OK, PLEASE UNRECOMMEND! Thank you all for the wonderful comments and continue to discuss them here -- I'll spend some time here this afternoon -- but I want to give back my spot on the Rec list. This group is great as always. THANKS!!!!
I'm Jack Carter's research director. I got back an hour ago from Jack's and Senator John Ensign's joint interview with Nevada's prominent pundit, Jon Ralston, which will be broadcast tomorrow. The media was there watching it, though, and so will report on it in the morning's paper, so we need our response today. I have about two hours to put it together.
The entire discussion was about Bush's warrantless wiretapping program and Iraq. Jack destroyed Ensign, if you know the facts. If you don't know the facts, it might have looked like a draw, so we need to get out the facts. I need people's research help IMMEDIATELY just to see if you can think of anything I haven't thought of. Ensign's positions -- ranging from wrong to totally screwy -- are after the jump.
WARRANTLESS WIRETAPPING PART 1
As you may know, Ensign is running the same ad that Nancy Johnson has run against Chris Murphy in Connecticut. You can find it here; search or scroll down to the post that says "Ensign loves the troops!" His ludicrous claim is that if a known terrorist from Afghanistan calls the U.S., Jack Carter wants the people monitoring it to hang up until they get a warrant from the Attorney General. He is adamant that under FISA, absence its modification by Bush, you have to hang up the phone on the terrorist's call right now. He was practically shouting. So: what's your best evidence otherwise? We want to find the most user-friendly way to convince people that he is off his everloving rocker is he says that FISA doesn't allow you to get a warrant in this situation (and, frankly, even harder cases) within 72 hours afte the call.
WARRANTLESS WIRETAPPING PART 2
Ensign says that the AUMF gave the President authority to engage in warrantless wiretapping. Now, look, I'm a lawyer, I know why this is wrong: when construing a conflict between two statutes, the specific one addressing a situation (in this case, FISA's rules regarding how to legitimize a wiretap of a foreign call) overrules the general one. But most people haven't studied law. If you have ideas about how to convey this clearly and with the best evidence, please shout it out.
IRAQ
Jack Carter's plan for Iraq has been (and will be) the "Redeploy and Contain" position offered by Jack Murtha and reportedly likely to be endorsed by James Baker's new commission, if you believe the leaks; he also wants us to go back to concentrating on defeating our enemies in Afghanistan, who we've been, um, neglecting a bit because we had bigger fish to explode.. John Ensign has now announced his position, and it's mindboggling: he says that the Iraqi people should, individually, own the oil, instead of the government owning the oil. That way, people will have a stake -- approximately a 1/3,000,000 stake, but with Iraqis being killed so much I guess that that denominator is shrinking every day -- in the oil, and they will no longer favor people blowing up the pipeline.
That is really what he said. His justification (I've heard elsewhere) is that it works in Alaska, so why not in Iraq. (Perhaps because Alaska is usually too cold for IEDs to work? I don't know, there must be another difference or two between Alaska and Iraw. I'll think about it.) I'm still trying to get my mind around it. Two obvious problems are that:
(1) if the government doesn't have this revenue, it cannot use the commonwealth (literally) to build schools, hospitals, roads, electric plants, and
(2) if Iraqis are able to cash in these shares, in a situation where they are afraid of being killed by U.S. troops and/or each other, what this will mean is a big rise in their ability to buy weapons and bombs, to use against their enemies (i.e. each other and us.) And if they're not able to cash in their shares, why do we assume that they are going to believe that they'll ever benefit from this, enough to keep them from blowing up pipelines to kick the U.S. out?
Anyone else have any other good ideas? I need them by 2:40 Pacific time, 5:40 Eastern, two hours from now as I post this.