Later On

UPDATE 4: Marcy Wheeler responds.

UPDATE 3: Brad DeLong weighs in on the topic.

UPDATE 2: Paul Krugman responds to Greenwald’s column.

UPDATE: See also this post by bmaz that details the Times’s backpedaling on the issue.

Greenwald, in my opinion, pretty well demolishes Paul Krugman’s argument. Here’s Greenwald:

In the midst of my lengthy discussion yesterday of Cass Sunstein’s proposal to “cognitively infiltrate extremist groups” by employing covert agents and secretly paying so-called “independent” analysts to tout the government line, I noted the recent controversy surrounding MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber.  Specifically, Gruber was receiving large, undisclosed payments from the Obama administration at exactly the time when the Obama White House (and Gruber himself) were holding him out as an “objective” expert endorsing various parts of the President’s health care plan.  Consistent with Sunstein’s view that certain actions may be wrong when done by Bad People but acceptable when done by those who are “well intentioned” and trying to “improve social welfare,” I noted that many Democrats who strenuously objected to non-disclosure scandals during the Bush years have been minimizing the conduct at issue in the Gruber matter, and cited Paul Krugman as an example.  Krugman responded last night on his blog, and I want to discuss a few of the points he makes because I think they have significance beyond the Gruber issue.

Krugman accuses me and others of “claiming that there’s a huge scandal” here and of conducting a “crusade against Gruber,” but I did no such thing.  “Huge scandal” is just a rhetorical straw man to rail against.  I didn’t even mention the Gruber matter until yesterday, and did so only because of its obvious relationship to the Sunstein scheme I was discussing.  Ironically, the only reason the Gruber matter has received as much attention as it has is because Gruber’s defenders began aggressively attacking the people who uncovered, documented and objected to the undisclosed payments, as Krugman did when he equated the sober and cautious Marcy Wheeler with “the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals.”  People can characterize the magnitude of the failings here however they want (“huge” or otherwise), but the indisputable fact is that Gruber was running around publicly and favorably commenting on the President’s health care plan — while the White House and its allies were centrally relying on him and characterizing him as an “objective” analyst — at exactly the same time that the administration, unbeknownst to virtually everyone, was paying Gruber many hundreds of thousands of dollars.   The DNC alone sent out 71 emails touting Gruber’s analysis without even once mentioning the payments.  Those are just facts…

Continue reading.

Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

Yesterday, for the first time in a decade, the Justice Department intervened in a gay rights suit. In August, an openly gay 14-year-old student named Jacob — with the help of the ACLU — sued the Mohawk Central School District in upstate New York because officials “did not appropriately respond to relentless harassment, physical abuse and threats of violence” that Jacob received because of his sexual orientation. NPR reported on some of the harassment to which Jacob alleges he was subjected:

Long before Jacob came out of the closet at age 14, he was harassed for being effeminate. According to court papers, kids threw food at him and told him to get a sex change. One student pulled out a knife and threatened to string Jacob up the flagpole. A teacher allegedly told Jacob to “hate himself every day until he changed.”

One day, Jacob came home from school limping. That evening, he called his father from a party and said he had sprained his ankle at the party.

Sullivan described taking his son to the hospital: “It was a really bad sprain. They put a cast on it, gave him crutches. And shortly after that, I found out that it didn’t happen at the party. It happened at the school, because somebody had pushed him down the stairs.”

Over two years, Sullivan went to his son’s school three or four times a week to talk with the principal. According to court papers, officials did nothing.

The Justice Department is citing Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — which protects people against gender discrimination — in its Motion to Intervene. However, the Obama administration is relying on a “broad reading” of Title IX, arguing that “the law also covers discrimination based on gender stereotypes.” In the Motion, the Justice Department argues that the Mohawk District officials also violated the Equal Protection Clause. On Jan. 7, the Assistant Attorney General authorized the federal government’s invention “by certifying that this is a case of general public importance.” Conservative lawyers are arguing against the Obama administration’s approach, saying that it is “making up a legal violation where there hasn’t been one.”

Under Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, the Justice Department has had a dramatically different focus than it did during President Bush’s terms. While the Bush Justice Department was focused on installing political cronies, going after mythical voter fraud cases, and the suppression of minority voters while looking out for the voter disenfranchisement of whites. The Obama Justice Department, by contrast, recently announced that it would also start aggressively going after “banks and mortgage brokers suspected of discriminating against minority applicants in lending.”

War really should be the very last resort—the damage it does to both sides is terrible. Halimah Abdullah in McClatchy:

Eight years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have etched indelible scars on the psyches of many of the nation’s servicemen and women, and the U.S. military is losing a battle to stem an epidemic of suicides in its ranks.

Despite calls by top Pentagon officials for a sea change in attitudes about mental health, millions of dollars in new suicide prevention programming and thousands of hours spent helping soldiers suffering from what often are euphemistically dubbed "invisible wounds," the military is losing ground.

The Department of Defense Friday reported that there were 160 reported active-duty Army suicides in 2009, up from 140 in 2008. Of these, 114 have been confirmed, while the manner of death in the remaining 46 remains to be determined.

"There’s no question that 2009 was a painful year for the Army when it came to suicides," said Col. Christopher Philbrick, the deputy director of the Army Suicide Prevention Task Force, in a statement, despite what he called "wide-ranging measures last year to confront the problem."

While the military’s suicide rate is comparable to civilian rates, the increase last year is alarming because the armed services traditionally had lower suicide rates than the general population did.

"I look at the numbers of each service, and that rate has gone up at the same rate across the services," Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a gathering of military mental health professionals and advocates this week. "This isn’t just a ground force problem."

Some of the suicides are young men, fresh from deployments and haunted by memories, who shoot themselves after they return from their second or third tours in Iraq or Afghanistan, or when romantic relationships turn sour, sometimes due to long separations or post-traumatic stress.

Others are career officers who quietly nurse addictions to drugs or alcohol and finally decide to silence their ghosts.

An increasing number are female soldiers, who rarely committed suicide before but now are killing themselves at a much higher rate…

Continue reading.

Alissa Novoselick at Salon.com:

Last month, Alissa Novoselick wrote a wonderful story for Salon about starting a school garden in rural Camp Verde, Ariz. So when Caitlin Flanagan wrote her sneering attack on Alice Waters, the Edible Schoolyard, and school gardening in general, Alissa chose to respond. Also read Andrew Leonard’s response here.

When I read Caitlin Flanagan’s "Cultivating Failure" in the Atlantic, my heart broke. Then, like most grievers do, I got angry. Throughout her drawn-out, misinformed piece, Flanagan says that school gardens destroy standardized test scores, promote apathy for education, and are …  racist? Please. Flanagan slashes at the tenets of strong educational tactics and makes me wonder if her "I-live-right-by-Compton credentials" (yeah, us white people all know someone from the hood somewhere) really have any validity at all. School gardens do exactly the opposite of what she states: They create excitement, create learning opportunities, and create a sense of community in classrooms where that is hardly ever seen.

Flanagan writes that gardening, of all things, is robbing our students of "reading important books or learning higher math … that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from the dirt." Not underpaid teachers, or lack of technology, or homeless students, or incompetent instruction? Funny, she doesn’t seem to think any of those very real factors are very important, but says that gardens distract from "true" learning — "leaving the Emerson and Euclid to the professionals over at the schoolhouse." She then dismisses the education that happens around gardening: "Students’ grades quickly improved … which makes sense given that a recipe is much easier to write than a coherent paragraph on The Crucible."

WRONG.

In the garden I started last year with my 6th grade students, Emerson and his good buddy Thoreau tagged along wherever we went. You see, good educators don’t leave the gurus behind when creating something exciting for the students; they include them. As the superintendent of my Camp Verde Unified School District, Dan Brown, told me this morning, "The best teachers use Bloom’s Taxonomy through project-based curriculum. That forces students to create something of their own." …

Continue reading.

At last. Greg Gordon for McClatchy:

Turning its scrutiny to bigger fish in the subprime mortgage scandal, the Justice Department is investigating whether lenders or Wall Street firms defrauded investors in the sale of risky mortgage securities, its Criminal Division chief disclosed Thursday.

"We absolutely are looking at the conduct of the securitizers themselves, and what did they say to those who purchased the (securities)," Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer told a commission created by Congress to investigate causes of the nation’s economic collapse.

"Candidly, (we) have been looking at that for awhile and are looking at that right now in a very key matter."

Breuer didn’t identify any company under scrutiny, but Wall Street’s biggest investment banks bought many of the $2 trillion in home mortgages issued to shaky borrowers, converted them to high-yield bonds and sold the bonds to investors including pension funds, insurers and foreign banks. Many of the securities have since defaulted, and investors have lost billions of dollars.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who also appeared before the commission, said the economic crisis has brought concern about financial fraud "to the forefront." Holder, who recently announced the creation of a financial fraud task force, said that the Justice Department "is using every tool at our disposal, including new resources, advanced technologies and communications capabilities" to catch perpetrators.

According to Breuer, the FBI received upwards of 70,000 "suspicious activity reports" relating to possible mortgage fraud in 2009 and has 2,800 investigations under way nationwide.

The Justice Department disclosures came on the second day of Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearings, as federal and state enforcement officials laid bare the regulatory holes, blunders and lack of foresight that enabled the subprime mortgage industry to churn out millions of ill-fated loans that sank the economy.

Those lapses included: …

Continue reading. What they seem to be saying is that you can’t simply trust businesses to do the right thing.

Pete Hecht at the Sacramento Bee:

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano emerged Tuesday from a victorious committee vote to legalize marijuana proclaiming history was in the making.

It didn’t matter that his bill was dead on non-arrival. A separate Assembly health committee won’t take up the bill this week, meaning it will miss a legislative deadline for reaching the Assembly floor.

But the political theater Ammiano stirred in winning a 4-3 vote in the Public Safety Committee for pot’s legalization raises the curtain on a near-certain November ballot fight and heated skirmishes in the Legislature over the future of marijuana use in California.

"I think the conversation is definitely gaining traction," Ammiano, a San Francisco Democrat, said after the bill passed the committee he chairs. "There was a time when the ‘M’ word was never mentioned in Sacramento."

No more.

Not when the owner of an Oakland medical pot dispensary has spent more than $1 million toward qualifying a November initiative to allow all California residents over age 21 to possess, cultivate, or transport marijuana for personal use…

Continue reading.

UPDATE: More here in Science News.

At last. Denise Grady reporting in the NY Times:

In a shift of position, the Food and Drug Administration is expressing concerns about possible health risks from bisphenol-A, or BPA, a widely used component of plastic bottles and food packaging that it declared safe in 2008.

The agency said Friday that it had “some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children,” and would join other federal health agencies in studying the chemical in both animals and humans.

The action is another example of the drug agency under the Obama administration becoming far more aggressive in taking hard looks at what it sees as threats to public health. In recent months, the agency has stepped up its oversight of food safety and has promised to tighten approval standards for medical devices.

Concerns about BPA are based on studies that have found harmful effects in animals, and on the recognition that the chemical seeps into food and baby formula, and that nearly everyone is exposed to it, starting in the womb.

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The Plisson Chinese Grey developed a good lather from Honeybee Spa’s Ginseng shea-butter shaving soap, which has a very nice fragrance indeed: not strong, but highly appealing. The Futur with a previously used Astra Keramik blade did a fine job, and Pashana was a nice finish.

Interesting finding by Marcy Wheeler:

As William Ockham has noted, there is a new—very informative—Vaughn Index and Declaration out. I’ll have much more to say about these. But for now, look at what documents 3 and 4 from the Vaughn Index tell us about the timing of the torture tape destruction.

November 1, 2005: Bill Frist briefed on torture.

November 1, 2005: Dana Priest reveals the use of black sites in Europe. In response, CIA starts moving detainees from the countries in question.

November 3, 2005: Leonie Brinkema inquires whether govt has video or audio tapes of interrogations. CIA IG Report on Manadel al-Janabi’s death completed.

November 4, 2005: Member of Congress writes four page letter to CIA IG.

November 8, 2005: CIA requests permission to destroy torture tapes. CIA reaffirms March 2005 statement that all interrogation methods are lawful. Duncan Hunter briefed on torture. Pete Hoekstra briefed on torture.

November 9, 2005: CIA confirms destruction of torture tapes.  Doug Jehl article on spring 2004 CIA IG report on interrogation methods appears.

November 14, 2005: Govt tells Brinkema it has no audio or video tapes.

That is, the CIA requested to destroy the torture tapes in email on November 8, 2005. They confirmed the destruction on November 9. Not surprisingly, after Leonie Brinkema had asked about videotapes. But also right in the middle of debates about McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act. And note that briefing for Crazy Pete Hoekstra—but not the other Dems in Intelligence Committee leadership—on the same day that CIA started asking to destroy the torture tapes.

The Wife figured out the Chrome problem when I described it to her: Chrome suppressing the menu bar at the top of my blog even though I was logged in. She suggested that I disable the ad-blocker I had installed. Sure enough, the bar popped right into existence. So I uninstalled that extension and installed a safer ad-blocker.

Nice to be back on Chrome.

James Ridgeway in Mother Jones:

In the wake of the devastating earthquake, American eyes are again turned toward Haiti—something that only seems to happen when yet another disaster strikes, and never during the daily chaos and misery that plague the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. I’ve spent a good deal of time in Haiti, reporting first on the repression under the Duvaliers, then on the rise of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s popular movement, and then on the 1991 military coup that brought him down. I was there during the period of the 1994 military intervention that restored Aristide to power.

US interest in the country seemed to wane with the departure of American troops, and in the aftermath of September 11 and the Bush administration’s numerous adventures around the world, Haiti returned to its usual state of invisibility in Western eyes. Few people noticed a remarkable report that appeared in the New York Times in 2006, based in part on the analysis of former ambassador Brian Dean Curran, showing how US policy helped to destabilize Haiti in the years leading up to 2004, when Aristide was again forced out by armed rebels under an accused death squad leader. Written shortly before the election won by current president Rene Preval, Walt Bogdanich and Jenny Nordberg titled their story "Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos." Here’s their account of the events following Aristide’s 2004 departure:

Haiti, never a model of stability, soon dissolved into a state so lawless it stunned even those who had pushed for the removal of Mr. Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest who rose to power as the champion and hero of Haiti’s poor.

Today, the capital, Port-au-Prince, is virtually paralyzed by kidnappings, spreading panic among rich and poor alike. Corrupt police officers in uniform have assassinated people on the streets in the light of day. The chaos is so extreme and the interim government so dysfunctional that voting to elect a new one has already been delayed four times….

Yet even as Haiti prepares to pick its first elected president since the rebellion two years ago, questions linger about the circumstances of Mr. Aristide’s ouster—and especially why the Bush administration, which has made building democracy a centerpiece of its foreign policy in Iraq and around the world, did not do more to preserve it so close to its shores.

The Times story explains how Bush administration’s flawed policy undermined democracy in Haiti: …

Continue reading.

Sounds interesting:

God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215

by David Levering Lewis

A review by John Leonard

There is no doubt that David Levering Lewis, with God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe; 570-1215 (Norton, $17.95), will ruffle the feathers of some scholar-birds, especially those right-wing one-notes who can be counted on to sing The Song of Roland at pep rallies for Holy War and regime change. You will remember from La Chanson that Roland, surrounded in the Pyrenees by swarthy Saracens, refused to blow his ivory horn for help. Never mind that any real Roland at Roncevaux in 788 wouldn’t have been killed by Muslins, either Arab or Berber, but by Basques annoyed that Charlemagne had trashed Pamplona. From poetry, writes Lewis, we got “an eighth-century prototype of the American cowboy” (and Hemingway hero). As immortalized in the eleventh-century gasbag epic, this imaginary Roland gave the inchoate West “an iconic hero how embodied caste supremacy and unrestrained martial valor,” just in time for the First Crusade.

Is that any way to talk about the fellow who practically invented heroic individualism? It’s the way Lewis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W.E.B. Du Bois, talks about everybody in his abundant and savory account of Islamic culture in early Europe, from the Prophet Muhammad to Pippin the Short. Lewis, an anti-Gibbon, believes that “large historical outcomes are far more often contingent then inevitable.” So as much as he revels in war and religion, gossip and betrayal, “dates, spices, perfume, and slaves” — in Greek fire, satanic verses, and bubonic plague; Sassanids, Umayyads, and Langobards; the True Cross, the Holy Sponge, and the Syrian fetish — so he resists “the eschatologies of the cultural and political simplifiers.” History could have been different, and almost was. Suppose that Abd al-Rahman, “the Falcon of the Quraysh,” whose brilliant Moorish culture made Dark-Age Europe look all the more opaque, whose Great Mezquita in Cordoba beat Chartes to the awesome punch by three hundred years, had conquered “Frankland”? Besides an earlier acquaintance with astronomy , trigonometry, Arabic numerals, and Greek philosophy, the West might have avoided its wars of religion. Surely Abd al-Rahman would not have sought an “ethnic cleansing” of the Saxons with anything like Charlemagne’s zeal.

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Time was when I moved frequently, typically every 1-2 years. A three-year stretch in one place was great.

Over time, that’s changed. I’ve been in this apartment for 18 years. But when/if I move again, I certainly will take a look at this.

Glenn Greenwald:

Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants.  Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs."  In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-"independent" advocates to "cognitively infiltrate" online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems "false conspiracy theories" about the Government.  This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.  The paper’s abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.

Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups."  He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called "independent" credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).   This program would target those advocating false "conspiracy theories," which they define to mean: "an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role."  Sunstein’s 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story‘s Daniel Tencer.

There’s no evidence that the Obama administration has actually implemented a program exactly of the type advocated by Sunstein, though in light of this paper and the fact that Sunstein’s position would include exactly such policies, that question certainly ought to be asked.  Regardless, Sunstein’s closeness to the President, as well as the highly influential position he occupies, merits an examination of the mentality behind what he wrote.  This isn’t an instance where some government official wrote a bizarre paper in college 30 years ago about matters unrelated to his official powers; this was written 18 months ago, at a time when the ascendancy of Sunstein’s close friend to the Presidency looked likely, in exactly the area he now oversees.  Additionally, the government-controlled messaging that Sunstein desires has been a prominent feature of U.S. Government actions over the last decade, including in some recently revealed practices of the current administration, and the mindset in which it is grounded explains a great deal about our political class.  All of that makes Sunstein’s paper worth examining in greater detail…

Continue reading.

Interesting interview by David Shafer in Mauitime:

If you really want to know about a war, ask the soldiers on the ground. In the case of the four-decades-old War on Drugs, those soldiers would be the police officers charged with busting dealers and users. And, though they may not represent a majority within their profession, some cops are beginning to break ranks, to publicly question the wisdom and effectiveness of drug prohibition.

Take David Bratzer, a Canadian police officer and a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition [LEAP], an international nonprofit organization made up of current and former law enforcement officials who support the legalization and regulation of marijuana and other drugs.

We asked Bratzer—who was recently on Maui—to talk about LEAP, legalization and what the drug war looks like from the trenches.

You’re a law enforcement officer advocating for the legalization of a substance that’s a Schedule One narcotic in the United States. Isn’t that a contradiction?

Not at all. We need to consider what drug prohibition has done to the vital profession of law enforcement. It has divided police officers from the communities we serve, alienated us from young people, sent our call loads through the roof, placed huge financial strains on police budgets and, sometimes, my colleagues have been injured or murdered while enforcing these drug laws. Every police officer should question whether the War on Drugs is worth fighting, particularly when there are other policy options that would result in less crime, addiction, disease and death.

What was the turning point that led you to support legalization?

It was a gradual process. During the police academy my instructors didn’t focus on the issue and they certainly didn’t encourage recruits to think outside the box. One turning point was the recent gang war in Vancouver over control of the drug trade. That was eye opening. As I attended various patrol calls I began to ask myself: was this incident related to drug use or was it related to the prohibition of drugs? And usually it was the latter. I began to research drug policy on my own.

I was surprised to discover that even though I was a police officer, I didn’t know as much about drugs as I thought I did. I publicly joined Law Enforcement Against Prohibition in November 2008 after speaking with my police chief. It’s a fantastic organization and I have no regrets about joining.

Do you think the War on Drugs has been lost? …

Continue reading.

Atul Gawande’s superlative article on the genesis and efficacy of checklists is directly relevant, and if you’ve not read the article, you should. I earlier blogged one reason I find a checklist useful in my overall fitness program, but last night I realized that there’s more to it.

I’m using Joe’s Goals, which provides exactly the tools I need. I have noted that I get a strong sense of making progress due to the checklist.

First, there’s the daily completion of an entire slate of checkmarks. (Today, for example, I’ll check Nordic Track, taking a walk, doing a weights workout, reading Herodotus, and studying Spanish, among other things.) Seeing every possible box checked for the day makes me feel that I made progress that day.

Second, adult beginners often become disheartened because they are keenly aware of how much they have to learn—in learning a language, for example, or in playing the piano, or in mastering sleight-of-hand tricks. Because they are conscious of the mountain of learning still to come, they often discount and minimize the progress they’ve made to date.

Indeed, in any long-term effort to acquire a skill the progress made in a single day is almost always imperceptible. But the additional checkmark is certainly perceptible—both for the day and in extending a long-term string.

As the checkmarks for any task grow longer, showing how much work I’ve done so far (on Spanish), it gives me reassurance and a definite sense that I am indeed progressing. Though I have so much to learn that the amount I’ve learned to date feels like nothing, the long string of checkmarks certainly doesn’t feel (or look) like nothing. The string lengthens each day (as I complete the day’s checklist), and I know that before the string gets to 365, I’ll be speaking Spanish. In the meantime the string’s growing length feels like good progress—and it keeps me going.

I don’t think this would happen if I was just keeping track in my mind. For one thing, I can get distracted and forget to do a task; for another, I don’t realize how long I’ve been working at something. The visible checklist takes care of all that.

UPDATE: The Wife points out that I assume in the above that the checklist user has a growth mindset (as described in Carol Dweck’s important book Mindset)—that is, the checklist user strongly believes that hard and consistent work always pays off when acquiring new skills or knowledge.

UPDATE 2: I thought of an example of how, though you feel from day to day that you haven’t really learned anything, in fact your knowledge grows through consistent work. I was in grad school studying math—abstract algebra, at the time—and I had never encountered such stuff. I felt abjectly ignorant and that I really understood nothing of it, and one day (not too far into the course) I was trying to explain to a non-mathematician what a homomorphism was and I actually saw their eyes glaze over and I realized that I in fact had made some progress.

Sounds like an interesting gadget, especially if you drink soy milk.

When will Texas make good on its threats and leave the union? Justin Elliott at TPM Muckraker:

When we last checked in on the U.S. history textbooks standards setting process down in Texas, the conservative-dominated State Board of Education was mulling one-sided requirements to teach high school students about Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Moral Majority.

Now, in the home stretch of a process that will set the state’s nationally influential standards, a liberal watchdog group is worried that the State Board of Education will try to push through changes to claim that communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy has been vindicated by history, among other right-wing pet issues.

The Republican-dominated board is meeting today in Austin to vote on amendments to the current draft standards.

"The social conservative bloc is pressing for the standards to turn Joseph McCarthy into an American hero," says Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that aims to "counter the religious right." …

Continue reading.

Interesting report by Linda Greenhouse in the NY Times:

Has anyone noticed that now that lesbians and gay men have left the closet to assert their equal rights as citizens, their adversaries seem to be running for a closet of their own?

My observation is, of course, prompted by the success that opponents of same-sex marriage had this week in persuading the Supreme Court to bar cameras from the San Francisco courtroom where Proposition 8 is now on trial. That is the amendment that California’s voters added to the state’s Constitution to provide that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

Judge Vaughn R. Walker of United States District Court for the Northern District of California, presiding over the challenge to Proposition 8 in the non-jury trial that began on Monday, announced last month that the court would provide a live video feed to enable remote viewing elsewhere in the courthouse as well as in federal courthouses in four other cities. He also raised the additional prospect of later posting on YouTube and the Internet. The Proposition 8 defenders, claiming that their witnesses would face harassment if their testimony was broadcast beyond the courtroom, asked the Supreme Court to block the plan. By the familiar vote of 5 to 4, the court quickly complied.

Beyond the ideological divide that the case produced, and the fact that Justice Sonia Sotomayor allied herself in dissent with her three most liberal colleagues, Justices Stephen G. Breyer, John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a public spat between two powerful judicial forces provided another intriguing dimension to this fast-moving dispute.

One was Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who approved the district court’s remote video plan. The other was the Judicial Conference of the United States, the federal courts’ chief policy-making body, headed by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who remained in the background as two top conference officials sent Judge Kozinski a coolly worded two-sentence letter “to bring to your attention” the longstanding Judicial Conference policy against televising trials.

Judge Kozinski, long the Peck’s Bad Boy of the federal judiciary, known for flaunting both brilliance and quirkiness, shot back with a reminder of his own — that “like it or not, we are now well into the 21st century.” His six-page letter basically declared that the Ninth Circuit would continue to do what it wanted. To describe the Supreme Court’s subsequent unsigned opinion blocking the video plan as a rebuke of Judge Kozinski would be an understatement.

That intrajudicial melodrama, so delicious that I could not resist describing it, should not obscure …

Continue reading.

Interesting that the investigation of the incident was done by non-Army personnel—I’ve noted before that the Army’s investigations of itself inevitably turn out to be cover-ups, with officers getting off and enlisted personnel taking the rap. But this time, the investigation was conducted by Togo West, a former Secretary of the Army, and Adm. Vernon E. Clark, a former Chief of Naval Operations. The story in the NY Times by Scott Shane and Elisabeth Bumiller:

The military’s defenses against threats from inside its own ranks are outdated and ineffective, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on Monday as he described the findings of a Pentagon review of the Nov. 5 shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas.

Mr. Gates cited poor communications about internal threats to the security of personnel, as well as a weak supervision by commanders, as systemic problems with implications that go beyond the single case of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the military psychiatrist accused of the shootings.

The formal report, released at noon by the Pentagon, found that “some medical officers failed to apply appropriate judgement and standards of officership” when judging Major Hasan, and that more attention should have been paid to his overall performance rather than just his academic record.

Major Hasan behaved erratically and had questionable communications with a radical cleric during the years and months before the shootings, which killed 13 and injured 28 more, according to various officials monitoring the investigations that ensued.

But his supervisors took no actions based on his behavior, and he was transferred to a combat unit at Fort Hood last summer.

Several officers may be held accountable for any failures in supervising Major Hasan during his psychiatric training in the Washington area, Mr. Gates said. He referred the recommendations to the Army for further review. He did not provide details, but the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times, which first reported the findings overnight, said that as many as eight mid-ranking officers could face reprimands…

Continue reading.

Some of you may recall Elisabeth Bumiller for her inept and inadequate reportage on the Bush Administration, somewhat explained by her remark that President Bush is so impressive and important that she didn’t feel she could question him. I was amused to note in posting the above that Windows Live Writer questioned the word “Bumiller” and suggested “bumbler” instead. I had no idea Live Writer monitored the news.