Dahlia Lithwick on what’s at stake with the next Supreme Court appointment (it’s more than just Roe v. Wade):
Justice John Paul Stevens is 88, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 75. David Souter is 68, and it’s widely rumored in legal circles that he wants out (see, New Hampshire, above). All three of these jurists recently voted against the proposition that the government can call you an enemy combatant based on your last name or area code, then hold you without charges for six years at Guantanamo Bay, on the promise that you’re either a bad guy, or will very likely become one after being held for six years without charges at Guantanamo Bay. If just one of these three were to retire, we could easily return to a world in which decisions about who is or isn’t a so-called “enemy combatant” are made by the military, in secret, and with roughly the same sophistication that seventh-grade girls use to decide who’s “popular.”
Also in Slate, on the legality of torture:
If we manage to erase one hideously bad idea from our collective memories of the law in the war on terror, please, please let it be this one: Legal questions are neither “hard,” nor “novel,” nor “open” merely because someone at the White House didn’t like the legal answer that followed them. Easy questions don’t morph into tough ones just because you can find some guy willing to argue the other side.
Bush and McCain have both scoffed at the notion of serving terrorists with papers. Here are a number of reasons why military action may not always be the best solution to terrorism:
First, terrorists often operate in our country, or in friendly countries, which makes military action against them tricky. McCain (through his campaign blog) assailed Obama for favoring “prosecutors rather than predators.” But, when the terrorists are holed up in New York City, as was the case with the 1993 bombers Obama referred to, simply arresting them strikes me as more efficient than leveling their apartment with a drone-fired missile.
(via Yglesias)
In sum, don’t hate on the law. As Matthew Yglesias explains, it’s the law that keeps America from the type of corruption common in countries like Russia:
Here if the government were to ask telecom firms to illegally cooperate with an illegal surveillance operation, we’d ensure the rule of law continues to operate by changing the law so that complying with such requests will be legal in the future and also bestowing retroactive immunity on the cooperating firms. And if the Vice President’s top aide were convicted of a crime, the president would need to step in and commute his sentence. It’s these kind of procedures that keep our country safe and free!
We are a civilized nation, after all.
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And then, there’s Burma. Here is a detailed explanation of why reform just is not happening there:
In the case of Burma under General Than Shwe and his military junta, no carrots have been tried, to my knowledge. Sticks in many shapes and sizes have been brandished and swung, to little effect. Economic sanctions, asset freezes, arms embargos and travel bans are currently in effect by the US and EU. I posed the question to a Burmese dissident last week. He reflected a moment, then smiled and said, ‘A missile launch pad in Thailand, that’s all we need’. No sticks, no carrots, just elimination: everyman’s fantasy. Were regime change so easy!
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And in Mumbai, people are seriously starving…
“Car-bound charity” is typical in India, where “feudal giving” (e.g, when a patron pays school tuition for the children of his household’s maid) also accounts for much of the nation’s charitable work, reinforcing household and societal chains of command. Anonymous or “checkbook charity” is more popular in Western countries, where parading the poor out on the streets is considered degrading. Drive-by charity, however altrusitic, is clearly not going to cut it as India tries to deal with the global food crisis. As of 2006, the country already ranked 96th — below Nepal and Pakistan — on the Global Hunger Index.
…and China has been buying up the manhole covers.
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On a lighter note, here are some tips on how to take better candid shots. The trouble with candid shots (I’ve found) is that they tend to piss people off. See if you can guess which of these shots from my party on Saturday are candids, and which are posed:
