You Can Call Him A Deceptive, Self-Deluded Ideologue, but...

... it is way too polarizing to call Bush a liar.

The New Flag of Iraq?

Well, probably not. But still worth a dizzying look.

What Is This - A Divorce?

A short time ago, with the full backing of the Bush Administration, the United States Supreme Court declined to grant "standing" to Michael Newdow, who had sued to end the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance as redefined by Congress to include the phrase "... under God". Why? Because the girl's mother had full legal custody, and Newdow had only a limited form of legal custody.

Today, the New York Times announces, "Custody of Hussein Will Be Transferred to Iraq This Week". That is to say, "the new Iraqi government will take over legal custody of Saddam Hussein on Wednesday to start proceedings that will lead up to an open trial in the next few months." The Washington Post is more accurate in its headline, declaring "Iraq Takes Legal Custody of Hussein Wednesday".

This seems like a strange way of reporting that the Iraqis are being given nominal "custody" over Hussein, who will remain where he is - in a U.S. operated prison manned by U.S. guards. The rush to trial is a bit troubling to me, given that this new "sovereign" government was picked by us, and perhaps it would be best if we permitted Iraq's first elected government to decide the fate of its former tyrant. But then, an elected government might actually demand physical custody, and custody disputes are so messy....

A Fascination With Power

A while back, a friend of mine commented that (despite the pereceptions of the state at large) she does not view the community in which we live as being particularly "liberal". She expressed that, despite a significant population which espouses liberal ideals, many within that population are fascinated by, and deferential to, those in possession of wealth or positions of power.

I wonder to what degree that fascination, as a broader phenomenon, is responsible for the loss of ideals within the Democratic Party or, for that matter, Congress as a whole. It has been a almost seventy years since Mr. Smith went to Washington, yet if anything - despite the critical attention of a large percentage of Americans - the situation in Congress has worsened. A "Mr. Smith" in today's Washington would be eaten alive, perhaps even by his own party. Whatever slight refuge a "Mr. Smith" might find in the Senate, there would be no similar protection were he in the House of Representatives - and who would fund his reelection campaign?

We know the type of government we want. And for the most part we know the type of government we have. What type of government do we deserve?

Sentencing Guidelines

In a recent decision that is getting quite a bit of press, the Supreme Court changed the law in relation to which "facts" can be considered at sentencing. Specifically, it held that facts which had not been proved before a jury should not be used when establishing a defendant's sentence. The Washington Post expresses that:

The decision casts grave and unwarranted constitutional doubt on sentencing regimes around the country, including federal sentencing guidelines, that have been designed to make punishments more predictable and more evenly applied.

The Post laments that, as the dissenting Justices observed, this ruling will require some dramatic transformation in mandatory sentencing guidelines.

For many reform laws rely on factors found by judges and probation officers after conviction to guide prison time up or down. The results of forbidding this are perverse. Legislatures will either have to end the trend toward more predictable sentencing -- thereby injecting back into the justice system the unevenness and inequity that sentencing reform was meant to address -- or prosecutors will have to list every potential sentencing factor in their indictments. This latter option would mean that highly prejudicial material now kept from juries and considered only in sentencing hearings would be put before them.

The Washington Post, of course, misses a few key factors. First, as the vast majority of convictions result not from jury trials but from plea bargaining, the biggest difference in most cases would be that the prosecutor would have to do something more than convince a judge to weigh a factor against a defendant. The prosecutor would also have to convince the defendant to plead to a particular fact or forego the enhancement. Also, as much of the "prejudicial material" the Post now fears will reach juries would not be admissible at trial, preserving the status quo would at most mean a bifurcated process as exists in death penalty cases - a trial to determine guilt, and a penalty phase to determine punishment.

But in my experience, the largest point is that the guidelines tend not to increase "fairness". Instead, they lock the judge into issuing a sentence within a particular range (or jumping through a lot of hoops to avoid the guidelines, with a significant possibility of reversal on appeal), at the expense of judicial discretion. In some jurisdiction, the prosecutor's position on the sentencing factors has a greater impact on the sentence than the judge. Also, whatever "regional" fairness was ostensibly intended to result from sentencing guidelines, the urban defendant who used to get a shorter sentence because the court's docket was crowded and the county jail was full will now typically get a better charge bargain up front. The guy in the rural county, where the judge and prosecutor want to show that they are "tough on crime" and have greater time and manpower to devote to an individual prosecution, will still often get a significantly greater sentence, as no similar plea bargain will be offered.

But were sentencing guidelines ever truly about fairness to defendants? If that were ever a consideration, it seems that political considerations long ago rendered it distant to "being tough on crime". And if guidelines are rewritten such that a judge can only sentence based upon what a defendant admits or has been proved at trial, what's so bad about that?

When Darfur Rears Its Ugly Head....

... What does Brave Sir Bush do? In the context of Darfur, according to Nicholas Kristof, he won't say a word.

I don't want to be unfair to Bush, though. Where Kristof suggests that it would be ridiculous to invade Sudan to end the genocide in Darfur ("The U.S. is not going to invade Sudan. That's not a plausible option"), and suggest that we can use shame as our exclusive tool, via a speech by Bush at the United Nations - "Governments tend to be embarrassed about exterminating minorities." - Bush and his advisors probably see things a bit differently.

If Bush acknowledges a genocide, makes a high profile statement calling for its immediate end, and then nonetheless permits it to continue, he will risk demonstrating that the putative "Bush Doctrine" is dead in its tracks - how can you claim an interest in democratization, ending internal oppression, increasing regional stability, ending support for terrorism and eliminating its "breeding grounds", when you won't even respond to genocide in Sudan? And I think it is reasonable to believe in this context that words won't be enough. Everybody in the world who wants to know what is happening is already aware, to some degree, of the atrocities which are occurring in Sudan. That is to say, the world's political leaders and opinion shapers have already looked at the situation and have more or less decided to keep it under the radar screen.

While a Bush speech may wake up the American masses who may not yet have learned of Darfur (due primarily to the typically atrocious international news coverage offered by most U.S. media outlets), it seems unlikely to bring in pressure from the rest of the world. So if Bush successfully brings attention to the genocide, brings about a popular demand for ending the genocide, and nothing happens in response... what's the upside for him? (And with all due respect to those in Kristof's "words are enough" camp, I must have missed the historic genocides that were ended merely because a government, not to ashamed to slaughter its own people under the eyes of the world, was embarrassed by a speech given at the U.N.)

This is a solution?

Many years ago, griping from the music industry resulted in a fee, attached to any blank cassette tape, which is supposed to compensate the music industry for any illegal copies of their music. It doesn't matter if you want to record a business meeting, birds in your back yard, or even to tape yourself singing in the shower - you pay the fee. From time to time I have heard people use this as a rationalization for the bootleg copies they have made - they ask, "Why should it be illegal to do this, when I already paid the fee when I bought the tape?"

Now, in the New York Times, a Harvard law professor tells the music industry to consider getting with the times and, rather than suing people who download music and trying to avoid the new market for downloading, creating some form of blanket license for its recordings.

To its credit, the industry has started to participate in paid music download services like iTunes, but a better solution would be to institute a monthly licensing fee paid by Internet users.

So, beyond the blank tape where you are ostensibly paying a small fee to make up for somebody else's piracy, this professor suggests that it would be a fair compromise to declare that if you want Internet access you should pay a full license fee for all music.

Apparently this professor is not familiar with the copyright and licensing issues involved in music - where there can be many copyright owners for even a single song, based upon authorship, the participation of multiple artists, sampling, and other such considerations - which would cloud the issue of compensation. Or perhaps he only cares that the music conglomerates "get their money", and is less concerned about the artists. But no matter what he intends, if his licensing scheme were implemented and an Internet user were asked, "How much music will you download now that you are required to pay a full licensing fee just to access the Internet?", a fair answer would be, "All of it."

Why it seems like only yesterday....

... that the Bushies were attacking Clinton for his North Korea policy, in which he had offered aid in return for their promises to freeze their nuclear weapons program. So, of course, the Bush Administration has now come up with a completely different approach to the situation. [cough]

Oh, sure, this time they are required to ship their plutonium out of the country. And surely, given how truthful they were last time around, they will be very honest about their ability to produce additional plutonium, and how much weapons grade plutonium they have already refined.....

Something We May Never Get Right....

Today's Washington Post calls for reforms in the foster care system, noting, "On average, children entering foster care languish in the system for three years, shuttled through three different placements.". The Post suggests that this results in part from "a federal system that creates perverse financial incentives for states to place and leave children in foster care rather than preventing them from entering the system or enabling them to exit more quickly". The Post suggests permitting states to shift some federal money designated to foster care to other programs, such as family preservation services or adoption promotion and support, to make federal adoption assistance available to all children regardless of the incomes of their birth parents, or to provide financial assistance to legal guardians in addition to adoptive parents.

The ideas aren't bad, but the problem goes beyond money. The Post seems to assume that because the federal government adds money to certain programs, states are limited in their ability to fund other programs. There can be some truth to that with federal matching funds, but states have engaged in creative bookkeeping for years - and are rather adept at shifting money from one program (which receives considerable federal funds) to another (which does not).

The issue of "reforming foster care", or "reforming child protective law", comes up every few years. The difficult issues involved - protecting children, improving parental competence and working toward reunification, providing appropriate placements for children in foster care or with family members, resolving the clouds of uncertainty over the future of a child in foster care, arranging and achieving successful adoptions of children whose parents have had their parental rights terminated - get discussed. But nobody wants to commit the type of manpower and resources which would truly be necessary to effect significant change. So policies are shifted, budgets are adjusted, and most things go on as before.

The Post probably views its position as "realistic" - suggesting that our political leaders play around with the money presently in the program, rather than calling upon them to commit new funds and resources - but that "realism" perhaps also reflects why things aren't likely to change.

Shattering All Our American Illusions

A couple of days ago, the London Guardian challenged us as to whether we really want honest politicians. Now it asks us whether democracy is overrated, concluding,

Perhaps these developments point to a deeper problem incipient in western democracies. Far from the free market and democracy enjoying the kind of harmonious relationship beloved of western propaganda, democracy grew in fact as a constraint on the market, holding it at bay and enabling a pluralism of values and imperatives. What happens when this healthy tension becomes a dangerous imbalance, in which the market is dominant and consumerism is established as the overriding ethos of society, permeating politics just as it has invaded every other nook and cranny of society? Democracy comes under siege. In Italy it is already gasping for breath. In the US it is deeply and increasingly flawed. Democracy is neither a platitude nor an eternal verity - either for the world or for the west.

Calling Chicken Little

Big news from the Heritage Foundation - "The liberals seek to tear our nation apart." Yup. You heard that right. According to President Ed Feulner:

While our troops wage war against terrorists, we conservatives are in a battle of our own – a fight against liberal extremists right here at home.

These extremists are working to undermine the war on terrorism and destroy America’s reputation and credibility around the world.

They seek to destroy the bedrock values of marriage, family and freedom that are the very foundation of our country.

The liberals’ weapons? Activist judges who rewrite laws from the bench. Domination of the main stream news media and entertainment industry. Unprecedented power over America’s classrooms and universities.

The liberal extremists will stop at nothing to attack America’s founding principles and weaken America’s sovereignty.

[Insert eyeroll here.]

Better to be Liked than Trusted?

In a rather odd editorial in the Guardian, it is suggested that in politics, trust is an exaggerated commodity. The author suggests,

But this trust is anyway a worthless commodity. Its manifest lack didn't wreck Lloyd George or SuperMac or the wizard called Wilson. Nobody gave it to Bill Clinton (though he was more poll popular when he left office than Ronald Reagan). Nobody in full sentience would dream of trusting Charlie Kennedy to tell the same story in Aberdeen and Penzance - or Michael Howard to explain why he sacked the head of the prison service. Too much ado about synthetic sincerity.

I recall in GW's election campaign, how campaign analysts were gushing over his nonsense line to the voters, "I trust you". Voters, they declared, were too cynical to trust a politician who said "trust me", but GW's pretense that he trusted the voters supposedly inspired us to trust him despite our cynicism. Since that time, of course, he's run one of the least trusting, most closed and most secretive administrations in U.S. history.

So is the lesson here that it is better to be liked than trusted in politics? We'll support politicians whom we don't trust, as long as we like them? "Al Gore, I'd trust to manage my retirement account, but I would rather guzzle beer with Clinton or GW." Or is it that we compartmentalize our trust - we didn't trust Clinton to tell us the time of day, but we trusted that he was nonetheless working for the betterment of the nation. That's a different sort of trust, after all, than a consistent expectation of the unvarnished truth, or the expectation of candor regarding extramarital exploits.

We want our political leaders to tell the truth...

But will we let them? The Guardian suggests that, as a whole, we won't:

And so, in the eighth year of [Prime Minister Blair's] premiership, this legendary truth-teller was asked whether he agreed with the warning against mortgages given by Britain's leading banker. The reply was utterly standard Westminster dead-bat: not sure he actually said that, need to look at what the words actually were, important not to take out of context, and so on.

For anyone who remembers Blair as a young politician, trying, at least within the limits of Westminster and journalistic conviction, to be candid, this was a distressing sight. The idea that all politicians are liars is a cheap jibe promoted by those who dislike politics, but there is actually a deeper truth in it. A culture has evolved in which our leaders must evade and paraphrase to their voters, keeping the truth for the ghost-writers.

Taking Responsibility

Steve Bell, whose dislike for the Bush Administration is quite patent in much of his work, addresses the issue of responsibility:

While Bell's stridency can be a bit off-putting, it nonetheless remains that the Bush Administration has a horrendous record of taking responsibility for anything. The closest we have is Rumsfeld's meaningless "It's my responsibility - just don't ask me to accept any consequence" over abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Bush Administration: We don't really care about malpractice, victims, but....

... we do want to avoid bad press when we limit their access to the courts.

Going Nuclear Over Iran, Revisited

A few months ago, I wrote what I thought was pretty obvious (so no pats on the back for my prescience):

While Iran, which is high on the Bush Administration's list for "preventive" intervention, probably does fear military consequence, it is no doubt aware that the U.S. military is in no position to simultaneously occupy both Iraq and Iran. I fully expect it to exploit that fact, and to attempt to complete its nuclear weapons program under the noses of the IAEA inspectors, such that it can be relatively certain of deterring any future U.S. invasion.

If you have been following the news lately, it has become apparent that pretty much every promise Iran made about its nuclear program, and how it was peaceful and intended only for electricity, was false. Now, according to Jim Hoagland, diplomats are hoping for a resolution that might prevent Iran from assembling the pieces of its atomic arsenal, such that it only lacks nuclear weapons in the most technical of senses:

Agreeing to live with an Iran that is a screwdriver's turn away from the bomb would be a bitter pill to swallow. It would accommodate a charter member of President Bush's "axis of evil" and a sworn mortal enemy of Israel. And it would undermine the goals and terms of global nonproliferation agreements that aim at halting the spread of nuclear weapons technologies to nations that do not now possess them.

Hoagland compares this situation to Pakistan, which delayed assembling and testing its nuclear arsenal for almost ten years, at which time "exploded its first device nine years later to respond to India's nuclear testing".

Personally, I don't think that Iran will forestall assembly for a decade. I think that at best Iran will delay assembly to ensure that no military strike against its nuclear facilities is imminent, and possibly until it is relatively sure that its nuclear devices can be adequately delivered by its missiles, and then to assemble, test, and declare itself a nuclear power. I won't be patting myself on the back for that prediction, either, should it become true - I think that the hope that Iran can be convinced to abandon, scale back, or delay its nuclear weapons development in any real sense is mere wishful thinking.

White House Press Briefings... By Maxwell Smart

Would you believe,

Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was told in 2002 that Cheney's former company would receive no-bid work to secretly plan restoration of Iraq's oil facilities, but the information wasn't given to the vice president, a White House official said Tuesday.

Well then, would you believe

Q Can I ask about Vice President Cheney, because yesterday he repeated what is a very controversial claim. He said that Saddam Hussein had long-established ties with al Qaeda. Does the President believe that Saddam Hussein had long-established ties with al Qaeda?

MR. McCLELLAN: We certainly talked about the ties with terrorism between the -- between the regime that was removed from power, and we talked about those ties prior to the decision to remove that regime from power. So that was well-documented. Secretary Powell went before the United Nations and talked about some of those ties to terrorism, as well. And Zarqawi is certainly a senior al Qaeda associate who was in Iraq prior to the decision to go in and remove the regime from power.

Q There's also al Qaeda in the United States. That does not mean the United States is cooperating with those members of al Qaeda. Just by the presence of someone does not mean there's a cooperation.

MR. McCLELLAN: But, remember, we're talking about an oppressive regime that was in power in Iraq that exercised control over that country. And go back and look at what we documented, Norah. We documented all this, and I think that's what the Vice President was referring to.

No? Just because the President and Prime Minister Blair disclaim any such connection, and because the 9/11 commission finds no such connection?

What sort of CONTROL Agent are you?

Recording Interrogations

I once heard a police polygraph examiner speak, and he waxed poetically about the wonders of his machine and his tremendous skill in discerning the truth from a lie. (Nobody believes in the validity of a polygraph machine more than a polygraph examiner.) He went on to explain how he reviews the entire police case file, to form an opinion as to a suspect's guilt or innocence, before he administers the test - a peculiar way to prejudice the results if he in fact truly believes in the machine.

The examiner's most infamous case involved a confession elicited after an extended interrogation which culminated in a polygraph test. The Court of Appeals reviewed a videotape of the suspect's confession, and found him to be sleep and food deprived, and at the point of exhaustion. His confession was suppressed, and the prosecution had to proceed without it. He was ultimately convicted. (The videotape might have backfired on the prosecution had the Court of Appeals allowed the confession to be used, as a jury might have had questions about the tactics of a police agency which would interrogate a suspect in that condition.)

The polygrapher's police agency created a new policy to ensure that this wouldn't happen again. Allowing suspects to rest during marathon interrogations? Ensuring that adequate food was supplied to suspects at appropriate intervals? Hardly. They ordered that no further polygraph examinations would be videotaped. End of problem.

There have been some troubling "false confession" cases, such as the New Baltimore, Michigan teens who falsely confessed to a murder plainly committed by others. The prosecutor in that case insisted that the teens, who were separately interrogated and who separately confessed, knew things about the crime scene that only the offenders would know. Yet it has since become plain that the source of that information was the police during the interrogation.

There are also many cases involving police incompetence or misconduct, where police officers either misreport what a suspect has said (often when "condensing" an interview that took place over several hours into a paragraph or two for a police report, before destroying their notes from the actual interview), or deliberate misconduct. It is difficult to tell whether the two boys, aged 7 and 8, who allegedly confessed to murdering an 11-year-old girl in New York City were the victims of police incompetence or deliberate misconduct, but it is apparent that the police frequently fail to follow appropriate protocols when interviewing minors.

The New Yorker presented a detailed analysis of that case, and found one of the boys to have a learning disability which made it difficult for him to articulate even a single sentence - yet he supposedly had provided an extremely articulate, detailed narrative of the murder. Unlikely? To say the least. The worst aspect of that case is that the false accusations against the boys destroyed the opportunity to convict the probable offender - a man whose semen was found on the dead girl's underwear.

Today's New York Times editorializes in favor of recording all police interrogations, noting "Now a new study has found that in the small number of jurisdictions that record their interrogations, law enforcement has come to favor it." That's not difficult to believe - like the Miranda ruling, rules which effectively compel the police to engage in better, more professional practices make it more likely that a confession will be admitted into evidence, and more likely that it will be believed by a jury. Recording would also make it more difficult for a suspect to change or finesse his story. There's nothing wrong with that.

Sidestepping? That's an understatement....

The Supreme Court "sidesteps" the Pledge question? Year after year after year, thousands of people petition the United States Supreme Court for redress of grievances. The Supreme Court entertains a very small number of cases, ostensibly those which raise the most significant issues of constitutional law:

Every year, the Supreme Court hears about 100 cases (in recent years, that number has dwindled down to about 90 cases per year). This is only a small fraction of the many cases (about 7,000 a year) filed before it.

The issue of "standing", whether or not an individual has the right to commence a particular lawsuit, is a pedestrian issue.

So when the United States Supreme Court takes a matter that many of the people in this nation perceive as of great import - whether they detest or support the lower court decision - and then vacates it on a technicality without addressing the constitutional questions, there is good cause to ask, "What's really going on?" Were they really convinced by the "lack of standing" argument - or did they regret taking a contentious case, and scramble for any way out which would let them avoid upholding an unpopular lower court ruling?

Perish the Thought!

Commenting on a failed British effort to get greater voter turnout with mail-in ballots, the Guardian notes that problems with voter fraud arose without any significant upturn in voting. (There was an increase in votes cast within test areas, but a similar increase occurred in other areas.) They suggest a different reason for low voter turnout than persistent claims of voter apathy:

Yet, according to a four-year study of the reasons behind falling turnout made by the Constitution Unit, people are not turned off politics, as politicians like to believe. Young people in particular remain full of idealism. It isn't politics that is at fault, it is the politicians. Voters trust them less than ever. And, says the Constitution Unit, trust is the most important element in political engagement - trust that politicians will keep their promises, and trust that they will behave with propriety.