I watched Michael Jackson’s interview on “60 Minutes” last night. I’m not all caught up in the media craze surrounding the criminal charges against him, but he’s a rather entertaining spectacle to watch.
Much of the negative reaction to the interview centers on his comments about bringing children into the bedroom. But I also found this comment a bit disturbing:

When I see children, I see the face of God. That’s why I love them so much. That’s what I see.

I don’t know. If God resembles some of the kids I’ve seen running around, I think we’re in trouble.

I missed this story earlier, but before Christmas President Bush signed a Patriot-like act which enlarged the FBI’s power to dig through financial records. The act expands the definition of a covered “financial institution” to include “stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office, and any other business ‘whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters.'”
Worse yet:

While broadening the definition of “financial institution,” the Bush administration is ramping up provisions within the 2001 USA Patriot Act, which granted the FBI the authority to obtain client records from banks by merely requesting the records in a “National Security Letter.” To get the records, the FBI doesn’t have to appear before a judge, nor demonstrate “probable cause” – reason to believe that the targeted client is involved in criminal or terrorist activity. Moreover, the National Security Letters are attached with a gag order, preventing any financial institution from informing its clients that their records have been surrendered to the FBI. If a financial institution breaches the gag order, it faces criminal penalties. And finally, the FBI will no longer be required to report to Congress how often they have used the National Security Letters.

Finally, notice how Bush operates. He signed the bill on the Saturday that Saddam Hussein was captured:

A White House spokesperson explained the curious timing of the signing – on a Saturday – as “the President signs bills seven days a week.” But the last time Bush signed a bill into law on a Saturday happened more than a year ago – on a spending bill that the President needed to sign, to prevent shuttng down the federal government the following Monday.
By signing the bill on the day of Hussein’s capture, Bush effectively consigned a dramatic expansion of the USA Patriot Act to a mere footnote. Consequently, while most Americans watched as Hussein was probed for head lice, few were aware that the FBI had just obtained the power to probe their financial records, even if the feds don’t suspect their involvement in crime or terrorism.

Sneaky, huh?

Joshua Marshall:

Is it really reasonable to expect that the values which undergird liberal democracy in America will be effectively spread abroad by the most illiberal people in America? It’s a good question. Think about it.

I guess it depends on what we are really attempting to accomplish in Iraq. Are we attempting to export Jeffersonian democracy to the Iraqi people? Or our we merely trying to establish a Middle East government more friendly to our strategic and corporate interests?
It’s conceivable that this administration could accomplish the latter. I’m not holding my breath for the former.

One of the things you quickly discover when weblog surfing is that subject matter varies widely.

Oops:

Tony Blair was at the centre of an embarrassing row last night after the most senior US official in Baghdad bluntly rejected the Prime Minister’s assertion that secret weapons laboratories had been discovered in Iraq.
In a Christmas message to British troops, Blair claimed there was ‘massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories’. The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) had unearthed compelling evidence that showed Saddam Hussein had attempted to ‘conceal weapons’, the Prime Minister said. But in an interview yesterday, Paul Bremer, the Bush administration’s top official in Baghdad, flatly dismissed the claim as untrue – without realising its source was Blair.
It was, he suggested, a ‘red herring’, probably put about by someone opposed to military action in Iraq who wanted to undermine the coalition.
‘I don’t know where those words come from but that is not what [ISG chief] David Kay has said,’ he told ITV1’s Jonathan Dimbleby programme. ‘It sounds like a bit of a red herring to me.’

Meanwhile, in Italy Prime Minister Berlusconi disputes the claim that he gave an interview warning of a terrorist strike on the Vatican.
And here in North America, Canada isn’t jumping on board with the U.S. claim that the mad cow came from Canada.
It does seem a little odd how quickly the government came out with that explanation, given how little it seemed to know about other details surrounding the incident.