When a public servant, clothed in public authority, using the public's tools, on the public's time, performs a notable act purportedly on behalf of the public, should that public servant's identity be made available to the public?

What if the act in question is one of the most extreme assertions of state authority over an individual imaginable — a police officer's fatal shooting of an unarmed man?

Most citizens, I think, would say that the identity of the public servant should be public.

As Mark Draughn shows us, the Fairfax, Virginia police disagree — and disagree rather scornfully. Read Draughn's excellent column to see how the police use evasion, bureaucratic jargon, and the thin blue line to justify concealing the identity of the public servant who shot a man on the people's behalf. Note well, those who enjoy indulging in media-bashing, how the state can employ it to justify withholding information from the public.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski and many high officials of the Polish government have been killed in a plane crash outside the city of Smolensk, in western Russia.  Perversely, President Kaczynski was on his way to a memorial for 15,000 Polish soldiers killed by order of Joseph Stalin in the Katyn forest.

We have a few readers from Poland, and would like to express our sympathy to them on this awful loss.

You know one time we had this commenter calling us mindless liberals for twelve hours, and when we called him on it, we didn't get one sensible reply, not one.  So I banned him.

It's that smell, that clean, fresh smell.  It smells like … victory.

Some day this blog's gonna end, but he won't be here to see it.

Sometimes I tease my wife about the fact that she's got a doctorate in clinical psychology and is widely reputed among her colleagues to be a gifted child psychologist, yet is as much at sea in raising our own little hellions as I am. She tells me that it's actually somewhat a joke in the mental health profession that their kids wind up disturbed. I can live with that, I guess; at least statistically one or two of them will drop out rather than going to an expensive college, and I can buy a cool car.

There's another group widely assumed to be naturally gifted and excellent at parenting: adoptive parents. But we're just not. Adoptive parents are used to people cooing "Oh, that's so WONDERFUL that you adopted a that child," often accompanied by suggestions that the parents are "rescuing" the child, that the child is inherently better off with the adoptive parents, and that the adoptive parents are somehow noble saviors. Well-adjusted and reflective adoptive parents tend to despise this, as I've said before in the course of discussion adoption. Well-adjusted adoptive parents recognize that they are the extraordinarily blessed ones in the relationship, that the adoptive-parent-as-savior concept is poisonous to a child's self-esteem and development, and that it perpetuates a sentiment that justifies trafficking in children from developing countries. Yet people still insist on believing that a family that wanted a child enough to adopt one is somehow naturally better prepared for life's unpleasant surprises. They're not.

That's why this story should horrify us and shock us that people in general, not adoptive parents in particular, could be so inhumane.

Russia threatened to suspend all child adoptions by U.S. families Friday after a 7-year-old boy adopted by a woman from Tennessee was sent alone on a one-way flight back to Moscow with a note saying he was violent and had severe psychological problems.

…

Nancy Hansen, the grandmother, told The Associated Press that she and the boy flew to Washington and she put the child on the plane with the note from her daughter. She vehemently rejected assertions of child abandonment by Russian authorities, saying he was watched over by a United Airlines stewardess and the family paid a man $200 to pick the boy up at the Moscow airport and take him to the Russian Education and Science Ministry.

It sounds as if the adoptive family was completely unprepared to deal with a child with behavioral issues. Rather than seeking help from private or public resources, the family chose to ship the child back like unceremoniously returning a defective product to the store. I'm not saying that no adoption disruption is never appropriate — sometimes a family, whether adoptive or biological, just isn't capable of addressing a child's needs. But decent people, having made a commitment to a child, ought to make every possible effort to live up to that commitment, and that includes seeking help and disrupting through official channels, not dumping the kid with a one-way ticket.

Irresponsibility is not a zero-sum game: without diminishing the parents' guilt, we can observe that the adoption agency in this case probably did a piss-poor job of vetting the family and making sure that it was capable of dealing with entirely predictable emotional and behavioral issues.

A lot of adoptive parents are quite outraged by this story. That's understandable. But the outrage should be tempered with a bit of mercy, humility (meaning recognition that adoptive parents are just as broken as anyone else), and awareness of the stance we normally take towards the birth parents of our own children. To use the currently correct term, our kids' parents "made an adoption plan"; to use the language people are using about this family, some of them "abandoned" their children. If we rail too hard at the Hansen family, our kids might wonder how we view their parents, and how they should view them. We should criticize the Hansen family and their response to their situation carefully, without dehumanizing parents who decide that they are not capable of raising their children and, out of love, seek to find them another home.

Newt Gingrich just called Obama "the most radical president in American history." Oh my, that's fun. Good one Newt. Oh wait, he wasn't joking?

So, the most radical President ever allowed guns in National Parks, let his Justice Department argue against gay marriage, bailed out Wall Street and stuck to a mediocre middle ground for pretty much his first year? And seriously, the Socialist tripe only serves to underscore your ignorance of what Socialism really means.

I did appreciate that Newt entered the arena to Eye of the Tiger, though. So it wasn't a total loss.

By the way, for the record, I would argue Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan (ironically for almost opposite reasons) as most radical Presidents. Any other ideas?

But David Brooks was cheering for Duke. Is there a more perfect synergy than the sneering out of touch Brooks and the sneering ivory tower Duke? Rooting for Duke over Butler is like reading any article Brooks has ever written. He unapologetically cheers for the Big Guy.

Oh, the article also has the wonderful insanity of Brooks trying to argue that because rich people work more hours than poor people (although he didn't cite a stat for that..) and then tactfully doesn't respond when questioned whether 40 hours in a factory might not be harder than 60 hours in an office.

It says something (although probably about me, admittedly) that the most shocking thing in this article was not that Glen Beck makes $13million a year from his books. No, far more shocking is that he is entering the field of fiction with a "torn from today's headlines" story of a revolution (I'm gonna guess armed, since that is how Mr. Beck rolls) of a small band of true patriots against the lawless government that strives to control them.

OK, I am a little shocked and depressed that Beck made so much money. But I guess now we know why those tax increases on the rich bother him so much.

PS – I feel a little bad putting this post under the category books.

I keep saying here that I'm a small-l libertarian. What does that mean? It means that I'm not a member of the Libertarian Party, and don't have any plans to become one. Why? In part it's because I think party identification encourages sloppy thinking and orthodoxy — it leads us to adopt positions not because we've concluded those positions have merit, but because the tribe with which we identify has adopted them.

Also, to be blunt, it's because the Libertarian Party and other bastions of libertarian officialdom (as opposed to individual libertarians) seem doomed to attract cranks and crazies, much to the detriment of libertarian ideas.

Case in point . . . .

Last year I wrote this post demonstrating that the Los Angeles Times had indulged in legally illiterate scaremongering about the PATRIOT Act. In short, the Times asserted that a woman named Tamara Freeman was held under the PATRIOT Act for misbehaving on an airplane, when in fact she was prosecuted based on a law that existed before the PATRIOT Act, based upon elements unchanged by the PATRIOT Act, for conduct that the Times substantially distorted and minimized. In other words, the PATRIOT Act had nothing do to with it. Here's how I closed:

As I have often argued on this blog, citizens should remain vigilant about how our government uses the convenient excuse of the War on Terror to expand police powers and trammel rights in a manner unrelated to legitimate anti-terrorist efforts. The media does it job when it reports on genuine abuses and expansions of power. However, like the boy who cried wolf, the media does more harm than good when it does not do its homework before asserting that pre-existing norms and practices are actually new developments. And the media certainly doesn’t do its job when it attempts to sanitize someone like Tamera Freeman.

You would think that nobody could read that and conclude that I'm a Republican defending the PATRIOT Act.

You'd be wrong. Here's the comment we got last night:

Hay [sic] dumbass Republican’s [sic] you are not safer on airlines becuase [sic] the Gov’t uses the Patriot Act for trivial nonsense like this. The LA Times was very correct in there [sic] reporting. Welcome to the USSA

This was so dumb, so sub-literate, and so completely lacking in any sign of reading comprehension that I decided to Google "mdabfab23@aol.com", the email address left with the comment. To my surprise — wait, that's misleading, to my regret — I discovered that the email address belonged to Dave Begy, "Membership Chair" of the San Diego Libertarian Party.

Surely, I thought, this must be some statist trying to discredit libertarians by trolling blogs with silly comments and leaving the email addresses of libertarian party officials. Right? So I sent Mr. Begy an email warning him that someone was misusing his email address using the name "Joe."

No such luck. Here's what I got back:

No your [sic] the educated idiot. If you think your [sic] safer on a plane because the Patriot Act is applied in this manner and a woman is denied her god given right of Habeas Corpus to go in front of a judge to answer to the charges brought against her then all I can say your a sad human being.
Got it! Did I make myself clear enough this time?

Yep, that sounds like the same commenter. I replied rather brusquely, he replied in kind again:

O.K. Mr. Fed [the name on the email address I used], let's try this, you're an educated moron. Got it? Lay off the conspiracy crack pipe dude. So when from the time she was charged with these "egregious" "trumped up" air crimes was it to the time she was brought before a judge? 3 months? tyranny works on your mind not mine. Take your meds and watch dancing with the stars. Don't insult my intelligence. Nice blog! I look up to controllers like you! lol

Of course, anyone who actually read the post on which Mr. Begy commented would see that I cited, and attached, multiple documents from Ms. Freeman's federal criminal prosecution illustrating that she was not held incommunicado under the PATRIOT Act in defiance of the Great Writ, but routinely prosecuted under pre-existing federal statutes, made multiple and timely court appearances, and only spent time in custody because nobody in her family would bail her out. Again, the entire point of the post was to document that the PATRIOT Act had nothing to do with the prosecution.

That level of reading comprehension seems to elude Mr. Begy. As far as I can tell, he read one or two paragraphs of the post at random and then emoted.

There are several possibilities. One possibility is that Mr. Begy really is exactly this thick. Another is that Mr. Begy is engaging in the fine internet tradition of trolling, but using the email address he uses in his capacity of Membership Chair of the San Diego Libertarian party. That possibility is sort of a riff on the first one.

Libertarian ideas are important and worth exploring seriously. That's why we've blogged about post-9/11 idiocies and abuses by the TSA, police misconduct, the encroaching Nanny State, and the excesses of the War on Drugs.

If you care about these issues, you should examine them carefully and draw your own conclusions. When you follow a party, or a party's platform, you are letting people like Dave Begy decide issues for you.

I've long wondered how much fun I could have cross-examining some redneck plaintiff who had a license plate or bumper sticker bearing this message:

Now it looks as though I'll get the chance.  I'd like to thank you, unnamed client, for taking a great set of photos at the accident scene, and I'd like to thank your insurance company for entrusting me with this important responsibility.

You may recall that on April 1st we were involved in a little prank, masterminded by Eric Turkewitz.  Although the prank took in the New York Times and, briefly, the Wall Street Journal, the story didn't get really interesting until April 3rd.

I give you the Tragedy of Jack Marshall, a play in nine acts.

I.    Eric Turkewitz reveals his prank.

II.  Jack Marshall, an expert in ethics, enters the fray announcing that an April Fools prank by a lawyer is a violation of professional ethics.

III. Turkewitz responds: Is an April Fools joke an ethical violation?

IV. Marshall ups the ante: J'accuse! (Note a key appearance by our own co-blogger Charles in comments).

V. Not content, Marshall announces that henceforth, there will be ethical standards for April Fools jokes.  Jokes that do not adhere to these standards are forbidden.

VI. The world asks Marshall: Are you serious?

VII. Marshall replies: Yes, but I was wrong. Sort of.

VIII. A musical interlude about the value of friends.

IX.  The chorus weighs in, and the curtain drops.

This is a weird and freaky internet friends, and I have been involved in some weird and freaky things on this internet.  But I have never seen anything quite like this drama, which played out over four days in April.

The normally tasteful and judicious folks in the Nike marketing department have made a new commercial featuring a creepy, unblinking Tiger Woods and the beyond the grave voice of his father (who liked a little action on the side as much as his son does, apparently..) The strange thing to me is I'm not sure what this commercial is supposed to mean. Is his father absolving him ("I'm inclined to be inquisitive..")Are the weird flashes towards the end supposed to symbolize the media that is hounding this innocent man?

It's rather clear that the spot is supposed to make me feel bad for poor Mr. Woods. That is probably not going to happen.

For my friend PLW, who wants a puppy:

His name is Tan Man.  I didn't pick the name but he answers to it and it fits.  He joined our household last week.

He is serious and dignified, by dog standards.  Yet he is very friendly and affectionate.  I hope you're happy.

A few years ago, I saw a delightful little English comedy titled Death at a Funeral. It was a light farce about wackiness at the funeral of the patriarch of an extended clan of characters. I saw it for two main reasons, Alan Tudyk and Pete Dinklage. (name dropping alert: I attended college and did a play with Pete Dinklage. He was one of the three people in my program that made me realize that I was doing this for fun, and they were doing it because they had to.)

The movie was fun, if unremarkable. I didn't really think about it again. Cut to today. I saw a commercial for a semi funny looking movie with Chris Rock, Danny Glover and Tracy Morgan called Death at a Funeral. Didn't really think much of it, until I saw Pete in one of the previews. It's the same freaking movie!

I have to admit I'm sort of intrigued. Is this like a Vince Vaughn "Psycho" shot for shot remake or a Battlestar Galactica reimagining? The plots look pretty similar from the previews (right down to the uptight guy taking hallucinogens.) The kicker? Pete is playing the same character (with the same plot, but a different name) in both films.

I have to admit, I'm intrigued.

I'm not blogging this week because I'm on a Spring break vacation with my family at my in-laws' place outside Nashville, Tennessee. I'm getting fatter on my mother-in-law's food, playing catch with my son so much my throwing arm hurts, and generally relaxing as much as is possible with a 9/6/3-year-old.

Today was the Nashville zoo. The kids had a blast.

As I've noted before, these little trips tend to improve my self-esteem by making me feel not quite so fat after all. After looking around the zoo today, all I can say is that if the South is going to rise again, they're going to need a shitload of those Rascal personal scooters.

That seems to be the view of some at Duke, including the director of the University Women's Center Ada Gregory (previously covered here), who was quoted speaking of the school's new sexual harassment policy:

The higher IQ, the more manipulative they are, the more cunning they are … imagine the sex offenders we have here at Duke—cream of the crop.

While to some Ms. Gregory may have seemed positively proud of her school's fine young sex offenders, she later insisted she was misquoted:

[I]nvestigations of these crimes [rape] can be further complicated by offenders who may also be categorized as antisocial or sociopathic, who are of above-average intelligence and can be highly manipulative and coercive, not only with victims but in the investigation process.

Universities gather a lot of people with above average intelligence, so it stands to reason that campuses might see more of these kinds of individuals than the general population. My comments about this complex issue were selectively edited and taken out of context to imply that all Duke students fit this pattern, which is emphatically not the case.

I don't know why Ms. Gregory was upset about the original story.  It seems she's still saying that those Duke University students who are rapists are in fact, superior, more capable rapists.

But Ms. Gregory's odd speech patterns aren't the main problem at Duke.  The problem is Duke's definition of rape.

Continue Reading »