February 2015 archive

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

February 24 is the 55th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 310 days remaining until the end of the year (311 in leap years).

On this day in 1803, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Marshall, decides the landmark case of William Marbury versus James Madison, Secretary of State of the United States and confirms the legal principle of judicial review–the ability of the Supreme Court to limit Congressional power by declaring legislation unconstitutional–in the new nation.

Marbury v. Madison is a landmark case in United States law and in the history of law worldwide. It formed the basis for the exercise of judicial review in the United States under Article III of the Constitution. It was also the first time in the world that a court invalidated a law by declaring it “unconstitutional.”

This case resulted from a petition to the Supreme Court by William Marbury, who had been appointed by President John Adams as Justice of the Peace in the District of Columbia but whose commission was not subsequently delivered. Marbury petitioned the Supreme Court to force Secretary of State James Madison to deliver the documents, but the court, with John Marshall as Chief Justice, denied Marbury’s petition, holding that the part of the statute upon which he based his claim, the Judiciary Act of 1789, was unconstitutional.

Marbury v. Madison was the first time the Supreme Court declared something “unconstitutional,” and established the concept of judicial review in the U.S. (the idea that courts may oversee and nullify the actions of another branch of government). The landmark decision helped define the “checks and balances” of the American form of government.

The Issue

There are three ways a case can be heard in the Supreme Court: (1) filing directly in the Supreme Court; (2) filing in a lower federal court, such as a district court, and appealing all the way up to the Supreme Court; (3) filing in a state court, appealing all the way up through the state’s highest courts, and then appealing to the Supreme Court on an issue of federal law. The first is an exercise of the Court’s original jurisdiction; the second and third are exercises of the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction.

Because Marbury filed his petition for the writ of mandamus directly in the Supreme Court, the Court needed to be able to exercise original jurisdiction over the case in order to have the power to hear it.

Marbury’s argument is that in the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress granted the Supreme Court original jurisdiction over petitions for writs of mandamus. This raises several issues that the Supreme Court had to address:

Does Article III of the Constitution create a “floor” for original jurisdiction, which Congress can add to, or does it create an exhaustive list that Congress can’t modify at all?

If Article III’s original jurisdiction is an exhaustive list, but Congress tries to modify it anyway, who wins that conflict, Congress or the Constitution?

And, more importantly, who is supposed to decide who wins?

In its answer to this last question, the Supreme Court formalizes the notion of judicial review. In short, the constitutional issue on which Marbury v. Madison was decided was whether Congress could expand the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.

Nope, Brave New Films War on Whistleblowers

This is why they hate us: Fox News, drones, “American Sniper” and the gross face we show the world

Marcy Wheeler, Salon

Friday, Feb 20, 2015 08:30 AM EST

Imagine if the United States had waged its Cold War ideological struggle with the Soviet Union on the same three-year cycle consumer goods companies currently use for branding?

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Instead, you might have the shoddy branding campaign the U.S. is fighting ISIL with right now, conceived largely in terms of unique impressions on Twitter rather than whether we can change larger narratives about America and the West.

“We’re getting beaten on volume, so the only way to compete is by aggregating, curating and amplifying existing content,” Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Richard A. Stengel said for a recent New York Times story.

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Another persistent misconception lies in where ISIL’s own propaganda has been effective. Both British and – less officially – American officials have called on Twitter to police speech, rightly pointing out the influence of ISIL propaganda posted there. Yet such views utterly ignore the powerful boost Fox and (until it came to a Jordanian pilot burned alive on video) CNN have given the very same propaganda by airing it for hours and days. ISIL propaganda on U.S. cable channels “radicalizes” different groups of people in ways that are every bit as dangerous as a young Muslim kid watching ISIL videos online, ways that feed a clash of civilization narrative rather than that of America’s Middle Eastern allies combating murderous thugs trying to take and hold territory in a region of strategic importance.

That also seems to breed a lack of awareness of the degree to which our own actions serve as propaganda serving ISIL’s goals. Yes, the U.S. flies drones because they are viewed as a safer (for our service members, as well as civilians on the ground) alternative to airstrikes. But the drones also persist as an audible and visual presence that permeates the consciousness of those who might otherwise oppose Islamists. “I see them every day and we are scared of them,” Mohammed Tuaiman, a 13-year-old killed, as an alleged al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula member, in an American drone strike last month, said to the Guardian in an interview laws year. “We even dream of them in our sleep.” And yet people in the U.S. rarely weigh those dreams against the nightmares we see over and over on Fox and CNN. It’s not enough to say we don’t behead people (though our close allies in Saudi Arabia do) or burn them alive in cages if our omnipresent weapons permeate people’s consciousness like an ISIL video being replayed on Fox.

But a very big part of the problem, it seems to me, is that the U.S. is thinking only in terms of “countering” an enemy. “We’ve got to discredit these ideologies,” President Obama said at today’s CVE summit. In part this means their American narratives end up scolding ISIL’s narrative, rather than presenting another more resonant one. More generally, however, it doesn’t even try to offer up America as the kind of promise to others it represented during the Cold War. The U.S. will not win this ideological war by attempting to do no more than drown out ISIL’s message in Twitter hits.

What does America think it is offering the world, beyond submission under the weight of an unrivaled military?  Why would people choose that over an ideology that promises – falsely – principle and morals? With the austerity America’s bankers demand, the U.S. isn’t even offering financial stability.

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And the president who has presided over six years of impunity for the bankers who crashed the global economy promised to combat corruption. “We’ll keep leading a global effort against corruption, because the culture of the bribe has to be replaced by good governance that doesn’t favor certain groups over others.”

“The essential ingredient to real and lasting stability and progress … is institutions that uphold the rule of law and apply justice equally,” said the president to a community often deprived of just that.

So to the extent we’re promising something, we’re not delivering on it.

Then there’s the larger picture. Consider what we’ve sold in two of our greatest export industries in recent years. Hollywood continues to sell its product around the world (with illegal knockoffs extending its reach). Yet it has been selling – with the explicit assistance of the administration – the torture of “Zero Dark Thirty” or the blind targeting of “American Sniper” rather than America as a beacon of freedom.

America’s tech giants had been a vehicle for communication and even for mobilization in recent years, until we learned the degree to which the NSA had prioritized a futile bid of omniscience online over the viability of those brands and what they stood for, both from a commercial and ideological perspective. More recently, we’ve learned American hardware, too, may have been hijacked as another tool of spying.

I’m not a fan of intelligence agencies buying out cultural institutions, as they did during the Cold War.

But if you’re going to wage an ideological war, do so competently. You’re not trying to sell a consumer an overpriced box of cereal or watery beer.

Yup, our elites folks.  The best and the brightest.

I thought we were pals after all that riding we did together. All of a sudden he’s worried about some mutt. Well, we did like he asked. We left him, and he went to jail for a dog. You want to hear the funny part? Paden didn’t even like that damn dog.

It evened out in the end. They locked me up; the dog sprung me.

So, what does it mean to love America?  I for one think it means recognizing the United States is not the only damn country on two continents and a land bridge and never confusing one with the other, but then again I have a lot of “crazy” ideas about ‘Liberty and Justice for All’ and ‘We, The People’ that are just so Enlightenment as to make me quaint and cuddly like a Mennonite kneecapper at an Amish Field Party.

Anyway, tonight we get to hear Martin Short (Canadian), Big Sean, Frank Rich and former senior media adviser to Mitt Romney Tara Setmayer (nee Wall) pontificate on the subject which will be a relief for you since you generally get me spouting off about it 3 or 4 times a day.

Continuity

James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now.  The report of my illness grew out of the report of his illness, the report of my death was an exaggeration.

Mark Twain, May 1897

To the death, serious wounding, or ‘Uncle’ saying Arby’s.

Horny Las Vegas Teens

This week’s guests-

• Monday 2/23: Christine Lagarde
• Tuesday 2/24: Lynsey Addario
• Wednesday 2/25: Conan O’Brien
• Thursday 2/26: Olivia Wilde

Christine Lagarde is the head of the IMF.  Do you think we will hear anything about SYRIZA and Greece?

Hmm…

This is why electing Judges is a bad idea.

Not all “reform” is good.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: Knowledge Isn’t Power

Regular readers know that I sometimes mock “very serious people” – politicians and pundits who solemnly repeat conventional wisdom that sounds tough-minded and realistic. The trouble is that sounding serious and being serious are by no means the same thing, and some of those seemingly tough-minded positions are actually ways to dodge the truly hard issues.

The prime example of recent years was, of course, Bowles-Simpsonism – the diversion of elite discourse away from the ongoing tragedy of high unemployment and into the supposedly crucial issue of how, exactly, we will pay for social insurance programs a couple of decades from now. That particular obsession, I’m happy to say, seems to be on the wane. But my sense is that there’s a new form of issue-dodging packaged as seriousness on the rise. This time, the evasion involves trying to divert our national discourse about inequality into a discussion of alleged problems with education.

And the reason this is an evasion is that whatever serious people may want to believe, soaring inequality isn’t about education; it’s about power.

Robert Reich: Why We’re All Becoming Independent Contractors

GM is worth around $60 billion, and has over 200,000 employees. Its front-line workers earn from $19 to $28.50 an hour, with benefits.

Uber is estimated to be worth some $40 billion, and has 850 employees. Uber also has over 163,000 drivers (as of December — the number is expected to double by June), who average $17 an hour in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and $23 an hour in San Francisco and New York.

But Uber doesn’t count these drivers as employees. Uber says they’re “independent contractors.”

What difference does it make?

For one thing, GM workers don’t have to pay for the machines they use. But Uber drivers pay for their cars — not just buying them but also their maintenance, insurance, gas, oil changes, tires, and cleaning. Subtract these costs and Uber drivers’ hourly pay drops considerably.

For another, GM’s employees get all the nation’s labor protections.

Of course this is waste of time.  What did you expect?

NYPD officers call re-training in wake of Eric Garner death a ‘waste of time’

by Lauren Gambino, The Guardian

Monday 23 February 2015 09.27 EST

A majority of New York police officers called the re-training program they were ordered to undergo after the death of Eric Garner a “waste of time”, according to the New York Post.

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But during the training, officers fell asleep in their seats and eight out of 10 gave the $35m program a negative review when they finished, the Post reported, citing a high-ranking NYPD official.

Relations between the NYPD and the mayor deteriorated in the aftermath of the shooting deaths of two officers in Brooklyn in December, with many officers angry with De Blasio for supposedly siding with protesters against perceived police brutality.

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The entire encounter – from Garner resisting arrest nonviolently to the officer locking his arm around Garner’s neck to Garner’s final words: “I can’t breathe” – were captured on video. Despite this, no indictment was returned. His family is supporting a legal push by civil liberties groups to release the grand jury proceedings.

The three day re-training program was touted by the mayor and his police commissioner, Bill Bratton, who said it would be both cognitive and tactical. The officers were meant to learn new techniques to use on resisting arrestees rather than the forbidden chokehold.

“I think you’re going to see a very different reality after this training has been achieved,” De Blasio said in December. “This will protect our officers, it will protect live citizens. I have no doubt some tragedy will be avoided because of this training.” The official, however, told the Post the program included eight-hour lectures rather than hands-on training.

“Officers thought they were going to get some real hands-on, quality training on how to deal with a hostile prisoner or arrestee,” the source said. “They didn’t get that.”

The three sessions included a cultural sensitivity workshop, followed by a course on the “legitimacy of policing” and, on the last day, training on the “high-low takedown”, a tactic to be used on suspects.

“It’s more of a self-reflection kind of course – reflecting on how they can improve as police officers,” the official told the Post.

2,631,126 Views

It’s actually much worse than this footage makes it.  Not just this incident.  It’s everywhere, all the time.

Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher

By JUSTIN GILLIS and JOHN SCHWARTZ, The New York Times

FEB. 21, 2015

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.

But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests.

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

The documents show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as “deliverables” that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.

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Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding.

Fossil-fuel interests have followed this approach for years, but the mechanics of their activities remained largely hidden.

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“What it shows is the continuation of a long-term campaign by specific fossil-fuel companies and interests to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change,” said Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center, a group funded by foundations seeking to limit the risks of climate change.

Charles R. Alcock, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, acknowledged on Friday that Dr. Soon had violated the disclosure standards of some journals.

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Dr. Soon is employed by the Smithsonian Institution, which jointly sponsors the astrophysics center with Harvard.

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Though often described on conservative news programs as a “Harvard astrophysicist,” Dr. Soon is not an astrophysicist and has never been employed by Harvard. He is a part-time employee of the Smithsonian Institution with a doctoral degree in aerospace engineering. He has received little federal research money over the past decade and is thus responsible for bringing in his own funds, including his salary.

Though he has little formal training in climatology, Dr. Soon has for years published papers trying to show that variations in the sun’s energy can explain most recent global warming. His thesis is that human activity has played a relatively small role in causing climate change.

Many experts in the field say that Dr. Soon uses out-of-date data, publishes spurious correlations between solar output and climate indicators, and does not take account of the evidence implicating emissions from human behavior in climate change.

Hmm…

I’m going mostly light this Monday morning cuz, let’s be honest, who wants to think too hard on a Monday morning?

First, now you can find out whether you’ve been spied on:

Find Out if You’ve Been Spied on-and Join the Fight for Privacy

Because of the ruling, there is an opportunity for people to try to find out if their communications were among those shared by NSA with GCHQ. Intelligence agencies use information like ip addresses and email addresses as “selectors” when sifting through the massive quantities of data they collect. GCHQ will comply with the IPT’s ruling by searching “selectors” it received from the NSA prior to December 2014.

But this won’t happen automatically. People need to actually file requests with the IPT. To help people do so, PI is collecting people’s names, numbers, and emails in order to assist them in asserting their rights and finding out whether those selectors were subject to unlawful sharing. If they were, PI will help individuals seek a declaration that that person’s privacy rights have been violated under Article 8 and Article 10 of the UK Human Rights Act, the law that codified the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law. Once the IPT issues a declaration for an individual, that individual can also request that their records be deleted. There’s no need to be a UK citizen-anyone can participate.

Jump!

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

February 23 is the 54th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 311 days remaining until the end of the year (312 in leap years).

On this day in 1954, a group of children from Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, receive the first injections of the new polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk.

Though not as devastating as the plague or influenza, poliomyelitis was a highly contagious disease that emerged in terrifying outbreaks and seemed impossible to stop. Attacking the nerve cells and sometimes the central nervous system, polio caused muscle deterioration, paralysis and even death. Even as medicine vastly improved in the first half of the 20th century in the Western world, polio still struck, affecting mostly children but sometimes adults as well. The most famous victim of a 1921 outbreak in America was future President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then a young politician. The disease spread quickly, leaving his legs permanently paralyzed.

Poliomyelitis, often called polio or infantile paralysis, is an acute viral infectious disease spread from person to person, primarily via the fecal-oral route The term derives from the Greek polios, meaning “grey”, myelos, referring to the “spinal cord”, and the suffix -itis, which denotes inflammation.

Although around 90% of polio infections cause no symptoms at all, affected individuals can exhibit a range of symptoms if the virus enters the blood stream. In about 1% of cases the virus enters the central nervous system, preferentially infecting and destroying motor neurons, leading to muscle weakness and acute flaccid paralysis. Different types of paralysis may occur, depending on the nerves involved. Spinal polio is the most common form, characterized by asymmetric paralysis that most often involves the legs. Bulbar polio leads to weakness of muscles innervated by cranial nerves. Bulbospinal polio is a combination of bulbar and spinal paralysis.

Poliomyelitis was first recognized as a distinct condition by Jakob Heine in 1840. Its causative agent, poliovirus, was identified in 1908 by Karl Landsteiner. Although major polio epidemics were unknown before the late 19th century, polio was one of the most dreaded childhood diseases of the 20th century. Polio epidemics have crippled thousands of people, mostly young children; the disease has caused paralysis and death for much of human history. Polio had existed for thousands of years quietly as an endemic pathogen until the 1880s, when major epidemics began to occur in Europe; soon after, widespread epidemics appeared in the United States.

By 1910, much of the world experienced a dramatic increase in polio cases and frequent epidemics became regular events, primarily in cities during the summer months. These epidemics-which left thousands of children and adults paralyzed-provided the impetus for a “Great Race” towards the development of a vaccine. Developed in the 1950s, polio vaccines are credited with reducing the global number of polio cases per year from many hundreds of thousands to around a thousand. Enhanced vaccination efforts led by the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and Rotary International could result in global eradication of the disease.

Eradication

While now rare in the Western world, polio is still endemic to South Asia and Nigeria. Following the widespread use of poliovirus vaccine in the mid-1950s, the incidence of poliomyelitis declined dramatically in many industrialized countries. A global effort to eradicate polio began in 1988, led by the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and The Rotary Foundation. These efforts have reduced the number of annual diagnosed cases by 99%; from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to a low of 483 cases in 2001, after which it has remained at a level of about 1,000 cases per year (1,606 in 2009). Polio is one of only two diseases currently the subject of a global eradication program, the other being Guinea worm disease. If the global Polio Eradication initiative is successful before that for Guinea worm or any other disease, it would be only the third time humankind has ever completely eradicated a disease, after smallpox in 1979 and rinderpest in 2010. A number of eradication milestones have already been reached, and several regions of the world have been certified polio-free. The Americas were declared polio-free in 1994. In 2000 polio was officially eliminated in 36 Western Pacific countries, including China and Australia. Europe was declared polio-free in 2002. As of 2006, polio remains endemic in only four countries: Nigeria, India (specifically Uttar Pradesh and Bihar), Pakistan, and Afghanistan, although it continues to cause epidemics in other nearby countries born of hidden or reestablished transmission.