You can’t stop either. Why that’s good.

By Jacob Weisberg | NEWSWEEK
Published Oct 31, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Nov 9, 2009

“I think this would be a good time for a beer,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said upon signing a bill that made 3.2 percent lager legal, ahead of the full repeal of Prohibition. I hope Barack Obama will come up with some comparably witty remarks as he presides over the dismantling of our contemporary forms of prohibition—laws that prevent gay marriage, restrict cannabis as a Schedule I controlled substance, and ban travel to Cuba. “You may now kiss the groom,” perhaps, or a version of the comment he once made about smoking pot: “I inhaled—that was the point.” (Click here to follow Jacob Weisberg)

Prohibition now is different from Prohibition then. When the 18th Amendment went into effect in 1920, it was a radical social experiment challenging a custom as old as civilization. A predictable failure—the insult to individual rights, the impossibility of enforcement, the spawning of organized crime—it came to an end in 1933. Today it is a byword for futile attempts to legislate morality and remake human nature.

Our forms of prohibition are more sins of omission than commission. Rather than trying to take away longstanding rights, they’re instances of conservative laws failing to keep pace with a liberalizing society. But like Prohibition in the ’20s, these restrictions have become indefensible as well as impractical, and as a result are fading fast. Within 10 years, it seems a reasonable guess that Americans will travel freely to Cuba, that all states will recognize gay unions, and that few will retain criminal penalties for marijuana use by individuals. These reforms are inevitable—not because politics has changed, but because society has.

A few reference points: in April, Obama lifted restrictions on travel and remittances by Cuban-Americans. Last month the Justice Department announced that it would no longer prosecute cases involving medical marijuana. Same-sex marriages are recognized in six states and counting. In a larger frame, loosening restrictions and lax enforcement reflect evolving social norms. Gay unions have been celebrated on the New York Times weddings page since 2002. Since George W. Bush left office, American tourists no longer worry about being prosecuted for visiting Havana without a Treasury license. In L.A., you need only tell an on-site doctor at a walk-in pot emporium that you feel anxious to walk out with a legal bag of Captain Kush.

The chief reason these prohibitions are falling away is the evolving definition of the pursuit of happiness. What’s driving the legalization of gay marriage is not so much the moral argument, but the pressures from couples who want to sanctify their relationships, obtain legal benefits, and raise children in a stable environment. What’s advancing the decriminalization of marijuana is not just the demand for pot as medicine but the number of adults—more than 23 million in the past year, according to the most recent government survey—who use it and don’t believe they should face legal jeopardy. What’s bringing the change on Cuba is not the epic failure of the 49-year-old U.S. embargo, but the demand on the part of Americans who want to go there—whether to visit relatives, prospect for post-Castro business opportunities, or sip rum drinks on the beach.

For similar reasons, there isn’t likely to be any retreat on the right to have an abortion or own a gun. Popular demand for an individual right is simply too powerful to overcome. The Internet has been a crucial amplifier of all such claims. With pornography and gambling, the Web itself became an irrepressible distribution tool. When it comes to gay marriage, it has accelerated the recognition of a new civil right by serving as an organizing tool and information clearinghouse. More broadly, the freest communications medium the world has ever known has raised expectations of personal liberty. In a world where everyone has his own printing press, restrictions on personal behavior become increasingly untenable.

Politicians will continue to lag, rather than lead, these changes. Republicans face a risk in resisting the new realities. If the GOP remains the party of prohibition, it will increasingly alienate libertarian leaners and the young. Democrats face a different danger in embracing cultural transformations too eagerly. Nearly four decades after George McGovern became known as the candidate of amnesty, abortion, and acid, cultural issues are still treacherous territory for them. Why get in front of change when you can follow from a safe distance and end up with the same result?

Jacob Weisberg is also the author of The Bush Tragedy and In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington .

Attorney says life sentence for teen lacks decency
by David G. Savage
Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON – Confronted with the stark reality of a 13-year-old boy sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, the Supreme Court justices signaled Monday that they were inclined to limit, or perhaps abolish, the use of life terms for teenagers whose crimes do not involve murder.

The court often has invoked the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” to restrict the death penalty. On Monday, the justices also sounded ready to rule that some states, in particular Florida, had gone too far by sentencing children to life in prison without a chance for a parole.

“To say to any child of 13 that you are only fit to die in prison is cruel,” attorney Bryan Stevenson told the court. “It cannot be reconciled with what we know about the nature of children. It cannot be reconciled with our standards of decency.”

Stevenson is representing Joe Sullivan, who at age 13 was convicted of raping a 72-year-old woman and given a life prison term. Stevenson said rapists in Florida are sentenced, on average, to 10 years in prison. Yet, Sullivan, who already has served 20 years, will die in prison unless the Supreme Court intervenes.

A second case heard Monday involved Terrance Graham, who at 17 was given a life term for his part in an armed robbery of a restaurant and a later home invasion robbery.

Sullivan and Graham are among 109 inmates nationwide who were sentenced to life in prison without parole for nonhomicide crimes.

During oral arguments, most of the justices sounded as though they were inclined to overturn at least some of these sentences as too extreme. However, they differed on how to do it. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. offered a middle-ground approach that could overturn prison terms in some cases if the state judges failed to weigh the youthful age of the offender. Roberts said this “case-by-case approach” was wiser than setting a single rule.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said he agreed.

But most of the liberal justices hinted they would go further and rule it was always cruel and unusual punishment to impose a life term for an offender who is under age 18 and who did not commit a murder.

“Every state recognizes the difference between an adult and a minor. And you have to make a line. We have it at 18,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said. “The teenager can’t drink, can’t drive, can’t marry. There are many (legal) limitations on children just because they are children.”

Only Justice Antonin Scalia defended Florida’s policy, saying the court should look to history.

“When the ‘cruel and unusual’ clause was adopted (in 1791), 12 years was viewed as the year when a person reaches maturity,” Scalia said. “And then all felonies (were subject to) the death penalty.”

by Mark Sherman
Associated Press

At a glance:

Only 9 people in the country are serving life sentences for crimes committed when they were 13. The number rises to 73 when 14-year-olds are added in. No other country allows life sentences for young offenders.

WASHINGTON – Joe Sullivan was sent away for life for raping an elderly woman and judged incorrigible though he was only 13 at the time of the attack.

Terrance Graham, implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17, was given a life sentence by a judge who told the teenager he threw his life away.

They didn’t kill anyone, but they effectively were sentenced to die in prison.

Life sentences with no chance of parole are rare and harsh for juveniles tried as adults and convicted of crimes less serious than killing. Just over 100 prison inmates in the United States are serving those terms, according to data compiled by opponents of the sentences.

Now the Supreme Court is being asked to say that locking up juveniles and throwing away the key is cruel and unusual – and thus, unconstitutional. Other than in death penalty cases, the justices never before have found that a penalty crossed the cruel-and-unusual line. They will hear arguments today.

Graham, now 22, and Sullivan, now 33, are in Florida prisons, which hold more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for nonhomicide crimes. Although their lawyers deny their clients are guilty, the court will consider only whether the sentences are permitted by the Constitution.

The Supreme Court’s latest look at how to punish young criminals flows directly from its four-year-old decision to rule out the death penalty for anyone younger than 18.

In that 2005 case decided by a 5-4 vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion talked about “the lesser culpability of the juvenile offender.”

“From a moral standpoint it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed,” Kennedy said.

Yet Kennedy also acknowledged the possibility that for the worst crimes and the worst offenders, “the punishment of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is itself a severe sanction, in particular for a young person.”

Both sides point to the same basic facts – the rare imposition of Draconian prison terms on people so young – to make their point.

The state of Florida, backed by 19 other states, argues it should retain flexibility in sentencing so that “particularly heinous acts that stop short of causing death” can be punished vigorously.

Life without parole “is appropriately rare and reserved only for the worst of the worst offenders,” crime victims groups said in court papers.

Most victims of juvenile violence also are young, the victims groups said, citing Justice Department statistics. “Softening sentences for juvenile offenders puts actual children in harm’s way – innocent ones, not those who have committed violent crimes,” the victims groups said.

Opponents of such sentences said, however, that most states have in practice rejected life terms for juveniles when no one was killed. The 109 juveniles serving terms of life without parole are in Florida and seven other states – California, Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska and South Carolina – according to a Florida State University study. More than 2,000 other juveniles are serving life without parole for killing someone.

Beyond the infrequency of such punishment, lawyers for Graham and Sullivan argue that it is a bad idea to render a final judgment about people so young.

“They are unfinished products, works in progress,” said Bryan Stevenson, who will argue Sullivan’s case at the high court.

Actor Charles Dutton, former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson and others who committed crimes as teenagers have weighed in against life-without-parole sentences. Corrections officials, psychologists, educators and even some victims also have taken Graham and Sullivan’s side.

Simpson, a Wyoming Republican, served 18 years in the Senate, but as a teenager, he pleaded guilty to setting fire to an abandoned building on federal property and later spent a night in jail for slugging a police officer.

Simpson said he sees no good argument for refusing even to review their sentences after the passage of time.

“When they get to be 30 or 40 and they been in the clink for 20 years or 30 or 40 and they have learned how to read and how to do things, why not?”

If a prisoner shows he is not fit to be released, “throw him back in,” he said. “That’s better than saying ‘Sorry, we can’t look at that file because you were sent here for life.’ ”

by Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Spokesman-Review

We don’t know why Faleh Hassan Almaleki came to this country in the mid-’90s, and it’s unlikely he’ll be able to tell us anytime soon. He’s in jail in Maricopa County, Ariz., at this writing, in lieu of a $5 million cash bond. It hardly seems far-fetched, however, to suppose he emigrated from his native Iraq for the same reason immigrants typically seek these shores: America promises opportunity and freedom.

But one wonders if he truly knew the meaning of the words.

Almaleki is the 48-year-old Glendale, Ariz., man who stands accused of using his Jeep Cherokee to run down his 20-year-old daughter, Noor, and another woman, Amal Edan Khalaf. Khalaf, said to be the mother of Noor’s boyfriend, is expected to survive the Oct. 20 attack in the parking lot of a state government building. Noor was less fortunate. She died last Monday.

About her, we know only a few things: She had a page on Facebook and another on MySpace. She was interested in modeling. And at some point she either went to Iraq and got married – or went there and rejected the suitor her family had arranged for her. Police are still trying to determine which of those stories, both in circulation, is true. Either way, she returned to the States, where she moved in with her boyfriend and his mother.

Something else we know: Almaleki felt his Facebook-using, husband-rejecting daughter had become too “Westernized.” His son, Peter-Ali, told a local TV news station that tensions ran high between father and daughter. Noor, he said, went “out of her way” to disrespect their conservative Muslim father.

And where Almaleki comes from, it is standard practice that the daughter who disrespects or brings shame upon her family is subject to what they call an honor killing. Repeating for emphasis: Almaleki is alleged to have run down two defenseless women as a matter of “honor.”

While you absorb that, let me tell you a few things I believe:

I believe that in most cases, I have no right to judge your culture by the standards of mine.

I believe what seems exotic to me might be enlightened to you.

I believe no culture has a monopoly on morality.

But I also believe you don’t run down your daughter because she has a page on Facebook and won’t marry the guy you choose.

That is not honor. It is, in fact, the opposite – an act of appalling cowardice suggestive not simply of religious extremism but of a people in fear of the sexuality and independence of women. It tells you something about a culture’s lack of faith in its own mores any time it feels compelled to use violence to enforce those mores upon its people. And it tells you something about Almaleki’s “honor” that he bolted like a scared rabbit after allegedly running the women down. It took over a week for authorities to capture him.

The U.N. Population Fund estimates that more than 5,000 women a year die in “honor” killings for such “crimes” as speaking to unrelated men or being raped. Take it as brutal evidence of the way half the human race continues to oppress the other half.

It is disgraceful that such a thing happens anywhere, but it is especially galling that it has happened here. Not just because this is home soil and such things are alien to most of us, but because it suggests, poignantly, that Faleh Hassan Almaleki did not truly understand the vastness of the hope that brings immigrants like him here. If America promised him freedom and opportunity to remake his life as he saw fit, he was apparently too short-sighted and concretized in old ways to see the obvious corollary.

It promised his daughter the same.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His e-mail address is lpitts@miamiherald.com.

Attorney general says prosecuting such cases ‘will not be a priority’

By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. directed federal prosecutors Monday to back away from pursuing cases against medical marijuana patients, signaling a broad policy shift that drug reform advocates interpret as the first step toward legalization of the drug.

The government’s top lawyer said that in 14 states with some provisions for medical marijuana use, federal prosecutors should focus only on cases involving higher-level drug traffickers, money launderers or people who use the state laws as a cover.

The Justice Department’s action came days after the Senate’s second-highest-ranking Democrat introduced a bill that would eradicate a two-decade-old sentencing disparity for people caught with cocaine in rock form instead of powder form. Taken together, experts say, the moves represent an approach favored by President Obama and Vice President Biden to put new emphasis on violent crime and the sale of illicit drugs to children. Legislation that would cover a third administration commitment, to support federal funding of needle exchanges, is moving through the House.

The announcement set off waves of support from advocacy groups that have long sought to relax the enforcement of marijuana laws. But some local police and Republican lawmakers criticized the change, saying it could exacerbate the flow of drug money to Mexican cartels, whose violence has spilled over the Southwestern border.

In a statement, Holder asserted that drug traffickers and people who use firearms will continue to be direct targets of federal prosecutors, but that, on his watch, “it will not be a priority to use federal resources to prosecute patients with serious illnesses or their caregivers who are complying with state laws on medical marijuana.”

The turnaround could pave the way for Rhode Island, New Mexico and Michigan to put together marijuana-distribution systems for residents of those states, according to Graham Boyd, director of the Drug Law Reform Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. Advocates say marijuana use can help alleviate pain and stimulate appetite in patients suffering from cancer, HIV-AIDS and other ailments. But the American Medical Association since 2001 has held firm to a policy opposing marijuana for medical purposes.

Under the Controlled Substances Act, which is more than three decades old, marijuana remains within the category of drugs most tightly restricted by the government. Donna Lambert, who is awaiting criminal trial in San Diego County Superior Court for allegedly providing medical marijuana to another patient, injected a note of skepticism into Holder’s announcement. In an interview, Lambert noted that senior administration officials had made public comments this year in line with the Justice Department policy, only to have law enforcement agents, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, take part in raids soon afterward.

Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said he and other advocates will watch closely whether federal agents refuse to participate in raids or send other signals to district attorneys in the states that allow some medical use of marijuana.

Americans for Safe Access, which supports medical marijuana programs nationwide, estimated that during the Bush administration federal authorities conducted 200 raids in California alone. A 2005 U.S. Supreme Court case made clear that the federal government has the discretion to enforce federal drug laws even in states that had approved some relaxation of marijuana statutes for sick patients.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, at a daily briefing in Washington, declined to address “what states should do” in response to the Justice Department guidance. But Gibbs said that the president since January had outlined his medical marijuana policy and that the Justice Department memo, signed by Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden, helped to fill in the details.

The administration stopped far short Monday of endorsing wholesale marijuana legalization, frustrating some activists. At the libertarian Cato Institute, official Tim Lynch described the war on drugs as a “grand failure.” He exhorted the White House to take “much bolder steps to stop the criminalization of drug use more generally.”

In the three-page memo, Ogden made clear that the department is not creating a new legal defense for people who may have violated the Controlled Substances Act. Instead, the memo is intended to guide prosecutors on where to train their scarce investigative resources.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police “strongly believes that the federal government must continue to play a central role in the investigation and prosecution of . . . traffickers, dispensary operators, and growers,” said Meredith Mays, a spokeswoman for the group.

Rep. Lamar Smith (Tex.), the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said the Justice Department guidelines “fly in the face of Supreme Court precedent and undermine federal laws that prohibit the distribution and use of marijuana.”

He added: “We cannot hope to eradicate the drug trade if we do not first address the cash cow for most drug-trafficking organizations — marijuana.”

The cocaine bill is still pending in the Senate, although advocates say its prospects are stronger now than over the past decade. The sponsor, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), said in an interview last week that he was working to enlist GOP co-sponsors to ease the bill’s passage.

Hearing could test reach of Second Amendment
Robert Barnes / Washington Post

Tags: gun rights u.s. supreme court

Associated Press The Supreme Court sits for a group photograph Tuesday ahead of the new session. The justices are: Samuel Alito Jr., Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Anthony M. Kennedy, John Paul Stevens, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court set up a historic decision on gun control Wednesday, saying it will rule whether restrictive state and local laws violate the Second Amendment right to gun ownership that it recognized last year.

The landmark 2008 decision to strike down the District of Columbia’s ban on handgun possession was the first time the court had said the amendment grants an individual right to own a gun for self-defense. But the 5-to-4 opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller did not address the question of whether the Second Amendment extends beyond the federal government and federal enclaves such as Washington, D.C.

Most court observers think that the five justices who recognized the individual right will also find that the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments, a move that could spark challenges of state and local laws governing gun registration, how and when the weapons can be carried, and storage requirements.

The court will hear a challenge of handgun laws in Chicago and the neighboring village of Oak Park, Ill. It was filed by Alexandria, Va. attorney Alan Gura, who successfully argued the Heller case. He said the Chicago ban is “identical” to the one found unconstitutional in the District.

The announcement came as the court prepared for its new term, which will officially begin on Monday. Justices sifted through more than 2,000 petitions accumulated through the summer and selected 10 to hear.

Also on the list was an examination of an anti-terrorism statute, widely used by federal prosecutors, that bans material support to groups that the State Department designates as terrorism organizations.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan told the court that the law is a “vital part of the nation’s effort to fight international terrorism,” but a lower court said some of the statute was unconstitutionally vague.

The decision to accept the Chicago gun case was a natural progression from the decision in Heller, which split the court on ideological grounds. The liberal justices said the Second Amendment guaranteed only a collective right for gun ownership to maintain militias.

If the amendment is extended, the next question will be about the kind of restrictions allowed. The Heller opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia said some requirements would be constitutional, but it was not specific.

Gura hopes for a “definitive ruling” on Chicago’s restrictions, and said he thinks that at a minimum the court would strike the same kind of handgun ban it found objectionable in Washington.

But gun-control advocates played down the importance of the case, saying few states or municipalities had such restrictive laws. Only a handful of states do not protect gun ownership in their constitutions, and 33 filed a brief advocating that the court find that the Second Amendment applies to them.

“Even if the court were to hold the Second Amendment applicable to states and localities, such a ruling is unlikely to change the crucial holding by the Supreme Court in Heller that a wide range of reasonable gun laws are presumptively constitutional, and that the Second Amendment right is narrowly limited to guns in the home for self-defense,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

The method by which the court might apply the Second Amendment is what interests constitutional scholars. The Bill of Rights originally was thought to be a restriction on the federal government, a perception furthered by a 19th Century court ruling that differentiated between state and federal rights.

Since then, the court has gradually applied most of the 10 amendments to the states in a process called “incorporation,” but not the Second Amendment.

Gura is supported by liberal and conservative scholars who say the issue should be taken care of by the post-Civil War 14th Amendment, which says a state may not “abridge the privileges and immunities” of citizens nor deprive liberty “without due process of law.”

Clark Neily, a senior lawyer at the conservative Institute for Justice, said in a statement: “This case is about more than guns – it is about whether the Supreme Court should interpret the Constitution as the powerful protection of liberty it was intended to be. His organization sees the “privileges and immunities” clause as a protector of “economic liberty” and “armed self-defense.”

Liberal scholars such as Doug Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center consider the clause an “explicit protection for substantive liberty that would reinforce the constitutional underpinnings of Roe v. Wade and the court’s ruling protecting sexual autonomy for gays and lesbians.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was part of a panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit that said in an unrelated case that only the Supreme Court could decide whether the Second Amendment applies beyond the federal confines. Because the court accepted the case from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, she is free to participate.

The case is McDonald v. Chicago. The earliest it would be argued is Jan. 11.

THE nation is abuzz with praise for law enforcement. After months of careful investigation, involving extensive surveillance and international monitoring of travel and financial records, the authorities disrupt a major Qaeda cell operating domestically, arresting the primary conspirators. The conspirators are indicted and detained, and the nation breathes a sigh of relief.

Until the subway explodes.

The situation described above is not, thankfully, what has happened in the wake of the arrests this month of Najibullah Zazi, his father and several alleged confederates in Colorado and New York. Instead, it describes what happened in England in 2004 when the authorities, in Operation Crevice, arrested several terrorists (five of whom were eventually convicted) but had insufficient evidence to charge several other associates. Those other men went on to bomb the London subway on July 7, 2005.

Taken together, the Zazi and British cases illustrate a daunting challenge facing the criminal justice system in dealing with domestic terrorism attacks: law enforcement must constantly balance its need to develop evidence sufficient to convict the conspirators against the potentially devastating consequences of allowing the conspiracy to ripen into an attack.

To arrest the suspects prematurely is to run the risks of acquittal, of forcing prosecutors to advocate and courts to accept overly broad interpretations of existing criminal statutes, and perhaps of arresting innocent people. To decide to wait, however, continuing surveillance in the hope of developing better proof, is to risk losing the suspects and placing the public in mortal peril.

Police departments, prosecutors and the F.B.I. all face similar challenges in other criminal contexts. Anyone who has been involved at a senior level in serious investigations is aware of the suspected sexual predator or armed bank robber — or even the suspected serial killer — who must be left at large because of the lack of admissible evidence. Sometimes, proof is developed and the perpetrator is caught; sometimes, people get hurt.

As a society, we have weighed the risks to public safety in curtailing police power against the risks to public liberty of allowing too much police power. The balance we have struck is reflected in our constitutional protections. The question posed by terrorism, however, is whether the stakes — possibly tens of thousands of deaths — are sufficiently higher to alter that balance in favor of greater government power.

History shows that our decisions have yielded mixed results. During the mid-1990s, the authorities were able to develop strong evidence against Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the Blind Sheik, and his fellow conspirators who were plotting to blow up New York City landmarks; they were convicted in 1995. In an earlier case, however, the unwillingness of a confidential informant to develop evidence that could be used in court led the F.B.I. to cut ties with him in 1992; the group on which he had been informing went on to bomb the World Trade Center the following February.

Prosecutors in the Zazi case to date have been unable to charge several other suspected co-conspirators — as many as 24, according to some reports. And while Mr. Zazi has now been accused by authorities of conspiring to make bombs, the other arrestees have been charged only with the relatively minor offense of lying to the authorities. Law enforcement is described in several news reports as “stretched thin” as it conducts surveillance of Mr. Zazi’s associates.

This has an ominous precedent: in the wake of the 2004 arrests, British authorities followed the other associates who had appeared on video surveillance with the conspirators, but eventually lost interest and moved on to other investigations. Those forgotten men proceeded to kill 52 people and wound 700 more.

Time will tell whether the decision to arrest Mr. Zazi and his associates was premature. If the case against them does not develop beyond what has been reported, and if no useable evidence is developed against the 24 other men, the decision to arrest will be second-guessed. That would be grossly unfair. From a public safety perspective, law enforcement officers and prosecutors cannot be faulted for acting when they believe that the public is in imminent peril, even if that means compromising an investigation.

The larger issue raised here is whether there is a viable alternative to the nerve-racking game of chicken that law enforcement must play in terrorism cases. The obvious — though extremely unpopular — alternative is the passage of a preventive detention statute.

Such statutes have been upheld in the context of people with a demonstrated proclivity toward violent conduct, like sexual predators; the concept could be adapted, in a way that withstands constitutional scrutiny, to cover people with a demonstrated proclivity toward terrorism. That approach would give law enforcement additional means to disrupt potential terrorist plots. It has the virtue of honesty, obviating the strained and sometimes disingenuous use of material-witness and false-statement statutes that are now frequently used to arrest and hold suspected terrorists, and would remove the temptation to criminalize conduct that borders on free speech.

Still, preventive detention is hardly a panacea. What should the burden of proof be in using “civil commitment” regarding terrorism? When should that burden be adjusted, if ever? How often would a subject’s status be reviewed? How long may someone be held? There is, moreover, something about detaining someone before he has committed an offense that runs counter to our core constitutional values.

The Zazi case may well end up providing more questions than answers. In the absence of some mechanism allowing for preventive detention, the F.B.I. and police must continue to make hair-trigger judgments in real time about whether and when to arrest and charge suspects. Those are decisions our law enforcement officials routinely make, and make well, in other contexts; in terrorism cases, however, we have to ask if the stakes are too high for the system we have in place.

John Farmer Jr., a former attorney general of New Jersey, is the dean of the Rutgers School of Law at Newark and the author of “The Ground Truth.”

Expert questions arson finding that led to execution

March 28, 2008

Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

“He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, ‘Here you go,’” Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”

The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, “like what’s going on here?” Diaz says. “He asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’”

Diaz replied: “If you’re willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me … hey, you’re more than welcome.

“You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help,” Diaz says.

Diaz says he and the teen went into the diner and sat in a booth.

“The manager comes by, the dishwashers come by, the waiters come by to say hi,” Diaz says. “The kid was like, ‘You know everybody here. Do you own this place?’”

“No, I just eat here a lot,” Diaz says he told the teen. “He says, ‘But you’re even nice to the dishwasher.’”

Diaz replied, “Well, haven’t you been taught you should be nice to everybody?”

“Yea, but I didn’t think people actually behaved that way,” the teen said.

Diaz asked him what he wanted out of life. “He just had almost a sad face,” Diaz says.

The teen couldn’t answer Diaz — or he didn’t want to.

When the bill arrived, Diaz told the teen, “Look, I guess you’re going to have to pay for this bill ’cause you have my money and I can’t pay for this. So if you give me my wallet back, I’ll gladly treat you.”

The teen “didn’t even think about it” and returned the wallet, Diaz says. “I gave him $20 … I figure maybe it’ll help him. I don’t know.”

Diaz says he asked for something in return — the teen’s knife — “and he gave it to me.”

Afterward, when Diaz told his mother what happened, she said, “You’re the type of kid that if someone asked you for the time, you gave them your watch.”

“I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It’s as simple as it gets in this complicated world.”

Produced for Morning Edition by Michael Garofalo”

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His e-mail address is lpitts@miamiherald.com.

For years, death-penalty opponents and supporters have been working their way toward a moment in which each side would rethink things. They were seeking a case in which a clearly innocent defendant was wrongly put to death. In a 2005 Supreme Court case that actually had nothing to do with the execution of innocents, Justices David Souter and Antonin Scalia tangled over the possibility that such a creature even existed. Souter fretted that “the period starting in 1989 has seen repeated exonerations of convicts under death sentences, in numbers never imagined before the development of DNA tests.” To which Scalia retorted: “The dissent makes much of the newfound capacity of DNA testing to establish innocence. But in every case of an executed defendant of which I am aware, that technology has confirmed guilt.” Scalia went on to blast “sanctimonious” death-penalty opponents and a 1987 study on innocent exonerations whose “obsolescence began at the moment of publication,” then concluded that there was not “a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.”

This suggested that if anyone found such a case, the Scalias of the world would rethink matters. As of today, the Innocence Project, a national organization dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted through DNA testing, claims there have been 241 postconviction DNA exonerations, of which 17 were former death-row inmates spared execution. The gap between their facts and Scalia’s widens every year. And now we may have found that case of an innocent put to death: Cameron Todd Willingham, executed by the state of Texas in 2004 for allegedly setting a 1991 house fire that killed his three young daughters.

David Grann, who wrote a remarkable piece about the case in last week’s New Yorker, sifted through the evidence against Willingham to reveal that the entire prosecution was a train wreck. And at every step in his appeal, Willingham’s claims of innocence were met with the response that he’d already had more than enough due process for a baby killer.

But you needn’t take Grann’s word for it. In 2004 Gerald Hurst, an acclaimed scientist and fire investigator, conducted an independent investigation of the evidence in the Willingham case and came away with little doubt that it was an accidental fire—likely caused by a space heater or bad wiring. Hurst found no evidence of arson, and wrote a report to try to stay the execution. According to documents obtained by the Innocence Project, it appears nobody at the state Board of Pardons and Paroles or the Texas governor’s office even took note of Hurst’s conclusions. Just before Willingham was executed, he told the Associated Press, “[T]he most distressing thing is the state of Texas will kill an innocent man and doesn’t care they’re making a mistake.”

Since Willingham’s death, two other independent inquiries found no evidence of arson. In 2007 the state of Texas commissioned another renowned arson expert, Craig Beyler, to examine the Willingham evidence. Beyler’s report, issued two weeks ago, concluded that investigators had no scientific basis for claiming the fire was arson.

One might think that all this would give a boost to death-penalty opponents, who have long contended that conclusive proof of an innocent murdered by the state would fundamentally change the debate. But that was before the goalposts began to shift this summer. In June, by a 5–4 margin, the Supreme Court ruled that a prisoner did not have a constitutional right to demand DNA testing of evidence in police files, even at his own expense. “A criminal defendant proved guilty after a fair trial does not have the same liberty interests as a free man,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. And two months later, Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas went even further when the Supreme Court ordered a new hearing in Troy Davis’s murder case, after seven of nine eyewitnesses recanted their testimony. Justice Scalia, dissenting from that order, wrote for himself and Thomas, “[T]his court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

As a constitutional matter, Scalia’s assertion is not wrong. The court has never found a constitutional right for the actually innocent to be free from execution. When the court flirted with the question in 1993, a majority ruled against the accused, but Chief Justice William Rehnquist left open the possibility that it may be unconstitutional to execute someone with a “truly persuasive demonstration” of innocence. Now, in Scalia’s America, the Cameron Todd Willingham whose very existence was once in doubt is legally irrelevant. We may execute a man for an accidental house fire, while the Constitution itself stands silently by.

Lithwick also writes for slate.com.

Well, we survived August, which is good news. It was not a month that will be recorded in the Enlightened Discourse Hall of Fame. In fact, it was a national embarrassment — not just the steady stream of misinformation about the nature of President Obama’s health-care proposals, but the racism — both overt and opaque — the death threats, the imprecations (calling someone a Nazi is evidence of the evil of banality), the idiots bearing assault rifles at presidential events. As the lunatics took over the asylum, the President’s poll ratings dropped, and the chances for a truly bipartisan health-care-reform effort vanished, if they existed in the first place. Consequently, we have had a back-to-school fusillade of advice for the President from my columnizing peers — and an effusion of premature crowing from conservatives about the collapse of the Obama presidency.

The drop in the President’s poll numbers represents a natural political process. When politicians talk about spending their political capital, they are talking about their poll numbers — and the cliché is somewhat misleading. They are actually investing their political capital, hoping for a greater return if their gamble succeeds. George W. Bush invested his capital in privatizing Social Security, and the stock tanked. Barack Obama is investing in health-care reform. We are at the point of the legislative process where all seems hopeless, but Obama should be heartened by the fact that most of his Republican adversaries oppose the bill for crass political rather than ideological reasons. They assume that if it passes, his investment of political capital will result in higher poll numbers — which means they assume the public will like the changes he is proposing. (See TIME’s photo-essay “The Health-Care Debate Turns Angry.”)

And, I fearlessly predict, the public will. If insurance companies can no longer deny coverage for pre-existing conditions, or drop people who get too sick, the public will love it. If health-care exchanges give individuals and small businesses the power to negotiate lower premiums from the insurance companies, people will love that too. Making health care available to everyone, even if some people — young, healthy people — who are not buying in now are told they have to join up, will also be well received. The odds are better than even that a bill containing those provisions will pass in Congress this fall.

But even if most of the noise about Obama is nonsense, there is one area of concern that could affect the ultimate success of his presidency. It is his tendency to overlearn the lessons of past presidencies, especially when those lessons enable him to avoid taking responsibility for tough decisions. It has been widely observed that Obama overlearned the lesson of the Clinton health-care effort by deferring to Congress to write the legislation. It has been less widely observed that the President overlearned the lesson of Bush’s hyperpoliticized Justice Department by leaving to Attorney General Eric Holder the decision about whether to investigate the CIA for torture abuses.

What should the President have done? Well, there’s a path between the 1,300-page Clinton health-care plan and the 1,000-page Henry Waxman plan that will be voted on in the House. The President could have laid out a set of principles and said, “I will veto any bill that doesn’t contain the following …” (Indeed, he still could do so.) They should be clear, simple, popular and achievable. My list would include insurance reform, health-care exchanges, near universal coverage and tort reform. (Obama’s position on tort reform is another abdication of responsibility: he says he’s open to it, knowing the congressional Democrats are closed to it.) (See “Understanding the Health-Care Debate: Your Indispensable Guide.”)

The President’s deferral of responsibility for the CIA investigation is more serious than his health-care meanderings. This is a matter of national security that will directly affect the morale and behavior of our clandestine services. The President can’t say he wants to look forward, not backward, then allow his Attorney General to look backward. The most egregious practices, like waterboarding, were (outrageously) declared legal by the Bush Justice Department. How can you prosecute one interrogator for threatening a prisoner with an electric drill and let others who waterboarded a prisoner 83 times off the hook? Is it right for the interrogators to be prosecuted and the real miscreants — people, like former Vice President Dick Cheney, who ordered, and still approve of, the torture — to escape unpunished? Most legal experts believe that such cases would be difficult to prosecute. But whether you favor an investigation or not, this is a presidential decision the President avoided.

In the great sweep of history, this presidency has barely begun. The mistakes Obama has made are rookie mistakes that can be corrected. And the general tendency of his Administration — toward civility, as opposed to the ugliness we’ve seen in the past month — is the right one. But he can’t allow his desire for civility to neuter the requirements of leadership. He has to lead, clearly and decisively, starting right now.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 750 stations in North America. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

By Michael D. Shear and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, January 5, 2009

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, chosen by President-elect Barack Obama to be commerce secretary, withdrew from consideration yesterday, citing an ongoing federal “pay-to-play” investigation involving one of his political donors as a significant obstacle to his confirmation.

Richardson, 61, who competed unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, becomes the first political casualty in Obama’s Cabinet, and his withdrawal marked the first visible crack in what had been one of the smoothest presidential transitions in modern history.

The former energy secretary and U.N. ambassador under President Bill Clinton was positioned to become the highest-profile Hispanic in Obama’s administration. But Richardson made it clear yesterday that he thought confirmation was far from a sure thing, even with Democrats firmly in control of the Senate.

“Given the gravity of the economic situation the nation is facing, I could not in good conscience ask the President-elect and his administration to delay for one day the important work that needs to be done,” Richardson said in a statement.

The New Mexico investigation, which began last summer, focuses on whether Richardson’s office urged a state agency to hire a California firm as a result of generous contributions from the company and its president to political action committees established by the governor.

Richardson insisted that he and his staff “have acted properly in all matters” and predicted that the investigation would exonerate him. But he said the probe could take weeks or months, potentially holding up his Senate approval. Instead, Richardson said he will remain “in the job I love as governor of New Mexico.”

He called Obama on Friday to advise him of his plans, and the president-elect accepted the decision “with deep regret,” according to a statement issued yesterday. Aides said no one in Obama’s transition pressured Richardson to drop out.

No clear replacement for Richardson at the Commerce Department emerged yesterday, but sources close to the transition said Obama would move quickly to find one.

A grand jury in Albuquerque is looking into whether CDR Financial Products received a contract with the New Mexico Finance Authority because of pressure from Richardson or other state employees. CDR made $1.48 million advising the authority on interest-rate swaps and refinancing of funds related to $1.6 billion in transportation bonds, state officials confirmed.

The Beverly Hills-based firm and its president, David Rubin, together gave $100,000 to Sí Se Puede and Moving America Forward, both PACs started by Richardson, shortly before winning the lucrative state contract, records show.

The federal probe heated up considerably last month, just around the time Obama announced Richardson as his choice for commerce secretary, according to sources familiar with the investigation. New subpoenas were issued, and testimony was scheduled from officials at J.P. Morgan Chase who worked for the state with CDR and from the director of Richardson’s political action committees.

CDR’s selection drew FBI interest because the firm did not make an initial list of the most qualified bidders. The bidding was reopened for review, and a state committee headed by one of Richardson’s former top aides later helped select CDR.

A legal source familiar with the investigation said yesterday that FBI agents, working on the Senate’s behalf and conducting a background check of Richardson for the Commerce job, conveyed to Obama’s transition team the seriousness and significance of the Albuquerque grand jury probe.

The agents are said to have communicated that the governor’s top aides — and even Richardson’s actions — were under scrutiny. At least two sources familiar with the investigation said some evidence raises concern about the propriety of the Richardson administration’s interactions with a donor.

Obama aides declined to comment on any conversations the transition team may have had with the FBI about the investigation.

The inquiry springs from a long-running nationwide investigation by the Justice Department into “pay-to-play” practices in local government bond markets. Federal investigators are questioning whether financial firms have lavished politicians with money and gifts in exchange for high fees on work advising municipal and local governments on investments.

In mid-December, Richardson spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said the governor was “aware of questions surrounding some financial transactions at the New Mexico Finance Authority” and expected state officials to cooperate fully.

CDR’s attorney, Richard Beckler, declined several weeks ago to elaborate on the investigation, but he told a Washington Post reporter Dec. 15 that the company “has always tried to abide by these byzantine campaign finance regulations and is cooperating fully with this investigation.”

The suddenness of Richardson’s withdrawal renewed questions about the Obama team’s vetting procedures. The New Mexico investigation had been publicized since the summer, yet aides to the president-elect said yesterday that they were not aware of the matter when Richardson was nominated. Richardson advisers insisted that the governor had relayed information about the investigation to transition officials before his name was announced.

“I think our vetters have done a good job,” incoming Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs said last night, crediting the “impressive . . . totality of our Cabinet picks.”

A senior transition aide said yesterday that Richardson had assured the team that he would emerge unscathed by the investigation and that there was no reason to think otherwise. “But it became clear that confirmation hearings would have to be delayed until the investigation was complete and that would take six weeks or, perhaps, longer. Governor Richardson concluded that this was too long, and he decided to withdraw,” the aide said.

Gallegos, the Richardson spokesman, said yesterday that the governor considered asking Obama to delay sending his name to Capitol Hill until the case was concluded.

“He was hopeful that his name would be cleared and it would be wrapped up before his confirmation,” Gallegos said. Over the weekend, when it became clear that would not happen, Richardson decided to withdraw, Gallegos said.

Obama praised Richardson yesterday and said that he looked forward to having the governor serve his administration in some capacity.

Staff writer Chris Cillizza contributed to this report.

By: Carrie Budoff Brown and Mike Allen
December 30, 2008 03:38 PM EST

Setting up a clash with Senate Democrats, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich announced Tuesday that he would appoint former state attorney general and comptroller Roland Burris to fill out President-elect Obama’s term in the U.S. Senate.

Saying Illinois should not be “deprived” of the representation of two senators, Blagojevich introduced Burris as “someone with unquestioned integrity.” The governor defended his decision to make the appointment as part of his gubernatorial responsibility to fill Senate vacancies.

“I would like to ask everyone to do one last thing: Don’t allow the allegations against me to taint this good and honest man,” Blagojevich said at a 3 p.m. press conference.

The move was met with a rebuke from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who said the Democratic caucus would refuse the appointment from a governor who stands accused of selling the position to the highest bidder.

“Under these circumstances, anyone appointed by Gov. Blagojevich cannot be an effective representative of the people of Illinois and, as we have said, will not be seated by the Democratic Caucus,” Reid said in a statement.

In addition, Jesse White, the Illinois secretary of state, said he will not certify Burris as the replacement for Obama’s seat.

For his part, Burris said it’s inconceivable that the state of Illinois should start the new Congress “shorthanded,” with just one senator.

Burris also said he has “no relationship” to charges that Blagojevich tried to sell Obama’s Senate seat for personal gain and said of the governor, “In this legal process, you’re innocent until you’re proven guilty.”

Blagojevich’s lawyer had said earlier that the governor did not plan to defy the Senate leaders and impose an Obama successor on them.

Reid (D-Nev.) has said that Illinois Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn should make the appointment, and the Senate Democratic caucus signed a letter supporting that option.

Reid said in a letter to the governor: “Please understand that should you decide to ignore the request of the Senate Democratic Caucus and make an appointment we would be forced to exercise our Constitutional authority under Article I, Section 5, to determine whether such a person should be seated.”

Blagojevich’s lawyer, Ed Genson, had told a news conference Dec. 17 that the governor did not plan to try to make the appointment. “Harry Reid said that they’re not going to accept anybody, so why would he do that?” Genson said.

Burris, 71, told reporters earlier this month that he only wanted to serve the remaining two years of the Senate term and would not run for reelection.

Burris was the first African American to be elected to statewide office in Illinois, serving as comptroller from 1983 to 1991 and as attorney general from 1991 to 1995.

He also ran against Blagojevich for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2002 – winning the support of much of Illinois African-American political establishment, including then-state Sen. Barack Obama.

Another complication in the selection is that Burris is a registered lobbyist in Illinois and Washington, D.C. His Chicago-based firm, Burris & Lebed, is registered in Springfield to represent clients ranging from Comcast to the Illinois Funeral Directors Association. In 2007, the firm was also registered to represent the Illinois Association of Mortgage Bankers. The firm is registered in both Springfield and Washington to represent MicroSun Technologies, an Illinois-based maker of battery and power supplies.

Burris’ lobbying partner is Fred Lebed, a veteran Democratic political operative who once served as executive director of the Cook County party and has also held a number of state government posts.

Blagojevich has been under pressure to resign from office, or at least relinquish his gubernatorial authority to fill Senate vacancies. He has remained in office, however, as he fights a federal corruption investigation and a legislative effort to impeach him.

The two-term governor has denied any wrongdoing.

It’s unclear whether Reid has the power to block Burris’ appointment. Senate leaders discussed the impending announcement on a conference call Tuesday afternoon.

John Fortier, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a Politico Ideas piece this month that the Senate doesn’t have the power to reject the appointment.

“The Senate would have little recourse but to seat Blagojevich, as he meets the minimum constitutional qualifications for office,” Fortier wrote of the possibility that the governor might appoint himself. “But after seating Blagojevich, the Senate could then expel him by a two-thirds vote. The seat would be vacant again, and the new governor could make an appointment. Or by then, the Legislature might have changed the law to do away with appointments, in which case the seat would sit vacant until a special election was held.

The office of the Senate historian referred questions Tuesday to the Senate counsel, saying it is a legal matter.

HONOLULU — In the days after Barack Obama’s election as president, Rahm Emanuel, a top adviser, suggested to Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois that Mr. Obama’s Senate seat should be filled by Valerie Jarrett, a confidante of Mr. Obama.

In that same week, as word of her potential interest in the Senate seat spread throughout the Chicago political world, Ms. Jarrett spoke with a labor union official in Illinois who said he had spoken to the governor about the possibility of appointing her to the seat. During that conversation, the union leader mentioned that Mr. Blagojevich had his eye on a possible cabinet position in the Obama administration.

The contact was among the findings of an internal report released Tuesday, compiled by lawyers for the president-elect. The report concluded that Mr. Emanuel had as many as six conversations with the governor’s office about the Senate vacancy, but that Mr. Obama had none, and that neither Mr. Emanuel, Ms. Jarrett, nor any other Obama associates had any talks about a deal in which Mr. Blagojevich would benefit from appointing someone to the Senate seat.

Mr. Blagojevich was charged by federal prosecutors in Chicago this month on a variety of corruption counts, including an alleged effort to trade the appointment to the Senate seat for a job or money. The report also disclosed that Mr. Obama, Mr. Emanuel and Ms. Jarrett were questioned by federal prosecutors last week in the corruption inquiry of the governor. Mr. Obama’s two-hour interview took place in his Chicago office, aides said, and he was not under oath or considered more than a witness in the case.

Mr. Obama did not speak about the matter on Tuesday. He continued his vacation in Hawaii, where he attended a memorial service for his grandmother, who died just before the election.

Ms. Jarrett, a longtime Chicago friend of the Obama family who will serve as a senior adviser in the White House, had no communication with Mr. Blagojevich or his aides, the report said. But it said that three days after the election, she spoke with Tom Balanoff, president of the Illinois chapter of the Service Employees International Union, about the Senate seat and the governor’s ambitions to serve in the Obama administration as secretary of health and human services.

This conversation, outlined for the first time, could be of interest in the criminal case against Mr. Blagojevich, who was recorded on the same day as the Jarrett-Balanoff meeting in wiretapped phone calls expressing an interest in a job with an arm of the union in exchange for a possible Senate appointment. According to an affidavit, Mr. Blagojevich was also captured on tape that day telling an unnamed adviser that he was willing to “trade” the appointment for the cabinet post.

“Ms. Jarrett did not understand the conversation to suggest that the governor wanted the cabinet seat as a quid pro quo for selecting any specific candidate to be the president-elect’s replacement,” Gregory B. Craig, who has been designated by Mr. Obama as his White House counsel, wrote in the report. “At no time did Balanoff say anything to her about offering Blagojevich a union position.”

The Obama transition team delayed the report’s release at the request of Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who wanted to interview prospective witnesses before it was made public. The delay prolonged questions on whether any Obama aides acted improperly in dealing with the governor’s office.

In the conversations with Mr. Blagojevich immediately after the election, Mr. Emanuel recommended Ms. Jarrett for the Senate seat, the report said, a position that later turned out to be contrary to Mr. Obama’s wishes.

“In those early conversations with the governor, Mr. Emanuel recommended Valerie Jarrett because he knew she was interested in the seat,” the report said. “He did so before learning, in further conversations with the president-elect, that the president-elect had ruled out communicating a preference for any one candidate.”

Mr. Emanuel was not available to answer a reporter’s questions on Tuesday, aides said, because he had left for a planned holiday trip to Africa with his family.

The report suggested that Mr. Obama had been more involved in thinking about his Senate successor than his public statements about the topic had indicated.

The report said that after Ms. Jarrett took herself out of the running for the Senate seat, citing Mr. Obama’s preference that she work for him in the White House, Mr. Obama authorized Mr. Emanuel to pass on the names of four people he considered highly qualified to take over his seat: Daniel W. Hynes, the state comptroller; Tammy Duckworth, the state veterans affairs director; and Representatives Jan Schakowsky and Jesse L. Jackson Jr., Chicago Democrats.

Mr. Obama later offered two other names, it said: Attorney General Lisa Madigan of Illinois and the Chicago Urban League president, Cheryle R. Jackson.

Those names were passed along by Mr. Emanuel in four calls to John Harris, the governor’s chief of staff, from early November through Dec. 8, one day before Mr. Blagojevich and Mr. Harris were arrested.

Mr. Emanuel, an Illinois congressman, was one of the few members of Mr. Obama’s inner circle who had a working relationship and talked occasionally with Mr. Blagojevich. But his contact with the governor was “totally appropriate,” Mr. Craig told reporters on Tuesday afternoon.

The only other name mentioned in the report was Dr. Eric Whitaker, a close friend of Mr. Obama, who was approached by a Blagojevich aide immediately after the election. The aide, the report said, “wanted to know who, if anyone, had the authority to speak for the president-elect.”

“The president-elect told Dr. Whitaker that no one was authorized to speak for him on the matter,” the report said. “The president-elect said that he had no interest in dictating the result of the selection process, and he would not do so, either directly or indirectly.”

December 22, 2008

By Ed Gillespie

As the year draws to an end and President Bush enters his final month in office, there is much commentary about the Administration’s record over the past eight years. Unsurprisingly, many of these stories assail and distort the President’s record and recycle myths and unfounded allegations that have been leveled for the better part of his two terms. Historical accuracy requires a response to the litany of attacks leveled against President Bush, and while there’s not enough space to respond to all of them, here are five of the most egregious:

Myth 1: The last eight years were awful for most Americans economically and President Bush’s deregulatory policies caused the current financial crisis.

Reality:

President Bush’s time in office is ending as it began, with our economy under stress. The recession President Bush inherited as he entered office ran through the attacks of September 11, 2001, but during the recovery that followed, and due in no small part to the tax relief President Bush worked with Congress to provide, this country experienced its longest run of uninterrupted job growth – 52 straight months, with 8.3 million jobs created.

This reflected six consecutive years of economic growth from the Fourth Quarter of 2001 until the Fourth Quarter of 2007. From 2000 to 2007, real GDP grew by more than 17 percent, a remarkable gain of nearly 2.1 trillion dollars. This growth was driven in part by increased labor productivity gains that have averaged 2.5 percent annually since 2001, a rate that exceeds the averages of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. In the same period, real after-tax income per capita increased by more than 11 percent, and there was a 4.7 percent increase in the number of new businesses formed. The current economic challenges, which the President and his Administration have responded to aggressively, threaten to reverse some of these gains – but the gains cannot be denied.

As for the current crisis, the President and his economic team have taken unprecedented actions to stabilize the financial sector and avert a collapse. While there are a number of causes of the housing and credit crises that are at the root of our current economic troubles, deregulation by the Bush Administration is simply not one of them. In fact, one of the circumstances that contributed to the crisis was the failure of the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which President Bush long tried to subject to greater regulation. In April 2001, three months after taking office, the President warned in his first budget that the size of the two GSEs were a “potential problem” that “could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting Federally insured entities and economic activity.” In 2003, the Administration began calling for a new GSE regulator, and over the next five years, the Administration continued to call for GSE reform only to be accused by Democrats in Congress of creating artificial fears and advocating for ill-advised proposals. By the time Congress finally acted in 2008 to provide the oversight the President requested, it was too late to prevent systemic consequences. Had the Administration’s initial reform proposals been adopted, some of today’s turmoil in our financial markets may have been averted.

Myth 2: President Bush’s tax cuts only benefitted the wealthy and were paid for by sacrificing investments in health care and education.

Reality:

There are not 116 million “wealthy Americans,” but that’s how many taxpayers benefited from the President’s tax relief. The across-the-board tax cuts provided tax relief to every American who pays income taxes, created a new bottom 10 percent bracket rate, doubled the child tax credit to $1,000, and actually increased the share of the Federal income tax burden paid by the top 10 percent of individual earners from 67 percent in 2000 to 70 percent in 2005. Furthermore, this Administration removed 13 million low-income earners from the income tax rolls completely.

The economic growth spurred by tax relief also spurred growth in Federal tax receipts. In fact, the Federal Treasury realized the largest three-year increase of revenue in 26 years, and tax receipts grew more than $542 billion between 2000 and 2007. And yes, much of that money went to investments in health care and education.

President Bush provided more than 40 million Americans with better access to prescription drugs by creating the market-based Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. And it is one of the rare government programs that actually costs less than expected. Projected overall program spending between 2004 and 2013 is approximately $240 billion lower, nearly 38 percent, than originally estimated, thanks to the market-oriented principles included at President Bush’s insistence.

Despite the heated rhetoric over children’s health insurance (S-CHIP) legislation last year, estimates from a 2007 Federal survey show that the number of uninsured children under the age of 18 actually declined by 800,000 from 2001 to 2007. From 2007 to 2008, the number of people covered by affordable and portable Health Savings Account-eligible plans increased 35 percent. Additionally, since President Bush took office, more than 1,200 community health centers have opened or expanded nationwide, which has helped provide treatment to nearly 17 million people.

Federal spending on education has increased nearly 40 percent under President Bush. Additionally, Pell Grant funding nearly doubled during the Administration, which is expected to help more than 5.5 million students attend college in the 2008-09 school year, 1.2 million more students than were assisted by Pell Grants in the 2001-02 school year. This financial aid assistance also helps account for the fact that 66 percent of high school graduates from the class of 2006 enrolled in colleges, compared to 63 percent in 2000.

Perhaps more importantly, the President’s No Child Left Behind Act has delivered tangible results to students. Since the law was enacted, fourth-grade students have achieved their highest reading and math scores on record, eighth-grade students have achieved their highest math scores on record, and African-American and Hispanic students have posted all-time high scores in a number of categories, narrowing the gap between minority students and white students.

Myth 3: The President’s “go it alone” foreign policy ruined America’s standing in the world.

Reality:

Rarely can one see revisionist history occurring in the present, but this charge is nothing short of that. The United States acted with a multilateral coalition of partner nations to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq after he failed to comply with the will of the international community, including numerous United Nations Security Council Resolutions. To ignore this fact is not only a distortion of history, but it is also an insult to the service members of our coalition partners who sacrificed their lives to contribute to the success we are now witnessing in Iraq. And in Afghanistan, approximately forty countries are currently deployed with American forces, including every one of our NATO allies.

The President also created a worldwide coalition of more than 90 nations to combat terrorist networks by sharing information, drying up their financing, and bringing their leaders to justice. To date, we have captured or killed hundreds of al-Qaeda leaders and operatives with the help of partner nations. Furthermore, the Administration established the Proliferation Security Initiative, which now includes more than 90 nations, and other multilateral coalitions to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The President successfully pushed for expanding NATO membership, generated international pressure on Iran to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, and organized the Six-Party Talks, which have resulted in North Korea committing to give up its nuclear weapons and abandon its nuclear programs. Verifying North Korea’s commitment will be a challenge, but at the most recent Six-Party Talks meeting, there was strong consensus among the five parties that North Korea must submit to a comprehensive verification regime that accords with international standards.

U.S. ties in Asia have been strengthened over the past eight years, and the Administration has built strong relationships with China, Japan, and South Korea, among others. We have signed an historic civilian nuclear power agreement with India, reflecting a fundamental change in our relationship. Pro-American leaders have been elected in Germany, France, and Italy. Eastern European countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Kosovo treasure their relationships with the United States, and no president has done more to improve health and security in the nations of Africa. We have also strengthened cooperation with Latin America, including initiatives with Brazil on biofuels and with Mexico and Central America on fighting organized crime. Finally, when the President took office, America had trade agreements in force with only three countries, versus 14 today – with three additional agreements approved by Congress but not yet in force and agreements with three countries that are awaiting Congressional approval.

Myth 4: The war in Iraq caused us to “take our eye off the ball” in Afghanistan and with al Qaeda.

Reality:

Iraq and Afghanistan are two fronts in the same war, and while the success of the surge in Iraq has been visible, we have also had a quiet surge in Afghanistan. The U.S. has continuously and aggressively fought side-by-side with Afghans and our allies to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The United States has provided nearly $32 billion for security, political, and economic development assistance and the international community has provided more than $55 billion to Afghanistan since 2001.

An additional U.S. Marine battalion deployed to Afghanistan in November and they will be followed by an Army combat brigade of about 3,400 troops in early 2009. U.S. forces now total approximately 31,000, and are joined by nearly as many coalition troops. The United States and our allies are working with Afghanistan to help it nearly double the size of the Afghan National Army over the next five years, from 79,000 now trained to 134,000 in 2014.

We have also deployed Provincial Reconstruction Teams to ensure security gains are followed by real improvements in daily life, and we have helped local communities strengthen their economies and create jobs, deliver basic services, improve governance and fight corruption, and build or repair key infrastructure such as roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools. More than six million children, approximately two million of them girls, are now in Afghan schools, compared to fewer than one million in 2001.

In this Global War on Terror, we do not have the luxury to fight on one battlefront at a time. To defeat the terrorists, we must fight them overseas so we don’t have to fight them here at home. Since 9/11, we have successfully captured or killed dozens of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership and hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives in two dozen countries, removed al-Qaeda’s safe-haven in Afghanistan and crippled al-Qaeda in Iraq, and disrupted numerous al Qaeda terrorist plots against the U.S., including a 2006 plot to blow up passenger planes traveling from London.

Myth 5: This Administration has been bad for the environment and ignored the problem of global warming.

Reality:

Given the liberal media’s failure to acknowledge this Administration’s true record on alternative energy, conservation, and climate change, it’s not surprising this charge has stuck. But here are some irrefutable data points: From 2001 to 2007, air pollution decreased by 12 percent, and fine particulate matter pollution is down 17 percent since 2001. Ethanol production quadrupled from 1.6 billion gallons in 2000 to 6.5 billion gallons in 2007, wind energy production has increased by more than 400 percent, and solar energy capacity has doubled. In 2007, solar installations increased more than 32 percent and the U.S. produced 96 percent more biodiesel (490 million gallons) than in 2006. The Administration also provided nearly $18 billion to research, develop, and promote alternative and more efficient energy technologies such as biofuels, solar, wind, clean coal, nuclear, and hydrogen.

This Administration has improved and protected the health of more than 27 million acres of Federal forest and grasslands, protected, restored, and improved more than three million acres of wetlands, and established the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, the world’s largest fully protected marine conservation area (nearly 140,000 square miles).

Much of the misperception about the President’s environmental record is born out of the President’s withdrawing the United States from the Kyoto Protocol, which did not include the effective participation of major developing countries such as India and China. Instead, the President worked to address climate change by launching the Major Economies Process, which convened the leaders of the world’s major economies, both developed and developing, to work on ways to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy security without harming our economies or giving any nation a free ride. Finally, the President set the country on course to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions below projected levels by 2025 and invested more than $44 billion in climate change-related programs.

Some other items that are infrequently mentioned about the real record of the Bush Administration but are worth noting: Teenage drug use has declined 25 percent; in 2007, the violent crime rate was 43 percent lower than the rate in 1998; between 2005 and 2007, the chronically homeless population decreased approximately 30 percent; funding for veterans’ medical care has increased more than 115 percent; and as of 2005, the most recent abortion rate is at its lowest since 1974.

And one last fact: Our homeland has not suffered another terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. That, too, is part of the real Bush record.

More on RCP: Gas Prices Shouldn’t Set Our Energy Policy

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/12/myths_and_facts_about_the_real.html at December 22, 2008 – 04:44:29 AM

Special election only way to keep things honest

Political leaders in Illinois may still not get it. But we do.

Gov. Blagojevich’s downfall has given the rest of the country a jaw-dropping look at how the world works in the Land of Lincoln.

And you know what? After they got past the nasty language, I doubt that the majority of them were shocked that the fix was in when it came to who would fill President-elect Barack Obama’s Senate seat.

The most shocking aspect of this tawdry affair is that Blagojevich was free to do whatever the heck he wanted.

Far as I can tell, no one complained about the lack of a credible and transparent process.

No one complained that the governor was dragging his heels.

No one ran off screaming: shakedown, shakedown!!

Despite Blagojevich’s arrogant and bullying demeanor, no one dared rat out the governor.

In fact, I would argue that Blagojevich’s colleagues weren’t surprised that he was trying to barter the Senate seat for political favors and campaign donations.

But these same colleagues are likely absolutely shocked by Blagojevich’s tackiness.

But Blagojevich apparently didn’t have time to be subtle.

He has been in the cross hairs of federal prosecutors since he took office in 2003.

Before he’d even warmed the governor’s seat, his own father-in-law, Ald. Dick Mell, who viewed his son-in-law as cocky and ungrateful, said publicly that Blagojevich was trading board appointments for campaign donations. It was beginning to look like “The People” had fallen for a rogue in reformer’s clothing.

Now it seems clear from the complaint that Blagojevich was certain he was going to be impeached and desperately needed a place to land.

“I’ve got this thing and it’s f—— golden, and uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for f——’ nothing. I’m not gonna do it,” Blagojevich allegedly said in a call that was intercepted by federal prosecutors.

Although the legislative body that was working with Blagojevich was a war zone, no one balked at him picking the next senator?

No one suspected the investigation that was swirling around Blagojevich was a problem?

No one had the courage to demand that the laws be changed so there could be a special election?

I suspect that Blagojevich’s biggest sin, and the thing that has members of the General Assembly gnashing their teeth, is that he was so inept at the sleazy gamesmanship that is an integral part of Illinois politics.

Blagojevich was caught on tape saying: “I want to make money,” words pols dare not speak … on a wiretap.

Because regardless of how we rail against Blagojevich, at the heart of all politics is pay to play.

Yes. There’s a thin line between expectations and shakedown. But do any of us really believe that the people who raise huge sums of money for a particular political candidate aren’t expecting something for their efforts?

Do we really believe that a person who is vested with the power to give away a Senate seat isn’t going to give it to the person who will somehow do him or her the most good?

That’s why the way out of the Senate seat scandal can’t be more of the same.

With all due respect to Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, he shouldn’t be in a position to pick the next Illinois senator.

He has served six years with the governor and didn’t have a clue as to what was really going on with the Blagojevich administration.

Hopefully, Blagojevich will resign and spare the state further embarrassment.

If he doesn’t, the General Assembly appears to be moving toward impeachment.

And a lawsuit filed by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan asking the Illinois Supreme Court to remove Blagojevich from office because he is unable to serve would also pave the way for a Quinn pick.

No thank you.

Once Blagojevich is drummed out of office, the race for the Senate seat would begin anew with a fresh round of lobbying and horse trading.

Illinois voters should demand that the state hold a special election.

We’ve heard enough promises of change from enough reformers that we finally get it.

We know how Illinois works.

Associated Press
December 9, 2008

In this August 2008 file photo, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich discusses an executive order he signed that extends the language of an ethics bill passed by the House and the Senate earlier this year to include campaign contributions from large state contractors to officeholders. Blagojevich was arrested Dec. 9, 2008, on charges of conspiring to get financial benefits through his authority to appoint a U.S. senator to fill the vacancy left by Barack Obama’s election as president. (Associated Press) A look at Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich Age, birthdate: 51; Dec. 10, 1956 Home: Chicago Family: Wife, Patricia; two daughters Education: Northwestern University, graduated 1979; Pepperdine University, law degree, 1983 Experience: Elected Illinois governor 2002, re-elected 2006; served in the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois’ 5th district 1997-2002; served in the Illinois House from a North Side Chicago district 1992-1996; assistant Cook County state’s attorney, prosecuting criminal cases. Quote: “I don’t care whether you tape me privately or publicly. I can tell you that whatever I say is always lawful.”

CHICAGO — Federal authorities arrested Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich today on charges that he brazenly conspired to sell or trade the Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama to the highest bidder.

Blagojevich also was charged with illegally threatening to withhold state assistance to Tribune Co., the owner of the Chicago Tribune, in the sale of Wrigley Field, according to a federal criminal complaint. In return for state assistance, Blagojevich allegedly wanted members of the paper’s editorial board who had been critical of him fired.

A 76-page FBI affidavit said the 51-year-old Democratic governor was intercepted on court-authorized wiretaps over the last month conspiring to sell or trade the vacant Senate seat for personal benefits for himself and his wife, Patti.

Otherwise, Blagojevich considered appointing himself. The affidavit said that as late as Nov. 3, he told his deputy governor that if “they’re not going to offer me anything of value I might as well take it.”

“I’m going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain,” Blagojevich allegedly said later that day, according to the affidavit, which also quoted him as saying in a remark punctuated by profanity that the seat was “a valuable thing — you just don’t give it away for nothing.”

The affidavit said Blagojevich also discussed getting a substantial salary for himself at a nonprofit foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions.

It said Blagojevich also talked about getting his wife placed on corporate boards where she might get $150,000 a year in director’s fees.

He also allegedly discussed getting campaign funds for himself or possibly a post in the president’s cabinet or an ambassadorship once he left the governor’s office. He noted becoming a U.S. senator might remake his image for a possible presidential run in 2016, according to the affidavit. And he allegedly said a Senate seat would also provide him with corporate contacts if he needed a job and present an opportunity for his wife to work as a lobbyist.

“I want to make money,” the affidavit quotes him as saying in one conversation.

The affidavit said Blagojevich expressed frustration at being “stuck” as governor and that he would have access to greater resources if he were indicted while in the U.S. Senate than while sitting as governor.

U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said in a statement that “the breadth of corruption laid out in these charges is staggering.”

“They allege that Blagojevich put a for sale sign on the naming of a United States senator,” Fitzgerald said.”

Among those being considered for the post include U.S. Reps. Danny Davis and Jesse Jackson Jr.

Blagojevich also was charged with using his authority as governor in an attempt to squeeze out campaign contributions.

His chief of staff, John Harris, also was arrested.

Corruption in the Blagojevich administration has been the focus of a federal investigation involving an alleged $7 million scheme aimed at squeezing kickbacks out of companies seeking business from the state. Federal prosecutors have acknowledged they’re also investigating “serious allegations of endemic hiring fraud” under Blagojevich.

Political fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko who raised money for the campaigns of both Blagojevich and Obama is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of fraud and other charges. Blagojevich’s chief fundraiser, Christopher G. Kelly, is due to stand trial early next year on charges of obstructing the Internal Revenue Service.

According to today’s complaint, Blagojevich schemed with Rezko, millionaire-fundraiser turned federal witness Stuart Levine and others to get financial benefits for himself and his campaign committee.

Federal prosecutors said Blagojevich and the chairman of his campaign committee have been speeding up corrupt fundraising activities in the last month to get as much money as possible before the end of the year when a new law would curtail his ability to raise contributions from companies with state contracts worth more than $50,000.

According to the affidavit, agents learned Blagojevich was seeking $2.5 million in campaign contributions by the end of the year, with a large part allegedly to come from companies and individuals who have gotten state contracts or appointments.

Blagojevich took the chief executive’s office in 2003 as a reformer promising to clean up former Gov. George Ryan’s mess.

Ryan, a Republican, is serving a 6-year prison sentence after being convicted on racketeering and fraud charges. A decade-long investigation began with the sale of driver’s licenses for bribes and led to the conviction of dozens of people who worked for Ryan when he was secretary of state and governor.

FBI spokesman Frank Bochte said federal agents arrested the governor and Harris simultaneously at their homes at 6:15 a.m. and took them to the Chicago FBI headquarters.

Bochte said he did not know if either man was handcuffed or if the governor’s family was their North Side home at the time of his arrest. He did say Blagojevich and Harris both were given time to get dressed before being taken to the headquarters.

He also did not have any details about Blagojevich’s arrest, only that he was cooperative with federal agents.

“It was a very calm setting,” he said.

The governor was to appear later today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Nan Nolan to answer the charges. The time was not immediately set.

Trial judge postpones pleas

Mohammed

Carol Rosenberg
McClatchy
December 9, 2008

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – Confessed al-Qaida kingpin Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four accused co-plotters offered Monday to plead guilty to orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a move that could leave President-elect Barack Obama to decide whether to execute them.

The surprise turnabout came in what was meant to be a routine pretrial hearing.

The Pentagon seeks the death penalty for all five men. And the trial judge postponed any pleas until lawyers sort out two key issues at the first U.S. war crimes tribunals since World War II: whether two of the five men are mentally competent to join the others in admitting to their roles in the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil; and whether the 2006 act of Congress that created the war court allows accused terrorists charged in a capital case to submit guilty pleas, without a jury of at least 12 U.S. military officers present to hear them and the evidence.

Victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, among five the Pentagon sponsored to observe the hearings, offered opposing views on the prospect of executions.

“If there ever was a case that warranted the death penalty, this is the one,” declared Hamilton Peterson, who lost his parents aboard United Airlines Flight 93.

“They do not deserve the glory of execution,” said Alice Hoagland, whose son Mark Bingham died on the same flight, struggling with the hijackers to crash the airliner in a Pennsylvania field.

“We should ensure that these dreadful people live out their lives in an American prison, totally under the control of the people they profess to hate,” she added.

The defendants made no explicit mention of the death penalty, or “martyrdom” as Mohammed calls it, in an appearance before the tribunal judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley.

Instead, the judge asked each man whether he wanted to waive his right to challenge the charges, and whether he believed prosecutors could prove his guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“I understand,” Mohammed replied, going first. “I hope that you will assign a proceeding in the near future, as fast as possible, to get over with this play.”

Mohammed earlier had declared his distrust of the system and said he would not distinguish among any of the Americans staging the trial – from judge and defense attorney to President George W. Bush and “the CIA, who tortured me.”

The spy agency has confirmed it waterboarded Mohammed into confessing to plotting a worldwide string of terror, before his transfer to the prison camps here two years ago.

Added Yemeni Ramzi Binalshibh, accused of helping the Hamburg, Germany, suicide squad: “We the brothers, all of us, we would like to submit our confession.”

Nothing will happen soon. The judge instructed prosecutors to research and write a brief on whether the legislation that created the war court envisioned letting an accused plead guilty in a death penalty case.

Moreover, the judge said he would not accept guilty pleas from co-defendants Binalshibh and Saudi Mustafa Hawsawi until the court resolves questions on their mental capacity to stand trial.

The prison camp has Binalshibh on psychotropic drugs. He allegedly helped a Hamburg al-Qaida cell, whose members became some of the hijackers. The health issue of Hawsawi, the plot’s alleged financier, is contained in a still-classified memorandum his Army defense attorney filed with the court.

Mohammed appeared as his own attorney on Monday, his fourth hearing meant to set conditions for the joint conspiracy trial alleging the five conspired to have suicide squads hijack airplanes and then strike the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

Ultimately, the commander in chief has the last say on execution, and the case involving Mohammed and his four accused co-plotters is not likely to be settled before Bush leaves office Jan. 20.

Judge Henley disclosed the five men made their offer, signed by each alleged Sept. 11 conspirator on Nov. 4 – Election Day – after prison camp guards arranged for a rare joint meeting of the group.

December 04, 2008

By Froma Harrop

WASHINGTON, D.C. — America ended Prohibition 75 years ago this week. The ban on the sale of alcohol unleashed a crime wave, as gangsters fought over the illicit booze trade. It sure didn’t stop drinking. People turned to speakeasies and bathtub gin for their daily cocktail.

Prohibition — and the violence, corruption and health hazards that followed — lives on in its modern version, the so-called War on Drugs. Former law-enforcement officers gathered in Washington to draw the parallels. Their group, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), has called for nothing less than the legalization of drugs.

And before you say, “We can’t do that,” hear the officers out. They have an answer for every objection.

Doesn’t the War on Drugs take narcotics off the street, raising their price beyond most Americans’ means?

Obviously not. The retail price of cocaine is now about half what it was in 1990. When the value of something goes up, more people go into the business.

In some Dallas junior high schools, kids can buy two hits of “cheese” — a mix of Tylenol PM and heroin — for $5, Terry Nelson, a former U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer, told me. Lunch costs more.

Wouldn’t legalizing drugs create new users? Not necessarily. LEAP wants drugs to be regulated like alcohol and cigarettes. Regulations are why it’s harder to buy alcohol or cigarettes in many schoolyards than drugs. By regulating the purity and strength of drugs, they become less deadly.

Isn’t drug addiction a scourge that tears families apart? Yes, it is, and so are arrests and incarceration and criminal records for kids caught smoking pot behind the bleachers. There are 2.1 million people in federal, state and local prisons, 1.7 million of them for non-violent drug offenses.

Removing the stigma of drug use lets addicts come out into the open for treatment. We have treatments for alcoholism, but we don’t ban alcohol.

LEAP’s members want to legalize drugs because they’re tired of being shot at in a war they can’t win. They’re tired of making new business for dealers every time they arrest a competitor. They are tired of busting people in the streets of America’s cities over an ounce of cocaine, while the Andean region produces over 1,000 tons of it a year. They’re tired of enriching terrorists.

“In 2009, the violence of al-Qaida will be financed by drug profits,” said Eric Sterling, head of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, which joined the call for legalization. As counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in the 1980s, Sterling helped write the anti-drug laws he now opposes.

Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimates that legalizing drugs would save federal, state and local governments $44 billion in enforcement costs. Governments could collect another $33 billion in revenues were they to tax drugs as heavily as alcohol and tobacco.

No one here likes drugs or advocates putting heroin on store shelves alongside ibuprofen and dental floss. Each state or county could set its own rules on who could buy which drugs and where and taxes levied — as they now do with alcohol.

What about taking gradual steps — say, starting with marijuana. And couldn’t we first try decriminalization — leaving users alone but still arresting dealers? Those were my questions.

The LEAP people want the laws gone, period. “We’re whole hog on it,” Nelson said. Keeping the sale of drugs illegal, he said, “doesn’t take the cartels out of it.”

Ending this “war” won’t be easy. Too many police, drug agents, bureaucrats, lawyers, judges, prison guards and sprayers of poppy fields have a stake in it. But Prohibition was repealed once. Perhaps it can happen again.

Benjamin Wittes

November 23, 2008

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates came into office wanting to close the American detention operation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Nearly two years later, Guantanamo is still there. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said she wants to close it. Guantanamo will outlast her. Yet, to watch the post-election Democratic triumphalism, you’d think that Guantanamo is as good as shuttered. President-elect Barack Obama has reiterated his campaign promise to close it, and some self-described advisers talk as though he’ll wave a magic wand on Jan. 20 and a problem that has bedeviled this country for seven years will evaporate.

Closing Guantanamo won’t be easy, at least not if Obama means to change the substance of American detention policy rather than merely altering its geography. Obama could, to be sure, fulfill his promise simply by moving detainees to a different facility while continuing to hold them as “enemy combatants.” The challenge of closing Guantanamo would then come down to a series of logistical and administrative questions.

Solving the Guantanamo problem means making important decisions about detention policy in combating terrorism more generally: When, if ever, should the United States engage in preventive detention of terrorism suspects? If and when it does, should it treat them as enemy combatants under the laws of war or under some other body of law, perhaps a new detention statute? What rights should they have? What should the government have to prove about them, to what standard of proof, and in what sort of forum?

Notwithstanding the idea projected by some members of his camp that closing Guantanamo is simply a matter of will, Obama cannot just wish these questions away. They defy answers in the absence of a systematic and rigorous review of the detainee population itself, including the classified information about each prisoner. This process, carried out properly, will not take place instantly.

There are three major groups of detainees at Guantanamo, each presenting distinct policy problems. For starters, there are detainees who could face trial. Most people regard criminal prosecution as the best means of neutralizing terrorism suspects and justifying their long-term detention, and some people regard trial as the only legitimate means of locking up America’s enemies. But how big is the group that might plausibly face charges? And to what extent does its size depend on which forum the government uses for prosecution? Is it a much smaller group if America tries these people in federal courts or courts-martial than if it continues using President Bush’s much-derided military commissions? Without knowing the answer to these questions, one cannot accurately assess the costs and benefits of America’s trial options.

Second, roughly 60 detainees have been cleared for release or transfer from Guantanamo but are stuck there because of fears of mistreatment at the hands of their own governments. Will Obama have an easier time than Bush in persuading third countries to accept these detainees, particularly if he accepts a few of them into the United States? That may well be the case, but without serious diplomatic engagement over the question, we simply can’t know how intractable this problem will prove to be. The ruling Thursday by a federal judge in Washington that five of six detainees in one case were held unlawfully raises the additional question of how many detainees should simply be released.

Third and most troublesome are the detainees too dangerous to be released but who cannot face criminal charges. How many this group contains, if any, will ultimately shape Obama’s policy. Detainees who pose a grave national security threat might be unprosecutable for a variety of reasons: because of deficiencies in the criminal law as it stood in 2001, because evidence against them would not stand up in court, because the government might not have enough evidence to convict or because it obtained key evidence under coercive conditions.

If there are only a few such detainees, and the danger they pose seems manageable, those of us who have advocated a preventive detention system should reconsider our position. On the other hand, some human rights advocates acknowledge privately that they may reconsider their categorical opposition to preventive detention if the group proves substantial and the danger it poses too significant to ignore. Right now, we can only guess at this group’s size.

It matters enormously, in short, who each detainee really is. Only a true ideologue – and Obama shows no sign of being that – would develop a policy concerning Guantanamo without studying the population carefully and thinking these questions through.

It’s reassuring simply to assert that these cases present no tension between America’s needs and her values. But that judgment is at least premature and may well prove dead wrong. In the short term, it does an injustice to the outgoing administration, many current and former members of which have struggled with these questions over seven long years. It also disserves the incoming administration, which will soon inherit detainees who defy such sloganeering and whose handling will require wrenching choices with no easy answers.

 

 

 

By Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 19, 2008; A01

Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich (D) defeated Sen. Ted Stevens, ending the tenure of the longest-serving Republican in Senate history, after the counting of more ballots yesterday gave him a larger lead than the number of votes still untallied, Alaska elections officials said.

Begich’s win gives Democrats control of 58 seats in the Senate, including two independents who caucus with them. That is two shy of the number needed to prevent Republicans from filibustering, with two races still undecided. Democrats have not controlled 60 seats since 1978.

Begich leads Stevens by more than 3,700 votes, according to the Alaska secretary of state. Gail Fenumiai, the head of the state’s election division, said about 2,500 absentee votes from overseas and Alaska’s most remote regions remain to be counted.

The Democrat’s lead thus far — 47.8 percent to 46.6 percent — puts him beyond the margin of victory that would allow Stevens to call for a state-funded recount of the ballots.

“I am humbled and honored to serve Alaska in the United States Senate,” Begich said in a statement declaring victory. “It’s been an incredible journey getting to this point.”

Alaska voters “wanted to see change,” he told reporters in Anchorage. “Alaska has been in the midst of a generational shift — you could see it.”

The race was closely watched, in part because Alaska had not sent a Democrat to Congress in nearly three decades, while Stevens was vying to become the first convicted felon to win election to the Senate. He was convicted last month on seven felony counts of failing to disclose more than $250,000 in gifts.

Begich is the son of Nick Begich, the House member from Alaska who disappeared in 1972 on a flight with House Majority Leader Hale Boggs (D-La.). Both were presumed dead. No Democrat has represented Alaska in its two Senate seats and one House seat since Sen. Mike Gravel was defeated by Republican Frank Murkowski in 1980.

Begich ran as a conservative Democrat, supporting gun owners’ rights and additional domestic drilling for oil production, including in wildlife areas where most Democrats have opposed drilling.

However, the race always focused on Stevens, with the campaign virtually stopping during his four-week trial. The candidates debated once, just days before the election. Begich sought to pay respect to Stevens’s long service to the state, contrasting that with the recent allegations against him.

“He’s done a lot for our state, and I’ve shared Alaska’s respect for him. The past year has been a difficult one for Alaska. With the verdict, we can put this behind us,” Begich said in an advertisement that aired the final weekend before Election Day.

Stevens, who is in Washington for this week’s lame-duck session, said yesterday that either his campaign or the Alaska Republican Party would definitely ask for a recount if the final margin fell within the needed 0.5 percent of the votes cast.

Still to be settled are races are in Minnesota and Georgia. Minnesota officials formally began a recount yesterday in the race between Sen. Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken; the Republican finished 206 votes ahead of the onetime comedian out of 2.9 million ballots cast. In Georgia, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) faces a Dec. 2 runoff against former state representative Jim Martin. Chambliss held a 110,000-vote margin on election night, but his share of the vote did not reach 50 percent, as required by state law.

Stevens, who turned 85 yesterday and was appointed to the Senate in 1968, told reporters yesterday that he was exhausted and had not slept well since his indictment in late July. He added that he had led “three lives”: as a senator, a criminal defendant and a candidate for office.

“I wouldn’t wish what I’ve been through on anyone, [not] my worst enemy,” said Stevens, who says he is considering appealing his convictions.

Stevens, an iconic figure who helped lead Alaska to statehood in the 1950s, served as chairman of the appropriations, commerce and ethics committees in his 40-year tenure in the Senate. He was known for steering hundreds of billions of dollars to his home state for projects.

But the earmarked projects also drew the scrutiny of federal investigators.

Bill Allen Jr., the former chief executive of an oil services company, Veco, pleaded guilty in May 2007 to bribing a host of Alaskan officials. He testified at Stevens’s trial that his company oversaw a massive reconstruction of the senator’s home outside Anchorage, raising the A-frame house on stilts and building an entire new floor and wrap-around deck beneath it.

Stevens was charged with not reporting the home rebuilding and other assorted gifts from Allen and other powerful friends on his Senate financial disclosure forms.

A federal jury in the District convicted Stevens on Oct. 27, eight days before most voters would go to the polls in Alaska. He faces a potential jail term, but sentencing has not been set.

Stevens said yesterday that he could not talk about his legal battle, neither with reporters nor even in a closed-door meeting of Senate Republicans.

Outside the GOP meeting, he said he planned to tell his colleagues, “It’s a nice day. It’s a really nice day.”

Reaction is strong to America’s first black president

This undated file photo provided by Gary and Alina Grewal, of Hardwick Township, N.J., shows a charred cross that had been burned on the lawn of their home after they placed a banner congratulating President-elect Barack Obama. Associated Press (File Associated Press )

Jesse Washington
Associated Press
November 16, 2008

Cross burnings. Schoolchildren chanting “Assassinate Obama.” Black figures hung from nooses. Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars.

Incidents around the country referring to President-elect Barack Obama are dampening the postelection glow of racial progress and harmony, highlighting the stubborn racism that remains in America.

From California to Maine, police have documented a range of alleged crimes, from vandalism and vague threats to at least one physical attack. Insults and taunts have been delivered by adults, college students and second-graders.

There have been “hundreds” of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

One was in Snellville, Ga., where Denene Millner said a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: “I hope Obama gets assassinated.” That night, someone trashed her sister-in-law’s front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs and left two pizza boxes filled with human feces outside the front door, Millner said.

She described her emotions as a combination of anger and fear.

“I can’t say that every white person in Snellville is evil and anti-Obama and willing to desecrate my property, because one or two idiots did it,” said Millner, who is black. “But it definitely makes you look a little different at the people who you live with, and makes you wonder what they’re capable of and what they’re really thinking.”

Potok, who is white, said he believes there is “a large subset of white people in this country who feel that they are losing everything they know, that the country their forefathers built has somehow been stolen from them.”

Grant Griffin, a 46-year-old white Georgia native, expressed similar sentiments: “I believe our nation is ruined and has been for several decades and the election of Obama is merely the culmination of the change.

“If you had real change it would involve all the members of (Obama’s) church being deported,” he said.

Change in whatever form does not come easy, and a black president is “the most profound change in the field of race this country has experienced since the Civil War,” said William Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. “It’s shaking the foundations on which the country has existed for centuries.”

“Someone once said racism is like cancer,” Ferris said. “It’s never totally wiped out, it’s in remission.”

If so, America’s remission lasted until the morning of Nov. 5.

The day after the vote hailed as a sign of a nation changed, black high school student Barbara Tyler, of Marietta, Ga., said she heard hateful Obama comments from white students, and that teachers cut off discussion about Obama’s victory.

Tyler spoke at a press conference by the Georgia chapter of the NAACP calling for a town hall meeting to address complaints from across the state about hostility and resentment. Another student, from a Covington middle school, said he was suspended for wearing an Obama shirt to school Nov. 5 after the principal told students not to wear political paraphernalia.

The student’s mother, Eshe Riviears, said the principal told her: “Whether you like it or not, we’re in the South, and there are a lot of people who are not happy with this decision.”

Other incidents include:

•Four North Carolina State University students admitted writing anti-Obama comments in a tunnel designated for free speech expression, including one that said: “Let’s shoot that (N-word) in the head.” Obama has received more threats than any other president-elect, authorities say.

•In Standish, Maine, a sign inside the Oak Hill General Store read: “Osama Obama Shotgun Pool.” Customers could sign up to bet $1 on a date when Obama would be killed. “Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count,” the sign said. At the bottom of the marker board was written “Let’s hope someone wins.”

•Racist graffiti was found in places including New York’s Long Island, where two dozen cars were spray-painted; Kilgore, Texas, where the high school and skate park were defaced; and the Los Angeles area, where swastikas, racial slurs and “Go Back To Africa” were spray- painted on sidewalks, houses and cars.

•Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted “assassinate Obama,” a district official said.

•University of Alabama professor Marsha L. Houston said a poster of the Obama family was ripped off her office door. A replacement poster was defaced with a death threat and a racial slur. “It seems the election brought the racist rats out of the woodwork,” Houston said.

•Black figures were hanged by nooses from trees on Mount Desert Island, Maine, the Bangor Daily News reported.

•Crosses were burned in yards of Obama supporters in Hardwick, N.J., and Apolacan Township, Pa.

•A black teenager in New York City said he was attacked with a bat on election night by four white men who shouted “Obama.”

•In the Pittsburgh suburb of Forest Hills, a black man said he found a note with a racial slur on his windshield, saying, “Now that you voted for Obama, just watch out for your house.”

Emotions are often raw after a hard-fought political campaign, but now those on the losing side have an easy target for their anger.

“The principle is very simple,” said B.J. Gallagher, a sociologist and co-author of the diversity book “A Peacock in the Land of Penguins.” “If I can’t hurt the person I’m angry at, then I’ll vent my anger on a substitute, i.e., someone of the same race.”

Organization’s voter drive is at center of controversy

Greg Gordon
McClatchy
October 18, 2008

WASHINGTON – The furor over the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now’s national voter registration drive exploded with new controversies Friday, including a call by Barack Obama for an independent prosecutor, a Supreme Court ruling over voter access and the disclosure of a death threat against an ACORN worker.

What remains unclear is whether the presidential campaigns of Democrat Obama and Republican John McCain will reach a truce over voter access to the polls by Election Day or whether their legal and rhetorical battles will persist to the finish line – or beyond.

Republicans allege that ACORN is engaged in rampant voter fraud, but they’ve offered no proof of such a systematic effort. The GOP does have evidence that some of the group’s 13,000 canvassers submitted fraudulent applications, but ACORN says it alerted authorities to most of the phony forms.

Democrats counter that the GOP is trying to whip up fears of voter fraud so it can knock students and low-income minorities off the voter rolls to enhance McCain’s chances of victory.

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled an attempt by Republicans to challenge the validity of 200,000 voter registrations in Ohio, saying that the party lacked the standing to sue.

The Republicans had sued to force Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, to provide county election officials with lists of registrants whose personal information did not exactly match Social Security or driver’s license data, a step that would leave those voters vulnerable to eligibility challenges.

Tensions began to escalate Thursday with disclosures that the FBI is investigating ACORN and the possibility that it’s engaged in a vote-fraud scheme.

On Friday, Obama’s legal counsel, Robert Bauer, wrote to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, charging that the inquiry is politically motivated and that it risks repeating the 2007 scandal over the Bush administration’s politicization of the Justice Department.

Bauer asked Mukasey to broaden a special prosecutor’s investigation to examine the origin of the ACORN inquiry.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, except to say: “We will review the letter.”

Earlier Friday, ACORN told McClatchy that one of its senior staffers in Cleveland had received a death threat and that its Boston and Seattle offices had been vandalized sometime Thursday, reflecting the mounting tensions over the group’s role in registering 1.3 million mostly poor and minority Americans to vote.

ACORN attorneys drafted a letter alerting the FBI and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division of the incidents, said Brian Kettenring, a Florida-based spokesman for the group.

Kettenring said that a senior ACORN staffer in Cleveland, after appearing on television this week, got an e-mail that said she “is going to have her life ended.” A female staffer in Providence, R.I., got a threatening call from someone who said words to the effect of “We know you get off work at 9,” then uttered racial epithets, he said.

McClatchy is withholding the women’s names because of the threats.

Separately, vandals broke into the group’s Boston and Seattle offices and stole computers, Kettenring said.

The incidents came the day after McCain charged in the final presidential debate that ACORN’s voter-registration drive “may be perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history” and may be “destroying the fabric of democracy.”

McCain’s comments provoked a response from ACORN.

“I would not say that Senator McCain is inciting violence,” Kettenring said, “but I would say that his statements about the role of this manufactured scandal were totally outlandish.”

Associated Press
October 11, 2008

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Sarah Palin unlawfully abused her power as governor by trying to have her former brother-in-law fired as a state trooper, the chief investigator of an Alaska legislative panel concluded today. The politically charged inquiry imperiled her reputation as a reformer on John McCain’s Republican ticket.

Investigator Stephen Branchflower, in a report by a bipartisan panel that investigated the matter, found Palin in violation of a state ethics law that prohibits public officials from using their office for personal gain.

The inquiry looked into her dismissal of Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan, who said he lost his job because he resisted pressure to fire a state trooper involved in a bitter divorce with the governor’s sister. Palin says Monegan was fired as part of a legitimate budget dispute.

The report found that Palin let the family grudge influence her decision-making even if it was not the sole reason Monegan was dismissed. “I feel vindicated,” Monegan said. “It sounds like they’ve validated my belief and opinions. And that tells me I’m not totally out in left field.”

Branchflower said Palin violated a statute of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.

“I disagree,” said Palin attorney Thomas Van Flein. “In order to violate the ethics law, there has to be some personal gain, usually financial. Mr. Branchflower has failed to identify any financial gain.”

The statute says “any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that (public) trust.”

Palin and McCain’s supporters had hoped the inquiry’s finding would be delayed until after the presidential election to spare her any embarrassment and to put aside an enduring distraction as she campaigns as McCain’s running mate in an uphill contest against Democrat Barack Obama.

But the panel of lawmakers voted to release the report, although not without dissension. There was no immediate vote on whether to endorse its findings.

“I think there are some problems in this report,” said Republican state Sen. Gary Stevens, a member of the panel. “I would encourage people to be very cautious, to look at this with a jaundiced eye.”

The nearly 300-page report does not recommend sanctions or a criminal investigation.

The investigation revealed that Palin’s husband, Todd, has extraordinary access to the governor’s office and her closest advisers. He used that access to try to get trooper Mike Wooten fired, the report found.

Branchflower faulted Sarah Palin for taking no action to stop that. He also noted there is evidence the governor herself participated in the effort.

Wooten had been in hot water before Palin became governor over allegations that he illegally shot a moose, drank beer in a patrol car and used a Taser on his stepson.

In proceedings revealed by the report, former Alaska State Trooper Col. Julia Grimes told investigators that Sarah Palin called her in late 2005 to discuss why Wooten hadn’t been fired, and Grimes told her the inquiry was confidential by law.

“Her questions were how can a trooper who behaves this way still be working,” Grimes said. “I asked her to please trust me, that because I can’t tell her details I would ask her to please trust me that I would take the appropriate action if and when I knew what the findings were. … I couldn’t have another conversation with her about it because, again, it’s protected by law.”

Grimes said Todd Palin also contacted her by telephone in late 2005 to discuss the confidential investigation of Wooten.

Wooten’s disciplinary case was settled in September 2006 — months before Palin was elected governor — and he was allowed to continue working as a trooper.

After Palin’s election, her new public safety commissioner, Monegan, said he was summoned to the governor’s office to meet Todd Palin, who said Wooten’s punishment had been merely a “slap on the wrist.” Monegan said he understood the Palins wanted Wooten fired. “I had this kind of ominous feeling that I may not be long for this job if I didn’t somehow respond accordingly,” Monegan told the investigator.

For months afterward, Todd Palin filed complaints about Wooten, saying he was seen riding a snowmobile after he had filed a worker’s compensation claim and was seen dropping off his children at school in his patrol car. Monegan said Wooten’s doctor had authorized the snowmobile trip and his supervisor had approved his use of the patrol car. Monegan said Alaska’s attorney general later called him to inquire about Wooten, and Monegan told him they shouldn’t be discussing the subject.

“This was an issue that apparently wasn’t going to go away, that there were certainly frustrations,” Monegan said. “To say that (Sarah Palin) was focused on this I think would be accurate.”

WASHINGTON — Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the longest-serving Republican senator in United States history and a figure of great influence in Washington as well as in his home state, has been indicted on federal corruption charges.

Mr. Stevens, 84, was indicted on seven counts of failing to report income. The charges are related to renovations on his home and to gifts he has received. They arise from an investigation that has been under way for more than a year, in connection with the senator’s relationship with a businessman who oversaw the home-remodeling project.

The indictment will surely reverberate through the November elections. Mr. Stevens, who has been in the Senate for 40 years, is up for re-election this year. Mark Begich, a popular Democratic mayor of Anchorage, hopes to supplant him.

The Justice Department announced the charges at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. The document says that, from the spring of 1999 through the late summer of 2007, Mr. Stevens failed to report “things of value” that he received in connection with his home in the ski resort city of Girdwood, about 40 miles south of Anchorage.

Prosecutors say Mr. Stevens, who referred to his home as “the chalet,” accepted goods and services worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, ranging from an outdoor grill to extensive home remodeling and architectural advice. Not only did Mr. Stevens fail to report the items on his Senate financial disclosure form, as required, but he took active steps to conceal the receipt of the goods and services, the indictment says.

All the charges are felonies. Justice Department officials declined to discuss how long a prison term a conviction on the charges might bring, noting that the maximum sentences allowed by law are rarely imposed. Mr. Stevens was in Washington on Tuesday, and was allowed to turn himself in for paperwork processing.

The business executive at the center of the affair is Bill J. Allen, a longtime friend of the senator’s and the founder of VECO, a company that builds pipelines and does other construction work for oil companies. Mr. Allen pleaded guilty in May 2007 to making $243,000 in illegal payments to a lawmaker, who was later identified as State Senator Ben Stevens, Ted Stevens’s son.

Ben Stevens, who was once president of the Alaska State Senate, is one of a half-dozen lawmakers under scrutiny for their relationships with Mr. Allen and his company.

Republicans on Capitol Hill were already jittery over a lobbying and influence-peddling scandal related to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is now in prison. Mr. Stevens’s troubles are not linked to that affair. Instead, they stem from his ties to an oil executive whose company won millions of dollars in federal contracts with the help of Mr. Stevens, whose home in Alaska was almost doubled in size in the renovation project.

Under Senate Republican party rules, an indictment on felony charges compels a member to temporarily give up his leadership posts, and Republican senators were told at their weekly luncheon on Tuesday that Mr. Stevens would do so. Mr. Stevens has been the ranking minority member on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

Mr. Stevens is a former chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and he is still on the panel. As chairman, he wielded huge influence, and did not hesitate to use it to steer money and projects to his state.

“No other senator fills so central a place in his state’s public and economic life as Ted Stevens of Alaska,” the Almanac of American Politics says. “Quite possibly, no other senator ever has.”

Mr. Stevens, one of only a handful of World War II veterans left in the Senate, grew up in Indiana and California and moved to Alaska in 1950, before it was a state, according to the political almanac. He first ran for the Senate in 1962, losing to Ernest Gruening, a Democrat. He was appointed to fill a vacant seat in the Senate in 1968 by the governor at the time, Walter Hickel, and has been re-elected six times since then.

Word spread through the Capitol like an electric current, prompting whispers among senators and staff. The Democrats were gathering in a room near the Senate chamber for their weekly conference lunch. Republicans, meanwhile, moved their lunch to the headquarters of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, a common change of venue when the primary topic of discussion is politics.

Mr. Stevens is seen as a legendary, even heroic, figure in Alaska, who played a crucial role in its achievement of statehood, which became official in 1959. According to Senate Republican rules, Mr. Stevens will have to give up his leadership positions, which include some hugely powerful posts, as the senior Republican on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and the defense appropriations subcommittee.

The long-running federal corruption investigation in Alaska has been hanging over Mr. Stevens as he faces his toughest re-election contest in many years. Mr. Begich was expected to mount a strong challenge even before word of the indictment spread.

Alaska, which last elected a Democratic senator in 1974, is one of several seemingly unlikely states where Democrats believe they have a strong chance of pulling off upset victories in the November elections.

The indictment comes nearly a year after federal agents raided Mr. Stevens’s home as part of a continuing investigation into corruption that had already ensnared the senator’s son.

Though lawmakers have been aware of the Justice Department inquiry for some time, the news of an indictment still came as something of a shock this week, as both houses of Congress are trying to wrap up legislative business before the monthlong August recess.

Senator Daniel Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, who is the chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee and a friend of Mr. Stevens, said Mr. Stevens should be presumed innocent unless and until he is proven guilty.Mr. Inouye said he did not expect that the indictment would interfere with Senator Stevens’s ability to work in the Senate.

Other lawmakers, including Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, the chairwoman of the ethics committee, said they needed to know more about the indictment before commenting.

Robert Barnes of the Washington Post

June 26, 2008

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that it is unconstitutional to execute someone who rapes a child, issuing a broad decision that reserves the death penalty for murderers and those who commit crimes against the state.

The 5-4 decision continued the move by a slim majority of the court to narrow the circumstances under which capital punishment is allowed, even when society views the crime with “revulsion.”

“There is a distinction between intentional first-degree murder on the one hand and nonhomicide crimes against individual persons, even including child rape, on the other,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in what will be a term-defining decision for the court.

While the latter may be “devastating in their harm,” Kennedy said, “they cannot be compared to murder in their severity and irrevocability.” He was joined by the court’s more liberal members: John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

No one has been executed for rape in the United States since 1964. Though capital punishment can be imposed for crimes against the state such as treason, espionage and terrorism, of the 3,300 inmates on death rows across the country, only two face execution for a crime other than murder.

The decision prompted outrage from the conservative wing of the court.

Justice Samuel Alito questioned the majority’s logic that every murderer sentenced to death is more “morally depraved” than any child rapist.

“I have little doubt that, in the eyes of ordinary Americans, the very worst child rapists – predators who seek out and inflict serious physical and emotional injury on defenseless young children – are the epitome of moral depravity,” he wrote. Alito was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

The decision overturned the death penalty for Patrick Kennedy, 43, who was convicted of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter in Louisiana in 1998 – an assault so brutal that the girl required surgery.

 

The last time the court issued a major decision on the right to bear arms was in 1939, when criminals wore fedoras.

Dahlia Lithwick

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 12:52 PM ET Mar 15, 2008

This week the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the most important gun-control case in 69 years. And almost lost amid all the political posturing on both sides of the case about the constitutional contours of the “right to bear arms” is the quiet, crucial fact that the high court is about to step into a cultural conflict for the first time in 69 years.

Think about it: abortion, homosexuality, affirmative action, separation of church and state, the death penalty. The court has waded into almost every hot-button social issue dividing this country.

And both conservatives and liberals suspect that in doing so, the high court has messed things up. Its most acerbic conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia, says the court should not conduct itself like an unelected superlegislature. It’s not for the court to invent new rights, it’s for the people: “You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it.”

A growing number of legal thinkers, including the University of Chicago’s Cass Sunstein, agree that judicial “minimalism” is preferable to resolving sprawling social problems with broad moral judgments. Many of the country’s pre-eminent liberal scholars believe that matters as important as abortion and segregation were better left up to the democratically elected branches; that the broad brushstrokes of the Warren Court launched a backlash still being felt today.

With District of Columbia v. Heller, these court critics may have fished their wish. The case tests the constitutionality of D.C.’s sweeping gun ban prohibiting handgun possession at home unless guns were registered before 1976, and requiring all guns—including rifles and shotguns—to be unloaded and either disassembled or bound by a trigger lock. Last year, by a 2-1 vote, a federal appeals court struck down the ban, claiming that the Second Amendment confers upon “the people” an individual right to bear arms, rather than a collective right to arm its militias.

Still, the most dramatic aspect of Heller may well be that the last time the Supreme Court issued a major proclamation on the right to bear arms, it was 1939 and the criminals in question sported fedoras and drove Packards. That makes this case a natural experiment in what happens when the Supreme Court butts out. If the gun fight is any indication, it’s not clear democracy moves to the driver’s seat when the court lets go of the wheel.

The Supreme Court determined in 1939 in U.S. v. Miller that an individual right to a gun had no “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia,” and thus the Second Amendment did not confer individual rights to guns. The court followed this with many decades of constitutional radio silence on the subject. When faced with opportunities to revisit Miller, the court either upheld it or declined to hear appeals that would raise it. In the wake of that silence, 10 of the 12 federal appeals courts also sided with this “collective rights” view of the Second Amendment.

But in the face of the courts’ quiet resistance, a well-funded and powerful lobby group, the National Rifle Association, forcefully and effectively pushed the claim that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to bear arms. Four million-plus-members strong, the group has handed out millions of dollars and is credited with winning the 2000 election for George W. Bush. Whatever financial or political clout it has exhibited pales next to its legal influence: polls show that while a slight majority of Americans would support stricter gun laws, about 75 percent of them believe the Constitution confers a personal right to own a gun.

The vacuum created by the courts was filled not only with special-interest groups but, more recently, with legal academics intent on preserving strong individual rights under the Constitution. And according to Robert Spitzer, a political scientist at SUNY Cortland and author of “The Politics of Gun Control” (2003), the failure of the Supreme Court to revisit the question of the Second Amendment for decades in fact created “the allegation of some legal pathology; that the court was avoiding it or embarrassed by it.” That embarrassment prompted an important liberal thinker, Prof. Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas, to pen a 1989 law-review article in favor of a “strong reading” for the individual-rights theory of the Second Amendment. Other prominent liberals and libertarians have followed, many less interested in reshaping modern gun-control policy than insider constitutional housekeeping: you can’t be for strong individual constitutional rights, and treat the Second Amendment like elevator music. But when Robert Levy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the engine behind the Heller lawsuit, determined the time was ripe to challenge the D.C. gun ban in court, one of the factors motivating him was this intellectual shift in the liberal academy.

So long overdue is Supreme Court scrutiny in Heller that the Bush administration has staked out one position, while Dick Cheney has taken another (rumors surfaced last week that the administration might change its position again at oral argument). But the more interesting question is whether, absent judicial pronouncements, large constitutional matters will be thrashed out by the people and the democratic process or by well-funded interest groups and well-meaning academics.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/123509

Leonard Pitts Jr.
Miami Herald
March 12, 2008

I admit that I’m curious.

What, exactly, is included in $5,500-an-hour sex? Does the woman sweat Dom Pérignon? Are you massaged with an oil distilled from the tears of virgins? Do you get a complimentary big screen?

There are, of course, more important questions raised by the stunning implosion of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s political career this week after he was named by federal officials as a customer of a high-priced prostitution ring. Still, the question that intrigues me most has nothing to do with politics. It is, rather, how?

How can a man do such a thing to his family? How can he do it to himself?

Yes, I know the popular wisdom: All men are canine. But the popular wisdom doesn’t answer the questions. Even if you believe every man is a slut helplessly in thrall to carnal wants – and I don’t – it does not explain this. After all, the issue here is not sex. With apologies to Bill Clinton: It’s the hypocrisy, stupid.

Consider the astonishingly lost list of high public officials and self-appointed moralists found – or in a few cases, strongly suspected – to be preaching one set of values while living another. It starts, of course, with the aforementioned Bill Clinton, whose indiscretions precipitated a constitutional crisis. But the list also includes: Jesse (”keep hope alive”) Jackson, Larry (”wide stance”) Craig, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, former Spokane Mayor Jim West, the Rev. Ted Haggard, Newt Gingrich, numerous priests of the Roman Catholic Church (It’s 10 o’clock – do you know where your altar boy is?), Strom Thurmond (apparently, he liked integration more than he let on), Mark Foley, Rudy Giuliani, New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey (some of us pronounce it, “McGreasy”), Gary Condit, Dan Burton, Bob Packwood and Henry (”a youthful indiscretion”) Hyde.

And that’s just in the past decade or so. Go back a few years more and you’ve got Jim Bakker, Wilbur Mills, Gary Hart and Jimmy Swaggart, crying tears that would shame a crocodile. Go back even more and you find John F. Kennedy and Thomas Jefferson.

Point being, yes, I know there’s nothing new about hypocrisy. There is, however, something new about this era of cell phone cameras, 24/7 news cycles, YouTube, diminished privacy and intrusive journalism. You’d think a smart man (that’s not an oxymoron, right?) would realize this and adjust accordingly. You’d think he would have sense enough to pack it – either the career or the extracurricular activities – in.

Instead, with an arrogance that beggars description, with a hubris that blots the sun, they try to game the system. And when it catches up with them, they don’t even bear the greatest cost. No, that’s borne by wives who must stand, dead-eyed and humiliated, by their sides through the ritual of apology, by children who must go to school the day after, by constituents who believed and now see that belief betrayed.

Do you know how hard it is to believe? To overcome cynicism and inertia and place fragile trust in the hands of someone who claims to represent values higher than expedience and self? Do you have any idea how much a fool you feel to see that belief, tenderly given, callously trampled? Do you know how much less likely you are ever to give belief again?

And finally, do you know how much it damages us, the larger us, when faith is calcified by cynicism? When we become unable to believe?

I don’t know what the governor received when he – allegedly – paid $5,500 for an hour of a prostitute’s time.

I hope it was worth it.

N.Y. Governor Apologizes for ‘Private Matter,’ Does Not Resign
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 11, 2008; A01

New York Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer’s political future was thrown in doubt yesterday after he was identified as an anonymous client heard on a federal wiretap arranging to pay money and buy train tickets for a high-priced New York prostitute to meet him at a downtown Washington hotel.

A person familiar with the case said Spitzer was one of the unnamed clients of a New York area prostitution ring mentioned in federal court documents unsealed last week. Spitzer, a rising star in the Democratic Party who has been in office for 14 months, did not directly address the allegations in a hastily called news conference, and he made no mention of resigning. But as he dropped from public view, canceling all of his planned events, his political career seemed in limbo last night amid speculation that he was preparing to step down.

“I have acted in a way that violated the obligations to my family and that violate my, or any, sense of right and wrong,” Spitzer, 48, said in a terse public statement, with his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, at his side. “I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard that I expect of myself.”

His political opponents in the state legislature were already calling for his resignation. Even sympathetic analysts said the governor — after a series of scandals and bruising battles with the legislature — does not have a reservoir of goodwill to draw upon that might help him overcome this latest controversy.

“This is not even a nail in the coffin — this is a spike,” said Douglas Muzzio, a political science professor at Baruch College. “It would be difficult for him to govern. His moral authority is nonexistent.”

A 1910 federal statute called the Mann Act prohibits traveling across state lines to engage in prostitution. Also, Republicans in Albany said that if the governor tries to keep his job, they will probably question whether his state police bodyguards, who provide him 24-hour protection, were complicit in his actions, and whether state money or facilities were used.

“I can’t see him getting through this,” said state Sen. Martin J. Golden (R), a former police officer. “Interstate transportation for sexual purposes is a federal crime. . . . We all think now he’s negotiating a plea.”

Spitzer has not been charged with any crime. The U.S. attorney’s office in New York had no comment on the case.

If Spitzer does resign, he would be replaced by Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson, scion to a well-connected Harlem political family and the state’s senior African American elected official. Paterson, who is legally blind, would be New York’s first black governor.

The wiretap was set up as part of a federal investigation of an exclusive prostitution ring, known as Emperors Club VIP. It charged well-heeled clients as much as $5,500 an hour for “exclusive, beautiful, educated companions of fine family and career backgrounds” while ensuring “privacy and discretion when dating and traveling,” according to the company’s Web site.

The site used a series of diamonds next to photographs of the women to rate them, with those having the most diamonds commanding the highest prices. The site has been shut down.

Last Thursday, federal authorities — using an agent posing as a client and wiretaps that recorded about 5,000 calls — arrested four people in connection with the prostitution ring. They included the alleged ringleaders in New Jersey, Mark Brener, 62, and Cecil Suwal, 23, known as “Katie,” who ran day-to-day operations. Also arrested were Tanya Hollander, 36, of Rhinebeck, N.Y., and Temeka Rachelle Lewis, 32, of Brooklyn.

The charge sheet for the four provided details about clients soliciting women. They included an unidentified “Client-9,” who called Lewis to say that he had sent a package, believed to be a monetary deposit, and wanted to have a prostitute named “Kristen” take the train from New York’s Pennsylvania Station to Union Station in Washington on Feb. 13 and meet him in Room 871 of a hotel in the District.

A source familiar with the investigation, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Client 9 was Spitzer.

On Sunday, Spitzer reportedly told his staff that he had been implicated in the prostitution ring, the New York Times reported on its Web site.

The Washington hotel was later identified as the Mayflower, and by evening, tourists were already snapping pictures of the city’s latest iconoclastic monument to scandal.

According to the details in the charge sheet, Client 9 appeared to be a regular user of the Emperors Club VIP services. When Lewis, awaiting the deposit, asked whether the client had used the correct mailing name, Client 9 replied, “Yup, same as in the past, no question about it.”

When the client asked which woman would be coming to Washington, Lewis told him it was Kristen, and Client 9 expressed some evidence of familiarity, saying, “Great, okay, wonderful.” He later asked Lewis to remind him what Kristen looked like, and was told she was a petite, pretty brunette, 5 feet 5 inches tall and 105 pounds.

The client also asked Lewis if he could give Kristen “extra funds” as a deposit for future services. Lewis explained that it was not standard practice, but that she was willing to make an exception for Client 9.

Spitzer’s travel schedule shows he spent the night of Feb. 13 in Washington to attend a congressional hearing the next day, Valentine’s Day. Spitzer was not initially scheduled to appear at the hearing on the state of the bond industry, held by the Financial Services subcommittee on capital markets, insurance and government-sponsored enterprises. But committee staff members said Spitzer called to insist on coming to testify, and they ended up pushing back the New York insurance superintendent to make room for the governor’s last-minute appearance.

Spitzer made a name for himself as New York’s crusading attorney general, taking on white-collar criminals and prosecuting securities fraud cases. He also broke up two prostitution rings.

Spitzer ran for governor in 2006 as a reformer who would shake up the sometimes gridlocked politics of Albany, and his landslide 69 percent of the vote was the largest margin ever in a New York gubernatorial race. But his popularity quickly waned as he became enmeshed in scandals and political missteps, including allegations that his staff used New York state troopers to collect potentially damaging political information against his chief rival in Albany, Joseph L. Bruno, the state Republican leader. Spitzer later apologized to Bruno.

As evidence of his tough-minded, no-compromise style, Spitzer also famously told James Tedisco, the State Assembly Republican leader: “I’m a [expletive] steamroller, and I’ll roll over you and anybody else.”

Spitzer also proposed a plan to give state driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. But that created a national firestorm of protest, and complicated the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who was asked in an early debate whether she supported it and is seen as having flubbed her answer.

“His whole first year has been in incredibly contentious relationships,” said Eric Lane, a law professor at Hofstra University.

Staff writers Carrie Johnson in Charlottesville and Jonathan Weisman and Petula Dvorak in Washington contributed to this report.

Kempthorne seeks compatibility with state laws

Richard Simon and Judy Pasternak
Los Angeles Times
February 23, 2008

WASHINGTON – In a victory for gun rights advocates, the federal government is preparing to relax a decades-old ban on loaded firearms in national parks.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said Friday his department would suggest new regulations by the end of April that could bring federal rules into line with state laws concerning guns in parks and public lands. His announcement came in a letter to 51 senators who have written to him about the issue. A near majority of the Senate, including Democrats and Republicans from Western states, has backed a drive to repeal the ban, which has been in place in some parks for 100 years.

The proposed rule change might let visitors carry loaded weapons into national parks in states with few gun restrictions, such as Montana.

Gun rights advocates, notably the National Rifle Association, have said the ban infringes on their Second Amendment right to bear arms and their ability to defend themselves from predators, human and animal.

“If you’re hiking in the backcountry and there is a problem with a criminal or an aggressive animal, there’s no 911 box where you can call police and have a 60-second response time,” said Gary Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association. “Here in Montana, we are very used to being able to provide for our own personal protection.”

Kempthorne’s decision to review the ban was hailed by the NRA. “This is an important step in the right direction,” said the organization’s chief lobbyist, Chris W. Cox.

On the other hand, the National Parks Conservation Association called Kempthorne’s action “alarming.” Tom Kiernan, the group’s president, said a loosening of the ban would be “a blow to the national parks and the 300 million visitors who enjoy them every year.”

His view is echoed by gun-control advocates and some rangers who say permitting firearms would be dangerous for visitors and wildlife and alter the national park experience.

“Parks have long been sanctuaries for both animals and people,” said Butch Farabee, a former acting superintendent at Montana’s Glacier National Park who is retired. “There need to be places in this country where people can feel secure without guns and know that the guy in the campground across the way does not have one.”

The federal government would not cede authority over firearms in national parks to the states, said Interior Department spokesman Chris Paolino, but would like to reflect the policies of host states. In drafting proposed new rules, Paolino said, the department also would take into consideration the ban on firearms in federal buildings.

“It’s important to note this is the beginning of the process,” Paolino added.

Weapons originally were prohibited in national parks to prevent “opportunistic poaching” of wildlife, said Frank Buono, a former assistant superintendent of California’s Joshua Tree National Park.

A 1908 Yellowstone National Park regulation, for example, required that visitors “having firearms, traps, nets, seines or explosives” surrender them at the entrance unless they received written permission from the park superintendent.

A similar policy was in effect at most parks for decades. Then the Reagan administration in 1983 required that visitors unload and store their firearms before entering most national parks.

Supporters of the repeal effort note that state gun laws currently apply to federal land managed by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, and they see no reason why that should not be the case in national parks and wildlife refuges.

So far, half the Senate seems to agree. Nine Democrats and 41 Republicans have signed letters to Kempthorne calling on him to lift the gun ban. “We do not believe that allowing law-abiding citizens to transport and carry firearms – rather than forcing them to disassemble or store them in their trunks – will increase the chances that they will be tempted to violate prohibitions on discharge,” one group of senators wrote.

Advocates believe it is, foremost, an issue of ending an unconstitutional infringement on their right to bear arms. But they also contend that park visitors are “increasingly vulnerable” to crime.

“While park rangers now use bullet-proof vests and automatic weapons to enforce the law, regular Americans in states where conceal-and-carry law exists are denied the opportunity for self-defense,” Coburn said in “talking points” distributed by his office.

The National Park Service says there were 116,588 reported offenses in national parks in 2006, the most recent year data are available, including 11 killings, 35 rapes or attempted rapes, 61 robberies, 16 kidnappings and 261 aggravated assaults.

Supporters also believe that gun owners should be able to protect themselves against dangerous animals, dismissing arguments that firearms would ruin the park experience.

Officials at Glacier – which recorded 10 deaths from grizzly bear attacks between 1967 and 1998 – said the last attack was in 2005, when a bear mauled two hikers. One of the victims, Johan Otter, of Escondido, Calif., said the idea that a gun could have stopped the 400-pound bear that charged him is naive. “We only had, like, half a second between seeing the bear and the impact,” Otter said.

Organizations that represent current and retired park workers oppose a repeal, saying it not only would endanger visitors, rangers and wildlife but would change the character of the parks.

Bill Wade, executive council chairman of the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, said, “How many of you would want to go out there if you knew that people were running up and down the Appalachian Trail with guns?”

Kevin O’Brien

February 15, 2008

More than six years after Americans watched Muslim terrorists destroy the World Trade Center, damage the Pentagon and kill more than 3,000 innocents, the Bush administration is about to attempt justice for some of the high-ranking alleged perpetrators.

Six al-Qaida members, a cast headlined by Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are headed for trial by a U.S. military tribunal.

The questions before the court will involve 169 charges, including conspiracy, murder in violation of the laws of war, and terrorism.

The question before the nation is broader: Are we more interested in defending ourselves from terrorists or defending terrorists against intrusions upon their “rights”?

For the last five or six years, the defendants have lived at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. The key word in that sentence isn’t “defendants,” “detention” or “Guantanamo.” The key word is “lived.” That’s the thing they got to do that their victims didn’t.

I can’t help but feel a little apprehension about seeing them go before a court – even a military court. We haven’t done very well at justice in this war.

In fact, lawyers have provided some of the finest aid and comfort to the enemy that money can buy. In doing so, they’ve worked hard to sow confusion in Westerners’ minds about what constitutes justice.

War isn’t a courtroom drama. The calculations of the people who must save their own lives by pulling a trigger shouldn’t have to include, “What would a lawyer say about this?” Yet those calculations are made every day. But only by our side.

We ought to be ashamed that our own good men have been wounded and killed because hesitation is built into their rules of engagement.

We ought to be ashamed that American lives have been sacrificed to fears that some terrorist might file a lawsuit against his interrogators.

What we don’t need to be ashamed about – not for one second – is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got water up his nose before he cracked. By the standards of his own organization, which has a penchant for cutting off the heads of its captives and gleefully packing the videotapes off to Al-Jazeera – Mohammed says he himself wielded the knife that killed journalist Daniel Pearl – he’s gotten off pretty light, so far.

The people we’re fighting have never shown the slightest inclination toward playing by the rules of the Geneva Convention, or anything else that might pass for “civilized” warfare.

They do not wear uniforms, nor do they act under the auspices of any nation or government. They target civilians. They don’t mistakenly commit the occasional atrocity in the heat of battle. Rather, they strive for atrocities, planning them carefully for maximum loss of life and shock value.

Their most effective weapons are terror, stealth, propaganda and our own civilized sensibilities, which they understand perfectly, sneer at, and use against us at every opportunity.

And some of their most effective propagandists, unwitting and otherwise, are people who demand that Americans focus on the legal niceties of this war and the legal rights of enemies who find our laws quaint, silly and useful.

So, although there were worse ideas than leaving Mohammed and his boys to rot in the warm Cuban breeze, the complaints of the I-dotters and T-crossers have won them a day in court. It isn’t the court they would have preferred – a civilian trial court where the whole legal circus could have come to town. But with the military promising all kinds of openness and transparency, the defendants and their advocates probably will have ample opportunity to spew their venom and insult our intelligence.

With the legal strategizing and handicapping already well under way, the Telegraph of London offered this bit of odd phrasing: “Legal experts said the willingness of Mohammed, known as ‘KSM’ in intelligence circles, to take credit for terrorism could complicate the tribunal process.”

Complicate? Killers who brag about their murderous exploits usually simplify the process.

Then again, maybe those legal experts are hoping for an acquittal.

Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Miami Herald
February 14, 2008

You have no right to read this.

The First Amendment gives me the right to write it, but doesn’t necessarily give you the right to read it. Or so I was once told by an attorney. While the right to free speech certainly implies a corresponding right to hear what is being spoken, he said, the First Amendment doesn’t explicitly grant such a right. So theoretically, it could be argued that no such right exists.

The key word being “theoretically.” As a practical matter, the freedom to read whatever we choose is such an intrinsic part of our national character as to make legal theory superfluous. People would rise in outrage if government ever attempted to dictate what they read. Theory and reality are often two different things.

I bring up the First Amendment in order to discuss the Second. The Supreme Court is pondering what is expected to be a landmark ruling on that amendment which, for the record, reads as follows: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

At issue is whether a District of Columbia law banning handgun ownership is constitutional. The key question is this: Does the Second Amendment confer an individual right to gun ownership, or does it refer only to the right of a state to raise a militia? I’ve always thought the latter, a view buttressed by many legal rulings, including the Supreme Court’s, when it last weighed in on the subject, nearly 70 years ago.

But in a very real sense, and for reasons similar to those just mentioned, I also think that’s beside the point. Regardless of whether a right to individual gun ownership can be found in the Second Amendment, the perception of that right is so deeply ingrained that legal theory is – here’s that word again – superfluous. Do you really think, regardless of what the court rules, it would be possible to ban firearms on a national scale? I think any attempt to do so would lead to uprisings we can scarcely imagine.

What we have here, then, is another case of theory versus reality. It’s a confrontation that did not have to happen.

The problem with this debate is that it has always been defined by its most extreme voices, its most uncompromising, ideologically pure voices.

But what if gun control advocates got over the idea that getting the right ruling from the right court would magically make guns disappear? And what if gun advocates got over the notion that every attempt at firearms regulation is a step toward totalitarianism? Where might this debate go then?

What if supporters of gun control could concede that hunting is, for some, an honored tradition? That some people feel it necessary to have a weapon in the home for protection? That some entirely rational folks simply like guns?

Could gun rights people then concede that you don’t need an assault weapon to go deer hunting? And that manufacturers who flood poor, violence-prone neighborhoods with cheap handguns ought to be held accountable? And that guys who sell guns from the trunks of their cars are nobody’s friend? And that background checks and gun safety classes for new gun owners make us all safer? And that gun registration isn’t totalitarianism any more than a driver’s license is? And, most of all, that all of us are tired of seeing children shoot children with guns they never should have had access to?

It’s called compromise and no, it would hardly mollify ideological purists. It would not make guns disappear, nor acknowledge an individual right to bazooka ownership. What it would do, though, is recognize that ideological purity has its limits. That’s a good thing to remember.

When theory confronts reality, put your money on reality every time.

By Michael Kinsley

What you are supposed to say about immigration–what most of the presidential candidates say, what the radio talk jocks say–is that you are not against immigration. Not at all. You salute the hard work and noble aspirations of those who are lining up at American consulates around the world. But that is legal immigration. What you oppose is illegal immigration.

This formula is not very helpful. We all oppose breaking the law, or we ought to. Saying that you oppose illegal immigration is like saying you oppose illegal drug use or illegal speeding. Of course you do, or should. The question is whether you think the law draws the line in the right place. Should using marijuana be illegal? Should the speed limit be raised–or lowered? The fact that you believe in obeying the law reveals nothing about what you think the law ought to be, or why.

Another question: Why are you so upset about this particular form of lawbreaking? After all, there are lots of laws, not all of them enforced with vigor. The suspicion naturally arises that the illegality is not what bothers you. What bothers you is the immigration. There is an easy way to test this. Reducing illegal immigration is hard, but increasing legal immigration would be easy. If your view is that legal immigration is good and illegal immigration is bad, how about increasing legal immigration? How about doubling it? Any takers? So in the end, this is not really a debate about illegal immigration. This is a debate about immigration.

And it’s barely a debate at all. On the Democratic side, the arcane issue of whether illegals should be able to get a driver’s license has bitten both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. On the Republican side, the candidates take turns accusing one another of committing some act of human decency toward illegals, and indignantly denying that they did any such thing. Immigration has long divided both parties, with advocates and opponents in each. Among Republicans, support for immigration was economic (corporations), while opposition was cultural (nativists). Among Democrats, it was the reverse: support for immigration was cultural (ethnic groups), while opposition was economic (unions). Now, for whatever reason, support for immigration is limited to an eccentric alliance of high-minded Council on Foreign Relations types, the mainstream media, high-tech entrepreneurs, Latinos, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and President George W. Bush. Everyone else, it seems, is agin.

Maybe the aginners are right, and immigration is now damaging our country, stealing jobs and opportunity, ripping off taxpayers, fragmenting our culture. I doubt it, but maybe so. Certainly, it’s true that we can’t let in everyone who wants to come. There is some number of immigrants that is too many. I don’t believe we’re past that point, but maybe we are. In any event, a democracy has the right to decide that it has reached such a point. There is no obligation to be fair to foreigners.

But let’s not kid ourselves that all we care about is obeying the law and all we are asking illegals to do is go home and get in line like everybody else. We know perfectly well that the line is too long, and we are basically telling people to go home and not come back.

Let’s not kid ourselves, either, about who we are telling this to. To characterize illegal immigrants as queue-jumping, lawbreaking scum is seriously unjust. The motives of illegal immigrants–which can be summarized as “a better life”–are identical to those of legal immigrants. In fact, they are largely identical to the motives of our own parents, grandparents and great-grandparents when they immigrated. And not just that. Ask yourself, of these three groups–today’s legal and illegal immigrants and the immigrants of generations ago–which one has proven most dramatically its appreciation of our country? Which one has shown the most gumption, the most willingness to risk all to get to the U.S. and the most willingness to work hard once here? Well, everyone’s story is unique. But who loves the U.S. most? On average, probably, the winners of this American-values contest would be the illegals, doing our dirty work under constant fear of eviction, getting thrown out and returning again and again.

And how about those of us lucky enough to have been born here? How would we do against the typical illegal alien in a “prove how much you love America” reality TV show?

The high court will soon examine D.C.’s handgun ban. In the meantime, life on the street carries on.

By Martha Brant and Stuart Taylor Jr.

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NEWSWEEK

Updated: 12:54 PM ET Nov 24, 2007

Washington, D.C., has the toughest gun-control laws in the country. For 31 years, it has been illegal in the nation’s capital to buy, sell or own a handgun. Residents may keep shotguns or rifles—but only if they are stored unloaded, and either disassembled or disabled with trigger locks. Even so, Damon Sams doesn’t spend much time worrying about restrictions on his right to bear arms. Now 19, the former drug dealer got his first gun, a .380 pistol, at 13, when he started selling marijuana and later crack on a street corner in Southeast Washington. “I wanted people to respect me and be scared of me,” he says. He also wanted protection. As a kid, he’d seen his father shot dead in the street. He’s been shot himself on two separate occasions. Now an aspiring rapper who works with Peaceoholics, a D.C. group that tries to get kids off the streets, Sams no longer has any guns, but he says it wouldn’t be much trouble to get them, ban or no ban. “I wasn’t tripping on D.C. laws,” he says with a smile.

The grand marble Supreme Court building is a few miles and a world away from the neighborhood where Sams grew up. But his life story might as well be exhibit A in a landmark gun-rights case the court will hear next spring. Dick Heller, a 65-year-old security guard who lives in a once drug-ridden D.C. neighborhood, challenged the city’s gun ban. With backing from a group of libertarian attorneys who had been searching for just the right gun case to bring before the Supreme Court, Heller argued the law violates his Second Amendment right to bear arms. It will be the first time the court has heard a Second Amendment case since 1939, when it upheld a federal ban on the interstate transportation of sawed-off shotguns.

Americans have argued for decades about gun-control laws—do they reduce violence or strip weapons from honest citizens while leaving them in the hands of criminals? But remarkably, the justices have never squarely answered the question at the heart of the gun debate: what does the Second Amendment mean? Its wording is maddeningly ambiguous: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Did the Framers intend to protect an individual right to bear arms, or is the amendment a relic from another era, intended to provide for long-defunct state militias, and therefore meaningless today?

The justices will now likely confront that question. If they reject the argument that there is an individual right to bear arms, then the D.C. law and other federal, state and local gun-control measures will be safe from the courts. But if the justices adopt the individual-rights view and strike down the D.C. restrictions, it will set off a wave of new lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of gun-control laws in cities and states nationwide. That doesn’t mean all those laws would be struck from the books. Even if the justices decide there is an individual right to bear arms, they conceivably could still uphold the D.C. ban as a reasonable measure to protect public safety. (Though not likely, there is a possibility that the court will decide the case without getting into any of these details. On a technicality, the justices could rule the Second Amendment does not apply to Washington, a federal enclave ultimately controlled by Congress, and leave it at that.)

Viewed from the streets of D.C., the colloquy over the Second Amendment can seem out of touch. It’s hard to argue that what Washington needs is more guns. So far this year, 169 people have been murdered in the city—77 percent of them victims of shootings. Heller, the man who brought the case, says statistics like that only reinforce his point. One day, he awoke to find a window of his Capitol Hill home punctured by a stray bullet. Another time, someone shot a hole near his front door. To Heller, who is licensed to carry a weapon for his job guarding federal buildings, the law has it backward. “I can protect [federal workers], but at the end of the day they say, ‘Turn in your gun, you can’t protect your home’.”

Gun-control advocates argue the trouble is that most people aren’t nearly as well trained as Heller. Studies show that rates of gun accidents, suicide and murder of family members are far higher in homes with firearms. Linda Singer, D.C.’s attorney general, agrees the gun ban hasn’t done enough to keep down street shootings. But without it, she says, “We would have far more guns in the city.”

As it is, getting a gun is absurdly easy in D.C., which is sandwiched between Maryland and Virginia, where handgun ownership is legal. The gun ban was never a concern when Sams went looking for a new weapon. He’d just call up friends in Maryland who would get him anything he wanted. “I know people with a gun license,” he says casually. “You just throw them a couple hundreds.”

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/72034

 

There’s wide support for a death penalty, but those who carry it out are increasingly uncomfortable.

By Evan Thomas and Martha Brant

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 4:31 PM ET Nov 10, 2007

Texas has long been the Hang ‘em high state. In 2000, it executed convicted prisoners at the rate of almost one a week. Gov. George W. Bush seemed to take pride in turning down appeals for clemency. The “Decider” was known for spending as little as 15 minutes reviewing a death case. In a Talk magazine piece, Tucker Carlson reported that Bush mocked the plea of one double murderer on death row, pursing his lips in mock desperation and whispering, “Please, don’t kill me.” (Bush later said Carlson had “misread, mischaracterized me.”)

Texas still accounts for more than half of all executions in the United States. But a strange thing is happening in the state that has executed more prisoners than any other since the U.S. Supreme Court revived the death penalty in 1976 after a brief hiatus. Texas prosecutors are less willing to seek, and juries are less willing to grant, capital punishment for aggravated murder. In 2006, only 15 Texas convicts were sentenced to death, down from 34 a decade earlier. Texas mirrors a national trend: death-penalty sentences in the 38 states that allow capital punishment dropped from 317 in 1996 to 128 in 2005, the latest year for which statistics are available.

Why the reluctance to populate death row? Polls show popular support for capital punishment stays relatively high, at about 65 percent. But when it comes to carrying out death sentences, the people involved—judges and juries, prosecutors and prison officials—are starting to recoil, or at least pull back. What is acceptable in theory seems less and less tolerable in practice. Indeed, the Supreme Court has called at least a temporary halt to executions while it examines the fine points of killing convicts by pumping lethal chemicals into their veins. “The death penalty may go out with a whimper, not a great moral revolution,” says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

The new reluctance to punish by killing is part of a historical trend. There was a time when death and torture were spectator sports, when crowds flocked to see prisoners drawn and quartered or beheaded. In some parts of the world, flogging and stoning are still public spectacles. But in the 19th century, supposedly “enlightened” states began looking for more-humane ways to serve final justice—to kill people without causing too much suffering to either the victims or their executioners. The authorities tried hanging, firing squads, electrocutions, gas chambers and, more recently, lethal injection. Each method was supposed to be an improvement over the last.

But the results could be ghastly. Too much depended on the uneven skills of the executioners. The hangman’s noose has to be handled just so. Too short a drop and the prisoner slowly strangles. Too long a drop and the prisoner can be decapitated. Witnesses to executions in the electric chair have watched, horrified, as flames shot out of the head of the doomed prisoner. In Arizona in 1992, the state attorney general vomited and the prison warden threatened to quit after observing the agonizingly slow death of a man in a gas chamber. Today not many doctors are willing to play any part in an execution, and prison guards often complain of little or no training.

Lethal injection is less violent than a firing squad and less grisly than the electric chair. In most states, the prisoner is given a “three-drug cocktail”: a sedative to put him to sleep, a paralyzing agent to stop him from struggling (or breathing) and a drug to stop his heart. But, hands shaking, guards sometimes botch inserting the needle, and veins can be hard to find if the inmate was a drug addict. In Ohio, a prisoner raised his head to announce, “It’s not working,” and in Florida, a prisoner sustained chemical burns on his arm while he grimaced for almost a half hour. Inevitably, defense lawyers began to attack the cocktail as “cruel and unusual punishment,” banned by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

The Supreme Court has imposed a de facto moratorium on lethal injection while it waits to hear oral arguments this January in Baze v. Rees, a case that could determine whether, or under what conditions, lethal injection can be used as capital punishment. It may be that states will resort to giving prisoners a massive dose of barbiturates—the preferred method for putting down sick pets. In theory, at least, the high court will uphold a “better” form of lethal injection, setting off a wave of executions. But whether state officials and juries will want to dispose of humans like dogs remains to be seen. A single drug might take longer to work—prolonging the death throes.

Jurors and prosecutors are steering away from the death penalty because they are both more and less afraid: more apprehensive about killing the innocent and less fearful of crime. Over the past decade, the use of DNA testing on wrongly convicted criminals has overturned prison sentences for at least 200 inmates nationwide (about 15 of them sentenced to death). In 2000, Illinois declared a moratorium on executions after 13 death-row inmates were exonerated. Back in the ’80s, when violent crime was surging along with crack-cocaine addiction in cities, Americans demanded retributive justice. But as crime rates fell in the ’90s and the first few years of the new century, jurors became more lenient in capital cases.

At the same time, prosecutors began to be wary of seeking the death penalty. A series of court decisions required that more states provide competent lawyers for the criminally accused in death-penalty cases. Better defense lawyers could stall and maneuver, running up the cost to the state of bringing a capital case. The more-clever lawyers have been especially good at introducing “mitigating circumstances” into these cases, arguing that the abuse suffered by the killer as a child helps to explain the horrible crime he or she committed. Since 1982, according to New Jersey Policy Perspective, a think tank, the state has spent more than $250 million on the death penalty, or about $11 million a year—without executing a single prisoner. With legal costs soaring in death cases, states are finding it cheaper to pay for lifetime prison sentences.

In many states, jurors chose the death penalty because they feared the convicted murderer might get out on parole and kill again. But in Texas, and many other states, jurors can now sentence the convicted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. (The motives of the Texas Legislature in passing this law two years ago were not altogether humane: when the Supreme Court did away with the death penalty for juveniles in 2005, some Texas lawmakers wanted to find a way to put away youthful killers forever.)

Opinion polls show that about 70 percent of Texans still favor the death penalty. But in Dallas, the district attorney, Craig Watkins, is not sure how he feels. “It depends on which day you ask me,” says Watkins, 39. “I’m sitting here at my desk looking at some autopsy photos. So, yeah, I’m for it.” (He was reviewing the 1996 case of a woman who killed her son and now sits on death row.) “But when I come out of church on Sunday morning, I’m against it.”

Two decades ago Watkins could not have been elected in Dallas. He is black, a Democrat and a former defense lawyer. His most famous, or notorious, predecessor was Henry Wade, the Dallas D.A. from 1951 to 1986. The year Wade left office, The Dallas Morning News found a manual used by city prosecutors. It stated: “Do not take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans, or a member of any minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or well educated.” Minorities have been disproportionately sentenced to death— especially if the victim was white. Wade apparently wanted to make sure they got no sympathy votes. Wade, says Watkins, choosing his words judiciously, was “a product of his time.” Watkins is a product of more recent times. In the 2006 election, tough-on-crime didn’t work in Dallas. “My opponent wore the number of people he had sent to death row like a badge of honor,” says Watkins, about the Republican incumbent he beat last year. Watkins’s more benign approach—stressing justice, not vengeance—was mocked as “hug-a-thug” by detractors, but Watkins won. “I see a change in mentality,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of folks coming out who didn’t commit crimes and that gives people pause.” Dallas leads the nation in the number of DNA exonerations for all counties in the United States (14). “In the near future, we will see the death penalty rarely,” he says.

There may be no such thing as a foolproof system for killing people fairly and painlessly. The smallest glitch can make too much of a difference. The last execution before the Supreme Court imposed its moratorium is a case in point. Harris County, Texas—encompassing the city of Houston—has far more executions than most states, so it has had plenty of practice. At 9 a.m. on Sept. 25, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would hear the Baze case challenging the constitutionality of lethal injection. Michael Richard, convicted of rape and murder in 1986, was scheduled for execution that night. His lawyers rushed to file a new motion based on the high court’s ruling, but their computer crashed and they missed the 5 p.m. filing deadline. A judge refused to keep open the state court. Richard was executed at 8:22 p.m.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/69546

Kathleen Parker
Orlando Sentinel
November 7, 2007

When Hillary Clinton fumbled a recent debate question about New York’s plan to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, she helped clarify at least one issue that keeps getting muddied: Illegal immigrants are illegal.

Why, then, are we granting them driver’s licenses?

Thus far, eight states allow illegal immigrants to receive licenses or permits (and 10 states offer in-state tuition) – all in the spirit of making America a better place.

But we don’t want to encourage immigrants to come here illegally.

Gotcha.

The illegal immigrant problem is huge, obviously, and there’s no single solution. But there is one word that would get the ball rolling in the right direction and win a lot of voters’ hearts: disincentivize. Stop making it so attractive to slip through, over and under the border.

As long as we offer jobs, medical treatment, driver’s licenses and in-state tuition to those who come here illegally, why would any right-thinking, would-be immigrant take a number and wait his turn? Why not just throw in the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and free tequila while we’re at it?

Arguments favoring services and privileges for illegal immigrants always point to the broader benefits to society. Healthy immigrants mean a healthier America; an educated populace means fewer jobless dependents; legal drivers are more responsible because, allegedly, they’ll also buy insurance and stick around when they have an accident.

The latter seems unconvincing given that illegal immigrants, by definition, tend not to think legally. In any case, by the same logic we might also say that amnesty is good for the country because then everyone would be legal. Rather than fix something, we simply accommodate circumstances. As in: Kids are having sex anyway, so we’ll just give them condoms.

Advocates for licensing also argue that illegal immigrants can’t get jobs without a driver’s license. Do I hear bingo? Isn’t that the point?

On the one hand, we argue that employers should be penalized for hiring illegal immigrants; on the other, we insist that the immigrants need driver’s licenses because employers demand them. I’m beginning to see how Clinton got so tangled up. You cannot argue rationally in defense of the irrational.

The Monday morning quarterback is, of course, a brilliant seer, and the stands are filled with hindsight prophets this week. Here’s one more shoulda for the pile-on. When NBC’s Tim Russert asked why she thought New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to give illegal immigrants driver’s licenses made sense, Clinton should have simply said:

“It makes sense for states to seek solutions given the federal government’s failure to reform immigration, but I’m not 100 percent satisfied with the licensing plan. Unfortunately, Tim, I’ll need more than 30 seconds to outline my concerns.”

Or something to that effect. Instead, Clinton called for immigration reform. It’s easy to say we need reform. Everybody agrees with that. It’s much harder to say we need to stop rewarding “illegal.”

Clinton even refused to use the term “illegal immigrant,” preferring the blander “undocumented worker,” as though people who cross our border illegally are just like the rest of us except for those darned documents.

They may be nice, hard-working people, but they’re not like other immigrants who, having come here legally, have demonstrated a commitment to the rule of law and fairness.

Surely, we can love our neighbors and be a pro-immigrant nation without granting de facto citizenship to illegal immigrants through a menu of rights and privileges. As is, all that’s missing is the oath – and any meaning attached to it.

Beyond principle, there are practical reasons for denying licenses to illegal immigrants. As some reformers have pointed out, the driver’s license is more than a permit to drive. It’s a nationally recognized ID that implies citizenship, and is the most coveted “breeder document” of terrorists because it allows them access to all the other things they need to blend in – jobs, housing, bank accounts – as well as access to commercial airplanes and rental cars.

Many states still don’t verify applicants’ identities. In May 2001, when Tennessee dropped its requirement that applicants supply a Social Security number, tens of thousands of illegal immigrants applied for licenses, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

There may be no way to solve every aspect of the immigration problem. Certainly, no serious person thinks we can round up 12 million people and deport them. But it would be refreshing if we began to take seriously what it means to be a citizen and stop making it so attractive to be a lawbreaker.

That would make sense.

Michael Barone
U.S. News & World Report
November 6, 2007

October 2007 may turn out to be the month that immigration became a key issue in presidential politics. It hasn’t been, at least in my lifetime.

The Immigration Act of 1965, which turned out to open up America to mass immigration after four decades of restrictive laws, wasn’t one of the Great Society issues Lyndon Johnson emphasized in 1964. The Immigration Act of 1986, which legalized millions of illegal immigrants but whose border and workplace provisions have never been effectively enforced, was a bipartisan measure unmentioned in the debates between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale.

There was no perceptible difference on immigration between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Both favored a comprehensive bill with legalization and guest-worker provisions. John Kerry in 2006 and 2007 voted for immigration bills along the lines supported by Bush.

Now, things look different. In the Democratic debate on Oct. 30, Tim Russert demanded to know whether Hillary Clinton supported New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s policy of issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. The forthright answer: yes and no. A clarifying statement by the Clinton campaign later in the week did not much clarify things: a hedged yes. It was one of several issues on which Clinton seemed to take calculating and ambiguous nonpositions. But it is one that may have major reverberations in the presidential campaign – and in congressional races, as well.

The reason is that the Democrats – and Bush – are out of line with public opinion on the issue. That became clear as the Senate debated a comprehensive immigration bill in May and June. Most Republicans and many Democrats, in the Senate and among the public, turned against the bill. Supporters of the bill tended to ascribe that to something like racism: They just don’t like having so many Mexicans around.

But if you listened to the opponents, you heard something else. They want the current law to be enforced. It bothers them that we have something like 12 million illegal immigrants in our country. It bothers them that most of the southern border is unfenced and unpatrolled. It bothers them that illegal immigrants routinely use forged documents to get jobs – or are given jobs with no documents at all.

You don’t have to be a racist to be bothered by such things. You just have to be a citizen who thinks that massive failure to enforce the law is corrosive to society.

That was apparent to me as I listened to a focus group of Republican voters in suburban Richmond, Va., conducted by Peter Hart for the Annenberg School of Communications. One voter after another complained that the immigration laws were not being enforced. None of them made any derogatory remarks about Latino immigrants – two said they admired how hard they work. They don’t want to see Latinos banished from this country. They want the immigrants here to be here legally.

Which leaves Democratic politicians and political candidates out on a pretty flimsy limb. Most of them reflexively back a comprehensive bill, and some of them (like Bush and a number of Republicans backing such a bill) have dismissed opponents as racists.

Most Democrats have also been backing bills extending various benefits to illegal immigrants, like the Dream Act for college education for illegals brought over as children. There are appealing arguments for such bills. But most voters reject them. And most voters certainly reject driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. That was one of the issues that led to the recall of Gov. Gray Davis in California in 2003.

The Republican presidential candidates have taken note. Only John McCain, a longtime backer of a comprehensive bill, stands apart, and he concedes that voters are demanding tougher enforcement. In the special congressional election in Massachusetts on Oct. 5, the Republican was able to hold the Democrat to 51 percent by stressing immigration as one of his two top issues.

Other Republicans are likely to echo that theme next fall. And the Democratic presidential nominee (unless Chris Dodd gets the nod) is going to have to explain why she or he believes it’s a good idea to give illegal immigrants driver’s licenses.

The last several Democratic nominees could have said that they’re just taking the same position as their Republican opponent. The 2008 nominee won’t be able to say the same of hers or his (unless McCain gets the nod).

“The centrality of illegal immigration to the current discontent about the direction of the country may be taking us back again to a welfare moment,” write the shrewd Democratic strategists James Carville and Stanley Greenberg. Yup.

James P. Pinkerton
Newsday
October 19, 2007

The 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal once observed that mankind is suspended between two infinities – the infinitely large and the infinitely small. And so it is with two figures in the news: Al Gore wishes to speak for the planet, while Bill Cosby wishes to speak to the human heart.

And it’s revealing, given the liberal biases of our culture, that one man receives so much attention and the other man, so little.

Gore, former vice president-turned-pundit-movie star, has chosen, as his topic, the infinitely big. And he has been rewarded hugely: He just won the Nobel Peace Prize, on top of many other awards showered down on him by the elite culture, including an Oscar and an Emmy. So Gore will ascend into the jet stream of world renown – the same left-tilting empyrean occupied by such globetrotters as Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates.

In the meantime, closer to the ground, the comedian-turned-reformer Bill Cosby has joined with Alvin F. Poussaint of Harvard Medical School to write a book, “Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors,” which argues that many of the problems within the black community are self-inflicted, the result of a counterproductive culture of violence and victimhood.

Cosby has been making this point for years – and has been attacked by the left for years. Michael Eric Dyson, speaking for the liberal street-activism left over from the ’60s, wrote an entire book attacking Cosby’s “poisonous” view of black culture.

But Cosby and Poussaint have the cold terrible facts on their side: “In 1950, five out of every six black children were born into a two-parent home. Today that number is less than two out of six.” Yes, white racism exists, but it was worse a half-century ago. Something bad is happening within black culture, and Cosby and Poussaint are not shy about naming it: the celebration of violence and ignorance emblemized in the “gangsta” lifestyle.

The unyielding truth is that any group climbs into the middle class only by embracing middle-class values. This is a “conservative” fact of life that was once equally embraced by liberals, before they “progressed” on to “liberation” as a new goal.

But after decades of disaster, black thinkers such as Cosby and Poussaint – and before them, John McWhorter, Juan Williams and, yes, Clarence Thomas – are leading a moral renaissance among African Americans, which surely counts as the most hopeful social trend in our national life today. And yet with the remarkable exception of NBC’s Tim Russert, who bravely devoted the entire hour of Sunday’s “Meet the Press” to Cosby and Poussaint, the mainstream media seem little interested in this black renaissance.

Why is that? Perhaps because the liberal-leaning elites realize that they are losing the debate over poverty and uplift – the winners being those who speak for hard work, abstinence and delayed gratification.

No wonder the chattering classes, fleeing from their horror of such a “bourgeois” existence, have moved on to new, greener pastures.

But there’s a problem looming ahead for Gore and his many fans: how to radically reduce “greenhouse gases.” The environmentalists have their answer: some sort of global authority to restrict factories and cars – which would, not coincidentally, authorize them to rule the world. But maybe China won’t cooperate. Maybe the Chinese will watch as we shut down our factories – and they keep theirs open. And then who will win the next war? Not a war of polar bears and the Prius, but a real war of ships and airplanes.

If Gore wants to be constructive, he will figure out to how to reduce pollution – while still preserving American industry. If he could do that, he would truly earn the respect and admiration of all Americans.

But in the meantime, Cosby and Poussaint have taken on a challenge that we can win, because the struggle will take place within our own hearts.

Ruling Could Lead To National Hiatus In Lethal Injections

By Robert Barnes and Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 18, 2007; A01

The Supreme Court stopped the execution of Virginia death row inmate Christopher Scott Emmett yesterday, a move that legal experts said might signal a nationwide halt to lethal injections until the justices decide next year whether the procedure amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

The court granted the stay of execution just four hours before Emmett was to be put to death. It is the second time the justices have stopped an execution since agreeing to decide whether lethal injections carry the potential for pain that would violate constitutional standards.

“I think this is a de facto moratorium,” said Douglas A. Berman, a sentencing expert at Ohio State University’s law school. Since almost all executions are carried out by lethal injection, he said a halt “would mean the most profound hiatus in the operation of the death penalty in at least two decades.”

The justices review applications for stays on a case-by-case basis and gave no indication what their decision means for other death row inmates. They gave no reason for halting Emmett’s execution, saying only that the stay would last until a federal appeals court in Richmond rules on the case “or further order of this court.”

Emmett’s attorneys have brought numerous appeals, and the Supreme Court turned down his latest Oct. 1. Emmett, 36, beat a co-worker to death with a brass lamp in a Danville, Va., motel room in 2001 and then stole his money to buy crack.

“The Supreme Court has spoken, and we will follow their decision,” said David Clementson, a spokesman for Virginia Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell (R), who had urged that the execution be carried out.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D), who previously had delayed Emmett’s execution so the justices could consider his latest appeal, said in a statement that he “had no reason to question the prosecutor’s decision to seek the death penalty or the jury’s decision that death was an appropriate punishment.”

The court’s action spared Kaine, who personally opposes the death penalty but has overseen four executions in his time as governor, from having to make the decision to either halt the execution or allow it to go forward before the justices decide whether lethal injection is constitutional.

Other governors and courts are facing the same question. Executions by lethal injection have been delayed in at least six states, including Texas, which leads the nation in executions, since the court announced Sept. 25 that it was taking up the issue by accepting a Kentucky case. Other states had suspended the use of lethal injections because of questions about it.

“I think you’ll see that very few states want to be the outliers when the court seems ready to step in and stop” the planned executions, Berman said.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center, agreed. “I believe this stay in Virginia, combined with previous stays in a number of other states, confirms that a moratorium on all lethal injections is in place in this country until the Supreme Court rules on the issue,” he said.

Lethal injection is the primary method of execution in 37 of the 38 states that have the death penalty. Nebraska uses electrocutions, but no executions are scheduled there.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director and general counsel for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which favors capital punishment and opposes expansion of criminal rights, said he had hoped the court would explain its reasoning in its case-by-case review of the stay requests. Another appeal, from Georgia, is likely to reach the court this week.

If the court’s action amounts to a moratorium, Scheidegger said, it would dilute “the deterrence effect” of the death penalty and “cause more innocent people to die.”

Even without a halt to the use of lethal injections, the pace of executions nationally is the slowest in a decade. A Texas execution carried out on the day the court announced it had accepted the Kentucky case was the last.

The case, Baze v. Rees, does not question the constitutionality of the death penalty but whether lethal injection violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

Since accepting the case, the justices have issued stays in two executions that lower courts in Texas and Virginia had said could move forward. Tuesday night, they refused to vacate a stay that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit had issued for an Arkansas death row inmate.

Justice Antonin Scalia dissented from that decision, saying that the appeals court applied the “mistaken premise” that the court’s decision to take Baze“calls for the stay of every execution in which an individual raises an Eighth Amendment challenge to the lethal injection protocol.”

No other justice signaled agreement with Scalia, and he did not note a dissent in the stay of Emmett’s execution.

States began using lethal injection in 1978 on the grounds that it was more humane than electrocution and the gas chamber. Almost all the states that employ lethal injection use the same combination of three chemicals: sodium thiopental, a barbiturate intended to render the inmate unconscious at the start of the procedure; pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the muscles; and potassium chloride, to stop the heart.

Studies have shown that if the barbiturate is not administered properly, some inmates might be fully aware as the paralyzing agent cuts off their ability to breathe. Moreover, pancuronium is known to cause severe pain, but the inmate would be unable to express that.

Maryland’s method of lethal injection is being challenged in federal court, and the state’s highest court ruled in December that state officials had not properly adopted the regulations for carrying it out. Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), an opponent of capital punishment, has delayed issuing those regulations.

Virginia’s Clementson said the commonwealth’s procedures have been reviewed by the courts “and always found to be humane and constitutional.” The state has no more executions scheduled this year.

U.S. needs programs to keep kids out of groups in first place

The Baltimore Sun
October 16, 2007

The following editorial appeared Monday in the Baltimore Sun.

The proliferation of gangs in American cities has led to calls for new federal laws and tougher penalties to stem gang violence. Locking up more gang members may deplete their ranks, but only until the next teenager becomes the newest recruit. It’s the wrong approach to the real solution, which is keeping youngsters from joining a gang in the first place.

We question the need for new laws because there are few crimes unique to gangs. Their members – no matter their colors – murder, steal, sell drugs, extort money, beat up rivals and intimidate witnesses.

Prosecutors in Maryland and elsewhere have successfully used federal laws to convict and imprison notorious gang members, but what’s lacking is a sustained public effort to protect kids from the lure of gangs.

Federal legislation pending in Congress would commit $1.1 billion for law enforcement and prevention efforts to attack gang problems that are consuming manpower and money in cities as different as Baltimore and Boise.

The Senate bill, sponsored by Dianne Feinstein, of California, would criminalize gang activity that is already a crime and outlaw recruitment for the purposes of committing a crime for the gang.

While the Feinstein bill provides $447 million for prevention, its thrust is enforcement. But keeping kids out of gangs in the first place would save millions of dollars now spent to arrest, convict and imprison them as lawbreakers.

Experts say that kids who join gangs are looking for the family support or stable home they lack. They need comprehensive programs in and out of school that nurture kinship and camaraderie among youths and, more obviously, stronger families. Baltimore, like other cities, must rely on a patchwork of programs to serve kids at risk for gang membership.

The Feinstein bill would increase funding for prevention programs, but the effort should be robust enough to underwrite an extensive campaign to counter gang life.

The legislation rightly recognizes the increasing problem of witness intimidation and dedicates $270 million to combat it. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, of Maryland, has been a forceful advocate for this aid because of Baltimore’s experience with witnesses who have been victimized.

When House members take up the Feinstein bill and other anti-gang measures, they should remember that tougher enforcement alone leads to only one place – prison.