The Interocitor

A Few Needed Constitutional Amendments

1) Nothing in this Constitution shall prevent the penalty of death, in punishment for the crimes of murder, treason, terrorism, espionage or Crimes of War, from being exacted after due process of law, nor is any method of execution that is not intentionally painful prohibited.

2) No treaty or other obligation of the United States, or part thereof, regulating the conduct of war, is binding on the United States with respect to any adversary who does not generally observe the same provisions.

3) No treaty or other obligation of the United States may abridge any right secured to Citizens of the United States by this Constitution.

4) No person not a Citizen of the United States may vote in any election held under authority of this Constitution or those of the several States.

5) A person born in the United States is a Citizen if and only if the mother is legally resident at time of birth.

6) Any Resolution of Amendment to this Constitution, except for changes to Senate suffrage, passed in identical form within the same seven year period by the legislature or people of four fifths of the several States, as provided for by the Constitution of each State, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution.

Just thought I'd toss those out there....oughtta offend someone....

Update: #2 probably doesn't bother Patterico.

"A Whiff of Partisanship"

The New York Times does not like the Texas redistricting decision. It's hard to know where to begin with their editorial, as it is so rife with error, omission and petulant whining (they even mention Bush v Gore), that only a full-on fisking will do it justice.

The Supreme Court, in a badly fractured decision yesterday, largely upheld Tom DeLay's gerrymandering of the Texas Congressional districts. Instead of standing up for a fair electoral landscape, the court produced a ruling that did little to ensure the vibrancy of American democracy, and that itself had an unfortunate whiff of partisanship.

I'm beginning to smell that whiff myself. So far, we've seen the words "fair", "gerrymander" and "Tom DeLay," not to mention the shining-city-on-the-hill of "vibrant democracy." What could that mean?

Given the strong negative feelings that voters have about Congress — in a recent Times poll, just 23 percent of those surveyed approved of the job lawmakers were doing — it is startling how few races are expected to be competitive this fall.

This was a problem during the long Democrat run as well -- in 1988 the Republicans tied the Democrats in overall vote, yet got 50 fewer seats, mainly for this reason.

This is largely because of increasingly sophisticated partisan gerrymandering that uses high-powered computers to draw lines that in many cases make voters all but irrelevant.

True. I'd love to see all gerrymanders illegal, but is that what the Times wants? Surely they'll invoke the ghost of Democrat Phill Burton, who invented the computer remap. Surely they'll proceed to lambaste the previous Democrat Texas gerrymander that turned a Republican landslide (59-41% in votes) into a Democrat victory (17-15 seats). After all, if the 2000 election upset you with its narrow margin, ignoring a nearly 20% margin should have you buying guns.

Texas' 2003 redistricting was an extreme case. Mr. DeLay, who was then the House majority leader, led a fierce and successful campaign to capture Texas' Legislature for the Republicans. (He is facing criminal charges of using illegal corporate campaign contributions to do it.) Then, even though Texas had already redistricted after the 2000 census [actually a Federal Court dusted off the 1990 gerrymander and reinstituted it, ignoring Texas' wishes entirely], the Legislature took the rare step of redistricting again. The new lines were drawn in such a partisan way that Republicans ended up with nearly two-thirds of the state's Congressional delegation.

Whoops! I guess they liked the prior scheme. 41% of votes = 53% of seats = fair. 60% of votes = 65% of seats = unfair. And they complained about Florida! Now we see what "vibrant democracy" means: we win.

The Supreme Court has indicated in the past that gerrymandering can be so egregious that it violates the Constitution's equal protection clause. But the court has never set out a test to determine what constitutes such a violation, and it failed to do so again yesterday.

Yeah, too bad the prior districts weren't up for review; that might have done it.

The court has proved itself capable of thinking up elaborate tests when it wants to — it has made up standards virtually out of whole cloth, for example, to decide when Congress has infringed on abortion states' rights. It is disappointing that the court is not as resourceful when it comes to protecting voters' rights. The court rightly struck down one Congressional district yesterday, citing the Voting Rights Act, but that did not begin to address the serious problems with the 2003 redistricting.

Problems such as Republicans winning in rough proportion to their votes, rather than losing with a 20% margin of victory. If anything the 2003 redistricting showed the wisdom of the Court's jurisprudence -- egregious gerrymanders are unsustainable and will be rectified by the people so long as the courts stay out of it. That's what "vibrant democracy" is all about!

In this post-Bush-vs.-Gore era [*sigh*], the court's critics will note that it again split on partisan lines, with the most conservative justices most approving of the Texas lines. That was also true in a 2004 case in which it upheld, by a 5-to-4 vote, a pro-Republican redistricting in Pennsylvania. But that same year the court, disturbingly, affirmed a lower court's ruling striking down a pro-Democratic redistricting in Georgia as unconstitutional.

Actually they vacated the decision and remanded, which is not the same as upholding. Further, the case was about upholding the Voting Rights Act, and as such had little to do with the Constitution, which the Act honors mostly in the breach.

It is disappointing that it could not have come up with a decision yesterday that had a greater appearance of fairness.

I guess they should have used the NY Times as a yardstick of such appearance. There is a whiff of partisanship here all right, but the Times' editors shouldn't be looking too far from home for its source.

The Power of the Jump

As Patterico is wont to point out, newspapers often hide information that undermines their slant well down in an article, usually on an inside page. Often the information is placed in some disembodied parenthetical comment that is lost even if you get that far. Today's LA Times article on the Texas redistricting decision is a wonderful example.

After going on for most of two pages about the "partisan gerrymander" that the evil Tom DeLay engineered in Texas (no doubt from the Karl Rove Battle Bridge^TM), on the third page they note that under the previous Democrat remap (rubber-stamped for a second decade by a pliant/lazy federal court), Republicans got 59% of the cumulative vote for Congress, and 47% of the congressional seats.

"There is nothing inherently suspect about a legislature's decision to replace mid-decade a court-ordered plan with one of its own," Kennedy said.

Second, he said, it is not clear that DeLay's plan was less fair than the Democratic-friendly plan it replaced.

Before 2003, Democratic leaders had used their power in Austin to preserve a Democratic majority in the state's congressional delegation, even as most Texans voted for Republicans. Four years ago, 59% of Texans voted Republican and 41% Democratic in statewide tallies, yet more Democrats than Republicans won election to the House of Representatives.

By this measure, DeLay's plan "can be seen as fairer" than the one it replaced, Kennedy said.

One might well ask what other measure of fairness in elections is there, other than "does the seat split reflect the vote?" One might even ask it sooner than paragraph 16 on the third page. Unless, of course, you view the result being fair only if your side wins, the vote be damned.

Also entertaining is the Times' separate article about how difficult it is for Democrats to gerrymander, considering how easy it was in Texas in the 90's, and how easy it seems here in California, where there are no competitive House districts. But that got the ultimate jump -- right off the end of the article.

"In the Public Interest"

The New York Times and Los Angeles Times assert that they have a right to publish wartime operations if there is, in the newspaper's opinion, significant public "need-to-know" about them. Here's an example of a World War II operation that was shrouded in the utmost secrecy and placed thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of US civilians in harm's way:

In 1942, scientists under the leadership of Enrico Fermi build an atomic pile under a stadium at the University of Chicago. Essentially, it was an unshielded nuclear reactor in the heart of a major city. They had only Fermi's calculations that it would all go to plan -- if it had gone wrong, it could have been a Chernobyl in the country's second-largest city. It was sited there because their first choice was unavailable and they were in a hurry -- there was a war on. As it turned out, the pile never had a problem and produced a self-sustaining and controlled reaction in late 1942, proving that plutonium could be manufactured by such a method.

Now, if a newspaper, say the Chicago Tribune, had been leaked this information by a disgruntled team member and published it, they could well have cited overwhelming public concern with such a dangerous project in a populated area. Certainly the danger was there. But it would have blown the cover off the most important secret wartime project in history. Does anyone doubt that FDR would have arrested the paper's management and interned them? The only real question is whether there would have been a trial.

Now, the comparison of the Manhattan Project to the current situation may be overwrought, but it illustrates that simple claims of public interest, questionable legality, or even strong public safety concerns does not, in and of itself, allow newspapers to expose secret government activity, especially in wartime.

This is a government of laws, not men, and just because a few men run a major newspaper does not give them the right to overturn decisions of democratically elected officials. Even if they voted for the other guy.

Update: Patterico, of course, is all over this.

Update II: The secret behind the bombing of Coventry would also qualify, I think. Churchill knew that Coventry was targeted, due to having broken the German codes, but judged the continued reading of German communications more important than saving several thousand British civilians.

Man Bites Dog: NON-smokers call smoking bans "intolerant"

According to Reuters, Germans view tolerance of smoking as a benchmark of social tolerance. About 2/3rds of German adults are non-smokers, yet anti-smoking forces in Germany are doing very badly.

"I don't want to be deprived of the relaxed company of smokers in restaurants and bars," wrote David Harnasch of Freiburg in a letter to Der Spiegel weekly. "If my clothes stink of smoke, I can wash them where exactly is the problem?"

Yvonne Deim from Munich wrote: "Sitting in a smoke-filled room for a few hours bothers me less than it would if smokers were forced to get up every few minutes to go smoke outside."

Governments across Europe are cracking down on smoking in public places. But resistance to new limits is strong in Germany, where the right to smoke became a mark of tolerance and freedom after the Second World War.

Polls show a majority of the population and one in two non-smokers opposed a proposed ban on smoking in restaurants and bars.....

Der Spiegel made clear where it stood by putting a picture of a broken cigarette on its cover alongside the title "Smoking The End of Tolerance".

This may have something to do with it:

Bank Records Haven't Been Private for Decades

With all the yammering by the anti-Bush press regarding the use of administrative summons, you would think this is some new violation of privacy unprecedented in modern times. It isn't.

In United States v. Miller (425 U.S. 435 (1976)), the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that a customer has no expectation to, or right of, privacy with respect to bank records. According to the Court, these records are the bank's and not the customers, so the customer need not be served with anything before the government can see them. All it takes is an administrative subpoena, sayeth the Court in 1976.

A thorough analysis of administrative subpoenas,written in 1978, shows an entire line of Supreme Court cases, largely intended to assist in funding the welfare state by finding tax cheats.

I suspect that the newspapers that decry the use of these subpoenas in the War on Terror had no problem when they were used in tax fishing expeditions during the War on Poverty.

Making a Point

It is time, and past time, for the US to treat al-Qaeda members caught committing atrocities as war criminals, trying them before a tribunal, and if found guilty of war crimes, shooting them.

There have been reports over the course of the war in Iraq, that after several bombings and other murders of civilians, perpetrators were caught. Perhaps now is the time to select 10 or 20 obviously guilty prisoners and giving them the justice they deserve.

There are those that will say that this is barbaric, that it will just inflame Iraqis. But the whole situation is barbaric and what probably inflames Iraqis is getting their relatives blown up at mosque or in school buses and nothing being done. I doubt there is much love lost between Iraqis and "foreign fighters" anyway.

And just maybe someone will think twice before they torture captives to death.

Book Report: Glasshouse

Charles Stross; Glasshouse (**** [out of 5])

Stross' latest, set about a thousand years hence, is billed as being in the same future as his recent Accelerando, but except for being post-Singularity it really doesn't matter -- the books are not connected in any way.

Human culture has expanded across the galaxy using wormholes, to the point where there is no geographic location to anything; the "corner store" might be 100 light-years from your front door, and your kitchen might as far the other way. Death has been cheated by backup-and restore, and the only real boundaries left are guarded by store-and-forward firewall routers which treat human beings as so many packets.

Robin, our hero, has recently been restored after he submitted to severe memory edit for reasons he's not clear on. But someone else is, and is trying to kill him and all his backups, possibly related to the recently concluded Censorship War, which Robin remembers having some vague part in. Anyway, he goes and hides in an intentionally closed polity where there is only one way in and out. Unfortunately, he seems to have left the frying pan for the fire... (d'oh)

Like Accelerando, Glasshouse left me vaguely unsatisfied; perhaps it's the alienness of the society, perhaps it's the lose-lose choices the heroes face, but I think it's the almost melancholy theme that Stross has employed. It's not a great future, it has lots of problems, but people struggle on just the same. Maybe that's to be expected, but I keep hoping for more.

A note aside: The whole idea of backup-and-restore immortality leaves me cold. The copy may think that it's the real deal with all the memories, but the previous copy died. I don't view being dead while some simulacrum continues as a very satisfying outcome. There is a difference between move and copy. Dr. McCoy was right.

Perverse Education Priorities

Let's say you have a school system that is generally regarded as one of America's worst, like Washington, DC. Nearly everyone involved that doesn't work for the school system, including the mayor and Congressional representative wants federal funding to send kids to private schools. To no avail.

Except there is lots of money available to send DC kids to private schools, just so long as they are stupid learning-impaired. According the the NY Times, DC schools spend 15% of their budget sending the lowest-achieving 4% to private schools. Smart kids they leave to rot in a system that no Congressman or bureaucrat sends their kids to. What's wrong with this picture?

Book Report: Variable Star, the Controversial New "Heinlein" Novel

Robert A Heinlein & Spider Robinson; Variable Star (***1/2 [out of 5]) (due September 2006, read in advance proof)

This is presumably the last book in Heinlein's Future History, taking place during the late Coventry period (circa Methuselah's Children or late 23rd Century). Heinlein completed a detailed outline and partial draft of this book in 1955 and then abandoned it to work on other projects. Recently, the estate arranged for Spider Robinson to complete the work. Without giving anything away, this story would have taken the History in another direction from the body of his published work.

On all but one page, Spider Robinson has done a great job here of channelling the Master, and for the most part this book is extremely well done, both in the style and flavor of late 50's Heinlein, and in the way it winds itself into the Future History canon. I recommend it for all Heinlein fans. But...

Alas, that one page. Mr. Robinson has big issues with the War and couldn't resist an extremely cheap and gratuitous shot at George Bush. Judging by nearly everything he wrote, and particularly his dislike of pacifism, Heinlein would never have allowed such a rant in a book he co-wrote. But, being 20 years dead, all he can do is spin.

Except for this unforced error, I'd give it four stars. Maybe between the galleys and the bookstores someone will have enough respect for Heinlein to not put factually challenged rants in his mouth. One would hope.

(the rant, with a mild spoiler appears below the fold)

A character is speaking about the group's shock and dismay over a large and murderous attack (pp 263-264 of the uncorrected proof), trying to talk them out of hasty action. This is couched in the timeline of Heinlein's Future History, but it's not exactly rocket science to figure out the context. Nehemiah Scudder (The Prophet) is an American Christian theocratic dictator in the canon, overthrown at great cost.

"I will offer only a single example: the Terror Wars that led inexorably to the Ascension of the Prophet.

"Shortly after Captain Leslie LeCroix returned home safely from the historic first voyage to Luna, fanatical extremist Muslims from a tiny nation committed a great atrocity against a Christian superpower. Suicide terrorists managed to horribly murder thousands of innocent civilians. The grief and rage of their surviving compatriots must have been at least comparable to what we all feel now.

"Intelligently applied, that much national will and economic force could easily have eliminated every such fanatic from the globe. At that time there were probably less than a hundred that rabid, and by definition they were so profoundly stupid or deranged as to be barely functional. It was always clear their primitive atrocity had succeeded so spectacularly only by the most evil luck.

"We all know what the superpower chose to do instead. It crushed two tiny bystander nations, killing some dozens of actual terrorists, and hundreds of thousands of civilians as innocent as their own dead loved ones had been. The first time it was suggested that nation's leaders had perhaps known about the terror plot and failed to give warning. The second invasion didn't even bother with an excuse, even though that nation had been famously hostile to terrorists. Both nations were Muslim, as the nineteen killers had been: that was enough. The nation nearly all of them had actually come from remained, inexplicably, the Christian superpower's almost only Muslim ally in that region.

'The generation of a large planetary web of enraged Muslim extremists was so inevitable it is difficult for us now to conceive of the minds that did it. They were some of the most intelligent and humane people in the history of the planet: what could they have been thinking?

"Of course they were not. They were feeling.

'They were a superpower, and monotheist. No one had ever hurt them remotely that badly, and they were utterly certain no one had any right to hurt them at all. They reverted to tribal primate behavior. Beaten and robbed of your banana by a bigger ape or a more clever chimp ... you find some smaller, stupider primate, beat him, and steal his banana.

"So doing, they ignited a global religious war that threatened to literally return the whole world to barbarism. The only thing to do then was crush it under the iron and silicon heel of a slightly smarter barbarism, a marginally less bloodstained religion, the best of all possible tyrannies. Nehemiah Scudder became the Holy Prophet of the Lord, smote the false prophets, and darkness fell."

Contrast this with actual Heinlein (Notebooks of Lazarus Long):

Those who refuse to support and defend a state have no claim to protection by that state. Killing an anarchist or a pacifist should not be defined as "murder" in a legalistic sense. The offense against the state, if any, should be "Using deadly weapons inside city limits," or "Creating a traffic hazard," or "Endangering bystanders," or other such misdemeanor.

The Democrat Plan for America Fisked

Old news, perhaps, but the Democratic Leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, issued a six-point plan last week to guide the party in the 2006 elections. Here's their plan. Really.

• Make Health Care More Affordable: Fix the prescription drug program by putting people ahead of drug companies and HMO’s, eliminating wasteful subsidies, negotiating lower drug prices and ensuring the program works for all seniors; invest in stem cell and other medical research.

Translation: Take the drug companies profits, which they would funnel back into research into new drugs, and instead spend the money on government boondoggles which we will call "research." I am willing to bet any amount of money that the first benefits of stem cell research will come from drug companies, not the federal government. There is nothing I can think of where government actions in fields where private industry was competing has ever produced more, faster or better results than the private efforts.

• Lower Gas Prices and Achieve Energy Independence: Crack down on price gouging; eliminate billions in subsidies for oil and gas companies and use the savings to provide consumer relief and develop American alternatives, including biofuels; promote energy efficient technology.

  Translation: Take profits from oil companies (I'm sensing a pattern), increase their direct costs (and bash them some more for raising prices) and use the money to buy off our constituents inflate demand help po' folk and fund more useless government boondoggles which we will also call "research."

  Drilling for oil in the 30-year proven supply that is off our coast and in the Arctic is completely off the table, of course, as is nuclear. Instead, we'll pander to the corn growers, pass endless unneeded regulations, close down more American production, and spend billions on research Toyota did better 5 years ago.

• Help Working Families: Raise the minimum wage; repeal tax giveaways that encourage companies to move jobs overseas.

  Translation: Screw the developing world, pander to unions, and drive marginal workers onto the dole. Because we're nice guys.

  Given that the unemployment rate is about as low as it ever gets, why in the world is anyone worried about people in India having jobs, too?

  Without coming here?

  Are we really so self-centered that we'll let trained brown people starve just so Billy-Bob Witless who dropped out of kindergarten can have a high-paying assembly job? It would be stupid if it wasn't so calculatingly cruel.

• Cut College Costs: Make college tuition deductible from taxes; expand Pell grants and slash student loan costs.

  Um, maybe except the last: College loans are under prime rate as it is, and are a darn sight more risky. Cutting the rate to 3% will simply ensure that they are paid back as slowly as possible.

• Ensure Dignified Retirement: Prevent the privatization of Social Security; expand savings incentives; and ensure pension fairness.

  A rare triple oxymoron.

• Require Fiscal Responsibility: Restore the budget discipline of the 1990s that helped eliminate deficits and spur record economic growth.

  Which didn't happen until you lot went into opposition. Different day, different earmarks; the real problem here is at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. What we need is a fiscally conservative Republican in the White House who will veto overspending instead of proposing it.

How about the Pinochet option?

So, Iran's President is planning on attending the World Cup in Germany if his team gets that far. Great. How about the US requests his extradition for kidnapping and imprisoning diplomats as one of the Iranian hostage-takers of 1979? If they can hold Pinochet for violating anti-torture treaties, surely there's some kind of international agreement against kidnapping diplomats.