Does anyone really give a damn about government regulations and the agencies that produce them? We should give a damn, because, at a very fundamental level, it's governmental regulations that truly affect our day to day lives. Sure, the war affects our lives, but chances are you won't be killed in Iraq. But if the government allows corporate America to do whatver it wants, your health and safety and your job may be at stake.

There are two ways that the government sets policies. Laws and regulations. At its most basic definition, Congress passes laws. Then the Executive Branch (the Presidency) issues regulations to help governmental agencies enforce those laws. Congress does not vote on the regulations, but the regulations still have the force of law. The agencies can't just issue any regulations they please. The regulations have to be consistent with the laws. But the agencies have a lot a leeway in issuing these regulations because they are supposedly staffed by experts who know how to make the laws work in light of their expertise.

If you understand the above paragraph, then you deserve an A+ in social studies. Then you can understand why a story in today's New York Times is so important, even though few people will read it all the way through or pass it over entirely because it's too boring. Except that if you do read it, you can see how our government works and why public health and safety is often thrown under the bus in the pursuit of corporate profits.

According to the article, the business lobby is worried that a Democrat will be elected President in 2008 and, in their mind, that would mean the end of business-friendly government. The Democrats are not socialists, and they tend to give business what it wants, but the Republicans are even more slavish to business interests. What the business lobby is doing is trying to get the Bush administration to enact regulations favorable to its interests before Republicans are shown the door next year. Here is a summary of what's going on:

Business lobbyists, nervously anticipating Democratic gains in next year’s elections, are racing to secure final approval for a wide range of health, safety, labor and economic rules, in the belief that they can get better deals from the Bush administration than from its successor.

Hoping to lock in policies backed by a pro-business administration, poultry farmers are seeking an exemption for the smelly fumes produced by tons of chicken manure. Businesses are lobbying the Bush administration to roll back rules that let employees take time off for family needs and medical problems. And electric power companies are pushing the government to relax pollution-control requirements.

“There’s a growing sense, a growing probability, that the next administration could be Democratic,” said Craig L. Fuller, executive vice president of Apco Worldwide, a lobbying and public relations firm, who was a White House official in the Reagan administration. “Corporate executives, trade associations and lobbying firms have begun to recalibrate their strategies.

No one pays attention to this, but this is one of the most important things going in in government right now. There is no doubt that the Bush adminstration will give business whatever it wants, particularly since that would free up more money in campaign contributions for other Republican candidates for 2008. When business gets what it wants, say goodbye to health and safety measures. Those regulations, can be erased without much warning. While the average American has no idea that this is going on, you can be sure that the business community is paying close attention.

War-mongers love war. With two wars raging, the war-mongers want another one, with Iran. For months, the Bush administration has been saber-rattling for war with Iran, even suggesting that it could bring about World War III. The dangerous ideologues surrounding Bush said that Iran is working towards nuclear weapons and that Iran therefore poses a threat to world peace. This was the kind of rhetoric that led to war in Iraq, with hundreds of billions of dollars squandered. Except that the U.S. intelligence agencies said yesterday that Iran stopped its nuclear program in 2003.

No matter. Iran is still a threat, says George W. Bush, in a circular public statement that suggests: Iran is still bad, and bad people may still want nuclear weapons in the future. We call this "spin," i.e., twisting the news to favor our side. As the New York Times reports, Bush said today: "I still feel strongly that Iran’s a danger . . . I think it is very important for the international community to recognize the fact that if Iran were to develop the knowledge that they could transfer to a clandestine program, it would create a danger for the world.” He added, "What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program?"

Can we go to war because there is some possibility that they may have nuclear weapons at some undetermined time down the road? Who's buying this shit? Video here. Some good analysis here, suggesting that Bush was kept in the dark about the news that Iran has no nuclear weapons: "At the same time Bush was ratcheting up the rhetoric on Iran, he was told by his National Intelligence Director that that have 'some new information.' Yet Bush wants the public to believe he never learned what the information was, nor was he interested."

The video footage of Bush at today's press conference is quite troubling. He seems uncomfortable and defensive. He is a lame duck. No one cares anymore, we we are all waiting for the next President to take office. No one told him that being President would be hard. Bill Clinton made it look easy. He should welcome the intelligence findings that Iran has frozen its nuclear program. One less war to worry about. But some war-mongers can't get enough.

Update: it is being reported that the White House knew for months that Iran had shut down its nuclear weapons program. One writer for Harper's Magazine spoke to a reliable intelligence source who said, "The White House, and particularly Vice President Cheney, used every trick in the book to stop it from being finalized and issued. There was no last minute breakthrough that caused the issuance of the assessment.” So why delay the report which would reduce the chances of war with Iran and prevent the White House from spiking the rhetoric? Why?

The law is more complicated than any of us can bear. As kids, we thought we knew the law, and we applied it daily. "Finder's keepers, losers weepers." Or my favorite, "A deal's a deal." Then you go to law school and the finders keepers theory of property law is lampooned. And forget about the "deal's a deal" argument in contracts class. There are a zillion ways to back out of a contract, and if you don't know those exceptions, then forget about passing the bar exam.

Even lawyers think they know the law, but they don't. It's not their fault. The courts issue rulings every day which apply settled legal principles to new factual situations, thereby creating a new slant on the law. There are now millions of slants on the law so that two legal experts can have different opinions about what the law really means. The absolute language in the First Amendment has given rise to more exceptions than anyone can really count, except for the law professors who gain tenure by writing about it for law journals that no one reads.

The First Amendment is a good way to show that the law is too complicated. Here is what the First Amendment says: "[the government] shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Sounds good, doesn't it? It says that the government cannot regulate speech or any attempt to petition the government for grievances. But that is not what it means. Here's a real-life example.

Let's say that a married couple shows up for a Town Board meeting. They own property in the Town and want to voice their opinion on a proposed law being considered by the Town's legislative body. The legislative body tells them to get lost; we are not going to hear you out. You can sit down and listen to us deliberate, but please keep quiet. They go to court to challenge this decision as a violation of their First Amendment right to free speech and to petition the government. Do they have a case?

It sounds like a no-brainer, right? The married couple pay taxes in this Town and they want to address the Town's legislative body on a matter of public importance. On its face, the First Amendment would seem to make their case a slam-dunk. But they lose the case because they have no right to speak at this public meeting. This is a real case, Curnin v. Town of Egremont, decided by the First Circuit Court of Appeals on November 29, 2007.

The reason the Curnins lose the case is because their Town is not just any Town in America where taxpayers do have the right to address the Town Board. They live in New England, the cradle of American democracy, where citizens go to Town meetings and the residents actually vote on legislative proposals. What the Court pointed out in this case is that Town meetings in New England are not like other Town meetings, where four or five elected officials sit at a table and discuss Town policy and vote on water, sewer, taxes and why the saloons need to close at 1:00 a.m. rather than 4:00 a.m. In New England the registered voters ARE the Town Board. This is unique to New England. If you are registered to vote in one of these towns, then you are officially a member of the Town Board, along with the 2,000 other registered voters in the Town.

So the First Amendment has to be interpreted in light of the unique form of Town government in New England, and if you pay taxes in your Town but are not registered to vote, you have no right to do what citizens can do in every other region in America: speak out at public meetings. The way the Court saw it in this case, allowing the Curnins to speak at these meetings would be like allowing Joe Blow to interrupt the Town Board while it discusses policy.

Of course, this outcome makes no sense at all. Cutting through the romantic visions of a boisterous New England Town meeting where everyone in Town has their say until 2:00 in the morning, the Curnins pay taxes in this Town but they cannot be heard at the Town meetings. You may wonder why the Curnins just don't register to vote in this Town. They can't: they are registered to vote in New York and only own property in New England. You are not allowed to be registered to vote in two separate Towns, so the Curnins have to sit down and shut up.

That's how the First Amendment works. The Courts don't take it literally. It's really an aspirational statement of how citizens should be allowed to express themselves in public, but it constantly gives way to quirks in the system and loopholes which make sense to judges who have to balance competing considerations in deciding who wins the case. As I read the decision in the Curnin case, the Court carefully untangles this issue in trying to make the outcome sound logical. And if you read the decision carefully, you can see that that is some precedent for what the Court did. But that only means that some Court screwed up this issue a long time ago and the current Court has to follow precedent and apply it reasonably. That means we lose sight of the big picture: some taxpayers in New England towns cannot speak out at meetings where policies affecting their lives are discussed. They don't have the right to free speech in this Town. They have the right to go screw themselves.

Before he decided to become a freak, Phil Spector was rock and roll's greatest record producer. He created the "Wall of Sound," a studio trick that combined orchestration and other instruments to create a . . . wall of sound. No one else could do this in the early 1960's, so Phil Spector became the boy-wonder of rock music, creating the best music that the post-Elvis and pre-Beatles era had to offer.

Like many Jewish songwriters, Spector decided to dabble in Christmas music. There's a good reason for this. Anyone who can write a Christmas song that becomes a standard can expect royalties into the next century.

But it's not easy to write a good Christmas song. We know this because once we put away the Thanksgiving turkey we are bombarded with hundreds of Christmas songs for the next month. Every major recording artist has a Christmas song. Some of them have two or three. Some even release entire albums of Christmas songs. Most are crap, but there are some good ones. I always liked this song. And Band-Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas" ain't bad, despite the bad 1980's haircuts. Unfortunately, the greatest songwriter of them all, the man who wrote Hey Jude, gave us this drivel.

Phil Spector was not content to write a Christmas classic. He instead recorded a Christmas album, using the girl groups that made him famous in the early 1960's. The album incorporates the famous Wall of Sound, and it's so good that one record reviewer said he listens to the album in the dead of summer. I believe him. Even an atheist would love the Phil Spector Christmas Album. Spector may or may not have killed a Hollywood actress a few years ago, but he sure as hell knows how to produce a great Christmas album.

The highlight of the Phil Spector Christmas Album is the Ronettes' Sleigh Ride. The below video captures the spirit of Spector's version, with Ye Olde pictures from the days of yore, before we inherited the horrible world that we live with today. My first choice is to return to the stone age, but I can live with the world depicted in this video, as well. Wouldn't you?

Christmas songs are big business. No one even knows most of the words to them beyond the first chorus, but even the atheists know the melodies. This is why everyone tries to write a classic Christmas song, and why so many of these songs make us physically ill. Except for the song highlighted below.

Most of the good rock 'n roll Christmas songs are adaptations from the Christmas classics, like "Sleigh Ride" and others. It takes real talent write up a whole new song. Though it's been done, few songwriters turn the Christmas song into an anti-war message. John Lennon was able to do this. When the Beatles called it quits in 1970, they had long abandoned their cheeky Beatlemania image from 1963-64. By 1969, John Lennon looked like Jesus Christ, and he pushed the envelope lyrically and musically, writing and playing from the gut. His first solo album was a shocker, a product of his Primal Scream therapy and the sparse musicianship that provided a coarse backdrop to the self-examination growing out of the Beatles' breakup.

That kind of songwriting wouldn't make for a pleasant Christmas song, however. So Lennon reached into his bag of melodies and gave us "Happy X-Mas/War is Over." This is a sing-a-long, but not quite Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. It's more like Johnny L. the anti-war preacher. This was during the Vietnam era, when few rock stars even wrote straightforward anti-war songs. Lennon took things one step further and wrote an anti-war Christmas song.

This brave act would be meaningless without a good song. It's all about the song. While the radio broadcast "Happy X-Mas/War is Over" through the 70's, 80's and 90's, the song never did seem that topical as there was no war going on. There's one now. War is back in style, but it's an anti-war moment for the rest of us. Music will never stop any war. But these days it's still a risk to even try. Lennon may no longer be with us, but I know for damned sure that were he alive today, he'd have given us a follow-up to "Happy X-Mas/War is Over".

Only a fool would disagree with the following notion: authoritarianism is not foreign to American political life. Authoritarian thinking thrived in Europe and elsewhere, and Americans think they are the chosen people who would never dream of such political oppression, much less vote for someone who thinks this way. But if, as they say, we are all brothers in this world, an authoritarian strain infects the political mind from America to Europe to Japan.

I have written about Cointelpro many times over the years, and if you want background for that U.S. government program to monitor and destroy the lives of leftist political activists in this country, just Google Cointelpro. That program officially died in the mid-1970's, when Congress investigated the FBI and discovered that the nation's premier law enforcement agency was also a political police department. Sleazy government surveillance resumed during the Reagan years and it continues through the present Bush regime.

But enough about the present. Lets go back into the past. The New York Times on Saturday ran a story on its website detailing how FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover hatched a plan in 1950 to imprison 12,000 Americans suspected of unpatriotic behavior. The story, reprinted below, is as shocking as it is unsurprising. Not only because Cold War America in th 1950's gave rise to nativist and blind patriotism, but because J. Edgar Hoover was perhaps the most disgusting piece of trash ever to hold high office in the United States. Quite disturbingly, the FBI building in Washington D.C. bears the name of this anti-democratic authoritarian who used the U.S. Constitution as toilet paper. His name should be sandblasted off that building immediately.

A 1950 Plan: Arrest 12,000, Suspend Due Process By TIM WEINER

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the long-time director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans that he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.

Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration’s decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for Congress and the Supreme Court today.

The Constitution says habeas corpus shall not be suspended “unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.” The plan proposed by Hoover, the head of the F.B.I. from 1924 to 1972, stretched that clause to include “threatened invasion” or “attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory.”

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush issued an order that effectively allowed the United States to hold suspects indefinitely without a hearing, a lawyer, or formal charges. In September 2006, Congress passed a law suspending habeas corpus for anyone deemed an “unlawful enemy combatant.”

But the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the right of American citizens to seek a writ of habeas corpus. This month the court heard arguments on whether about 300 foreigners held at Guantánamo Bay had the same rights. It is expected to rule by next summer.

Hoover’s plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of cold-war documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The collection makes up a new volume of “The Foreign Relations of the United States,” a series that by law has been published continuously by the State Department since the Civil War.

Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow.

So the bureau had arranged for “detention in Military facilities of the individuals apprehended” in those states, he wrote.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel comprised of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.

The only modern precedent for Hoover’s plan was the Palmer Raids of 1920, named after the attorney general at the time. The raids, executed in large part by Hoover’s intelligence division, swept up thousands of people suspected of being communists and radicals.

Previously declassified documents show that the F.B.I.’s “security index” of suspect Americans predated the cold war. In March 1946, Hoover sought the authority to detain Americans “who might be dangerous” if the United States went to war. In August 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark gave the F.B.I. the power to make a master list of such people.

Hoover’s July 1950 letter was addressed to Sidney W. Souers, who had served as the first director of central intelligence and was then a special national-security assistant to Truman. The plan also was sent to the executive secretary of the National Security Council, whose members were the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and the military chiefs.

In September 1950, Congress passed and the president signed a law authorizing the detention of “dangerous radicals” if the president declared a national emergency. Truman did declare such an emergency in December 1950, after China entered the Korean War. But no known evidence suggests he or any other president approved any part of Hoover’s proposal.

Here's how the courts really honor the First Amendment: they first claim that the right to free speech represents one of our "cherished" freedoms. Then they find a way to take it away from us.

There's a theory in First Amendment law called the "public forum," which is a legal term of art. It means that certain public spaces are First Amendment zones where speech cannot be restricted. The town square is a public forum. So are the sidewalks and public parks and any other place where speech traditionally takes place. The public forum is truly one of those concepts that makes our's a free society.

In the late 1960's, the U.S. Supreme Court, like nearly every other institution in American society, was progressively pushing forward. The Justices on the Court were predominantly liberal and found ways to bring the Constitution to life. It was during the 1960's that the Supreme Court identified a constitutional right to privacy and required the police to read criminal suspects their rights during their arrest. But the most profound thing that the Supreme Court did was to proclaim in 1968 that private shopping malls were public forums, reasoning that shopping malls were the new town squares, and if speech cannot be restricted in the town square, then it cannot be restricted in shopping areas, which have all the hallmarks of a town square except that it's private property.

As the 1960's turned into the 1970's, things began to turn to shit. The 1970's weren't all bad, but American society was hung-over from the 1960's, and that hangover brought us a period of malaise and second-rate American leadership, including a criminal by the name of Richard Milhous Nixon, elected President in 1968 and given the opportunity to appoint four Supreme Court Justices in just a few years. The permanent majority on the Supreme Court turned into a conservative majority in just a few years. One of the first things the Nixon Supreme Court did was to overrule that decision from 1968 which held that private shopping areas were public forums. The new rule was that private property was private property and you can shop here but shut the hell up and take your shit and get out of the mall if you don't like the way things are.

The good thing about American freedom is that the state courts can expand our freedoms even when the U.S. Supreme Court is taking it away from us. Certain things are legal because the state courts say they are legal, no matter what the Supreme Court says. So some state courts interpreted their state constitutions protect free speech in the shopping mall even though the Supreme Court said that the federal Constitution says otherwise. One of those states is California, which has held for about 30 years that private shopping areas remain free speech zones.

That principle was almost taken away from us in California last week. The California Supreme Court reaffirmed the principle that free speech exists in private shopping areas, but it did so by a 4-3 vote. One vote going the other way and we lose a major free speech priinciple in California. According to Associated Press:

Shopping malls can't stop protesters from calling for boycotts of its stores, even when they're on mall property, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday.

In a 4-3 decision, the justices ruled that California's free-speech protections extend to demonstrators who set up inside shopping centers and urge customers not to stop there.

Monday's ruling upholds a 1979 state Supreme Court decision that found that shopping malls are public forums in which people's free speech rights are protected by the California Constitution.

What did the dissenting judges say in this case? They don't like extending free speech protections to private property and urge the court to overrule its precedents holding otherwise. The dissent said: "Private property should be treated as private property, not as a public free speech zone." But wait! These judges want to be on record as supporting free speech: "I do not denigrate free speech rights. As the New York Court of Appeal stated in its opinion rejecting [free speech on private property], 'the right to free expression is one of this Nation’s most cherished civil liberties.' But free speech rights and private property rights can and should coexist."

This anti-speech approach by the dissenting judges in California reflects the majority of state courts which have ruled in the issue. California is one of the few states which protect speech on private property. The other courts have thrown in the towel and bowed their heads to the almighty God of private property and, by implication, private enterprise, which is the national religion in the United States. As private developers build more and more shopping malls and plazas, our right to free speech diminishes every time a shovel is thrust into the ground for the ceremonial ground-breaking.