Why not punch a nun while you're at it?

From the Associated Press, via the New York Daily News:

Police used a Taser on a pastor and pepper spray to disperse his congregants Wednesday after the pastor allegedly interfered with a traffic stop in the church parking lot.

Congregants say they were in the Iglesia Profetica Peniel church for an early morning prayer when pastor Jose Elias Moran went to assist the stopped driver, a church member, by asking the police what had happened.

An incident report on the Webster police department's Web site said Officer Raymond Berryman tried to calm Moran and arrest him. But police say he pushed the officer, went inside the church and returned with 40 other congregants.

The congregants say Moran fled into the church when the officer grew angry and began to yell, and Moran's family disputes that the pastor touched the officer.

Moran's son Miguel said 30 witnesses saw the officer turn aggressive and repeatedly kick the church door. Several members were hit with pepper spray and children were present, Miguel Moran said.

Obviously, we don't know the full story yet. Maybe the pastor and his flock were out of line. But if 30 people really saw the officer flipping out, I'm curious to see how the PD will try to put a positive spin on this.

If you want a disturbing insight into what's wrong with this country, look at the knee jerk support for the boys in blue in the comments to an article on the incident at the Houston Chronicle. It seems that Tasers and pepper spray may not have been enough; perhaps the riot guns should have been broken out to teach proper respect for authoritah.

Tomorrow may be Independence Day, but not too many people are still independent of the disease of uniform-worship.

In which I infiltrate Team Red and Team Blue and report my findings

I meet the most interesting people through my blogging and my columns for The Examiner.

Because I write about gun rights, limited government and free speech, I get invited to participate in conservative conferences and mailing lists. My advocacy of gay marriage, drug legalization and restraints on law enforcement get me invites from progressive groups. I don't think either conservatives or progressives truly think I'm one of them, but rather they conclude -- accurately I'd say -- that I'm a guy they can talk to.

I really haven't had a bad experience with my (mostly passive) participation in these groups yet. The individuals with whom I've corresponded, on both sides, come off as decent folks, even when they voice opinions that I consider to be fucking insane. I can chat with them, have drinks with them and otherwise interact on a friendly level. There's quite a wide range of opinion on both sides, and significant disagreement over some important issues.

But the collective teams are a different matter. As in most situations, individuals are easier to take than the herd. I'm going to speak in generalities here, because I've promised to not name individuals or quote conversations from any of the groups that have been kind enough to entertain me as a participant.

First of all, both teams, red and blue, have their holy doctrines -- areas in which disagreement is treated as heresy.

With conservatives, that seems to be abortion. I was curious, at first, whether gay marriage might be a lightning rod, but that's not the case. There are homophobic wingnuts, but there's a lot of tolerance, too -- most conservatives just don't seem all that worked up about who is bedding who, and only lukewarm over whether gays can formalize their relationships as "marriage" or not. But abortion is the untouchable tenet. If you're pro-choice, you get stripped of your American flag pin.

For progressives, the point of Holy Doctrine that will not be disputed is global warming/climate change. For folks who insist on describing their ideology as founded in reason and science, their treatment of the issue is awfully theological. Deviate from the script and you lose your membership card in the reality-based community (and your right to sport a truly awful hippy name, like that used by ... never mind).

Neither the conservatives nor progressives with whom I interact seem to know many members of the opposing tribe -- by and large, the opposition are treated as aliens encountered only rarely, and then, hopefully, on neutral ground. This social division may be why they're all so prone to delegitimizing each other's world views.

For conservatives, lefties are mendacious bastards who adopt any argument under the sun in order to further a hidden, totalitarian agenda.

For progressives, righties are soulless scum who've sold out to whatever corporation is certainly sponsoring their advocacy, and who would undoubtedly spin a 180 in their opinions if directed to do so by their Wall Street masters.

It seems that nobody could ever sincerely disagree.

And, of course, the opposition is always plotting. The righties better get their white-supremacist military coup in motion and depose Barack Obama before he successfully repeals the 22nd amendment and serves as president-for-life.

While they're not necessarily dominant, both conservatives and progressives have sizable subgroups in their ranks that are remarkably open about their authoritarianism and contempt for civil liberties. With the right, this was no secret during the Bush years, with war-on-terror cheerleaders applauding the Bush administration's detentions and wiretaps, and denying the use of torture by the government right up until they praised the use of torture once it was revealed (or else denied that waterboarding, sleep deprivation and beatings qualify as anything more than gentle roughhousing).

With progressives, I see declining respect for the idea of free speech. The pattern here is the same as with every other policy issue on the left: Point to how much "better" Europeans and Canadians are at regulating "hate speech" for the good of society, and denouncing free speech advocates as corporate shills. It's only free if you can be punished for doing it the wrong way, don't you know, and anything that pisses off the self-appointed regulators is the wrong way. That's quite a shift from the dearly missed days of free speech absolutism (and it seems to bewilder some of the more traditional preogressives).

As individuals, I repeat: conservatives and progressive bloggers and pundits in these groups are almost all nice folks I can drink with. As Team Red and Team Blue ... well ... I'm surprised they haven't already started shooting at each other.

New boss, same as the old boss, chapter 26

President Barack Obama is actively considering issuing an executive order authorizing the continued, indefinite detention of terrorism suspects, without trial, according to the Washington Post and Pro Publica. The news is widely being treated as a shocking about-face for a president who has criticized his predecessor's harsh tactics in dealing with alleged terrorists. But for anybody paying attention, this is just one more step along a path the president has has already traveled, with indefinite detention hinted at in a May speech and even championed by the Obama administration in legal papers filed in March.

According to the Washington Post report:

Obama administration officials, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, are crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that an order, which would bypass Congress, could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

Indefinite detention, which flies in the face of Obama's campaign-trail civil libertarian attacks on the Bush administration, could apply to as many as half of the 229 detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay. And, while it's a sharp departure from the position he took while courting voters, it's very clearly a logical outcome of the direction in which he's been moving since taking office.

On May 21, President Obama gave a speech on national security in which he addressed the issue of detention. He took care to criticize Bush-era detention policies, but then allowed that he might do the same thing -- though only with congressional approval.

[T]here remains the question of detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. And I have to be honest here -- this is the toughest single issue that we will face. We're going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who've received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.

Let me repeat: I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture -- like other prisoners of war -- must be prevented from attacking us again. Having said that, we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can't be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone. That's why my administration has begun to reshape the standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of law. We must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who fall into this category. We must have fair procedures so that we don't make mistakes. We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified.

I know that creating such a system poses unique challenges. And other countries have grappled with this question; now, so must we. But I want to be very clear that our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for the remaining Guantanamo detainees that cannot be transferred. Our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so, going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.

Implementing indefinite detention via executive order would abandon this earlier commitment to work with Congress and bring the new president's position even closer to that of former President George W. Bush.

But even the May speech can be seen as a follow-up to a March 13 filing with the federal district court for the District of Columbia. In that document, the administration reasserted the Bush-era argument for holding detainees.

The President has the authority to detain persons that the President determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and persons who harbored those responsible for those attacks. The President also has the authority to detain persons who were part of, or substantially supported, Taliban or al-Qaida forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act, or has directly supported hostilities, in aid of such enemy armed forces.

An accompanying statement explained that the Obama administration had tweaked the legal rationale for indefinite detention -- but still planned to maintain that policy.

[T]he Department of Justice submitted a new standard for the government’s authority to hold detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility. The definition does not rely on the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief independent of Congress’s specific authorization. It draws on the international laws of war to inform the statutory authority conferred by Congress. It provides that individuals who supported al Qaeda or the Taliban are detainable only if the support was substantial. And it does not employ the phrase "enemy combatant."

Taken all together, it's clear that the Obama administration has been moving toward a policy of indefinite detention of detainees under the unilateral authority of the president -- a position much like that taken by the Bush administration -- since before the moving boxes were unpacked in the White House.

I know you're all mourning the passing of Michael Jackson as much as I am

Which is to say, you're a bit astonished he lived this long. On the off chance that he actually died of "natural causes," that would be just about the only natural thing about his life in ... oh ... 30 years.

That's not to say I'm not sorry he's dead. Death is usually sad, even if it is an inevitable part of life.

But I'm not as sad as the sackcloth and ashes mood on the TV news suggests I should be. I mean, the guy was a pretty talented performer who peaked a quarter of a century ago, and had since pissed away much of his fortune exploring the outer limits of weirdness and fending off child abuse charges.

The guy is dead. I know his family and friends mourn. Now, report on something a little meaningful. How's Iran doing today?

Supreme Court says: Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone

A strip search of a high school student based on a tenuous tip that she possessed a legal painkiller -- forbidden under school rules -- violated the constitutional rights of that student and is unjustified under law. However, the school officials who ordered and conducted the search cannot be held legally liable for their actions. That's the decision of the United States Supreme Court in a much-anticipated decision (PDF) that further defines the Fourth Amendment protections available to public school students, and stands as a victory for Savana Redding, the student who waged a long battle after being humiliated by officials in Safford, Arizona.

In 2003, at the time of the search in question, Savana Redding was a 13-year-old eighth-grader at Safford Middle School in the small town of Safford, Arizona. School officials got a tenuous tip that Savana had given a friend some ibuprofen -- the stuff in Advil and Motrin. That was against school rules, so the girl was detained by Assistant Principal Kerry Wilson. She was subjected to a strip search by two female school employees. The search turned up nothing.

But the Redding family wasn't done. They fought the search through the courts, finally winning at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (PDF) which ruled "A reasonable school official, seeking to protect the students in his charge, does not subject a thirteen-year-old girl to a traumatic search to 'protect' her from the danger of Advil."

Today's Supreme Court decision, written by retiring Justice David Souter, and sparking notable dissent to its Fourth Amendment holdings only from Justice Clarence Thomas, says in part:

[T]he content of the suspicion failed to match the degree of intrusion. Wilson knew beforehand that the pills were prescription-strength ibuprofen and over-the-counter naproxen, common pain relievers equivalent to two Advil, or one Aleve. He must have been aware of the nature and limited threat of the specific drugs he was searching for, and while just about anything can be taken in quantities that will do real harm, Wilson had no reason to suspect that large amounts of the drugs were being passed around, or that individual students were receiving great numbers of pills.

The court goes on to say:

In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to thestudents from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear. We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.

But while an intrusive search in search of a vague threat based on tentative suspicions fails to meet constitutional muster, the officials in this specific case can't be held liable for their transgressions. That's because of legal uncertainty over the extent of school officials' liability for constitutional missteps, providing officials, up until now, anyway, with conflicting guidance about just how far they can go. Because of that gray area, says the court, Wilson and company are entitled to qualified immunity for their actions.

That leaves Savana Redding with no clear path to seek redress for her abuse by school officials -- other, that is, than the knowledge that such searches are clearly off-limits in the future. Savana's fight has strengthened legal protections for students following in her footsteps.

Public medicine looks a lot like public school

With our son approaching school age, my wife and I are considering a variety of options: charter, private, homeschooling. Just about the only option not on the list, even though we're forced to pay for it anyway, are public schools. We're not only unimpressed with the results achieved by local public schools, but we also don't like their one-size-fits-all structure. As things stand, we're concerned that, a few years from now, we'll face a similar situation with health care, forcing us to pay for coverage that we don't want in addition to care that we actually choose.

That's the big problem with government-sponsored versions of anything. No matter the quality of the ultimate product, everybody has to pay for it, even if it doesn't suit their personal needs and preferences. Just imagine if dining out was a state-provided service. Given popular preferences, at best, we'd end up with reasonably decent steak and burger joints from sea to shining sea -- and that's it. Good luck to vegetarians and fanciers of exotic ethnic foods.

Of course, at worst, you'd be forced to pay for the food quality of a high school cafeteria mixed with the service you've come to love at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

That worst-case scenario came to pass in Canada, where the country's Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the quality of medical care provided by the state system in Quebec was so terrible that the province's law against private health insurance couldn't be allowed to stand. While the ruling doesn't apply elsewhere, private -- and arguably illegal -- clinics are springing up around the country to provide care to people who'd rather pay for medicine twice than accept the government's prescription.

Private medicine is legal in the United Kingdom, where about 11.5% of Britons (up from 5% in 1980) carry private insurance in addition to the taxes they pay for the National Health Service. Government-provided dentistry is such a shambles that people have fled the system, and dentists now make more from private-pay patients than from the state system.

But if other country's medical systems have troubles, so does the American system. After all, The World Health Organization gave America's health care a miserable 37th-place ranking out of 191 countries, right?

Well ... not so much. Actually, when economist Glen Whitman looked at WHO's rankings, he concluded:

The WHO rankings depend crucially on a number of underlying assumptions—some of them logically incoherent, some characterized by substantial uncertainty, and some rooted in ideological beliefs and values that not everyone shares.

The analysts behind the WHO rankings express the hope that their framework "will lay the basis for a shift from ideological discourse on health policy to a more empirical one." Yet the WHO rankings themselves have a strong ideological component. They include factors that are arguably unrelated to actual health performance, some of which could even improve in response to worse health performance.

Basically, WHO front-loaded its ratings with criteria that guaranteed high rankings to tax-supported systems, and low rankings to systems where people pay for their own care. Said Whitman, "To use the existing WHO rankings to justify more government involvement in health care--such as via a single-payer health care system--is therefore to engage in circular reasoning because the rankings are designed in a manner that favors greater government involvement."

Plenty of people share WHO's biases -- many Canadians and Europeans are happy with what they get, and lots of Americans say they want the same thing. But plenty of people don't share WHO's biases. If you implement a state-sponsored health care system, everybody gets drafted into the one-size-fits-all scheme, without consideration for their personal preferences.

Actually, "draft" is the right word. Since state-supported schemes are supported by taxes picked from all our pockets, they're basically conscription with limited -- or expensive -- opportunities for conscientious objectors (and sayonara to voluntary alternatives). That's true of public schools, and it may soon be true of health care.

Right now, President Obama and his allies in Congress say they have no plans to displace private medicine, only to create a public plan that would compete with and "discipline" private insurers.

Right. What do you think would happen to Burger King if McDonald's not only ran its own restaurants, but also had the power to charge everybody for Big Macs whether they ate under the golden arches or not, and could regulate all fast-food joints? That's the sort of "discipline" you get from a government plan.

I expect that, in years to come, my wife and I will be looking at our options for escaping not just public education, but also public medicine. And, as it already is for Britons and Canadians, that choice will be expensive and limited by a government that doesn't put a lot of value on personal choice.

Uncle Sugar to the rescue (of our beleaguered newspapers)

There's an old saying that "he who takes the king's coin becomes the king's man." Those words are worth remembering as journalists rend their clothing over the death throes of many of the nation's newspapers, activist groups call for the government to rescue the dead-tree press as a crucial prop for preserving democracy, and opportunistic politicians respond with schemes to put the nation's broadsheets and tabloids on government-funded life support. When journalists are dependent on coins tossed their way by the political class, just which way do you think their stories will lean?

The problem is that people just aren't reading newspapers. Readership plunged last year, again. And with subscription dollars and advertising following readers out the door, more newspapers went bankrupt, closed their doors or went online-only in response. In keeping with the times, some folks think the solution is to have Uncle Sam break out the checkbook.

Some of the calls for subsidized journalism are outright ironic. Free Press, a "media reform" advocacy organization, complains that "[t]he takeover of our country's media outlets by a small handful of giant conglomerates puts too much power and influence in too few hands. That's bad for our democracy, which depends on our ability to access diverse sources of news, information and opinion."

Even if you buy the argument that media ownership is more concentrated now than in the past (a tough sell in the world-spanning Internet age to those of us who remember when "the press" meant a couple of network TV affiliates and the local newspaper), it's difficult to see how making the press dependent on a single benefactor -- the government -- would improve matters. But that's what the organization advocates in a recent report (PDF), in the form of state-regulated non-profit status, government subsidies and even direct employment of journalists by the government.

Along these lines, Senator Ben Cardin, of Maryland, has introduced the Newspaper Revitalization Act, with an eye to allowing newspapers to function as educational non-profits, so long as they "contain local, national, and international news stories of interest to the general public and the distribution of such newspaper is necessary or valuable in achieving an educational purpose" and "the preparation of the material contained in such newspaper follows methods generally accepted as educational in character." Oh, and newspapers with non-profit status would be barred from endorsing candidates.

But those caveats provide a hint of problems with the plan. Imagine lawyer-fueled arguments over the meaning of "of interest to the general public" and "generally accepted as educational in character." Even Free Press concedes that the scheme has First Amendment problems and might not stand up in court. Report authors Victor Pickard, Josh Stearns and Craig Aaron also allow that the plan raises concerns about "newsrooms currying favor with their benefactors."

But if non-profit status raises the possibility of favor-currying, how about direct ownership of media by local governments, government subsidies, or government employment of journalists?

This isn't exactly uncharted territory -- even within the United States. The New Deal-era Federal Writers Project, so praised in the Free Press report, employed journalists to document the America of the time and (not incidentally) to put to work in government employment writers who might otherwise be disaffected. An article in 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies says the FWP can be described "perhaps most aptly, as a politicized documentary of the times with a social democratic slant." Of the guidebooks produced by the project, author Michael Dittman writes, "To further their hegemonic ends, the FWP could not have chosen a better propaganda tool."

But the propaganda effort didn't stop there. Writing of the same era, Nicholas John Cull, David Holbrook Culbert, David Welch point out in Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present:

Murals (intended for post offices and other public buildings) were commissioned as Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief work. They were painted in an American socialist realist style ...

The Federal Theater Project adapted topics favorable to the New Deal in a series of "Living Newspaper" productions. For example, Power defended the socialist content of the TVA and openly advocated public control of utilities.

FDR was by no means the only U.S. president to use propaganda to further his goals, but since his example is so approvingly cited by modern advocates of government-subsidized media, it's worth examining the results.

Of course, independent media can curry favor with advertisers and investors, too, just as subsidized media caters to the government. But advertisers and investors tend to be a diverse bunch, with different and sometimes opposing interests. And they don't all have their fingers in all of the pies. Setting the state up as every journalist's sugar daddy is sure to create a situation where politicians have an awful lot of say over what is published.

Considering the power wielded by those politicians, and the investigative eyes we should all hope are fastened on them, that's an unhealthy prospect.

Such fears won't stop old-line fans of cheap paper and smeary ink from fretting over the declining fortunes of warhorses like the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. But those publications are stumbling because they can't attract customers even as many Websites created in recent years (and the online editions of old newspapers) are enjoying booming readership. If the old-timers don't see the connection, maybe their successors will.

In The Joplin Globe, Jessica Shreindl, a college newspaper editor and (presumably) journalist of the future recently wrote:

And even if a government buyout, err, bailout of the newspaper industry wasn’t eerie, its necessity is hard to argue. The hard truth of the free market is that industries either adapt or they die. Contrary to the “death of democracy doom-and-gloomers,” information and news sources are not on the decline. Online readership is up. With the click of a mouse readers are deciding what the news is.

The industry will be fine, it may consolidate, but it will be fine. There will always be news gatherers so long as people desire to know what’s going on in their communities and the world around them.

Newspapers arose out of people’s ingenuity and need-to-know; not by some legislature’s stroke of the pen. They will continue to do just fine without Uncle Sam.

She's right. People who gather information have always found a way to cater to people who want to consume information. Just because one crop of aging providers can't figure out how to change with the times and keep customers happy (or make money from online customers) doesn't mean the whole business should be turned over to the people most deserving of scrutiny.