Category: Issues of the Day

Political advice

NewMexiKen was reminded this morning of yet another reason the Catholic Church should stay out of politics.

When spy Robert Hanssen’s wife found out he was selling secrets to the Russians, she took him to their priest for advice. According to Mrs. Hanssen, as the penalty, the priest proposed a donation of Hanssen’s ill-gotten gains to Mother Teresa.

Reality check

The Department of Homeland Security awarded the multi-billion dollar contract for border security to Accenture, an offshore company (Bermuda) that is a spin-off from Arthur Andersen.

Artesia family nation’s biggest oil and gas leaseholders – by a massive margin

From AP via the Albuquerque Tribune:

A single New Mexico family – the Yates family of Artesia – and a dozen big oil companies now control one-quarter of all federal lands leased for oil and gas development in the continental United States despite a law intended to prevent such concentration, federal records show.

Since 1997, mainly as a result of mergers and acquisitions, six companies have exceeded the limit of 246,080 acres in leaseholdings on public lands in a single state other than Alaska. But the Bureau of Land Management, in charge of enforcing the 1920 law, has chosen to extend compliance deadlines for years.

Individuals and companies affiliated with the Yates family, which is by far the biggest leaseholder, have given $276,926 to Republican candidates and efforts since 1999. Democrats have received $11,400 from those companies and individuals during the same period.

Americas Dreamers: The Lure of Las Vegas

On Sunday, The New York Times began a multi-part series on Las Vegas and its incredible growth. Sunday’s article, The Budget Suites, where “the city’s promise of new beginnings is regularly put to the test.” Today’s article, New Teachers, Pupils, and Classrooms With Revolving Doors, tells the travail of one of 2,000 new teachers this year.

Both articles are well done and worthwhile, as are the sidebars.

The rest of the story

It appears there is more to the Rio Rancho High School poetry story than reported here yesterday.

First, at The Volokh Conspiracy Eugene Volokh (May 23) has the rebuttal from the school and details from the student involved, who’s pretty agitated that her poem has been published on the Internet (and changed) without her approval.

At The Agitator, Radley Balko (May 20) discussed the case. This is where Volokh learned of it, and it was among the comments here that Volokh learned of the rebuttal.

David Neiwert has a long discussion as part of an essay on Facism at Orcinus (May 22).

And there are a number of comments, including those of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, at Electrolite (May 23).

The actual happenings took place last year; the lawsuit against the district was filed September 15. The newspaper column that re-heated the controversy was published in The Daytona Beach News-Journal ten days ago. It was written by a friend of the teacher.

Land of the free

From Democratic Underground’s The Top Ten Conservative Idiots (No. 157) (link via TBogg):

Bill Nevins was recently fired from the largest public high school in New Mexico. Why? Because he foolishly decided to help organize a school poetry club. Yeah, yeah, I know that organizing a school poetry club wasn’t always a criminal offense in freedom-loving America, but remember – we’re now living in the Century of the Wingnut. See, it turns out that one of Bill Nevins’ students wrote a poem that criticized the war in Iraq and the Bush administration, which, in the Century of the Wingnut, is a crime apparently comparable to ritual Satanic child abuse. When Rio Rancho’s military liaison officer heard the poem he complained to Principal Gary Tripp, who promptly suspended Bill Nevins and then fired him. The complaint? “Disrespectful speech.” That’s right – there were no obscenities nor incitements to violence in the poem, it was simply “disrespectful.” But that’s not all – Tripp then went on to ban the poetry club and classes in poetry. He also ordered the student’s mother – who happens to be a teacher at Rio Rancho – to destroy her daughter’s poetry. The mother refused, and now her job has been threatened too. But that’s not all either! Tripp discovered that some art students had created satirical posters in class which criticized George W. Bush and promptly had the posters torn down, then refused to renew the contracts of art teachers who refused to participate in the destruction. Finally, at a school event Tripp apparently read a poem of his own which instructed those who disagreed with him to “Shut your faces.” I do hope Gary Tripp’s students have learned a valuable lesson from this incident – there’s absolutely no place for dissent (or critical thinking) in the Century of the Wingnut. Heck, let’s go shoot some poets! Who’s with me?

Honest Abe

Since so many wingnuts want to paint objections to the disaster in Iraq as unpatriotic, it’s time to remember that anti-war traitor A. Lincoln, congressman from Illinois, who in December 1847, sponsored a resolution requiring President Polk to provide the House with “all the facts which go to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed, was, or was not, our own soil.”

According to David Herbert Donald in Lincoln (1995):

In the manner of a prosecuting attorney, he demanded that the President inform the Congress whether that spot had ever been part of Texas and whether its inhabitants had ever “submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas, …by consent, or by compulsion, either by accepting office, or voting at elections, or paying taxes, or serving on juries, or…in any other way. ” Lincoln clearly intended to show that the American army had begun the war by making an unprovoked attack on a Mexican settlement, despite the fact that “Genl. Taylor had, more than once, intimated to the War Department that…no such movement was necessary to the defence or protection of Texas.”

Thanks to Political Animal for the reminder.

Speak now or forever hold your peace

In light of the media’s seeming need to give two sides to every gay wedding story, Romensko correspondent Constantine von Hoffman has a good suggestion.

All wedding stories — whether hetero, homo or metro-sexual — should include dissenting voices. Whether it’s the jilted spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend or just random family members/acquaintances who think couple X is a bad idea, this would more than enliven an otherwise dull story under the name of “fair and balanced” coverage. It would also make these stories “must reads” for all involved and fun for everyone else, too. Just think about the day-after follow up stories! Papers could start selling ad space on those pages to divorce lawyers, so that would expand the news hole by providing another revenue stream! By God, editorial will finally go hand-in-hand with the business side, as balanced journalism can start pointing to exactly how much money it is contributing to the papers’ bottom line. This could be print’s answer to Reality TV! Woo HOO!!!

Another Mandatory Sentencing Injustice

From Talk Left

Dixie Shanahan’s story isn’t pretty. Her husband beat her for three days, angry that she became pregnant with their third child. He responded to her refusal to get an abortion by repeatedly punching her in the stomach. When she fled, her husband dragged her back into the house, pointed a shotgun at her and threatened to kill her.

At some point, Shanahan shot her husband. Whether she did so in response to another threatening move, or shot him in his sleep, was disputed at her trial. An Iowa jury convicted her, and a judge imposed a mandatory 50 year sentence. The judge didn’t think the sentence was fair under the circumstances, but mandatory sentencing laws gave him no discretion.

The sentence, said Shanahan’s attorney, was like one last beating.

Mandatory sentencing laws often lead to injustice.

But then, justice has become a rarer commodity since the "get tough on crime" movement swept the nation during the Reagan years. Declaring the courts too soft on crime, state legislators around the country decided that judgment was too important to be left to judges. They enacted mandatory sentencing guidelines that were supposed to produce tougher and more uniform sentences. Instead, those guidelines produce travesties.

It will be 35 years before Shanahan is eligible for parole.

The Political Compass

The Political Compass uses six pages of questions (3-5 minutes) to evaluate your political/economic attitudes and place you on a four-dimensional chart. It’s interesting, and more thoughtful and thorough than most of these things. As the authors point out: “The old one-dimensional categories of ‘right’ and ‘left’, established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today’s complex political landscape.”

NewMexiKen is proud to report that I was positioned somewhere in the territory of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.

Also take a look at their Iconochasms. Your heroes may surprise you, as mine did me somewhat.

Thanks to Byron and Jill for the pointer.

No más cruces en la frontera

Timothy Egan has an informative and at times moving front page piece in The New York Times on illegal border crossings in the Sonoran Desert. He begins:

At the bottleneck of human smuggling here in the Sonoran Desert, illegal immigrants are dying in record numbers as they try to cross from Mexico into the United States in the wake of a new Bush administration amnesty proposal that is being perceived by some migrants as a magnet to cross.

“The season of death,” as Robert C. Bonner, the commissioner in charge of the Border Patrol, calls the hot months, has only just begun, and already 61 people have died in the Arizona border region since last Oct. 1, according to the Mexican Interior Ministry — triple the pace of the previous year.

Nearly 300,000 persons have been apprehended between Yuma and Nogales since October 1.

“It’s like catch-and-release fishing,” Mr. Stroud, the Border Patrol agent, said with a shrug after helping Mr. García with his blisters. “One week, I arrested the same guy three times. If I dwell on it, it can be frustrating.”

Hide and seek

From Wired News, Los Alamos Lab Loses More Data

The Los Alamos National Laboratory, the nation’s most important nuclear weapons lab, lost another hard disk drive filled with classified information, once again throwing a spotlight on lab officials who have been trying to re-emerge from years of scandals and mismangement.

The latest episode came to light Thursday, after Los Alamos admitted that, since a Monday inventory check, its custodians hadn’t been able to find a “classified removable electronic media,” or CREM — disks and drives inscribed with the country’s secrets.

Fahrenheit 9/11

Frank Rich tells us about “Fahrenheit 9/11” Michael Moore’s film.

Whatever you think of Moore, there’s no question he’s detonating dynamite here. From a variety of sources – foreign journalists and broadcasters (like Britain’s Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped him illicit video – he supplies war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view. Instead of recycling images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, once again, Moore can revel in extended new close-ups of the president continuing to read “My Pet Goat” to elementary school students in Florida for seven long minutes after learning of the attack.

*****

Wasn’t it just weeks ago that we were debating whether we should see the coffins of the American dead and whether Ted Koppel should read their names on “Nightline”? In “Fahrenheit 9/11,” we see the actual dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike, with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the violence of war entails. We also see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where they try to cope with nerve damage and multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk about their pain and their morphine, and they talk about betrayal. “I was a Republican for quite a few years,” one soldier says with an almost innocent air of bafflement, “and for some reason they conduct business in a very dishonest way.”

*****

Speaking of America’s volunteer army, Moore concludes: “They serve so that we don’t have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is, remarkably, their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm’s way unless it is absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?”

Thanks to The Sideshow for the link.

Jon Stewart, William & Mary, Class of ’84

Jon Stewart’s Commencement Address at William & Mary. Geez, when NewMexiKen attended William & Mary graduations the speakers were (yawn) James Baker and (yawn, yawn) George Will.

Some highlights:

I know there were some parents that were concerned about my speech here tonight, and I want to assure you that you will not hear any language that is not common at, say, a dock workers union meeting, or Tourrett’s convention, or profanity seminar. Rest assured.

Today is the day you enter into the real world, and I should give you a few pointers on what it is. It’s actually not that different from the environment here. The biggest difference is you will now be paying for things, and the real world is not surrounded by three-foot brick wall. And the real world is not a restoration. If you see people in the real world making bricks out of straw and water, those people are not colonial re-enactors—they are poor. Help them. And in the real world, there is not as much candle lighting. I don’t really know what it is about this campus and candle lighting, but I wish it would stop. We only have so much wax, people.

College is something you complete. Life is something you experience. So don’t worry about your grade, or the results or success. Success is defined in myriad ways, and you will find it, and people will no longer be grading you, but it will come from your own internal sense of decency which I imagine, after going through the program here, is quite strong….

Saint Gianna Beretta Molla

Sunday, Pope John Paul II canonized Dr. Molla. The Catholic Community Forum tells us:

Mother of three, she continued her medical career, treating it as a mission and gift from God. During her pregnancy with her fourth child, she was diagnosed with a large ovarian cyst. Her surgeon recommended an abortion in order to save Gianna’s life; she refused and died a week after childbirth, caring more for doing right by her unborn child than for her own life.

And, apparently, also caring more for her unborn child than for her living children, ages 5, 4 and 2.

See also the Blessed Gianna web site for background such as: “She became engaged to Pietro Molla and was radiant with joy and happiness during the time of their engagement, for which she thanked and praised the Lord.”

Thanks to Quirky Burque for the pointer.

Voters can go to hell

Excerpt from “A Pastoral Letter to the Catholic Faithful of the Diocese of Colorado Springs on the Duties of Catholic Politicians and Voters”

Any Catholic politicians who advocate for abortion, for illicit stem cell research or for any form of euthanasia ipso facto place themselves outside full communion with the Church and so jeopardize their salvation. Any Catholics who vote for candidates who stand for abortion, illicit stem cell research or euthanasia suffer the same fateful consequences. It is for this reason that these Catholics, whether candidates for office or those who would vote for them, may not receive Holy Communion until they have recanted their positions and been reconciled with God and the Church in the Sacrament of Penance.

Most Reverend Michael J. Sheridan
Bishop of Colorado Springs