PATRIOT Act, Megan's Law — a novel study of lawmakers' pet names for pet bills

An interesting study by George Mason University grad student Brian C. Jones of the names lawmakers attach to bills and laws makes us breathe easier: We're unlikely to ever see a bill titled "The Rudy Giuliani 9/11 Victims Act."

And Jones's study does spark an awareness of the tools of propaganda. In this era of nonsensical, nonstop political campaigning, such reminders can't hurt.

Jones's project for his master's thesis tested the fictitious and real names of bills among several hundred fellow students at the Virginia school.

One of the examples he used in the survey was the real anti-terrorism bill, on which he slapped Rudy's name. The bad news is Rudy's name kinda fouled up Jones's results. That's because the good news is that faux-9/11 hero Giuliani seemed to be enough of a polarizing figure, now that he's a presidential candidate, that his name didn't make the students necessarily want to support an anti-terrorism bill any more than if it had been called "The Terrorism Act" or the unfortunately real name, "USA PATRIOT Act."

Now, if Rudy had been a victim — instead of a phony hero who mentions 9/11 more often than a nun says, "Hail Mary" — that would be different. Megan's Law, a real law named for the victim of a sex offender, resonated more with the students surveyed. So did a phony name, the "Alice Walker Juvenile Crime Act."

The impact of mass-media b.s. about such bills is beyond the scope of Jones's study. He does come up with other morsels that I'll get into in later posts, but don't think for a minute that you're too smart to be influenced by such silly things as the names of bills and other emotional appeals. Jones cited Ted Brader's 2006 book, Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work, noting:

This isn't a new idea. French sociologist Jacques Ellul is dead, but his ideas live, particularly (for me) his '60s book Propaganda, which is still an extremely relevant read and makes a similar point to Brader's. Writing about the mass media and propaganda, here's the prolific Ellul from one of his books:

What I got from Propaganda is that we all get got by propaganda.

In other words, if you're aware of the world around you, particularly the political world, then you're more susceptible to propaganda than those slack-jawed yokels who aren't so interested or aware.

Often referred to as a "Christian anarchist," Ellul painted a frightening portrait of society, viz. this passage in Propaganda:

As we get inundated more and more by marketers political and otherwise, here's one more quote from Ellul's Propaganda that might agitate you:

In advance of the next year and a half of media blitzes in the presidential campaign, consider yourself warned.

If Mike Bloomberg winds up running for president (only if Rudy Giuliani doesn't win the GOP nomination), all the money in the world won't save the billionaire New York mayor from the glare of bad publicity.

Unless he stops people from shooting pictures, video, or film. That's exactly what Bloomberg (a one-person Green Party) is trying to do. One of his latest stunts would stunt others' ability to shoot film or video or even pictures on New York's streets.

Of course, in his own case, he likes to choose what pictures to show. For example, Bloomberg's official website showed no photographic evidence back in 2002 that Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, whose underlings have been known to boil people to death, had not only visited New York; the torturer had chatted with Bloomberg in the mayor's office while the two posed for photos (see above). You could find the pictures only on Karimov's Uzbekistan website.

Now, in a city full of film-and-video students armed with digital equipment, Bloomberg's film office has a plan to stop crews as small as two people from taking pictures of anything on city streets. Here's the New York Times's Colin Moynihan the other day in a story about protesters protesting Bloomberg's clampdown:

Yeah, free. Not free to shoot, but free of charge, except for purchasing the insurance. And no hassle, except for having to register with the government before you take pictures on the street.

Bloomberg did a fine job protecting the GOP from the public during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Central Park, the natural spot for half a million protesters, was off-limits, and demonstrators were herded like cattle in a feedlot.

A group called Picture New York is fighting the new restrictions. Sorry, don't have any pictures of them.

Considering the high rate at which private equity firms are gobbling up U.S. corporations and even veering into electoral politics, it wouldn't be much of a surprise if billionaire New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg really did decide to run for president.

As the world shrinks, government is moving farther and farther away from the people it rules.

The breaking news today is that Bloomberg has switched his registration from fake Republican to independent — not that he himself stands for independence. Bloomberg's always been a rich blend of Republican and Democrat — with an emphasis on "rich." So here's what came out of New York this evening, according to the Washington Post's Perry Bacon Jr.:

Mitt Romney, a founder of Bain Capital, is already in the race, running for the GOP line. Hillary and Rudy have tapped into the rapidly growing industry of very lightly regulated private equity funds. You know democracy is in bad shape when even shareholders are getting shut out of the big action.

Bloomberg isn't much of a Republican, but he isn't much of a Democrat, either. For that matter, he isn't much of a small-D democrat. But this new green party of private investors in public corporations and public politics — maybe not your idea of a third party — has a big tent, especially in New York, where many private equity firms and hedge funds are headquartered.

Bloomberg should be particularly scary to those who love civil liberties. He's not a knee-jerk reactionary. No, he's a mildly moderate social liberal — at least in his personal views — and a piranha-like fiscal conservative. He didn't build his own media empire by being a dissenter — quite the opposite: He catered to the bidness community by feeding them the news they wanted so they could play more games with our money.

Bloomberg doesn't seem to have a natural sympathy — or even tolerance — for those who dissent, who question. As I noted in December 2005, he rolls out the red carpet for the likes of Uzbek dictator/torturer Islam Karimov but condemns a transit strike as "morally reprehensible."

In September 2005, it was easy for him to pull the plug on Cindy Sheehan only a few yards away from a Gandhi statue in Union Square. As mayor, Bloomberg has been an extremely difficult opponent for dissenters and dissidents.

Cracking down on dissent is a good business practice to Bloomberg, but it plays hell with the Constitution. Take a look at my colleague Nat Hentoff's recent "J. Edgar Bloomberg: COINTELPRO in NY."

However, Bloomberg also knows how to keep his own mouth shut — even at the wrong times. Lacking the personal pizzazz of mayors like Fiorello LaGuardia, Ed Koch, and Giuliani, he has let the Bush regime off the hook. Colleague Wayne Barrett pointed that out in 2005:

And take the 2004 Republican National Convention debacle. (See "Streets of Rage," by my colleague Tom Robbins and ex-colleague Jennifer Gonnerman.) A huge number of people poured into the streets to protest George W. Bush and his regime, but Bloomberg's troops were more than ready and herded the mostly orderly throngs through elaborate chutes and pathways akin to those of a cattle feed lot.

God love the protesters, but they had little impact on the election, and the Democratic Party gave them no rhythm for standing up to Bush. Meanwhile, Bloomberg didn't hesitate to stir up the fears of unrest in the streets of New York, right in tune with the mainstream media, which also love order.

Bloomberg would be a quite scary president. With the powerful NYPD and a massive bureaucracy dominated at the top by developer-friendly and public-school-hatin' officials, he wants to run the kind of orderly New York City that Singapore's old despot Lee Kuan Yew would probably love. And without the canings.

Now if Bloomberg could only get rid of those messy street vendors. Squeezing the color out of New York City would suit him fine.

One good thing: Bloomberg's entry into the race could shake up the currently encrusted two-party system. Only in 21st century America could we envision a billionaire making that kind of contribution to democracy.

What a remarkable series of conversations it must have been: Alberto Gonzales grilling Bernie Kerik.

If you believe this morning's New York Times, Bush's nominee as attorney general conducted "hours of confrontational interviews" with Kerik, to make sure none of the little Napoleon's cream filling had spilled into places it shouldn't have. (See photo of tough guy Gonzales below.)

The Times' Elisabeth Bumiller pins her tale to an unnamed "government official." I hesitate to believe it only because Bumiller also describes the White House as "normally careful." I think she means "normally careful" only in vetting potential nominees, which means that the White House is careful about whom it trusts and picks? Uh-huh. In her same story, she points out that the White House was careless in dispensing top-security information after 9/11: Kerik, while still the NYPD commissioner, was put on the list even though he neglected to fill out the basic form to start the security-check process. I wouldn't call that "normally careful." If Bumiller means "normally careful" in general—no, she can't mean that.

Anyway, this is how Bumiller sketched Gonzales's personal vetting of Kerik:

Mr. Gonzales, who is himself in the middle of a background review as Mr. Bush's nominee for attorney general, spent hours grilling Mr. Kerik, the official said. As with other nominees, the sessions were aggressive and designed to make Mr. Kerik uncomfortable enough to reveal possible embarrassing events in his record. Even so, he apparently withheld some pertinent facts. Mr. Gonzales declined to comment.

Well, let's see. Gonzales was a key figure in OK'ing the torture that we've used on prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. As my colleague Nat Hentoff writes today:

If there ever is an honest investigation of who is ultimately responsible for what happened [at Guantánamo] and at Abu Ghraib, Mr. Gonzales might well be in the dock, along with Donald Rumsfeld and a number of the defense secretary's closest aides.

When Gonzales was faced with vetting Kerik, we could reasonably assume that Al took his own advice on interrogation techniques, like the ones listed in today's Washington Post story by Thomas E. Ricks, "Detainee Abuse by Marines Is Detailed."

Which means that Gonzales probably burned Kerik's hands by dipping them in an alcohol-based cleaner and then igniting them, tied him up and held a pistol to his head, made him kneel next to an open grave and then fired a shot as a "mock execution," and hooked him up to an electric transformer to make him "dance."

Apparently, none of that worked on Kerik. Some people just won't talk about some things.

But then there's Paul Wolfowitz, who before the U.S. invasion of Iraq just wouldn't shut up about how easy the occupation was likely to be. As I wrote a while back, to get Wolfowitz to spill his guts back then, you didn't even have to drag the deputy secretary of defense by his hair from a Humvee to a prison cell or strip him and wedge him into a pyramid of naked people or punish him while he prays or have him simulate masturbation or threaten him with rape or throw him into a wall or smear shit on his back or scare him with a growling dog or put a dog collar on him or ride him around like a donkey or hook up wires to his nuts while making him stand on a box or make fun of his schmeckel while you grinned for the camera.

Maybe Wolfowitz and Kerik like wearing dog collars.

You can call Bernie Kerik's sudden withdrawal Friday night from the Homeland Security job another instance of Nannygate. But the reason Kerik and the White House are bawling their eyes out may have more to do with intrepid reporters like Newsday's Leonard Levitt, whose One Police Plaza column in the paper's New York City edition has kept a close eye on Kerik and other such schnooks.

The initial word from the White House late Friday and early today was that Kerik was no longer suitable as the nation's chief security guard because of his domestic situation. Kerik said he hadn't paid employment taxes on his nanny's behalf and—oops!—she wasn't even in the U.S. legally.

Hmmm.

Then it was revealed that she left the U.S. about two weeks ago, just before his nomination was announced; a "former New York City official" told the New York Times that her departure had been planned "for at least two months," the paper's Elisabeth Bumiller and Eric Lipton wrote.

Hmmm. Hmmm.

The Times story noted up high:

White House officials were clearly annoyed at Mr. Kerik for not determining the nanny's immigration status prior to this week, but said they had no evidence he had sought to mislead them. "It was Kerik's screw-up, it was that simple," the official said. "But it's a mistake you can't tolerate with someone who has oversight for immigration."

Bullshit that it was that simple.

Way down low in the Times story is something that's probably closer to the truth:

Mr. Kerik's housekeeper situation was only the latest question to be revealed about the nominee. A series of critical news reports about questionable actions had begun to surface about Mr. Kerik, threatening to turn his Senate confirmation into a lengthy embarrassment for the administration. The reports looked at Mr. Kerik's use of city personnel while in office, potential conflicts between his business life and the role of the Homeland Security department, and events growing out of his personal financial difficulties several years ago.

One Democratic Senate staff member, who had been following the nomination process closely and asked not to be identified because of the political sensitivity of the matter, said he was convinced that the nanny question was not the sole reason that Mr. Kerik had dropped out. "Multiple media organizations were pursuing multiple stories," that would be potentially damaging to Mr. Kerik, he said. Because many of these questions had not yet been answered by the administration, the staff member said, "fundamentally, he was a bad pick."

The staff member added: "The process worked here."

No, it's veteran scribe Leonard Levitt who works. Many of those "critical news reports about questionable actions" were written long ago by Levitt, and you can bet your ass that Google-eyed reporters all over the world (plus the high rollers who travel by Lexis) have been downloading him at a machine-gun rate. He's one of the best cop-shop columnists, because instead of swallowing the propaganda from pols and police officials, he's rough on top dogs and sympathetic to underdogs such as most street-level cops and the public. The dogged columnist's Friday piece, "Why Back So Soon, Kerik?," zeroed in on Bernie's mysteriously brief 2003 stint in Iraq, where he ostensibly trained Iraqi police and security troops.

Levitt points out that Kerik, in his own words, vowed to be in Iraq "at least six months—until the job is done." Yet he left barely halfway through that short stint. Why? Read Levitt's column for the details, but here's a passage that may help you understand:

[Kerik] has never explained his premature departure from Iraq. Had he junked his training of the Iraqi police, said to be among the least prepared of that nation's law enforcement agencies? Did he fear for his safety, as many in law enforcement believe?

Sources told Newsday Kerik was concerned enough that whenever he traveled he cleared a two-block radius.

On Wednesday [December 8], Kerik's attorney, Joe Tacopina, said he would ask Kerik for an explanation. Yesterday [December 9], Tacopina did not return calls.

In the same column, Levitt revisits some highlights of Kerik's tenure as NYPD commissioner:

During his two years as commissioner, [Ray] Kelly has not hesitated to belittle Kerik, his predecessor. One of Kelly's first actions was to move a statue commemorating September 11 with a quote from Kerik against a wall in the lobby of One Police Plaza so Kerik's words could not be seen.

Last summer, Kelly spokesman Paul Browne questioned Kerik's having ordered four high-tech $50,000 security doors for police headquarters while commissioner, and announced the department's Internal Affairs Bureau was investigating. That announcement followed the Department of Investigation's arrest of Alan Risi, whose company supplied the doors, for allegedly overcharging the city $50,000 to service similar doors on other city buildings.

DOI shared its findings with the Police Department, which found no impropriety but noted that a proper engineering study was not conducted. Internal Affairs Chief Charles Campisi said he would not discuss department business.

Lots of administrators and flaks have reason not to want to talk to Levitt. All the more reason to read Levitt's column, because lots and lots of insiders do talk to him, even if they have to do it on the q.t.

I'll bet the White House started reading Levitt's million or so columns on Kerik and envisioned a winter scene of the little Napoleon tumbling down a snowy hill, gathering slush and dirt and picking up speed, going faster and faster and getting bigger and bigger—until he smacked right into George W. Bush's legacy and knocked it on its ass.

Don't let those big, expensive doors hit you on the ass on your way out, Bernie.

Did everybody catch the big dog-and-pony show on February 24 in D.C.? Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge, flanked by New York City and California officials, proudly announced a new "Homeland Security Information Network," a massive chat room linking cops throughout the country so they can share info on terrorists.
And that means protesters.

By this summer, just in time for the GOP's coronation of Bush, 5,000 "authorized users" in 300 police agencies from every state, five territories, and 50 urban areas will have real-time IM, e-mail, and live chat with one another. As The Washington Post put it, "the system will flash information from a police officer on the street to Ridge's office to across the country in minutes." Ridge was practically creaming: "We'll be able to send photos and maps, even streaming video. We'll even be able to access data at the scene of a crime . . . through wireless laptops."

This network is an extension of what's called the Joint Regional Information Exchange System (JRIES), headed by Ed Manavian, whose California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC) has been blasted for feverishly collecting and distributing information on protesters. The "founding partners" of JRIES are CATIC, the NYPD's Counter Terrorism Division, and the Defense Intelligence Agency's Joint Intelligence Task Force Combating Terrorism. (Check out the slide show at dtic.mil/ndia/2003homeland/palmer.ppt.)

Manavian is a former narc whose title last year was CATIC director but who now has a more benign appellation: chairman of JRIES. He told Tuesday's D.C. press conference that JRIES (rhymes with "scabies") has already proved its worth, noting that last December, two LAPD cops separately identified suspicious people and alerted the network, through which D.C. cops recognized one of the names and immediately opened an investigation.

John Miller, the turncoat ABC journalist who's head of the LAPD's counter-terror unit, describes the network as "the ultimate chat room for the anti-terrorism business."

They're all so enthusiastic. But here's the question: Who's a terrorist?

According to Manavian and his CATIC crew, protesters are terrorists.

Last spring, after CATIC warned that anti-war protesters were gathering at the Oakland port, Oakland cops fired wooden slugs at the protesters. Afterward, CATIC spokesman Mike Van Winkle told the Oakland Tribune, "You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that [protest]. You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act."

Yes, protesting against the "war on terror" makes you a terrorist. Remember that this summer.

As the Tribune noted, causing a traffic jam is enough to stir CATIC and JRIES into warnings of terrorist activity. (That, of course, immediately puts all Manhattan cabbies in the "terrorist" category--even the ones who aren't immigrants.)

"If we receive information that 10,000 folks are going to a street corner and going to block it, that's breaking a law," Manavian told the Tribune. "That's the kind of information we're going to relay."

And Van Winkle added: "I've heard terrorism described as anything that is violent or has an economic impact, and shutting down a port certainly would have some economic impact. Terrorism isn't just bombs going off and killing people."

Civil libertarians have tried to point out that protesters aren't necessarily terrorists. (Check out the Tribune's exhaustive story. Most of the paper's "Protest at the Port" coverage can be found online. Civil libertarians' reactions are in a Tribune story archived at Global Exchange.)

But CATIC's fervent info-gathering has lumped all protesters, all dissenters into the terrorist category. There are no independent safeguards in place. And now this is a national network under the combined control of the NYPD, Department of Defense, and CATIC. Can this be happening here? Yes, this summer.