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Unfortunately I now have a concrete example of the impact of the culture of fear that the president has cultivated. Two men returning from Paris on American Airlines flight 45 were confronted by a flight attendant for kissing, and told to “stop that.” Several exchanges between the men and the purser ensued, by all accounts entirely calm and civil.

The purser asked the men to describe what they’d been doing, and she acknowledged that their behavior had not been inappropriate. Tsikhiseli then asked if the stewardess would have made the request if the kissers had been a man and a woman. Suddenly, Leisner said, the purser “became very rigid.” Contradicting what she’d told them before, she stiffly said, “Kissing is inappropriate behavior on an airplane.” She then said that she was busy with the meal service and promised to come back.

Eventually the pilot summoned one of the men to the cockpit where he told him that is he didn’t drop the matter the plane would indeed be diverted.

Maybe an hour later, the purser approached Tsikhiseli and said that the captain wanted to talk to him. Tsikhiseli went up to the galley and gave the captain his business card. The captain told Tsikhiseli that if they didn’t stop arguing with the crew he would indeed divert the plane. “I want you to go back to your seat and behave the rest of the flight, and we’ll see you in New York,” he said. Tsikhiseli returned to coach.

American Airlines says that a similar injunction against showing “affection” beyond a “peck on the cheek” would be made whether the couple is gay or straight. Fine and that is as it should be. I am no fan of intense public displays of affection — certainly even less on a crowded airplane. However, the lesson I take away isn’t that you shouldn’t kiss on the plane, it’s that the threat of the terrorist treatment now faces each of us if we do something a person in a position of power, i.e. an airline pilot, disagrees with.

Clearly the threat of diversion represents a concurrent threat of action by legal authorities on the ground for, I don’t know, causing a disruption on an aircraft. Who knows — and it is beside the point. I should now have to fear that in everyday situations I might be singled out for actions that someone finds offensive and threatened with repercussions not at all commensurate with the offense.

As Americans we need to reevaluate just how far we allow ourselves to fear terrorist attacks and to what extent we give authority to those with little accountability.

Hopefully American Airlines (and all airlines) will make it clear to their pilots exactly what types of “offenses” warrant aircraft diversion. If they fail to make it clear perhaps the courts should do it for them.

Did you know that President Bush hasn’t vetoed a single bill since taking office six years ago? How the heck does he manage that kind of congenial record with the most irritatingly partisan congress in history? I’ll tell you how: presidential singing statements.

Basically a signing statement is a brief note attached to a bill when the president signs it, which tells the congress how the Executive interprets the language of the bill. Sounds fair enough, right? Here’s an example dealing with one of my least favorite laws, The PATRIOT Act.

The law: Justice Department officials must give reports to Congress by certain dates on how the FBI is using the USA Patriot Act to search homes and secretly seize papers.

Signing statement: The president can order Justice Department officials to withhold any information from Congress if he decides it could impair national security or executive branch operations.

The addition essential negates the law, returning authority to the Executive to do as he pleases.

Granted form presidents have also used these statements, that doesn’t make them less offensive to the idea of our republican democratic system. During the present administration they seem to deal often with alleged national security exemptions. Here’s my favorite example:

The law: Forbids US troops in Colombia from participating in any combat against rebels, except in cases of self-defense. Caps the number of US troops allowed in Colombia at 800.

Signing statement: Only the president, as commander in chief, can place restrictions on the use of US armed forces, so the executive branch will construe the law ”as advisory in nature.”

Essentially a big screw you to the people’s elected representatives from the commander-in-chief of America’s armed forces.

Please stop writing to or calling your elected officials, they are very busy considering the very most important issues of the day an don’t have time to speak with you right now. Some of the pressing matters recently or soon to be voted on are:

• protecting the flag from the recent rash of burnings and other desecrating acts
• protecting innocent men and woman from the too-fabulous weddings of gay couples
• protecting the Pledge of Allegiance from recalcitrant schoolchildren and parents
• protecting free thinking individuals from the dangers of Internet Texas Hold’em poker
• various other unspecified “social issues” called the “The American Values Agenda”

Now here’s a list of the things that the congress considers less important, but that you still should not contact them about:

• discovering what’s broken in Iraq and helping to fix it
• providing legislation that will protect America from attachs via our seaports
• developing meaningful, consequential caps on vehicle emmisions to prevent global warming
• legitimately investigating and monitoring the president’s overreaching domestic surveillance programs
• stopping the same spy activities
• fixing the gaping budget deficit
• repairing Social Security and more importantly Medicare entitlements before they bankrupt my children’s government
• improving American primary and secondary schools
• helping the 40 million children without it to get into some form of health insurance program

He is consistently positive about the prospects for America’s contining to stand at the forefront of nations, economically, politically, and otherwise. Friedman’s column in the New York Times today is a perfect example of why I always enjoy reading what he has to say.

He describes his daughter’s graduation ceremony at a fairly large high school in Maryland. The roster of grads was very diverse:

The commencement was my daughter Natalie’s, the high school was Montgomery Blair in Silver Spring, Md. There were some 700 kids receiving their diplomas, and as I sat there for two hours listening to each one’s name pronounced, I became both fascinated and touched by the stunning diversity — race, religion, ethnicity — of the graduating class. I knew my daughter’s school was diverse, but I had no idea it was this diverse.

He goes on to say that there may be many reasons to feel pesemistic about the future of America: the war in Iraq, fiscal irresponsibility, and waning educational success. And then he turns it around again:

But if there is one reason to still be optimistic about America it is represented by the stunning diversity of the Montgomery Blair class of 2006. America is still the world’s greatest human magnet. We are not the only country that embraces diversity, but there is something about our free society and free market that still attracts people like no other. Our greatest asset is our ability to still cream off not only the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world but the low-skilled-high-aspiring ones as well, and that is the main reason that I am not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China. Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese. […] It is hard to watch a graduation like this and not think about our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan — the Taliban, Islamo-totalitarians like bin Laden and Zarqawi, and the retrograde regimes that support them. Their whole mind-set is about how to purify their world from “the other,” from diversity, from “infidels.” With enough brutality, they may win in Iraq. I still hope not But they will never win the future — because as soon as their oil wells run dry, their societies will be as barren, bland and unproductive as their deserts. Our oil wells, by contrast, will still be pumping. They’re right there, hiding in plain sight, in the Blair commencement book…

Sleeping Gage, originally uploaded by larslevie.

The cutest baby on the planet, now with three weeks added.

That’s a word I don’t get to use very much — scathing. But it described precisely an Editorial in the New York Times today that essentially labels Bush administration completely incompetent, and largely due to the incompetence of the President himself.

I haven’t been a fan of the President’s for a long time and the piece makes some good points about his apparent lack of effective leadership, the disastrous role of a VP run amok, and the prospect of three more years.

She is the Queen on Country, an expert with a bedazzler, and she doesn’t need a biennial name change to boost her public profile. She is Dolly Parton and I had the pleasure of seeing her perform live at Radio City Music Hall last Thursday night. It was a great performance and I had a fabulous time with my friend Laura Sobel.

Dolly had no less than five bejeweled instruments (not including herself) on stage and I’ll be damned if she didn’t play each one at least once. Her instrumental repertoire included an autoharp, a mandolin, a piccolo-type wind, three or four guitars (bejeweled, blue and fender-made), a white bedazzled fiddle, and I can’t even remember what else. It was amazing.

As one of my co-workers who also saw the concert observed, it was amazing to see her connect with the audience and really tell a story along with the music that drew everyone in completely. Dolly really is a genuine performer.

Have you ever heard of the MIT Media Lab? Media Lab is one of those institutions, like Xerox Parc and IdeaLab, that just crank out the most amazing, cool stuff. MIT’s Media Lab announced a project to create a $100 laptop to sell to third world countries for school children. The plan is to build millions at a time and hand them out like textbooks through ministries of education in countries like China and India. According to Nicholas Negroponte they hope to build 100 to 200 million units by 2007; that is more than the number of computers existing in the top 10 computer-owning countries combined. Reading about the initiative reminded me that some people and organizations are still interested in doing amazing good in the world.

Read more here

I was so proud of Dick Durbin until yesterday He lasted a week without apologizing for saying something that needed to be said, if perhaps in a more delicate way. When I read what he said in the Congressional Record it didn’t read at all the way it was being played in the news and by many people in Washington. Here is exactly what he said,

“On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold… . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.”

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

What I think when I read this is that Durbin is condemning a broad strategy of torture handed down from the upper-reaches of the military and the administration (i.e. the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States). By using the broad category or Americans, Soviets and the generic regimes, it is obvious he meant to compare the actions of apples to apples (government to government) not apples to oranges (government to individual soldier).

It is sad that the opponents of honesty in Washington were able to manipulate the Senator’s words, with the full cooperation of the media, into such a hysterical farce.

For a while I have been trying to think of a word to describe President Bush’s public relations strategy. Nothing had been coming to me until I watching Finding Neverland with Baby a few days ago. I will now call the president’s approach the Peter Pan method — it consists mainly of making something true by believing it a lot and out loud. For example, despite continued dreadful conditions in Iraq, the insurgency is in it’s “last throws,” the present administration practices true “spending restraint,” and Bush doesn’t condone torture.

The president and most of Congress lives in fantasy world like the one that J.M. Barrie created for the four sons of his true love. Only this world is created for special interest groups, moral conservatives, big spending legislators, and neoconservatives. Here’s a good example, President Bush and Congress have restrained spending so much that it has only grown by 33% during his tenure.

Today, we know that compassionate conservatism is really just big government and changing the tone means his veto pen is buried under the ground. The last four years, total spending has risen 33 percent - a figure larger than Clinton’s two terms combined. Adjusted for inflation, one would have to go back to Lyndon Johnson to find a larger increase. Moreover, real discretionary spending increases in FY2002, FY2003, FY2004 and FY2005 are 4 of the 10 biggest annual increases in the last 40 years.

Someone needs to find that man a pen and a stamp ASAP. We can’t afford to live in Washington’s collective dreamland anymore. For so many reasons.