TERRORIST GROUP RENOUNCES VIOLENCE, or: the downside of listening to the news before waking up

It was announced yesterday that the IRS has renounced its support of armed violence. Presumably this means that we can now pay our income taxes without fear that our money will be used to burn villages and bomb innocent women and children and...what? Oh, that was the IRA? Never mind.

Solidarity Forever?

The AFL-CIO is celebrating its 50th anniversary by losing two of its largest unions, the Teamsters (who have always been sort of in and out of the larger organization) and the Service Employees International Union. AFL-CIO president John Sweeney is furious, and says this moves weakens organized labor disastrously. Andrew Stern, president of SEIU, says what organized labor needs is more members, and Sweeney's people aren't working hard enough to get them. "Throwing money at politicians," he says, is no substitute for membership.

The new organization (tentatively called Change to Win Coalition) is looking for new members primarily in the service sector. Child care workers, home health care workers, hotel and restaurant workers and like that. They have three things in common: their jobs are regarded as low-skilled, they are paid wages far below what even a single person can live on without subsidization from other family members or the public sector, and nobody has yet figured out a way to offshore or automate their jobs. As opposed to the information sector of the economy, where skills and salaries are high, but the work is in the ethereal realm of cyberspace or phonespace, and for precisely those reasons, employers have a huge incentive to hire more-or-less English-speaking people overseas to fill the jobs.

The new coalition itself may be able to get the ear of politicians, even without throwing money at them, if it can promise them the votes of an increased member base. That, of course, requires, first, getting those new members, and second, persuading them to bother voting at all. Who they vote for is almost an afterthought. While union members do typically vote in larger proportions than the rest of the working class, low-wage workers generally do not vote at all. Stern and his colleagues will have to put serious effort into changing this pattern. Fasten your seatbelts, folks, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Bush Declares the War is Over

Today's Progress Report, from the American Progress Action Fund, reports:

After having waged an entire presidential reelection campaign based on the need to stand strong in the "war on terror," the Bush administration is now informing us that there isn't really a war on terror after all. The New York Times writes that Secretary Rumsfeld and military officials have spoken of a "global struggle against violent extremism" rather than the "global war on terror" because "if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution." For his part, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers said he had objected to term "war on terrorism" before, but in yet another case of the White House not listening to military leadership, they've continued to politicize the term over the past 3 years. After having fended off criticisms that it was overly-focused on a military victory in the "war on terror," the Bush administration appears to be slowly gravitating the correct view that "the solution is 'more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military.'"

Of course, we still don't know how this affects the status of enemy combatants being held for the duration of whatever we call it now, or for that matter the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act through Congress.

Supporting our troops, Bush style

Yesterday NPR did a terrific story on Walter Reed Hospital's rehab program for physical and mental trauma of Iraq War Veterans. The program is apparently really innovative and gets great results. However, NPR left out one crucial detail--Walter Reed Hospital is scheduled to be closed in this current round of military base closings.

Apparently the administration's idea of "supporting the troops" has nothing to do with devoting resources to alleviating the suffering of "him who shall have borne the battle" (much less his widow and his orphan.) No, all we're supposed to do is continually reassure them that their suffering is politically and morally "worth it." That's cheap, and the administration is gambling that it will be enough to assure us a "continual supply of heroes."

Recommendations

Things to read when it's too hot to go out:

this month's Harper's Magazine--especially the articles about the stolen Ohio election and the Right's wrong take on Christianity

ggsloth.blogspot.com

Bleak House--the summum bonum of lawyer novels, in which one of the main characters is a lawsuit. I am an unashamed Dickens freak anyway. Among other things, I love the size of his universe. Most novels these days have two or three main characters and a couple of walk-ons and that's it. The Victorians--Dickens, Tolstoy, George Eliot--create whole worlds full of characters. Even their walk-ons are three-dimensional. And (interestingly enough from the socioeconomic point of view) even the servants have servants. The other fascinating and useful thing about the Victorian novels is that they show us what a world without a safety net looks like, giving us a chance to prepare for it before the Scrooges get their chance to re-create it. Even Christmas Carol, though smaller in dimension, is helpful for that purpose. "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? Bah, humbug!"

New Biblical Find -- The Fundies Had It Right

Archeologists have recently uncovered some fragments of a scroll which appears to be a parallel Gospel and commentary on one of the lost books of the Bible, the Book of the Wars of the Lord. Owing to 4 misspent years in divinity school, I'm in close contact with one of the people working on translating the scroll, so I can provide regular updates of the work. This may be one of the most important biblical finds ever, "probably bigger than the Dead Sea Scrolls," according to my source.

Anyway, the author of this scroll claims to be the apostle Bartholomew, one of the few apostles who had not previously had a gnostic gospel attributed to him. The first fragment translated so far says, "and Jesus took them up to a very high mountain, and told the people, 'You have heard it said, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you." But I say to you, "Smite your enemies before they smite you." You have heard it said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But I say to you, "Do unto others as they would do unto you, and do it first."'"

A couple of the other fragments seem to talk about "the sons of Sodom" and quote Jesus as saying, "You shall not do business with them or their friends, and your laws shall not shelter them."

And the most recent piece to be translated seems to say, "You have heard it said, 'The poor you have always with you,' and 'You shall love the poor, the widow, and the orphan.' But I say to you, 'Let the poor, the orphan, and the widow fend for themselves; have no compassion on them. For they would not be poor if My Hand were not against them; they have what they deserve, and they deserve what they have.'"

Watch this space for further finds.

Sleight of Hand and the Supreme Court

After a couple of weeks of highly-publicized screening, W finally came up with his pick for Justice O'Connor's Supreme Court seat--an esteemed legal scholar and recent appointee to the DC Court of Appeals named John Roberts Jr. The good news: he is by all accounts a competent jurist and a nice person. Considering that the last Republican pick for the Supreme Court was Clarence Thomas, that's a relief. In years of court-watching, I have known the Supreme Court to turn liberals into conservatives and conservatives into liberals, but I have never known it to turn a hack into a competent jurist. Roberts, apparently, not only believes in stare decisis, he can spell it.

The middling news: he does believe in stare decisis, and has stated that Roe v. Wade is the law of the land and that's that. On the other hand, back when he was working in the Solicitor General's office, he did write a brief urging the reversal of Roe. I've written briefs espousing weirder positions than that, and didn't necessarily endorse their premises, so I don't know that that means anything. And Roberts is logistically an ideal pick because he has already been through one senatorial confirmation, which he passed with flying colors, but he hasn't been on the bench long enough to leave much of a paper trail.

The bad news: his wife (also a lawyer, which I guess is kind of good news) is a leader of a major women's "pro-life" organization. The Republicans are really pleased with this appointment. The head of Operation Rescue is pleased with this appointment. That's scary.

And the news management news: Bush floated a host of names of women and hispanics before making his choice, and apparently thinks that he deserves credit from minorities, women, and in particular Laura, for having done that even if all we wind up with is another white guy. (We will presumably never know if he spends the next month sleeping on the couch.) He played 20 Questions with the press for several days in a really obnoxiously coy manner guaranteed to get their attention off of Karl Rove (see yesterday's blog) just in time. He can keep on using the nomination for the same purpose until the confirmation hearings are over, possibly all the way to the first Monday in October. That's really scary.

IT AIN'T WHAT YOU LEAK, IT'S THE WAY THAT YOU LEAK IT

Let me see if I have this straight. It all started when President Bush, in the course of justifying his invasion of Iraq, alleged that the Iraqis were buying, or trying to buy, uranium ore in the African country of Niger, in order to make nuclear weapons. This was part of his larger contention that the Iraqis had and would soon be in a position to use weapons of mass destruction, if not stopped by invading forces.

This impelled Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat in the Clinton administration, to take a trip to Niger to check out these allegations. The allegations proved false.

In the course of trying to put a negative spin on this revelation, columnist Robert Novak stated that some governmental source had told him that Wilson's trip to Niger had been arranged by his wife, a CIA operative. The wife's name was not used, but there has never been any allegation that Wilson is a polygamist. And I still have trouble understanding why it should matter, even if true, that the trip was arranged by the then-otherwise-anonymous Mrs. Wilson. If anything, someone whose travel arrangements were made by a CIA operative ought to be able to do a better job of getting at crucial information. And, more to the point, nobody has ever alleged that Wilson's findings were untrue or mistaken, much less falsified. That is, nobody has ever claimed that Bush was not lying or recklessly indifferent to the truth when he stated that the Iraqis had been buying uranium ore in Niger.

Novak's story got picked up by two other reporters, Time's Matt Cooper and the New York Times' Judith Miller. Both of them checked out the Novak story with anonymous government sources. Cooper actually published an article on the subject; Miller never did. At some point subsequent to all this, a grand jury investigation was opened by Chicago's own US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, now on temporary duty in DC, into -- well, it's not quite clear into what. We also don't know who was a "target” of the investigation, except that Fitzgerald has stated it wasn't Karl Rove. (Back to Rove in a minute.) Cooper and Miller were both subpoenaed by the grand jury to identify their sources. After an odyssey through the federal courts ending with a Supreme Court ruling that the First Amendment in this case did not give the reporters the right to refuse to identify their sources to the grand jury, Cooper testified. He identified one of his sources as White House adviser Karl Rove, and another as Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby. Miller refused to testify and is still in jail as a result.

Rove's defense against any possible charges of revealing classified information or revealing the identity of a covert agent, apparently, is twofold. First, he never identified "Joseph Wilson's wife" by name. Most lawyers, given the monogamous nature of the Wilson marriage, find this laughable. And second, when he talked to Cooper, Novak had already blown Mrs. Wilson's cover, so Rove disclaims any blame for having "leaked" or "revealed" classified information. Apparently his position is that information is classified, and a covert agent's identity is covert, only until somebody makes it public. Although Novak is "cooperating fully with the grand jury," we still don't know who his source was. Rove has apparently said nothing one way or another about whether it was he.

The Democratic response to all of this was a great deal of indignation and denunciation, plus a proposed bill that would revoke the security clearance of any federal official found to have revealed classified information. While this is a perfectly reasonable "logical consequence," it might not be applicable to Rove himself, since the Constitution frowns on ex post facto punishments.

And the Republican response to the Democratic response has been to denounce Wilson for making such a fuss about the blowing of his wife's cover, and attributing to him motives of purely personal and partisan rancor.

All of this brouhaha calls to mind an earlier uproar, back in 1997. Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear... Some couple from Atlanta is driving around Washington with the car scanner on, and they suddenly recognize one of the voices coming over it. It is the voice of a fellow Georgian (though probably they would have recognized it anyway), the then Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich. “Hey, this is interesting!” says one to the other. “Let’s tape it!” Which they do. (I don’t know enough about this kind of automotive communications technology to know how difficult that would have been, or what quality reproduction one could expect under these circumstances.) By the end of the conversation, they become convinced that it indicates something shady going on. They apparently conclude that their duty as Good Citizens is to hand it over to Congress, preferably to somebody on the House Ethics Committee whose investigation is the subject matter of the conversation. So far, so reasonable. So they send it to the office of Representative McDermott, then the ranking Democrat on the committee. This is where our reflexive “yeah sure, why not?” breaks down. Why McDermott specifically? He was not their representative. So far as we know, they had no previous acquaintance or contact with him. We must confess ignorance, for now anyway. And then, somehow or other, by a mechanism yet unknown, the tape finds its way from McDermott’s office to the press.

Let’s fill in some detail. In most states, it is illegal for civilians to use police scanner radios in motor vehicles. In some jurisdictions, it is illegal to tape conversations, or particularly telephone conversations, without the knowledge/consent of at least one party (in some places, all parties) to the conversation. On the other hand, the Supreme Court has held that people who converse on portable phones have no expectation of privacy, because portable phones for technical purposes are nothing but a specialized form of CB radio. There is no ruling on cellular phones yet, but anyone acquainted with that technology would expect a similar ruling when the issue comes up. The conversation in question was overheard on scanner because one of the parties to it was using his cellular phone. Not being licensed to practice where the events in question took place, I’m not quite sure what the operative law is. But these are the outer limits of it, to the best of my knowledge.

The Republicans, however, decided to take the position that the matter had a lot more to do with ethics than with law. On ethics, of course, we are all experts. What was the overheard conversation about? Well, it all started with Newt Gingrich’s college course. He has a PhD in history. Historians I correspond with seem to be skeptical of his professional competence in that area, but he has at least paid his dues, and has every right to teach the subject at college level. But this particular course was apparently nothing but a billboard for his political positions and ambitions. Far be it from this writer to object to that, since this blog serves a very similar purpose. But I run it on my own dime. Gingrich ran his course, apparently, on money raised from tax-exempt foundations whose legal status requires them to stay out of politics. After a couple of years of dithering about this, the House Ethics Committee finally decided that this was a violation of their code, and that something had to be done. Unusually for a Congressional committee, they decided to do it in the form of what would be called a plea bargain if it had happened in a criminal forum--allowing Gingrich to accept a pre-ordained punishment of reprimand and fine, and thereby removing a serious obstacle to his re-election as Speaker. One of the conditions of the bargain was that Gingrich and his far-right cronies should shut up about it. The telephone conversation in question was held between Gingrich and some of those cronies, and its subject was how they could present this to the public. In short, it was a smoking gun revealing violation of the deal.

But all the public outcry involved, not Gingrich’s original misbehavior, nor his later violation of the plea bargain about it, but McDermott’s possible involvement in illegal taping and unethical leaking of Gingrich’s phone conversation about it. You got that? What matters is not what the Republican did wrong, but the way it got revealed to the public under the auspices of a Democrat. Starting to sound familiar?

So can we get back to the basic facts, the things nobody on either side denies, of this particular brouhaha? Namely: President Bush lied, or anyway spoke in reckless disregard for the truth, about the Iraqis buying uranium in Niger as part of his pitch to sell the war in Iraq, Wilson revealed that fact, and Rove and Libby, probably among other government officials, then blew Wilson's wife's cover as a covert CIA agent, thereby ending her usefulness to the Agency and possibly endangering or at least ending the usefulness of many of her contacts. Did Wilson make a fuss about this out of partisan or personal rancor? Who cares? Did Rove break the law? Who knows? What we do know is that upwards of 1,700 Americans and untold thousands of Iraqis have died in an unnecessary and illegal war based on untruths told by our president. This time, let's not let ourselves be distracted by questions of procedural nicety and personal motivation from the real issues of war and peace, life and death.

Odd Lots #2 winner

Jon guessed right--Edgar Allen Poe, Timothy Leary, and Chris Kristofferson all went to West Point. Only Kristofferson graduated, however.

Okay, here's Odd Lot #3: Dorothy Day (founder of the Catholic Worker Movement), Dorothy Sayers (mystery writer), Maria Montessori (early childhood education pioneer), Loretta Young (movie actress in the 1940s and 50s).

Why Doesn't the Democratic Party Have a Farm Team?

You know what a farm team is--every major sports league trains and develops its players by bringing them up through minor leagues. Okay, the NFL and the NBA use collegiate sports, but the baseball system is built on A, AA, and AAA leagues through which players rise and sometimes fall before their shot at the big games.

Increasingly, the Right has farm teams of its own, sometimes beginning as far down as local school boards, and bringing candidates up through state legislatures, the US Congress, and above all, governors' mansions. But the Democrats? The closest thing they have to a farm team is the US Senate. Almost every Democratic candidate for president in my lifetime has been a member. A few have been recently resigned ex-members, but mostly they've been sitting senators. And the last time a sitting senator was elected president was before most of today's electorate was born (1960 to be exact.) What we need is what God's Own Party has in abundance--governors. Preferably Southern governors. The only Democratic presidents since 1968 were both Southern governors (Carter and Clinton.)

I don't mean to imply that there's anything wrong with senators. In fact, most of the Democratic senators who have run for President in the last 45 years have been pretty high-quality candidates--smart, articulate, hard-working, and taking positions that (even if I didn't always agree with them) were well-argued and supported by good use of evidence. But the American people don't really like senators. Or respect them. I mean, what do senators do? Talk. Argue. Compromise (showing they're fundamentally wimpy) or refuse to compromise (showing they put their own political advancement ahead of the common good.) They don't really accomplish anything.

Governors, on the other hand, can easily claim to resemble that most respectable of American icons, the CEO. They run a big business. They administer a big budget. They tell people what to do--and it gets done. It's great job training for the biggest executive job of all.

Which is why, I suspect, the right-wing media elite worked so hard to get rid of Howard Dean last time around--unlike all the other possibles of that year, he was a governor. Not, admittedly, a Southern governor, but still somebody who had done a pretty good job of meeting a payroll. So when he came out with his wild barbaric yawp after the Iowa caucuses, the conservative pundits took it and ran, knowing it was probably the last shot they would get at a man who had come up with the first successful innovation in political fund-raising since Richard Viguerie's direct mail brainstorm in the 1970s.

Well, enough of the post mortem. The point is, this year we're really short on Democratic governors. There's Tony Richardson in New Mexico (a sort of Southern state, I guess, and in spite of his Anglo last name, a Hispanic) and Rod Blagoyevich in our own state. Illinois governors, though, are a chancy commodity. Three of them have actually done prison time for official jiggery-pokery; one is currently under indictment, and two others that I know of have left office just ahead of the sheriff. (I think this means that if Barak Obama, our current junior senator, is to get the proper seasoning for a presidential run, he should probably move to another state and run for governor there first. These days, most people don't object to carpetbagging--if it's good enough for Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, why not Barak Obama? Maybe he should move back to Hawaii?) Offhand, I don't know of any others. Even Massachusetts now has a Republican governor, for pete's sake.

So the Democratic Party needs to evolve a long-range strategy (like the one the GOP famously formulated after Goldwater bombed in 1964), and that strategy needs to feature, above all, the cultivation of Democratic governors, especially in the South and West. It would be nice if some of them were women, or Hispanic, or African-American, too. It would be okay for them to spend some time in the Senate, but that should under no circumstances be their last stop before a presidential campaign. The long-standing habit of governors (of both parties) filling unexpected senatorial vacancies by resigning and having their successors appoint them to the senate, has got to stop. Ex-governors are better than no governors at all, but not much.

Yes, I know that when you are up to your ass in alligators, it is difficult to formulate a long-range strategy to drain the swamp. But the sooner we start, the sooner it will pay off.

The Red, the Right, and Religion

Yesterday I heard an excerpt from the Mayor of London's speech at the vigil in honor of the victims of last week's bombing, in which he urged the citizens of London not to hate those who had done this awful thing. I was taken aback at first. The London mayor is popularly known as "Red Ken," for his generally leftist policies. Good grief, I thought. The Tories are really going to roast him for that--'weak-kneed liberal' is probably the kindest thing they'll say. I tried hard to imagine Mayor Giuliani saying anything like that after 9/11, and the response of the Hard Right if he had.

So far as I know, the Tories haven't said anything, not yet anyway. And I found myself thinking a bit harder--despite the general presumption on both sides of the Atlantic that leftists are less religious than conservatives, "Red Ken" is telling his constituency pretty much what Jesus would have said. "If a man strike you on the right cheek, turn to him your left....If a man compel you to go one mile with him, go with him a second mile...love those who hate you, do good to those who harm you...."

Which is not necessarily my position on the subject--I'm not a Christian, after all, and if somebody blew up my subway and several of my fellow citizens merely because we are "unbelievers", I'd be damned mad. But it's a bit scary to realize that people who think of themselves as the religious Right would laugh a politician out of public life forever for merely saying what their supposed Master would say under the same circumstances.

Odd Lots #1 answer

One reader has suggested that what Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Emma Goldman, Mary Renault and P.D. James have in common is that they each wrote at least one book, and wrote in English. Nice try. Actually, before any of them got into the book-writing business, they were in nursing! (Whitman and Alcott during the Civil War, the others at various times since.)

Okay, here's Odd Lot #2: Edgar Allen Poe, Chris Kristofferson, and Timothy Leary. Yes, they're all anglophone, and I think wrote at least one book apiece. Try looking for something else.

Intellectual Property News

Last week Charna Halperin, director of the Improv Olympics, announced that the name of that enterprise will be changed to IO, in response to threats of litigation from the International Olympic Committee.

This week, Ms. Halperin announced that the name of the enterprise formerly known as IO has been changed once again, to I*, in response to threats of litigation from Opr*h W*infr*y and the magazine she publishes under the title O.

Other letters of the alphabet soon to be removed from the public domain include X, Q, and F.

The Dismal Science

One of Bush's less notorious proposals for "reforming" Social Security is to index it to prices rather than wages. This requires explanation: to "index" a regular payment to some other measure is to make it rise along with that measure. If Social Security had not been indexed to something, it would still be paying out $10 a month or thereabout. It is now, officially anyway, indexed to the index of incomes. That is, supposedly it goes up as the average income goes up. Bush wants to index it to the Consumer Price Index. He says this will slow the rise in benefits because prices are rising more slowly than wages.

Which raises a whole bunch of questions.
1. Why does he want to slow the rise in benefits? My esteemed spouse's Social Security check went up by 1.75% last year. (see http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA) In the meantime, the average CEO's salary and compensation package went up by 12% in the same year. (http://www.aflcio.org/corporateamerica/paywatch/pay/)

2. Who says wages are rising faster than prices? Whose wages? Which prices? Anybody who can say that with a straight face either isn't paying attention or is engaging in deliberate flimflammery. Where do these statistics come from?

Officially they come from the US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index (http://www.bls.gov/cpi/home.htm). The CPI has been under attack from the conservatives for years because they claim (get this!) it overstates price inflation, by ignoring the tendency of the savvy consumer to replace high-cost items with cheaper stuff after a certain point. The conservatives, of course, are ignoring the fact that such "commodity substitution" works only up to a certain point. People who have been eating steak can switch to hamburger, people who have been eating hamburger can switch to tuna, and people who have been eating tuna can switch to eggs and peanut butter, but what can people switch to from eggs and peanut butter? And such enforced commodity substitution, whatever you call it and whether or not you choose to call it inflation in the cost of living, is definitely a decrease in the standard of living.

In fact, the way the cost of living is conventionally reported in business periodicals and broadcasts understates increases in the cost of living, by deliberately and explicitly factoring out such items as housing, fuel, and health care because they are so "volatile" that they "distort" the general picture. If I could factor those volatile items out of my price index, life would be a lot easier. In fact, the price of gasoline has risen almost 30% in the last year. I'm not citing any sources for that, because you can check it for yourself every time you take your car out. The purchase price of the average house increases betw1een 7 and 12% a year (www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/econ_housinginflation.shtml). The cost of health care has been increasing at the rate of about 7% a year for the last ten years (http://www.nchc. org/facts/cost.shtml) You get the picture.

There are a couple of things you can do to keep from being taken in by this statistical dreck:

following is a batch of interesting links that will help you keep track of what's really happening in the economy:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/longterm/cpi/cpi.htm

http://money.cnn.com/2003/11/14/markets/inflation/

http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_04/paulos090904.html

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1094/is_n3_v32/ai_19735856

http://www.rense.com/general4/lv.htm

http://www1.jsc.nasa.gov/bu2/inflate.htm

http://www.bls.gov/dolfaq/bls_ques2.htm

http://www.pww.org/past-weeks-2000/Cost%20of%20living.htm

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0317-04.htm

http://www.themilitant.com/1996/6045/6045_1.html

Some of them, you'll notice, are impeccably middle-of-the-road, like CNN and the Washington Post. Some of them are far to the left of anything the Democratic party dares to say these days. Doesn't matter--they all tell us pretty much the same thing: the official reports of what's happening in the economy cannot be trusted. If you don't want to be flimflammed, follow the unofficial reports.

And second, try keeping your own consumer price index. It's probably good for your budgeting anyway. Track what you pay for your week's grocery shopping, your gas fillup, and your health insurance copays. Make a note when when your heating bill goes up. And so on. It's better than suddenly realizing you're running out of money earlier in the month than you were last year. If you don't pay attention to what is happening in your own life, nobody else will.

Have a nice week.

London and other dangerous places

The scariest thing about the London bombings may be the statement by one British authority on terrorism that Al-Quaeda isn't an organization any more, it's an ideology. Any group of people that wants to call itself an Al-Quaeda cell and engage in terrorism can do it, he says. Which actually makes Al-Quaeda sound more like a franchise than an ideology. On the other hand, the prospect of a major terrorist operation getting bogged down in intellectual property disputes over who can use the Al-Quaeda logo and name is kind of appetizing. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.

In the meantime, the USA PATRIOT Act is still up for renewal in Congress, and Bush is threatening to veto any attempt to diminish its scope and power. And at the same time, they're still talking about the "Real I.D. Act." That one raises a couple of questions. On one hand, the orthodox civil libertarians are unalterably opposed to a single national identity document, because it just sounds too much like the internal passports of the Soviet Union and the infamous pass documents of apartheid South Africa. On the other hand, in order to achieve the same result, the federal government is now trying to reshape the way the states issue driver's licenses.

At this point, I think we might actually be better off with a single national identity document. In the first place, nobody could refuse to accept it. (Racial minorities are especially familiar with being barred from various places and activities requiring "good I.D." because whatever document they presented wasn't "good enough" -- obviously racism was the real reason, but as long as the proprietor had the right to refuse to accept the validity of somebody's I.D., he could get away with it.) In the second place, that might leave the states free to go back to regulating driver's licenses for their original purpose--insuring that the people driving on our roads are competent to do so, regardless of their immigration status. In the third place, people who for whatever reason don't drive are entitled not to be treated as second-class citizens with second-class I.D.s. The use of the driver's license as the primary and preferred identity document discriminates against people who are too old, too young, too disabled, or too poor to drive.

Yes, I know ours is not the first society to build an entire social and political system on a means of transportation. Since the first use of horses for military purposes (in classical Rome, I think), owning a horse was the measure of nobility and citizenship, pretty much until the invention and widespread use of the automobile. Most of the European words that mean "noble" are connected with the horse (cavalier, chevalier, caballero, ritter, chivalry, and so on.) That doesn't make it a good idea.

Indeed, as the population of most industrial countries ages, the use of the automobile becomes more and more problematic. Most of us think it's okay to keep children from driving, and we don't really worry much about poor people and people with disabilities--they'll manage somehow, and if they don't, who cares? But all of us are getting older, and eventually we will get too old to drive safely. Just as getting a driver's license marks the passage from childhood into adulthood, losing it marks the passage from adulthood into redundant and dependent old age. Unless we either dramatically improve the public transportation system or invent a "smart car" that doesn't need a physically competent driver, we're all headed for trouble.

So in the meantime, can't we at least invent a form of identity document that doesn't require the ability to drive a car? And, at least as important, can't we go back to using the driver's license for its original and vital purpose--keeping our roads safe?

Welcome to the Future?

Just saw this year's Boston Pops celebration of the Glorious Fourth. My husband and I, being former Bostonians, get really nostalgic for Pops Promenade concerts, and normally really get off on the Fourth. This year, I had to conclude the Pops had been hijacked by Republican Governor Romney trying to stick it to his blue state. It started badly, by being announced as "commercial-free"--immediately before a commercial. Another commercial completely overrode the fireworks finale. The broadcast quality was poor--what was billed as "high definition" was anything but, and the sound was badly mixed too. The live music was lifeless. The music finale was all recordings. Is this what our Glorious Leader plans to do to the arts?

Which reminds me--did Senator Durbin overstate his case by comparing the situation at Guantanamo to the Soviet Gulag and the German camps? A historical purist could probably say so, yes. A historical purist could make a good case that Mussolini's Italy would be a more apt comparison. But neither Durbin nor his critics know that much about history. What Durbin should have said in response to his critics is that throwing people behind bars without charges, without a chance to prove their innocence, and for an indefinite period wasn't the worst thing the Soviets and the Nazis did--but it was certainly among the worst things. And now we're doing it. End of argument.

Oh well, have a Glorious Fourth.

Holiday weekend 7/3/05

Last week the AMA decided to waffle on the issue of drug companies marketing directly to consumers. Perhaps one of the big pharmaceutical companies made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Maybe the only way to get serious attention drawn to this issue is to figure out a way to sue the drug companies for malpractice the next time a patient encourages his doctor to prescribe something he saw on TV (this apparently happens a lot) and then has a bad reaction to it.

Or maybe--well, where is the Religious Right when we really need it? Okay, we do see a lot of ads for "the little purple pill" for gastric reflux (like people color-coordinate their meds, right?) and a couple of anti-depressants, but what we mostly see ads for on TV--and usually smack in the middle of prime time--are medications for erectile dysfunction and genital herpes. Do we really want our kids watching these ads? Or, more to the point, do we really want to have to explain to our kids what erectile dysfunction is? Or, worse still, do we want to live with the likelihood that they already know? If I had kids at home right now, I would be totally dismayed, and would probably keep my TV on TIVO permanently to keep them from seeing those ads. I can't be the only person who feels that way. Probably most parents don't mind their kids learning about depression and indigestion, but genital herpes? Yikes!
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Celebrating the Fourth:

Apparently we are once again headed for a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning. So no doubt people who are into flag-burning should do it while they still have the right to, before our glorious leaders trash the substance of what America stands for in order to protect the symbol. But personally, I prefer to keep my symbolic actions in line with what Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas suggested back in the '60s when flag-burning was somewhat more popular than it is now: don't burn the flag, wash it. Maybe we should all head down to our local parade stands with a dishpan, a flag, and some soap and water to celebrate the Fourth by cleansing our national symbol of the lies and violations with which this administration has defiled it. Sounds like good clean fun to me.
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Game for the week:

Since I'm a history buff, I like to collect "odd lots" of historical personages who have something in common that most people would never guess. This week's odd lot is:

Emma Goldman
Walt Whitman
Louisa May Alcott
Mary Renault
P.D. James

Respond under "comments" if you think you know. Have a good picnic.

Dissociated Press

Week of June 26, 2005

This has been a week of surprises. First Newt Gingrich, one of my least favorite people, comes out with a proposal for reform of the United Nations which seriously appeals to me, partly because he isn't just proposing to abolish it or pull the US out of it, but mostly because he takes seriously the disadvantaged position in the UN of the state of Israel. Israel is the one nation in the entire world that can never become a temporary member of the Security Council, because only "regional groups" can appoint such members, and Israel (alone among all the nations of the world) is not a member of any regional group. Gingrich doesn't exactly talk about the reason for this anomaly (which is that neither Christian Europe nor the Muslim Middle East wants to accept the Jewish state as a member), but he does say it has to be remedied.

Then the Supreme Court issues a decision on eminent domain, which in its substance is no surprise at all, but merely endorses the way things have been in this country for at least the last sixty years, in that government can seize private property for ostensibly public purposes and then hand it off to private developers to profit from (frequently for some sort of ethically questionable remuneration, but nobody mentions that.) The surprise is that all my favorite justices voted for this result, with Stevens writing the majority opinion. The dissent included all the justices I love to hate, most notably Scalia and Thomas.

And finally, of course, Sandra Day O'Connor has announced her impending retirement. When I was first admitted to the Bar back in 1977, I went out and bought a photo of the Supreme Court of that time, and posted it on the wall of my office with a caption, "What's Wrong With This Picture?" What was wrong, of course, was the all-male composition of the Court at the time. I wisecracked to my friends back then that my ambition wasn't to be the first woman on the Supreme Court, but the fifth. The first, I pointed out, would be a mere token. The fifth would be the swing vote. I was wrong, of course. Sandra Day O'Connor was no token, and she was very often the swing vote.

Lots of commentators have talked about that role, but none of them have noticed something that became apparent to me fairly soon after she was appointed--that she did wonders for the group process of the Court. Before that, the Court was always coming down with opinions that were divided into so many parts as to be utterly useless for precedential purposes. The worst of the lot was Bakke vs. UC Davis Board of Regents, which came in something like 59 single-spaced pages consisting of two dissents and three separate concurrences (I may be mistaken in some of the details after all these years) and a "majority" opinion in two parts, which was endorsed in its entirety by only one justice. I had visions of the Court ordering lunch--pizza: one slice sausage, two slices mushroom and green pepper, one slice each Canadian bacon and anchovy, you get the idea. All that stopped after Sandra stepped in. Nobody ever talked about it at the time or since, but I could only conclude that she sat them all down and said softly, "Now boys..." and they shaped up.

Also, Justice O'Connor forced the resolution of one of those maddeningly trivial protocol/etiquette problems that so often stand in the way of equality for women: since at the time, all the other justices were officially referred to as "Mister Justice Whoever," would she be "Mrs. Justice O'Connor" or "Madam Justice O'Connor" or what? Instead, they all became simply "Justice Whoever," the simplest and most elegant solution possible. We will probably never know if it was her idea, but I'm betting it was.

The ideological battle lines are already forming for the struggle over her replacement (make that "successor"--I'm not sure anybody could replace her.) I worry about the fate of Roe v. Wade too, but I worry a lot more over what could happen to the tone of the Court if the right-wing ideologues have their way. Tone is intangible, but sometimes its results last a lot longer than the win-lose scores and the legal precedents. Let's hope that what Justice O'Connor has done for the tone of the Court outlasts her tenure on it.