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Friday, December 16, 2005Now that the Iraqi elections have gone off rather smoothly, I'll advise what many others are: It's time for Bush to take some initiative in explaining what all this means:Our democracy policy is working far better than the critics suggest. It's not nearly as far from the expectations Wolfowitz set as the critics suggest. Realistically speaking, something really wild and nifty is going on that could change the Middle East forever. Iraq demonstrates that given a choice, Muslim peoples are neither doomed to nor necessarily persuaded by the idea of government by mullah. Government by mullahs is, in fact, just another form of "government by experts" in which an elite tries to tell everyone else to do. This is why some Western nations find it safe or reasonable to deal with: the bureaucrats implementing a scientifically managed society view the people exactly the way that mullahs implementing a religiously managed society do. It's time for the West to take its message everywhere, even into its own ethnic neighborhoods. If Fallujah could be liberated, so can Sydney, London and Paris. It just requires the same committment to individual liberty. 
posted by gbarto at 12:48 PM Monday, December 12, 2005I don't know whether Corey Maye is a small-time drug dealer who offed a cop and played dumb or a poor man who had the misfortune to live next to a more clearly nasty peddler.Neither does anyone else. And we may never know. Curiously, the police sought, the judge issued and the police enforced warrants on the hearsay of an officer and none of them left written documentation. I'm baffled. Our Constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure should imply that law enforcement need cross a meaningful threshhold before being allowed unrestricted access into our homes. And yet no one involved in the issuance of warrance regarding persons unknown kept a sheet handy explaining what the hell they were doing busting into Corey Maye's house? To read the statements of the prosecutor, the details of tactics and more, one gets the feeling that Mississippi prosecutors and law officers are operating in the Old South were stringing up a Black man was par for the course, not in the 21st century. This story, whatever it says about Maye, says it all about law-and-order and to hell with the niceties attitudes indicating that 20th, never mind 21st, century hasn't made it to Ole Miss after all. One hopes the governor, now sometimes mentioned as having national prospects, will take corrective action, working to assure that whatever the status of Mr. Maye, Mississippi is no longer a place where law-and-order is a law unto itself and citizens' rights are only operative if they don't inconvenience local law enforcement. Seriously, the police chief's son barging into a house on the basis of a name unknown warrant whose justifications are neither documented nor known to the issuing judge except that they come from an unknown informant? That's Dukes of Hazzard stuff, worthy of addled writers at the CBS of the 1970s. In real life, the seedy South can and should do better.
posted by gbarto at 4:25 PM Looking at the way the fine folks in the Senate are handling Doctor Senator Coburn, it appears that they're more concerned with defining their jobs up than protecting the ethics of the chamber. Perhaps from the start they knew they'd need to send a message to the good doctor, lest he shake up their cozy business as usual routine. If it were a Democratic Senate, I'd take it as par for the course for the bloviators to think that pushing paper and pampering egos was more important than birthing babies. Since it's a Republican Senate, I can only conclude that it makes no difference. Should the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee come calling again this year, they'll be told that there is no chance of my donation exceeding what they allow Doctor Coburn to derive from the practice of medicine. Though even the price of my time in telling them so would be worth more than these scoundrels and rogues deserve. When the Republicans find more Senate nominees like Doctor Coburn and fewer like the crew running things now, maybe I'll contribute again. Otherwise, the current Senate has gone out of its way to convince me that letting the Senate fall into Democratic hands again would be only marginally worse than what the GOP has on offer. Maybe I'm wrong, and the wiser part of me suspects so, but if the RSCC and the Republican Senate leadership don't pull their collective heads out of their collective patooties, we'll all find out soon enough. And while the country doesn't deserve that, the GOP Senate contingent does.
posted by gbarto at 12:23 PM Sunday, December 11, 2005Imagine:One dark night, a Mississippi man is sleeping in a spare bedroom with his 18 month old daughter. He knows he lives in a bad neighborhood. He's pretty sure his duplex neighbor is a dealer. He keeps a piece under his pillow for protection. On this dark night, his neighbor has gone one step too far. His client just got home with a sack of flour and sugar. The neighbor's client is back. And high. And confused. He busts into the neighbor's house, finds no one, runs out. He sees a door. He forces his way in. He wants his ice. And his vengeance. A frightened and bewildered Corey Maye, awakened by the commotion, has had just enough time to know something scary's happening. And to get his hand on his gun. An unidentified man bursts into the room. Maye shoots. Prosecutors are nervous about pressing charges. The man, after all, was defending his own home in a murky situation. No charges are filed. A few community activists whisper that he is, in fact, a hero, for protecting his family from the mean streets. * * * We don't know enough to be certain. But until fellow police officers started going to their buddy, it's plausible from what we do know that this scenario is exactly appropriate to the life Corey Maye was stuck in. * * * America is ostensibly a free country. One of our freedoms is from having government officials invade our property on a whim. For this reason, police need search warrants to enter our homes against our wills. I would think the bar would be especially high for an unannounced search. So... Either the judge who issued this no-knock search warrant was careless about handing out such a document to officers who didn't really know what they were planning to search or... Police gave the judge the impression they knew more than they claimed. How else to explain an officer breaking into the wrong house? Even if Maye was wrong to shoot, the maximum penalty he should have faced was negligeant homicide. He didn't shoot an officer who was performing his duties. He shot an officer who was manifestly failing to perform his duties and violating a free citizen's most basic Constitutional protections. As for the claims that there had been shouts of "Police," so what? Does this not make it just as likely that the unidentified man who just banged his way into your house is fleeing the police as a member of them? If there's no cause for police entering your house, I think it does. If Corey Maye is put to death, it will send a very clear signal for all of us: In the name of the war on drugs, our Constitutional rights are now null and void and officers of the "law" are free to do anything, however stupid or wrongheaded, with the citizenry expected to be more professional than so-called "law-enforcement professionals" when things get tight.
posted by gbarto at 5:07 PM Could they be starting to get it? Here's Roger Simon pointing out that a few countries have actually taken exception to the new nutjob in Iran.
posted by gbarto at 5:06 PM |
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