Later On

I have to learn to evaluate food quantities again. It’s no problem at all to cook 2 qts of quinoa: 2 c. of grain in a quart of stock cooks up to close to 2 quarts in volume. That’s great, but a serving these days is 1/3 c, so 2 qts amounts to 24 meals. I just bought boneless chicken breasts. I initially was going to buy 3, which ran to just over 2 lbs, but then I recalled that a meal is 4 oz, so I was looking at 8 meals.

I need to cook less if I’m going to eat less—that, or become accustomed to fizzy food with a funny taste.

James Inhofe goes for the front pages in the winter, with his igloo made following the record snowstorm in DC, but in summer, with record high temperatures, he is uncharacteristically silent. Timothy Egan has some fun with this in a column in the NY Times. From the column:

… Around Capitol Hill, I could not find what I was looking for: agitprop from the number one global warming denier, Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma. In February, remember, during a record snowstorm, Inhofe’s family constructed a primitive igloo.

“Honk if you love global warming,” was one of the signs placed in front of their snow cave. “Al Gore’s new home,” was another.

The snowy winter day was followed, all too quickly, by the hottest spring in Washington history. And then, early summer brought a spate of grim heat records around the globe. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, much of Africa, Russia — all posted their hottest temperatures of all time, accompanied by forest fires, water shortages and crop failures.

Last month was the hottest June ever recorded worldwide, and 2010 is on course to be the warmest year since record-keeping began, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In Senator Inhofe’s home state of Oklahoma, the National Weather Service issued a warning this week of “dangerous heat index values” of up to 110 degrees. A report from AccuWeather.com last month stated that, this year, “no other region has seen the variety of extreme weather” as much as Oklahoma.

Extreme weather. Perfect for an extreme politician, a man who won his senate seat in 1994 by using, as his slogan, the actual words of a cynical strategy to get people to think about anything but real issues: “God, guns, and gays.” Maybe, with this weather, God is trying to tell the senator something.

In Washington, I expected to see a homemade greenhouse constructed by Inhofe, complete with pithy remarks about the heat. No?

This is how he acts in his official capacity: when it snows, he makes fun of the consensus scientific view that the trend to a more inhospitable earth is incontrovertible. But during this heat wave, nothing. On his Web site, he’s still been highlighting a winter week when 49 of the 50 states had snow on the ground. There’s another reference to his much-quoted remark that global warming “is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” (Wait a minute: what about the Nigerian e-mail scam?)

And the official, taxpayer-funded site devoted to the Republican position on climate change — the minority page of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, where Inhofe is the ranking member — features a five-month-old video of Inhofe bloviating over the leaked emails of leading atmospheric scientists in England. He called it “the most significant scientific scandal of our generation.”

Surely, there would be an update, based on the latest of the independent investigations, the one released earlier this month, which found that “climategate” was much ado about poor e-mail etiquette, and nothing to do about hard science. Surely, he would want to set the record straight. But Inhofe did not post this update. If you relied on him, you would think it’s deep winter.

“The senator still believes global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” said Nat Dempsey, a spokesman for the Republicans on the Senate environment committee. He explained that the politicized igloo was the work of Inhofe’s grandchildren, and dismissed the recent heat records as a short-term phenomenon that should not be the basis for legislation.

True on the last count. Few things are more inane than trying to conduct public policy based on news of the moment, especially the weather. But that’s what we have with one side of the “debate” on climate change. I bring up the heat records to show that, if they were consistent with their calls for attention whenever it snows, Republicans would be alarmed during thermal meltdowns.

Senator Inhofe should be a harmless diversion, the kind of laughable fool that any state can kick back to the capital, where hard-earned ignorance is supported by a well-paid staff. But he is one of the lead Republican senators on climate change, and he doesn’t even believe the climate is changing. He gets his science from a dead fiction author, Michael Crichton, who wrote a fantasy thriller about climate alarmists. If Inhofe’s party wins control of the Senate, the igloo man will steer a significant part of American policy on this issue…

Read more.

Marci Hamilton discusses the issue at FindLaw:

The Supreme Court has not yet addressed an important First Amendment religion doctrine that has percolated in the lower federal courts and in the state courts for years — to the point that courts seem to be putting their finishing touches on the nuances of the doctrine. This doctrine establishes the so-called "ministerial exception" — an interpretation of the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses that requires the courts to avoid interfering with religious organizations’ employment decisions regarding clergy and other religious employees who are involved in religious doctrine.

As I have written in past columns such as this one, this is a doctrine that pits anti-discrimination laws (that is, Title VII, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and their state counterparts) against religious-liberty claims. There is now a significant split among the courts regarding several aspects of the doctrine, and, therefore, it is time for the Court to weigh in. With federal appellate courts settling into their particular interpretations, we are seeing that the same claims can get significantly different treatment depending on the circuit.

Title VII Forbids Employment Discrimination But Not When the Ministerial Exception Applies

Title VII has an exception for religious groups that permits them to discriminate on the basis of religious belief. By contrast, there is no exemption to Title VII’s prohibitions on race, national origin, or gender discrimination. The decision to create the belief exemption but to keep the other civil rights laws in place was intentional. But courts have been uncomfortable when dealing with the question of who can be a member of the clergy. Churches do not enjoy autonomy from the law, but the Establishment Clause does forbid courts from determining religious beliefs and that extends to a prohibition on judicial oversight of the choice of clergy. In order to stay out of that quagmire, the courts have crafted the ministerial exception, which is a First Amendment doctrine that creates exceptions to Title VII for religious entities, including houses of worship, religious organizations, and schools.

The exception’s core idea is that the courts should not be in the business of second-guessing religious doctrine, belief, or the qualifications of clergy. Religious organizations have pushed to expand the latter category beyond official clergy to "ministerial employees"– which means that courts have had to define what constitutes a religious employee.

To my knowledge, no ministerial-exception case has ever held that a religious group can discriminate on the basis of race. Most of the cases deal with claims of gender discrimination, though claims of age and disability discrimination also have been raised.

The typical case involves a woman who experiences gender discrimination or sexual harassment (sometimes in the form of a hostile work environment). These claims are often paired with a retaliation claim — that is, a claim that the religious employer took action against the plaintiff after she complained about the discriminatory behavior.

One Notable Case: Lynette Petruska’s Suit Against Gannon University

A classic example involved Lynette Petruska and her employer Gannon University, a Roman Catholic institution in Erie, PA. Petruska was the University chaplain for which there was no gender prerequisite. The record before the court indicated that she was fired on the basis of invidious and arbitrary gender discrimination…

Continue reading.

The Oklahoma legislature is an odd thing. Its latest effort is to ensure that judges in Oklahoma don’t suddenly begin applying Sharia law in the courts there. (I don’t think it’s a real problem, somehow, but this is Oklahoma we’re talking about.) That is still underway, but they have already passed a bundle of anti-abortion laws, some over the governor’s veto. Sherry Colb discusses one of these at FindLaw:

Earlier this year, the Oklahoma legislature passed several abortion measures, a number of which required overriding the Governor’s veto. One of the laws prevents a patient from suing her doctor for failing to reveal the presence of a fetal abnormality.

The structure of this law is different in kind from that of other abortion restrictions, and it accordingly calls for a separate analysis. I will here analyze how the Oklahoma law differs from garden-variety abortion restrictions and whether we ought therefore to view it in a different light.

How Most Abortion Restrictions Operate

Existing abortion restrictions generally make it more difficult for a pregnant woman who wants an abortion to get one in the time, place, and manner of her choosing. Waiting periods may require a woman who can ill-afford it to take several days off from work to visit a clinic repeatedly, before her provider may permissibly terminate her pregnancy. Mandatory ultrasounds and fetal-information lectures may cause emotional distress that many women would prefer to avoid. Gestational-stage deadlines (whether at viability or, as a Nebraska law that I discussed in another column provides, at several weeks prior to viability) prohibit abortion outright after a certain point, unless the woman can satisfy one of a narrow set of criteria, including a pregnancy that poses a threat to her life.

Method restrictions (e.g., the federal "Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act," which the Supreme Court upheld in Gonzales v. Carhart and which I discussed in a different column) limit a provider’s flexibility in selecting the abortion procedure that best meets the needs of her patient. Measures of this sort may also deter providers from performing even permissible later-term abortions, because of the risk that a provider will inadvertently render herself subject to criminal prosecution.

Finally, parental-notification and parental-consent requirements compel some underage women who would rather keep the information private, to reveal their desire for an abortion to either a parent or a judge (or alternatively, as in all cases, to forgo the abortion).

These restrictions and others operate to make it more difficult and burdensome — physically, financially, and emotionally — for a woman to carry out a decision that she has made to have an abortion.

Oklahoma’s Law: Liability Preclusion for the Physician Who May Not Want to Reveal Fetal Abnormalities to Pregnant Patients

As I noted above, the new Oklahoma law takes an approach quite distinct from that of the various laws I just described. Specifically, precluding liability for a doctor who fails to reveal a fetal anomaly to her patient is different from the above restrictions in two ways — one more significant than the other.

The less significant way in which this law differs from the others is that — rather than either requiring a doctor or a pregnant woman to do something that she considers burdensome, or prohibiting a doctor or a pregnant woman from doing something that she considers desirable — this law protects a provider from being sued by a patient for violating what might otherwise have been a duty to provide material information to her patient.

Under the Oklahoma law, a doctor who wishes to tell her patient about a fetal anomaly may do so without penalty. The law simply gives the provider the additional option of withholding the information without legal consequence…

Continue reading. Don’t you just love laws that encourage doctors to mislead their patients?

As noted previously, the Affordable Care Act is something that will be revised and improved over the coming years—and in particular it needs a public option. Steve Benen:

Even after Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) forced the removal of the public option from the health care reform package last year, proponents of the idea said the setback was temporary. The popular measure, generating competition between private and public insurance, would return, again and again.

As it turns out, it’s returning right now.

At a time when both political parties are worrying about the federal deficit, an unexpected and unorthodox proposal is coming back from the shadows of last year’s health-care debate the "public option." The idea of creating a major government health insurance program was roundly rejected last year, but the 128 House Democrats pushing to reconsider the idea are now advancing the argument that it would help hold down federal spending.

Their bill, which faces long odds, would allow Americans who do not get insurance at work to choose a government plan for their health coverage starting in 2014.

"There is all this concern about the deficit," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., a leading champion of the proposal. "Well, guess what, this would reduce the deficit because it saves so much money."

Why, yes, as a matter of fact it does. When policymakers were weighing provisions of the legislation that would produce savings, one of the most effective measures was always the public option. For conservatives, however, the debate was always more about ideology than pragmatism.

But if deficit reduction continues to dominate much of the public discussion, public option advocates have a new pitch: the CBO believes the idea could save the federal government $68 billion between 2014 an 2020.

Deficit hawks consistently say lawmakers are going to have to accept some choices they don’t want to make in order to get the deficit under control. Well, what do they have to say about $68 billion in savings from an idea that most of the country consistently loved during the health care debate?

Even proponents don’t expect action on this in the coming months, but Woolsey vowed to keep fighting for the idea. Good

Part 1.

So far as I can tell, Obama was totally not involved, save perhaps in directing Gibbs to apologize. But somehow people are trying to make this about Obama. Josh Marshall comments:

Forty-eight hours ago the story was another bad apple found on Obama’s cart. By yesterday morning it was another black eye for Obama and Tom Vilsack for rushing to dump a blameless woman on no good evidence and cravenly or cowardly or pusillanimously running for cover because Breitbart, Roger Ailes and whatever other gods of The Crazy said boo! For progressives mad at their president, at some level, that’s understandable. They have no relationship with and expect only the worst from the Breitbarts and Fox Newses of the world. But with Obama they expect more. And it’s personal.

Still, you just have to back up from that and realize that as disappointing as Tom Vilsack’s first crack at this was, the idea that he or Obama is the bad guy in this story is not only preposterous but verging on obscene. It’s like the NYPD as the bad guy in the Son of Sam saga because they didn’t catch David Berkowitz fast enough. Or perhaps that the real moral of the story is that the woman with the stalker should have been more focused on personal data security. Not for some time has something so captured the essential corruption of a big chunk of what passes as ‘right wing media’ (not all, by any means, but a sizable chunk along the Breitbart/Fox/Hannity continuum) and the corruption of the mainstream media itself as this episode.

Let’s review what happened here. And for the sake of conversation, let’s assume that Breitbart and his crew didn’t edit this thing and hadn’t seen any of the rest of the highly exculpatory video. (I’m willing to assume that for the sake of the conversation. And I think it may even be true as a matter of fact.) That’s by far the most innocent explanation. And that means that Breitbart got a piece of video he knew nothing about and published it with a central claim (that it was about Sherrod’s tenure at the USDA) that he either made up or made no attempt to verify. No vetting, no calls, no due diligence, not the slightest concern to confirm anything or find out what was true. Even setting aside the fact that, as Josh Green ably notes, most of Breitbart’s scoops center on race and/or race-baiting, for anyone else practicing anything even vaguely resembling journalism, demonstrated recklessness and/or dishonesty on that scale would be a shattering if not necessarily fatal blow to reputation and credibility.

Yet most of the coverage has been along the lines of Breitbart sparks debate about racism or White House pratfall on prematurely canning Shirley Sherrod. Indeed, ABC tonight is sending out an exclusive on Breitbart, which is … a puff piece about how he got his start in new media.

Or what about the Fox News? To use to terminology of infectious disease, Fox was the primary vector of this story. And to the best of my knowledge, there’s been not only no disciplining of anyone in the news room but as far as I can see no retraction, apology (with the exception of a semi-retraction, on a personal basis, from Bill O’Reilly) or even discussion of their primary role in an obvious smear. The only ‘press criticism’ I’ve seen is this piece by my friend Howard Kurtz which can’t be called anything but a white-wash, even including a self-serving internal email leaked from Fox about taking a careful, thoughtful approach to the story. (My god!)

For that matter, you simply can’t discuss Fox’s role in the Sherrod episode without …

Continue reading.

I think we all recognize that the denizens of the Far Right—the Breitbarts, Hannitys, Roves, Gingriches, and the like—deal primarily in lies, with much reinforcement among themselves. Media Matters has an enlightening and detailed timeline of the Sherrod smear that’s worth reviewing to see just how the attack machine works. It begins:

Media Matters has documented a timeline of Andrew Breitbart’s smear of Shirley Sherrod, from Breitbart’s initial posting of his deceptively edited clip of Sherrod — which was amplified by Fox News and other right-wing media — through the release of the full video of Sherrod’s comments, which made clear the context of her remarks.

Monday

11:18 a.m.*: Breitbart posts Sherrod video, calls her "racist," claims "Context is everything."Breitbart posted the heavily edited video of Sherrod and falsely suggested that Sherrod discriminated against a white farmer in her capacity as the Agriculture Department’s Georgia Director of Rural Development:

We are in possession of a video from in which Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, speaks at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia. In her meandering speech to what appears to be an all-black audience, this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions.

In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn’t do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from "one of his own kind". She refers him to a white lawyer.

Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.

Fox News amplifies Breitbart’s deceptively edited video. On July 19, FoxNews.com reported: "Days after the NAACP clashed with Tea Party members over allegations of racism, a video has surfaced showing an Agriculture Department official regaling an NAACP audience with a story about how she withheld help to a white farmer facing bankruptcy." The FoxNews.com article further reported that "[t]he video clip was first posted by BigGovernment.com" and that "FoxNews.com is seeking a response from both the NAACP and the USDA." The article is no longer available on FoxNews.com but was republished on another website: …

Continue reading.

Tryphon Rose shaving cream again uses no dye and the fragrance, though pleasant, is not strong. It created a good lather with the G.B. Kent BK4, and the iKon with its Swedish Gillette blade did three quite comfortable passes. I used thee iKon open-comb again this morning to compare it with the Mühle open-comb, but the two are close enough (for me) that I will have to use them both in the same shave to note any differences. They both are, for me, quite comfortable and pleasant razors. Some of TOBS “A Gentleman’s Aftershave Balm” and I’m good to go. I actually like this balm quite well.

I’ve been waiting and waiting for red Fresno peppers to show up in the store. Today they had red habaneros, so I went with those. This batch is going to be a bit hotter than normal. I did add 4 dried ancho peppers to mild it down a little, but I think it is still going to be extra hot.

I had to make it again. Improvements:

1. I bought heritage tomatoes

2. I sliced the tomatoes thinly and then used scissors to cut up the top and bottom (so no big piece of tomato skin). The immersion blender then worked much better.

It’s chilling now. And I did add some chopped Walla Walla onion at the end.

Steve Benen makes a good point:

The notion that conservative outrages tend to be manufactured nonsense isn’t new. The last 18 months has been filled with them.

Remember how excited the right was about the Gerald Walpin firing? Or the time conservatives were convinced that the White House was closing car dealerships based on owners’ political contributions? How about the time the right was apoplectic because the president urged kids to do well in school when last year’s school year began? And who can forget when Republicans discovered job offers to congressional candidates and compared it Watergate?

Inexplicably, several major news outlets responded to stories like these by insisting that the media should do more to take seriously the kind of stories and ideas that bubble up on conservative websites and talk radio.

More recently, however, the larger trend has taken a turn for the worse. It’s not just that the right gets worked up over stories that fall apart after minimal scrutiny — though that’s part of it — it’s also that the trumped up garbage is starting to get more focused. Kevin Drum raised an excellent point today:

There have been three big conservative outrages that have choked the airwaves over the past couple of weeks. #1 was about a bunch of scary black men, the New Black Panther Party. #2 was about a bunch of scary Muslims who want to build a triumphal mosque on the sacred soil of Ground Zero. #3 was about a vindictive black woman who works for the government and screws the white people she deals with. The running theme here is not just a coincidence.

This, by the way, coincided with leading Tea Party zealots blasting the NAACP as "racist," and a coordinated attack against Thurgood Marshall by Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

There have to be some decent folks on the right who are uncomfortable with this. I know RNC Chairman Michael Steele recently conceded his party relied on a racially-divisive "Southern Strategy" for at least four decades, and that animosity towards Barack Obama is exacerbated by race, but conservatives — Fox News, GOP activists, prominent far-right media voices — continue to push the boundaries of acceptable discourse here. We’ve gone from conservatives making up scurrilous nonsense to gin up excitement with far-right voters to conservatives making up racist nonsense to gin up excitement with far-right voters.

And as the midterms draw closer, the ugliness seems to be intensifying. Where are the Republican grown-ups willing to say, "Enough"?

I simply don’t understand why gays cannot openly serve in the US military.

Worth reading.

One important step is to prevent coverage of police actions, so that the police can operate with as little oversight as possible. Thus the increasingly strong movement to prevent recording or videotaping (e.g., with cellphones) police (public servants) as they do their work. Here are some recent stories on this wrong-headed movement:

Ray Sanchez has this story at ABC News:

Growing Number of Prosecutions for Videotaping the Police
Prosecutions Draw Attention to Influence of Witness Videos

That Anthony Graber broke the law in early March is indisputable. He raced his Honda motorcycle down Interstate 95 in Maryland at 80 mph, popping a wheelie, roaring past cars and swerving across traffic lanes.

Anthony Graber was arrested for posting a video of his traffic stop on YouTube.
But it wasn’t his daredevil stunt that has the 25-year-old staff sergeant for the Maryland Air National Guard facing the possibility of 16 years in prison. For that, he was issued a speeding ticket. It was the video that Graber posted on YouTube one week later — taken with his helmet camera — of a plainclothes state trooper cutting him off and drawing a gun during the traffic stop near Baltimore.

In early April, state police officers raided Graber’s parents’ home in Abingdon, Md. They confiscated his camera, computers and external hard drives. Graber was indicted for allegedly violating state wiretap laws by recording the trooper without his consent.

Related:
WATCH: Caught on Tape: Cop Punches Girl

WATCH: Should Cops Wear Body Cameras?

WATCH: Cop Cam

Arrests such as Graber’s are becoming more common along with the proliferation of portable video cameras and cell-phone recorders. Videos of alleged police misconduct have become hot items on the Internet. YouTube still features Graber’s encounter along with numerous other witness videos. "The message is clearly, ‘Don’t criticize the police,’" said David Rocah, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland who is part of Graber’s defense team. "With these charges, anyone who would even think to record the police is now justifiably in fear that they will also be criminally charged."

Carlos Miller, a Miami journalist who runs the blog "Photography Is Not a Crime," said he has documented about 10 arrests since he started keeping track in 2007. Miller himself has been arrested twice for photographing the police. He won one case on appeal, he said, while the other was thrown out after the officer twice failed to appear in court.

"They’re just regular citizens with a cell-phone camera who happen to come upon a situation," Miller said. "If cops are doing their jobs, they shouldn’t worry."

The ACLU of Florida filed a First Amendment lawsuit last month on behalf of a model who was arrested February 2009 in Boynton Beach. Fla. Her crime: videotaping an encounter between police officers and her teenage son at a movie theater. Prosecutors refused to file charges against Sharron Tasha Ford and her son…

Continue reading. It’s a long story. I see no reason whatsoever to forbid taping police as they do their work. Indeed, I think it’s a great idea that should be encouraged. The police are public servants, and the public is well-served by seeing how they operate. I also believe that city council meetings should be videotaped and broadcast, and that trials should be videotaped and broadcast. Why not?

Carlos Miller, mentioned in the story, blogs about this issue. Here’s a sample post:

ABC News is the latest national mainstream media news organization to address the growing epidemic of cops using wiretapping charges to arrest people videotaping them.

And as in the previous cases, Photography is Not a Crime gets a link, a mention and I even get a quote in.

In the last few weeks, USA Today, The Washington Post (article and editorial) and NPR’s Talk of the Nation have addressed the issue.

Also on a more local level, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported last week that the Allegheny County district attorney’s office settled a federal lawsuit by agreeing to redistribute a memo to police departments explaining that it is not against the law to videotape a cops on duty.

Unfortunately, memos don’t seem to make a difference because an Oregon police chief who received a similar memo from the city attorney vowed that these arrests would continue.

All this media coverage was probably what prompted U.S. Congressman Ed Towns last week to introduce a resolution to protect citizens against these arrests.

From what I’ve learned, a resolution is merely a ceremonial gesture that doesn’t carry much legislative weight.

But nothing happens overnight in Congress. The fact that a Congressman even made the effort to address the issue is a move in the right direction.

However, now it’s up to us to keep the momentum going by reaching out to the rest of Congress.

The first step is to create a national database of where these incidents have taken place.

Radley Balko, senior editor of Reason Magazine, suggested we create a map as he did when we worked at the Cato Institute to address the epidemic of botched police raids.

The question is, should we just limit the map to where people have been charged with wiretapping charges for videotaping cops or should we include all photography harassment, including at the hands of security guards?

I prefer the latter, only because it will really demonstrate that this is a regular occurrence.

Let me know what you think and what we can do to get more Congressional attention.

Finally, see Bruce Schneier’s post on this issue:

In at least three U.S. states, it is illegal to film an active duty policeman:

The legal justification for arresting the "shooter" rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also include an exception for recording in public places where "no expectation of privacy exists" (Illinois does not) but in practice this exception is not being recognized.

Massachusetts attorney June Jensen represented Simon Glik who was arrested for such a recording. She explained, "[T]he statute has been misconstrued by Boston police. You could go to the Boston Common and snap pictures and record if you want." Legal scholar and professor Jonathan Turley agrees, "The police are basing this claim on a ridiculous reading of the two-party consent surveillance law — requiring all parties to consent to being taped. I have written in the area of surveillance law and can say that this is utter nonsense."

The courts, however, disagree. A few weeks ago, an Illinois judge rejected a motion to dismiss an eavesdropping charge against Christopher Drew, who recorded his own arrest for selling one-dollar artwork on the streets of Chicago. Although the misdemeanor charges of not having a peddler’s license and peddling in a prohibited area were dropped, Drew is being prosecuted for illegal recording, a Class I felony punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison.

This is a horrible idea, and will make us all less secure. I wrote in 2008:

You cannot evaluate the value of privacy and disclosure unless you account for the relative power levels of the discloser and the disclosee.

If I disclose information to you, your power with respect to me increases. One way to address this power imbalance is for you to similarly disclose information to me. We both have less privacy, but the balance of power is maintained. But this mechanism fails utterly if you and I have different power levels to begin with.

An example will make this clearer. You’re stopped by a police officer, who demands to see identification. Divulging your identity will give the officer enormous power over you: He or she can search police databases using the information on your ID; he or she can create a police record attached to your name; he or she can put you on this or that secret terrorist watch list. Asking to see the officer’s ID in return gives you no comparable power over him or her. The power imbalance is too great, and mutual disclosure does not make it OK.

You can think of your existing power as the exponent in an equation that determines the value, to you, of more information. The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data.

Another example: When your doctor says "take off your clothes," it makes no sense for you to say, "You first, doc." The two of you are not engaging in an interaction of equals.

This is the principle that should guide decision-makers when they consider installing surveillance cameras or launching data-mining programs. It’s not enough to open the efforts to public scrutiny. All aspects of government work best when the relative power between the governors and the governed remains as small as possible — when liberty is high and control is low. Forced openness in government reduces the relative power differential between the two, and is generally good. Forced openness in laypeople increases the relative power, and is generally bad.

EDITED TO ADD (7/13): Another article. One jurisdiction in Pennsylvania has explicitly ruled the opposite: that it’s legal to record police officers no matter what.

This is sort of sickening. First, Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress:

Today, the Senate extended unemployment benefits for millions of jobless Americans. Despite the terrible shape of the economy, conservatives resisted extending unemployment insurance for weeks for Americans who can’t find work, launching a filibuster to prevent a vote on the benefits.

Writing at the American Spectator yesterday, former Nixon speechwriter and TV personality Ben Stein downplayed the suffering unemployed Americans are experiencing by writing that the people who are unemployed right now are “generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities.” He claims the unemployed are Americans with “unpleasant personalities…who do not know how to do a day’s work“:

The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say “generally” because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work. They are people who create either little utility or negative utility on the job. Again, there are powerful exceptions and I know some, but when employers are looking to lay off, they lay off the least productive or the most negative. To assure that a worker is not one of them, he should learn how to work and how to get along — not always easy.

Of course, saying that the 15 million Americans who are unemployed right now are “generally” people with “poor work habits” is as offensive as it is wrong. The current recession is a global phenomenon caused by the collective bad behavior of the world’s largest financial institutions. Before the recession, the unemployment rate hovered around six percent; it is ludicrous to say that millions of Americans suddenly got lazier and less able to work within the span of a few months.

Unfortunately, Stein is a widely respected voice on the American right who regularly appears on cable news to offer his thoughts on politics and policy. Using the Critical Mention media search engine, ThinkProgress finds that the name “Ben Stein” was mentioned 64 times in major television media networks within the past thirty days alone.

And Steve Benen comments on the GOP, even when it loses, holds on like dead-enders:

There was quite a bit of attention yesterday afternoon when the Senate, after multiple tries, finally overcame a Republican filibuster on extended unemployment benefits. It was welcome, overdue news.

What got far less attention was what happened next.

Under inexplicable Senate rules, after a filibuster is broken, the minority trying to block passage can delay a final, up-or-down vote for 30 hours. Democrats hoped Republicans would agree to waive this pointless delay, and allow the Senate to vote on jobless aid. Republicans, who know the bill is going to pass anyway, refused without explanation.

Why would they bother? It’s not just about Republicans being callous misanthropes — though that’s likely part of it — it’s also a matter of running out the clock. There’s just not much time left on the Senate schedule, and the GOP wants to use up as much of the calendar as possible to prevent other bills and nominations from coming to the floor.

If that means needlessly delaying aid to struggling families for a couple of days, Republicans see this as a small price to pay. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) spoke on the chamber floor last night, lamenting the pointless holdup. "I want everyone watching the proceedings tonight to again understand what the Republicans are doing," Reid said. "We just passed badly needed legislation to help 2.5 million unemployed. To show the lack of understanding and feeling and compassion of the Republicans, they’re making us waste 30 hours. There are people who are desperate for this money — desperate. And they’re making us wait because that’s what the rule of the Senate is.

"Now, I hope the American people understand how callous this is. People are desperate, can’t make house payments, car payments, can’t pay for kids’ food. And they are having us wait for 30 hours after cloture’s been invoked. We only need a simple majority to pass this bill now, but they’re making us wait. I just can’t articulate in strong enough feelings how unfair this is to 2.5 million people…. Every hour that is delayed is more misery for 2.5 million people."

I should also note that, under these same rules, the Senate can’t take up any other bills or nominations while waiting for the 30 hours to elapse. In effect, it’s like a mini-filibuster that gets tacked on to the failed filibuster.

If Republicans push this to its limit, the Senate won’t vote on the extended unemployment benefits until 9 p.m. (ET) this evening.

A Greenwald column that observes how greatly Stony Hoyer has changed his tune on Guantánamo:

Letter signed by Steny Hoyer to George Bush, June 29, 2007, demanding closing of Guantanamo:

Holding prisoners for an indefinite period of time, without charging them with a crime goes against our values, ideals and principles as a nation governed by the rule of law. Further, Guantanamo Bay has a become a liability in the broader global war on terror, as allegations of torture, the indefinite detention of innocent men, and international objections to the treatment of enemy combatants has hurt our credibility as the beacon for freedom and justice. Its continued operation also threatens the safety of U.S. citizens and military personnel detained abroad. . . . A liability of our own creation, the existence of the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay is defeating our effort to ensure that the principles of freedom, justice and human rights are spread throughout the world.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, today:

Gitmo shut-down not a priority, top Dem says

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer acknowledged Tuesday that closing down the Guantanamo Bay prison is not a top priority for congressional Democrats.

In response to a question from a reporter about where shutting down Gitmo stands, Hoyer said, "I think that’s not an item, as you point out, of real current discussion. There’s some very big issues confronting us – dealing with growing the economy and Iraq and Afghanistan."

Hoyer added, "I think you’re not going to see it discussed very broadly in the near term."

How can it be that it’s not a priority to end something which — as Hoyer put it in 2007 — "threatens the safety of U.S. citizens and military personnel detained abroad"?   Why would Democrats like Hoyer be so willing to jeopardize the safety of American citizens and the lives of Our Troops abroad by de-prioritizing something which (at least if the 2007 Hoyer was to be believed) directly threatens them?  Also, we had wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2007 along with a whole variety of other problems — if those issues now justify de-prioritizing the closing of Guantanamo, why wasn’t that also true in 2007 when Hoyer (and most other Democrats ) were vocally demanding that Bush close the camp? 

This, needless to say, is par for the course:  policies which establishment Democrats pretended to vehemently oppose when out of power magically transformed into policies they embrace when in power.  Ironically, in response to the 2007 Hoyer letter, a Bush spokesperson "said the letter was received and noted that Bush has said he wants to close Guantanamo. ‘A number of steps need to take place before that can happen, and we’re continuing to work on those,’ she said."  Sound familiar?  Recall, too, that even the Obama plan to move the camp to Illinois would have entailed preserving one of the core factors condemned by Hoyer ("Holding prisoners for an indefinite period of time, without charging them with a crime goes against our values, ideals and principles as a nation governed by the rule of law").

Along these same lines, a provision in the new Intelligence Authorization Act which would provide for substantially greater oversight of the intelligence community has now disappeared from the bill in the face of a threat from the Obama White House to veto any bill containing it.  I wrote before about the Obama administration’s efforts to prevent greater oversight of covert intelligence programs — greater oversight also used to be an advocated Democratic policy — but it’s particularly ironic that Obama succeeded in quashing further oversight on the exact day that The Washington Post documents the completely out-of-control, unaccountable, secret world of the National Security and Surveillance State.  Allowing an audit of these intelligence programs by the General Accounting Office to ensure compliance with the law — something Nancy Pelosi was pushing — would have been one mild means of ensuring at least a marginal degree of accountability over Top Secret America.  Yet it looks likely even that will not happen because Obama is threatening a veto to prevent it.  I wonder why he would do that?

And another bad sign, from the same column:

Charlie Savage just noted on Twitter that Marty Lederman — the former blogger, Georgetown Law Professor, and vociferous critic of Bush executive power and Terrorism policies — is leaving his position at the Office of Legal Counsel to return to Georgetown Law.  Late last month, David Barron — the acting OLC Chief — also announced that he is leaving, to return to Harvard.  With Dawn Johnsen never having been confirmed and her nomination to head the office now withdrawn, what had originally seemed to be such a promising team at OLC — the office which determines for the Executive Branch the legal limits of presidential authority — no longer exists.  It will be interesting to see if Lederman comments on any of the theories and policies that were continued and/or adopted during his tenure.

I lost another 1/4 pound. I think that by 31 July I may be able to leave the realm of the obese. At my height, 230 lbs is the dividing line between "obese" and "overweight."

I bought some heritage tomatoes to make another batch of the Moroccan tomato soup. It’s terrific.

While I was at Whole Foods, I looked at some fruit juices and fruit juice drinks. I note that sugar gets added to almost every drink. No wonder the US is the land of the obese. I did find some that did not use sugar, so I got those to add as flavoring to my iced white tea.

There is much to like in the Obama Administration, but sadly, also much to condemn—the Obama citizen-assassination program first and foremost, but much else besides. Take a look, for example at this report by Nina Bernstein:

Vincenzo Donnoli was 9 when his family immigrated legally to Brooklyn. He attended Erasmus Hall High School, married and divorced in Flatbush, ran a landscaping business and had five children. But at 51 he is back — alone and jobless — in Pomarico, the hill town in southern Italy where his father was a shepherd, as a deportee banned for life from returning to the United States.

His offense: two misdemeanor convictions for possessing small amounts of cocaine, in 1988 and 2006, both guilty pleas resolved without jail time. Retroactively, immigration authorities added them up to equal an “aggravated felony” that required Mr. Donnoli’s automatic deportation last year.

That kind of arithmetic, an aggressive government interpretation of 1996 immigration laws that has been increasingly invoked in recent years, was rejected by the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision in June. But the ruling came too late for Mr. Donnoli and thousands of deportees like him, all former lawful residents who have no way to turn that legal vindication into a chance to come home.

“The Supreme Court has said in a series of cases that the government’s theories of deportation have been wrong for years,” said Daniel Kanstroom, a professor at Boston College Law School, citing earlier decisions that rejected the government’s classification of other minor crimes as deportable offenses. “And yet the legal system has not developed a mechanism to right that wrong for the thousands of people who have been wrongly deported.”

Under the ruling last month, which echoed decisions by four federal circuit courts, including the one covering New York, legal residents with minor drug convictions are eligible to have an immigration judge weigh their offenses against other factors in their lives and decide whether to let them stay.

But deportees who were denied such a hearing have no means to get one now. The Board of Immigration Appeals says it has no jurisdiction over any case after deportation. Government regulations prohibit any motion to reopen the case of someone who has left the country; judicial circuits are divided over that interpretation of immigration law, and a request that the Supreme Court consider the matter is pending.

The Obama administration, which is on track to deport a record 400,000 people this fiscal year, according to government statistics, has shown no eagerness to open the door. Now two dozen legal rights groups are calling for a process that would let immigrants reopen their cases under the ruling last month.

“American principles of justice — fairness, due process and discretion — require that these immigrants now receive their day in court,” the groups wrote in a June 18 letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security.

The Justice Department referred questions about the letter to the Department of Homeland Security, where a spokesman, Matthew Chandler, declined to comment on the issues it raised. . .

Continue reading.

Where is that guy who took the position that we can simply trust businesses to do what’s good for us, the general public? I would love for him to explain this story, whose headline is included:

Lobbyists push use of deadly asbestos in developing nations

A global network of lobby groups has spent nearly $100 million since the mid-1980s to preserve the international market for asbestos, a known carcinogen that’s taken millions of lives and is banned or restricted in 52 countries, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has found in a nine-month investigation.

Backed by public and private money and aided by scientists and friendly governments, the groups helped facilitate the sale of 2.2 million tons of asbestos last year, mostly in developing nations. Anchored by the Montreal-based Chrysotile Institute, the network stretches from New Delhi to Mexico City to the city of Asbest in Russia’s Ural Mountains. Its message is that asbestos can be used safely under "controlled" conditions.

As a result, asbestos use is growing rapidly in countries such as China and India, prompting health experts to warn of future epidemics of lung cancer, asbestosis and mesothelioma, an aggressive malignancy that usually attacks the lining of the lungs.

The World Health Organization says that 125 million people still encounter asbestos in the workplace, and the United Nations’ International Labor Organization estimates that 100,000 workers die each year from asbestos-related diseases. Thousands more perish from exposures outside the workplace.

Dr. James Leigh, the retired director of the Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health at the Sydney School of Public Health in Australia, has forecast a total of 5 million to 10 million deaths from asbestos-related cancers by 2030, an estimate he considers conservative.

"It’s totally unethical," Jukka Takala, the director of the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work and a former International Labor Organization official, said of the pro-asbestos campaign. "It’s almost criminal. Asbestos cannot be used safely. It is clearly a carcinogen. It kills people."

Indeed, a panel of 27 experts convened by the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer reported last year, "Epidemiological evidence has increasingly shown an association of all forms of asbestos … with an increased risk of lung cancer and mesothelioma."

The asbestos industry, however, has signaled that it will fight to protect sales of raw fiber and finished products such as asbestos cement roofing and water pipes. Among its allies are industry-funded researchers who have contributed hundreds of articles to the scientific literature claiming that chrysotile — white asbestos, the only kind sold today — is orders of magnitude less hazardous than brown or blue asbestos. Russia is the world’s biggest chrysotile producer, China the biggest consumer…

Continue reading. So: They know their product will cause agonizing deaths for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. That’s on the hand. On the other hand, they can protect themselves and their families and they will make a lot of money. For a certain kind of person (a sociopath), it’s easy to decide in favor of the money. And those are the people who run businesses—the ethical and moral get sorted out in the process because they are unwilling to put the company’s profits first, before all other consideration.