http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Sun, 25 Mar 2007 13:37:14 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/03/25/133714.php Mark KleimanMy friends Phil Cook (economics and public policy, Duke) and Peter Reuter (public policy and criminology, Maryland) have a very nice essay forthcoming in the journal Addiction, under the provocative title, "When is alcohol just another drug? Some thoughts on research and policy." It addresses the question of why, when people talk about abusable drugs, they aren't usually thinking of alcohol, and makes a strong case for considering alcohol and controlled substances together as a research topic - taking clues from alcohol policies and problems about the likely consequences of legalizing cannabis.The editors were so pleased by the essay they asked other people to write short commentaries. This is generally understood as an invitation to bloviate at will, and in any case I had nothing much to add to the Cook and Reuter thesis, which is solid, important, and tightly argued. Instead, I indulged in a little bit of cultural and media criticism. The issue of Addiction containing this material won't appear until June or July, but the editors have kindly permitted me to post my musings here, in the hopes that some readers will be motivated to look up the underlying paper when it appears. It should go without saying that neither Cook nor Reuter bears any responsibility for what appears below.If you have substantive suggestions or literary corrections to offer (in the comments section below), I still have time to make revisions. Alcohol as a Drug: A Moral Revolution"In terms of its effects on the human body and psyche, alcohol is simply another psychoactive substance." This sentence, with which Cook and Reuter begin their very able essay, embodies a proposition that will be taken as a truism by most readers of this journal, but would be regarded as a fallacy, an outrage, and an insult by many, if not most, ordinary citizens.Why is that claim controversial, and why does the rejection of that claim matter?It is controversial, I would submit, because the mood in which the public, its elected representatives, and their appointed officials consider drugs, drug-taking, and drug policy has little to do with the calm, evidence-based, policy-analytic tone taken by Cook and Reuter. The two scholars do not recite, because they do not believe, the basic credo underlying the international drug control regime, as well as the drug policies of most countries: outside a strictly medical context, drugs are fundamentally evil, drug-taking is both harmful and morally culpable, and drug-takers require some mixture of treatment and punishment. It is this credo that is threatened by any attempt to treat alcohol as a drug.By contrast with any of the controlled drugs, alcohol use is neither statistically nor legally deviant. In particular, those who discuss drug policy (outside Islamic societies) have no obligation to pretend they themselves are -- nor any right to assume that their audiences are -- abstinent from alcohol. Thus courtesy forbids even those who themselves do not drink and disapprove of drinking from referring to alcohol users generically as "drunkards" or "degenerates" or "slaves of the Demon Rum." Problems with alcohol must therefore be treated, in Abraham Lincoln's formulation, as "the abuse of a good thing," not "the use of a bad thing." If alcohol is a drug, then drug use is normal, and not all drug use is abuse. That undercuts the entire project of stigmatization underlying much of what passes for drug abuse prevention. If smoking cannabis, snorting cocaine, swallowing MDMA (ecstasy), or even injecting heroin are not different in principle from having a glass of wine, then the moral basis for treating cannabis-smokers, cocaine-snorters, rave-goers, and heroin-injectors as carriers of a deadly plague is called into question, and even suppliers of those drugs might be seen as regulatory violators rather than hostes humani generic (enemies of humankind), the modern incarnation of a legal category that used to cover pirates and slave-traders. Conversely, labeling alcohol a "drug," given the nasty connotations that word has been so carefully given, calls into question the presumptive innocence and innocuousness of drinking by responsible, non-alcoholic adults, and of the industry that supplies them, as it also supplies children, alcoholics, and those who become violent and imprudent under the influence of drink. To the analytically minded it seems perverse that the one-eighth or so of diagnosable substance abuse disorder (other than nicotine dependency) that relates to the controlled drugs should receive much more attention (whether measured by rhetoric or control resources) than the seven-eighths in which the problem substance is alcohol. Back when the United States Office of National Drug Control Policy (the "drug czar's" office) was new, I had a conversation with someone who was then a staffer and is now a senior official. When I suggested the office ought to include alcohol among its targets, he fairly snarled, "Don't change the subject!" Someone of a psychodynamic or cultural-critical turn of mind might be inclined to turn that response around and consider the current social and political formulation of the drug problem as a massive displacement mechanism, an effort to "change the subject" from the one drug that claims the majority of the addicts and accounts for the vast bulk of drug-related deaths and drug-related violence.What Cook and Reuter propose is nothing less than a moral revolution. If current attitudes overstate the evils of drugs and understate those of alcohol, if current policies are excessively harsh on drug users and dealers excessively loose about the use and supply of alcoholic beverages, then that revolution might bring both sets of policies closer to their respective optima. To the vast majority whose views the current laws reflect, treating alcohol as a drug would be not only an instance of moral confusion, but also an invitation to policies both unduly lenient toward wrongdoing and unduly meddlesome about normal, innocent pleasures and comforts. That the proposed revolution reflects a scientific consensus would be, to that majority, at best a cold comfort. Sci/Tech60931@blogcritics.org Sun, 25 Mar 2007 13:37:14 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/03/23/183720.php Mark KleimanThe White House is making it increasingly clear that Scooter Libby will be pardoned if he doesn't manage to beat the rap on a technicality. After all, what's a little bit of perjury and obstruction of justice among friends? Democrats, on the other hand, along with those Republicans still committed to the rule of law (all four of them), are exercising their outrage muscles in anticipation. They ought to do more. So far, Congressional Democrats have shown they know how to use the power of investigation. Now it's time to use the power of the purse, and in particular that Swiss Army Knife of legislation-in-opposition, the "no funds" rider on an appropriations bill: "No funds appropriated in this or any other bill shall be used for the purpose of ..."Nothing can be done without money. Even an action with no direct budgetary implications still requires someone to do something. So it's a crime (a violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act) for any federal employee to perform an official task forbidden by a "no funds" rider. (There's a specific provision that forbids anyone on the Federal payroll from "volunteering" his or her services, which is why non-emergency employees aren't allowed to come to work in a funding shutdown such as the one Newt Gingrich engineered under Clinton.)Now the Presidential power to pardon is in the Constitution and is unfettered. So I don't believe that the Congress could Constitutionally forbid the President from issuing a pardon. But Congress could in effect require that he write it out in his own handwriting, by forbidding any other federal employee to help him.I had previously suggested that such a ban be placed on pardons for Presidential appointees and other "politicals": members of the non-career Senior Executive Service and those hired under Schedule C. That still seems to me a sound principle. But if the goal is to denounce a Libby pardon in advance, there's a much simpler approach. The Pardon Attorney's office in the Justice Department has a set of guidelines, one of which provides that:No petition for pardon should be filed until the expiration of a waiting period of at least five years after the date of the release of the petitioner from confinement or, in case no prison sentence was imposed, until the expiration of a period of at least five years after the date of the conviction of the petitioner. Generally, no petition should be submitted by a person who is on probation, parole, or supervised release.So all the Congress needs to do is write that published guideline into law: "No funds appropriated in this or any other bill shall be used to receive or process a petition for pardon, or to issue or prepare to issue a pardon, for any offense of which the person to be pardoned has been convicted within the previous five years."Would this ensure that Libby will serve the sentence Judge Walton finally imposes on him? No. Libby's lawyers could write up a pardon proclamation and hand-carry it to Mr. Bush (his secretaries would be barred from so much as opening the envelope and handing the President the contents). But it would put the Congress firmly on record behind a sound policy already embodied in regulation. If the rider were attached to the appropriation for the Executive Office of the President, Mr. Bush wouldn't have much choice but to sign, or to force a shutdown of his own office in defense of the principle that perjury isn't actually a crime.Update My friend the Super-Smart Criminal Appellate Lawyer disagrees. On Constitutional grounds, he doubts the Congress can use "no-funds" to take away one of the President's explicitly-granted powers. On policy grounds, he thinks we need more clemency, not less, and regards the five-year rule as unreasonable, especially in cases of actual innocence.Politically, I think there's something to be said for making GWB stick to his own published guidelines. But I agree that the substantive rule ought to be "no Plum Book appointee."Constitutionally, my friend may be right as a matter of Supreme Court doctrine. But if the Constitution means what the framers meant, then I doubt it. The framers were Whigs. The whole history of Whiggery was using the power of the purse and the statute book to rein in the King's use of what no one denied were his prerogative powers. In particular, by making it impossible for the king to act except through his ministers, refusing to vote taxes except on conditions ("grievances before supply"), and making the ministers criminally responsible for any bad use of the King's undoubted powers, the Whigs slowly transformed the United Kingdom from a monarchy with some ill-defined legal limits and a Parliament whose only unshared power was voting taxes to a republic with a ceremonial hereditary head of state.I wouldn't have wanted to tell Madison, or even Hamilton, that under the document they'd written the Congress had less power to check the President than the Parliament had to check the British monarch. The main point here, of course, is party-political. The Democrats want to go into 2008 chanting "No amnesty," and they want to make the Republicans defend the principle of letting criminals get away with it if they're well connected. In war and politics, take the high ground. Politics60927@blogcritics.org Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:37:20 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/03/21/170356.php Mark KleimanKevin Drum has the one thing public policy and management professors most want their students to develop: the capacity to think about public problems concretely rather than through the lens of slogans. Having supervised and fired people, he asks a reasonable question: If we make it easier for principals to fire teachers, will they have enough information to be able to fire the right ones? After all, teachers do most of their work out of the sight of other grown-ups, and there aren't really good, accurate, real-time measures of teaching performance.He's right to be concerned. There's a non-trivial risk that some principals will fire teachers for reasons other than classroom performance. One the other hand, there are teachers whose performance is transparently substandard, people who have retired in place.Here's a partial fix for that: when a principal bounces a teacher, the teacher should have the right to transfer to any other school in the district with an opening. If bounced a second time, the teacher should still be able to transfer to any school with an opening and whose principal will accept the transfer. Getting rid of a teacher should be made somewhat painful for the principal by always replacing a fired teacher with a rookie. If a teacher bounces twice and can't find a new home, there's a reasonable probability that the world is being deprived of a shoe-store clerk. Yes, it's possible, especially in a small district, that a perfectly good teacher could be victimized by an old-boys' network among principals. You'd want to figure out a way to prevent a superintendent or School Board member from pressuring a principal to fire a teacher for being a "troublemaker," but there's no perfect system anywhere. The existing problem of retired-in-place teachers is bad enough to warrant fixing, even at some cost in fairness. That discussion leaves out what seems to me the most important fact. For current wages, and under current working conditions, there's no ready supply of good teachers to replace those who would be fired if we made firing teachers easier. The California Basic Educational Standards Test (C-BEST), required to receive a California teaching credential, requires a tenth-grade reading score. California is so short of teachers it has to give emergency credentials to some applicants who flunked the C-BEST. Part of the problem there is that pay-by-seniority means teaching isn't competitive for the services of fifty-something and sixty-something professionals who want to or have to leave their current jobs but aren't ready to retire. They'd wind up getting paid the pittance kids fresh out of school get paid.Most teachers burn out. Teacher performance, on the crude measures we have, improves for about the first ten years, plateaus, and then declines on average after fifteen years on the job. A sensible design for a school system would encourage people to teach for a spell, but not for a lifetime. We do that with police work and the military, with generous pensions payable after twenty years' service.The brute fact is that we're not currently paying teachers enough to attract an adequate number of high-quality teachers. The only way to fix this is by raising wages for the kind of people we want to attract. Without that, making firing easier is mostly a matter of rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship. It's still worth doing for the incentive effect -- you can't really hold a principal accountable for the performance of an organization whose composition he or she can't change -- but to divorce that discussion from the salary problem makes sense only if your goal is union-bashing rather than educational improvement. Culture60930@blogcritics.org Wed, 21 Mar 2007 17:03:56 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/01/26/001317.php Mark KleimanA string of residential drug treatment programs for juveniles based on the "tough love" principle has been abusing children -- and occasionally killing them -- for three decades now. Some of them have been moved off-shore, and beyond the reach of U.S. regulators, after the authorities here got wind of what was going on. (It won't surprise you to know that many of the program operators have strong Republican connections. Mel Sembler, for example, founder of the notorious Straight, Inc., is a major Republican fundraiser and was GWB's ambassador to Rome; his wife Betty chaired Jeb Bush's gubernatorial campaign.) Maia Szalavitz, a careful, thoughtful, and completely relentless reporter, has been sending a little bit of "tough love" back at those programs for some time now. Their operators must have been dreading her new book, Help at Any Cost, which has an official publication date next month but is already available for pre-order. I've read it in galleys, and it's a truly devastating document. Not a fun read: Szalavitz's unadorned prose focuses unsparingly on the suffering of the victims, and the perpetrators, like the Semblers, mostly get away with their crimes, so there isn't even the grim satisfaction of seeing the bad guys eventually take a fall. The early reviews, such as this one from the on-line version of Library Journal are favorable. Without a major publisher behind it and with some powerful people threatened by it -- according to Radley Balko, Straight, Inc. bullied Fox News into pulling his expose column on the program -- a book like this risks going unnoticed. Pre-orders on Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com are now crucial in determining booksellers' decisions about what books to carry. So if you're inclined to read this -- or to send it to your favorite public official or journalist -- I'd encourage you to order now. Culture42715@blogcritics.org Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:13:17 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/04/174841.php Mark KleimanMore bad news for Rove, Libby, et al.: Lawrence Franklin has agreed to plead guilty to leaking classified information to two AIPAC staff members. Why do say that's bad news for the folks who outed Valerie Plame Wilson? Because Franklin was indicted under the Espionage Act (specifically 18 U.S.C. 793 (d)) for giving classified information to those not eligible to receive it, including members of the media. No money involved, no intelligence identities. And yet Franklin is pleading out. Looks to me as if the Espionage Act is still alive, and as if it applies squarely to the facts of the Plame case. The maximum sentence, by the way, is 10 years, and the guidelines call for 87-108 months. We may need some modifications to the Espionage Act. As written, it goes too far in shutting the mouths of those who know information that, while classified, can in fact be revealed without damage to the national security and which the public has a need to know. I'd favor adding an element of actual damage to the national security to the offense. But in the Plame case, that test is easily met. Politics37408@blogcritics.org Tue, 4 Oct 2005 17:48:41 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/04/174325.php Mark KleimanJim VandeHei and Walter Pincus report that lawyers close to the Valerie Plame investigation (identified as lawyers for witnesses, but presumably those would be potential defendants) say that Patrick Fitzgerald is pointing toward conspiracy charges."Many lawyers in the case have been skeptical that Fitzgerald has the evidence to prove a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which is the complicated crime he first set out to investigate, and which requires showing that government officials knew an operative had covert status and intentionally leaked the operative's identity. But a new theory about Fitzgerald's aim has emerged in recent weeks from two lawyers who have had extensive conversations with the prosecutor while representing witnesses in the case. They surmise that Fitzgerald is considering whether he can bring charges of a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by a group of senior Bush administration officials. Under this legal tactic, Fitzgerald would attempt to establish that at least two or more officials agreed to take affirmative steps to discredit and retaliate against Wilson and leak sensitive government information about his wife. To prove a criminal conspiracy, the actions need not have been criminal, but conspirators must have had a criminal purpose."Note first that everything VandeHei and Pincus report about conspiracy is from defense lawyers. They may be spinning, and Fitzgerald may not be showing all his cards. I'm not sure where VandeHei and Pincus get the idea that the Intelligence Identities Protection Act is the crime Fitzgerald "set out to investigate." He set out, as I recall, to investigate what crimes might have been committed in the course of unmasking Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as a CIA operative who once worked under Non-Official Cover. The potential defendants and their friends in the White House and the conservative media have been working hard to keep everyone focused on the hard-to-violate IIPA rather than the easier-to-violate Espionage Act. The second paragraph quoted above seems to me somewhat confusing about the meaning of "conspiracy" as a criminal charge. A "criminal purpose" means either the purpose to do something forbidden by some substantive criminal law or an "attempt to defraud the United States."Here's the full text of the relevant statute, 18 U.S.C. 371 Section 371. Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud United States "If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.If, however, the offense, the commission of which is the object of the conspiracy, is a misdemeanor only, the punishment for such conspiracy shall not exceed the maximum punishment provided for such misdemeanor."So "conspiracy" isn't a free-standing charge. It has to be a conspiracy to do something, where "something" names a specific crime. That crime might be a violation of the IIPA, or the Espionage Act, or the false statements law (18 U.S.C. 1001), or obtruction of justice. The only act specifically criminalized under 371 is a conspiracy to defraud the United States, but I'm not sure I see how that would apply here. The point of a conspiracy charge is to be able to bring in people who can't be shown to have done anything except conspire, and to be able to make a case even where the underlying offense was never completed. So I wouldn't be surprised to see, e.g., Libby charged under the Espionage Act and Rove charged as a co-conspirator under 371. But I'd bet on a substantive criminal charge against someone. I keep coming back to Judge Hogan's remarks [Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F.] Hogan said Miller was mistaken in her belief that she was defending a free press. He stressed that the government source she "alleges she is protecting" had already waived her promise of confidentiality. He said her source may have been providing information not to shed light on government secrets but to try to discredit an administration critic."This is not a case of a whistle-blower" revealing secret information to Miller about "dangers at a nuclear power plant," Hogan said. "It's a case in which the information she was given and her potential use of it was a crime. . . . This is very different than a whistle-blower outing government misconduct." " ...the information she was given and her potential use of it was a crime ..." What crime? Not perjury or obstruction of justice, since this was before the investigation. Not the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which wouldn't have covered Miller's use of the information. The only law I can think of that fits Judge Hogan's description is the Espionage Act. Now maybe Fitzgerald can't prove an Espionage Act case, and will therefore either write a report and fold his tents quietly or try to charge various people with ancillary offenses: perjury, obstruction of justice, or conspiracy to obstruct justice. Politics37407@blogcritics.org Tue, 4 Oct 2005 17:43:25 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/08/25/145416.php Mark KleimanI'm delighted that the New York Times finally has a columnist wiling to point out the idiocies of the drug war. Too bad he's such a sucker for the idiocies of the extreme libertarian fringe of the anti-prohibition movement. One of the great drug-war follies is to pretend that drugs such as cannabis and MDMA are as dangerous as heroin (or its close substitute, pure oxycodone), smokable cocaine (including crack), and methamphetamine. It would be useful if John Tierney used his platform on the op-ed page of the New York Times to make that point, and the related point that alcohol is, at a pharmacological level, much more dangerous than many currently illicit drugs.Instead, Tierney seems to be intent on pretending that some of the really dangerous drugs are in fact no big deal. Last time, Tierney massaged a bunch of statistics he clearly didn't understand to "prove" that Oxycontin abuse is not really a significant problem. Today it's methamphetamine's turn to get a coat of the Tierney whitewash. Tierney cites the low ratio of meth addicts to lifetime meth users in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health as evidence that meth isn't very addictive. But everyone in the field knows that the aptly named NS-DUH misses the majority of problem drug users. For example: In 1989, the NS-DUH -- then called the NHSDA -- estimated that there were 500,000 people in the United States who used cocaine or crack weekly or more. But the arrestee drug testing data showed that three to four times that number of heavy cocaine users were arrested that year. A projection of the NHSDA frequency estimates suggested that total cocaine consumption in the US was about 30 metric tons a year, though it wasn't hard to see from the level of activity in the market that the real number had to be about 10 times that large.When you reflect that heavy illicit drug users make up about 2% of the adult population, while the nonresponse rate in the household drug surveys runs about 20%, it's easy to see how a big chunk of the drug users might be in the group that couldn't be found or decided not to tell the nice man from the government's contractor about their illegal activity. (For a devastating critique of the national drug data collection effort, see this National Academy panel report.) NS-DUH is useful for some purposes, but measuring chronic serious drug abuse, as opposed to drug use, isn't one of them.Moreover, lots of students take amphetamine or methamphetamine occasionally to study for exams or write papers, and most of them don't enjoy it much. That bulks up the denominator of the addict-to-total-user ratio with people who never use the amphetamines recreationally. Contrary to Tierney's assertion, the demon-drug status of meth isn't new. Back in the late 1970s, in the argument about how risky cocaine was, the hawks used to argue that cocaine might possibly be nearly as dangerous as meth (As it turned out, the hawks were mostly wrong about snorting cocaine powder, but turned out to be right about smoking crack or freebase.) That meth and heroin were more or less the gold standards for drug dangerousness wasn't even controversial: everyone knew meth as the drug that spoiled the "Summer of Love." (It wasn't the drug warriors who put up those "Speed Kills" posters; it was the hippie Deadhead docs at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics.) Meth was known to be much more toxic than heroin (all this was more or less pre-AIDS), but heroin generated a much more persistent addiction, partly because it wasn't nearly as rough on the body.I have never heard anyone who knows anything about drug abuse assert that methamphetamine -- snorted, smoked, or injected not under medical supervision -- is anything but an insanely vicious drug of abuse. As a snorted/smoked/injected drug, meth is highly addictive (which means a conversion rate of somewhere between a fifth and a third of those who try it more than casually) and highly toxic to lots of organs, including the brain. A couple of years' steady use of meth leaves marked and lasting cognitive deficits, which is not true for any other recreational drug, including even alcohol. That's entirely consistent with the fact that oral methamphetamine, used under medical supervision, is a reasonably safe and highly useful drug for nacolepsy, ADHD, and increased alertness for people who absolutely must stay alert for long hours, such as combat pilots. (Tierney quotes Jacob Sullum to the effect that he'd rather be on the road with a truck driver using meth than with one who is tired. That omits the possibility that the driver on meth is also tired, having used it precisely to cut down on his sleep time. Tired and edgy is a bad combination. And even that leaves out of account what happens to a truck driver who uses meth steadily for months or years.)Yet Tierney reaches deep into his top hat and pulls out the proposition that methamphetamine is less dangerous than alcohol. Of course, meth does less total damage, because alcohol is so widely used. But if Tierney means what he seems to mean -- that starting the recreational use of methamphetamine is less risky than starting to drink -- he is simply wrong, and I challenge him to find a single competent phamacologist (a class to which, despite his manifold virtues, Jacob Sullum does not belong) who agrees with him. Just as someone needs to tell the drug warriors that not all illicit drugs are equally dangerous, someone needs to tell the extreme libertarians that not all illicit drugs are equally safe. Some illegal drugs are actually quite nasty. And anything that makes it harder for policy-makers and drug users to accurately distinguish degrees of risk makes the drug abuse problem worse. The true-believing drug warriors such as Bill Bennett love opponents like Tierney. By making dumb mistakes and utterly far-fetched arguments, he discredits not only himself but those of us who know more than he does, hold less extreme views, and would like to see some progress toward sanity on drug abuse control before we're all too old to care.Ed:LM Politics34806@blogcritics.org Thu, 25 Aug 2005 14:54:16 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/08/25/144658.php Mark KleimanPat Robertson has an interesting idea about how to handle public figures he disapproves of: Robertson proposes murdering Hugo Chavez, and he somehow seems to think the Monroe Doctrine means that would be OK. Of course, turnabout is fair play. If Robertson is trying to arrange to have Chavez rubbed out, maybe Chavez ought to move first. Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six, and all that.I strongly disapprove of political murder, but the day Chavez and Robertson both die will be a pretty good day for the cause of civilization. Footnote: Has someone mentioned to Robertson that "Thou shalt not kill" is one of the Ten Commandments? Even under the more literal translation "Thou shalt not slaughter" or "Thou shalt not murder," which would allow for killing in self-defense and in warfare, political assassination would seem to be clearly over the line.Ed:LM Politics34805@blogcritics.org Thu, 25 Aug 2005 14:46:58 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/08/25/144236.php Mark KleimanJodi Wilgoren has a truly chilling account in Sunday's New York Times of the Discovery Institute, which is leading the current anti-evolution crusade. The piece includes discussion of the Institute's "Wedge Document", which proposes a twenty-year campaign to overthrow the scientific worldview. Discovery's PR firm is the one that pushed the Contract with America. Discovery's funding sources include the standard array of Clinton-haters such as Ahmanson, Scaife, but also the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Verizon Foundation. Naturally, Bill Bennett, who used to call himself a Kantian philosopher, has his pictures all over the walls. No one can deny that Discovery is making rapid -- well, it would be silly to say "rapid progress" in this context, so perhaps I should say "rapid regress." Sen. Dr. Frist's declaration in favor of teaching "intelligent design" as if it were a theory rather than a lunacy demonstrates that no one can hope to lead God's Own Party without kowtowing to the creationist mob. I keep hoping that intelligent conservatives and libertarians will eventually notice, and be repulsed by, the interlocking directorates between the Bushite Party and the lunatic fringe that wants to repeal the Enlightenment. But it's hard to live on hope. Give me a little help here, fellas!Ed:LM Politics34804@blogcritics.org Thu, 25 Aug 2005 14:42:36 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/08/25/143613.php Mark KleimanSo the U.S. ambassador to Iraq is actively pushing secular Iraqis, and in particular the Kurdish leadership, to accept a more-theocratic rather than a less-theocratic constitution, one that will subject family matters to clerical jurisdiction and provide that no law can be made contrary to the "fixed principles" of Shari'a. (Scroll down about 2/3 of the way for the details.) It would be easy, but false, to sneer about the Bush Administration's consistency in being friendly to theocrats at home and abroad. The truth is much more discouraging. A democratic Iraq cannot be a liberal Iraq, because the Iraqi majority is profoundly illiberal: illiberal to a degree that makes the majority in Alabama or Texas look positively Whiggish by comparison. With the (otherwise desirable) destruction of the Ba'athist regime and party, there is simply no remaining secularist force capable of competing with the mullahs. It was perfectly predictable that occupying Iraq would put the United States in a position of needing to cater to the desires of the Shi'a clergy, and in particular to Ali Sistani. Now, their hands strengthened by the long string of blunders that has characterized the occupation, the mullahs are collecting their ransom. Sad? Yes. Disgusting? Somewhat. But not surprising. This is the sort of problem which led the Bush I team to stop short of conquest when the road to Baghdad was open.Ed:LM Politics34803@blogcritics.org Thu, 25 Aug 2005 14:36:13 EDT