Sunday, May 31, 2009
Sotomayor the Bigot Not really, of course. She’s not even unusually “empathic” in racial discrimination cases. But, the media persist in making this sound like an issue to address:
Other than Ricci, Judge Sotomayor has decided 96 race-related cases while on the court of appeals.
Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge. In the one divided panel opinion, the dissent’s point dealt only with the technical question of whether the criminal defendant in that case had forfeited his challenge to the jury selection in his case. So Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a margin of roughly 8 to 1.
Of the roughly 75 panel opinions rejecting claims of discrimination, Judge Sotomayor dissented 2 times.
…In sum, in an eleven-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of 4 times. http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/judge-sotomayor-and-race-results-from-the-full-data-set/
Domestic Terrorism: The doctor, George Tiller, a veteran of anti-abortion assaults against himself and his clinics dating back to at least 1991, was shot to death in a Wichita church. Tiller was one of the two doctors in the country that specialized in late in pregnancy done for health reasons, i.e. generally because the pregnancy was a danger to a woman's or fetus’s health or life. Various members of the so-called Right to Life movement, such as Randall Terry, applauded the assassination. The suspect is a veteran of Right-wing activism, including Operation Rescue.
A suspect in this morning's fatal shooting of abortion doctor George Tiller is in custody and on his way back to Wichita, Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom Stolz said at a news conference late this afternoon.
The 51-year-old male suspect was arrested without incident on Interstate 35 in Johnson County about three hours after the shooting, Stolz said.
Police did not release the suspect's name.
The investigation is in its "infancy stages," Stolz said. He said the shooting appeared to be an isolated act.
Tiller, 67, was shot once just after 10 a.m. in the lobby of Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th St., where he was a member of the congregation.
Stolz said Tiller was shot in the foyer of the church. There were three or four eyewitnesses, he said. Six to 12 people were in the foyer at the time of the shooting. http://www.kansas.com/news/breaking/story/833730.html
One of the incidents / distortions in Tiller’s career:
On Friday, November 3, 2006, Bill O'Reilly featured an exclusive segment on his show, The O'Reilly Factor, saying that he has an "inside source" with official clinic documentation indicating that George Tiller performs late-term abortions to alleviate "temporary depression" in the pregnant woman. According to reporting data provided to the Kansas Board of Healing Arts for the year 1998, all of the post-viable "partial-birth" (dilation and extraction) abortion procedures performed in Kansas during that year were performed because "the attending physician believe[d] that continuing the pregnancy [would] constitute a substantial and irreversible impairment of the patient's mental function." Tiller responded to O'Reilly's statements by demanding an investigation into the "inside source" through which the information was leaked, suggesting that Phill Kline, then the Kansas Attorney General, was responsible. Kline denied the charge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tiller
GM: Officially Bankrupt Looking Back:
It is a company that helped lift hundreds of thousands of American workers into the middle class. It transformed Detroit into the Silicon Valley of its day, a symbol of America’s talent for innovation. It built celebrated cars, like Cadillacs, that became synonymous with luxury.
And now it is filing for bankruptcy, something that would have been unfathomable even a few years ago, much less decades ago, when it was a dominant force in the American economy.
Rarely has a company fallen so far and so fast as General Motors. And while its bankruptcy appeared increasingly likely in recent weeks, the arrival of the moment is still a staggering blow, particularly for anyone with ties to the company.
“I never ever could have believed that one day this thing would go that way,” said Jim Wangers, a retired G.M. executive who was part of the team that developed the Pontiac GTO, and the author of “Glory Days,” about Pontiac’s heyday in the muscle-car era of the 1960s. “We were so successful,” he added.
Founded in 1908, G.M. ruled the car industry for more than half a century, with a broad range of vehicles, reflecting the company’s promise to offer “a car for every purse and purpose.”
The expression “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country” entered the lexicon, even though it was a slight misquotation of Charles E. Wilson, G.M.’s president in the early 1950s.
But then G.M. began a long and slow process of undermining itself. Its strengths, like the rigid structure that provided discipline early on, became weaknesses, and it lost its feel for reading the American car market it helped create, as Japanese automakers lured away even its most loyal buyers. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/business/01downfall.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
Robert Reich: It’s a stall; More pain to come:
GM has been on a downward slide for years. In the 1960s, consumer advocate Ralph Nader revealed its cars were unsafe. In the 1970s, Middle East oil producers showed its cars were uneconomic. In the 1980s, Japanese carmakers exposed them as unreliable and costly. Many younger Americans have never bought a GM car and would not think of doing so. Given this record, it seems doubtful that taxpayers will even be repaid our $60bn. But getting repaid cannot be the main goal of the bail-out. Presumably, the reason is to serve some larger public purpose. But the goal is not obvious.
It cannot be to preserve GM jobs, because the US Treasury has signalled GM must slim to get the cash. It plans to shut half-a-dozen factories and sack at least 20,000 more workers. It has already culled its dealership network.
The purpose cannot be to create a new, lean, debt-free company that might one day turn a profit. That is what the private sector is supposed to achieve on its own and what a reorganisation under bankruptcy would do.
Nor is the purpose of the bail-out to create a new generation of fuel-efficient cars. Congress has already given carmakers money to do this. Besides, the Treasury has said it has no interest in being an active investor or telling the industry what cars to make.
The only practical purpose I can imagine for the bail-out is to slow the decline of GM to create enough time for its workers, suppliers, dealers and communities to adjust to its eventual demise. Yet if this is the goal, surely there are better ways to allocate $60bn than to buy GM? The funds would be better spent helping the Midwest diversify away from cars. Cash could be used to retrain car workers, giving them extended unemployment insurance as they retrain.
But US politicians dare not talk openly about industrial adjustment because the public does not want to hear about it. A strong constituency wants to preserve jobs and communities as they are, regardless of the public cost. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/528ba940-4e19-11de-a0a1-00144feabdc0.html
Health Care: Kennedy vs Baucus: EMK’s plan: The former wants the public option; the latter doesn’t. And, Kennedy adds a proposal to expand Medicaid beyond what anyone has previously imagined.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) is circulating the outlines of sweeping health-care legislation that would require every American to have insurance and would mandate that employers contribute to workers' coverage.
The plan in the summary document, provided by two Democrats who do not work for Kennedy, closely resembles extensive changes enacted in the senator's home state three years ago.
In many respects it adopts the most liberal approaches to health reform being discussed in Washington. Kennedy, for example, embraces a proposal to create a government-sponsored insurance program to compete directly with existing private insurance plans, according to one senior adviser who was not authorized to talk to reporters.
The draft summary also calls for opening Medicaid to those whose incomes are 500 percent of the federal poverty level, or $110,250 a year for a family of four.
President Obama, meanwhile, is urging his most loyal supporters to reactivate the grass-roots machine that helped elect him and direct it toward health-care reform.
"If we don't get it done this year, we're not going to get it done," he said yesterday in a call to members of Organizing for America, the political group formed to advance his agenda. "And to do that we're going to need all of you to mobilize."
A top administration official said the White House expects Kennedy to unveil his bill Monday. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/28/AR2009052803772_pf.html
Cyber Arms Race: New Funds for Cyber Warfare: An explosion of contracts, ostensibly to do with computer security, but actually it's about weapons for breaking into enemy computers so as to steal data and disable their networks. The military-industrial complex is always looking for ways to anticipate / cause the next round of competition.
The government’s urgent push into cyberwarfare has set off a rush among the biggest military companies for billions of dollars in new defense contracts.
The exotic nature of the work, coupled with the deep recession, is enabling the companies to attract top young talent that once would have gone to Silicon Valley. And the race to develop weapons that defend against, or initiate, computer attacks has given rise to thousands of “hacker soldiers” within the Pentagon who can blend the new capabilities into the nation’s war planning.
Nearly all of the largest military companies — including Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon — have major cyber contracts with the military and intelligence agencies.
The companies have been moving quickly to lock up the relatively small number of experts with the training and creativity to block the attacks and design countermeasures. They have been buying smaller firms, financing academic research and running advertisements for “cyberninjas” at a time when other industries are shedding workers.
The changes are manifesting themselves in highly classified laboratories, where computer geeks in their 20s like to joke that they are hackers with security clearances. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/us/31cyber.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=print
Richard Clarke: Enough of the “9/11 Trauma Excuse” Clarke explains why he's sick of this line frequently offered by Bush Administration principals:
Listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic.... I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.
Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea. [...]
Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques -- but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/29/AR2009052901560.html
Afghanistan: Body Counts As the Pentagon did during the Viet Nam war, totaling up enemy dead is back in style. Concurrently we’re getting upbeat reports of a Pakistan “offensive” against the tribes that constitute the Taliban.
Body counts are back, reigniting the decades-old debate about whether victory in war can be judged by measuring the stack of enemy dead.
In recent months, the U.S. command in Afghanistan has begun publicizing every single enemy fighter killed in combat, the most detailed body counts the military has released since the practice fell into disrepute during the Vietnam War.
The practice has revealed deep divides in military circles over the value of keeping such a score in a war being waged not over turf, but over the allegiance of the Afghan people. Does it buck up the troops and the home front to let them know the enemy is suffering, too? Or does the focus on killing distract from the goals of generating legitimacy and economic development?
American commanders have detailed nearly 2,000 insurgent deaths in Afghanistan over the past 14 months. U.S. officers say they've embraced body counts to undermine insurgent propaganda, and stiffen the resolve of the American public. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124380078921270039.html
-R
