Saturday, January 7, 2006

Today's Political Rant

On December 28, the Rasmussen Poll announced that it had recently surveyed Americans and determined that...

Sixty-four percent (64%) of Americans believe the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States. A Rasmussen Reports survey found that just 23% disagree.

Today, results were released of an AP-Ipsos poll that said...

A majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists, an AP-Ipsos poll shows. 56 percent of respondents...said the government should be required to first get a court warrant to eavesdrop on the overseas calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens when those communications are believed to be tied to terrorism.

Now, let's assume for the moment that both these polls are correct — a small assumption with the AP one, a larger one with Rasmussen but still, in both cases, an assumption. These two polls are not mutually exclusive. If I believe the Bush administration should be allowed to snoop on the phone calls of terrorist suspects but should do so only with warrants and judicial oversight, I'd be with the majority in both polls. The thing is: Neither poll reflects the actual situation. Neither is really asking about the law as it currently stands.

The NSA law allows the administration to eavesdrop on just about anybody it wants. They're supposed to get a warrant before they do it but if they feel time is of the essence, they can do it immediately and then they have 72 hours to secure the warrant afterwards. Some people don't seem to know about this last part. A lot of Bush defenders are arguing for his position as if complying with the law as written means that they have to go to a judge beforehand and therefore can't act swiftly. Not so. They just have to let this secret court that was set up to keep an eye on wiretaps know what they're doing.

The controversy is not about whether if Osama bin Laden phones you, the government should be listening in. It's about whether the Bush administration can overlook a law that was set up to govern how wiretaps would be done, and can conduct them without any oversight, either before or after the fact. How come nobody's polling on how we feel about that?

• Posted at 4:05 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Glenn Greenwald refutes the argument that it harmed National Security for the New York Times to reveal that our government spies on phone calls without obtaining warrants. I think he's right. They didn't aid terrorists in any way. All they did was to point out that the Bush administration may be violating the law.

• Posted at 8:42 AM · LINK

You've Become Unstuck in Time, Charlie Brown!

Robert Faires writes to ask about the Peanuts reprints that are currently being made available to newspapers...

Sometime in the last week or two, Peanuts jumped way back in time. I don't really recall what time frame the strips were in before the jump — early to mid-seventies, I'd guess — but now they look to be late fifties/early sixties, and considerably earlier than the period of strips when they started the "classic" repeats around the time of Schulz's illness and passing. It's not that I mind at all, since I actually like the era these strips are from better than the seventies and later, when the characters and humor took a turn that didn't work as well for me, but it struck me as a curious move, one that kind of came out of nowhere, and I wondered if you had any reaction to it.

Well, the first thing that needs to be explained here is that United Feature Syndicate offers two different groups of vintage strips to its subscribing newspapers. One set is from the nineties (though it hasn't always proceeded in sequence) and the other started with 1974 strips and then jumped back to 1973 strips and then to 1972 and so on. The idea here as I understand it is that some papers wanted the older strips and were willing to deal with the fact that they have different proportions than most modern-day strips. Some weren't and so they run strips from after Mr. Schulz adjusted his dimensions to match everyone else's.

Anyway, the older package was in the middle of a 1969 storyline about Charlie Brown, Linus and Snoopy going to a sports banquet to meet the round-headed kid's hero, Joe Shlabotnik. On January 1, they suddenly abandoned that story and hopped from 1969 to 1959. (Today's strip is from January 10, 1959.) My reaction? I think it would be neater if they'd started in the late fifties and worked forward but it's all wonderful stuff. As we'll probably all discover after Fantagraphics has more of its wonderful Peanuts archive books out, it's quite arguable when the strip "got good." A lot of it depends on how you take to the gradual humanization of Snoopy and the focus on his fantasies. Some thought that was when the strip stopped being about children...and of course, others thought it was never about children. Personally, I thought Schulz began to hit repetitive patches in the seventies so that was never the ideal place to start. In a sense, I thought the last ten or twelve years of strips were better than the ten or twelve years that preceded them but they're all worthy of another look.

• Posted at 1:30 AM · LINK