Month: August 2009

by Patrick Appel

From his perch in sunny LA, Jonah Lehrer explored the normalization of marijuana and the possibility of a Prozac for pot. Jim Manzi couldn't make heads or tails of a paper on universal health care and job loss. Andrew, who is allegedly on vacation, popped his head in to post a pair of bloodthirsty dissents, bemoan Washington nepotism, and throw a punch at Max Boot. Julian Sanchez sympathized with policy wonks getting trampled by horse-race politics, while Jonah got inside the personal bubble of a close-talker. Chris Bodenner looked at life through the eyes of an armadillo and wondered about the Libertarian position on laws against threatening the President. Finally, it appears that an innocent man was put to death in Texas, and we got to see what a respectable dime-bag looks like.

 

A competitor takes part in the World Bog Snorkeling Championships held at Waen Rhydd Bog on August 31, 2009 in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales. By Richard Heathcote/Getty.

by Chris Bodenner

Hoekstra is lashing out at a letter signed by 10 former military and national security officials accusing him of fomenting "fear in order to score political points" on Standish:

Hoekstra spokesman Dave Yonkman dismissed the letter as a thinly veiled political attack from Democratic partisans. "Congressman Hoesktra is concerned with what the people of Standish and the state of Michigan have to say about transferring terrorist detainees into our state, not the opinions of a bunch of out-of-state Democrat contributors and partisans."

This is coming from the spokesman of a gubernatorial candidate whose Michigan district is on the other side of the state, and who in 2006 made headlines when he declared that WMDs had, in fact, been discovered in Iraq – in the form of a degraded chemical shells buried after the Iran-Iraq War. Also, those "partisans" include Richard Clarke – who was Bush's top counter-terrorism adviser and also served under his father and Reagan – and, even more to the point, this stalwart:

Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham is a highly decorated former military intelligence officer who served at Guantanamo Bay, where he had access to the government’s files on all of the detainees held there. He was so appalled by the use of fragmentary, contradictory and coerced evidence there that he resigned his commission and wrote an affidavit for the Supreme Court urging them to allow the detainees there to have access to civilian courts. Abraham is, in fact, a lifelong Republican whose civilian work was with the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation.

To add a bit more perspective to Yonkman's statement, a recent poll found that Michiganders – the people with the most at stake if detainees come to Standish – are decidedly more open to the idea than Americans as a whole; 50% oppose the transfer, compared to 58% nationwide. There are plenty of issues to be partisan about; this shouldn't be one of them.

by Patrick Appel

David Indiviglio tries to understand what Disney buying Marvel means for business and comic book geeks everywhere.

by Chris Bodenner

Burning Man began today. Photographer John Curley and his team will be documenting the desert debauchery on the Burning Blog. (Jealous.) If you're unfamiliar with the week-long phenomenon, here's a brief take from Wikipedia:

Burning Man is an annual event held in the Black Rock Desert, in Northern Nevada. It takes its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy on Saturday evening. In 2008, 49,599 people participated in Burning Man. The event is described by many participants as an experiment in community, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance. Participation is encouraged.

A recent report on the playa (that's dry lakebed) after the jump:

[N]ot bad. Yes there are chunky areas. Yes there are areas that will force you off your bike. But in general, not bad at all. There is a surface crust of an inch or so in most places, with some patches, like the area above, a bit deeper than that. The surface is hard-packed right now, but obviously that's going to change when everyone gets here. Will there be dust? Yes there will be dust.

Bonus hippies: A video shot at Venice Beach of a topless protest staged by a UFO cult called  the Raelians (NSFW, obviously). One woman explains at length the difference between their group and the Scientologists.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

If Ted and Vicki's marriage was "blessed", it means the marriage was convalidated.  Convalidation is when the Church recognizes the marriage.  For that to occur, annulments would have to have occurred.

Another digs deeper:

I did a little Lexis-Nexis searching and can report that it's a matter of public record that Victoria Reggie sought and received an annulment to her first marriage sometime prior to marrying Senator Kennedy.  However, while the couple married in a civil ceremony before the Senator's first marriage was annulled, by Jan. 1995 it was subsequently annulled, and his marriage to Reggie was blessed by the Church. 

see: James L. Franklin, “Senator Quiet on Application for Annulment, Boston Globe, (July 5, 1992), p. 10. and Peter Steinfels, “Kennedy Blessing Raises Questions for Catholics,” New York Times, (Jan 28, 1995), p. 9.

And another offers some excellent thoughts:

I think this reader is confusing the Vatican with the acts of a local church. This church and the priests involved in the ceremony were doing the decent humane thing which was to acknowledge Sen. Kennedy’s current spouse. My dad was briefly married and divorced before he married my mom, but my mom was acknowledged as his spouse at his funeral as well. Many individual churches have more understanding and compassion than the Vatican. Should this compassion be extended to same sex couples? In my mind, of course.
 
Also, as a recent Time piece illustrates, the Vatican didn’t seem to keen on Ted Kennedy.
 
The Catholic Church, especially the Vatican, is brimming with hypocrisy. The Pope rails on about abortion and the sanctity of life, while still ignoring the sins and crimes of pedophile priests. The Vatican came out in support of punishing the doctors and mother of a child who was repeated raped and impregnated, because they procured an abortion for her. The Vatican did not care that the pregnancy would likely have killed this girl who had already suffered so much. The sanctity of the fetus’s life mattered – the life of the girl who was already walking the earth did not. Of course the Vatican had little to say about the man who raped her and her sister. All people are not equal in the eyes of the Vatican.
 
So a local priest being sensitive to the realities of a family is not the big gotcha moment for nailing the Church’s hypocrisy.

by Julian Sanchez

First, thanks to Andrew for inviting me to play Garry Shandling while he's off being an international man of mystery. Out of respect for the august reputation of the Atlantic, I promise not to let my posts degenerate into a series of LOLcats and obscene limericks before Wednesday at the very earliest.

I see that Paul Krugman, Matt Yglesias, and John Sides have been pondering the much-lamented predominance of horse-race reporting over more substantive policy analysis.  Much of Krugman's analysis will sound familiar to fans of James Fallows and his excellent book Breaking the News: To wit, it's a hell of a lot easier to do strategic handicapping than to get into the policy weeds, and less risky as well, since you don't have to imperil your appearance of objectivity by taking a stand on whose claims are—if you'll forgive the quaint terms—"true" or "false."

Sides and Yglesias add that this may to some extent genuinely reflect audience preference. The most voracious consumers of news, after all, are disproportionately likely to be partisans who already have fairly strong opinions about which policies—or at least, which policy makers—they support. Which is to say, they're fairly sure they know who's got the best ideas; what they want to learn is whether and by what means their side can win.

Recently, though, I had a conversation with a reporter friend that illuminated another cause of the strategic focus: the high premium reporters place on breaking news. My friend, you see, has spent years accumulating some pretty deep policy expertise as a health care reporter; you could say he's been waiting his whole career for the present moment, as his issue becomes the central topic of our national political debate. Yet he's found himself incredibly frustrated, because most of the contacts he's built up over the years are, well, health care people. But it's his colleagues with a network of sources on Capitol Hill who are scoring the scoops that make page one.

That may just sound like a restatement of the problem—the strategy obsession—rather than an explanation, but the driving force here is not just a desire to cover the power struggle; it's the desire to break news, to beat the competition to some new revelation. This creates a bias against a policy focus in a couple of ways.

First, off-the-record access to Hill staffers is still a much more scarce commodity than access to proposed legislation. You can have a reasonable expectation that the tidbit you wheedled out of some LA at the pub will still be an exclusive in the morning when the papers hit the stands. There's no similar guarantee that some nimble blogger won't have a thorough analysis of the latest draft out of committee before you can go to press.

Second, in the immortal words of Moz, these things take time. If a court ruling was handed down in the morning, your editor probably wants 800 words filed by afternoon, and while the good ones will be flexible when you explain that this is not always going to be compatible with giving a densely-argued 80-page opinion a close reading, it puts you at a disadvantage vis a vis the guy who skimmed the syllabus and got a couple pithy quotes. When it's a thousand-page piece of legislation that interacts with dozens of other statutes, a serious close reading can take days. And if everyone else had the story on Tuesday, your thorough and thoughtful analysis on Thursday is more likely to get a chorus of cricket-chirps than a round of applause.

One final and more speculative thought is that the ratio of horse-race to policy coverage may be a rough gauge of our cynicism about the political process. If you think of American democracy as a fundamentally deliberative enterprise—citizens gathering in a great Norman Rockwell painting to reason together about the common good—obviously it's going to be important for citizens to be well informed about the details of policy so they know who to support, what to say when they write their senators, and so on. If that's all a lot of crap and there's really just a big mud wrestling match between interest groups to see who gets to turn the crank on the sausage machine, you may as well forget about the sausage ingredients and watch the bout.

by Patrick Appel

Massie takes on those who claim torture is justified:

If I knew that I could commit a crime – housebreaking say – and get away with it, would that give me license to commit such a crime because I really, really needed the stuff I'd steal, I had no other way of getting that stuff and I could steal it in a very efficient manner? Would the "harsh interrogation techniques" brigade think that fine and dandy?

Ambinder does the same. And Ryan Sager wants to change the terms of the debate.

by Patrick Appel

by Chris Bodenner

In all the debate over protesters bringing guns to Obama rallies, I'm surprised I haven't heard anyone talk about Title 18871, the federal law against threatening the president. It reads:

Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits for conveyance in the mail [any] document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States […] or knowingly and willfully otherwise makes any such threat against the President […] shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

Gun-loving Republicans and liberty-loving libertarians have framed the issue as simple speech, which I sympathize with. But a loaded gun is different than simple speech, because it carries a much greater potential for deadly violence (especially when that gun is a semi-automatic assault rifle). So how is the simple act of talking about killing the president – as distinguished from a material plot to do so – that different from guns at rallies?

I'm not suggesting that everyone who brings a legal firearm to a rally wants to harm Obama; the vast majority of them are patriots who just want to make a political statement. However, what is more dangerous to the president: a gun-toting individual who may or may not wish harm, or an individual with a "Death To Obama" sign who may or may not intend harm? The Secret Service is obliged to monitor both situations, thus taking up valuable resources. And of course the sign-carrier is far more detestable than the gun-carrier. But should the sign be illegal?

The sign-carrier in question was merely detained, but many people have been charged under Title 18871. Nathan Wine was recently arrested for forwarding an email ranting about Obama's death. Vikram Buddhi is still in prison for making threats against Bush posted in a chat room opposing the Iraq War. A few more examples are here. Each case if different, and the legal distinctions between joking, not joking, threatening, and threatening with intent are often difficult to determine. Eugene Volokh, a law professor, wrote a helpful post on the subject back in 2005:

A brief First Amendment analysis: Joking about shooting the President certainly isn't a crime as such; threatening to shoot the President is. Threats (whether against the President or not) are indeed constitutionally unprotected, but to be a punishable threats, a statement must at least be understood by a reasonable listener as a true threat, rather than just hyperbole (or humor). Here's an excerpt from the leading case, Watts v. United States (1969):

[D]uring a public rally on the Washington Monument grounds [in 1966, t]he crowd present broke up into small discussion groups and petitioner joined a gathering scheduled to discuss police brutality. Most of those in the group were quite young, either in their teens or early twenties. Petitioner, who himself was 18 years old, entered into the discussion after one member of the group suggested that the young people present should get more education before expressing their views.

[P]etitioner responded: “They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.” “They are not going to make me kill my black brothers.” On the basis of this statement, the jury found that petitioner had committed a felony by knowingly and willfully threatening the President….

We do not believe that the kind of political hyperbole indulged in by petitioner fits within [the term "threat"]…. The language of the political arena … is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact. [Watts'] only offense here was “a kind of very crude offensive method of stating a political opposition to the President.” Taken in context, and regarding the expressly conditional nature of the statement and the reaction of the listeners, we do not see how it could be interpreted otherwise….

[W]hile the Secret Service does need to investigate all such statements, out of an abundance of caution, the speakers can't be prosecuted given the context. The speakers may also have another defense: Virginia v. Black (2003) also held that a statement can't be a punishable threat unless it's made "with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death." Thus, following Black, a statement is a punishable threat only if a reasonable listener would understand it as a threat of attack and the speaker intended that the listener get that impression.

Volokh also raises another example of speech that is deemed dangerous enough to be illegal: talking about bombs in airports. I'm curious where libertarians stand on that issue as well.