NSA Domestic Espionage On Americans And Others Finally Declared Illegal - "Unconstitutional" has to wait.

US Appeals Court Bravely Declares NSA Phone Spying Program Illegal, Cowardly Fails Ruling To End Or Declare Unconstitutional Now-Illegal Program

Constitution Briefly Pauses Its Slow Fade Into Irrelevance

(adapted from Reuters by RantBoy) - A U.S. spying program that collects data effectively spying on millions of Americans' phone calls is illegal, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday, adding pressure on lawmakers to decide quickly whether to end or replace the program, which was intended to help fight terrorism and stifle dissent.

While stopping short of correctly declaring the program unconstitutional, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said Congress did not authorize the National Security Agency to spy on Americans' phone records in bulk, a shocking decision founded on rationality rarely found in post-9/11 American politics or public policy.

The existence of the NSA's collection of "bulk telephony metadata" was first disclosed in 2013 by former NSA contractor and American hero Edward Snowden.

Writing for a three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Gerard Lynch said Section 215 of the Patriot Act governing the collection of records to “fight terrorism” did not authorize what he called the NSA's collection of a "staggering" amount of information, contrary to the hollow claims of the Bush and Obama apparatchik.

"Such expansive development of government repositories of formerly private records would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans, [but it would have turned Nixon and McCarthy on like no stripper ever could.]" Lynch wrote in a 97-page decision. "We would expect such a momentous decision to be preceded by substantial debate, and expressed in unmistakable language. There is no evidence of such a debate."

The appeals court did not issue an order to stop the collection of data, noting that parts of the Patriot Act including Section 215 will expire on June 1. Lynch said it is for Congress to make clear whether it considers the NSA program permissible.  Appeals court representatives could not be reached by phone for comments regarding this significant oversight, but instead offered to meet in a secluded parking garage in rural Maryland.

Federal appeals courts in Washington, D.C. and California are also considering whether the domestic espionage is legal.

The U.S. Department of Justice had called the program necessary to protect national security and root out disloyal citizens who oppose such “innocuous programs” in the name of the 4^th Amendment and civil liberties.

Ned Price, a spokesman for the White House's National Security Council, said President Barack Obama has been clear he wants to end the existing NSA program, but would love to find some other way to collect data on citizen dissent and other un-American activities, and is encouraged by the "good progress" in Congress to find an alternative preserving its "essential capabilities" in the area of domestic espionage and surveillance of the American people.  “Congress must act now to preserve this capacity for tracking sedition and helping us find out who our internal enemies are, foreign or domestic.

The ACLU did not immediately respond to a request for comment.  A representative from the NSA told us that the ACLU expressed “smug self-congratulatory hugs and handshakes” at their corporate headquarters when news of the decision was handed down, “but you didn't hear it from me.  That room’s supposed to be closed to outsiders.”

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee voted 25-2 in favor of the USA Freedom Act, which would end the bulk collection of telephone data, and the bill is expected to pass the full House.  Staffers at Monticello worried briefly about the collected artifacts when Thomas Jefferson’s corpse paused spinning it his grave at the news and the site’s air-conditioning cut out.

A similar bill has been proposed in the Senate, with backing from some liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, but has faced resistance from senators including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Passage remains uncertain.  Staffers at Monticello breathed a sigh of relief as the AC kicked back on when Jefferson’s body resumed its role, keeping the precious artifacts cool.

COUNTER-PUNCH

Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican and presidential candidate, tweeted after the decision that "phone records of law abiding citizens are none of the NSA's business! Pleased with the ruling this morning."

Another presidential candidate, Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, tweeted that "the NSA is out of control and operating in an unconstitutional manner."

All three legislators quickly retracted their tweets upon finding the heads of Kentucky Derby losers at their offices, adorned with private images pulled from their phones.

Thursday's decision overturned a December 2013 dismissal of the ACLU's lawsuit by U.S. District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan, who called the NSA program a government "counter-punch" to terrorism at home and abroad.  That Pauley’s wife immediately returned home after missing several days from work without first calling in was declared irrelevant.  Speculation as to the coincidental nature of these events continues.

Pauley had ruled 11 days after U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington, D.C. said the "almost Orwellian" program might violate the Fourth Amendment.  Leon issued an injunction to block the program but put it on hold pending appeal.  That Leon's mother returned from a previously unannounced "vacation" to an unspecified location immediately following his placing the hold was also said to be "irrelevant." The federal appeals court in Washington heard oral arguments in November.

Thursday's decision did not resolve the ACLU's claim that the NSA program violated the bar against warrantless searches under the Fourth Amendment.  It also failed to stop the sale of Bill of Rights Toilet Paper in the NSA gift shop or on its web site.

Lynch, though, did note the "seriousness" of the constitutional concerns over "the extent to which modern technology alters our traditional expectations of privacy."  An NSA spokesman countered that “Most Americans just don’t care about their on-line privacy.  See how they so promiscuously share their data with Facebook, Twitter, and marketers?  How’s that so different from what we’re doing?  Besides,” he concluded, “anyone who opposes this program hates America and is probably a terrorist.”

The case is American Civil Liberties Union et al v. Clapper et al, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 14-42.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Additional reporting by Kevin Drawbaugh,David Ingram and Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Frances Kerry, Noeleen Walder, Grant McCool)

Final Edit Courtesy RantBoy

What's Wrong With Education in New York? Nothing

What's Wrong With Education in New York?  Nothing

--This rant may be about New York's governor and education issues, but the issues are not specific to New York.  Feel free to substitute your state and/or city for almost everything below (there are a couple specific things.)--

Governor Cuomo is at war with the teachers of New York.  He has certain reforms he wants to see put in place, and given his track record of bullying, executive orders, and generally acting as of the legislature is his own personal rubber stamp, he will probably see them enacted.

Cuomo's reforms will have no demonstrable positive impact on the scholastic outcomes in the state of New York.

Maybe we'll see a small temporary uptick that Il Duce will claim is momentous progress.  That seems to be his MO - take credit for anything positive, place blame for anything negative.  That uptick will be temporary at best, but most likely be an illusory gain as ephemeral as the reforms of the Moreland Commission. 

The reforms will not work because the governor is aiming his reforms in the wrong place.  This is the same mistake George Bush made with No Child Left Behind, it's the same mistake Barack Obama and Arne Duncan made with Race to the Top, it's the same mistake made by Bill Gates and the Koch Brothers.  It's the exact same mistake anyone who tries to reform education by reforming the teachers makes:  Teachers are not the problem. 

A recent report by the Horace Mann League and the National Superintendents Roundtable explains my point well - as reported by the Charlotte Observer.

Builders cannot make a high-rise stay up if they use weak iron and poorly mixed concrete.  Brewers can't make good beer if the hops are bad and the wheat is infested with weevils.  Microsoft can't make a good XBox if the plastic is badly mixed and the circuit boards are poorly soldered.  Teachers can't make good students when pupils arrive in the classroom poorly prepared and socially promoted to the point that they are not months but years and years behind their peers.

The vast majority of New York's schools are not failing and are turning out students ready to take on any career, academic or military challenge the world hands them.  The so-called "failing schools" are primarily located in the state's largest cities - in areas where the concentration of poverty is very high, and the opportunity for living-wage jobs for high school graduates is very very low.  Students in these schools start out at a genuine disadvantage.  They enter kindergarten knowing hundreds upon hundreds fewer words, having had fewer cultural experiences, get read to far less, and are surrounded by people who have to hustle and work multiple jobs (if they can find jobs) to eke out livings.  Then, for the next 8 years they get socially promoted through schools where behavior issues are so dire that the curriculum gets largely abandoned for behavioral modification, and academics become secondary to the teacher being able to make it through the day.

By the time an average city student enters 9th grade (whether they've passed 7th or 8th grade or not) they are reading at a 3rd or 4th grade reading level.  They can sound out words, but comprehension is very very low.  Why did these students supposedly do well in the elementary grades for so long?  The answer probably has more to do with the tests, but I honestly do not know.  The supposed "middle-school drop-off" is more often a middle-school reality check as the skills tested become comensurate to the skills that are supposed to be taught.

Students in city schools who are socially promoted to 9th grade hit a wall not because of a failure of the efforts of some very hard-working teachers, but because they are finally socially promoted to a grade where failure is possible.  Students in the suburbs who are socially promoted without passing 8th grade also find failure is possible, but the vast majority of them have enough academic preparedness to make the leap to high school once that realization has kicked in.  More often these students failed academically due to laziness instead of inadequacy.

I spent 15 years teaching in city schools.  I have spent the last year subbing in a variety of suburban schools.  The difference is remarkable.  Conditions in suburban middle schools are generally better than any city middle or high school as far as student attitude, academic achievement, drive and behavior is concerned.  Many suburban 8th graders can write circles around city 11th graders.  Suburban students often have real discussions about their academic work, and can be turned loose on an academic assignment and they will do it without too much need for prodding.  I've seen it.  After 15 years in the city, I was stunned by it.  Stunned.

This difference is NOT a result of superior teachers.  In fact, at least at the middle and high school level, city teachers are probably better prepared and more creative with their lessons than suburban teachers seem to be.  I have seen more than a few lessons in the suburbs that would go wildly off the rails in the city simply due to the intense boredom generated by a lecture or a failure to provide enough work to fill the class time.  Suburban kids endure these lessons because they know they will get decent jobs when they are done (with college, anyway.)  City kids would not let their teachers get away with lessons as "traditional" as the lectures and rote memorization I've seen, and if there's ever down time in the classsroom, city students will fill it with chaos and noise.  It is NOT the teachers who are to blame for the outcomes of the city schools.

If teachers had their way, social promotion would be a thing of the past, and students would get promoted solely on merit, and if that meant there was a special elementary school with 18-year-old third graders, then so be it.

I honestly believe most administrators don't actually want to socially promote students either.  It makes discipline harder for them to maintain.  Administrators, however, have very few metrics to be measured by, and suspension rates and passing rates are those metrics.  The suppression of one and inflation of the other is completely at odds with what's good for anyone else in the district, but they do it for the same reason most people do crap they don't want to at their job: they want to keep their job.

Should we blame the parents?  No.  In general, they are a direct result of trends and forces well beyond their control.  Jobs with wages too low to support a family, social programs that actually punish marriage, a legal system seemingly designed to send as many black men to prison for as long as possible, all these and more are factors that tend to keep parents who want to do a good job from being able to follow through on that desire.

If the governor really wants to improve public schools, if he's genuinely interested in that outcome, then the solution is NOT to go after the hard-working besieged teachers in the few difficult schools.  The solution is so much harder and more wholistic than that.  Living wage jobs, a justice system that actually dispenses justice instead of oppression, social programs designed to keep families intact and in fact promote that end - those are reforms that would be much more effective at helping school children succeed.  They are also difficult, long-term reforms that will take years to bear significant fruit.  Unfortunately, our political system, like our media and business systems require immediate results, regardless of the long-term consequences.

Why does Il Duce Cuomo hate public schools and teachers so?  Ask the hundreds of thousands of dollars that have flown into his campaign coffers fromcharter school proponents and companies.  Charter schools sound like a good idea.  Planted firmly between private and public schools, charter schools offer parents an option to send their children to schools that supposedly have higher standards for behavior and academics; producing results that, depending on the metric and the measurer, are anywhere from equivalent to better than public schools.  However, these comparisons are relatively invalid, and charter schools actually hurt the public schools.

Charter schools, by virtue of their size and funding, do not have to accept special ed students (well, they do, but they don't have to provide the support structures of small classes, one-to-one aides and the like, so few special ed students even try.)  This leads to test scores skewed by falsely equivalent  students.  Public schools are forced to provide needed support structures for spec ed, regardless of cost or assessment outcomes.  Charter schools also can expel difficult students back to public school.  I know this for a fact, as I have received those students in the past.  The removal of disruptive students and the example that sets for other students has a tremendous impact on the behavior in charter schools, while at the same time dumping problem-causing children back into the public schools.  Comparing public and charter schools is about as valid as comparing two glasses of water, one from a fresh artesian well and one from a stagnant pond.

The push for ever more charter schools at the expense of public schools also has a significantly deleterious impact on the teachers' unions and pay for teachers.  A not insignificant factor considering Il Duce's antipathy towards loci of power and strength not named Andrew Cuomo.  Get enough charter schools going, and the public schools will nothing more than holding pens for the worst behavior problems and the special ed kids.

Fine, you say.  The problems are real and systemic and they're not going to be easily fixed and it's not the teachers' fault.  How do we deal with these problems?  The answer, of course, is to deal with the poverty.  Rochester is the poorest city in New York and third most impoverished in all the nation (among cities of its size.) The single best poverty program has always been and always will be living wage jobs for even those who have an inadequate education.  New York can have that again if we stop being the most taxed state in the nation.  And forget about "tax incentives" for industry to move here.  We've been doing that forever.  If that were going to work, we'd have been out of this mess 15 years ago.  No, the state government needs to do the hard work of rolling back decades of accretion of taxes and fees and let people and business feel that they will be allowed to thrive and not serve as ATMs for the state.  But, again, that's hard work, and our state doesn't know how to do that.

To sum up, if the people responsible for New York's education who aren't in the classrooms actually wanted to make things better they should stop screwing around with crap that doesn't work but looks like they're doing something.  Instead, they should end social promotion and work with communities and families to provide enriching activities outside of the school environment that will help poor students catch up their vocabulary and life experiences.  Also, a genuine effort to make New York an attractive place to live, work, and found industry would be at least as big a help.

Unless or until these reforms are attempted, anything, and I mean *anything* they try inside schools - from Common Core, to the new evaluations, to even dumping tenure and making it possible for the governor to fire anyone anyone he wants at the drop of a hat - will not work.  Period.

Fox's "Empire" is Bigot Bait

I recently had the opportunity to binge the first 3 episodes of Empire, the Fox network prime time drama about black entertainment mogul Lucius Lyon (Terrence Howard) and his dysfunctional family.  The show is lushly produced (it is obvious that significant money has been spent.)  However, shortly after the viewing stopped and the thinking started, I began to cogitate on the characters and their stereotypes.  The characters, I don't care how well-meaning or well-written, are complete stereotypes from top to bottom.  From the tortured patriarch/CEO with an as-yet unnamed disease who also happens to be a complete asshole to everyone around him, complete with his killing an long-time family friend to the cop with the doggedness to return to a nearly incoherent homeless guy who witnessed the killing and the first face he showed the homeless guy (who he bought beer for to gain his confidence) was the patriarch/CEO.  We the audience are in the know, but how could he?

The family members are no less out of central casting's bin of obvious characters.  The matriarch, Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henderson) spent 15 years in prison and is now out to "get what she's owed" and acts like the most broadly brushed Key & Peele character, yelling, scheming, interrupting high-powered meetings and even throwing a shoe.

The sons are equally ill-served - the eldest, Andre Lion (Trai Byers) is college educated, smooth, womanizing and married to a white woman, Rhonda Lyon (Kaitlin Doubleday); the middle child, Jamal Lyon (Jussie Smollet) is gay (which displeases Lucius greatly) and as a child played dress-up with mommy's clothes, his partner, Michael Sanchez (Rafael de la Fuente) is latino. Jamal sings sensitive ballads John Legend-style.  The youngest, Hakeem Lyon (Bryshere Y. Gray) is a charicature rap artist who behaves badly in public, mostly failing to live up to his potential, yet he keeps badgering his father for more.

Supporting characters, from Lucius' secretary Becky (Gabourey Sidibe), who fawns over the gay brother (at his concerts anyway) to Cookie's sister/aide who's along for the ride and also maintains her ghetto attitude and dress despite the new surroundings of wealth.
The only character that, as yet, remains uniquely unique is Puna (Cuba Gooding Jr.).  He lives on a horse farm, and does not desire the spotlight.  He's the definitve cameo/minor character, appearing only once so far for about 3 minutes. (IMDB indicates he will not be showing up again this season.)
The shame is that this cast deserves better.  Terrence Howard, Taraji P. Henderson, Malik Yoba (Vernon Turner, Lucius' chief  of staff) and the others have demonstrated time and again that they can perform any character they've been called upon (although, honestly, Yoba's pretty well cast here as an infrequently seen upper-level advisor to Anderson) from Howard's turn opposite Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark to Henderson's now-defunct role on Person of Interest to Sidibe's hotel maid in Tower Heist.

Even if the setting of urban record label remained at the core of this show, a few changes might have eminently improved the whole enterprise, and lifted it from its cavalcade of stereotypes.  Make Lucius gay, Cookie "classier," and at least one of the sons should be trying to be something important outside the music industry - maybe an artist (the kind that paints) being badgered to contribute album covers, when he'd rather be doing mixed media or something.  Anderson shouldn't have straight-up killed a family friend in episode 1 and the oldest son's beloved could be a black nationalist social worker, distressed about the impact of some of the label's artists on the youth she works with.  Changes on this level would result in plenty of conflict, without resorting to crude stereotypes.

As beautifully shot, well designed and excellently acted as Empire is, the sheer magnitude of the stereotypes is just astounding.  I trust the producers and all the others involved in this production have, as a goal, story-telling of the highest quality.  While they certainly succeeded at that, the results are not so innocent as all that.  Unless the characters became welfare queens and abusive drug dealers, a Grand Wizard could not paint more unlikable and stereotypical characters with such a broad brush.  Melvin Van Peebles, Gordon Parks, Spike Lee and John Singleton made careers out of creating sympathetic, diverse and creative black characters.  "Empire" sets their efforts back several decades.  I can only hope that the rest of the series corrects this trend. From writer/director Lee Daniels, the creative force behind The Butler and Precious, I can only hope for this.

Welcome to RantBoy's RantWorld

Welcome to RantBoy's RantWorld.  This is a standalone blog for me to brain dump whenever something irks me bad.  Topics to include politics, religion, not religion, sports, media, celebrities, internet culture and anything else that comes to mind.  Frequency will be whenever I bloody well feel like it - sometimes a couple times a week, other times, monthly or less.  Knowing the news... probably will be often enough.
I will be welcoming posts from readers.  I'll post any that come it provided the argument is about the topic.  I won't post those that contain personal attacks, extraordinary vulgarity (if you know me, you know the threshold is high), off- topic rants or do any name-calling of posters or private citizens - celebrities and politicians put themselves out there, so the threshold for them is far higher.  Disagreement: OK.  Disagreement by calling someone an idiot, moron or worse: Not OK.

I'm in the midst of writing my first rant now.  I want it to be a good one, so it'll take a couple days to show up.

Stay tuned for. . . at the very least irritated pieces of my mind dripping into the ether...