Note to President Obama: Holder has to go

Enough is enough. President Barack Obama has two choices -- he can either stand up and tell the American public that he supports the chilling use of subpoenas against journalists, taking full responsibility for actions that are purely and simply an attack on the press, or he can fire Attorney General Eric Holder and demonstrate that his administration will not tolerate such breaches of the First Amendment.

The New York Times today calls the out the Obama administration for overreach. It has

moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news.

The issue, according to the Times, is that "the administration has gone overboard in its zeal to find and muzzle insiders." While the assault on internal whistleblowers -- those who leak information to the public in an effort to uncover wrongdoing or provide transparency in an era of excessive secrecy -- has had its own chilling effect, the decision to name a member of the press as a co-conspirator in a terrorist case and the revelations that Associated Press phone records were seized by the federal government make it plain that someone in the Justice Department views reporting as tantamount to espionage.

The president has a responsibility here to nip this in the bud and the best way to do that is to fire the man who heads the department under which this overreach has happened. Offering soft mea culpas and raising the possibility that a federal shield law could be enacted (not with a House of Representatives in the hands of conservative Republicans) is just not good enough.

As Glenn Greenwald makes clear, the stakes are too high. Each executive overreach (and I am being kind in using such a benign term) -- whether under Bush or Obama (or any previous president) -- creates a precedent for future overreach. Fox News correspondent James Rosen has not been charged in the case of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, who was indicted in 2009 for leaking information about North Korea's likely response to sanctions to Rosen. But the Justice Department did accuse Rosen of breaking the law. This is from The Washington Post story cited by Greenwald:

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

The story goes on to offer some detail about how the two corresponded, painting a picture of a journalist working a source in an effort to provide important information to the public. It is all very Woodward-and-Bernstein.

This is the ultimate issue. The journalist's job is to work sources, to collect information and to present it to his or her readers or viewers. Sometimes, that will involve some cloak-and-dagger work, though most of the time it won't. And it often puts journalists in adversarial relationships with those in power.

In our republican form of government, we grant the executive branch a significant amount of authority, expecting the other two legs of the stool -- the judiciary and the legislative branch -- to act as balancing entities. The founders, after much dispute and acrimony, came to understand that these checks on power were not enough, so they included a Bill of Rights -- the first 10 amendments -- as an addendum to the Constitution that set up our government. And the first of these amendments (based in part on the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which declared that "freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty") banned Congress from "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" -- a prohibition that has come over the years to include the executive branch and the state governments, as well.

The reason, as the English  constitutional theorist and philosopher said (quoted by Thomas Carlyle), is that  

Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy; invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable ... Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in lawmaking, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite. The nation is governed by all that has tongue in the nation. Democracy is virtually there.

Greenwald says this basic understanding -- and the very nature of a free press -- is under attack.

Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ - that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for "soliciting" the disclosure of classified information - is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.

That same "solicitation" theory, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, is the one the Obama DOJ has been using to justify its ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: that because Assange solicited or encouraged Manning to leak classified information, the US government can "charge [Assange] as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them." When that theory was first disclosed, I wrote that it would enable the criminalization of investigative journalism generally.

Greenwald then demolishes the standard reply -- that Obama is attempting to balance national security with press freedoms, a balance that Obama clearly sees as favoring the need to keep secrets (no matter how chilling the effects on the media). Otherwise, why -- as The Washington Post points out -- is our ostensibly liberal and civil-liberties-loving president lead an administration that has pursued more leak cases "than all previous administrations combined"? As Greenwald says, there's "no defense for this behavior."

Obama defenders such as Andrew Sullivan claim that this is all more complicated than media outrage suggests because of a necessary "trade-off" between press freedoms and security. So do Obama defenders believe that George Bush and Richard Nixon - who never prosecuted leakers like this or formally accused journalists of being criminals for reporting classified information - were excessively protective of press freedoms and insufficiently devoted to safeguarding secrecy? To ask that question is to mock it. Obama has gone so far beyond what every recent prior president has done in bolstering secrecy and criminalizing whistleblowing and leaks.

Even Dana Milbank at The Washington Post, who has been the definition of Beltway insider, is aghast at what he calls the "Rosen affair." He calls it, rightly, I might add,

as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.
To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job — seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public — deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based. Guns? Privacy? Due process? Equal protection? If you can’t speak out, you can’t defend those rights, either.

Of course, that's not what the Rosen affair is about. No one is proposing jailing journalists -- that happens in Iran, not here, right? -- and certainly not President Obama. Milbank quotes White House Press Secretary Jay Carney saying that

Obama doesn’t think “journalists should be prosecuted for doing their jobs” (perhaps he could remind the FBI of that), and the administration has renewed its support for a media shield law (a welcome but suspicious gesture, because the White House thwarted a previous attempt to pass the bill).

But Milbank -- like Greenwald -- makes it clear that the jailing of reporters may not be all that farfetched, unless the president makes a bold move that eliminates any doubt as to where the president stands on the question. It is not enough to say you support a free press. You have to demonstrate your support with action

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Quote of the day: On writing

From Walter Benjamin:

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.

From "One-Way Street," One-Way Street and Other Writings, p. 65. Penguin Classics. London: 2009.

Saturday playlist: R.E.M. through the years

R.E.M. issued a remastered version of its 1988 album, Green this week, which got me thinking a bit about who the band was and what it meant to me when it was still recording and touring and what it means to me now.

Green is not my favorite R.E.M. album -- hell, it's not in my top 8 (see below). But it is still a great album in many ways, which proves just how significant the Athens, Ga., quartet was.

First, consider the timing. Green was released just five years after Murmur, making it the culmination of a frenetic period of creativity -- six albums in six years. And it was a commercial breakthrough that turned R.E.M. into an arena band without sacrificing any of its indy cred.

Pitchfork offers a great overview and review, so I won't belabor it, but what's shocking to me is that Green's weakness can only be viewed as a weakness within the context of what the band managed to do on its first nine albums. Green, to me, is the weakest of them, which says far more about the perfection of Document and Automatic for the People than it says about Green.

I first heard R.E.M. on WRSU, Rutgers' student radio station, when this odd, jangly pop song that took its name from the American-funded station broadcasting into the then-Eastern bloc. The sound was different -- nothing like the radio pop of the time, but also not punk or new wave. There was a freshness and a DIY quality -- the vocals were a bit muffled and buried in the mix. So I bought Murmur -- and continued buying their records until they announced last year that they were splitting up.

The impact of those early records is hard to explain, as I said; the lo-fi sound was different than what was dominating the radio. There was a simplicity to the sound and a complexity to the lyrics, which were literate and muffled and mysterious. This was not Haircut 100 or the Flock of Seaguls. It was not Duran Duran, a pretty band with a pretty sound singing about pretty things in a superficial manner. This was serious stuff and, in its odd way, it helped keep alive the emotional and artistic rebellion launched by punk at a time when that rebellion's fire was dying out.

I saw the band in 1987, on the Document tour on my 25th birthday at the Rutgers Athletic Center. In a couple of years they would be playing arenas while still putting out music that stood in stark contrast to the pompous nonsense that characterized arena rock. By the time Out of Time was released in 1990, Stipe had moved from mumbling to singing, his lyrics growing and shifting with this change.

The band's artistic growth peaked with Automatic for the People, one of rock music's most perfect recordings. It was quieter, mournful, but just as forceful and focused as anything they had done. It also represented a bit of an endpoint -- everything that comes after Automatic is essentially a search for direction. Monster is the best of what follows, R.E.M.'s answer to Kurt Cobain and its last great disc.

This is not to denigrate what follows, because even Reveal, by far the weakest album in the R.E.M. canon, is a solid bit of pop and far better than what most bands produce at their best. I can say this without hyperbole, having spent the better part of the week listening to the full catalog, 15 studio albums, plus assorted Best of collections and live discs that taken together stand as a testament to the band's greatness and lasting legacy.

My ranking:

1. Document
2. Automatic for the People
3. Reckoning
4. Chronic Town (EP)
4. Murmur
5. Life's Rich Pageant
6. Out of Time
7. Fables of the Reconstruction
8. Monster
9. Green
10. Accelerate
11. Around the Sun
12. New Adventures in Hi-Fi
13. Up
14. Collapse into Now
15. Reveal

A god complex

I'm at the car dealership today, getting some basic maintenance done when I overhear a conversation between a woman and an older man.

"I was brought up a Baptist, " he said. "But I realized I had to find a different church to hear the real Word."

"It's so watered down now, from the Founding Fathers," she said.

"And we don't have Christian men leading us, when they endorse homosexuality."

The Founders, of course, were nominally Christian -- they were deists who believed in a creator and were careful to exclude overt mention of god in our founding documents. They were skeptics who understood the dangers of mixing politics with religion because they lived through the violence and intolerance that mixture breeds.

And yet, there's nothing unusual or ahistorical about this overheard conversation. Since our beginnings as a nation, there have been men -- and women -- who have wanted to impose their conception of god on their neighbors and who have attempted to claim the Founders as religious zealots like themselves.

A numbers game

Gov. Chris Christie answers questions during a town hall meeting today in Sayreville.

The state got some good news today as its unemployment rate dropped for the third-straight month to reach its lowest level in four years. The rate now stands at 8.7 percent, the lowest level of the Christie administration.

Gov. Chris Christie, speaking to a packed house at a town hall meeting in Sayreville today credited his tax policies and touted his balanced budget. But it is unclear exactly what is driving the numbers.

According to the press release issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development, 4,100 jobs were added in April by the private sector, with a total of 131,500 being added since February 2010.

"The marked decline in unemployment over the last year mainly reflects the ongoing gains in jobs we are experiencing. April saw the largest 12-month gain in the number of employed residents that New Jersey has seen in seven years, with an increase of more than 60,000 compared to April 2012," said Charles Steindel, Chief Economist for the New Jersey Department of Treasury.

New Jersey Policy Perspective, however, saw the report as mixed, at best. Its president, Gordon MacInnes, issues the following statement:

"While we're certainly glad to see New Jersey's jobless rate drop below 9 percent for the first time since 2009, it would be foolish to claim victory and to assume that the state's economy has recovered. It hasn't. There remain 400,000 people officially looking for work and many more who have given up, our jobless rate remains much higher than the nation's, and New Jersey has still recovered less than half the jobs it lost in the Great Recession, while neighbors like New York have recovered all of them plus added even more. Add to that the relatively low-wage nature of our new jobs, and it's clear: New Jersey needs to do more to create good jobs."

What I find striking is how easy it is to use the numbers to prove nearly any point you need to make.
The fact is that the state's economy, like the national one, remains badly flawed and in need of help. Just cutting taxes is not going to do it.
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