Room to maneuver. Julie Kay of the Daily Business Review has a worthy article (reprinted at law.com) on turmoil in the Miami law enforcement community, as a new interim U.S. Attorney there re-prioritizes:

When FBI supervisors in Miami met with new interim U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta last month, they wondered what the top enforcement priority for Acosta and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would be.

Would it be terrorism? Organized crime? Narcotics trafficking? Immigration? Or maybe public corruption?

The agents were stunned to learn that a top prosecutorial priority of Acosta and the Department of Justice was none of the above. Instead, Acosta told them, it's obscenity. Not pornography involving children, but pornographic material featuring consenting adults.

Acosta's stated goal of prosecuting distributors of adult porn has angered federal and local law enforcement officials, as well as prosecutors in his own office. They say there are far more important issues in a high-crime area like South Florida, which is an international hub at risk for terrorism, money laundering and other dangerous activities.

His own prosecutors have warned Acosta that prioritizing adult porn would reduce resources for prosecuting other crimes, including porn involving children. According to high-level sources who did not want to be identified, Acosta has assigned prosecutors porn cases over their objections. ...

Acosta, a Miami native who formerly held a high-level position in the Justice Department, is having a hard time persuading other law enforcement officials in South Florida, including his own assistant U.S. attorneys, to join the anti-porn crusade.

Sources say Acosta was told by the FBI officials during last month's meeting that obscenity prosecution would have to be handled by the crimes against children unit. But that unit is already overworked and would have to take agents off cases of child endangerment to work on adult porn cases. Acosta replied that this was Attorney General Gonzales' mandate.

The article goes on to make it clear that Acosta, per Gonzales, is operating at the behest of Christian rightist pressure groups, in particular the Mississippi-based American Family Association, whose media spokesman obviously knows more about the law-enforcement biz than any of those weak-kneed goonies who actually work in it:

[Randy] Sharp of the Family Association ... said any prosecutors who object to prosecuting obscenity don't understand the law. "Most attorneys have been led to believe that what is illegal is not illegal in terms of obscenity," Sharp said. "They have a misconception of what should be prosecuted. They think because it's consenting adults, it's not illegal."

Sharp said the initiative is necessary because local law enforcement and city attorneys get "crushed" by high-powered lawyers hired by adult book stores or video stores when there are efforts to shut those establishments down.

"You need the federal government to assist," said Sharp, who takes credit for closing six adult bookstores in his hometown in Mississippi.

But should porn be a priority in a place like Miami, where serious crime is rampant? "It's all part of the same thing, of the organized crime syndicate," Sharp said. "It has an effect on children."

Can't argue with that logic. Mere actual child endangerment, which in Florida is of no particular concern anyway, is peanuts by comparison to the distant possible structural enabling of child endangerment through the tentacles of the porn empire.

This report comes on the same day as Michael Scherer's Salon article on the "The FCC's cable crackdown," which points to the establishment of a fairly significant theo-winger beachhead in that agency:

[New FCC Commissioner Kevin J.] Martin, a former White House aide to President Bush, has been meeting privately with evangelical activists to assure them of his commitment to change the television landscape.  ... In one session this summer, Martin told activists that he is privately reaching out to industry leaders to address racy content on basic cable and satellite television, says Rick Schatz, the president of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, a Christian ministry. "He said the free rein of cable and satellite and satellite radio is not acceptable," says Schatz, who sat in on the meeting. "He's committed to seeing something is done during his tenure." ...

Worried about the bottom line, the cable and satellite industry has responded by launching a campaign to educate parents about available technology, like the V-Chip, that can block certain channels from any single television. The campaign has been opposed by a powerful coterie of family advocacy groups and activists with close ties to major evangelical ministries and the Bush White House. "It will be war," says Schatz, of the coming battle over cable and satellite regulation. "There will be tremendous grass-roots pressure brought to bear."

This summer, Martin hired one of the activists, Penny Nance, to work in the FCC's Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis, a position that will allow her to advise on indecency issues. Nance founded the Kids First Coalition, a group that fights abortion, cloning and indecency in the name of "pro-child, pro-family public policy." She has long been one of the nation's leading anti-pornography crusaders, testifying repeatedly before Congress.

Nance is a nutjob/opportunist who, the article goes on to note, describes herself as a "suburban stay-at-home mom" in spite of her activist career, and who considers herself a "victim of pornography" because, she says, a man who watched porn once tried to rape her.

Now, putting aside the obvious and inevitable first reactions to this stuff, what are we looking at here? If you ask me, these read like the signs of a strategic retreat: the Rove coalition having passed its high-water mark. In a different political dispensation, you might expect the GOP to come through with a nice, distracting little cultural hygeine campaign at this point—you might expect it to try to leverage the concerns of the Christianist base to improve its position at the margins, grab the allegiance of a few more of the more easily ruffled "values" voters. And yet one has no sense that anything of the sort is in the offing—or would have a prayer of success if it were, when the political oxygen for the foreseeable future is going to be sucked up by the disaster unfolding in Iraq. (Not to mention the Patrick Fitzgerald wild card yet to be played ...) An overt and general campaign, in fact, would be likelier to alienate than attract unaffiliated voters, who thanks to the Schiavo travesty have already been well seeded with the "GOP captive of theocrats" meme.

No, I suspect the administration would like these sorts of initiatives to see as little daylight as possible. (No FCC or other administration official, for instance, would be quoted for the Salon piece—it's basically Christianists only.) The accommodations reported in these articles are the sort made by a party that has little political room left to maneuver—a party concerned that its core activist elements might hive off unless they're continually and practically placated, no matter how much that might limit the party's appeal in the wider electorate. More indication, in other words, that the Republican masterminds realize that their old lip-service formula—pay off the theos with words, not policy—can no longer hold the center. And you know, it seems kind of remarkable to me: that within a few months of a successful reelection campaign, the governing party should be in a position where, far from thinking about expanding or solidifying a majority, it's devoting all its energy just to keep swimming in place.

posted by michael  1:46:39 PM  
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Unless, that is, they're poor brown people that one of my freedom-loving friends has had killed:

"I will never be silent about the death of those who cannot speak for themselves," the former senator wrote in "Here's Where I Stand," which is scheduled for release Tuesday.

—Jesse Helms, congratulating himself on his moral fortitude in opposition to abortion in a new memoir (via TBogg)

Helms has long maintained an extensive network of contacts in Latin America that serves as a sort of shadow State Department. "For years he had a cadre of young people who were very well-connected," says a committee staff member. "You could have set them down in any South American junta and they would have been right at home."

The problem, say those familiar with his network, is that the information it provides is one-sided. "When I bring people to his office to tell him what we've seen, we aren't even allowed in," says Gail Phares, who leads delegations to Central America through Witness for Peace. "I remember when one delegation managed to get in and told his staff what they'd seen and heard in Nicaragua about the contras killing doctors and nurses and children, their response was, 'Well, they're just Communists--they deserve to die.'"

Eric Bates, Mother Jones, May 1995

All I know is that [Roberto] D'Aubuisson is a free enterprise man and deeply religious.

—Jesse Helms, congratulating himself on his support of the political leader of El Salvador's death squads in the 1980s and the man who ordered the murder of Archbishop Romero

posted by michael  10:57:56 AM  
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