Joel Mathis

LA Times: Residential telephone customers can sue the government for allegedly eavesdropping on their private communications in a warrantless "dragnet of ordinary Americans," a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, however, upheld dismissal of other cases that sought to hold the telecommunications companies liable, citing Congress' decision to grant them retroactive immunity. I'm kinda-sorta OK with this outcome. The telecom companies facilitated the eavesdropping at the government's behest; targeting the companies for their participation was always a way of trying to hold somebody accountable for the government's illegal actions. I'm no fan of big corporations, but if the government that has regulatory power over you prompts you to do something illegal in the name of preventing terrorist attacks—well, I imagine that prompt would be pretty difficult to ignore. The government's respons

Earnest C. Withers, a black man who photographed so many key moments of the Civil Rights Movement, was apparently a paid informant of the FBI during the 1960s -- keeping the government apprised of the movements and plans of Martin Luther King Jr. and his allies who fought for equal rights. Civil rights leaders have responded to the revelation with a mixture of dismay, sadness and disbelief. “If this is true, then Ernie abused our friendship,” said the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., a retired minister who organized civil rights rallies throughout the South in the 1960s. Others were more forgiving. “It’s not surprising,” said Andrew Young, a civil rights organizer who later became mayor of Atlanta. “We knew that everything we did was bugged, although we didn’t suspect Withers individually.” The children of Mr. Withers did not respond to requests for comment. But one daughter, Rosalind Withers, told local news organizations that she did not find the report conclusive. “This is the fir

I've long believed the Tea Party phenomenon is mostly about sore loserdom -- the people who've been taking to the streets and raising hell at Congressional town meetings these last 18 months say they're alarmed at deficits and runaway government spending. But they were nowhere to be found while those same things were getting started under George W. Bush. The complaints of Tea Parties have, generally, fallen under the rubric of "tyranny." The Obama Administration is infringing on our freedoms, it is said, to a degree unimaginable outside of historically extreme circumstances. But really, I don't believe the Tea Partiers on this front, either. Why? Well, let's look at today's Washington Post: The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation. Cr

Over at The Corner, Shannen Coffin -- Dick Cheney's lawyer during the Bush Presidency -- goes after the New York Times for its apparent hand-wringing over the "unauthorized disclosure" of the so-called " Climategate " e-mails. The post is called "Propriety in Newsgathering" and it deserves to be fisked a little bit. Let's start at the beginning: Since at least the Pentagon Papers case (and surely before even then), the New York Times has made many a nickel on unauthorized leaks of sensitive national security information. It's true the New York Times is a for-profit concern, but I think it's unseemly to suggest the Times tries to profit from -- as Coffin is going to get around to implying -- killing American soldiers. Most newspapers operate with two missions: A) to turn a profit and B) to serve the public. At their best, for-profit media has offered defenders of capitalism a success story: Doing well by doing good. Sometimes, "d

Over at No Left Turns , Justin Paulette drops a bomb in the middle of a complaint about Great Britain: I've previously mentioned several of his examples on NLT, but Mark Steyn sums up the absurd charade of "rights"-based oppression prevailing in Great Britain . It's shamefully ironic that George Bush was consistently denounced for rights-depleting policies by which (as in the "domestic spying program") not a single American can be located who was in any manner harmed in the slightest - yet Democrats merrily seek to silence conservative talk-radio and liberals would arrest pro-life prayer groups as organized crime syndicates without the slightest sense of contradiction or hypocrisy. I think the last bit of Paulette's claim here is either overstated or outright wrongheaded, but let's leave that alone for his second. I'm struck by his claim that we can't find a "single American" who was harmed by the domestic spying program. Well o