Category: Issues of the Day

From the St. Petersburg Times, Driver’s parents risk jail for silence:

The parents of a young woman implicated in a hit-and-run accident that killed two children told a judge Friday they would rather go to jail than answer questions about their daughter’s role in the collision.

James and Lillian Porter, looking frazzled and scared, appeared before Hillsborough County Judge Walter Heinrich and asserted their Fifth Amendment rights to refuse a subpoena issued earlier Friday by the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office.

Read more.

Movie critic Roger Ebert sounds off on Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh and freedom of speech — Stern belongs on radio just as much as Rush. He concludes:

It is a belief of mine about the movies, that what makes them good or bad isn’t what they’re about, but how they’re about them. The point is not the subject but the form and purpose of its expression. A listener to Stern will find that he expresses humanistic values, that he opposes hypocrisy, that he talks honestly about what a great many Americans do indeed think and say and do. A Limbaugh listener, on the other hand, might not have guessed from campaigns to throw the book at drug addicts that he was addicted to drugs and required an employee to buy them on the street.

But listen carefully. I support Limbaugh’s right to be on the radio. I feel it is fully equal to Stern’s. I find it strange that so many Americans describe themselves as patriotic when their values are anti-democratic and totalitarian. We are all familiar with Voltaire’s great cry: ”I may disagree with what you say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.” Ideas like his helped form the emerging American republic. Today, the Federal Communications Commission operates under an alternative slogan: ”Since a minority that is very important to this administration disagrees with what you say, shut up.”

From Electablog* Campaign News with all the Carbs:

John Kerry should absolve George W Bush of anything and everything done or not done before September 11. Kerry should give a major address in which he says enough is enough. Yes, the 9-11 Commission is vitally important. But there is plenty of blame to go around. Kerry should explain that the only people who need to apologize for 9-11 are the ones who planned and supported the attack. Yes, we desperately need the recommendations of the 9-11 panel and yes, the person in the Oval Office should be judged closely on how efficiently the much-needed reforms are implemented.

But we need to let W off the hook.

John Kerry needs to send this loud and clear message of absolution because every minute spent debating the memos and the clues and the hints and the mistakes and the vacations, along with every moment the press spends asking the President if he thinks he should apologize for 9-11, is ultimately a good moment for the Bush campaign.

George W Bush will not lose this election because Sept 11 happened under his watch. But he may very well lose this election because of what he’s done since.

And every moment that the public and the press are not focused on this period (during which we’ve seen false bravado, a march to an optional war, questionable strategies and leadership related to that war, a wedge driven between us and some of our closest allies, a clinging to secrecy, repeated attacks on those who even hint at criticism or disagreement, the mistake of tax cuts during a time of war, an unwillingness to admit mistakes or take advice, an unwillingness to level with the American people, a totally unclear strategy for the future, etc) is a lost moment for the Kerry campaign.

And there’s not a moment to lose.

Courtesy South Knox Bubba

An income tax was first collected during the Civil War from 1862 to 1872. During the administration of President Grover Cleveland, the federal government again levied an income tax, enacted by Congress in 1894. However, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional the following year. Supporters of an income tax were forced then to embark on the lengthy process of amending the Constitution. Not until the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913 was Congress given the power “to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census of enumeration.”

Source: Library of Congress

From the Albuquerque Tribune, a depressing story with a tragic ending.

1986: Lloyd Larson involved in crash where alcohol suspected. Hired by Bureau of Indian Affairs as civil engineer technician.

June 26, 1986: Arrested on DWI charge by Navajo police.

1987-88: Prohibited from using BIA vehicle because of driving history and suspended license.

June 10, 1990: Arrested on DWI charge by Navajo police. Convicted.

March 20, 1993: Arrested on DWI charge by Navajo police. Sentence deferred, sent to DWI school. Larson tells BIA supervisor.

April 3, 1993: Missing from work without excuse, or AWOL, four hours. Supervisors exchange memos.

Oct. 4-7, 1993: AWOL four days. Supervisor sends letter.

Nov. 13, 1993: AWOL 24 hours. Supervisors exchange notes.

Jan. 1, 1994: Arrested on DWI charge in McKinley County. Convicted.

Jan. 18, 1994: Supervisor reports seeing Larson drunk at Kachina Trading, sends memo.

Jan. 24, 1994: Larson sends letter to supervisor admitting alcohol problem, DWI, loss of driver’s license.

Feb. 15, 1994: Memo between supervisors asks Larson to seek help; Larson refuses.

Feb. 21, 1994: Arrested on DWI charge in McKinley County. Convicted. Driver’s license revoked one year.

March 11, 1994: Supervisor secures limited driver’s license for Larson, saying his services are needed.

March 28, 1994: Suspended from job five days for being AWOL in November 1993.

July 18-20, 1994: AWOL three days.

Aug. 1-4, 1994: AWOL four days.

Sept. 21, 1994: Suspended 14 days for various AWOLs.

March 20-21, 1995: AWOL two days.

March 22, 1995: Calls supervisor, says he is “recovering” and won’t be at work.

April 16, 1995: Rolls own pickup truck on I-40, leaves crash scene. Empty beer containers found at site.

April 20, 1995: Arrested on DWI charge and other charges for rollover. Notifies supervisors. Driver’s license revoked until May 1996.

May 29, 1995: Suspended from work 30 days because of AWOLs.

July 13, 1997: Arrested on DWI charge in Sanders, Ariz. Convicted. Larson notifies supervisor.

May 15-16, 2001: AWOL two days.

May 16, 2001: Arrested on DWI charge by Navajo police. Charges dismissed on technicality. Notifies supervisor.

May 24, 2001: Navajo Times reports Larson’s May 16 arrest.

May 31, 2001: Supervisor sees newspaper article, sends letter.

June 4, 2001: Larson responds to letter, saying his driver’s license is still valid.

Aug. 11, 2001: Arrested on DWI charge by Navajo police. Convicted, sentence deferred, ordered to DWI school. Supervisor notified.

Aug. 16, 2001: Navajo Times reports Aug. 11 DWI arrest.

Jan. 17, 2002: BIA check shows Larson driver’s license valid.

Jan. 25, 2002: Drives BIA truck wrong way on I-40, slams head-on into Cadillac, killing Nebraskans Edward and Alice Ramaekers and Larry and Rita Beller. Admits to drinking nine beers.

April 23, 2002: Pleads guilty to four counts of second-degree murder. Sentenced to 20 years.

Source: Testimony, court documents from both plaintiff and defendant [in current wrongful-death case being tried in Federal court].

From AP via CNN.com:

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia (AP) — The police department’s decision to test the DNA of hundreds of black men in their search for a serial rapist has angered community leaders who view it as racial profiling.

At a forum at the University of Virginia, city leaders, academics and residents criticized the practice during a presentation by city Police Chief Timothy J. Longo and other law enforcement personnel.

“Because the suspect is black, every black man is a suspect,” said University of Virginia graduate student Steven Turner, who has twice refused to be tested. “What are we going to do about this as a community?”

Longo said police question and test men for three reasons: Tips from the public, a potential suspect has a record of sex crimes or burglaries, or a 911 call alerts authorities about a man who resembles the drawing of the rapist.

As of Monday, Longo said, 690 men have been eliminated from the list of possible suspects and 10 have refused to submit to a swab test, in which DNA is collected from a potential suspect’s cheek.

Link via Political Animal.

One of the security firms under contract in Iraq is Custer Battles. It’s two guys, Scott Custer and Mike Battles, but as Body and Soul remarked, “isn’t that name almost asking for trouble?”

From the Albuquerque Tribune:

Jesus Castillo grabs his walker, swings his twisted leg and heads for the paved bus lane at Polk Middle School.

The 12-year-old flashes a mischievous smile as he swerves past his classmates strapped in wheelchairs.

Six boys in Frances Farrah’s class for severely disabled students are getting some fresh air. Jesus finds another gear and the wheels of the walker shudder.

“That’s fast enough,” Farrah warns.

“I wish he was more serious,” she sighs. “It’s therapy, not a go-cart.”

Farrah cares deeply for Jesus, who has physical and mental disabilities from cerebral palsy. He is her brightest student, the only one able to recognize all of his classmates’ names on a test.

He is also one of the neediest students at Polk, going home every day to a donated trailer heated with wood and patched with plastic on Pajarito Mesa.

Viewed through state accountability standards, Polk’s biggest problem is low test scores. The South Valley school must improve them or risk state takeover.

But many students at Polk live in poverty, struggling with getting through life instead of getting good grades.

Read more.

Dan Froomkin’s White House Briefing from washingtonpost.com is a good, thorough, even-handed summary of the reaction to yesterday’s 9/11 commission hearing with Condoleezza Rice.

The Los Angeles Times has a good article on the confiscation of reporters’ tape recordings at a speech given by Justice Scalia.

Money quote:

Soon after Scalia entered the gym, a marshal told a TV reporter to stop recording. The justice spoke to the assembly of students, faculty and parents about the importance of the Constitution.

The Constitution protects the rights of all, he said, according to a reporter’s account. It is a “brilliant piece of work. People just don’t revere it like they used to,” he said.

Indeed.

From AP via the San Francisco Chronicle —

College grades have been creeping steadily upward for 30 years, but Princeton University may try to break the trend by rationing the number of A’s that can be awarded. The proposal has academics wondering already about the possible impact at other schools.

In what would be the strongest measure to combat grade inflation by an elite university, Princeton faculty will vote later this month on a plan that would require each academic department to award an A-plus, A or A-minus for no more than 35 percent of its grades.

A’s have been awarded 46 percent of the time in recent years at Princeton, up from 31 percent in the mid-1970s. Since 1998, the New Jersey school has been encouraging its faculty to crack down, but marks have kept rising. Finally, Princeton administrators decided that the only solution would be to ration top grades.

From the San Francisco Chronicle —

Close your eyes and transport yourself back, for a moment, to a more hormonal time.

You’re a senior in high school, you invite all the cool kids over because your parents are out of town and only the dorks from the Physics Club show up.

That’s been the mood at the Scott Peterson double-murder trial for the last three months. What was anticipated to be a star-studded journalism affair has slowly turned into Just Another Trial, populated mostly by the same old faces from the local media.

Since pretrial motions began at the Redwood City courthouse in February, there’s been no Geraldo Rivera, no Greta van Susteren and no Dominick Dunne. (A few sort-of-familiar faces from CNN and MSNBC have shown up sporadically — the celebrity journalism equivalents of free acts on the county fair concert schedule.)

From the Baltimore Sun Administration wages war on pornography:

Lam Nguyen’s job is to sit for hours in a chilly, quiet room devoid of any color but gray and look at pornography. This job, which Nguyen does earnestly from 9 to 5, surrounded by a half-dozen other “computer forensic specialists” like him, has become the focal point of the Justice Department’s operation to rid the world of porn.

In this field office in Washington, 32 prosecutors, investigators and a handful of FBI agents are spending millions of dollars to bring anti-obscenity cases to courthouses across the country for the first time in 10 years. Nothing is off limits, they warn, even soft-core cable programs such as HBO’s long-running Real Sex or the adult movies widely offered in guestrooms of major hotel chains.

Read more.

Compromise May Restrict ‘Morning-After’ Pill

The distributor of the emergency contraceptive “Plan B” and the government are discussing a compromise that would place some restrictions on proposed over-the-counter sales of the “morning-after” pill — an outcome that critics say would be based more on election-year politics than on science.

Although a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel voted 23 to 4 in December in favor of making the drug available on drugstore shelves, the proposed compromise would ignore important elements of that recommendation, said several people familiar with the negotiations but not allowed to speak on the record.

The application to give Plan B full over-the-counter status has been sharply criticized by social conservatives who say it would lead to increased teenage promiscuity.

The ongoing talks have focused on possibly setting a minimum age for purchasers and keeping the drug behind drugstore counters so pharmacists would control sales. As word of the possible restrictions has spread, critics have stepped up a campaign to try to persuade the FDA to approve the application without restrictions.

Read more.

Click on image for larger version.

Read what the creator has to say here. Scroll down to April 7.

Kevin Drum misses April Fools Day by a week.

I’d like to see videotaping required for all police interviews, and in return I’d suggest that the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination be discarded. If police interviews are all recorded and trials are all held in public, it’s not at all clear to me what value the 5th Amendment right to silence has anymore.

Sure, it’ll never happen. But with Star Chambers a thing of the past and videotaping preventing coerced confessions, I really do wonder if the self-incrimination clause of the 5th Amendment has enough value left to make it worth the problems it causes. I suspect it doesn’t.

Read Drum’s whole post.

An excellent article from The Washington Post on the people building the World War II Memorial. It begins:

Construction workers have had the National World War II Memorial to themselves for more than 21/2 years, laboring behind construction fences to transform a mostly grassy expanse of the Mall into what promises to become one of Washington’s most-visited sites.

Next week, possibly as early as Monday, they’ll share their work with the public. The construction fences are coming down around the site between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, and visitors will be free to explore 7.4 acres that make up one of the largest memorials in a city that’s full of them.

Almost all of the workers will move on to other jobs, but many say they’ll be taking some vivid memories with them when they go. Some say they remember seeing an airplane flying toward the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Many anxiously watched floodwaters rise within inches of a ruinous setback during Hurricane Isabel. They’ve labored through two unusually harsh winters. They’ve mourned the death of their lead construction supervisor. A couple of them fell in love with each other and plan to marry. Almost all of them have watched tourists poke their heads through gaps in the construction fence and ask, What are you building in there?

Read more.

See also The Makings of the Memorial.

Thanks to Jill for the pointer.

Pleasanton finds a way to slow impatient drivers —

Pleasanton is about to turn the fast into the furious.

In a move unprecedented in the Bay Area, the city’s traffic engineers have created a traffic signal with attitude. It senses when a speeder is approaching and metes out swift punishment.

It doesn’t write a ticket. It immediately turns from green to yellow to red.

Residents and commute-jockeys said Tuesday that the light, which the city plans to unveil today on Vineyard Avenue at the intersection of Montevino Drive, is either an inspired leap into the future or a blatant example of government overzealousness.

“It’s kind of big-brotherish, but sometimes it’s the price we pay for safety,” said JoAnne Brewer, 49, who walked her golden retriever past the new signal Tuesday morning and predicted it would be a success.

“I’m not much of a speeder myself,” Brewer added. “It’s my husband that it will catch.”

This wouldn’t work everywhere — I mean what happens when you install it at an intersection and people are speeding on both streets — but NewMexiKen likes the sounds of this.

Of course, some speeders run red lights, too.

Jon Stewart on The O’Franken Factor (quoted from Eschaton) — “[T]he best metaphor for the media was 6 year olds playing soccer. The ball pops up, and they all run towards it.”

From AP via the Los Angeles Times —

For more than three decades, people in some parts of Indiana set their clocks ahead one hour during daylight saving time, but most do not. It is an issue debated each year in the Legislature, in bars and on talk radio.

Some say the existing system hurts the state’s image and stunts commerce. Others, like former Indiana House Speaker John Gregg, scoff at such claims.

“It’s still 24 hours,” said Gregg. “If you want more daylight, get up earlier.”

Electablog* gets a lot off his chest. “I am a card carrying member of the intellectual elite.”

Paul Krugman has a few words about Letterman and Clarke, CNN and the White House.

Teddy Roosevelt coined the term “bully pulpit” to mean the White House was a terrific platform from which to persuade. The current inhabitants are intent on restoring both “bully” and “pulpit” to their more traditional meaning.

Air America Radio

On Sunday, NewMexiKen posted Tax Cuts 101 (or one way of looking at it). Today, an individual commenting wrote, “the phd from georgia says that he didnt write the example on taxcuts.”

NewMexiKen contacted the person who commented and he replied with a copy of an email from David Kamerschen, the professor to whom the story is attributed. Kamerschen wrote, “I DID NOT WRITE THE TAX STORY AND I DO NOT KNOW WHO DID.” The email is dated today.