Apologies to President Roosevelt

Tred Somewhere Else You Pusillanimus Little Toadies

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Oscar Wilde

THE BEST OF THE WEB: This is from Slate and I dare you to read this and not get bat-shit crazy angry.

Cruel but Not Unusual

Clarence Thomas writes one of the meanest Supreme Court decisions ever.

By Dahlia LithwickPosted Friday, April 1, 2011, at 7:43 PM ET

Clarence ThomasIn 1985, John Thompson was convicted of murder in Louisiana. Having already been convicted in a separate armed robbery case, he opted not to testify on his own behalf in his murder trial. He was sentenced to death and spent 18 years in prison—14 of them isolated on death row—and watched as seven executions were planned for him. Several weeks before an execution scheduled for May 1999, Thompson's private investigators learned that prosecutors had failed to turn over evidencethat would have cleared him at his robbery trial. This evidence included the fact that the main informant against him had received a reward from the victim's family, that the eyewitness identification done at the time described someone who looked nothing like him, and that a blood sample taken from the crime scene did not match Thompson's blood type.

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In 1963, in Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must turn over to the defense any evidence that would tend to prove a defendant's innocence. Failure to do so is a violation of the defendant's constitutional rights. Yet the four prosecutors in Thompson's case managed to keep secret the fact that they had hidden exculpatory evidence for 20 years. Were it not for Thompson's investigators, he would have been executed for a murder he did not commit.

Both of Thompson's convictions were overturned. When he was retried on the murder charges, a jury acquitted him after 35 minutes. He sued the former Louisiana district attorney for Orleans Parish, Harry Connick Sr. (yes, his dad) for failing to train his prosecutors about their legal obligation to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense. A jury awarded Thompson $14 million for this civil rights violation, one for every year he spent wrongfully incarcerated. The district court judge added another $1 million in attorneys' fees. A panel of the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict. An equally divided 5^th Circuit, sitting en banc, affirmed again.

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But this week, writing on behalf of the five conservatives on the Supreme Court and in his first majority opinion of the term,Justice Clarence Thomas tossed out the verdict, finding that the district attorney can't be responsible for the single act of a lone prosecutor. The Thomas opinion is an extraordinary piece of workmanship, matched only by Justice Antonin Scalia's concurring opinion, in which he takes a few extra whacks at Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent. (Ginsburg was so bothered by the majority decision that she read her dissent from the bench for the first time this term.) Both Thomas and Scalia have produced what can only be described as a master class in human apathy. Their disregard for the facts of Thompson's thrashed life and near-death emerges as a moral flat line. Scalia opens his concurrence with a swipe at Ginsburg's "lengthy excavation of the trial record" and states that "the question presented for our review is whether a municipality is liable for a single Brady violation by one of its prosecutors." But only by willfully ignoring that entire trial record can he and Thomas reduce the entire constitutional question to a single misdeed by a single bad actor.

Both parties to this case have long agreed that an injustice had been done. Connick himself conceded that there had been a Brady violation, yet Scalia finds none. Everyone else concedes that egregious mistakes were made. Scalia struggles to rehabilitate them all.

One of the reasons the truth came to light after 20 years is that Gerry Deegan, a junior assistant D.A. on the Thompson case, confessed as he lay dying of cancer that he had withheld the crime lab test results and removed a blood sample from the evidence room. The prosecutor to whom Deegan confessed said nothing about this for five years. While Scalia pins the wrongdoing on a single "miscreant prosecutor," Ginsburg correctly notes that "no fewer than five prosecutors" were involved in railroading Thompson. She adds that they "did so despite multiple opportunities, spanning nearly two decades, to set the record straight." While Thomas states the question as having to do with a "singleBrady violation," Ginsburg is quick to point out that there was far more than just a misplaced blood sample at issue: Thompson was turned in by someone seeking a reward, but prosecutors failed to turn over tapes of that conversation. The eyewitness identification of the killer didn't match Thompson, but was never shared with defense counsel. The blood evidence was enough to prove a Brady violation, but it was the tip of the iceberg.

In the 10 years preceding Thompson's trial, Thomas acknowledges, "Louisiana courts had overturned four convictions because of Brady violations by prosecutors in Connick's office." Yet somehow this doesn't add up to a pattern of Brady violations in the office, because the evidence in those other cases wasn't blood or crime lab evidence. Huh? He then inexplicably asserts that young prosecutors needn't be trained on Brady violations because they learned everything in law school.

Scalia and Thomas are at pains to say that Connick was not aware of or responsible for his subordinates' unconstitutional conduct, except—as Ginsburg points out—that Connick acknowledged that he misunderstood Brady,acknowledged that his prosecutors "were coming fresh out of law school," acknowledged he didn't know whether they had Brady training, and acknowledged that he himself had 'stopped reading law books … and looking at opinions' when he was first elected District Attorney in 1974." And Connick also conceded that holding his underlings to the highest Brady standards would "make [his] job more difficult." As Bennett Gershman and Joel Cohen point out, the jury had "considerable evidence that both Connick and prosecutors in his office were ignorant of the constitutional rules regarding disclosure of exculpatory evidence; they were ignorant of the rules regarding disclosure of scientific evidence; there was no training, or continuing education, and no procedures to monitor compliance with evidentiary requirements; prosecutors did not review police files; and shockingly, Connick himself had been indicted by federal prosecutors for suppressing a lab report of the kind hidden from Thompson."

It's not just that a jury, a judge, and the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Connick knew his staff was undertrained and he failed to fix it. It's that it's almost impossible, on reviewing all of the evidence, to conclude anything else. Nobody is suggesting that the legal issue here is simple or that there aren'tmeaningful consequences to creating liability for district attorneys who fail to train their subordinates in Brady compliance. But those aren't the opinions that Thomas and Scalia produced. Their effort instead was to sift and resift the facts until the injury done to Thompson can be pinned on a single bad actor, acting in bad faith. It's a long, sad, uphill trek.

Beyond that, there is no suggestion in either opinion that this is a hard question or a close call or even a hint of regret at their conclusion. There is only certainty that the jury, the appeals court, and above all Ginsburg got it completely wrong in believing that someone should be held responsible for the outrages suffered by John Thompson. If there is empathy for anyone in evidence here, it's for the overworked and overzealous district attorneys.

It's left to Ginsburg to acknowledge that the costs of immunizing Connick from any wrongdoing is as high as the cost of opening him to it: "The prosecutorial concealment Thompson encountered … is bound to be repeated unless municipal agencies bear responsibility—made tangible by §1983 liability—for adequately conveying what Brady requires and for monitoring staff compliance." As Scott Lemieux points out, by all-but-immunizing Connick for the conduct of his subordinates, the court has created a perfect Catch-22, since the courts already give prosecutors absolute immunity for their actions as prosecutors (though they may still be liable for their conduct as administrators or investigators). By immunizing their bosses as well, the court has guaranteed that nobody can be held responsible for even the most shocking civil rights violations.

I don't think that the failure at the court is one of empathy. I don't ask that Thomas or Scalia shed a tear for an innocent man who almost went to his death because of deceptive prosecutors. And, frankly, Ginsburg's dissent—while powerful—is no less Vulcan in tone than their opinions. But this case is of a piece with prior decisions in which Thomas and Scalia have staked out positions that revel in the hyper-technical and deliberately callous. It was, after all, Scalia who wrote in 2009 that "this court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent." It was Thomas who wrote that a prisoner who was slammed to a concrete floor and punched and kicked by a guard after asking for a grievance form had no constitutional claim.

The law awards no extra points for being pitiless and scornful. There is rarely a reason to be pitiless and scornful, certainly in a case of an innocent man who was nearly executed. It leads one to wonder whether Thomas and Scalia sometimes are just because they can be.

Stop your screaming!

"I can't hear you honey. Did you say, 'Hose the floor,'

 or, 'Close the door.'"

Nourishment For Your Brain

"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul." -- George Bernard Shaw

Huckleberry Finn: In Trouble Again

            This has been in the news of late so I’m sure some of you are aware of this controversy surrounding Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Southbooks recently announced that it would publish an updated version of Twain’s classic. What, you might ask, does that exactly mean? Huck and Jim adrift on the Mississippi River; finding their way with a GPS device; the widow Douglas vacuuming her rugs with a Dyson; or maybe we might find that Pap has joined a twelve step program? God knows he needs one.

            Well, we aren’t that lucky. The updating involves replacing the 219 times “nigger” appears in the text with the word “slave.” For the added enjoyment of the modern reader the editors are also replacing the word “injun” in the text with the word “pineapple.” I jest; the word injun will become Indian. Don’t ask me. The only reason I can think of is that the modern reader would consider the word ‘Injun” to be an epithet when actually, in the novel, it’s really simply just the way people in Huck’s socioeconomic class pronounced the word Indian. If they wanted to insult an injun they would have used words like, red devil or heathen savage.

            Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the most banned book in the world. After it was published in 1885 it only took a few weeks for the banning to start and it doesn’t look to be slowing down anytime soon. At the bottom of all this you’ll probably find that the loudest critics haven’t read it.

            Fundamentally, there are three reasons people want the book banned, Twain’s use of the word nigger, the way Jim is portrayed in the book, and it fails to depict the way the south really was at that time in history.

            First it needs to be said that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the first truly American novel to have appeared on the literary scene up to that point. It’s the first book dealing with American themes; using American characters who were not portrayed as warmed over Brits; and talking in the way Americans talked. I know this might come as a shock to some of you modern readers but Americans use all the words that Twain puts in the mouths of his characters…all of them…including the word nigger. At the time it was a demeaning, derogatory word aimed at slaves in particular but black people in general. It hadn’t yet taken on the unrivaled power that the word has today. Of course it matters who is using it and for what reason. Isn’t that the way with all words? That word is one of the most important words in the text; remove it and you eviscerated the power of the novel and you make Huck’s epiphany at the end of the book mean almost nothing. The word is used in a variety of ways depending on who uses it. That word in particular gives you an insight into the character who uses it. There is a big difference between Pap’s use of the word and Huck’s. Pap spits it out with hatred and Huck almost just uses it as an identifier. In Huck’s world that seems to be what you call black people. Huck hasn’t been as yet indoctrinated into the evils of that word, but he will learn to hate all that it represents by the end of the book and choose not to be part of it and, instead, affirm Jim as his friend.

            Second, some people feel that Jim is portrayed as a simpleton, as an Uncle Tom type of character. This is absurd on the face of it. You don’t even have to read the text closely to see that Jim is the only, let me repeat, the only character who is pure of heart. He treats everyone he meets with kindness and respect. He is gentle and loving. His innocence is the counterpoint to everyone else in the book. Jim is the only good man through and through in the book. His is dignified in his dealings with everyone. He is the example of how a human being ought to act.

            Thirdly, people criticize the book because it doesn’t illustrate the South accurately. This, of course, really depends on who is doing the illustrating. Twain was a Southerner and for a short time found himself a member of a Confederate Militia at the beginning of the war. He left after a few days and hightailed it out west to avoid all contact with the war. As a Southerner his voice seems to have taken over and overshadowed Hucks. I have some startling news for you. Twain wasn’t trying to depict the South. He was trying to depict a world that has Huck at its epicenter using the South as the background.

            There can be no modern version of Huck Finn. That, my friends, is something of an oxymoron. The version Twain wrote stands alone as a colossus of American Literature. The only one who has the right to change anything in the text is the writer. You have a choice. You can read the book as it was meant to be read and have yourself an experience that goes to the heart of who we are as a people. If you think you might be offended at the use of the words “nigger” or “injun” or even “pineapple” then you can choose to not read it and that’s the way it should be.

             Previously published in 365ink.

Was Jesus a Christian?

      There are two reasons I am somewhat reluctant to write about Bart Ehrman’s new book Jesus, Interrupted. The first is that whenever one talks about Jesus, the Bible, or religion in general someone is always wrong about everything and someone is always right about everything. It’s practically impossible to have a discussion where two or more people can disagree in a rational way. It always ends up feeling like Cardinal Bellarmine will break down the door any minute and stretch you out on the rack screaming, “Confess your heresy or lose your immortal soul to the damning fires of hell for all eternity.”

      Secondly, in order to show that I have some minor expertise in these matters I’m going to have to reveal things about my past and I’m not that comfortable spraying ancient times all over this review but I came to the conclusion that Mr. Ehrman’s book is well worth the effort. So, here goes. I come from a rather strict Irish Catholic family; growing up on the South Side of Chicago. I mean this in all of its forms; altar boy; no meat on Friday; Lent was an Earthly version of hell; Catholic education all the way through college. About my education, I was at the hands of the Dominicans in grammar school, sometimes referred to as the Sisters of Perpetual Repentance. High school and college were taken over by the Jesuits. That was the period in my life when I spent six years studying to be a priest. It took me six years to figure out that the Church was really serious about that celibacy thing…bye bye.

      In the seminary, as you might expect, we studied the Bible backwards and forwards, especially the New Testament which afforded me the unremitting bliss of reading in ancient Greek. Thankfully not all 27 books of the New Testament but enough that the memory of it now has me reaching for a tub of Ex Lax. In any event we read the Bible in a devotional, meditative way which is how 99% of all people read it…little bits at a time. We mostly read it, however, in huge chunks. When you read the Gospels all at once over, say, a three day period, you notice some extraordinarily interesting things. These four guys didn’t agree about anything.

     Mr. Ehrman’s book is subtitled, Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible and Why We Don’t Know About Them. It is as informative, riveting, and revealing a book on early Christianity as I have ever read. A great companion piece is Mr. Ehrman’s previous book Misquoting Jesus. It is not necessary to have read it to enjoy his new book but, taken together they are a tour de force.

     Here is a taste of a few things that Mr. Ehrman writes about and Biblical scholars have accepted and taken for granted in the last 60 years. These ideas seem to have missed the general Christian population because very few Christians are aware of them and they are not hearing anything from the pulpit about them.

     The four Gospels were not written by the men to whom they are attributed. These Gospels were written a long time after Jesus died by men who didn’t know Jesus. They didn’t know anybody who knew Jesus. They were highly educated men who were writing in another language in cities far away from Jerusalem. The parts of the story they didn’t borrow from each other they learned from people telling them stories about Jesus via an oral tradition passed down in non written form. These were four men who were telling their own version of Jesus’ ministry. Each of their Gospels takes a different perspective because they were trying to say different things about Jesus. That’s why the Jesus during the crucifixion in Mark’s Gospel bears so little resemblance to the Jesus in the other Gospels. You might ask yourself if they were all writing about the same guy.

     There were all kinds of Gospels floating around. Each little Christian community had their own books that proved their sect was the one true Christian version of Jesus’ ministry. It wasn’t until the Council Of Nicaea some 300 years after Christ died that the ROMAN version of Christianity got itself together and set in granite the 27 books we now use as the New Testament and embarked on a course to destroy all the other “books” that were in circulation.

     Jesus was an itinerant rabbi preaching an apocalyptic form of Judaism. He was born a Jew, raised by Jewish parents, preaching to Jews a particularly Jewish message. This was a form of Judaism NOT a new religion. By all accounts Jesus never intended to start a new religion. St Paul, however, did, and St Paul’s story is one of the most interesting of the lot. Ehrman does a great job of telling it.

     Bart Ehrman is an exceptionally good writer and Jesus, Interrupted flows as easily as a well constructed murder mystery, which, in a way, it is. It’s a must read for every Christian. Try to avoid the arguments because I assure you that after reading it you will become either a more serious, sophisticated Christian or a pagan. I know I did.

     Previously published in 365ink.

Toxicman

            I learned a new word today. Mephitic! It means foul smelling, noxious, poisonous, putrid, and rank. Mephitic! Just the word to describe Known and Unknown: A Memoir by Donald Rumsfeld. But don’t take my word for it. Far smarter and more eloquent people than I think that Donald Rumsfeld is one of the most toxic men to have ever served in our government and that his new book is a delusional exercise in trying to convince all of us to live in the same psychotic reality that Mr. Rumsfeld has lived in for a very long time. No less than the respected journalist; the word “respected” connected to a journalist is not used lightly here; Bob Woodward writing last Tuesday as a guest columnist for the magazine Foreign Policy’s  Best Defense feature had this to say about the new Rumsfeld book. “Rumsfeld's memoir is one big clean-up job, a brazen effort to shift blame to others -- including President Bush -- distort history, ignore the record or simply avoid discussing matters that cannot be airbrushed away. It is a travesty, and I think the rewrite job won't wash.”

I am tempted to leave the whole thing right there but I think I have come up with a way to use Mr. Rumsfeld’s rancid memoir in a way to let in some fresh air. By all means read it but at the same time read Andrew Cockburn’s Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy. This is an important companion piece to Rumsfeld’s attempt to paint himself as an American Hero. Cockburn doesn’t so much as do a hatchet job on Rumsfeld as a dissection with copious notes, references, and attestations.

Nowhere in all this is Rumsfeld’s evil genius for ignoring the truth and passing blame onto everyone around him more apparent than the whole topic of Weapons of Mass Destruction and what part they played in being the excuse for the war and the way the government convinced the American people that this was our first strike back in retaliation for 911. He wraps it all in the flag, democracy, and freedom to such an extent that one could expect to see his bust carved on Mount Rushmore. Mr. Cockburn’s book might leave you with the thought that Rumsfeld’s visage would be more appropriately carved on lump of excreta and flushed away.

Rumsfeld sticks to a story that almost everyone in the world already knows is not true. We didn’t invade Iraq to destroy WMD and to bring the holy grails of freedom and democracy to the people of Iraq. We didn’t invade Iraq in order to depose the Saddam Hussein because he gave logistical support, money, and refuge to al-Qaida. It turns out that Hussein might not have personally known anyone in al-Qaida or been in contact with anyone at the bottom of 911. No, we did not invade Iraq for any of those reasons. The real reason might seem, at first, a little complicated but when you think about it, it was staring everybody in the world right smack dab in the face.

It was the reason Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and the rest of the neo-cons decided was necessary for the building of the, so called, new world order with the USA on top and the neo-cons in control. The real reason we invaded Iraq can be summed up in one word, OIL!

Here is a very short version of how that worked. The region was/is very unstable. In order for the USA to construct the new world order we need oil, and plenty of it, to flow easily and cheaply to the USA. The region is so unstable that we can’t count on our friends in the area to be in control for the foreseeable future and it could very easily happen that the control of the oil could slip into hands that are not friendly to the USA: hands that would not sell the oil to us or charge us an exorbitant price so as to cause catastrophic damage to our economy. We needed an excuse to put a large army in the region so, if things go from bad to worse we could protect the interest of the USA; by that you can read, take and hold the oil fields by force if necessary because we already have the army there to do it. Saddam Hussein was just the excuse. In fact we now have an occupying force on both ends of the region, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, and it doesn’t look like we will be leaving anytime soon.

Read both books, Rumsfeld’s Known and Unknown and Andrew Cockburn’s Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy. The dots will be connected, the picture will be a lot clearer and you will be a better person for the effort.

Lastly, I’m very conflicted about buying Rumsfeld’s book because I don’t want him to get rich off this smelly pack of lies. He said he is donating all the profits to charity. I’m just not sure the charity, The Donald Rumsfeld Foundation, it exactly what I had in mind. I went to the Library which is a little bit better than buying it myself. The Library, however, does have to buy its copies from the publisher albeit at a reduced price which makes me feel a little better. I offer the Library alternative because I can’t, in good conscience, recommend that you steal it.

Previously published in 365ink.

What Comes Round After Going Round Seems Different Now

Guess who said the following?
"The GOP has changed. Under the influence of the neoconservatives, the GOP is becoming a Brownshirt party. 
I am a constitutionalist, a civil libertarian who believes that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are the FIRST things to be defended, not the last to be defended or that can be pushed aside in the name of "national security." Without the Constitution and the civil liberties that it guarantees, there can be no security.
When it comes to the market economy, I am a realist. I understand that, compared to a nation of farmers and artisans, a market economy--especially under free trade, jobs offshoring globalism--subjects people to massive economic insecurity and requires a strong social safety net. The idea that Republicans are espousing that the social safety net can be sacrificed in the name of deficit reduction in order to pay for wars of hegemony is insane, inhumane, and evil."

Are you ready??

Paul Craig Roberts!

He was one of Ronald Reagan's original group and the main inventor or Reaganomics. I don't know about you but I find it scary that I'm agreeing with him, at least in this case. I, personally, hope the Republicans and the Democrats spontaneously immolate and weaken themselves to such an extent as to allow a strong third party to emerge in this country; and I'm NOT talking about a gathering of rabble like the Tea Party.

In any case, Dan Froomkin over a HuffPo wrote an interesting column on Roberts. You might want to migrate over there and give it a read.


Roibeard Padraig McBlather
The Gentleman Anarchist

They Got It Right???????

If Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck and all the Tea-Party folks think that the founding fathers got it right the first time with regards to the Constitution then they should mull this over:

1. The Constitution we currently adhere to is not the first one, it's the second one we have developed: See Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. Got the first one right did they?

2. If the founding fathers got it right the first time how come the Constitution as been amended 27 times. An additional six amendments failed to pass; that would be 33 attempts to change the document. 10,000 amendments have been suggested but only those 33 made it to a vote.

3. When the Constitution we currently have was first passed, slavery was allowed, and no women had the right to vote. Do you think they got that right the first time?

You people show unconscionable ignorance every time you open your mouths. As for Ms Bachmann the US representative from Minnesota...she should have been required to pass a civics test before being allowed to run for office.

Roibeard Padraig McBlather
The Gentleman Anarchist