Month: May 2009

First Amendment

by digby

Excuse me?

A federal judge has ruled that a history teacher at a Southern California public high school violated the First Amendment when he called creationism “superstitious nonsense” in a classroom lecture. The judge, James Selna, issued the ruling after a 16-month legal battle between a student, Chad Farnan, and his former teacher, James Corbett. Mr. Farnan’s lawsuit said Mr. Corbett had made more than 20 statements that were disparaging to Christians and their beliefs. The judge found that Mr. Corbett’s reference to creationism as “religious, superstitious nonsense” violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause. Courts have interpreted the clause as prohibiting government employees from displaying religious hostility. Mr. Corbett teaches at Capistrano Valley High School.

So a public school teacher is in violation of the first amendment by speaking disparagingly against a religious belief? Really?

Here’s the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I guess someone can interpret that to mean that a teacher speaking in a classroom is establishing a religion or prohibiting its exercise by disparaging one, (or maybe because that comes first in the clause such an interpretation supercedes the very clear provision against abridging the freedom of speech) but it sure looks like a stretch to me. In fact, it seems like a ruling that could only be made in bizarroworld.

If this holds up, it would mean that no science teacher of any public institution could challenge creationism. Indeed, virtually all teaching regarding religion that someone could perceive as “hostile” would be in violation of the First Amendment.

It’s one thing to say that it can be abridged in the “shouting fire in a crowded theatre” sense. That speaks to public safety in a very direct,obvious way. And you can certainly argue that the first amendment cannot be used as a protection for child pornography, where real children are exploited and damaged. But to say that a teacher cannot insult a religious teaching because it violates the establishment clause is truly nuts. It turns the First Amendment completely upside down.

History Fer Plumbers

by digby

So Joe the Plumber gave an interview to Christianity Today (via the Colorado Independent), helpfully explaining politics and history to the folks. Here’s an excerpt:

You realize the things you’re saying, are going to be attacked by a lot of different people.

Bring on all the motherfuckers! Bring their college degrees in here! I got nuthin’ to hide. They can’t buy me. You can’t buy me. I don’t even need the parole. This is about the truth coming out…

It’s important to know why you’re telling us this.

You wanna know why? ‘Cause that mother fucker Kennedy stole that fuckin’ election, that’s why! Nixon was gonna be one of the great Presidents ’til Kennedy wrecked this fuckin’ country. Got ni**ers all over the fuckin’ place asking for their rights, where do you think we got all this fuckin’ crime now, ’cause Kennedy promised ’em too damned much. Revolution comin’. Fascism’s coming back. I tell ya this – the day that Communist sumbitch died was a great day for this country. I jes’ hate to think they’re blaming it on some silly fuckin’ Oswald who didn’t know shit anyway. People should know why that sumbitch was killed. ‘Cause he was a Communist. Put me on the stand, go ahead, I’ll tell the same goddamn story, I’m proud of it, don’t matter fuck all to me, things don’t change.

Oh sorry, that was Kevin Bacon in JFK. I got confused. They sound equally confused. Here’s Joe:

Why does conservatism appeal to you as a Christian?

Conservatism is about the basic rights of individuals. God created us. As far as the government goes, the Founding Fathers based the Constitution off of Christian values. It goes hand-in-hand. As far as the Republican Party? I felt connected to it because individual freedom should not be legislated by the federal government.

In the last month, same-sex marriage has become legal in Iowa and Vermont. What do you think about same-sex marriage at a state level?

At a state level, it’s up to them. I don’t want it to be a federal thing. I personally still think it’s wrong. People don’t understand the dictionary—it’s called queer. Queer means strange and unusual. It’s not like a slur, like you would call a white person a honky or something like that. You know, God is pretty explicit in what we’re supposed to do—what man and woman are for. Now, at the same time, we’re supposed to love everybody and accept people, and preach against the sins. I’ve had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my children. But at the same time, they’re people, and they’re going to do their thing.

Does the Republican Party reach out to evangelicals enough?

No. None of them stand up for anything. They use God as a punch line. They use God to invoke sympathy or invoke righteousness, but they don’t stay the course. That’s why I think that all needs to be taken out of the federal level and give it back to the states. We’ve lost our American history. Every state has “In God we trust” or “With God’s help” in their constitution. God is recognized as, if you will, America’s religion.

Some people have criticized the Republican Party as being the party of the rich. How can they change their image?

I don’t know if they can change their image. I really don’t. But, you also have to take into consideration that the Democrats say they are for people in poverty. They’re not. They take advantage of all the tax breaks that the IRS has put in place for them. Tax lobbying is a billion-dollar industry up in Washington. Get rid of the tax code we have. Implement a fair tax—make it a level playing ground. People in poverty keep them in power—that’s what people have to understand.

Joe says he’s waiting to see if God tells him to run for office.

No One Could Predict Any Problems With This

by tristero

Gun owners are stocking up on so much ammo, suppliers can’t keep up.

That’s a problem? Of course not! Gun owners are responsible, mature people. Especially those who are buying up every single round they can find because of totally unfounded fears that Obama will ban their guns.

And yes, of course this sign is just a joke:

Now, doesn’t that just crack you up? Hahahahahah!

A Menu

by tristero

Today, I came across the following menu:

Cucumbers with garlic and fine herbs
Basque chicken thigh with herbs
Red and green bell peppers and olive oil
Couscous
Organic yogurt
Apple

In most parts of the US, that would be described as a gourmet, or near-gourmet meal. In France, it’s called government-sponsored school lunch.

Cookie Cutters

by digby

Chris Matthews, speaking for oppressed white male millionaires everywhere says:

Will he go to the usual cookie cutter. He’s supposed to pick a latina, a hispanic woman, would be a woman. Would he do that just because that’s sort of the unfilled void in his patronage plan so far?

Robinson: I don’t know. I doubt it.

Matthews: Sonya Sotomayor from New York.

Simon: He wouldn’t do it just because, but if you;’re asking if there was a qualified latina out there would he …

Matthews: Well, there is one.

Simon: would he recognize the symbolism of it and would he say, this would be a good move both for the country and the court…

Matthews: Even if she was involved in a case which involved firefighters and the old question of the white firefighters fighting for their position and holding to what they have against the new breed guys, the people of color coming along? That’s the kind of fight that goes on all the time.

Right, I guess a cookie cutter candidate is now someone who is a darker hued, feminine kind of cookie. After all, the women and the minorities are just overflowing the Supreme Court with unqualified losers and the poor white guys can’t catch a break. This absurd conversation is happening all over TV today.

Ezra does a nice take down of this stupid talking point:

But some of the successive commentary made it seem like it was America, and not just its eager white men, who would suffer from this noxious bit of discrimination. After all, if you’re not auditioning white males, how do you know you’re getting the best candidate? As Emily Miller, a former Tom DeLay staffer, wrote at Politics Daily, “We want to have the smartest, hardest working and best qualified person.” And if that person is a white male, then so be it.

[…]

For all the talk of ideal candidates, Supreme Court nominations are generally grubby and instrumental things. Members of both parties live in fear of an Earl Warren or a David Souter: a qualified nominee who unexpectedly pursues an ideologically independent course. They cast about for nominees with enough of a paper trail to assure predictability (no more Souters!) but not enough of a paper trail to guarantee controversy (no more Borks!). They search out young candidates — the average age in recent years has been 53 — because the typical length of a justice’s tenure has shot from its pre-1970 average of 14.9 years to 25.6 years, and no president wants to risk exerting only two decades of influence on the Court.

In comparison to all this, the case for including gender diversity in the search process is downright high-minded. The United States Supreme Court is 88 percent male and 77 percent white male. And this is actually a fairly diverse moment in the Court’s history. As Adam Serwer pointed out, “There have been 110 Justices on the Supreme Court. Of those, two have been women, and two have been black. The other 106 have been white men. That means that around 96 percent of Supreme Court Justices have been white men.”

I actually heard this colorblind argument quite a bit even in liberal circles during the Obama transition, when the argument was made that he should choose only on the basis of who was “best” for the job. I’m pretty sure these were all people who’ve never hired anyone for a job. As Ezra points out, it is rarely a purely meritocratic decision in the real world, with all sorts of different factors coming into play, in recent years diversity being one of them. And that doesn’t just come out of some misplaced political correctness. Studies show that diversity is a useful for its own sake, particularly on the courts.

I’m finding myself screaming at the TV even more than usual when I hear this ridiculous whine that putting a woman or hispanic on the court is some kind of “patronage” choice, as if it’s impossible that they could be as qualified as some white male. It reminds me of a boss I once had few years ago who, after interviewing a number of people for mid-level job said, “you know I’d really like to hire a female or a person of color for the job but I just don’t feel as though any of them have quite the same potential as the white guys.” When I wondered why he thought that, he said, completely without guile, “well, how many successful people of color or women do you know?” And around and around it goes.

After making the mistake of putting his friend Harriet Miers up for nomination and angering the conservative intelligentsia, George W. Bush put two more white guys on the court to great approbation of the entire village for his wonderful choice of “extremely qualified” people for the job. It’s quite clear that contrary to what Matthews says, the cookie cutter choice is a white male. To say that Obama is being predictable by considering women and men of color is bizarroworld nonsense that only people in the insular beltway bubble would blurt out as if it makes sense.

Harman’s Magic Act

by dday

By a twist of fate, Jane Harman actually appeared at the AIPAC convention over the weekend, bringing full circle the recent controversy over her comments picked up on a wiretap offering help to get AIPAC staffers out of a Justice Department probe in exchange for help getting the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee. She vowed to begin a crusade against illegal wiretapping and overreach from the surveillance state.

Harman has described the wiretap as an abuse of government power. But sources have told The Washington Post that she was not being surveilled; the tapped phone belonged to the suspected Israeli agent, who happened to talk to her.

“I will not quit on this until I am absolutely sure this can never happen to anyone else,” Harman told the AIPAC audience, which warmly applauded her. She said the incident was having “a chilling effect” on members of Congress who “care intensely about the U.S.-Israeli security relationship . . . and have every right to talk to advocacy groups.”

Later, she called herself a “warrior on behalf of our Constitution and against abuse of power”. Which, coming from Harman, is utterly absurd, a magic act where she transforms herself from a vigorous defender of executive prerogatives on wiretapping to a civil liberties zealot who wants to take down the surveillance state.

Jane Harman is a warrior on behalf of the Constitution and against abuse of power — that’s the same Jane Harman who tried to bully The New York Times out of writing about Bush’s illegal spying program, who succeeded in pressuring them not to publish their story until after Bush was re-elected, who repeatedly proclaimed the program to be “legal and necessary” once it was revealed, who called the whistle-blowers “despicable”, who went on Meet the Press and expressed receptiveness to a criminal investigation of The New York Times for publishing the story, who led the way in supporting the Fourth-Amendment-gutting and safeguard-destroying FISA Amendments Act of 2008, and who demanded that telecoms be retroactively immunized for breaking multiple laws by allowing government spying on their customers without warrants of any kind.

That is who is a self-proclaimed “warrior on behalf of our Constitution and against abuse of power.”

As Atrios notes, Jane Harman is primarily concerned about wiretapping of People Named Jane Harman. And her point that this represented a potential abuse of government power, which by the way is
entirely plausible, was the entire point of people like me when we decried an illegal wiretapping program that would be ripe for abuse. You know, the one Jane Harman defended.

Worse, in the “Fact Sheet” Harman is sending around to supporters in the district, she characterizes herself as, among other things, a longtime critic of warrantless wiretapping in the most fantastical way possible:

• Harman has never supported so-called “warrantless wiretaps” on Americans. “We must use all lawful tools to detect and disrupt the plans of our enemies; signals intelligence and the work of the NSA are vital to that mission. But in doing so, it is also vital that we protect the American people’s constitutional rights.” (Press release of Dec. 21, 2005 — four days after the President declassified the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program).

• Harman introduced the LISTEN Act (H.R. 5371) with House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers to add resources to the Justice Department to ensure the issuance of individualized warrants under FISA. (Press release of May 11, 2006).

• Harman, Senator Obama, and Speaker Pelosi supported amendments to FISA to expand protections to US citizens, and give limited court-reviewed immunity to telecommunications firms that prove they relied in good faith on what they believed was a valid order to produce records. (Vote date of June 20, 2008).

She must think we’re all idiots. That vote of June 20, 2008, the amendments to FISA to “expand protections to US citizens,” in addition to providing retroactive immunity for the telecoms for breaking the law, actually granted sweeping new powers to the federal government, including the ability to “conduct mass, untargeted surveillance of all communications coming into and out of the United States, without any individualized review, and without any finding of wrongdoing.” The fact that this lack of oversight or judicial review could lead to abuses of surveillance power has been confirmed by reports that the NSA overstepped its legal authority to wiretap by intercepting the private emails and phone calls of Americans, problems which grew “out of changes enacted by Congress last July in the law that regulates the government’s wiretapping powers.” The fact that Barack Obama supported that bill, considering that he was massively criticized by progressives for that FISA vote, doesn’t exactly help the cause.

Harman’s record on wiretapping is well-known and her efforts to wiggle out of it are frankly laughable. And the rest of her record, as demonstrated by Swing State Project today, shows her to be among the top 20 Democrats voting less liberal than what their districts would support. That, more than this hypocrisy on civil liberties, is why she’ll draw a primary challenge next year, should she choose to run again.

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SIFFting Through Celluloid Is Back On

by digby

As some of you know, over the week-end I asked that readers politely let the Seattle International Film Festival know that you value Dennis Hartley’s reviews and that you would like them to kindly reconsider their denial of a press credential for him to do his work. I’m thrilled to report that they have changed their minds as a result of the outpouring of support for Dennis’ work:

Dear Digby,

Thanks so very much for bringing this to our attention. After reading all
of the letters we received over the weekend from your readers, we can
certainly ascertain that Mr. Hartley¹s reviews are read around the country,
by a loyal and passionate following. Based on this additional information
and further research, we have decided to reverse our initial decision and
will be extending press credentials to Mr. Hartley for SIFF 2009. We have
reached out to Mr. Hartley this morning to inform him personally.

I do want to assure you and your readers that we recognize the importance of
blogs and have many bloggers on our press list. We do our best in
researching all those who approach us, accrediting those with legitimate
blogs and healthy readerships. Of course, as a film festival, we are paying
most attention to those blogs that focus on film, entertainment, and pop
culture. We did not understand the impact of Mr. Hartley¹s Saturday film
reviews on what is first and foremost a political blog.

We¹re delighted to learn that so many of your readers take great interest in
independent and international film. It¹s heartening to know that, through
Mr. Hartley¹s work, readers around the world can learn a little about SIFF
and a lot about the excellent filmmakers we work so hard to showcase.

Thanks again,

Deborah

Thank you all very much for taking the time to ask them and thanks very much to Deborah Person for responding with such generosity and openness. Believe me, a lot of people wouldn’t have done that and Dennis and I both appreciate it very much.

Like the Drinking/Laughing/Living Liberally concept, I think supporting independent film, music and art is an area where we can consolidate our political/social culture a bit and I’m glad that this blog is able to contribute a little bit to that effort with Dennis’ film critiques and tristero’s world renowned music. It’s a good thing.

Left Behind

by digby

This is nice:

“The Democratic Party is geographically rich and ideologically variegated,” Reid writes. “Our many voices is the source of our strength. Sometimes, some on the left in our party don’t seem to understand this.”

And some on the right seem to feel they have veto power over the majority.

The article from which that’s lifted discusses an essay Reid has written explaining his decision to allow Lieberman to stay in the caucus. He recounts the defection of Ben Nighthorse Campbell from the Democrats in 1994 as the object lesson in never allowing the left to pressure a right wing Democrat lest they leave the party. It’s a funny lesson, considering the fact that Nighthorse Campbell said at the time that he left the party because Bill Clinton’s economic policies were too liberal and he resented the fact that he was asked to stay loyal to the party. In fact, he was quoted later saying he “only wished he’d made the change years earlier.” If Reid really thinks that he should have been accommodated so that Clinton’s economic plan would fail, he’s one hell of a leader.

Nighthorse Campbell left the Senate in 2004 after voting enthusiastically for Bush’s tax cuts. But one does wonder how much he enjoyed his independence under the Bush administration’s iron hand, which made any arm twisting Bill Clinton ever did look like child’s play. The fact is that Nighthorse Campbell was riding the 1994 Republican Revolution wave, just like a whole bunch of other craven opportunists who wanted to surf with Newtie the superstar. It was a fashion statement.

It’s pretty clear that the Democratic leadership still has an irrational fear of the DFHs, and it is irrational. Nothing “the left” is arguing for is out of the mainstream of American thought. Indeed, what “the left” wants is what President Obama and the Democratic Party ran on.

Yet, Lieberman went out on the trail with John McCain and said President Obama wasn’t qualified. Specter is changing parties not for reasons of conscience, but because he can’t win a primary as a Republican because they are batshit insane and the Dems apparently gave away the store. Most telling about all this is that with the exception of Jeffords, all recent party switchers made sure to win their elections with Democratic Party money. Both Shelby and Nighthorse Campbell switched right after they had run as Democrats and now Specter is switching ahead of the race so that he can win with Dem Party money as well. Lieberman left the party after he lost a primary and he won with Party backing anyway and then repeatedly and openly stabbed presidential its nominee in the back as often as possible.

What a great scam. But I do have to wonder why anyone, left, right or center, gives money to the party when its obviously expects absolutely nothing in return? It’s a bad bargain.

Update: I do love the fact that Politico reporter helped Reid formulate his rationale for all this.

Put most simply: The Campbell lesson helped keep Lieberman, Lieberman helped get Collins, Collins helped bring along Specter. Finally, the same type of party extremes that led Campbell to switch then drove Specter to jump.

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Reid said in response. “But that’s right. That’s good.”

That’s very cute. Nighthorse Campbell won his election with the full support of the rank and file of the party and a ton of Democratic money and then refused to support the party and left shortly after the election. And it’s exactly the same as Specter, who failed to get the support of the rank and file voters and the Republican Party and only moved to the Democrats so he could take their money and block a real Democrat from winning the seat. Got it.

Could Have Lifted A Finger

by dday

The New York Times takes notice of White House silence in the wake of Sen. Durbin’s failure on cramdown.

The Obama administration sat by last week as 12 Senate Democrats joined 39 Senate Republicans to block a vote on an amendment that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to modify troubled mortgages.

Senator Obama campaigned on the provision. And President Obama made its passage part of his antiforeclosure plan. It would have been a very useful prod to get lenders to rework bad loans rather than leaving the modification to a judge.

But when the time came to stand up to the banking lobbies and cajole yes votes from reluctant senators — the White House didn’t. When the measure failed, there wasn’t even a statement of regret.

Digby has mentioned the coming second wave of ARM recasts and accompanying foreclosures, not to mention the acceleration of foreclosures brought on by mounting job loss. As Durbin said in his floor speech, when he first offered up the cramdown option 2 million homes were threatened by foreclosure. Now we’re looking at 8 million, and nobody should expect that number to go down the next time the very serious Senate kills the provision. The Times estimates that 14 million homeowners are underwater on their mortgages. As Atrios says today, “I don’t want to hear any of this ‘nobody could have predicted’ crap from Larry and Timmeh.”

With opposition that strong, I’m not sure the President could have brought around all twelve Democrats who voted no to his side. But they might have given it a try. Because it’s clear now that the best tool for dealing with the second-order foreclosure crisis, which will affect the banks and the greater economy in an exponential way, is lost for the near future, and the consequences will be deep.

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Congratulations To Smithfield Foods!

by tristero

I missed this when it was announced in October, but Smithfield Foods won an environmental sustainability award.

Susan Forsell, Vice President Supply Chain, Quality Systems, McDonald’s USA said, “Smithfield Foods deserves to be recognized for their innovative approaches to protect the environment, to ensure the safety of their employees, the well-being of animals, the quality of products, and to promoting education in the communities they serve.”

That’s right: Smithfield won an environmental sustainability award from McDonald’s. What an honor! Of course, that must be a different Smithfield’s than this one:

In 1999,[then head of Smithfield Joseph] Luter bought a state-owned company called Animex, one of Poland’s biggest hog processors. Then he began doing business through a Polish subsidiary called Prima Farms, acquiring huge moribund Communist-era hog farms and converting them into concentrated feeding operations. Pork prices in Poland were low, so Smithfield’s sweeping expansion didn’t make strict economic sense, except that it had the virtue of pushing small hog farmers toward bankruptcy. By 2003, Animex was operating six subsidiary companies and seven processing plants, selling nine brands of meat and taking in $338 million annually.

The usual violations occurred. Near one of Smithfield’s largest plants, in Byszkowo, an enormous pool of frozen pig shit, pumped into a lagoon in winter, melted and ran into two nearby lakes. The lake water turned brown; residents in local villages got skin rashes and eye infections; the stench made it impossible to eat. A recent report to the Helsinki Commission found that Smithfield’s pollution throughout Poland was damaging the country’s ecosystems. Overapplication was endemic. Farmers without permits were piping liquid pig shit directly into watersheds that fed into the Baltic Sea.

Actually, it is the same Smithfield Foods that won the award. I guess in the past 10 years they’ve gone green. And if you believe that, there’s a hog farm down in Veracruz I’d like to sell you.

BTW, here’s a video interview with current CEO of Smithfield Foods, Larry Pope. In it, he claims that swine flu isn’t swine flu. Except he also agrees it is. It is simply impossible to parse most of what he’s saying: his sentences make sense, but they just don’t add up to a coherent meaning except for one thing: we’re working darn hard to make sure you won’t blame Smithfield. I, for one, believe him. They are indeed working darn hard to make sure you won’t blame them. (Note: to date, there is no conclusive evidence tying Smithfield hog farms to the outbreak, despite the fact that most of the earliest recent cases occurred about 12 miles away from a Smithfield subsidiary with truly disgusting conditions. )

Pope also claims, among other things that no employee or pig has gotten sick from swine flu, which, to be kind, is disingenuous. Let’s talk about the pigs first. The following statement appeared in a WHO FAQ about swine flu. It has since been removed, although a search of the sentence turns up references to it on their site as well as in this pdf:

The virus is spread among pigs by aerosols, direct and indirect contact, and asymptomatic carrier pigs.

In other words, the pigs don’t need to have swine flu symptoms to spread swine flu (again, it is important to stress that obviously pork products you buy in a store cannot spread swine flu ). [Update: Swine flu has recently been found in Canadian pigs.]

As for employees at the hog farms, they too needn’t be sick:

Although immunity to swine H1N1 viruses is low in the human population, a high proportion of persons occupationally exposed to pigs (such as pig farmers or pig veterinarians) have been shown in several studies to have antibody evidence of prior swine H1N1 flu infection.

Further swine flu news: The current virus appears to have first appeared in the US in 1998:

But let us be clear: the genetic sequences, which admirably are all being posted publicly, overwhelmingly confirm that the virus from Mexico is one of a type that has been circulating aggressively in North American pigs since 1998…

…based on the scientific details that have emerged in the past 24 hours from Andrew Rambaut’s lab at the University of Edinburgh, it is clearer than ever that there is a direct link from pigs to the human swine flu virus.

[Note: I haven’t read the material from Dr. Rambaut’s lab.]

Some folks think all the swine flu brouhaha is just so much…swill… because so far, except in Mexico, the swine flu has been mild. First, the swine flu has been spreading rapidly all over the world. Secondly, as many people point out, the first wave of infections in the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 was relatively mild. It was later waves of infection that were the most serious. Thirdly, there is no vaccine for this strain of swine flu.

Is all this reason to panic? Of course not. We’re not Republicans, for goodness sakes! But it is cause for serious concern [Update: the mortality rate has recently been estimated as being between 0.1 and 0.5%, about half the rate as the more standard flu. That doesn’t mean swine flu is “mild.” It simply underscores how dangerous all influenzas really are.]. And it is cause to investigate carefully and thoroughly how and where this virus originated and evolved.