12.05.30, early morning, Liberty Park

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Liberty and Due Process in America: Indefinite Detention without Due Process

Jonathan Weisman, House Vote Upholds Indefinite Detention of Terror Suspects NYTimes (May 18, 2012):
"The House on Friday turned back an unusual coalition of liberals and conservatives and voted down legislation to reject explicitly the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects apprehended on United States soil....
"Well before the final vote, the White House promised a veto if the final version maintained the House spending levels and tied President Obama’s hands on detainee and nuclear policies. ......
"The Defense Authorization Act is required each year to set Pentagon policy and spending levels, but House Republicans have turned it into a showcase for their opposition to Obama administration policies.

"This year, Democratic leaders had some surprise support. Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, a Tea Party-backed freshman Republican, teamed up with Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, to declare that terrorism suspects apprehended on United States soil should not be detained indefinitely without charge or trial.

"But the left-right coalition fizzled in the face of charges that the two lawmakers were coddling terrorists. On the 238-to-182 vote against the amendment, as many Democrats — 19 — voted against it as Republicans voted for it.

"'We’ve got a ways to go still, but there are a lot of Republicans who are listening now,' Mr. Amash said. 'I’m confident that most of them are going to go back to their districts, and they are going to get hammered on this issue.'"

        

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Putin's Democratic Order

Ellen Barry, Putin Reaches Down to the Assembly Line for First Appointment NYTimes (May 18, 2012):
"Mr. Putin’s first high-level appointment as president was Igor R. Kholmanskikh, 42, a tank-factory worker from the Urals who is famous for one thing: offering to travel to Moscow with a gang of assembly-line workers to chase antigovernment protesters off the streets.

"'If the militia, or the police, as it’s now called, can’t handle it, then me and the boys are ready to come out and defend stability,' Mr. Kholmanskikh said during a live television broadcast in December, bringing a broad, happy smile to Mr. Putin’s face. 'Of course, within the boundaries of the law,' he added hastily."        

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Elizabeth Warren: Fodder for a New Pudd'nhead Wilson

Amy Davidson, Elizabeth Warren's Native American Question (blog), New Yorker (May 8, 2012):

"Warren, a Harvard Law School professor who is running for Senate in Massachusetts against Scott Brown, has said that she is one thirty-second Cherokee—which, under tribal rules, could be enough—and there is apparently genealogical evidence to back her up. What makes her identification with the tribe feel scattershot, if not outright opportunistic, is that she reportedly only listed herself publicly that way from about 1986 until the mid-nineties, in her first academic posts, and then stopped doing so after getting the appointment at Harvard. This is why the Boston Herald, which broke the story, has taken to calling her 'Fauxcahontas.'

"When first asked about the directory listing, she told the Herald,

I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off.

"She put herself down as Native American for the lunch invitations, and stopped when none were forthcoming? Hearing that from a woman who knows how to be straightforward—and who would now surely be able to issue some invitations on her own—one can’t help but wince. ... The problem is that even if you accept Warren’s explanation entirely at face value—that this was all about a Native American woman looking for other Native Americans to talk to—it doesn’t sound good. She doesn’t appear to have looked very hard, for one thing. No one has an obligation to be a spokesman or advocate for any ethnic group, or to turn one’s life into a readable catalog. And yet what Warren is saying is that when she was a junior faculty member, and relatively powerless, she opened herself up, waiting to be asked; as a senior professor, and in a position to be the asker, or at least a resource, she took her name off the list."

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The Very Rev. Al Sharpton, Civil Rights Leader

Alan Feuer,  Asking How Sharpton Pays for Those Suits; Case Offers Glimpse of His Finances, NY Times (Dec. 21, 2000): 
"He says he owns no suits, but has 'access' to a dozen or so. He says he owns no television set because the one he watches in his home was purchased by a company he runs. He says he has no checking accounts, no savings accounts, no credit cards, no debit cards, no mutual funds, no stocks, no bonds, no paintings, no antiques. The only thing he admits to owning is a $300 wristwatch and a 20-year-old wedding ring.

"The finances of the Rev. Al Sharpton have a somewhat troubled history. He was indicted on charges of income tax fraud and stealing from charitable donors in 1989, but was eventually acquitted at a trial. In 1993, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of failing to file a tax return for 1986. His eponymous promotional company has no official documents on record with the state. As recently as two years ago, he drew no salary, but he still manages to send his daughters to an expensive and respected private school.

"Mr. Sharpton has always been studiously circumspect when talking about his pocketbook in public, yet this month he suddenly announced that he could not afford to pay a judgment entered against him in the Tawana Brawley defamation case. ...

...

"Among the quirks that surfaced from Mr. Sharpton's answers [in a deposition] were these: he owns no silverware or stereos, he has not filed tax returns since 1998 and he uses the front door of his Brooklyn home for business visitors and the back for family and friends. He drew a tangled road map of his finances that might well have confused a professional tax accountant. He said 99 percent of the salary he made from his nonprofit corporation was immediately invested into a private promotional company called Rev. Als Productions -- making sure to indicate that there was no apostrophe before the S in 'Als.'"

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A Category Mistake: Biology and Religion

The language of contemporary philosophy is often ungainly. But sometimes such language is quite apt. For example, Paul Bloom, in a review of Edward O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth, writes:

"Wilson’s careful and clear analysis reminds us that scientific accounts of our origins aren’t just more accurate than religious stories; they are also a lot more interesting."

But religious stories are "interesting" in their own way. (Some of us find questions about the meaning of life interesting.) And religious stories ordinarily aren't meant to be "scientific accounts." If religious accounts are interesting and accurate, they are that for reasons that are different from those that make scientific accounts "interesting and accurate" -- unless, of course, one grants Professor Bloom's presupposition that spiritual matters are uninteresting and unreal. (N.B. By saying this, I do not commit myself to a dualism of body and spirit.)

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Latvia Rises from the (Recent Economic) Ashes?

Milda Seputyte, Latvian Economy Quickens to Maintain Fastest Pace in EU, Bloomberg Businessweek (May 10, 2012).

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Ambiguous Career Advice

Advice for the Class of 2012: Don’t Try to Be Great
Posted May 3, 2012 9:00 AM CDT

By Debra Cassens Weiss

Commencement speakers who urge you to aspire to great things don’t have your happiness in mind.
Charles Wheelan, an economist who has studied well being, says commencement speakers should instead advise you: Don’t try to be great. “Being great involves luck and other circumstances beyond your control,” Wheelan says in an article for the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.). “The less you think about being great, the more likely it is to happen. And if it doesn't, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being solid.”



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Richard Lugar

The word is much overused but, Richard Lugar: statesman. He should be proud for having contributed much to world peace and the world's welfare. And he should have been President. He also should have been a Nobel Peace Prize winner, a prize he would have gotten the old-fashioned way: by earning it. (Perhaps the latter achievement remains within his grasp?)

May Indiana's Democratic candidate for the Senate prevail. Lugar's defeat in the primary is a sin that cannot be forgiven.

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