-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Impeached POTUS A Difficult Spell on Capitol Hill by Mark Steyn OUTSIDE Monica's and my hotel, the first demonstration of this trial is going on - from a pro-intern group waving a placard saying "Hounded From Day One". As a sign of solidarity, they've adopted the same spelling standards Monica demonstrated in her Revlon job application and are accusing the Republicans of "Hypocricy". "You've got 'hypocrisy' wrong," I tell the large African-American woman in front of me. "I know hypocrisy when I see it," she says. "No, no. I mean you've mis-spelt it." "Says who?" "Says the dictionary." "Says your dictionary." Ah, the old Clinton defence: I'm obviously using a partisan dictionary; it depends what the spelling of the word "is" is. But then right from the start this trial has been characterised by shoddy spelling. Back when the senators first signed their solemn oath to administer "impartial justice", they were given the federal government equivalent of a Crackerjack pencil - a souvenir ballpoint pen emblazoned with the words "Untied States Senator". That's right: not "United", but "Untied" - as if they'd all been called out of a bipartisan bondage session in the Capitol basement. The question was whether the senators could really be untied - from their party caucuses - and do impartial justice as independent jurors. But one by one the chickens have all come home to their Democrat roost. Senators Joe Lieberman, Bob Kerrey and Pat Moynihan, all of whom spoke out against the President, have fallen into line. Fritz Hollings, the junior senator from South Carolina, was also tipped as a possible defector: he's assumed to loathe Mr Clinton, mainly on the grounds that he loathes everybody else. Now Senator Hollings, in his stately Southern drawl, has pronounced: "Theah ox is ean theah ditch." The ox is presumably the House managers' case, not the President, who is, um, the bull and is back in the cowshed with the milkmaid. But, if the House case is in the ditch, then why not just leave it there? Still, Democratic senators insist that the Clinton defence has been "compelling". In case you've forgotten what it was, here's a summary: a) The President was telling the truth when he denied that he'd lied about whether he told the truth. b) It would do grave damage to the dignity and solemnity of The World's Greatest Deliberative Body for senators to discuss oral sex in the well of the chamber. Senators should only discuss oral sex in the well of their massage parlour. c) Our defence team has a person of colour (African-American Cheryl Mills, also a person of gender), a person of disability (wheelchair-bound Charles Ruff) and a person of hogwash (authentic Arkansas swamp-gibberish-bound Dale Bumpers): we look like America. The prosecution look like uptight, sexually repressed, Rotarian nerds. To counter this compelling defence, the House managers have resorted to desperate measures. Late on Sunday I was startled to see Representatives Asa Hutchinson and Ed Bryant come by in open-necked shirts and roll-neck cardigans to interview Monica. Monica was unimpressed, accustomed as she is to meeting government officials in open-zipped trousers. Out on the street, the world's press waits for Monica. Methinks she'll use the convenient, no-fuss, express check-out. Unfortunately for senators, the impeachment clause of the US Constitution has no express check-out. The London Telegraph, Jan. 26, 1999 Impeached POTUS That Was a Trial? Of course he's guilty Solons and pundits have recently spent a lot of time plumbing the Constitutional phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors." It seems they should instead have been trying to discern how the Founding Fathers understood the verb "to try," as in Article I, Section 3, which gives the Senate "sole Power to try all Impeachments." The proceedings that have so far taken place in the Senate have been theatrical and sometimes illuminating, but have had only a passing resemblance to a trial. When in the two centuries since Blackstone, in particular, has anyone held a trial with rules that outlaw witnesses? The World's Greatest Deliberative Body is now bending itself out of shape debating whether it's kosher for prosecutors even to talk to witnesses. The Democrats are transparently disingenuous, while Republicans as usual cower behind their majority. At least we have Henry Hyde (see alongside) to point out that the emperor has no clothes. The issue of the moment is whether Trent Lott, Orrin Hatch and the rest can summon themselves to do what the Constitution, universal practice and common sense make obvious. It is of course equally obvious that the President is guilty as charged. White House lawyers headed by Counsel Charles Ruff have been skillful in their nit-picking. They complain that the prosecution keeps changing its mind about which of the President's manifold perjuries it wants to discuss. They invent serial excuses for a pattern of obstruction. In the alternative reality they have constructed false affidavits appear by immaculate conception, and the President "refreshes his memory" by repeating a series of self-serving lies to Betty Currie. And somehow the President discussed gifts with Monica Lewinsky, but never enlisted in the conspiracy that led her and Betty Currie to hide subpoenaed evidence under a bed. It is mere happenstance that the sole beneficiary of all this obstruction was Bill Clinton. Article One of the impeachment resolution charges President Clinton with lying to the grand jury about "the nature and details" of his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. For openers, in his prepared statement, he testified, "I regret that what began as a friendship came to include this conduct." Some friendship. By Ms. Lewinsky's testimony, it was only a matter of hours after their first encounter that the President of the United States had the 21-year-old intern in the Oval Office performing a sexual act on him. Months into their "friendship," Ms. Lewinsky was still uncertain if he even knew her name. Article Two charges the President with obstructing justice. Of course he did not explicitly tell Ms. Lewinsky to lie. He only encouraged her to file a false affidavit and give false testimony in the Jones suit, and supported the scheme to conceal the subpoenaed gifts. He allowed his attorney to make a false and misleading statement to a Federal judge characterizing an affidavit. Clearly he secured job assistance for Ms. Lewinsky to prevent her truthful testimony; how many job-seeking twenty-somethings meet with the U.N. ambassador at his suite at the Watergate for a job interview ? After his own deposition in the Jones case, Mr. Clinton summoned Betty Currie to an unusual Sunday session at the White House, asking her rhetorical questions: "I was never really alone with Monica, right?" and "Monica came on to me and I never touched her, right?" The repetition of what the President knew to be falsehoods can have no other purpose than tampering with a witness. For all the haggling over details, Mr. Clinton, like Richard Nixon before him, was at the heart of a concerted effort to obstruct justice. The remaining issue, of course, is what to do about this. There is indeed a sense in which witnesses are not needed. The logical procedure would be to enter a summary judgment that the President is guilty of perjury and obstruction, and proceed to the debate over whether Presidential felonies are grounds for "overturning" an election now as we did in 1974. The need for witnesses arises only because the President continues to dispute each charge; Mr. Ruff was hilarious arguing that the payment of $850,000 to Paula Jones does not allow us to infer that the President indeed tried to do with her precisely what he admits he did with Ms. Lewinsky. If the President continues to assert his innocence on perjury and obstruction, let him come personally to assert it before 100 Senators. Summary judgment against the President, however, is far from what anyone has in mind. Instead we get Senator Robert Byrd's uncharacteristically slimy motion to end the proceedings without ever taking a stand on the merits. It is not Bobby Byrd who wants to let the President off, it's all those other guys who will never convict him, so forget it. Position and power without responsibility or accountability--the essence of what passes for politics today. Senator Byrd's motion at least puts to the test whether his Republican colleagues are serious. Senator Byrd, like others, professes to believe that dismissal would "promptly end this sad and sorry time for our country" and begin a "process of healing." What planet have such people been living on these past six years? This is not a matter of a President happening to fall for a 21-year-old temptress, but an ingrained habit of lying. Bill Clinton conducts politics at the level he does because it has never occurred to him to do otherwise--lying to Colonel Holmes to launch his career and lying to the American people to save it. His entire Presidency has been bent to obstructing justice, from barring Justice lawyers from Vincent Foster's office after his death to resisting, as droves of witnesses flee the country or hide behind the Fifth Amendment, an independent counsel on using illegal Chinese money to win the last Presidential election. The notion of mutual healing is nowhere in sight. It is not as if the President were joining Senator Byrd's own call to follow the law with regard to the Vacancies Act, or offering to put the Justice Department in the hands of some clearly impartial trustee for the next two years. Instead, Mr. Clinton would spin dismissal as a vindication and move brazenly on to new heights of arrogance. He would beat his bongo drums and, say, turn the Justice Department over to the tort lawyers. Judiciary Chairman Hatch would mumble a few words of opposition and cave as he repeatedly has. Even Republicans such as Senator Sam Brownback are saying, "the biggest comment I get from people in Kansas is: 'Get it over with!'" This goal is of course laudable, but the Senate will end nothing by sweeping the current mess under the rug. It has to go to the source of the problem, which is not the House managers or Kenneth Starr or a "vast right-wing conspiracy." The source lies in the psyche and personality of William Jefferson Clinton; there is only one way the Senate can promptly put "it" behind us. To wit, render an impeachment conviction and hope that President Gore will abide by our laws. The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 25, 1999 The Polls Are Rigged Supreme Court Rejects Sampling for 2000 Census Plot to manipulate votes fails WASHINGTON -- The 2000 census cannot be adjusted through statistical methods to make up for an expected undercount of minorities, the Supreme Court said on Monday. The ruling means the head count will be conducted the traditional way. The federal census law bars use of statistical methods intended to make the national population count more nearly accurate for deciding how many members of the House of Representatives each state gets, the justices said. The 5-4 ruling could have a major effect on money and votes nationwide. Republicans had fought the Clinton administration's sampling plan as a threat to their control of Congress. The law ``directly prohibits the use of sampling in the determination of population for purposes of apportionment,'' Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the court. When the census law was amended in 1976, ``At no point ... did a single member of Congress suggest that the amendments would so fundamentally change the manner in which the (Census) Bureau could calculate the population for purposes of apportionment,'' O'Connor wrote. O'Connor said ``it tests the limits of reason'' to suggest that Congress would have been silent in enacting ``what would arguably be the single most significant change in the method of conducting the decennial census since its inception.'' House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said, ``The Supreme Court today reaffirmed a basic constitutional principle. The census must not be a poll and everyone must be counted.'' Adjusting the census likely would have helped Democrats because minorities and inner-city residents, who tend to vote Democratic, made up a large share of the estimated 4 million people missed by the 1990 count. Republicans oppose adjusting the numbers to make up for that undercount because people who tend to vote Republican also are more likely to voluntarily respond to the census. In other action, the court: --Reinstated federal rules aimed at quickly opening the $110 billion local telephone market to competition. --Killed a lawsuit by five retired employees of Hughes Aircraft Co. over what they say was a $1.2 billion surplus in the company's contributory pension plan. That could affect 33 million workers and retirees who participate in defined-benefit pension plans. --Agreed to review a ruling that struck down Missouri's limit on campaign contributions as free-speech violations. Joining O'Connor's decision that adjusting the census figures is unlawful were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. Dissenting were Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, who said the federal census law did not bar the government from adjusting the figures. Census counts have been imperfect since Thomas Jefferson oversaw the first one in 1790. All sides acknowledge that census-takers cannot expect to find every American. At issue in today's case was whether the government may use modern statistical knowledge to estimate how many people were missed. The Constitution requires an ``actual enumeration'' of the nation's population every 10 years to help divide the 435 members of the House of Representatives among the states. Census figures also are used to draw congressional, state and local voting districts, and to hand out $180 billion in federal funds each year. Two lower courts ruled the government's proposal unlawful last year, saying a federal census law barred adjustment of census figures used for dividing the House members among the states. Clinton administration lawyers contended the government has estimated at least part of the population in each census since 1940, but acknowledged the new plan was a significant change. The House Republicans' lawyers said the Constitution and federal census law allow only a one-by-one head count. O'Connor said that because the census law barred the use of statistical sampling, the high court was not deciding whether such methods would violate the Constitution's ``actual enumeration'' language. The government's census plans were challenged by taxpayers in six states -- Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- who said adjusting the census would cost them federal money and political power. House Republicans also sued, saying the Constitution and federal census law allow only a one-by-one head count. The Supreme Court said the taxpayers had legal standing to sue, and today's ruling was based on their case. The Republicans' appeal was dismissed. The high court had aimed for an early decision in the case to give the government time to plan for the census, scheduled for April 1, 2000. The census is conducted by mail, and about two-thirds of Americans return their forms. Census workers then begin knocking on doors to find the rest, but that does not always work. The Clinton administration's plan would use those traditional methods to find 90 percent of Americans, then use a separate survey of 750,000 people across the country as a ``quality check'' to decide where people were overcounted or undercounted. Three years ago, the Supreme Court ruled the Bush administration could decide not to adjust the 1990 census figures even though a disproportionate share of those undercounted were minorities. Today, the high court said the Clinton administration cannot decide to adjust the figures when it wants to. Because today's ruling only bars the use of adjusted census figures for allocating House members among the states, the government might still be able to use adjusted numbers for drawing election districts and doling out federal aid. However, Congress could refuse to pay for creating a second set of figures for those purposes. In dissent, Stevens said the census law allows statistical adjustment of the numbers. ``Since it is perfectly clear that the use of sampling will make the census more accurate ... the proposed method is a legitimate means of making the 'actual enumeration' that the Constitution commands,'' he wrote. The cases are Department of Commerce vs. House of Representatives, 98-404, and Clinton vs. Glavin, 98-564. The New York Times, Jan. 26, 1999 Information SuperSpyWay Intel Alters Plan to Spy on Chip Customers Buy our chips, you get numbered Intel Corp. backed away on Monday from a plan to embed an identifying signature in its next generation of computer chips, bowing to protests that the technology would compromise the privacy of users. Intel, which makes about 85 percent of the world's computer processors, announced last week that each of its new Pentium III chips would have an identifying serial number that would enhance the security of electronic commerce and guard against software piracy. But advocacy groups said they feared it would mark a further erosion of anonymity on the Internet and would allow companies to collect detailed profiles of consumers, which could then be resold. On Monday, Intel said it would modify the identification system in the new chips so that it is automatically disabled unless the computer user voluntarily turns it on. The company said it would also offer free software to allow customers to turn off the feature permanently. "We've always understood that there are security questions that get raised when someone is providing identification in a transaction," Tom Waldrop, an Intel spokesman, said in explaining the reversal. "Whether an individual is showing a driver's license of handing over a credit card number, it always raises a privacy question. We have done things to address that. You have to weigh the positive value of having more secured Internet transactions, more secure electronic commerce, against any privacy concerns." Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group in Washington, D.C., which had called for a boycott of the new chip, said, "It looks like we won Round 1." But he said much more needed to be done. "It's a temporary fix, he said. "It can be as easily disabled as enabled. There's not enough assurance here that the chip will not be misused." Intel said it would continue to work with consumer groups to allay fears about the new chip. Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, with $26.2 billion in sales last year, said the chip signature was intended to promote the growth of electronic commerce by giving companies a better way to verify the identities of their customers. It said the feature could also be used to avoid piracy by preventing a single copy of a software program from being installed on several machines. But after Intel last week announced plans to include the identification technology in its Pentium III chips, which are due for release in a few months, a furor ensued. Junkbusters, a high-tech lobbying group based in Green Brook, N.J., said in a statement on its Web site: "Intel's proposal to put a unique ID code inside of every computer it sells will significantly reduce the level of privacy available to computer users around the world. The unique code will make possible far more extensive tracking and profiling of individual activity, without either the knowledge or consent of the user." On Friday, Rep. Edward Markey, the senior Democrat on the House consumer protection subcommittee, wrote a letter to Intel's chief executive, Craig Barrett, asking that the company reconsider its plans, "to better balance both commercial and privacy objectives." Markey said he understood the technology's implications for online commerce, where the anonymity of the Internet can encourage fraud. But he expressed concern that it would also help online marketers surreptitiously track consumers on the Web. "Intel's new product improves technology for online commerce in a way that compromises personal privacy," Markey wrote. The skirmish over the Pentium III is the latest front in the struggle between security and privacy on the Internet. Earlier rounds have focused on the use of an identifying mechanism called "cookies," which enable Web sites to write information onto a computer's hard drive that could serve to identify the computer user on future visits. Many Web sites now require users to accept a cookie as a condition of entry. But unlike cookies, which are contained in a text file that can be altered or deleted by the user, the Pentium III signature would be a part of the hardware. In its effort to reassure consumers, Intel said it would not maintain a master database of consumer names matched to Pentium serial numbers. The company said it would also encourage Web sites and software programmers to warn consumers whenever the serial number is retrieved. While much of the privacy debate has focused on how online marketers and companies collect personal information, the new technology also raises concerns about whether it could be used by law enforcement officials and governments. "We've always thought that in this debate over authentication, governments would like more rather than less," Rotenberg said. "This is the flip side of anonymity, and governments are pushing for authentication. So there are some real concerns about government control." The dispute erupted at an awkward time for the Clinton administration, which has for months been trying to convince the European Union that American companies are doing enough to protect consumer privacy on line. In October, the European Union enacted a tough privacy law that prohibits companies doing business in its 15-member countries from disclosing personal information about customers without their consent. Rather than pass a law adopting the European Union requirements, the Clinton administration has been pushing online marketers and merchants to adopt self-regulatory models for protecting consumers on line. But it has had a tough time selling that approach as adequate to the European Union, although the union has delayed sanctions against the United States while negotiations continue. Gary Clayton, counsel and senior privacy analyst for Stone Investments, a technology investment firm based in Dallas, said that while there are some legitimate privacy concerns with the new technology, "this is designed to actually protect people from something privacy advocates have been talking about, which is theft of personal information and fraud." New York Times, Jan. 26, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
