Gonzales’s Rationale on Phone Data Disputed By Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writer

Civil liberties lawyers yesterday questioned the legal basis that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales used Tuesday to justify the constitutionality of collecting domestic telephone records as part of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism program.

While not confirming a USA Today report May 11 saying the National Security Agency has been collecting phone-call records of millions of Americans, Gonzales said such an activity would not require a court warrant under a 1979 Supreme Court ruling because it involved obtaining “business records.” Under the 27-year-old court ruling in Smith v. Maryland , “those kinds of records do not enjoy Fourth Amendment protection,” Gonzales said. “There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in those kinds of records,” he added.

Noting that Congress in 1986 passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in reaction to the Smith v. Maryland ruling to require court orders before turning over call records to the government, G. Jack King Jr. of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said Gonzales is correct in saying “the administration isn’t violating the Fourth Amendment” but “he’s failing to acknowledge that it is breaking” the 1986 law, which requires a court order “with a few very narrow exceptions.”

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said, “The government is bound by the laws Congress passes, and when the attorney general doesn’t even mention them, it is symptomatic of the government’s profound disrespect for the rule of law.”

Editor at Conservative Magazine To Be Top Policy Adviser to Bush By Michael A. Fletcher, Washington Post Staff Writer

President Bush appointed a longtime scholar at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday to be his top domestic policy adviser, a post that has been vacant since February, when Claude A. Allen stepped down after being charged with stealing more than $5,000 in a phony refund scheme.

Karl Zinsmeister, who has worked the past 12 years as editor in chief of the American Enterprise magazine, is slated to assume his White House post June 12. At the institute, he focused on examining cultural issues, as well as social and economic trends. His columns for the magazine included pieces praising Wal-Mart’s efficiency and extolling the role of religion in forming the glue that bonds communities.

Zinsmeister, 47, also has written three books defending the war in Iraq, a nation he has visited four times as an embedded journalist. … [H]e argues, [good news in Iraq] is often overlooked by much of the media.

“What the establishment media covering Iraq have utterly failed to make clear today is this central reality: With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over,” Zinsmeister wrote in his column last June. [mjh: Mission Accomplished!]

“Karl has broad policy experience and a keen insight into many of the issues that face America’s families and entrepreneurs, including race, poverty, welfare, and education,” Bush said in a statement. “He is an innovative thinker and an accomplished executive. He will lead my domestic policy team with energy and a fresh perspective.” …

As Bush’s assistant for domestic policy, Zinsmeister will be called on to brief the president on a wide spectrum of issues, including education, housing, space exploration and poverty. [mjh: “space exploration”? Send Bush to Mars!]

One must struggle to get past the sneering dismissal Max Boot makes of any and all civil liberties concerns people have with the Endless War Against Evil, er, Terror. Even after all his jabs at our “silliness,” he pauses to admit FISA was justified after J Edgar Hoover and Dick Nixon. Still, he says FISA is now archaic and should be “euthanized.” Let the President do anything he wants to (he is already, by the way) and hope whistle-blowers shall set us free again (ignoring this administration’s efforts, like Nixon’s, to seal all leaks but the ones they use for their own purposes).

Forget privacy, we need to spy more by Max Boot, Los Angeles Times

If civil liberties agitators, grandstanding politicians and self-righteous newspaper editorialists have their way, we will have to give up our most potent line of defense because of largely hypothetical concerns about privacy violations. …

All this concern with privacy would be touching if it weren’t so selective. With a few keystrokes, Google will display anything posted by or about you. … Such information is routinely gathered and sold by myriad marketing outfits. So it’s OK to violate your privacy to sell you something — but not to protect you from being blown up. [mjh: nonsense, Max — it’s bad enough when marketers do it, worse when it’s the government.]

HOW FAR DO the civil-liberties absolutists want to take their logic? [mjh: he continues with a specious straw man argument about Miranda warnings in Afganistan.] …

Much of this silliness can be traced to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which for the first time made judges the overseers of our spymasters. This was an understandable reaction to such abuses as the FBI’s wiretapping of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But FISA is a luxury we can no longer afford. …

This archaic law should be euthanized. Replace it with legislation that gives the president permission to order any surveillance deemed necessary….

So far there has been no suggestion that the NSA has done anything with disreputable motives. The administration has nothing to be ashamed of. The only scandal here is that some people favor unilateral disarmament in our struggle against the suicide bombers.

It is touching how much faith people have that our technology will stop determined lunatics who use box cutters and donkey carts, if only the whining civil libertarians would get out of the way. mjh

PS: I can’t read “Max Boot” without thinking what a great name it would be for a fascist: he meets all enemies of freedom with Max Boot. I wonder if he chose his name like Homer Simpson chose “Max Power.”

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both. — Benjamin Franklin

Duhbya is the least articulate president — perhaps of all. In addition, his administration is the most secretive (closed-mouthed and closed-minded) of all. So, prepare to scratch your head trying to understand the official position on a common vs official vs unifying vs national language, also known as “English-Plus” to the Administration, as in “Duhbya is a double-plus-good leader!”

Our national language is BUllSHit. mjh

English as US’s ‘official language’ a semantic question: Gonzales – Yahoo! News

Further muddying a political debate on the country’s principal language that has arisen amid a wave of largely Spanish-speaking illegal immigrants, Gonzales said Bush “has never been supportive of English-only, or English as the official language.”

“But certainly we support the fact that English is the national language of the United States of America,” he told ABC’s “This Week” program.

Bush’s top legal advisor, Gonzales — himself the grandson of Mexican immigrants — was attempting to clear up seemingly conflicting White House positions on two competing US Senate bills that seek to establish in law the position of English as the country’s official language.

One bill would make English the US “national language”, replacing a previous draft making it the “official language”.

The second bill said the US government “shall preserve and enhance the role of English as the common and unifying language of America.” Both passed the Senate Thursday.

While Gonzales had indicated Bush — who himself speaks some Spanish — opposed the laws, on Friday Bush spokesman Tony Snow suggested his support.

“I think that both of these amendments are consistent” with Bush’s wishes, Snow said.

“This is really a question of semantics,” Gonzales said.