No Summer Vacation for Attacks on our Civil Liberties

No Summer Vacation for Attacks on our Civil Liberties

It might seem that June has been a great month for advocates of civil liberties, particularly with the Supreme Court's stinging rebuke of the Bush Administrations to deny prisoners at Guantanamo due process and the rights of habeas corpus.

But if it seems that enemy combatants will finally get a chance to confront their accusers in court, Americans at home are facing the prospect of more spying on every phone call, every key stroke, every text message they send.

Nor will they ever be able to find out if their telecommunications companies spied on them and how extensive that spying was.

Why? Because it appears that Democrats may be getting ready to capitulate to a lame duck administration and effectively grant these telecommunications companies immunity from prosecution.

Even more cynically, they are dressing up this capitulation with a legal fig leaf. Congressional aides have leaked the information that a new bill will allow the “federal district court deciding on retroactive immunity [to] review whether there was 'substantial evidence' the companies had received assurances from the government that the administration’s program was legal.”

In other words, these companies only have to demonstrate that the Bush Administration told them the spying was legal and they're off the hook, not just for the spying they've allegedly engaged in, but for all future spying. As long as our government gives them a “Get out of Jail Free” card in advance, they can spy on as much as they want, and we'll never know if, when, or how much.

A New York Times June 18^th editorial entitled, “Mr. Bush v. the Bill of Rights,” notes that “approving [such] immunity would be tantamount to retroactively declaring the spying operation to have been legal.” Even worse, according to this editorial, is that the new “compromise” bill would give the government “too much leeway to acquire communications in the United States without individual warrants or even a showing of probable cause, greatly reduce judicial review, and remain in force for six years, which is too long.”

What should anger all Americans is that this important legislation which undermines our Constitutional right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure is being passed in the last days of a Presidential administration when voters are on vacation, distracted with high energy costs, and generally not paying attention to anything except the election campaigns.

Sidelining this legislation would do nothing to jeopardize current and ongoing efforts to fight terrorism. Current FISA legislation still lets the Bush Administration spy now and get a warrant later.

So why is Congress rushing to pass this ill-considered immunity for telecommunications companies and an even worse sell out of our civil liberties? And where is the Democratic leadership of Steny Hoyer, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and yes, Barack Obama, on this issue?

Maybe Americans should call their representatives and tell them that even if they're on vacation, they're not out to lunch when it comes to their basic rights and corporate accountability.

Soothing the Parents – How to Send Your Kids off to College without Making Mom and Dad Cry

Soothing the Parents – How to Send Your Kids off to College without Making Mom and Dad Cry

This past week I attended “family orientation” at the University of Texas at Austin. I wasn't quite sure what this was going to turn out to be.

After all, when I went off to college twenty-seven years ago, my mother dropped me and my trunk off at my dorm room and left the next day. My husband's family simply put him on a plane and trusted a family friend to transport him to campus. They didn't ask for information about my classes or student support services or safety on campus, although my family, I must admit, was half hoping I'd become desperately homesick and think about attending a school closer to home.

But here I was, almost thirty years later, in a beautifully appointed, air-conditioned ballroom with hundreds of other middle-aged men and women listening to administrators, college kids, and deans reassure us over and over with the mantra: “We're going to take care of your kids. We're going to take care of your kids.”

At first this seemed like a kind gesture, and then it started to feel almost a little creepy, as if they were all expecting us to burst into tears and grab our kids saying, “You can't have them! You can't have them!”

A couple of days later after I had had some time to think about this some more, I began to wonder what motivates this kind of concern on the part of universities and colleges to try to make parents feel comfortable about leaving their kids in a “safe” environment.

Is it because college costs so much these days that schools feel they must treat families like customers and make them feel better about the “product” (a college education) they are purchasing?

Is it because more families are sending their kids to college and this elicits more anxiety in families who have never sent a child away to school?

Is it because of media coverage of sensational crimes on campuses like the shooting at Virginia Tech?

Are we all now living in a culture of fear that may magnify the real dangers we face in everyday life?

Are middle-class kids so much more sheltered now growing up when they spend most most hours of the day supervised at day-care, school, after-school activities, and sports that the transition to the independence of college living is a much bigger step towards adulthood than it used to be?

For me, thinking about this anxiety about the safety of my children made me realize once again how ambivalent I feel about our cultural obsession with eliminating every possible danger.

At some point, it seems counter-productive, the same way we've discovered that using anti-bacterial household products have made our homes “too” clean so that our kids may be underexposed to enough germs to generate a healthy auto-immune response or that we may be risking creating “superbugs” that our drugs can't treat.

If my kids hadn't biked to school on their own, or taken public transportation on their own, even traveled by themselves, I'd be a lot more worried about how my oldest son would make the transition to college.

But with a functioning cell phone, common sense, and his karate training, I don't worry too much about his physical safety. We don't live in a perfectly safe world, and I know that really terrible things can happen when a young person is the wrong place at the wrong time, but I also trust that most of the time we are perfectly safe, and perhaps safer than we assume

So after we get back home from orientation, I'm going to put my son on a plane to college by himself and trust a family friend to help him get his stuff to campus. Even after thirty years, I don't think the world is a much more dangerous place for most of us.

So thanks UT-Austin for the pep talk, but I already know I can't keep my son under my care and supervision forever, and I don't even want to. He's ready to taken on his new-found independence and so am I.

Instant Gratification Takes Too Long - The realities of off-shore oil drilling

Instant Gratification Takes Too Long! The Realities of Offshore Oil Drilling

When I hear politicians like John McCain, Dick Cheney, John Sununu, and now more shamefully, Mel Martinez, tell the American public that off-shore oil drilling will lower gas prices (eventually), I can only think of that moment in the movie Postcards from the Edge where Meryl Streep mutters “instant gratification takes too long” as she's lying in bed in a rehab center while her mother (Shirley McClaine) chatters on about her career, oblivious to what her daughter really needs.

Once again politicians are also playing the role of overbearing stage mother, telling Americans that if they just let a little oil drilling take place off shore, all will be well again, just trust them, okay? Yeah right. Even if we were to open up every coastline and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling tomorrow, the earliest we'd see a drop of that oil at the pump would be in seven to ten years.

The only instant gratification that anyone is getting in this sorry political sham is the gratification of politicians who are running scared from the anger of their constituents over soaring prices at the pump. They think they've hit on a quick fix to placate the voters and they're trying to sell this snake oil, hoping that emotion rather than reason will hold sway over Americans, at least until November.

Scamming the voters only becomes sweeter if you're a politician who has accepted money from oil and gas interests, or if you and your friends have substantial investments in these industries.

For years Republicans have preached the same mantra to American energy needs: drill, drill, and drill some more, just at they respond to every economic bump by chanting: cut taxes, cut taxes, and cut taxes again, especially for those at the top 1% of the income scale.

Before Americans are taken in by this mantra, they might want to remember the rosy scenarios for oil prices that Republicans fed them before the Iraq War, and look how much that war has cost us, not only at the gas pump, but in terms of our national debt, and the lives of families who have lost sons or daughters or seen them severely injured both physically and mentally.

Is this really the party we want to trust to direct America's energy future?

Certainly Americans are right to be upset about the sharp spike in gasoline prices that has caught everyone off-guard, but that anger should be directed at both Republicans and Democrats for always directing energy policy first towards supply and hardly ever at demand.

In fact, most Americans are voting with their feet on gas prices by keeping them firmly fixed on the brakes instead of the gas pedal and reducing the number of miles driven for a record six consecutive months, an historical record.

Congress and the Bush administration could encourage and reward these grass-roots conservation efforts by creating tax credits for the purchase of hybrid or high mileage vehicles or by offering emergency funding to towns and cities who are finding themselves overwhelmed by increased use of mass transit, or even by providing block grants to states to fund additional forms of public transportation.

Even if some portion of the current rise in oil and gas prices stems from market speculators, Americans must face the new reality that they are competing globally with expanding economies in Asia for a limited supply of energy, and no amount of raving at your representative or senator will change that.

Americans should reject the quick fix of politicians who tell them oil drilling in U.S. coastal waters will do anything to help them with today's energy realities.

Republican politicians are taking the approach of those quick weight loss ads telling Americans that they can shed 10 pounds in two weeks and refusing to face the harsh reality that oil prices are simply and stubbornly set by supply and demand. The statistics are stark – the U.S. has roughly 3% of the world's oil reserves and consumes about 25% of current supply.

We can no longer drill or fight our way into an adequate supply of oil. Instead, it is time for Americans to look seriously at what they can do to reduce their demand.

Many of us are already doing this; it's too bad politicians can't follow their example because in the case of energy, instant gratification really does take too long.