Wampum

Chronicles of the Kings of England

The war started on March 19, 2003.

In April 2002 Blair told Bush “the UK would support US military action to bring about regime change”

At 9 am on July 23, 2002, Blair held a meeting of military and intelligence chiefs. Blair discussed military options already committed to supporting Bush’s plans, not just for war, but for seizure of Baghdad. A briefing for the meeting said Britain and America had to “create” conditions to justify a war. A UK Intel chief present noted "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".

At the July meeting Jack Straw said the case for war was “thin” as “Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran”, and suggested [Blair and Straw] should “work up” an ultimatum about weapons inspectors that would “help with the legal justification”. Blair is recorded as saying that “it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors”.

Until today the substance of the April meeting -- an agreement to go to war -- was not known to to members of Parliment. Eight months after the April decision to go to war, Blair notified Parliment that war was "inevitable" (read "planned").

This is the stuff of Kings. Parliments dissolved. Privy Councils. Arrests. Tortures. Executions. Arms. The 13 page Goldsmith memo is here (pdf).

In the year of the incarnation of our Lord 449, Angles and Saxons first came into Britain...

Found under rock -- the Bush SocSec Plan

I hadn't noticed monied Republicans returning their checks to Washington voluntarily. Maybe they will appreciate having their checks returned for them. Stranger things have happened, and if not, it's their problem.

Jonah is five. Sam is six. I'll be doing the Social Security paperwork for them this year. When the regime's spokes drone on about retirement indexed benefits, I've no idea what they have in mind for disabled children, other than less. Much less.

The best way to avoid the bite of the Gila is not to pick one up. Leave them alone, though in a pinch they are edible.

This bill proposes to recognize the Abenaki people in Vermont

The Ivory Billed Woodpecker was declared extinct in the US in 1988. Abenakis were declared extinct in Maine about 100 years earler. One of MB's things-to-do-if-elected to the Maine Legislature was to introduce a bill to recognize Maine Abenakis.

The media in Burlington covered a hearing on a bill introduced by Republican Senator Diane Snelling, daughter of Governor Richard Snelling, who ended Vermont's state recognition of the Mississquoi Abenaki, to again recognize, as a state, the Mississquoi Abenaki. Here's the story.

Here's the text of the bill in the current (2005 - 2006) legislative session: link.

Here's the text of the bill in the 2003 - 2004 legislative session: link.

Here's the text of bills in the 2003 - 2004 legislative session: link and link.

Comments?

The SPR redux

While Chris Matthews and others fall all over Bush's "candor" in conceding that there is absolutely nothing he can do to decrease gas prices, that there needs to be an increase in the amount of oil in the world market, I have one question.

Why, in the midst of this admitted "energy crisis" (Andrea Mitchell even used that term numerous times) did we thus add 3.742 BILLION barrels to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? (Note: Current US consumption averages around 20 million barrels/day.)

So is there anything the President can do?

Well, according to the DOE website:

Question: When can the Reserve be used?

Answer: The circumstances that might require the use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are defined in the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA). Generally, there are three possible types of drawdowns envisioned in the Act:

* Full drawdown: The President can order a full drawdown of the Reserve to counter a "severe energy supply interruption." EPCA defines this as "a national energy supply shortage which the President determines -

(A) is, or is likely to be, of significant scope and duration, and of an emergency nature

(B) may cause major adverse impact on national safety or the national economy; and

(C) results, or is likely to result, from (i) an interruption in the supply of imported petroleum products, (ii) an interruption in the supply of domestic petroleum products, or (iii) sabotage or an act of God.

EPCA also states that a severe energy supply interruption "shall be deemed to exist if the President determines that -

(A) an emergency situation exists and there is a significant reduction in supply which is of significant scope and duration;

(B) a severe increase in the price of petroleum products has resulted from such emergency situation; and

(C) such price increase is likely to cause a major adverse impact on the national economy."

Now, there have been times where the President has suspended oil shipments to the Reserve. Clinton, concerned with the massive budget deficit he inherited, instituted a period of suspension from 1994. But upon reading further from the DOE's site, these paragraphs in particular disturbed me:

In February 1999, the Clinton Administration announced a new plan to resume fill of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve with federal royalty oil from production in the Central Gulf of Mexico. The initiative was designed to replace approximately 28 million barrels of oil which were sold from the Reserve in fiscal years 1996 and 1997 largely for deficit reduction purposes.

Royalty oil is owed to the U.S. government by operators who acquire leases on the federally-owned Outer Continental Shelf. Under current law, federal ownership ranges from 12.5 percent to 16.7 percent of the oil produced from federal leases. The Minerals Management Service (MMS) is responsible for collecting royalties. MMS has traditionally collected royalties from federal oil and gas leases in cash, but, in 1998, it started testing the effectiveness of collecting royalties "in kind" - or in other words, acquiring the crude oil itself. This mechanism was adopted to begin refilling the SPR.

In May 2001 the Bush Administration released its National Energy Policy. The Policy endorsed adding oil to the Strategic Reserve using the "royalty in kind" program, and in November 2001, President Bush announced his intent to fill the Reserve to 700 million barrels.

On several occasions, the Energy Department has rescheduled incoming oil shipments to the Reserve, deferring them for several months to a year or more. In these instances, companies under contract to deliver crude oil to the Federal Government agree to increase the volume of oil shipped to the Reserve at the later date at no additional cost to the taxpayer. This also permits more oil to remain on the market and available to consumers during times when supplies are tight.

Shipments in April, when oil climbed to over $55/barrel, increased over 150%. US oilmakers this week announced their highest profits every. Anyone willing to put one and one together?

(Note: I first raised this issue back in February 2003 at the old Wampum.)

Elvis Found (update)

Woodpecker transcends the four directions of the present world. This motif has been present in Woodlands art for a thousand years prior to contact, Woodpecker is elusive, heard more than seen. Even here in Maine, at the outer edge of Hopewell interaction sphere, it is the elusive, heard more than seen loon that is mdawilha, the medeoulin's bird. The person who moves between the unseen and the seen, connecting both halves into a whole. This is really good news.

Update: I've replaced the popular Audubon print with the best example the googling monkeys came up with for the more important Cox Mound gorget motif. There is an amazing amount of bad scholarship availble on the net about the symbolism of woodpecker in Woodlands cultures.

The January 13th, 205 post Woodpecker and Petrified Forest contains the John James Audubon print of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker.

If you can't laugh at war ...

Mel Gibson's character says this about the absurdity of flying opium and war lords to and fro in Laos in the film "Air America". Juan Cole gives a parallel lives of non-saints Abu Muslim, d. 755 A.D., and Ahmad Chalabi, d. Not Yet, ending with this -- "Chalabi turns out to be more politically astute than was Abu Muslim."

Ahmad Chalabi has just been named acting oil minister in the Iraqi Government.

All those guys and gals, drowned, dusted, fragged, burned, mva'd ... drawn, quartered, beheaded, pressed, staked, or merely made simple, halt, blind, dumb ... on Ahmad Chalabi's London-based intel that Eyrak has Nukular Weapons.

From a flat in London and brown bag lunches with Agency handlers to a down-the-hall office in Paul Bremer's palace to the minister-of-prize. Now there's an American rags-to-riches story.

1958

In that year the CCP launched the (the Great Leap Forward) campaign under the new "General Line for Socialist Construction." The GLF was aimed at accomplishing the economic and technical development of the country at a vastly faster pace and with greater results, and it was a disaster of historic proportions.

We in the US now have our own , our own little wu fan, our five movements:

substantive deregulation of commercial electrical generation stations using uranium and plutonium fuels,

suspension of Sections 203 and 204 of the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, as amended, and suspension of the current system of rules that govern base reuse implementation, for commercial petro-chemical refineries,

subsidized gas pipelines to take Alaskan gas off the open market, federalization of commercial LNG permiting, ending local and state oversight,

a mystery that will create 26 private investment dollars for every 1 public dollar invested in "clean coal",

another mystery that will make "nuclear" hydrogen, ethanol, biodiesel, wind and solar economic.

We get nuclear no-liability quickies, as if something fundamental in either PWR tech or risk mitigation had happened since TMI (it hasn't). We also get an American xaifang or "down to the countryside movement", for oil refining. China had the famous backyard pig-iron furnaces. And we not going sell LNG to East Asia, because of self-sufficiency rhetoric, but we're going to buy LNG from West Asia, because the market is the best regulator, after sweeping away -- a la Truman's seizure of the steel industry -- state and local control of industrial sites. Finally, we get two magic acts. One gold coin in the magic box and 26 gold coins out, and things that are marginal now, will be ... marginal later.

Of course, CAFE standards could have been raised last week, but that wouldn't have been supply-side.

Source: Today's Whitehouse blatt.

Posted by EBW at 07:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Writing with smoothbore

I'm not sure which is odder. The idea that the appropriate defensive armament to deploy upon notice that an aircraft appears to be targeting the Whitehouse is the shotgun, or the idea that tourist and staff managment at the Whitehouse during POTUS protection events is planned around the use of the tactical shotgun.

Or maybe its Quail season somewhere.

Grave Injustice

I think it is safe to interpret the representation of William Myers that he is qualified to sit on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, given the self-awareness that he has never handled a criminal case and has never appeared before a jury, and the general awareness that the Courts of Appeals "try" the judges and attornies who tried juried criminal cases, generally from a position of greater subject matter (law and practice) expertise, that he is a man of faith. Great faith. A faith greater than a decade of trial court works, or two decades of trial court works, or three, or even four. There are persons in their 60s with four decades of works in the courts who William Myers holds himself out as the equal to, or superior of, not by his empty count of works and days, but by his faith alone, to sit on the 9th Circuit.

Since faith is the sine qua non of the moment, it is reasonable to ask what are, other than his ability to rise to the professional level of expertise, at the loss of life, liberty or fortune of no other person, that is the norm for 9th Circuit judges, the articles of faith of William Myers, III.

European funerary ritualism or burial ritualism has had the concept of a spatial locus for a very long time. The tombs of princes define lands, yards of churches parishs, and ossuaries the unworldly. Causes of action arise in Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Christian law courts for grave robbing.

The Institutes of Gaius, c. 160 A.D., holds that as soon as a body is buried in a tomb by its owner, the tomb and body become religiosus, consecrated to the gods of the underworld. Violation of any such thing is an act of sacrilege. The Institutes of Marcian, c. 310 A.D., sets the penalty for sacrilege as extra ordinem, crucifixion is allowed. The Duties of the Proconsul of Ulpian, c. 220 A.D., remarks that many have been "condemned to the wild beasts for sacrilege, some even burned alive, and others hanged on the gallows" for grave robbing. His Praetor's Edict from the same period has "the action for violation of a tomb entails infamia", i.e. "disgrace," a formal legal term entailing loss of important rights as well as gaining a severely poor reputation--the criminal becomes "infamous" and loses the right to represent himself or others in any court of law, and the right to stand for or hold any office. Ulpian continues that "by tomb we understand any place of burial". Septimius Severus, c 193 to 211 A.D., reinforced by decree that "corpses are not to be detained or molested" and that "provincial governors are to take severe action against those who despoil corpses". The Public Prosecutions of Macer, c. 230 A.D., holds that "the offense of violating a tomb can be said to come under the Lex Julia de vi publica ... (law against the use of force in public, such as any act of breaking and entering entails) ... where it is provided that nothing shall be done to prevent the occupant from being entombed". The Views of Paul, c. 220 A.D., concludes that "Those guilty of violating tombs, if they remove the bodies or scatter the bones, will suffer the supreme penalty."

Without the Paschal Mystery, the “redemptive death” and "resurrection", that is, a tomb emptied of a corpse three days after it was deposited there by agencies other than human, there would not be a lot left of Christianity.

If a person holds that grave robbing is malum prohibitum rather than malum in se, what is the faith of that person? It can't be Christianity. The Apostles had a lot to say about Jewish, Greek, and Roman law, but they didn't come out against the Lex Julia de vi publica and make sacrilige for the purpose of worldly gain an article of faith.

It has taken the American Republic the better part of a century to decide what to do about the social and pseudo-scientific acquisition of human remains, Indian, by non-Indians. NAGPRA has been the law of the United States now for 15 years.

The faith of nominee Myers is that grave robbing is malum prohibitum, and that NAGPRA prohibits nothing absolutely, and so it may be waived for a marginal cynaide leach gold mine, and the bodies, the funerary ritual objects -- bowls, rock inscriptions, and the tombs may be violated, without injury to his faith.

There is a very fine flute carved from a human femur from about 800 A.D. in the archaic shell middens at Sarasota, another has been found in a Hopewell context in Ohio, another still in Guyana (photo) and there are lots more in China. Nominee Myers could be a faithful Hopewellian, but he cannot be a faithful follower of the redemptively dead and resurrected one, a Christian.

Unless of course, he's a racist. One of those schismatics with "good news" for some and "not so good news" for others. I'll buy the assertion that nominee Myers is a man of racist faith. That seems a really safe proposition, and I oppose his nomination because of his faith.

[update: it is coincidental that Dwight and I both wrote on the subject today. His post is linked to, as it should be. Mine developes from Three sheets to the wind, about Myers and NAGPRA, When is a Hawai'ian a Hawai'ian?, which is about NAGPRA and Rice v Cayetano and/or the Akaka Bill, and Its not a molehill, if your Aunties are inside it, and things outside of Wampum. ebw]

Professor Bainbridge’s Frivolous Disparate Impact Case

Cathy Young, writing in the Boston Globe, notes that Republican charges that Democrats are discriminating against religious people in judicial confirmations are bunk.

Stephen Bainbridge, a law professor at UCLA, counters that Young has overlooked the principle of disparate impact:

It is a basic principle of discrimination law that overt evidence of bigotry is not required to find that someone has discriminated. As an HR source explains the relevant legal principles:

Even where an employer is not motivated by discriminatory intent, Title VII prohibits an the (sic) employer from using a facially neutral employment practice that has an unjustified adverse impact on members of a protected class. ... The plaintiff must prove, generally through statistical comparisons, that the challenged practice or selection device has a substantial adverse impact on a protected group.

The justification that is advanced for the use of the disparate impact standard has obvious relevance to the present dispute, as suggested by my minor blacklined edit:

Bigotry is better hidden than it used to be and, thus, proving discriminatory intent is often impossible. Disparate impact provides a useful prophylactic for rooting out intentional discrimination, and it has the important side-benefit of doing away with rules and policies that hold back (minorities) devout Christians for no good reason. Any qualifying test that hurts (minorities) devout Christians, and isn’t job-related, is just as well gotten rid of. ( Link)

Obviously, I am not claiming that the Senate is violating Title VII. Instead, I am simply pointing out what strikes me as an apt analogy.

The Democrat litmus test for judges has a disparate impact on devout Catholic and Evangelical nominees for judicial office, which is a perfectly appropriate ground for criticizing that litmus test. To reiterate, such criticism offers a "useful prophylactic for rooting out intentional discrimination, and it has the important side-benefit of doing away with rules and policies that hold back devout Christians for no good reason."

(Please note that the Findlaw article used “minorities” instead of “devout Christians.” Professor Bainbridge’s post included the word “minorities,” struck through, and substituted “devout Christians” to make his point. I would have reproduced Bainbridge’s post exactly but I have no idea how to interlineate).

Professor Bainbridge’s argument is that a disparate impact anaysis shows that Senate Democrats are guilty of religious discrimination. All Professor Bainbridge's argument lacks is evidence to support that very serious charge.

As Bainbridge notes, the first step in a disparate impact case is to accumulate the statistics to show whether or not an identified group suffered a disparate impact.

George W. Bush has made at least 229 judicial nominations. Democrats in the Senate have blocked ten. How many of those 219 confirmed nominees were “devout Christians?” How many of the ten blocked nominees were “devout Christians?”

I do not know the answer to those questions and I suspect that Professor Bainbridge does not either. After all, how could we ever determine which of the nominees are “devout Christians?”

Many people believe that being a “devout Christian” involves more than bashing gays and being pro-life. Unless there is some test to determine who is a “devout Christian,” Professor Bainbridge can not identify the group allegedly discriminated against.

I guess we could ask the nominees if they consider themselves devout Christians. I do not think that would be very helpful. John Kerry, for instance, considers himself a devout Catholic. He certainly attends Mass more often than George W. Bush attends church.

John Edwards, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Hilary Clinton, and Harry Reid also consider themselves devout Christians. I doubt that those are the type of people Professor Bainbridge believes the Democrats have discriminated against. If self identification does not work, how are the necessary statistics to be gathered?

We could look to see whether the nominees agree with principles espoused by various Christian denominations. Some Christian churches believe the death penalty is wrong. When preparing our statistics for a disparate impact discrimination case, do we exclude all pro-death penalty nominees from our stats on the ground that they must not be “devout Christians?”

Other churches feel that protecting the environment is a fundamental element of Christian belief. One of the blocked nominees, William Myers, has been an advocate and lobbyist (pdf) for mining and ranching interests for much of his career. Should he be included or excluded from our list of “devout Christians?”

I was taught that helping the poor was at the core of Christian belief. One blocked nominee, Janice Brown, wants to return to the Lochner era in which minimum wage laws and child labor laws would be unconstitutional. Should she be considered a “devout Christian” for the purpose of our statistics? If so, why? If not, why not?

No disparate impact case can be brought without statistics showing that a class of persons has disproportionately suffered harm. If Professor Bainbridge thinks that Democrats have discriminated against “devout Christians,” it is incumbent on him to demonstrate which of the nominees are “devout Christians” and which are not. So far, he has presented no evidence whatsoever. Bainbridge has collected a number of responses to his post, many of which make interesting points. (See, Red State, Ace, Stop the Bleating, Mossback Culture, Democracy Project, New World Man, and Juan Non-Volokh). None even begin to present the type of evidence on which a disparate impact case could even be begun. No one has come forth with any evidence to show that the nominees whose conformation has been blocked are devout Christians or that the nominees gaining confirmation are not.

Talk is cheap. If Bainbridge seeks to prove that Democrats have discriminated against devout Christians, and if he intends to rely on a disparate impact analysis for his proof, he needs to produce some evidence.

I do not think that Professor Bainbridge can present such evidence. Disparate impact cases are very hard to prove. We begin with the fact that President Bush is likely to have nominated many people who consider themselves Christians. We then add the complication that whether or not such nominees are “devout” is likely to be a matter of opinion. We also must consider the fact that fewer than 5% of all of President Bush’s judicial nominees have been blocked. Given all that, I just do not think Professor Bainbridge can meet his burden. Without statistical data to support his charge, I am afraid that a motion to dismiss Professor Bainbridge’s disparate impact suit would have to be granted.

Even if Professor Bainbridge could present evidence of disparate impact, he still has not won the case. He neglects to mention that one affirmative defense to a disparate impact case is to show that there is a legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for the action.

Do Democrats have a legitimate, non-discriminatory reasons for opposing the ten blocked nominees? I have not looked closely at all ten blocked nominations but I have previously explained my opposition to three of the nominees without reference to their religion.

I oppose the nomination of Thomas B. Griffith because, among other things, he has shown a lack of respect for the law and the legal profession by practicing law without a license.

I oppose the nomination of William Myers because, among other reasons, he has no judicial experience and he has never tried a single case to a jury in his entire life. Trial experience is not everything in a appellate judge but given that the main function of the Circuit Courts is to correct trial court errors, it is a pretty big deal. I think a Circuit Court Judge should have picked a jury, argued evidence objections, and made a closing argument a few times in his life. I want an appellate judge that knows the difference between hearsay and hirsute. Trying cases is not the only way to learn about how trials actually work, but it is the best way.

I oppose the nomination of Janice Brown because she does not believe that the 14th Amendment incorporates the protections of the Bill of Rights so as to apply those protections to state, as opposed to federal, actions. I think that if one of the secular blue states enacts a statute outlawing the reading of the Bible in private homes, the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment should declare such a law unconstitutional. Justice Brown disagrees (by the way, does she still qualify as a “devout Christian”?). For me, incorporation of the Bill of Rights to apply to state and local governments action is a litmus test.

In none of those posts did I make any reference to the nominees’ religious beliefs. Indeed, I know next to nothing about any of their religious beliefs. I did learn today that Justice Brown is a culture warrior in the grand tradition of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 convention speech.

I think those are legitimate, non-discriminatory reasons but you can decide for yourself. If accused of discrimination, I would take my chances in court with those reasons.

Charging Democrats with religious discrimination is serious business. Professor Bainbridge would need a lot more evidence than he has yet presented (none so far) before he could make out a disparate impact case against Senate Democrats. Indeed, I think we have finally found one of those frivolous lawsuits Republicans are always talking about.

Rove Attacks AJC, Shoots Himself In Foot

Karl Rove recently criticized the media in a speech in Chestertown, Maryland. A portion of the AP story on the speech reads:

The media have started applying the horse race style of campaign coverage to daily reporting on government, leading to adversarial reporting that can obscure the truth just to create conflict, President Bush's chief political strategist said Monday…

Naming specific reporters and news organizations, Rove said the media unfairly created the impression that President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, introduced early in his first term, was stalled in Congress at every step before its passage.

But the legislation was passed by the House and Senate with wide margins and was signed by Bush less than a year after it was introduced, Rove said. He said the media have taken a similar approach to the current debate over Social Security.

Apparently, Rove singled out a headline in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and argued that headline left the incorrect impression that NCLB legislation was stalled. Tom Baxter and Jim Galloway, who write the Political Insider column for the AJC report:

According to a story in The Washington Post, the White House strategist used coverage of the passage of President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" education plan in 2001 to make his point. Among other examples, he cited an AJC headline, "Bush plan to face more challenges," over a story about a House vote on an amendment to the bill.

If the first rule of reporting is to get the story right, then the first rule of media criticism should be to make sure that the media got the story wrong. Rove, but not the AJC, broke the first rule. Baxter and Galloway continue:

[W]e went back to look at that AJC headline for ourselves.

Turns out the headline over the story was "House keeps tests in education bill." The line which offended Rove was a subhead, in smaller type, over a lead paragraph by Scott Shepard that said: "President Bush's education reform plan easily weathered a challenge Tuesday when the House defeated an attempt to remove student-testing requirements."

If that is the best example that Karl Rove can come up with to show that the media has treated his guy poorly, then he really should stay far, far away from the issue.

Indeed, I will leave it to you to decide whether it was the AJC or Karl Rove who used “adversarial reporting” and “unfairly created … (an) impression” that obscured “the truth just to create conflict.”

Nanook of the MacGregors

The jumps in the Porcupine Hills have been used for 6,000 years. Cairns form the drive lines from the gathering basin to the jumps, "V"s of stone persons between whom the runner lead the curious yearlings followed by the cows, calves and bulls, ten miles to the pis'kanii, the jumps. The consumer of the images, from the runner to the stone persons, made live by persons and sticks and robes, was the curious, social, short sighted ini. There are thousands of cairns on the gathering basin and along the drive line complex to the jumps, and many texts in the aakaitapitsinniksiists describe them and the ini'skim that call the ini.

I have no insight into Inuit culture, other than time in skin boats, but I cracked up when I read Sewart Philip's comment on the "Ilanaaq" (image). "I can't help but notice the remarkable resemblance it has to Pac-Man." It still makes me crack up, hours later, writing this. Chief Philip is the President of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, one of the two political formations I pay attention to, the other being the Atlantic Policy Congress.

Grand Chief Edward John of the First Nations Summit, which represents the interests of First Nations west of the Rockies that have chosen to participate in the treaty-making process with Canada, commented "The person who put this together is not Inuit."

No. The graphics designer probably hasn't used stone cairns for navigation in fog or white-out, going towards, then away from, taking rock to, maintaining and rebuilding. If she had, she wouldn't see it as five wicked heavy rocks, erected by vannished giants, a megalithic henge, but either as whole, the way it is seen as intended, a distant shape, a navigational mark, or as a stonework, the built and rebuilt and rebuilt work of many hands over deep time. The Inuit were the last to cross the ice, they have been on the back of the turtle, at the edge of the ice, for as long as jump complex in the Porcupine Hills has been maintained. The ice is receeding now, but the circumpolar inuktut have been in place for as long as people have needed navigational referents.

It could have been worse. The MacGregor design could have been for a skin boat.

Oki, ki animaayi ihkakottsii.

Return of the ... One True King (XXI)

Twenty five years ago today a series of operational errors lead to too many aircraft, rotary and fixed wing, in too small an area, in too minimal visibility conditions, caused the deaths of Maj. Richard L. Bakke, USAF, navigator, Maj. Harold L. Lewis Jr., USAF, pilot,, Tech. Sgt. Joel C. Mayo, USAF, flight engineer, Capt. Lyn D. McIntosh, USAF, co-pilot, Charles T. McMillan, USAF, navigator, Sgt. John D. Harvey, USMC, Cpl. George N. Holmes Jr., USMC, and Staff Sgt. Dewey L. Johnson, USMC. The operational errors arose from ordinary error, inter-service rivalries, a profoundly problematic operational plan and a strategy driven by domestic political expedency.

The last time I spoke to him, a former co-worker was making IR beaconing LZ gear for rotary wing units deployed in Iraq that are encountering the same dust conditions.

Between the 1953 overthrow of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, the restoration and years of support for Reza Pahlavi and the SAVAK state police apparatus, and the general trajectory of the CIA in Europe, Africa and Latin America under previous administrations, the Carter administration could have eaten crow, gone through some show trials for intelligence officers attached to the US Embassy in Tehran, and normalized relations with the Islamic Republic. But that would have handed Ronald Reagan the election in November, so a military rescue, rather than a diplomatic rescue, was ordered.

We are surrounded by the debris of those errors today. In London Charles Kennedy (Lib Dems) is campaigning not only on Tony Blair's going into Iraq illegally and on a string of lies, but the risk that Britain could be dragged into a new Middle East war in Iran if Tony Blair is re-elected. Bill Clinton spoke Sunday on a video hookup from New York to a Blair rally in London's Old Vic theater, as if Iraq, and Iran, existed in an alternate universe, and the Bush regime weren't inherently dangerous.

Not even the Big Dog could go to Tehran and rescue the United States from its 444 days of self-imposed blindfolds and day-counts, the odd miracle of Iran-Contra, and the rest of the Reagan / Bush legacy, up to and including NRO provisioning of targeting data for Iraqi use with chemical weapons from 1984 to the April to August 1988 offensive at the Al-Faw peninsula, around Basrah and the Majnoun Islands.

This morning Hashemi Rafsanjani accepted the bitter draught ... "The issue of presidency is among my current preoccupations and although I would like someone else to take up this responsibility, I think I have to take this bitter medicine. I think I have to take this bitter medicine since what I didn't like to happen is apparently occurring." He's referring to the lack of a well-known pragmatic or moderate candidate, and the importance of getting a turn-out at or near the 60% level.

In his remarks a few days ago he said what I've thought was obvious for some time, and not predicated on some slender reed of possession of some trivial inventory of intermediate-range exotic weapons -- "that the US was pressing Iran in a brutal manner as the focal point of the resistance by the Islamic world and regretted that certain foolish people in the region helped the US in this connection ignorant of the fact that they would be most seriously damaged if Iran is harmed." Does that really need decoding?

In other election news, Rafat Bayat, one of 12 women elected to the 7th Majlis, tossed her hat into the ring too. She's testing if being approved as a candidate for the Majlis by the Guardian Council, and elected by her district, is sufficient to meet the Guardian Council's ”rejal” requirement for candidates for presidency.

Ali Larijani also formally tossed his hat in to the ring at a meeting of conservatives last week. He is the former head of the state broadcasting apparatus and for the moment, the rising star of the well-connected conservatives. His numbers were 3.9% in the latest IRNA poll. It is interesting that the rest of the conservatives and young neo-cons haven't folded their tents and gotten with the program.

Mustafa Moeen (Reform) (photo) has a blog link

See also XIX and XIII and X.

update: Mohsen Mehralizadeh just announced. He's an unalligned reformer, and currently vice-chair of an atheletic organization. He'll drop out if the reformers reach a compromise, and he'll stay in if they don't. Not very useful, but he thinks the conservatives won't get their act together, which is interesting.

Mostafa Moeen is messaging on management, productivity and infrastructure.
Mohsen Mehralizadeh is messaging on presidential authority, efficient government and social calm.

Modernists at the Gates

The study of Europe is not something that should be left just to Europeans. If it were, one would have to accept their mythologies, and they would be inscruitable, opaque. It is possible that Europeans can benefit from the study of Europe by non-Europeans, but they are not the intended beneficiaries.

In 1990 the Belgian Jacques Dupuis, S.J., presented a paper entitled Religious Plurality and the Christological Debate at a symposium sponsored by the "Dialogue with Living Faiths" section of the World Council of Churchs in Barr, Switzerland. The paper addressed the Christological problem that is at the core of the Christian theology of religions: "Is Jesus Christ the one and universal savior?" It concludes with this:

... a Christian theology of religions must show that the members of the other religious traditions, together with Christians, share in the reign which God has established in history through Jesus Christ, and that the Spirit of Christ is present among them end operative in them.

Seven years later he would publish Toward a Theology of Religious Pluralism (Amazon link), the work he is best known for.

The man shown in the photo was not amused. When he says "dictatorship of relativism", he means Jacques Dupuis, S.J.

Why is this of the slightest interest to anyone with an interest in Federal Indian Law? Because ...

Ex Parte Crow Dog and the Major Crimes Act of 1886 simply are incomprehensible unless viewed in two contexts -- institutional and political, the context of the elites, and the context of the message to the non-elites.

The institutional transformation was the transfer of control of exploitation of the Americas from one institution to another, one in a long series, from Rome to secular crowns in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, from secular crowns to colonial charters and viceroys in the 17th and 18th centuries, and from colonial charters and viceroys to "revolutionary" regimes in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The international legal regime created in the Conquest of the Canaries, then the Conquest of Indies, and finally in the Conquest of Mexico and Peru, fully developed in the legal processes of the Audencias -- Hernán Cortés, Nuño Guzmán de Beltran, and their successors in appointment were answerable to the Crown of Spain, which was in turn answerable to the Curia in Rome, ended in half of the English controlled exploitation zone in 1832, the date of the real "American Revolution", when the Supreme Court of the United States in Worcester vs. Georgia held the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation illegal, unconstitutional and contrary to treaties negotiated by previous Executives and ratified in previous sessions of the Senate, and President Andrew Jackson said "John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can." The Conquistadors of the Western States were no longer answerable to the successor in interest to a European Crown, and in turn to the Curia in Rome.

The national legal regime created in 1832, of an Executive and Senate, composed of two members from each State, including Rhode Island, Deleware, Maryland, and Massachusettes, Connecticut, and Virginia, which had all surrendered any western extension claims based upon colonial charters in the late 18th century, which exclusively "dealt with Indian Nations", answerable to no higher authority other than itself, ended with the Appropriation Act of March 3, 1871, Ch. 120 §1, 16 Stat. 544, 566 (codified at 25 U.S.C. §71). That was the end of "Federalism" and Article II as the foundation of relations between the United States and Indian Nations. The majority in the House excluded the Executive and the Senate from negotiating treaties, and with the Act of Mar. 3, 1885, S 9, 23 Stat. 385, now codified, as amended, 18 U.S.C. S 1153, the "Major Crimes Act", the majority in the House placed all Indian Treaties previously negotiated and ratified under the unilateral, unrestricted control of the momentary majority in the House. Modernly this is all resolved by an appeal to Article I, S 8, cl. 3, which provides Congress with the power to `regulate Commerce . . . with the Indian Tribes, where "regulate Commerce" means anything any momentary majority in the House, or any revisionist, writing an opinion or a textbook, intends it to mean.

The political message was the extension of the benefits of Christian civilization, a package of sedentarism and agriculturalism and modernism, made in the enduring European mythos of non-sedentarism, and therefore without title to land, and non-agriculturalism, and therefore without economic exchange systems, and non-modernism, and therefore without enlightenment. Central to this criminal jurisdictional claim was the natural supremacy and universality of Christian morality, a theory of law Robert A. Williams explored in The Algebra of Federal Indian Law: The Hard Trail of Decolonizing and Americanizing the White Man's Indian Jurisprudence, 1986 Wis. L. Rev. 219. He traces the origins of Natural Law, the foundation of objectivism, and therefore universal truths, back to the European Middle Ages, to the exchange of letters in 1246 between Sinibaldo de' Fieshi and Güyük Borjigh.

In his letter to Güyük Borjigh, son of Ogodei Borjigh, who had defeated the Europeans at Mohi in Hungary and Liegnitz in Poland, and grandson of Temujin Borjigh (Chingis Khan), the ruler of most of Asia and a significant part of Europe, Sinibaldo de' Fieshi, as Pope Innocent IV and in 1246, ruler of what was left of Catholic Europe, wrote from exile in Lyons and dependency under Louis IX a simplified version of his commentary on the canonical law collection of the Liber Extra. I'm paraphrasing the commentary on Liber Extra.

From the beginning of all times, when all territory was still common property, anybody who first took possession of a piece of land owned it legally from then on and forever or until he gave it up voluntarily, be he Christian or not. Thus, a non-Christian ruler could rule his realm legally and a heathen ruler could even rule legally over Christian subjects as long as he treated them well.

Innocent IV did not argue a Christian legal basis, but a "natural law" to which all living beings are bound -- since the Pope is Christ's vicar on earth, and Christ is the natural Lord, dominus naturalis, of the World, the Pope must clearly be the one authority to supervise right or wrong behaviour, to punish heathen rulers who treat their Christian subjects badly and Christians who illegally attack heathens who never did anything wrong. Güyük Khan accepted the "natural law" argument, with the modification that his chair, not Innocent's, was the center of the natural universe.

Innocent's pupil Henricus de Segusio (Hostiensis), denounced Innocent's "natural law" theory, stressing that Christ's first coming had reorganised all property rights so that legal sovereignty can only lie in Christian hands. The difference between these two 13th century canon lawyers would manifest in the difference between the Inter Caetera of 1493, authorizing "... that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself ..." and the Sublimus Dei of 1537, directing "... by these Our letters ... that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved ..." However imperfect its execution, it is from the Sublimus Dei that the American Republic severed itself in 1832, and it is from the Sublimus Dei that the Catholic Church is now severed.

Why this is of the slightest interest to anyone with an interest in Federal Indian Law is because Rehnquist in Oliphant, the jurisdictional cognate of ecclesiam nulla salus (no salvation outside of the Church), in an opinion that resurected the reasoning of 1886 while eliding the Christian basis for that reasoning, came down on the side of Hostiensis, not Innocent IV, and Benedict XVI is unmistakably also a Hostiensis man.

In 1610 Rome entered into a treaty with the Mi'kmaq of Unamaki (Cape Breton), part of the greater tribal group of the Mi'kmaq Nation, itself part of the Wabanaki (Dawn Land) Confederacy of Nations. The text of the treaty is the Mombertou Wampum Belt, which establishes the Catholic Church in Unamaki, with the condition that the walls of the European Church have an Indian Window, carefully detailed in the Wampum. The walls define, but the window allows the spirit to enter and exit at will. The Inquisition and its successor, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, have never been permitted in the Wabanaki Church.

The distance from the SCOTUS to Rome is a sea of time and salt, but what is shared by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Prefect Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is immanent.

Jacques Dupuis, S.J., died on December 28th, 2004.

Autism Open Thread

We need a new autism open thread. To get things started, I want to present two quotes from David Kirby’s book, Evidence of Harm, and then ask a question. The first quote:

She walked over to Will and scooped him up in her arms. He refused to meet her gaze. He neither giggled nor smiled. Today, he seemed to barely move at all, though some days he never stopped moving for a second. Tears welled in Lyn’s eyes as she spoke to her son, trying to see if the words were registering behind that faraway face.

The boy kept his gaze out the window, as if something were stirring in the garden. But in the late September afternoon, all was still. “We’re going to find out what happened, Will,” Lyn vowed. Her voice tripped with emotion. Will didn’t notice…..

The second quote:

Lyn ran to her files and pulled out the list of eleven vaccinations that Will had been given between two months and eighteen months of age…. All the shots, except MMR, contained thimerosal. Lyn cried as she read the numbers and wrote them down in a little column on her pad. She had difficulty controlling the pen.

At his two month well-baby visit, Will had received a diphtheria-tetanus shot that had 25 micrograms of ethylmercury used as a preservative. On the same visit, Will had been given an Hib shot, with another 25 micrograms, and hepatitis-B, which had 12.5 micrograms. At four months, he got the same three shots, or another 62.5 micrograms….

Lynn added up her column and almost choked: Will had been injected with a total of 237 micrograms of mercury. And most of that -- 175 micrograms-- he received in the first six months, when he weighed very little...

But what did Will’s numbers mean in terms of EPA limits? To find out, Lyn looked took Will’s exposure at two months. At that age, he weighed a little over 10 pounds, or 5 kilograms. According to the EPA guideline of 0.1 microgram per kilogram per day, Will should not have been exposed to more than 0.5 micrograms of mercury on the day of his doctor visit. But he had received 62.5 micrograms. Lyn did the math. She was sure she had calculated wrong. The way she figured it, Will’s exposure that day exceeded the EPA limit by 125 times.

The question: How do people at the FDA, the CDC, and at Eli Lilly sleep at night?

Anyone have any answers?

Milestone

At 5pm last night we signed the papers putting our house under contract with a buyer. If all contingencies are met, we hit the road on June 6th, 2005.

I'm just thrilled I don't have to deal with "showings" anymore. And can finally plan a real route.

Yay.

Fear This

David Broder, writing in today’s Washington Post, proposes a laughable “compromise” between the parties on judicial nominations:

The Democratic Senate leadership should agree voluntarily to set aside the continued threat of filibustering the seven Bush appointees to the federal appeals courts who were blocked in the last Congress and whose names have been resubmitted. In return, they should get a renewed promise from the president that he will not bypass the Senate by offering any more recess appointments to the bench and a pledge from Republican Senate leaders to consider each such nominee individually, carefully and with a guarantee of extensive debate in coming months.

It is hard to see what the Democrats get from such a "compromise." The objectionable nominees get lifetime appointments to the bench. Democrats surely can’t cheer that. If Democrats volunteer to forego their filibuster power, the President will not need to make recess appointments as his nominees will be confirmed.

I am sure that each GOP Senator now feels that they have provided careful individual consideration of the judges so that promise provides nothing. Finally, Democrats now have the right to extensive, indeed, unlimited debate. That promise is worthless. What do Democrats get from the compromise? Nothing worth having, but let’s hear Broder out.

Broder thinks that causing the Senate to shut down will be bad on policy grounds.

If that were to happen, Democrats have said they would use every rule and procedure available to them to bring the work of the Senate to a halt.

Building such a roadblock to consideration of such important legislation as energy, Social Security, welfare reform and the routine financing of government ...

Harry Reid has promised not to use the shutdown to prevent such matters as the financing of government. As to Social Security, energy and welfare reform, Democrats have no power to implement their own agenda and find the GOP agenda on those matters odious. Why should Democrats care if that agenda does not get enacted?

Broder suggests that Democrats will pay a heavy political price for shutting down the government. Continuing with Broder:

[T]he mighty megaphone of the White House would ensure that Democrats took the brunt of the blame. Democrats need to remember what happened to Newt Gingrich when he shut down the government for a few days in 1995 in a budget dispute with President Bill Clinton. It was not Clinton who lost public support.

Atrios points out that shutting down the Senate, which most American will not even notice, is a far cry from shutting down the government when National Parks and monuments closed and Federal workers were sent home.

In addition, Broder ignores evidence that shutting down the Senate will hurt Republicans, not Democrats. Recent polling data suggests that most Americans oppose ending the filibuster. Broder also ignores that the nuclear option is causing a split in the interests of parts of the Republican coalition. For the cultural conservatives, nothing is more important than the Courts. Big business, on the other hand, wants all manner of legislations promoting its interests. Democrats are smart to make sure that the GOP has to choose between its factions.

Finally, Broder ignores the arguments made by some Republican Leaders, such as Bob Dole, that permitting a majority of the Senate to eliminate the filibuster will have detrimental long term consequences for the GOP.

In essence, Broder argues that Democrats should give up because otherwise the President will call them bad names. Any policy that is 1) supported by a majority of Americans (51-39 in the latest polling I saw) that also results in 2) splitting the GOP coalition, 3) preventing enactment of legislation that Republicans favor and Democrats oppose, and 4) causes the GOP problems “down the road” as Bob Dole said, is not a course that Democrats should fear.

Broder’s last reason for Democrats to “compromise by conceding” is this:

In addition, if the judicial filibuster were ended by a vote of the Senate, it would vanish entirely. By yielding the right to filibuster these specific court appointees, the Democrats could deny the Republicans any immediate pretext for changing the rules -- and preserve the possibility of a filibuster should Bush later submit someone they find seriously objectionable for a vacancy on the Supreme Court.

Democrats have proved themselves to naïve (ask Max Cleland), but even Pollyanna would not buy that argument. If the GOP is willing to suffer the shut down of the Senate, with all of the dangers listed above, over a few Circuit Court nominees, why in the world should Democrats think that the GOP would not simply take their gains and then go nuclear to prevent a filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee?

It is hard for me to believe that the GOP is going to allow its entire agenda to be set aside in order to push through a handful of judicial nominees. I guess I should be thankful for small favors as it seems likely that the move will be a disaster for the GOP in both policy and political terms, both in the short and long run.

I do not fear the political consequences of which Broder gravely warns. Indeed, it is hard for me to see the invocation of the nuclear option as anything but helpful to the enactment of progressive legislation once the pendulum swings. After all, if a simple GOP majority of Senators can change Senate rules with regard to judicial nominees, why could a simple Democratic majority not change Senate rules on behalf of health care reform?

What I do fear is that President Bush and the GOP will realize that they can have their cake and eat it too. If the President called off the nuclear option, withdrew the contested nominees, and announced that each of those nominees would be getting a recess appointment, what could the Democrats do?

The cultural conservatives would not only get their judges on the bench in the short term, but they would have a chance to see them in action before committing to a lifetime appointment. Given conservative anger at many Republican-appointed Justices, such as Warren, Stevens, Souter, and Kennedy, I expect that the right wing would cherish a probationary period for judges, if only because they would retain the leverage of a possible lifetime appointment for Judges who did not offend.

Meanwhile, the entire GOP agenda could proceed apace with Democrats having no good reason to shut down the Senate. The oil companies would get their swag. Doctors, Big Pharma, and many businesses would get liability protection. Paris Hilton could avoid estate taxes. The developing schism between big business and the God Squad would heal. The public would not blame the GOP for changing the rules in the middle of the game. Bill Frist could brag in the 2008 campaign that he got a bunch of wing nuts on the courts. In 2006, GOP incumbents could point to a record of enacted legislation.

If I am wrong and Democrats suffer losses as a result, so what? If having 45 Senators does not allow Democrats to exert any power, what does it matter if the number drops to 42 or even 39?

I think the nuclear option is a bluff on the part of Bill Frist and the GOP. I do so hope I am wrong.

Vioxx Emails

The New York Times reports on internal Merck emails concerning Vioxx:

In 2000, amid rising concerns that its painkiller Vioxx posed heart risks, Merck overruled one of its own scientists after he suggested that a patient in a clinical trial had probably died of a heart attack.

In an e-mail exchange about Vioxx, the company's most important new drug at the time, a senior Merck scientist repeatedly urged the researcher to change his views about the death "so that we don't raise concerns." In later reports to the Food and Drug Administration and in a paper published in 2003, Merck listed the cause of death as "unknown" for the patient, a 73-year-old woman…

During the Advantage trial, eight people taking Vioxx suffered heart attacks or sudden cardiac death, compared with just one taking naproxen, according to data released by the F.D.A. earlier this year. The difference was statistically significant, but Merck never disclosed the data that way…

The Advantage trial was completed in 2000, but its results were not published until 2003, when they appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a well-regarded journal. Dr. Jeffrey R. Lisse, a rheumatologist at the University of Arizona who is listed as the study's first author, said in an interview that at least two other journals had rejected the study because its results were not novel.
In the published study, Dr. Lisse reported that five patients taking Vioxx had suffered heart attacks during the trial, compared with one taking naproxen, a difference that did not reach statistical significance. But the paper never mentioned the three additional cardiac deaths of patients taking Vioxx, including the 73-year-old woman.

Dr. Lisse said that while he was listed as the paper's first author, Merck actually wrote the report, an unusual practice.

"Merck designed the trial, paid for the trial, ran the trial," Dr. Lisse said. "Merck came to me after the study was completed and said, 'We want your help to work on the paper.' The initial paper was written at Merck, and then it was sent to me for editing."

Dr. Lisse said he had never heard of the case of the woman who died, until told of it by a reporter. "Basically, I went with the cardiovascular data that was presented to me," he said.

The 73-year-old woman who became the subject of the debate inside Merck died on Oct. 21, 1999, a few minutes after calling her son to tell him she felt short of breath. By the time her son reached her house, she was dead. Records show that she had been taking 25 milligrams of Vioxx a day as part of the clinical trial.

That reports tells us a lot about various relationships in the scientific community.

First, the relationship between the Merck researchers and Merck management is, unsurprisingly, one of employer to employee. The employees are discouraged from making decisions based on their scientific knowledge and training if such decisions would put the company “in a terrible situation” with regard to sales of its products. The safety of the consumers of the products is secondary to the profits of the company.

Secondly, the relationship between the drug companies and the academic world is scandalous. In the “publish or perish” world of academia, it is not really very hard to publish. Merck designed the study, paid for the study, ran the study, massaged the results, and wrote the report. It then provided the misleading report to Dr. Lisse, who signed his name and added another publication to his CV. He did not verify the data but, rather, “went with the cardiovascular data that was presented” to him. The results of the study look so much better when an academic is listed as the first author, even though he had little or no involvement with the actual study. The fact that the study put consumers at risk seems to have been of little concern to Merck, Dr. Lisse, or the University of Arizona. I wonder whether Lisse or UA received any grant money from Merck for rubber stamping the misleading study.

Perhaps the greatest insight from the emails concerns the relationship between Merck officials and the FDA. The Times reports on emails from Merck’s top scientist, Dr. Edward M. Scolnick:

In one e-mail message, Dr. Scolnick said the drug trial that included the woman's death had "put us in a terrible situation." In others, he fiercely criticized the F.D.A. and said he would personally pressure senior officials at the agency if it took action unfavorable to Vioxx.

The idea that a drug company employee thinks he can personally and effectively pressure senior officials at the FDA tells us all we need to know. It is a relationship of foxes to chickens. The FDA offices, of course, should unofficially be known as the “chicken house.”

Who's Left?

Bob Graham (D FL) would have voted against yet another "Emergency" Supplemental Appropriation, giving Bush another $81 bn to make vanish in Iraq. But after writing a damn fine economic stimulus plan and running a campaign honestly and intelligently, he withdrew when most of the smart money went to candidates who "supported the troops", and retired from the Senate, and his seat was taken by a mean-spirited man who will amount to little in public life.

John Edwards (D-NC) also would have voted against yet another "Emergency" Supplemental Appropriation, giving Bush another $81 bn to make vanish in Iraq. But after writing a damn fine economic policy centered "Two Americas" stump speach and running a campaign honestly and intelligently, with no negatives what so ever, he accepted the request to accept the nomination for vice-president, subordinate to a candidate who "supported the troops". He too retired from the Senate, and his seat was taken by man who campaigned with Jessie Helms, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush.

Barbara Boxer (D-CA), voted against S. 1689 (Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Iraq and Afghanistan Security and Reconstruction Act, 2004), as did Robert Byrd (D-WV), Dan Harkin (D-IA), Fritz Hollings (D-SC), John Jeffords (I-VT), Edward Kennedy (D-MA), John Kerry (D-MA), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Paul Sarbanes (D-MD).

However, not a single Democratic Senator voted against the "Emergency" Supplemental Appropriation of 2005. Not one. Danniel Inouye (D-HI) recorded "Not Voting".

DNC Chair Howard Dean is not Candidate Dean. What is left of what was a Congressional opposition to the Bush War is now unanimous in its support for the Bush War, and that isn't his fault. He'd have to resign as DNC Chair if he didn't say such gob stopping stupid things as "We're There and We Can't Get Out".

So far the "net roots" thing seems to be disfunctional. Either the Democratic caucus in the Senate "is" the Party, and the "net roots" is just froth and a large, low value per transaction ATM, or the "net roots", contrary to appearences, really do "support the troops" and want them marooned in Iraq for as long as the regime can come up with rationals to keep them there, or there is a fatal disconnect. As of this week, the loyal opposition to a regime created by election fraud and defined by foreign policy fraud, consists of unqualified support for a foreign policy of fraud. I've no idea how the altruistic Deaniacs are going to weather this, I expect more than one is screaming.

Image courtesy of evilpundit, by way of deep blade,

Maples and Magnolias

Here in Southern Maine the maples are beginning to pop. The branches are thickening red after a season of stark black against grey skies. Our two magnolias are in flower, one glorious white, the other sunrise red. It is snowing in The County but the earth knows that it is spring, and the verdent explosion has already begun in the grass, bringing out groundhogs -- Wise Grandmother Agaskwa of the Gluskabe creation and wisdom story cycle.

Le Monde too reports the first signs of a change in the weather.

"Nous rejetons la responsabilité de ces actes sur les membres de la communauté sunnite et nous leur demandons de condamner ces agissements criminels pour ne pas être obligés d'y riposter", a déclaré à l'AFP Assad Abou Qalal, gouverneur de la ville sainte de Nadjaf et haut responsable du Conseil suprême de la révolution islamique (CSRII), le principal parti chiite irakien.

This is the first time that a Shia leader, the governor of Najaf, member of the governing council of SCIIR, has accused the Sunnis collectively of responsibility for supporting the anti-Occupation forces, and is the first time a Shia leader has delivered an ultimatum, backed by a threat of reprisal, to the Sunnis. Assad Abou Qalal had just performed services for six of the nine Shia killed at a Baghdad mosque when he made the statement to the press.

Juan Cole will certainly have coverage tomorrow.

MPG & MBTE for Earth Day

We're looking at solutions to the problem defined by seven passengers and a tow capacity of between 4,000 and 5,000 pounds. The Honda Odessey, which neatly solved the seven passengers problem, is in the 20/28 mpg range for city/highway operation. The tow capacity moves this down to the 14/18 mpg range for solutions to the complete problem, which the tow itself drops another two or three mpg, which translates into navigational shock at the contraction of distances between gas pumps as we plan our year of living vagrantly.

Celebrating Earth Day week in its own unique way, the House Energy and Commerce Committee rejected a proposal to increase average fuel efficiency (CAFE standard) 20% by 2014. That proposal would have raised the CAFE standard for cars from the current 27.5 mpg to 33 mpg. The Republican spin on CAFE is that it's government intrusion in the private economy, ergo a bad thing, but the vote in committee was 36–10, so quite a few Democrats share the view that conservation isn't good energy policy, and an industry that has focused its profitability on gas guzzlers like the Hummer H2 (10/13 mpg), the Lincoln Navigator (13/18 mpg), the Chevrolet Suburban (14/18 mpg) and the Cadillac Escalade ESV (13/17), is well managed and needs little in the way of government intrusion. Oddly, the UAW agrees that Big Three management are not intractible boneheads.

The French investment bank IXIS-CIB celebrated Earth Day week slightly differently, releasing a forecast for oil demand through 2015, which Al Jazeera published and was on the Friday morning breakfast table, along with coffee and coissants, of every OPEC minister, giving what I suspect is good cheer. It is the most emailed story of the week for Al Jazeera. The IXIS-CIB oil analysis forcasts a price level of $380 per barrel in 2015.

Writing for the NYTimes, Jad Mouawad argues that higher energy prices are a hohum, after taking inflation into account, prices would have to reach $80 a barrel to match the record of March 1981, and besides, there is no manufacturing left in the US anyway, so who cares?

But the best part of HR 6 is the determination by the Majority in the House that MBTE, like Mercury, is not in fact toxic.

Nominee England (DSecDef)

Everyone who reads political blogs on the left hand side of the dial has some idea that Paul Wolfowitz was Donald Rumsfeld's deputy at the OSD. Who Gordon England is and what job he's currently doing is more a trivial pursuits, sailor edition, than part of the generic journo-blogo repitoire of political literacy.

But he is interesting and he is the nominee for Donald Rumsfeld's deputy at the OSD. From his biobraphy at SECNAV

Prior to joining the administration of President George W. Bush, Mr. England served as executive vice president of General Dynamics Corporation from 1997 until 2001. In that position he was responsible for two major sectors of the corporation: Information Systems and International. Previously, he served as executive vice president of the Combat Systems Group, president of General Dynamics Fort Worth aircraft company (later Lockheed), president of General Dynamics Land Systems Company and as the principal of a mergers and acquisition consulting company.

That makes him an Iron Triangle arbitrager who made it into the boardroom of General Dynamics and is now doing the revolving door at pseudo-Defense -- first in the chaos that isn't getting any better in Joe Lieberman's and George Bush's colosal blunder -- the Department of Homeland Security, and now at the Navy Department.

Yesterday's piece on the Base Closure and Reallignment Commission made the point that at least two of the uniformed services -- the Air Force and the Navy, are institutions lacking strategic missions. The problem for the Air Force goes even deeper than the end of parity with the Soviets, but I haven't yet written the piece on strategic bombing of electrical infrastructure (which I expect only VJ will read anyway, but writing is for writing), so I'll leave the strategic (non-nuclear) bombing value proposition as an assumed truth.

He made news recently by putting his mark on a bit of procurement policy paper approving the closure of General Dynamics' yard in Maine, making the economic vaporware arguement that the Navy would save $300 mil per unit if all future Destroyers were built at the Litton Industry's yard in Mississippi. The DD(X) procurements are currently split, one hull in three at the Maine yard (Bath Iron Works), two hulls in three at the Mississippi yard (Ingalls at Pascagoula). Fortunately for the Republican majority in the Senate, and several thousand Mainers, and possibly most tax payers if single-source and non-competitive government contracts is a bigger failure of process than 300 million hypothetical "economies of scale and efficiency saved" green stamps in a system that loses billions of dollars on well-known bogosities every year, someone at the OSD, or more likely, someone in politics who cares about the Republican majority in the Senate, scotched Gordon England's clever plan.

But that's ordinary administrative venality, playing with pretend money and sacking an entire town somewhere "out there" in fly-over land. There's worse.

As Secretary of the Navy England should have been figuring how to de-couple the Navy from an obsoleted or vastly down-scaled mission -- being the third leg of America's Strategic Nuclear Deterrence. There's not a lot left to deter, whether what's being "deterred" is run out of Moscow or Beijing. Getting at least half of the SSBN fleet off the operational budget and onto a lower cost maintenance and life-extended budget, and getting more than two crew shifts per boat to maintain manpower should have been his first priority. Instead, like several SECNAVs before him, he's left the SSN and SSBN fleets drift downward with few accelerated retirements. In effect, the only "signal" from the Navy's portion of the "deterence trident" that the Soviet Union, and China, no longer present a credible threat of initiating an intercontinental nuclear exchange, is the fact that no new SSBNs are entering the fleet. Everything is riding down its 30 year plus or minus life-time operating cost curve, mostly undisturbed by policy oversight.

It is the SECNAV's job to notice things like that.

However, if the SECDEF is keen to transform the Army from a stable institution composed of stable commands in Europe and Korea, into an unstable institution composed of ad hoc situational commands, anywhere on a moment's notice, the "agile spear", and the SECNAV's loyalties are ... not to the Navy's permanent mission of bi-coastal blue water defense, then the SECNAV's job is replacing the blue water navy with a brown water navy -- one Rumsfeld can take with him into the littoral combat sphere of operations.

There are some real problems with the littoral combat sphere of operations theory. First, it assumes that the unfortunate recipients of the brown water navy's attentions lack the means to pot shallow-draft, fast, unarmored boats shooting up their shores. Its 100 kg of commodity explosives, a commodity rocket moter, and a guidance system of choice, from joy-stick and wireline to active sensors and integrated, or standoff illuminators. Rinse and repeat.

But lack of surface-to-surface artillary capability in the littoral combat zone as an article of faith is not the only problem with the littoral combat sphere of operations theory. Not only must the natives be passive recipients of the attentions of the brown water navy, but they must lack the means deny use of the littoral zone to vessels other than those shallow-draft, fast, unarmored boats. Its 1,000 kg of commodity explosives or a dozen commodity RPGs, a commodity fast boat, from Zodiac inflatables to Cigarette boats, and a guidance system of choice, from hand-on-wheel to auto-pilot. Rinse and repeat.

But lack of water-born denial capability in the littoral zone of the area of operations, the inability to repeat the War of the Tankers as an article of faith, is not the last problem with the littoral combat sphere of operations theory. These two articles of faith posit littoral combat operations without cause. I'm getting tired of beating around the bush. The "brown water" isn't the Orinocco or the Amazon, its the coast of West Asia, the Persian and Arab and Omani Gulfs.

The littoral combat was for the control of indefensible oil embarcation points, and associated sealift landings for the logistical tail of the on-shore portion of the operation, and the unrestricted transit to and from those indefensible oil embarcation points and sealift landings, and the "reach back" to the ports where forces were "surged out" from, and where tankers and containerships go to and come from to sustain the purpose of the original US vs Other State military conflict.

The last article of faith of the littoral combat sphere of operations theory is that no other blue water navy, either regional or global in nature, will engage the brown water navy in blue water, or otherwise compromise the strategic exercise of sea power confined to brown waters.

With those three articles of faith, the Litorial Combat Ship (LCS) program at the expense off the Next Generation Destroyer (DD(X)) program isn't criminally insane, If those articles of faith are just someone's wishful thinking, and there is a lot of that in the current crop of Cabinet and sub-Cabinet political appointees in the Pentagon, then its a trillion-dollar fiasco, as if it was the Wasp, Hornet and Lexington that went down on December 7th, 1941, leaving the US to fight out the rest of the Pacific naval war with the Arizona, the Idaho, and the California -- ships of the line circa 1914.

That's why Rumsfeld wants England bumped up from SECNAV to DSECDEF. Rumsfeld has a lot more "modernizing" to do. He's got the whole dump-the-armor-for-Intel for the Army program to sell to Congress, That's "Intel" as in "Intelligence" and "Intel" as in laptops-as-a-substitute-for-armor. He needs someone who has the "agile spear" vision, and England appears to have that, and not a lot else. Except for one little detail.

The top three corporations in the defense industry account for 25 cents out of every defense budget dollar, and as MB pointed out last December 7th, is lobbying to both drive the defense budget up to 4% of GNP, and to capture as much of the Defense budget as it can for high margin "missile defense" and exotic and/or space-based or space-expoloiting products, where those top three capture much more than 25 cents on every dollar.

Gordon England is both from GD, one of the big three, he's also from the zoomie / exotics / tech side of GD. SECNAV and stepping on the toes of the black shoes in the fleets was just a step up to the big-time -- SECDEF after SECDEF.

Not my choice for a senior staffer at the OSD, but then again, I count how many attack boats India's got or is buying off the Russians, and how many attack boats the PRC is on-schedule for, all of these are blue water sea-denial assets, and tastes vary.

Coming to what's left of Maine near you

With the few exceptions of governments actually committed to the planned use of military assets to obtain policy objectives, "military necessity" is defined by local politics. The antenna farm at Cutler, which pumps out 50 characters/second of submarine command and control messages over Very Long Wave radio, has been short on mission since the end of Cold War.

The airfield at Brunswick, which flies long-range maritime patrol aircraft, has also been short on mission since the end of Cold War.

The shipyard at Portsmouth, which overhauls and repairs nuclear-powered submarines, has also been short on mission since the end of Cold War.

Being short on mission is common to every global thermonuclear war postured military asset. Which military assets continue to be funded is a political issue, there is no "rational necessity" test.

However, as long as there is funding to operate submarines as instruments of national policy, that is, covert placement of armed and instrumented engineering spaces just off any point of the Atlantic, Mediterranian, Baltic and Circumpolar coasts, or at any blue water intercept coordinate is necessary to achive national policy goals, funding for the antenna farm at Cutler is safe.

Similarly, as long as there is funding to operate long-range maritime patrol aircraft as instruments of national policy, that is, rapid placement of armed and istrumented engineering spaces at any point in the central and western North Atlantic, or at any blue water intercept coordinate is necessary to achive national policy goals, funding for the air field at Brunswick is safe.

Again, as long as there is funding to operate submarines as instruments of national policy, the Submarine Maintenance Engineering, Planning and Procurement activity (SUBMEPP) must also be funded. Whether it is funded at the yard at Bremerton, the yard at Pearl Harbor, the yard at Hampton Roads, or the yard at Portsmouth is a balence of Atlantic Fleet fictions between Portsmouth and Hampton Roads -- yard efficiency, economies of scale vs single point of failure, and the effectiveness of Congressional delegations as lobbiests -- and the dirty secret that all four yards are public, contrary to the ideologies of privatization and reduction of government.

The General Dynamics yard at Bath is not a DoD facillity, so it is not within the scope of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC), which needs 60 staffers in a wicked big hurry, to start four months of frenzied analysis and cross-country travel, obviously some to Maine, by May 16, when Secretary Rumsfeld’s realignment and closure recommendations must be given to the commission. Bath's problems lie elsewhere, nominally in the single-source cost-savings narrative, which is a rational for the Ingall's (Litton) yard in Passcagoula over the General Dynamics yard in Bath, but more fundamentally in the change of naval policy from blue water to brown water capabilities. In a nutshell, the Navy is trying to follow the Army down the special forces / asymetric forces / fast mobile rathole, because that's where the money is.

Where the Press Herald errs is in first accepting the assumption that the Base Realignment and Closure Commission is a rational process. There are dozens of very expensive bases, from Texas to North Dakota, that can not be postured as military assets except for fighting an intercontintal thermonuclear war. Most of the 8th Air Force, B-52 Wings in Texas, Louisiana, Missori, and the Dakotas, and most of the 12th Air Force, B-52 Wings in Nebraska, Montana, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Washington, serve little useful purpose other than hauling cruise missiles and dumb bombs strategic distances to deploy in tactical theaters. Most of the 20th Air Force, the 90th Space Wing in Wyoming, the 91st Space Wing in North Dakota, and the 341st Space Wing in Montana, serve little purpose other than proping up claims that ICBMs are protecting America from something. And that's just the Air Force's obsolete "strategic" assets, overwhelmingly in Red States. The Atlantic SSBN fleet at King's Bay Georgia is wicked expensive, in a Red State, and a lot of it could be stood down and life-extended, because it too serves little present purpose other than proping up claims that ICBMs are protecting America from something.

Where the Press Herald errs next is accepting the assumption that necessity and utility evaluation is policy neutral. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is set on recreating the Armed Forces as a light mobile active force, abandoning heavy armor and the concept of European and Korean Theater Commands. In a nutshell, more Marines-lite and no follow-on forces capable of operating against WARSAW-PACT equivalent forces. Secretary of the Navy Gordon England is set on the same course, transforming the blue water Navy organized around carrier strike groups into a brown water force organized around littorial missions in support of light mobile ground forces. As Cabinet and sub-Cabinet appointees of the Executive, they are acting within their authority to reorganize operational commands, to discard and replace training and doctrine, and to make recommendations to Congress on any subject whatsoever. However, it is Congress that appropriates Defense funding, and exercises its independent judgement on the fundamentals -- e.g., adding Blackhawk helicopters and keeping a production line open. Ultimately, it is Congress, and not the Pentagon, that decides what the Military is, and how and where it is used. There is no clause in the War Powers Act that allows the Executive Branch to commit the United States to ad hoc asymetric adventures and ignore symmetric challenges, or to assume that the Wars of 1990 and 2002/3 in West Asia against militaries functioning at or below the 1950s level of operational art and material preparedness, repeated, is the Challenge of the Future. The Secretary of Defense makes policy recommendations. Policy recommndations are not policy neutral. Congress, not the Executive, make policy choices through Defense Appropriations. Congress may choose to extend the life of the Los Angeles Class attack submarines, and it may choose to maintain a blue water capability in the northern hemisphere, the Secretary of Defense is free to ignore Congress, but he is not free to tell Congress what it can, and cannot do.

The BRAC is not objectivity from on high. George Bush had to use a recess-appointment on April 2nd to get Anthony Principi as the commission chair. Senator Trent Lott (R-MI) put a hold on the nomination because of his opposition to domestic base closings. On April 5th Charlie Battaglia was hired as the Commission’s chief of staff, and having no infrastructure left over from the series of Base Realignment and Closure C commissions in 1991, 1993 and 1995, the Commission moved into office space on Jefferson Davis Highway in Crystal City, Va., and has quickly hired 30 staff members, many of whom have been involved in previous BRAC processes. He still must recruit another 60 people — mostly administrative staff and associate analysts — for yearlong positions. These positions are sought by people who are either on their way out of government, or just entering government. They are Mac-Jobs.

Posted: April 20, 2005

The Base Closure and Realignment Commission is seeking qualified personnel for the following positions:

Associate Analysts – must possess writing and analytical skills toassist senior analysts in evaluating complex and extensive data. Ability to work under pressure and overtime. Very challenging assignment. Skilled in Microsoft Office Suite. Some travel. Position available from May 2 to October 8, 2005. Past experience as a legislative assistant a plus.

Commission Security Officer. Responsible for maintaining the physical security of the Commission office and documents. Process the security clearances of staff as required. Experience as a federal security officer a requirement.

Advance Team Member. Coordinate and prepare senior officials’ visits and arrange for field hearings over a two to three month period commencing in late May. Extensive travel within the United States.

Position assignment from May 2 to October 8, 2005.
Staff Assistants. Maintain executive calendars, prepare draft correspondence, maintain files and documents, expense records and other duties as assigned. Excellent oral and interpersonal skills, experience in operating Microsoft Office Suite. Administrative skills required.

Competitive salary commensurate with experience and skills. Send resume to: robert.cook@wso.whs.mil

That is what is coming to Kittery and Brunswick. Not anything more than that. That is what the Portland Press Herald should have written about.

Nuclear Option Becoming Less Likely

In a very smart post at Tapped, Sam Rosenfeld argues that the chances that the Republican Senate will “go nuclear” to prevent judicial nominees from being blocked by filibuster is fading. There are a number of reasons why that may be true.

Rosenfeld links to this article in The Hill noting that internal Republican polling looks bad for the nuclear option:

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a leading advocate of the “nuclear option” to end the Democrats’ filibuster of judicial nominees, is privately arguing for a delay in the face of adverse internal party polls.

Details of the polling numbers remain under wraps, but Santorum and other Senate sources concede that, while a majority of Americans oppose the filibuster, the figures show that most also accept the Democratic message that Republicans are trying to destroy the tradition of debate in the Senate…

Confirming public disquiet over the “nuclear” or “constitutional” option, Santorum said, “Our polling shows that.”

Some party elders, like Bob Dole, have also been urging caution. An AP report from the Oklahoma Daily:

A looming power play by Senate Republican leaders to clamp down on filibusters against judicial nominees is a high-risk strategy.

It could change the balance of power in the Senate, erode the rights of the minority party and backfire against Republicans in the long term.
The Senate is "not always going to be Republican," former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the 1996 GOP presidential candidate, is reminding fellow Republicans. "Think down the road," he advises.

Dole is one of several former Senate majority leaders who have counseled a go-slow approach on the brink of a parliamentary war over Democratic filibusters--delaying tactics--against President Bush's judicial nominees.

A third reason that Republicans may shy away from the nuclear option is the fall out from the Terri Schiavo matter. As the Hill reports:

“He (Santorum) was concerned that too many things are competing in the same area and you couldn’t get a clean shot at it,” a GOP aide said. The aide cited the “fallout” from congressional Republicans’ intervening in a Florida court’s decision to remove Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube and the subsequent controversy caused by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s (R-Texas) statement that “the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.”…

Senate and House Democrats have woven the Republican intervention in the Schiavo issue, DeLay’s statement about judges who declined to save her life, and GOP consideration of the nuclear option into a broad message that Republicans are abusing power.

Perhaps the most powerful reason for declining the nuclear option is that the resulting slowdown or stoppage of Senate business will leave Republicans in the position of not having addressed issues that actually matter to the American people. Eric links today to a Washington Post story about how out if touch with the concerns of the American people Washington has become:

Inflation and interest rates are rising, stock values have plunged, a tank of gas induces sticker shock, and for nearly a year, wages have failed to keep up with the cost of living.

Yet in Washington, the political class has been consumed with the death of a brain-damaged woman in Florida, the ethics of the House majority leader, and the fate of the Senate filibuster.

The disconnect between pocketbook concerns of ordinary Americans and the preoccupations of their politicians has helped send President Bush's approval ratings on the economy down, while breeding discontent with Congress. The problem has yet to grow into a political wave that could sweep significant numbers of lawmakers from power next year, but both parties face risks if they fail to pivot their attention to economic issues.

"There is a lot of frustration," said Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R) on Tuesday, as he was returning from his district in western Michigan. Republican leaders "need some seats from the Midwest and Northeast to maintain a majority, and if we continue at the rate we're going, we may well lose a few seats." …

Ehlers said he has been getting an earful from constituents, angered by gas prices, frightened by the latest layoff announcement, this one from the Grand Rapids-based office furniture giant Steelcase Inc., and frustrated by Congress's inattention. The negative reaction to Congress's intervention in the Schiavo case was particularly jarring, Ehlers said.

"Many are rather upset at the Terri Schiavo issue," he said, even "moderately pro-life" voters. "I'm getting a lot of the, 'Why are you spending time on that when we don't have jobs?' type of thing."

Republicans will try to blame Democrats for any gridlock in the Senate. At the end of the day, however, it is the GOP that has the power and the duty to govern. If the concerns of the American people are not addressed, it is the GOP that will bear the brunt of the blame.

Take Ohio Senator Mike DeWine, for instance. He is up for reelection in 2006. He has remained mum about his position on the nuclear option. Does he really want to run for reelection against a backdrop of a poor economy after casting a vote to ensure that the Republican Senate will do nothing to alleviate (or even to appear to alleviate) the problems? Can he go to his constituents and successfully argue that it was more important to get seven or so of the most wingnutty judicial nominees confirmed than to do something about gas prices, stagnant wages, and job losses?

"In terms of what they're looking for out of Washington and the president and Congress, [people] are expecting some policy that will address this issue [gas prices]," said GOP pollster David Winston. "It doesn't have to happen tomorrow, but they expect to see some progress being made."

Is it wise to vote for a provision that makes it impossible to meet the public’s expectation?

Rosenfeld writes:

A large number of Republican senators -- far larger than the number who've publicly expressed ambivalence -- simply don't want to pick this fight. They (reasonably, from their perspective) don't think ramming through a tiny handful of judicial nominees is worth the sacrifice of being able to pass more GOP-friendly legislation in the coming months. The real enthusiasm for judicial battles is concentrated in a number of hardcore Senate fire-breathers and a huge array of conservative interest groups, and the continued push for the nuclear option has been fueled more by Bill Frist's presidential ambitions (that is, his need to earn the credibility of a religious conservative movement that has long cast a very skeptical eye on him) than it has by any real desire on the part of most of his caucus.

Are Republican Senators such as DeWine, Smith, Sununu, Collins, and others willing to risk their majority status and even reelection to improve Bill Frist’s chances of being the 2008 Presidential nominee?

I suspect that is a hard sell.

Update: Or maybe not.

C'est vachment l'economie idiot

Ten days after the story is above the fold in Le Monde, Weisman and Balz do a write-up at the WaPo. Link. Tra la.

Write your own narrative

Why I Am Leaving, Senate - March 19, 1996

Senator William Cohen (R-ME) with Senator George Mitchell (D-ME) on the Brewer Bridge in Bangor, Maine. November 11, 1986

Last week, I announced that I would not seek reelection to the Senate for a fourth term. I have been moved by the reaction of my constituents and colleagues. Many expressed sadness over my decision, and nearly all were perplexed. Why are so many leaving the Senate? How can the center hold? Won't the system fall apart?

It is not a case, to continue with Yeats's words, `that the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.'

Such a poetic construct presumes too much and maligns the character and capabilities of those who have most recently arrived in Congress and those who have chosen to remain.

Those of us leaving the Senate do so for unique and deeply personal reasons. I suspect, however, that we share a common level of frustration over the absence of political accord and the increase in personal hostilities that now permeate our system and our society.

Increasingly, public officials face: Too little time to reason and reflect; the hair-trigger presumption of guilt pulled at the slightest whisper of impropriety; the schizophrenia of a public that wants less government spending, more government services and lower taxes, and the unyielding demands of proliferating single-issue constituencies.

Too many hours are devoted to endless motion without movement, interminable debate without decision and rhetorical finger-pointing without practical problem-solving.

George Mitchell and Bill Cohen look over the bill authorizing the settlement of the Maine Indian (Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, and Maliseets only) land claims. September, 1980

Our republic, we know, was designed to be slow-moving and deliberative. Our Founding Fathers were convinced that power had to be entrusted to someone, but that no one could be entirely trusted with power. They devised a brilliant system of checks and balances to prevent the tyranny of the many by the few. They constructed a perfect triangle of allocated and checked power, Euclidean in symmetry and balance. There could be no rash action, no rush to judgment, no legislative mob rule, no unrestrained chief executive.

The difficulty with this diffusion of power in today's cyberspace age is that everyone is in check, but no one is in charge.

But more than the constitutional separation of powers is leading to the unprecedented stalemate that exists today. There has been a breakdown in civil debate and discourse. Enmity at times has become so intense that members of Congress have resorted to shoving matches outside the legislative chambers. The Russian Duma, it seems, is slouching its way toward the Potomac as debate gives way to diatribe.

We are witnessing a gravitational pull away from center-based politics to the extremes on both the right and left. Those who seek compromise and consensus are depicted with scorn as a `mushy middle' that is weak and unprincipled. By contrast, those who plant their feet in the concrete of ideological absolutism are heralded as heroic defenders of truth, justice and the American way.

Secretary of Defense Cohen, 13 March 2000, Hanoi

The departure of centrists from party ranks may be cheered by ideologues in the short term. But unless the American people are willing to embrace one party dominance and governance for extended periods (or turn to the British parliamentary model, which I don't recommend), then elements within the liberal and conservative factions will necessarily move back to the center, toward compromise and, yes, consensus.

The American people are experiencing a great deal of anger and anxiety at this time. The stern virtues of self-discipline and fiscal prudence have given way to the soft vices of mindless consumption and selfish gratification. We are now paying for the wages of our sins, and ironically, our citizens are angry with political leaders who have indulged their appetites, purchased their votes and passed the bills to the next generation. The road to fiscal solvency and sanity will not be easy, and it surely will not be paved with the bloated promises of blandishments of political extremists.

I have devoted nearly a quarter of a century to public service and a search for common ground in a society that is growing in complexity and diversity. Although I have decided to enter the private world to pursue new challenges and opportunities, I remain convinced that the American political system will pass through this transitional phase in our history and return to the center, the place where most people live and a democracy functions best.

WILLIAM S. COHEN, MAINE

The Whites of our Eyes

"We value the process more than we value the outcome." With those words, Leo McGarity, Josiah Bartlett's Chief of Staff, ends a plot thread about a populist uprising and incidental seizure of an American owned oil refinery in some South American state. A coup is not the way to get better government.

I'm informed that the majority in the Congress do not intend to allow debate on the Supplemental Appropriation for the War in Iraq. I'm also informed that the Supplemental Appropriation for the War in Iraq, $81bn in this supplemental, is not a partisan issue, that the minority and the majority alike want to give the financial resources to support our troops.

Those are of course, irreconcilable statements. One drawn from a fictional Democratic leadership, one from a non-fictional Democratic leadership.

Riverbend writes about the "news" that anti-occupation forces had taken a over a hundred Shia hostage in Madain this week.

We know a lot of our new officials and spokespeople are blatantly lying and it's fine to lie about security, reconstruction and democracy- we've gotten used to it. In fact, we tell jokes about it and laugh about it at family gatherings or over the telephone. To lie about something as serious as Sunni-Shia hostage taking is another story altogether. It's unacceptable and while Sunnis and Shia were hardly going to take up arms against each other over this latest debacle, but it was still extremely worrisome and for people who wish to fuel sectarian violence, it was a perfect opportunity.

Our situation is this. Our leadership asserts that a rules change by the Senate Majority to end the filibuster over a dozen nominees, several of whom are not qualified to play lawyers on TV or the net, is an outrage. Before that the there was another outrage, no debate on a major bill, and another, no readings of bills before their floor vote, and another, and another. Each of these was a Death of the Republic Film at 11 moment, all the way back to the Delay Bourgeois Mob of the Florida recount, except that Al Gore didn't make his disappointment, and ours, a Constitutional Crisis. Later this year the Senate Majority rules outrage will be over a nominee to the Supreme Court, to replace the man Nixon appointed, who as soon as Nixon was out of commission, created in the Court a check to balance Nixon's policy ending Termination as the Indian policy of the United States.

The question is this. Have we been lied to? Is the latest squawking and shaking of ruffled feathers something we would be better off joking about, than falling into donative frenzies, generally to the cost of other political work? I'm was lied to when someone told me that the cloture petition on debate on the Supplemental Appropriation was institution endangering partisan politics by the Senate Majority, but the undebatable Supplemental Appropriation, and necessarily the safety of, and the protection from the commission of crimes of, over 140,000 citizens now in Iraq, and tens of thousands more who will be sent to Iraq, is inherently non-partisan, with the facts already in evidence concerning the ongoing policy of the Executive Branch concerning the safety of military personnel and their protection from the commission of crimes. It's Maine National Guard out of the Portland Armory, 15 minutes away by foot pushing a stroller, who have guarded Abu G since the sadists and murderers were bagged last year. A parent met at a 7 year old's birthday party, shipping out to Gitmo for a year of guard duty. Another parent from down the street back from Abu G. It's not abstract or symbolic.

The rejected-and-renominated are pretty damn funny -- Janice Rogers Brown thinks the 2nd Amendment applies in State courts, but only to armed Indians. Or soldiers. Or both. William G. Myers, 3rd can't find his way through the Federal Rules of Evidence, even with a nutshell pocket guide, but he knows that archaic pottery associated with burial ceremonial ism are "killed" by breaking a hole in the bottom of the pot, and modernly this is best done with bulldozers, followed by a pass through a stamping mill and a gentle infusion of cyanide. Thomas B. Griffith is the go-to guy if your client has been convicted of practicing law without a license, or any cognate of that modest character defect. And so on.

Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are being worked by both the save-the-filibuster and the sink-the-filibuster collections of hacks. I led the recess visit for People for the American Way and Working Assets to Olympia's Portland office. I'm personally part of this. I've been involved in the unsuccessful campaigns of Mark Lawrence and Chellie Pingree for the seats these two hold in the '00 and the '02 cycles. Bill Frist won't campaign for reelection from Tennessee in the '06 cycle, and he will campaign the Republican primaries, including New Hampshire, in the '08 cycle. If the filibuster, first over the Bush rejected-and-renominated, then over the one or more appointments to the Supreme Court, is just ruffled feathers and rooster-in-or-on-hen-house squawking, like the posturing over the Supplemental Appropriation, then it has no legs, and no one will remember or care when Olympia, or Susan, return to Maine to do the retail. If Frist fails to be useful to drive up Susan's negatives, what use is any of this to anyone interested in a competitive campaign targeting the weaker of the two Republican Senators from Maine?

Gaming an election that is within a MOE and delivers the necessary votes in the Electoral College to determine who holds the Executive Branch does not constitute a Constitutional Crisis. Turning the lower chamber of the Legislative Branch into a one-party-puppet show does not constitute a Constitutional Crisis. Turning the upper chamber of the Legislative Branch into a second one-party-puppet show does not constitute a Constitutional Crisis. Putting a baker's dozen of Country Club comedians and comediennes in the Judicial Branch, and Robert Bork or John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales on the Supreme Court, or moving Antonin Scalia from Associate Justice to Chief Justice, does not constitute a Constitutional Crisis.

If any of them did, the Minority leadership and rank-and-file would have shown that a Constitutional Crisis existed. When the Minority in the Texas Lege wanted to prevent an abuse of process, they moved, as a body, first to Oklahoma, then to New Mexico. The voters did not punish them. They punished the feckless member of the Minority who did not walk away from a crooked table. They didn't come back to Texas to a sham vote to show they supported the troops (and get arrested), or worry about Tom Delay getting John Ashcroft to try and get them arrested on federal warrants. They just played hardball and let the voters call the strikes.

The Democrats could go to Windsor and talk about the future of Detroit and the rest of the Blue North East and Old North West, and reconfiguring the military for humanitarian and peace and stability operations, as well as US-Canada trade -- Red State cattle, oil and gas, softwoods, and NAFTA. They could go to Caiudad Juaraez and talk about the future of New Mexico, Texas and the Hispanic demographic, as well as US-Mexico trade -- Red State oil and gas, corn, maquiladoras and labor and immigration issues and NAFTA. They could be working and playing hardball and let the voters call the strikes.

We value the process more than we value the outcome, and no process and no outcome is a pretty poor substitute for other political work.

Just A Deep Pocket Or An Irresponsible Airline?

I recently wrote about then Governor Bush’s suit against Enterprise Rent-A- Car:

When one of his twin daughters was involved in a fender bender (in which no one was hurt), then Governor Bush filed a lawsuit to recover property damage to the car. I do not know which driver was at fault, but I found it interesting that Bush sued Enterprise Rental-A-Car.

His theory was that the other driver did not have a valid driver’s license and, therefore, that Enterprise should not have rented him a car. I leave it to you to decide if that is an example of looking for a deep pocket with only a tangential relationship to the damage. Bush collected a $2,500 settlement from Enterprise.

David Adesnik of Oxblog thinks that Bush was eminently correct to file the suit:

Damn right Bush should've sued Enterprise. It is ridiculously irresponsible to rent a car to someone who doesn't have a valid license.

I do not think the Bush should have filed the suit, not because I fail to recognize Enterprise Rent-A Car’s irresponsibility, but rather because I do not think that law suits should be filed over trivial matters. No one was hurt in the wreck and Bush’s own insurance policy would have covered the property damage, except for the deductible. I do not find Bush’s suit to be frivolous, but I do not approve of filing law suits over every small matter. Had the stakes been higher, I would have no problem with such a suit against Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

Let’s look at another example of an effort to impose liability for a car wreck on a deeper pocket than the driver at fault.

Jack Townsend was a 25 year-old college graduate in the process of gaining his certificate to be a school teacher. On March 29, 2001 at 10:30 p.m., Townsend was in his Ford Focus driving home in the north Metro Atlanta area.

At the same time, James Serio was driving his Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo home from the Atlanta airport, located about forty miles south. Serio, a fifty year-old software salesman and youth minister at his church, was returning home from a business trip to Milwaukee.

Serio crossed the center line of the road on a curve and struck Townsend’s car. Townsend was severely injured:

Townsend suffered severe head and orthopedic injuries and has run up more than $1 million in medical bills … He is no longer able to drive, lives with his parents, and has short-term memory loss. The only job he is able to hold is serving soft drinks at a Chick-fil-A restaurant…

Serio plead guilty to drunk driving. His liability for Townsend’s injuries is clear but it is unlikely that he has the assets or insurance coverage to make Townsend whole.

Townsend sued not only Serio but also a deeper pocket, Delta Air Lines.

Serio had been on a Delta flight before getting in his Jeep and heading home. The flight from Milwaukee to Atlanta takes a little less than two hours.

Serio had used frequent flyer miles to upgrade to first class. While in first class, Delta had served Serio 6-8 glasses of red wine. Serio contends that he consumed no other alcohol that night either before or after the flight.

A Georgia statute, OCGA § 51-1-40(b) provides, in part:

a person who willfully, knowingly, and unlawfully sells, furnishes, or serves alcoholic beverages to a person … who is in a state of noticeable intoxication, knowing that such person will soon be driving a motor vehicle, may become liable for injury or damage caused by or resulting from the intoxication of such minor or person when the sale, furnishing, or serving is the proximate cause of such injury or damage.

Delta holds a Georgia liquor license. You may assume that some of the wine was served to Serio while the plane was over Georgia. An FAA regulation, 14 CFR § 121.575, prohibits airlines from serving alcohol to intoxicated persons but provides no right of action to a third party for violation of that rule.

The issue is whether or not Townsend should have the right to try to prove that Delta falls within the provisions of the Georgia dram shop statute cited above.

That matter is now pending before the Georgia Supreme Court. It appears that no airline has ever been held liable under a state dram shop statute. The Georgia Court of Appeals opinion, upholding Townsend's right to sue Delta, is here.

A very good discussion of the case by Gordon D. McCauley of the California law firm of Hanson Bridgett (arguing that Delta should have no liability) is here (scroll down and look for “Air Scoop: Mistakes”).

It seems obvious that Townsend joined Delta in the suit only because Delta had resources that Serio lacked. If Townsend’s damages were within the insurance coverage held by Serio, there would be no reason to join Delta as Townsend would be made whole in any case, and joining Delta would needlessly complicate an otherwise simple case. In that sense, Townsend was engaged in a search for a deep pocket.

Nonetheless, under the Oxblog rule, as announced above, it is not also true that Delta was “ridiculously irresponsible” in serving Servio 6-8 glasses of wine in less than two hours? Does that lead to the conclusion that “Damn right Townsend should've sued Delta?”

So, what do you think? Is that a case where the plaintiff improperly seeks a deep pocket by suing a party only tangentially related to the event, or is Townsend simply trying to hold Delta responsible for the damages it caused by its violation of a federal regulation and a Georgia statute?

No More Than We Can Handle

Dr. Manhattan of Blissful Knowledge, a fellow POA, finds little consolation when people acknowledge his family’s situation by saying, "God only gives people what they can handle."

Many people of a certain religious sensibility commonly react to news of an ongoing or long-term tragedy by reassuring the unlucky party that "God only gives people what they can handle."

I know it a) is meant as a compliment, b) is the messy result of when the laudable desire to console meets the unconsolable, and c) may even be true on some level. But - coming from another person - it is also a selfish response: The person reacting thusly does so because he or she is unable to confront the reality without giving a reason, no matter how inapt. The "answer" may work for someone uninvolved with the situation on a daily basis, but here's a tip: it doesn't work so well for those who have to live with it. As such, it's about consoling the consoler.

Taken literally, the statement is patently untrue. If we assume that events are orchestrated by God, what are we to make of Pat Cooper? She was the mother of Torrence Cantrell, an eight year old autistic boy who died during a religious ceremony intended to drive the “demon” of autism from his body. It seems likely that Ms. Cooper turned to the Faith Temple Apostolic Church of Milwaukee, Wisconsin because she did not feel she had any other options. Ms. Cooper held her son down while a “minister” lay across Torrence’s body, crushing his chest and preventing the child from drawing breath. The child died of asphixiation. Ms. Cooper was given more than she could handle.

The prevalence of suicide, divorce, murder, and depression all suggest that lots of people are given more than they can handle.

That said, I take no offense when I am told that God does not give us more than we can handle. As Doctor Manhattan correctly notes, it is a well intentioned effort “to console” the “unconsolable.” It affirms that the speaker understands that our situation is difficult and helps them feel more comfortable. That is a good thing, perhaps the best possible result, as nothing that can be said will make our situation better and there is no point in making others uncomfortable.

Dr. Manhattan is also correct that it is meant as a compliment. It is meant to convey that the speaker admires the way we have coped with difficulty and to reassue us that we will continue to be able to cope.

While I appreciate the compliment, I wonder if it is deserved. There have been many occasions when I have had more than I can handle at the moment. I do not know how single parents of severely autistic kids manage. There are two of us. When one can no longer handle the moment, we have a back up. I cannot even recall the number of times when one of us has saved the other from a complete collapse.

Whenever I am told that God has not given me more than I can handle, I silently and fearfully add the word “yet.”

Who'd have thunk?

Over the last week, I've been floundering helplessly in a subject I know absolutely nothing about, but which I know I'd better master, at least nominally, before I commit my family to a year in a 1900 cubic foot metal box with wheels, ostensibly "off the grid", so to speak. The subject? Electrical engineering. Double E, as referred to with knowing glances by my dad and brother, both engineers of the mechanical/metalurgical persuasion. Despite four years close proximity physically and socially to three of the top tech schools in the US, I never dated a Double E. I was told there was a reason for that. They never left the library.

We have two options as "fulltimers" in an RV: We can remain on the "grid", setting up "camp" (if one can call it such) in full-service camp-grounds with full hookups, including 50 A power, or we can "boondock", living off non-grid power, namely, our house batteries. Thing is, batteries need to be recharged, and that's where the vast black hole of knowledge on my part came in. A week ago, I could not even honestly articulate the difference between AC and DC; Okay, can you? And don't even try with the Heavy Metal references.

So now, after literally more than a hundred hours of study, I not only know the basics of the RV's electrical backbone, I now feel comfortable setting up a basic solar electric array, as well as inverting my 12 volt DC current into 110 volt AC, without frying my whole system.

Because of this intense study, I only yesterday became aware of Senator Frist's massive leap of faith into the heart and soul of the Christian Taliban. But I now feel the timing couldn't have been better. I figure that between the Yellowstone Caldera erupting on a supervolcano scale and the Age of Revelations due any moment, it seems to be a perfect time for a little "Survivalist" training - you never know when you might be fleeing into the wilderness from pyroclastic flow, or good old fire and brimstone, of the more traditional kind.

I've become more and more convinced of late that the Christian Right has honestly read one too many in the Left Behind genre. To that end, who cares if the economy tanks, the environment is trashed or thousands of our young men and women die in an Arab desert thousands of miles from home. It's all part of "The Plan" anyway. But it's certainly distressing for the mere thought of an alternative practicality for these "sustainable living" skills to pop into my head after reading one too many headlines indicating that there are far too many in this country who would welcome it's complete meltdown - as evidence that Armageddon was upon us. Not only welcome it, but work towards that end.

I look forward to the day that learning the difference between watts, volts and amps merits pure unfettered joy on my part. It's certainly a strange enough occurence that it certainly warrants such an undiluted reaction. Or should I say undeluded.

[Addendum: In case anyone is interested, here is the setup I've decided upon:

Morningstar 30A controller w/ meter
2 Kyocera 125W solar panels (14.4A)
2-4 Trojan T105 6v batteries (220 - 440 AH)
1 Xantrex 1500W inverter/charger
1 Xantrex inverter control panel
1 Kipor 2KW generator

Please feel free to critique.]

Fluttering the Pigeons

Someone decided to flutter Bandar-e Mahshahr (Abadan refinery) and the Khuzestan provincial capital of Ahvaz with a letter from former Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi. The letter was circulated in Ahvaz and other Arab minority cities outlining a plan to decrease the percentage of Arabs in the region by moving in non-Arabs. Some disturbences, some rioting, some arrests, two killed here, three killed there, and the government has closed the Al Jazeera offices for breaking the story.

The letter was a forgery.

So who benefits from engineering a social flutter on the Arab edge of Khuzistan, and telling the 3% of ethnic Arabs who are a majority in this oddly strategic bit of Iran, that the Persians are out to get them? It probably wasn't a satellite television network based in Qatar broadcasting in Arabic, not Farsi. Al Jazeera's biggest institutional event on the near horizon is finding a buyer, not finding a rioter.

Updates as the data trickles in. But my working assumption is a CENTCOM psyop or an agency dependent. If there's more of these it means there is a movement order.

Law School Rankings Out

US News has published its annual rankings of the top 100 law schools. Duke University, where I got my JD, ranks eleventh. Emory University, where I got my LLM, is tied at thirty-second.

I don't think those rankings mean very much. Although I have never done a statistical study, over the years it has seemed that the Duke Law School ranking rises or falls with the fortunes of the Duke basketball team.

The law school at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University did not make the list. Although it charges more $23,000 per year in tuition and fees, there is no guarantee that its students will even be able to take the bar exam upon graduation.

As the Liberty web page explains:

Provisional approval is the mandatory first step toward full ABA approval. The ABA requires a new school to be in existence for at least one year before it seeks provisional approval. Once a school has obtained provisional approval, it remains in provisional status for at least three years…

Liberty University School of Law, as a new school, is neither fully nor provisionally approved by the American Bar Association.

Liberty becomes eligible for provisional approval next fall, once it has been open for a year. I have a great deal of admiration for this year’s Liberty law students. They have spent a year and more than $23,000 without knowing whether or not provisional approval will be granted. Those students are risking the possibility that after three years and more than $66,000 of expenses, they will not be able to practice law. As is appropriate for Liberty students, they have proceeded on the basis of faith. They are willing to take a much greater risk in the hopes of becoming a lawyer than most. They want to be lawyers much more than I ever did.

I hope Liberty gets it provisional approval. Students willing to take that much risk to become lawyers deserve a chance to take the bar exam.

Ted Nugent’s Strategy To Grow the NRA

Ted Nugent has a strategy to grow the membership of the NRA. The AJC reports:

With an assault weapon in each hand, rocker and gun rights advocate Ted Nugent urged National Rifle Association members to be "hardcore, radical extremists demanding the right to self defense."

Speaking at the NRA's annual convention Saturday, Nugent said each NRA member should try to enroll 10 new members over the next year and associate only with other members.

"Let's next year sit here and say, 'Holy smokes, the NRA has 40 million members now,'" he said. "No one is allowed at our barbecues unless they are an NRA member. Do that in your life."

My guess is that the Amway strategy for increasing NRA membership will not be a success.

The strategy of NRA member-only barbecues, for instance, seems misguided. It is hard to recruit new members at a barbecue at which every attendee is already a member.

Am I really supposed to feel ostracized if I do not get invited to a NRA only barbecue? People who only want to associate with other NRA members would not make great dinner companions. Besides, former Georgia Congressman and NRA board member Bob Barr might show up and then it could be downright dangerous:

An antique .38-caliber pistol accidentally discharged as it was being handled by U.S. Rep. Bob Barr during a reception in his honor. The bullet hit a glass door, and no one was hurt.

Georgia lobbyist Bruce Widener said Tuesday that he had removed the magazine from his 1908 Colt but did not clear the chamber before handing the weapon to Barr, a board member of the National Rifle Association.

Widener said "one of us hit the trigger" just as he gave Barr the gun during Friday's reception at Widener's home.

All in all, I would rather attend the NRA members-only barbecue than a Ted Nugent concert, but, then again, the same is true of an appointment for a root canal.

The Nugent plan also seems destined to fail because to grow its membership ten fold, the NRA would have to reach out to folks like me.

I am in a prime demographic for an NRA membership drive. I am middle-aged, white, male, and southern. I have done more than my share of hunting. I believe that the Second Amendment provides an individual right to own a gun. I owned a gun(s) from the time I was 12 until my kids came along (the risk/reward ratio of gun ownership changes with kids in the house, particularly with a curious, judgment-free, autistic child).

Ted Nugent’s appeal is completely lost on me. I think it is lost on almost everyone who is not already an NRA member. After all, it is hard to see how the NRA can reach beyond its base with Nugent’s pitch that the NRA is for "hardcore, radical extremists.”

The AJC story continues:

He (Nugent) drew the most cheers when he told gun owners they should never give up their right to bear arms and should use their guns to protect themselves if needed.

"Remember the Alamo! Shoot 'em!" he screamed to applause. "To show you how radical I am, I want carjackers dead. I want rapists dead. I want burglars dead. I want child molesters dead. I want the bad guys dead. No court case. No parole. No early release. I want 'em dead. Get a gun and when they attack you, shoot 'em."

I have no brief for carjackers, burglars, rapists, or child molesters. As a prosecutor, I used to put them in jail. Nonetheless, the idea that we should leave it to the likes of Ted Nugent to separate out the bad guys from the good guys (and, therefore, decide who should be shot dead) is just downright scary. Calling for death with “no court case” to determine guilt is not likely to expand the NRA’s appeal.

If the NRA really wants to increase its membership, the first thing they should do is to stop inviting folks like Ted Nugent to speak on its behalf.

Firefox 1.0.3 released

Security fixes. Description. Link on sidebar. The win32/US English bits are on Jonah's Sleepless Mirror.

What is Justice?

By 1871 the House of Representatives had grown tired of living with the results of Federal Indian policies carried out by the Senate and President through their treaty making authority. Their remedy was the Appropriation Act of March 3, 1871, Ch. 120 §1, 16 Stat. 544, 566 (codified at 25 U.S.C. §71), which ended the Treaty Period. That wasn't enough however, and in 1885, in a climate of Judeao-Christian indignation at the failure of a Tribal Court to condemn an Indian to death for having killed another Indian, the House attached a bill to the general appropriation act of 1885 enacting the Major Crimes Act. In Federal Indian Law this is ex party Crow Dog. Nominally to provide the Indian Tribes with the benefits of Christianity, in particular, the lex talionis or law of similar retribution¹, but in fact creating the Plenary Powers Doctrine that Congress (read "the House") is supreme over mere Treaties (read "deals the Senate cut"), and created the authority, under US law, for Congress to unilaterally change Treaties. Treaties with Indians. Treaties about land or fish. Treaties with Russia. Treaties about anti ballistic missile systems and things that go bang.

As stark as that is, that is how the bedrock of modern Federal Indian Law came into being, petty institutional jealousy in the House. Since that is too horrible for young law students, this is papered over by the "Chritian Civilizing the Indian" fiction, which is still fairly ghastly, even Rehnquist couldn't sell it when drafting Oliphant, so it is fortuitous that most Americans, even those worldly enough to get into law school, are predisposed to think that American jurisdiction naturally and unremarkably prevails over Tribal jurisdiction for major crimes committed, where some of the lesser included offenses, say shoplifting prior to a fatal exchange of gun fire, if tried seperately, would naturally and unremarkably remain subject to Tribal jurisdiction. It is a better brand of justice, neh?

The resurrection of justice is slow and mostly invisible.

The Meskwaki Nation, the only Federally recognized Indian nation within the borders of Iowa, is putting finishing touches on its own laws and court system. The Meskwaki Tribal Court stems in part from the leadership dispute in 2003.

Any tribe in exercising its sovereignty ... should have all facets of its government in place, meaning the legislative, executive and judicial. More important for the tribe is that its rules it wants to operate under and the laws under which the community is to live should be based on the tribe's norms and practices.

Elbridge Coochise (Hopi), chief judge for the Meskwaki Tribal Court.

The tribe is compiling a code of law and has chosen three judges who have served on the courts of other tribes. Also appointed to the MTC bench are Henry Buffalo Jr. of Minnesota and Kimberly Vele of Wisconsin. A fourth judge's slot remains open, The court hired a clerk and is operating in the tribal administration building.

The court has fairly broad jurisdiction, and it's just a matter of what people file in the tribal court. We expect a full set of family law cases, child welfare related cases, some civil cases. When it comes to dispute resolution, the tribal system differs from the American system in that the goal is less about determining winners and losers as it is about getting at the truth.

Jeff Rasmussen, an attorney who helped establish the Meskwaki Tribal Court.

An excerpt from the code says the purpose is to seek a resolution which restores balance to the community in accordance with the customs and traditions of the tribe, repairs relationships, results in fairness and avoids principles of retribution and punishment.

I get the sense that the process will be different than the adversarial process you normally come across in other court systems. My sense of where the tribe wanted to go with this court was to take away some of the formality of the Western court systems in an effort to make it more friendly toward the people who will use the courts.

Henry Buffalo Jr, a tribal judge in Minnesota since 1986.

Had Jeff Weise survivied his own massacre, American justice would be Nancy Grace, howling "a life for a life", and America would be fixated on the question of whether and when, under the Federal Death Penalty rules, juveniles may be executed. I don't think that the Red Lake Nation, if it had jurisdiction over Jeff Weise, if he had survived his own massacre, would be as savage. As fixated upon retributiion, religion and a social magic of mystic equivalencies. The Red Lake Tribal Council voted to distribute $5,000 checks to 15 families, for medical or burial expenses, including the family of 16 year old Jeff Weise, who killed nine people before killing himself.

What is justice? Is it only, or simply best obtained by the present American adversarial system? Where does one come down on issues like retribution and rehabilitation, on tort reform, on federal, tribal, and state jurisdiction? Iowa is an early caucus state. Being there, and being engaged in real questions, is something to look forward to in the candidates of the next cycle. I hope at least one can be found there.

We're still collecting for the Red Lake Memorial Fund.

[1] best known by the phrase "an eye for an eye" (Ex. 21:23, 24; Lev. 24:19, 20; and Deut. 19:21). Physical similar retribution first appears in the Old World legal systems in the Code of Hammurabi (1795-1750 BC), either as a limit on social disruption, or as a magical formula. Earlier Mesopotamian legal codes provided only for restitution and did not attempt to create a system of magical equivalencies.

The GOP Is Robbing Us Of Our Christian Heritage

The NY Times reports:

As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.

Family Research Counsel President Tony Perkins recently wrote the following:

As the liberal, anti-Christian dogma of the left has been repudiated in almost every recent election, the courts have become the last great bastion for liberalism. For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the A.C.L.U., have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms."

If we assume that Perkins is right about that, who is to blame for robbing us of our Christian heritage and religious freedom?

Consider the fact that Democrats have blocked only 10 of President Bush’s 229 judicial nominees. If Democrats are blocking all nominees of faith, should Perkins blame the Democrats for blocking the ten, or should he blame President Bush for nominating 219 judges (more than 95% for the total) who are not “people of faith?”

If the Federal Courts are the “last great bastion for liberalism,” whose fault is that?

I previously noted the following:

Of the nine current members of the Supreme Court, seven were appointed by Republicans. In the last thirty-five years (since 1969) there have been thirteen appointments to the Supreme Court. Republican Presidents have made eleven of those appointments while Democratic Presidents have made two.

At the Circuit Court of Appeals level, the pattern remains the same. Since 1969, Republican Presidents have appointed 211 Judges to the Circuit Courts. Democrats have appointed 122. Since 1969, Republican Presidents have appointed 813 trial Judges to the District Court bench while Democrats have made 508 such appointments.

If the Federal Judiciary is comprised of a bunch of liberal activists, it is the GOP who put them there.

Either Mr. Perkins is targeting the wrong party or he does not really believe his own rhetoric.

Sunday Technotrivia

In comments Friday, Steve Plonk wrote that Wampum was offline for [the bellsouth] area. The only network event of any note this week was the Comcast outage.

Comcast said the intermittent but often-severe nighttime outages . which also occurred April 7, Tuesday and Wednesday across the country and in the St. Paul area . are related to software malfunctions on company computers responsible for receiving, interpreting and routing subscribers' Web-site requests. E-mail also was affected in some cases.

A company spokeswoman wouldn't elaborate on the nature of the software problems, identifying them only as a "memory leak." But she said steps meant to end them roughly coincided with Thursday's erratic outage, which may have been less severe than the earlier ones, and added the fixes will likely avert future service blackouts of this kind.

By coincidence, BigPond/Telstra, a provider in Oz, found that it only took 6 compromised customer machines to make a difference:

Disconnecting six compromised personal computers on Tuesday evening eased the difficulties caused by bogus requests which clogged BigPond's domain name servers (DNS), slowing customer e-mail and Web site access, Telstra said.

We never heard back from John Dowdell's colleges, so as far as we can tell, cookies in Flash are here to stay. Those who Flash, Share, by design. Update: Adobe is now the data collector using the .so mechanism.

From the "National Cyber Security Alliance", who wouldn't dream of suggesting that using Microsoft Operating System Product (any) and a bottom-feeder ISP (any, but cable companies come to mind quickly, followed by the $9.95/mo crowd of modem port resellers, followed by any TelCo offering xDSL at Cable pricing) is problematic ab initio, some data:

blank	Dialup Users	Broadband Users
Anitivirus	84%	86%
Firewall	7%	51%
Parental	16%	4%
VIRUS	25%	15%
SPY/AD	88%	74%

Source: http://www.staysafeonline.info/news/safety_study_v04.pdf

Reading this like a poll, this suggests that every connected Microsoft/Intel machine that isn't generating royalties to at least one A/V vendor is hosting virii, and a third of the dial-up connected M/Imachines that are generating royalties to at least one A/V vendor host virii, possibly because virii propagation is synchronous with use, and A/V update is not. There is a joke in the operator community about installing Microsoft Service Packs (containing A/V updates). Can a machine actually complete an update on a fast, but undefended link without being infected? The humor is knowing that the answer is "no".

The other major item of enlightenment (no, I don't care that dialup has a 400% greater penetration by NannyWare marketers, I even consulted for one for pin money over the winter break) is that firewalls have no effect on the installed base of machines that host spyware/adware, and that any question that when asked of random sample of link-technology-independent Microsoft/Intel users, so any WiFi hotspot will do, that generates a "correct answer" fewer than one time in four -- say "Did you vote in the November 2004 election, and did you vote in a Democratic primary or caucus, and did you vote for John Edwards" -- is as likely to be true as the machine the survey subject is using is to be unpopulated by spyware and adware.

Wampum was visited by 103 different machines in the space of about 200 midnight minutes, which contributed 127 comments, no more than five in any writable comment URL, mostly about health products and social play service providers. The ad-insert operator's address inventory does not have clusters, when viewed from an Autonomous System (AS) perspective. UUNet is just one AS. Off hand, any address-based filtering scheme would have presented no cost to this insertion campaign. I think what is needed for "flash" events is the ability to undo the database transactions for some temporally characterized class of transactions.

Exit Strategy for Pakistan Army (ESPA)

The South Asia Tribune just published an interesting piece. Here's the blurb:

This is a considered paper written after long discussions between thinking friends to come up with concrete proposals to let the Army get out of politics. There could be no better way. link

While reading it, bear in mind that the Army bagged Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of Benazir Bhutto, the minute he set foot back in Pakistan -- he'd been away for a family marriage and the meeting of most of the opposition parties -- both of which took place in Dubai, since if they'd taken place in Pakistan, arrests would have intervened on both a first family marriage, and an opposition meeting.

Something to re-read is an earlier piece, also in the SATrib. Deux vieu KGB schnooks thinking outloud about the original Beluchistan Liberation Army and real politick. It throws some water on the standard fictions concerning the US, Pakistan, and the calculus of illusions.

Another interesting piece in the SAT is Kaushik Kapisthalam's Guarding Pakistan's nuclear estate, which was published 10 days ago.

Merit Pay

Viacom has suffered recently. In the last year, its stock price has fallen from about 42 to about 34. That is a loss of almost 20% for its shareholders. That loss is particularly troublesome since one of Viacom’s most visible competitors, Time Warner, saw an 8% rise in its stock price last year.

The fourth quarter of 2004 was particularly bad for Viacom. It reported a loss of more than $18 billion for the quarter as it wrote down the value of its radio and billboard assets. That loss amounts to more than $10 per share.

What happens to top executives of a public company when the earnings and stock price crater? Do they get fired for doing a bad job? Does their pay get cut? The New York Times
reports:

The top three executives at Viacom Inc. received total compensation last year valued at about $52 million to $56 million each in salary, bonus and stock options, the company disclosed yesterday.

The three officers - the chief executive, Sumner M. Redstone, and the co-presidents, Tom Freston and Leslie Moonves - received a total of $160 million. Viacom filed documents disclosing the compensation with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday, after the market closed.

The compensation is beyond breathtaking, and it dwarfs what their competitors are earning," a longtime compensation specialist, Brian Foley, said.

How much is $160 million for three executives?

It would pay the average yearly salary of $36,547 for 4,377 firefighters.

One hundred and sixty million dollars could have paid all the product liability settlements and judgments in Texas in 2002 and still have had more than $80 million left over.

It would pay four full years of tuition ($4,078 per year for in state students) for all 5190 freshmen at the University of Georgia still and leave enough left over to pay each of the Viacom executives $25 million.

It could lift 27,633 families consisting of a single mom and two children (with the mom working full time at minimum wage) out of poverty. One hour of compensation for one of the three executives is above the poverty line for a family of three.

It could provide more than a $4,000 per year raise for each of the 38,350 Viacom employees.

As the owner of Infinity Broadcasting, Viacom used to broadcast Howard Stern. The compensation of the three top Viacom executives could pay the FCC’s half a million dollar fine for Stern’s alleged indecency 320 times. For the amount paid Viacom’s three top executives, Stern could be indecent five times a week for a year with money left over.

It is not as if Viacom could not find substitutes for its three executives at a lower price. The Times:

Viacom's market capitalization is roughly 70 percent of Time Warner's, and roughly on a par with those of the Walt Disney Company and the News Corporation.

The three Viacom executives earned more than the combined compensation of the leaders of the other three top companies, Mr. Foley noted.

He calculated that Time Warner's top three executives - the chairman, Richard D. Parsons, and top lieutenants, Jeffrey L. Bewkes and Donald Logan - received total compensation of $42.9 million in 2004.

Michael D. Eisner and Robert A. Iger of Disney took home $20.2 million in fiscal 2004, and Rupert Murdoch and Peter Chernin of the News Corporation received $35 million combined.

I own Viacom shares through a couple of mutual funds. I wish those funds would vote against directors who approve outrageous executive compensation packages. They should also vote with their investment dollars. Companies giving bloated compensation packages to executives are wasting company money. That does not exhibit a commitment to creating shareholder value. The absence of a commitment to maximizing shareholder value should be a consideration when mutual fund managers are deciding where to invest.

Bring back Newt, or Nixon, or Tail Gunner Joe

TomorrowNext Sunday Bill Frist kicks off his campaign for Commander in Priest. Of all the Constitution-hating people who've popped out of the tall grass in my lifetime, he is the strangest. Tail Gunner Joe had a riff that worked, and a blank piece of paper. Newt had a Contract. Nixon was complex and flawed. But Frist talks to God, and he's got God convinced that America is Godless, and in need of ... fire? brimstone?? the sudden swift retirement of judges whether named Deborah or not???

I'm just amazed that the media isn't captioning him as "Senate Majority Leader and self-described Moses the Second". I keep expecting Charlton Heston to rise from his sickbed*, point a finger at Frist, and say "I played Moses, and you're no Moses".

Color tomorrow next Sunday cartoon Sunday.

*MB reminded me that Mr. Heston is still alive, though stricken with Alzheimer's.

John Edwards on the Bankruptcy Bill

John contributes a guest piece to TPM.

Annoying Blockheads

The way things used to be, every time a ferry pulled into dock, the shore and vessel crews would secure the lines, run out the ramp, raise the safety barriers, and herd the passengers, their cars, the trucks, and whatever else used the ferry for passage, island sheep and llamas, quarry granite, and so on off the vessel and onto the landing. In a few minutes of cheerful chaos the ferry and docks would be empty, except for the sheep, llamas, and equally intelligent quarry granite. Sea gulls and return-trip passengers, if not already queued up, would eventually do so, and the miracle reversed, sure as the tide.

That changed when Tom Ridge discovered that since he ripped the Coast Guard out of the Treasury Department, he got to mess with ferries. All up and down the coast of Maine, HSD morons are paid a wage better than most Islanders, and a sizable plurality of mainlanders, to ask islanders if they've become terrorists since the last time they went to Sears, and to ask the summer people if they failed to disclose their terrorist organizational memberships when making B&B reservations over-winter, or since they last went to their summer island camps.

Annoyed is hardly the word. Weather, booze, stupidity and ordinary accidents are usually fatal on water, and the HSD whiteshirts are demanding everyone pay more attention to them and their loyalty tests -- for public safety -- than to life preservers, hull maintenance, comms and nav gear, and fog lights and horns. As if it is safer to be in a mishap at sea protected from islanders and summer visitors who might have spontaneously combusted into al Qaida suicide cadres, than not to have mishaps at sea.

The biggest ferry on the Gulf of Maine, the 145-meter Scotia Prince, carries 200 cars and has 1,054 berths and does the 340-kilometre Yarmouth-to-Portland crossing in about 11 hours twice every day from May to September. Passenger totals for 2004 were down 23 percent from 2003, and down 30 percent from 2002.

Passenger totals for 2005 are now forecast to be 0.

The proximal cause is a dispute between the City of Portland and the operator of the Scotia Prince, arising out of the City of Portland's ambivalence about a working water front, the closure of the Bath Iron Works facility, the departure of the dry dock, and the last oil rig ... so the City put the Scotia Prince's landing in a building with a leaky roof and therefore toxic mold. Fourteen Scotia Prince employees became ill, as did some Federal employees, nominally from the toxic mold in the area where they were confined to work, and the Scotia Prince employees sued their employer for subjecting them to a known hazard. The operator and Portland did a blame, costs and works ballet over the winter while the Prince was working in the Caribbean, with this year's landing hall for the Prince being a "durable fabric over a tubular structure" (a large tent), and yesterday the Scotia Prince notified Portland that the deal wasn't working and they were cancelling the 2005 sailings. Portland immediately struck back, claiming bad faith -- having been forced to spend (sob!) $600,000 of muni funds (sob!) to fix a building with a toxic mold problem (Portland tore down and rebuilt a neighborhood school for toxic mold just a few years ago for about 10 times the cost) by the wicked Scotia Prince, and cancelled the Scotia Prince's lease. Just to be sure, the City of Portland demanded that all of the Scotia Prince's gear on City land be removed by ... 15 April 2005. Close of business today.

Overlooking the massive stupidity, all that fuss is just the proximal cause. The root cause lies elsewhere.

The reason why the Scotia Prince must have a landing hall at all is so that its passengers may be confined to be examined by the agents of the United States to determine if each is ... a terrorist.

We know that Prince's passengers can't be smuggling booze into the States from Canada, because booze is wicked cheaper in the States than in Canada. About all that could be smuggled into the States from Canada is Cuban cigars, which is pretty much a yawn unless you are (a) from Miami, and (B) insane. We know that the Prince only carries 200 cars, less than an hour or so's traffic across the boarder at Calais, and the autos there are not inspected. We know the Prince only carries a desultory cargo, and no body minds the Irving oilers going in and out of Portland two or three times a week, or the scrap haulers, or ...

No, it really comes down to the folks trying to get back to New Jersey from a vacation trip to Nova Scotia. The HSD morons have to move them into pens and interrogate them and examine their proof of US citizenship or Permanent Residency status in confinement. They can't do it in Halifax, because Halifax is in Canada, and Sovereign States can't allow their border control function to be exercised by another Sovereign State (which is why airplanes that attempt to fly between Portland and Halifax fall directly into the Gulf of Maine at the dotted line, for lack of air traffic controllers), and they also can't do it on the Scotia Prince because ... of all the people getting on and off the Prince in the middle of the Gulf of Maine ... its just too chaotic to control a 145 meter long ship with a thousand passengers with no land in 40 miles in any direction. Or something.

Therefore the big pen has to be in Portland and proximal to the waterfront, at which point you're stuck with a rotting building that Portland should have fixed or fired ages ago, or a ridiculous tent, or nothing. Stripped of all the persiflage its a half-dozen border cops and their doughnuts, for a few hours a day, and the heroic myth that they are *** protecting America ***, when in fact what is happening is that the economics of an open border are being undermined. Last year the self-signed crossings between rural Aroostook County and New Brunswick were closed, and some poor schlub who walked back home from church and visiting his nieces in town, a total distance of about 100 meters, got hit with two $5,000 fines for not going several hours out of the way to a Sunday-Open crossing, instead of walking home from meeting and socializing with his nieces. This year it is Portland itself that went under water.

Meanwhile, Peace Action Maine and this year's ceremonial stuckee as "Mayor" of the City of Portland are pretending that they are bringing down the tyranny by doing some media availability at the Post Office on April 15th. The American Stassi have shut down, via egregious nonsense, the 35 year long ferry operation between Portland and Halifax, and the Mayor of Portland is playing war-tax resistance.

Annoying Blockheads, in Washington and in Portland.

Update: "l" added to "Blockheads". I need a beer.

Federal Judges and Frivolous Litigation

How big a problem are frivolous filings in the Federal District Courts? According to a survey of Federal trial judges, it is not much of a problem at all. From Mark Hoffman of Business Insurance (via Talk Left:

Frivolous litigation is not a major problem in the federal court system, according to an overwhelming majority of federal judges who participated in a recent survey.

The survey, conducted by the Federal Judicial Center, was based on the responses of 278 federal district court judges. Seventy percent of the respondents called groundless litigation either a "small problem" or a "very small problem," and 15% said it was no problem at all. Only 1% called it a "very large problem," 2% called it a "large problem" and the rest rated it as a "moderate problem" in their courts.

The trial judges are in the best position to know whether frivolous filings are a serious problem. Their opinion should carry significant weight.

In today’s post-Terri climate of Federal Judge bashing, some may dismiss the study on the grounds that Federal Judges are just a bunch of arrogant, unaccountable, judicial activists who do not recognize the problem of frivolous suits.

If so, an interesting question arises. If Federal District Court Judges are not able to identify a frivolous lawsuit when one is presented to them, why were conservatives so eager to funnel class action lawsuits to those very same arrogant, unaccountable, activist judges?

Work Ethic

A strong work ethic is usually, but not always, a good thing. From the AJC:

Some work-release inmates just kept on truckin', Clayton County police said.

Instead of going to legitimate jobs when they left jail in the mornings, the men stole trailers loaded with tires, beer, paper products and potted meat, then went back behind bars at nights, said police Detective Tom Martin. In all, the group made off with $750,000 in goods from at least five trailers in February and March, police said.

One daring member of the ring even drove a stolen truck to the work-release center, but the vehicle broke down and had to be towed, Martin said.

One might think that having a stolen truck break down in the parking lot of the jail would provide a clue. It is easy to imagine the anouncement over the jail's P.A. system:

"Your attention please. Your attention please. Will the inmate who left the stolen truck in the parking lot, please move it. If it isn't moved within ten minutes, we are going to have it towed and you will lose all of your loot."

Maine Poll on the Filibuster

Last month the People for the American Way fielded a poll (Marttila Communications Group, pollsters) of 1,600 Mainiacs on the Filibuster. The data was released yesterday. In what follows the MoE is +/- 2.5%, except where there is a split sample, which I'm showing as (a)(b), and the MoE is +/- 3.5%. The cryptic "PrsvFil" means "of the sample group who answered `yes' to question 1(a)". Sorry about the formatting, and I'm not going to reset it in tables and cells, you'll just have to read carefully.

1(a). Should the Senate Preserve Filibuster?
           All Ind Mod
Preserve 57% 59% 66%
Eliminate 34% 32% 26%

1(b).More/Less Likely To Vote For Senator if She Protected Filibuster
More likely 53%
Less likely 21%

2. Closest To Your View?
Pres. Should Be Able To Appoint SCOTUS Justice Who Shares His Values, Even When The Other Party Disagrees, OR Founding Fathers Wanted The Judicial Branch To Be Independent, Not Dominated By One Party
           All Ind Mod PrsveFil
Free of partisianship 73% 75% 78% 83%
Share Pres's values 23% 20% 19% 15%

3. Pres. Should Be Able To Appoint SCOTUS Justice Who Shares His Values, Even When The Other Party Disagrees, OR Because Justice Is A Lifetime Term, Both Parties Should Determine Appointees
           All Ind Mod PrsveFil
Free of partisianship 66% 73% 77% 77%
Share Pres's values 27% 19% 20% 21%

4. Filibuster Has Protected The Minority Party For 200 Yrs And It Would Be A Mistake To Change It Now, OR Dems Have Been Using The Filibuster In An Unprecidented Manner And It Must Be Eliminated
Keep filibuster 61%
Eliminate 30%

5. Bush Has Monited Extremem Right Wing Judges. Dems Need The Filibuster To Prevent Agst The Appontment Of Extreme Nominees, OR Dems Have Been Using The Filibuster In An Unprecidented Manner And It Must Be Eliminated
Keep filibuster 53%
Eliminate 36%

6. GOPers Want The SCOTUS In Order To Control All 3 Branches. Filibuster Must Be Preserved To Prevent That, OR Dems Have Been Using The Filibuster In An Unprecidented Manner And It Must Be Eliminated
Keep filibuster 52%
Eliminate 37%

7. America Works Best When No One Party Has Absolute Power
Convincing 75%
Not convincing 21%

I've no idea why anyone who thought that the filibuster should be preserved could agree with "the President should be able to appoint SCOTUS Justice who shares his values", regardless of how the question ends. That's 15% and 21%, for Judicial Indpedence and Lifetime Appointments, respectively.

What is shown by this data is that Judicial Indpedence polls 2 x MoE above Lifetime Appointments as a value to be preserved when Republicans are in the sample, or when the sample is restricted to those who answered "yes" to question 1(a). Further, either of these poll 4.5 x MoE above the generic preservation question 1(a). Also, protection of the minority polls 3 x MoE above deamonology, the "extreamist judges" or the "all three branches" theories.

Unfortunately, the poll designer abstracted away from the specific defects of the Bush re-nominees, so we don't know what the numbers are for questions of the form:

8. Bush has nominated a man who has never set foot in a federal court or participated in a trial to the second highest court in the federal judiciary, should the Senate review the nomination, or just approve it?

9. Bush has nominated a man who has practiced law without a license to the second highest court in the federal judiciary, should the Senate review the nomination, or just approve it?

10. Bush has nominated a woman who thinks that civil rights do not exist, except on Indian Reservations, Military Bases, and the Capital District of Washington, D.C., to the second highest court in the federal judiciary, should the Senate review the nomination, or just approve it?

What we do know is that specific defects in a nominee, a history of bank robbing say, or being dead, obtain higher negatives than ideological features, so for half or more of the Bush re-nominees, one-in-four in favor is the best response a poll question on the specific nominee should return, but possibly as poorly as one-in-five.

What should Susan Collins do with this kind of data? I guess she can hope that 4 out of 5 Mainiacs have wicked bad short-term memory and won't recall a thing in three years, despite a Senate slooooooow down and the SCOTUS being memorably packed with Frist-approved hacks. If she is going to run on Frist's coat tails in the next cycle, she'll go with the Mainiacs-R-Morons model. If she is going to run on her own in the next cycle, she'll go the way Maine goes, and dump the re-nominees like yesterday's leftover shellfish.

The Tort Burden On Texas Businesses, By the Numbers

Many tort reformers argue that the civil justice system places a crushing burden on businesses. That burden, they argue, makes business less competitive. Tort reformers then try to sell legislation as a means on improving the economy. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford made that argument recently:

We’ve got the eleventh-worst civil justice system in the nation and it continues to hold us back as a state. If we’re ever going to be competitive in business and healthcare, we’ve got to have a more equitable civil justice system… tort reform is a big part of us becoming more competitive on both fronts.”

The National Small Business Association makes the same argument:

Time and again we hear from National Small Business Association members that an increasingly litigious business environment stifles innovation, drives up the cost of insurance and threatens to run promising ventures out of business. Reform and common sense must be returned to our system of civil litigation.

What seems to be missing from the debate over the effects of the tort system on business, and small business in particular, is reliable data.

Many of the talking points arise from a study commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform:

According to a 2004 study commissioned by the Institute for Legal Reform, small businesses alone pay $88 billion a year to cover the cost of America's tort system- money that could be used to hire additional workers, expand productivity and improve employee benefits.

Please forgive me for being skeptical of claims made based on a tort reform study commissioned by the Institute for Legal Reform. The Chamber of Commerce is not an unbiased source. What is needed is solid data from an independent source.

A while ago, Kevin Drum linked to the abstract of a study by four law professors concerning medical malpractice in Texas. Kevin summarizes the abstract:

Since 1988 the number of large claims was stable, the number of small claims declined, the number of paid claims was stable, the average payout per claim was stable, and total payouts were stable. In other words, whatever it was that's caused malpractice premiums to skyrocket, it hasn't been any actual change in malpractice awards against doctors.

I looked for the full study on the net and did not find it. In the process, however, I did locate the 2002 Texas Liability Insurance Closed Case Annual Report (pdf). That report provides data on the burden borne by the Texas business community as a result of the tort system.

The report is published by the Texas Department of Insurance pursuant to the requirements of a Texas statute. The report is prepared annually (2002 was the 15th annual report) and seeks to provide “reliable information concerning liability insurance claims, related court actions and other information pertinent to the claims settlement process and the civil justice system in Texas.”

The Texas Insurance Department collects the data directly from insurance companies offering commercial liability coverage in Texas. The universe of data includes all types of business liability insurance lines including general liability, medical professional liability, other professional liability, commercial automotive liability, and the liability portion of commercial multi-peril insurance. Thus, the data covers essentially all liability insurance written for businesses and professionals in Texas.

The universe of claims is not complete as the department collects data only on payments (whether by settlement or judgment) of at least $10,000. The smaller payments are ignored. That is not a serious defect in the data. Payments ranging from $10,000 to $25,000 comprised about 40% of all claims but accounted for just 6% of payments. Including claims smaller than $10,000 should show only a very small effect on the total costs.

Texas is a big place. In 2002, it had a population of almost 22 million people or roughly 7.4% of the U.S. population. In other words, about 1 in 14 Americans live in Texas. Texas had a Gross State Product in 2000 of more than $742 billion or about 7.6% of the GDP of the United States in 2000.

Texas is only one state and, with regard to national tort statistics, it may not be typical. Nonetheless, the report of the Texas Department of Insurance can provide us with some hard data in an area that seems doomed to debate by anecdote. What follows are some of the highlights I gleaned from the report:

• There were 9,723 personal injury claims in the universe reported. Including payments made by insurers, insureds (primarily consisting of the deductible), and uninsureds, the total payout (pursuant to both judgments and settlments) in those cases was about $1.8 billion. The average payment was about $114,500.

• The Texas Insurance Department asked the insurance companies for their allocated loss adjustment expenses (ALAE). The report notes that such expenses were 18% of the total paid in settlements and judgments. ALAE includes, among other things, attorney fees and litigation expenses (it is not clear to me whether the ALAE figure includes the costs incurred in the cases the defense won. If it does not include such costs, then the cost of defending those claims should be added to the numbers presented below). Assuming the ALAE includes all cases, total expenses would be about $324 million bringing the total cost of personal injury claims to Texas businesses and professionals to about $2.1 billion per year

• As one in fourteen Americans live in Texas, if the Texas experience was repeated in each of the fifty states, the total cost to businesses, big and small, of the personal injury tort system would be on the order of $30 billion per year, not the $88 billion claimed by the Chamber of Commerce as the cost to small business alone.

• In 2002, Texas had a gross state product of about $742 billion. The personal injury costs to Texas businesses and professionals in 2002 represented a little more than a quarter of one percent of the Texas GSP.

• With a price tag of about $2.1 billion, the cost of personal injury cases to businesses works out to about $95 per Texan per year. In 2001, per capita personal income in Texas was $28,581. Tort costs to businesses amounts to about one third of one percent of per capita income, or about a quarter per day per Texan. If you imposed all of the costs of personal injury on the victims and gave defendants immunity from damages for personal injuries, and if those businesses passed the savings along to consumers, the average Texan would save enough money to take a round trip on the Dallas bus system once a week or so.

• Of the 9,723 closed cases in 2002, 4073 (about 42%) involved payments of $25,000 or less. More than four-fifths of the cases (7,945 of 9,723) involved payments of less than $150,000. There were 170 payments (less than 2%) of $1,000,000 or more.

• Car wrecks accounted for 60% of the claims and 40% of the payments.

• There were 625 closed product liability cases in Texas in 2002. Those cases had an average payment of $122,491 and an average allocated loss adjustment expense of $25,286. Thus, the total cost of product liability claims incurred by Texas businesses in 2002 was a bit over $92 million or about $4.20 per Texan per year.

• Medical professional liability represented about 12% of the cases. In 2002, there were 1,181 closed claims under medical professional liability policies in Texas. Those claims were the most expensive of any category with an average payment of about $261,000. That is perhaps not surprising since medical error has the potential for such severe harm. For instance, although medical professional liability cases accounted for just 12% of the total claims, it accounted for 48% of the death claims.

Med mal cases are expensive to litigate (which, perhaps, is also a function of the stakes being high in such cases). The ALAE for med mal cases averaged $62,118. The total cost of the med mal tort system (including settlements, judgment, attorney fees, and litigation expenses) was a little less than $382 million per year. That works out to about $17 per year per Texan.

• For those who believe that litigation is a lottery in which the amount awarded is unrelated to the severity of the injury, the Texas data may change your mind. The three categories of injury with the highest average payments were brain damage ($450,000), spinal cord injuries ($350,000), and death ($300,000). The lowest was back injuries ($55,000).

• Non-economic damages made up 57% of verdicts awarded at trial. Thus, a damages cap of $250,000 on non-economic damages would have little or no effect on cases with payments of $500,000 or less. In 2002, there were 566 cases closed with payments of half a million dollars or more (please note that is for all tort cases against businesses or professionals, not for med mal cases alone).

There is a lot more data contained in the report. It is really nice to have a ready source of actual data available for discussions of the civil justice system. If we maintained and published national data comparable to the Texas data, the debate over tort reform might move away from debate by anecdote. That would permit us to shed more light and less heat on the subject.

Posted by Dwight Meredith at 11:11 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

War for Life

The overwhelming majority of the majority party, and a minority of the minority party, such as Maine's Michael Michaud in the 109th Congress, believe as a matter of religious dogma that "life begins at conception". They don't even wait for the zygote to attach to the uterine wall. Have a period, go to jail is the recent Virginia expression of this wisdom, for non-celibate women.

The majority of the 7th Majlis believe that "life begins at quickening", and have just approved a conditional abortion bill for circumstances where the fetus is damaged or the life of the mother is endangered by pregnancy. This removes liability for three to ten years imprisonment for the woman and any person assisting in the expulsion of a fetus, and a fine for the judicial value of a wrongfully taken human life.

When the overwhelming majority of the majority party, and a minority of the minority party, vote to commit the United States to a war against Iran, it won't be to secure Iranian oil and gas for the US, though they may believe that. It won't be to end the non-existant dangers of a non-existant nuclear weapons program, which even when such a program assumed to be existant is hysterically miniscule compared to the "loose Soviet nukes" problem, though they may believe that too.

No, when the overwhelming majority of the majority party, and a minority of the minority party, vote to commit the United States to a war against Iran, it will be to secure democracy and human rights, and they will believe that.

If the Republican legislative leadership woke up some morning, and by some miracle, they woke up in Tehran, they would be more anti-woman than the legislative leadership of, and the majority of the 7th Majlis. And they'd work to overthrow democracy and re-criminalize abortion under any circumstances.

I tried explaining this to the guy who runs the Network Information Center for Iran, we were both doing maths at Berkeley during the 70's. He just couldn't believe that our leadership was more God-Damned than his was.

Of course, under it all, the overwhelming majority of the majority party, and a minority of the minority party, will vote to commit the United States to control the access of East and South Asia to West Asian fossil carbons, though they will not believe that.

Blood Money

Seisint (LexisNexis) is now reporting that 310,000 consumer profiles have been, in data protection parlance, repurposed. I haven't been keeping track, but the announcements seem more frequent and involve larger cohorts of compromised consumer profiles than at any time in the past five years since I started work in data protection (the W3C P3P 1.0 Spec and similar works). That leakage data does not include end-user profile capture by commodity operating system exploits, and as drone armies are known to exist as large as the Seisint leak, it seems safe to assume that on the order of 10^^7th consumer profiles will be compromised in the US in 2005.

The Republican members of House Rules Committee, voting on party lines, killed an amendment to S-256, the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005", offered by Representative Adam Schiff of Pasadena, which is the home of Cal Tech and the Jet Propulsion Lab. Representative Schiff's amendment created an exemption where bankrupty arose from criminal acts by third-parties, negligently concealed or facilitated by financial services entities, where the modus of the crime is financial exploitation of identity theft.

There is a class of persons that is of the same order of magnitude as the Seisint consumer profile class of persons who endure significant economic diminuation of their wages and fluctuating economic conditions and who are confronted with very unusual and complex employment contracts and who are , as a matter of law, denied collective barganing rights. This class of persons does not appear to be diminishing over time.

The Republican members of House Rules Committee, voting on party lines, killed an amendment to S-256, the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005", offered by Representative Marty Meehan of Lowell, where working-class women first entered the wage labor force in the mills, requiring financial services entities provide free credit counseling services to men and women who have recently left the military after serving in combat zones. Another amendment to protect disabled veterans who have developed financial problems due to their combat service met the same fate.

There is a class of persons whose medical costs total more than 50% of their annual income. The Republican members of House Rules Committee, voting on party lines, killed an amendment to S-256, the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005", offered by Representative Zoe Lofgren of San Jose, to protect persons in this class.

I make that to be between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 human tragedies per year made worse in so far as material want can make any human tragedy worse, affecting nuclear and extended and separated families, peers and up and down generations, just to put a few more percent of profits on MBNA's books.

It is why every day I forward my mortgage and credit card spam to Olympia Snowe (olympia@snowe.senate.gov).

Oh. Mssrs. Hastart's and Delay's House will vote on S-256 tomorrow.

Money For Nothing

Kash at Angry Bear posts a chart showing health care costs and some health care outcomes in various countries.

The United States, for instance, spends $5,267 per person on health care and has a life expectancy at birth of 77.1 years and an infant mortality rate of 6.8.

France spends about $2500 per person per year less than we do for health care and the French live two years longer and have a lower infant mortality rate.

Sweden spends less than half the money per capita on health care than the US, and the Swedes live longer and have an infant mortality rate a little over half the US.

The Japanese have longer life expectancies and lower infant mortality rates while spending only spending about 40% of our costs.

Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber posted a chart showing the percentage of health care costs borne by the governments of various countries. Thus, we learn that in the US, the government pays about 40% of total health care costs while the government of France pays 75% of its total health care costs, Japan 80% and Sweden 85%.

Let's combine the information from the two charts. In the United States, the government spends $2106 per person on health care while individual Americans pay $3160, for a total of $5267 per person. In France, the government pays $2052 while the individual Frenchman pays $684 per year. In Sweden, the goverment pays $2139 per person while the individual Swede pays $377.

Thus, our government pays about the same or more for health care than the governments of Sweden or France while buying only about half of the care. It is hard to see what we get for the additional $2500 or so per person per year. That seems to be money spent for nothing.

The choice for a normal American family of four is stark. You could have our current health care system, or your family could have the longer life of the French along with a little under $10,000 per year to spend however you choose.

You could have our health care system in its current form, or you could have the lower infant mortality of the Swedes along with more than $11,000 per year to spend however you wish.

I know that it is hard to have to wait a while to get hip replacement surgery, but at $10,000 per year from now until I need the procedure, I can afford the wait.

Has the tide begun to turn?

For years now, mainstream activists on both the Left and Right have shied away from the Thimerosal/autism debate. I imagine this is due to the fact that the underlying premise, i.e., BigPharma knowingly poisoned tens of millions of American babies with the most dangerous neurotoxin known to man and US government agencies covered it up, fits better as the plot of a Michael Crichton novel than present day reality. To be honest, before my own kids were diagnosed and I fell smack into the middle of the conspiracy theorists, I too thought they were all a bunch of ranting lunatics.

Well, it looks as if at least one of the First Family of Democratic politics has come over to the Darkside. Is it possible that more will now follow? (Note: I'm publishing this in full as the registration process at PE.com is too onerous for one editorial. I thus claim Fair Use as a defense.)

Playing politics at kids' expense
Bill would insulate pharmaceutical firms from liability

06:42 PM PDT on Sunday, April 10, 2005

By ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has buried a provision in the "Protecting America in the War on Terror Act" to insulate the pharmaceutical industry from liability for venal actions that may have poisoned an entire generation of Americans.

Mounting evidence suggests that Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative in children's vaccines, may be responsible for the exponential growth of autism, attention deficit disorder, speech delays and other childhood neurological disorders now epidemic in the United States.

Prior to 1989, American infants generally received three vaccinations. In the early 1990s, public-health officials dramatically increased the number of Thimerosal-containing vaccinations without considering the cumulative impact of the mercury load on developing brains.

Warning Issued

In a 1991 memo, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck's vaccination programs, warned the president of the company's vaccination division that 6-month-old children administered the shots on schedule would suffer mercury exposures 87 times the government safety standard (400 times the current U.S. government's safe level). He recommended that Thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants and children."

Merck ignored Hilleman's warning and, for eight years, government officials added seven additional shots for children containing Thimerosal.

Mercury is a known brain poison, and autism rates began rising dramatically in children who were administered the new vaccine regimens. A decade ago the American Academy of Pediatrics estimated the autism rate among American children to be 1 in 2,500. Today, the CDC places the autism rate at 1 in 166, or one in 80 boys. Additionally, one in every six children is now diagnosed with a related neurological disorder.

In 1998 the CDC's lead Thimerosal researcher, Dr. Thomas Verstraeten, complained to his colleagues in a secret memo that, despite rerunning and rethinking the research, the links between Thimerosal and autism "just won't go away."

Secret Meeting

In 2000, CDC, FDA and pharmaceutical companies called a secret meeting to review Verstraeten's findings. According to transcripts, participants were alarmed about the undeniable link between the mercury preservative and autism. Dr. Bill Weil told the group, "You can play with (the results) all you want. They are statistically significant."

Dr. Richard Johnston acknowledged he feared his grandchild getting vaccinated. But the group was most concerned with keeping the findings secret.

Numerous animal, DNA, epidemiological and other studies point to Thimerosal as the culprit in America's epidemic of neurological disorders.

Autistic children have been shown to have higher mercury loads than nonautistics, and there have been reports of significant improvements in some brain-injured children by removing mercury from their bodies.

Most of the symptoms of autism are similar to the symptoms of mercury poisoning. Recently, scientists have been able to induce autism in certain mice by exposing them to Thimerosal.

In a recent study, former FDA scientist Dr. Jill James uncovered a scientific link that helps explain why Thimerosal injures some children and not others. That study found that many autistic children are genetically deficient in their capacity to produce glutathione, an antioxidant generated in the brain that helps remove mercury from the body, a harmless difference until the child is exposed to large quantities of mercury.

Porter Bridges' experience is typical. In 1993, this healthy 4-month-old slipped into a coma hours after receiving his vaccines.

Today, 11-year-old Porter is autistic, hyperactive and severely brain damaged. He requires minute-to-minute supervision, is frequently afflicted with violent seizures and is not yet toilet-trained.

After a seven-year legal fight, the U.S. government acknowledged that Porter was damaged by his vaccines. There are now 520,000 autistics in the United States with 40,000 new cases each year.

High Cost of Care

The cost of caring for autistic children is conservatively $40,000 annually. Families with children with autism and other neurological diseases have filed more than 4,200 claims in the special federal "Vaccine Court." Some plaintiffs have also filed in trial courts.

Some Drug Makers Act

Thimerosal defendants include Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Aventis, Weyeth and Eli Lilly. Frist's newly proposed "anti-terror" legislation would create insurmountable burdens of proof for plaintiffs in these cases and forbid states from banning Thimerosal.

Drug makers wary of liability have reduced Thimerosal in children's vaccines in recent years, with the exception of Chiron and Aventis' pediatric flu vaccine. Mercury-laced vaccine stocks were given to children until the end of 2003.

Thimerosal's inventor, Eli Lilly, donated $226,000 to Frist's national Republican Senate Campaign Committee in 2002 and bought 5,000 copies of Frist's book on bioterrorism. Congress will vote on Frist's bill in the near future.

Instead of demanding the immediate removal of Thimerosal from all vaccines, and making the drug industry help defray the public and private costs of caring for injured children, Frist's bill would give the industry a free ride at public expense.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper and a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Now, granted, few US newspapers even picked up Kennedy's editorial, but somehow that matters little to me on this cold Spring morning.

Voting Anti-War in the UK

In an OpEd piece in todays Guardian, Tariq Ali argues for tactical voting along an any-party anti-war line. That means Liberal Democrats, Scottish Nationalists and Plaid Cymru, and in the few constituencies where votes for a Green/Respect candidate won't simply ensure re-election of a New Labor war-monger, even Green/Respect .

Tariq asks "So why not treat this election as special and take the politics of the broad anti-war front to the electoral arena? If the result is a hung parliament or a tiny Blair majority, it will be seen as a victory for our side."

Now is a good time for US Dems to avoid uber-poxy Tony Blair and next-up Gordon Brown, and for Karl to lay on a London Calling tour for George and Dick. If they lose the UK, the multi-lateral facade is gone and the invasion of Iran is made less likely.

Michael Klare on Iran

I'm the last to know. Tom Engelhardt published on his blog, which to tell the truth I never read anyway, Michael Klare's piece on Iran, which has now found a publisher at Mother Jones as Oil, Geopolitics, and the Coming War with Iran.

I've written upwards of 30 pieces on or wicked close to the subject, and Juan Cole comes in a respectable second when his NeoCon agenda and Iran intel pieces are counted, but Michael Klare, citing Sy Hersh, has discovered the Coming War with Iran, Oil and Geopolitics.

Some things to keep in mind.

First, Iran sells its oil under long-term deals with Shell, British Petroleum, TotalFinaElf, etc., and directly to independent refineries, again, under long-term agreements. Iran is a dependable long-term energy exporter. It does not offer its oil on the commodities market. Contractually, Iranian oil is one of the least fungible sources of oil in the global market. Disrupting the sources means disrupting the destinations, or forcing "market discipline" (spot market prices and fluctuations) on independent refineries, Shell, British Petroleum, TotalFinaElf, etc.

Second, approximately sixty percent of Iranian crude is sold sold in Asia. To really get a grasp on why that is so, one needs to look at the US oil market. The following is from the NYNEX description for "Light, Sweet Crude Oil Futures" (CL):

Light, sweet crudes are preferred by refiners because of their low sulfur content and relatively high yields of high-value products such as gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, and jet fuel.

Continuing with the NYNEX contract specification for CL:

Deliverable Grades
Specific domestic crudes with 0.42% sulfur by weight or less, not less than 37° API gravity nor more than 42° API gravity. The following domestic crude streams are deliverable: West Texas Intermediate, Low Sweet Mix, New Mexican Sweet, North Texas Sweet, Oklahoma Sweet, South Texas Sweet.

Specific foreign crudes of not less than 34° API nor more than 42° API. The following foreign streams are deliverable: U.K. Brent and Forties, for which the seller shall receive a 30 cent per barrel discount below the final settlement price; Norwegian Oseberg Blend is delivered at a 55¢–per–barrel discount; Nigerian Bonny Light, Qua Iboe, and Colombian Cusiana are delivered at 15¢ premiums.

No mention of Middle Eastern oil streams, and emphesis added at just the right spot.

Now from a random Asian bulk petrochemicals commodities wholesaler:

Iranian Light crude oil , Specification Test Units Average
API gravity 33-34
...
Total sulpher content % wt 1.00 to 1.70

There it is. You'll need this when reading Michael Klare on Iran. Its not something he supplies. As he squeezes the jello at one end of the salad bar, and argues that something necessarily happens at the other end, or somewhere else of logical necessity, keep that number and these in mind: 44% from the Western Hemisphere outside the US (Canada, Mexico, Venezuala), 20% from the Middle East (14% from Saudi), 14% from Africa (Nigeria, Angola, Gabon, Algeria), and 8% from Europe (UK, Norway, Russia).

Next there is natural gas. Again, Iran is a policy-defined energy exporter. Natural gas isn't treated differently from oil (or hydroelectric power, sold to its northern neighbors), and contracts and pipeline manuvers across Pakistan (see my "Is Pakistan?" series) to India are pending, and somewhere between Tehran and Karachi is the definition-subject-to-modification-by-pending-war Central Asian access corridor from Gwadar (PK) and the Sui gas field or Bandar Abbas (IR) and the South Pars gas field.

To paraphrase Patton, its not our poor dumb necks we're trying to keep from getting squeezed, its some other poor dumb bastard's neck we're trying to squeeze.

Other nits. Klare should situate Iran's commercial uranium enrichment program within the stable energy exporting context rather than assume that Iran is making, or intends to make fission bombs (PK has upwards of 50, IN about 30, IL over 200, and the US inventory in the CENTCOM AOR plus the Indian Ocean is ... non-trivial, and that doesn't count the FIS or the PRC). Klare could also label the MEK as a cult rather than as an opposition group momentarily stuck with a statute-terrorist label.

I guess I'm most pissed that what I hoped to learn from, a piece by a Nation/Jones writer on Iran, is something I could have written if I forgot everything I knew. If we're going to critique a war we'd prefer didn't start, getting the details correct seems resonable.

The Syrian tyne of the fork bent rather suddenly, but Walking Backwards is still my best attempt to dissern causation and actors. Then there's the other 30 to 50 pieces.

Mainiacs -- Call Susan Collins

Here's our one-liner on several of the Bush re-nominees:

1. William G. Myers, III -- has no courtroom experience and does not believe either National Register of Historic Places or Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act is controlling on Federal lands,
   
2. Thomas B. Griffith -- has no courtroom experience and practiced law (1998-1999 Impeachment Trial of President Clinton) without a license and practiced law (in-house counsel for Brigham Young University) without a license,
   
3. Janice Rogers Brown -- does not believe in the incorporation doctrine (goodbye US Bill of Rights in State courts), and favors a return the Lochner era jurisprudence of substantive due process (goodbye worker protection laws that "violated the right of free contract"),
   
4. William H. Pryor, Jr. -- does not believe in (or obey) campaign financial disclosure laws and does not believe the Americans with Disabilities Act is Constutional,
   
5. Brett Kavanaugh -- lack of experience, post in progress
   
6. William Haynes -- lack of experience, post in progress
   
7. Terrence Boyle -- another ADA-is-unconstitional, with the additional twist that discrimination in employment is a cultural value of a state tha trumps Federal Law. In Norther New England that would be the "No Indians or French (or Catholics) wanted" laws brought back to life,
   
8. David McKeague -- dismissed a Justice Department request to investigate Michigan prisons claims that female prisoners were being abused and raped by male guards,
   
9. Priscilla Owen -- an Enron lobbist, and a woman NOW does not want to see on the Federal Bench,
   

Call Susan Collins' staffers:
Augusta Office (207) 622-8414
Bangor Office (207) 945-0417
Biddeford Office (207) 283-1101
Caribou Office (207) 493-7873
Lewiston Office (207) 784-6969
Portland Office (207) 780-3575
and/or send email (moronic webmail form) and let her know that ending the historic rule on debate for these morons is ... something a Mainiac is unlikely to ever forgive or forget.

[date fudged to keep at top of page. ebw]

C'est l'economie idiot

Le Monde has a piece (above the fold) on the US economy that I hope some of the economists on the left hand side of the dial will work their way through -- Malgré la croissance, le déclin de l'industrie américaine continue.

Sleepwalking to disaster in Iran

Former UN Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq (1991-1998) Scott Ritter has an essay in Aljazeera.net -- Sleepwalking to disaster in Iran. It is worth reading.

The Return of the ... One True King (XX)

Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf formally tossed his hat into the ring today. He'd resigned a head of the national police last week as the prelude to starting his retail political campaign for the June election. Qalibaf was head of the air force wing of Iran's Revolutionary Guards and frontline veteran of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war before becoming the national police chief. Some quotes:

I am a pragmatist, I believe in basic principles, I am not a rightist nor a fundamentalist. I have no attachments to any conventional political wings.

In today's world it is essential to have relations with all the countries. I do not see any limitations in this respect; we have to consider our national interests and use our entire capacity,

Who does Qalibaf think are his rivals? He said he considered powerful former president and top cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani his only potential rival. Rafsanjani as president was considered a pragmatist, and is expected to run, though he hasn't yet made a formal announcement. Several other potential candidates, including former Foreign MinisterAli Akbar Velayati, have indicated willingness to quit the race if Rafsanjani throws his hat in the ring. I posted IRNA'spublic opinion survey earlier.

So what didn't Qalibaf say? He didn't create limitations w.r.t. either the Zionist Entity or the Great Satan. Of course, both the Sharon regime and the Bush regime are exceptionalist towards Iran, and are postured towards a relationship of war, not a relationship of peace. So Qalibaf is running a pragmatic defense of the realm campaign, with the message to the voters that compeating campaigns that adopt exceptionalism towards Israel and/or the United States act contrary to the defense of the realm, so that's a caution to, and a distance from, the actors who interfered with the campaigns for the 7th Majlis, broadly, the religious activist conservatives, creating exceptionalist litmus tests for determining legislative candidate fitness, and with the message to the voters that Iran's best defense is not some secret war plan, but the front pages of Le Monde. I expect Rafsanjani will message similarly, and this is what Mohammad Khatami has been doing, diplo work to isolate the US, for the last several months.

It must be tough to campaign with cruise missile populated submarines and carriers to the south, over 130,000 troops, armor, and air to the west, more troops and forward air bases to the north and east, and the steady infiltration of logistics and prepositioned troops and air assets to the east, and message what is in effect ... "Wait for it. Wait for it. Don't fire until you can see the whites of their eyes."

MOX != Moxie

Last November I wrote Use or Lose? on the MOX scam. 134 kilos of weapons-grade plutonium went by rail from Los Alamos to Charleston, then by sea in vessels operated by British Nuclear Fuels, the Pacific Teal and Pacific Pintail, to Cherbourg, then by truck to the Areva-Cogema nuclear fuels reprocessing complex at La Hague, Normandy, and subsequently to the Cadarache MOX fabrication complex, near Aix en Provence. There the plutonium was blended with uranium (20/80 or 5/95) into metal oxide mix (MOX), pellatized, and the transport route reversed to the US, where the fuel elements will be burned in a commercial reactor to generate electricity.

The boats are due any day now back at Charlston, loaded with pellatized MOX populated fuel rods with transport scheduled by truck to the Catawba Nuclear Station on Lake Wylie (Duke Power). However, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which approved the shipment, has decided that Catawba isn’t ready to accept the load, and they won't go on record for how long it will take to get Catawba ready, or where the MOX assemblies will be stored. So the 17-foot long, 14,000 pound cylindrical casks (aluminum frames linked to anti-vibration pads) are going to sit somewhere for an indeterminate period of time.

Cotton Howell is the Emergency Management Director for York County. He's asked the NRC for an emergency plan to deal with MOX in case of an accident, a test drill to make sure the plan works, a communication plan for a coordinated response in case of an accident, and notification of when and where shipments are made in York County. Fairly sane stuff. The NRC and Duke have both told him to fuck off.

The NRC reply was misdirection and mystification -- transportation would be treated the same as other Special Nuclear Material (SNM) used for national defense (read as "This is a pilot program, funding for design and procurement of an appropriate-to-risk transport was not in budget, the DoE's using a bomb truck, therefore Duke Energy is not in the liability loop, and local yokels get as much access to transport, container, and cargo data as they do in any Special Nuclear Materials movement order -- none what so ever"). The Duke Power reply is also misdirection -- its a DoE thing, so please don't look here or read the April 18th, 2001 Federal Register concerning acceptance of an application for authority to construct a MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) from Duke, Cogema, Stone & Webster (DCS) on the Savannah River Site, or the NRC's March '05 MOX Newsletter (pdf), that in two pithy pages states that the NRC has issued a construction authorization to DCS for the MFFF, over the objections of the lead intervener, Georgians Against Nuclear Power, as well as approvals for four MOX Lead Test Assemblies (LTAs) in either Unit 1 or Unit 2 of the Catawba Nuclear Station, and provides the name of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, in the context of a classified report on ... "security related issues" which the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) has not released or redacted, but found as a matter of law that Duke's requested exemptions from 10 CFR Part 11 and 73 were "appropriate".

The short reading of the Part 11 exemption is that yes, the fuel elements meet the formulaic definition of "Special Nuclear Materials" (SNM), meaning that 10 CFR part 73 concerning the process and procedure to identify personnel requiring NRC-U orNRC-R access authorizations applies, except that "[MOX] is not attractive to potential adversaries from a proliferation standpoint due to its low Pu concentration, composition, and form (size and weight)", which means that SNM transport for any part of the return leg from Aix en Provance could have been waived (see Cotton Howell's problem, above, where the fact that MOX meets the forumlaic definition of SNM is offered as a defense to any claim by York County government for information concerning MOX transport and store in York Couty), and Duke is free to move personnel lacking NRC-U or NRC-R certs in and out of the MOX control areas. Those are Duke management, machineists, electricians, casual labor and rent-a-cops.

The short reading of the Part 73 exemption is that yes, the fuel elements contain 6% or less by weight plutonium, the rest of the fuel element being depleted uranium, and each one is over 12 feet long and weights about 3/4ths of a ton, so "a large quantity of MOX fuel and an elaborate extraction process would be required to yield enough material for use in an improvised nuclear device or weapon". So there is no risk unless assembled correctly into a functioning fission device. If some wankers with blow torches and nitrogen fertilizer and diesel fuel manage to put a MOX plating on downtown {Atlanta|Charlston|Columbia} and contribute a MOX aerosol to the South Eastern lower atmospheric exotics inventory some Sunday, no risk arises. Possibly because plutonium is no longer carenogenic, or when "recycled" decomposes naturally like autumn's leaves, or summer's lawn trimmings. See rent-a-cops, casual labor, above.

Coverage of the MOX shipment hitting the Palmetto State is available from The State, a Knight-Ridder paper in Columbia, WIS Channel 10 in Columbia, the Rock Hill Herald, a McClatchy paper, WYFF Channel 4, an NBC affiliate in Greenville, WLTX Channel 19 in Columbia, and WCIV Channel 4, an ABC affiliate in Mount Pleasant. None of these properties could figure out the name of the organizations that are parties to the still classified Atomic Safety and Licensing Board process concerning access to and transport of Special Nuclear Materials in South Carolina, or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's process concerning siting approval of a MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility on the Savannah River, despite the fact that these organizations file petitions with the NRC and send out press releases. Even the NRC is a better source than the media, which means that if Jeff Gannon got a job working for any of these fine media outlets, their reporting would actually become more, rather than less, factual.

Those are the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, web site: www.bredl.org, and Georgians Against Nuclear Power, no web site, so I'll be even more subversive and provide Women's Action for New Directions MOX website: www.wand.org.

I also wrote Two texts for those interested in the Swords into Plowshares rif. The industry is working on "recycling" as their next working meme, as if the extraction of gold from post-processed persons of undesirable ancestry in Mittleeuropa in the middle of the last century was environmentally friendly and socially responsible "recycling".

For whose common good?

Over the past few years I've become increasingly cynical regarding the American public's cavalier attitude over our governmental health "watchdog" agencies, namely the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Center for Disease Control (CDC), and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These agencies refusal to, at best, admit failure to protect from, and at worst, complicity with BigPharma in, the endangerment of over 30 million children in the US alone, and hundreds of millions of children worldwide, is criminal. For the first few years, I thought that the public, including the Left, just weren't aware of the problem. Now I believe that JQ Public cannot fathom that our own government doctors and scientists would in fact knowingly subvert the truth in order to protect their own skins, and pet project funding. [Note: It's ironic that a majority of American purportedly don't trust scientists to determine if the world is older than 4000 BP, yet unquestionably allow them to oversee the health of present and future generations.]

Even the fallout from the FDA's Vioxx scandal hasn't led to a general clamoring for heads to roll or even a review of its files. The fact that the agency is more concerned with banning Plan B contraceptives and the potential non-implantation of fertilized ova than the deaths of thousands of fully-formed humans has barely caused a ripple in either the press or a change in the Progressive critique of this Administration.

Now it's the NIH's turn at the scandal bat:

Women at NIH allege harassment, lax safety

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Women at the National Institutes of Health faced sexual intimidation and repeated disregard of their concerns for the welfare of patients in AIDS experiments, according to testimony by two senior female officers and documents gathered by investigators.

One longtime medical officer at the government's premier medical research agency alleges that the harassment and disregard for federal safety regulations are so widespread that employees are now afraid to hold up experiments even if they see a safety problem.

Her sworn testimony and other documents were obtained by The Associated Press from a variety of sources inside and outside NIH.

"It can be fairly uncomfortable," NIH medical officer Betsy Smith testified in a recent civil case deposition that has been turned over to federal and Senate investigators. "There are a number of things that you really don't talk about."

In such a work environment, "You don't hold up any projects even if you feel there are safety issues for certain projects," she said.

Testimony by Smith and the chief compliance officer for AIDS research, as well as e-mails involving more staffers and several bosses, paint a picture of a sometimes raunchy, profane-language atmosphere inside an agency regarded for its pristine science.

Documents tell of a supervisor sending a red bra to a former female subordinate and of women being hugged or kissed by bosses. In one instance, a supervisor invited a colleague to a West Coast rock concert and suggested they also visit an AIDS clinic there so the trip could be charged to taxpayers.

Smith and the top regulatory compliance officer in the NIH's AIDS division, Mary Anne Luzar, stepped forward in interviews with investigators and in sworn depositions in recent weeks and expanded upon allegations made last year by an agency whistleblower, Dr. Jonathan Fishbein. Their videotaped testimony was given in Fishbein's lawsuit against the agency.

Fishbein alleges he is in the process of being fired as the AIDS division's chief of human research protection because he raised concerns about patient safety and shoddy science. The NIH says he was fired for poor performance.

Anyone whose taken the time to even glance at David Kirby's Evidence of Harm (see below) has learned what many of us on the Parents of Autistics' bench have known for years: The revolving door between US federal health agencies and BigPharma has completely undermined the public safety, and the millions paid in political bribes, er, "contributions", namely to the same Republicans who now control Congressional oversite committees, leaves the foxes guarding the henhouse.

The fact is that the grownups are no more in control of federal health agencies than they are any other US "watchdog" agency, e.g. EPA, NRC, FCC, TSA. If Americans actually want to protect themselves, and their children or potential children, they'd better understand that they may in fact be on their own.

So start paying as much attention to tort and malpractice "reform" legislation as you do Social Security privatization, as that's where BigPharma gets its cronies to hide their perks and protections. Injured kids and dead arthritis sufferers may not vote, but their families sure can.

Is a midterm Congressional election revolt brewing?

Both Duncan and Josh have pointed to this Greenwich Times article where Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT), in no uncertain terms, distances himself from Majority Leader Tom DeLay. At one point in the town hall meeting with his constituents, Shay asserts that he would vote against DeLay if he should ever run for Speaker.

But what I found even more interesting than Shays comments, which, to be honest, aren't all that remarkable, since Shays is one of the most liberal Rs in the House, but the response of one of Shay's supporters in the audience:

Town resident John Howard, 39, said he has supported Shays in the past and knows that the congressman is not a defender of DeLay. Even so, Howard said, he wouldn't continue to support Shays if he voted to keep DeLay in power.

"I was very proud of you for standing up to the Republican caucus," Howard said. "However, you do vote for the Republican leadership in Congress -- and you must know that you have a lot of constituents, like myself, who deeply respect you, and agree with you on many different issues -- but I can't vote for a congressperson who would vote to keep Tom DeLay in power. You must understand that he's a liability for you."

[Emphasis mine]

There are more than a few Republican members of Congress who hail from "blue" or even "purple" districts where Delay has is now long past his shelf life date. It's clear that at least this one constituent of Shays understand how Republican leaders become just that - their own party caucus votes them in. Thus, the way to get rid of the DeLays on the Hill is to get rid of those who vote them in, even if it means voting down otherwise popular Representatives and Senators.

One can only hope.

Via Riverbend (who reads T.S. Eliot)

Via Riverbend (who reads T.S. Eliot). Two photos from yesterday's joint Sunni-Shia US Out RSN protest in Baghdad. First, just one of the main roads in central Baghdad, one on which US vehicles are routinely engaged by IEDs and mobile light infantry (LMGs and RPGs) when they attempt to traverse central Baghdad. The third photo is a distance shot of one of the consumer frauds of the Bush War marketing -- the "joyful masses pulling down the Lenin-esque statue of Saddam" photo, which probably won awards for responsible photo-journalism.

You can judge for yourselves if the US coverage of "thousands" or "tens of thousands" really cuts the mustard, or if N x 10^^6 for a low value of N is closer to reality, and you must believe that there are more people in the 3rd photo than in the second. To believe otherwise would be give aid and comfort to the enemy. You just have to keep in mind that the jubulent masses of Iraqis in the 3rd photo are all wearing Romulean Cloaks of Invisibility, except for the US soldiers, embedded media, and the dozen or so Iraqi slackers who actually can be seen.

Evidence of Harm

One could, if one were so inclined, follow the lead of the oddly industry inclinded CDC, and assert a priori, that there can not be a biologically plausible pathway between thimerosal (a vaccine adulterant manufactured by Eli Lilly that is 50% mercury by weight, and metabolized or degraded to ethylmercury and thiosalicylate) and autism, and if there is, the data and researchers that prove merely that a biologically plausible pathway exists will be withdrawn and defunded, respectively.

The solid rocket booster O-rings were not defective by design, and Morton Thiokol couldn't be liable for the Challenger disaster. Hint: What does 31°F mean to citrus farmers and O-ring riders? That was good for a hoot. Every time no one is looking Bill Frist tries to pull the vaccine adulterant manufacturer (Eli Lilly) under the umbrella of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, and at the same time, loot the fund. Because the notion that there might be a biologically plausible pathway between thimerosal and autism is utterly implausible, and that much money could be put to better use than compensating children who couldn't, by assertion, have been injured.

Or one could ask, if something used to kill or maime one person in ten thousand, and now gets one boy out of every eighty or ninty, and one girl out of every 250 or so, and the ramp-up has been both non-linear, and confined to the last 10 to 15 years, and hasn't been shown to have slowed its rate of growth, if being institutionally stupid about diagnostics is the better course of action.

We haven't yet read David Kirby's Evidence of Harm, but we intend to. You can order a copy from Amazon, Borders, Powell's, or just ring up your usual dealer and ask them to order a copy from a wholesaler. The price should be between $15 and $20, or about twice a Grisham novel about toxic torts, plaintiff's attorneys, and megapolluters (in paper). Kirby's work has one feature not present in Grisham's novels ... it is reality based.

Journalism & Blogs

Matt Ynglesis looks uncomfortable sitting next to Jeff Gannon. It serves him right, Matt repeats the Administration's talking points on Iran. Mullahs gonna get a bomb. Danger to to 'Mericun Democ'cy. Und so weiter. There's no reason why he shouldn't get paid too.

John Stanton (Congress Daily) managed to say (a) that there is "objectivity", and (b) that everything that appears in blogs serves an agenda, as opposed to objectivity, and (c) that the blogosphere consists of Powerline and Daily Kos and their repective camps of echolaliaists. Subjectively, he's dumb as a post. Objectively, the PoMos are correct.

Jack Abramoff & Tom Delay

[via triballaw]

Slate has a piece out on one of the least liked toads ever to "work" Tribal Sovereignty issues -- Jack Abramoff, and links to fellow-traveler Tom Delay.

April is the cruelest month, mixing memory and desire

Remember this map? In 1999 Operation Southern Watch (CENTCOM OSW) US and UK warplances carried out 61 strike days below the 33rd parallel, and Operaion Northern Watch (EUCOM ONW) carried out 102 strike days above the 36th parallel. In 2000 there were 32 OSW and 48 ONW strike days. In 2001 there were 34 OSW and 11 ONW strike days (multiples counted as singles). In 2002 there were 60 OSW and 18 ONW strike days. The targets, whether hit or missed, were "elements of the Iraqi integrated air defense system" -- AA radar, AA missiles and guns, and military aviation.

For the better part of two years, the OSW (Shii') area has been self-governing, in so far as the CPA allowed self-government in the Southern provinces. Similarly, the ONW (Kurd) area, extended to Kirkuk, has been self-governing, in so far as the CPA allowed self-government in the Kurdish provinces. And, for the better part of two years, other than the Green Zone, and the defensive perimeter of convoys and patrols, all of which are engaged more than 50 times a day, mostly within the area bounded by the 35th and 32nd parallels -- the "Sunni Triangle" -- the Sunni Baathists make pretentions by others that they rule visibly false on a daily basis.

Had the Bush war limited, non-pervasive aims, and dislocations of the Baath government been limited to generally the OSW and ONW areas, or to the area seized by US and UK forces as of 21 March 2003, before the main battles of the war in central Iraq, and long before the disasterous secondary battles in Falluja and Najaf, then ... the OSW (Shi'i) area would also have been self-governing for the past two years, in so far as the CPA allows self-government in the Southern provinces and the ONW (Kurd) area would also have been self-governing, in so far as the CPA allows self-government in the Kurdish provinces. And, for the better part of two years, the Sunni Baathists would be attempting to retain a "state" in profound isolation, except perhaps for Syria and Jordain on the western desert.

Stripped of the non-essentials, a head of state captured, but not the entire state, a national government that may be national, except where it is not, and has not governed, and may not, where it is not, and the rest of the Baghdad Bobbery ... other than a wicked huge pile of dead and wounded and a landfill of money burned or stolen, and the retrogression of basic human services, from water to medicine and education, as well as the creation of a criminal class that makes the historic Prohibition Chicago and New York gang wars look gentle, at least towards women and businesses not identified as "the rackets", not a lot has really changed.

That dot that alone moves amongst the fixed stars, that's what all this really is, thousands of lives, hundreds of billions of dollars, just a ball of dust and some gas. Calling that "victory" and hijacking the Republic to make it so is ... there is a word for that. It isn't "poetry".

My Shortest Career Ever

Computer Science Professor X, who invited me to assist him or her extend some biologist-written code that solves, in a particular way, problems arising in molecular biology (genetics) expressed as phylogenic trees, and provide an alternative mechanism, not written by biologists, to solve the same problems, but potentially examining the solution space differently, was unhappy this morning, and had some things to say. I handed Professor X the paycheck and expenses check for travel to his or her institution that I'd picked up a few minutes earlier at the admin office and returned to the admin office to drop of my institutional ID. Less than half-an-hour before I signed a non-disclsosure agreement, completing the employment contract.

From one point of view I was employed for two weeks, most of which I spent as a host for flu, thinking fondly about the influenza pandemic of 1919. From another, for half an hour, the time it took me to wait for a copy of the last legal gizmo, walk across campus, and listen to some things Professor X had to say, and walk back across campus. And since I took no money from Professor X's institution, neither mileage nor salary for time about which Professor X had so much to say, I don't see any consideration, so I don't see any contract at all. Any one of those three qualify for my shortest non-temp job ever.

Anyway, my technical sins have a blog of their own at here. The notes of a POA lurching towards computational molecular biology, from operating systems, unhindered by education, other than maths.

A Note

Congratulations to the North Carolina Tar Heels. Hey, Sean May, you can make millions and millions of dollars if you go pro before the next time Carolina plays Duke. I’m just saying, millions and millions.

It is spring break for the kids and we are taking another house hunting trip. I’m taking the laptop and, if I get the time and a decent internet connection, I may post a few things that I have been working on. If not, I will see you next week.

Update: Just before leaving, my 11 year old and I were reviewing houses on the net in preparation for the trip. He saw one that had a third floor loft with a bedroom, a private bath, and a playroom. He immediately thought about having that space as his own private reserve. "I like that one," he said. "Click the button to put it in the shopping cart."

It is a new world.

Red Lake Teachers return to school

Wampum's readers have put $300 on our blanket (via PayPal) for the Red Lake Condolence Fund. We're going to tansfer the funds next week, so there is still time to give via a link click.

Also, RezNet has gotten a blog together at Red Lake Rez. Skip Atrios today and read it. The URL is http://www.reznetnews.org/news/050331_blog/, and reading RezNetNews is always a good idea.

Brenda Child, Red Lake Ojibwe, has a piece in the Star-Trib. She connects the Boarding School past (which is very present) with the present (which also contains the past). Since it is a subscription site, I've copied it into the extended area. Professor Child is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota and author of "Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families: 1900-1940."

Dear Sir,

It is with a feeling of sorrow that I write you telling of the death of your daughter Lizzie. She was sick but a short time and we did not think her so near her end. Last Wednesday I was called away to Minneapolis and I was very much surprised upon my return Saturday evening to find she was dead, as they had given us no information except she might live for a number of months. Those that were with her say she did not suffer, but passed away as one asleep. I am very sorry that you could not have seen your daughter alive, for she had grown quite a little and improved very much since you let her come here with me. If we had known she was going to live but so short a time, we would have made a great effort to have gotten you here before she died.

So wrote the superintendent of Flandreau Indian School to the father of a student who died of tuberculosis in a government boarding school in 1907. The recent deaths of students at Red Lake High School remind me that this is not the first tragedy in the history of Indian education.

Hundreds of children like Lizzie died at boarding school, never to return to their families and communities. Indians survived that dark era with tribal cultures largely intact and a remarkable commitment to the future of their people. As a historian who has written about American Indian people during an era when the United States government followed a policy to break up Indian families through assimilation programs and government boarding schools, I have often been inspired by the strength of Ojibwe family ties and the heroism of children.

Therefore, I was not surprised to learn that school guards acted bravely, and that some Red Lake students shielded others during the shooting with their own bodies or pulled classmates to safety. A Red Laker would do that. Courage, fortitude, and the ability to act for others are built into tribal life and are the very foundation of Ojibwe values.

On Sept. 21, 2004, exactly six months before the tragic shootings took place at Red Lake, a number of people from our tribe attended the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian, the latest branch of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Together we marched under the Red Lake flag in the "Native Nations Procession."

I spent a few days in Washington as a consultant to the new resource center for the museum, and wrote an essay for the museum's inaugural book, "Native Universe: Voices of Indian America." Billed as "one of the largest gatherings of Native peoples in the 21st century," it was a joyous public event.

Thousands of Indians from all over this hemisphere organized in the early morning for a walk up the mall to the new museum at the foot of the Capitol building. As a gesture of remembrance, I wore my mother's red dance shawl in the procession. She spoke Ojibwe while growing up in Red Lake during an era when Indian culture was rarely celebrated in American society.

A half year later, we are a community in mourning.

In the aftermath of this tragedy I have received many messages and phone calls from generous students and friends. Colleagues in the United States, Canada and beyond have extended their sympathy. The other day I received a formal message of condolence from a mayor and city councilman in Spain that I will forward to our own tribal council. I had given a talk there in December. Everyone I ran into inquired about my family and expressed heartfelt sadness over the tragedy.

My own family spent several anxious hours that day before we learned the status of one of our relatives wounded in the shooting. That evening his older brother phoned us from the hospital with the news we hoped for but did not expect: He survived. But as an extended family, all Red Lakers are devastated.

It is heartening that countless expressions of sympathy have been extended to members of families who lost their beloved children and loved ones, or to children who bear physical or psychological wounds, and to the entire Red Lake Nation. We especially appreciate the kindness from the people of Minnesota.

Our tribal council has received condolences from across Indian Country, many from the same tribal leaders and people who gathered in Washington last September. We knew them already from boarding school. As Indian people, our histories are intertwined and we support one another.

Ojibwe people follow traditions that call for a formal year of grieving after a death. I have always been deeply impressed by how Ojibwe people conduct themselves in mourning, with a profound cultural understanding of the psychology of grief that is unparalleled in my experience.

Perhaps this is what sustained Indian people during the boarding school era. When a year has passed, bereaved family members hold a giveaway ceremony and feast to thank those who embraced them in their time of sorrow and despair. The Red Lake Nation is in mourning, and next year there will be so many people to thank.

Brenda Child, Red Lake Ojibwe, is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota and author of "Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families: 1900-1940."

The Wes Clark Show

I was happy to give my spot on the Wes Clark Con-Call-with-Bloggers on the Iraq War to Riverbend, an Iraqi woman who's blog is a gem of reason, but then one of my sons twiched in his sleep and I awoke from the real world of dreams to this far-less real world of sleeplessness.

Riverbend's piece on American Media begins:

You wake up in the morning. Brush your teeth. Splash the sleep out of your eyes and head for the kitchen for a cup of coffee or tea and whatever is available for breakfast.

You wander to the living room and search for the remote control. It is in its usual place- stuck inexplicably between the sofa cushions. You turn on the television and stand there flipping from one channel to the other, looking for a news brief or something that will sum up what happened during those six hours you slept. You finally settle on the pleasant face on the screen- the big hair, bright power suit, capped teeth and colorful talons- blandly reading the news. The anchoress is Julie Chan. The program is CBS’s The Early Show (Live from Fifth Avenue!).

Guess the nationality of the viewer above. Three guesses. American? No. Canadian? No. British? Japanese? Australian? No, no and no. The viewer is Iraqi… or Jordanian… or Lebanese… or Syrian… or Saudi… or Kuwaiti… or… but you get the picture.

She ends it with this:

We sat there watching like we were a part of another world, in another galaxy. I’ve always sensed from the various websites that American mainstream news is far-removed from reality- I just didn’t know how far. Everything is so tame and simplified. Everyone is so sincere.

Furthermore, I don’t understand the worlds fascination with reality shows. Survivor, The Bachelor, Murder in Small Town X, Faking It, The Contender… it’s endless. Is life so boring that people need to watch the conjured up lives of others?

I have a suggestion of my own for a reality show. Take 15 Bush supporters and throw them in a house in the suburbs of, say, Falloojeh for at least 14 days. We could watch them cope with the water problems, the lack of electricity, the check points, the raids, the Iraqi National Guard, the bombings, and- oh yeah- the ‘insurgents’. We could watch their house bombed to the ground and their few belongings crushed under the weight of cement and brick or simply burned or riddled with bullets. We could see them try to rebuild their life with their bare hands (and the equivalent of $150)…

I’d not only watch *that* reality show, I’d tape every episode.

---

I'm using Juan Cole's notes from the call, available at Informed Comment, so its my paraphrase of Juan's paraphrase of a con-call.

Clark characterized the Bush regime'spolicy in Iraq as an operational stepping stone to overthrowing the regimes in Syria and Iran.

So he must be aware that 10^^6 troops, heavy armor, artillary, combat air and heavy lift air, and an operational logistical tail plus a fully charged sea lift, is waiting for a movement order, and there is a real risk that the regime's movement order won't be "return home".

Clark insisted that the Iraq crisis differs significantly from Vietnam in that the guerrillas in Iraq are so over-matched that they can never hope to engage in more than hit-and-run operations.

So he knows that most of the heavy armor, artillary, and combat air deployed in Iraq serve no useful purpose for the operation of record -- suppression of insurections. Yet they are still in-country, burning money. Waiting for a movement order.

He also knows that the guerrillas in Iraq are of no military consequence to the US military.

So he knows that the guerrillas in Iraq are of little or no military consequence, to an Iraqi military.

Clark said the success of this enterprise requires that the government in Iraq have political legitimacy. If there is a way out, this is the way [i.e. that the Sunni Arabs would gradually give allegiance to the new elected government in Iraq].

But he knows that guerrilla wars are primarily political in nature, they can never be won until the war against the guerrilla movement becomes a political issue in the domestic politics of the aggressor state, and they can never be sustained if the war against the occupational force becomes a political issue in the domestic politics of the occupied state.

The presence of US forces in Iraq enhances the political legitimacy of the guerrillas. Absent a unifying foreign target the guerrillas are reduced to using "Bad Arab" or "Beard not long enough (or too long)" to sustain their recruiting and attrition-by-suicide goals.

Apparently not mentioned in the call was the raison d'être for continuted American presence in Iraq -- that without it, there would be civil war.

So, if the guerrillas in Iraq are of little or no military consequence, they can't start, or sustain, let alone win, a civil war. And if the American are gone from Iraq -- if they Just Go -- the guerrillas are reduced to either proclaiming victory and disarming, or attempting to start a civil war they can neither win or sustain, organized around civil rivalries, not national resistance to an alien invasion.

---

Send more troops, but make them regional Arabs. In effect, Clark is just another "Yea" voice on the question of whether to pass an Emergency Supplemental Appropriations For Iraq And Afghanistan Security And Reconstruction Act, and give the regime another $87 billion to play out another fraction of a year of the ongoing destruction of Iraq.

I'm struck by the timorousness of Clark. Fill a room with guys, a solution will come, and it can't change the current situation by very much. Some other guys made a bad call a couple of years ago, and boy are they dorks. This is a fairly target-rich enviornment. The morons who own defense appropriations are going to blow most of the military budget for the next two decades on replacing armor with happy-happy networks of Microsoft Windows, under the theory that soldiers can stay dry when left out in the rain, if they are smart enough. Abu Gharib is just waiting for a Vetern's Desert Soldier Investigation (most of which can be done in the New Hampshire media market). Defense contractor corruption appears to be at least as big as it was when everyone fleeced the Union Army.

Worst of all, he doesn't have an answer to Riverbend. Its the economy, stupid. Not the testosterone.

Chief Teresa Chambers, United States Park Police

A year ago Teresa Chambers, then the head of one of the top uniformed Federal law enforcement agencies, Chief of the United States Park Police, became a whistleblower. She went on the record and confirmed to a journalist working for a paper of record that the United States Park Police could no longer provide the level of service that citizens and visitors had grown to expect in our parks and on our parkways in Washington, D.C., New York City, and San Francisco. She writes:

For being candid -- for being "honest" -- while still being supportive of my superiors, I was, without warning, stripped of my law enforcement authority, badge, and firearm, and escorted from the Department of the Interior by armed special agents of another Federal law enforcement entity in December of 2003. Seven months later, the Department of the Interior terminated me.

Frighteningly, the issues I brought to light about our citizens' and visitors' safety and security and the future of these American icons have not been addressed -- other than to silence me. In fact, there are fewer United States Park Police Officers today than there were more than one year ago when I was sent home for daring to say that we weren't able to properly meet our commitments with existing resources. Other security concerns I raised internally have also gone un-addressed.

...
My story is told on a website, www.honestchief.com, established in December 2003 and maintained by my husband so that the American people could "witness" the issues in this case. The website has provided transparency to my situation by making key documents available for viewing, including the transcripts of depositions of top officials and their testimony during a key administrative hearing.

Suppression of information is spreading - gag orders, non disclosures agreements, and the government's refusal to turn over documents. In agencies that span Federal service, conscientious public servants are struggling to communicate vital concerns to their true employers - you, the American public. Is anyone listening?

When we were in Washington last year we stopped to show Grace the signature of William Williams, Delegate from Connecticut at the Continental Congress, on the Declaration of Independence. William was elected to the Continental Congress in 1776. He voted for Independence, signed the Declaration, and was then appointed a member of the committee to frame the Articles of Confederation. In 1777 he was appointed to the Board of War. After the war, he attended the Hartford convention, where Connecticut ratified the Federal Constitution. His brother, Capt.. Benj. Williams, did the iron and blacksmith work and fitted the fully-rigged ship Oliver Cromwell in Essex (Saybrook), a warship of the Connecticut Navy that took nine British ships prize before captured by the Royal Navy. The Oliver Cromwell carried 20 guns and had a crew of 180 men. Grace & sibs are descendents of Capt. Benj. Williams.

Sam, Jonah and Kezzie, especially Sam, was chomping at the bit to go on to the Dinosaurs, which are a little older than the foundation documents of the Republic, but Gracie was amused that everybody signed the Declaration on July 2nd, not July 4th.

The later Framers knew that persons and party would, if unchecked, tend towards dictatorship, and the document intended to replace the Articles of Confederation created three co-equal branches of government. But there can be no meaningful checks and balances when the Executive can conceal its acts from the Legislature and Judiciary. That is why whistleblowers are important, and why it is of the first import when the regime can simply make the Chief of the United States Park Police "disapear", because it is inconvenient that she not.

Launch Codes Line Dancing

John Kerry would like people who haven't yet done so to contact their Republican Senator's office, and politely let him or her know that, as a constituent, one is deeply opposed to Senator Frist's "nuclear option" plan.

He's got an ad scheduled for tomorrow in USA Today, and he's hoping to get 200k signatures. I hope he'll get more. The URL is johnkerry.com/usatoday.

If it helps, try compartmentalization. This is about process, should 50 Republicans + Cheney swing the judical nomination debate to an end and also determine the outcome of the vote? How unqualified some of the Bush appointees are is what each seperate debate could be about, if a debate can be held, after 50 Republicans + Cheney have decided how many minutes to allow for debate in the Senate before an up-or-down vote on each nominee.

Remember, the issue is only in part the inexperienced nominees we've been writing about, the rest of the issue is how William Rehnquist and other SCOTUS retirees are replaced, and therefore, by nominees of what stature. FDR tried to pack the Court to get a majority on NRA legislation. This is attempting to pack the Court with party hacks, who are counter-intuitively marketed as "not activist".

Somewhere over the horizon, waiting like Coyote, and drawing ever closer, is a sign that simply reads "The Republic Ends Here".

Taurel Gets A Raise

Eli Lilly, notable for putting mercury in infant vaccines, knows how to treat its CEO, Sidney Taurel. The New York Times:

Net income at Eli Lilly fell 29 percent and its return to shareholders dropped 17 percent last year, but its chief executive, Sidney Taurel, saw his pay go up 41 percent, to $12.5 million.

Taurel and Lilly are part of a campaign urging the administration and Congress to limit the amount of pain and suffering damages recoverable in tort actions to $250,000.

Apparently, Eli Lilly thinks that it takes the equivalent of 49 lifetimes of pain and suffering to lure a manager who can make earnings fall 29% and can depress shareholder return by 17%. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Taurel is not too ashamed to take the money.

Just For the Record Update

I have been meaning to update the Just for the Record series in which I looked at various measures of economic performance by the party of the President ( budget deficits, government employment, economic growth, unemployment, inflation, and job creation).

I have not updated because those posts involve a lot of tedious work crunching economic data. Fortunately, I no longer feel the need to update because Michael Kinsley has done the work (I bet he has a staff).

Federal spending (aka "big government"): It has gone up an average of about $50 billion a year under presidents of both parties. But that breaks down as $35 billion a year under Democratic presidents and $60 billion under Republicans…

Spending goes up faster under Republican presidents than under Democratic ones. And the economy grows faster under Democrats than Republicans. What grows faster under Republicans is debt.

Under Republican presidents since 1960, the federal deficit has averaged $131 billion a year. Under Democrats, that figure is $30 billion. In an average Republican year, the deficit has grown by $36 billion. In the average Democratic year it has shrunk by $25 billion. The national debt has gone up more than $200 billion a year under Republican presidents and less than $100 billion a year under Democrats…

From 1960 to 2005 the gross domestic product measured in year-2000 dollars rose an average of $165 billion a year under Republican presidents and $212 billon a year under Democrats…

The average annual rise in real per capita income -- that's the statistic that puts money in your pocket. Democrats score about 30 percent higher…

Democratic presidents have a better record on inflation (averaging 3.13 percent compared with 3.89 percent for Republicans) and on unemployment (5.33 percent versus 6.38 percent). Unemployment went down in the average Democratic year, up in the average Republican one…

Kinsley doesn’t mention my favorite. Here is the ranking of the last 13 presidents by job creation:

1) Roosevelt (1933-45): +5.3%

2) Johnson (1963-69): +3.8%

3) Carter (1977-81): +3.1%

4) Truman: (1945-53): +2.5%

5) Kennedy (1961-63): +2.5%

6) Clinton (1993-2001): +2.4%

7) Nixon (1969-75): +2.2%

8) Reagan (1981-89): +2.1%

9) Ford (1975-77): +1.1%

10) Eisenhower (1953-61): +0.9%

11) Bush (1989-93): +0.6%

12) Bush (2001-present): -0.7%

13) Hoover (1929-33): -9.0%

Those rankings were through 2002, if I remember correctly. The current President may have have moved up a notch or so since then. That list is suggestive because job growth was higher under all six Democratic Presidents than under any of the seven Republican Presidents.

The true genius of the GOP has been its ability to get people not to vote their wallet.

Update: Avedon on the Deadbeat Daddy Party.

Watching TV

I do not watch a lot of television. It is not that I am particularly high brow about it. I enjoy watching television and wish I could watch more often, but I never seem to get the chance. If the television is on, Bobby insists that it be tuned to Channel 8. That’s fine only if Channel 8 (PBS) is running something interesting. When push comes to shove, I would prefer to play bridge on the net, read a book, or, sometimes, even prepare to post something here.

I have never seen a single episode of Seinfeld, Friends, South Park, Survivor, The Simpsons, 24, Wired, Arrested Development, Desperate Housewives, or whatever show happens to be popular right now. A couple of years ago, someone in my comments section (I forget who) referred to “pulling a Bartlett.” I embarrassed myself by thinking that they were referring to a compilation of quotations rather than to a fictional President.

Being a native North Carolinian and having spent years getting a couple of degrees from Duke, one television event that I always watch is the NCAA basketball tournament, March Madness. In watching this year’s edition, I noted a couple of things that I do not understand. Perhaps you can help.

During last nights’ Carolina game, the local CBS station ran a teaser for its news coverage. I believe the exact quote was:

After the game, the world mourns a Pope.

As judges sometimes say when a lawyer bungles a question, “Would you care to rephrase?” I could understand, “After the game, Michigan mourns the Spartans.”

The second thing I do not understand is the American Express commercial starring Duke Basketball coach Mike Kryzewski.

Don't get me wrong. As a double Duke alum, and a Duke fan, I have a lot of admiration for Kryzewski. I was pleased that he turned down the bazillions offered by the Lakers and stayed at Duke. He is the very best college basketball coach in the land and ranks with the likes of John Wooten and Dean Smith for the honor of being the very best ever.

In the commercial, Kryzewski says “I don’t look at myself as a basketball coach, I look at myself as a leader.”

He doesn’t look at himself as a basketball coach? Perhaps a couple of decades of having players, fans, media, alumni, and everyone else refer to him as “Coach K” should have given him a clue. From now on, he should be known as “Leader K.”

I could understand, “I don’t look at myself as a basketball coach, I look at myself as a husband and a father.” As it is, it appears that that Kryzewski thinks he made a wrong turn while at West Point and ended up in the gym instead of the offices of the Joint Chiefs.

I suggest a new commercial in which Coach K says, “I don’t look at myself as a basketball coach, I look at myself as a TV pitchman.”

We were not authorized to investigate ...

Since my Iran and Pakistan and Uranium Enrichment and Iraq posts are really all about intelligence, I'm going to repeat what should be painfully obvious:

"We were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community,"

From "The most important sentence in the commission report", at Eric Umansky's blog.

Corsi and the Persian Moonie Chorus

I see that the Heritage Foundation and the PMOI are planning a spring gala. Tomorrow BC04 political assassin Jerome Corsi, PhD, author of "Unfit for Command", will be doing a brown bag stand-up gig at the HF's Lehrman Auditorium & Petting Zoo. The title of his routine is "Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians", so he'll be working the body of material originally created by Tel Aviv commediens and the Persian Moonies. His spin on the Debka schtick is, unsurprisingly, that the market for domestic (US) political assassins is poised for growth. Kind of cheery in its own wierd way. "I just flew back from Iran and boy are my arms tired. bud-a-boom."

The PMOI is now floating a new theory-of-Zoroastrian-Evil-and-Mannichean-Everythingness. In this episode the Criminally Insane Mullahs are going to skip production, assembly, batteries required, and buy three warheads on the open warhead market. This latest Persian Moonie ism is coincidently floated just days after 30 or so journalists trooped through the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, then the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan, and reported no moonbats.

Mohammad Mohaddessin, who can't actually do stand-up in the States without complications, since he is a status terrorist, has the job of being the Persian Moonie Spoke in Paris. The Paris gig is a lot cushier than being in the bag at Camp Ashraf, where the celibacy-between-married-couples-and-everyone-else rule still applies inside the camp, even if General Sanchez lets them carry weapons, drive Hummers, and test drive M1A1 Abrams tanks outside the camp. He's now alerting the world that swarthy mustashioed men with bulging suitcases stuffed with geldt are trolling the Rodeo Avenues of the world armaments markets, looking for much more bang for their bucks. Logically, this would put them in Moscow, doing a buy, or on K Street, driving nails in the coffin of the "loose Soviet-era nukes" program.

Meanwhile, in the saner bits of the world ...

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Lisa Margonelli reviews three books vastly more interesting. David Harris' The Crisis: The President, the Prophet and the Shah -- 1979 and the Coming of Militant Islam (Little, Brown; 470 pages; $26.95), Afschineh Latifi's memoire "Even After All This Time: A Story of Love, Revolution and Leaving Iran" (Regan Books; 320 pages; $24.95), and The Muslim World After 9/11 (Rand; 525 pages; $40 paperback).

An editorial in the Salt Lake Trib today reads:

What is most alarming is the commission's conclusion that it has no confidence that the U.S. government knows what is going on today in Iran and North Korea.
...
Part of the problem was wholesale American ignorance about Islamic culture. The intelligence community today is the same one that was built to counter the Soviet threat. In broadest terms, the commission is telling the nation that it must restructure its intelligence services to deal with a different kind of enemy.
We should have got that message by now.

If you didn't click on the link to Lisa Margonelli's book reviews, you missed the point the Salt Lake Trib Editorial Board was making.

Friday .cat blogging

ICANN published its meeting minutes for January, February and March yesterday, on the eve of the public meeting at Playa del Mar, Argentina.

.CAT sTLD Approval to Enter Negotiations

Kurt Pritz introduced the .CAT application materials, evaluator's responses and the applicant's supplemental materials. There was extensive board discussion regarding the application. Following this discussion, Vint Cerf moved for a vote on approval the resolutions as set out below, seconding was simultaneously offered by Mouhamet Diop, Veni Markovski, and Michael D. Palage. The resolution was the following:

Resolved [05.__] the Board authorizes the President and General Counsel to enter into negotiations relating to proposed commercial and technical terms for the .CAT sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) with the applicant, in conjunction with consultation with the appropriate governmental authorities.

Resolved [05.__] if after entering into negotiations with the .CAT sTLD applicant the President and General Counsel are able to negotiate a set of proposed commercial and technical terms for a contractual arrangement, the President shall present such proposed terms to this board, for approval and authorization to enter into an agreement relating to the delegation of the sTLD.

This resolution was approved by the Board by a roll call vote of 10-2, with one abstention. The following Board Members voted affirmatively: Raimundo Beca, Vint Cerf, Mouhamet Diop, Hagen Hultzsch, Joichi Ito, Veni Markovski, Michael D. Palage, Hualin Qian, Vanda Scartezini and Paul Twomey. Alejandro Pisanty and Thomas Niles voted against the resolution. Demi Getschko abstained from voting. Njeri Rionge and Peter Dengate Thrush were not present for the vote.

I knew because Amadeu wrote me weeks ago, but seeing it in print, in public, makes me ... purr. One of Jonah's songs goes like this, with excessive vowels reduced and polisyllabics rendered explosively seperated, but recognizable, and a riot to sing:

Everybody wants to be a cat,
because a cat's the only cat
who knows where it's at.

Back online

My laptop has returned, for the third time from the HP repair facility, and everything but the wireless seems to be working. This is a vast improvement over the last time I received it, when it wouldn't even turn on, seconds after being removed from the FedEx box. I'm tied to a land line until the wireless problem is resolved, but at least I have my own machine.

The timing was honestly pretty good, as I've been a bit burned out, post-Election and post-Koufax, and quite overwhelmed with our upcoming exodus from Maine/trip to wonderful somewhere or another. I've contracted to have the house go on market a week from Monday and inspected half a dozen trailer options, from pop-ups to Airstreams to "hybrids". I think we're settling on the latter. With Eric's new job, we have to arrange two-way satellite connectivity (internet, phone, etc.) so while the rest of us are watching baby whales romp off the coast of Baja Sur, he can slave away over a hot laptop.

Anyway, I hope to be back at the helm sometime soon, though probably not until after the house shows, as I have a ton of cleaning, packing and painting to do in the next 9 days.

Most importantly, please remember this is Autism Awareness Month in the US. Please show your support by donating to a worthy cause, such as Cure Autism Now, SafeMinds, or Unlocking Autism.

Transitions: Fred Korematsu

Fred Korematsu died this week. He was 86. He declined voluntary internment, which required the government to use force, and appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, which upheld, 6 - 3, the military necessity theory for the seizure of all Japanese-American property and assets in the Western Military District, and the confinement of American nationals at places like Tule Lake and Manazar and Topaz.

The SacBee editorial is here: link.

The LA TImes commentary is here: link.

The situation was no different in Canada, except that the Canadian-Japanese weren't released from the Prarie and Ontario camps and allowed to return to British Columbia until 1949.

Red Lake Update

A few minutes before noon the day after the shootings, I got email from Lefty at A la Gauche. It concerned a major crime on Indian Country, so I knew the FBI had jurisdiction, and it was probably of interest to the investigation of the crime, but I called the Tribal Law and Order first. The person who took the call from some blogger half a continent away about some a cached page from the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party bboard that contains the transcript of a web discussion between Jeff Weise and LNSGP members was Sgt. DeWayne Dow, who listened to me politely then told me the FBI had jurisdiction and provided a number where they could be reached. The text below from the Minneapolis Pioneer Press errors in identifying him as a Captin in the Red Lake Tribal Police. The AP text more widely circulated today errors differently in quoting a "tribal police officer".

RED LAKE, Minn. — More students than gunman Jeff Weise and an alleged co-conspirator — possibly "up to 20 kids" — might have known about a planned high school shooting spree before it happened, police Capt. DeWayne Dow said Friday in urging school board members not to resume classes until student safety is assured.

The context of the quote is a meeting of the Red Lake School Board to discuss when classes should resume. Sgt. DeWayne Dow informed the Board that the FBI had seized about 30 computers from the school's computer lab yesterday and was searching them for evidence of online contacts between students. He said classes should not resume until authorities know whether any other students were involved. "The indication is there were more kids involved ... Grades are important but our kids' lives are more important."

James Doran is working up an alternate narrative which I recommend to anyone following this story. Jeff Weise's father, Daryl "Baby Dash" Lussier Jr., ended a round-the-clock stand-off with Tribal Police by shooting himself. Daryl "Dash" Lussier Sr., was one of the officers present at the stand-off, and was unable to negotiate a peaceful ending. That was in July 21st, 1997. In September Jeff entered 4th grade in Shakopee, his grandfather the policeman a party to the killing of his father.

Jeff Weise's mother, Joanne Weise and Elizabeth May Jourdain, a cousin, went drinking and mid-day Jourdain ran a red light in Shakopee and slammed into a tractor-trailer making a left turn, killing Elizabeth May Jourdain and causing debilitating-for-life brain injuries to Joanne Weise. That was March 5th, 1999. Jeff Weise and Louis Jourdain, both 16, are the great-grandsons of Patrick Jourdain and Elizabeth May Jourdain.

Joanne Weise's married Timothy Troy DesJarlait on June 27, 1998, had two children by him, and Joanne and Tony seperated in 2000, and divorced in May 2004. The with a dissolution agreement discussed the custody arrangement for the other two children, but not for Jeff. Kim DesJarlait, Tony's sister and Jeff's step-aunt, wanted Weise to stay with her family in Shakopee, but in September Jeff entered 6th grade at Red Lake, living with his grandmother, Shelda Lussier, and at some point subsequent, living with his grandfather, Daryl "Dash" Lussier Sr., and Michelle Sigana.

Chase "Beek" Lussier , 15, was also killed in the shooting. He leaves behind two-month-old olld boy named Ayden, by his girlfriend Alex Roy, 14.

In the past five years, the U.S. attorney's office in Minneapolis has filed charges in 19 homicides on the reservation. Alcoholism, domestic violence, unemployment, poverty, substance abuse, and animosities between families and groups on and off the reservation, have contributed to these crime stats -- which don't include suicides, attempted suicides, rapes, assaults, and deaths by bottle.

Three of the killed were Lussier family, four if Michelle Sigana, the companion of Daryl "Dash" Lussier Sr., is counted as "related", five counting Alicia White, a Jourdain, and six if Derrick Brun, the 28 year old school security guard is counted among "Tribal Police", of the ten killed. Personally, I have a hard time with the "Nazi narrative" as an explination for what occured. It is a part, but not the central theme.

The link to James Doran's piece in the timesonline.co.uk is here.

In other news, Polk County Deputy Sheriff James Goss was placed on leave with pay. Deputy Goss was detailed to Red Lake to provide building security while the Red Lake Tribal Police attended the funeral of Sgt. Daryl Lussier (ret.). Pat Mills, director of public safety for the Red Lake Band, said the presence of 150 or more law enforcement officials — who included officers from St. Paul, Minneapolis, Duluth, Canada and tribal officers from across the nation — brought Red Lake officers comfort. I think that if asked she wouldn't say that Deputy Goss brought Red Lake officers comfort.

Deputy Goss wrote the text that was the basis for the "insider report" published by the Associated Press. He wrote up a tour of the crime scene note and emailed it to his relatives, one of whom provided it to the AP.

RFC 4014

A new Request for Comments is now available in online RFC libraries.

RFC 4041

Title: Requirements for Morality Sections in Routing Area Drafts
Author(s): A. Farrel
Status: Informational
Date: 1 April 2005
Mailbox: adrian@olddog.co.uk
Pages: 8
Characters: 15249
Updates/Obsoletes/SeeAlso: None

I-D Tag: draft-farrel-rtg-morality-requirements-01.txt

URL: ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc4041.txt

It has often been the case that morality has not been given proper consideration in the design and specification of protocols produced within the Routing Area. This has led to a decline in the moral values within the Internet and attempts to retrofit a suitable moral code to implemented and deployed protocols has been shown to be sub-optimal.

This document specifies a requirement for all new Routing Area Internet-Drafts to include a "Morality Considerations" section, and gives guidance on what that section should contain.

This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

The Camel as a Strategic Weapon

Here's a Poisson d'Avril gem, taken from NBC this morning.

Despite lacking nuclear warheads, the rockets could advance Iran's alleged quest for nuclear weapons -- they could reverse engineer the missiles, and double the range of its most powerful rocket, the Shahab-3, US intelligence officials told NBC.

With Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko coming to Washington next week, the story of Ukraine's complete withdrawal from Iraq by October has to be buried by something, so the January story of six abandoned X-55 cruise missiles carcasses, minus their warheads, fuel, and launcher motors, being "illegally sold" to Iran is a good candidate for recycling.

So, the X-55 cruise missiles, in the Kh-55, long-range with nuclear weapons package, or the AS-15, short-range with high-explosive package models, are powered by a turbofan and fly at Mach 0.48-0.77, at an altitude of 40 to 110 meters. The guidance system is standard follow-on-board-map in terrain following / terrain avoidance mode. Something I personally worked on at Hughes Radar in 1977-79.

The Shahab-3 is derived from the North Korean Nodong-1, itself derived from the Soviet Scud, is a ballistic missile, with a single thrust chamber that delivers 1.6 gees of thrust (at lauch weight) over 110 seconds to a cut off velocity of 3,700 meters/sec, or about Mach 11, and a range of 1,500 km. The guidance system is standard inertial with GPS.

Two possibilities exist. Either access to the six X-55 carcasses will allow Iranian rocket scientiests to make the Shahab-3 22 times slower than it is at present, in "ballistic" mode, or make the Shahab-3 operate in "nape of the earth" mode, at a wicked healthy Mach 11, 22 times faster than any cruise missile in the US inventory. For 110 seconds (less, but lets ignore drag).

We'll take these two possibilites to our scientists at the ACME labs.

Using our ACME computers, if Wyle E. Coyote is moving at between Mach .47 and .74, or less than 250 m/s, he is moving 5.4 times slower than the V-2 rocket of 1943-45, and when and oriented near-vertically, the resulting ballistic manuver envelope closely resembles the lauch point, adjusted for local breeze directionality and vigorous arm waving on descent.

Again, using our ACME computers, if Wyle E. Coyote is moving at 3,600 meters/second at an altitude of 110 meters at a distance of 396 km from his launch point, when the burn ends, at 9.8m/sec, gravity should reduce Wyle E.'s altitude to zero (ground strike liklihood greater than 100%) in under 5 seconds, giving Wyle E. a post-burn run of 18 km, for a total range of 414 km (minus drag effects, solved by Warner Bros. engineering).

Since a camel can go for a week or so without water, and can cover about 250 miles before pegging out "dry", this provides the defense planner with the footprint of the new threat -- Iran will be able to project force via overwhelming technical means at a stand-off range of about 1 camel (no refills) from its boarders.

Wicked scary stuff either way.

Another possiblity pair exists. That US intelligence officials think NBC is dumb as a post, and will swallow Wyle E. Coyote attempting to go ballistic transported by ballons, birds, and so on, or the Wyle E. Coyote burning a hole through hill and dale at Mach 11 for the length of a dehydrating camel (no refills!).

Or. US intelligence officials who brief NBC on faux casus belli, and therefore operate out of either the Firth Ballroom at the Pentagon, or the Rove Alcove off the Oval in the Whitehouse, believe Wyle E. (either model) is a credible threat to the United States.

Wicked scary stuff either way.

City of New Jerusalem v Sovereign Oneida Nation of Wisconsin

Writing for the entire SCOTUS, minus J. John Paul Stevens, who wrote a dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote that:

• that Indians are, as a matter of law, a "lost tribe of Israel", and
  
• the 50 year old Oneida claim for "lebens raum, or at least some air" had expired.
  

The High Court ordered the Sovereign Oneida Nation of Wisconsin be imediatly taken into custody by the INS, waved deportation hearings as "mere process without merit", and ordered the Wisconsin Oneida transported without delay to any location in Palestine "on the other side" of the Sharron Wall.

In his dissent, J. John Paul Stevens wrote "Earth to Ruthie! Earth to Ruthie! Ask Billy and Tony what they plan to do next with Jews. Country clubs it isn't!"

City of New Jerusalem v Sovereign Oneida Nation of Wisconsin is little-noticed companion case to City of Sherrill v Oneida Indian Nation of New York. The issue of contention is a claim by the Swedenborg Church to all the oxygen in the air mass covering Wisconsin, in particular, the oxygen seized by individual Onedia and concealed within their bodies and clandestinely transported into the Oneida Reservation.

Thanks Verizon!

For taking us and everyone using the Mid-Maine xdsl DSLAM in North Deering out for just over 8 hours. (3 fourty in the am to noon twenty)

I'll look for the "except April 1st" clause in our SLA.