South Dakota Politics

Obama Endorses Bush on Surveillance

It is a commonplace on the Left that the anti-terrorism policies of George W. Bush represented a grave threat to civil liberties. This view centered chiefly on two aspects of his policy: the enhanced interrogation procedures, like water-boarding, and surveillance procedures authorized under the Patriot Act.

As to the former, the Obama Justice Department pretended for a while that it might prosecute Bush Administration lawyers for advising then President Bush that the interrogation procedures were legal. This week that pretense was dropped. That hardly amounts to an endorsement of the Bush policies, but it is just as surely inconsistent with the view that those policies amounted to a serious violation of law or human rights.

Today President Obama signed an extension of the Patriot Act. The MSM has been rather quiet about this. Neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times has done their own story. Both rely on the AP story, and both bury it where only a search can find it. Here are some bits from the AP story as it appears in the WaPo:

The act, which was adopted in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, expands the government's ability to monitor Americans in the name of national security.

Three sections of the Patriot Act that stay in force will:

-Authorize court-approved roving wiretaps that permit surveillance on multiple phones.

-Allow court-approved seizure of records and property in anti-terrorism operations.

-Permit surveillance against a so-called lone wolf, a non-U.S. citizen engaged in terrorism who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group.

Obama's signature comes after the House voted 315 to 97 Thursday to extend the measure.

The Senate also approved the measure, with privacy protections cast aside when Senate Democrats lacked the necessary 60-vote supermajority to pass them. Thrown away were restrictions and greater scrutiny on the government's authority to spy on Americans and seize their records.

The Patriot Act has been kept, without changes that some critics in the Senate wanted. That does count as an unambiguous endorsement of Bush's surveillance policies. President Obama is now responsible for protecting Americans against terrorists, and he wants the same powers that Bush wanted and got from Congress. Powerline says:

I suppose it's too much to expect the Democrats to admit they were wrong all along.

Yes, and it's too much to expect from our major newspapers.

Democrats in Disarray

Political parties are the means by which a very large and complex electorate forms itself into coherent alternative policies. Effective decisions on the floor of Congress or at the voting booth come down to yes or no, this candidate or that one. The easiest way to form a coherent position is to become the party of "no". That is what the Republicans are now doing, and it looks like they have the majority behind them.

If you are the majority party, you have to be for something. That ain't easy when all the things you are for (the public option, cap and trade) are losing issues. It's even harder when your coalition is refusing to coalesce.

Jonathan Allen at Politico has this about the majority caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives.

For a few hours Thursday night, the House of Representatives was in chaos.

Shortly after dinnertime, New York Democrat Charlie Rangel emerged from his private hideaway after news broke that he would be admonished by the House ethics committee.

But reporters in the Capitol rushed right past Rangel to ask House Democratic leaders about a critical intelligence bill that had just been pulled over a torture provision. The language had been inserted in defiance of leadership by House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.).

At the same time, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was slated to meet with leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus to try to salvage a routine $15 billion jobs bill that had turned into a piñata for progressives, the moderate Blue Dog Coalition and members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Any of these three issues — a floundering jobs bill, a hastily scotched intelligence authorization or an ethics committee admonishment of the powerful chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee — would qualify as a midlevel crises.

Together, these incidents illustrated a chamber in a minimeltdown near week's end.

This is the chamber upon which the Democrat's health care reform project depends. Speaker Pelosi has to put together 217 votes to pass the Senate version of reform, which no one thought would be the bill when they voted for it, and then pass legislation to fix it. This is the way we are going to transform one sixth of the American economy?

Healthcare Reform Endgame 2: Summit Edition

The President's health care reform summit is over, and not a lot happened. That is a victory for Republicans, many of whom were terrified in advance, and a defeat for President Obama, who apparently thought he could accomplish something there.

The Republicans came ready to play, and play they did. Any complex piece of legislation is likely to have a lot of problems embedded in it, and the House and Senate healthcare bills, along with the President's pseudo-bill, are collectively one grand mess. Usually this sort of thing doesn't matter, as all the details with all their devils are discussed behind closed doors. The President's summit gave the Republicans a six hour forum to open up the Senate bill (the only one that has a chance of passing) to public inspection, and they were well-prepared to do so. The Republicans were careful to be scrupulously respectful of the President. It was the President who grew a bit testy as he realized that he couldn't control the conversation. It is to his credit that the result was largely a wash, but he needed a clean win.

Why did the Administration engineer this summit? That was largely, I think, because of the President's success when he recently appeared before the Congressional Republicans. But at that event, the President stood at a podium. Such things matter. The American Presidency is an awesome spectacle. Anyone standing has an advantage over a crowd that is sitting.

The President thought he could make that same mojo work a second time, but at the summit he was sitting down at a square set of tables. It is hard to imagine our most successful Presidents doing that. It reduces the preeminent advantage of the President to that on one among many. That's true even if the President gets one third of the speaking time. President Obama said that his remarks at the opening didn't count against his time because "I'm the President." That was light-hearted, but it was also revealing. He didn't realize how much he had surrendered by the setting.

The most charitable view of what the President was trying to accomplish at the summit is this: he didn't expect to bring any Republicans over to his side, and he didn't expect to sway public opinion. He was only trying to give wavering House Democrats something they could use. They can say: we bent over backwards to bring the Republicans on board and the bastards wouldn't budge. That's why I had to vote for the detestable Senate bill and go along with the reconciliation strategy.

Maybe that will help. But no one thinks that Speaker Pelosi has the votes yet to pass the Senate bill. Short of a change in public opinion, can she get them? I am guessing that very few Americans watched the summit. The Democrats have been playing this song for a year now, and no one is dancing. The electorate wants the government to be concentrating on the economy and jobs, and all the Democrats want to talk about is health insurance.

The only thing left is to see if the Democrats can really "Rahm-through" a health care bill. If they can, that will be bad for them. Maybe Americans will come to love their legislation when it is enacted, but it is designed not to make much difference for years. It might not be any more loveable this November. If they can't, they will be just as unpopular among the majority that opposes their health care adventure, and their own base will be existentially dispirited. Oh, and they will have frittered away a year of Democratic dominion in the legislative and executive branches.

SD State Legislature on Global Warming

I was quite ready to take issue with Badlands Blue and the Madville Times on HCR 1009. I am doubtful that global warming or the teaching of such in our state High Schools are topics that call for a resolution. After a brief read, I thought that most of the resolution was basically on target.

However, while I certainly do not endorse my blogosphere colleagues' snide remarks about our legislators, they were right to make fun of one part of the resolution. The problem is this passage:

That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative

This is basically correct, except for a couple of words. "Astrological"? This word refers to astrology. Does it affect global climate when the moon is in Virgo, and anyone who is a Gemini need beware? Probably the right word would be "astronomical".

What about "Thermology"? That, I gather, refers to the infrared imaging of the human body. I have heard it said that whenever Al Gore shows up to give a speech on global warming, the local temperatures plunge by ten or twenty degrees and it snows. Could he really exercise such a cooling effect? Until some study confirms it, thermology probably doesn't belong in this bill.

Also, I don't think "interrelativity" is a real word or a useful coinage. Perhaps "interrelationship" might have been better.

Climate change alarmism is in a crisis right now, for good reason. Cap and Trade legislation, a very costly proposal based on very dubious quazi-scientific ideas, is something the State of South Dakota ought to be concerned about. It is easy to make mistakes when putting a resolution together, but if we are going to weigh in on this we need to be rather more careful in our choice of words.

Health Care End Game

Tomorrow the President holds his summit with Republicans. His strategy is somewhat mysterious, but here are some speculations.

What is the purpose of the summit?

We know what the President does when he really wants to broker a deal: he meets behind closed doors, with Democrats. The invitation to the summit that was issued to Republicans made it clear that only some version of the existing House and Senate bills would be entertained. The President's own proposal, too vague on numbers to be scored by the CBO, is an example. The length of the summit, six hours, makes it pretty certain that few Americans will watch it. It is designed to provide a lot of material out of which clips and bites can be excerpted in order to paint an unflattering picture of the opposition. There is nothing wrong with any of this. The President is playing the cards he has, and this is his best chance to gain some ground on the GOP. But it's helpful to realize what it is.

What does the President hope to gain by it?

Barack Obama clearly has a high opinion of his own rhetorical powers, so perhaps he thinks he can swing public opinion behind the Democratic legislation. He has utterly failed to do so in dozens of speeches so far, but perhaps his rhetoric will be more persuasive with the Republicans present to compare him to. A significant shift in public opinion at this point would be a heroic achievement and it's conceptually impossible. More realistically, the President can hope to make the Republicans look bad.

Caveat

The President might attempt a game-changer by offering the GOP a major concession or two, like real tort reform or interstate competition for health insurance markets. That would require, however, that he is in a position to make those offers. It would also allow the Republicans to call for rewriting the bills.

What is the strategy after the summit?

Short of a sudden and more or less miraculous change in public opinion, the Democrats collectively and individually have to decide whether they are better off passing health care legislation or letting it die. Collectively they think they are better off passing it.

This is not because they still believe that the public will punish them for doing nothing; rather, the Democrats think they have lost pretty much everyone for whom voting Republican is thinkable. They can't do any more damage to their brand among independents, let alone moderate conservatives. What they have to fear now is that a lot of liberals and those further to left will sit this fall's elections out. Passing legislation would likely energize the remaining base, and that might make the difference between a merely terrible election and an apocalyptic defeat.

Besides, this is as close as they have ever come to realizing their ancient dream of government controlled health care. If not now, then when?

Can the Democrats pass a bill?

Reid, Pelosi, and company say they are prepared to move ahead with legislation and try to pass it by means of a reconciliation bill. Short of a Captain Kirk rhetorical victory at the Summit, this doesn't look likely.

The real trouble now is the House, not the Senate. The House bill passed with only a handful of votes to spare. Even if it looks like the Democrats need to pass a bill, the House is full of individual Democrats who have to wonder how they can get their butts back into the next Congress. It appears that the House will have to go first in passing the Senate bill and an accompanying reconciliation bill. There are still parliamentary procedures that might allow Republicans to then stall the bill in the Senate. So Pelosi must ask House members to go out on a really shaky limb and vote for a deeply unpopular bill, knowing that it still might not pass.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer let slip that the votes just aren't there. I am guessing that means the votes just aren't there. John Judis, in the New Republic, gives us a glimpse at why.

According to the Franklin and Marshall poll, which surveyed 1,143 residents of Pennsylvania, former Representative Pat Toomey--a Republican disciple of Steve Forbes and the Club for Growth--leads Democratic Senator Arlen Specter in the senate race by 44 to 34 percent among likely voters. He leads Democratic Representative Joe Sestak by 38 to 20 percent. If you want to get really worried about Democratic prospects, look at the breakdown. Toomey leads Specter among whites by 53 to 24 percent and among voters from union households by 44 to 41 percent. The only groups among whom Specter does well (besides registered Democrats) are non-whites and people with no religious affiliation. He's got that vaunted McGovern coalition wrapped up.

Is this Strategy or Inertia?

The summit is brilliant, tactically. The Republicans are surely afraid, thinking they can't wiggle out and can only lose. But tactics are useless unless they contribute to a strategy. If the President cannot change the whole board, all the way down to the ground in Pennsylvania, then it's hard to see what the strategy is. Failing to pass an unpopular bill means the Dems get blamed for the bill's unpopularity without getting much reward for their effort. Perhaps this isn't strategy at all, but mere inertia. The Democrats know they are racing toward the precipice, but they can't get out of the sled.

More Climate Change Meltdown

From the British Guardian:

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

When it rains it pours, at least on climate scientists. This is something like the fourth or fifth big embarrassing story this month. But you gotta' love this line:

Mark Siddall [Earth Sciences, University of Bristol] said that he did not know whether the retracted paper's estimate of sea level rise was an overestimate or an underestimate.

Oh! Oh! I know the answer to that one teacher!

SD House 1278 and 1277 Fail to Get Committee Support

That's what Pat Powers is reporting. 

Free Speech, Defamation, and SD House Bills 1277 & 1278

This is a very interesting debate on the local blogosphere. The proposed legislation would make it easier for any person bringing an action for slander or libel to compel online content providers, including bloggers, to turn over information indicating the identity of anonymous commenters.

I am opposed to the legislation, as are Cory Heidelberger, Pat Powers, and Doug Wiken. Todd Epp, I understand had a hand in preparing the text of the bills. Professor David Newquist has not endorsed the bills, but I understand him to be defending the general idea. I note that the opposition consists of both conservative and liberal bloggers. This looks to me like what the blogosphere is for.

House Bill 1277 is the less objectionable of the two. As I understand it, once an action for libel etc. has been brought, content providers could be compelled to turn over any information they happen to have about the identity of the defendant. 1277 also protects content providers against liability in case of a judgment against the defendant. Without that, comments sections might well disappear from the internet, and that would shut down a major new venue for discourse. However I suspect such legal actions will be rare. If I am right, this provision would have little actual effect on the blogosphere. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. 1277 clearly poses a threat to internet anonymity, which I think is bad for reasons I articulated in an earlier post.

House Bill 1278 is a much more intrusive piece of legislation.

Any person who allows internet posts shall keep a record of the internet-protocol logs adequate to provide identification and location of otherwise unknown, anonymous, or pseudonymous persons who leave or upload content.

This would require "all persons who allow internet posts" to go to a lot of trouble to keep records that might, conceivably, be wanted in a legal action. Apart from the unprecedented intrusion, that amounts to requiring all content providers to act as spies for the courts. I protest.

Moreover, it is not at all clear to me how compliance with this provision is possible. Site administrators can require that posts be signed and require a legitimate e-mail address be attached. But whether the signatures are genuine, or the e-mail addresses useful for identification, I have no way of knowing. I certainly don't know how to keep "internet protocol logs" that would be "adequate" for the purpose in mind here.

Professor Newquist and I agree at least on the question:

My original post on the Defamation Law amendments stressed the point that the concept of free speech involved in protecting the anonymous is in direct conflict with that which states that people possess the right not to be defamed and that free-speakers can be held responsible for their abuse of free speech.

The difference between us is that, given this "direct conflict" I would choose free speech over the right not to be defamed. There is a long history of libel laws being used to suppress dissident speech, in this country and elsewhere. Anonymity has been a big part of the defensive strategy.  The use of pseudonyms in the early republic, and recent attempts by repressive regimes to uncover dissident bloggers, seem to me to be of the utmost importance. I haven't read Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents, but I am guessing that Reporters Without Borders would agree with me. 

I also agree emphatically with a point my friend Cory Heidelberger makes.

I'm still waiting for examples of online speech of any sort that has done actual damage in South Dakota or libel cases in South Dakota that have been stymied by comment anonymity.

Yes. Could someone please show us an example of a case that was brought and was stymied by comment anonymity, or would have been brought under the proposed legislation? Could someone show that this is a significant enough of a problem to justify this legislation?

Darwinian Evolution and Hindu-Arabic Numerals

Charles Darwin has an entertainingly diverse collection of enemies. Conservative Christians and more recently Muslims object to the general theory on the grounds that it encourages atheism. Feminists and political leftists object to its application to human beings, for they think it encourages stereotypes. A surprising number of scientists object to natural selection because they think it has become "imperialistic," invading disciplines where it does not belong.

A distinction must be drawn two key Darwinian ideas. The sexiest idea is natural selection which I won't deal with here. The other is the idea of the taxonomic tree: all organisms have a common ancestor that lived at some point in the past, and organisms can be grouped together according to how long ago that common ancestor lived. These groups "branch out" as time goes by, and can be represented as a family tree with its roots in very early, very simple organisms.

Virtually all scientists accept this idea, as the evidence for it is overwhelming. Only the most literal interpreters of scripture reject it on religious grounds. I suppose, however, that many people have a hard time imagining the evolution from simple organism to pigs and people because they have a hard time grasping the vastness of the length of time over which that happened.

The most obvious obstacle to imagining geological time is simply that it is unimaginably large. We cannot imagine how long a million years is, let alone 3.5 billion years, just as we cannot imagine how far the earth is from the moon, let alone from distant galaxies.

But it occurred to me for the first time tonight that the way we write numbers may be part of the problem. The wonderful Hindu-Arabic numeral system, precisely because it can efficiently handle large numbers, may be an obstacle to imagining the true vastness of geological time.

We write the number one as 1, and the number ten as 10, using the zero as a place holder. That's very efficient, but also visually misleading. 10 takes up twice as much space on the page as 1; however, it is not twice as large as one but ten times as large. Likewise, the number 100 written that way takes up only three times as much space as one, so the disproportion between the size of the numerals and the actual numbers they represent is much larger.

We have no trouble understanding this, of course, but it might do to reflect that the most natural way of judging the size of any two objects is to look at them both at the same time. One way to see this is to present the numbers in the simplest way possible.

1

1111111111

11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

Presented in that way, we get a vivid idea of the proportions involved. It strikes me that this might matter a lot with larger numbers. I did a little experiment and continued the above series in a separate document to two more places. I could get 1, 10, 100, and 1000 all on about a third of one MS Word page. When I went to 10,000, it took up almost three full pages. 100,000 little one's required a thirty page document. Copy and paste is great! All that took a few minutes, and I didn't go any further. I am guessing that a million ones would take up about three hundred pages. Be careful not to hit print.

But the number 1,000,000 is only seven times larger than 1 when written in the Hindu-Arabic way. For all of its usefulness, I think this may be psychologically retarding. Writing it the way we do, with ones and zeros, a million years doesn't look all that big. It is in fact so large as to challenge our imagination. What does three hundred densely printed pages look like, spread out on a wall?

Human beings share a common ancestor with the chimpanzees. That ancestor lived about 6,000,000 years (or 1800 pages) ago, give or take 500,000. Mammals show up in the fossil record about 250,000,000 years ago. Multi-celled organisms date back to about 600,000,000 years ago. The earliest fossils of simple photo-synthetic bacteria? That's about 3,500,000,000 ago.

Even the Arabic numerals start to get long at this point, and writers go to decimal notations like 3.5 billion years. Darwinism holds that all organisms are part of one family tree, stretching back over that distance in time. Each generation took care, at least in a mechanical way to provide for the next. 3.5 billion years is time enough for love.

Not Bush v. Not Obama

Whatever one thinks about Bush's decision to invade Iraq, it was a political disaster for the 43^rd President and for his party. Bush's approval ratings never recovered, even when his strategy began to work. The Democrats won two straight elections and, briefly, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The recent collapse of Democratic fortunes is happening in spite of the fact that the wounds suffered by Republicans as a result of the Iraq war have not yet healed.

In the short run, that might not matter much. Election analyst Charlie Cook makes an almost indisputable point: that the Democrat's health care reform legislation is Obama's Iraq: it has deeply wounded the Democrats, and the wound may be beyond healing. Here is a clip of Cook's interview with the National Journal. It's a strong shot of whiskey.

Here is the money quote:

I sort of reject the notion that there is a communications problem with President Obama. I think it's just fundamental, total miscalculations from the very, very beginning. Of proportions comparable to President George W. Bush's decision to go into Iraq.

How bad is the Democrats situation? Michael Barone and Democratic Pollster Stan Greenberg apparently agree on that. From Barone's blog:

I find it interesting that veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg agrees with my Wednesday Examiner column that if the November elections were held today, Republicans would win control of Congress…

Greenberg compares the Democrats' plight with their situation in 1994. I believe it's actually worse. Back in 1994 I wrote the first column that appeared anywhere outside of explicitly Republican media arguing that Republicans had a serious chance of winning a majority in the House. It appeared in the U.S. News issue dated July 18, which was published (in line with magazine custom) on July 11. That was almost five months later in the 1994 cycle than we are in the 2010 cycle today. That means that Democrats have more time to recover than they did that year, but it also means that they are in far more trouble at this stage in the current cycle than they were 16 years ago.

As Barone points out, there is good news and bad news for the Democrats in that. Like a downhill skier, their party is dreadfully behind on the upper part of the course. Maybe they can ski really fast on the rest of the course. I'm inclined to doubt it.

Republicans are in a position to benefit from hindsight, if only they will look past their own hind ends. The Democrats didn't surge in 2006 and 2008 because the voters embraced their programs and personalities (well, maybe they did embrace Obama's personality). They surged because they were the party of Not Bush. That of course is how the two party system works. It's like a steering wheel, when you don't like what is to your right, turn the wheel to the left.

The GOP is right now in the same position as the Democrats after 2003. Republicans are not surging because the people have suddenly recognized the virtues of the party. They are surging because they are the party of Not Obama, Not Reid and Not Pelosi. That is especially true regarding the Tea Party Movement, which is all about what it is not in favor of.

The Republicans are doing just fine as the party of no, but if they do capture control of one or both houses, they will have to become the party of this. They had better be thinking about what this is. I am not optimistic about that. I am not confident that Republicans in general have the imagination to find an agenda that will solve the problems we face and satisfy the vast no vote in the electorate. Worse still, I am not sure that such an agenda is available.

Global Warming Melts Down

My latest column in the American News:

If you want to know what the temperature is in your back yard, you probably don't want to put the thermometer on top of a hot oven. If you want to monitor changes in global temperature, you probably shouldn't rely on weather stations located mostly in cities and other developed areas where the environment is artificially warm. Yet that is what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been doing. The IPCC is the primary scientific body raising the alarm about global warming.

The London Times reports that a wide body of research now questions the claim that the world is warming at all. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, found that in three areas, Alabama, California, and East Africa, apparent warming was entirely due to local factors that influenced the weather stations. When economic professor Ross McKitrick was invited by the IPCC to review its recent report, he found that the panel's "climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialization and data quality problems." A number of researchers in Britain and elsewhere are reaching the same conclusions.

The claim that industrial production is causing an unprecedented and dangerous spike in global temperatures was based largely on so called "hockey stick" charts. These charts showed more or less even temperatures over the thousand years followed by a sharp upward spike beginning in the 1970s. The charts were bogus. The evidence indicates that there were periods of global warming prior to the industrial revolution, including the medieval warming period when global temperatures may have been warmer than they are now. If the world is indeed in a warming period, and it probably is, there is no good reason to believe that this is due to industrial production rather than natural fluctuations in the climate.

Trying to measure changes in the global climate is a very difficult business. Figuring out what causes those changes is enormously more difficult. Water vapor traps a lot of solar energy, but fluffy white clouds reflect a lot of it back into space. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that absorbs a lot of the sun's heat, but more CO2 and warmer temperatures cause forests to grow faster. Trees sequester CO2. No one can be sure how these things balance out.

It is not, however, the IPCC's scientific accuracy that is now most at question. It is its good faith. When thousands of email messages between climate scientists were pirated and released to the public several months ago, it became clear that some of the latter were engaged in manipulating the data and were determined to prevent dissenting scholarship from being published.

The IPCC has solemnly reported that by 2035 the Himalayan glaciers will be gone, that rain fed crop production in Africa could be cut in half by in ten years, that 40% of the Amazon rainforest will disappear, well, soon, all because of global warming. Any one of these things would be a catastrophe of Biblical proportions, but the IPCC has been forced to admit that not one of them has any reliable research behind it. These are the sort of things that come out of the mouth of a carny barker. They discredit a supposedly responsible scientific committee.

Global warming alarmism is politics, not science. Politicians in the developed world like the idea that human industry is destroying the environment. It fills their sails with righteous indignation and gives them a reason to demand more political control over their national economies and those of other nations. For climate scientists, this means a lot of public funding and the warm feeling that they are saving the world.

If the whole thing melts away, the conceits of politicians are no great loss. The reputation of the scientific community is another matter.

2 More Republicans 4 Congress

In last night's post on the Republican candidates for Congress, I neglected to mention Pastor Steve Hickey. This was not intended as a judgment on his campaign, let alone as any kind of slight. I had seen his campaign announced by Cory Heidelberger, from whom I get all my news. I just forgot about the Hickey campaign.

Steve Hickey

I do not know Pastor Hickey. All I have to go on is his website, which is sharp and reasonably informative. I don't know if he drinks beer, but if so I'm buyin'. The theory of sociological representation says that people do or should vote for people just like themselves. If that were true, I ought to be voting for Steve. He confesses to a degree in political science and has a beard.

His issues list is bread and butter conservative with a strong emphasis on the "social values" thing. That and the fact that his career consists almost entirely of his work as a Pastor makes him the candidate of the religious right. Cory thinks that Hickey and Blake Curd will split the "angry conservative and fundagelical vote." "Fundagelical?" This, Cory thinks, will allow Nelson to win the nomination.

I am skeptical. Unlike Nelson, Curd, and Noem, Hickey doesn't seem to have significant political experience. If it's really an anti-establishment year, that might play to his advantage; but I am guessing that he will seem too much the religious candidate to a lot of Republicans who want to win in November. His lack of a political base means he has a lot of ground to cover in voter recognition.

Tarn Vieira

My SDP colleague Miranda Flint informs me of a fifth candidate, Tarn Vieira. Tarn has the most entertaining website, at least to a political scientist. How many candidates inform you that they have read most of Will Durant's History of Civilization. I like that bit of honesty. No living human being has read all of Durant's History. Like Scott Brown, Tarn has a pickup truck. 

Tarn describes himself as a transplanted Californian. That might be a problem, but at least he can say, as I can, that he voluntarily left there for here and doesn't regret his choice. His issues page is a lot richer in personality than any of the others, and identifies him as a twenty-four karat right wing populist. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

From his website I like Tarn just fine and I suppose he might bring some refreshing breezes into what might otherwise be a stale campaign.

Just now I don't think either Steve Hickey or Tarn Vieira will be serious contenders in the campaign. To be sure, both can appeal to anti-establishment sentiment better than Nelson, Curd, and Noem; but I expect the latter three will compete for most of the political resources in the state, including party organizations, activists, and money.

Three is a magic number in a political environment like South Dakota. If the top two contenders savage each other, a third might well win by default. With Noem in the race, I just don't see any opening for Hickey or Vieira unless one or the other turns out to have some kind of prairie magic.

3 Republicans 4 Congress

It appears that South Dakota Republicans will have three contenders to choose among when they cast their votes in this summer's Congressional primary. Right now the field looks to be unusually strong.

I have had the pleasure this year of appearing with two of the Republicans aiming to unseat Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin. I arrived a bit late for a Tea Party meeting in Watertown, and got to enjoy most of Dr. Blake Curd's talk. If memory serves, Dr. Curd was wearing jeans and boots. He brought a copy of one version of the health care bill, and it stood nearly as tall on the stage as I would. Dr. Curd struck me as a very serious candidate with an excellent command of the issues and a natural born ability to connect with his audience. Those two things don't always go together, and that means we usually have to settle for the latter. With only this one glimpse to go on, I think that Representative Curd would give us both.

More recently I took part in discussion on Dakota Midday with Secretary of State Chris Nelson. The topic was the recent Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC. Secretary Nelson was speaking in his official capacity, so I didn't get to see his political skills. I can say that he was very good on the law and the issues surrounded it. He has that rare ability to unravel very complex legal knots in a way that any listener can understand. That is something to be wished for in a statesman. I warmed to him immediately.

More recently still I received a note that Kristi Noem (pronounced like gnome), Representative for District 6 of the South Dakota house, is throwing her hat in the ring. Perhaps I will get to hear Representative Noem at some venue, but right now I don't know where she stands on national issues. I have heard from people I trust that she is sharp and articulate, and knows the public business.

She does have several advantages that are very important for aspiring candidates: she is photogenic, well-rooted in the community, and has three equally attractive children. We may think that such things do not matter, but perhaps they do. As a rancher's wife, she will appeal to a lot of South Dakota voters.

This looks to me like an unusually strong field. The only SD poll I know about had Congresswoman Herseth-Sandlin ahead, but below 50%. That is generally a warning sign for an incumbent, especially if she has served more than one term. I have also heard from my various contacts that Ms. Herseth-Sandlin's fundraising has been anemic. There is certainly the sense in the air that she is vulnerable.

A strong field of contenders for the nomination means that Ms. Herseth-Sandlin may well be replaced by a Republican. That would be more likely if, as seems the case, there is a strong wave building for the GOP. One of the above may be our next representative in Congress.

Whether that is the case or not, there is also the future to look to. Any one of the above looks like a serious contender for Tim Johnson's senate seat in 2014, especially if Senator Johnson decides to retire. Curd, Nelson, and Noem must compete this year, but it is very important that they avoid savaging one another. If they can avoid this, the Republican Party may soon control all of South Dakota's national delegation.

Bayh Gones

The Democrats may be setting a record for longest unbroken string of bad news. Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana has decided not to run for re-election. This was a seat the Democrats figured they couldn't lose, and now they are very likely to lose it.

Bayh departed in a huff, blaming excessive partisan on both sides. But actions speak louder than words, and his action looks likely to improve the fortunes of Republicans while wounding his own party deeply. Bayh waited until four days before the filing date for the Democratic primary to announce his decision. Indiana Democrats have to scramble now to field a candidate.

As things stand now, Republicans will probably hold all of their vulnerable seats. They seem like to take at least seven Democratic seats, including defeating Harry Reid. That would bring the Senate balance 52/48 Democrat.

A Republican take-over is not out of the cards, but it would require some rock solid Democratic seats to crumble. I suspect the Republicans are better off not taken control. But as Massachusetts proved, this year anything can happen.

The Goth Vamp as Hero

Ghost House Pictures is on a roll. This partnership between magus Sam Rami (Evil Dead, Spiderman, Hercules and Xena) and Robert Tapert has been evoking some very successful movies. 30 Days of Night comes to mind. I haven't seen Drag Me To Hell, but the genre publication reviews are very good.

I recently watched GH's The Messengers, a movie set on a North Dakota farm. It was quite good, mixing computer generated poltergeists with the haunting memory of past crimes. Oh, and it had malevolent crows. You gotta love malevolent crows.  The movie combines a lot of modern anxieties: will the infant ever recover and talk? Can Dad make a go of it out here when he crashed and burned in the city?  Can we trust our teenage daughter?  It also delivers a useful warning: be careful in deciding what you should be afraid of.  It might not be the ghosts. 

Last night I watched The Children. I don't get scared by movies very often, but this one had me sitting up wide-eyed and wondering if Jane Austin wouldn't have been a better choice.

The film begins with a family reunion at an isolated house somewhere in the woods. Exactly where I couldn't tell, except that the steering wheels were on the wrong side of the cars and everyone spoke English. The house is occupied by a young couple and their two children. They have "sold their business" and retired comfortably to the countryside. Mom is pure domestic hippie, with lots of new age icons dangling everywhere, a chalk board of things to do, and gold stars for good kiddies. Dad sneaks off to smoke pot in the greenhouse.

Mom's sister arrives with husband, teenage daughter Casey, and younger children Miranda and Paulie. The film didn't make it easy to keep track of whose children were whose, but what mattered was the count: four adults, five children, and one teenage girl with straight black hair, red lipstick, and fishnet stockings below the miniskirt.

In short order the children show flu-like symptoms, then start acting strangely, and then turn homicidal. Teen vamp Casey sees it before anyone else, and of course when things go south, she is the initial target of suspicion.

The Children combines several familiar elements of modern horror fiction. Something ordinary and innocuous (in this case, little kids) suddenly becomes malevolent and deadly. See The Birds. Contagion and zombie-like behavior arise out of modern science colored by ancient fears. Since the children themselves are transformed by biological evil, the instinct to protect them becomes a fatal vulnerability.

Two things struck me as interesting about this film. One is that in incorporates a problem familiar to anyone who has raised a child or tried to housetrain a pet: you can try to modify the behavior of another animal, but you can do so only indirectly. What is going on behind those precious eyes is pure black box.

More basic to a fan of horror fiction is a transformation in the attitude toward a certain kind of hero. From the 1950's onward, the teen rebel as hero has been a staple of horror films. See Steve McQueen in The Blob. But until very recently, the moral was always the same: don't judge a book by its cover. Just because the hero has long hair, is young, has a pin in her lip, you should still listen to him or her. Crusty ole' bad adults don't listen, because they are crusty, bad and adult.

In The Messengers and The Children, the weight of responsibility shifts to the teen hero. So you want to dress in a way that is calculated to arouse alarm in adults. So you behave irresponsibly most of the time. Fine. But don't be surprised when you are the only one who sees the monsters coming and no one takes you seriously. That is an unlooked for sign of maturity in contemporary horror fiction. It also makes for pretty good plotting. If you are looking for some thoughtful chills, put these two on your Netflix cue.

The Democrat’s Addictive Behavior

A few short weeks ago the Administration let it slip that they intended to put health care reform "on the back burner," so as to concentrate "like a laser" on jobs. It seemed like a good plan. Health care reform was making them sick, so the sensible thing to do was to stop drinking the stuff and try to find something healthier to put down their gullets. But here we are talking about almost nothing but whether the Democrats can revive their health care agenda.

All this reminds me of one of my favorite songs, by Celtic singer Andy M. Stewart:

Geordie's a man I hav'ny seen lately,
I met with his brother in Tain.
Says I, "Do ye think that he's
still off the drink?"
"Oh, no, HE'S AT IT AGAIN!"

Aye we telt him and aye we warned him;
And aye he promised, but then...
At the turn o' yer back, he'd be right off the track;
And noo, HE'S AT IT AGAIN!

It isn't hard to understand why the Democrats cannot break out of their cycle of addiction. They've been sipping this stuff for a long time. Rehab is for quitters, and the Dems think they will be seen as unmanly if they quit.

It would be one thing if they can in fact, somehow, bring the Bacchus bill across the finish line. Pardon me, that's the Baucus bill. Bacchus is the Roman god of intoxication. But do they really have hopes for such a victory?

It would require some very dodgy legislative tricks, and right now it doesn't look like they have the votes. Mark Tapscott, cited by Michael Barone, thinks that Speaker Pelosi is about 100 votes shy of what she needs to push any kind of bill through. If that's anywhere near accurate, health care reform is as dead as it looks.

Failing to pass reform will dispirit and alienate the Democrat's activist base. Talking about it when they have no hope of passing it only rubs salt in that wound. It also irritates the majority of Americans (including a robust majority of independent voters) who are resolutely opposed to the Democrats' health care reform bills.

Passing the Baucus bill would probably a disaster for the Democratic Party. It has already cost them two state houses and a Senate seat. But pretending that they can pass it when they can't seems like the worst possible behavior. You can telt 'em and warn 'em all you want, but noo, they're at it again.

The Price of Cruelty

Many of the major news outlets are reporting that a shooting has occurred at the University of Alabama Huntsville. Here is CNN's account. According to Fox, Dr. Amy Bishop has been arrested and charged with the crime.

Three faculty members were fatally shot on campus. Fox News reports that Bishop had been denied tenure before the incident occurred. Some are therefore suggesting the shooting was Bishop's attempt to exact vengeance.

Since there has been no trial, I am not sure if Bishop is guilty or not. Yet the following message is on the University's Web Site:

There has been a shooting on campus.  The shooter has been apprehended.  The campus is closed tonight.  Everyone is encouraged to go home.  Classes are canceled for tonight.  

This indicates that the school officials are relatively convinced that Bishop is guilty.

Bishop is a strange suspect. One does not generally suspect a neuroscientist with a Harvard PhD to go on a shooting spree.

The woman appears to be quite brilliant.

According to the university's blog, Bishop developed a technology called InQ, which was, "designed to increase the precision and consistency of cell growth in laboratory experimentation." 

She had her own lab, her own personnel. Her graduates were successful. She was involved in a space experiment that sent nerve cells to space. She had received funding for her projects, at one point winning $4000 in research support for a proposal. She and her husband also won $25,000 in a business competition by creating a portable cell incubator.

One suspects that someone with so much success, such a large library of publications and such a reputation would be able to find work easily. Why, then, would she worry so much about tenure?

If the rumors that Bishop killed her colleagues out of vengeance are correct, it would mean that Bishop placed the value of cruelty to others over her science, students, career and even her life.

The AP is reporting another disturbing murder.

In Greensburg, Pennsylvania, a disabled woman with the mental abilities of a young girl was tortured and killed by six people she believed were her friends. They forced her to drink urine, detergent and soap, beat her with a variety of objects before stabbing her fatally. Of the six, the youngest is 17 and the oldest is 36. Each had plenty of life left to live. Yet if they are convicted, they will have thrown their lives away. Cruelty comes at a high price. Yet many seem willing to pay it. One wonders why.

Kennedy Will Not Seek Re-Election

The BBC is reporting that Patrick Kennedy will not be seeking re-election. This is, says the BBC, the end of the Kennedy dynasty. The Kennedy family, says the BBC, has been involved in politics since the late 1940s. The Boston Herald reports that this announcement is coming after Kennedy's poll numbers tumbled in Rhode Island. Kennedy, however, like some of his counterparts who have made similar decisions, cites personal reasons for the move.

Miranda Misrule & the Bloomer Bomber

The Administration bought itself a heap of trouble when it decided to "mirandize" bloomer bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and thus to treat him as an ordinary criminal. In the first place, it looks like this decision was made rather incompetently, by the Attorney General alone without consulting the heads of the Intelligence and National Security agencies.

The decision itself is questionable because General Eric Holder doesn't seem to have asked the right question, or if he did he answered it the wrong way. When police arrive at the scene of the crime they have two purposes: one is to make sure that the innocent are protected against any further injury and the second is to make sure that the perpetrator can be prosecuted. The former is primary and usually the courts will not allow actions taken to protect the innocent to prejudice a prosecution. A cop doesn't need a warrant to barge into a residence if he hears someone inside screaming for help.

When Mr. Abdulmutallab was in custody, the most pressing matter was to find out if there were other terrorist plots in execution. The second most pressing matter was to find out who was behind Mr. Abdulmutallab and where they were so we can go capture and/or kill them. Only after those objectives have been pursued as much as they can should the authorities have considered the question whether to treat him as a criminal or an enemy combatant. It seems unlikely that the fifty minutes of questioning to which Abdulmutallab was subject before he was mirandized was enough to gain the intelligence we needed. General Holder went straight to prosecution mode.

But even if it made sense to put prosecution first and national security second, it isn't clear that there was any reason to advise Mr. Abdulmutallab of his Miranda rights. The only reason an investigator needs to read someone his rights is if the former intends to interrogate the latter for the purpose of getting a confession or other information that might lead to a conviction. In that case, the warning is necessary if any such information is to be introduced into court.

Did General Holder really think he needed anything more to get a conviction here? The bloomer bomber walked on an airplane with explosives in his skivvies! The good folks who tackled him did so because they witnessed him trying to blow them out of their underwear. For heaven's sake, what more would a prosecutor need?

The decision to mirandize Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab makes no sense at all in terms of legal strategy or any realistic approach to national security. It makes sense only if you are worried that we have been treating terrorists too harshly, that our treatment of detainees is a cause of rather than a tool in the hands of anti-American sentiment in Europe, that young men like Mr. Abdulmutallab would be less likely to join Al Qaeda if they thought Americans were more scrupulous in their observance of due process. Such fancies as these are commonplace among the American left, out of which our President emerged. That they are guiding our national security policies is cause for concern.

The Wolfman

The beast will have its day. The beast will out.

The greatest success that a movie can achieve is when its story, characters, or dialogue are written indelibly into popular culture. The 1941 Universal Pictures film, The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney, Jr., certainly achieved that. It shares that honor with three other monster movies: Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy. The four have spawned thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of movies featuring similar monsters. Vampires are a virtual industry in contemporary Hollywood. In the case of the latter three, there are scores of versions of the original movies. Indeed, Boris Karloff's Mummy was itself largely a remade version of Bela Legosi's Dracula.

I haven't done a lot of research, but I believe that Joe Johnston's The Wolfman is first time that the original 1941 story has been retold on film. I doubt that there is anything in the new film that will make a lasting mark on the genre, but it is a rocking good monster movie and a nice tribute to its famous predecessor.

The movie has its flaws. If you are allergic to cheap romance, you will be sneezing more than a few times. The love story is pedestrian. Anthony Hopkins, the big money actor is, well, Anthony Hopkins. He's a one trick dog, but the trick works well enough if you don't mind his accent shifting in and out of character. Benicio Del Toro was well-cast if you wanted someone who looks like Lon Chaney Jr., sort of, and even more if you wanted someone with the discipline to maintain exactly the same haunted (or is it slightly stupefied?) look throughout the picture. Emily Blunt looks good in dark corridors or with the moors behind her, but Hell I could do that. On the other hand, Hugo Weaving (Elrond in LOTR) is marvelous.

What saves the movie is its story and graphic texture. In the original film, Lawrence Talbot is an American engineer returned to his birthplace in England. That fits into the Dracula story line of new world reason meets old world hocus pocus. Young Talbot meets Gypsies, gets smitten and bitten, and things get hairy after that.

In the new version, Talbot is an actor who comes back at news that his brother has disappeared. He arrives to learn that his brother has been killed by some mysterious animal. He is smitten by his brother's fiancée, bitten by his brother's killer and, you guessed it.

SPOILER WARNING!

The story is basically an oedipal conflict between father and a son haunted by a memory of his mother's murder. Not to be too explicit, it culminates in a battle between two werewolves, one of whom is tortured by what he has become while the other has learned to love it. There is also a nice little story explaining the origin of the lycanthropic infection that borrows somewhat from the current zombie genre.

The actions scenes include a lot of villagers with torches and shotguns, and a monster run amok scene in London. There is one great scene which I will not describe, but it is delicious precisely because you can see exactly what is going to happen and you pretty much want it to happen.

The texture is almost black and white, with a constant back lit, approaching storm sort of lighting. I found it delicious to watch. If you like werewolf movies, don't miss this one.

An Overdue Response to Travis Dahle of Bandlands Blue

Travis Dahle of Badlands Blue and I are in a bit of a row over the issues of tolerance, gay marriage, Don't Ask Don't Tell. Travis took the time to reply to my original arguments with a post of his own that can be found here. I am responding with a blog post, as it allows for better formatting and because the original debate began here.

Below is my reply to Travis's last argument:

This is a difficult issue for me, because I agree with your idea that people ought to be treated with respect. I also agree that it is possible to treat people with whom one disagrees respectfully. Nevertheless, I am opposed to forcing Christians, families, schools and soldiers to accept a practice that is morally reprehensible to them. I believe that these groups are entitled to respect and dignity as well. I am also opposed to the idea of giving approval to a practice that I believe will increase the exploitation of young men and boys.

Your original statement was the following:

To me it is about treating all people with respect and dignity - of course, I'm a liberal, and I think they should be allowed to marry as well, so I'm sort of in the minority here...

I read this as a claim that conservatives did not believe in treating people with dignity and respect. You claim that you only meant that liberals were more tolerant than conservatives on gay rights issues and that I certainly agree with. However, I still disagree with your statement. Here, you say that to you, the issue is about treating all people with dignity and respect. But in your most recent response, you say the following about the views of fundamentalist Christians:

Playing the 'I show a lack of tolerance towards their belief' card doesn't affect me at all – I have no problem being intolerant to views that are archaic and out of date.

Supporting intolerance toward people who have these views is not "treating all people with respect and dignity." It is insulting to call their views archaic and out of date. Therefore, I believe that to be accurate, your statement ought to read, "I believe in treating people I agree with with dignity and respect." So does almost everyone.

Furthermore, tolerance of homosexuality is not a new idea. It has been around at least since the heyday of Ancient Greece. Therefore, I could just as easily dismiss your support of gay rights as archaic and out of date. But it is the merit of our ideas that is important here, not their modernity.

I disagree with your notion that you are not forcing your views on anyone else. You are, indeed, by trying to change legislation. Whether you are right in doing this is something we can debate about. But the fact that you are doing it is obvious. By supporting the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, you are supporting efforts that will require soldiers to accept homosexuality. So I don't buy the idea that Christians are the only ones who are trying to force their will on others. Liberals do it often. This is, I think, the way American politics is supposed to work. We, the people are supposed to be a part of our government. But let's not pretend one side is pushing views on the other, while the other is simply "wishing" people would agree with theirs.

Meanwhile, by trying to push legislation that legalizes gay marriage, you do not simply affect the government. Already, individuals have been sued for refusing to hire homosexuals or, in a recent case, refusing to photograph gay weddings. These lawsuits will almost certainly be more common and more successful if gay marriage is legalized. So to pretend that you are somehow not forcing your views on others may make you feel better about doing it, but it is not honest.

Furthermore, legalizing gay marriage puts what some call "a societal stamp of approval" on male-to-male courtship, which, when it exists between two middle-aged males may not be such an issue. But when it happens between a middle-aged male and a young boy it can be highly exploitative.

You offer instances of Lesbian-Baiting and rape up as evidence that the Don't Ask Don't Tell Policy is a bad one. These are things which, you say, we should be appalled by. I agree. Rape is appalling – which is one reason many are uncomfortable about allowing homosexuality in the military. There has been, historically, a problem with allowing homosexual men to serve as authority figures for young men and younger boys.

Consider the problem of homosexual bullying in British boarding schools, where boys as young as twelve were preyed upon sexually for years by male supervisors and older boys. It has had devastating consequences. You can read about some of these in the following articles:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/international/europe/11britain.html?_r=2&pagewanted=2

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article2446412.ece

Consider also the vulnerability of young men to the advances of pedophile priests that have repeatedly made the news.

There is a similar problem in the American military, where homosexual sergeants have used date rape drugs to rape and molest younger recruits.

In the Air Force, Capt. Devery L. Taylor was court martialed after he was found guilty of the rape of four soldiers and the attempted rape of two others. The story of his case can be found here:

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,126982,00.html?ESRC=dod.nl

Retired Colonel Richard H. Black submits that homosexuality in the military undermines discipline, saying the following:

Worldwide crime reports documented serious disciplinary issues involving homosexuals who slipped unlawfully into U.S. military forces. Troops physically restrained one homosexual drill instructor as he attempted to rape a recruit struggling to flee out a second-story window. Two homosexual soldiers forcibly sodomized a lone soldier showering at night, forcing him to submit by strangling him with a bath towel. A master sergeant preyed on newcomers by getting them drunk before sexually assaulting them.

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/military-232507-homosexuals-officers.html

Are not these also things that we should be appalled by?

It is hard for women to admit they have been raped. It is, perhaps, harder for men who have been forcibly sodomized. Cody Openshaw was a disabled vet who was raped by a male platoon sergeant while waiting to be medical discharged. It ruined his life. Here is his story:

http://hamptonroads.com/2009/10/military-men-are-silent-victims-sexual-assault

The sergeant warned Openshaw against talking about the rape, threatening his family.

I think that this is at least as appalling as the lesbian-baiting you mention.

Now, to you, the fact that lesbian-bating is appalling is reason enough to oppose Don't Ask Don't Tell. Is the fact that forced sodomy exists reason enough to oppose it?

I have one more major issue with what you say. You quote Richard Mohr as saying the following:

The order says that as long as you gays act as though we people don't know who you are, we will act as though you don't exist, and thus in our willing ignorance, recommit ourselves to viewing your status as loathsome and repulsive.

You bold another section, indicating that you agree especially with it:

No one can accept the "don't ask, don't tell" policy and suppose that at the same time he or she is treating lesbians and gay men as persons.

I disagree emphatically with this idea. The policy does not mean that homosexual soldiers are treated as if they don't exist. It simply asks them to keep their sexual lives private. Therefore, a soldier can, instead of looking at his fellow soldier as "that guy who has sex with men," see his brother in arms for his merit. If he is a good soldier, his fellows will see that, rather than his sexual preferences.

One's sexual appetites are only one part of life. They are not the whole thing. Pretending that there is nothing more to a homosexual man than sex is extremely unfair. Elton John is not simply a gay man. He is also a phenomenal singer. If I don't focus on the fact that he is gay, but rather on the fact that he has a beautiful voice, is that really denying his existence? I don't think so. I really don't know why anyone needs to make the world aware of their private inclinations. I certainly would not choose to and I would be rather happy to know that someone was judging me on my merit, rather than some sort of idea about sexuality.

The Administration Questions My Patriotism?

It is an article of faith on the American Left that the Bush 43 Administration questioned the patriotism of those who opposed the invasion of Iraq. So what are we to make of this comment by John Brennan (Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism)? It comes at the end of Brennan's op-ed piece in USAToday, defending the Administration's handling of the Bloomer-Bomber against Republican criticism.

Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda. Terrorists are not 100-feet tall.

That is exactly the kind of comment that interpreted as a challenge to the patriotism of critics back when some Bush Administration official said such a thing. I wait to see whether my esteemed Keloland colleague Doug Wiken and my friend and former student Travis are appalled.

In fact, there is no question of patriotism here; there are only questions of policy and competence. And as the USAToday editorial puts it, the Obama Administration's National Security team fails to inspire confidence.

We now know that the Justice Department decided to advise would-be suicide-bomber Umar Abdulmutallab of his rights and try him in civilian courts without even consulting the Secretary of Defense, the intelligence community, or the Department of Homeland Security. What exactly are those people for?

We know that an Administration task force created over a year ago recommended the establishment of a High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG). That is exactly the kind of group that, one supposes, would interrogate a guy like Mr. Abdulmutallab. It shouldn't be hard to put one together rather quickly, since emergencies happen without warning. But it turns out that the HIG doesn't exist yet. What were they waiting for, someone to walk on an airplane with a bomb in his bloomers?

I don't think that the Bush Administration or the Obama Administration really questioned anyone's patriotism in any significant way, and frankly I don't care. What I care about is whether the current administration is competent to respond to a terrorist attack, find out rapidly whether the attack is an isolated event or part of a larger scheme, find out where the terrorist came from and who put him up to it before all the rats can scurry back down the sewer pipes. Whatever the Obama Administration has been thinking about over the last year, this wasn't it.

Anonymity, and Free Speech, and the American Tradition

Professor Newquist's recent reply to me presents a strong case, but my Keloland colleague seems to see only one side of the question. We agree that people have a right to be protected against defamation and that this right requires that violators be held responsible for abuses of freedom of speech. Whether this is among the unalienable rights that the Founders recognized is more problematic.

But sometimes the protection of one right is limited by another, or by legal procedure, as when a murderer goes free (perhaps to kill again) because he cannot be subject to double jeopardy, or because the evidence needed to convict him was excluded from court.

The question here is whether protecting people from defamation is worth requiring the abolition of anonymity in speech and writing.

Professor Newquist says this, in reply to my post:

The idea that holding people accountable for their words chills open discussion is nonsense. It destroys open discussion. The First Amendment was not conceived as a protection of cowardice and insidiousness. Those speakers who fear responses to their words and wish to throw missiles and cower behind a mangled First Amendment, we cite another cliche: if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Or in the language of the blogosphere, if you can't accept responsibility for your words, just STFU. Communication involves a message from a sender to a receiver and back again. An interpretation of the First Amendment that protects anonymous speech is an interpretation that subverts the whole idea of robust dialogue.

This flies in the face of much recent liberal thinking on freedom of the press, for example. Many reporters have gone to jail rather than reveal anonymous sources. I am not convinced that such sources are protected by the Constitution, but it is hardly nonsense to think protecting such anonymity makes it easier for reporters to get sources to talk. There is a good case to be made for shield laws that protect journalists and their anonymous sources.

Likewise, I do not think that the right to post anonymously or to allow anonymous posts is protected by the Constitution, though I am not at all sure how the Supreme Court would come down on that. But I am quite sure that internet anonymity does encourage robust dialogue. Consider the case of someone who wishes to weigh in on the subject of gay marriage on my blog, but doesn't want his neighbors to know who he is lest they begin wondering about why he remains so long a bachelor. I think protecting his anonymity is a reasonable price to pay for encouraging him to join in the conversation. Professor Newquist's response to him is to shut the f**k up.

Professor Newquist links to a case which is very interesting. From the New York Times:

It occurred to Anne Mitchell as she was writing the letter that she might lose her job, which is why she chose not to sign it. But it was beyond her conception that she would be indicted and threatened with 10 years in prison for doing what she knew a nurse must: inform state regulators that a doctor at her rural hospital was practicing bad medicine.

Judging from the reporting at the Times and on NPR, it looks like Nurse Mitchell was doing the right thing and acting in the best interests of this doctor's patients when she set out to alert authorities about the doctor's questionable practices. But he had the ear of a powerful local sheriff, and now she is being prosecuted under a law prohibiting "the misuse of official information."

However this comes out, it is clear that laws holding people to account for what they say and right can be used by the powerful to stifle dissenting voices. As I pointed out, internet anonymity is vital to the dissident movements in Iran and China. Why else did the Chinese Government and Google come into conflict? People have less to fear in these United States, but as Ms. Mitchell's case show, that doesn't mean they have nothing to fear.

I am not saying that there should be no protections against defamation or that no person should be held to account for his speech and writing. But I do think internet anonymity is a valuable protection for dissenters here as in more repressive regimes. When someone writes publically, as David and I do, in our own names, we take responsibility for what we say and for that reason what we say can be taken more seriously than anonymous voices. David, however, refuses to acknowledge that there can be legitimate motives for remaining anonymous, and this does a disservice to a lot of internet heroes around the world.

It also does a disservice to those champions of unalienable rights, the American Founders. A lot of the finest American rhetoric was published under pseudonyms. What was a necessity during the revolution became a standard practice in the early years of the Republic. Over forty of those who wrote during the debates over the Constitution wrote under pseudonyms like "An American Farmer," or "Cato" or "an Officer of the Late Continental Army." The greatest commentary on the Constitution was written by three men (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay) who published under the name of Publius.

Contrary to what my colleague seems to think, anonymous political speech as been part of the American political tradition from the beginning. I stand with the Founders.

John Murtha Passes

Okay, I'll admit it, I went first to Michael Barone to see how competitive John Murtha's district is. The answer: very. It is the only Congressional district to vote for John Kerry and John McCain.

I suggest that the Republicans choose a competent and attractive candidate, named John.

Defamation, Anonymity, & Free Speech

My Keloland Colleagues Cory Heidelberger, Pat Powers, and Professor David Newquist, have commented on the "leaked" text of a bill supposedly on its way to the South Dakota legislature. Cory and Pat are deeply opposed to the bill. David Newquist has a long and very informative comment.

I understand from Cory that the bill has not been filed yet, and I certainly have no information regarding the authenticity of the text that is being circulated. But that text is surely worthy of comment. Here is the most interesting passage:

Any person who allows internet posts shall keep a record of the internet-protocol logs adequate to provide identification and location of otherwise unknown, anonymous, or pseudonymous persons who leave or upload content. However, no person may be compelled to produce such information except in response to a court order.

This would certainly be a very bad piece of law making, for two reasons. First, it is an egregious intrusion into the business of anyone who hosts a site where others can comment. In effect it requires "any person who allows internet posts" to act as agents of the courts and police, gather information that might be needed in a case.

I am not at all sure that this is practical. There are many services that provide almost perfect anonymity and so the requirement could not be met even if every such person tried.

Second, there are good reasons for protecting the anonymity of internet interlocutors. It means that one can post his or her opinion freely without fearing reprisal from those who vehemently disagree or without having to explain oneself to one's family, or neighbors, or other members of a church. This is exactly the same reason we go to great lengths to protect the secret ballot.

At South Dakota Politics I have had a number of guests over the years who post frequently under a pseudonym. I have no idea who they are and I am obligated to respect their privacy. Abolishing anonymity, which is what the above language seems designed to do, would surely have a chilling effect on online dialogue. If you don't believe me, ask Iranians or Chinese bloggers who write critically about their own governments. You can find some of them in the slammer.

Professor Newquist is concerned about defamation and rightly so. If someone were posting false information damaging to his reputation or mine, I would certainly wish that we had some legal recourse. I just don't think that this is worth requiring every person who allows internet posts to spy on their guests for the government, or revealing the identity of anyone who wishes to post his opinion anonymously. I don't see any way to do the one without doing the other.

Professor Newquist has frequently complained about the conduct of bloggers and commenters, and he has stoutly defended the mainstream media as more professional and responsible. Though I have a more favorable opinion of the blogosphere in general than he does, I certainly agree on the latter point. The MSM, mostly, can afford fact checkers. Most bloggers cannot.

Protection against internet defamation probably has to rely on this distinction. Everyone has to know that whatever appears on a blog or privately hosted website should be taken with a grain of salt. What appears in the MSM ought also to be questioned, but the standards are rather higher. You start to really believe a story when it leaps from the blogs and the National Enquirer to the Washington Post.

Bloggers and their commenters have played a vital role in keeping the MSM and other institutions honest. If you don't believe me on this one, ask Dan Rather or the International Panel on Climate Change. Protecting the freedom of internet interlocutors to write freely is an imperative for free government in the modern world.

Fox News Gives Daschle a Hand

Fox News, which has sometimes been accused of acting as part of the Republican Party, helped out a Democrat today. Former US Senator Tom Daschle was, according to this story, stranded in the D.C. snowstorm. A Fox News photographer happened to see him trying to push his car and lent a hand. I have faith in Daschle's ability to combat the snow. He is, after all, a South Dakotan, but this was a nice gesture from Fox -- even if the network did use it as an opportunity for a story.

Here's the link to the video.

Canada votes with Scott Brown

Why is health care reform failing in the U.S.? Blame it on Canada!

ST. JOHN'S, N.L. -- Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams will undergo heart surgery later this week in the United States…

Mr. Williams' decision to leave Canada for the surgery has raised eyebrows over his apparent shunning of Canada's health-care system.

"It was never an option offered to him to have this procedure done in this province," said Ms. Dunderdale, refusing to answer whether the procedure could be done elsewhere in Canada.

Let's get this straight. The Premier of Newfoundland is coming to the United States for heart surgery because he can't get it in his own province and presumably nowhere else in Canada. Well, that does raise eyebrows, doesn't it?

Maybe this is one reason that the Democrats have failed to make the American health care system more like the Canadian one. Otherwise, where would Canadian premiers go when they need surgery?

Blame it on the last Administration

President Truman said of his White House that, while everyone else is passing the buck, "the buck stops here." President Obama has made passing the buck a key part of his rhetoric. If a toilet backs up in the West Wing, he will blame it on "the last eight years" of mismanagement and neglect. He doesn't seem to have noticed that year has passed since George W. Bush left office.

Kathleen Stewart has noticed, and she puts the President's rhetoric to music. Give this one a listen: http://kathleensings.com/blame.html.

Hat tip to Powerline. 

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

While America is repealing its “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Policy,” Malaysia’s opposition party leader Anwar Ibrahim is being tried for Sodomy for the second time in a row. Anwar previously served six years in prison for sodomy, before he was exonerated of the crime in 2004. Ibrahim claims that the charges are false and that the current Prime Minister  is using the charges in an attempt to prevent Ibrahim from challenging him.

According to Time, an Ibrahim supporter claims, “They are all afraid of [Anwar] because if he wins and becomes Prime Minister, they will all end up in jail."

Time says that the trial will either make or break Ibrahim. If he is found guilty, it will kill his chances to challenge the Prime Minister. If he is found innocent, and, indeed, if he can prove that the prime minister conspired against him, he might very well be the next.

What is more interesting is that if Ibrahim is guilty, but is found innocent, Malaysia may elect its first homosexual Prime Minister before the United States elects its first gay president. Yet, America has become increasingly tolerant of homosexuality, while in Malaysia, it is illegal and punishable by up to twenty years in prison.

Then again, if Ibrahim is found guilty, one could argue that he might have benefitted from a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” style policy. So might others. Suppose no one knew Matthew Shepard was gay. Would he still be here?  Maybe.

Dr. Blanchard in an earlier post submits that the repeal of the policy is right, because he has not yet heard a good reason why homosexuals should not be allowed to serve in the military. But that isn’t the issue. The issue is whether or not they should be allowed to announce their preferences. It is easy to say that soldiers should be able to deal with discomfort. But what about the well-being of homosexual soldiers? What if they were safer silent? 

We craft hate-crime legislation specifically to protect homosexuals, indicating that they need extra protection. If this is the case, might it not make sense to take precautions such as DODT, particularly in an environment where weapons are readily available?

Corporate Personhood 2

I have been in Arkansas attending to a family emergency, and while down there I joined (by cell phone) Professor Bob Burns, South Dakota Secretary of State Chris Nelson, and host Paul Guggenheimer on Dakota Midday. The topic was the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC. This is obviously a hot topic here and elsewhere. You can use the link above to listen to the show. I recommend it, for Professor Burns and Secretary Nelson, at least, had a lot of interesting things to say about the case.

While I was away, Professor David Newquist responded to my recent post on the topic of corporate personhood. Or at least I think he was responding to me. For reasons he has never bothered to explain, he usually refuses to identify or link to the people he takes issue with. My post was a critical response to an earlier post of his on the same topic.

Here is the thread, as I understand it: Professor Newquist wrote this in the earlier post:

To contend that a corporation, which is a political contrivance of humans with an agenda, is in any way a person is to fly in the face of an essential linguistic and semantic distinction that is deeply rooted in the language.

I pointed out that to speak of a corporation as a person was in fact a well established convention in English and I demonstrated it by quoting the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionaries.

In his recent post, Professor Newquist explains that part of his original post was lost due to a computer error. If only we had the missing passage, we would see that he was not in error. There is a bit of "the dog ate my homework" in that, but it concedes my point. "Corporate personhood" is not, as he originally argued, an Orwellian distortion of language; it is common English usage.

Professor Newquist goes on to make a serious and credible argument. As I understand it, he agrees that corporations are artificial persons bearing rights and duties, as the dictionaries say. Corporations are not, however, natural persons, and so do not enjoy the inalienable rights of the latter. He accuses the Supreme Court of confusing the two concepts of personhood by declaring that corporations enjoy the First Amendment right of freedom of speech.

The literature of America deals extensively with the idea that inalienable rights accrue to natural persons but not to artificial ones.

The issue with the Supreme Court decision is that the majority opinion does not adhere to that distinction of what is considered an authentic person and equates corporations with natural persons in defining that matter of rights.

While I am not so sure that that first line can be backed up with documents (he offers no citation) I certainly agree with Professor Newquist's distinction. I would add that the rights and duties are derivative of the rights and duties of the persons who form a corporation.

I am not convinced, however, that the distinction establishes Professor Newquist's point. The Founders surely considered the right to own and acquire property as an inalienable right of natural persons. Corporations have the right to own and acquire property under law. Government cannot take such property without due process.

The Court found that corporate bodies likewise enjoy freedom of speech. When a group of citizens gets together, pools their resources, and issues a statement of their collective opinion, is that not protected by the freedoms of speech and of the press? The Court thinks so, and I agree. Professor Newquist is certainly entitled to disagree, but he has hardly demonstrated that the Court is guilty of "engaging in semantic shysterism in defining corporations as persons in the same sense that individual humans are."

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Bother

President Obama took on health care reform like Bill Clinton, and failed like Bill Clinton. Now he is poised to repeat Clinton's attempt to remove the ban on homosexuals serving in the military. Clinton instituted the current "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, under which homosexuals can serve so long as they are not "openly" gay.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has taken steps to end the policy and allow openly homosexual men and women to serve. Gates is backed by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen.

Secretary Gates is right to take this action. I have yet to hear a good reason why homosexuals should not have the same opportunity to serve this country as anyone else. The reasons frequently offered seem to me to be impressionistic at best.

Republican senators said they worry that a change in the law could undermine morale, disrupt unit cohesion and affect recruiting, especially at a time when the military is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This seems to rest on the simple idea that non-homosexuals will be uncomfortable with openly homosexual comrades. But there are very many reasons why one solider may initially be uncomfortable serving next to another. Surely it is one of the duties of a serviceman to get past all that and judge his fellows by their conduct as soldiers, sailors, etc.

Right or wrong, it is not going to be easy to push this change through. So far, all Gates is proposing is a year-long study by the Pentagon and perhaps, in the meantime, a loosening of the standards as to what constitutes being "openly" gay. Opposition in congress is strong, and includes many prominent Democrats. This strikes me as a recipe for another slowly disintegrating initiative.

I gather that the President could change the policy all at once with an executive order. If ever there was an occasion for that kind of thing, this would be it. But, like Clinton, President Obama doesn't seem to have that in him.

Legislative Limbo

It seems likely that health care reform is dead. We hear that Democrats are working quietly behind the scenes to jumpstart the stalled process; but the fact that they have to work quietly is not promising.

Many have concluded that the only hope for resuscitating the healthcare legislation is to push the issue off the front page and give lawmakers time to work out a new compromise and shift public perception of the bill.

The Democrat's only hope for progress on the issue is to make sure the public doesn't know what they are doing. Good luck with that.

I predicted early on that health care reform would fail, and it turns out I was right. I can't take much credit, because only a few weeks ago I lost all confidence in my prediction and I thought that passage was pretty likely. But the reasons for my original prediction were sound.

It is not the Democrats' strategy or tactics that put the bill into legislative limbo. It is that economic and political circumstances right now are very unfavorable for fundamental reform. The Democrats never acknowledged this, nor would it have made much difference if they had. There just isn't any way to get there from here.

Here is The Politico on the Obama's budget:

President Barack Obama's new $3.83 trillion budget paints a bleak landscape of record deficits aggravated by the economy and wars overseas and now threatening to pull down his top legislative domestic priority—health care reform.

Released to Congress Monday morning, Obama's spending plan anticipates $5.08 trillion in deficits over the next five years and seems almost a cry for help in the face of what he sees as intransigent Republican opposition.

This is the background against which the Democrats tried to create a massive new government program.

The budget's grim numbers present a chickens-come-home-to-roost moment for both the White House and Democratic Congress, which skipped past any real deficit debate last year in their eagerness to get onto healthcare reform.

The goal was to act quickly — before the deficits hit home — and institute major changes which proponents argue will serve the long-term fiscal health of the country. Instead, a year of wrangling and refusal to consider more incremental steps have brought Obama and Democrats to this juncture, where waves of red ink threaten to overwhelm their boat already threatened by high unemployment.

The only hope they had was to enact the bill "before the deficits hit home," i.e., before the public became aware of what they were doing. Well, we know how that worked out.