Monday late night politics.

* Strange things are happening in South Carolina, where Governor Mark Sanford has been missing for four days. Reports are that the governor has made contact, but the governor's office won't confirm that's true. (UPDATE: The governor's office is now saying that Sanford is on the Appalachian Trail, a mere 2000 miles long.)

* Waxman-Markey Watch: In the comments Alex drops an A-bomb to describe one of the key antagonists on this bill, Colin Peterson. Apparently the bill is unlikely to be debated this week. Yale e360 had a roundup of opinions on Waxman-Markey that's worth reading, with Climate Progress providing a roundup of the roundup. Krugman (also via CP) had a recent column on the bill, too, coming out in favor of it.

* Mexico has decriminalized small amounts of drugs. Good.

* 'Eco-Friendly Meat Could Begin With Mini-Cows.' Gross.

* Dystopia is now: Bill Simmon takes a good, hard look at reports that Lancaster, PA, will soon be putting in so many security cameras that it will take a volunteer Stasi comprised of local busybodies to watch them all and determines that this may be the least worst alternative for our privacy-robbed future. Frankly I think Bill's got this one wrong: open-source surveillance is a police state, just one with slightly better branding. Call me Sisyphus Q. Luddite if you must but I don't think panoptic surveillance is some historical inevitability; it can and should be resisted, not embraced.

* And Ta-Nehisi Coates calls for a reality check regarding Martin Luther King. (NB: He's already walked the post back.)

Slate has a helpful Venn diagram tracing the network of major Bush administration illegality, and surprisingly it's Alberto Gonzales and not Dick Cheney who emerges as the Worst of a Very Bad Bunch.



Meanwhile, via MeFi, Salon asks whether or not Congress might pursue a Church-Committee-style truth commission in the wake of the criminality of the last eight years.

That question was answered in the seven-page memo. "The rise of the 'surveillance state' driven by new technologies and the demands of counter-terrorism did not begin with this Administration," the author wrote. Even though he acknowledged in interviews with Salon that the scope of abuse under George W. Bush would likely be an order of magnitude greater than under preceding presidents, he recommended in the memo that any new investigation follow the precedent of the Church Committee and investigate the origins of Bush's programs, going as far back as the Reagan administration.

The proposal has emerged in a political climate reminiscent of the Watergate era. The Church Committee was formed in 1975 in the wake of media reports about illegal spying against American antiwar activists and civil rights leaders, CIA assassination squads, and other dubious activities under Nixon and his predecessors. Chaired by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, the committee interviewed more than 800 officials and held 21 public hearings. As a result of its work, Congress in 1978 passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which required warrants and court supervision for domestic wiretaps, and created intelligence oversight committees in the House and Senate.

...Some see a brighter prospect in Barack Obama, should he be elected. The plus with Obama, says the former Church Committee staffer, is that as a proponent of open government, he could order the executive branch to be more cooperative with Congress, rolling back the obsessive secrecy and stonewalling of the Bush White House. That could open the door to greater congressional scrutiny and oversight of the intelligence community, since the legislative branch lacked any real teeth under Bush. (Obama's spokesman on national security, Ben Rhodes, did not reply to telephone calls and e-mails seeking comment.)

But even that may be a lofty hope. "It may be the last thing a new president would want to do," said a participant in the ongoing discussions. Unfortunately, he said, "some people see the Church Committee ideas as a substitute for prosecutions that should already have happened."

Vatician City is about to become the world's first carbon-neutral state, while back in the U.S.S.R. airport screeners are collecting extensive data on air travelers, including personal items they carry and books they're reading, and storing the data for years. Both links via MeFi.



That's Paul McCartney rocking Red Square in 2003. History is strange sometimes. Just another example: even an hour ago I never would have predicted I'd ever have anything nice to say about Pope Benedict.