Why Not Just Legalize Bribery While We're at It?

Lance Burri's enlightened position on campaign finance reform: screw donor limits.

Why not sell advertising space on legislator's office doors? There could be the Wisconsin's 9th Senate District brought to you by Kohler© or the Ocean Spray® 24th District Senate Seat of Wisconsin's Legislature or the 32nd District Sponsored by Larry's Booze and Bait™ on the Corner of Main Street and Fifth Avenue in Scenic Downtown Viraqua, Wisconsin?

Burri should know better. If you're desperate to exercise your First Amendment rights by spending a lot of money to get someone to manipulate the machinations of government in a manner of your liking there is already an avenue available for you: hire a lobbyist.

Absolutely Un-fucking-believable Polling Results

I find this appalling:

Many adults in the United States believe their federal government should not endorse the practice of inflicting pain as a means of getting information, according to a poll by YouGov/Polimetrix released by The Economist. 49 per cent of respondents think it is unacceptable to use torture when interrogating suspected terrorists.

[...]

Is it acceptable for the U.S. government to use torture when interrogating suspected terrorists?

Yes	34%
No	49%
Not sure	17%

Notice the phrasing of the question, which specifically asks the respondent if he or she endorses torture. Only 49% appear to understand that torture is wrong ... a full third of the people polled are fine with attaching electrodes to someone's testicles ... and nearly one in five "aren't sure."

So this poll basically finds that 51% of Americans don't know that torture is wrong ...

Amateur Hour at UC-Irvine

Here's a story I give Tony Palmeri about a 100% chance of saying something about in the next few days:

Erwin Chemerinsky, the prominent legal scholar slated to be founding dean at University of California, Irvine's new law school, had his offer withdrawn because of controversy created by his well-known liberal views, Chemerinsky said Wednesday.

A professor at Duke University School of Law, Chemerinsky accepted the post last week after months of talks, but on Tuesday UC-Irvine's chancellor Michael Drake asked him to give it up.

"He said I proved to be too politically controversial," Chemerinsky said in a phone interview from his Durham, N.C., home.

The "good" thing about this colossally bad idea is that it is being uniformly denounced by just about every one with either a printing press or an internet server. Did we mention Chemerinsky also had Californian ties? Here's the L.A. Times:

What makes Chemerinsky stand out is not his liberalism but the intellectual rigor of his analysis and the effectiveness of his argument. He works well with scholars of other viewpoints, as attested to by the cries of outrage from conservative scholars at his treatment by UC Irvine. Chemerinsky also sets a fine example for law students by putting his abilities to work not just in the courtroom and the classroom but in service to community. He co-wrote the current Los Angeles City Charter. He conducted, for the Police Protective League, a study of the LAPD's handling of the Rampart corruption scandal.

It was a great loss to the region when he left USC for a position at Duke University in North Carolina. It will be a shame not to bring him back to Southern California.

But it is a greater shame that UC Irvine apparently wants a dean unburdened by academic fame or legal point of view. Orange County, contrary to its stereotype, is a politically diverse and creative powerhouse and deserves a law school that will embody California's tradition of academic excellence. The decision to rescind Chemerinsky's deanship puts it on another course altogether.

He's even being praised (or at least defended) by many voices on the right.

The school will likely suffer for being utterly clueless in the handling of the matter:

And there is another mystery. The school had a huge interest in an amicable separation with Chemerinsky. Could those who are acting for the school have failed to perceive that there would be devastating bad press? The school has trumpeted its ambitions to become a top tier school. I have to assume they tried to avoid an ugly public breakup. Unless they are shockingly incompetent, there must have been an attempt to reach an agreement with Chemerinsky to create a public appearance that would flatter both him and the new law school. They could have papered over the discord with a nice statement that Chemerinsky wished UCI well but had come to appreciate the depth of family's attachment to Duke and that UCI regretfully accepted that decision and remains convinced that he would have made a wonderful dean. So why did the nastiness boil over where we could see it?

There's a lot of suspicion that the nastiness boiled over to the point where all could see it at the behest of Donald Bren, the law school's namesake and big time GOP donor, but there has yet to be any evidence to prove causality in this respect.

Oddly enough, if Mr. Bren was responsible or at least had a hand in giving Chemerinsky his walking papers, the school that bears his name just went from being an ambitious upstart to a farcical laughing stock whose future failures will be traced back to this regrettable incident.

It's going to be hard to bounce back from something this ugly.

MORE: On the bright side, at least in UC-Irvine's case, it could always be worse.

EVEN MORE: Michael Drake responds.

Timing Your Commute

Why do Governors always seem to wait until the last possible minute to commute the sentences of convicted criminals?

Does it really take that long to review a case? Are they waiting for further exculpatory evidence? Is crafting a budget a higher priority? Does the victim's family frequently lobby for an expedited execution? Does it take a long time for a public outcry to develop in support for the prisoner?

Or does the drama build the closer the execution comes giving the granter of clemency an almost God-like status as someone who holds life and death in his or hands? Does a governor become more merciful the closer the death of the inmate becomes?

If that's the case, isn't that kind of cruel and/or unusual?

Just a thought ...

You Know You're Screwed When...

... Wonkette plays your story straight.

This is genuinely revolting.

Fanaticism

This woman and this man are two very different writers but things like this make me wonder about the similarities of the folks who don't read either of them.

That thing About Torture

You know, this thing about torture? Yeah, well, it's hopefully been taken care of ... finally.

On Torture

Katherine Eban has garnered a good deal of praise for her article in Vanity Fair on torture techniques and medical ethics, but it should be pointed out that Jane Mayer was the first one to really touch on the subject with her truly chilling piece in The New Yorker ominously entitled "The Experiment." It wasn't the first time Mayer discusses torture in The New Yorker: a few months earlier she wrote a detailed work on extraordinary rendition simply called "Outsourcing Torture."

I find absolutely fascinating the pace at which this conversation is evolving -- it seems like it no one wants to talk about it at all. Any time a smart article on the subject comes out the right denounces the disclosure as being contrary to the interests of the war on terror (without ever mentioning anything about the potential for an act of torture to take place); while the left tepidly applauds the revelation of an abuse of power by the Bush administration, fervently declares torture to be wrong, then promptly forgets about it as quickly as possible. No one wants to have serious discussion about what is either going on or what should be going on in the dark places where civilians dare not to tread.

In my estimation there have only been a few serious attempts to engage this subject. Mark Bowden gave readers of the The Atlantic a primer with "The Dark Art of Interrogation" in 2003. Charles Krauthammer was roundly criticized for his article "The Truth about Torture," in which the specter of the "ticking time bomb" seemed to justify doing all kinds of things to people (even when there wasn't any ticking time bomb). Andrew Sullivan recently held forth on the use of the Bush administration's use of the euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques." Yet the country isn't any closer to a national consensus on the matter than we were in the days after 9/11 when it became clear to almost everyone (whether they admitted it or not) that this was going to be a problem in need of a solution sooner rather than later.

The most evident proof of this occurred during the GOP presidential candidates' debate in South Carolina last May, when nearly each one of the candidates did their damnedest to demonstrate they would have no qualms approving of torture using every form of winking and nudging in their arsenal. They did this all while sharing the stage with someone who underwent 5 years of torture as a P.O.W. and who was the only one among them to denounce the practice outright. The incident was embarrassing to watch and will be examined by future historians in the same appalling light that currently colors our examination of black and white television footage of Southern sheriffs (in uniform, no less) dropping the n-word during documentaries of the Civil Rights Era .

The worst part about the peculiar silence on this issue is that we have the experience of other countries to demonstrate to us that having this difficult conversation will be far easier now than when such things as Truth and Reconciliation Committees need to be formed. America can not afford another Abu Ghraib, even if the next one doesn't have the graphic pictures to outrage the public. For my money, Mark Bowden arrives at what I believe to be the best moral, legal, and practical compromise given the current circumstances; but looking back at the South Carolina debates there are clearly a few folks that think otherwise, and at this rate we'll never reach a mutually agreeable conclusion.