I've just read a brief story on the BBC site about the homeless in Mongolia.It's a slideshow following a homeless family. In the middlish portion the assertion is made that inflation in Mongolia is caused by rising prices of food and fuel.No citizen needs to be an economist to know that this is not true; that it is in fact the reverse of the truth. Inflation as the name suggests is an enlarging of currency in general circulation that devalues that currency.
We all know that, or should.
This myth is circulated by American media as well.
There are a number of myths about money taken as fact by the general population.
What can be done about that?
What can I do?
I guess I could write a series of articles entitled, "Facts of Money" for the local newsletter that serves these tiny towns in the mountains of northern New Mexico.
I'll do that.
Our president elect has given reason to believe that his will be a transparent administration; that his policies will be both reparative and in the interest of the general public, that he is not in the corporate pocket. For this I voted, I am proud to have done so.
His lack of candor however about root causes within government and powered circles end in no little anxiety. Institutions such as DHS, Federal Reserve, CIA, corporate military interests, have evolved into unaccountable, expensive, secret powerbases not unlike governments unto themselves. The assembly over the last eight years of unprecedented and incredible power of the presidency has played out in the public sphere as grotesque fait accompli. Power grabs, both corporate and governmental, the likes of which have only appeared occasionally during the history of the US are occurring daily. A kind of insectile sociopathy pervades.
The public, within what is presumed to be its own media, appears to be viewed with suspicion, parameters of acceptable citizenry narrows, while the value of the dollar and ultimately of labor dwindles progressively to the point of desperation. We the working class are not just alienated but divested. Ours has become a versus relationship with government; one in which interface with institutions common to our experience represent compromise of safety and are therefore avoided.
The ideal of government of and by the people is dead. Left to fend for ourselves within this context we turn on one another, deconstructing our only hope, unity. To what or whom shall we turn? Or is this turning a foolish extension of an ideal long dead? There must be clarity and honesty. No ugliness can be left unaccounted or an already lost citizenry will remain turned away.
From this new administration I then ask this; please, if nothing else, tell the truth. Say it like it is, all of it. Give voice to what is obvious and let us know you see it too. K.
I saw in the paper two years ago while eating breakfast in a charming diner in West Oakland a picture of Junchiro Koizumi the prime minister of Japan trying on a pair of sunglasses once worn by Elvis in the presence of, in order away from him, Priscilla Presley, Lisa Marie Presley, George Bush, and lastly Laura Bush.
A whirlwind tour had apparently been arranged for the Prime Minister. Below in the story written by two staff writers at the New York Times an event was described in which the Prime Minister grabs Lisa marie by the waist while singing Hold me Close after which George claps him on the shoulder and shakes his hand. This is seen by the writers as the president putting a stop to a morally questionable action or perhaps as the protection of Lisa Marie. This presumes either that Lisa Marie was unable to handle herself in that situation or that the Prime Minister was subject to an, by American standards, offensive moral ideology. This impression is intensified by describing the president as an ex drinking and incredibly fit hero wandering around in the palace of The King, who was famous for his lascivious and drug addled lifestyle.
One may at a casual glance presume that morality and law are very similar. In fact one may go so far as to assume that law is to society as morality is to interpersonal relations. This connection is dubious at best. Legally they are like heat and light, always co-existent but not the same.
We are the proud inheritors of a constitutional republic. In essence our political system, here in America, is a democracy tempered by a constitution. The function of the constitution is to disallow egregious insults on the rights of any citizen and to define the extent to which morals may intrude upon law.
Morals are subjective. One may find the exposing of flesh inappropriate. It would then behoove that person to wear a lot of clothing. Others however may feel or even be constrained by religion to wear as little as possible. The more politically inclined among these populations may make an effort to legislate their moral leanings, thereby infringing the rights of their opposition. This is made impossible, presumably, by the constitution by circumscribing the extent to which morals may intrude upon law.
The war on Terror is an interesting effort legally. It engages the misunderstood powers of the presidency in times of war and creates a schism in the crisp differentiation between moral beliefs and law. Examples are rife these days. Same sex marriage, pornography, school prayer, drug and alcohol policy, flag burning, abortion, all of these exploit subtle differentiations within the law concerning the separation of law and religion or moral ideology.
The degree of extremity of belief seems to be the turning point. If a group within the general population believes with sufficient extremity in a moral proposition it must then be considered by law. The law is, again, prevented by the constitution from legislating morality and from an abridging of the rights of the few by the vote of the majority.
So there is this guy, Guy Dubord, Who wrote a pamphlet named, "The Society of the Spectacle" http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4 Wikipedia has an excellent overview of the pamphlet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_the_Spectacle Guy Debord and his group , the "Situationists" are pretty interesting and worthy of an afternoons reading but I digress.
I present this pamphlet because the points it makes are so relevant to culture today and ultimately our experience day to day. In it he asserts that, "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation." I spent a few weeks in the early Nineties going to various churches with my dear friend Linda who, by the way has recently lost her husband Victor; Jesus Linda what can I say. We were looking for Gospel of the homespun variety. What we found were churchfulls of people who participated entirely in the service. Although it is true that the "Spectacle" was present in the form of preachers and choirs and bands of various sizes doing their thing on risers above the faithful, the dynamic had a call and response feel in which the events on the stage served as foci from which a maelstrom of activity and emotional intensity emerged. This was not mere group participation. It was more like a merging.
I write about this because, A. It was beautiful and if you've not done it you should, and B. because it is an example, I think, of how the human spirit prevails within the context of the "Society of the Spectacle". Our very closest assumptions about culture and our places in it are formed in the thickest muck at the bottom of the lake of our collective subconscious. Those assumptions form the boundaries or parameters of our expectations of self and society. This lake of subconscious is ultimately fed and grows through streamlets and rivers of myth, ever changing and evolving. Myth is the story we tell ourselves over and over, the story that we tell our children. It is a recursive phenomenon. On one hand it may be presumptuous to think that "Spectacle" has any power over this process. On the other hand one might assert that our self image as a society is based on an assumption of passivity. An assumption that we are, if only until we get out our wallets, like princes and princesses in court fanning ourselves while a parade of spectacles parades before us.
"Ah Me!"
We are seduced by the spectacle while being entirely unaware that it is the spectacle insidiously that forms our definitions of self and society by replacing the function of myth within our society. We feel empowered by the parade but are constrained by it's very nature to not merge with it. It has become an industry, one that exists throughout the world and one that is, once seen for what it is, extremely interesting.
So what's it all about Alfie?
Well first of all, I think, we gotta yell in church. Second of all we gotta not abandon the root of our myth as served up by our predecessors because it is only through evolution that myth can change. Third we gotta mix it up and see what comes. Most of all we gotta see the process for what it is and know that life is far richer than we are led to believe, that the sky is the limit. K.
I am feeling that feeling where the past is haloed with a soft yellow light, you know, with the dust motes trailing past and all.
I am remembering a thing I used to do when I was a kid.
My brother was one for getting out as a child. He would, after breakfast, get on his huffy bicycle, gold with a sissy bar and banana seat, and ride away alone. He would never return before five in the evening and it was not unusual for him to return after dark. His departure was almost never a matter of common knowledge. He would simply be gone; unannounced.
I never knew, at the time, where he had gone or what had happened there. I would sometimes ask and he would say something like, "I went out the river road to Freeport". This would mean nothing to me.
While he was gone I would imagine him riding along on the side of some road. I would imagine cars passing him and the sound of crushed granite gravel in his tires. I imagined the road as it appeared to his ten year old eyes; approaching slowly at four or so feet off the ground, unraveling vistas of trees and shadows and long streches of sundrenched road with wire fences and bleached yellow white grass long dry from the Sacramento summer.
I never imagined him stopping. My understanding of his character dictated that stopping overlong would be an insult to his journey, that going, just going, was the point.
It's been almost forty years; I've never stopped looking out my brothers eyes, I still occasionally find myself imagining what he is seeing day to day. Still wondering where he is. What they are saying to him as I watch they're mouths moving or where he is driving to.
I heard a woman talking today. She was saying that we are all winners because when we were conceived it was a race for the egg by millions of sperm and we were the one that won.
Never mind the patriarchic context. We are after all the byproduct of both egg and sperm but it truly is the sperm that competes and the egg, at least according to popular understanding, is a relatively passive recipient of frantic attention. I heard once from a fellow carpenter that the egg becomes softer to penetration by sperm when a woman has had an orgasm, hmmm.
I was, while this parable was being issued, suddenly flung into a dream. In this dream I am, or was, about seven and on a playground behind a public school. I was looking around at the other children and suddenly realizing that this was not the world I had hoped or assumed that it was. I saw for the first time that this was an intensely competitive place, this world of humans, not co-operative or loving or even mutually satisfactory really. I saw the other children locked in an animal race for domination and fulfillment of whatever instinctive need presented itself. I was shocked, angered. I was extremely angry.
I made a decision then that has colored my entire life. I decided to never engage in the struggle, to neither win nor lose. I decided to disengage.
I returned to my chair in the room with the woman and finished listening to her talk and after the thing was over I told her the effect her words had on me. She seemed to understand and said that my expectation that the world be fair, her word, is entirely unreasonable. I interjected that although she may be right it is not because my hope is not beautiful but because it is not the way the world really is. I later realized that I had fallen into a syntactic trap by accepting both the word fair as assessment of my desire and by accepting the assumption that I had wanted the world, of humans, to be fair rather than merely assuming, as a child, that it already was.
The truth is that those who have won the race are by definition winners. And that if winning the race gets one alive then right on for winning. The truth is that when she spoke of winners she was talking to those who might suspect that they were losers and so the dichotomy is reinforced through consolation.
If there is a god then he is a trickster.
I like that kid I was on that playground. I respect his decision.
To win or lose is a stupid way to spend ones life. To win or lose is a tragic misuse of the incredible and gigantic potentials of humanity.
I must say though that as an adult I am having a rather different perspective on the issue. If I see a rent it is my duty to either sew it closed or tear it further open according to my will. I am, after all a member.
Our working class is dominated by an apparently singular mythos. One that seems to have found it's genesis in heroic literature and in the American west where individual effort resulted in, presumably, heroic consequences. We salute as a body the individual via his efforts. Even Mister Rogers said that we are each special and unique and that we each have a special and unique place in the world, essentially recapitulating the idea that God creates each of us in order to affect some necessary function within the world as we know it. He was by the way an immensely charming man, Mr. Rogers that is, obviously extremely well intended and is well remembered by me and probably all of my peers. Nonetheless this myth is, I think, an antecedent of the deconstruction of the American working class family.
The industrial age at it's inception with its focus on group endeavor made no dent in this powerful myth or communal self description but did add a principle, a sotto voce contractual principle, in which the individual, with uniqueness of function in hand, even if his or her function was only that of a cog for the betterment of society at large, deserved and got substantial support from that society upon retirement.
This addition to our pre-existing working class mythos has no bearing on the way that other, wealthier, classes perceive a working individual or the working class as a whole. And that, in fact, more wealthy classes seem to see this support of the individual worker as a sort of corporate welfare in which their expenses, read wages, are externalized through the exploitation of taxpayer burden, thereby placing the burden of the care of any individual directly on the working class as a body rather than on that individual.
A laudable system actually, one that not only has provided for millions of Americans upon retirement but circuitously, if unintentionally, engaged an interior myth of the working class while solving the problem in a much more rational, less illusioned fashion. It is both elegant and a textbook Klein bottle effect.
But is this not a societal paradigm that begs a question? Does not the assertion that we are each special and unique end in proving that the great mass of the working class is nothing but an exploitable resource?
I spoke to an elderly man in in Berkeley a couple of years ago. We were preparing his house for sale by replacing windows, doors, sheetrock and cabinets. He said that he had to move because it had become too expensive to live there anymore. He said that in the sixties a working guy would sell his home, if he had to move, to another working guy for a price that was fair and that the other guy could afford. He said that in the early seventies the sale of working class homes became an "Investment Opportunity" for working people. He said that this had never happened before and that before that workers stuck together. In addition he suggested that the self exploitation of workers was increasing and very dangerous calling investors in both real estate and the market sheep in wolves clothing that were compromising the only power that the working class have, unity for personal gain and at the same time creating an environment that could no longer support the very people it was created for.I heard him.
Seemingly the last man standing in this socioeconomic spray of imaginary heroics is the one that writes the paycheck for it is he who appears to benefit from the social security system. This may be true but not for the small business owner. Here enters the amazing web of confusing red tape and presumed cost sharing that is the burden of the small business employer. The impenetrable thicket and skyrocketing costs of insurances in combination with a truly amazing body of law is in effect a Lilliputian effort at restraining what could be the only hope of the working class since these employers emerge from the same class as their employees. Essentially strapping the small business owner to debatable civic responsibilities at the expense of the well being of his employees and ultimately himself thereby, perhaps coincidentally, creating a versus relationship therein. As a result of this quagmire of law and insurances the small business owner simply cannot afford to pay his employees what they need to actually support themselves throughout their lives.
The political sphere resonates with domination and power mongering. What was to be a merely organizational effort i.e., government, has blossomed, triumphed. Corporations via the dollar rule with an iron fist the ground they share with citizens. And idealism at best a quaint spark fades and is overshadowed by a realism necessitated by bullies, the creators and maintainers of wealth. Swords are sharpened in wait for the next spending spree; humanism hasn't a shred of hope in the wake of the almighty faceless economic juggernaut that is self interest as expressed by the corporation.
There is a passage in Richard Jefferies' book The Story of my Heart in which he writes "Is there any theory, philosophy, or creed," he says, "is there any system of culture, any formulated method, able to meetand satisfy each separate item of this agitated pool of human life? By which they may be guided, by which they may hope, by which look forward? Not a mere illusion of the craving heart--something real, as real as the solid walls of fact against which, like seaweed, they are dashed; something to give each separate personality sunshine and a flower in its own existence now; something to shape this million-handed labor to an end and outcome that will leave more sunshine and more flowers to those who must succeed? Something real now, and not in the spirit-land; in this hour now, as I stand and the sun burns. . . . Full well aware that all has failed, yet, side by side with the sadness of that knowledge, there lives on in me an unquenchable belief, thought burning like the sun, that there is yet something to be found.... It must be dragged forth by the might of thought from the immense forces of the universe."
Jeffries casts himself as a romantic dreamer whiling away the day while standing before a beauteous terrain lost in thought with his hands in his pockets. But on closer inspection this passage makes a very interesting point and asks an interesting question. What can the working class point itself toward that will aid them in their efforts and keep them trudging foreword in their labors?
I guess the point I was trying to make before I lost my way here was that economically it has been the tack of administrations and the political sphere in general to solve the post industrial working class problem by setting us one against another economically. But that like the old man in Berkeley I believe that unity is the only way out.
During a conversation I had with Taj Mahal several months ago I asked what he thought would become of the working class after the deconstruction of the support systems attendant upon it and the obvious end of the industrial age here in America. His answer was that we as a class should become creative producers in the world arena. He said that creativity could and should be learned and taught in schools. He said that as a body the working class could, utilizing creativity, raise itself from the desperate straits it now faces.
This seemed idealistic to me initially. As I gave it some thought though I realized that I had internalized a presumptive and perhaps arrogant element of our world view that states that creativity and the efforts that it fosters are a realm available to a few.
He may be on to something. I don't know.
I do know that something has to happen though. The burgeoning working class is far too large to fit in the service industries and the service industries cannot pay their employees enough to ever buy a house or send even one kid to college.
Anybody got any ideas?
The war on Terror has come home. It has been on its way but is now fully through the door and has been invited. Here in the United States we passed the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007"
Here is a quote from the homeland security webpage about the bill; "We must intervene before a person crosses the line separating radical views from violent behavior, create an environment that discourages disillusionment and alienation, and instill in young people a sense of belonging and faith in the future"
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h110-1955 The full text of the bill, "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007".
http://homeland.house.gov/about/subcommittees.asp?ID=287&SubSection=0&Is This is the DOHS's brief on the above bill.
http://www.dhs.gov/xres/programs/editorial_0498.shtm This is a page from the DOHS website. It outlines the "Centers for Excellence" program and lists the institutions involved with links and the tasks each is charged with.
This is a disturbing development in the world of counter+errorism. A self empowerment which outlines plans to snip in the bud, the, according to the authors, evolution of radicals to terrorists via a plethora of studies by institutions both public and private collated and made judgment upon by a central commission whose sole responsibility is to, "Examine and report upon the facts and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in the United States, including United States connections to non-United States persons and networks, violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in prison, individual or `lone wolf' violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence, and other faces of the phenomena of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence that the Commission considers important."
A report was mandated within eighteen months, submitted to the president and congress, it was to consist of "Findings and conclusions, legislative recommendations for immediate and long-term countermeasures to violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence, and measures that can be taken to prevent violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence from developing and spreading within the United States, and any final recommendations for any additional grant programs to support these purposes. The report may also be accompanied by a classified annex."
Also there is to be formed a network of cooperative "Centers for Excellence" Check the link above for a list Here is the relevant quote from the bill… "The Secretary of Homeland Security shall establish or designate a university-based Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism in the United States (hereinafter referred to as `Center') following the merit-review processes and procedures and other limitations that have been previously established for selecting and supporting University Programs Centers of Excellence. The Center shall assist Federal, State, local and tribal homeland security officials through training, education, and research in preventing violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism in the United States. In carrying out this section, the Secretary may choose to either create a new Center designed exclusively for the purpose stated herein or identify and expand an existing Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence so that a working group is exclusively designated within the existing Center of Excellence to achieve the purpose set forth in subsection (b). `(b) Purpose- It shall be the purpose of the Center to study the social, criminal, political, psychological, and economic roots of violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism in the United States and methods that can be utilized by Federal, State, local, and tribal homeland security officials to mitigate violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism"
Of course the beginning of the bill contains definitions; here are some of them,
VIOLENT RADICALIZATION- The term `violent radicalization' means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.
HOMEGROWN TERRORISM- The term `homegrown terrorism' means the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.
IDEOLOGICALLY BASED VIOLENCE- The term `ideologically based violence' means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual's political, religious, or social beliefs.
I am speechless, probably because I am holding my breath until that report comes out. Unfortunately there will be a classified annex to the report which we the public will not have access to. I guess you noticed that the "Centers for Excellence" are charged with training and informing operatives within the DOHS.
This appears to be outside the parameters of the bill as written and allude to a future time in which the information gathered and the obvious agenda are brought together, decisions made and acted upon that presumably shall imperil political dissidents all over the nation. I wonder; will they be considered innocent before proven guilty? What will be the determined definition of guilty? What of the quote from the DOHS's webpage which appears earlier in this blog that reads, "Instill in young people a sense of belonging and faith in the future". What does this mean, this instilling?
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Michael Mukasey’s finger in the dyke.
There has been somewhat of a furor in the leftish media recently about a speech made by our Attorney General Michael Mukasey on July 21 to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. A fascinating bunch, they are the pre-eminent example of organized political policy manipulators with agenda initiated in the private sector.
AEI is a conservative think tank, founded in 1943. According to the institute its mission is "to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism — limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and responsibility, vigilant and effective defense and foreign policies, political accountability, and open debate." AEI is an independent, non-profit organization. It is supported primarily by grants and contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. It is located in Washington D.C. AEI has emerged as one of the leading architects of the second Bush administration's public policy. More than twenty AEI alumni and current visiting scholars and fellows have served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government's many panels and commissions. Former United States Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is a visiting scholar, and Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a senior fellow
According to a spirited American Civil Liberties Union article, "Mukasey asked that Congress issue a new declaration of war that would make the entire globe -- including the United States itself -- a "battlefield" where the president decides who will be locked up forever"
This seemed rather extreme to me so I did a little looking about and found the speech he read. Mukasey's speech reads as a mission/policy statement in response to a decision by the supreme court in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that military commissions set up by the Bush administration to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay lack "the power to proceed because its structures and procedures violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949." Specifically, the ruling says that Common Article 3 of the Third Geneva Convention was violated. The case considered whether the United States Congress may pass legislation preventing the Supreme Court from hearing the case of an accused combatant before his military commission takes place, whether the special military commissions that had been set up violated federal law (including the Uniform Code of Military Justice and treaty obligations), and whether courts can enforce the articles of the 1949 Geneva Convention.
An unusual aspect of the case was an amicus brief filed by Senators Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), which presented an "extensive colloquy" added to the Congressional record as evidence that "Congress was aware" that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 would strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to hear cases brought by the Guantanamo detainees. Because these statements were not actually included in the December 21 debate, Emily Bazelon of Slate magazine has argued this was an attempt to mislead the court.
On June 29, 2006, the Court issued a 5-3 decision holding that it had jurisdiction, that the administration did not have authority to set up these particular military commissions without congressional authorization, because they did not comply with the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Convention (which the court found to be incorporated into the Uniform Code of Military Justice).
Just days earlier, Hamdan's defense attorney Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift had been named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by the National Law Journal. But in October, the Navy announced plans to dismiss him under it's "up or out" promotion policy.
The written version of the speech that I found online is entitled "Remarks Prepared for Delivery by Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research" with the department of justice seal above. In Mukasey's speech the main points seem to be a reiteration of the dangers of terrorist foreign combatants, a statement of the need to create an infrastructure devoted to the hearing of cases relevant to the Habeus Corpus rights of detainees, (described by Mukasey as a lawsuit brought by someone in custody who asks to be released on the ground that his detention is unlawful) and an interpretation of the decisions of the supreme court in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that suggests that the court was in agreement with the aims and actions of the administration.
In the speech as written and in the recording of it that I later listened to there is no mention of anything like what the ACLU suggests in their article.
Again rather odd, I would assume the ACLU to be interested in reporting hard facts. I felt that my investigations should continue. What I found was a circular series of seemingly unrelated issues and events the center of which seemed to be the extent of presidential powers in times of war.
A new law has been passed this month on the fifth. It is called the "Protect America Act"
It allows the unregulated monitoring of all electronic communications of people in the United States without a court's order or oversight, so long as it is not targeted at one particular person "reasonably believed to be" inside the country. It also protects any private company utilized by the government from civil action irrespective of the relative legality of their actions on behalf of the government. This is by any estimation a vast abridgement of the citizenry's right to privacy.
In December 2005, the New York Times published an article that described a surveillance program of warrantless domestic wiretapping ordered by the Bush administration and carried out by the National Security Agency in cooperation with major telecommunications companies since 2002 (a subsequent Bloomberg article suggested that this may have already begun by June 2000). Many critics have asserted that the Administration's warrant-free surveillance program is a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution against warrantless search, and, a criminal violation of FISA.
The Bush administration maintained that the warrant requirements of FISA were implicitly superseded by the subsequent passage of the" Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists" and that the President's inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to conduct foreign surveillance trumped the FISA statute.
However, the Supreme Court decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld placed the legitimacy of this argument into question. If the president's decisions concerning the treatment and disposition of detainees are subject to legal scrutiny and fail that scrutiny then the president's decision to monitor all electronic communications of people in the United States may also be severely threatened rendering most if not all of the "Protect America Act" null via unconstitutionality.
So the upshot seems to be that the speech read to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research by Michael Mukasey was an attempt to both limit the scope of the supreme court's decision by misinterpretation and compartmentalization and to reassert the presumptive "Supreme ruler" model of presidential powers in times of war and finally to defend and protect the Protect America act.
One might in retrospect say that the ACLU article although specifically incorrect alluded to a larger perspective in which it was all too correct. That in fact we the people are subject to a government that is prepared to do immediate war upon us and is actively engaged in wartime activities within our borders.
