All Play and Carrie Bradshaw Makes Scott an Unholy Boy

One of Bill Maher’s funniest antireligious moments on TV was the time he put up a photo of three asinine-looking clerics at some interfaith dialogue. You had the Greek Orthodox guy in his stupid hat; next to him was a Muslim mullah with the big turban, and then there was this bishop with his big stupid hat. So here are these three old men in Halloween costumes talking about their gods and moralities and the only thing they could agree on was that sex is bad.

“Why is sex bad, anyway?” Sarah Jessica Parker said to me plaintively, in a dream I had from Sex and the City. Actually she didn’t say that; I just wrote it for effect. But I did dream about her. She’s not even my type, physically speaking (I like Asians), but I dreamed of her overnight hugs, kisses, and highly charged intimate passion because her personality in the TV show was so appealing. Well, OK—so was her body, not to mention the gorgeous hair. Obviously the Lord abandoned me that night to my evil thoughts. Within the space of three weeks I dreamed not only of Carrie Bradshaw but also my beautiful Vietnamese physician and my Chinese ex-wife’s sister. At least I got my Asians in there, but the consensus among the religious is that I will burn in hell for all eternity. Repent! I must repent my sinful subconscious!

One thing the religions all agree on is that they each have exclusive rights to the correct answers. Others may be partially correct, but only my religion has all the correct answers. You ask me if my religion offers the correct answers? What a dumb question. Of course it does, otherwise I wouldn’t belong to it, now, would I? I know it’s the correct one because my parents and my clerics and people like me have been telling me so all my life.

It’s so comfortable not to have to think, to have clerics and parents and the lowest common denominator of sheep do the thinking for me.

If you’re born in the Middle East, it may be advisable not think at all, seeing as how the religion has every detail of your life mapped out for you, and original thought is discouraged—except, of course, for highly original conspiracy theories about how the CIA is responsible for the lousy tap water. The religion even tells you how to wipe yourself. No kidding, I’m not making it up.

If it tells you how to do that, you can imagine how pretty much everything else is prescribed. For example, one of the Hadiths (a supplement to the Koran, it’s a collection of reputed pearls of wisdom from the Prophet) states, according to Islamic scholar Muhammad bin Shaker Ash-Sharif: “…the wife will not be fulfilling her duty towards Allah until she fulfils her duty towards her husband. If he asks her (for sexual intercourse) while she is on a camel (what means, being busy), she should not disobey him.” Another version I read said something about “she must accede to her husband’s wishes even if she is busy at the oven,” but I am splitting hairs. It doesn’t matter whether she’s busy at the oven or busy on a camel, OK? She has to open her legs when hubby says “Habib, I’m home!” (Carrie Bradshaw would say “Does a woman experience sexual fulfillment bouncing and bumping on a camel? What’s more fulfilling, anyway, a camel’s hump or the Scraggly-Bearded One just returned from 4 a.m. prayer call?”)

It is said by some that Mormons believe they will become gods in the afterlife and get their own planet if they’ve been good during their mortal lives. Others deny it, but frankly I am not interested in doing enough research to determine definitively whether Mormon families inherit their own planets. I give it as much credence as Catholics thinking, to paraphrase Bill Maher, they’re actually eating the flesh of a 2,000-year-old dead god when they suck on the wafer. It’s not even worth my time contemplating other than to make it grist for my anti-religion mill. Come on, life is short; use your brain cells for something reasonable. Joseph Smith believed in moon men, for Christ’s sake, who looked like us and lived for a thousand years.

Decades ago, when I was a child in the Netherlands, young Mormon missionaries on bicycles wearing short-sleeved white shirts and skinny ties visited us on a weekly basis to impart priceless truths. My parents were religious nuts too, so we had a weekly Battle of the Religions. I liked the final logic of the Mormons, though: “The thing is,” they said, “all the religions tell you they’re right. The difference is, we know we’re right.”

Right.

By the age of 16, I knew I was done with religion.

Theatre of the Absurd is a regular satirical column at Demockracy

Cheney Seeks True Love Online

Where has tricky Dick been lately? I know, I know, Nixon done died. I mean Dick Cheney. Where is that bigmouth. Where are the pearls of wisdom reminding us he was always right and Obama is wrong about everything? Can anybody help me find him? Like Dave Letterman, I want to know who the hell I’m supposed to make fun of after this old trooper fades away. Certainly not Michael Jackson; forget about that.

Oh—just got a news flash.

Houston—

From: admin @ missmatch.com

Sent: Friday, June 23, 2009

To: Dick Cheney (dickhead @ hottiemail.com)

Dear Dick:

Your photos and profile for Missmatch.com have been approved! You now have your NEW PASSPORT to a new love, a new life, a new adventure! Given your record as former Vice President, however, we would like to emphasize that “a new adventure” at Missmatch.com refers to new adventures in love and life, not invading countries all over the Middle East. Now it’s up to you to find Miss Right Wing!

But here at Missmatch.com we don’t just take a shotgun approach. We genuinely want to help you find the right-wing girl. Our state-of-the-art, highly personalized database has already prepared a starter kit of sexy female neocons to write to. Click on the following profiles, submitted for your approval:

1. Ann Coulter (Look for her profile name DCDOMME!)—describes herself as tall, blonde, lanky as Twiggy, with a caustic wit that can drive you to distraction. She enjoys a good argument, long walks on your chest, crushing hands, and romantic candlelit dinners that involve dripping the hot melting wax on your nipples.
2. Harriet Miers (Look for her profile name MATUREBABE!)—says she’s a “mature babe.” We know you’ll overlook the wrinkles on this hottie because you’ll love her for her mind. And for an evangelical Christian whom George Dubya nominated for the Supreme Court, she’s pretty darned nonjudgmental. She’s described Dubya as the most brilliant man she’s ever met, so she’s right (no pun intended) up your alley!
3. Condi Rice (Look for her profile nickname, NICERICE!)—your compatibility score with this sexy Ph.D. goes right through the roof when you consider she talks just like you! For example, she once said, “This is the democratic process at work….what you’re seeing with this process is the Iraqi people embracing American-style democracy.”  What a dreamer! Just like you, Dick—and she plays piano, too. A true Renaissance babe, brown sugar for your coffee.

The rest is up to you, Dick. Go get ‘em! Shoot ‘em if you have to.

Sincerely,

Missmatch.com Management

P.S. We are sorry but not surprised you were rejected by eHarmony.com. Our competitors at eHarmony accept only beaming goody-two-shoes types, which you clearly are not.

From: texasfewextrapoundschick  @ match.com

Sent: January 31, 2009

To: dickhead @ hottiemail.com

Dear Dick:

You do have a way with words that make me hot. I love the decisive way you keep repeating “in fact,” tempered occasionally by “if you will.” You said you are “in fact in the final throes, if you will,” of any attachments to your former wife. But since everybody knows you are divorced from all reality in the first place, how the hell do I know you’re really divorced from your wife? And why am I having trouble believing you after you posted pics of Brad Pitt to represent you in your profile? I was mesmerized at first, but really you’re an old fat guy with a pacemaker. And by the way, who hacked my computer and deleted all your emails to me?! What other lies are you telling me…and living with?

Yours,

Disappointed texasfewextrapoundschick

From:dickhead@ hottiemail.com

Sent: January 31, 2009

To: texasfewextrapoundschick @match.com

Dear Fewextrapounds:

I think you are on the last throes, if you will, of your sanity. Those photos are in fact ME, and they are RECENT. Less important than physical accuracy in imagery, I think, is that the American people want me to look like Brad Pitt. As for my health, except for the occasional heart attack, I’ve never felt better. OK, as I admitted before, I am mentally not quite as sharp as I was when I was Vice President. Tell you the truth, hon, I had a bad day yesterday when I mixed up my Viagra pills with my Valium. I had a stressful job interview with Halliburton so I had intended to take a Valium, only I took a Viagra by mistake and when the woman HR officer shook my hand I had an orgasm. This was most unfortunate, and I in fact did not get the job, and furthermore it made my pacemaker run amok. Later, that night, I had a date with Condi Rice. (She had me at “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” you know.) Well my pills were still mixed up and I took the Valium that night instead of the Viagra and fell asleep just as I started to kiss her. She’d put me to sleep before, playing Mozart on the damned piano, but this was ridiculous.

Let’s face it, girl, you and I need each other. Just because I peppered your husband’s face with birdshot and I mix up my Valium with my Viagra doesn’t mean you should shut me out. I believe in fact you will greet me at your door as your liberator. I am prepared to face my responsibilities and am willing to use force if necessary.

Yours,

Dick, sad, confused but decisive

Pfizer Stimulates Economy with Free Viagra Offering

This podcast takes a look back at some of the issues that made news over the past two weeks.  First, it deals with economic issues and how they pertain to pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Next, it looks at North Korea and the reaction from the international community to its latest nuclear activities. This podcast includes the headlines of the day, analysis, soundbites, and a song that either encapsulates the news of the day or something entirely random that I feel rocks. The purpose of these podcasts are to delve deeper into the issues and to report the things that the mainstream media often misses.  As usual, all of this will of course come from a place of humor, irony, and sarcasm:

Viagra Stimulus Podcast

The Future Won’t Be Televised

Digital TV is here and the government can’t give you another extension. It’s time to figure out how to convert your TV if you want your entertainment. I anticipate in the next week several hard luck cases will be marched out to show how not everyone can catch up, but if you are complaining that you didn’t have enough time–they announced this switch to DTV back in 2005! And if it’s just news you need the radio is still free… that is until the next government move.

Let’s Talk About Sonia Sotomayor Like Grown-Ups

During his confirmation hearing in 2005, John Roberts likened the job of a Supreme Court justice to that of a baseball umpire:

Judges and justices are servants of the law, not the other way around. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, if there’s anything the media love when reporting on the law, it’s simplicity, either because they don’t understand or don’t have the column-inches for thorough understanding. The umpire analogy was well-received by the mainstream media: “We’re Americans, we understand baseball, but we don’t understand the federal judiciary. Judges make rulings; umpires make rulings. Therefore, umpires are like baseball judges, right?”

Not so much. The baseball analogy fails because appellate court judges, and Supreme Court justices in particular, can re-write the rules of the game, provided they believe those rules to be wrong in the first place. Umpires are not at liberty to “interpret” anything; theirs are facile rulings. They may rule that a particular pitch was a strike, but they may never re-define what constitutes a “strike.” If we really must reason by analogy (which we shouldn’t), then umpires are most like trial court judges. They deal with the object of the law, whereas appellate court judges deal with the law itself. This is why appeals of a trial court ruling do not bring with them any new evidence or new substantive hearings; as far as the appellate court is concerned, the issue of what happened has been settled, but the issue of how the law applies to what happened has not. By the way, this is basic stuff that everyone should know. It’s important to know, since it defines how our judicial system works.

Courts hear a few different kinds of cases. They hear criminal cases, in which someone has violated a law and the plaintiff to the suit is the executive branch of the government, which is charged with enforcing the law. They hear civil cases, in which two parties have a dispute and request the mediation of a neutral decision-maker. Sometimes, in a civil case, the law itself is the subject under discussion, as in, “I think this law violates the Constitution,” or, “I think that thing you did is unconstitutional.” The Constitution is sacrosanct; no law may conflict with it, and when there is a conflict, the Constitution must always win. For this reason, we have tried to imbue the Constitution with what we believe to be the best principles of good governance. When those principles are in the Constitution, then we may say that we are not adjudicating based on just a document, but we are adjudicating against our values, since the ideal Constitution would be synonymous with our values.

The vast majority of judges are really smart people, and Supreme Court justices are the best of the best. I mean that even for the justices I don’t care for, like Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas. (This is probably why the nation was outraged when President Bush selected Harriet Miers, a true intellectual lightweight, to occupy the nation’s highest bench. It was painfully, painfully obvious that she was nowhere close to qualified to occupy the position. Even conservative commentator George Will said that she was not among the 10,000 most qualified people in the country.) Judges are learned people who make thought-out, reasoned arguments. What it boils down to is whose arguments are most convincing. Ideally, the arguments that best address the law should be most convincing. But law isn’t the only thing that goes into legal opinions, as we shall discover.

For one thing, the law can be vague. When is a government activity a “public benefit” and when is it “general welfare”? The Supreme Court disagreed over these definitions in Kelo v. New London. The court decided (wrongly, in my opinion) that the unsecured promise of future economic revitalization was “public benefit” enough to allow the city of New London, Connecticut to turn over private property for development to Pfizer. The Supreme Court has spent many years deciding what is “necessary and proper” and when an action interferes with “interstate commerce.”

In his book The Invisible Constitution, law professor Laurence Tribe argues that the Constitution is just as much composed of unwritten rules as written ones (kind of like how the universe is composed of both matter we can see and “dark matter.” Hey, analogies are fun!). Roe v. Wade was decided based on legal principles that weren’t necessarily written down, but that must be inferred to exist based on the tone of the rest of the Constitution. Add up amendments 1, 4, 10, and 14, and you get a right to privacy that, while not explicit, is clearly lurking beneath the surface. Appellate courts tend to examine intent more than trial courts, and rightly so, since their rulings will have effects that reach much further than the individual case. (More on that later.)

Were you aware? The Constitution contains no explicit language permitting federal appellate courts to decide the constitutionality of statutes, but Chief Justice John Marshall, in Marbury v. Madison, suggested that judicial review was a necessity for proper enforcement of those things that were written down in the Constitution. No one would argue that, because there is no explicit permission granted to the judiciary to engage in judicial review, the courts should not engage in the practice. If someone did argue that, then the next question would be, “So who will tell us what is constitutional or not?” Chief Justice Marshall had the answer already prepared: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases must, of necessity, expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the Courts must decide on the operation of each.” This rule has served us well for over 206 years.

Where is this going? Sonia Sotomayor has been criticized for suggesting that judges “make law.” Here is a transcript of the relevant portion of her comments, in context this time:

All of the legal defense funds out there, um, they’re looking for people with court of appeals experience, because it is– court of appeals is where policy is made. And I know this is on tape and I should never say that, because we don’t “make law,” I know. I know. I’m not promoting it and I’m not advocating it, I’m– you know. Having said that, the court of appeals is where, before the Supreme Court makes the final decision, the law is percolating. It’s interpretation, it’s application, and Judge Ocero’s right. I often explain to people, when you’re on the district court, you’re looking to do justice in the individual case, so you are looking much more to the facts of the case than you are to the application of the law, because the application of the law is not precedential. So the facts control. On the court of appeals, you’re looking to how the law is developing so that it will be applied to a broad class of cases.

Appellate courts exist because the other branches of government (including the judiciary) make mistakes. No one would suggest (hopefully) that the legislation that comes out of Congress is perfect. Judges are there to correct errors; this is called “relief.” Sometimes, the relief comes in the form of an outright overruling of legislation that Congress has passed. Other times, the court doesn’t, as in the case of Ledbetter v. Goodyear. While the Supreme Court certainly did not endorse pay discrimination, the majority ruled that the Supreme Court did not have the power to grant Ledbetter the relief she sought due to the language of the legislation. Appropriate relief, they said, would be for Congress to amend the law, which it did earlier this year. This is an example of the government working correctly, as much as some people believe that the court should have immediately overturned the legislation.

Judges do not make law, but they do make policy, which Sotomayor also said. Sometimes they have to, because Congress has made incorrect policy, for whatever reason. But anyone who suggests that judges do not sometimes engage in policymaking is being either ignorant or disingenuous. Each branch of government makes policy using the tools at its disposal. Note the use of the word “policy” and not “legislation”; “policy” is a much broader term that encompasses the many kinds of enforceable legal principles that exist in government. Every branch makes “policy,” whether through executive orders, statutes, judicial opinions, public referenda, and constitutional amendments. Not all policy is of the strictly legislative variety.

Sotomayor has also been criticized for suggesting that Latinas make better judicial decisions than white men. The New York Times recently published a transcript of the 2001 Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture at Berkeley Law School, during which the comments were made. Her lecture was, among other things, about the lack of diversity in the federal court system, and how that impacts judicial opinions. “Diversity” is important, she said, because “in any group of human beings there is a diversity of opinion because there is both a diversity of experiences and of thought.” But why is that diversity of opinion important? It goes back to the wiggle room that all judges have when interpreting the law and potentially making policy. That wiggle room allows for a range of options, all of which are perfectly legal and perfectly defensible. Judges’ backgrounds and experiences influence where they fall within that range. They can, for example, lean toward the side of punishment, or they can lean toward the side of rehabilitation. Both fall within the range of legal possibilities, but judges with different experiences will necessarily have different opinions on which solution is most appropriate. (Or, to bring this outside the realm of race, let’s talk about technical savviness as another kind of diversity of opinion: a judge who understands technology might rule that a minor who “sexts” another minor should not be prosecuted as a sex offender.)

Even Justice Clarence Thomas, who is among the most conservative of the Supreme Court justices, may have brought his experience as a black person to bear on the issue of whether or not cross-burning was protected by the First Amendment. In 2002, Justice Thomas took a break from being famously quiet during oral arguments to declare, “This was a reign of terror, and the [burning] cross was a symbol of that reign of terror. [...] It is unlike any symbol in our society. [...] There was no other purpose to the [burning] cross. There was no communication of a particular message. It was intended to cause fear and to terrorize a population.” Was this an example of someone’s experience informing his interpretation of the law? Potentially. (By the way, in the case, Virginia v. Black, the Supreme Court ruled that a Virginia statute prohibiting cross-burning was unconstitutional. Justice Thomas dissented, writing, “A conclusion that the statute prohibiting cross burning with intent to intimidate sweeps beyond a prohibition on certain conduct into the zone of expression overlooks not only the words of the statute but also reality.”)

Here’s the money quote that some people are upset about:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? After that, she says:

I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. [...] However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

Unfortunately for the people who would like to attack her comments, Sotomayor was not talking about all cases, but rather sex and racial discrimination cases specifically, suggesting that a woman who has had to experience sex discrimination herself is more capable of understanding the reality of sex discrimination than a man who has never experienced it, or studied it only in the abstract. I refer to the Justice Thomas paragraph above.

So no, Sonia Sotomayor is not a racist. And no, she will not legislate from the bench. These two arguments are ridiculous, and it’s shameful that people (like me!) should have to spend so much time refuting them. But as her confirmation hearing looms, the arguments will appear again. It’s important to keep in mind the qualities that make a good Supreme Court justice. Should a justice follow the legal model of applying the law based on pure legal reasoning? Should a justice follow the attitudinal model of using his attitude and values to decide a case? Lawrence Wrightsman, in The Psychology of the Supreme Court, suggests that both must be melded into a human model of what it means to be a justice, since “[t]he legal model bleaches the decision-making process of its colorful human ingredients; it can be portrayed as an ultralogical, if not mechanical, analysis of applications of relevant statutes and decisions.” The attitudinal model, “taken to its extreme, fails to recognize the constraints upon the judge as a professional person.” Melding the two approaches creates a justice who applies the law using reason and logic, but also understands that her opinions will have real consequences for real people.

Judge Sotomayor is definitely a human judge. But then again, all judges are human. While we all acknowledge that judges must use reason to decide their cases, we are loathe admit that, as humans, they have biases that also influence those decisions. Even Justice Scalia, champion of “originalism,” has biases. At least Judge Sotomayor is up front about those biases. And in being up front about those biases, she can be held accountable to them. In her 2001 speech, she said, “I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.”

Her opinions are sound (if a little conservative, actually), her experience unquestionable. Her judicial philosophy is, actually, no different from that of other justices, judges, lawyers, and professors around the country and the world. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t succeed Justice Souter and do an excellent job.

Letter from Saudi Arabia: Jeddah Knights and the Nadir of Existence

It’s 15 hours of flying time to Saudi Arabia, where I taught English to military recruits in the early to mid-1990s.

As usual, it’s two o’clock in the morning when the plane approaches–a sterile, flat dustbowl streaked with streetlights that from the air look like endless threads of yellow beads.

And then I’m back in the classroom.

“Teacher, you go corniche last night?”

“No, why?”

“Why you don’t go to corniche? Veddy beautiful.”

‘You think so? I don’t. I find it kind of dirty and smelly, don’t you?”

“Teacher, corniche veddy nice, with many fat boy.”

“Fat boy?”

“Ha ha! Man good, woman no good, but I like young fat boy, every night I go corniche and chase the fat boys, believe me, last night I running veddy fast and I get veddy beautiful fat boy,” – smack goes his fist – “he look same-same baby doll, like Toys-R-Us baby, he have the fat cheek and I running down the corniche to catch him but he run veddy slow because he fat boy so I catch him no problem and” – smack -”believe me teacher!”

“Let me get this straight. You chase little fat boys down the corniche?”

“Believe me, nice fat boy spending the time.”

“And you-”

Smack. “Yes, believe me, teacher, every Thursday night go corniche, find the fat boys!”

“This is the nadir of existence,” another teacher declares. He declares that every day after classes. Nadir indeed. With the usual Office griping continuing as backdrop, I write a mock financial news article while my own classroom encounter is still fresh in my mind. It’s a form of catharsis.

JEDDAH-April 17 (Corniche News Agency). Japanese electronics giants Hitachi and Nintendo today jointly unveiled a new pocket video game designed for the Saudi market.

“In the past, our famous Gameboy has enjoyed tremendous popularity worldwide,” Nomuro Wahdukahodicu [Workaholic-get it?], vice president for marketing at Nintendo, said. “This includes the Arab world.” Wahdukahodicu said the joint project has taken pocket video games a step further. “The new game is not only more sophisticated, it is also market-specific to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. So, after our success with Gameboy, I am pleased to announce Fatboy, the pocket game for the man of the corniche.”

Wahdukahodicu said the new game is more challenging and claimed the graphics are almost “Spielbahg-like.” He said the software graphics depict realistic little Technicolor fat boys running down the Jeddah corniche being pursued by men in thobes and gutras flapping in the wind. The object is to rescue ten little fat boys by plucking them from the sea wall and cramming them into your Land Cruiser before they hurl themselves into the waves.

“It is most diverting,” Takeio Samuraya, sales manager at Hitachi, said, “and clearly suited to the local culture. We would not market Fatboy in Japan, for instance, where the homosexual culture is far less pervasive and overt. So for the Japanese market of mostly straight men, we have developed Groperboy and Molest Man for the male who enjoys vicarious sexual harassment on subway trains.”

For the future, Nintendo will keep an eye on sales in Jeddah. If Fatboy the game takes off like the little fat boys in its graphics, the company has ambitions to market-test a full-sized Virtual Fatboy video game for the more affluent Saudi.

Kenji Companyman [get it?], a software engineer, explained. “The software scenario for this game will be truly interactive,” he said. “Players can cruise the corniche in a new Caprice in search of fresh and sassy fat boys without leaving the comfort of their tea rooms. The object, of course, is to capture a juicy one, but it won’t be easy. Dangerous obstacles abound. At one point, the Caprice’s accelerator sticks to the floor and the car takes off like a rocket. So the driver has to swerve to avoid Pakistani pedestrians, who are everywhere except on the sidewalk. And only a world-class driver can avoid crashing into the police car.”

If the driver does crash, however, there is still a 50/50 chance that the police officer will be tired from Ramadan.

Once the car is back under control, the player can triple-park it and pursue fat boys along the sea walk. But perils persist: some striplings turn out to be Royal Family runaways, others are “not clean,” and still others play hard to get.

The two Japanese companies are also tailoring various new games to specific national markets. “Even now, our software creators are developing fresh new products for familiar markets,” Samuraya said. “Next year in France we expect to market Insecureboy and Culture Controlboy.”

Competing giants are not taking all this lying down. Sony also has plans to penetrate the Saudi market with its own game, called Lazyboy, featuring adventures for the Saudi man of leisure in a recliner.

Review of West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State

West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State
by Mark Arax
Public Affairs: 350 pp., $26.95

It’s coming to America first, the cradle of the best and of the worst.

“Democracy,” Leonard Cohen

As America is to the world, so is California to America. If you’re looking for the greatest opportunities and the biggest dreams – along with the biggest absurdities and the greatest atrocities – well, you go to the U.S. of A. And if you’re already there, in one of the other forty-nine states, why then, you go west. Or, more precisely, as author Mark Arax notes, you go west of the West which is where Teddy Roosevelt said he felt he was when he was in California. You might say that California is America to the next degree – America squared.

Much of the rest of the country’s knowledge of the Golden State is limited to the Pacific Coast from San Francisco down to Los Angeles or maybe San Diego. Not that this doesn’t encompass a lot – this 550 mile stretch includes the country’s largest county, Los Angeles (whose nearly ten million population almost doubles that of runner-up Cook County, Illinois) along with four of America’s thirteen most populous cities. Arax wrote for the Los Angeles Times for twenty-seven years, so his new collection of essays, “West of the West” does cover this well known California, but ultimately he is not of it and his writing on it is not his best work.

“Eyre of the Storm,” for instance, is a bit of stereotyped mockery of the “far out” Bay Area that covers “Naked Day” in Berkeley, a convention of conspiracy theorists, and an old family friend in Berkeley who is “a believer in UFOs and past lives,” including her own past life as Mary Magdalene. Arax ends the piece lamenting the decline of meaningful political activism and “[t]he social transformation of San Francisco and Berkeley, its iconic foot bath and organic tampon self-absorption, [and] the inexhaustible consumption made possible by the ascent of the silicon chip.”

Unfortunately he appears not to have examined much past his preconceptions, otherwise he would have found a left wing majority on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors actively involved in creating programs like a municipal minimum wage, maintaining rent control, and generally grappling with the problem of ensuring that the city’s working class and poor population is not swept away by the waves of wealth washing up from Silicon Valley. And quality aromatherapy is not high on their agenda.

Arax himself originally hails from Fresno, whose population of nearly half a million makes it California’s largest city not bordering on the Pacific Ocean — in other words, California’s largest unknown city. “If you want to see concentrated poverty,” he writes, “unlike any other city – Fresno number one, New Orleans number two – or witness the nation’s highest per capita IV drug use, come to our inner city.”
And it is in his reporting on the unknown California that Arax shines. As the state’s banks repossessed $100 billion worth of houses over a two-year period – 1,300 houses emptying each business day – he tells us that no area was hit harder than the Central Valley where Kern County had become so pro-growth that it abolished its planning commission, helping to make “Bakersfield, the most sprawled city in the West.”

Leading up to the crash, “[f]or every dollar the boom was generating,” he writes, “cities were spending roughly two dollars to provide streets and sewers and cops to serve the new suburbs. … When the city’s [Fresno’s] own economic impact studies began showing that each housing tract was putting Fresno deeper in the red, Mayor Jim Patterson stepped in. The city, he said, could no longer afford to do economic analysis.”

But the best parts of “West of the West” concern California agriculture – and its amazing extremes. “The Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman” is a story of migrant farmworkers. Now, most of America thinks it already knows that one; after all, United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez has even had his own postage stamp. But these are not Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers. Today one out of every five farmworkers in the Valley – 75,000 – are Mixtec Indians who have left behind villages in Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Puebla now largely depleted of working-age men. Their children often struggle in California schools not just because they don’t speak English, but because they don’t speak Spanish either, but rather Mixtec languages such as Triqui.

Arax rides a farmworker bus headed to the raisin fields filled with speakers of six indigenous languages. “They had left villages of slash-and-burn farming for the most technologically advanced agriculture in the world,” he writes, and yet “the work could not have been more primitive.” He found the fastest pickers earning between $10 and $12 an hour; they might make $10,000-12,000 in a summer. The slowest “were not even making $30 a day – somewhere between $2 and $3 an hour.” He concludes that “[w]e are more than happy to buy a bag of plums for the same $5 we paid in the 1990s but give no thought as to how that trickles down to the farmer and his field hand.”

“Highlands of Humboldt” covers the other end of California agriculture – geographically and economically. Arax visits a plot where no one earns “less than $40 an hour, likely the highest piece rate in all of American agriculture.” These farmworkers harvest marijuana, “the biggest single cash crop in all of California, dwarfing the $10 billion a year agricultural bounty of Fresno and Kern – the number one and two farm counties in the country.” In the geographic top of California – 7,081 square miles, 215,000 people, 85 percent of them white – “nearly every standing thing in a two-hundred-mile stretch from Ukiah to McKinleyville … was almost wholly reliant on the unfettered cultivation of marijuana.”

Although the marijuana-growing “Emerald Triangle” pre-existed it, the 1996 passage of Proposition 215, the state’s medical marijuana law, took the industry to a whole other level as it made it quasi-legal. That is to say, legal – with certain restrictions – under state law, but still illegal under federal law. And about once a decade the feds will attempt to assert themselves as they did on June 24, 2008 “when residents awoke to a convoy of 450 federal, state, and local police – cars, trucks, all-terrain vehicles, three-wheelers, a mobile communications center, portable toilets – roaring up the hillside” to raid the fields and grow houses.

Meanwhile, the Emerald Triangle has become home to a cultural divide that few outsiders would conceive of. Arax attends a community meeting, complete with a professional facilitator, called to discuss the problems of “diesel dope” in the Humboldt County town of Garberville. As a grower from Mendocino County to the south had told him, “Weed is a spiritual experience here. We grow it in a sustainable way. We grow it in the backyards using the sun. [In Humboldt t]hey build these huge indoor grow houses and use diesel generators to keep the lights burning.” With the estimated seventy-five gallons of fuel needed to produce one pound of indoor pot being about what an average car burns in a trip from California to Texas, bumper stickers have begun to appear that read: “Diesel Dope: Pollution Pot.”

The Humboldt “rasta rednecks,” as Arax dubs them, are “hill people, the sons and daughters of the old lumbermen and fishermen” whose industries have died out. And he notes that some chapters of the county’s history are of the sort that the nation prefers to speed read through; In 1854, four years after California’s admission to the Union, the Sinkyone, Yurok, and Karok Indians of Humboldt had not seen a white man; ten years later their societies had been destroyed by them. An early edition of the Humboldt Times describes “the red-skin scourge that has long been preying upon their [the colonists’] lives and property.” Arax describes a massacre of three hundred natives, driven by “the calculus that for every white man killed by an Indian, 150 Indians needed to die in return.” (A cynic might note a similarity to the nation’s post-9/11 policy in regard to Muslim nations.)

Where California goes from here is an ever-fascinating question. Just the other day a University of Southern California study reported that for the first time in its history, a majority of the state’s residents were born and raised there. Meanwhile, renewed efforts to cover farmworkers under federal labor law and to legalize and tax marijuana for general use have surfaced. For now, if you want to catch up on a few developments in the state that so often seems home to what is best and what is worst in America, Arax’s book is a good place to start.

Welcome to the Wilderness: Where Will the GOP Go From Here?

As I watched Newt Gingrich on Meet the Press recently, I began to think about the current state of the Republican Party. Now, a Republican I am not. However, I do believe in a healthy multiparty system, and with the current death spiral of the Republican Party, we are drifting more and more away from that.

Of course, all parties often find themselves in the political wilderness from time to time. In many parliamentary systems, such as the UK, virtually all power shifts from one party to another every 5-15 years. In the US, with multiple branches of government and rules such as the filibuster, which theoretically are designed to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority, such wilderness periods are usually not as absolute. The closest thing the US has seen in the past century was perhaps the period from 1933 to 1939, when the Democrats controlled the Presidency and supermajorities of both Houses. But even then, the Supreme Court was not fully in line, hence FDR’s disastrous attempt to expand the size of the court.  Other time periods in the “liberal consensus” period of 1933-1969 saw much division within the majority party (largely along North-South lines), which gave a great deal of power to the minority party on many issues, such as civil rights.

Therefore, the current Republican wilderness period isn’t as common as we might think. However, at the same time, it is a great time for the party to define itself going forward without the pressure of actually governing. Going forward, there are several different paths the Republican Party could take. Let’s take a look at some of them:

1. The Establishment Direction

Current Leaders: Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and Dick Cheney

Potential 2012 Candidates: Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Jeb Bush

This option generally embraces the past and takes the position that what worked in the 1990s will work now, full stop. It simply plugs in tired arguments of the past into the present and expects that they will produce the exact same results, no matter how different circumstances may be today. This option embraces the fact that Republican values are important, and that the party cannot compromise on its core values. This “love us, or leave us” strategy places a renewed emphasis on national security, fear, and wedge issues.  However, unlike some of the options outlined below, this option is very inside baseball. It’s Washington insiders, roaring 1990s, all over again.  According to the latest CNN Research poll, each of the leaders of this strategy have approval ratings in the 30s according recent opinion polls, but yet enjoy the support of a large majority of members of the shrinking Republican party. As more and more Republicans leave the party, the greater percentage of those left that will be in support of this strategy.

2. Establishment with a Twist

Current Leaders: Mitt Romney and Eric Cantor

Potential 2012 Candidates: Mitt Romney, Lindsay Graham, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and Tim Pawlenty

This faction of the Republican party is in some ways perceived as “moderate,” but yet in other ways very conformist and in sync with the establishment listed above. However, unlike members of the establishment, people like Mitt Romney and Lindsay Graham are actually somewhat likable individuals that don’t seem like retreads from a past era. However, when you look beyond a few policy exceptions, most in this group fall in line with the group above. However, this path realizes the importance of aesthetics and is willing to compromise on a few tangential issues in order to actually win. While there is nothing necessarily fundamentally different about this group that could necessarily shift the dynamics away from the Republican Party becoming limited to a regional force in the long run, right now this option may be the best bet for the short term survival of the party that doesn’t compromise some on some of its core ideals of the past several decades.

3. Movement Conservatives

Current Leaders:  Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh

Potential 2012 Candidates:  Sarah Palin and Tom Tancredo

This path is top-down populism if there ever was such a thing. Four plus decades after the Southern strategy began its outreach to social conservatives throughout the country, the “movement” they created has come close to completely taking over the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln. What started with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan’s pawns, first achieved electoral victory within its new home in 1988 when Pat Robertson finished a strong second in the Iowa caucuses, solidly ahead of sitting Vice President George H. W. Bush.  Twenty years later, for the first time, the movement had one of its own nominated to be Vice President of the United States. Don’t expect the movement to stop there. The movement has all the momentum within the party and will not be satisfied until one of its own is the Presidential nominee, no matter what that might mean for the overall party’s general election chances. Although his name may never appear on a ballot, Rush Limbaugh is without a doubt the current leader of this faction of the Republican Party.

4. A New Populism

Current Leader: Mike Huckabee
Potential 2012 Candidate: Mike Huckabee

This option is intriguing because it has the potential to contract and/or expand the reach of the Republican Party in the long run.  Like the movement, it is populist in nature. However, unlike the movement, it seems to have the potential for real bottom-up populism. With an emphasis on social values, religion, and cultural issues, this option in many ways continues the trend of making the GOP a regional party of the South. However, at the same time, this option is also anti-establishment in a way that the movement is not. Also, this path is not necessarily in line step by step on foreign policy and economic issues with the three factions outlined above. Mike Huckabee flirted with economic equity arguments in 2008, but never went quite far enough to establish a real break here. In the long run, a real break with Republican core stances on certain issues, such as tax policy or immigration, with a reemphasis on cultural issues, could be an intriguing strategy for the GOP.  This strategy could finally open the GOP tent to many African American and Latino voters, who tend to be more socially conservative. While this may sound drastic, such a realignment would not necessarily be anything new in American politics. American history suggests that fundamental political realignments may occur every three to four decades. If you consider 2006-2010 a realignment period (some scholars argue that a realignment normally includes three consecutive elections with the same dynamic trend, although there is generally a critical election) that has finally ended the political equilibrium that has existed since 1968 or 1980 or 1994 (depending on when you define end of the Fifth Party System), then it is still unclear exactly what equilibrium may exist by the middle part of next decade. In fact, some scholars argue that we are currently in the middle of a disalignment, and the exact composition of the Sixth Party System is yet to be set in stone. (Admittedly, with Republican actions in recent years and the rise of Obama, this sort of realignment is probably not realistic for at least a decade or more.)

5. Rockefeller Revisited

Current Leaders: Colin Powell, Jim Huntsman, Charlie Crist, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Tom Ridge

Potential 2012 Candidate:  Tom Ridge

This is the old, moderate, and even sometimes liberal Republican party. And it also could be the new Republican Party that emerges out a possible realignment period. At least in the short term (2012), this looks like the only faction that could actually stand a chance at winning a general election at the presidential level. However, although more popular overall, this faction no longer has many votes within the Republican Party itself. As moderate Republicans have become independents or Democrats in recent years, the Party has essentially purged itself of many of these sane voices. For example, while Republican Colin Powell has a 70% approval rating in the latest CNN poll of all voters, only 64% of Republicans approve of him. When a greater combined percentage of Democrats and independents approve of a Republican than Republicans, chances for a like-minded moderate winning a Republican primary are slim to none. Smartly, Obama and many Democrats know that this is the only faction of Republicans that could beat them in the short term and have strategically moved to the center on several key peripheral (in their mind) issues to ensure that most of those who switched party affiliation in the past 4 to 8 years will remain Democrats or independents throughout the Obama years. This virtually eliminates the GOP’s best hope for 2012, nominating a moderate voice. Further, the best and brightest potential presidential candidate for the GOP out of this moderate wing, Utah governor Jim Huntsman, was recently appointed by Obama to be Ambassador to China.  With Hillary and Huntsman on board, Obama has continued to marginalize those who he sees as political threats. It’s no coincidence that David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and presumed reelection captain, said publicly 10 days before the appointment that Huntsman was his greatest worry for 2012.

Who Will Win Out?

As the Republicans continue their internal fight out of the wilderness, everyone will speculate about who will emerge out of this power vacuum. While a month, let alone a year, is an eternity in politics, if I were to guess right now, I would predict the following:

The Three Headed Monster of Gingrich-Cheney-Limbaugh will continue to dominate the conversation through the 2010 elections. At that time, as the Republicans gear up for 2012, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee will all emerge as serious presidential contenders. Notice how I did not mention any of the moderate Rockefeller Republicans in that list. Right now, I simply don’t see anyone emerging. Possibly Tom Ridge, but I wouldn’t bet on it. While I think Romney would be the most competitive general election candidate out of the four names listed above, I still think all four would lose pretty handily. Huckabee may be the best hope for some sort of outside-the-box, realignment election. Gingrich is the worst for the short term and the long term, but next to Romney, may have the best shot at the nomination. However, by 2014 or 2016, I believe that either the movement or Huckabee wing will emerge. In many aspects, both of these options represent a complete destruction of the Republican status quo and establishment. The movement was meant to elect Republicans, not to actually run the party from within. The Southern strategy will have finally come full circle.

So what happens if and when the movement does finally completely take over the party? The movement could then continue down the death spiral to irrelevance, leading to a possible reemergence of a moderate wing of the GOP or a formidable new second party to fill that vacuum (assuming the Dems don’t totally co-opt the center, which may lead to a leftist party).  Finally, although unlikely, a unification of populist elements under the guise of cultural conservatism, racial tolerance, economic equity, and/or freer migration of people is another intriguing possibility for a potential new period in American political history.

And you wonder why they call it the wilderness….

Sotomayor ‘Unpredictable’? Only If You Don’t Read the Court Decisions

One of the things are media are not good at is covering nuance. Once you add a couple conjunctions and independent clauses to a sentence, people’s eyes glaze over. There’s no better example of this than “mainstream media” reporting of court cases. Take this article from The New York Times about Sonia Sotomayor’s “unpredictable” legal opinions:

In a 2006 property rights case, she upheld a town’s effort to take private property for redevelopment. But in 2002, she supported property rights in a case involving impounded cars.

With only that information, it sure sounds like she’s crazy. But appellate court opinions regularly exceed 50 pages for a reason: there’s a lot to talk about, there are details to pay attention to, and the distinctions being made are incredibly fine — finer than a 750-word newspaper article can go into, either by design (it’s only 750 words, after all) or accident (does the person writing the story know about the law?).

Well, it’s a good thing they’re hopeless, because that gives me something to write about.

The “2006 property rights case,” Didden v. Village of Port Chester, came directly after the Supreme Court’s abominable 2005 decision in Kelo v. New London, in which the court’s liberal wing was actually the stupid group and where Justice Clarence Thomas wrote something worthy of praise. (I wrote about this case back in 2005.) First of all, the 2006 opinion isn’t even an opinion! It is properly called an “order.” Second, Sotomayor was part of the three-judge panel that heard the case, but that means nothing. The order, since it was nothing more than an order from the court, was signed by the clerk and not by any individual judge. Guilt by association, perhaps?

But getting to the substantive issue, the circuit court would have been hard-pressed to make a ruling that directly contradicted a Supreme Court decision. The case would have been appealed, and the Supreme Court would have decided the same way again. Blame the Supreme Court for such a terrible decision, not the Second Circuit for upholding it (this is the doctrine of stare decisis that the Senate Judiciary Committee brought up so often during the Roberts confirmation).

The Wall Street Journal Law Blog published an article titled “Will Didden v. Port Chester Be Judge Sotomayor’s Kelo Decision?” The short answer is “Yes, it will,” but only because, as a circuit court judge, Sotomayor is bound — again, by stare decisis — to uphold a decision that is both prior and from a higher court. What do conservatives want? If she had decided to overturn the precedent set by Kelo, then that would have been true “judicial activism,” to use the Right’s own empty language. But now they’re upset that she didn’t overturn the decision? Perhaps if she had been a member of the Supreme Court, she would have had a different opinion, but as a member of the Second Circuit, she was required to uphold the Supreme Court’s decision, something that the Second Circuit explicitly stated in its order: “the recent Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London [...] obliges us to conclude that [plaintiffs] have articulated no basis upon which relief can be granted.” But then again, the entire issue is moot because (1) there was no opinion issued; and (2) Sotomayor cannot be given exclusive ownership of the order, no matter how much her critics (or even misunderstanding journalists) would like to give it to her.

The 2002 case “involving impounded cars” — Krimstock v. Kelly – was another U.S. Second Circuit Court opinion of a three-judge panel, but at least an opinion was issued for this one. At issue was New York City’s authority to seize property used in the commission of a crime; to whit, vehicles driven by people arrested for DWI. Felony complaints required that the accused be afforded a “prompt” hearing to determine the legitimacy of the seizure; misdemeanors, which included DWI charges, had no such requirement. DWI defendants could challenge the seizure only after the city sought something called civil forfeiture, which, in the case of the six plaintiffs in this case, ranged from three months to a year after their DWI arrests. But even then the vehicle’s return is not ensured:

Upon seizing the vehicle, the police issue the arrestee a voucher for the vehicle and any other seized property. If a claimant makes a formal demand for the return of the vehicle, the City has twenty-five days in which either to initiate a civil forfeiture proceeding under the City’s Administrative Code or to release the vehicle. Even if the City chooses to commence a civil forfeiture proceeding within the twenty-five day period, however, the proceeding is commonly stayed until the criminal proceeding concludes. In a forfeiture proceeding, the City “bear[s] the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that [it] is legally justified to continue to retain the property.” [Citations removed]

Sotomayor and the two other judges who heard the case found that this policy was ridiculous because an individual should not be denied the use of his or her property while a case is pending, especially given that “[a] car or truck is often central to a person’s livelihood or daily activities,” and given that “such possession may ultimately prove improper.”

Makes sense to me. Especially since some of the plaintiffs were making car payments on a vehicle they couldn’t use because it was impounded! Sotomayor, writing the opinion, acknowledged the legitimacy of seizing the vehicle in the first place (upon arrest for DWI), but then wondered why the police needed to continue to hold the vehicle pending trial. The court’s ultimate concern in this case was that there was no pre-emptive method for the accused to contest the continued holding of the vehicle, especially when it could take months or years for it to be returned.

The moral? Don’t believe what you read about court cases. As I’ve demonstrated here, two seemingly conflicting rulings on a “2002 property case” and a “2006 property case” turn out not to be so conflicting, or even rulings. Judge Sotomayor is not only smart, but eminently qualified, and makes her rulings based on the law, while giving the benefit of the doubt — where the law permits such benefit to be given! — to plaintiffs. What good does it do to err on the side of harshness, as Justices Roberts and Scalia do?

You Can Indefinitely Detain Some of the People Some of the Time

One of the larger problems in my life is that, whenever I want to write about a civil liberties issue, Glenn Greenwald has already beaten me to it. And written it better than I could have. Greenwald is a former civil liberties attorney and number one defender of The Constitution. He is not a Democratic apologist. He heavily criticized President Bush. And he is now heavily criticizing President Obama. In Greenwald’s opinion, suggesting that enforcing our laws is “radical” or “extreme” or “left-wing” is disgusting. When did enforcing the law become a partisan issue? He also writes about the media and how he believes that the media are beholden to the political class in a horrible, symbiotic relationship that ensures that the Fourth Estate will never actually hold our leaders accountable for anything.

And I agree with him on all of it. Absolutely all of it. Darn him! Darn him to heck!

For example, Glenn and I were furious this last week when Sen. Harry Reid kept using a verb that could just as easily have been crafted by Karl Rove. The verb was “release,” as in, “Terrorists from Guantanamo Bay will be released into the U.S.” Many pundits, and even Obama himself, used the verb “release” to describe what the government will do to detainees in Guantanamo Bay now that the administration has re-iterated its desire to close the prison there. “Release” evokes images of terrorists approaching the shore on boats and then merrily skipping off, free of shackles and permitted to wander throughout the country, blowing up whatever they please.

Let it be known: terrorists will not be released into anything. They will be shackled, they will be monitored, they will be in our custody and under guard as they are transported from Cuba to the mainland. And once on the mainland, they will continue to be monitored and under guard as they are moved to whatever prison they will occupy next. Those who believe that terrorists will be “released” in the United States are either negligently ignorant, willfully stupid, or maliciously misrepresentative. One guess as to which one describes Harry Reid.

Prior to September 11, 2001, we believed in something called “due process.” It’s a Fifth Amendment guarantee:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. [Emphasis mine.]

The Supreme Court has ruled before that, since the Constitution uses the word “person” and not “citizen”; and since it would have been very easy to use the word citizen, but person was used instead; and since the author of the Bill of Rights, James Madison, was a lawyer by trade and a very smart man and probably not prone to misusing words; that it therefore follows that the Bill of Rights was intended to apply not only to U.S. citizens, but anyone in the United States. This is affirmed in the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits a state to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Again, note the use of the word person where citizen could have been used, but wasn’t.

In 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed by a group of terrorists led by Omar Abdel-Rahman, better known as The Blind Sheik. The bomb damaged a parking garage and did kill some people, but it didn’t come close to bringing the building down. Abdel-Rahman and three other accomplices were indicted by civilian prosecutors, accused of breaking publicly-accessible laws, tried in open court inside the United States, under the guidelines of the Constitution and the rules of U.S. civil procedure, and sentenced to U.S. civilian prisons. After 1993, the nation was not less safe because Abdel-Rahman and his accomplices were being imprisoned inside the United States. Abdel-Rahman is housed at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

In 1995, Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols parked a rental truck containing a homemade fertilizer bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The bomb exploded, killing 168 people, injuring 800 others, and destroying the building. Nichols and McVeigh were indicted, again by civilian prosecutors, accused of breaking publicly-accessible (that is, not secret) laws, tried in open court, and sentenced to U.S. civilian prisons. McVeigh was given the death penalty. The nation is not less safe because Terry Nichols is housed inside the United States.

I think you get the point. Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bomber; Wadih el-Hage, accused of involvement in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings; Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber; Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”; Jose Padilla, the “dirty bomber.” All of these people are being held inside the United States right now, and no one — no one! — is arguing that the United States is less safe because of it. To suggest that allowing Dangerous Criminals inside our borders is silly; there are already more dangerous criminals here!

It’s also worth noting that, with the exception of Reid and Padilla, all of the above criminals were convicted using the 200-year-old, civilian due process proscribed by the Constitution. Reid and Padilla were held incommunicado in U.S. navy brigs. The government eventually dropped its terrorism charge against Padilla, who was alleged to be making a “dirty bomb” (a traditional bomb filled with radioactive material; it would not cause a nuclear explosion, but it would spread radiation). Since the government didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute the terrorism charge, the charge was dropped. Padilla, nevertheless, was sentenced because even though terrorism is a crime, all the things that terrorists do are already illegal, anyway! Blowing up a building is no more illegal because it was done with a political agenda in mind.

The assertion that Terrorists need to be tried in a special, extra-Constitutional way, held without charge, subjected to torture, and perhaps never afforded a trial is ludicrous. In the paragraphs above, we have ample evidence proving that trying terrorists in civilian courts, using civilian rules, does work. The United States is not less safe. And furthermore, housing convicted terrorists in civilian prisons does work. And furthermore, charging them and trying them does work. For people like Vice President Cheney to suggest that using due process makes us less safe just goes to show us how out of his mind the man is. He would probably be happier living in Iran, where the executive has unlimited power to imprison people for made-up reasons, or no reason at all. Here in the United States, we do not convict people merely on the confidential say-so of the executive branch; that’s the way dictatorships (you know, those countries that we purport to be fighting against — unless your name is “Saudi Arabia”) behave. Here in the United States, it is up to the executive to prove that the accused is guilty. Guilt is never assumed — unless, apparently, you committed a terrorism-related crime after September 11, 2001. Or you were linked to terrorism, no matter how specious the link or how questionable the evidence. Or you associated with terrorists, even if you didn’t know they were terrorists. Or you were planning on committing a terrorism-related crime, even if “terror” wasn’t your goal. Or, as Obama articulated yesterday, the government is afraid you might commit terrorist crimes in the future. Yes, the possibility of future law-breaking is now grounds not only for detaining someone, but for never giving them a trial or even a preliminary hearing to prove that they did what they were accused of doing. As long as the government says “Terrorist,” an individual’s guilt is implicit and that person will never, ever be released. (More likely, as Greenwald observed, you will be imprisoned indefinitely if the government can’t guarantee that it will win a trial. Do show trials sound like the hallmark of a vibrant democracy or a repressive despotism?)

Obama’s plan is definitely a step in the right direction, but it’s not nearly enough. In order to restore the rule of law to this out-of-control country, he must admit that there is no situation in which a person should be held indefinitely; habeas corpus is a right guaranteed to anyone in U.S. custody, and the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed as much. Obama apologists have used exactly the same rhetoric President Bush used to support Obama’s case; namely, “we are at war.” And these prisoners are prisoners of war; therefore, they do not have the right to contest their detention, and they may be detained until the end of the conflict. Seeing as how we’re waging a war on an abstract idea, it’s hard to see exactly when (or if) this war will be over.

Are we now in the business of imprisoning people indefinitely? What does that say about us as a nation? What will historians say fifty years from now? Today, we regard the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as deplorable and appalling, but at the time, it made sense to our political leaders. We have the ability to stop lawlessness right now instead of musing, decades later, about the mistakes we made, and saying, “We’re so sorry. We’ll do better next time.” Unfortunately, every time “next time” comes up, we fail again (we began failing as early as the John Adams administration, with the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts). Obama offers the promise of actually living up to our ideals as a country. Rather than fumble to attempt to explain and excuse his actions, we must ask, “Is what he is doing right? Is it legal?” And, as Glenn Greenwald wonders, “What would I have said if George Bush and Dick Cheney advocated a law vesting them with the power to preventively imprison people indefinitely and with no charges?”

Please do read Glenn’s article. It is a thorough, lucid, and amazing analysis of Obama’s position on these detainees, with some very tough questions and conclusions that must necessarily follow from that position. I do not believe they are questions that Obama and his supporters want to ask, because they lead to the very same places formerly occupied by previous administrations. At the end of the day, Obama & Co. are saying, “Yes, it is okay to detain some people indefinitely, without the government ever having to prove that they committed a crime.” Not only is that assertion illegal, it’s un-American, and if we continue down that road, it makes this country not only less safe, but less worth defending.

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