Author: NewMexiKen

Tommy Chong’s take on Paris

I’d sworn to myself that I wouldn’t have any more stuff about P.H., but some of Tommy Chong on The Colbert Report is pretty funny.

By the way, during all the “health” issues last week, did anyone mention that Ms. Hilton just maybe was going through drug and alcohol withdrawal? If so, I didn’t see or read about it.

Although I suppose it’s not as if the L.A. County Jail is a drug free zone.

Video via Crooks and Liars.

Elsewhere, the best Paris Hilton-related line of the day, so far:

This guy [Dr. Steven Hoefflin who saw Paris Hilton while she was at home last week] used to be Michael Jackson’s former plastic surgeon and has also done work on Sylvester Stallone, Joan Rivers, and Janet Jackson. So really, he’s less of a doctor, and more of a guy with a scalpel who has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. I really have no idea why Paris would be seeing him, since you’d get about the same quality of work from a blender.

The Superficial

Best rhetorical question of the day, so far

Although its ultimate resolution is complicated, the question raised by Al-Marri is a clear and simple one: Does the President have the power — and/or should he have it — to arrest individuals on U.S. soil and keep them imprisoned for years and years, indefinitely, without charging them with a crime, allowing them access to lawyers or the outside world, and/or providing a meaningful opportunity to contest the validity of the charges?

How can that question not answer itself? Who would possibly believe that an American President has such powers, and more to the point, what kind of a person would want a President to have such powers? That is one of a handful of powers which this country was founded to prevent.

Glenn Greenwald

To repeat: That is one of a handful of powers which this country was founded to prevent.

More Greenwald:

Anyone who believes that the President should have the power to order individuals inside the U.S. imprisoned forever with no charges and no process is someone who, by definition, simply does not believe in the political system of the United States.

How States Rank on Health Care

Hawaii leads and Oklahoma lags on a new state scorecard about health system performance.

The scorecard is the first of its kind from the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation focused on health care.

The Commonwealth Fund rated states based on 32 indicators, including access, quality, cost, insurance, preventive care, potentially avoidable hospital visits, and premature death (death before age 75).

The top five states in order are Hawaii, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine.

The bottom five states are Nevada, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma.

WebMD

New Mexico ranks 35th. Follow the link to see the complete list of states.

June 13th

The Olsen twins are 42 today.

John-Boy Walton is 56. That’s actor Richard Thomas.

The voice of Buzz Lightyear is 54. That’s Tim Allen.

Alexandra Elizabeth Sheedy is 45. Ally Sheedy was 23 when she made St. Elmo’s Fire, but when she was 12 she wrote a novel, She Was Nice to Mice. It was a best-seller about a mouse, Esther Esther, in Elizabeth I’s court.

The Nobel Prize in Literature winner for 1923, William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet and playwright, was born on June 13th 1865. Yeats received the Prize primarily for his dramatic work; he achieved even greater acclaim subsequently for his poetry.

You have the right to remain silent

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court found on this date in 1966 that Ernesto Miranda had not been informed of his rights before he confessed to the rape of a mildly retarded 18-year-old woman in 1963. His case was remanded to Arizona for a new trial. More importantly, the decision stated that the Constitution required that all persons arrested be informed of their rights before they were interrogated. These rights became known as Miranda Rights.

  • You have the right to remain silent.
  • Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.
  • You have the right to have an attorney present now and during any future questioning.
  • If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you free of charge if you wish.

Ernesto Miranda was retried (he had remained in prison throughout on another conviction). He was found guilty on other evidence and sentenced for a second time to 20-30 years for rape. He was paroled in 1972 and for a time sold autographed “Miranda” cards such as the police carried.

Ultimately Miranda was stabbed to death in a bar fight in 1976.

Read the decision.

View Chief Justice Warren’s handwritten notes.

Listen to the oral argument [45 MB mp3 file].

AmericanHeritage.com had some background last year on the 40th anniversary.

‘A line that one thought the American Government could not cross without enormous backlash’

I really recommend reading (at least) the first 11 pages of the court’s decision, where the court sets forth in very stark and clear terms exactly what we have done to al-Marri. I recall the sensation, back in law school, of reading legal opinions from various periods of time throughout our country’s history which began by recounting the government’s behavior and finding it difficult to believe that any government could engage in such conduct without provoking a massive backlash (and sometimes it did).

That is the reaction which this opinion provokes (even though the facts are familiar). No matter how many times one thinks about it, reads or writes about it, it never ceases to amaze — literally — that our government has asserted the power to imprison people, including those on U.S. soil, and keep them locked up for years and years, indefinitely, without so much as charging them with any crime or even allowing them access to lawyers. And that is to say nothing of what is done to them while being held completely incommunicado. That was just a line that one thought the American Government could not cross without enormous backlash.

Glenn Greenwald

Here’s the decision. [pdf]

On the Rocks

John McPhee disciples will appreciate Douglass McCollam on McPhee’s Annals of the Former World — On the Rocks.

McPhee then offers a try-at-home exercise to help break the bonds of animal time:

With your arms spread wide again to represent all the time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.

Virginia wasn’t always for lovers

In June, 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a Negro woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia pursuant to its laws. Shortly after their marriage, the Lovings returned to Virginia and established their marital abode in Caroline County. At the October Term, 1958, of the Circuit Court of Caroline County, a grand jury issued an indictment charging the Lovings with violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge, and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, the trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of 25 years on the condition that the Lovings leave the State and not return to Virginia together for 25 years. He stated in an opinion that:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

After their convictions, the Lovings took up residence in the District of Columbia. On November 6, 1963, they filed a motion in the state trial court to vacate the judgment and set aside the sentence on the ground that the statutes which they had violated were repugnant to the Fourteenth Amendment. …

Loving v. Virginia

Forty years ago today the Supreme Court of the United States ruled:

These statutes also deprive the Lovings of liberty without due process of law in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. … To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.

These convictions must be reversed.

It is so ordered.

Here’s an AP report on the Couple [That] Broke Marriage Barrier 40 Years Ago.

At the time the Supreme Court overturned the convictions in 1967, Virginia was one of 16 states that still had laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

Thanks to John for the tip.

Cars don’t create red light violations; the lights do

Mesa [Arizona] has struggled with earning a significant profit from its program since November 2000 when the city increased the duration of the yellow warning signals at left-turn intersections from 3.0 to 4.0 seconds — in violation of a Lockheed Martin IMS contract stipulation that mandated no timing improvements be made. As a result, red light violations dropped 72 percent at those intersections and never returned.

theNewspaper.com

Imagine that.

You tell yourself they can’t get dumber. On Sunday, the hapless Post did.

But on Sunday, the Post unleashed its big guns once again; the mighty paper was deeply troubled by an error in Gore’s kooky book. Andrew Ferguson did the honors, right there in the Outlook section—the same high-profile Sunday section which sang the praises of brilliant Fred Thompson just a few weeks ago. You always think they can’t get dumber. But they can’t wait to prove you wrong! Indeed, here’s how Ferguson started:

FERGUSON (6/10/07): You can’t really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, “The Assault on Reason.” It’s a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I’d love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.

You always think they can’t get dumber. Then, they do something like that.

How pitiful has the Post become? Ferguson said he’d love to know where Gore found his Lincoln quote—but, since Gore’s untidy puddle of a book lacks footnotes, he just couldn’t figure it out. But good lord! Gore’s book has twenty pages of end-notes—including an endnote that plainly explains the source of that page 88 Lincoln quote. The quotation comes from The Lincoln Encyclopedia, a 1950 Mcmillan compilation, edited by Archer Shaw. Yes, readers, that’s where Gore “found the quote.” It says so right in his book.

Daily Howler

Gore’s book has 273 endnotes.

Contributing to the delinquency

What is wrong with these people?

Paris Hilton is supposedly at the breaking point in jail — but she’ll be breaking out the champagne and partying like mad the second she’s released, if her parents get their way.

Page Six has learned that the celebutard’s doting daddy, Rick Hilton, was recently shopping a “Get Out of Jail” bash for his little girl to the top Las Vegas clubs, including Pure, the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino and the Palms.

Page Six

Meanwhile —

Paris Hilton says she’s found God behind bars – and will dump the ditzy-blonde persona that’s made her a world-famous celebutante.

“My spirit or soul did not like the way I was being seen, and that is why I was sent to jail. God has released me,” Hilton told Barbara Walters in a collect call from the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles.

New York Post

June 12th

President George H.W. Bush is 83 today. Instead of impregnating Barbara with George W., George H.W. should have done what his son should do now. Withdraw.

Well, gawwwleee and shazzayam, Jim Nabors is 77.

Marv Philip Aufrichtig was born 66 years ago today. We know him as Marv Albert.

Armando Anthony Corea is also 66. We know him as Chick.

Anne Frank should have been 78 years old today. The Writer’s Almanac has a brief essay about Frank.

Thirteen years ago today someone killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

Funny money

Florida pays basketball coach Billy Donovan $3.5 million a year and football coach Urban Meyer $3.25 million. But that isn’t the shocking part.

Noted David Whitley of the Orlando Sentinel: “Donovan and Meyer still combine to make $750,000 a year less than Dodgers center fielder Juan Pierre, who hasn’t won a national title and is hitting (.271).”

Sideline Chatter

Sideline Chatter also notes that Gilbert Arenas, who will make $12.8 million in the 2008-2009 season, may have to renegotiate. “Arenas said Saturday that the knee injury he suffered in April and the recent birth of his second child has led him to view his financial future in a different light.”

The 24 Hours of Le Mans and the tyranny of time

Dan Neil blogs the world’s greatest race. An excerpt:

I have been to most of the world’s great auto races, sometimes as a journalist, other times as a spectator, and I promise you Le Mans is the best. No other race has the history, the pageantry, the poetry of Le Mans. Unlike, say, an IRL race under the lights at Texas Motor Speedway –- entertaining but shallow –- Le Mans is long enough for dramas to unfold, narratives to play out, heroes and fools to be minted. I worked on the Panoz LMP900 crew a few years ago –- neither of the team’s cars finished the race –- but I stood in awe of the savage determination of the mechanics as they threw themselves onto the boiling-hot cars over and over, trying to patch up the suffering machines. My God. These people love racing.

The race begins at 3PM Saturday.

Best line of the day, so far

“We’ve got a basic version that will cost $129. We’ve got a premium version which will cost $129. We’ve got a business version! $129. Ultimate version! We’re throwing everything into it. It’s $129.”

Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, talking about the new Mac OS X due out in October. His reference, of course, is to the multiple versions of Windows Vista, his point being there is just one Mac OS X version.

Best conversation of the day, so far

Take Dish Network for example: I called them last week after reading on their web-site that it’ll only take a minute to announce my move and have a service technician come out to the new place and hook me up again. After calling their 1-800 number and heavy punching on the “0” button a sleepy-sounding female rep picks up the phone.

Me: Hi I’m moving next Friday.
Her: And?
Me: Well, I’m calling you to let you know that I’m moving next Friday.
Her: What do you mean?
Me: What do you mean “what do you mean?”? I’m taking all my belongings, put the stuff in boxes, put the boxes in a big truck and move them to a new house. That includes my Dish Network ViP 622 …
Her: Oh, you’re moving!
Me: [… speechless …]

kahunaburger, who also has the antidote in a good representative at Qwest. No, really.