Ethel considers the Office of Homeland Security: “What they’re saying is that since this is a super-agency, which is immune from congressional oversight or judicial review, there has to be some regulatory body above it. That will make this Council extra-legal, extra-constitutional, extra-judicial, and extra-legislative. And it’s even extra-executive. Bush then is essentially assuming supreme power as Chairman of the Supreme National Security Council.” [Now, as everyone else is saying in weblogland, go read the rest of Ethel the Blog as well.]
More on the coming police state. Here in my own backyard, the Worcester Telegram reports on peace demonstrators being photographed by the local police; turns out it was at the FBI’s instructions. Want your five minutes of media fame? It’s off to a peace vigil; time’s a’wastin’! I’ve already had my moments in the limelight, several times in fact. While a high school student in 1969, I refused to shake Gen. William Westmoreland’s hand on nationwide television while in Washington receiving a young scientist award. I was on the front page of the New York Post, I think it was that year too, as an unidentified rain-drenched hitchhiker holding up a sign in New York seeking a ride to the March on Washington against the war. A human die-in in Central Park designed to simulate some body count showed my body in the foreground, in one of the New York papers. And several years later I made the Boston Globe as the “unidentified protester” being attacked on the front page by police dogs let loose against us during a Cambridge civil disobedience action. I wrote a letter to the editor identifying myself on that occasion as well. A string of arrests for civil disobedience got my name in the papers several more times, related to both antiwar activities and the Clamshell Alliance’s efforts to stop the Seabrook nuclear plant on our seacoast. I’ve still got the yellowing clips of all of these somewhere. Funny, Freedom of Information Act inquiries I made years later failed to come up with a dossier about me from those days. Disappointing, actually. Hey, I wonder if the FOIA is still going to be enforceable in the new regime… [Now that I’ve come out of the closet about my sordid and criminal past, you’re forgiven if you get squeamish about continuing to read FmH.]
