The collapse of the Republican Party is due in no small part to the fact that they believe Newt is an intellectual. Now he's a Catholic intellectual, and poor Flannery O'Connor must be spinning in her grave.
I love Charley Pierce, and I would be delighted to see some prosecutions-- or a lot of them. I think it is sickening that the scumbags that conjured up rationalizations for obvious criminal acts get a pass, but low level dopes like Lynde England are put through elaborate show trials. That said, however, I think Mr. Pierce is being just a tad disingenuous when he says that the rational for the Obama DOJ's decision to decline prosecution is that the American people don't want to see such prosecutions. I don't know that anyone knows whether that is true or not, but for sure Congress would be unable to function properly if it were decided to go forward with a full-blown criminal investigation-- or even a Congressional investigation, at least at this point. (Yea gods, it would probably fall to Joe Lieberman to chair the committee-- can you imagine?) Deciding to prosecute would turn the prosecutions into the main business of the country, and there is quite a bit more business in front of us that should take priority. It is to Obama's credit that he is pushing as much as he is on as many things as he is-- something that he said he would do, and something that is systemically so difficult that during the campaign he was criticized for promising to undertake. The fact is that we need health care reform, and education reform, and to restructure the national defense, and to restore the US leadership posture abroad-- and oh, yeah, we have these two catastrophic wars, and am I leaving anything out? Oh, right, the tanking national and international economy. I'm all for hounding John Woo in the streets, but he's small potatoes relative to the work that desperately needs to get done.
My wife started her career with the Kings County DA's office, and although most of our friends from that time have moved on I still feel a connection to it. I'll be interested to read about the experience. The deliberative process-- the reason you are there-- is a worthy subject, but I also think it would be fun to hear about the more mundane, mechanical aspects of your Grand Jury service. Were the chairs comfortable? How were the acoustics? Where'd you go for lunch? What was your interaction with the courthouse staff like?
Matthew Daly- "the richness of choice and information and all that gooey democratic freedom stuff" is really something of a sham in the context of multiple party elections in non-parliamentary systems because of the operation of the voter's paradox. What you end up with is everybody's second choice, rather than anybody's first choice. Worst case scenario? We just had eight years of it. I stand corrected on John V. Lindsay-- he was cross-endorsed, and the Liberal lable made him more palatable to some voters than he might otherwise have been.
New York's minor parties are mostly patronage vehicles. In exchange for a ballot line the successful major party is expected to find a spot or two on some payroll for a member of the minor party. You may recall the old Liberal Party. That turned into a pure patronage play for its chair, a cat named Raymond Harding, and his family. There have been people elected on those tickets-- John V. Lindsay was elected Mayor as a Liberal, and James L. Buckley was elected to the Senate as a Conservative Party candidate. Split support was what turned the trick in those instances-- Buckley ran against a Rockefeller Republican, Charles Goodell, and a liberal Democrat, Richard Ottinger. Back then a lot of New Yorkers split their tickets because the Republicans were quite a bit more moderate on social issues. The Democratic base in NYC split, and Buckley waltzed in. Lindsay's case was similar.
As I recall the late Elliott Wilk was elected to the bench as a Liberal. He'd been asked to stand for the office by the party in order to fill out the ticket, and the Democrats screwed up their filing and didn't have a slate. Those are the instances of someone actually winning something that I can recall-- for the most part the minor parties are a sham, useful primarily as a screening device in the Right to Life instance, merely clutter most of the time, and a near occasion of sin in many cases.
One of my happiest travel memories includes sitting at a long table in a Swiss inn somewhere, drinking wine, eating Raclette and cornichons, telling lies and laughing with a group of new friends. I didn't know you could get the cheese in the US, and now I'm going to have to hunt it down
Interestingly, it thinks my blog stuff is female, but the pseudonymous style column I write gets male grades. I guess that's a good thing-- the column isn't supposed to sound like me-- but I feel kinda weird about it.
It is a myth to assert that universal single-payer health coverage would be too expensive. We have the most technologically advanced medical system in the world-- which already enjoys substantial governmental subsidization-- but access to it is limited in weird and almost arbitrary ways. The fix will not be particularly popular with many practitioners, but needs to happen. Subsidize medical education in exchange for a service commitment to free public medical service-- eliminating the medical profession's reliance on the argument that the "free market" is its due, owning to the cost of training. Expand the VA system to include all comers. And let anyone who wants to opt out -- providers or patients-- do so.
I don't know a single doctor who won't tell you that health care is a "right". The problem is that the compensation infrastructures that we have in place now consume a substantial component of medical overhead. That has to change, and universal single-payer is the way to do it. All we want is the same healthcare that every member of Congress enjoys. Is that so much?
Liberty Island is New Jersey. The Constitution makes the Supreme Court the trial court for cases between the several states-- in this instance (it was within the last ten years) the Supreme Court appointed a Special Master, pursuant to stipulation between the parties, and the ultimate finding of fact wa in favor of the Garden State. (1997 WL 291594 if you are interested-- the Supremes affirmed the finding.)
BTW, I am loving the CD. The day will come when you are playing out and I am overnight in the City, at lose ends and looking for some live music. I'm looking forward to it.
I can't believe I just read that entire thread. I always thought of myself as a leg man.
My fax reads:
"The FDA has banned the use of Cylert in the U.S., a crisis for persons who suffer from narcolepsy, many of whom have found that this medication is the only effective treatment.
I am aquainted with one such individual, and am writing because her situation is familiar to me.
The FDA's decision should be the subject of hearings by your subcommittee, and some means must be found to bring about the production of Cylert.
Thank you for your attention and consideration. Please keep me advised as to your actions on this issue."
I offer it as a template only-- form letters are worse than useless. By all means, however, ask to be kept advised-- put it on them to do something, even if it's just to report back.
I'm totally loving the tracks on the band site. I won't be in town, but put me down for a CD.
What I still don't get is how Howard Dean managed to lose the Democratic nomination. He plays hard-- but fair-- he is by g-d right thinking, and he actually has ideas but what needs to be done and what should be done, and how we should be doing it. Of course it's true that not being in the Senate makes it easier to be these things, but right now I can think of very few national Democrats that possess these qualities.
Vardibidian makes an interesting point in saying, "I think there were a lot of people, particularly Senate Democrats, who were not prepared for the breadth of the lies coming from the White House, and who felt that there must be some kernel of truth at the middle of it."
I think that the majority of people in the country were (and probably are) unwilling to accept that our government is being run by the worst kind of thugs. They stole the election in 2000, and we have closed our eyes to that, and to just about everything else they have done since, in the foolish belief that Bush, Cheney, and the rest of them are, at a minimum, acting out of the good faith belief that what they are doing is in the best interests of the US and the world. We just don't want to admit that we have been so stupid as to have turned the controls over to a group of criminals who, on a world historical basis, can be number with the worst of all time.
And guess what? They are consolidating their position. By mocking dissent, they have neuralized the ability of the opposition to even critique their policies.
John D says it all: Powell's "proof" was insulting to the intelligence of anyone who was paying attention, and anyone who says that they found it convincing is admitting either that they are too stupid to be trusted to go to the store and come back with the right change, or that they were already receptive to the case he was making. To this day I'm not so sure he belived it himself-- I always thought he was smarter than that.
I had a professor in law school who used to say, "When I started practice I didn't know how to do a lot of things, and I know I could have done a better job for some of my clients. When I was more experienced, I sometimes got better results than my clients actually deserved. In the end, justice was done." Of course, he was trying to be ironic-- most of the time splitting the baby and justifying it by pointing to the unhappiness of both parties is intellectual laziness, or dishonesty, or some combination of both.
The jurisprudence of religious displays is incoherent, and these two decisions merely illustrate this. In truth, there is very little in our legal system that derives from the Big 10-- mostly the Commandments are religious rules. I am the Lord Thy G-d. Thou Shalt Not Take the Lord's name in vain. Keep Holy the Sabbath. No doubt there are those who would like to see these principles enshrined in civil law, but that's not the way our system actually is. If you go with the Catholic version, then you are looking at several rules that cover how we think-- no coveting. That's not what the law does,either. So all this stuff about the Ten Commandments being foundational really comes down to no killing, no lying, no stealing and no adultery. Basic, but hardly original. I don't mind seeing Moses with the tablets in courthouse murals, but holding the rules themselves out as the basis for Anglo-American law is crossing the line, I think.
It is hard for me to imagine that anyone could think that an event like the Olympics would be a good idea for NYC. New York is hard enough without that sort of circus-- on any given day the people who live there have dry cleaning to pick up, offices to get to and from, groceries to shop for-- and each of these tasks are more complicated than a full day in most other cities. Every now and then the President comes to town, or the UN is in session, or a circuit breaker blows and suddenly the level of difficulty assigned to simply getting cross town goes up ten points.
What straphanger would want to add to this sort of complexity?
I might add, as a Bills fan and as a parent of children in NYS' public schools, that there are loads of better ways for the City and the State to spend the money.
I was reminded of the scene in The Big Sleep when Marlow is trying to figure out what the deal is with the phony bookstore. (It is a porno front, and a blackmail operation.) He asks for a "Ben Hur" 1850-- "with the errata on the 56th page." (I don't have it at hand-- that's not the exact quote.) In the movie the following exchange then occurs:
Philip Marlowe: You do sell books, hmm?
Agnes Lowzier: What do those look like, grapefruit?
Philip Marlowe: Well, from here they look like books.
Marlowe then goes across the street to a real bookstore, and the clerk there recognizes that "Ben Hur" is a contemporary novel.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 4 |
| 2008 | 2 |
| 2007 | 3 |
| 2006 | 4 |
| 2005 | 7 |
| 2004 | 1 |
| 2003 | 4 |
| 2002 | 1 |
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