The Execution of Troy Davis

Tom Van Dyke 17 Comments

This serves no useful purpose. The deterrent value is zero, and millions are convinced this proves once again that a black man can’t get a fair trial in America. Especially in the South.

Poking through the case against him—as minimally reported by the press but re-examined numerous times by the legal process—“beyond a reasonable doubt” on the part of the original jury is not beyond question. There is no new exculpatory evidence beyond witnesses recanting. [Would you recant testimony if it meant sparing a man’s life? I sure might.]

Again, to avoid the tall weeds of the particulars—and every advocate is an expert—the legal process has been observed every step of the way. It’s not the legal system’s job to retry a case from scratch every year for decades. Davis was convicted in 1991; he’s had 20 years of appeals on numerous and varied grounds including whether the electric chair is unconstitutional under the 8th Amendment.

[Lethal injection is now the plan; Troy Davis has just been granted an 11th hour stay.]

This isn’t a legal question, then. The law has been observed, and now it requires its pound of flesh.

The wisdom of extracting this pound of flesh is at question here. Law and its enforcement is not an end in itself; it’s the means to a better polity.

Not only does this serve no good purpose, it will make things worse in our country. This is unwise.

________

LATE ADD: The Supreme Court’s stay has been lifted.
________

LAST ADD: Troy Davis is dead.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers [for they shall be killed by their own]

Tom Van Dyke 11 Comments

Michael Collins [1890-1922], Ireland. Sought to bring an incremental peace to his troubled native land. Killed by the Irish Republican Army.

Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi [1869-1948], India. Non-violently won independence for India from the British Empire. Killed by a fellow Indian opposed to an accommodation to Pakistan, India’s Muslim twin separated/partitioned at birth.

Malcolm X/El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz [1925-1965], US. Turned from race confrontation to racial ecumenicalism with his conversion to orthodox Islam. Killed by his old mates at the race-based Nation of Islam.

Muhammad Anwar al-Sadat [1918-1981], Egypt. Partner in historic peace agreement with Israel. Egypt is suspended from the Arab League; Sadat is killed by fundamentalists in his army two years later.

Yitzhak Rabin [1922-1995], Israel. Nobel Prize-winner for his work on the Oslo Accords. Killed by a fellow Israeli opposed to them.

And now

RIP

Burhanuddin Rabbani [1940-2011], Afghanistan. Former president of Afghanistan. Was mediating a possible political peace and reconciliation with the Taliban. Killed by a Taliban suicide bomber.

Nothing to add here but the thanks of all mankind. Of all our heroes, these are our greatest. Rest now, our brothers. In Peace.

You did what you could.

Doubling Down on Audacity, or: On President Hillary

Tom Van Dyke 9 Comments

It’s an open secret that the Obama presidency stinks on ice. Nick Gillespie of the libertarian Reason mag prophetically came up with the locution as early as April of 2009:

Question to the folks, including some of the libertarian persuasion (you fools!), who were bullish on Obama back when the alternative was John McCain, the Terri Schiavo of presidential candidates: When are you going to admit that Barry O stinks on ice? That for all his high-flying and studiously empty rhetoric he’s got the biggest presidential vision deficit since George H.W. Bush puked on a Japanese prime minister (finally, revenge for that long run of Little League World Series losses in the ’70s!).

Google “Obama” and “stinks on ice” and you’re rewarded with an avalanche.

You fools. But that’s not to say Americans think John McCain would have been a better president. Me neither; albeit an unapolegetic gentleman of the right, there’s a limit to partisanship and what I can say with a straight face. Americans sensed there was something not quite right with Sen. McCain, and his first two executive decisions, his choice of VP and ditching the campaign trail in reaction to the budget crisis, showed an astonishing lack of prudence, the thing we need most in a Commander-in-Chief.

In a recent Bloomberg poll, “Twenty-nine percent say things would be better if McCain were president, while 28 percent say things would be about the same and 35 percent say the nation would be in worse shape.”

There’s little nostalgia for what might have been with a President McCain. 29 percent represents the GOP hard core more or less. By contrast, “34 percent say things would be better under a [Hillary] Clinton administration, [with] almost half — 47 percent — saying things would be about the same and 13 percent say worse.”

Now, the crosstabs are limited, but I think there’s less than meets the eye here. 44% of the Tea Party types [27%, according to the poll] went Hillary over Obama. If they hate McCain as much as he hates them, the better numbers for a Hillary presidency over a McCain presidency start to reconcile right out of the box.

Me, I think Mrs. Bill Clinton was arguably the best of the three. Unlike BHO, she knew where the White House bathrooms are, and unlike McCain [metaphorically] and her husband [literally], she knows how to keep it in her pants. Hillary is a statesman.

[I was going to do more analysis and crosstabbing on the Bloomberg poll because it’s been a 24/7 news hit, but you know, I found its 45% approval for BHO a high outlier, its questions leading, and its poll sample highly questionable, like 27% reporting income above $100K, where the true nat’l number is perhaps a third less. Polls. Whatever.]

Back to BHO, I think Gillespie was rather wrong—Candidate Obama had a vision for this country.

President Obama is right back on the trail with what is putatively a “jobs bill,” but its main feature is raising taxes on the rich. Dude has a serious bug up his ass about “wealth inequality.” Wealth “equality,” the bastard child of “the rich must pay their fair share?”

My problem is, I dunno what a “fair share” is, and I’ve never been moved by arguments of “tax fairness,” whether it be from the right [too much] or left [too little]. Whatever works. We all benefit from a country at relative peace, roads, running water and sewers, food that probably won’t kill you and almost uncountable other little things. Let’s get real. If Bill Gates had spent most of his adult life in the crapper with dysentery, you wouldn’t even be reading this on yr computer screen about now.

The capital gains tax, on money made not of a man’s labor but the money he already has [or inherited or stole] is the last thing I’d consider as sacred. 15%? 50%? Whatever works, and fills the public treasury to the maximum and most efficient degree.

The last thing anyone should hold sacred for its own sake is money. So guess what’s on the block? Capital gains. “The Buffett Rule,” “The Millionaire Tax.” We all sort of agree that we shouldn’t tax a Bill Gates or Warren Buffett on the way up, but when do we decide he’s stopped creating wealth for all of us and he’s on the way down, and it’s time to hit him bigtime?

This new Obamajob thing. Will it create jobs? Can it ever pass? It doesn’t even matter anymore. I’m not one for psychoanalyzing pols, esp the guy who sits in The Big Chair. We all got our mishigas. But one thing I’ve noticed in life is when somebody gives a pontifical self-analysis, believe the 180.

“I think one of the criticisms that is absolutely legitimate about my first two years was that I was very comfortable with a technocratic approach to government … a series of problems to be solved. …

Carter, Clinton and I all have sort of the disease of being policy wonks.”

Um, no, 180. Clinton and arguably Carter were policy wonks. From the first, BHO left the details to others, even the drafting of his signature achievement, the Obamacare bill. BHO is completely disinterested in whether something will work, although I’m sure he hopes it will. That’s an ideologue, “vision” up the wazoo, Mr. Gillespie.

Even now, there is no Obamajobs bill. Pass it, said President Obama, a week ago. “If you love me,” at that. I suppose the American people could call to double down on the audacity of electing him in the first place, if only the bill existed in the first place.

Let’s pass it anyway. What could possibly go wrong?

[This is not to say the GOP won’t come up with somebody as bad as McCain in 2012 and BHO still won’t be the better choice. At least he knows where the White House bathrooms are now. This is no small thing, metaphorically speaking.]

Oh, Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Rage

Tom Van Dyke

zzzzzzProtestors gathered in Lower Manhattan for what some called the United States Day of Rage. PHOTO: Robert Stolarik

NYT:

At William Street, [the protestors] were blocked from proceeding toward the stock exchange, and the march ended in front of a Greek Revival building housing Cipriani Wall Street. Patrons on a second-floor balcony peered down.

As some of the patrons laughed and raised drinks, the protesters responded by pointing at them and chanting “pay your share.”

So it goes.

What Would the Founders Do?: Liberty and Slander

Tom Van Dyke 9 Comments

Not one of us has ever written what he thinks on the internet without being rewarded with attacks personal, unfair and scurrilous.

Blog moderators tend to let it slide, First Amendment and all that.

What Would the Founders Do, somebody asked the other day.

As usual, Ben Franklin supplies the needed wisdom:

ben

“… I have been at a loss to imagine any that may not be construed an infringement of the sacred liberty of the press. At length, however, I think I have found one that, instead of diminishing general liberty, shall augment it; which is, by restoring to the people a species of liberty, of which they have been deprived by our laws, I mean the liberty of the cudgel.

“In the rude state of society prior to the existence of laws, if one man gave another ill language, the affronted person would return it by a box on the ear, and, if repeated, by a good drubbing; and this without offending against any law. But now the right of making such returns is denied, and they are punished as breaches of the peace; while the right of abusing seems to remain in full force, the laws made against it being rendered ineffectual by the liberty of the press.

“My proposal then is, to leave the liberty of the press untouched, to be exercised in its full extent, force, and vigor; but to permit the liberty of the cudgel to go with it pari passu. Thus, my fellow-citizens, if an impudent writer attacks your reputation, dearer to you perhaps than your life, and puts his name to the charge, you may go to him as openly and break his head. If he conceals himself behind the printer, and you can nevertheless discover who he is, you may in like manner way-lay him in the night, attack him behind, and give him a good drubbing.”

I’m a devout Franklinist, BTW. Liberty of the Cudgel. I like it, bigtime. Word up.

Global Warming Consensus, Minus One

Tom Van Dyke 133 Comments

On a major Vision of the Anointed, anthropomorphic global warming climate change, a Nobel laureate in physics includes himself out:

Dr. Ivar Giaever, a former professor with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday, Sept. 13, from the premier physics society in disgust over its officially stated policy that “global warming is occurring.”

The official position of the American Physical Society (APS) supports the theory that man’s actions have inexorably led to the warming of the planet, through increased emissions of carbon dioxide.

Giaever was cooled to the statement on warming theory by a line claiming that “the evidence is inconvertible.”

“In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”

Now, I’d like to use a “mainsteam” source for this instead of Fox, but a google doesn’t show any of them reporting it yet. Perhaps The New York Times will mention it in its own good time, but regardless, we should not expect a fawning tribute to Dr. Giaever in the NYT Magazine, as the brave rebel who gave the intellectual finger to the reigning academic Powers That Be.

The Leviathan of the Anointed has two heads, the academic establishment and the traditional media, a synchronized one-two bite that’s impressively deadly to its foes: one plays the game and the other prints the box scores, where the good guys always win.

I had an interesting exchange with an academician recently, the author of a new book for the Harvard University Press presumably on history, but really appears to be a Coulter-style polemic [sans wit and originality] against the fundamentalist Religious Right, therefore against the right, therefore against the GOP, therefore Vote Democrat. We Anointed-watchers are already familiar with this script. Even street-fighter James Carville knows the lines by heart:

“…these creationism-loving, global-warming-denying, immigration-bashing, Social-Security-cutting, clean-air-hating, mortality-fascinated, Wall-Street-protecting Republicans running my country.”

The rhetorical tactic is that creationism [on which the academy is surely correct] is leveraged into the self-evident truth of the academy’s other left-liberal positions on everything else: ecology, sociology, sexuality, history. Policy.

I recently declined an invitation into the tall weeds of the AGW debate; two commenters accepted it and spent hours and hours of research and cut-and-paste to the net effect of zero. So I decline again–my point then and now is that the Anointed have squandered the public trust on all these issues, with their claims that “the case is closed” and the strong-arming of their critics under cover of scholarly authority.

No surprise, then, that one recent poll found “69 percent of those polled believe it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs. Just 6 percent felt confident enough to report that such falsification was “not at all likely.”

Another poll found that 57% of Americans trust the media to report “fully, accurately and fairly” not very much or not at all. The Great Unwashed may be dumb, but they ain’t blind.

Our civic problem remains epistemological: that’s why we can barely have an adult discussion across ideological lines anymore. It’s my opinion that the Anointed of the academy and the media have betrayed their trust by their tactics. Whether or not that opinion is true, what’s a fact is that they have lost their trust and authority with a strong majority of the American public, and that’s the name of this tune.

Me, I don’t think academic alphabet soup after one’s name or a byline in the NYT liberates anyone from the bias and shading of the argument that we’re all prone to.

Because The Anointed are people, too. Sort of.

Abortion, Infanticide, Murder, and Slippery Slopes

Tim Kowal 88 Comments

From Huffington Post back in November 2009, waiving off the accusation that abortion is a slippery slope to murder:

The [South Carolina State House "born alive"] bill legitimizes the myth of the baby-killing doctor and seizes upon a fictional abortion scenario to imply that, even if the abortion is first-trimester and the fetus is palm-sized, it’s a slippery slope from abortion to murder. And the kind of people involved with abortion — doctors, women, activists — are so morally reprehensible that they can’t be trusted to observe the boundaries between a legal medical procedure and a crime.

Then, less than two years later, there’s this story from CBC News in Canada (via Mark Steyn):

The Wetaskiwin, Alta., woman convicted of infanticide for killing her newborn son, was given a three-year suspended sentence Friday by an Edmonton Court of Queen’s Bench judge.

Katrina Effert was 19 on April 13, 2005, when she secretly gave birth in her parents’ home, strangled the baby boy with her underwear and threw the body over a fence into a neighbour’s yard.

She silently wept as Justice Joanne Veit outlined the reasons for the suspended sentence. Effert will have to abide by conditions for the next three years but she won’t spend time behind bars for strangling her newborn son.

. . . .

The fact that Canada has no abortion laws reflects that "while many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support," she writes.

. . . .

"Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother."

The girl who killed her baby only faces actual jail time “for throwing her baby’s body over the fence.”

Why “not every human problem deserves a law”

Tim Kowal 70 Comments

In the comments to my previous post on California Gov. Jerry Brown’s veto message, I said:

I cannot subscribe to a theory of government in which all our choices are reduced to a crib sheet and then regulated, penalized, mandated, or outlawed based on the conclusions of government actuaries. Man is not a sprig in an organ vat, as Dostoyevsky said. Law should not be made to replace the need for virtue and social norms and good sense, and if once we’ve come to depend on it for such, we will have already ceased to be a republic.

Creon Critic wonders how this view answers questions about mandating kids’ skiing headgear, motorcycle helmets, seat belt laws, car seat laws, and the like.  That is, “Do all these public health cases (and all my fretting about disease burdens) fall under the freedom you described earlier as ‘freedom to make ill-advised, economically inefficient decisions’?”

Trizzlor similarly asks whether I am really just an empiricist who would join in supporting things like helmet laws and babysitter laws so long as I was satisfied there exists a “significant pattern of abuse.” 

First, let me explain more clearly what I mean by my comment that “man is not a sprig in an organ vat” and thus the government is not mean to control for—by which is meant to regulate, license, fine, credit, prohibit, or mandate—his every inclination toward some preset conception of optimal efficiency.  Conservatism and libertarianism are in agreement in their aversion to government interference in activity that is legitimate even though perhaps improvident.  They part ways when it comes to activity that is illegitimate (though that determination is often deemed to be subjective, a principal reason libertarians reject the distinction).  Thus, conservatives who join libertarians in rejecting motorcycle helmet laws and seat belt laws will also turn around and support the criminalization of recreational narcotics and prostitution. 

Liberalism, on the other hand, embraces the notion of government as an instrument toward efficiency in certain vogue humanitarian objectives—e.g., health, egalitarianism, economic security, social acceptance, etc.  In this way, liberalism is exclusive of both conservatism and libertarianism.  At the same time, however, liberalism rejects the traditional, conservative notions of what constitutes “illegitimate” activity.  Thus, liberalism and libertarianism find common ground on issues like gay marriage, abortion, and the legalization of certain recreational narcotics.

Completing the triangulation of these three political theories, liberalism also shares some common ground with conservatism to the extent illegitimate activities (the regulation of which conservatism favors) are also empirically sub-optimal activities (the regulation of which liberalism favors).  Thus, conservatism and liberalism might reach the same result with respect to issues like polygamy (to conservatives, a threat to traditional marriage; to liberals, a threat to women’s rights), prostitution (to conservatives, a sexual morality issue; to liberals, a sexual health issue), and certain hard drugs (to conservatives, a question of temperance; to liberals, a question of preventing harm to oneself). 

With that rubric in mind, as a conservative I reject helmet laws because they have no normative component.  They are merely a question of prudence.  If someone wants to bear his own risk in not wearing a helmet, I am content to leave him that choice.  My disapproval of that choice is qualitatively no different than were he to invest his life savings in a single stock rather than in a diversified portfolio.  So as to these questions, the conservative’s response is no different than the libertarian’s response.

To questions such as whether kids should be mandated to wear state-approved headgear while skiing, or whether adults should be mandated to wear seat belts while driving, I think the conservative/libertarian response will vary from “no way/never,” to something more like “provided there is a demonstrated need for such a law.”  I fall in the latter camp. 

Consider, however, what a “demonstrated need” for a law would look like.  It cannot simply be the fact that some people are suffering the eminently predictable consequences of their risks, otherwise we are removing the freedom to take the legitimate risk in the first place.  Instead, there must be something unusual about the risk or otherwise unpredictable about the outcomes that warrant the law intervening in some way as to correct the misinformation problem.  In this way, such laws will actually promote freedom rather than inhibit it. 

On that note, consider that a low threshold to regulating, sanctioning, mandating, and/or prohibiting activity in all cases—except perhaps by accident—subverts freedom in favor of the lawmaker’s desired outcome. This makes freedom merely instrumental to other political objectives.

In the conservative/libertarian approach, then, it will be the exceptional case where need is demonstrated sufficient to justify limiting a legitimate individual choice.  It does not appear to have been demonstrated in the case of the proposed headgear bill put before Gov. Brown.  He was right to veto it.

California Governor Jerry Brown vetoes ski helmet mandate, language bill, and higher cell phone fines: “Not every human problem deserves a law”

Tim Kowal 4 Comments

In the comments to my recent piece on the new babysitter legislation on its way to becoming law in California, co-blogger Tom Van Dyke mentioned that Gov. Jerry Brown “has a righteous spark.”  The very next day, Gov. Brown proved him right by vetoing a ridiculous bill (yes, it made it through both houses of this state’s dysfunctional legislature) that would have criminalized child skiing and snowboarding without state-approved headgear.  In his veto message, Gov. Brown reminded his fellow Democrats in the state legislature the limits of lawmaking:

To the Members of the California State Senate:

I am returning Senate Bill 105 without my signature.

This measure would impose criminal penalties on a child under the age of 18 and his or her parents if the child skis or snowboards without a helmet.

While I appreciate the value of wearing a ski helmet, I am concerned about the continuing and seemingly inexorable transfer of authority from parents to the state.  Not every human problem deserves a law. 

I believe parents have the ability and responsibility to make good choices for their children.  [Emphasis added.]

The bill had been introduced by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, the lawmaker who earlier this year proposed making it illegal for businesses in the state to require its employees to speak any specific language.  I wrote about that proposal here.  Gov. Brown vetoed that bill, too.

Cleaning up the inning, Gov. Brown also vetoed a measure to increase base fines for using a cell phone while driving by $50 on the first offense and $100 on subsequent offenses.  The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the measure “would have brought the total penalty to $328 for the first offense and $528 for subsequent offenses. It also would have applied to bicyclists, but with lower penalties.”

As participants in our previous discussion recall, I noted the same wrongheaded yet pervasive approach to lawmaking that Gov. Brown criticizes in his veto message.  Specifically, while we can agree that most proposed laws have in mind the enforcement of some nice-sounding objective, the law is not an appropriate instrument to achieve every such objective.  To the (surprising) number of you who defended the babysitting bill, then, I want to know your response to Gov. Brown here.  Do you agree with his vetoes of these bills?  If you agree, how does the basis for that agreement square with your support for the babysitter law?

[Cross-posted at the main page]