives. One might think that Republican legislators gathered at a national ALEC meeting could be sufficiently numerous to trigger the “walking quorum rule” that makes it illegal for public officials in Wisconsin to meet unannounced without public notice of their meeting. But they’re able to avoid this rule (which applies to every other public body in Wisconsin) because they’re protected by a loophole in what is otherwise one of the strictest open meetings laws in the nation. The Wisconsin legislature carved out a unique exemption from that law for its own party caucuses, Democrats and Republicans alike. So Wisconsin Republicans are able to hold secret meetings with ALEC to plan their legislative strategies whenever they want, safe in the knowledge that no one will be able to watch while they do so.
(See http://www.doj.state.wi.us/dls/OMPR/2010OMCG-PRO/2010_OML_Compliance_Guide.pdf for a full discussion of Wisconsin’s otherwise very strict Open Meetings Law.)

If it has seemed to you while watching recent debates in the legislature that many Republican members of the Senate and Assembly have already made up their minds about the bills on which they’re voting, and don’t have much interest in listening to arguments being made by anyone else in the room, it’s probably because they did in fact make up their minds about these bills long before they entered the Capitol chambers. You can decide for yourself whether that’s a good expression of the “sifting and winnowing” for which this state long ago became famous.

Partners in Wisconsin and Other States: SPN, MacIver Institute, WPRI

An important partner of ALEC’s, by the way, is the State Policy Network (SPN), which helps coordinate the activities of a wide variety of conservative think tanks operating at the state level throughout the country. See its home page at
http://www.spn.org/
Many of the publications of these think tanks are accessible and downloadable from links on the SPN website, which are well worth taking the time to peruse and read. A good starting place is:
http://www.spn.org/members/

Two important SPN members in Wisconsin are the MacIver Institute for Public Policy:
http://maciverinstitute.com/
and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI):
http://www.wpri.org
If you want to be a well-informed Wisconsin citizen and don’t know about their work, you’ll probably want to start visiting these sites more regularly. You’ll gain a much better understanding of the underlying ideas that inform recent Republican legislation by doing so.

Understanding What These Groups Do

As I said earlier, it’s not easy to find exact details about the model legislation that ALEC has sought to introduce all over the country in Republican-dominated statehouses. But you’ll get suggestive glimpses of it from the occasional reporting that has been done about ALEC over the past decade. Almost all of this emanates from the left wing of the political spectrum, so needs to be read with that bias always in mind.

Interestingly, one of the most critical accounts of ALEC’s activities was issued by Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council in a 2002 report entitled Corporate America’s Trojan Horse in the States. Although NRDC and Defenders may seem like odd organizations to issue such a report, some of ALEC’s most concentrated efforts have been directed at rolling back environmental protections, so their authorship of the report isn’t so surprising. The report and its associated press release are here:
http://alecwatch.org/11223344.pdf
http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/020228.asp
There’s also an old, very stale website associated with this effort at
http://alecwatch.org/

A more recent analysis of ALEC’s activities was put together by the Progressive States Network in February 2006 under the title Governing the Nation from the Statehouses, available here:
http://www.progressivestates.org/content/57/governing-the-nation-from-the-statehouses
There’s an In These Times story summarizing the report at
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2509/
More recent stories can be found at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/alec-states-unions_b_832428.htmlview=print
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6084/corporate_con_game (about the Arizona immigration law)
and there’s very interesting coverage of ALEC’s efforts to disenfranchise student voters at
http://campusprogress.org/articles/conservative_corporate_advocacy_group_alec_behind_voter_disenfranchise/

and
http://www.progressivestates.org/node/26400

For just one example of how below-the-radar the activities of ALEC typically are, look for where the name of the organization appears in this recent story from the New York Times about current efforts in state legislatures to roll back the bargaining rights of public employee unions:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/business/04labor.html
Hint: ALEC is way below the fold!

A Cautionary Note

What you’ll quickly learn even from reading these few documents is that ALEC is an organization that has been doing very important political work in the United States for the past forty years with remarkably little public or journalistic scrutiny. I’m posting this long note in the conviction that it’s time to start paying more attention. History is being made here, and future historians need people today to assemble the documents they’ll eventually need to write this story. Much more important, citizens today may wish to access these same documents to be well informed about important political decisions being made in our own time during the frequent meetings that ALEC organizes between Republican legislators and representatives of many of the wealthiest corporations in the United States.

I want to add a word of caution here at the end. In posting this study guide, I do not want to suggest that I think it is illegitimate in a democracy for citizens who share political convictions to gather for the purpose of sharing ideas or creating strategies to pursue their shared goals. The right to assemble, form alliances, share resources, and pursue common ends is crucial to any vision of democracy I know. (That’s one reason I’m appalled at Governor Walker’s ALEC-supported efforts to shut down public employee unions in Wisconsin, even though I have never belonged to one of those unions, probably never will, and have sometimes been quite critical of their tactics and strategies.)  I’m not suggesting that ALEC, its members, or its allies are illegitimate, corrupt, or illegal. If money were changing hands to buy votes, that would be a different thing, but I don’t believe that’s mainly what’s going on here. Americans who belong to ALEC do so because they genuinely believe in the causes it promotes, not because they’re buying or selling votes.

This is yet another example, in other words, of the impressive and highly skillful ways that conservatives have built very carefully thought-out institutions to advocate for their interests over the past half century. Although there may be analogous structures at the other end of the political spectrum, they’re frequently not nearly so well coordinated or so disciplined in the ways they pursue their goals. (The nearest analog to ALEC that I’m aware of on the left is the Progressive States Network, whose website can be perused at
http://www.progressivestates.org/
but PSN was only founded in 2005, does not mainly focus on writing model legislation, and is not as well organized or as disciplined as ALEC.) To be fair, conservatives would probably argue that the liberal networks they oppose were so well woven into the fabric of government agencies, labor unions, universities, churches, and non-profit organizations that these liberal networks organize themselves and operate quite differently than conservative networks do–and conservatives would be able to able to muster valid evidence to support such an argument, however we might finally evaluate the persuasiveness of that evidence.

Again, I want anyone reading this post to understand that I am emphatically not questioning the legitimacy of advocacy networks in a democracy. To the contrary: I believe they are essential to democracy. My concern is rather to promote open public discussion and the genuine clash of opinions among different parts of the political spectrum, which I believe is best served by full and open disclosure of the interests of those who advocate particular policies.

I believe this is especially important when policies are presented as having a genuine public interest even though their deeper purpose may be to promote selfish or partisan gains.

Reasserting Wisconsin’s Core Values: Decency, Fairness, Generosity, Compromise

ALEC’s efforts to disenfranchise voters likely to vote Democratic, for instance, and its efforts to destroy public-sector unions because they also tend to favor Democrats, strike me as objectionable and anti-democratic (as opposed to anti-Democratic) on their face. As a pragmatic centrist in my own politics, I very strongly favor seeking the public good from both sides of the partisan aisle, and it’s not at all clear to me that recent legislation in Wisconsin or elsewhere can be defended as doing this. Shining a bright light on ALEC’s activities (and on other groups as well, across the political spectrum) thus seems to me a valuable thing to do whether or not one favors its political goals.

This is especially true when politicians at the state and local level promote legislation drafted at the national level that may not actually best serve the interests of their home districts and states. ALEC strategists may think they’re serving the national conservative cause by promoting legislation like the bills recently passed in Wisconsin–but I see my state being ripped apart by the resulting controversies, and it’s hard to believe that Wisconsin is better off as a result. This is not the way citizens or politicians have historically behaved toward each other in this state, and I for one am not happy with the changes in our political culture that seem to be unfolding right now. I’m hoping that many of my fellow Wisconsinites, whether they lean left or right, agree with me that it’s time to take a long hard look at what has been happening and try to find our bearings again.

I have always cherished Wisconsin for its neighborliness, and this is not the way neighbors treat each other.

One conclusion seems clear: what we’ve witnessed in Wisconsin during the opening months of 2011 did not originate in this state, even though we’ve been at the center of the political storm in terms of how it’s being implemented. This is a well-planned and well-coordinated national campaign, and it would be helpful to know a lot more about it.

Let’s get to work, fellow citizens.

William Cronon

 

P.S.: Note to historians and journalists: we really need a good biography of Paul Weyrich.

 

An Introductory Bibliography on the Recent History of American Conservatism

John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, 2004 (lively, readable overview by sympathetic British journalists).

David Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Brief History, 2010.

George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, 1976(one of the earliest academic studies of the movement, and still important to read).

Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution, 2002 (written from a conservative perspective by a longstanding fellow of the Heritage Foundation).

Bruce Frohnen, et al, American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, 2006 (a comprehensive and indispensable reference work).

Jerry Z. Muller, Conservatism, 1997 (extensive anthology of classic texts of the movement).

There are many other important studies, but these are reasonable starting points.

http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/15/alec/

Exclusive: U.S. expansion of biometric tech poses ‘grave danger,’ ACLU tells Raw Story

By Stephen C. Webster
Friday, March 25th, 2011 -- 1:09 pm

A recent announcement by the Federal Bureau of Investigations detailing plans to embark on a $1 billion biometrics project ^[1] and construct an advanced biometrics facility to be shared with the Pentagon has the American Civil Liberties Union ^[2] on red alert.

In an exclusive interview with Raw Story, attorney Chris Calabrese, an ACLU's legislative counsel in Washington, D.C., warned that this move in particular was indicative of a fast approaching mass surveillance state that poses a "grave danger" to American values.

The FBI's forthcoming biometrics center will be based on a system constructed by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and part of that system is already operating today in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Starting with fingerprints, and creating a global law enforcement database for the sharing of those biometric images, the system is slated to expand outward, eventually encompassing facial mapping and other advanced forms of computer-aided identification.

To help ramp up the amount of data flooding into this center, the FBI said that electronic fingerprint scanners would be sent to state and local police agencies, which would be empowered to capture prints from any suspect, even if they haven't been arrested or convicted of a crime.

"We think rolling out these kind of invasive measures is really another step toward mass surveillance of the population," Calabrese told Raw Story. "I mean, now if you're just walking around on the street, do you think that automatically police should be able to check your fingerprint? Seems very invasive to us."

But it's more than just invasive, he suggested: it's a fundamental revolution in American values.

"Facial recognition is one of the most invasive biometrics because it allows surreptitious tracking at a distance," Calabrese continued. "They can secretly track you from camera to camera, location to location. That has enormous implications, not just for security but also for American society. I mean, we are now at a point where we can automatically track people. Computers could do that. That's what, we think, is a grave danger to our privacy."

And it's not just a rhetorical threat, where -- as many a police officer has said -- if you aren't doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide. It could actually go so far as changing the culture of law enforcement as a whole, Calabrese said.

"Law enforcement's focus should stay where it's been for a 100 years: finding bad guys, but since 9/11 the focus has shifted toward terrorism. It's suddenly this idea that's like, well, let's scrutinize the whole U.S. population before trying to find bad guys."

He went on: "In the United States, you're innocent until proven guilty for a reason. You're supposed to have the right and the ability to live your life free of government scrutiny. That's fundamental to American values.

"That's what we're really talking about here: a shift in American values, from a place where you can live your life unencumbered by government scrutiny to one where you really have to worry whether the government is watching you either through a video camera, or a police officer who could step up and potentially ask you for a fingerprint at any time."

Mr. President, tear down this list

Another item in the FBI's announcement that alarmed civil libertarians was the creation of yet another database dedicated to tracking certain individuals. The FBI said this latest database, called the "Repository for Individuals of Special Concern," would only focus on wanted criminals, registered sex offenders and "suspected terrorists."

But considering the Obama administration's secretive policy which strips Miranda rights from U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism -- a policy issued in January and revealed yesterday by The Wall Street Journal ^[3] -- that database could become a flashpoint.

Miranda rights are what allows suspects to remain silent in the face of police questioning, and have an attorney present for their interrogation. The Obama administration's policy says that law enforcement may deny these rights if they deem the situation "exceptional," even if it doesn't pertain to any immediate threat.

While Calabrese did not address the issue of Obama's Miranda policy, the ACLU at-large did issue a statement yesterday ^[4], condemning the administration.

"It is important to remember that no change in FBI interrogation policy can alter the constitutional imperative that information gained without Miranda warnings is inadmissible against a defendant in a court of law where no public safety exception exists," they said. "This principle is fundamental to the American system of justice."

But what about these lists? And specifically, the "Individuals of Special Concern," which is now only likely to grow in importance as a database containing some individuals who the president potentially considers to be unprotected by the U.S. Constitution.

"The biggest problem with the terrorist database is not having a separate database of people," Calabrese said. "There may be situations where you have high value targets, you know, you want to make sure you can immediately get a ping-back on. The problem is how people get on those lists. Have they been connected to a crime? Is there an arrest warrant out for them? In situations like that, obviously it's fine. We want the police to be able to find dangerous people. Once there's a warrant out for a person's arrest, obviously we want to give law enforcement the tools they need to capture those people."

Unfortunately, he added, that's not a reflection of today's U.S. law enforcement.

"What we have instead is secret watch lists, where people don't know they're on the list, they don't know the standard for putting them on the lists and there's no way to get off the lists," Calabrese said. "That's a serious problem."

"We're not opposed to technology, but we are seeing technology advancing rapidly and often times legal protections aren't keeping up. When it's now technologically possible to do things like capture a facial recognition image and use the various cameras across a city to track somebody using that image automatically ... When that's technologically possible, the only barrier between us and widespread mass surveillance is legal protections. They don't exist right now, in many cases."

Image: Attorney Chris Calabrese. Courtesy photo via the ACLU.

URL to article: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/25/exclusive-u-s-expansion-of-biometric-tech-poses-grave-danger-aclu-tells-raw-story/

URLs in this post:

[1] a $1 billion biometrics project: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/24/fbi-dedicates-1-billion-to-massive-biometrics-identification-program/

[2] the American Civil Liberties Union: http://action.aclu.org/site/PageServer?pagename=FP_about_accomplishments&cr=1

[3] revealed yesterday by The Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704050204576218970652119898.html

[4] did issue a statement yesterday: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/24/obama-curtails-miranda-rights-for-american-terrorism-suspects/

Scott Walker Kills His Wisconsin Union Busting Bill By Publishing It

March 25, 2011
By Sarah Jones

Wisconsin Republicans stunned the nation today when they published Governor Scott Walker’s anti-union bill in seeming violation of a restraining order. The legislation was enjoined from publishing by a judge who ruled that Republicans violated the Open Meeting law when passing it. By publishing their anti-union legislation and turning it into law, Scott Walker and the Republicans may have killed the bill.

Republicans skirted the judge’s order today by having the legislation published by an agency other than the specifically enjoined Secretary of State, claiming that the constitution does not specify which body must publish a law, while Democrats claim that the law must be published by the SOS.

Which body may or must publish the law appears a moot point, given the judge’s specific ruling, wherein it is clear that she is enjoining and restraining the bill in a much broader context than merely the SOS:

The Wisconsin State Journal reported:

An order signed March 18 by Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi bars La Follette from publishing the bill. But as she verbally issued her decision at the end of a hearing the same day, the scope of her order was broader.

“I do, therefore, restrain and enjoin the further implementation of 2011 Wisconsin Act 10,” Sumi said, according to a transcript. “The next step in implementation of that law would be the publication of that law by the secretary of state. He is restrained and enjoined from such publication until further order of this court.”

By attempting to go around the judge’s order, the Republicans violate the spirit of her ruling if not the letter of it. In any case, this won’t be the Wisconsin Republicans first run at violating the law in order to push their anti-union measure through.

It’s obvious from recent events, including the Wisconsin Republicans attempting to intimidate a Professor who wrote a critical article about their actions for the New York Times by demanding his emails through the Wisconsin Open Records law, that the Republicans are desperate. Apparently they are so desperate that they are no longer trying to hide their agenda under the guise of a budget issue, let alone pretend what they are doing is legal.

But what the Wisconsin Republicans have really done by publishing the anti-union bill is kill their own legislation. By publishing the bill, the Republicans have made it easier to fight in court, because it is now law and hence, can now be permanently overturned.

The Wisconsin State Journal reported:

By doing so, Pines said, the bureau made moot the actions currently before the state Supreme Court and the state Court of Appeals. He said that would actually simplify the case that District Attorney Ismael Ozanne has to make on the alleged open meetings violation by a legislative conference committee, now that he doesn’t have to worry about whether a judge has the authority to stop legislation before it takes effect.

“I suspect that if Judge Sumi was willing to take up a (temporary restraining order) against publication I suspect she’d do the same thing on enforcement (of the new law),” Pines said.

Pines said it also opens up legal channels for other groups who have been waiting to challenge the law but had to wait until it was enacted, like Madison Teachers Inc., which plans to file its own lawsuit on Monday. He said it has not been decided whether MTI will seek a restraining order or injunction barring enforcement of the law.

“This is going to unleash a tsunami of litigation,” Pines said.

The irony here is that they didn’t kill their bill by passing it without the necessary quorum, violating state Open Meeting laws or publishing it in violation of a judge’s order; they killed it with their own hubris. Now that it’s published, it is much easier to have it stopped permanently. It can and will be fought on all of the above grounds as well as countless others — amounting to a “tsunami of litigation” against the anti-union law.

By publishing this bill, Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans remind Americans about the fatal flaw of the modern day Republican Party: It and its leaders lack judgment. The publishing of this bill which was now not only passed while violating state law but now published in violation of a court order smells vaguely but sickeningly of George W Bush’s arrogant invasion of a sovereign nation. Just as Bush refused to wait for the UN, Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans could not allow the process to play out properly. Instead, they went all rogue cowboy and reminded us why we swore we’d never vote Republican again.

Republicans are great dictators, but they are terrible chess players. Wisconsinites will want to be sure to vote for their state Supreme Court justice on April 5. After all, dictators get into office when people stay home from the voting booth.

http://www.politicususa.com/en/scott-walker-kills-wisconsin-bill