Bryan Caskey posted this over on his blog. I don’t know where he got it — the URL makes me think some social media site such as Facebook, But wherever, I liked it, too. So I’m sharing it.
There are more good guys than bad guys
21 Replies
Category Archives: Rule of Law
AP says there are no more ‘illegal immigrants’ in the U.S.
But Doug and others who’ve been yearning for this day shouldn’t get overexcited. AP says we still have an “illegal immigration” problem.
It’s a matter of style.
Most news organizations in this country follow The Associated Press Stylebook quite religiously. Except for a few local exceptions here and there, so did every paper I ever worked at.
And AP style just changed. Those who follow the guide are no longer to call anyone an “illegal immigrant,” or refer to people as “illegals.”
Romenesko quotes from the statement today from AP explaining the change:
The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term “illegal immigrant” or the use of “illegal” to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that “illegal” should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally…
The discussions on this topic have been wide-ranging and include many people from many walks of life. (Earlier, they led us to reject descriptions such as “undocumented,” despite ardent support from some quarters, because it is not precise. A person may have plenty of documents, just not the ones required for legal residence.)…
… we had in other areas been ridding the Stylebook of labels. The new section on mental health issues argues for using credibly sourced diagnoses instead of labels. Saying someone was “diagnosed with schizophrenia” instead of schizophrenic, for example.
And that discussion about labeling people, instead of behavior, led us back to “illegal immigrant” again.
We concluded that to be consistent, we needed to change our guidance.
So we have….
Here’s the way the entry in the Stylebook reads now:
illegal immigration Entering or residing in a country in violation of civil or criminal law. Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant. Acceptable variations include living in or entering a country illegally or without legal permission.
Except in direct quotations, do not use the terms illegal alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented.
Do not describe people as violating immigration laws without attribution.
Specify wherever possible how someone entered the country illegally and from where. Crossed the border? Overstayed a visa? What nationality?
People who were brought into the country as children should not be described as having immigrated illegally. For people granted a temporary right to remain in the U.S. under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, use temporary resident status, with details on the program lower in the story.
There’s a certain logic to this, but I think the AP is going about a step too far. I can see not describing humans as “illegals.” It’s lazy, and unless a person has been declared an outlaw in the full meaning of the term (is that even possible in today’s legal system), the person himself is not illegal.
But by doing away with “illegal immigrant,” AP is eliminating a perfectly clear and accurate way of describing one aspect of a person. I doubt the service would balk at “recent immigrant,” or any other accurate modifier used with the word “immigrant.” “Illegal immigrant” is a quick, accurate way to describe a characteristic of an individual that is important to the story (else it wouldn’t be mentioned at all). I see no reason to inconvenience thousands of writers and millions of readers by forcing them into less direct ways of communicating the same concept.
Does anybody out there read ‘terms and conditions,’ ever? If not, it gives me hope…
I almost ignored the essay in the WSJ today about simplicity, because it started out with something about Henry David Thoreau. I’ve never been a fan. I don’t like anything about Walden. Life can indeed be simple if you isolate yourself from society — simple, but not worth living. (I say this as a person who is given to self-absorption, but that’s not a quality I like in myself, which causes me to react viscerally against Thoreau.) Also, it’s hard to avoid snorting in contempt at anyone who thought “modern” life in the first half of the 19th century had too much hustle and bustle in it.
But my interest was engaged a few grafs on, when I got to this bit:
Do you know anyone who stops to read “click-through” agreements on websites in the middle of performing a task? One company, PC Pitstop, deliberately buried a clause in its end-user license agreement in 2004, offering $1,000 to the first person who emailed the company at a certain address. It took five months and 3,000 sales until someone claimed the money. The situation hadn’t improved by 2010 when Gamestation played an April Fools’ Day joke by embedding a clause in their agreement saying that users were selling them their souls…
For a long time, I’ve meant to write a post asking, “Does anybody out there ever read those ‘terms and conditions’ agreements that you have to click ‘Agree’ to in order to proceed?” I tell myself that no one does, but I was a bit leery of posting the question because everyone might respond, “Of course we do,” at which point I would know for sure that what I’ve often suspected in the past was true: I’m on the wrong planet.
If it turned out everyone else was reading them, it was going to make me feel guilty every time I clicked “Agree” without reading all that crapola. It wasn’t going to change my behavior — I’d rather go to Room 101 than read a single one of those monstrosities. But it would make me feel bad. A little.
Those things always come up when I’ve already been substantially inconvenienced, having been forced to go through unanticipated steps in order to get on with whatever I was trying to do when the process started. You know those nightmare traps, in which you’re trying to do A, but realize that you can’t do A until you’ve done B, and then it turns out that B can’t be accomplished without first having completed C, etc. Those 20,000-word masterpieces of unreadability only come up when you’re fuming your way through G or H, and you’ve had it.
Besides, I couldn’t read one if I tried — not if by “reading” it, you mean get anything out of it. The surface of every letter in such documents is polished, then coated with grease, so that my brain can’t grab ‘hold of them. I can only read them on proofreading level. I don’t know if everyone experiences this or only someone who’s spent a lot of years as an editor, but there’s a certain level of reading on which I can catch spelling, punctuation and even grammatical errors, but when I’m finished, I can’t tell you what I just read. That’s as deeply as I can go into those kinds of documents.
The authors of the essay in the WSJ note with justice that much of the unnecessary complexity of life — the sort that’s too much to deal with — is caused by lawyers and technologists. On the one hand, lawyers try to protect their clients by covering every base to an absurd degree. Then there are those people who think everything can be quantified — people like “Clive,” a character created by John le Carre, of whom he wrote, “He believed that facts were the only kind of information and he despised whoever was not ruled by them.”
But you know what? If everyone else — or at least a goodly proportion of the populace — clicks through all those things without reading them, it gives me some hope for the world.
I tend to lump in this sort of complexity with the lack of trust in the world. I wrote a column back in the ’90s that was sort of my Unified Field Theory of public life. I said everything that was wrong with society resulted from the fact that we didn’t trust each other. Overly lawyered, too-complex-to-read contractual agreements are monuments to this problem. As I wrote in 1995, “A lack of basic trust of each other explains why… We have so many laws, and so many lawyers. We trust nothing to common sense…”
One of the great ironies of this is that so many people come to hate government because they get fed up with bureaucracy and overly complex rules. And yet the reason we have all those excessive rules is that someone insisted that we add them because they didn’t trust government just to use good judgment.
But I just realized something about those agreements I click on without reading: They show that I trust the entity that posted the agreement. I know I’m not signing away one of my grandchildren or my house or whatever, because I know that society wouldn’t stand for that. I know that if the agreement for this software that millions of others have downloaded meant that I was selling myself into slavery, I would have heard about it. Society, that thing too many of us distrust, wouldn’t have stood for it. So, even more than the entity that drafted the agreement, I’m trusting society as a whole. I’m trusting the village, or the wisdom of crowds, or whatever you choose to call it.
Which makes me feel better about the world, and about myself. And about everyone else who clicks on “Agree” without reading the agreement, and gets on with life. It makes me feel better about the world I live in.
Court rejects ‘penny’ challenge; bus improvements can begin
Well, it’s about time:
The State Supreme Court has denied an anti-tax group’s protest of the results of the Nov. 6 penny sales-tax referendum, paving the way for delayed improvements to the bus system.
In a short, to-the-point order dated Thursday, the court denied the request by Michael Letts to overturn the vote increasing the sales tax to 8-cents-on-the-dollar.
“It’s about time the community was allowed to do what they voted to do in November,” Bob Schneider, director of the Central Midlands Regional Transit Authority, said Friday.
Frannie Heizer, CMRTA attorney, said a copy of the order was forwarded to the SC Department of Revenue, and that she would expect collections of the additional sales tax to start May 1, as originally planned.
Schneider said he’s prepared to institute basic route improvements to bus service by June 1…
Now, when our new, public-transit-riding Pope comes to Columbia, he’ll have a way to get around…
Sorry, but ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ wasn’t Best Picture
The Wall Street Journal editorial board has been upset with U.S. senators Feinstein, Levin and McCain for criticizing the makers of “Zero Dark Thirty” for making it look like torture was essential to getting Osama bin Laden.
Now, the editors blame the senators for the movie’s poor showing at the Oscars:
As no one should forget, Senators Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain wrote letters to Sony Pictures and the CIA charging that “Zero Dark Thirty” was a “grossly inaccurate and misleading” portrayal of the interrogation of al Qaeda detainees. Ms. Feinstein’s intelligence committee opened an inquiry into what the CIA told the filmmakers, and the letters coincided with a media attack led by those great believers in artistic free expression at the New Yorker magazine.
Well, mission accomplished. The film was among the best reviewed of 2012 and has done well at the box office. But the attacks had their desired effect of intimidating Hollywood. Director Kathryn Bigelow was denied an Oscar nomination and the film won only a single (shared) award for sound editing. The Oscar ceremonies were Sunday night.
A day later, Reuters reported that the Senate is dropping its investigation of the film and CIA cooperation with the filmmakers…
The WSJ’s reasoning seems to go like this: Feinstein and Levin are liberals (McCain and his experienced-based objections to torture are conveniently forgotten). Hollywood is full of liberals. So Hollywood was cowed into stiffing ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ by fear of straying from liberal orthodoxy. Or something.
But the editors are ignoring something: “Zero Dark Thirty” didn’t deserve Best Picture honors, or Best Director. It was good, even important (important enough that I don’t blame senators at all for taking a political stand on it). But Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” which did win the Best Picture honor in 2009, was a more impressive, highly original film.
And the torture scenes? Speaking artistically and not politically, they went on too long. Long enough that it’s perfectly understandable that someone who doesn’t want our national defense to depend on the mistreatment of prisoners to think a political point was being made, and to object to that point. If this had been a work of fiction, devoid of political content, I think most critics would say the interrogations scenes were a drag on the storytelling.
I actually think the point being made by the filmmakers was neutral. I don’t think they were saying torture is good or necessary. I thought they were just saying (oversaying), it happened. And it sorta kinda maybe helped find bin Laden. It’s something to throw into the mix of how we feel about all that. War, including asymmetrical war, is filled with moral ambiguities.
I think they thought it would have been dishonest to leave out that part. Maybe they were right. In any case, they did not make this year’s best picture. Not this time.
Now, changing the subject slightly — what should have been Best Picture? Well, I can’t judge that, because I haven’t seen “Argo.” But I can say with all confidence that I wouldn’t have given it to “Zero Dark Thirty” in the same year that “Lincoln” came out. And if a director was slighted this year, it was Steven Spielberg.
John Yoo on the Obama administration’s drone memo
When I first read of the Obama administration’s drone memo earlier in the week, I idly wondered what John Yoo would think of them.
You remember him. He’s the lawyer who wrote the “Torture Memos” for the Bush administration.
Well, now I don’t have to wonder, because he wrote what he thinks of the latest development in The Wall Street Journal today.
The general thrust of his piece is that the great flaw in the current administration’s justification for its drone program is that it’s based not in the assumption that we are at war with al Qaeda, but on the assumption of so many on the antiwar left that terrorism should be treated as a crime. As he puts it, “the Obama administration is trying to dilute the normal practice of war with law-enforcement methods.” Which means you have to go through extra gyrations of rationalization to order a drone strike.
I’ll let others argue over that. What intrigued me was the ethical question Yoo raised at the very end of his piece:
Rather than capture terrorists—which produces the most valuable intelligence on al Qaeda—Mr. Obama has relied almost exclusively on drone attacks, and he has thereby been able to dodge difficult questions over detention. But those deaths from the sky violate personal liberty far more than the waterboarding of three al Qaeda leaders ever did.
That’s something else I’ve been thinking about: Which is worse, taking someone captive and mistreating him, or killing him?
There’s the related question: Is the killing of our enemies with essentially a deus ex machina from the sky, with no risk to Americans, rather than facing them in battle, the morally preferable course? OK, most Americans would probably say “yes,” to that one, but let’s address the first question: Is killing preferable, morally and ethically, to capturing and torturing?
And no, those aren’t the only two options we have. But that’s the question Yoo posed, and I find it an interesting one.
Graham plants himself squarely in pro-gun territory
Lindsey Graham, widely expected to face a challenge next year from right out of the 1830s, has responded to President Obama’s gun proposals today with words that place him safely in NRA territory:
Graham Expresses Opposition to President Obama’s Gun Control Proposal
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) today made this statement in opposition to President Obama’s gun control proposal.
“The recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School is heartbreaking and beyond words. However, the gun control plans brought forward by President Obama fail to address the real issues and I’m confident there will be bipartisan opposition to his proposal.
“One bullet in the hands of a homicidal maniac is one too many. But in the case of a young mother defending her children against a home invader — a real-life event which recently occurred near Atlanta — six bullets may not be enough. Criminals aren’t going to follow legislation limiting magazine capacity. However, a limit could put law-abiding citizens at a distinct disadvantage when confronting a criminal.
“As for reinstating the assault weapons ban, it has already been tried and failed.
“Finally, when it comes to protecting our schools, I believe the best way to confront a homicidal maniac who enters a school is for them to be met by armed resistance from a trained professional.”
#####
But take heart, gun control advocates: At least he doesn’t want to arm teachers, right? Not unless that’s what he means by “trained professional.” I initially took it to mean “cop,” but can we be sure?
What should happen to teachers who have sex with students?
Boyd Brown picked at my friends at The State the other day over the above headline, which inevitably makes one think, “And in related news, Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim“… In The State‘s defense, they caught it and fixed it — I can’t find it anywhere online now. (That’s the awful thing about the 24-hour news cycle. Used to be, you had a chance to catch these things before anyone saw them. Now, even when you catch it, it’s already out there and somebody has preserved it.)
Of course, this is no laughing matter, however much our inner 8th-grader may snicker. There are serious issues at stake. I was intrigued by this angle, raised in a long letter to the editor yesterday:
Don’t prosecute Dreher teacher for having sex with students
The two young men whom a Dreher teacher allegedly or admittedly engaged in sexual intercourse were above the age of consent. There are no allegations of coercion, intimidation, payments or rewards offered or given in return for sex.
Had the teacher been a neighbor or a family friend, a Mrs. Robinson if you will, there would be no crime.
I believe it is unconstitutional to have one law for teachers and another one for everyone else. An act should either be a crime if anyone does it or it should not be a crime…
Of course the teacher should be decertified, fired and counseled. But she never should have been arrested, she should not face prosecution, and she should fight for the right of teachers to not be made criminals for what other women can do without a threat of prosecution…
What do y’all think? Should this be a criminal matter, or merely an administrative one for the district’s H.R. folks to handle?
Personally, I’m not a bit bothered, at least in theory, by the existence of a “double standard” whereby teachers are treated differently from other folks. They hold a special public trust, and should be accordingly accountable to the public.
I just don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other as to whether that accountability should extend to criminal prosecution. Perhaps some of y’all can clarify my thinking on that…
Biden says Obama will issue executive order on guns
Wow. I don’t know whether Joe Biden is being — excuse the seeming pun — a loose cannon again, or whether the president is really considering this (or both), but I pass it on:
(Reuters) – Vice President Joe Biden said on Wednesday the White House is determined to act quickly to curb gun violence and will explore all avenues – including executive orders that would not require approval by Congress – to try to prevent incidents like last month’s massacre at a Connecticut school.
Kicking off a series of meetings on gun violence, Biden said the administration would work with gun-control advocates and gun-rights supporters to build a consensus on restrictions. But he made clear thatPresident Barack Obama is prepared to act on his own if necessary.
“We are not going to get caught up in the notion that unless we can do everything, we’re going to do nothing. It’s critically important that we act,” said Biden, who will meet on Thursday with pro-gun groups including the National Rifle Association, which claims 4 million members and is the gun lobby’s most powerful organization…
“There are executive orders, executive action that can be taken. We haven’t decided what that is yet,” Biden said, adding that Obama is conferring with Attorney General Eric Holder on potential action…
It this is true, this would be a stunningly bold move by the president on an issue of great concern to the nation that our Congress has demonstrated for decades that it is unwilling or unable to address.
But, wow: The reaction he would likely engender from the really serious pro-gun people out there hardly bears thinking about. On the one hand, this shouldn’t be a shock to them, since they (and only they) have believed all along that “That Obama’s gonna come after our guns” — even though, before Newtown and his pledge to do something in response to it, the president has shown little or no interest in their guns. Which is why they went on a gun-and-ammo shopping spree after he was elected.
But that doesn’t mean their reaction won’t be visceral to any unilateral action by the president, however limited. It would be, to them, the realization of their darkest forebodings.
So is the president really willing to go down that road? Maybe. And maybe Joe doesn’t know what he’s talking about…
Wait a second. That was the Reuters story. In The Washington Post, Biden sounds a lot more definite about this:
Vice President Biden vowed Wednesday that President Obama will use executive action where he can to help stop gun violence as part of the White House’s response to the mass shootings in Newtown, Conn.
“The president is going to act,” Biden said during brief remarks to reporters before meeting with victims of gun violence and firearm safety groups…
Why have BOTH parties wasted our money on Voter ID?
This just in from Lindsey Graham and Trey Gowdy:
Graham, Gowdy Defend South Carolina Voter ID Law
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and U.S. Congressman Trey Gowdy (South Carolina-4) today sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder renewing their request for documents pertaining to the Justice Department’s costly opposition to South Carolina’s Voter ID law.
Last Friday, the Washington, D.C. District Court issued a unanimous decision awarding South Carolina certain litigation costs incurred while defending its Voter ID law against a Justice Department challenge. The case cost the State of South Carolina an estimated $3.5 million.
“Not only do we strongly support the Court’s decision to award costs, we request follow up on our previous letter regarding the reasons why this costly litigation occurred in the first place,” wrote Graham and Gowdy. “If some, or all, of the costs associated with these actions could have been avoided by following the recommendation of career Voting Section experts, then we would like to know the reason why they were overruled.”…
Good question. Of course, it would be just as good a question to demand that our governor and legislative majority why they have insisted on passing and then defending in court a completely useless Voter ID bill.
As I’ve said so many times before, I remain completely unconvinced by either Republicans’ claim that there is a need for such a law, or by Democrats’ claim that it constitutes an intolerable burden. Every taxpayer dollar that either party has caused to be spent on the bill has been a waste, in my book.
First sex offenders, then gun permit holders…
Click on this image of the map to get to the original article.
Chip Oglesby (the guy who very kindly gave this blog a whole new theme this week, just because y’all complained about the comments format in the previous new one) brings this to my attention today.
The L.A. Times is reporting on a contretemps precipitated by another newspaper, on the East Coast:
It’s getting hard to find a public official in Putnam County, N.Y., who thinks putting the names of gun permit-holders on a map does anybody good.
On Thursday, a flock of officials gathered at a news conference to announce their support for County Clerk Dennis Sant’s decision to refuse a public-records request by the White Plains-based Journal News for a list of licensed handgun permit-holders, whose names and addresses are public record under law.
The state’s top open-records official previously told the Los Angeles Times that county officials would be breaking the law by refusing the newspaper’s request.
On Dec. 22, the newspaper published online an interactive map that included the names and address of people who had pistol permits licensed by Westchester and Rockland counties. The map led to so much outrage that the newspaper has hired armed guards to protect its newsroom. Reporting on one recent incident, the newspaper said it received a suspicious envelope containing white powder on Wednesday evening, which was deemed to be nontoxic.
The Journal News also wants to publish a similar map for Putnam County, but officials have resisted. On Thursday, there was no indication of the battle easing after Putnam County officials said they’re prepared to take the fight all the way to its conclusion, according to statements released by the office of state Sen. Greg Ball, a Republican who represents the area…
This raises all sorts of questions, mainly about privacy in an age in which very little privacy exists. Also about the principle that so many newspaper editors like to go on about, which holds that “the people have a right to know” pretty much anything that an editor gets it into his head to publish.
Do the people have not only a right, but a need, to see this map? And does it outweigh any presumed privacy that a gun permit holder might feel entitled to? I mean, it’s one thing for permits to be public information, so that an individual holder could be looked up. It’s another to publish a map, holding these people up to… I don’t know what, really. Because I don’t really understand what practical purpose the map serves. Is it intended as a sort of sociological study of the county, to satisfy someone’s curiosity as to where permit holders are most likely to live?
I’m curious to know the editors’ thinking on that, because without knowing that, I don’t know what to think. Going by this story, the editors haven’t been forthcoming on that point. But the publisher said, “We believe the law is clear that this is public information and the residents of Putnam County are entitled to see it. We’re troubled that county officials have apparently switched their position since we first requested the information.”
In response, a critic of the newspaper’s position says, “The Journal News has really come up with the perfect map for the perpetrators and for the stalkers and for the criminals. They have yet to give us a cogent reason why, except for the reason that they can. I am sorry — that is not acceptable.”
Frankly, I’m not persuaded either that the editors had a clear, thought-out reason for using that portion of their newshole for this purpose. Nor am I convinced that anyone has been harmed by their doing so. But that’s the way it is with so many things that people get really, really stirred up about…
Questionable claims for the AR-15
Just read an interesting piece over at Slate, by a guy who calls himself “a Second Amendment supporter” (although, living in NYC, he doesn’t own a gun — but I guess that’s as close to pro-gun as Slate gets), discussing the claims that the AR-15 is a great weapon for hunting and home defense.
Which seems doubtful to me on both counts. This writer, Justin Peters, cites most of the reasons I already thought that. If I were into hunting, I’d use a rifle (or for birds, a shotgun), rather than a weapon that, as Sean Connery’s Raizuli would say, “fires promiscuously.” A matter of sportsmanship. For home defense, a pistol seems far more practical than a long gun, even a carbine.
But then I’m not trying to sell “modern sporting rifle” to the public.
Here’s the core of the article’s argument:
But the AR-15 is not ideal for the hunting and home-defense uses that the NRA’s Keene cited today. Though it can be used for hunting, the AR-15 isn’t really a hunting rifle. Its standard .223 caliber ammunition doesn’t offer much stopping power for anything other than small game. Hunters themselves find the rifle controversial, with some arguing AR-15-style rifles empower sloppy, “spray and pray” hunters to waste ammunition. (The official Bushmaster XM15 manual lists the maximum effective rate of fire at 45 rounds per minute.) As one hunter put it in the comments section of an article on americanhunter.org, “I served in the military and the M16A2/M4 was the weapon I used for 20 years. It is first and foremost designed as an assault weapon platform, no matter what the spin. A hunter does not need a semi-automatic rifle to hunt, if he does he sucks, and should go play video games. I see more men running around the bush all cammo’d up with assault vests and face paint with tricked out AR’s. These are not hunters but wannabe weekend warriors.”
In terms of repelling a home invasion—which is what most people mean when they talk about home defense—an AR-15-style rifle is probably less useful than a handgun. The AR-15 is a long gun, and can be tough to maneuver in tight quarters. When you shoot it, it’ll overpenetrate—sending bullets through the walls of your house and possibly into the walls of your neighbor’s house—unless you purchase the sort of ammunition that fragments on impact. (This is true for other guns, as well, but, again, the thing with the AR-15 is that it lets you fire more rounds faster.)
AR-15-style rifles are very useful, however, if what you’re trying to do is sell guns. In a recent Forbes article, Abram Brown reported that “gun ownership is at a near 20-year high, generating $4 billion in commercial gun and ammunition sales.” But that money’s not coming from selling shotguns and bolt-action rifles to pheasant hunters. In its 2011 annual report, Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation announced that bolt-action hunting rifles accounted for 6.6 percent of its net sales in 2011 (down from 2010 and 2009), while modern sporting rifles (like AR-15-style weapons) accounted for 18.2 percent of its net sales. The Freedom Group’s 2011 annual report noted that the commercial modern sporting rifle market grew at a 27 percent compound annual rate from 2007 to 2011, whereas the entire domestic long gun market only grew at a 3 percent rate…
Just before that excerpt, Peters cited what I suspect is the biggest appeal of the AR-15: “because carrying it around makes you look like a badass.”
Indeed.
Your ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ scoreboard
OK, I think I’ve got it straight now.
I had thought that the official GOP position was that “Zero Dark Thirty” was the result of an unholy relationship between the filmmakers and the Obama administration, meant to aggrandize the latter.
I had seen Sen. John McCain’s criticism of that film as overlapping somewhat with that position, although I also saw it as consistent with his principled, and very personal, opposition to torture.
I was vaguely inclined toward emphasizing the latter reason for McCain’s objections over the former, because I had heard that Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin were joining McCain in his criticism of the movie.
Anyway, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal stepped in today to straighten me out and clarify the partisan battle lines over the film:
You know it’s a bad day in America when Hollywood seems to have a better grip on intelligence issues than the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the top two Members at Armed Services. The film depicts the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or EITs, used on the detainees held at the CIA’s so-called black sites, and hints that the interrogations provided at least some of the information that led to bin Laden’s killing.
What Ms. Bigelow intended by depicting the EITs is not for us to explain: This is an action flick, not a Ken Burns documentary. Yet the mere suggestion that such techniques paid crucial intelligence dividends—as attested by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former CIA Director Michael Hayden, among many others—has sent Mrs. Feinstein and her colleagues into paroxysms of indignation. They even have a 5,000-plus-page study that purports to prove her case…
One day, perhaps, some of our liberal friends will acknowledge that the real world is stuffed with the kinds of hard moral choices that “Zero Dark Thirty” so effectively depicts. Until then, they can bask in the easy certitudes of a report that, whatever it contains, deserves never to be read.
So, in the never-ending partisan argument, which requires that everyone take one of two (and only two) directly opposing positions, apparently opposition to the movie is officially a Democratic, liberal position, and John McCain’s agreement with that position is designated as just one of his “maverick” positions.
Whatever. I still sympathize with McCain’s objection to our nation embracing torture on any level.
And… I still look forward to seeing “Zero Dark Thirty.”
The Jeffersonian notion of ‘militia’ didn’t work all that well out in the real world
General Brock was mortally wounded, but his redcoats won the Battle of Queenston Heights.
On a previous thread about the Second Amendment, I promised to comment further on the notion that the Framers had of a militia made up of a well-armed citizenry.
I got to thinking about it because of this column in The Wall Street Journal on Friday. It’s purpose was to argue, on that conflict’s bicentennial, that the War of 1812 was more important than many people believe. It did so ably enough. An excerpt:
First, the war validated American independence. The new republic had been buffeted between the two great powers of the age. Great Britain had accepted the fact of American independence only grudgingly…
Thus historians have sometimes called the War of 1812 the second war of American independence.
Second, it called into question the utopian approach to international relations. As president, Thomas Jefferson had rejected Federalist Party calls for a robust military establishment. He argued that the U.S. could achieve its goals by strictly peaceful means, and that if those failed, he could force the European powers to respect American rights by withholding U.S. trade.
Jefferson’s second term demonstrated the serious shortcomings of his thinking… As a result of the War of 1812, American statesmen realized that to survive in a hostile world, the U.S. would have to adopt measures, including the use of military power and traditional diplomacy, that doctrinaire republicanism abhorred.
Third, the conduct of the war exploded the republican myth of the civilian militia’s superiority to a professional military. Thus, during the three decades after the War of 1812, the Army would adopt generally recognized standards of training, discipline and doctrine. It would create branch schools, e.g., schools of infantry, cavalry and artillery.
It’s that third item that I call y’all’s attention to in particular.
The Jeffersonians, among whom we for most purposes can count leading Framer James Madison, had an image in their minds of what government in general should be, which in a word one would say minimal. It was close to the ideal that libertarians still embrace today. We were to be a nation of independent yeoman farmers, each of whom looked after himself, and should the need for national defense arise, these doughty free men would come together spontaneously to drive away the invader.
Consequently, Jefferson opposed both a standing army and a navy, for anything other than coastal defense.
It is in that context that the Second Amendment makes the most sense. If those citizens were to be any use in a militia, they needed to be armed, and to have some personal experience with firearms.
But it didn’t take long at all for history to teach us the utter inadequacy of the Jeffersonian ideal of an armed citizenry being the only defense we needed. In Jefferson’s own time as president, he discovered the need to project power far beyond our coast, against the Barbary pirates. Our young Navy and its Marine contingent came in very handy in that instance.
But it took the War of 1812, “Mr. Madison’s War,” to demonstrate how useless untrained or lightly trained militia, with an unprofessional officer corps, was against the army of a superpower.
We got spanked by the redcoats, in one land encounter after another. The Brits burned Washington. Until the Battle of New Orleans — which unbeknownst to the combatants occurred after the war was over — the irregular American troops were humiliated time and again. If not for the occasionally sea victory, in single-frigate-versus-single-frigate actions (which, until Philip Broke’s big win off Boston Harbor, totally demoralized the Royal Navy, accustomed as it was to dominating the French), there would have been little to give heart to Americans during most of the course of the war.
Being reminded of all this led me to an interesting train of thought, as follows: The constitutional justification for universal gun ownership, a well-regulated militia, was shown within a generation to be a deeply flawed model of national defense.
From then on, American history saw a fairly steady march toward maintaining professional military forces, led by a professional officers. The notion of the citizen-soldier is far from dead, but it’s highly amended. We created a mighty force out of the civilian population in World War II, but they were trained up to effectiveness by a core of experienced professionals. And today’s National Guard contains some of the most thoroughly trained individuals in our overall defense establishment. Technology has made warfighting such a specialized enterprise that no one expects anyone to be an effective soldier just because he owned a rifle growing up.
Oh, one footnote, from that same column. I thought the South Carolina angle intriguing:
Many of these military reforms were the work of John C. Calhoun, who proved to be one of the most innovative and effective secretaries of war (which was the title of the cabinet officer before 1947, when it was changed to secretary of defense).
Early in the war, our only victories were at sea. Here, USS Constitution defeats HMS Guerriere.
Surprise! The NRA concedes nothing
Earlier in the week, we saw this release from the NRA:
National Rifle Association of America is made up of four million moms and dads, sons and daughters—and we were shocked, saddened and heartbroken by the news of the horrific and senseless murders in Newtown. Out of respect for the families, and as a matter of common decency, we have given time for mourning, prayer and a full investigation of the facts before commenting. The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again. The NRA is planning to hold a major news conference in the Washington, DC area on Friday, December 21.
… which kind of made it sound like the gun lobby, sensing a change in mood in the country, even among some traditional allies, was willing to concede something, give some ground, agree to something it would never have agreed to before. I mean, that’s what “The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions” sounds like to most people.
Fat chance.
Here’s what they came up with today:
WASHINGTON—The nation’s most powerful gun-rights lobby called Friday for armed security guards in schools, saying that children had been left vulnerable in their classrooms.
Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, said that “the monsters and the predators of the world” have exploited the fact that schools are gun-free zones. Other important institutions—from banks to airports to sports stadiums—are protected with armed security, he said, but this country has left students defenseless.
So basically, their response to the nation’s concern over all those guns out there is… more guns. That, and gun-lover buzz phrases: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” It would never occur to the NRA that maybe, just maybe, an even better solution would be to keep the bad guy from getting a gun to begin with. There’s a whole lot less crossfire that way, for one thing.
Mind you, I’m not entirely against the idea of armed officers in schools. Mainly because, as I’ve said before, I think the likelihood of gun control measures that would really, truly keep guns out of the hands of bad guys is next to nil. It’s an economic problem. There are just too many guns out there chasing too many tragedies. Think chaos theory gone mad.
But I also think that’s not going to happen. For every extreme gun nut out there — the kind who sits up late oiling and stroking his weapons and whispering pet names to them, and thinks government exists to threaten his “freedoms” — there’s a corresponding gunophobe who goes weak in the knees at the very sight of anything that looks like a firearm, who gets chills down the spine at the idea of being within range of one, even in the hands of cops. And a lot of those folks in the latter groups have little kids in school, and would have an absolute stroke at the idea of any sort of firearms in the vicinity of their children. (And this week, it’s a little hard to argue with their emotional response.)
Beyond that, though, my real objection is this: The NRA’s utter unwillingness to say, “Here’s something we’re willing to give up.” This was a moment for doing that. Something, anything, however marginal or minimal in impact, that said “fewer guns” rather than “more guns.”
But the folks at the gun lobby seem to be genetically incapable of that. Or something.
A communitarian view on gun control
I thought y’all might be interested in this perspective on gun control from Amitai Etzioni, who is sort of the godfather of the rather modest communitarian movement in this country. An excerpt:
We should not wait for our elected officials, in President Obama’s good words, “to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” We should do our share. One way to proceed is to mark our homes, apartments and condos, with a “gun free” sign. Parents should notify their friends that they would be reluctant to send their child over for a play date unless the home was safe from guns. Residential communities should pass rules that ban bringing guns onto their premises, clearly marking them as gun free.
Anyone who puts up such signs will become an ambassador for gun control, because they are sure to be challenged by gun advocates to explain their anti-gun positions. Here are some pointers they may wish to use against the typical pro-gun talking points.
“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
• Tragically, it is the case that there will always be dangerous individuals, but they can kill a lot more with easy access to guns. On the same day as the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, a knife-wielding man targeted a primary school in a Chinese village. Twenty-two children and one adult were wounded, but none were killed.
“Guns deter crimes and save lives.”
• Of the 30,000 gun deaths in America every year, only 200 are caused by self-defense. Studies have shown that a higher rate of gun ownership is correlated with higher rates of homicide, suicide and unintentional shootings. The U.S. has a firearms homicide rate 19.5 times higher than the combined rate of 22 high income countries with similar non-lethal crime and violence rates…
Note the emphasis on community-based solutions — starting in one’s home and workplace, engaging one’s neighbors in debate. Very much based in faith in engaged communities.Very different from the “50 percent plus one” forced solutions that left and right tend to jockey for…
Not that a communitarian would object to more reasonable laws regarding guns. As Etzioni says, “No right is absolute. Even the right to free speech, considered the strongest of them all, is limited. You cannot shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater — precisely because it endangers life.”
The hopelessness of discussing school shootings
OK, so we have another mass shooting in a school, and this one may be a record-breaker, in the K-12 category. Twenty children dead, several adults.
We’ve had the obligatory statement from the president. There’s no reason for the president of the United States to comment on such things, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with his job description. After the Columbine shootings, I wrote about the absurdity of reporters standing outside the White House for hours waiting for the president to say something. But it’s expected now. People don’t think about what the president’s job is and isn’t; he’s expected to be emoter in chief.
So he said something, and he shed tears. He might as well. I mean, what do we expect him to do? He indicated his intention to do something:
President Obama, in one of his most emotional speeches as president, wiped away tears as he spoke about the shooting from the White House’s briefing room. “Our hearts are broken today,” Obama said. He promised “meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this,” but did not say specifically what he might do….
What would he do, indeed?
I don’t normally post about stuff like this because there’s really nothing helpful to say. These things fill me with hopelessness. The only thing that would do anything to prevent such events in the future would be a level of gun control that would mean changing unshakable reality in this country by 180 degrees.
Understand me — I’m not proposing anything, because I don’t know of anything that would both solve the problem and also be achievable.
Here’s why it’s so hopeless: Even if, by some miracle, we bypassed or reinterpreted the Second Amendment so as to allow for the strictest laws in the world regarding gun ownership, we still would not have solved anything. Which is why you don’t see me going around advocating gun control.
That’s because the guns would still exist. And the gun-rights people are right: If you outlaw guns, outlaws will still have guns. The problem is that there are just so many firearms out there in this country. Even in the most repressive, worst jackbooted nightmare for the gun rights people, with police rounding up all the guns they can lay their hands on, there would still be so many left that you would see incidents such as this school shooting still happening from time to time.
It’s an economic problem — too many guns chasing too many potential shooting victims. There are at least a couple of hundred million guns in the country — I’ve seen statistics suggesting there are 90 for every 100 people. And of households that have one firearm, more than 60 percent have multiple guns.
You know what this situation reminds me of? Slavery before 1860, and why it was such an intractable problem for the country. No, gun lovers, I’m not saying it’s the moral equivalent or anything like that. I’m saying the dynamics of the political challenge are similar.
There were about 4 million slaves in the country when South Carolina seceded. Here in SC, there were more slaves than free people. Slaveholders were so invested in the institution that there was no possible political or legal solution that would have induced them to give up their slaves. The position of white elites in this and other states (but most especially this one; SC had always been the most extreme on the issue) was essentially that you’d have to pry their slaves from their cold, dead hands. And that’s what happened. It took a war that killed more Americans than ALL of our other wars, from the Revolution through Iraq and Afghanistan, combined, to end slavery. And we’re still wrestling over the repercussions.
For Barack Obama, if he wanted to address the gun issue meaningfully, the political obstacles are very similar to those that faced Lincoln dealing with slavery. Lincoln had to spend the early months of his administration, the early months of the war, insisting to the world that he was NOT the abolitionist that the Southerners depicted him as. It’s not that he was pro-slavery; he was always opposed to it. But even well into the war itself, he saw abolition as a political impossibility. He and others saw the fact of those 4 million slaves as something they didn’t know how to deal with. It seemed unimaginable to many anti-slavery pols then that former slaves could just co-exist with former slaveholders in the future.
Obama is to gun-rights people, in a way, what Lincoln was to the slaveholders. He didn’t run on a gun-control platform, and has never made any serious proposals to limit gun rights, that I can recall. And yet I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there has NEVER been a president of the United States as distrusted by gun-rights people — and I mean serious gun-rights people, the sort who would list the 2nd Amendment as a top concern.
For Barack Obama to step out and advocate anything that would put a serious crimp in gun availability in this country would create a political backlash that — while it wouldn’t be the same as secession (and the reaction would be more individualized than a state-by-state thing) — would probably outstrip anything sense, in terms of the sheer passion of the response.
It would be the most politically (and, frankly personally — the Secret Service would have a horrific new challenge on its hands) risky thing I’ve ever seen a president do in my adult lifetime.
Which is why I kind of doubt we’ll see it.
Which is why waiting for the president to say something about such things seems so hopelessly pointless…
SC Senate’s “first-ever serious (ethics) fine”
In her column Sunday, Cindi Scoppe reported on the SC Senate Ethics Committee’s second public reprimand (the one of Jake Knotts was the first), and “its first-ever serious fine:”
A forgiving law isn’t precisely the problem in the case of Sen. Kent Williams, but his public reprimand points to another significant shortcoming in our ethics and campaign finance law that isn’t getting much attention. Left uncorrected, it could greatly diminish the value of any new reporting requirements the Legislature passes, leaving them dependent on the honesty of the candidates filing the reports.
According to the Senate Ethics Committee, Mr. Williams accepted 15 contributions in excess of the legal maximum of $1,000 for this year’s election. It ordered him to return the extra $12,801 and pay a $5,390.05 fine. The Marion County Democrat, who is running unopposed for his third term, did not contest the charges.
Ten of the illegal contributions were straightforward violations that anyone who looked closely at his campaign reports would have noticed, and probably the result of bad record keeping. But in five cases, Mr. Williams reported that he received two $1,000 checks on the same day from the same donors — one for the 2012 race and one to pay down a 2008 campaign debt — but used all the money for his 2012 campaign. The panel called these “deliberate attempts to mislead the public,” noting that to anyone looking at those reports, “it appears” that the donations were legal.
It’s Mr. Williams’ apparent compliance with the law that makes this case so worrisome. The Ethics Committee discovered the ruse because its attorney noticed that the senator wasn’t reporting enough outstanding debt to justify the repayments; he asked for bank records, which showed the payments hadn’t been made.
It was similar serendipity that led to the reprimand against Mr. Knotts for accepting illegally large donations, misreporting the identities of some donors and not reporting others, and not reporting some expenditures. In that case, it was what appeared to be, but wasn’t, excessive interest income that raised the attorney’s suspicions, leading him to ask for the bank records that revealed unrelated violations…
Cindi suggests random audits to overcome the weakness that the Williams case exposed — that weakness being the assumption that what is put on disclosures is accurate.
Court panel OKs SC voter ID law for 2013
This happened about the time I was going to lunch today:
A federal court in Washington, D.C., has upheld the constitutionality of South Carolina’s new voter ID law.
However, the law — which requires voters to present a state-approved ID with their picture at the polls before casting a ballot — will not take effect until 2013, meaning it will not affect S.C. voters during the November presidential election.
The U.S. Justice Department had blocked implementation of the new law, passed in 2011. Civil rights groups also had challenged the law, saying it unfairly discriminated against minority voters, who were less likely to have access to the records or state facilities necessary to get a photo ID.
However, a three-member federal panel ruled Wednesday that the law’s “expansive ‘reasonable impediment’ provision” made it unlikely that any voters lacking a photo ID would be turned away at the polls. Those voters still can vote “so long as they state the reason for not having obtained” a photo ID, the ruling noted.
That was followed in the report by some silly comments from Nikki Haley about the mean ol’ federal gummint trying to do awful things to South Carolina. (“Every time the federal government has thrown us a punch, we have fought back.”) Because you know that’s what this is about, right? The feds just picking on us for no reason.
The same mean ol’ federal government that wouldn’t let us keep our slaves anymore…
Excuse my disgust. Mind you, as I’ve said many times before, I think this is generally an issue blown out of proportion by both sides. But when I see the way the governor couches it, it’s pretty off-putting.
Yep, Voter ID is a waste, and has been from the very beginning
Have to agree, in part, with this release from Lindsey Graham and Trey Gowdy:
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and U.S. Congressman Trey Gowdy (SC-4) today sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting documents pertaining to the Department of Justice’s opposition to South Carolina’s Voter ID law.
Graham and Gowdy expressed concerns that an approval recommendation by career Voting Section experts was ignored and overruled by Obama appointees at the Justice Department…
Oh, it’s a waste all right — the whole mess. Starting with the GOP’s completely unnecessary imposition of this “solution” to a nonexistent “problem,” and ending with Democrats’ hyperventilating over it. As I’ve said over and over again for years, a huge waste all around — and we all know that it’s about each party trying to gain or protect every ounce of leverage it can get at the ballot box. Which has an unbecoming intensity in this very close election.
But gentlemen, as much as one might find in “waste” on both sides — and if the DOJ leadership ignored its own staff recommendation, that does raise one’s eyebrows — the truth is that your own side started this unnecessary fight.