Month: April 2005

[Updated] There’s been a fair amount of comment in progressive media about possibly physical and other threats being made against judges in the wake of the Terri Schiavo case. A lot of it arises from the Confronting the Judicial War on Faith conference, “remarkable in bringing together lawmakers and Capitol Hill staffers with unabashed theocrats,” held last week and I’ve tended to think it overblown. Writing for Salon.com, Michelle Goldberg worries:

It is a challenge to know how seriously to take this sort of thing. The world inhabited by most of those at the conference seems so at odds with empirical reality that one expects it to collapse around them. With each new lunacy perpetrated by religious fundamentalists, progressives tell each other than any second the pendulum will swing the other way and some equilibrium will return to our national life. They’ve been telling each other that for more than four years. But the influence of religious authoritarianism keeps growing.

Max Blumenthal, writing for The Nation, sees it as a calculated tactic:

The threatening tenor of the conference speakers was a calculated tactic. As Gary Cass, the director of Rev. D. James Kennedy’s lobbying front, the Center for Reclaiming America, explained, they are arousing the anger of their base in order to harness it politically. The rising tide of threats against judges “is understandable,” Cass told me, “but we have to take the opportunity to channel that into a constitutional solution.”

I’m not inclined to regard The Washington Post as progressive, but there too, Dana Milbank offers an alarming perspective.

Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of “Remedies to Judicial Tyranny” decided that [Supreme Court Justice] Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse….

Ominously, [lawyer-author Edwin] Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’ ” Vieira said.

This is a particularly alarming passage. Milbank and Blumenthal both offer the full quotation, that “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.” In her article, Milbank explains the particular relevance:

A judge in Atlanta and the husband and mother of a judge in Chicago were murdered in recent weeks. After federal courts spurned a request from Congress to revisit the Terri Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said that “the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) mused about how a perception that judges are making political decisions could lead people to “engage in violence.”

As Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn’s chief of staff Michael Schwartz told Blumenthal, “I’m a radical! I’m a real extremist. I don’t want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!”

“The people who have been speaking out on this, like Tom DeLay and Senator Cornyn, need to be backed up,” [Phyllis] Schlafly said to applause [Friday]. One worker at the event wore a sticker declaring “Hooray for DeLay.”

What seems odd to me is a relative lack of outrage over such remarks. If President George Bush were the subject of these remarks, rather than the judiciary, or if the source of these comments were considered leftist, rather than evangelical, surely the press would pick up on this a lot more. As it is, the Washington Post published this story on page A03.

In an editorial, the Los Angeles Times also sounds a note of alarm, but seems to share the impression that DeLay merely wants to assert legislative control over the courts. That’s quite bad enough. The so-called Constitutional Restoration Act would “restrict federal courts from ruling on anything involving God or basing any rulings on the precedents of foreign courts (for instance, in death penalty cases)” and “is sponsored in Congress by Sens. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), Zell Miller (D-Ga.), Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Reps. Robert B. Aderholt (R-Ala.) and Mike Pence (R-Ind.). The Los Angeles Times is not in favor. “Judicial independence is one of this nation’s distinguishing traits and a hallmark of our constitutional scheme. To endure, our democracy requires that legislators respect the independence of the judiciary, even when it comes to decisions they don’t like.”

Blumenthal describes the bill more harshly:

Cass’s “solution” is the “Constitution Restoration Act,” a bill relentlessly promoted during the conference that authorizes Congress to impeach judges who fail to abide by “the standard of good behavior” required by the Constitution. If they refuse to acknowledge “God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government,” or rely in any way on international law in their rulings, judges also invite impeachment. In essence, the bill would turn judges’ gavels into mere instruments of “The Hammer,” Tom DeLay, and Christian-right cadres.

Goldberg quotes Michael Schwartz, who said:

“This problem that we’re dealing with fundamentally is a question of sovereignty,” he said. He went on to argue that, “when the Supreme Court says that there is a right to kill babies in the Constitution and therefore we can’t have laws against that, or there is a right to commit buggery in the Constitution and we can’t have laws against that,” it implicitly asserts that “the people have no right to make laws.”

“As long as the Supreme Court purports to “grade the papers of Congress” — in other words, to evaluate its laws — “it is counter to the very basis of this republic.” Thus, until America throws out the [principle] of judicial review, “it is a sick and sad joke to claim we have a Constitution.”

Blumenthal quoted former presidential candidate Alan Keyes:

“Ronald Reagan said the Soviet Union was the focus of evil during the cold war. I believe that the judiciary is the focus of evil in our society today,” Keyes declared, slapping the lectern for emphasis.

Finally, Goldberg cites a prayer offered at the conference that seems to call for Judge Greer’s death, following remarks by David Gibbs, attorney for the Schindlers:

“Father, we echo the words of the apostle Paul, because we know Judge Greer claims to be a Christian. So as the Apostle Paul said in First Corinthians 5, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus.”

[Updated] From the New York Times:

Tim Brazeal has a dream: to raise enough money from fans to subsidize a fifth season of “Star Trek: Enterprise” (with Scott Bakula), currently scheduled to end on May 13. Mr. Brazeal, who lives in Marysville, Tenn., also has a number: $3,139,035.50. That’s the amount that he said had been donated or pledged to his campaign, by more than 8,500 donors, by early last week. And he hinted that by this weekend, if a few anticipated pledges came through, “that figure will look small.”

It’s worth remembering that $3 million of the amount raised so far came in a single contribution. But that leaves $139,035.50 from others, an impressive amount for what can best still be described as a long shot.

SaveEnterprise.com and TrekUnited.com have, so far, raised less than 10% of what they think they need. The goal is to raise $32 million, enough to “buy network air time for 23 new episodes at $1.6 million each.” And Paramount denies that it would even be willing to accept the money. According to Sci Fi Wire:

A high-ranking executive at Paramount Television, which produces Star Trek: Enterprise, not only denied to SCI FI Wire that the studio is in talks with Trek United, the fan group that is raising money to revive the show, but also sent a letter to Trek United chief Tim Brazeal last month saying that the studio would not accept fan money for such a purpose. “There are no talks going on with anybody at Paramount,” John Wentworth, executive vice president for communications at Paramount TV, said in an interview. “And the decision to end the show is final.”

The fund raising effort may also have rubbed some people the wrong way, as Sci Fi Wire also reported that “the message boards on the official Star Trek Web site had removed Trek United’s prominently displayed solicitations for funds as of April 11. Last week, the message boards for Trek Nation/TrekToday did the same, citing in part Trek United’s aggressive fund-raising tactics and the resulting rancorous debate surrounding them.”

The new version of Apple’s Mac OS X, version 10.4, dubbed Tiger, will be released on my birthday — April 29.

According to the Associated Press, a number of news organizations have filed a court brief “asking that the online publishers be allowed to keep their sources confidential” in a trade secret suit being pursued by Apple Computer. Apple subpoenaed ISP records to track down the sources, who it claimed, had “violated non-disclosure agreements and California’s Uniform Trade Secrets Act.” The bloggers objected, saying that compliance would create a “chilling effect” on reporting in the public interest. “Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg ruled in Apple’s favour last month, saying that reporters who publish ‘stolen property’ are not entitled to protections. The online reporters then appealed.”

“Recent corporate scandals involving Worldcom, Enron and the tobacco industry all undoubtedly involved the reporting of information that the companies involved would have preferred to remain unknown to the public,” the 38-page brief stated. “Just because a statute seeks to protect secrecy of such information does not mean that the First Amendment protections provided to the news media to inform the public are wiped away.”

Joining the brief were the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Orange County Register, as well as the Bee newspapers in Sacramento, Fresno and Modesto. Also supporting the brief were the California Newspaper Publishers Association and the non-profit free speech organisation California First Amendment Coalition.

The Associated Press also joined the brief. “‘For us, this case is about whether the First Amendment protects journalists from being turned into informants for the government, the courts or anybody else who wants to use them that way,’ [Dave] Tomlin, [assistant general counsel for the AP,] said. ‘We believe strongly that it does, and that it’s a good thing for all of us that journalists have this protection.'”

Salon.com thinks that public reaction in the Terri Schiavo matter may have killed the “nuclear option,” a plan to revise “the cloture rule reducing the now required 60 votes to end a filibuster to a simple majority.”

Republican senators, stung by the negative public reaction to their intervention in the Schiavo case, are likely to be twice-shy about being seen, once again, as the tools of the religious right. With one-third of all Republicans saying Democrats in Congress should prevent Republican leaders from “going too far in pushing their agenda,” and 41% of Republicans opposing the “nuclear option,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is going to have a hard time convincing the half-dozen Senate Republicans who are either opposed to or wary of the nuclear plan that they’ll face major political consequences if they don’t get on board.

The plan would “involve a request for a ruling from the chair that filibusters of judicial nominees were unconstitutional. The chair would likely be occupied by either Vice President [Dick] Cheney or Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the chamber’s President Pro Tem. After the ruling came down against filibusters, Democrats would object and demand a vote, requiring Republicans to round up 50 votes on their side to do away with filibuster on judges.” Such a procedure was last used by the Democrats in 1975 to reduce the number of votes needed from 67.

There’s plenty of pressure to make it happen. As Salon.com explains, “Religious conservatives, outraged that the courts did not step lively to the tune they called in the Schiavo case, will push Republicans even harder than before to find ways to confirm Bush’s judicial nominees over Democratic opposition. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council ramped up the rhetoric this week, saying that judge[s] currently conduct themselves as ‘an occupying force of liberal elitists who answer to no one.’ And David Limbaugh warns in his column today that Republican leaders ‘will pay a price’ if they ‘even think about caving’ on the ‘nuclear option.'”

One blogger disputes that requiring a supermajority is constitutional. “The Constitution sets forth seven instances where anything other than a simple majority is necessary… and you guessed it… ending filibusters isn’t one of them.” Actually it is constitutional, but so too is the “nuclear option.” Article I, section 5 states in part, “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.”

[Updated] Just in case anyone thought things might be getting better for Americans in Iraq, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times, “Chanting ‘Death to America!’ and burning effigies of President Bush and Saddam Hussein, tens of thousands of Iraqis flooded central Baghdad on Saturday in what police called the largest anti-American protest since the fall of Baghdad exactly two years ago.” A story in the Independent put the number of demonstrators at 300,000.

Of course, such an expression of free speech would have been impossible under Saddam Hussein’s regime.

“This is the first manifestation of freedom in Iraq,” said Lt. Ali Muhsin of the Iraqi national guard, raising his voice to be heard over the din. “We have never witnessed such a thing before. In the old days, people would only have been able to do this if they were hailing Saddam. Now they are protesting for their rights.”

But the occupation is getting old, and the continued American presence is at least partly what motivates the Sunni insurgency. “Two years have passed and all we see is bloodshed, destruction and looting,” said Sheik Harith al-Dahri, leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars. The occupation forces are “killing the Iraqi people daily,” he said. “Opinion polls confirm that two-thirds of Shia Arabs – 60 per cent of Iraq’s population – as well as an overwhelming majority of Sunnis want US troops to leave immediately or in the near future. The Kurds, a fifth of Iraqis, are the only community fully to support the US presence.”

But there are new signs of a split in the insurgency, between those who have targetted Iraqis in any way connected with the occupation and “nationalists” who “say that resistance to the Americans is being discredited by the kidnapping and killing of civilians. ‘They have tarnished our image and used the jihad to make personal gains,’ Ahmed Hussein, an imam from a mosque in Ramadi, was quoted as saying.” Posters in Ramadi, “a Sunni Muslim city on the Euphrates river west of Baghad,” threaten “extreme resistance fighters.”

Today’s accusations against subversive professors differ from those of the past in several respects. In a sign of the times, the test for disloyalty has shifted far toward the center. Once an unreliable professor meant an anarchist or communist; now it includes Democrats. Soon it will be anyone to the left of Attila the Hun. Second, the charges do not (so far) come from government committees investigating un-American activities but from conservative commentators and their student minions. A series of groups such as Campus Watch, Academic Bias and Students for Academic Freedom enlist students to monitor and publicize professorial conduct. Third, the new charges are advanced not against but in the name of academic freedom or a variant of it; and, in the final twist, the new conservative critics seem driven by an ethos that they have adopted from liberalism: affirmative action and a sense of victimhood, which they officially detest.

I’d run the whole column here if copyright allowed it.

But politicization is perceived as a problem. Steve Goodman, an educational consultant, wrote in the Washington Post:

Yes, I do get some students who expressly wish to apply to either a liberal or a conservative college. But the vast majority are simply eager to find a school that will help them advance in their intellectual and professional lives. They’re flabbergasted by courses with titles like “Pornography and Evolution,” “The Beatles Era,” or “Introduction to Material Culture,” as well as educational values that appear only tangentially related to the reality of their lives.

Too easy. From at least the time of the Roman Republic (see Cicero, On the Character of the Orator), the purpose of a higher education hasn’t merely been to “get a job,” but to prepare one for civic engagement. As Thomas Ehrlich wrote for the National Center of Public Policy and Higher Education, “For America, politics is a crucially important dimension of civic life. Our democracy depends on an informed and engaged citizenry, one that acquires the knowledge and skills needed to become politically involved and then participates actively.” That’s why there are so many general education requirements in a “liberal” education.

The point of a class in “Pornography and Evolution” isn’t so much about pornography or evolution as the skills students acquire in critically examining our political and social paradigms. Reading the description (from the UCLA Communication Studies course listings) that goes along with that title explains:

M159. Pornography and Evolution. (4)

(Formerly numbered 197K.) (Same as Women’s Studies M159.) Lecture, three hours. Discussion of theories and research on why pornography exists and its effects. Use of topic to illustrate value of evolutionary theory to social sciences generally. Letter grading.

I’m not even a student at UCLA; so I haven’t taken this course. But Darwin did not intend for his theory to be used in this context. And I suspect that’s part of the point. As Daniel Kevles wrote in the 1995 Preface to In the Name of Eugenics, “Some supporters of Darwin’s theory of evolution have misapplied the biological principles of natural selection — ‘survival of the fittest’ — to the social, political, and economic realms.”

If, then, you’re going to criticize the existence of this course, you need to explain why it is that educated people, supposedly prepared for civic engagement, shouldn’t be concerned about the common misapplication of one of the most important scientific theories of our time. And you need to explain why educated people shouldn’t be concerned about the effect of pornography on gender relations–and there’s more to this than I’m going to go into here, as well.

Steve Goodman does raise an interesting point on how a college education has come to be seen as elitist:

A large part of the alienation I’m seeing stems from the widening economic disparity between the middle class and the universities. While the median income for a family of four is just a little over $62,000, middle-class families are regularly expected to come up with nearly $200,000 per child for four years of college. And tuition rates keep soaring. Brown University’s yearly tuition, which was an already-hefty $14,375 in 1989, reached $30,672 last year.

Attending a state university, my costs aren’t nearly this high. But there’s little question that government has increasingly come to see education more as a cost than as an investment. Colleges aren’t getting cheaper to run, but their budgets are being cut nonetheless, and as our population expands, there is ever greater demand for their services.

An educated populace seemingly doesn’t serve conservative interests, and perhaps that has something to do with academic attitudes. As Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times, “Think of the message this sends: today’s Republican Party – increasingly dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation, not research – doesn’t respect science, or scholarship in general. It shouldn’t be surprising that scholars have returned the favor by losing respect for the Republican Party.”

The outlook may not be so bleak for “Jeremy Hinzman, the US Army soldier who fled north [to Canada] in January 2004 rather than be deployed in a war he regards as a ‘criminal enterprise,'” and whose application for refugee status was refused, as was widely reported.

[The ruling] may be disappointing, both Hinzman and [his attorney, Jeffry] House note, but it was not unexpected, given that [Immigration Review Board member Brian] Goodman did not allow them to argue that the war itself is illegal. Punishing someone for refusing to participate in such a war would certainly amount to persecution, House says.

They note “that precedent-setting cases–such as one involving a Russian who was granted refugee status after fleeing military service in Chechnya–were won on appeals.”

The case of eight Earth First! protesters, whose eyes Humboldt County law enforcement officers swabbed with pepper spray, returns to court in San Francisco this week. The first trial ended with jurors deadlocked 6-2 in favor of the protesters, who had staged a sit-in “in the Eureka office of Representative Frank Riggs (R-California) on October 16th” (1997) to protest logging in the Headwaters Forest. National guidelines governing the use of pepper spray specify that it should not be discharged into the eyes at distances less than two feet, should not be used on people in restraints and should not be used as punishment, the suit said. At issue is whether the use of “a chemical weapon” under these sorts of circumstances constitutes a reasonable use of force. “‘What we’re trying to do is deal with the situation with a minimum of force and a minimum of hazard,’ [Sheriff Dennis] Lewis told reporters.” The protesters had linked arms inside metal sleeves; officers said using the pepper spray was safer than trying to cut the metal sleeves. Jury selection is scheduled for Tuesday, April 12, 2005, and is expected to take one day. The trial is expected to begin the following day.

[Updated] In the face of budget cuts, and a presidential mandate for manned programs to the Moon and to Mars, NASA is contemplating cutting a number of unmanned programs, including the Voyagers, which are still sending data as they approach the edge of the solar system. This only makes sense, though, for the Bush Administration, which either ignores research or twists it to suit its own ideological purposes.

Whether the evangelicals who have captured our government understand it or not, Rick Weiss argues in the Washington Post that we need to care about basic research. “U.S. scientific enterprise is riddled with evidence that Americans have lost sight of the value of non-applied, curiosity-driven research — the open-ended sort of exploration that doesn’t know exactly where it’s going but so often leads to big payoffs.” Weiss cites the Internet as a project DARPA might not fund today and the Department of Energy decision to kill the “so-called BTeV project at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., one of the last labs in this country still supporting studies in high-energy physics.” It hasn’t always been this way.

Early research on DNA splicing in bacteria unexpectedly gave rise to the biotechnology industry, a huge economic engine that launched today’s golden age of biology and medicine. Unfettered studies of electronics at places like the old Bell Laboratories gave the world transistors, lasers and the basic information theory that led to computer networking. Albert Einstein often said that his work on the general theory of relativity was too arcane to ever have any practical application. Yet without it we would not have the global positioning satellite system that today tells our cars — and the military’s “smart” bombs — where they are and where they need to go.