Drew Carey and our friends at Reason have produced a great 25 minute documentary about the Corey Maye case.
For additional background on the Maye case, go here.
This Sunday, the department of Santa Cruz, the richest region of Bolivia, will hold a referendum on regional autonomy. Other departments in the eastern half of the country will likely follow suit in the upcoming months. The central government in La Paz opposes the project and calls it “separatist.” Despite that, polls show that an overwhelming majority of “cruceños” will vote in favor of autonomy.
As a consequence, the ruling party has threatened to use violence against the citizens of Santa Cruz who show up to vote on Sunday. It wouldn’t be the first time. Last December, the government forced the approval of a new constitution in a Constituent Assembly while a pro-government mob outside the building prevented opposition assemblymen from attending the session. This year, something similar happened when the national Congress declared these referenda on regional autonomy illegal in a rigged session while mobs outside Parliament prevented opposition Congressmen from entering the building.
This time around, the party of president, Evo Morales, has warned about the possibility of taking thousands of its supporters to Santa Cruz to prevent the vote from taking place. The only way to accomplish this is by force.
So it’s kind of surprising that the European Union is taking sides with those who, over and over again, have used violence to suppress democratic institutions. The French ambassador in Bolivia and representative of the EU in that country has stated that the leaders of Santa Cruz who are pushing for autonomy will have to “assume the consequences” if violence erupts on Sunday. That is, the EU will blame the victims if they get beaten up by government thugs for exercising their democratic rights.
Shame on the EU.
Yon Goicoechea, leader of the pro-democracy student movement in Venezuela, has been awarded the 2008 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Under Goicoechea’s leadership, the student movement organized mass opposition to the erosion of human and civil rights in Venezuela and played the key role in defeating Hugo Chávez’s bid for a constitutional reform that would have turned the country into a dictatorship. Goicoechea’s vision of optimism, tolerance, and modernity has breathed new life into efforts to defend basic freedoms in Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin America where freedom is threatened.
Good column on the seizure of 400+ children from the FLDS ranch in Texas. (HT: Volokh).
As I said in this Cato podcast, I think it is telling that no young adult or child has been found saying “Thank you so much for rescuing me! It is nice to be in a place where I am not beaten up!” The absence of proof is now considered evidence of massive “cult” brainwashing. If a child says “I love my parents and want to go home,” it means he has been brainwashed by the “cult.” And if a child says “I like my foster parents a lot. They give me candy and the video games are awesome,” it means the child’s actual parents are unfit.
State authorities talk a lot about rape and forced marriages, but 300 children are ages 4 and below. They should be sent home because there is no evidence of abuse. All the boys should go home because there’s no evidence of abuse. As for the remaining girls, they have been held for 3 weeks already … the judge should give the police one more week to present evidence or they should be going home too. The investigation can continue, but 3+ weeks in custody is enough already.
When it comes to separating children from the parents, the burden of proof must be borne by the state.
Much as I hate to rain on my colleague Juan Carlos Hidalgo’s understandable happiness at the decriminalization of personal consumption/possession of small amounts of drugs, this doesn’t exactly represent a ray of hope in Argentina’s otherwise gloomy policy mix. Not because I believe in the War on Drugs – I can’t imagine anybody at Cato does – but because it was a court that reached this decision instead of a policymaking body.
Imagine the outcry if the U.S. Supreme Court simply decreed a policy it didn’t like to be unconstitutional – I know, with Justices Stevens and Kennedy at the apogee of their powers, it’s not a far stretch. Better yet, recall the poison the Court injected into our legal and political systems when it short-circuited the political process by inventing a right to abortion in Roe v. Wade (again, I’m not saying anything about the underlying policy arguments).
So it is here: Instead of having the Argentine Congress change the law, the nation’s Supreme Court (by a vote of 4-3) simply decreed that criminalizing drug use is unconstitutional. Reports are still sketchy, but this sounds like precisely the kind of judicial fiat developing (or any) countries need to avoid if they want to strengthen the rule of law.
The Universal Right to Vote by Mail Act of 2007 (H.R. 281) recently passed the House Committee on House Administration. It would amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require states to allow eligible voters to request a mail-in ballot for all federal elections without having to provide a reason.
In a TechKnowledge piece called “Voter ID: A Tempest in a Teapot that Could Burn Us All,” I shared some thoughts that are relevant to this bill:
Increasing voter participation has been a policy fetish for the last decade or two-never mind whether more voting for its own sake makes a better democracy. . . . The growth in absentee balloting has undone some of the protections against voter impersonation and multiple voting that previously existed. People are much more reticent to commit fraud in person - it’s riskier - so in-person voting was a natural security against impersonation fraud. Voting in multiple jurisdictions is simply too time-consuming to do on any scale when it has to be done in person.
The bill would require states to verify signatures on absentee ballots by cross-checking them with voters’ signatures on the official list of registered voters, but this only begins to shore up the security hole opened by mass absentee balloting.
The people who want this bill undoubtedly believe it will improve both the political discourse and their electoral prospects. Folks on the other side - the proponents of identification requirements for voting - will only be energized by these efforts, which lower the bar for both legitimate voting and for voter fraud.
Both sides should just drop this food-fight-to-the-death and work on substantive policies that they believe will win voters to their sides. Hopefully, those policies are centered on limited government, free markets, and peace.
Yesterday, in addition to announcing its decision in the Medellin case (which I blogged about here), the Supreme Court heard argument in two cases relating to the War on Terror.
First, in Munaf v. Geren, two U.S. citizens (also citizens of Jordan and Iraq, respectively) held captive in Iraq by U.S. forces — as part of Multi-National Force-Iraq, which may but should be a key determinant – challenged their detention and potential transfer to Iraqi authorities for what they fear will be torture as part of criminal prosecution in Iraqi courts. This seems to be an easier case than Boumediene, a case argued in December wherein Guantanamo detainees challenge their containment and the military commissions by which they are to be tried. (My colleague Tim Lynch blogged about that case here and here, and also filed an amicus brief.)
Whatever hope the detainees had was probably dashed by the incoherent presentation made by Northwestern Law School Clinical Professor Joseph Margulies on their behalf. As Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog put it, “when several Justices of the Supreme Court tell an attorney they do not understand his argument, and they do so because the argument was, indeed, fundamentally confusing, the chances of winning may be significantly reduced.” Ouch. Margulies turned what should be relatively straightforward issues into a convoluted maze, and those of us in the audience were not the only ones shaking our heads.
The second argument, and the one relating to the title of this blog post, involved the prosecution of the guy who was caught smuggling explosives into the U.S. from Canada in an attempt to blow up LAX at the turn of the century. (Is it ok to use that expression for the 1999-2000 period yet?) In United States v. Ressam, Attorney General Mukasey exercised the AG’s historical (but not much used of late) prerogative to argue before the high court, defending the 10-year additional prison term slapped on the Milennial bomber for “carrying an explosive” while “committing a felony” — the felony being lying to the border guard. Having learned from Margulies’s example, Mukasey did a workmanlike job and sat down with 14 minutes remaining in his allotted time. The case will turn on some rather technical statutory analysis which I’ll spare you, but it was refreshing to see an appellate advocate who was clearly not there to hear his own voice.
Imagine that you do business in California. Maybe you’re in construction, or health care, or auto repair. Now imagine some or all of your income comes from state contracts; using the above examples, perhaps you build schools, or take care of patients on Medi-Cal, or fix broken-down LAPD squad cars. Now imagine that the state comes in and says, aha, because we pay your bills — again, on contracts relating to construction, health care, auto repair, etc. — and we love unions, you can’t talk to your employees about any negative aspects of unionization. Ridiculous, right? Who is a customer to tell you what to do with money that’s already in your pocket?
Well, that’s precisely what the great state of California is trying to do with a new statute that small businesses are challenging in the case of Chamber of Commerce v. Brown. It’s a little bit more complicated than I outline above because the case implicates highly technical provisions of the National Labor Relations Act (and previous Supreme Court interpretations thereof), but the gist is that California is attempting to silence employers by tying speech restrictions to unrelated state spending. For reasons that the petitioners ably present in their briefs and that I summarize in a podcast and in Cato’s own amicus brief, the Supreme Court should strike down this statute.
In any event, that’s the background to my trip to the Court to hear argument in Chamber v. Brown today. (The plaza in front of the courthouse steps was remarkably free of demonstrators after yesterday’s hoopla surrounding the DC Gun Ban case.) I’ll save you the detailed summary of the argument, but suffice it to say that the outcome will almost certainly go against California. It’s always dicey predicting the scorecard, but based on oral argument it will probably be 7-2, 6-3, or maybe 6-1-2. On one side, Justices Scalia and Alito and Chief Justice Roberts were safely on the side of free speech; Justices Justice Souter surprisingly led the charge against California’s interpretation of labor law; Justice Breyer, though skeptical, will likely write his own opinion agreeing in the Court’s opinion for separate reasons or possibly calling for remand rather than strict reversal; and Justice Thomas was silent but is expected to join the majority. On the other side, Justices Stevens and Ginsberg seem to have no problem with California’s regulation. On his own side as usual, Justice Kennedy’s vote seems to be up for grabs, but – based on his decisions in previous labor and regulatory preemption cases – I would bet on him siding with the majority.
In short, California employers will live to speak another day.
Last week, former Federal Election Commissioner Hans A. von Spakovsky published a Heritage Foundation Legal Memorandum entitled Stolen Identities, Stolen Votes: A Case Study in Voter Impersonation. Contrary to claims made by prominent newspapers and attorneys, he argues, in-person voting fraud is a real problem.
The evidence he provides is a vote fraud ring that began operating in 1968 and that was broken up more than 25 years ago in 1982. Impersonation fraud can be committed at polling places, and a voter-ID requirement would make it a little harder, but a quarter-century-old case is hardly evidence of a significant problem.
How states secure their voting processes should turn on how they structure their voting processes. States might choose a voter ID requirement if they can do so in a way that balances security against access, convenience, and privacy. Absentee balloting is generally a far greater threat to the security of elections than weak or non-existent ID requirements at polling places.
The thing that matters most is avoiding a uniform national voter ID requirement. I wrote about this in my TechKnowledge piece Voter ID: A Tempest in a Teapot That Could Burn Us All: “To ensure that American voters enjoy their franchise in a free country, clumsy voter ID rules should be avoided. A national voter ID system should be taken off the table entirely.”
In a new plan to combat crime on the streets of our fair city, Mayor Adrian Fenty and Police Chief Cathy Lanier are encouraging residents to submit to voluntary searches of their homes in exchange for amnesty if the residents have illegal guns (or drugs). (”Excuse me, ma’am, mind if I take a look around… “)
Well, this isn’t illegal — consent is, after all, one of the exceptions to the warrant requirement — but it is head-scratchingly poor public policy. Those who don’t want to give up their contraband won’t consent to searches, those who want to get rid of it will find a way to do that without signaling “check here again next week,” and the police will waste their resources rifling through the homes of people with nothing to hide.
Maybe D.C. should pass a law outlawing gun ownership. Oh wait, they already did that and are fighting to keep it in the face of, um, the Second Amendment. (The Supreme Court hears argument in D.C. v. Heller next Tuesday.)
The bottom line is that voluntary home searches, like outright gun prohibitions, only hurt law-abiding citizens. Those who have already chosen to engage in crime will not be deterred merely because their actions violate gun-related ordinances in addition to the laws against robbery, rape, murder, etc. The only guns swept up in this “amnesty” will be those kept by people trying to protect their families from the criminals the police fail to catch.
A site for community review of police officers called RateMyCop.com gets the benefit of the “Streisand effect” today. For a period of time, it was shut down by its web registrar, GoDaddy.com, most likely because of law enforcement complaints about being subject to public oversight.
(The “Streisand effect” is the phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove information from the Internet backfires, causing it to be more widely publicized. The term refers to a 2003 incident in which Barbra Streisand sued a photographer and Web site in an attempt to have an aerial photo of her house removed from a publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs. The lawsuit made the photo very popular.)
I’ve taken issue with plenty of things Ted Kennedy has done in the past, most recently his suggested reforms to the judicial confirmation system. My response [$] to his proposals was essentially that he ought to go back to Civics 101 and learn the difference between law and politics, and between the respective powers of the judicial and legislative branches.
Apparently, someone on Kennedy’s staff has done just that because this week the good senator introduced two bills designed essentially to remedy what he sees as Supreme Court error in the field of employment discrimination. This action naturally caught the attention of the New York Times editorial page:
One of the most troubling rulings was in the case of Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company plant who was paid less than her male colleagues after she was given smaller raises over several years. The court’s conservative majority ruled that Ms. Ledbetter had not met the 180-day deadline to file her complaint. It insisted that the 180 days ran from the day the company had made the original decision to give her a smaller raise than the men.
….
The Fair Pay Restoration Act, one of Senator Kennedy’s bills, would undo the injustice of the Ledbetter decision by establishing that the 180-day deadline runs from when a worker receives the unequal pay, not when the employer decided to discriminate. It would make clear that each discriminatory paycheck restarts the clock.
Kennedy’s other bill, the Civil Rights Act of 2008, would reverse more bad decisions. One of these is a 2001 ruling that says that people who are discriminated against in programs using federal funds can sue only for intentional discrimination, not for actions that have a discriminatory effect.
Kennedy, wittingly or not, has just demonstrated how our constitutional system of checks and balances and separation of powers should work — as well as illustrating the difference between law and politics.
November 9 will mark 1 year in jail for an innocent young man, sentenced to four years in prison for expressing his opinions on his blog.
Raja Kamal of the University of Chicago and I told the story in “Freedom for an Egyptian Blogger and Freethinker” last February in the Washington Post. You can get more details, including how you can help take part in a dignified protest for human rights, write letters to Egyptian officials, and more, at www.freekareem.org.
(This story was originally sent last week by Declan McCullagh to his politech e-mail group. Most of Declan’s e-mail follows.)
The Gilpin County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado, a rural area not that far west of Denver, recently set up a highway checkpoint where motorists were stopped and, at least in some cases, not allowed to leave until they gave breath, blood, and saliva samples for the benefit of a private research firm. A report by Ernie Hancock says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was involved as well.
A Denver Post article is here:
http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_6922089More:
http://cw2.trb.com/news/kwgn-invasive-checkpoint,0,2092732.story
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=57733
http://freedomsphoenix.com/Discussion-Page.htm?InfoNo=024006The Post says the private organization in question is the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, or PIRE, in Calverton, MD. Their Web site seems to be down but can be viewed here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050826173038/www.pire.org/The thoroughly-misnamed PIRE is a major DC government contractor (and in fact its offices are within walking distance of the Beltway). It specializes in funneling over $35 million of taxpayer money a year into its own coffers through law enforcement contracts of dubious utility, mostly dealing with drugs and alcohol, from sources including the U.S. Department of Justice. 100 percent of its budget appears to come from government contracts or grants.
Although PIRE pretends to be a “nonprofit” organization — at least that label helps to collect those fat taxpayer-funded checks from the DOJ — in reality it spends about $1.35 million a year on lobbyists. Not a bad 30-fold return on investment. And its employees are paid six-figure salaries that would be handsome even by for-profit standards.
PIRE seems to specialize in devising new and intrusive ways of government meddling in personal lives. One PIRE success story helps to coerce retailers to card octogenarians who dare to try to buy a bottle of Cabernet. (”This method of enforcement gives retailers the necessary incentive to comply with the state’s law regarding the sale of alcohol, given that their next customer could be part of a compliance check. The Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) has developed a detailed document to assist in the development and implementation of compliance checks.” See:
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/injury/alcohol/dotpartners/chapter_5.htmPIRE is an ardent supporter of the War On (Some Politically Unacceptable) Drugs, also known as an excellent way for Feds and contractors to fleece the public in a war that will never end, eviscerate the Fourth Amendment, and create a police state with perfectly legal no-knock raids. One PIRE researcher who focuses on “middle-school-based drug prevention programs” and has written a paper claiming anti-drug programs in schools actually work:
http://www.nida.nih.gov/Meetings/Prevention/PrevBios4.htmlPIRE also supports higher taxes on alcohol and firmly opposes lowering the minimum drinking age to be akin to Europe or Canada (something that would probably do much to limit abuse). See:
http://www.higheredcenter.org/thisweek/tw010629.html
http://resources.prev.org/documents/BeerTaxesNewsRelease.pdf
…you’re having wistful fantasies about staff meetings. In all seriousness, though, there’s great news: once imprisoned by Iran, Wilson Center scholar Haleh Esfandiari is back at home in Washington–and back at work at the Wilson Center. But as she says, during her stint in Evin prison, she was indeed dreaming about being back at Wilson Center staff meetings:
I had blocked, you know, thinking about my husband, my daughter, my grandchildren, the house; I blocked all that out because that would have led me to despair. So, for eight months, or for the four months in prison, I didn’t think about it.
I dreamt of my first staff meeting at the Wilson Center. (Laughter.) I seriously did. I really did that, I said, OK, I would [not] tell anybody I’m in town … I would open the door Monday morning at 9:00, walk in to the staff meeting and everybody [would say], “She’s here!”
Full transcript of Esfandiari presser here. (.pdf)
A variety of news outlets are reporting that Wilson Center scholar Haleh Esfandiari has been released from Evin prison “on bail,” and Reuters is reporting that Esfandiari’s lawyer, Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi, is stating that Esfandiari is now “legally allowed to leave the country.” Encouraging news.
Meanwhile, our thoughts and prayers are still with Kian Tajbakhsh, Ali Shakeri, Parnaz Azima, and their friends and families.
A devastating column in the Wall Street Journal calculates the death toll caused in part by the bureaucrats at the FDA. The paper-pushers refuse to let critically ill patients have access to experimental new drugs – even when those drugs already have cleared some clinical tests. In a free and just society, individuals would have the right to make those decisions:
The Alliance began pushing for access to investigational drugs for terminal patients after its founding in mid-2001 upon the death of Abigail Burroughs, who was denied an investigational drug (Erbitux) that an early trial showed might have helped her. She and her doctor were right, but she never got the drug. Over the past five years, the Alliance has pushed for access to 12 exceptionally promising investigational cancer drugs which have subsequently been approved by the FDA and now represent standard care. At the time we began our advocacy, each of the drugs had cleared at least preliminary Phase 1 testing, and in some cases more-advanced Phase 2 or Phase 3 trials. In other words, they obviously worked for some patients. …
In sum, these 12 drugs — had they been available to people denied entry to clinical trials — might have helped more than one million mothers, fathers, sons and daughters live longer, better lives. We have actually underestimated the number of “life-years” lost at more than 520,000, because we have not included other safe and effective uses of these drugs that the FDA has yet to approve. …
The American Cancer Society reports that some 550,000 cancer patients die annually, making the number of cancer deaths from 1997 to 2005 about 4.8 million. Over that same period, the FDA reports granting individual access to an investigational drug to not more than 650 people per year for all diseases and drugs — a pathetic, even cruel, pittance. A few thousand more patients managed to gain access by enrolling in relatively small clinical trials or exceedingly rare expanded access programs. The other 4.7 plus million cancer patients, not to mention millions more with other diseases, were abandoned to die, denied access to progress by their own FDA when they needed it most.
Today, a federal judge awarded plaintiffs $101 million in a lawsuit that was filed against the federal government. FBI officials looked the other way as the plaintiffs were framed for crimes that they did not commit. FBI lawyers said there was no merit to the lawsuit because the FBI had no obligation to come forward with the information it had. The federal judge said that was “absurd.”
Will the FBI headquarters inform the tourists who visit their facility of its peculiar legal argument? The question sorta answers itself, doesn’t it?
A great legal victory, to be sure. Unfortunately, I expect the government attorneys will offer a substantially lower amount — or threaten to drag the case through the appellate courts for several more years. Still, this is an important precedent.
It is an outrage that so many wrongfully convicted people get little or no compensation. I don’t know how these politicians can spend the enormous sums that they do and let this go on. Do we need any additional argument for term limits (pdf)?
Previous coverage of this litigation can be found here.
The Mayor of Washington DC just announced that the city will ask the Supreme Court to reverse a landmark Second Amendment ruling from the DC Court of Appeals.
This is great news–as the whole idea of this lawsuit has been to get a good case up to the Supreme Court. Had DC officials not filed an appeal, they would have had to amend DC’s 30 year ban on guns, but they could have kept the case out of the Supreme Court. By filing an appeal, DC officials are hoping that the lower court will be reversed, but the risk is that the High Court will rule otherwise. For opponents of the DC firearm ban, it is nice to have a favorable precedent from the DC Court of Appeals–but it is even better to have a favorable precedent from the Supreme Court.
The ball is now with the Supreme Court. DC has decided to appeal but review by the High Court is hardly automatic. The Supreme Court declines to hear hundreds of cases every year. To hear a case, four justices must agree that a particular case ought to be heard. We will likely learn whether this case, Parker v. District of Columbia, will be reviewed when the Court reconvenes in early October, after its summer recess.
Background on the lawsuit here. Cato’s Second Amendment work is here.
This morning there is a congressional hearing about the DEA’s campaign against pain doctors. The drug war is a disaster in so many ways–but this aspect of the war is particularly cruel. Siobhan Reynolds of the Pain Relief Network will give members of Congress an earful as to what the government is actually doing.
Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling on race-based student assignment programs is pretty clear: public school districts cannot simply use racial balance targets to determine where children will go to school.
A key point in the ruling is that districts must exhaust racially neutral means of achieving their diversity and minority achievement goals before race-based student assignment can even be contemplated. In both cases before the court, the districts failed to do that.
This central point of the ruling apparently escaped CNN judicial analyst Jeffrey Toobin, who made the following statement in a live interview: “the school districts were told they couldn’t integrate their schools.”
Live TV is an unforgiving medium, especially when covering breaking news, so it’s not entirely clear that this is what Toobin meant to say. What is clear is that it is 100% nonsense.
Integration is a goal. There are many possible ways of achieving it besides government compulsion. As I pointed out in a blog post on Thursday afternoon, it can in fact be much better achieved through voluntary school choice programs that make both public and private schools financially viable options for all families. Summaries of some of the relevant studies, along with links to the full text in several cases, can be found here.
Tuesday is the 40th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage. It’s a good time to reflect on the social progress that Brink Lindsey discusses in The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Changed America’s Politics and Culture. Indeed, the Freedom to Marry Coalition has been celebrating the anniversary with a series of newspaper ads highlighting the interracial marriages of such prominent Americans as Jeb Bush, Mitch McConnell, Clarence Thomas, Jim Webb, and Tiger Woods.
But Virginia’s attempts to impede the course of true love didn’t begin or end with its “anti-miscegenation” statute. As I noted for Reason a couple of years ago, in the early part of the 20th century the state was in the habit of sterilizing “imbeciles.” The Supreme Court, influenced by Progressivism, approved that exercise in social engineering. And in our own times, Virginia has been repeatedly banning same-sex marriage, not worrying excessively about how much collateral damage it does to wills, custody agreements, medical powers of attorney, or joint bank accounts.
I wrote about the state’s tradition of interfering with private choices:
Neither of these now-derided laws is a perfect match with the predicament facing gays in Virginia, but both flowed from an arrogant desire by the state to control private relationships. The state is schizophrenic about such things, but if the past is any indicator, things do not look good for gay Virginians. In the 1995 case of Sharon Bottoms, the Virginia high court took a two-year-old child away from his lesbian mother, because of her sexual orientation. If voters pass the amendment against gay marriage and civil unions next year, it would have real teeth. Already, many gays in Virginia are talking about moving to Washington or Maryland if what they view as an anti-gay crusade doesn’t recede. If things continue on their present course, the state might have to amend its slogan, “Virginia is for lovers,” to include the caveat, “some exceptions apply.”
The Washington Post has a travel article about Atlantic City featuring a brief review of this amusing little bar in the Tropicana Casino:
We stopped at Reichstag (no cover!), a bar with faux-Nazi decor. A portrait of Hitler hangs over the hostess station, and the light fixtures are shaped like Nuremberg Rally torches. For $12.75, I enjoyed the best Pilsner I’ve ever had.
Not so funny? How about this:
We stopped at Red Square (no cover!), a vodka bar with faux-Commie decor. A portrait of Lenin hangs over the hostess station, and the light fixtures are shaped like the turrets of St. Basil’s. For $12.75, I enjoyed the best vodka tonic I’ve ever had.
Is it funnier now?
I’ve been out of the office for a bit, but coming back I see that the Government of Iran has now charged Woodrow Wilson Center scholar Haleh Esfandiari with trying to foment a “velvet revolution” in Iran. It is awful news for several reasons.
First, the charges that Esfandiari was plotting to overthrow the Tehran government seem ridiculous. The notion is entirely at odds with the body of Esfandiari’s scholarly work at the Wilson Center, not exactly a hotbed of ideological bomb-throwing. (The Wilson Center chief, Lee Hamilton, tried quietly approaching President Ahmadinejad starting in February, keeping the matter out of the headlines. He has as yet received no response.) It is also worth mentioning that Esfandiari had come under some criticism from neocons and right-wingers in Washington for being too sympathetic to Tehran’s position in the bilateral relationship. The notion that she is a U.S. or Israeli spy strains credulity.
Second, her arrest gives hardliners in Washington grounds to wag their fingers in the faces of those of us (including people like Esfandiari) who favor dialogue and reduced tensions. Reuel Marc Gerecht immediately charged to the pages of the New York Times to argue that the event made clear that his view of the Islamic Republic, “suspicious, cynical, hawkish and religiously oriented,” offered the most plausible explanation. In part as a result of the Esfandiari case, it is an argument with more momentum than this analyst would like.
Third, it greatly jeopardizes U.S.-Iran relations at a time when the Bush administration is seen (grading on a curve, admittedly) as taking small steps away from confrontation with Iran and toward conciliation. Whether Esfandiari’s detention and arrest were an attempt by hardliners in Iran to scuttle rapprochement or not, the events have an effect of putting a damper on pushes from Washington to get to the negotiating table and avert a catastrophe.
But all of the political implications pale by comparison to the fact that a human being–and one who has worked tirelessly to produce outcomes that would benefit the citizens of both Iran and the United States–has been imprisoned unjustly and without even the pretense of due process. One can only hope that the leadership in Iran will come to its senses, whether out of recognition of its error or out of the realization that this sort of confrontation serves no one’s interests: the regime’s, the Iranian people’s, or the world’s.
The American Islamic Congress has set up a “Free Haleh” website here, and for further back story, read the op-ed from Esfandiari’s husband, GMU professor Shaul Bakhash.
Sebastian Mallaby’s Washington Post column today on immigration is simply outstanding. After providing evidence that hard-working people who have crossed the border without the state’s stamp of approval do not increase the rate of unemployment, cost the average taxpayer nothing, and at worst depress wages of native high school drop-outs by 9 percent, Mallaby makes the argument that many otherwise decent people seem unable to make: the well-being of immigrants counts, too:
[A]lthough the concern for high-school dropouts is welcome, it must be weighed against the aspirations of migrants. Is it right to push native workers’ pay up by 2 percent [a generous estimate of the gain from tighter restrictions on liberty of movement] if that means depriving poor Mexicans of a chance to triple their incomes?
Of course it isn’t, and given that the total economic effect of immigration on U.S. households is a wash, the big ramp-up in enforcement spending beloved by immigration hawks is an egregious waste of money. But no politician is going to say that.
Another excellent, and rather more entertaining, rejoinder to nativist hysteria is Penn and Teller’s new immigration episode of Bullsh*t, available here for your viewing pleasure.
