I've always thought Sandra Day O'Connor's decisions were muddled, a form of torture inflicted upon law and political science students everywhere. But now, there are clear signs that the woman no longer has any business serving on the United States Supreme Court:
She's gone from merely being a muddled legal thinker to someone who has no business being on the Court. Her colleagues should encourage her to retire.The U.S. judiciary should pay more attention to international court decisions to help enrich our nation's standing abroad, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said Tuesday.
"The impressions we create in this world are important and they can leave their mark," O'Connor said.
On the whole, the U.S. judicial system leaves a favorable impression around the world, she said "but when it comes to the impression created by the treatment of foreign and international law and the United States court, the jury is still out."
[snip]
For decades, O'Connor said, U.S. courts declined to consider international law when reaching important decisions.
But in recent years, she said, the U.S. Supreme Court began acknowledging the thoughts of the global community.
The first such case was decided in 2002 when the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional to execute the mentally retarded, she said. In arriving at that decision, O'Connor said, the high court noted that the world community overwhelmingly disapproved of the practice.
[snip]
The second ruling cited by O'Connor was, as she called it, "the famous or perhaps infamous case," in which the Supreme Court overturned the Texas anti-sodomy law.
In that decision, the Supreme Court majority relied partly on a series of decisions by European courts on the same issue, O'Connor said.
"I suspect," O'Connor said, "that over time we will rely increasingly, or take notice at least increasingly, on international and foreign courts in examining domestic issues."
Doing so, she added, "may not only enrich our own country's decisions, I think it may create that all important good impression."
Orrin Judd suggests Shadia Drury "has a tendency to treat [Leo Strauss and his students] as if she'd personally uncovered the new Protocols of the Elders of Zion...."
Great stuff, as usual, from Orrin.
Libertarians often confuse the practice of politics -- in particular the pursuit of the politically possible -- with political philosophy, a different creature altogether.
Thus, we get lectures like this one from Jacob Sullum:
"Partial birth" abortion is said to be especially immoral, but it isn't.
[snip]
"Partial birth" abortions, a method that doctors call "dilation and extraction" (D&X) are performed in the fifth month or later and account for around 0.2 percent of abortions, according to survey data from the Alan Guttmacher Institute. They involve partly removing the fetus from the uterus, poking a hole in its skull with a sharp implement, and sucking out the brain through a tube to collapse the head so the rest of the body can be removed.
It's not surprising that 64 senators, including many who consider themselves "pro-choice" on abortion, decided this procedure was indefensible. But is a D&X really more objectionable than the much more common "dilation and evacuation" (D&E) method, in which the fetus is dismembered inside the uterus and removed piece by piece?
If so, it's only because the killing is more visible and because a D&X starts out like a delivery, thereby emphasizing the similarity between the fetus and a baby. Those factors make "partial birth" abortions an easier target politically, but they are morally insignificant.
Sullum, of course, wants you to accept without critical thought that a baby that is partially born, then brutally killed, is no different than a fetus that is aborted inside the womb. He wants you to concede there is no distinction.
Do you?
If so, then the pro-life side probably hasn't won the victory they think. As our friend the Conservative Observer suggests, they probably would have been better off publicizing this particular form of "abortion" as infanticide, and forcing the issue.
If you don't concede Sullum's distinction, does that make you any less concerned about the other procedure, the one in which the baby is, to use Sullum's words, "dismembered inside the uterus and removed piece by piece?"
Maybe, maybe not.
The partial-birth abortion ban is a step in the right direction for those of us who have, over time, come around to a pro-life position. It was, as Sullum concedes, a tactical political victory (though perhaps not as brilliant as he suggests), and for the right reasons. It may not be as pure as, say, Sullum's defense of your "right" to sit around stoned in your living room. It may not even be as pure as the Conservative Observer's suggestion regarding infanticide. But politics is often the practice of the possible, rather than a Platonic dialogue.
Here's a keen observation from Jay Nordlinger today:
In an arch and overwrought piece in yesterday's New York Times, Frank Rich bemoaned the administration's attempted "management" of the news and declared another Vietnam — while denying that he was declaring another Vietnam (a neat trick). There were many hilarious things in this piece — inadvertently hilarious — but I direct your attention to the ending:
"At the tender age of six months, the war in Iraq is not remotely a Vietnam. But from the way the administration tries to manage the news against all reality, even that irrevocable reality encased in flag-draped coffins [ooh, what pathos!], you can only wonder if it might yet persuade the audience at home that we're mired in another Tet after all."
And the joke of it is — as my grandmother would say — that Tet, as all good NRO readers know, was not a setback for the United States: It was just rendered so by Uncle Walter and other influential folk at home.
Yep. But that's not the history we teach.
Harvard Law School's Larry Tribe, a notorious liberal judicial activist, has weighed in on the Terri Schiavo case in Florida, contending that the state's recent legal action to prevent her starvation is somehow prohibited by a 1990 U.S. Supreme Court case:
Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said the action by Bush and the Legislature ``violates the core principles'' of a 1990 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
The AP report that everyone (including Fox News) is running includes the following tidbit:
The court ruled in a Missouri case that Nancy Cruzan, who had been fed through a tube for seven years, could be permitted to die if ``clear and convincing evidence'' proved that was what she wanted. Her parents had fought for the right to remove the tube.
Actually, Tribe is wrong, and so wrong (for a man so obviously bright) that there is no conclusion to be drawn except that he is spinning to the point of lying. And the second quote is misleading as interpretation of constitutional law.
I actually lived in Missouri when the Cruzan case (to which Tribe is referring) was being fought (I think my undergrad con law prof even submitted briefs or was somehow involved in some of the legal work, but I can't recall for sure). And my recollection of the case didn't square with this AP representation.
So I did a bit of digging to refresh my memory. What actually happened was that Nancy Cruzan's family petitioned a state court to terminate her feeding tube, based on Missouri statutes (which place a certain burden of proof as to the patient's intent on petitioners). The Missouri Supreme Court initially found that Cruzan's family didn't meet that burden of proof (she had allegedly made a comment once about not wanting to "live like that" in reference to a vegetative state). Her family took the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping that court would essentially manufacture an absolute "right to die" from the U.S. Constitution that would trump Missouri's procedural safeguards. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to do so (later, a state court heard additional testimony, and found that the state procedural safeguards were satisfied). Indeed, Rehnquist, writing for the majority, couldn't have been more clear in declining to do so. I'm going to quote heavily from the decision, because it so starkly contradicts what Tribe contends (and what the AP story says). I have bolded the most relevant portions, and cleaned up the text slightly, omitting case references for presentation purposes (you can get them in the original here):
The difficulty with petitioners' claim is that, in a sense, it begs the question: an incompetent person is not able to make an informed and voluntary choice to exercise a hypothetical right to refuse treatment or any other right. Such a "right" must be exercised for her, if at all, by some sort of surrogate. Here, Missouri has in effect recognized that, under certain circumstances, a surrogate may act for the patient in electing to have hydration and nutrition withdrawn in such a way as to cause death, but it has established a procedural safeguard to assure that the action of the surrogate conforms as best it may to the wishes expressed by the patient while competent. Missouri requires that evidence of the incompetent's wishes as to the withdrawal of treatment be proved by clear and convincing evidence. The question, then, is whether the United States Constitution forbids the establishment of this procedural requirement by the State. We hold that it does not.
Whether or not Missouri's clear and convincing evidence requirement comports with the United States Constitution depends in part on what interests the State may properly seek to protect in this situation. Missouri relies on its interest in the protection and preservation of human life, and there can be no gainsaying this interest. As a general matter, the States - indeed, all civilized nations - demonstrate their commitment to life by treating homicide as serious crime. Moreover, the majority of States in this country have laws imposing criminal penalties on one who assists another to commit suicide. We do not think a State is required to remain neutral in the face of an informed and voluntary decision by a physically able adult to starve to death.
But in the context presented here, a State has more particular interests at stake. The choice between life and death is a deeply personal decision of obvious and overwhelming finality. We believe Missouri may legitimately seek to safeguard the personal element of this choice through the imposition of heightened evidentiary requirements. It cannot be disputed that the Due Process Clause protects an interest in life as well as an interest in refusing life-sustaining medical treatment. Not all incompetent patients will have loved ones available to serve as surrogate decisionmakers. And even where family members are present, "[t]here will, of course, be some unfortunate situations in which family members will not act to protect a patient." A State is entitled to guard against potential abuses in such situations. Similarly, a State is entitled to consider that a judicial proceeding to make a determination regarding an incompetent's wishes may very well not be an adversarial one, with the added guarantee of accurate factfinding that the adversary process brings with it. Finally, we think a State may properly decline to make judgments about the "quality" of life that a particular individual may enjoy, and simply assert an unqualified interest in the preservation of human life to be weighed against the constitutionally protected interests of the individual.
In our view, Missouri has permissibly sought to advance these interests through the adoption of a "clear and convincing" standard of proof to govern such proceedings.
[snip]
We think it self-evident that the interests at stake in the instant proceedings are more substantial, both on an individual and societal level, than those involved in a run-of-the-mill civil dispute.... The more stringent the burden of proof a party must bear, the more that party bears the risk of an erroneous decision. We believe that Missouri may permissibly place an increased risk of an erroneous decision on those seeking to terminate an incompetent individual's life-sustaining treatment. An erroneous decision not to terminate results in a maintenance of the status quo; the possibility of subsequent developments such as advancements in medical science, the discovery of new evidence regarding the patient's intent, changes in the law, or simply the unexpected death of the patient despite the administration of life-sustaining treatment, at least create the potential that a wrong decision will eventually be corrected or its impact mitigated. An erroneous decision to withdraw life-sustaining treatment, however, is not susceptible of correction. In Santosky, one of the factors which led the Court to require proof by clear and convincing evidence in a proceeding to terminate parental rights was that a decision in such a case was final and irrevocable. The same must surely be said of the decision to discontinue hydration and nutrition of a patient such as Nancy Cruzan, which all agree will result in her death.
It is also worth noting that most, if not all, States simply forbid oral testimony entirely in determining the wishes of parties in transactions which, while important, simply do not have the consequences that a decision to terminate a person's life does. At common law and by statute in most States, the parol evidence rule prevents the variations of the terms of a written contract by oral testimony. The statute of frauds makes unenforceable oral contracts to leave property by will, and statutes regulating the making of wills universally require that those instruments be in writing. There is no doubt that statutes requiring wills to be in writing, and statutes of frauds which require that a contract to make a will be in writing, on occasion frustrate the effectuation of the intent of a particular decedent, just as Missouri's requirement of proof in this case may have frustrated the effectuation of the not-fully-expressed desires of Nancy Cruzan. But the Constitution does not require general rules to work faultlessly; no general rule can.
In sum, we conclude that a State may apply a clear and convincing evidence standard in proceedings where a guardian seeks to discontinue nutrition and hydration of a person diagnosed to be in a persistent vegetative state. We note that many courts which have adopted some sort of substituted judgment procedure in situations like this, whether they limit consideration of evidence to the prior expressed wishes of the incompetent individual, or whether they allow more general proof of what the individual's decision would have been, require a clear and convincing standard of proof for such evidence.
The Supreme Court of Missouri held that, in this case, the testimony adduced at trial did not amount to clear and convincing proof of the patient's desire to have hydration and nutrition withdrawn. In so doing, it reversed a decision of the Missouri trial court, which had found that the evidence "suggest[ed]" Nancy Cruzan would not have desired to continue such measures, App. to Pet. for Cert. A98, but which had not adopted the standard of "clear and convincing evidence" enunciated by the Supreme Court. The testimony adduced at trial consisted primarily of Nancy Cruzan's statements, made to a housemate about a year before her accident, that she would not want to live should she face life as a "vegetable," and other observations to the same effect. The observations did not deal in terms with withdrawal of medical treatment or of hydration and nutrition. We cannot say that the Supreme Court of Missouri committed constitutional error in reaching the conclusion that it did.
There is nothing in Cruzan that suggests that the recent legislative action and executive order in the state of Florida restoring Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, as we see from Justice Rehnquist's holding, the Supreme Court adopted a highly deferential attitude toward state prerogatives in Cruzan, refusing to hold (as Nancy Cruzan's parents wanted) that a mythical right to die would trump state legislation to the contrary. Further, Justice Rehnquist denied that Nancy Cruzan's parents had any absolute right (that trumped state legislation) to make that decision for her:
Petitioners alternatively contend that Missouri must accept the "substituted judgment" of close family members even in the absence of substantial proof that their views reflect the views of the patient. They rely primarily upon our decisions in Michael H. v. Gerald D., and Parham v. J.R.. But we do not think these cases support their claim. In Michael H., we upheld the constitutionality of California's favored treatment of traditional family relationships; such a holding may not be turned around into a constitutional requirement that a State must recognize the primacy of those relationships in a situation like this. And in Parham, where the patient was a minor, we also upheld the constitutionality of a state scheme in which parents made certain decisions for mentally ill minors. Here again, petitioners would seek to turn a decision which allowed a State to rely on family decisionmaking into a constitutional requirement that the State recognize such decisionmaking. But constitutional law does not work that way.
No doubt is engendered by anything in this record but that Nancy Cruzan's mother and father are loving and caring parents. If the State were required by the United States Constitution to repose a right of "substituted judgment" with anyone, the Cruzans would surely qualify. But we do not think the Due Process Clause requires the State to repose judgment on these matters with anyone but the patient herself. Close family members may have a strong feeling - a feeling not at all ignoble or unworthy, but not entirely disinterested, either - that they do not wish to witness the continuation of the life of a loved one which they regard as hopeless, meaningless, and even degrading. But there is no automatic assurance that the view of close family members will necessarily be the same as the patient's would have been had she been confronted with the prospect of her situation while competent. All of the reasons previously discussed for allowing Missouri to require clear and convincing evidence of the patient's wishes lead us to conclude that the State may choose to defer only to those wishes, rather than confide the decision to close family members.
The judgment of the Supreme Court of Missouri is Affirmed.
Aside from the fact that the Florida legislation was enacted at a late hour, I do not see how the requirements enacted by the state of Florida differ significantly (in a legal-constitutional sense) from the requirements of the state of Missouri in Cruzan. And I don't see how Tribe can make the claim that the majority in Cruzan held exactly the opposite of what they did, or why the Associated Press is repeating his egregiously false assertions.
One may think Florida lawmakers overstepped their bounds (I do not), and one may disagree with their decision (I do not), but I cannot find anything in Cruzan that would act as a constitutional barrier to what they did.
Today was a good day for those who are pro-life.
The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved a partial-birth abortion ban that will go on to be signed by the President.
And the Florida legislature empowered Governor Jeb Bush to stop the starvation of Terri Schiavo.
People who don't know much about American foreign policy -- especially liberals -- are going to read this latest piece by Seymour Hersh and draw all the wrong conclusions: that the Bush Administration politicized intelligence in order to conduct an unnecessary war, that Dick Cheney and DoD hardliners figured most prominently in the politicization, and that President Bush himself may even have been deceived. That seems to be the conclusion Hersh wants readers to reach.
But Hersh, perhaps because he doesn't know as much as he'd like to think he does about foreign policy, gives away much, much more in this piece.
For one thing, it's clear from Hersh's sources that certain people in CIA -- if not the agency itself -- were at odds with the civilians charged with formulating foreign policy in this administration. Here is part of the giveaway:
This is no secret, at least not at DoD. Early on, Secretary Rumsfeld charged several senior officials with performing competitive analysis of intelligence, eventually forming a separate office to handle the task. Intelligence data in itself tells one little -- it's the analysis that matters. And Secretary Rumsfeld was/is properly suspicious of the Agency's analysis (and biases that drive its analysis). CIA doesn't like that, of course, any more than they liked the various B-Team experiments over the years. Hersh's sources make that clear.In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.
Hersh goes on:
In other words, the administration started looking at raw intelligence more closely, and doing competitive analysis. CIA doesn't like that. And it especially doesn't like either its methods or its analysis being questioned. We know that from Angelo Codevilla's fine Informing Statecraft: Intelligence For A New Century, which described his own experiences challenging the CIA bureaucracy. Incidentally, his critique of the CIA's pervasive bureaucratic mentality seems more valid today than when he wrote the book (1992).Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.
“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”
Here's more indication that Hersh talked to a lot of CIA people with their noses still out of joint:
But it's not cherry-picking selectively to ignore intelligence that doesn't confirm what one wants to find? It strikes me that this former aide has just made the very case for competitive analysis of intelligence!As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President’s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq’s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence.
“It was an unbelievably closed and small group,” the former aide told me. Intelligence procedures were far more open during the Clinton Administration, he said, and professional staff members had been far more involved in assessing and evaluating the most sensitive data. “There’s so much intelligence out there that it’s easy to pick and choose your case,” the former aide told me. “It opens things up to cherry-picking.”
And here's where it gets really interesting. Recall the whole Niger yellowcake issue, and the question of forged documents? Even Hersh concedes it's entirely possible they were manufactured by CIA officials engaged in nasty bureaucratic warfare:
Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.Hersh has just inadvertently made the case for reforming the CIA that Angelo Codevilla laid out in Informing Statecraft. Certainly we don't know at this point if CIA analysts had a hand in the Niger controversy, but it does seem that the Agency's interest here began to intrude on policymaking, which is well beyond its charge (or should be).Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.
“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.
“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go—to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels—a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”
Like all large institutions, C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, is full of water-cooler gossip, and a retired clandestine officer told me this summer that the story about a former operations officer faking the documents is making the rounds. “What’s telling,” he added, “is that the story, whether it’s true or not, is believed”....
The F.B.I. has been investigating the forgery at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A senior F.B.I. official told me that the possibility that the documents were falsified by someone inside the American intelligence community had not been ruled out. “This story could go several directions,” he said. “We haven’t gotten anything solid, and we’ve looked.” He said that the F.B.I. agents assigned to the case are putting a great deal of effort into the investigation. But “somebody’s hiding something, and they’re hiding it pretty well.”
Separately, Mark Steyn and Steve Hayes also point out that the CIA has become a political bureaucracy -- driven by a political agenda that is not always consistent with that of the policymakers within the Bush Administration (and more often at odds with them). DoD's solution -- effectively to form its own competitive analysis group -- is not really an adequate solution to the larger problem, given the Agency's efforts to undermine the Administration. Indeed, reforming our intelligence community may be the most important foreign policy challenge facing the Administration at this point. To get it right will require exertion of Presidential authority, or at least delegation of said authority to someone like Vice President Cheney.
But the lesson of these writings by Hersh, Steyn, Hayes, and Codevilla (not to mention 9-11) is that we have neglected intelligence reform for far too long. CIA's charge should be intelligence gathering, and civilians should be in charge of policy formation based on analysis of intelligence. That shouldn't be a controversial statement (and wouldn't be, if liberals didn't sense they might gain partisan advantage over the issue).
Orrin Judd alerted me to this latest bit of crackpottery from Shadia Drury on Leo Strauss. I suppose she thinks she is making either Strauss or the American right look bad. In reality, she is doing much to reinforce the notion that political philosophy is nothing more than ideology. That is disgraceful.
Ken Masugi's review of an earlier book of hers remains one antidote to such nonsense.
Slate has a great column up regarding myths about religion and politics.
Myth 2: The religious right flooded the polls for George W. Bush in 2000. Turnout among the members of the "religious right" (that's the goofy way pollsters make people self-identify) was 56 percent, says Green, only slightly higher than the national average—and actually lower than that of devout Catholics, mainline Protestants, and Jews. The "religious right" gets a lot of attention because a) to liberals, they are verrrrrrry scarrrrrry and b) their turnout has been on the rise in the past few decades.
But Bush's political folks view this as a huge target of opportunity. They were able to increase turnout among religious conservatives in the 2002 congressional elections through aggressive get-out-the-vote efforts. The 2004 election may turn in part on whether religious Christians behave more like they did in 2000 or 2002.
It seems to "dumb down" evangelicalism to the point that it's not much different from just being protestant, but that's a trend I've been noticing quite a bit lately, particularly among those Democrats like Amy Sullivan who seek to bring religion back into the Democratic fold.
At the end of the day, I would still have to agree with Orrin Judd insofar as the modern Democratic Party, for good or for ill, is incompatible with public social morality as outlined in contemporary evangelicalism. A Democratic presidential nominee can talk all day long about how important public morality is, but as long as he has to build up political capital among his base by fighting for 3rd trimester abortions for underage teens without parental notification, it's going to be a tough sell.
Richard Bennett comments on some techie bloggers who are advocating something they call "emergent democracy" -- apparently some sort of euphemism for direct democracy (though they don't want to call it that) from folks who don't seem to know much about political philosophy. Bennett responds:
Of course they don't.This is an awfully pure and austere model, where the people have to each and every one take the time out of their busy days to study each and every issue for themselves in order to govern without representives, or at least without paid ones.
The question that it raises following the recall is, of course, how the people - even when armed with super-fantastic blogware - can make detailed policy decisions if they can't be trusted by the technical elite to make basic personnel decisions as we did in the recall.
They have no answer to that question.
Nor do the techie bloggers have an answer to the question, what is to stop these fully empowered citizen-democrats from simply voting themselves the largesse of the state.
Publius, of course, wrestled with these questions. But not on a Linux box, I'll concede.
John Fund thinks Governor Arnold can learn something from my own Governor right here in Texas:
That pretty much sums it up, but too many Republicans "grow" after they're elected, much like the President's father "grew" in D.C. when he abandoned his no-new-taxes pledge. Thank goodness Governor Perry hasn't "grown" so far.If he has to look for models in successful governance, the Terminator could do worse than Texas. Governor Rick Perry, a Republican who succeeded George W. Bush in the governor's office in 2001, has just wrestled a $10 billion budget deficit to the ground.
"I got a helluva New Year's present--a deficit that was 16% of my total budget," he told a group of conservatives in Washington last week. "I quickly decided we weren't going to hurt the state's people or economy by raising taxes."
That's been Arnold's line too, and Gov. Perry has proved that it's possible to mean it. He required every agency to state its budget needs starting from zero. They weren't allowed to start by saying how much more they needed than in the previous year. This zero-based budgeting approach ensured that no program escaped scrutiny and oversight.
His cost-saving efforts pared a billion dollars of the state's health care agency by consolidating its bureaucracy. He performed the same surgery on the state's sprawling education bureaucracy. Every other agency was required to cut its budget by 13% for the remainder of the fiscal year.
"Those who say you can't balance a budget without raising taxes are just interested in the taxes," he says.
I got a kick out of Andrew Sullivan's interpretation of the Schwarzenegger election:
But Arnold also shows that Eagle politics can work - fusing low-tax conservatism with social tolerance and a tough foreign policy is the great missing politics in America. We may have just found our first truly charismatic candidate.
Because, as we all know, California is the exemplar of a bellweather state...
Mikhail Gorbachev offers a bit of strange advice:
We?Gorbachev said that it is "most important" to get rid of weapons of mass destruction, adding that 90 percent of them are in Russia and the United States.
As for the U.S. failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he said, "We have to get to the bottom of it _ whether they actually existed in Iraq and also the question of the quality of intelligence. ... Whether it (the failure to find the weapons) was the result of faulty intelligence."
Why should Mr. Gorbachev be so concerned about U.S. intelligence? And shouldn't he know something about U.S. capabilities, given his regime's efforts to penetrate U.S. agencies over the years?
I agree, in part, with this advice:
Excellent! We will appreciate Mr. Gorbachev's support as pressure for change is applied to the Baathist regime of Syria.In the visit marking the 10th anniversary of Green Cross International and its U.S. affiliate, Global Green USA, Gorbachev said the world's priorities must include elimination of chemical and nuclear weapons and shortages of fresh water that in turn affect climate change.
I don't generally talk about work here and I never name the place, but I do work for a Houston firm related to energy exploration and production (shocker in Houston, I know).
We had some guests in the office today who had recently been to Iraq, and who suggested that things are going much better than Western media reports would suggest (as have others, whom I've noted on the front page from time to time). Mainly, they contend, there are disaffected Baathist and terrorist elements who are causing some problems, but overall things are going pretty well, and Iraqis seem to understand why the United States did what it did (far better than, say, the Dem presidential candidates).
It's anecdotal evidence, of course, but I thought it was some scuttlebutt worth sharing here.
A reader who caught the reference to Richard Hofstadter in Michael Dirda's review of School of Dreams on the front page emailed earlier.
The glowing reference to Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism In American Life does say something about Dirda, does it not?
Some days I wonder -- if it were a campaign where a Democrat was getting smeared like this, the Democrats would be raising holy hell.
Wait. They already did, during the Clinton campaign.
Why is it that Democrats get away with this?
I can point to influence #1; Arianna Huffington. Stuck-up, worthless, couldn't possibly be a decent government official, but as a syndicated columnist she has a certain amount of pull. More to the point, her NOW ties make it quite easy for her to send around a cry for help to get people to attack Schwarzenegger.
I can further point to influence #2; Gray Davis. Face it, Cruz Bustamante's been marginalized this last week, as the Democrats decided that focusing on keeping Davis in office is the way to go. This brought it down to a two-man race; Schwarzenegger vs. Davis. Yes, McClintock and Bustamante are still in the replacement race, but McClintock doesn't have the numbers, and the threat of Bustamante is already pushing Republicans to rally around just one candidate. My best guess is that McClintock gets less than 10% of the vote.
Davis, on the other hand, has a history of running dirty tricks campaigns. (To be fair, both parties, Democrat and Republican, are well schooled in dirty tricks. They're also well schooled in hiding their own involvement in setting them up). To have Arianna on his side now, and to "suddenly" have women coming forward to the LA Times, is suspicious to say the least. Face it, these women could have come forward at any time in the past. It's not a situation where Schwarzenegger was a little-known figure until just now, he's been in the public eye for decades. The fact that they're strangely silent until so close to the election is highly suspicious.
My prediction: This race comes down to the wire in terms of the predictions polls, but the outcome is going to be enough of a percentage lead for Schwarzenegger or Bustamante that nobody challenges the six counties that had paper ballots.
If Schwarzenegger wins, expect the NOW crowd and Arianna Huffington to hold on till the bitter end, just like Sharpton and that Tawana girl.
If Bustamante wins, expect the Times to quickly bury the retractions of the women on page 69 of the housekeeping section.
North Korea suggests it is now making nuclear weapons:
The big news here isn't so much that North Korea aspires to be a nuclear power -- everyone knows that -- but the fact that our intelligence services appear clueless:North Korea said Thursday it is using plutonium extracted from 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods to make atomic weapons, a move that could dramatically escalate tensions on the Korean peninsula and strengthen its hand in negotiations with the United States.
Maybe they have a hundred, maybe they don't have any. Your guess is as good as our intelligence community's, it would seem. Especially since North Korea has said "NOW we're making nuclear weapons" several times now.The claim came as some U.S. intelligence analysts are becoming increasingly concerned that North Korea might have three, four or even six nuclear weapons instead of the one or two the CIA now estimates.
So for those in favor of cutting an arms control deal with North Korea, just this question: why should that nation be trusted, and if your answer is "they shouldn't," then how shall we convince them to submit to an intrusive arms-control verification regime?
Professor Reynolds calls attention to the importance of the 17th century to American political thought in his latest TCS column:
Professor Reynolds nails it with that first phrase that I have bolded, but then he veers slightly off track in the two paragraphs that follow (presumably because he wants to read a radical libertarianism into the Founding). What is most important about seventeenth century America is that the American colonists were experiencing political life, and developing institutions and political theory out of practice and necessity (including the notion of popular -- as opposed to parliamentary -- sovereignty). With political covenants dating back to the Agreement Between The Settlers At New Plymouth (some may know it as the Mayflower Compact) and agreements that were effectively rules of immigration (such as the Plymouth Oath) and protoconstitutions such as the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut and federating covenants like The New England Confederation agreement, American colonists were creating a political order pretty much on the fly.But though books about Isaac Newton tend to focus on scientific developments, one of the biggest changes brought about by the seventeenth century -- and one of the most ignored, especially by Americans -- was the wave of political change that it produced. In fact, the American Constitution, commonly thought of as an eighteenth-century document (since that's when it was drafted, after all) is really a document infused by seventeenth century ideas and experiences.
The English Civil Wars -- also something of which most Americans are disappointingly ignorant -- prefigured almost all the unfortunate political events that Europe has experienced since: rule by powerful dictators (Cromwell), mass executions (all sides), efforts to disarm the populace and terrorize them with standing armies, the relegation of many businesses to government-dominated monopoly, religious persecution, informers, Star Chamber prosecutions (not just a figure of speech then, but literally involving the Court of the Star Chamber) and so on.
After the Glorious Revolution and the passage of the English Bill of Rights in 1689, the memory of these events waned in England, and lost much of its influence by the latter half of the 18th Century. But so many Americans were descended from those who had fled the tumult in England that the memories of these problems remained much fresher on this side of the Atlantic, and the United States Constitution was the result of their effort to ensure that nothing like that happened again, by limiting the sphere of government, and bolstering the power -- economic, political, and physical -- of citizens as a check on abuses.
But not entirely on the fly. They were guided by thinkers on liberty and experiences from the old world, yes. But they were also guided by their religious beliefs -- and indeed, many of the agreements and protoconstitutions of 17th century colonial America were informed by the religious covenant tradition. Reading radical libertarianism -- or even Locke -- into the American Founding effectively disregards both the radicalism and uniqueness of the American Founding and American constitutionalism.
The 17th century was most certainly crucial to the development of American constitutionalism, as Professor Reynolds asserts, and for that reason his column is useful. But the next step in understanding that development is not to read one's own preferences into the era, but instead to step back into it as much as possible (forgive me for sounding Straussian). For those who wish to do so, a good starting point is Colonial Origins Of The American Constitution, a fine collection put out by the invaluable Liberty Fund. The genesis of American constitutionalism is found in those documents, among others, and they certainly help to illustrate the religious covenant tradition as an element of American political thought (a line of thought pursued vigorously by Daniel Elazar, and also by Don Lutz, in various publications).
Another day for the helmets-of-blue:
MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) -- Gunfire and explosions erupted in Liberia's capital Wednesday even as a new U.N. peace mission took control, with insurgents and government forces opening fire as the top rebel leader tried to make his way into Monrovia.
Associated Press journalists saw three bodies -- two civilians shot in the crossfire, and a rebel killed by civilians outraged at the return to fighting. Defense Minister Daniel Chea put the death toll at five.
The firefight, with AK-47s and grenade-launchers, marked the most serious clash in Monrovia since an interim West African peace force moved into the capital Aug. 4.
The battle, coming one day after the last U.S. forces withdrew from the city, broke out as top rebel leader Sekou Conneh made his first entry into Monrovia in a motorcade to meet with new President Moses Blah.
Have you ever read an op-ed piece that presents itself as political advice to a party or politican, but quickly reveals itself to be a clandestine partisan attack? Well, if you've never seen such a piece before, I'd suggest you read the essay by Domenico Maceri in today's Houston Chronicle. Here's an excerpt:
Did you catch it? The essay sounds complimentary at parts, but this is only used at a set-up for an attack on Republican policy. I you didn't know any better, you might suspect that Maceri is presenting an objective analysis. However, when you realize that Maceri is essentially claiming that the GOP doesn't get the Hispanic vote because it doesn't boost left-wing policies, his column seems less like analysis and more like a vicious attack.At the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, speeches in Spanish were given by Abel Maldonado, a California assemblyman, and George Prescott Bush, the president's nephew. It was not the message that mattered since all those present and those watching on television understood English. The use of Spanish suggested acceptance and inclusiveness for the language and of course for those who speak it. Spanish was part of the GOP. Latinos were welcome regardless of what language they spoke.
Language for Latinos is also critical as an issue, particularly in light of the anti-bilingual education movement and the English-only legislation of the past decade.
The virtual elimination of bilingual education in California, Arizona and most recently Massachusetts is viewed by Latinos as an imposition on how their children will be educated. Anglos typically vote against bilingual education by a 2-to-1 margin; Latinos vote in its support by the same margin.
The declaration of English as the official language in 26 American states has also been interpreted by Latinos as an attack on Spanish and by extension on all Latinos.
By showing an interest in the Spanish language, Bush and the GOP distance themselves from English-only groups, some of which have shown anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic tendencies. Walter Cronkite, Linda Chavez and David Horowitz, for example, resigned from U.S. English, because of concerns with the group's insensitivity to minorities. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a member of the U.S. English advisory board, has been criticized sharply for not doing the same.
Moreover, if you check Maceri's other columns from Hispanicvista.com, you find that he's about as far left as it gets. For instance, he slammed Bush judicial nominee Miguel Estrada, basically asserting that he wasn't Hispanic enough to become a judge. This isn't a guy prone to being fair to Republicans, although he makes no attempt to make this clear to the reader. What a hack.
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