Law 'n order

From LA Times. Does anyone know the incident referred to in a story about gay marriages in which someone mentions Dan Lungren having had to apologize for a homophobic brief filed by one of his subordinates a few years ago?

Lungren & Pete Wilson are calling for a bill to refuse CA recognition of gay marriages, now wending its way through the legislature. Wilson wants only the traditional marriage of a man, a woman, and an illegal immigrant nanny.

An article on Tony Blair says that he supported family values back when most Tories were still on their first wives.

Yeltsin and the Wilsonites

I've just read the piece in this week's Time magazine about how American advisers helped Yeltsin run a "modern" election campaign. One problem with it is that the consultants clearly did a much better job conning Time into exaggerating their importance than they did conning the Russian people. Still, it's an amusing piece. Yeltsin's people saying, why can't we just tell the factory owners to order their workers to vote for us? and the Americans saying, no no, you have to have focus groups and go negative negative negative, show pictures of Soviet breadlines, and never promise anything because no one believes a word Yeltsin says. The clash of two totally different forms of complete and utter political cynicism.

All of the American consultants, none of whom spoke Russian and who spent the whole time hiding out in a hotel room so that no one would know Americans were trying to run the Yeltsin campaign, were former aides and campaign managers of our own Pete Wilson. Thus the negative strategy.
And again, Wilson was hated almost as much in California as Yeltsin was in Russia but they both got (re)elected. The parentheses in the previous sentence indicate my understanding that Yeltsin was not reelected since he was holding an office, president of a sovereign country, to which he was never elected in the first place--the last presidential election took place when there was still a Soviet Union responsible for foreign policy, the military and so on, all run by Micky "Mr. 0.5%" Gorbachev.

Cough cough

Bob Dole goes insane on morning television and insists that C. Everett Koop has been brainwashed by the liberal media for thinking that cigarettes are addictive.

It's not just that Dole has personally received close to $400,000 in tobacco money and that Philip Morris sponsors the Republican conventions, but that many of his consultants, spin-meisters and lawyers are shared with tobacco companies and lobbies.

By the way, Dole's brother died of emphysema.

Now for real news, did you notice the LA Times reference yesterday to a Topless Traffic School?

And did you see Scalia's dissent, joined by Justice Pubic Hair as always, on the right to free political speech by independent government contractors, where he said that there was a traditional right to reward your friends and punish your enemies?

Supreme Court rules 5-4 that a death sentence can't be set aside simply because the prosecutor introduced new evidence, after telling the defence he wouldn't, in the *sentencing* phase, accusing the defendant of a whole new murder for which he was never charged.

The Great Beef War of 1996 ends with a total capitulation by John Major. The British secret strategy was to delay negotiations until lunchtime, so that the always-hunger Helmut Kohl would want them wrapped up quickly.

People who are no help at all: the Saudi dissident that Britain tried unsuccessfully to deport to Dominica because the Saudis threatened their business deals--and amazingly this was cited by the British government as sufficient reason to do it--well, he may now be charged under the race relations act or whatever else they can think of, for calling for the annihilation of all Jews (well, Al Masari says he just meant all the Jews in Israel, so that's all right then).

Another day, another proposed Amendment to the US Constitution. This one a victims' bill of rights sort of thing, allowing the victims to be notified of prison releases, escapes and be present at all phases of the trial, even when testifying themselves. And for a speedy trial, even if this violates the defendant's right to due process. Sponsored by our own Senator Di Fi, supported by Clinton.

The US frees Haitian death squad leader Emmanuel Constant without
deporting him back to Haiti, citing concern for the overburdened Haitian courts and prison system, and not having anything to do with his CIA links at all, no sirree bob.

The RSPCA had to change its constitution because it was being covertly infiltrated by hunters wanting to change its position against hunting.

Some guy in Lincolnshire paid 10,000 pounds for a Russian Scud missile for his front garden.

While 7 Supreme Court justices accepted that there is a common law right of privacy for patients of psychiatrists, Scalia said that people would be better off talking to their mommies, but there is no mother-child privilege.

The Southern Baptist convention has voted both to boycott Disneyland for giving benefits to gay partners of its employees, and to try to convert Jews. I've tried like hell and I can't think of a funny way to connect the 2. There will be a virtual prize (like a prize, but not actually existent) for the best joke. Void where prohibited.

So I'm reading the Supreme Court decisions rejecting all these black districts. What's interesting is less that they consider race valid as a criterion (hey, if you had to work with Clarence Thomas every day, you'd have second thoughts about affirmative action too!), than the valid criteria mentioned in the decision. It's ok to gerrymander for political reasons, for example to protect incumbents (i.e., not having 2 incumbents run against each other). I must have missed the jobs-for-life clause in the Constitution. Drawing up districts on party affiliation lines is also ok. Silly me, I thought we had elections to determine the party make-up of Congress. If that is the case, then surely party affiliation is the least appropriate criterion for redistricting. Stevens, in the sort of dissent that makes you wish Brennan or Marshall were still on the court, notes that strange-shaped districts are banned only to facilitate minority voters, not white ones.

The Supreme Court also found valid in upholding the reduction in the sentences of the cops who beat up Rodney King the criterion that they had been found innocent in the local trial. Assuming that you accept the bizarre presumption that the federal trial wasn't double jeopardy because it was a different jurisdiction ("Well, we couldn't convict them at the state or federal level, let's try them in their waste management district, then the water district..."), surely the results of one trial shouldn't be used to change the sentence in a trial where a different decision was reached. Should hung juries count? Are we just taking the average of innocent + guilty? They also got time off for being cops and therefore in greater risk in prison. By that standard, child rapists should all get reduced sentences....

Horror story of the week

Several decades ago (the story is unclear), presumably around the same time the Australian government was stealing Aborigine children, it was doing the same for illegitimate ones. Certainly dozens, maybe thousands. The mothers were told that they'd died, or were drugged, or tricked into signing papers, and the babies taken away for adoption.

Manners are everything

New York Times story: "An Ethiopian man who hijacked a German jetliner to NY in 1993 was sentenced to 20 years in prison after a judge rejected his assertion that the hijacking was justified because his visa application to the United States had been denied. The man, Nebiu Demeke, said, "I was forced to hijack the plane and I hijacked it politely."

The Antiterrorism Act passed last month included a finding that international terrorism is more dangerous to the US than pollution or population growth. It also says that the gov should use covert action and military force to destroy terrorist infrastructure abroad--a sort of Tonkin Gulf resolution for the '90s.

China will join the nuclear test ban treaty when it is quite done exploding nuclear bombs, evidently having given up on using nukes for tunnelling and abandoning the planet to killer asteroids. The small print says that they also want to ban any high-tech monitoring of compliance with the test ban.

One of the preconditions for fair elections in Bosnia not yet in place is some form of nation-wide media. Serbs say that their communications infrastructure was too badly damaged by the war for them to participate. In the meantime, there is Pale TV, which just announced its scoop, that NATO used low-intensity nuclear weapons in last year's air strikes on Serb positions. Pale TV also says that the war crimes tribunal tortured a Serb general, and when a UN spokesman held a press conference in Pale to condemn the beating and torture of 7 Muslim prisoners, they cut out that bit and claimed that he called the Muslims terrorists.

In 1961 the CIA started sending Vietnamese agents into North Vietnam. The project was taken over by the Joint Chiefs in 1964. The agents had a way of not coming back, and the military started declaring them dead in 1965, and lying to their families: over 200 people they knew were not dead. Many of them are now in the US after 15 years or more of Vietnamese prison, and they'd like their back pay now, $2,000 per year, without interest. The US is resisting this in court, saying that secret contracts for covert operations are unenforceable (a 1875 Supreme Court case denied back pay to a Union spy from the Civil War), so we don't have to pay.

Go team!

Competing to replace Bob Dole as Senate majority leader, are two
Mississippians, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, who also have in common a) silly names beginning with T, b) they were both cheerleaders at Old, pardon me, Ole Miss.

For God, Harry, tallow, gellatin and semen!

The British war on Europe continues in earnest. While a Cabinet minister back home is admitting it could take 6 years for British cattle herds to be clean of BSE, Br reps in Europe are vetoing all measures that arise. So far, in the war to get Europe to take British tallow, gellatin and semen (and you thought the War of Jenkin's Ear was silly), they have vetoed measures on AIDS, 3rd World Refugees, cutting red tape for small businesses....

So Yeltsin promised to "go to Chechnya" like Ike, before the election, but his people told him it was way too dangerous. So yesterday he signs a peace accord that settles none of the main or even the minor issues, and today to everyone's surprise he turns up in Chechnya, not least surprise of the Chechen leaders and officials who are still in Moscow. Repeat: who are still in Moscow, and suddenly realizing that they have become in effect hostages for Yeltsin's safety. This isn't my paranoia, this is the London Times. What a sneaky little fucker Yeltsin is!

Summary of Romer v. Evans Decision (fwd)

My impression is that this decision is even narrower than we had guessed, that it was more the pre-emption of future political processes that was the problem for the Court.

Scalia's dissent was especially apalling, as per usual. I liked his approving reference to Kulturkampf. I'd have stayed away from the German terminology if I were him....

John Major formed a beef war cabinet today. The man thinks that trying to force his beef down the throats of hapless Europeans (British beef, you'll never get better) is going to be his Falklands.

Clinton was on McNeil-Lehrer (or whatever) today talking about how uniforms cut down violence in schools. Yeah, right, like it worked in the post office (that's someone else's joke), and like the Chief of Naval Operations didn't just die over some jewelry, just like they do in South-Central LA (that's mine).

A true Clinton appointee, United States Attorney for Southern Florida Kendall Coffey, resigns after getting into a fight in a bar with a topless dancer, biting her on the arm.

Warren Christopher wants to have regular Cabinet-level meetings with the Chinese. Great, appeasement on the installment plan.

Finally, a physicist got a postmodern deconstructionist spoof published in the cultural studies journal Social Text. "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" was passed by 6 editors who didn't know what that meant either. The article, evidently modeled after a real trend towards lit crit deconstruction of
physics just like they do for literature, says that "physical `reality', no less than social `reality,' is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific `knowledge', far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations fo the culture that produced it." Basically, gravity, and pi, are just what the dominant culture chooses to believe.

Who needs sitcoms when you have the New York Times?

Yes it hurt. Yes it worked

James Miller III, Reagan's budget director, who evidently thinks that that is a qualification for higher office, running against John Warner for the Republican nomination for Senate from Virginia, visits so many gun shows that his staff have to make sure he doesn't violate the state's one gun per month law.

Speaking of idiots in the South, since the Olympics committee re-routed the Olympic torch route away from Newt's Cobb county because of its 1993 anti-homosexual ordinance, Spartanburgh (!) SC, on the new route, has decided that a bunch of foreigners won't push them around, and passed their own anti-gay ordinance for no other reason than to annoy the Olympics. Since the Olympics originated in a bunch of Greeks watching a bunch of naked Greek guys run around sweating, I don't know what they're complaining about. The whole torch thing only goes back to 1936 anyway, when Hitler's filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl thought it would look neat (especially if they were naked).

New Tory party ad campaign: "Yes it hurt. Yes it worked."

De Klerk left the South African government, claiming that the ANC was racist.

The latest victim of the Yugoslav break-up: the language of
Serbo-Croatian. The Bosnian Muslims are bringing in Arabic words, while Croatians are reviving 15th century words and voting on a law on the Quebec model. President Tudjman personally came up with new tennis terms, but forgot when meeting Clinton that he was supposed to be sretan (happy) to meet him, not srecan (happy). Croatian tv edited it out.

Sigh.

NY Times headline: "Dole attacks Clinton Asia policy although he supports part of it", and actual Dole quote: "As we have seen in Bosnia, Iran, Cuba and elsewhere, when President Clinton is faced with a fork in the foreign policy road, he takes it." (huh?)

Or in this case, chop sticks presumably.

Speaking of which, the US decision not to punish China as required by law for selling nuclear equipment to Pakistan is based on our belief that they were telling the truth. And what they said, that we believed, is that the transfer never happened, that the government didn't know that it had happened, and that it wouldn't happen again.

In return, they promise to believe that Clinton didn't inhale.

If Clinton really believes all that, then he has passed the qualifying test for jury duty in LA.

Rep. Wes Cooley, arch anti-environmentalist Republican from eastern Oregon, class of 1994, who called Federal Fish and Wildlife Service agents a Gestapo & told a wildlife conservationist during Congressional hearings not to set foot in Oregon, who mistook an April Fools story for real and made a speech about it, then threatened to punch (his office claims whip, so that's all right then) the (6-month pregnant) Oregonian reporter who questioned him about it, is in almost as much
trouble as I am trying to figure out how to end this sentence before it goes on too long. He either lied in the 1994 voters' pamphlet, a federal crime known as voter fraud, about being married, or he and his wife have been fraudulently collecting collecting her 1st husband's death benefits from the Marine Corps. Not that fraud would be new to him. He collects
a tax break for his farm although he does not farm there, he manufactures vitamins (from snake oil, no doubt). Also on the voters' pamphlet, he claimed to have been in Phi Beta Kappa. Well, maybe it was Alpha Beta Epsilon.... And said he'd served in Korea. Then he said he was doing secret demolition work and wasn't allowed to talk about it. Then he admitted he was lying.

And he didn't even make the Progressive's 10 stupidest Congresscritters list a few months back.

That'll show him!

REUTERS

KEY WEST, Fla. A tiny flotilla of Cuban exiles sailed toward international waters near Cuba Wednesday to toss flowers and human rights pamphlets into the sea in protest against Fidel Castro's May Day celebration.

Ooooo, soggy pamphlets. Castro must be shaking in his boots....

Helmut Kohl is in Britain. They gave him a nice big plate of British beef, with no alternative dish prepared. Fortunately for their little publicity stunt, none of the German delegation turned out to be vegetarians. (I'm trying to think of a segue to Hitler having been a vegetarian, but I can't)

Do you think Governor Engler will be denied the chance to be Dole's running mate solely on the basis that he was too fat to be drafted to go to Vietnam?

The Alabama Prison Commissioner, renouned for making prisoners who masturbate in front of female guards wear pink uniforms, has resigned in disgust because they wouldn't let him start up female chain gangs (evidently the state is being sued by male prisoners for discrimination).

Dole, continuing the attack on judges that Clinton so skillfully turned aside last month by caving like a kleenex full of snot, said yesterday that the Supreme Court is just one appointment away from being the most liberal court since Warren.

Clinton may not be able to stand up to Dole, but he sure gets tough on 13-year old girls who get in his way. When those 2 were arrested for sending him crank letters a week ago, I really thought it would be laughed out of court by now, but no....

I understand Dole is now taking warmth lessons. "Bob Dole feels your pain." Rather like when they locked LBJ in a room for six months to teach him to say negro. "Niggra-o." "No, no. Try again, Mr. President." (old Dick Gregory joke, I believe)

Did you see where Mississippi is mandating equal admissions standards for all its public universities, ensuring a 50% drop in black enrollment in the 3 traditionally-black U's?

So Judge Baer reversed himself. Not because of all the intense political pressure of course, but because of new evidence, including the testimony of a cop that blatantly contradicted his written report after the arrest. And Clinton suggests that all he did was to comment on the case, as if he had never threatened to demand the judge's resignation. Judicial integrity is being beaten like a dark-skinned person after a chase in southern California.

Tony Blair: "Our government will fail if it sees its task as dismantling Thatcherism." Boris Yeltsin: "No one with a heart can but regret the end of the Soviet Union. No one with a head can think of creating an exact copy." And US reform rabbis voted to support gay marriages but not actually to perform them.

The House ethics committee gave Gingrich another walk, without
questioning anyone or examining any documents.

Did you see where the law against "partial birth abortions" was so badly written that a) its definition included other types of abortion, b) its exclusion to save the life of the mother wasn't one, because it specified if the life was endangered by a physical disorder or such, but most women who have late-term abortions are threatened by the actual pregnancy, which is not a physical disorder.

The Treasury Dept forbids its law-enforcement officers to exhibit any bias off-duty on basis of sex, religion, etc etc. Intended to keep them from the Good Ol' Boys Roundup, it's actually so broad as to punish ethnic jokes, say, told privately.