February 22nd, 2008
I’d like to say that if I seem a bit off this week, it’s because I’m still trying to get my head around the mysterious appearance of egg loaf in a cooking pan one night earlier this week.
What is egg loaf? I’m not entirely sure myself. It was supposed to be an asparagus frittata. Those tender shoots of early Spring asparagus looked so good at the Farmer’s Market on Wednesday that I knew something had to be done with them.
There were obscenely fresh eggs and artisan cheese to be had as well. The choice was simple, to frittata, or not frittata.
That’s no choice at all, really. I enjoy the rustic feel of a frittata way too much for there to be any choice in the matter. Just some simple ingredients, roughly chopped, mixed with a savory base of scrambled egg, and cooked slowly to set. It’s a dish that’s entirely versatile, able to support nearly any flavor with a minimum of fuss.
Leave it to the Italians. None of this fussy soufflé crap. Soufflés are complicated and temperamental. They’re the thoroughbred race horses of the egg world, often graceful and inspiring, but never easy to work with.
Frittatas, on the other hand, are simple, honest, and happy to be part of your dinner plans.
Egg loaf is anything but honest. It looks just like a frittata, but it’s lying.
Instead of staying loose and moist like a frittata, Wednesday’s egg loaf was mysteriously dense and dry.
It was an abstraction of a frittata with all the life sucked out of it. Firm like a sponge half-dried and left to sit behind the sink at 3am. Oddly enough, it had the perfect consistency for a nice sandwich bread, minus the crust. It felt as if you could slice it, spread some mustard, and go to town with some salami.
But that would be wrong, because it was made out of egg and cheese.
How did it happen? We’d really like to know, although that’s not all. More important is finding out how we turned a simple frittata into a monstrous egg loaf so that it never happens again.
It’s become one of those “mistakes of the past” moments in my kitchen, hopefully never to be repeated.
A failed frittata may not seem to have much to do with the news, but I brought up the story to make a point.
There are a lot of people out there who don’t pay attention to the news because more often than not it’s depressing or troubling. There isn’t a lot of good news out there, and that little bit is buried underneath stories about the latest celebrity sex scandal or bombings in a country that seems further away than it really is.
People turn away from the news because they can’t feel good about bombings, or don’t like feeling good about that celebrity scandal.
Much as I hate to admit it, talking about celebrity scandals seems to fill a need for gossip shared by humans. Likewise for bad news.
Bad news is like egg loaf. We need to talk about it, figure out what happened, and what went wrong, even if that’s an uncomfortable conversation, because otherwise nothing changes the next time around.
Broadcasting this Friday evening on the 22nd of February, ‘08, with the goal of sparking some conversation, comfortable or otherwise, this is the Timothy Jordan Show News.
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Unfortunately it’s all too often that people find reasons to avoid having those uncomfortable conversations.
Monday afternoon the Supreme Court refused to hear a case important to the ongoing warrantless wiretapping debate. The ACLU was protesting the warrantless wiretapping program for a group of journalists and lawyers on the basis that warrantless wiretapping infringed on their lawful right to private communications with their sources and clients. They also made the claim that the President’s declaration of authority to freely intercept the private communications under the guise of his executive war powers is unconstitutional.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the ACLU on both claims in July of last year, saying that they lacked the evidence to prove that they’ve been illegally wiretapped.
There is a well-documented case of illegal government wiretapping of a lawyer and his clients, decided in September of ‘07. Not only was there evidence of government violations of lawyer-client privilege and perjury by Federal agents, but Judge Aikens also ruled part of the Patriot Act unconstitutional in Mayfield vs U.S.A.
It would seem to be part of the public record that wiretapping of lawyers and clients has occurred, but this wasn’t enough for the 6th Circuit, or the Supreme Court. In denying to hear the case, the Supreme Court is agreeing with the appeals court that the ACLU doesn’t have enough evidence because of the State Secrets claim by the Federal government.
Essentially, arguing the case requires access to information about the warrantless wiretapping program, information which the government refuses to provide, and so the case can’t go forward.
If I were an ACLU lawyer, I’d be really frustrated right now. Arguing this case must feel like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube with your elbows.
• Mayfield vs. U.S.A. ruling PDF (122.2KB)
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Which is understandable, because writing about it with the goal of being interesting and informative is like trying to build a chicken out of lotion and balsa wood. Does that make any sense? No, I didn’t think so.
One of the other central issues in the debate over warrantless wiretapping doesn’t make sense, the Federal government’s claim that the major telecommunications companies need immunity from the legal system.
Why oh why would the telecoms need immunity from prosecution if they haven’t been doing anything wrong? That’s a critical question, and one that may have been answered by students at the University of Oregon School of Law.
Students writing for the school’s online law journal pointed out a little-noticed provision within the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, §1810, which covers civil liability in the event of unlawful electronic surveillance.
For the government and AT&T, a decision by the courts that the warrantless wiretapping program was indeed illegal, §1810 would authorize payments of $1,000, to each and every person affected, or $100 per day for each and every day of the violation, whichever happens to be the larger amount.
So… let’s see here. There are 365 days in a year. At $100 per day, that’s potentially $36,500 per person illegally wiretapped, per year. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is asserting in Hepting v. AT&T that virtually all internet traffic is being routed through NSA taps on AT&T switches, making all 303,477,000 U.S. citizens potential victims under §1810.
That’s potentially over $11 trillion in damages owed per year.
Not the sort of liability that a company takes on, and don’t think for a moment that AT&T’s lawyers are ignorant of §1810, without some kind of protection. They must be screaming bloody murder at the White House right now, demanding protection.
Just what promises were made to the telecom industry by the Bush administration back when they undertook the warrantless wiretapping of everyday Americans? Whatever assurances were offered to the companies, they should have known that the program was probably illegal.
The legal justifications for the warrantless wiretapping program are considered so secret by the White House that not even the chief legal counsel for the NSA was allowed to review them. How likely is it that the telecoms were fully briefed?
What kind of promise or incentive was enough for the telecoms to undertake a wiretapping program that was clearly illegal?
• Telecom liability, via The Legality
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At least people are finally paying attention to our President’s record in office. Mr. Bush’s job approval rating sank to a new low this week in a survey by the American Research Group.
In a survey of over a thousand households, the President’s approval rating sank to a bare 19%. Some 77% of Americans in the survey disapproved of his performance.
There’s no better way to describe these results than sub-Nixonian. At the end of his impeachment-interrupted Presidency, Mr. Nixon, no slouch in the illegal wiretapping department himself, was looking at a 24% approval rating.
The survey is even worse in economic terms. Only 14% of the people in the survey approved of the President’s economic policies.
We can only assume that massive tax cuts for the rich didn’t end up helping the middle class after all.
• American Research Group, economic survey results
• Historical Presidential approval ratings
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Our closest and dearest friend in the Persian Gulf, the Saudi government, is preparing to execute an illiterate woman on charges of witchcraft, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Two years ago Fawza Falih was arrested and charged with being a witch, based upon allegations of supernatural occurrences and one man who told religious police that she made him impotent.
Beaten to the point of needing hospitalization while in police custody, she then fingerprint signed a confession that she wasn’t able to read, according to Human Rights Watch. She was barred access to her lawyer by police before the trial, and the judge seeing the case banned her lawyer during the trial. She was sentenced to death in the name of “public interest”, HRW objected in a letter to Saudi King Abdullah.
Saudi judges and police have broad freedom to interpret the law, as the country has no written penal code.
• Woman to be executed as a witch
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At least they have that excuse. While we look down on the Saudis for torturing illiterate women, our own government describes its methods as “harsh interrogation”.
Several lawsuits and investigations have sought to determine just what meaning lay behind that entirely neutered phrase. One of those lead to the recent discovery that the CIA had destroyed video evidence, evidence that it didn’t reveal having until after the destruction, of two interrogations early in the Global War on abstract nouns.
The loss of those tapes caused an outcry by human rights groups, as well as members of the 9/11 Commission, who’d been told by the CIA that no video evidence of interrogations existed. That answer must have seemed unlikely at the time, about equally unlikely as the CIA only having two taped interrogations.
Doesn’t it seem odd that they would only record just those two? It should, because it’s not true.
According to a report called “Captured on Tape” by the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research, every single one of the more than 24,000 interrogations that have taken place at Guantanamo since it became our very own little gulag in the tropics.
Based upon U.S. government documents, the report details the policies behind video recordings, the many agencies involved, and evidence that “harsh interrogation” has a deeply sinister meaning.
The report’s authors, students at Seton Hall Law school warn that if tapes have already been destroyed, the others are equally vulnerable. If people are being tortured at Guantanamo, these tapes are the best evidence that we can hope for.
• Captured on Tape, Seton Hall Law PDF (895.4KB)
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So is it good news? Not really. It’s like that egg loaf. If we talk about it, maybe we can make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
Fortunately it isn’t all egg loaf. There are a few folks out there fighting against egg loaf in all its forms. We think that those people are excellent.
There’s a group out there that always makes us think of egg loaf, the Recording Industry Association of America. Their fight to maintain a system of copyright law that’s been obsolete since the dawn of the digital age has cost millions of dollars, and ruined more than a few lives.
But there’s been one man consistently pointing out how wrong, wrong, wrong they are. He’s a lawyer named Lawrence Lessig, and he’s the focus of a movement to draft him for a run at the U.S. Congress.
Already an expert at the forefront of copyright law issues in the digital age, Mr. Lessig has turned his attention to the role of corruption in government and society.
With the recent death of Rep. Tom Lantos, there’s an opening to fill out the remainder of his term. Sparked by a few people who thought, “Hey, we should try and get somebody really intelligent to run for Congress for a change,” the group has not only engaged the interest of Mr. Lessig himself, but over 4,000 people who’ve volunteered time and money to help out with the campaign.
We’ve got to admit that Lawrence Lessig is one of the heros of the News Staff, and the chance of seeing someone like him working in our government seems something out of fantasy.
More information is available at draftlessig.org, lessig08.org, or linked from this evening’s News post at timothyjordanshow.com.
According to Mr. Lessig, he’s seriously considering making the run. He could use some help and advice about Federal election law, so if you want to have a hand in making something excellent happen, get onto the intertubes and see what you can offer.
A special election to fill the remainder of Mr. Lantos’ term in Congress will be held April 8th. We’ll be bringing our listeners more as this story of potential excellence develops.
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And that’s the News for February 22nd, ‘08.