Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the U.S. government modeled Guantánamo interrogation techniques directly on a Chinese torture manual for inducing false confessions. I wonder whether John McCain still thinks that the Supreme Court’s decision was one of its worst? Does Justice Scalia believe that torturing someone until they confess to anything will save lives?
Filed under Essays
It looks like it all comes down to an interpretation of some shady grammar, of commas, of prefatory, operative, and ablative clauses. And something about Latin.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
If the founding fathers only had better grammar, Christians wouldn’t need guns and the death penalty to keep black kids from having abortions and life saving condoms out of Africa.
Filed under Essays
To no one’s surprise, Justice Scalia and his Republican appointee brothers on the Court have shown a fine example of judicial activism. Personally, I think that from a historical and even a literal reading of the Constitution, it is a real stretch to find an absolute right to bear arms in the Second Amendment. And regardless of how you feel about the issue, it takes a great feat of judicial activism to overturn the will of the D.C. electorate who have been firmly against firearms possession since 1976. I wonder whether John McCain thinks this particular instance of judicial activism is one of the best or worst decisions in the Court’s history.
In referring to Scalia’s flip flop, E.J. Dionne Jr. writes,
In his intemperate dissent in the court’s recent Guantanamo decision, Scalia said the defense of constitutional rights embodied in that ruling meant it ‘will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.’ That consideration apparently does not apply to a law whose precise purpose was to reduce the number of murders in the District of Columbia.
Filed under Essays
The Journal does it again! Yesterday I watched the video podcast of the most recent edition of the Bill Moyers Journal. The topic was race in America and the history and legacy of slavery, featuring three parts: Patterson and Loury on Race in America (featuring Orlando Patterson and Glenn C. Loury), Documentary Preview: Traces of the Trade (about an upcoming documentary on Rhode Island’s slave trading heritage), and Douglas Blackmon on Slavery by Another Name (about Blackmon’s new book Slavery by Another Name).
The Slavery By Another Name segment was by far the most impacting of the three segments. Blackmon, in introducing his book, explains how slavery essentially continued in the South long after the Emancipation Proclamation up into the 1940s through forced labor, discriminatory laws and a justice system tailored around African Americans serving the South’s economic dependency on free labor.
What is amazing is how this painfully disturbing history has been hidden away, at least from White memory, so that Americans do not have to confront such a shameful and uncomfortable past. It’s ironic when putting this book into perspective — especially with everything that has been said recently about Jeremiah Wright, so-called “anti-American Black preachers”, and Black victimization — how we still prefer to think of ourselves as an innocent nation and label anger or frustration with the past as being essentially anti-patriotic or subversive. As Blackman says,
Well, there’s no way that anybody can read this book and come away still wondering why there is a sort of fundamental cultural suspicion among African-Americans of the judicial system, for instance. I mean, that suspicion is incredibly well-founded. The judicial system, the law enforcement system of the South became primarily an instrument of coercing people into labor and intimidating blacks away from their civil rights. That was its primary purpose, not the punishment of lawbreakers. And so, yes, these events build an unavoidable and irrefutable case for the kind of anger that still percolates among many, many African-Americans today.
I was just watching yesterday’s post Tim Russert Meet the Press with guests Senators (D-DE) Joe Biden and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and yesterday I read an excellent piece about Bush’s energy policy by Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times. Both got me to thinking — and I can’t remember whether it is postive or negative reinforcement — that the Bush Administration and now John McCain want us to reward them for their remarkable ineptitude.
I don’t need to spell it out for you in detail because the facts are pretty clear. We have a war in Iraq that is lasting longer than World War II and John McCain thinks we need to stay the course because the war has benefitted Iran. We need to stay because there are terrorists that we cannot properly fight in Afghanistan because we are overcommitted in Iraq, and we cannot leave because we have installed a democratic government that is pro-Iran.
The war has also helped in the demise of the U.S. economy and has furthered revealed our fossil fuel dependency and vulnerability. While we all suffer $4.00 a gallon gas, Exxon Mobile has earned record profits. Instead of diversifying our energy sources and preparing for the future — that would be bad for the oil companies — Bush and McCain want us to reward oil companies yet again with the contracts. Let’s drill up the American coastline and give the American oil addicted population what it needs — some domestic grown petrol dope. The pushers will profit and the people can eazy ride their way into oblivion.
McCain even appears to have changed his mind on torture, Guantanamo, an independent judicial branch and a political system of checks, balances and separation of powers, calling the Supreme Court’s recent (obvious and foreseeable) decision one of its worst ever. Why would someone who has been tortured in a foreign military prison want to reinforce a legal climate that leaves the door open to similar practices? Even conservative pundit George Will (who I believe to be a closet Obamamaniac) was surprised by McCain’s “Contempt of Courts“, wondering whether McCain thought the Court’s decision ranked as poorly as Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson or Korematsu. Go George! Continue reading
During the primaries, I repeatedly denounced the press’ stretching of the facts to keep the Hillary v. Obama contest going as long as possible. The press needed a good story to tell — a battle of the titans — and it also knew that McCain was simply too boring for primetime.
Depending on how things proceed over the next few months, whether there is some unforeseen scandal or political crisis, the general election in November may be a blow out in Obama’s favor. Nevertheless, the press is at it again, trying its very best to cover up the obvious — McCain is less interesting than Bob Dole’s E.D.
In attempting to tune people in, we are made to believe that this race is both too close to call (so keep watching) and that there is a real demographics war going on, with Hillary voters turning to McCain. What a load of excrement! On Sunday, Frank Rich wrote an excellent op-ed in the New York Times about how the press is ignoring the data. Check it out: Continue reading
Out of respect for Tim Russert, the guys at Meet the Press have yet to begun throwing names out there for his replacement. My vote goes to Gwen Ifill. As the host of Washington Week and a regular on both Meet the Press and the NewsHour, Ms. Ifill has proven to be independent, impartial, and tactful. She can also ask the tough questions, as Tim Russert did, gracefully.
Filed under Essays
For about a year now, I have been addicted to podcasts, especially of the political kind. Even before moving to Spain eight years ago, one of my favorite activities was spending Sunday mornings watching Meet the Press and This Week. So when I finally discovered the Meet the Press videopost, I incorporated it into my Sunday lifestyle abroad as well.
Thanks to these podcasts I am incredibly well informed about the 2008 U.S. Presidential Elections and my obsession for the Obama campaign has been further enhanced. I even turned my girlfriend into a Meet the Press junkie, calling it “our show”. Having said this, it is then no surprise that we were incredibly surprised to hear the news yesterday of Tim Russert’s sudden death at the age of 58. Russert was an institution in Washington political news, having served as the host of Meet the Press since 1991. He also moderated numerous debates during this primary season. It almost breaks your heart to think that Russert won’t be able to witness the results of an election that he played a very active role in moderating. I know my Sundays won’t be the same.
Filed under Digressions, Essays
The Internet is now full of a bunch of silly and sometimes astounding allegations against Obama and his wife. In the primaries, Hillary tried to paint him every color imaginable. Now that he is up against the Republicans, we are hearing even more accusations of Obama being a radical, a racist, and worst of all, a Muslim?
To help defend himself against many of these absurd allegations, Obama has set up a Fight the Smears website. It reads,
What you won’t hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon — that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize. Because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first.
But as an American, especially one who has just been welcomed into a Muslim home, I am incredibly and painfully embarrassed about the whole anti-Obama, anti-Muslim campaign. Obama defended himself as being a Christian, but should have been bolder and braver. He should have said, “No, I am not a Muslim, but even if I were, this is the United States of America where it is not illegal to be a Muslim, just as it is not illegal to be Jewish, Christian, Hindu, or atheist. We cannot afford to lose our most precious values lest we risk reducing ourselves into an intolerant totalitarian nation.”
Honestly, how can we be so politically correct and politically careful all the time about every other class of people and on every issue, yet such raging Islamophobia gets a free pass?
As I have already discussed recently, people around the world are rooting for Obama. Obama’s candidacy and nomination has restored some of the faith in the United States by the citizens of the world.
In a recent op-ed piece for the Washington Post entitled “Whose Race Problem“, Anne Applebaum correctly speaks about Europe’s fascination with Obama and how many in the old continent are asking whether the U.S. is ready for a black president. But then she asks whether Europe and other countries are ready for the U.S. to have a black president. Having spent the last eight years living abroad and witnessing America’s moral authority go down the tubes, I think that she’s got it partly right.
There are two separate issues here. The first is what does an Obama victory mean for European politics and that of the rest of the world, and the second is why the world is so eager to see Obama victorious. Continue reading
Grave Error 