Scoplaw

Coulter

Ann Coulter calls John Edwards a faggot.  Of course, this is childish, shameful and generally embarrassing behavior by a mind the conservatives think is so important that they'll invite her to speak and introduce Mitt Romney at a political event. 

She likes Mitt Romney ("I think he's probably our best candidate."), Mitt Romney likes her ("I am happy to hear that after you hear from me, you will hear from Ann Coulter. That is a good thing. Oh yeah!"), and that tells you pretty much what you need to know about both of them.  Except that Romney wants to blame the French for our country's troubles.  This is a perplexingly frightening combination of 1984 doubletalkish cynicism and South Park's Blame Canada joke, largely because it should be inconceivable that such a stupid idea would be embraced so jadedly by a politician seeking to become the chief executive of the United States.  Why anyone gives either of them air time is beyond me. 

Coulter has long proved that she's a crazy and unbalanced partisan xenophobe who, for some reason, keeps getting endorsed and *publicly applauded* by the conservative bloc.  That alone should tell you something about their stance on substantive issues. Even my home state's Libertarian Party saw through her.  (Conservatives, police your own if this is a problem for you).

For anyone tempted to call Ann Coulter names in response, I think the worst thing you can call her is Ann Coulter.  Is it necessary to go beyond that?  Her behavior is so outrageous and she brings so little to the national debate that there's really no need to rhetorically link her to anyone else.  She's Ann Coulter, and that's enough to make any thinking citizen's mouth twist in disgust.  "Coulter" means something as uniquely bad as what "McCarthy" means or what "David Duke" means.  All through her own efforts.

Now, can we just shun her please?  I'm all for the conservatives shooting themselves in the foot over this one, but please, let's stick to the issues - the disastrous war in Iraq, the equally disastrous educational policy of "No Child Left Behind," the bludgeoning of the middle class, the shameful lack of affordable health care access, global warming, and so on.  It's issues like these that Coulter wants to distract everyone from, with her bedroom innuendos.   

State of the Union

I've mocked them in the past, but man oh man.  This clown lied to get us into the Iraqi quagmire because he had a personal ax to grind.  How anyone can get up and applaud his empty platitudes, lies, and half-truths, I'll never know.

Where are all the outraged Republicans?  You know, the ones that impeached Clinton? 

Where are the outraged Democrats?

Put a tie on a sewer pipe, stick it up there, and they'd still stand an applaud at every full-stop in the gurgling flow, if not every other comma. 

George Washington

I don't know how many of you have seen this video yet, but it's probably the coolest and funniest thing that I've seen in a long while.

Apologies to all my friends in England, but  -  fuck yeah!

Election Objections

Well, not really objections per se, but cautions.  I’m not a political analyst and I don’t spend a lot of time engrossed with the details of political races, so take this with a grain of salt.

Overall, I think this was a protest vote, and protest votes are not sustainable.  In a way, I see the election as a mini-Leiberman primary.   It's a shot across the republican’s bow over a few big issues.  The war, the economy, political scandals. 

The Ds were able to go on the offensive, as underdogs taking on an unpopular president/majority party embroiled in a few scandals and a bad war.  It’s enough to get them elected, but not enough to keep them in power as the majority.  Well, at least not now, since the exit polls indicate the country is still polarized on social issues like gay marriage and abortion.  If perceptions of the war change, and/or there’s no radical difference between the policies of the Ds and the Rs, social wedge issues like these will keep elections in play.

The problem is, as far as I can see it, is that the Ds are just weak willed. You've got a few firebrands, yes. But the rank and file just sadly shook their heads over this and that during the course of the war.   John Kerry is not a guy that suggests he has an ounce of moral outrage in his body.  And, frankly, up to this point, the Ds could have presented themselves as centrist as they wanted to, so long as they were against the mismanagement of the war in Iraq and for the war on terror in principle. 

Personally, I'm worried that whomever the Rs put forward for president, they'll just use the same strong rhetoric associated with that party.   Family, safety, security, fiscal restraint, local control.  These are ideas (regardless of actual policy, regardless of actual effects) that resonate with the voters.  They allow for the “water-cooler effect” – people can repeat this simple planks as a justification for their voting patterns and as a means to persuade others.  And it’s this kind of behind the scenes debate and discussion that’s crucially important in shaping the opinions people take with them to the ballot box.  The Rs already have that in place.  They just need new faces, untouched by corruption, stubbornness, and the war, to deliver it. 

The Ds are still not articulating that kind of simple national message that they need to get people behind them.  They need to get a repeatable message out that will tie their (very good) specific positions together.  The politicians don't convince Americans, Americans convince Americans.  And the D’s need to give people arguments they can make for them, arguments that justify keeping them in power.

As a coda, I don’t want to appear bloody minded, but I feel a sense of relief re: the future of the Supreme Court.  Stevens is getting up there - 86yrs old I think.

Not Official

I know it's not official and that VA might have a recount if the margin is under 1%. . .but, as my esteemed fellow-former-clerk, "Knew Her When She Was 15," wrote me:

As Oscar Wilde might have put it: "To lose one House may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness."

This is too sweet.

Gosh these Laurels are Comfy!

This morning I wanted to write a bit about D.Patrick and the political situation in MA, which is both appalling and inspiring.  I also am limping along on that Fanning review. 

What I will instead be doing is tracking down a complaining witness and attempting to get a statement.  In my favor I have my catlike stealth, my keen navigational and interviewing skillz, compass, map, trusty investigative partner, and a blacked-out/redacted police report, which, when placed on a backlit window, completely fails to obscure the CW's name, address, phone number, and other significant details.  Doh!  I realize this is not as cocktail-party-impressive as deducing the witness's info from my client's descriptions. . .but I'll take it.

Yesterday I ran into a 2L who complimented an older post on politics, racism and the law which I'd written in the course of my rambling Airy Poetics posts (sidebar right).  At least I'm pretty sure he was talking about that post.  As an aside, why do I always meet people on campus when I'm ready to collapse from hunger and exhaustion?  Anyway, in lieu of new writing, I thought I'd link to it as it provides a background to the upcoming (I hope) Patrick post. 

Sickness and Mood

Today was a brilliant day for biking, but I remained indoors to nurse my head-cold/chest-cold.  A single-mile ride on Sunday had resulted in me feeling like my wheezing lungs were full of cold and clammy fluid.

My mood gets alternately prickly and lethargic when I’m ill.  Part of me wants to write some bit of poetics – namely how awfully boring most critical writing is, how much it rehashes stuff from 30 years past (yeah, language is indeterminate, who knew?), contrasted to the failure of the critical arts to cohere around and elucidate a poetry that actually speaks to fundamental human concerns in times of crisis.  Perhaps I want also to write about the numbers of humans who waste their human potential on word-constructs-to-be-explicated, but desire to identify themselves as poets. 

I find it increasingly appalling, actually, given that many of these writers have important things to say, things which their fellow citizens need to hear.  Instead we get code and cant. 

In my current mood, I find a frustrating similarity in the left’s recurring failure to do anything but criticize.  Those criticisms (valid) tend to attach to persons, not broad ideas.  Meanwhile the right has endless new unsullied politicians who can step forward and articulate ideas which do mobalize the voters imagination.  Democracy!  Saving American Lives!  Fighting Terror!  And so on.  Scandals may knock out individuals, but the same old rhetoric is where their true power is.  It’s what gets them elected.

The left needs to abandon it’s current rhetoric and restate (on a popular level) a positive articulation of core values that swing voters (not leftists) can get behind.  Bring the Troops Home! is getting a bit shopworn, but it’s the most effective thing the left’s done in awhile. 

Rumor has it that Kerry may run again – and given that the last election wasn’t so long ago, I’d like to ask anyone if they remember any big sweeping value that Kerry endorsed (that wasn’t co-opted by the Republicans).  I suspect few of us can name them easily.  Yes, he had his platform planks and proposed policies, but he didn’t have one-word sweeping ideas/ideals which his programs grew out of.  Or if he did, he singularly failed to communicate them.

Sometimes I think of juries as mini-electorates.  Some will find a formal hook on which to hang their hat, but I wonder how many of them decide for or against someone based on that sweeping “total” argument, then go looking for points to justify that decision? 

We are what we do

Neo Tokyo Times has a wonderfully succinct post about what it means to live as Americans in these times, while The Imbroglio reminds us that this is not a time of war.

Ultimately, as a people, we are what we do.  But we are not what we claim we'd liked to have done in different or easier circumstances.

Moussaoui Gets Living Death, which is the best option

Seth has a good post which takes the piss out of Noonan's “Death for Moussaoui” arguments which have been floating about.

In general, most of those death penalty arguments are kind of silly, given that if you took the reasons given seriously, you get all kinds of absurd results when you apply that reasoning.  For example, the most common argument out there for Mousaoui (in my quick skim of the blogosphere via Technorati) is that “Moussaoui wanted to kill Americans and should die.”  Seriously, that’s not a strawman on my part.  First of all, there's tons of people who want to kill Americans and tons of people Americans want to kill.  We don't just drag them into court and use the mechanism of the state to kill them off.  Nor do we give ourselves up to foreign tribunals and confess to a) giving our tax dollars to and voting for someone who is going to make war on them.   

To go a little deeper, I think we have to keep in mind that Moussaoui confessed to being part of a criminal conspiracy to carry out the actions that took place on 9/11.  I think it’s pretty obvious from all the evidence that’s on record that Moussaoui did have a strong connection to Al Qaeda.  But in reality, it’s very questionable as to how far he was involved in the 9/11 plot, or even if he had knowledge of it that would have helped investigators prevent the attacks.  The evidence on record also suggests that Moussaoui is intelligent but nutty and death/martyrdom-seeking.  As Lyco pointed out, this means that we ought not to fully trust his testimony/confession since Moussaoui's interest is to inflate his own role in the 9/11 attacks. He has every incentive to lie about his involvement.
 

As I understand conspiracy (which is a pretty nebulous and shifting legal doctrine) if it had gone to trial, Moussaoui probably would have been found guilty of being in a conspiracy because the threshold for conspiracy as a stand-alone charge is pretty low, and, as I said, there’s strong evidence that he took money from Al Qaeda while he was on American soil, knew he was training for some kind of illegal act, and so forth. (So we’re good up to this point, the system works as far as “tracking” with reality.)  There might have been a few legal defenses Moussaoui could have tried to muster, including insanity, but these would be difficult to pull off.

So, Moussaoui is guilty in the eyes of the law.  And now the question shifts to punishment.  What kind of punishment do we want to inflict on him?  It’s here where those conservative arguments pro death penalty get dicey.

First off, (and this flavors all the subesequent arguments) from 5000 feet, you want to have a consistent legal system that’s predictable and consistant – people ought to know what’s allowed and what’s not, further, what the penalties are for bad acts. 

If we look at a general policy/system perspective, it seems that Bush’s administration has been pretty lax in preventing terrorist attacks, and has shown little or no incentive to go after the person most involved (Bin Laden).  In both cases of war/invasion which ostensibly address "terrorism," we’ve arguably had two basic ulterior motives.  Invading Afghanistan and putting in a puppet govt. lets us establish a pipeline through the country.  Invading Iraq (no connection to 9/11) allows us to control the oil fields of that country.  (Actually the best argument for invading Iraq is simply because we a) wanted the oil, and b) wanted a terrorist-magnet so that foreign terrorists would target American troops abroad and innocent civilians, not attack here on US soil; which I think is still a pretty crappy argument, and Bush ought to be impeached, but that’s beside the point.)  So, it seems pretty odd that the government (or the illusion of the government as a cohesive group) would act so inconsistently, spending life on side-wars, refusing to go after Bin Laden (over Iraq), torturing people with minimal knowledge of terrorist activities, BUT on the other hand trying to seek the death penalty against someone who (they allege) knows a lot about Al Qaeda, AND who may not have actually been involved in 9/11 in any significant manner. 

So, keeping that in mind, there are two classic reasons for the death penalty, and I'll look at each of them in turn:

Vengence/Just Desterts (a.k.a. deontological)
If we look at the death penalty option for Moussaoui on Vengeance/Just Deserts grounds, which means we punish the guilty *regardless* of the social cost in doing so or the benefits forgone in doing so, there are major problems on two fronts:

1 – We’re being inconsistent in terms of dishing out “just deserts” on a broad scale:

For example, if we were really concerned with divvying up blame for 9/11, where are the charges of gross negligence that should be brought against airport security?  I mean, these people let 4 *groups* of men armed with box cutters aboard 4 separate airplanes.  Instead we have all of our “vengeance” eggs in one basket – and that’s a basket case guy who the government has no intelligence interest in, who has repeatedly said he’d like to be martyred.  Meanwhile Bin Laden is making his video tapes and we’re quagmired in a COMPLETELY UNRELATED country that’s bursting at the seams with ethnic tensions and ripe for civil war.  Does this make sense?  Shouldn’t we be spending out money and lives in an effort to dish out justice to Bin Laden, instead of a crackpot like Moussaoui?  While you can argue that we ought to do "the right thing" in this case, part of what determines "the right thing" is what we do in every other case.

2 – We’re being inconsistent with this individual case:

It’s entirely arguable that even though Moussaoui told us he was intimately involved, he may have only been marginally involved.  He may not deserve death, even though he's full of hatred.  More on this in a second.

As a second point, Moussaoui wants death/martyrdom.  It's troubling to "punish" someone by giving them exactly what they want.  Life in a small box, with minimal human contact, is a completely grievous punishment.  And, even assuming he deserves supremely strong punishment for his role, this kind of thing *fully* suffices.  In fact, most of us would rather choose death than such a life with no hope of ever getting out.  This is “a just desert," and there's no need to go beyond it to punish him severly; that it aligns with his worst fear (imprisionment to old age, not martyrdom) only makes punishment on an individual basis, more severe, more just (again, assuming he deserves grave punishment).  I'll repeat this in my final point in the set of utility arguemnts.

**

Social Utility/Doing What's Best for Society (a.k.a. Utilitarianism)

If we look at the death penalty from a “social utility” perspective (i.e., we do what’s best for the country first, like deterring terrorism, then consider other options second), we again have two problems:

1 – Our behavior is inconsistent from a broad information gathering stand point. Wouldn’t it be better to keep this guy alive and find out what he knows?  I mean, if we were totally caught with our pants down (Cole, 9/11, British bombings, Madrid Bombings, etc.) should we really kill someone who knows about this stuff? 

As I’ve said before, this really only makes sense if the Govt. thinks that Moussaoui:

1. Really does not know anything (and thus it’s no loss to kill him).
2. Is insane and analysis can’t help unveil any new info/ideas that might give us insight into Al Queda (and thus it’s no loss to kill him)
3. Falls into a mix of the above (and thus, again, no information loss to kill him, but some social gain in executing a figurehead and making it look like “something is being done.”

Now (as a sub-issue) that “something being done” propagandistic prong is supremely stupid – assuming that Moussaoui is a marginal figure, it’s really only deluding Americans into a false sense of security, whereas, Al Queda *knows* this guy is a small fry, and laughs at American’s proclaiming that they nailed a major operative.  Who is this kind of thing meant to delude? Also, I think we have to remember that Moussaoui launched a huge propaganda war from his table and that people around the world have followed the trial.  By making the trial into a spectacle, saying he’d be killed regardless, then being killed (as a small fry), we’re really playing into his hands.  Individual justice issues aside, it's the wrong thing to do from a utility perspective.

2 – We’re acting a bit oddly in terms of “the need for closure” (which is often cited on blogs) Do we really want to delude ourselves that by killing Moussaoui we’ve “closed the book” on 9/11?  (See above.)

3 - In terms of detering terrorism, using the death penalty over life imprisonment does not make much sense on either individual or group deterrence groungs:

Individually, if he's locked away for life, Moussaoui will never pose an individual threat to the US. 

Further, Moussaoui's penalty is a shameful one in light of the idea that a death penalty would have martyred him.  Thus if you want to "send a message" to deter other terrorists who believe that suicide attacks or execution afterward will be a "good outcome for them," you want to set up a counter incentive and in essence say, "if we catch you, you're not in a win-win situation, in fact, you're not going to get martyred, you're going to rot in a cell. Enjoy."  You don't give them their individual "ultimate reward" (martyrdom). 

(As Lyco points out, this has both a utilitarian and deontological valence: because it's not just to "punish" individuals by giving them what they really want.)

From a social utility perspective, all we get out of killing this guy is:

1. pointless propaganda,
2. no real deterrence, and
3. a false sense of security.

Colbert Roasts Bush

Pretty Awesome.  Short version of the story:  on Saturday, Stephen Colbert roasted Bush at the annual White House Press Corps dinner.  But his "roast" went a bit beyond a roast - he openly mocked the President (to his face) for his unthinking, unswerving policies and brought up every single scandal associated with the presidency.  And, really, when you think about it, we've hit that point.  A president this dangerous and reckless should get absolutely no break in the pressure, absolutely no free passes.  I mean really, *why* should we not ask hard questions and demand honest responses?

Of course, Colbert also made fun of the media, suggesting that they should go further, press harder, etc.  So the word is that the "liberal" press isn't spreading the roast around all that much.  I've no idea if that's true or not. 

Regardless, if you blog, spread the word.

Here is a transcript, and below oae the vidoe links)

• Crooks and      liars (partial)
• YouTube: Part 1, 2, 3
• Torrent      (a bit more than Colbert)