Attention Internet Students

Here is your next assignment (assignment 2):

2301: Using your email searching skills, do the following: Get comfortable with the way that the terms "liberal" and "conservative" are used in contemporary discourse. Then look up the respective positions taken by the two principle presidential candidates on issues like the economy, social and moral issues, energy, immigration and more. What are the liberal positions on these issues and what are the conservative positions? Is there a key ideological distinction between the two candidates on these issues or do they take similar stands? On which side does the American public tend to stand? Which do you think is the winning side of the issue?

Email me 500 words on this subject by Monday September 8th.

2302: Read the three Federalist Papers assigned in your syllabus. You'll note that page on the wiki also contains the Anti-Federalist response (you are not responsible for reading them--but ought to anyway). Outline each of these and point out the way that each takes human nature into consideration in the design of the republic.

Email me 500 words on this subject by Monday September 8th.

Feel free to use the comments section below this post to ask questions. I do read them and will respond if necessary.

Out of Town Until Sunday

Note: I will be out of town until Sunday night. I will try to stay on top of my emails, but can't guarantee that. On Monday I will start adding material to the two wiki pages devoted to the readings and assignments for week two. Remember that we do not have class on Monday due to Labor Day.

2301 week two

2302 week two

Remember that I want one full page written on the fallacies assignment. When we get back in I want you to have hard copy with you so we can discuss it in class. Internet students, please email it to me.

A Note to Internet Students

Apparantly there are about 40 of you, but I've heard from maybe five. You need to get in touch--but how would you be able to read this if haven't touched base?

hmmmmm.

For those who are following along: In case I haven't been clear enough, please email me all your work to my ACC address: kjefferies@alvincollege.edu.

A Witch! May We Burn Her?

A classic exercise in logical analysis:

The Witch Scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

An Amazing Elections Website

Check it out:

Voting America.

It contains dynamic representation of American election results spannign over a century and a half.

Thanks to ACC Head Librarian Tom Bates for pointing this out to me.

Fallacies and Marketing

I'm going to throw a monkey wrench into the fallacies assignment. I've asked you to consider whether the messages we hear from and about the candidates are logical or fallacious, and to give me examples of fallacious arguments, but might also want to think about how successful logical arguments are.

Are simple messages that appeal to emotion or fear or whatever, more effective than logical arguments. A lot of the money pumped into campaigns is spent on determining what messages work best. Polls and focus groups are used to ensure that messages hit their targets.

Is there something in our DNA that makes us more receptive to emotional arguments than logical ones?

Links to follow

Blogging About Myself

Thanks To Rick Casey for my 15 seconds of fame.

Professor worries TAKS test breeds ignorant voters.

The comments are my favorite part. Here's this choice bit: Question. Why is it that most 4 year degrees in collage now take 5 years? Could it be because our kids are not prepared from high school and are taking courses the first year to get up to the level of ability required in collage?

It's so sad that we aren't preparing kids to excel in collage, or macrame either.

I need a drink.

The Bad News is that Gas Prices Went up to $4 a Gallon

The good news is that traffic fatalities haven't been this low in almost 50 years:

Experts who have studied motor vehicle fatality trends said one reason for the dramatic decline is that people are reducing their nonessential driving first, which is often leisure driving at night or on weekends. That also happens to be riskier than daylight commuting on congested highways at lower speeds.

Teenage and elderly drivers — who also have higher accident rates — are more likely to feel the pinch of higher gas prices, and thus may be cutting back more than other drivers. Federal data also shows that driving declines have been more dramatic on rural roads, which have higher accident rates than urban highways.

And, some drivers are simply trying to save on gas by slowing down, which also decreases risk. "It could be that the safety benefits of driving slower are proportionately greater than the fuel economy benefits," Sivak said.

The steepness of the fatality decline underscores a point several experts have made recently — that raising the price of gas is more effective than almost any other means of reducing fatalities.

So does this mean the rise has been worth it?

Warning--Don't Make a Fallacious Argument Yourself

After talking to a couple of you, I'm worried that this exercise might turn into a chance to whine about candidates you don]t like.

That's a great way to get a low grade, and bore me to tears. You'll note that at no point did I ask: "Tell me what you don't like about X." That's a great way to fall into a fallacious way of reasoning yourself. Your emotions about a candidate begin to govern your assessments of the truth.

Stick to the arguments made by others and make an objective analysis of that argument. When I want your opinions, I will ask for them.

Obama's Economic Agenda

The New York Times provides an overview of Barack Obama's economic plans.

Save this for when we discuss the contemporary state of ideology. Is this a liberal plan? Are there conservative aspects to it? How do we know?

About that Fallacy Assignment

If you are not sure how to start on the first assignment, here are a few links that should help search for arguments that may or may not be fallacious:

1--The McCain website has a nice "bad stuff about Joe Biden" page.
2--The Obama website has a page confronting McCain's accusations.
3--The Republican National Committee's research briefings site digs the dirt on Obama.
4--The Democratic National Committee's press release page has loads of negativity on McCain.

You might also like to check out the following site: FactCheck.org to get their assessment of the truth or falsity behind recent adds.

There's more out there, but this gives you a head start on the assignment.

Rulemaking: The Endangered Species Act

From today's Washington Post, word of administrative changes in how the Endangered Species Act will be implemented:

The Bush administration yesterday proposed a regulatory overhaul of the Endangered Species Act to allow federal agencies to decide whether protected species would be imperiled by agency projects, eliminating the independent scientific reviews that have been required for more than three decades.

The new rules, which will be subject to a 30-day per comment period, would use administrative powers to make broad changes in the law that Congress has resisted for years. Under current law, agencies must subject any plans that potentially affect endangered animals and plants to an independent review by the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service. Under the proposed new rules, dam and highway construction and other federal projects could proceed without delay if the agency in charge decides they would not harm vulnerable species.

This appears to be an additional attempt to expand executive powers at the expense of the legislature.

Is McCain's Strategy Working?

The Washinton Times indicates that it just might be. The story suggests that race may play a factor in a shift away from Obama.

State Republican Party leaders interviewed by The Washington Times said fear of a far-left Obama presidency is warming once-skeptical voters to Sen. John McCain, fueling growing enthusiasm among Republicans that Mr. McCain's more aggressive campaigning can lead to victory.

"It appears that the more that Obama speaks, the more afraid folks in South Carolina get," said Spartanburg County Republican Party Chairman Rick Beltram. "We are seeing 'die-hard' Democrats tell us that Obama is not their man.

"We are expecting the white Democrats to be fleeing the Democratic ship when November 4 comes around - plus, the Democratic candidate [Bob Conley] that is running against Senator [Lindsey] Graham is also running away from the Democrats, and you can quote me on that," Mr. Beltram said.

In union-dominated Michigan, a state targeted by both major parties, state Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis said he is seeing signs that independents and Reagan Democrats are moving toward Mr. McCain.

"People who may have been apprehensive about McCain now see this race as potentially winnable," Mr. Anuzis said.

The latest daily tracking poll by Gallup shows the presidential contest in a statistical dead heat, with the Illinois Democrat three percentage points ahead of the Arizona Republican, 46 percent to 43 percent. National tracking polls of likely voters

Campaigning: Money Talks

If you want to know why River Oaks does as well as it does, it helps to understand just how much money flows from that neighborhood into the hands of Republican and Democratic office seekers.

Campaigning: Another peak inside the McCain Campaign

From today's NYT:

...Mr. McCain is called the White Tornado by some people who have worked for him over the years. Throughout his presidential campaign, he has been the overseer of a kingdom of dissenting camps, unclear lines of command and an unsettled atmosphere that keeps aides constantly on edge.

Even now, after a shake-up that aides said had brought an unusual degree of order to Mr. McCain’s disorderly world in the last month, two of his pollsters are at odds over parts of the campaign’s message, while past and current aides have been trading snippy exchanges debating the wisdom of attack advertisements he has aimed at Mr. Obama.

In an interview, Mr. McCain said he believed an organization consisting of sometimes colliding centers of power made sure that a candidate, or a president, reached fully informed decisions. “You’ve got to have competing opinions,” he said.

“I think a certain amount of tension is very healthy, and a certain amount of different views,” he said. “Because of the bubble that a president is in, and the bubble that a candidate is in, sometimes you find out afterwards something that — ‘Oh boy, I wish I had heard thus and such and so and so.’ So I appreciate and want some of the tension; I don’t want too much of it, obviously, because we have to have certain efficiencies. But I think there is a balance there.”

Mr. McCain hungers for information. He can regularly be seen reading newspapers from cover to cover, and aides say he embraces the briefing books given to him each night. His aides say he is especially studious when it comes to economic issues, an area in which he has admitted weakness. A former fighter pilot, Mr. McCain preaches the need to improvise under pressure, subscribing to the military maxim that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The bursts of temper fellow senators have endured are rarely directed at his underlings. Indeed Mr. McCain has a history of being surrounded by people who are intensely loyal to him — and remain so even after being pushed off his ship.

But if Mr. McCain’s management style has kept him well informed and flexible, its drawbacks have been especially evident in the many often turbulent months since he began his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. It offers a contrast to the more rigidly controlled and nearly corporate management style that has marked the campaign of Mr. Obama, his Democratic counterpart. If anything, it recalls the freewheeling ways of the last Republican senator to win his party’s presidential nomination, Bob Dole in 1996.

Agenda Setting: The Sherman Bus Cash

Behind most every regulation lies a tragedy. Today's Chron tells us that the bus crash in Sherman (17 dead at this moment) is likely to lead to bus safety reform:

...the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has announced its intention to do more testing aimed at developing standards for seat belts and safety glass in charter buses.

But the agency has stopped short of mandating the same for the large yellow school buses, making it optional. U.S. Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, are sponsoring a bill that would bypass safety testing on charter buses by immediately requiring such protections. Brown became involved in the bill after seven baseball players from Bluffton University in his state died when their charter bus fell off an overpass in Atlanta on their way to a tournament.

Lack of seat belts was cited by the National Transportation Safety Board as one of the causes of the injuries. "It's all about cost, and we're looking for the money to help pay for bus safety," Forman said. Forman noted the most protected person on a charter bus is the driver, who has a seat belt and a laminated windshield.

Haven't we been through this before?

Enemy Deprivation Syndrome

This is a phrase I picked up from a Samantha Power essay on foreign policy. Presumably it refers to an ear when an enemy does not exist and interests that benefit from having a concentrated enemy suffer.

Democratic Platform circa 2008

Click here for comments on a preliminary version of the Democrat's 2008 platform, and here for background information on the platform writing process itself.

Creative Budgeting

Michael Granof, an accounting professor at the University of Texas writing in the New York Times, discusses the budgetary tricks that state government are going through in order to balance their books. It involves techniques where bonds are issued in order to finance the purchase of one part of government to another. The purchase is then entered into the books as revenue, which balances the books, without actually increasing revenue. All involve some way of ensuring that current obligations are passed onto the next generation:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California wants to reduce his state’s deficit by borrowing money from the future. His plan is to issue $15 billion in bonds that are backed by future lottery revenues. More than a third of that money would be used to ease California’s current-year deficit.

Borrowing from the future to pay for the present is, unfortunately, becoming routine. In 2006, Indiana leased a toll road to a foreign consortium from Australia and Spain. The state received $3.8 billion upfront by surrendering the next 75 years of toll revenues. Other states have sold tobacco bonds that provide one-time infusions of cash — in return for forgoing 25 years of payments from cigarette companies that were supposed to pay for health care related to tobacco-caused illnesses.

Another trick is to move up the due dates on merchant-collected sales taxes from early next year to late in the current year. These taxes then are counted as revenues for the current year.

Other states have moved employee paydays from the last day of the month to the first day of the next month. This enables them to eliminate an entire month of employee pay from the year’s budget, because for one year there are only 11 paydays instead of 12. In subsequent years, the budget includes 11 paydays from salaries earned in the current year and one payday for money earned the previous year.

States also transfer money from a “rainy day” reserve account to the general fund and then count the amount transferred as revenue. This is the equivalent of solving personal fiscal problems by moving money from a savings account to a checking account and calling it “income.”

Pensions are the ideal budget item for imaginative accounting. When pension expenditures are decreased, the consequences of the cuts may not show up for decades. States can simply fail to pay the amount that is actuarially sound into pension funds. The retirement checks that state employees eventually receive under a defined-benefit plan are determined by the promises incorporated into the plan, not by the timing of a state’s contributions. In effect, the state pays now or it pays later.

All this while investments in the future are cut for current economic gain. Sucks to be young.

Presidential Advising: Cheney and Addington on Bush

Here are a few q and a's in the New Republic which touch on how President Bush and VP Cheney used information in deciding whether and how to torture detainees:

Many have wondered what transformed Vice President Cheney into the Prince of Darkness. Why do you think he embraced Addington's radical legal vision so enthusiastically?

Of course, I don't really know; you can't get inside of his head. I wish I'd been able to interview him. I certainly think he had a pre-existing political agenda, which was to strengthen the executive branch. But people I've interviewed who know him well, including an old family friend who really likes him, said that he was altered in some profound way by 9/11. This particular friend said that he became steely, that he had seen something terrible that he could no longer talk about. And, of course, Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief-of-staff to Colin Powell, actually comes out and says that he thinks Cheney became paranoid. Granted, that's a clinical term, and Lawrence Wilkerson is not a doctor. But there's more than ample evidence that he became obsessed with the terrorist threat, and you could question whether his judgment became skewed.

I think one of the interesting questions is whether after 9/11 the top people in the Bush administration didn't almost poison themselves with information. They removed all the filters on the kind of intelligence information that went to the president and vice president and other top people in the administration. Prior to 9/11, the CIA and the FBI screened out all the unreliable information about what kinds of threats were coming in. But after 9/11, Cheney in particular wanted to see everything. He no longer trusted that the CIA was able to screen it properly. So, according to one of the people I quote, Roger Cressey, who was at the National Security Council at the time, they started just bombarding themselves every morning with these reports filled with what Cressey describes as mostly garbage, but that were completely alarming. And so, in the words of Jim Comey again, he describes it as locking yourself in a room with Led Zeppelin every morning. You would just lose your mind.

Why did Bush turn over so much of his presidency to Cheney and Addington? Did he understand the radicalism of the positions taken in his name?

This is such a good question. I've interviewed people who are more moderate than Cheney in the administration, who like to think that if they had only been able to get more information to President Bush, he would have put the brakes on. And they blame Cheney and Addington and a small group of others around them for too radically narrowing the information that reached President Bush. Yet there were memos that did reach the president. He certainly had the basic outlines of what was going on. What I'm told is that Cheney really knew how to play him, and would say in meetings, If we don't continue to use the most extreme possible methods on terror suspects, if anything goes wrong, you'll be blamed. And nobody ever did a Plan B kind of analysis to see whether this radical course in fact was necessary for national security. The CIA never sent in a team to see whether they got better information out of torturing people or out of not torturing people. There was no alternative program that was ever given to the president about how to treat terrorist suspects.

What about Jack Goldsmith's thesis that Bush's excesses resulted from a failure to recognize that presidential power is the power to persuade. Was Bush's problem that he had contempt for politics?

No, I think that, again, what Cheney convinced Bush of was that if they did not go to the farthest possible regions of the law, the most outermost edges of what you could do to detainees, then they would be shirking their responsibility in terms of protecting the country. So rather than having a policy debate and a political debate on what the right thing to do was, and what the smartest thing to do was, they simply let the lawyers define policy by setting the outer limits of the law. You have John Yoo saying, "Well, I'm just a lawyer; I'm just telling you what you can do legally. It's above my pay grade to have a policy debate." But his judgments became the policy because they didn't have that debate.

Inherent Powers: Did Lincoln Have the Constitutional Power to Emancipate the Slaves in the South?

Yes, because it was during a civil war and he claimed it to fall under his war powers:

The Civil War transformed Lincoln from a president into the constitutional commander in chief of the army and navy. What that meant, exactly, was far from clear. But that status might also give him yet another route toward emancipation. International law recognized that, in time of war, military commanders had the authority to suspend the normal operations of civil law and rule by decree. Only one American general—Andrew Jackson—had actually ever done this on American soil. But there had also never been a civil war in America before. And so Lincoln began gradually flexing his “war powers”—he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, he called up armies of volunteers into federal service, and he imposed a blockade of the Confederacy.

Of course, at each point, Taney and the Supreme Court hotly contested Lincoln’s use of these “war powers.” And this made him leery of pressing the “war powers” to the point of emancipating the South’s slaves. But by the summer of 1862, the military aspect of the war was going very badly. Relying on the labor of its slaves, the Confederacy was able to field armies that could easily hold their own against Lincoln’s armies. And his own generals—chief among them George B. McClellan, the commander of the Army of the Potomac—were politically unsympathetic to emancipation and sulky in taking orders from Lincoln. And to make matters worse, Delaware turned down the buy-out plan. If Lincoln waited longer, he might have victorious rebel armies surrounding Washington; or he might have mutinous generals threatening to seize the government for themselves. We “must change our tactics or lose the game,” Lincoln announced, and on July 22, 1862, Lincoln read to his cabinet a draft of an emancipation proclamation, threatening to decree the freeing of the slaves as a “fit and necessary war measure for suppressing” the rebellion. When McClellan and his army finally defeated the Confederates at Antietam in September, Lincoln published the proclamation and gave the Confederates 100 days to end the rebellion or the emancipation would take effect. The 100 days came and went without any repenting on the part of the Confederates, and on January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law.

Into military law, that is. Lincoln had no more civil authority as president to emancipate slaves in 1863 than he had had at the beginning of the presidency, and every lawyer in the country knew it. This is why the proclamation did two very peculiar things: first, it based its emancipating authority strictly on Lincoln’s “power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief . . . in time of actual armed rebellion.” Second, it limited the reach of emancipation only to the slaves in “the States and parts of States . . . this day in rebellion against the United States.” The four slave states that had not joined the Confederacy (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri) were not “in rebellion” and so Lincoln’s “war powers” had no reach over them.

Pardons: Is It's Necessary to Find Out the Truth About Torture?

Stuart Taylor, writing for Newsweek says so:

President George W. Bush ought to pardon any official from cabinet secretary on down who might plausibly face prosecution for interrogation methods approved by administration lawyers. (It would be unseemly for Bush to pardon Vice President Dick Cheney or himself, but the next president wouldn't allow them to be prosecuted anyway—galling as that may be to critics.) The reason for pardons is simple: what this country needs most is a full and true accounting of what took place. The incoming president should convene a truth commission, with subpoena power, to explore every possible misdeed and derive lessons from it. But this should not be a criminal investigation, which would only force officials to hire lawyers and batten down the hatches.

Pardons would further a truth commission's most important goals: to uncover all important facts, identify innocent victims to be compensated, foster a serious conversation about what U.S. interrogation rules should be, recommend legal reforms, pave the way for appropriate apologies and restore America's good name. The goals should not include wrecking the lives of men and women who made grievous mistakes while doing dirty work—work they had been advised by administration lawyers was legal, and which they believed was necessary to prevent terrorist mass murder.

A criminal investigation would only hinder efforts to determine the truth, and preclude any apologies. It would spur those who know the most to take the Fifth. Any prosecutions would also touch off years of partisan warfare. The lesson for occupants of the toughest government jobs—if the next administration could find people willing to fill them—would be that saving innocent lives is less important than covering their posteriors. Any hope of a civil conversation about lessons we need to learn would be dead.

The need for truth outweighs the prosecution of criminal behavior. Ring true? Or does this simply allow an out for any administration to claim it is above the law and do as it chooses when in charge?

Elections: The Age of Helms

A great recent article in Salon outlines Jesse Helms' influence on politics. He gave the Southern oligarchy a quasi-populist face which allowed it to preserve its privileges:

Where Jesse Helms came from was the Third World, the American South between World War I and the civil rights revolution. In the generation before Helms was born the son of a police chief in 1921, the Southern oligarchy had been terrified by Populism. The greatest threat to the white elite was the revolt of white workers and farmers. To forestall that possibility, the Southern state governments, in the decade before World War I, used literacy tests, poll taxes and other measures to eliminate not only all blacks but half of the white Southern population from the electorate. In the election of 1936, voter turnout in Georgia was 16.1 percent, 13 percent in Mississippi, and only 10.7 percent in South Carolina. (It was higher, 42.7 percent, in Helms' North Carolina, where populists had abolished the poll tax.)

Having crushed the Republican and Populist parties, the oligarchs imposed a one-party dictatorship on the region, with secret state surveillance units and occasional collaboration between the police and the Ku Klux Klan. In its economy, the South was a banana republic, a commodity-exporting resource colony in which a "comprador bourgeoisie" of local landowners and local businessmen collaborated with investors in New York and elsewhere in fleecing the region.

To serve their interests, the old latifundist families and corporate elites hired "Dixie demagogues," who were to genuine populists like William Jennings Bryan what a Disney pirate is to a pirate. All of them were entertaining. Some began as entertainers, like musician-slash-flour miller W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel, who went from hosting the "Hillbilly Flour" radio show to the Texas governor's mansion in 1939. The "Dixie demagogues" denounced various supposed enemies of the white tribe, but with two exceptions -- Huey Long and George Wallace -- they never threatened the rule of the country clubs and courthouse gangs. Jesse Helms was one of these theatrical quasi-populists, an uncomplicated establishment conservative who parlayed a liberal-baiting radio show into a political career. Like other faux-homespun Southern conservatives, he employed rhetorical populism against blacks, homosexuals, liberals, professors, modern artists and "common-ists" in the service of his business backers, most noticeably North Carolina's tobacco industry.

Now after Helm's Republican Party has transformed the last three decades of politics, according to the author, the United States today, looks much like the South then:

So here's the real horror story. In every respect except white supremacy, contemporary America looks more and more like the South between the world wars that Jesse Helms wanted to preserve. We have growing inequality and concentration of wealth, and an elite economic strategy like that of the traditional South that focuses on importing cheap labor, outsourcing manufacturing and exporting commodities (we supply industrial Asia with timber and soybeans). Private-sector unions are all but dead, as in the South. The political parties, as organizations, are weak, as in the South. More and more elected officials are self-funded millionaires or billionaires. Contemporary American politics, like Southern politics past and present, pits elite business-class conservatives against feeble, housebroken elite progressives who are not real threats to entrenched privilege. When, inevitably, the occasional populist protest figure like Perot, Dobbs or Huckabee appears, the affluent progressives quickly close ranks with the corporate conservatives.

Jesse Helms is dead -- but his sinister influence lives on. If you seek his monument, look around.

Pardons: Some Recent News Items

Since we're covering the executive, and are coming to terms with the notion of an executive pardon, here are some recent news items on the subject. Recall that we can consider a pardon to be an executive check on judicial powers. It also can give a conservative minded judiciary a way out when it does not want to hear new evidence concerning a convicted person's innocence. This, they can say, is up to the executive, not the judiciary.

Felons are seeking pardons from President Bush as he leaves office.
Marion Jones wants a presidential pardon.
Bush may preemptively pardon many who might face various charges when they leave office.

Privitization: Can the Free Market Conquer Space?

Not yet. A privately funded rocket blew up with three satellites and the ashes of over 200 people, including Star Trek's Scotty, on board.

Is space travel too big for the private sector?

Partisanship and Activism on the Court

According to this study in the Washington Independent, Justice Thomas is the most partisan justice, and Scalia the most activist.

Executive Privilege: An Appellate Court Rules that White House Aides Must Testify Before Congress

From The New York Times:

President Bush’s top advisers cannot ignore subpoenas issued by Congress, a federal judge ruled on Thursday in a case that involves the firings of several United States attorneys but has much wider constitutional implications for all three branches of government.

“The executive’s current claim of absolute immunity from compelled Congressional process for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law,” Judge John D. Bates ruled in United States District Court here.

Unless overturned on appeal, a former White House counsel, Harriet E. Miers, and the current White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, would be required to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee, which has been investigating the controversial dismissal of the federal prosecutors in 2006.

While the ruling is the first in which a court has agreed to enforce a Congressional subpoena against the White House, Judge Bates called his 93-page decision “very limited” and emphasized that he could see the possibility of the dispute being resolved through political negotiations. The White House is almost certain to appeal the ruling.

The decision can be found here. The Judge in question was nominated to the bench by H.W. Bush.

The Latest on Political Correctness in College

Professors, it seems, still tend to be liberal at most campuses, but conservatives exist, and do pretty well for themselves.

There is less political correctness in community colleges than other types of colleges.

Here are the relevant reads:
- Defining Political Correctness and Its Non-Impact.
- The Liberal (and Moderating) Professoriate.
- The Social and Political Views of American Professors.

Since the whole PC thing is so 80s, a refresher might be in order. At its simplest, it simply refers to individuals who see racial and gender and racial discrimination as a real phenomenon that has an impact on society. Things get controversial when prescriptions are offered which include affirmative action and, at it's extreme, suppression of ideas that are seen to further suppression.

Critics of the counter movement argue that conservatives served up political correctness as a whipping boy to stir up support for their movement.

Given its state, its surprising to see references to it today. But these studies tell us interesting things about the current state of ideology on campus.

Campaigning: About McCain's Campaign Adviser

From The New Republic, a story about Steve Schmidt, post Rove guru:

Even in the hyper-competitive world of political media strategists--a line of work that tends to reward the studied deployment of affectation and outsized personality--Steve Schmidt, the tough-talking, shaven-headed, 37-year old former high school tight end from North Plainfield, New Jersey, who recently emerged from a scrum among John McCain's inner circle to become the head of day-to-day operations, arrived on the national stage trailing more colorful nicknames than most.

"He figured out pretty quickly that [a martial] reputation would work to his professional benefit," Dan Schnur, McCain's communications director in 2000, recently told me. "When he came on to the Schwarzenegger [2006 gubernatorial] campaign, I told his junior staffers: If you show up late to a meeting, Steve will waterboard you."

Schmidt's most recent promotion was announced on July 2. Campaign manager Rick Davis's duties were scaled back to fundraising, searching for a v.p., and making preparations for the national convention, while Schmidt was dispatched to the campaign's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, where he assumed "full operational control." In Republican circles it was hailed as a move in the right direction; the question was whether it had come too late.

Read on to get an inside look at the current state of the McCain campaign.

The American Aristocracy: Eileen Slocum

Yes there is a unofficial aristocracy in the US of A and one of it's leading figures died recently. From the NYT obituary:

Eileen G. Slocum, a doyenne of Newport, R.I., society who was a stalwart of the Republican Party both in Rhode Island and nationally and whose family history is dotted with connections to the most moneyed and powerful of the American aristocracy, died on Sunday in Newport. She was 92.

...The wife of a diplomat who served in Egypt and Germany, among other places, and a descendant of the Brown of Brown University, Mrs. Slocum came to be described as Newport’s “grande dame” — “that silly name,” Ms. Quinn said — after moving full time to the family estate she inherited from her aunt in the 1960s and becoming involved in politics.

The house, which was built in the 1890s on Bellevue Avenue, often called Millionaire’s Row, has two libraries and its own marble ballroom and was the site of many Republican fund-raisers for the likes of President Gerald R. Ford, Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Mrs. Slocum, who was vice chairman of the Republican State Central Committee for many years, was Rhode Island’s Republican national committeewoman from 1992 until earlier this year and a delegate to several Republican national conventions. She had hoped to be present at the convention next month in St. Paul, said her son, John J. Slocum Jr.

Eileen Gillespie was born on Dec. 21, 1915, in Manhattan. Her father, Lawrence Lewis Gillespie, was a banker. Her mother, Irene Muriel Sherman, was the granddaughter of John Carter Brown, the philanthropist and bibliophile whose book collection formed the basis of the John Carter Brown Library for research in history and humanities at Brown University. His father, Nicholas Brown Jr., was the benefactor for whom the university named itself, changing it from College of Rhode Island in 1804. Other Brown family members included slave traders and abolitionists.

Its a nice life I suppose, but can she cook squirrel in a popcorn popper?

ACC out of Pearland?

Outgoing Texas Rep Mike O'Day wants ACC to yield to SanJac and allow them to offer community college classes in the city. Beneath the conflict lies a reluctance of Pearland to vote itself into the taxing district of any community college system. And beneath that lies ongoing conflict between the two towns.

After being frustrated by attempts to increase the number of courses for college credit at a Pearland campus, a Texas legislator asked the Alvin Community College board of regents to give up its stake in the city.

State Rep. Mike O’Day,R-Pearland, told regents during a meeting Thursday night he would like to see the San Jacinto College District take over Pearland ISD’s “service area” to provide community college needs.Alvin Community College board members said though classes and enrollment have dropped at the Pearland location, they have crafted a new plan to bring Pearland ISD students back.

After O’Day spoke Thursday night to the regents, they did agree to appoint two board members and one administration official in the future to talk with O’Day and the newly created Northern Brazoria County Education Alliance to find a solution.

Stay tuned.

Campaigning: About McCain Going Negative

Here's a chunk of text from Slate's Today's Papers about McCain's decision to go negative on Obama:

. . . Obama's efforts to "portray himself as presidential … run the risk of appearing arrogant or presumptuous," says the LAT. That's exactly what the McCain campaign is hoping for as it released an advertisement yesterday that compares—"and not in a good way," the NYT helpfully specifies—Obama to celebrities like Britney Spears by showing pictures of his speech in Berlin last week. "Right now, both campaigns have to do the same thing, which is establish who Barack Obama is," a Republican pollster tells the LAT. "That's the real battle going on."

Something the LAT fails to mention but the NYT points out in its off-lead is that McCain's tactic comes straight out of the President George Bush playbook that seeks "to make campaigns referendums on its opponents." The WP goes one step further and directly states that McCain is "adopting the aggressive, take-no-prisoners style of Karl Rove." Everyone says that even some Republicans have been taken aback by the recent aggressiveness of McCain's attacks. Espousing such a persistent negative message about his opponent could easily evaporate one of the main aspects working in McCain's favor—his image as a politician who doesn't play by the normal rules of Washington. Still, it's clear that since much of the public is trying to make up its mind about Obama, McCain has a great opportunity to plant doubts about the Democrat that could persist until Election Day.

That is assuming he can stick to the message. In a front-page piece that almost (but not quite) implies that McCain's aides are thrusting this aggressive style on the candidate against his will, the Post notes that the senator from Arizona is unpredictable and dislikes parroting talking points over and over again. As a result, McCain's "advisers cringe" when he "keeps talking" and subsequently dilutes what could have been a good sound bite. McCain's campaign has been criticized for lacking a consistent message, but to some Republicans that failure has more to do with the candidate's shortcomings rather than the campaign's failures. And the NYT points out that there are those who believe that trying to "apply the Bush model" to McCain simply won't work. "It could be the Coca-Cola strategy of marketing that they're trying to apply to Dr Pepper," a former McCain strategist said.

In the Post's op-ed page, David Ignatius flat-out suggests that what we're seeing now isn't the real McCain. In a fawning piece that goes through McCain's biography, Ignatius says the presumptive Republican nominee needs to stop listening to advisers and start being himself. "What's damaging the McCain campaign now, I suspect, is that this fiercely independent man is trying to please other people," writes Ignatius. "He should give that up and be the person whose voice shines through the pages of his life story."

Not everyone agrees. In a piece that is bluntly (disrespectfully?) titled "Is John McCain Stupid?" the WSJ's Daniel Henninger writes that McCain is constantly making things harder for himself on the campaign trail by talking too much and failing to make things simple. "Someone in the McCain circle had better do some straight talking to the candidate," writes Henninger, who suggests that, essentially, the presumptive Republican nominee needs to be saved from himself. Instead of playing to win, McCain is "competing as if he expects the other side to lose it for him."

In the LAT, Jonathan Chait also essentially says that Obama needs to let go of his instincts, but in the other direction. Instead of just presenting himself as the better candidate, Obama must tell voters why they shouldn't vote for McCain. Just like McCain seems to be following Bush's playbook, Chait says Obama appears to have picked up John Kerry's strategy that worked so well in 2004. Now, instead of relying on his usual "weak-tea replies" that "express 'disappointment' with McCain," Obama needs to go on the offensive and start attacking. "Obama doesn't need to engage in character assassination and baseless charges, as his opponent has done," writes Chait. "All he needs to do is stop letting McCain paint a wildly distorted self-portrait."

Executive Order: Bush Overhauls Intelligence Agencies

From the Wall Street Journal:

The White House is expected Thursday to unveil the largest overhaul of intelligence powers in a generation, spelling out the responsibilities of each intelligence agency in the wake of several reforms following the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to government officials familiar with the plans.President George W. Bush signed the executive order updating spy powers Wednesday, the officials said. Designed to bolster the power of the director of national intelligence, the revision has been a source of significant turf battles among intelligence agencies, which fear the rewrite of spy powers is coming at their expense.

Congress created the intelligence director's post as part of a series of intelligence reforms in 2004, but the extent of his authority has been a constant source of debate among intelligence officials and lawmakers.

The overhaul gives the intelligence director a greater role in hiring and firing agency heads, authority to remove barriers to intelligence sharing, and the responsibility for overseeing the acquisition of expensive programs such as new spy satellites, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. It also hands the intelligence director more power to direct midlevel intelligence officers.

The executive order can be found on the White House website.

Justice and Education

Federal Judge William Wayne Justice has ruled that the state of Texas is not complying with the requirement, under the Equal Opportunity Act, that they adequately educate students with limited english proficiency:

Justice noted that the eighth-grade achievement gap for reading never got better than 48 percentage points between limited English proficient students and all students from 2003 to 2006. The 10th-grade achievement gap for mathematics never got better than 31 percentage points during that same time period. And the 11th-grade achievement gap for science never got better than 30 percentage points.

Justice's ruling noted the testimony from former State Board of Education member Joe Bernal of San Antonio, who called the test scores "horribly bad," and also from former Education Commissioner Shirley Neely who said: "There's not anybody in their right mind that would say these are good scores."

The court ruling is significant because "140,000-plus English language learners at the secondary level will not be forgotten, and they will not be pushed aside by the state as a matter of convenience," said David Hinojosa, San Antonio-based staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which helped develop the case on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens and the American GI Forum.

"The opportunities and the expectations for those students will not be forgotten if the state lives up to its responsibilities," Hinojosa said.

The Texas Education Agency disagrees and has asked the Texas Attorney General to appeal the ruling, which they are mulling over apparently.

Here's a book about the judge.

SIgn of the Times?

Let's hope not:

The Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority, which secured more than $500 million in educational loans last year, announced Monday that it would not offer loans for the coming academic year.

The self-financing state authority, known as MEFA, was unable to secure financing for the 40,000 students it services, said Tom Graf, the authority’s executive director, in a statement. The authority offers fixed-rate loans to students who live in Massachusetts or attend school there.

This is just as students are about to head to school for the fall semester. No word yet on how many may decide not to go. This is more fallout from the mortgage crisis.

Ouch.

Kill all the Liberals

Apparently that's one of the things that motivated Jim David Adkisson to fire a shotgun into a Tennessee church. This is one way to deal with the problem of factions (not Madison's but he's dead and gone).

According to the affidavit requesting to search Adkisson's home, the suspect told investigators liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country. Adkisson also blamed Democrats for the country's decline, according to the affidavit.

"He felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of major media outlets," the affidavit said. "Because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement ... he would then target those that had voted them into office."

The church he fired into, the Unitarian-Universalist Church, tends to swing to the left, and had declared itself to be "gay friendly" in its advertisements. CNN states that this may be prosecuted as a hate crime, but news sources seem to suggest Adkisson was just angry guy.

Now questions will be raised about whether his behavior has somehow been fueled by overheated ideological rhetoric. If so, it might be interesting to speculate about how culpable sources of this rhetoric might be for these actions. We just covered the concept of fighting words in 2301 and toyed with where the line might be drawn between speech that merely conveys a belief and speech that sets action in motion.

In the short term I can see introspection about whether the low quality of political speech in this country is to blame and ought to be modified, but the unworkability of any solution, along with the sheer enjoyment and ease of spewing hate will likely win out in the end. This is human nature after all.

This post from belief.net points out that the format of the internet itself--anonymous, brief, superficial--lends itself to childish superficiality. Perhaps technology is to blame.

Oversight: The politicized Judiciary

The Department of Justice Inspector General issued a report today alleging that the Bush administration deliberately used political and ideological leanings to determine whom to hire and fire. The House Judiciary issued a commentary on the report:

"Today's report describes ‘systematic’ violations of federal law by several former leaders of the Department of Justice," said Conyers. "Apparently, the political screening was so pervasive that even qualified Republican applicants were rejected from Department positions because they were ‘not Republican enough’ for Monica Goodling and others. The report also makes clear that the cost to our nation of these apparent crimes was severe, as qualified individuals were rejected for key positions in the fight against terrorism and other critical Department jobs for no reason other than political whim. The Report also indicates that Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson, and Alberto Gonzales may have lied to the Congress about these matters. I have directed my staff to closely review this matter and to consider whether a criminal referral for perjury is needed."

Here is a link to the full report.

The Hill reports that Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers may seek action against Alberto Gonzalez.

Freedom of the Press in Iraq

Apparently there is no such thing.

The Marines have successfully kicked out a photographer who has posted images of American war dead on his blog. There has been a long term effort to not duplicate the impact of the media on public opinion in Vietnam due to unlimited access to battle sites. Minimizing media access to the imagery of war is seen necessary to this effort.

Journalists say it is now harder, or harder than in the earlier years, to accompany troops in Iraq on combat missions. Even memorial services for killed soldiers, once routinely open, are increasingly off limits. Detainees were widely photographed in the early years of the war, but the Department of Defense, citing prisoners’ rights, has recently stopped that practice as well.

And while publishing photos of American dead is not barred under the “embed” rules in which journalists travel with military units, the Miller case underscores what is apparently one reality of the Iraq war: that doing so, even under the rules, can result in expulsion from covering the war with the military.

“It is absolutely censorship,” Mr. Miller said. “I took pictures of something they didn’t like, and they removed me. Deciding what I can and cannot document, I don’t see a clearer definition of censorship.”

The Marine Corps denied it was trying to place limits on the news media and said Mr. Miller broke embed regulations. Security is the issue, officials said.

“Specifically, Mr. Miller provided our enemy with an after-action report on the effectiveness of their attack and on the response procedures of U.S. and Iraqi forces,” said Lt. Col. Chris Hughes, a Marine spokesman.

Harris County Votes?

Does Harris County do a good enough job of registering voters? That seems to be the underlying question in the top story in today's Chron:

Harris County's roll of registered voters will hit 2 million for the Nov. 4 election, according to the voter registrar — a record high that should surpass the total for all of Iowa and at least 22 other states during an exciting presidential campaign.

But the local list also has triggered controversy, surprises and skepticism about who registers and how aggressively the county recruits, and rejects, potential new voters. Even the forecast of 2 million — made by voter registrar Paul Bettencourt, a Republican seeking re-election as tax assessor-collector — is in dispute.

For starters, 2 million citizens older than 17, in a county of roughly 4 million people, would represent only meager growth from the last presidential election here. The 2004 roll fell only 60,000 shy of 2 million.

On the other hand, the roll dropped to 1.8 million a year ago, due in part to Bettencourt's groundbreaking efforts under state and federal law to remove outmoded or improper registrations.

Now, consider what the voter roll shows about the record-shattering voter turnout for the county's March 4 presidential primaries. Those elections were preceded by several voter registration drives as Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton fought for the Democratic nomination and John McCain emerged as the GOP favorite.

But of the 407,102 voters in the Democratic contest, only 9,850 had never registered to vote in Harris County before this year, according to statistics developed for the Houston Chronicle by Bettencourt's staff. And of the 169,448 people who voted in the Republican primary, a mere 2,454 had never registered here.

The story suggests that the county aggressively removes voters from rolls, which leads to obvious questions about bias. High turnout tends to favor Democrats, county offices are dominated by Republicans. Are these factors related? Recall that one of the goals of the Progressives was to minimize the ability of transients and the poor to vote by making the process more difficult. This wouldn't be unusual.

Culberson and NASA

John Culberson, who represents U.S. House District 7, has harsh words for NASA:

"We need revolutionary change, a complete restructuring," Culberson told the Houston Chronicle. "NASA needs complete freedom to hire and fire based on performance, it needs to be driven by the scientists and the engineers, and it needs to be free of politics as much as possible."

The fourth-term lawmaker said he was "kicking around" a proposal designed to make NASA more like the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency led by a director and a 24-member board appointed by the president.

Culberson, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said that despite spending $156.5 billion over the past decade, NASA had surrendered "a 40-year advantage" in space exploration. He said the agency continues to rely on liquid-fueled rockets with technology dating back to "Robert Goddard-era rockets" in the 1920s.

"I have always been a zealous advocate for the space program," said Culberson, who dates his interest in the subject to a childhood telescope. "But the setbacks are inexcusable and maddening — all because the magnificent men and women scientists and engineers have been frustrated by the bureaucracy, waste and duplication at headquarters."

Nick Lampson, whose district contains NASA, came to its defense, as did a supporter who pointed back at Congress:

John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, challenged Culberson's claim that the nation had little to show for NASA's efforts over the past 50 years, adding that NASA had fulfilled what the White House and Congress requested and financed for decades.

"It's easy to beat up on them because they're at the end of the shuttle program and they've been given inadequate funding by the administration and Congress to move forward with the new program for manned space flight," Logsdon said.

Culberson's comments apparently were inspired by previous statements by Newt Gingrich such as the following:

I am for a dramatic increase in our efforts to reach out into space, but I am for doing virtually all of it outside of NASA through prizes and tax incentives. NASA is an aging, unimaginative, bureaucracy committed to over-engineering and risk-avoidance which is actually diverting resources from the achievements we need and stifling the entrepreneurial and risk-taking spirit necessary to lead in space exploration.

My hunch is that both Culberson and Lampson are buttering up separate constituencies. Lampson's is the existing bureaucratic constituency across I-45 in Clear Lake (and a total of 20,000 related workers in the Houston area), Culberson's is a potential private sector constituency who could take advantage of funding that would be redirected to the private sector. Typical ideological politics, nothing new to see.

The Chron story concludes with a statement that attests to NASA's ability to broaden its appeal across Congress:

Culberson emphasized that his proposal to revamp NASA's structure had not been drafted into legislation and that he had not yet solicited co-sponsors.

But prospects for passage of such a measure would difficult, given wide bipartisan support in Congress for NASA and a jam-packed election year congressional calendar.

Who Can Serve on a Grand Jury?

Grits for Breakfast has such a great post today I'm going to steal it completely. It has to do with which historical figures would not be able to serve on a Harris County Grand Jury--he says Jesus. Moses and the Apostle Paul:

Houston criminal defense attorney Mark Bennett says one question Harris County prosecutors are particularly fond of asking prospective jurors during voir dire is:

If we only present one witness, but based on that witness’s testimony you believe beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty, can you convict him?After which, "The prosecutors then gleefully challenge, for cause, all of the jurors who say 'no.'

”In the comments I pointed out that the Bible, Old Testament and New, says no one should be convicted for any crime except on the testimony of “two or three” witnesses. Moses (Deut. 19:15), Jesus (Matt. 18:15-16), and the Apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 13:1) were the ones who laid down the “two or three” witnesses rule, so none of them could serve on a Harris County jury if they were alive today and honestly answered that question! The same goes for modern religious folk who believe as those men did. Further, I argued:

Even for those unaware of the biblical precedent, ... jurors know that anybody can make an error and that the decision before them is a serious one, while the ADA is engaging in gamesmanship at the expense of a fair jury.

Bottom line: The jurors struck are concerned about the possibility of convicting an innocent person. The prosecutors who ask the question are not.

A prosecutor in the comments took umbrage at Bennett's criticism, insisting that "just because it works and you don’t like it doesn’t make it unfair." What is meant, though, by "it works"?

Apparently that the question keeps people with values similar to Moses, Jesus, and St. Paul from ever participating on a Harris County jury. Heaven knows where that kind of thing could lead!

Aside from the point about the fairness of the justice system in Harris County it helps understand what parts of the justice system are--or in this case are not--based on biblical principles.

Policy Evaluation: Is the TAKS Test Making us Stupid?

That seems to be the implicit question asked in the following story from the Dallas Morning News.

Despite high TAKS test scores, students do poorly when asked to read a story and write three short response questions. Fewer then half of Dallas area students can do this adequately even though large percentages pass the TAKS test.

The reason may be that the TAKS is a multiple choice test test that does not measure comprehensive knowledge nor the ability to translate that knowledge logically and sensibly.

Some point blame at the current technological environment with its emphasis on short brief communication and the short attention spans it breeds. But given that school commonly teach to the test, are we under severe financial pressure to demonstrate performance, we might just as well look at the instruction that this environment creates. Don't we now reward short term attention spans and thereby encourage it?

Some educators and testing experts say the low scores reveal a troubling lack of critical thinking and communication skills.

"Can your kids identify and state a main idea? If not, you need to teach them strategies to think through the text," said Patricia Mathes, director of Southern Methodist University's Institute for Reading Research in Dallas. "The real issue is not waiting until high school to teach these skills. If we teach our kids well, they will do well on these tests."

But some classroom teachers are frustrated, saying they teach the material the way they've been trained. Scoring on that section is too tough, they say, and doesn't truly measure what students know.

"The methods we've been told to use fail when it comes to the short-answer test," Rockwall High School English teacher Melissa Nelson said. "We feel like we're banging our heads against the wall."

The teachers are doing what they should be doing given the testing regime in place. If you want to better result, change the tests. If the nature of testing matters, and I thin it does, the shift to longer answers is welcomed, but it comes --literally--with a price. These tests take more time to grade, and time means money. Multiple choice tests can be quickly graded with machines, ask me I know. As with so many things involving education, are we as a society willing to put the time and money into doing what must be done to adequately teach our youth?

Texas Bible Classes

Texas is in the process of figuring out how exactly to implement a law passed last legislative session that allowed school districts to offer an elective focusing on the Bible. The problem of course is doing so without violating the 1st Amendment.

People are free to exercise their religious beliefs as they choose--save for human sacrifices or other similar practices--but government cannot establish a church. This creates tension. People like the idea that they can use their public schools as venues for religious expression, but the classroom has historically been a place where governments establish, or impose, religious beliefs.
The bill was modified as it passed through the legislature in order to ensure that it focused on historical aspects of the document and steered clear of preaching. That's been the objective of the Texas Education Agency and the Attorney General's office as they determine how the bill can be converted into specific rules. Aside from the constitutional issues associated with the case, its a great case study of how laws get implemented.

Let's walk through the history, via available Houston Chronicle stories.

- The bill is introduced by Warren Chisum and considered in the House Education Committee.
- The bill passes the Texas Senate and is sent to the governor for a signature.
- The State Board of Education requests clarification about the bills language.
- The Attorney General states that the course passes Constitutional muster.
- The Chron editorializes that the standards are too loose, preaching may well result.

Here is a document from the Texas Education Agency site outlining hearings and providing links to other documents related to the establishment of a Bible based curriculum.

About FISA

Was Congress' decision to pass amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which gave telecom companies immunity from any laws they may have violated while carrying out requests by the Bush Administration, a further erosion of individual liberties or a necessary way to ensure our nation's security? Of course it could be both. The question is whether this erosion is reasonable, or if its a simple power grab on the part of an ambitious executive branch.

In essence the bill stops any court proceedings underway to punish the telecom companies for their actions, so consider this a legislative and executive check on the judiciary.

A key problems faced by republics is how to balance the maximum extent of liberty while also providing for security, which is the central task of any government. Republics have to continually wrestle with this dilemma, and this is what we are currently doing.

I have no answers, but we may wish to cover this issue in class. Here's some background:

- The bill summary from Thomas.
- Bill overview by GovTrack.
- Bill overview by OpenCongress.

The ACLU plans a lawsuit and lists the problems it sees with the bill. Here is a key complaint: [FISA] permits only minimal court oversight. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court) only reviews general procedures for targeting and minimizing the use of information that is collected. The court may not know who, what or where will actually be tapped.

This is a 4th Amendment issue. The ability of the people to control the investigatory powers of government by ensuring that searches are limited by a warrant issued by the judiciary is seemingly negated when the president wants it to be negated. Is this an appropriate way to address a new kind of threat or the typical way that executives grab power? The irony is that this legislation was originally passed in the wake of abuses by the Nixon Administration when domestic spying focused on political organizations. The system was designed to allow for the secrecy necessary to investigate national security matters, but not domestic politics. The question asked is how do we know this restriction is still in place?

Central to this dispute is the role of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This report prepared by the Congressional Research Service helps outline the court.

Conservatism: Crisis or Opportuntity?

For some time now conservatives have been bemoaning the state of their movement, but they also have an opportunity to rethink the movement and reorient it for the future. Much of this is happening within the walls of the American Enterprise Institute, which has been the source of conservative ideas since the movement achieved dominance three or so decades ago.

They are still in the process of figuring out what in fact happened to derail the movement:

“Now there’s the sense that the Republican Party is clearly on the defensive, and potentially heading for a disastrous election,” said Norman Ornstein, a longtime scholar at A.E.I. who specializes in legislative issues. “Even if John McCain wins, it’s not at all clear what that means in terms of ideas that conservatives have promoted. There is a division on what role we play in the world, what a smaller government means.”

For some on the right, the conservative decline is simply the result of veering away from the golden age of Ronald Reagan. Jonathan Rauch, a writer and a guest scholar at another Washington research organization, the Brookings Institution, said that many conservatives still believe that “Reagan got it right and the party has strayed too far.” He noted that the Heritage Foundation runs a feature on its Web site titled “What Would Reagan Do?”

For others, however, the nub of the problem is not deviance from the 1980s agenda but worshipful adherence to it. Mr. Frum is one of those who has undergone a conversion (or two). His book “Dead Right,” published in 1994, was a brisk catalog of Reagan’s failures (especially his failure to reduce the size of government). Then, after writing speeches for President Bush, Mr. Frum wrote “The Right Man,” in which he characterized President Bush’s leadership as “nothing short of superb.” But in his newest book, “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again,” Mr. Frum confesses that his former boss has “led his party to the brink of disaster.”

This'll be interesting to watch. Conservatism has been an ongoing force in American politics since it's inception--they are the people who brought you the Constitution in its original form--so they are not going away, but they will be woodshedding for a while.

More on Habeas Corpus

The New York Times editorializes on an appellate court decision that may drastically expand the president;s ability to indefinitely curtail individuals detained on American soil.

The Bush administration has been a waging a fierce battle for the power to lock people up indefinitely simply on the president’s say-so. It scored a disturbing victory last week when a federal appeals court ruled that it could continue to detain Ali al-Marri, who has been held for more than five years as an enemy combatant. The decision gives the president sweeping power to deprive anyone — citizens as well as noncitizens — of their freedom. The Supreme Court should reverse this terrible ruling.

Mr. Marri, a citizen of Qatar legally residing in the United States, was initially arrested in his home in Peoria, Ill., on ordinary criminal charges, then seized and imprisoned by military authorities. The government, which says he has ties to Al Qaeda, designated him an enemy combatant, even though it never alleged that he was in an army or carried arms on a battlefield. He was held on the basis of extremely thin hearsay evidence.

Last year, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, based in Richmond, Va., declared that the government could not hold Mr. Marri, or any other civilian, simply on the president’s orders. If it wanted to prosecute him, the court ruled, it could do so in the civilian court system.

But this decision was overturned in a complex decision in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. The question is whether a president's decision--or whims--may override the legal system.

. . . the full Fourth Circuit reversed the decision, and with a tangle of difficult-to-decipher opinions, upheld the government’s right to hold Mr. Marri indefinitely. The court ruled that Mr. Marri must be given greater rights to challenge his detention. But this part of the decision is weak, and he is unlikely to get the sort of procedural protections necessary to ensure that justice is done.

The implications are breathtaking. The designation “enemy combatant,” which should apply only to people captured on a battlefield, can now be applied to people detained inside the United States. Even though Mr. Marri is not an American citizen, the court’s reasoning appears to apply equally to citizens.

“Our colleagues hold that the president can order the military to seize from his home and indefinitely detain anyone in this country — including an American citizen — even though he has never affiliated with an enemy nation, fought alongside any nation’s armed forces, or borne arms against the United States anywhere in the world,” wrote Judge Diana Gribbon Motz.

At the moment this seems to be a marginal case, but how easy would it be for a president to declare anyone he chooses an enemy combatant and lock them up indefinitely? Think about what might happen following a 9/11 type episode. Is this the leading edge of a wedge expanding further the president's detention policies or a reasonable and limited response to an isolated incident?

Here's a link to the decisions: Al-Marri v Pucciarelli

A Liberal Scalia?

The Washington Post tells us this morning that this is the dream of liberal activists:

Ask some activists on the left the kind of Supreme Court justice they would like to see a President Obama appoint, and the name you hear most is the same justice they most often denounce.

They want their own Antonin Scalia. Or rather, an anti-Scalia, an individual who can easily articulate a liberal interpretation of the Constitution, offer a quick sound bite and be prepared to mix it up with conservative activists beyond the marble and red velvet of the Supreme Court.

We are accustomed to think of the Supreme Court as a bastion of liberalism, which was certainly the case in decades past, but concerted efforts by conservatives to reshape the court have largely been effective, only Democrats have nominated three justices in the past 40 years, and only two of the current groups. And each of the current justices, with the exception of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was more conservative than the one they replaced and the results are now being felt in decisions that are pro-business and anti-civil rights. In fact, we are told, there are no real liberals along the lines of Warren, Blackmun and Marshall on the court at the moment. Only centrists who vote to the left and write marginally liberal decisions.

Liberal groups are hoping to replicate conservative efforts to turn the Supreme Court composition into an election issue. The two oldest justices are the two most liberal: 88 year old John Paul Stevens and 75 year old Ginsburg. Given the tight balance between the two sides, the next president has the chance to drastically transform the court.

The article suggests that the next president might break with recent tradition and shy away from nominating a reclusive judge to a more outgoing politician. This would not be a first:

There is a substantial list of justices who once held political office. Most famously, President Dwight D. Eisenhower made good on his promise of an appointment to his onetime rival, California governor Earl Warren.

But the jobs could hardly be more different -- the somewhat solitary pursuits of a justice versus the glad-handing and collaborative responsibilities of a politician. But someone who has been tested by campaigns for public office might be more comfortable in the public arena, argued Dawn Johnsen, a former Clinton administration official who now teaches law at Indiana University, who said there "is a desire to have justices talking to the American people beyond their opinions."

Racial Divide in Opinion Persists

A New York Times poll confirms that black and white America see the world in substantively different ways. This isn't news, but it does suggest that attitudes change very slowly. Unless of course the two populations have substantive reasons to see the world in different ways. That's a good topic for debate.

Nearly 60 percent of black respondents said race relations were generally bad, compared with 34 percent of whites. Four in 10 blacks say that there has been no progress in recent years in eliminating racial discrimination; fewer than 2 in 10 whites say the same thing. And about one-quarter of white respondents said they thought that too much had been made of racial barriers facing black people, while one-half of black respondents said not enough had been made of racial impediments faced by blacks.

The survey suggests that even as the nation crosses a racial threshold when it comes to politics — Mr. Obama, a Democrat, is the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — many of the racial patterns in society remain unchanged in recent years.

Indeed, the poll showed markedly little change in the racial components of people’s daily lives since 2000, when The Times examined race relations in an extensive series of articles called “How Race Is Lived in America.”

As it was eight years ago, few Americans have regular contact with people of other races, and few say their own workplaces or their own neighborhoods are integrated. In this latest poll, over 40 percent of blacks said they believed they had been stopped by the police because of their race, the same figure as eight years ago; 7 percent of whites said the same thing.

Nearly 70 percent of blacks said they had encountered a specific instance of discrimination based on their race, compared with 62 percent in 2000; 26 percent of whites said they had been the victim of racial discrimination. (Over 50 percent of Hispanics said they had been the victim of racial discrimination.)

And when asked whether blacks or whites had a better chance of getting ahead in today’s society, 64 percent of black respondents said that whites did. That figure was slightly higher even than the 57 percent of blacks who said so in a 2000 poll by The Times. And the number of blacks who described racial conditions as generally bad in this survey was almost identical to poll responses in 2000 and 1990.

“Basically it’s the same old problem, the desire for power,” Macie Mitchell, a Pennsylvania Democrat from Erie County, who is black, said in a follow-up interview after participating in the poll. “People get so obsessed with power and don’t want to share it. There are people who are not used to blacks being on top.”