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UPDATED: Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be … Journalists

Tempest in a teacup?

Mainstream media’s (MSM) addiction to innuendo over evidence certainly has found a fix in the Blagojevich scandal, printing Republican calls that Obama “immediately disclose any and all communications his transition team has had with the governor’s office.” Turns out RNC chair, Mike Duncan, is campaigning to save his job against five opponents, and is trying to deflect attention from the RNC’s laughable contribution to the 2008 presidential campaign and the loss of several congressional seats, opting to focus moral outrage at Obama by implying transition-team complicity in the Blagojevich circus. Not to be outdone, Duncan’s opponents are weighing in with their own judgments.

That Duncan is using this tactic is fine; that MSM are fanning the flames of implied accusation is not. Once again, MSM is taking the easy road, relying on the sexy angle instead of delving into the real story: the Republican Party’s identity crisis, the failure of tried-and-true Republican campaign strategies in the face of substantive issues, and the strange “failure of management” regarding Palin’s very expensive image. Duncan needs to answer for quite a bit, but apparently not enough to displace speculation by the MSM on Obama’s potential involvement in pay-to-play politics. Apparently, picking a cabinet and designing an effective economic stimulus package isn’t enough of a test for Obama. The true test is how Obama handles the big crisis: Blagojevich.

One need only read the 76-page criminal complaint against Blagojevich and the transcript of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald‘s press conference to understand Obama and his team likely do not have a whole lot to add to the scandal. (This list will help you understand who’s who in the complaint.)

During the press conference Fitzgerald asserted “there’s no reference in the complaint to any conversation involving the president-elect or indicating that the president-elect was aware of [Blagojevich's plan], and that’s all I can say.”

It is naive to think Rahm Emanuel did not speak with Blagojevich’s staff about the senate appointment, and the Chicago Tribune confirms he did, but Obama did not deny his staff had communication with Blagojevich’s staff. Rather Obama denied his staff participated in any wrongdoing, any collusion in Blagojevich’s fantastic schemes to enrich himself. The conversations regarding Blagojevich’s grand senate-appointment schemes were largely “brainstorming” sessions that invoked scenes from Tony Soprano’s office at the Bada Bing!

It appears the only meaningful contact between Blagojevich and the Obama camp occurred through an SEIU official. On approximately November 5, Blagojevich met with the SEIU official “to discuss the vacant Senate seat, and [Blagojevich] understood that SEIU Official was an emissary to discuss [Valerie Jarrett]’s interest in the Senate seat.” On November 12, Blagojevich again spoke with the SEIU official, this time unloading his desire that Obama secure funding for a charitable organization Blagojevich would head after leaving office, in exchange for appointing Jarrett. This conversation took place on Wednesday. By Friday, November 15, Obama had named Jarrett to a position as senior white house advisor, effectively removing his team from Blagojevich’s game.

But these facts don’t impress the RNC, and the MSM are eagerly delivering the outrage. This isn’t the first time in recent memory the MSM have let us down. Unfortunately, it is much cheaper to publish speculation rather than investigation, and amidst MSM lay-offs and bankruptcy, there is little hope this strategy is going to change.

UPDATE: The Obama team just released its statement regarding its interactions with Blagojevich (emphasis mine):

“At the direction of the President-elect, a review of Transition staff contacts with Governor Blagojevich and his office has been conducted and completed and is ready for release. That review affirmed the public statements of the President-elect that he had no contact with the governor or his staff, and that the President-elect’s staff was not involved in inappropriate discussions with the governor or his staff over the selection of his successor as US Senator.

Also at the President-elect’s direction, Gregory Craig, counsel to the Transition, has kept the US Attorney’s office informed of this fact-gathering process in order to ensure our full cooperation with the investigation.

In the course of those discussions, the US Attorney’s office requested the public release of the Transition review be deferred until the week of December 22, in order not to impede their investigation of the governor. The Transition has agreed to this revised timetable for release,” said Obama Transition Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer.

A Citizen’s Guide to the War on Terror, #1: WTF is FISA?

Since Barack Obama voted this past summer for a proposed modernization of FISA – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 – liberals and fake liberals alike have used the vote as a way of casting the President-Elect as “no true progressive.” This is wrong. While the prospect of wiretap surveillance is frightening indeed, FISA, and FISA as-amended, in fact strike a fair compromise between the need to monitor terrorist networks and the need to maintain national security. Pivotally, both exist to defray the much more disturbing prospect of unregulated, unwarranted, unilateral executive surveillance.

FISA emerged out of the Church Commission, a 1970′s-era report that documented widespread abuses in the intelligence community, ranging from wiretapping of domestic Americans to shocking overuse of assassination as a tool of political change abroad. Congress reacted by passing FISA, prescribing a specific regulatory scheme as the only method by which intelligence operatives could conduct surveillance, short of a warrant upon probable cause. Under classic FISA, executive agencies can submit an application to a specially designated “Court” (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) composed of a rotating number of federal district judges, requesting authorization to wiretap specific “facilities” (telephones or e-mail accounts) or specific persons. The executive had to prove that:

1. The target is a “foreign power” or an “agent of a foreign power,” provided that no “U.S. person” (citizen, resident alien, etc.) can be so classified on the basis of first-amendment activities only;
2. The surveillance is likely to turn up relevant evidence (less than probable cause, more than a hunch), and the primary purpose of the acquisition is gathering foreign intelligence;
3. The line being surveilled could be described as one of a few types of communications, and is not purely domestic communications between two U.S. persons (for which there has to be a real warrant), and;
4. Surveillance would be conducted in accordance with minimization procedures designed to protect privacy and destroy records of communications after they’ve outlived their usefulness.

Also under “classic FISA,” Department of Justice officials assumed that national security officials could share information with law enforcement officials only under limited circumstances, as a means of ensuring that FISA did not turn into a workaround for the traditional warrant system. Old FISA, then, did not gut Fourth Amendment values: it compromised only when necessary.

Perhaps too well. In fact, this “wall” between law enforcement and counterterrorism worked so well at protecting against abuses of FISA that, at least according to some, the consequential lack of cooperation between the departments directly precipitated 9/11. There’s evidence to suggest that, if the departments had shared information more freely, at least one of the hijackings could have been stopped. Continue reading »