Poor Defendants Go To Jail

Any of you who are ACLU members, or who regularly read Grits for Breakfast or related blogs, are well aware of the problem of inadequate criminal defenses provided to indigent defendants. Christy Hardin Smith examines the problem and concludes that it's getting worse, in her post "Sixth Amendment In Crisis: Right To Competent Counsel At Risk." If you're poor in America, and you're charged with a crime, you are no longer assured of even a minimally competent defense The theoretical presumption of innocence doesn't mean much if not backed up with an adequate defense... and few Americans seem to give a damn. All of our founders are surely spinning in their graves.

Steve
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These Days, Rich Beats Smart

Sorting through closet contents today, I came across my Master's degree, the actual large parchment scroll from Rice University, awarded in (sigh) 1971. Yes, they used actual parchment in those days. No, I did not even open the storage cylinder; I was afraid the certificate would all too symbolically disintegrate after all those years.

Sifting through web news today, I came across this sad discussion in the New York Times of the fact that universities, even well-known ones of national or international repute, are being forced to prefer adequately qualified students wealthy enough to pay full tuition in preference to even exceptionally bright, capable students who lack the resources to pay and must be subsidized in one way or another.

As you may have guessed, I was the latter. I was the son of two schoolteachers. We were a tiny notch above dirt poor, but we were economically lower class. Without a full tuition scholarship, I'd have gone to a decent but less prestigious school. Rice decided to risk an investment in me. I was grateful. I like to think they were well rewarded for their decision to admit me on their own coin, and I know it has been an excellent source of opportunities for me to have graduated from a name-brand university.

A college-bound high school senior today whose economic circumstance resembles mine in 1966 would very likely not go to Rice, let alone Harvard or any Ivy League school. The financial assistance is just not available.

Perhaps my contribution to our society is not what the providers of financial aid dreamed of when they awarded me scholarships each year of my five-year degree plan. Or perhaps it is; I don't know. But I do know that the more America allows its most talented and diligent youth to fall by the boards, missing college altogether or attending a school a notch or two below the caliber of which they are capable, the more America will fall behind in the civilized world. Our place in the world did not come without sacrifice for and investment in our young people... and America can lose that place, make no mistake.

Steve
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Reid: Roberts Lied

Via Huffington Post, we learn from Yahoo! News Politico (say what?) that Harry Reid says Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts lied to the Senate in his confirmation hearings in 2005. Somehow, I hear in my mind's ear the voice of Gomer Pyle: "Surprise, surprise!"

No Supreme Court nominee by a Republican president starting with Reagan has been truthful about his or her judicial approach at their confirmation hearing since Robert Bork, for the rather obvious reason that none of them could be confirmed if they told the truth. Think about it. William Rehnquist lied. Clarence Thomas lied. And on and on. Republican presidents starting with Reagan have had solely ideological criteria for picking Justices, and the question has been how to get them past the honest concerns of the Senate. Now we're stuck with a bunch of them; the bench will be soiled with zealots for decades to come. Will Senate Democrats ever learn that Republican presidents nominate dishonest people to our highest Court? Somehow, I doubt it.

Steve
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Veep Cheney Dissed Obama To Israelis

This is quite out of bounds... unpatriotic... damned nearly treasonous (but from Dick "Dick" Cheney, is anyone surprised?). Here's Seymour Hersh's account:

     ...

The Obama transition team also helped persuade Israel to end the bombing of Gaza and to withdraw its ground troops before the Inauguration. According to the former senior intelligence official, who has access to sensitive information, “Cheney began getting messages from the Israelis about pressure from Obama” when he was President-elect. Cheney, who worked closely with the Israeli leadership in the lead-up to the Gaza war, portrayed Obama to the Israelis as a “pro-Palestinian,” who would not support their efforts (and, in private, disparaged Obama, referring to him at one point as someone who would “never make it in the major leagues”). But the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of “smart bombs” and other high- tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel. “It was Jones”—retired Marine General James Jones, at the time designated to be the President’s national-security adviser—“who came up with the solution and told Obama, ‘You just can’t tell the Israelis to get out.’ ” (General Jones said that he could not verify this account; Cheney’s office declined to comment.)

     ...

Hoping a president fails, as many high-ranking Republicans do publicly now, is unpatriotic. Undermining that same president-elect deliberately and explicitly to a foreign government in a matter of international relations is treasonous.

Mr. Cheney: shut up. Shut the fuck up. Damn you to hell, shut your fucking mouth before you do even more damage after your term in office than the already ghastly amount of destruction you accomplished while you sat in the chair you stole. Just shut up. NOW.

Steve
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Presented Without Comment

(H/T Crooks and Liars.)

Steve
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Off The Blogroll

Fact-esque is off the blogroll, for extreme gratuitous Texas-bashing. Goddamit, Mick, we are not all like the state board of education, or GeeDubya, or name-your-favorite-Texas-villain. Well over 40 percent of Texans are fighting that shit, and the percentage is growing so rapidly that we will have the Lege in another couple of elections. Meanwhile, you're entitled to your fuck-headed opinion, but I'll be damned if I'll link to it.

Steve
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Is Scalia A Homophobe?

The L.A. Times, in an editorial, says Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) "may have gone too far" in calling Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a "homophobe." Hmph.

So... what exactly is Frank permitted to call Scalia? How about a "tyrannical anti-Constitutional right-wing religionist bigot"? May he call him that?

In our nation's history, there have been a lot of really bad Supreme Court Justices, so it is probably inappropriate to call Scalia the worst Justice ever. But he is surely the most destructive of our time. Don't worry, Justice Roberts and Justice Alito: there's still time for you to catch up.

Steve
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Friday House Cat Blogging

Tabitha rests on a pillow in the bedroom of the new old house. Meet the new nap: same as the old nap.

Please forgive Tabitha for her slightly cranky demeanor. We're all that way at the moment; Stella's absence is keenly felt by the three of us remaining. She returns on the 31^st. CORRECTION: very late at night on the 30^th.

Steve
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Libel, Here And Elsewhere

A Web friend in the UK has been threatened with a libel lawsuit and has withdrawn web content to avoid it. This kind of threat would be more or less empty if issued in the US. I am withholding names and links to avoid creating further trouble for the friend. But I have a couple of observations (remember, I am not a lawyer):

• In England, per Mansfield, "the greater the truth, the greater the libel," although in modern times, it appears that "justification" (truth) is a legal defense in England as in America. In America, the truth of a statement has been a virtually unbreakable legal defense against libel charges since 1734 (see same wiki).
• The writer's blog is carried by a service that is hosted in America. That is, it is published in America. That this is no safety against the cost of defending a lawsuit says a lot about how malevolent individuals abroad can have an impact on matters that by right should be American domestic matters. If I recall correctly, muckraking reporter Greg Palast, an American living at the time in London, encountered a similar threat and was forced to withdraw true content to save his publisher.
• The writer did not himself state the alleged libel; a commenter did so. In other words, the threatening plaintiff holds the writer responsible for his commenters' statements. That is not right. But it is unsurprising in today's world. For the plaintiff, the point is issuing a threat, not responding to actual injury.
• The person threatening the lawsuit is a religious figure who appears to me (remember, I am not a lawyer, let alone a UK citizen) him- or herself to engage repeatedly in defamation.

There are many ways in which America has deteriorated in matters of protected rights. It appears to me that in this case, as in many in America, the law is on the side of the writer, not the potential plaintiff, but the very possibility of a SLAPP burdens the writer with an unreasonable expected cost of exercising his or her right to freedom of the press. We live in parlous times, times in which many powerful individuals and corporations seek to turn back the clock, not just decades but centuries. Apparently, in this case, they have found the means to do so.

Steve
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Kids For Cash

Guardian:

Hundreds of teenagers who were subjected to months in custody by a corrupt judge have had their convictions quashed by Pennsylvania's highest court in a judicial scandal dubbed "kids for cash".

The state's supreme court ruled that the judge, Mark Ciavarella, had violated the constitutional rights of the teenagers who came before his court, by failing to ensure they were properly legally represented.

Last month Ciavarella and another senior juvenile judge, Michael Conahan, pleaded guilty to having taken $2.6m (£1.78m) from the co-owner and builder of a private detention centre. The judges were accused of setting up a system to ensure a steady flow of children committed to custody in the care of the private firm in return for kickbacks.

Ciavarella handed down custodial sentences for children as young as 14 for offences such as as stealing a $4 jar of nutmeg or creating a satirical MySpace page of their headteacher.

     ...

Hey, it's not Madoff or AIG. But it's the little crimes that count. In some ways, keeping these hundreds of teens in custody out of sheer greed contributes more to my disillusionment than all that willful fraud committed against our financial system. I hope the judges and the private detention center directors are put away for a long time.

(No, I do not feel better this morning. With Stella gone, I have to breathe against kitty Tabitha's weight all night; it's not exactly conducive to good sleep.)

Steve
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The Move: Worst Day Yet

Most bodily pain. Least moved. Most aggravation. Least help available. Most desperation. Don't ask.

Steve
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Watch Bill Moyers

... interview Mike Davis. You'll find it a well-spent half hour.

Steve
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Stella Is Here

... at least for tonight. Extreme effort on her part (and no small amount on mine) succeeded in moving all of her material possessions to the new old house (well, actually, a few are stored in my old apartment until she returns from her trip). The keys to her old place have been turned in. For her, her former residence is history.

Tomorrow morning, Stella travels to Georgia (USA) to attend a family wedding Saturday. She's trying on clothes right now; I consider it a testament to her organizational abilities that she can actually find her dress clothes and shoes immediately after a major move... Dog knows I can't find mine right now.

So... will I go back to blogging right away? Probably not: my own apartment still has a lot of stuff in it, and I have until 4/6 to get that stuff over here. Most of all, I need to spend about a full day asleep, and use a lot of creams and ointments on my feet, before I begin moving my remaining stuff. Thanks for your patience while I get through this in the only way I know how.

Steve
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Moving All-Consuming

Stella has to be completely out of her old apartment by tomorrow at the end of the business day. Then she heads out of town for almost a week for a family wedding. My moving schedule is a bit more flexible, but I cannot slack off until Stella is out of her place. Meanwhile, every cell in my body aches, and looking back on the move so far, I cannot see anything major that we could have improved upon... in other words, Americans like us accumulate too damned much stuff, and moving it all is a serious challenge no matter how well we plan. I'll check in as often as I can, but don't expect any great literary or philosophical works from these parts in the next few days.

Steve
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Use Only Our Hocus Popus, Ah, Pocus

The Pope warns Angolans against practicing witchcraft.

Look: magic is magic, no matter what name you give it. And in the physical world, it doesn't do anything. There is no substantive difference between what The Pope practices and what some Angolans practice. Both are full of hocus-pocus, and both involve "child abuse and human sacrifice," to quote the article about the Angolan traditional faiths. With due respect to my Catholic friends, many of whom are genuinely good people, The Pope can just STFU about how his magic is superior to other people's magic. And don't get me started on his lectures about not using condoms...

Steve
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Undo Diligence

PC World:

Hands on with Gmail's New 'Undo Send' Feature
Brennon Slattery
Mar 20, 2009 10:08 am

Sometimes after sending an e-mail, you immediately realize it was a mistake. You slap your forehead and pray the recipient confuses it for spam or just thinks you're off your meds. Google understands your pain, and has introduced an Undo Send feature to Gmail.

Turn Undo Send on in Gmail Labs under the Settings panel of your Google account. Undo Send is hidden somewhere near the bottom of the page. Once the feature is enabled, an Undo option appears after you've sent a message. You have five seconds to click it. Hit it in enough time and you're good to go. Miss the mark and your acid-laced diatribe about your boss will see the light of day.

     ...

Gmail Labs has announced plans for a related product aimed at teenagers, tentatively named "Undo Screw."

The moving experience continues. There's no real news: it's a pain. Literally.

Steve
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Spring Is Here

"... a-suh-puh-ring is here, ..."

Happy Vernal Equinox. Ours is beautiful and springy here. Let us know how yours is.

And now, for me, it's back to packing and moving.

Steve
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Barbarous

Bar-ba-rous (a) Resembling the elder Barbara Bush in disposition.

Seriously, not everything in Texas is as barbarous as this:

DALLAS — A high school principal and his security staff shut feuding students in a steel cage to settle disputes with bare-knuckle fistfights, according to an internal report by the Dallas Independent School District.

The principal of South Oak Cliff High School, Donald Moten, was accused by several school employees of sanctioning the “cage fights” between students in a steel equipment enclosure in a boy’s locker room, where “troubled” youth fought while a security guard watched, according to the confidential March 2008 report first obtained by The Dallas Morning News.

Such fights occurred several times over the course of two years, the report said.

     ...

For the record, this sort of stuff did not happen in the high school I attended in Houston. Things really are going to hell, here as elsewhere.

The move continues. Every one of our muscles aches...

Steve
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Moved But Still Moving

Happy St. Paddy's Day. My ancestry is Orange Irish, but like most Americans, I celebrate the wearin' o' the green... just not as a political or religious matter. I love the Irish people I've known, and I love their music. For me, that's all that really counts.

If there is a more stressful endeavor in the world than moving to a new home, I don't know what it would be... maybe participating in a war. We have been living in the new old house for three full days now; it is still pretty chaotic around here. Don't even mention how it is at the old apartments. Stella is at hers right now, packing things as rapidly as possible, because her date to vacate is about a week sooner than mine. I help her when I'm able, but there are some things she must do herself.

On the positive side, both kitties have adapted adequately, finding the food bowl all the time, and the litter box, um, most of the time. And we have done a great deal better ever since heat and hot water became available. Ironically, in the afternoon, it's a little too warm here. (If you don't like Houston weather, wait an hour or two.) This evening, we took a break (rare these days) and sat on a bench on the front porch for a while. (Sigh.) This is part of what I imagined in deciding to move here with Stella (who sat with me) and the kitties (who emphatically were not allowed to, after Tabitha tried to make a dash for the back yard through a door opened for a repair person yesterday).

On the technology front, both phones work, after three (3) AT&T technicians came out. As you can see, my 'net connection also works, and though it is not yet at the speed I'm paying for, it's a good deal faster than it was at the apartments, just because the lines are better here. I broke my own 'net connection a couple hours ago by being a little too rough on a modular plug; Stella is convinced the tech wired the jack wrong, but the plug on one of my own wires is visibly missing a pin, and replacing it fixed the problem. It was just another process of elimination to find the source of the disconnect. Stella's connection remains to be tested; she hasn't completed setting up her system yet.

The hardwood floors improve the acoustics every bit as much as I remembered from my previous house. Wow.

That's it for now. We still have work to do, as those of you who have moved recently will understand, but we've gotten through one of the two unpleasant phases. At the moment, I think I'll take a break and read about the world and my nation; it's been several days since I've done so.

Steve
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Moving Break Begins Now

The YDD will be away for a few days. See you soon.

Steve
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Cheney's Assassins

Emptywheel follows Sy Hersh in revealing the sordid details. Please read her post; I haven't time to do the matter justice (justice... what a concept) in the midst of this overwhelming move.

Steve
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GOP Web RFP 'Every Consultant's Nightmare'

The GOP is the party of business, right? Uh-uh, says Zachary Roth of TPM:

We've talked to a couple more people about that Request-for-Proposal sent out by Michael Steele's RNC, looking for a consultant to redesign the organization's website.

And if there were any doubt before about the fact the document is embarrassingly sketchy and vague for a project of this kind, there's isn't now.

"It's really hard to write a proposal for that vague of a request," Jennifer Kyrnin, who has been designing web sites since 1995, and teaching web design since 1997, and who frequently responds to RFP's for web design work, told TPMmuckraker.

Kyrnin allowed that she had received RFP's as vague as this one, but never from a company or organization as prominent as the GOP. "Most are from new small businesses who've never put up a site before," she said.

     ...

Micah Sifry, a founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, which focuses on the intersection of technology and politics, agreed. He called the document "at best a back of the envelope vision statement that you give to someone to write an RFP."

"This is every consultant's nightmare," said Sifry, who, like Kyrnin, has worked regularly with such RFP's for web design. "They have no idea what they're asking for."

     ...

And they wonder why they got their asses kicked. They already have policies vastly unpopular with the voters, obstructionist behavior that may bring us all down in Great Depression II, a history of administrations that do not believe in fundamental American rights and liberties... and now we find out they can't even write an RFP for a web site.

I've been on the receiving end of some of those things, good ones and bad ones, and I can tell you there is no way to recover a project that is ill-done at the front end. People without a clue clear notion of their business needs will get whatever they get, no matter that the consultant makes a good-faith effort to give them what they need.

How embarrassing for the GOP!

Steve
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Court Thinks About It To Marri

WaPo:

Court Puts Off Decision On Indefinite Detention
Justices: Indictment Made Issue Moot

By Robert Barnes and Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 7, 2009; Page A05

The Supreme Court yesterday vacated a lower court's ruling that the president has the right to indefinitely detain a legal U.S. resident as a terrorism suspect, and put off a decision on one of the most expansive legal claims of the Bush administration.

The justices did not rule on the merits of the decision but, instead, said it is moot now that the Obama administration has indicted suspected al-Qaeda agent Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri and said it would move him from a Navy brig to the federal court system.

     ...

The court's action relieves the new administration of having to either endorse or repudiate the Bush administration's assertion that the president may use the military to detain those legally in the country but accused of being enemy combatants without charging them with a crime.

     ...

The new administration was not eager to take a stand on the legal issues surrounding Marri, 43, a Qatari national. Bush officials said Marri was part of a sleeper al-Qaeda cell intent on mass murder and disrupting the banking system, but they lacked the kind of evidence against him that a federal court would require.

Just before Marri was to be tried on fraud charges in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered him transferred to military custody, and he has been in the Navy brig in South Carolina since.

     ...

But after the Supreme Court accepted Marri's case for review, the Justice Department decided last week to move Marri to the purview of the federal courts, and he was charged with conspiracy and providing material support to terrorists.

     ...

Marri himself is still being held, just not as an enemy combatant. According to the LAT,

Marri will be transferred to civilian custody as soon as next week to face charges of providing material support for terrorism. Obama administration lawyers had argued that the case before the high court was moot because Marri had been charged in the criminal system.

This ruling leaves one with mixed feelings.

In Marri's individual case, the Court vacated the ruling that allowed the president to detain indefinitely and without due process just about anyone he pleases. But the Court didn't overturn the matter on principle; they merely dismissed the case.

The original Justice Department action under Bush, deciding after six years detention without trial to move Marri's case to federal court, was clearly an improvement from a civil liberties perspective, even if it was done for the worst of motives: for the individual, a legitimate trial, on real charges in a duly constituted court, is always better than no trial and indefinite detention on a dictator's president's whim.

But the Court dodged an opportunity to rule on the entire "enemy combatant" principle, under which a president claims the right to detain anyone, even an American citizen or a legal resident, without trial, indefinitely.

In other words, this ruling is probably beneficial to Marri's rights, but does nothing whatsoever to repudiate the notion that the president may detain anyone, arbitrarily and indefinitely. The fundamental rights of Americans and legal residents of the US continue to erode.

Steve
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Saturday Signs - Pie In The Face Edition

Today is Stella's and my anniversary; we've been together 12 years today. In the process of driving out to a place to buy a used refrigerator for our new old house, we ran across this place, and decided that pie would be just the thing for a celebration. We came home with two pies, blackberry and key lime, and we both plan to put some pie in our faces before long. We'll let you know how it turns out. I think I can assure you that no saucers will fly in the course of our celebration...

Steve
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'The First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All The Liberals'

That's not quite what the Bard's character Dick said in Henry VI. But it certainly seems to be a common sentiment among highly placed Republicans these days.

First, Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Senility) remarked at a Republican fundraiser that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be dead of pancreatic cancer in at most nine months, and must be replaced with a conservative Justice: "Even though she was operated on, usually, nine months is the longest that anybody would live after (being diagnosed) with pancreatic cancer." Justice Ginsburg wasn't having any of that.

Now, the de facto leader of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, is prospectively killing off Sen. Ted Kennedy, saying that Kennedy will be dead before a healthcare bill passes: "Before it's all over, it'll be called the Ted Kennedy memorial health care bill," said the fat, cigar-smoking, drug-addicted one.

Where's the outrage? Where's the condemnation in the mainstream media?

This sort of death wish for one's opponent is bad enough in one's most private fantasies. It is utterly unacceptable in the public utterances of powerful political leaders. Dog knows there are enough crazies out there that if Limbaugh announces that Kennedy will soon be dead, one of them could easily try to help the process along. And apart from the danger, can you imagine how Kennedy and Ginsburg and their families must feel when they hear statements like that?

Publicly wishing one's opponent dead is simply outside the bounds of discourse in a civilized society.

Steve
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The Best Of Intentions

My phone and DSL, and Stella's phone (and current DSL), are all supplied by AT&T. After a long conversation a few days ago involving a couple of AT&T agents (read: sales reps) and both of us customers (well, OK, we omitted Tabitha, who occasionally insists on tapping a few keys on Stella's computer, and who speaks loudly and frequently on the phone, but has no interest in listening to it), we arranged the merge of household communications to take place on the 16th. With one exception, everything was set to go, and we knew what that was, and it's not relevant to this story. As a sort of fun bonus, I was going to get a 6 mbps line out of the deal; my current DSL is only 1.5 mbps.

Then about two days ago I noticed a curious short outage (maybe 20 minutes) in my DSL here in my apartment. (Stella's DSL was still working.) On my side, modem lights flashed as if connecting, but never settled into a connection. About the time I reached AT&T support, the line started working again.

It happened again yesterday, for only about 10 minutes. I hadn't even reached the support person before things went back to normal.

Earlier today, it happened once more, and this third time, the line went down for good and all. Lights flashed endlessly, but no connection was established in over an hour of attempts. Cycling power on everything, twice, had no effect. So for me it was once more into the fray, phoning support and working my way through endless phone menus, three people, and more dog-awful hold music than you've ever heard in your life.

Finally I reached an actual line tech. I had to promise to sell my firstborn to get through to him; please don't tell AT&T that I don't have a firstborn. Anyway, he recognized the problem. AT&T has an automated system that performs the actual upgrades to line speed when a customer purchases faster service. Unfortunately, no one told that system to wait until 3/16 to upgrade to 6 mbps... and the lines into this apartment support at most 3 mbps. The tech called the people working on that line at the moment; five minutes later, my DSL was working again at its old speed, and my web addiction was once again satisfied.

It's interesting to me how this came about. It was no one's fault, really, and everyone acted with the best of intentions. The original agent was pleased to offer me a line four times as fast as the one I have now. I was pleased to accept: one can never be too rich or too thin, or have too fast an internet connection. The tech (or data entry person) who started the automated system making the change 10 days early probably assumed I'd be glad to have the extra speed a few days in advance. No one, at AT&T or on our end, had any reason to check the maximum speed of the lines into this apartment, because we weren't setting up for this apartment, and the new old house is in a neighborhood equipped for the higher speed. And yet I still lost my DSL for half a day, and lost a good deal of time pursuing the problem that I needed to have spent packing for the move. Isn't technology wonderful?

An aside: As one who loves language, I wish to point out a real annoyance which I encounter every few days. "DSL" stands for "digital subscriber line." That means "DSL line" is equivalent to "digital subscriber line line." I've even said it myself... but really, none of us should say it. "DSL" is sufficient.

Steve
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Anonymity Of Journalists' Sources

A highly placed blogger is against it, except under very strict guidelines. So am I. Apart from whistleblowers, public officials should not be granted anonymity for what are essentially purely political purposes. My highly placed source explains how such gratuitously granted anonymity is corrosive of the public's right to evaluate the veracity and validity of the purported news they are provided.

Steve
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Friday Kitty Drink Blogging

There's nothing like sharing a cold one with a friend...

Steve
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The Right To Right Arms

For some people, the question is not whether they can bare their beautiful arms in their official portraits (see post upstream), but whether they have a right to use an FDA-approved prescription drug without undue worry about whether they will lose an arm altogether. That's what happened to Diana Levine, who was... was, Dog help her... a musician:

Victory bittersweet for drug liability case victim
By JOHN CURRAN – 3 hours ago

MARSHFIELD, Vt. (AP) — A Vermont musician who lost her arm after a botched drug injection says the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold a $6.7 million verdict against the pharmaceutical company that made the drug is a victory for consumers.

"I just feel really good for what this means for the whole country," said Diana Levine, 63. "The money, to me, means the company was held accountable for something that didn't need to happen, number one.

"So hopefully, they'll learn their lesson from it and change the label so this doesn't happen to any more people," she said.

     ...

Incredibly, Wyeth argued that FDA approval of their label should shield them from the lawsuit. The company issued a statement:

"When lay juries are permitted to second-guess the experts at FDA on the benefits and risks of particular medicines, the result is uncertainty for patients and doctors alike about how and when to use prescription drugs," the Madison, N.J.-based company said in a statement.

Um... no. What lay juries are permitted to do is hold large corporations accountable when their products, through negligence or greed, utterly ruin people's lives.

AP saw fit to follow with a quote of a professor at... no, not a medical school... a school of business. The quote referred to "plaintiff lawyer sharks." <sarcastic> Right. Sharks can cause you to lose your arm, right? That's what happened here, right? Right? </sarcastic>

No. It wasn't sharks, or lawyers, who caused Ms. Levine to lose her arm. It was Wyeth. Let's give Ms. Levine the last word:

"I miss my arm. I really miss my arm. I grieve the loss of my arm, nine years later. I would give $6 million for my right arm," she said.

If only $6 million could make that happen.

Steve
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The Right To Bare Arms

Bonnie Fuller asks the right question about Sleevegate:

Is Michelle Obama supposed to wear a burka? Since when are a woman's arms considered an erogenous zone here in America? Why would it be inappropriate for the First Lady to attend her husband's address to Congress in a beautiful, purple Narcisco Rodriguez SLEEVELESS dress?

Whoever those twitterers — or should I call them "twits" — are out there who have raised the question of propriety, they should not only get a life, but also a history book. ...

"We wore sleeveless dresses all the time," Letitia Baldridge, Jackie Kennedy's social secretary, tells me. "It was the fashion of the times ..."

Hillary Clinton's Social Secretary, Ann Stock, couldn't be more in agreement. Sleeveless "is totally appropriate," she reports.

     ...

Clearly, Michelle's critics are just envious. Our First Lady is stunning: we have not had such a strikingly beautiful First Lady since Jackie Kennedy. Don't those "nattering nabobs of negativism" have something better to natter about? As to indecency, think for a moment about Bar Bush with bare arms; now that would be obscene...

Steve
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Bush Considered Suspending First Amendment

Michael Isikoff (yeah, I know):

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Justice Department secretly gave the green light for the U.S. military to attack apartment buildings and office complexes inside the United States, deploy high-tech surveillance against U.S. citizens and potentially suspend First Amendment freedom-of-the-press rights in order to combat the terror threat, according to a memo released Monday.

     ...

But the memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel—along with others made public for the first time Monday—illustrates with new details the extraordinary post-9/11 powers asserted by Bush administration lawyers. Those assertions ultimately led to such controversial policies as allowing the waterboarding of terror suspects and permitting warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens—steps that remain the subject of ongoing investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. The memo was co-written by John Yoo, at the time a deputy attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel. Yoo, now a professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, has emerged as one of the central figures in those ongoing investigations.

In perhaps the most surprising assertion, the Oct. 23, 2001, memo suggested the president could even suspend press freedoms if he concluded it was necessary to wage the war on terror. "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," Yoo wrote in the memo entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States."

     ...

John Yoo... that name keeps turning up like a bad penny. But Yoo would have gained no traction for his totalitarian ideas had he not served a president who cheerfully joked about being a dictator.

And all those people still live here, Dog help us. We may not have seen the last of them. I'd feel better if they all stood trial for their anti-constitutional activities; I'd feel even better if they were convicted and jailed for them.

Absent consequences for subverting the Constitution, these miscreants will try again and again over the decades until one day they will succeed. Will it happen in your lifetime? your children's? grandchildren's?

Steve
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Will Los Angeles Stop Cussing?

No fuckin' way!

This move is killing me. A small apartment full of books and furniture has no staging area for material already packed. There are boxes everywhere, and the furniture still isn't clear to be moved. It's true that we have over a week until the movers take the furniture. I hope I never have to do this again in my life.

Steve
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... And The Pursuit Of Crappiness

Via Blue Texan of Firedoglake, we learn that Rush Limbaugh not only cannot quote our nation's central documents correctly, he cannot even distinguish the Declaration of Independence from the Constitution. Here's Rush at CPAC, quoted on HuffPo:

We want every American to be the best he or she chooses to be. We recognize that we are all individuals. We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. [Applause] We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life. [Applause] Liberty, Freedom. [Applause] And the pursuit of happiness. [Applause] Those of you watching at home may wonder why this is being applauded. We conservatives think all three are under assault. [Applause] Thank you. Thank you.

This is the man that conservative GOPers consider their great leader. He does fit right in, doesn't he? Ignorance and arrogance are the classic conservative Republican combination. But the real irony is that Rush uses part of his speech to decry Obama for displaying insufficient reverence for the documents.

(Oh, by the way, Rush... the Constitution is not a "founding document[]": it was written more than a decade after the Declaration, and seven years after the Articles of Confederation. Crack a book once in a while, Rush... you'd probably better put down your fat cigar before you do so.)

Steve
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Obama Fulfills A Pro-Choice Promise

'stina (texaslawchick) points out a Chicago Tribune article:

WASHINGTON — Taking another step into the abortion debate, the Obama administration Friday will move to rescind a controversial rule that allows health-care workers to deny abortion counseling or other family-planning services if doing so would violate their moral beliefs, according to administration officials.

The rollback of the "conscience rule" comes just two months after the Bush administration announced it last year in one of its final policy initiatives.

     ...

Try to put aside for an instant your personal pro-choice or "pro-life" position: what did these regs do from a constitutional viewpoint? Right. They intruded on the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech, in an extremely crucial and personal context, the speech between a woman and her healthcare provider. In short, Bush's attempted "conscience" regs were actually unconscionably unconstitutional.

(Yes, here's the ritual full disclosure: 21 years ago, when I started my contract programming business, my first contract was with the local Planned Parenthood, producing a political mailing list database for them. Back then, as now, I was not even remotely neutral on this issue.)

Steve
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GOP Has AIG On Its Face - UPDATED

As Joe Nocera explains in the article Propping Up a House of Cards, AIG literally cannot be allowed to fail, unless we want the entire global financial system to fall like dominos as a consequence. Does anyone else find that fact reminiscent of the S&L scandal in the Eighties? That scandal was estimated to have cost the US taxpayer $124.1 billion; this one could easily be much, much larger (AIG alone has already cost us $150 billion), and involve far more institutions.

If I may generalize, it seems that every time we have an extended period of Republican administrations, we have a major financial crisis that has to be cleaned up at the expense of the American taxpayer, usually as a result of government deregulation (or inadequate regulation) of an industry that will not regulate itself. If the US survives this crisis, and I'm not confident it will, do you think maybe we as a nation could see the correlation, note its likely causal relationship, and change our voting behavior?

UPDATE 3/2: US to spend another $30 billion sucking AIG's.

One of TPM's readers, in a letter to Josh Marshall, asks, "Why is it only the American government/taxpayer putting money into AIG when it is an international problem? Are European governments anteing up? Has the leadership, those responsible, at AIG changed?"

Why, indeed.

Steve
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Saturday Signs - Universal Edition

This sign was hand-painted decades ago (can you tell?) at the "old" Star Pizza, the one near Shepherd and US 59. The aliens in the saucer speak in surprisingly Greek-like characters; the translated conversation runs "THE TRIP WAS WORTH IT" and "BEST PIZZA IN THE GALAXY". Who am I to disagree!

Back to the topic with which I'm now obsessed. The move is requiring more time and energy (not to mention money) than I ever would have believed, but we're getting there. The deadline for furniture moving is 3/14, and we've hired the best small family moving business in town. (I know that because they moved me to this apartment. Everyone should have such a good attitude toward their work.) This has been a week of starting up utilities, arranging services, etc. Now comes the packing in earnest... not fun. But once again, I look at the house... and of course I look at Stella... and decide again and again that it's all worth it.

Steve
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Uninsured

I have now officially joined the ranks of the medically uninsured. Is this a great country, or what?

Steve
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Friday Alert Mau Blogging

Lotus, our friend Catherine's Egyptian Mau, notices something on the sofa beside me...

If Lotus is a representative example of the breed, the Egyptian Mau is an exceptionally bright, alert, involved cat. That aspect is real enough... but I have to admit that the traffic-light eyes are an artifact of the flash photo.

Steve
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Chimps And Watermelons

Steve
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2 Cats, 2 Humans 2 Share Domicile

OK, it looks as if this is really going to happen. Stella and I, and of course Tabitha and Samantha, will be moving into a house starting the middle of next month. After ranging far and wide looking for a suitable place, we found a spacious one-story rent house just a few blocks from here. "Spacious" is important to us: not only are we combining two households, each full of a lifetime's accumulation of books and... well... stuff, but each of us has lived alone for many years, and both of us need privacy. Oh, and the place is only 1½ blocks from our favorite public library... what more could one ask!

The place has hardwood floors (oh, the acoustics!) and a mirror wall in the living room that makes it look even larger than it is. If I were still an active performer, that room would be a great rehearsal space.

I'd like to thank our apartment complex, which motivated us by raising the rent on both our apartments drastically, to a point at which the combined total was not much below the rent on a house.

I'm looking forward to the companionship and the space, but I admit I am dreading the move. All words of comfort about moving are appreciated, whether they're true or not. Needless to say, blogging will be irregular for a while, starting about next month.

(Steve walks away humming...)

Our... house...
Is a very, very, very fine house...
With two cats in the yard,
Life used to be so hard,
...

- CSNY

(Yes, about things other than politics, I can be an incurable romantic.)

Steve
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Kuttner's Open Letter

Steve
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Down, Down, Down - UPDATED (DOWNDATED?)

Steve
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Real Life Interrupts Blogging - UPDATED

Steve
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Unbelievable? No. Unacceptable? Totally

Steve
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Socks The Cat (March 1989–February 20, 2009)

Steve
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Saturday Signs - Pizza Edition

Steve
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Friday Perfect Pair Blogging

Steve
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Gitmo Guard Tells Of Torture

Steve
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Cut!!!

Steve
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Goodness Gracious, Great Ball O' Fire!

Steve
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When Life Hands Stella Lemons...

Steve
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