A convincing case for Bush impeachment

is made by former Reagan official Bruce Fein on BloggingHeads. And for the record, I still prefer Bush over Kerry. It won't happen due to the fact that Bush was smart enough to enlarge presidential powers for all subsequent presidents, so no one will have the incentive to give any of them up.

Talking to the police

Watch this video - it's a lecture by a law professor and a detective, both of whom agree on practically everything, it's weird.

The Scooter Libby commutation inspires a detached nausea in me

One of the main selling points of the rule of law is that everyone has to abide by the same ones. Or not...

Bush commutes Libby's prison sentence
President Bush commuted Monday the prison term of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, facing 30 months in prison after a federal court convicted him of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators.

Sure, the investigation seemed to be centered around something that wasn't a crime. Fine. But Libby had every opportunity to plead the fifth and he didn't. Instead he lied under oath.

I've long maintained that one of the great social blunders of my lifetime was not convicting Clinton for perjury in the Lewinsky case. Not that the crime itself was terribly notable, but setting a high, enforced standard of the rule of law would have changed subsequent presidents for the better.

Signs of progress

In policing Atlanta anyway

Atlanta police have virtually stopped seeking search warrants for drugs following the November shooting of an elderly woman and dropped — at least temporarily — the forced-entry tactics that led to her death, court records show.

In the six months since Kathryn Johnston died in a botched police raid, Atlanta narcotics officers have not sought a single "no-knock" search warrant, court records show. They served at least 25 no-knock warrants during a comparable six-month period a year earlier.

Reason has prevailed, at least temporarily.

Two for Monday

• Sandy Berger gives up his law license, which makes me thing that there is some serious hiding going on.
• More on the rogue Atlanta narcotics squad. Unmentioned is any mention of the judges and magistrates who rubber stamp all this crap. Ideally they would be help liable for any fraudulent warrants they sign, but that will never happen.
  

Flying Squads

Unbeknowst to me, before now, the Justice Department sends out teams to fight street level crime in cities around the country. The Yahoo News article lists it's failures, which are to be expected. It's hard to see how it could be successful when all of it's efforts and managements are so insulated from feedback. Sending out federal people to deal exclusively with local crime is a troubling trend.

The mother of all abortion posts

Glen Whitman has pretty much all of the abortion analogies (all five of them) that enter the logical debate about the topic.

It's an odd thing. I used to debate him quite frequently on a now-defunct website, and he caused me to change my position on what the legality of early-term abortion should be with analogy number five

The Negligent Driver. When you negligently or deliberately cause harm to another person, the law requires you to provide compensation, either with money or some kind of action. If your negligent driving puts a pedestrian in the hospital, you are liable for his medical bills. Likewise, one might argue, your sexual behavior creates the risk of placing a fetus in a very precarious situation. If so, you are liable for the fetus’s care during that time. This analogy emphasizes the responsibility of people for the risks they create, thereby dodging the previous analogy’s “no invitation” problem. The difficulty with this analogy comes from the definition of “harm.” Harm doesn’t mean being in a difficult situation – it means being in a worse situation than you would have been otherwise. Were it not for your reckless driving, the pedestrian would (in all likelihood) still be walking around, safe and sound. Were it not for the act of sex, the fetus would not exist at all. To sustain the claim that the act of sex creates a risk of harm to the fetus, you have to insist that existence in a dependent state is worse than sheer non-existence. If the act of sex constitutes a tort, it is the only tort I can think of that creates the very person it victimizes.

I'm the only person I know of who changes his mind on abortion due to a logical argument.

Your tax dollars at work

After being hyped for years, the label "The Imperial Presidency" seems to be coming true.

A Justice Department official will refuse to answer questions during a Senate committee hearing on the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, citing her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself, her lawyer said Monday.

All of this hubbub for something that the president has the explicit power to do (fire US attorneys), he just can't look statesmanlike in doing so. Proving once again that the genius of the American political system lies in impeding the politicians, not empowering them.

The pro-war libertarian quiz

The ever interesting reason magazine posted

The Pro-war Libertarian Quiz

How far are you willing to go to win the War on Terror?

These days I'm more for finishing Iraq favorably than pro-war, but I am strongly against just "declaring victory" or "strategic redeployment" without really changing anything.

Recently, here are my answers

1. Should the National Security Agency or CIA have the ability to monitor domestic phone calls or e-mails without obtaining judicial approval?
   
   Nope. I think this is an impeachable offense too. The current case (supposedly) only monitored calls that crossed borders, which is legally a different matter, if I'm understanding things correctly.


2. Should the government have the ability to hold an American citizen without charge, indefinitely, without access to a lawyer, if he is believed to be part of a terrorist cell?
   
   No. If caught on the battlefield I support stripping them of citizenship (by virtue of them being a foreign army and then treating them as one would a foreigner).


3. Can you imagine a situation in which the government would be justified in waterboarding an American citizen?
   
   Yes. This question doesn't belong here at all. This should be subject to warrants as well, but there are several situations where this could be the right thing to do.


4. Are there American journalists who should be investigated for possible treason? Should Sedition laws be re-introduced?
   
   If they committed treason (using the standard definition that is unrelated to journalism) ,then yes. If not, then no. No to sedition laws. FYI - I consider freedom of the press to mean publishing, not protecting confidentiality of sources. They should be able to publish whatever they want, its the cover-ups and withholding information that I don't consider protected.
   


5. Should the CIA be able to legally assassinate people in countries with which the U.S. is not at war?
   
   Yes


6. Should anti-terrorism cops be given every single law-enforcement tool available in non-terrorist cases?
   
   No. I guess this is really asking is if we should have super-cops or not.


7. Should law enforcement be able to seize the property of a suspected (though not charged) American terrorist, and then sell it?
   
   No. Absolutely not. Due process of law in all things.
   


8. Should the U.S. military be tasked with enforcing domestic crime?
   
   No. With a possible exception of keeping order in case of natural disasters.


9. Should there be a national I.D. card, and should it be made available to law enforcement on demand?
   
   No.


10. Should a higher percentage of national security-related activities and documents be made classified, and kept from the eyes of the Congress, the courts, and the public?
    
    No. Anything classified should have an automatic sunset date commensurate to it's secrecy, but nothing should be indefinite.
    

8 out of 10.

This is weird and scary

Private industry eavesdropping

The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone -- for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts.

Criminals can use such records to expose a government informant who regularly calls a law enforcement official.

Suspicious spouses can see if their husband or wife is calling a certain someone a bit too often.

And employers can check whether a worker is regularly calling a psychologist -- or a competing company.

I've been wondering about this. I wonder how much the media does this as well. There has been very little coverage about cell phone privacy since Gingrich was recorded illegally several years ago. PGP encryption coverage has been curiously non-existent as well.

Thoughts on torture

According to this Instapundit post, large majorities in many modern countries support the legal use of torture in extraordinary circumstances. There is even the line that it should be "legal, safe and rare".

I'm still not quite sure how I feel about it. I am willing to say that it is a trade-off. While we gain information we lose some degree of moral high-ground and reputation (which has other long run costs), and there will inevitably be lots and lots of mistakes as with any government endeavor.

But what does one do in the ticking time-bomb situation, or what you reasonably think is one? You've got bloody hands either through action or inaction.

Interesting

Jose Padilla is being charged with actual crimes, and not as an enemy combatant. This is a good thing I think. American citizenship does and should draw a clear line on who gets charged with what.

Wednesday round up

1. Torture Warrants - it deals with everything honestly I suppose.
2. Google founders buy a private jet - and yet "We've worked very hard to make sure our [net] impact on the environment is positive"
3. The gutlessness of the Republican party is amazing.
4. Kinky!
5. Topless protesters - though after a certain age one's cause doesn't really break even in effectiveness. The organization is called "Breasts not bombs" though I see no reason why we can't have both.
6. Ayn Rand's cover illustrator is still alive and has some wonderful art on his site. I highly recommend it. His prints are exhorbitantly expensive sadly.
7. Wonderful pulp art (the Shadow) from Micah Wright, who it would seem is a fraud in his other endeavors.
8. Twinsparc has released SaySo.org
   

Victory!

Miers withdraws!

Now Janice Rogers Brown perhaps?

Curiously this was not buried during the weekend.

Saturday morning rapid fire

1. A good short history of the Davis Bacon act
2. A longer piece about Edward R Morrow (real name Egbert Roscoe Murrow I found out) and his dealing with Joe McCarthy. Short version - McCarthy bad, but Communist threat real, and the new Clooney movie inaccurately gives credit to Morrow for a lot of other people's work. The article is well worth reading in it's entirety.
3. A fairly brutal piece on Harriet Miers in National Review Online who correctly see that Supreme Court picks are not a zero sum game.

   So, we have reason to fear, will be the case with Miers. And even if she does not become a Blackmun, her record strongly suggests she will be an O’Connor — a split-the-difference judge. As one of her former colleagues has said of her, Miers’s office was the “place where the action stopped and the hand-wringing began.” If she follows that course, we will be left with a Court that retains immense and inappropriate lawmaking power but refuses to make clear laws. The rule of law is based on the making of arguments and the giving of reasons, not on sentiment or group loyalty — which is the basis on which Miers’s defenders want us to support her.

4. We live in strange times when Ann Coultier is correct in direction and degree. In her column "Does this Law Degree Make my Resume Look Fat?" she makes a strong case that against Miers.
   

Two unrelated things

Via Instapundit, some thoughts on profiling and lawsuits

As I recall, though, the detainees were charged with various crimes -- such as immigration law violations, etc. -- not simply with "being Muslim." And, in fact, these guys were apparently guilty: "Elmaghraby and Iqbal were deported to their home countries after serving time for charges unrelated to terrorism -- Elmaghraby for a counterfeiting charge and Iqbal for fraud."

Prosecutors enjoy nearly unlimited discretion on whom to prosecute, and if federal prosecutors chose to prosecute people they feared might have terror connections for unrelated crimes I don't see how that can make out a constitutional violation. Perhaps, though, I misunderstand the claim, as the story isn't very clear.

And my favorite Irish band from Wisconsin, the Kissers have an interesting tour blog.

An amazing conflict of interest

Family of Red Sox fan sues gun maker

In May, the city of Boston settled a lawsuit by Snelgrove's family for $5 million. As part of the settlement, the city cooperated in the suit against the gun maker and will receive half of any damage award, up to $2 million.

Is it me, or switching sides like that a monumental conflict of interests?

Social Decline

From the article Police: Witnesses mum in rap mogul's shooting

"It's disturbing that someone can let off six shots in a packed club and can escape without being arrested," said Elliott Wilson, editor in chief of the rap magazine XXL. "The hip-hop community doesn't trust the police to confide info to them, and in turn the police have done little to make us feel like they give a damn about our safety. It's a vicious cycle."

He said this out loud. As if giving information on someone who had shot a member of the "hip-hop community" was some sort of deep favor to the police. Sigh.

Nighttime thinking

It's probably meaningful that I come across this article on Urban surveillance networks and this article on profiling on the same day. Both of them are worth reading.

Consider the following statement.

An overwhelming majority of Americans think that racial profiling is wrong. A lesser number think that racial profiling is not worth doing under ordinary circumstances, a smaller number think it's not worth doing under any circumstance.

The above is an accurate description of public sentiment when 100% of the factor is race. Gender and age are usually thrown in as well. The above still holds true.

But what happens when race is one factor of 50 and the profiling is being done by a computer? Assume a surveillance server can determine, height, weight, approximate age, race, gender, posture, gait, clothes, et al. Does it become acceptable at that point?

This line of thought reminds of the last Supreme Court affirmative action decision where it was said that it was wrong for people to discriminate, but fine for computers to do so.

Thoughts on the Supreme Court selection

I think it's tactically brilliant. By nominating a qualified but recordless (where did he find this guy?) judge he puts the Democrats in a very difficult position.

Bush will probably have 3 opportunities to nominate judges. The Democrats have a limited amount of resources to expend fighting the nomination. If they adopt a scorched earth policy on Roberts they will have nothing left PR-wise should Bush nominate a more naturally appealing candidate (i.e. black/female, aka Janice Rodgers Brown) as his next nomination.

Most likely they will play this one very mellow and save all their capital for the next fight.

I like Rehnquist

From CNN

"I want to put to rest the speculation and unfounded rumors of my imminent retirement," Rehnquist said in a statement released through his family. "I am not about to announce my retirement. I will continue to perform my duties as chief justice as long as my health permits."

He wants to go out on his shield, how cool.