The ghosts of interrogations past have come back to haunt the Bush administration. This week, the legal officer supervising the military trials at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, dismissed capital charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, who allegedly would have been the 20th hijacker during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had he not been prevented from entering the country. The decision has been widely reported as a serious setback for the administration’s quest to bring terrorists to justice.
al-Qahtani was “threatened,” “stressed,” “questioned” and “humiliated.” These are, we are told, “inhumane acts.” And though he lives, unlike the victims of 9/11, al-Qahtani is reportedly a “broken man.” Boo-hoo.
Let’s say we did break him. If the government is therefore unable to prosecute him, so what? We did not interrogate him to collect evidence for trial. We interrogated him to extract information that could be used to prevent another terrorist attack.
The housing perhaps-not-entirely-a-crisis resembles, in one particular, the curious consensus about the global warming “crisis,” concerning which the assumption is: Although Earth’s temperature has risen and fallen through many millennia, the temperature was exactly right when, in the 1960s, Al Gore became interested in the subject. Are we to assume that last year, when housing prices were, say, 10 percent higher than they are now, they were exactly right? If so, why is that so? Because the market had set those prices, therefore they were where they belonged? But if the market was the proper arbiter of value then, why is it not the proper arbiter now?
The name of the agenda doesn’t matter, but the substance does. Voters no longer think lean government, smart and strong defense, and good old-fashioned family values when they think Republican. They think reckless spenders, misguided war and hypocrisy. Republicans “don’t have a vision,” says former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas). “Their behavior is being governed by a bad political model, and we’re losing races.”
Republicans need to focus on cutting taxes, slashing spending and rediscovering their edge on national security matters. More important, they need to jump ahead of Democrats in thinking anew about entitlement programs, health care, technological innovation, global trade and new energy plans.
If a Republican renaissance depends on fiscal probity, then all hope is lost.
Accordingly, in light of the conclusions we reach concerning the constitutional questions brought to us for resolution, we determine that the language of section 300 limiting the designation of marriage to a union “between a man and a woman” is unconstitutional and must be stricken from the statute, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available both to opposite-sex and same-sex couples.
Mayday! Mayday! The ship’s going down says Republican campaign chairman Tom Cole, and it’s every man for himself:
I encourage all Republican candidates, whether incumbents or challengers, to take stock of their campaigns and position themselves for challenging campaigns this fall by building the financial resources and grassroots networks that offer them the opportunity and ability to communicate, energize and turn out voters this election.
Myself, I couldn’t quit laughing. I just kept thinking, “What if a gay boy showed up dressed like this, especially if they suspected he didn’t have any drawers on?”
To the mammoth deficit confronting federal entitlement programs, add the gargantuan deficit confronting state and local pension funds. But don’t worry. Your government is cooking the books:
The funds that pay pension and health benefits to police officers, teachers and millions of other public employees across the country are facing a shortfall that could soon run into trillions of dollars.
But the accounting techniques used by state and local governments to balance their pension books disguise the extent of the crisis facing these retirees and the taxpayers who may ultimately be called on to pay the freight, according to a growing number of leading financial analysts.
State governments alone have reported they are already confronting a deficit of at least $750 billion to cover the cost of the retirement benefits they have promised. But that figure likely underestimates the actual shortfall because of the range of methods they use to make their calculations, including practices that have been barred in the private sector for decades.
Some analysts say public employees should brace for a “massive breach of faith.” For when you add these shortfalls to the ordinary care and feeding of the Leviathan, we will soon be unable to pay our bills even if we tax people at 100%.
A fight that broke out at a troubled South Los Angeles high school escalated into a campus-wide brawl involving as many as 600 students before it was quelled by police in riot gear.
The melee, which students said started around noon Friday between rival black and Hispanic gangs, forced authorities to shut down Locke High School and keep students in their classrooms.
In an editorial on John McCain’s judicial philosophy, the editors of USA Today show themselves to be shallow and uninformed:
Social conservatives are a key part of the Republican coalition, and their top priority is control of the courts. They hope judges will implement social policy goals that have proved impossible to legislate, particularly reversing the court’s pivotal abortion decision, Roe vs. Wade.
Reversing Roe v. Wade is legislatively impossible, but only because you can’t legislatively override the Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions. If the Court itself overruled Roe and returned the nation to the status quo ante, social conservatives could legislate easily in one state after another.
The judiciary is supposed to be an independent branch of government composed of serious jurists with the unenviable task of applying the law, legal precedent and constitutional principles to cases that are by their very nature ambiguous.
No one disagrees with that. The debate is about the nature of the constitutional principles to be applied. In other words, how shall we construe the constitution? The way Justice Scalia wants it construed, or the way Justice Ginsburg wants it construed? USA Today has a lot of resources. What can’t it keep up with the discussion?
The Supreme Court, in particular, is in need of fewer ideologues and more pragmatic consensus builders such as former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a role that has been filled to some degree by Anthony Kennedy after her retirement.
Every member of the Court, including Justice Kennedy, is an ideologue. You cannot avoid ideology, i.e. a system of ideas and ideals. Even the notion that the court should be “pragmatic” is ideological (ideological pragmatism). All USA Today is saying, in other words, is that it wants the court to adopt to its ideology, namely liberalism recast as pragmatism. We all want the court to adopt our ideology.
The kind of ideological conformity demanded by religious conservatives or their counterparts of the left threatens to undermine confidence in the courts as independent, unbiased finders of fact.
Here the editors are just ignorant. Appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, are not triers of fact. The facts of a case are established at trial. Appellate courts resolve questions of law: How does the law apply to these facts?
Until they marshall an elementary understanding of its functions, the editors of USA Today should stop writing about the Supreme Court.
