Close calls of a Constitutional kind

Today we entered some scary territory, Constitutionally-speaking, and it is apparent that more is yet to come. Memos from the period immediately following 9/11 have been released by the Obama Justice Department that were written by the Bush Administration's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and that justified, rather speciously, a range of extra-constitutional presidential prerogatives. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff has more:

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Justice Department secretly gave the green light for the U.S. military to attack apartment buildings and office complexes inside the United States, deploy high-tech surveillance against U.S. citizens and potentially suspend First Amendment freedom-of-the-press rights in order to combat the terror threat, according to a memo released Monday.

Many of the actions discussed in the Oct. 23, 2001, memo to then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's chief lawyer, William Haynes, were never actually taken. [snip]

[/snip] In perhaps the most surprising assertion, the Oct. 23, 2001, memo suggested the president could even suspend press freedoms if he concluded it was necessary to wage the war on terror. "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," Yoo wrote in the memo entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States."

This claim was viewed as so extreme that it was essentially (and secretly) revoked—but not until October of last year, seven years after the memo was written and with barely three and a half months left in the Bush administration.

This is the stuff Orwell's nightmares were made of, and it is this type of legal rationale to justify presidential actions that was one of the greatest fears of constitutional lawyers for the past eight years. Beyond the warrantless wiretapping of foreign and domestic targets, extraordinary rendition, and CIA "black sites" in foreign countries, these memos outlined the legal procedures for the establishment of no less than a police state.

The implications of what these memos could have meant for the general population, for you and for me, are staggering. One does not need to be a legal scholar to understand that the President suspending free speech protections and being able to direct the military inside US borders is a serious threat to American civil liberties. Keith Olbermann and constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley have more from Countdown tonight:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

What is perhaps most disturbing of all is that there are apparently a number of other legal opinions from the Bush Administration that the Justice Department is considering making public. What else could be contained in those opinions is anyone's guess, but the fact that the Justice Department has hesitated to release them suggests that they are either more controversial or more nefarious, or both. I'll update again when/if they are released, watch this space.

Heartbreak

I came across this article through Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic, and the case of Annie Leibovitz and Susan Sontag is one that dramatizes the very real financial burdens that result from marriage inequality in our society. At a very basic level, the whole situation begs the question as to why the state should at all be involved in the decision of whom one loves and (theoretically, at least) decides to spend the rest of one's life with. As a straight male, it offends me that I am able to marry any woman off the street without having to know anything more than the basic "who what where when" details of her life, yet committed same-sex partners of 30 or more years do not share in the ability to publicly declare their covenant with each other.

This movement to expand equal rights is not about a government decree from on high; it is an ongoing conversation amongst friends and neighbors that challenges opinions and assumptions and asks for explanations. Think of Annie and ask why.

Doing what we sent him to do?

Yesterday, in his weekly Saturday morning address, President Obama pronounced himself to be preparing for a massive battle with the entrenched corporate interests of the energy, health care, and education industries. This, in the same week that he nominated a key arms-control expert to oversee the Pentagon's weapons procurement, a position that is subject to intense lobbying by defense contractors including Raytheon, Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas and others. Weapons procurement doesn't sound like the sexiest or most controversial area of government, but Fred Kaplan of Slate.com provides a glimpse of the difficulties in cutting defense spending through the example of the highest-profile military purchase in some time: the F-22 Raptor fighter jet. Read it and weep.

There will be no movement back to fiscal sanity and deficit-cutting without cutting programs and increasing government revenues through closing tax loopholes and reversing tax cuts for selected industries that would continue to do quite well without them (i.e. the energy sector). Obama's first budget aims to accomplish many of these goals, and his efforts will be opposed vigorously by those industries affected and by their defenders in Congress who benefit from corporate largesse in the form of campaign contributions. These are big battles to be waged on many fronts, and the fact that Obama is putting the nation on notice about his intentions to wage those battles appear to me to point to cojones we can believe in. I am personally excited to see where this goes.

Rwanda: A journey into self through the other

Resume blog:

I went to Rwanda almost three weeks ago for a stay of 7 nights. I was accompanying my mother, who had some potential work to do in Kigali, the capital, and she was invited to attend a conference on forgiveness convened by Jean-Paul Samputu, internationally renowned singer from Rwanda who now resides in Canada. JP has his own story of forgiveness that is extremely powerful, and in forgiving his neighbor, he overcame a number of debilitating addictions. The conference was aimed at promoting the message of reconciliation through forgiveness on a larger scale, and naturally, that entailed a lot of learning about the genocide and hearing peoples' testimonials about their experiences. The whole experience has left me both speechless and brimming over with information I want to share ith people; I feel like a Rwanda evangelist, in a way, in that I want to dispel peoples' misperceptions of the country and bring them into a new understanding. Below I've inserted a bit of an email I sent back to friends and family expanding on my experience:

The setup of our conference we have been in has been both a blessing and a curse, in a sense; for we have reached far into the depths of this country's wounds of the genocide 15 years ago, which as Mom alluded to are still very fresh for the majority of people here. However, reaching into the past trauma of millions of people so deeply naturally affects you in a way that you cannot avoid. You cannot understand Rwanda without learning of the genocide, it is simply too much a part of the collective psychology of Rwandans to avoid. It is as though life stopped in 1994 for a large part of the population, and they lost part of their souls in that 45 day period. We met with a group of perpetrators and victims in the town of Nyamata two days ago, which was a kind of "ground zero" for the genocide for reasons I don't fully understand. The eyes of those people, both victims and perpetrators, are something I will never forget. I have never seen such emptiness in human eyes before; an emptiness beyond mere sadness, as if life cannot show these people anything anymore. As though life itself is a curse to them, and living on is the cross they must bear, yet they are too courageous to take their own lives. So they exist in some sort of netherworld where their husbands, wives and children hold no more joy for them.

Mom is absolutely correct in saying that this is the most intense place we have ever traveled to, yet the intensity is not there because of any sort of violent tension or danger, but rather, the near-universal process of national reconciliation and introspection that is constantly at work here comes through in virtually every conversation I have, and that positive, creative tension of attempting to find meaning in genocide is constantly palpable. Make no mistake, the people here are the warmest, most welcoming, bar none, that I have ever met. There is an incredible tenderness and physicality to the culture in Rwanda that belies the violence and brutality of the genocide. The standard greeting is to hug someone and to air kiss them on each cheek for a total of three times. And it is a real, sustained hug, not the French laying of hands on the arms-type of hug. When people talk to you, they hold on to your hand, men included, and when other men, usually teenagers or young men my age want to show me something, they literally lead me by the hand. It puts into drastic relief the coldness and distance of our North American and European cultures, and I find I rather appreciate it.

So if this email strikes a somewhat somber note, I did not intend it to be that way, it is just the basic reality of this country. That being said, I have fallen in love with this place. There have been so many serendipitous events here that seem to point me towards moving here and working to help people and promoting Rwandan development, it just feels that the universe wants me to be here. It feels so natural to live here, simply and relatively in tune with nature, it will be quite a shock to leave on Wednesday. I have open invitations to stay in Nairobi, Kenya with some students I have befriended, and another from a man who has helped to run things here in Kigali, the wonderful Celestin. So we'll see what happens when I return to San Francisco, but at this point I feel pretty determined to find my way back here for a more extended stay.

Yes, to say I was struck deeply by Rwanda is a gross understatement.

Cheating on my Baby...

So I haven't addressed it yet on this here blog, but I'm an avid motorcyclist, and for the last year and a half I've owned the bike of my dreams (See left). This is a Triumph Daytona 675, and for those of you not familiar with it, it is a three cylinder sportsbike that displaces 675 cubic centimeters. Triumph claim that the 675 puts out 123 horsepower out of the box, which means usually around 107-110 at the rear wheel (horsepower figures are usually measured at the engine crank, for both cars and motorcycles, so that when the power actually makes it to the drive wheels there is some power loss through parasitic drag, i.e. the transmission and the drive chain suck some of the power up) and if you factor in the fact that the 675 weighs around 417 lbs. when fully fuelled, it's quite a rocket. It revs up to 14,000 rpm before the rev limiter kicks in, and at that engine speed, the wailing of the bike is sonorous and absolutely beautiful; smooth yet raspy at the same time. The handling of the bike has always been of some concern to me however, as I've never really felt fully comfortable on it. The suspension is adjustable for preload, rebound damping and compression damping in both the front and rear, so this means that you can either make it ride very sweetly if you know what you're doing, or you can totally bugger it up if you don't, as in my personal case. Suspension theory is a black art/science, and I won't even pretend to understand it well enough to explain it here, but suffice it to say that the 675 is a quick-steering little animal, darty, and even a bit twitchy for my tastes. It's very aggressive in both its riding position and its overall feel, which is a revelation when you're in the right frame of mind, but slightly intimidating for a conservative rider such as me.

Today, though, after fiddling with the suspension over the last few weeks, I think I finally found the right mix of settings so that I felt much more comfortable when railing through some corners today on some twisty roads south of the city. I'm sure I wasn't as fast as I thought I was, but I'll just say that I haven't felt that good or that fast in a while. I'm preparing for a 3,000+ mile odyssey up to see my friend in Calgary, AB at the beginning of July, so I need to make sure to spend lots of time on the bike these next few weeks to ensure that my body's ready to be in position for 10+ hour days as I travel through Reno, northern Nevada, southeastern Idaho, and through Montana until finally reaching Alberta some 20 hours later! It'll be quite an adventure, and I need to get a camera to be sure to document it.

BUT, to take things back a little bit, the whole point of this post was to discuss the fact that last weekend I cheated. I rode a couple other motorcycles while the 675 sulked in a parking spot nearby, all in plain sight...

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The Dirty Deed

Buell is an American motorcycle company that was founded about 25 years ago by Erik Buell, an engineer, with a singular vision of applying some innovative and unconventional engineering principles to the paradigm of the sporting/racing motorcycle. Over the last ten years, Buells have been using tuned-up Harley-Davidson engines, since HD has been the sole owner of the Buell Motorcycle Company since 1998, so they emit that potato-potato-potato Harley sound that is the scourge of San Francisco tourists walking down the Embarcadero from the Giants ballpark (you get lots of Harleys accelerating hard with open exhaust pipes around there, ya know).

Having read a number of reviews of Buells over the years, I've always been interested in them, as much for their unconventional engineering solutions (holding the fuel in the frame of the motorcycle, mounting the exhaust under the engine, rather than out the side, and having one large front brake rotor that is mounted to the rim of the front wheel, rather than the hub, to name just a few innovations) as the fact that they're a fully American born and bred company. So when I heard that they were holding a Demo Day in Vallejo, CA last weekend, I knew I had to go over and see what these bikes were all about.

I've never been to a demo day for any motorcycle company before, so it was with some trepidation that I drove into the parking lot where the massive Buell truck and trailer were parked. It turned out that I had nothing to fear however, as the atmosphere was very laid-back, with a DJ spinning all types of music, guys sitting around chatting, and burgers at 12:30PM. You'd sign up, show your motorcycle endorsement on your license, and take out a bike for a 1/2 hour guided test drive with both a lead rider and a sweeper at the back. I was really hoping to be able to take off on my own with one of the bikes and to run at my own pace, since I figured the group rides would be pretty slow, but alas, it was not to be...

The first ride I chose the Firebolt XB12R, as I have read that it is the most "focused" of the Buells for sport riding. Start it up...boombadaboombadaboom...I look in the mirror and I see the world behind me zizzing around like so many reflections in broken shards of glass. Yeah, it vibrates a bit. The engine is alive, pulsating, rocking, coughing itself into life like a bear awakening from hibernation with a case of emphysema. The Buell rep who is running the show says mildly that the engine is a bit, ahem, "cold-blooded". I'll say! The engine is a Harley Sportster 1200 Evolution engine tuned for more performance, which means its engine architecture dates back to the mid-1950s or so, which isn't necessarily a bad thing; at least you know it's been around the block a few times...Still, at this point I'm just taken aback by how raucous this thing is without having even touched the throttle yet to start down the road. I get in behind a couple other riders after clunking into first gear using the agriculturally-smooth gearbox, and we start moving.

It's a half-hour test ride through downtown Vallejo and out to some moderately twisty roads running out past a mine and the backside of what looks to be some sort of refinery/factory unit, ending with a 4-5 mile blast down the highway so everyone can crank on the throttle some. Immediately, the Firebolt feels unlike anything I've ever ridden before; there's a plantedness to it, a certain organic sense to it, that helps it to feel "all-of-a-piece", as though it is a pretty good extension of myself, rather than just a machine. Buell's marketing materials call it "Intuitive Handling", which seems to be a pretty good way to sum it up. It took me a few minutes to look past the chunky vibes of the engine, however, to appreciate the rest of the motorcycle. First of all, I love the look of the thing --see below-- with its clean, bright white paint and contrasting blue windscreen and wheels. Secondly, the engine, despite its cold-bloodedness, feels fun, naughty even, and I understand why all those Harley guys love to put those loud-ass pipes on their bikes. Not that I would do that, mind you...

The first ride was quite slow for my taste, made worse by the fact that the other test riders ahead of me were hanging back and not letting the lead rider know to up the pace at all. I was a bit frustrated, but I figured I'd try again later, this time with a plan.

Upon returning to the lot to switch bikes, I decided to try the new 1125R, which is a completely new, mostly proprietary Buell with a water-cooled Rotax engine from Austria. This one is reputed to put out 146hp, according to Buell, so it's quite quick, then. I noticed that the engine sounds a lot like a parallel-twin when other riders were on them, which was a bit dissappointing, as I expected more trademark v-twin rumble from America's sole sportsbike maker. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot, and while the 1125R was undoubtedly fast as hell and more refined than the Firebolt, it is not the Buell I want. My Triumph is already too fast for me, so why would I want a bike that has over 20hp more? The big difference in this ride, other than the bike, was that I made sure to be right behind the lead rider, and the pace was, let us say, more spirited this time. I was grinning like crazy on the bike, amazed at how it let me do what I felt like so easily and was so competent, yet when the hammer went down, oh boy, it just shot down the road. Still, it ain't for me, necessarily.

So the third time in the lot, I decided to take the Firebolt again, to give it a proper go, riding right behind the lead rider again. Unfortunately, the pace was slow again, and so I didn't get to push the bike's handling that much, but still, I gained some insight on the Buell philosophy. Mass centralization - placing the weight as close to the center of the bike as possible - is a damn effective idea. It took a big shove on the bars to get the bike to turn quickly, but I realized after the fact that I wouldn't take the liberties I took with the Buell on my Triumph. Where the Triumph is a ginsu blade made for slicing, dicing and being as precise as possible, the Buell was more of a broadsword with training wheels: a manly - sorry ladies - motorcycle that still manages to give you a massive confidence boost, which ultimately is a more valuable character trait than any amount of power or technology. I wish I could be more specific with my comments on the handling of the Buell, since it left such a massive impression on me, but alas, my time with the bike was too brief, and I didn't take notes on how it felt at the time.

So I get back on the Triumph, start it up, and it settles into its familiar triple drone. I pull out of the parking lot, marvelling at how sewing-machine smooth it is after the bucking bronco Firebolt and shove on the handlebars to make a left turn...and almost crash. The Buell had gotten me so used to its style of handling, to shoving on the bars hard to get that mass-centralized mass to turn properly, that I used an inordinate amount of force on the Triumph without realizing it, and the quick-steering little 675 turned far more quickly than I had expected. That's when I realized just how different riding the Buell really was for me; it made my own bike, the bike of my dreams seem alien and a little bit uncomfortable. I had trusted the front-end of the Buell so much, so implicitly, that I steered it in a way that I never would on the Triumph. For the rest of the long ride home I was walking on eggshells, not trusting myself to steer the 675 to its liking, and not trusting the bike to cover up any mistakes I might make.

At this point, I started feeling guilty for my transgression, for having cheated. The touch of another lover had soured me on my first love, and I couldn't look at the 675 in the same way again. Which is not to say that I am not still enamored of the Triumph, far from it! This is just to say that the Firebolt showed me an alternate motorcycling reality, one in which my motorcycle skills were broadened and expanded by the bike, rather than scoffed at and ultimately inhibited by my own fears. The Triumph is a bike you approach (or at least, I approach) on bended knee, cowering in the face of its abilities and its single-mindedness, while the Buell is even more single-minded, yet somehow uplifting, asking you to ride with it on an adventure together. Well, that sounds pretty sappy, but at this moment, I don't have any other good way to describe it, and this post is getting excessively long.

Hopefully I can put a used Firebolt in my garage sometime in the near future, as I really liked that bike, and I really like the fact that it's American and distinctive. In the meantime, I'll definitely go back for another demo day next time Buell comes back to the Bay Area, and if they come to your area, give them a shot, you won't regret it.

Yeah, I'm happy on "my" Firebolt - mass centralization rawks!