They can see you naked – but you can’t see their rules:

Want to see the federal government’s regulation authorizing airport security personnel to pat you down before boarding a plane? You can’t. It’s a secret rule. Would you like to read the government regulation that says all passengers must present identification before being allowed on an aircraft, or what sort of identification meets the government requirement? Sorry, you’re out of luck. That’s a secret law, too. They’re just two of several secret regulations issued after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The intelligence bill that Congress sent to President Bush this week establishes a new “privacy council” that’s responsible for reviewing government activities and ensuring that privacy rights of Americans are protected.

The secret rules are an outgrowth of a 1974 law that allowed the Federal Aviation Administration to withhold from public disclosure any information “detrimental to the safety of persons traveling in air transportation.” After 9/11, Congress transferred airport security to the newly created TSA in the Department of Homeland Security and broadened the FAA rule to cover anything that might be “detrimental to the security of transportation.” The government is now declaring all forms of interstate transportation – including airplanes, buses, trains and boats – covered by the cloak of “sensitive security information” and moving to keep information from public scrutiny, said Todd Tatelman, an attorney with the Congressional Research Service. Even the wording of regulations authorizing government employees to carry out the procedures is kept secret. TSA spokesman Darrin Kayser said the regulations aren’t available for public reading because that might provide terrorists with information on airport operations.

Looks like – contra that liberal media – poverty and racism may be barriers to Black achievement after all:

Karolyn Tyson, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and William Darity Jr., an economist at Duke and U.N.C., coordinated an 18-month ethnographic study at 11 schools in North Carolina. What they found was that black students basically have the same attitudes about achievement as their white counterparts do: they want to succeed, understand that doing well in school has important consequences in later life and feel better about themselves the better they do. So where does the idea of the burden of “acting white” come from? One explanation the authors offer will make sense to anyone who has ever seen a John Hughes movie: there’s an “oppositional peer culture” in every high school — the stoners and the jocks making fun of the nerds and the student-government types. When white burnouts give wedgies to white A students, the authors argue, it is seen as inevitable, but when the same dynamic is observed among black students, it is pathologized as a racial neurosis.

More insidiously, the authors say, the idea that failing black kids pull down successful black kids can be used as an excuse by administrators to conceal or justify discrimination in the public-education system. The one school where the researchers did find anxiety about “acting white” was the one in which black students were drastically underrepresented in the gifted-and-talented classes. And significantly, at this particular school, the notion of the burden of “acting white” was most pervasive not among the black students interviewed by the researchers, but among their teachers and administrators, who told researchers that blacks are “averse to success” and “don’t place a high value on education.”

Who’s the sick one here:

On June 15, 2003, Sgt. Frank ‘Greg’ Ford, a counterintelligence agent in the California National Guard’s 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion stationed in Samarra, Iraq, told his commanding officer, Capt. Victor Artiga, that he had witnessed five incidents of torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees at his base, and requested a formal investigation. 36 hours later, Ford, a 49-year-old with over 30 years of military service in the Coast Guard, Army and Navy, was ordered by U.S. Army medical personnel to lie down on a gurney, was then strapped down, loaded onto a military plane and medevac’d to a military medical center outside the country.

Josh Marshall (following the Jewish principle of gam zu l’tovah) offers the least incriminating explanation possible for why Bush rewarded State Rep. Gerald Allen with a White House visit for calling for books which allude to homosexuality to be buried in a big pit:

One possibility, of course, is that Allen was invited to the White House because Lynne Cheney wanted to see if she could get an exemption for Sisters, the lesbian romance novel she wrote in 1981.

Mark Weisbrot says what no one at Bush’s summit did:

That’s right, according to Reform Plan 2 of the carefully misnamed “President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security,” this partial privatization would mean a sizeable loss of benefits for most Americans. A 20-year-old just entering the labor force would lose 34 percent of his or her expected benefits under this plan. This would amount to almost $134,000 over a lifetime of retirement. They would have a chance to gain back, on average, about $47,000 of this from an individual account — provided the stock market doesn’t tank like it did from 2000-2002, just in time for their retirement. For the next poll, here is a more accurate question: would you like to see your Social Security retirement benefits cut by 34 percent, and have a chance at getting back a fraction of that from a private account? That’s for the young workers. The amount of the cuts decreases as you move up the age ladder, but the plan still provides a net loss for the vast majority of Americans.

How many people do you think would say yes to a deal like that? But that’s the deal that President Bush appears to be offering. His commission, which unlike other such bodies was stacked with people who favor privatization, came up with three plans. Mr. Bush hasn’t explicitly chosen one, but shortly after the November 2 election he indicated that he is talking about Reform Plan 2. Note to journalists covering this issue: let’s get the headline news up front. Big cuts to create private accounts, and for what? So that people can invest some of their Social Security taxes in a stock index fund? We already have a number of means by which people can take their earnings tax-free and put them in the stock market, such as Individual Retirement Accounts or 401 (k) accounts. Yet less than 5 percent of employees are taking full advantage of these opportunities.

Time for the Democrats to take Theda Skocpol’s advice:

Paint Republican privatization plans not as an attack on the elderly alone, but as an attack on all working Americans. “They are going to take the taxes everyone has contributed for years and use them to pay fees for Wall Street brokers.” “They are going to let richer people opt out of paying their fair share into Social Security–and make the system go broke very soon.” “They are going to break the promises long ago made to all of us who contribute to Social Security, take away the benefits we have built for our own retirement, as well as to take care of our parents and grandparents.” “Social Security works as a savings system for all of us together. We save efficiently that way. It leaves each of us free to save more if we can. But no one should have to give up their promised benefits so Republicans can pay off their rich friends.”

More pork barrel spending:

An important test of the United States’ fledgling missile defense system ended in failure early Wednesday as an interceptor rocket failed to launch on cue from the Marshall Islands, the Pentagon said. After a rocket carrying a mock warhead as a target was launched from Kodiak, Alaska, the interceptor, which was intended to go aloft 16 minutes later and home in on the target 100 miles over the earth, automatically shut down because of “an unknown anomaly,” according to the Missile Defense Agency of the Defense Department. The launching had been planned as the first full test in two years of this element of the Bush administration’s effort to deploy a multilayered missile defense shield. The setback threatened to delay further the initial step of activating a basic missile defense, which had once been planned for September but slipped into next year after a series of canceled tests and developmental difficulties.

Joe Lieberman does something right:

Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman has twice in recent days said “no” when approached about the possibility of a major job in the second Bush administration, CNN has learned. The Cabinet vacancy at the Department of Homeland Security was the subject of the latest overture, according to congressional and other government sources. Those sources said the earlier overture was to see whether Lieberman might be interested in becoming the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. White House officials declined comment, saying they do not discuss personnel matters.

This denies the Bush administration the fig leaf (masquerading as an olive branch) of ostensible bipartisanship a Lieberman nomination would have represented, and keeps the Democrats at four more in the Senate than we need to sustain a filibuster. If Lieberman really wants to put aside appeasment of the Bush administration, he should spend the next two years as a visible spokesman slamming them on their failure to make the sacrifices necessary at home to keep Americans safer. And then he should step aside and let Dick Blumenthal take his seat.

As Digby suggests, this timeline of how the Republicans killed the Clinton healthcare plan offers a good indication of what a real opposition party looks like.

Dan Koffler questions those who claim to be principally opposed to the death penalty “with exceptions”:

…shouldn’t it be obvious that opposition to the death penalty is only meaningful in precisely the sorts of purported-to-be-exceptional cases that offend societal moral intuitions the most deeply? Who is arguing for the death penalty in cases of mundane, everyday felonies? [There is somebody, I’m sure–ed.] I’m against capital punishment in all cases because I think that a realm of autonomy manifestly inclusive of one’s own physical existence is intrinsic to the very notion of citizenship, and that no citizen, therefore, no matter how bestial a criminal, is property of the state such that he can be executed by state fiat. And since the government really is a social compact, I’m revolted by the fact that every application of the death penalty makes me a party to a premeditated killing.

Now, I recognize that any practicable moral system includes an escape hatch for “emergency” scenarios, such that, e.g., killing in self-defense is morally justified. The death penalty, and the notion of “exceptions” to the rule against state-sanctioned killing, is plainly not such an emergency case. Prisoners in shackles do not create the immediate overriding imperative for lethal action that’s necessary for an emergency to obtain. The upshot of that is that opposition to the death penalty not only can’t admit of exceptions, but is a rare example of a moral legislation that is both absolute and practicable.