The MechMed Blog

BY LEONARD PITTS JR.

KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS

Another president, perhaps.

Maybe then it would be easier to look the other way, give a tacit nod to the abrogation of constitutional freedoms as a wartime necessity. After all, Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus during the Civil War and history does not begrudge him for it, given that he faced an enemy massed almost

literally within sight of the White House.

But this is not President Lincoln we’re talking about. It’s not even President Franklin D. Roosevelt, succumbing to post-Pearl Harbor hysteria and interning thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry.

No, we’re talking about President George W. Bush — King George, if you will — and last month’s New York Times bombshell that a few months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without warrants on phone calls and e-mails of hundreds if not thousands of U.S. citizens.

Which happens to be against the law, and a good law at that. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 was written after revelations that the government spied on and used dirty tricks against civil rights activists and war protesters who had done nothing more sinister than exercise their constitutional right of dissent. Before it can bug any American suspected of international crimes or conspiracies, the government must, under the FISA, first obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in closed session.

With the proverbial stroke of a pen, Bush has obliterated that protection. If the government believes you have a terrorist connection, it is now empowered to snoop on your international phone calls or e-mails without court approval. King George and his enablers argue that this is necessary to give investigators the agility they need to pursue terrorists.

It is a seductive argument. One is appalled to imagine the Statue of Liberty blown to smithereens while those who might have saved it are dithering over legal papers.

So, yeah, another president and you might almost buy it. But this is the same president who has, over the last five years, repeatedly demonstrated utter disregard for the rights, freedoms and basic intelligence of the people he serves. Moreover, he’s the one who last year promised an audience in Buffalo that “nothing has changed” with regard to government surveillance of citizens. “When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists,” he said, “we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.”

We know now what he knew then: This was a lie.

Want to guess how long it takes to get a warrant to eavesdrop? It can be done in hours. Even minutes. In extraordinary circumstances, investigators can listen in for up to 72 hours “without” a warrant. You know how many warrant requests were submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Court last year? According to the Times, 1,754. Know how many were rejected? None.

So agility is not the issue here. The drift of the presidency toward dictatorship is.

Maybe you figure it has nothing to do with law-abiding you and if “those people” weren’t up to something nefarious, the feds wouldn’t be investigating them. Of course, one might argue that it’s foolish to impute infallibility to a government that sometimes sends Social Security checks to dead cats.

Still, it’s not hard to understand the urge to look the other way. Because with all due respect to the threat terrorists pose, Franklin Roosevelt was right. Fear itself is still the first enemy.

When people are scared, they don’t think, they don’t reason, and they want nothing so desperately as to just stop being scared. So often, they’ll go along with anything that holds out that promise. Even if it means allowing the rights our forebears won from Britain’s King George III to be denuded by America’s King George I.

Still, we should be ashamed.

Freedom deserves a better epitaph than fear.

LEONARD PITTS JR. is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla. 33132. Write to him at lpitts@herald.com.

An article by David Brooks of the NY Times

“Dude, we totally need to hang out. … Erin, you’re a [great] waitress and friend. We definitely need to hang out sometime. … You rock my world. It was awesome seeing you. … Where did you go!!! I haven’t seen you in a long time and I NEED to see you!!! Cause I love you!!! … Happy New Year my sexy friend. I love you sooo much!”

Companionship isn’t dead. Go to MySpace.com or Facebook or Xanga or any of the other online sites where people leave messages on the home pages of their friends and you’ll see these great waves of praise and encouragement. People visit their friends’ pages and drop lovebombs. There’s scarcely a critical word about anyone or anything in the whole social network. It’s just fervent declarations of friendship, vows to get together soon and memories of great times gone by.

So they bond online with an almost desperate enthusiasm. The Web pages they create are part dorm-room wall, part bulletin board, part young person’s society page. They post photos of favorite celebrities, dirty postcards and music videos. And there are tons of chug-and-grins: photos of the gang gripping beers at a bar, photos of the tribe chugging vodka on the beach, photos of the posse doing shots at an apartment. Scroll down the page and there are people falling over each other, beaming and mugging for the camera phone. You can see why Rupert Murdoch just spent $580 million to buy the company that owns MySpace. It’s become a treasured institution and, in many ways, quite a positive one. But, this being youth culture in America, of course there’s something to make parents cringe.

Every social environment has its own lingua franca, and the one on these sites has been shaped by “American Pie,” spring break and “Girls Gone Wild.” The sites are smutty. Facebook, which is restricted to students and alumni of colleges, is rollicking but respectable. But there is a huge class distinction between the people on Facebook and the much larger and less educated population that uses MySpace. The atmosphere on MySpace is much raunchier.

To get the attention of fast-clicking Web surfers, many women have posed for their photos in bikinis or their underwear or in Penthouse-parody, “I clutch my breasts for you” positions. Here’s a woman in a jokey sadomasochistic pose. There’s a woman with a caption: “Yes, I make out with girls. Get over it” – complete with a photo of herself liplocked with a buddy.

Some sociologists worry that we’re bowling alone, but these sites (MySpace has 20 million visitors a month) are all about community. They’re commonly used by people in the new stage of life that’s been created over the past few decades. They are in their early to mid-20′s; they’re out of school but have no expectation they should marry soon. They’re highly mobile, half-teen/half-adult, looking for a life plan and in between the formal networks of school, career and family.

The girls are the peacocks in this social universe. Their pages are racy, filled with dirty jokes and macha declarations: “I’m hot and like to party. Why have one boy when there are plenty to go around?!” The boys’ pages tend to be passive and unimaginative: a guy posing with a beer or next to a Corvette. In a world in which the girls have been schooled in sexual aggressiveness, the boys sit back and let the action come to them.

On most Web pages, there’s a chance to list your favorite TV shows and books. And while the TV lists are long (“The OC,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Nip/Tuck,” etc.) many of the book lists will make publishers suicidal: “Books! Ha! Me! What a joke! … I think reading’s ridiculous. … I don’t finish books very often but I’m attempting ‘Smart Women Finish Rich.’… This is what I have to say about books (next to an icon of Bart Simpson’s rear end).”

The idea on these sites is to show you’re a purebred party animal, which leaves us fogies with two ways to see MySpace.

The happy view is that this is a generation of wholesome young people building nurturing communities and the smutty talk is just a harmless way of demarcating an adult-free social space. The dark view is that these prolonged adolescents are filled with earnest desires for meaningful human contact, but they live in a culture that has provided them with no vocabulary to create these sorts of bonds except through cleavage and vodka.

Depending on the person, both views are true

Reading the paper today and have some links..
Big secret revealed…. This is what I’ve been working on for the last 2 years.

Detroit Free Press article.
Detroit News article.

“The Chrysler Group, in particular, is planning some antics.

Chrysler spokesman Jason Vines was mum on the details, but the introduction for the Wrangler might be reminiscent of the best-remembered public relations stunt in Detroit auto show history.

Back in 1992, Bob Lutz, who was then president of Chrysler, and Coleman Young, who was then mayor of Detroit, drove a Grand Cherokee off the assembly line at Chrysler’s New Jefferson plant, down Jefferson Avenue, up the steps of Cobo Hall, and right on through a set of glass front doors at Cobo, which were specially prepared for the stunt.

Whatever Chrysler is up to, it has notified city officials of the potential hazards.”
We sort of did it again.