USA Today on Friday had, via AP, an article about the controversial body scanner with "backscatter" technology that graphically reveals everything about your body, in an effort to see what an airline passenger may be carrying on his or her body.  Don't want to be seen nude on a computer screen?  Then you can be subjected to a patdown instead.

Glenn Greenwald explains how Lanny Davis mirrors his buddy Lieberman as the Fox Democrat, this time on Bush's illegal warrantless surveillance:

[E]ven if Lanny Davis and the other Republicans on the panel think the President is using his illegal powers carefully, his conduct is no less illegal. Why is it necessary even to point that out? This has been the obvious and paramount point from the beginning, as I wrote in my book (at pages 25, 60) (emphasis in original):

The heart of the matter is that the president broke the law, deliberately and repeatedly, no matter what his rationale was for doing so. We do not have a system of government in which the president has the right to violate laws, even if he believes doing so will produce good results. . . .

. . . In a system that operates according to the rule of law, what matters is what the law says, not what Lanny Davis or the other members of some meaningless ad hoc council think. The fundamental issue here is not what sort of privacy protections the NSA program does or does not provide; the problem is that the NSA program does not comply with the law. . . . This is a BIG DEAL. A constitutional system of government cannot tolerate a chief executive who operates outside of the law, even if, in doing so, he implements policies that Lanny Davis thinks are swell. There is no 'Lanny Davis exception' to the rule of law.

The government claimed a fingerprint linked Brandon Mayfield to a terrorist attack in Spain. That claim was false, as Spain said all along. "Sneak-and-peek" warrants, issued pursuant to the Patriot Act, were used to search for evidence against the innocent Mayfield. When no supporting evidence was found, Mayfield was arrested and detained as a material witness.

Mayfield sued the government. The suit has been settled for $2 million together with a rare apology for the government's misbehavior. The settlement does not bar Mayfield from moving forward with a challenge to the Patriot Act.

Mayfield's case called attention to the myth that fingerprints are an infallible method of identification:

The war on Christmas wreaths (or maybe it was a war on peace) has ended. TalkLeft recently featured a story about a Colorado woman who was threatened with a fine for placing a "divisive" wreath, shaped like a peace symbol, on her door. In a show of solidarity, other residents of Pagosa Springs expressed their support for peace:

Tuesday morning, 20 people marched through the center carrying peace signs and then stomped a giant peace sign in the snow perhaps 300 feet across on a soccer field, where it could be seen from about just everywhere by just about everyone.

The daffy members of the Loma Linda homeowners assocation board who thought the peace symbol might be a sign of the devil have resigned, and the threat to fine the homeowner has been rescinded.

Bump and Update: Jeb Bush writes this letter (pdf)to Tancredo complaining about his remarks.

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Tom Tancredo Calls Miami A Third World Country

Is there nothing Tom Tancredo won't do for a soundbite?

He's now called Miami a "third world country."

In South Florida to attend Restoration Weekend, a gathering of conservative activists, the Colorado Republican, whose district includes suburbs of Denver, pointed to Miami as an example of how ''the nature of America can be changed by uncontrolled immigration,'' the story says.

''Look at what has happened to Miami,'' the WorldNetDaily quotes Tancredo as saying in an interview. ``It has become a Third World country. You just pick it up and take it and move it someplace. You would never know you're in the United States of America. You would certainly say you're in a Third World country.''

Talk about viewing the world through a cracked lens.

Newt Gingrich was in New Hampshire this week. He gave a talk in which he said that free speech will be forced to curtailed in the name of the war on terror.

Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a "different set of rules" may be needed to reduce terrorists' ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message.

"We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade," said Gingrich, a Republican who helped engineer the GOP's takeover of Congress in 1994.

The event he was speaking at?

Gingrich spoke to about 400 state and local power brokers last night at the annual Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment award dinner, which fetes people and organizations that stand up for freedom of speech.

Other Gingrich positions included this on the separation of church and state:

Bob Kearns is president of the Loma Linda Homeowners Association in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The enormous power he wields seems to have gone to his head.

Lisa Jensen put a Christmas wreath on her condo door. The wreath features a peace sign, although Kearns claims that some residents believe it to be a symbol of Satan. Whether those residents are of sound mental health is unclear, but the three or four resident complaints prompted Kearns to warn Jensen that the association "will not allow signs, flags etc. that can be considered divisive." He plans to assess a daily fine of $25 if she continues to display the wreath. Peace, it seems, is a divisive issue in Pagosa Springs.

The association prohibits residents from posting "signs, billboards or advertising" without approval of the architecural control committee. When the five committee members concluded that the rule didn't apply to Jensen's wreath, Kearns fired all five of them. Merry Christmas.

It's been almost a year since the public learned of President Bush's warrantless NSA electronic surveillance program.

Under the Republican leadership in Congress, nothing much happened to shut it down. A lot of bad bills, such as Sen. Arlen Specter's, were tossed around but went nowhere.

What will change in January when Democrats have a majority in Congress? Not enough, from my vantage point, but here's the lowdown:

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law won a major victory against Fresno, California in federal court this week.

They are asserting that police and sanitation workers violated the rights of the homeless for the past three years by defining their property as trash and bulldozing their encampments.

The federal judge assigned to the case, Oliver W. Wanger, ruled:

U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger, calling Fresno's policy regarding homeless people's property "dishonest and demeaning," granted a preliminary injunction Wednesday ordering the city to stop seizing and destroying homeless people's property without warning while the civil rights lawsuit winds through the courts.

"Persons cannot be punished because of their status," the judge said. "They cannot be denied their constitutional rights because of their appearance, because they are impoverished, because they are squatters, because they are, in effect, voiceless."

Mamaroneck is a suburb of New York City, near Larchmont and New Rochelle, in affluent Westchester County. Last week, in a 72 page opinion, a federal judge ruled the village discriminated against Latino day laborers.

The ruling cited evidence that following the Mamaroneck Village Board’s resolution earlier this year to close a day labor hiring site in Columbus Park, police applied a “virtual zero tolerance policy” to contractors seeking to hire Latino day laborers near the park but issued no tickets to parents dropping off children at the nearby day care center and schools, even if they blocked traffic. Police were observed ticketing Latino drivers for not wearing seatbelts, but merely gesturing at white drivers to buckle up.

The New York Times has a terrific editorial today on the case.

You cannot abuse people through selective enforcement of the law. You cannot single people out for special punishment without cause. You cannot instruct the police to harass people for being Latino and poor. Cities and towns across the country have overlooked these basics in their eagerness to punish those they presume to have violated federal immigration laws. But thankfully for all of us, the Constitution still has the final say.

The full text of the ruling is here (pdf).

The Washington Post has an article today criticizng Georgia's new sex offender banishment law.

The roughly 10,000 sex offenders living in Georgia have been forbidden to live within 1,000 feet of a school, playground, church or school bus stop. Taken together, the prohibitions place nearly all the homes in some counties off-limits -- amounting, in a practical sense, to banishment.

Here are some of those affected by the law: A man with alzheimers and another who is 100 years old. A third is living in a nursing home where he is dying of heart disease.

The stupid law makes no distinction between those who are dangerous and those who are not. Even those who are not may be forced to move or expelled from their hospices.

Via the AP:

Nearly all air travelers entering the U.S. will be required to show passports beginning Jan. 23, including returning Americans and people from Canada and other nations in the Western Hemisphere.

The date was disclosed Tuesday by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in an interview with The Associated Press. The Homeland Security Department plans to announce the change on Wednesday.

This includes Americans traveling to Mexico, Bermuda and Canada, countries where birth certificates or drivers' licenses have always sufficed.

The cost of a passport? $97.00. For a family of four planning a trip, that's not cheap change. HSA says currently only 1 in 4 Americans have a passport.

What's next? Requiring infants to register for a social security card before the age of three? DNA testing at birth? This is just the kind of overkill that shows that the terrorists have won Bush's War on Terror by causing us to diminish our way of life and the degree of mutual trust we citizens have maintained with our government.

In ten years, will we even recognize our own country? I'll bet Osama will be sitting in his cave giggling it up with five or six of his number two henchman about how easily we fell into his scare scheme.