If you thought the PATRIOT act was bad, The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 should make you shudder. The Justice Department, under Ashcroft's direction, in a continuing effort to keep us from being spoiled by having too many civil rights, has drafted a kind of reverse bill of rights. The DSEA serves to make Big Brother even bigger and more knowledgeable about our business. In an article in the Washington Post, Charles Lane reports, "Under the draft, the government could declare individuals, not just groups, 'foreign powers' subject to clandestine surveillance under looser standards than would apply in criminal cases, and it would permit such surveillance against a U. S. citizen suspected of spying for a foreign power, even if the alleged suspicious conduct was not itself criminal." If you are a U. S. citizen of Middel Eastern descent, and you call your uncle back in the old country, heaven help you if Uncle is, for example, a functionary in his government's bureaucracy. Such a call could land you in jail without representation for an indefinite period. You disappear if Mr.Ashcroft decides that your questions about when you get the money Uncle owes you for "getting that information about how to get a visa" is an effort to smuggle evildoers into the country. [To read all of Lane's article, go to: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/02/08/MN206260.DTL]


In other good news about the strangulation of information (eminating from the administration while expanding its collection of information about citizens), the GAO has dropped its suit against VP Cheney to get him to fess up to who he courted in the oil industry to write legislation that is beneficial to the industry. If you or I fail to report our taxes on time, we get nailed. If Dick suppresses information, he gets an attaboy and pays no penalty. The corruption of this administration certainly rivals that of Nixon, I think, but let us not speak of that particular Dick, now. Things are too depressing as it is.

Our president is now the president of "big ideas and big projects," according to one Whitehouse spin doc. What was once bad --monstrous deficits-- is now good. "Big" government was once bad, now is good, too. What's is interesting is that Bush can announce a $300 billion deficit in the same breath that he admonishes Congress to have fiscal "discipline." He argues that a $1.7 trillion tax cut is needed to perk up the economy (the theory being that the rich need the dollars to invest. Recall the "voodoo economics"of the Reagan regime and recall that that term was used by Bush, Sr. to describe Reagan's plan.), but many of the RICHEST PEOPLE AND COMPANIES DON'T PAY TAXES.


How does he get away with it? Much rests on the interaction of the message structure and the knowledge base of the audience. In fact, the audience is at a tremendous disadvantage in critically responding due to the complexity of the issues and systems described by Bush and due to an audiences' propensity to cooperate (See the work of Paul Grice; specifically "the cooperative principle."). Most of the public wants to support the President as much as possible, and most unconsciously adopt the principles of cooperation which lead them to assume the President is being as informative as is required, not saying that for what he lacks adequate evidence, speaking about that which is relevant, and avoiding obscurity. Given those rules by which people tend to decode his (and his flacks') messages, and given that he must simplify (and therefore recreate) information, he is able to shape a reality that many find difficult to critique.


To get a sense for the complexity of the information, look at this web site: http://www.publicampaign.org/stateoftheunion/ (Creative Commons). Thanks to such efforts, we have some tools to call Bush's statements into question, but it takes time and effort even to visit these sites. Nevertheless, as citizens, it is important that we are not consumers of the Whitehouse or even Congress' discourse, but critical analysts that can reasonably affirm that which is essentially true and critique and reject that which has been so twisted as to no longer qualify as being true. It is a patriotic thing to do.