“Frankly, I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed for our party and I’m embarrassed for those who did not come, because there’s long been a divide in this country and it doesn’t get better when we don’t show up.”

—former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee

He was speaking at a GOP debate at historically black Morgan State University in Maryland, commenting on the fact that McCain, Romney, Giuliani, and Thompson decided not to attend, citing “scheduling conflicts.”

Full article here. I don’t feel like I have to add a thing.

Have you ever been caught telling a story at a party as though it happened to you, but really you read it on a blog or saw it on TV? That can be really embarrassing when someone calls you on it. “Naw, dude, that didn’t happen to you. That was on Wonkette last month.” Well, it appears that we’ve caught our president recycling someone else’s sound bites. Only ‘recycling’ doesn’t quite capture it. Regardless of whether you agree with the assessment of Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who last week testified about the military’s progress in Iraq before a joint session of the House armed services and foreign affairs committees, you have to admit that the statement was crafted with some attempt at eloquence:

Evaluating where Iraqis are today only makes sense in the context of where they have been. Any Iraqi under 40 years old—and that is the overwhelming majority of the population—would have known nothing but the rule of the Ba’ath party before liberation four and a half years ago. Those 35 years were filled with crimes against humanity on every scale. Saddam Hussein ruled without any mercy, not hesitating to use lethal force and torture against even those in his inner circle. His genocidal campaign against the Kirds and savagery toward southern Shi’a are well known. But he also used violence and intimidation as tools in the complete deconstruction of Iraqi society. No organization or institution survived that was not linked in some way to regime protection. He created a pervasive climate of fear in which even family members were afraid to talk to one another.

That is the legacy that Iraqis had as their history when Saddam’s statue came down on April 9, 2003. No Nelson Mandela existed to emerge on the national political scene; anyone with his leadership talents would not have survived.

Our president liked that idea. He thought it had some merit. So today he decided to try his hand at it. However, from the mouth of the leader of the free world, it comes out sounding like this:

Referring to former South African president Nelson Mandela, who led the fight against apartheid to become a symbol of reconciliation and hope, Bush said of Iraq: “I heard somebody say, ‘Now where’s Mandela?’”

“Well, Mandela is dead. Because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.”

“No Nelson Mandela existed to emerge on the national political scene, anyone with his leadership talents would not have survived,” he said.

The next question, of course, is whether someone had to tell him who Mandela was, or whether he already knew. “Now hold on a minute, Dick. You want me to say Saddam Hussein killed Josef Mengele. You mean that Nazi doctor? Why’d he do that? Did he hate Nazis?”

UPDATE: 9/23/2007 9:50 AM

Thanks to wizbangblue, I’ve become aware of a couple of other interesting facts about the Mandela reference. The first is that Condoleezza Rice also tried it out between Crocker’s speech and Bush’s.

I think the Iraqis are trying to pull it together. Look, what they’re doing is very hard. Saddam Hussein destroyed the fabric of that society. Someone asked me, “Why is there no Nelson Mandela that, you know, a general, a huge figure who’s appeared to unify Iraq?” Well, the truth of the matter is that Saddam Hussein killed people, a lot of the leadership of Iraq.

Who is this person who keeps asking everyone in the administration about Mandela?

The second is that Dick Cheney, when he served in Congress, repeatedly called Nelson Mandela a terrorist and a communist, and in fact in 1986 voted against a non-binding resolution that called for the apartheid government of South Africa to release Nelson Mandela from prison and negotiate with the African National Congress, on the grounds that Mandela and his organization were terrorists who would establish a Communist dictatorship. But now Mandela’s a hero. How quickly we can change our minds when it suits us to do so.

Nelson Mandela can speak from personal experience on the matter. On Larry King:

KING: When did—were you a—you were a revolutionary. Were you a terrorist? Did you ever commit acts of aggression, violence?
MANDELA: Well, terrorism depends on...
KING: ... who wins.
MANDELA: That's right. I was called a terrorist yesterday, but when I came out of jail, many people embraced me, including my enemies, and that is what I normally tell other people who say those who are struggling for liberation in their country are terrorists. I tell them that I was also a terrorist yesterday, but, today, I am admired by the very people who said I was one.

For five years, everyone who has dared to opine that the Iraq war is largely about oil has been dismissed as a liberal nut job, if not a traitor or worse. The truth, said the administration (and talk radio, and the network news, and the cable news) is that the war was about the imminent threat that Saddam Hussein would use weapons of mass destruction to launch an attack on the United States. Then, after that proved to be false, it was in the name of liberating the Iraqis from living under the oppression of a ruthless dictator. Then it was about stopping the terrorists, who later became insurgents. Then it was about ending the sectarian strife. Now it’s about trying to contain the civil war. Here we are, li’l Dutch boy, finger in the dyke.

The story has been changing all along. Some of us (a pretty lonely minority for a while) suspected, from the first bellicose speeches in 2002, that it was about oil, or oil combined with the desire to project a major American military presence into the Middle East for decades to come. But that’s really only a priority because there’s so much oil there, right? For example, Robert Mugabe is a ruthless dictator who has practically broken his country. Inflation in Zimbabwe is over 10,000%, and something like 3 out of every 4 adult males has left the country because there are no jobs there. People push wheelbarrows full of cash to the store to buy cooking oil, when they can find it. But no one’s proposing to launch a war to free the poor Zimbabweans from their vile oppressor. Zimbabwe has very little oil, so we are busy elsewhere. (For details on Zimbabwe, see this article in the Economist.)

So along comes Alan Greenspan, who apparently included one inflammatory sentence in his new book: “I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows—the Iraq war is largely about oil,” and all of a sudden the media is ablaze with speculation. “Was it really? All this is about oil? Couldn’t be. Why are we just hearing about this now? Everyone knows it? We thought it was about freedom!”

Alan Greenspan is a very smart man. His adroit spinning of the interest rate knob did, after all, avert a potential financial disaster after the dot-com bubble. And hey, if you played it right, you cashed out a small fortune in equity when your house tripled in value. (You did cash out, didn’t you?) However, back then it was primarily investors who would have borne the brunt of the disaster. Well, I suppose that means pension funds, many states, your 401(k), and a lot of other parties. But now that everyone’s leveraged to the hilt with home equity loans left over from those heady days, the risk has been spread across the 60-odd percent of us who own homes. We’ll see what a tidy solution it really was to let all that froth foam over from equities to housing. I suspect that, in the end, it will be less than tidy. So does Mr. Greenspan. As the Financial Times reported today,

Mr Greenspan said he would expect “as a minimum, large single-digit” percentage declines in US house prices from peak to trough and added that he would not be surprised if the fall was “in double digits”.

That’s the nationwide average, by the way. By some measures, property values in California and Florida are already down 10% or more from their peaks and probably have more to go. For the nationwide average to fall by 10%, the coasts are going to fall by a much larger number.

The FT article also said (and this is my favorite part):

As Fed chairman, Mr Greenspan had talked about “froth” in the housing sector, but never said there was a bubble in the market as a whole. His successor Ben Bernanke has also avoided the word “bubble”.

But Mr Greenspan told the FT that froth “was a euphemism for a bubble”.

He said he still thought froth—a collection of bubbles—was a better description, because of the variation in house price appreciation in different local housing markets. But he said “all the froth bubbles add up to an aggregate bubble”.

Now he tells us. All that froth does add up to a bubble. I knew it! And that gets me back to my point: Why are you telling us only now, Mr. Greenspan, that there’s a housing bubble, now that you’re retired and can float around being an insanely well-paid pundit? It’s patently obvious now anyway. We don’t need your penetrating insights to see it now.

And why are you telling us only now that the invasion of Iraq was about oil, now that it’s way too late to do anything about it? Where were you, and all the other people in positions of power, who knew back in 2003 that Bush was making all this shit up? We needed you. 92% of people, or something almost as ridiculous, thought Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9-11 plot. The Republican house and senate were all in lockstep. The network and cable news outlets, and the Rush Limbaughs and the Fox Newses were all banging their drums and flashing their infographics and animated “War on Terror ’02: Invadistan” logos. And then there were the rest of us, all five of us or so, looking at each other incredulously, asking “What the hell is going on here, and why is no one asking any real questions?” We could have used your penetrating insights back then, Maestro.

Hindsight is always 20/20, as the cliché goes. Fine and good. But what about foresight? Not everyone has it. We can’t fault our past selves for not being omniscient. But sometimes, intelligent people who have the capacity for foresight decide to remain silent, when one might argue that it’s their responsibility to edify the rest of us. Or at least to contribute to the conversation and make a thoughtful point of view more widely understood. We certainly could have used it then.

This chart from the August 2007 National Geographic is telling. Perhaps the ardent champions of family values who ran congress for 12 years overlooked this state of affairs. Opposing gay marriage can easily fill your calendar, after all. Though I’d be surprised if the current occupants did much better.

Not often does all of sub-Saharan Africa (except Liberia) have us beat on any measure worth emulating.

There’s not much I need to say about the Libby thing that hasn’t been said. Outraged? Not really. Deeply offended? Yes. But we should have expected it, shouldn't we? After all, as the adage goes, fool me once, shame on me . . . you. Fool me twice, shame on . . . wait. Fool me . . . aw, hell.

But you know what I mean. Why should we have expected anything else? This follows a tried and true pattern for this administration. Everyone in the inner circle, publicly and privately, is exempt from the rules. If necessary, they’ll take the time to change the rules (sometimes publicly, often secretly) or draft up memos explaining why the rules don’t apply in this particular case. But in a pinch they’ll just ignore the rules, knowing that they can cover it up or get around the outcry and the consequences later.

On one hand, I do have a lot of sympathy for Libby. What else is he but a fall guy? If we follow the naive assumption that the person responsible for a given act is the one who should receive the credit, blame, or punishment for it, then he should face the consequences of lying to the FBI and to the special counsel. But bound up in his 30 month sentence was a grander lie about the war and the reasons for going to war in the first place. While he was, to some extent, an architect of that lie as well, the real blame for it goes to his superiors. And many of us who were raised to do the right thing even when no one is looking think they should have served that much jail time (or more) for their roles. But everyone knew better than to hope for that. Libby really only deserved to spend 30 months in jail if Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, and the rest were there with him. Justice should be applied fairly and uniformly, or not at all. Because if not fair and uniform, it’s a charade. That’s gist of the national outcry.

The front page of yesterday’s New York Times had a nice historical comparative quote series from Bush to remind us where we’ve been. The first was from back in September 2003, when he said, “If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of.” I wonder if commutation is what he meant?

Also in the NYT (online edition), was this letter to the editor that eloquently explains the part of the Libby thing that does actually outrage me.

To the Editor:

When George W. Bush was governor of Texas, he presided over more than 150 executions. In more than one-third of the cases — 57 in all — lawyers representing condemned inmates asked then-Governor Bush for a commutation of sentence, so that the inmates would serve life in prison rather than face execution.

Some of these inmates had been represented by lawyers who slept during trials. Some were mentally retarded. Some were juveniles at the time they committed the crime for which they were sentenced to death.

In all these cases, Governor Bush refused to commute their sentences, saying that the inmates had had full access to the judicial system.

I. Lewis Libby Jr. had the best lawyers money can buy. His crime cannot be attributed to youth or retardation. He has expressed no remorse whatsoever for lying to a grand jury or participating in the administration’s effort to mislead the American people about the war in Iraq. President Bush’s commutation of Mr. Libby’s sentence is certainly legal, but it just as surely offends the fundamental constitutional value of equality.

Because President Bush signed a commutation, a rich and powerful man will spend not a day in prison, while 57 poor and poorly connected human beings died because Governor Bush refused to lift a pen for them.

David R. Dow

Houston, July 3, 2007

The writer is a professor at the University of Houston Law Center who represents death row inmates, including several who sought commutation from then-Governor Bush.

It’s an X-Files moment. Or an alternate take on “Children of Men.” It would be such cool science fiction: All the honeybees on Earth disappear, or at least a good chunk of them disappear fairly rapidly over the course of a few months. Gone without a trace. All those teeming swarms you rarely stop to think about, gone. Silenced. Who’s going to make all that honey for my Crispy Honey Toasty Oat Os? Who’s going to pollenate the fruit trees and all that other agricultural crap?

But more importantly, where did they go? Back to their colony on the dark side of the moon, to feed and nurture the giant Space Queen who’s going to launch the invasion to retake the Earth after millenia of waiting? Back to their underwater lair for the thousand-year Transformation? Has the Hymenoptera Pied Piper set up camp in the backwoods of Idaho and begun calling his horde home? Where oh where hef dem goed?

But the scary part is that it’s really happening, and happening quickly, and no one knows why! If you haven’t heard news reports about it yet, you will soon.

My own feelings about this extinction (if it comes to that) are complex, because I have a complex relationship with all striped black and yellow flying things.

On one hand, there’s the burning hatred, instinctive and deep, stretching back to childhood. I’m deathly allergic to them. The last time I was stung I spent two days in the hospital covered in red puffy welts and white blisters, pumped full of antihistamines and adrenalin by IV. Whenever one starts to hover near me, I freeze and become frantically panicked at the same time. As soon as the thing lingers or lands, I kill it. I take great joy in killing it. I can’t help it. Granted, I get much more joy from killing wasps, because something about those long dangly legs seems obscene and makes them much more evil. Well, malicious and taunting anyway, and less useful in the sort of communal, symbiotic sense that gives some people the warm and fuzzy feeling about bees.

On the other hand, there’s my love of bee pollen as a nutritional supplement. Sure it’s good for you, boosts yer pep and whatnot. But the coolest thing about it is that you’re eating pure information rendered into material form. 'Cuz what else is pollen but plant DNA, and what else is DNA besides pure information? I’m not going to get into the pros and cons of eating animal DNA in this forum, though the subject has been broached in The Straight Dope and many other places. Plant DNA doesn’t carry the same connotations, so I feel much more free to talk about it.

Unfortunately, that’s as far as thought goes: eating pure information is cool. The fact that there's an insect that gathers it up and presents it to the person or machine who packages it and ships it so I can buy it fresh at Whole Foods? That’s pretty cool too.

And then there’s the hypernatural unexplained way that bees navigate and communicate and function as individual nodes in an enormous network, with that wacky little “This Way to the Honey” dance they do, and all the rest. That’s pretty cool too.

But what’s not cool at all is this: (1) that they’re dying; and (2) all the crackpot head-up-the-arse cockamamie notions that people are coming up with to try to explain the disappearance. My Space Queen idea isn’t really all that outlandish when you consider some of what I’ve been seeing.

From craigslist:

In case you haven't heard, Cell phones are killing us.

They are fucking up the bees. The bees are getting fucked up by the radiation from the phones and coming out the hives retarded.

They are NOT pollenating!

If they don't do that = WE ALL DIE

IT IS TIME TO KILL THE CELL PHONE AND GO STAND IN LINE WAITING ON A PAY PHONE

That actually sounds uncannily like an ex-girlfriend of mine.

This theory is treated as a possibility by actual sources as well (well, actual British sources): The Independent.

And then there’s the guy who’s figured out how to profit from it. My favorite quote from his write-up: “Of course, it's not just an issue of losing blueberries and broccoli. Farmers stand to lose a lot of money.” (Because that’s by far the hugest consequence of a bee extinction.) And to be fair, further on down he does admit that the nearly 100 crop species in the U.S. that rely on honeybees for pollination constitute about 1/3 of our diet. But that pales in comparison to the farmers’ loss. We can always just eat more beef, I suppose.

Penny prefers oboes to strings. She finds the tones more soothing, she said.

From the New York times:

After more than an hour of fierce and emotional debate, the senators rejected pleas to add exceptions for incest or rape or for the health of the pregnant woman and instead voted, 23 to 12, to outlaw all abortions, except those to save the woman's life.

More here (registration required).

This is a clever piece of writing from The Washington Post about a Minuteman fanatic who’s just come to DC for a Capitol Hill rally. It caught my eye this morning and almost had me spitting out my Grapenuts by the end. Though of course this woman probably had more to say than what’s quoted here, the article reminds us that anti-immigration fanaticism can be a pathology. Some people fear germs or pollen and wear surgical masks around town; others fear immigrants and the rampant sex slave trade plaguing our country. You have to read all the way to the end to get it.

Guardian of the Green Card
Warrior Against Illegal Immigration Sees Signs of Trouble All Around Her
By Carol Morello, Ernesto Londoo and Allison Klein
Wednesday, February 8, 2006; Page B01

As she breezed off the plane from Salt Lake City, the woman who had come to protest illegal immigration crossed paths with a man who first set foot here as an illegal immigrant. Carmen Mercer bustled into Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport wearing a big red and white sticker on her jacket that said, "Secure America Now! No to Amnesty."

It was amnesty, granted a few years after he entered the country illegally from El Salvador, that allowed Cadelario Reyes to build a landscaping business in Gaithersburg. As Mercer's flight landed, Reyes's 24-year-old son was about to depart for duty in the Navy, and the two men embraced near the security gate. Mercer, 51, a petite grandmother, had come to Washington for today's Capitol Hill rally by the Minuteman Project, an activist group that wants to seal the nation's borders against illegal immigration and torpedo President Bush's proposed guest-worker program for illegals. Locally, a Minuteman chapter has tracked immigrants at a site where day laborers gather in Herndon.

Though she runs a diner barely 30 miles north of the Mexican border in Tombstone, Ariz., Mercer said she once was oblivious to the tide of immigration.

"For years, I never was aware of it," Mercer said as she headed toward the baggage carousel, near the newsstand where Gilda, from Guatemala, and Maria, from Mexico, chatted amiably in Spanish in between ringing up purchases. "Now I see it everywhere."

In the Washington region, where an estimated one in six residents is foreign-born, she would see a thousand faces of immigration during her visit.

Her eyes were opened to them by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As she was becoming more vigilant, Arizona had an influx of people after crackdowns along the Mexican border in California and Texas.

"I can guarantee terrorists have come across the border," she said. "I don't want 9/11 to happen again. It's a national security thing."

Mercer walked toward the rental car shuttle, past cabdrivers from Russia, Africa and Asia waiting by the curb, and by Olawoyin Dauda, a Nigerian who moved to the United States after his computer business tanked. He now stood beside his blue Super Shuttle van.

For now, the buffalo burgers in her Tombstone diner are being served by her 13 employees, freeing Mercer for what she considers her patriotic duty.

Many nights, she has headed into the Arizona desert in her Chevrolet pickup, on patrol with another woman. Locals call them the Granny Brigade.

They sit on lawn chairs perched on hilltops or in the brush, armed with night-vision goggles, walkie-talkies and guns. Mercer's is a .45-caliber Colt. She holsters it in a custom gun belt with leather loops to hold bullets, like a bandoleer.

But it has become harder to find time for patrolling. Mercer is vice president, chief fundraiser and national recruiter for Minuteman, as well as director of the Tucson chapter. The group started less than a year ago with 400 members. Now, she estimated, they have signed up 8,000.

She said that part of the solution would be a tall, concrete wall erected along the entire 2,000-mile Mexican border between California and Texas.

"All they have to do is secure the borders," she said. "We won't have fear of terrorists coming across. We won't have fear of the sex-slave trade. We won't have criminals crossing."

Noticing a young man in an Army uniform struggling under a pile of green bags in the rental car terminal, she dashed to hold open the door for him.

"He's going to Iraq," she said, returning to her seat. "I love soldiers. They're our protection. They should be on our border."

At the Holiday Inn in Alexandria, a man with a Jamaican accent helped check in Mercer, who has a slight accent of her own. Outside, where taxis lined up four and five deep, the accents of the drivers were those of the Middle East and Africa.

"It is very hard to survive here if you want to live in a proper place," said cabby Khalil Siddiqui, 48, who has a master's degree from a university in Pakistan and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

The corner gas station three blocks away was staffed by a man from Pakistan and two women, one from Ethiopia and the other from India.

"Foreign people are hard workers," said Tahir Younis, 28, the mechanic. "You go to McDonald's, and who works there? Foreigners. If there were not foreigners, what would you do?"

At a nearby fast-food restaurant, a 21-year-old woman mopped the floor. She chatted openly in Spanish, until the topic of a green card was raised. Then she lowered her head, hushed her voice to barely a whisper and said she could no longer speak because she had to return to her work. When Mercer last visited Washington in May, she said, she and another Minuteman asked the drivers of all the cabs they took whether they were citizens. If they said they were not, Mercer and her colleague asked for their green cards. Mercer said they wanted to prove a point and did not report anyone to immigration authorities.

Recently, Mercer's landlord paid for a new roof on the building housing her diner. She fed every member of the crew, except for two who stayed in the trailer. She later learned that they did not have green cards. "If I'd have seen them, I would have reported them," she said. Benefits for Both

In a dimly lit alley behind a row of restaurants in Alexandria, workers slipped out of back doors to smoke or haul heavy trash bins to a dumpster. The alley was slick with fetid puddles and dirty with discarded cigarette butts. The only light shone through the bars of an adjacent parking garage.

Nelson Posada emerged from a restaurant door into the alley dragging a garbage can. Originally from Honduras, he crossed the border illegally, traversing the Arizona desert in 1994. He left behind a 6-month-old boy who knows his father only from phone conversations and the money he wires home. Posada, who works two full-time jobs six days a week, has relatives who talk of following him here. He tells them the border is not what it used to be when he crossed by paying smugglers $2,000.

Now, immigrants face a beefed-up U.S. Border Patrol and private citizens scouring the desert, on the lookout for undocumented foreigners. "I'd like for the United States to give us papers," he said. "We come to work, and that benefits us both."

Seated at a table in a seafood restaurant just off the alley, Mercer ordered her dinner from a menu that featured on the back the photographs and names of a half-dozen employees with Latino names and their years of service.

It is a rare dinner out for Mercer, who on principle has cut back on patronizing restaurants.

"I stopped, because wherever you go, you constantly find people are working there illegally," she said. "I'm not saying that's the case here. But if 80 percent of the kitchen staff is from another country, you wonder."

After a breakfast omelet served yesterday by a waiter from Pakistan, Mercer went sightseeing at the Jefferson Memorial. Near the end of a biographical film on Jefferson, the movie showed the Statue of Liberty and Jefferson's words, "Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe?"

Mercer purchased two pamphlets, one on the U.S. Constitution and one on the Founding Fathers, from a Filipina cashier in the gift shop.

At a construction site near the memorial, a work crew was directed with orders shouted in Spanish over the noise of heavy machinery. On the crew was Ernesto Valdez, 36, a native of the Mexican state of Guerrero. He came to the country illegally but received amnesty in the mid-1980s. The immigration documents allowed him to be hired on a project on federal property; without documents, he would have been excluded.

But requirements for regular construction sites are more lax, he noted. Despite tougher immigration laws, the lure of dollars remains strong.

"People keep crossing," said Valdez, wearing stained jeans, a white hard hat and a green vest. "It's a big problem." On that point, Mercer would agree. And she is determined to do her part to stop it.

"You can't have a country if you don't have borders," she said. "If we don't do something now, we might not have another chance."

Mercer moved to Tombstone in 1992 after a divorce from a soldier ended the migration from base to base—Florida, North Carolina, New Mexico, Germany and Arizona—so common to military life.

They'd met when he was stationed in Germany, where Mercer was born and raised in a small town near Cologne.

She might never have become a U.S. citizen had she not been kicked off a local planning and zoning committee in Arizona when it was discovered she was not. In 1999, almost a quarter-century after coming to the United States, she was naturalized.

She remembers being one of about 500 people naturalized that day. "Two of us were from Germany, one was Russian, one was Japanese and two were from Korea," said Mercer, who speaks with only the slightest hint of a German accent and thinks and dreams in English. "The rest, about 480 of them, were from Mexico."

Finally, someone has stood up and drawn a detailed schematic of democracy’s decay, with a little “You are here” dot for those who came in late. That someone is Al Gore, so I can only assume that Limbaugh and Krauthammer and the rest are up late tonight putting the polishing touches on their playground bully schtick for tomorrow morning’s shows. Now, granted, you had to be awake in history class to catch some of Gore’s references, and some of his sentences contain more than two clauses, so this speech is likely only to be summarized for us by the networks who understand that we would rather have more time to watch Simpson’s reruns or the OC.

For example, it contains such whoppers as this: “It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has.” That’ll never make it onto Fox News. Thus the speech, which is the most circumspect and forthright analysis to date of the Emperor’s curious new taste in fashion, is quoted in its entirety below. Some of us have been asking these questions since 2001, and others of us are just starting to wonder. If you’re not asking questions yet, you won’t bother listening to the answers anyway.

Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens—Democrats and Republicans alike—to express our shared concern that America's Constitution is in grave danger.

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses.

It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.

So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people.

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped—one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the “most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country” and vowed to “take him off his pedestal.” The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue.

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on “large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States.” The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program “without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection.”

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place.

But surprisingly, the President's soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution—our system of checks and balances—was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution—an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, “On Common Sense” ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America's alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that “the law is king.”

Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us operate within our constitutional structure, which means that our democratic institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation. It means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint.

The rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be tested, studied, reviewed and examined through the processes of government that are designed to improve policy. And the knowledge that they will be reviewed prevents over-reaching and checks the accretion of power.

A commitment to openness, truthfulness and accountability also helps our country avoid many serious mistakes. Recently, for example, we learned from recently classified declassified documents that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the tragic Vietnam war, was actually based on false information. We now know that the decision by Congress to authorize the Iraq War, 38 years later, was also based on false information. America would have been better off knowing the truth and avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our history. Following the rule of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable.

The President and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism is all too real. There is simply no question that we continue to face new challenges in the wake of the attack on September 11th and that we must be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm.

Where we disagree is that we have to break the law or sacrifice our system of government to protect Americans from terrorism. In fact, doing so makes us weaker and more vulnerable.

Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles. As the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws.

The President's men have minced words about America's laws. The Attorney General openly conceded that the “kind of surveillance” we now know they have been conducting requires a court order unless authorized by statute. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act self-evidently does not authorize what the NSA has been doing, and no one inside or outside the Administration claims that it does. Incredibly, the Administration claims instead that the surveillance was implicitly authorized when Congress voted to use force against those who attacked us on September 11th.

This argument just does not hold any water. Without getting into the legal intricacies, it faces a number of embarrassing facts. First, another admission by the Attorney General: he concedes that the Administration knew that the NSA project was prohibited by existing law and that they consulted with some members of Congress about changing the statute. Gonzalez says that they were told this probably would not be possible. So how can they now argue that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force somehow implicitly authorized it all along? Second, when the Authorization was being debated, the Administration did in fact seek to have language inserted in it that would have authorized them to use military force domestically—and the Congress did not agree. Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Jim McGovern, among others, made statements during the Authorization debate clearly restating that that Authorization did not operate domestically.

When President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him all the power he wanted when they passed the AUMF, he secretly assumed that power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother. But as Justice Frankfurter once wrote: “To find authority so explicitly withheld is not merely to disregard in a particular instance the clear will of Congress. It is to disrespect the whole legislative process and the constitutional division of authority between President and Congress.”

This is precisely the “disrespect” for the law that the Supreme Court struck down in the steel seizure case.

It is this same disrespect for America's Constitution which has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution. And the disrespect embodied in these apparent mass violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution that is deeply troubling to millions of Americans in both political parties.

For example, the President has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer—even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.

The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned.

At the same time, the Executive Branch has claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture in a pattern that has now been documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world.

Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by Executive Branch interrogators and many more have been broken and humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were innocent of any charges.

This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president since then—until now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, not to mention our own laws against torture.

The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals in foreign countries and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture.

Some of our traditional allies have been shocked by these new practices on the part of our nation. The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan—one of those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons—registered a complaint to his home office about the senselessness and cruelty of the new U.S. practice: “This material is useless—we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful.”

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is “yes” then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?

The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch's claims of these previously unrecognized powers: “If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution.”

The fact that our normal safeguards have thus far failed to contain this unprecedented expansion of executive power is deeply troubling. This failure is due in part to the fact that the Executive Branch has followed a determined strategy of obfuscating, delaying, withholding information, appearing to yield but then refusing to do so and dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of the legislative and judicial branches to restore our constitutional balance.

For example, after appearing to support legislation sponsored by John McCain to stop the continuation of torture, the President declared in the act of signing the bill that he reserved the right not to comply with it.

Similarly, the Executive Branch claimed that it could unilaterally imprison American citizens without giving them access to review by any tribunal. The Supreme Court disagreed, but the President engaged in legal maneuvers designed to prevent the Court from providing meaningful content to the rights of its citizens.

A conservative jurist on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the Executive Branch's handling of one such case seemed to involve the sudden abandonment of principle “at substantial cost to the government's credibility before the courts.”

As a result of its unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the Executive Branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk. The stakes for America's representative democracy are far higher than has been generally recognized.

These claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power restored to our Republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of our democracy may well undergo a radical transformation.

For more than two centuries, America's freedoms have been preserved in part by our founders' wise decision to separate the aggregate power of our government into three co-equal branches, each of which serves to check and balance the power of the other two.

On more than a few occasions, the dynamic interaction among all three branches has resulted in collisions and temporary impasses that create what are invariably labeled “constitutional crises.” These crises have often been dangerous and uncertain times for our Republic. But in each such case so far, we have found a resolution of the crisis by renewing our common agreement to live under the rule of law.

The principle alternative to democracy throughout history has been the consolidation of virtually all state power in the hands of a single strongman or small group who together exercise that power without the informed consent of the governed.

It was in revolt against just such a regime, after all, that America was founded. When Lincoln declared at the time of our greatest crisis that the ultimate question being decided in the Civil War was “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure,” he was not only saving our union but also was recognizing the fact that democracies are rare in history. And when they fail, as did Athens and the Roman Republic upon whose designs our founders drew heavily, what emerges in their place is another strongman regime.

There have of course been other periods of American history when the Executive Branch claimed new powers that were later seen as excessive and mistaken. Our second president, John Adams, passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts and sought to silence and imprison critics and political opponents.

When his successor, Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses he said: “[The essential principles of our Government] form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation... [S]hould we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety.”

Our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current administration were committed by President Wilson during and after WWI with the notorious Red Scare and Palmer Raids. The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII marked a low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive. And, during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of the abuses experienced by Dr. King and thousands of others.

But in each of these cases, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, the country recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.

There are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be changing and that the cycle may not repeat itself. For one thing, we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power. In a global environment of nuclear weapons and cold war tensions, Congress and the American people accepted ever enlarging spheres of presidential initiative to conduct intelligence and counter intelligence activities and to allocate our military forces on the global stage. When military force has been used as an instrument of foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands, it has almost always been as the result of presidential initiative and leadership. As Justice Frankfurter wrote in the Steel Seizure Case, “The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.”

A second reason to believe we may be experiencing something new is that we are told by the Administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place the country is going to “last for the rest of our lives.” So we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other Presidents to justify arrogations of power will persist in near perpetuity.

Third, we need to be aware of the advances in eavesdropping and surveillance technologies with their capacity to sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of information and to mine it for intelligence. This adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential power of those technologies. These techologies have the potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in ways both subtle and profound.

Don't misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is all too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction does create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the Executive Branch with swiftness and agility. Moreover, there is in fact an inherent power that is conferred by the Constitution to the President to take unilateral action to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat, but it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not.

But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power grab lasting for years that produces a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government.

There is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something more than just another cycle of overreach and regret. This Administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential authority is exactly what our Constitution intended.

This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive but which is more accurately described as the unilateral executive, threatens to expand the president's powers until the contours of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the President's authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by Congress. President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign. When added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine.

This effort to rework America's carefully balanced constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and judiciary is—ironically—accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework America's foreign policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to establish dominance in the world.

The common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate and control.

This same pattern has characterized the effort to silence dissenting views within the Executive Branch, to censor information that may be inconsistent with its stated ideological goals, and to demand conformity from all Executive Branch employees.

For example, CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House assertion that Osama bin Laden was linked to Saddam Hussein found themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing promotions and salary increases.

Ironically, that is exactly what happened to FBI officials in the 1960s who disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover's view that Dr. King was closely connected to Communists. The head of the FBI's domestic intelligence division said that his effort to tell the truth about King's innocence of the charge resulted in he and his colleagues becoming isolated and pressured. “It was evident that we had to change our ways or we would all be out on the street.... The men and I discussed how to get out of trouble. To be in trouble with Mr. Hoover was a serious matter. These men were trying to buy homes, mortgages on homes, children in school. They lived in fear of getting transferred, losing money on their homes, as they usually did. ... so they wanted another memorandum written to get us out of the trouble that we were in.”

The Constitution's framers understood this dilemma as well, as Alexander Hamilton put it, “a power over a man's support is a power over his will.” (Federalist No. 73)

Soon, there was no more difference of opinion within the FBI. The false accusation became the unanimous view. In exactly the same way, George Tenet's CIA eventually joined in endorsing a manifestly false view that there was a linkage between al Qaeda and the government of Iraq.

In the words of George Orwell: “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes. Dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded.

Last week, for example, Vice President Cheney attempted to defend the Administration's eavesdropping on American citizens by saying that if it had conducted this program prior to 9/11, they would have found out the names of some of the hijackers.

Tragically, he apparently still doesn't know that the Administration did in fact have the names of at least 2 of the hijackers well before 9/11 and had available to them information that could have easily led to the identification of most of the other hijackers. And yet, because of incompetence in the handling of this information, it was never used to protect the American people.

It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has.

Moreover, if the pattern of practice begun by this Administration is not challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the American system. Many conservatives have pointed out that granting unchecked power to this President means that the next President will have unchecked power as well. And the next President may be someone whose values and belief you do not trust. And this is why Republicans as well as Democrats should be concerned with what this President has done. If this President's attempt to dramatically expand executive power goes unquestioned, our constitutional design of checks and balances will be lost. And the next President or some future President will be able, in the name of national security, to restrict our liberties in a way the framers never would have thought possible.

The same instinct to expand its power and to establish dominance characterizes the relationship between this Administration and the courts and the Congress.

In a properly functioning system, the Judicial Branch would serve as the constitutional umpire to ensure that the branches of government observed their proper spheres of authority, observed civil liberties and adhered to the rule of law. Unfortunately, the unilateral executive has tried hard to thwart the ability of the judiciary to call balls and strikes by keeping controversies out of its hands—notably those challenging its ability to detain individuals without legal process—by appointing judges who will be deferential to its exercise of power and by its support of assaults on the independence of the third branch.

The President's decision to ignore FISA was a direct assault on the power of the judges who sit on that court. Congress established the FISA court precisely to be a check on executive power to wiretap. Yet, to ensure that the court could not function as a check on executive power, the President simply did not take matters to it and did not let the court know that it was being bypassed.

The President's judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure that the courts will not serve as an effective check on executive power. As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a longtime supporter of a powerful executive—a supporter of the so-called unitary executive, which is more properly called the unilateral executive. Whether you support his confirmation or not—and I do not—we must all agree that he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion of executive power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his deference to the expansion of executive power through his support of judicial deference to executive agency rulemaking.

And the Administration has supported the assault on judicial independence that has been conducted largely in Congress. That assault includes a threat by the Republican majority in the Senate to permanently change the rules to eliminate the right of the minority to engage in extended debate of the President's judicial nominees. The assault has extended to legislative efforts to curtail the jurisdiction of courts in matters ranging from habeas corpus to the pledge of allegiance. In short, the Administration has demonstrated its contempt for the judicial role and sought to evade judicial review of its actions at every turn.

But the most serious damage has been done to the legislative branch. The sharp decline of congressional power and autonomy in recent years has been almost as shocking as the efforts by the Executive Branch to attain a massive expansion of its power.

I was elected to Congress in 1976 and served eight years in the house, 8 years in the Senate and presided over the Senate for 8 years as Vice President. As a young man, I saw the Congress first hand as the son of a Senator. My father was elected to Congress in 1938, 10 years before I was born, and left the Senate in 1971.

The Congress we have today is unrecognizable compared to the one in which my father served. There are many distinguished Senators and Congressmen serving today. I am honored that some of them are here in this hall. But the legislative branch of government under its current leadership now operates as if it is entirely subservient to the Executive Branch.

Moreover, too many Members of the House and Senate now feel compelled to spend a majority of their time not in thoughtful debate of the issues, but raising money to purchase 30 second TV commercials.

There have now been two or three generations of congressmen who don't really know what an oversight hearing is. In the 70's and 80's, the oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I participated held the feet of the Executive Branch to the fire—no matter which party was in power. Yet oversight is almost unknown in the Congress today.

The role of authorization committees has declined into insignificance. The 13 annual appropriation bills are hardly ever actually passed anymore. Everything is lumped into a single giant measure that is not even available for Members of Congress to read before they vote on it.

Members of the minority party are now routinely excluded from conference committees, and amendments are routinely not allowed during floor consideration of legislation.

In the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on being the “greatest deliberative body in the world,” meaningful debate is now a rarity. Even on the eve of the fateful vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously asked: “Why is this chamber empty?”

In the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely competitive election contest every two years is typically less than a dozen out of 435.

And too many incumbents have come to believe that the key to continued access to the money for re-election is to stay on the good side of those who have the money to give; and, in the case of the majority party, the whole process is largely controlled by the incumbent president and his political organization.

So the willingness of Congress to challenge the Administration is further limited when the same party controls both Congress and the Executive Branch.

The Executive Branch, time and again, has co-opted Congress' role, and often Congress has been a willing accomplice in the surrender of its own power.

Look for example at the Congressional role in “overseeing” this massive four year eavesdropping campaign that on its face seemed so clearly to violate the Bill of Rights. The President says he informed Congress, but what he really means is that he talked with the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees and the top leaders of the House and Senate. This small group, in turn, claimed that they were not given the full facts, though at least one of the intelligence committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to VP Cheney and placed a copy in his own safe.

Though I sympathize with the awkward position in which these men and women were placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty Coalition when it says that Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress must share the blame for not taking action to protest and seek to prevent what they consider a grossly unconstitutional program.

Moreover, in the Congress as a whole—both House and Senate—the enhanced role of money in the re-election process, coupled with the sharply diminished role for reasoned deliberation and debate, has produced an atmosphere conducive to pervasive institutionalized corruption.

The Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant iceberg that threatens the integrity of the entire legislative branch of government.

It is the pitiful state of our legislative branch which primarily explains the failure of our vaunted checks and balances to prevent the dangerous overreach by our Executive Branch which now threatens a radical transformation of the American system.

I call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress today to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you're supposed to be.

But there is yet another Constitutional player whose pulse must be taken and whose role must be examined in order to understand the dangerous imbalance that has emerged with the efforts by the Executive Branch to dominate our constitutional system.

We the people are—collectively—still the key to the survival of America's democracy. We—as Lincoln put it, “[e]ven we here”—must examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and degradation of our democracy.

Thomas Jefferson said: “An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.”

The revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was based was the audacious belief that people can govern themselves and responsibly exercise the ultimate authority in self-government. This insight proceeded inevitably from the bedrock principle articulated by the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: “All just power is derived from the consent of the governed.”

The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now in such danger was created with the full and widespread participation of the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the day, widely-read newspaper essays, and they represented only one of twenty-four series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia.

Indeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the people—in their various States—that refused to confirm the result until, at their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document sent forward for ratification.

And it is “We the people” who must now find once again the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution.

And here there is cause for both concern and great hope. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television—a distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates.

Lincoln's memorable call during the Civil War is applicable in a new way to our dilemma today: “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Forty years have passed since the majority of Americans adopted television as their principal source of information. Its dominance has become so extensive that virtually all significant political communication now takes place within the confines of flickering 30-second television advertisements.

And the political economy supported by these short but expensive television ads is as different from the vibrant politics of America's first century as those politics were different from the feudalism which thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.

The constricted role of ideas in the American political system today has encouraged efforts by the Executive Branch to control the flow of information as a means of controlling the outcome of important decisions that still lie in the hands of the people.

The Administration vigorously asserts its power to maintain the secrecy of its operations. After all, the other branches can't check an abuse of power if they don't know it is happening.

For example, when the Administration was attempting to persuade Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many in the House and Senate raised concerns about the cost and design of the program. But, rather than engaging in open debate on the basis of factual data, the Administration withheld facts and prevented the Congress from hearing testimony that it sought from the principal administration expert who had compiled information showing in advance of the vote that indeed the true cost estimates were far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the President.

Deprived of that information, and believing the false numbers given to it instead, the Congress approved the program. Tragically, the entire initiative is now collapsing—all over the country—with the Administration making an appeal just this weekend to major insurance companies to volunteer to bail it out.

To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political appointee in the White House who had no scientific training. And today one of the leading scientific experts on global warming in NASA has been ordered not to talk to members of the press and to keep a careful log of everyone he meets with so that the Executive Branch can monitor and control his discussions of global warming.

One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow of information is by consistently resorting to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest. As President Eisenhower said, “Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America.”

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: “Men feared witches and burnt women.”

The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment's notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march—when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.

We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens' right not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive Branch and the President's apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law.

I endorse the words of Bob Barr, when he said, “The President has dared the American people to do something about it. For the sake of the Constitution, I hope they will.”

A special counsel should immediately be appointed by the Attorney General to remedy the obvious conflict of interest that prevents him from investigating what many believe are serious violations of law by the President. We have had a fresh demonstration of how an independent investigation by a special counsel with integrity can rebuild confidence in our system of justice. Patrick Fitzgerald has, by all accounts, shown neither fear nor favor in pursuing allegations that the Executive Branch has violated other laws.

Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress should support the bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the appointment of a special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the President.

Second, new whistleblower protections should immediately be established for members of the Executive Branch who report evidence of wrongdoing—especially where it involves the abuse of Executive Branch authority in the sensitive areas of national security.

Third, both Houses of Congress should hold comprehensive—and not just superficial—hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the President. And, they should follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Fourth, the extensive new powers requested by the Executive Branch in its proposal to extend and enlarge the Patriot Act should, under no circumstances be granted, unless and until there are adequate and enforceable safeguards to protect the Constitution and the rights of the American people against the kinds of abuses that have so recently been revealed.

Fifth, any telecommunications company that has provided the government with access to private information concerning the communications of Americans without a proper warrant should immediately cease and desist their complicity in this apparently illegal invasion of the privacy of American citizens.

Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the restoration of the health of our democracy.

It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy depends on it.

I mentioned that along with cause for concern, there is reason for hope. As I stand here today, I am filled with optimism that America is on the eve of a golden age in which the vitality of our democracy will be re-established and will flourish more vibrantly than ever. Indeed I can feel it in this hall.

As Dr. King once said, “Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.”

From yesterday’s Washington Post, a well-reasoned argument why the U.S. should not delve into creative interrogative methods, from someone who should know:

By Vladimir Bukovsky
Sunday, December 18, 2005
CAMBRIDGE, England

One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. “But, Comrade Stalin,” stammered Beria, “five suspects have already confessed to stealing it.”

This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John McCain’s amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.

This is a new debate for Americans, but there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. Most nations can provide you with volumes on the subject. Indeed, with the exception of the Black Death, torture is the oldest scourge on our planet (hence there are so many conventions against it). Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these “interrogation” practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.

Apart from sheer frustration and other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they have a “ticking bomb” case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one’s sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin’s notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria’s predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.

So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to "improve intelligence-gathering capability” by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some "cruel, inhumane or degrading” (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.

Even talking about the possibility of using CID treatment sends wrong signals and encourages base instincts in those who should be consistently delivered from temptation by their superiors. As someone who has been on the receiving end of the "treatment" under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the "Chekist’s handshake" so widely practiced under Stalin— a firm squeeze of the victim’s palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?

Now it appears that sleep deprivation is "only" CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin’s "show trials" of the 1930s. The henchmen called it "conveyer," when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.

I know from my own experience that interrogation is an intensely personal confrontation, a duel of wills. It is not about revealing some secrets or making confessions, it is about self-respect and human dignity. If I break, I will not be able to look into a mirror. But if I don’t, my interrogator will suffer equally. Just try to control your emotions in the heat of that battle. This is precisely why torture occurs even when it is explicitly forbidden. Now, who is going to guarantee that even the most exact definition of CID is observed under such circumstances?

But if we cannot guarantee this, then how can you force your officers and your young people in the CIA to commit acts that will scar them forever? For scarred they will be, take my word for it.

In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner— through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.

The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man— my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: "Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It’ll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool." The doctor was in tears: "Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can’t do that. . . . ” And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.

Today, when the White House lawyers seem preoccupied with contriving a way to stem the flow of possible lawsuits from former detainees, I strongly recommend that they think about another flood of suits, from the men and women in your armed services or the CIA agents who have been or will be engaged in CID practices. Our rich experience in Russia has shown that many will become alcoholics or drug addicts, violent criminals or, at the very least, despotic and abusive fathers and mothers.

If America’s leaders want to hunt terrorists while transforming dictatorships into democracies, they must recognize that torture, which includes CID, has historically been an instrument of oppression— not an instrument of investigation or of intelligence gathering. No country needs to invent how to “legalize" torture; the problem is rather how to stop it from happening. If it isn’t stopped, torture will destroy your nation’s important strategy to develop democracy in the Middle East. And if you cynically outsource torture to contractors and foreign agents, how can you possibly be surprised if an 18-year-old in the Middle East casts a jaundiced eye toward your reform efforts there?

Finally, think what effect your attitude has on the rest of the world, particularly in the countries where torture is still common, such as Russia, and where its citizens are still trying to combat it. Mr. Putin will be the first to say: “You see, even your vaunted American democracy cannot defend itself without resorting to torture. . . . ”

Off we go, back to the caves.

Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent nearly 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals for nonviolent human rights activities, is the author of several books, including “To Build a Castle” and “Judgment in Moscow.” Now 63, he has lived primarily in Cambridge, England, since 1976.

There’s very little time to spare because I have a plane to catch, but one of my roommates left the Post splayed out on the kitchen table this morning, and this headline (Shortage of Immigrant Workers Alarms Growers in West) caught my eye as I walked past. I believe it underscores my previous point about the extent to which the smooth running of the world economy hangs on a ready supply of cheap labor. So while you’re stuffing your face with turkey tomorrow, just remember who picked it for you. Happy thanksgiving to all.

Here's a little evidence that economic incentives can move mountains in a hurry: Sales of the largest SUVs dropped by over half in September, compared to a year before. And sales of the Prius (Toyota's hybrid) is up by 90%. Makes you wonder why the tax code actually gives tax breaks for SUV purchases. And makes you wonder what would happen if it were the opposite. More hurricanes! More! Let's have just a couple of environmental pseudo-disasters to wake us up before the real ones start.

“I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot.”

                                      —Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parish, LA

Myself, I would like a better idiot also. Yesterday’s list of recent quotes and photo op faux pas from the Washington Post makes me think that W has decided to try his hand at a Will Ferrell impression (he’s not bad!).

Bush had raised eyebrows on his first trip by, among other things, picking Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss.—instead of the thousands of mostly poor and black storm victims—as an example of loss. “Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house—he’s lost his entire house—there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch,” Bush said with a laugh from an airplane hangar in Mobile, Ala.

Later in Biloxi, Miss., Bush tried to comfort two stunned women wandering their neighborhood clutching Hefty bags, looking in vain for something to salvage from the rubble of their home. He kept insisting they could find help at a Salvation Army center down the street, even after another bystander had informed him it had been destroyed.

And at his last stop that day, at the airport outside of New Orleans, Bush lauded the increasingly desperate city as a great town because he used go there and “enjoy myself—occasionally too much.”

Unlike his galvanizing appearance in the rubble of the World Trade Center just days after the 2001 attacks, Bush has stayed far from the epicenter of New Orleans’ suffering. His only foray into the city was to its edges to watch crews plugging one of the breached levees on Friday.

On Monday, he skipped the hardest-hit coastal areas entirely, choosing instead to visit Baton Rouge, the state capital about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, which sustained no damage. He also went to Poplarville, Miss., to walk the streets of a middle-class neighborhood that seemed to suffer little more than snapped trees, a couple off-kilter carport roofs and a downed power line or two.

Apparently it’s difficult to fill a photo-op with homeless, fed-up black people to act as smiley-faced cheerleaders for the right. Do they not look all-American enough? Are they not telegenic with their garbage bags and milk crates? Maybe, if the spirit of human compassion still truly lives, a few hundred of the displaced will get together and build Trent Lott a new house. Call Habitat for Humanity.

Go, Pat!

Believe it or not, I still go to the gym. Admittedly, it’s dropped from five times a week down to slightly less than three (on average), but I’m still there after work more often than not, sweating away on some machine, listening to the same five albums on my iPod, and watching Fox News with the closed captioning on.

I don’t choose the Fox. It’s what’s on. But having nothing to do with my eyes for an hour a day while I run on the goofy pseudo-mountain-mimicking machine reconfirms my old suspicions that it’s nothing but a propaganda mouthpiece for the far right. It really hurts to watch it and realize that a huge swath of this country thinks it’s news. Tonight, for instance, I noticed that the right-wingest of right-wing nut jobs, Sean Hannity and Charles Krauthammer are regular commentators. I haven’t seen any amid the sweat dripping into my eyes, but I’m assuming that the liberals they put on stage to pretend at an unbiased presentation sound pretty middle of road. If they showed us the rainbow from green to ultraviolet, we’d be happy to affirm that the whole spectrum’s there, give or take the lunatic fringe.

My favorite sequence tonight segued within ten seconds from a story about Al-Zarqawi’s aide’s confirmation of intent to pull off attacks on U.S. soil (did that come as a surprise? the last one got such a rise out of us) to a couple of apocalyptic quotes about how terrorists could plant a bomb anywhere if they put their minds to it (e.g., movie theaters, malls, schools, your freedom-loving blonde-haired son’s lunchbox), to a story about our wide-open and unsecured border with Mexico where, wouldn’t you know it, over one million illegal aliens are caught ever year trying to sneak across! And an estimated three to five million more get through! Omigod! We’ve got to shut that border with Mexico!

Last September, Time magazine gave a similarly dramatic pronouncement: “The number of illegal aliens flooding into the US this year will total three million.” Time, bastion of rigorous analysis that they are, reached this figure by figuring that for every illegal immigrant caught, “at least three make it into the country safely." Now that’s science. I expect my journalists to use more than the fingers of one hand to do their figgerin’. Do you?

I might have believed those figures, too, had I not been reading this very morning on the bus to work in, you guessed it, The Economist, that

. . . the immigrants caught by the Border Patrol are often repeat offenders. They are returned to Mexico and then promptly try again. In other words, a million arrests do not equal a million different people.

What would be a more plausible figure for the growth in illegal immigration? The INS once calculated that around 40% of undocumented residents entered America legally, but then overstayed their visas. At the same time, many illegal residents have managed to legalise themselves.

Apart from the official amnesties (some 2.7m took advantage of the blanket amnesty in 1986 and another 3m or so have benefited from six targeted bills passed by Congress between 1994 and 2000), at least 100,000 unauthorised residents become legal every year, either by “adjusting their status” (it helps if you marry an American citizen) or by leaving the country and returning with a visa. The numbers are confused guesswork, but it is perfectly possible to believe that some 1m migrants might enter the country illegally this year.

If their numbers are in doubt, their destinations are not. Many will join the 1m or more undocumented immigrants (out of a total agricultural workforce of 1.6m) who are at back-bending work in the nation’s fields, particularly in California.

The last figure got me thinking. Almost two-thirds of the total agricultural workforce in this country consists of illegal immigrants? So what would happen if we were, in a hypothetical world, successful in rounding up every last undocumented worker and shipping him or her back to Mexico or Paraguay, and sealing up the border for good? Would we find a million Americans who are willing to toil in the sun picking strawberries and oranges for $4 to $6 an hour? It’s possible, but I suspect not. I suspect that even if we could find a million Americans (or legal immigrants, but i guess they’re Americans too) who were willing to do the work, they’d demand a hell of a lot more than minimum wage to do it. That would drive up produce prices, making American produce more expensive on the world market and (ouch!) in the grocery store. It might put a dent in our ability to get asparagus for $2.99 a bunch in the middle of January in Chicago. Would consumers stand for that for long?

That got me thinking about the minimum wage, an increase in which was recently discussed briefly in Congress and shot down. It’s been $5.15 for eight years now, so I can only assume that the road to our glorious and shiny new ownership society is paved with fives. Now, I remember finding that it was difficult to own much of anything when I made minimum wage. I’d always go to the restaurant next to Tower Records and order a glass of water and a cup of soup for my lunch, because it came with a roll basket, and even then my lunch came to almost an hour’s pay. On that kind of pay, I’d love to divert a hefty chunk of my social security contributions into a personal savings account. Heck, I’d throw in $20 or more a year! Would that be enough to retire on? If the S&P 500 grew just 10,000% annually (on average), I’d be able to afford name-brand coffee to drink while I relax in the shade on what’s left of the concrete slab upon which used to set my grandpappy’s mobile home.

Even Rick Santorum (that’s Latin for "asshole") proposed a $1.10 increase, just barely half of Ted Kennedy’s $2.10 proposal, with an exemption for small businesses (which admittedly makes some sense). But both were rejected as amendments to the bankruptcy bill, which passed to the delight of credit card companies everywhere. Here’s what The Economist thinks of the law:

Is the system really abused? In fact, evidence suggests that the boom in personal bankruptcies has more to do with the piling on of consumer debt than with debtors playing the system. In the 1990s, revolving debt (mostly credit-card debt), grew by as much as 12% a year; from 1980 to 2004, it increased nearly 15 times. And the non-partisan American Bankruptcy Institute puts the number of bankruptcy filers who could afford to pay a good chunk of their debts at 3.6%: still a big number, but not nearly as much as the 10% or more claimed by creditor groups.

In any case, the bill’s means test (an average of the debtor’s past six months of income) should catch those who can clearly pay up. But opponents fear that the test, which they think too harsh and arbitrary, will drag those who rightly belong in Chapter 7 unfairly into court.

More troubling is the part of the legislation that makes it harder for poorer debtors, not likely to be the abusers of the system, to file for bankruptcy. Some 84% of all filers are too poor to qualify for the new law’s means test. But they will still be put through a great deal of rigmarole to get relief. For example, all debtors will have to get credit counselling before they file—a costly process, and one which does little to steer people out of bankruptcy. The bill also requires people to produce all sorts of paperwork, from payroll stubs to tax returns. Those who have not kept strict records will have to give up or pay for a lawyer to plead their case in court.

Other quirks of the legislation make one wonder why credit-industry groups are so keen on it. One loophole allows rich debtors to go on shielding assets in special trust accounts that are legal in a few states. And debtors’ fancy homes in Texas and Florida will still be off-limits to creditors. The bill’s backers say that fear of trampling on states’ rights stopped them closing such loopholes. But it smells rather pervasively like special treatment for the rich.

But here’s my point (by now you were wondering if I had one): Those who argue that people at the bottom of the income ladder deserve to be there—that they would simply find a better-paying job if they were responsible enough to handle one—always seem to miss the basic point. Someone has to do those jobs. Some of the foundations of the daily pleasantness of our American way of life depend upon people earning what many of us wouldn’t bother to pick up if it were blowing down a windy street.

Imagine if waitresses weren’t paid $2.10 an hour, and every restaurant bill suddenly shot up by 20% or more as their wages figured into the meal’s overt price tag. Imagine, immigrants gone, if Americans were picking all those grapes and avocados, and produce prices shot up by 30% or more. Imagine (gasp!) if we kept all these outsourced manufacturing jobs in America and you had to pay at least 50% percent more for everything you buy at Target or Walmart. Imagine what would happen to the cost of living if all the cleaning people, grocery store clerks, gas station attendants, window washers, furniture movers, and so on were suddenly paid enough to live on? It sounds like I’m arguing to drop the minimum wage even lower, but in fact I’m just trying to point out to what extent our comfort and easy living depends explicitly upon the low wages of the people who provide us with it. (And yes, I pulled those percentages right out of my santorum.)

Whatever the anti-immigrant views of the ordinary Joe on the factory floor, America’s bosses are well aware of their dependence on foreign workers. High-tech companies benefit from H-1B visas, created in 1990 to allow the entry of scientists and other skilled professionals for a maximum of six years. In theory there is an annual cap of 65,000 H-1B visas, but during the dotcom boom this was frequently relaxed. Immigration critics say there are now more than 1m H-1B visa holders, plus more than 325,000 holders of L-1 visas, which allow the intra-company transfer of workers from foreign subsidiaries. Doubtless one reason for the influx is that foreigners are cheaper, but the bosses argue that there is also a shortage of qualified Americans.

The same argument applies lower down the employment scale. The Essential Worker Immigration Coalition lobbies Congress and the White House on behalf of ill-paid sectors such as the hotel industry, fast-food, farming, nursing and animal-slaughtering; these could not survive without their immigrant workers, many of them undocumented. The argument is that immigrants take the nation’s dirty and dangerous jobs because Americans will not. The counter-argument is that Americans would if they were paid enough. But there is precious little evidence that Joe White, whatever the pay, is willing to toil alongside José Blanco picking fruit in California. Short of a big increase in legal immigration, illegal immigrants will continue to meet America’s needs.

If everyone in every crappy service-sector job in the country mustered up the motivation to enroll in community college this fall (provided they could afford tuition) and went out looking for that better job in 2007, would we be willing (1) to do without the services they provide? and (2) to provide them each with a better job? No to both, of course, because they perform necessary services, and there simply aren’t enough skilled jobs in the economy to accommodate all the people. Though it takes no real skill to perform them, the worst-paying jobs must still be performed by someone. And there’s no cosmic economics equation dictating a one-to-one correspondence between born losers and crappy service-sector jobs.

In fact, as more manufacturing jobs are shipped off to cheaper places, there are few options left to many people. Ask the guy I know in Polo, Illinois (population 2500) how far he’d have to travel to find a decent-paying manufacturing or trade job of any kind. Everyone for miles around now works at Walmart or Costco in the next big town over.

For many people, it amounts to getting stuck at the wrong end of the bell-curve in a class of overachievers. Even though you answered 80% of the questions right, the fact that half the class did better than you means you’ll be cleaning out toilets until you’re 70. Sorry, that’s just the way things work out. Here’s your plunger. The company supplies the first one. If you should lose or break it, the next will come out of your paycheck.

Excuse me, ma’am, I don’t mean to bother you or seem impertinent in any way, but I couldn’t help but notice all those magnetic ribbons on the back of your SUV. That’s quite a collection you’ve got. Now, I understand that you love America. How could anyone not love it? It’s almost as unimaginable as not loving freedom, or not hating terrorists. Jeez, I hate them. I used to hate communists, but there aren’t too many of them left anymore. Freedom bea