Stephen's Political Statements Political commentary and links to political stuff, by Stephen Duncan Jr, a Programmer/Web Geek working in the defense industry.

See No Good

AT SATURDAY'S New Hampshire debate, Democratic candidates were confronted with a question that they have been ducking for some time: Can they concede that the "surge" of U.S. troops in Iraq has worked? All of them vehemently opposed the troop increase when President Bush proposed it a year ago; both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama introduced legislation to reverse it. Now it's indisputable that the surge has drastically reduced violence. Attacks have fallen by more than 60 percent, al-Qaeda has been dealt a major blow, and the threat of sectarian civil war that seemed imminent a year ago has receded. The monthly total of U.S. fatalities in December was the second-lowest of the war.

I Heart Huckabee

Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who has actively sought union support during his campaign, crossed WGA picket lines outside NBC studios in Burbank Wednesday in order to appear on the Tonight Show, all while offering several (often lame) excuses for his actions.

Topless Woman Lured Perverts in Police Sting

Robin Garrison, an off-duty 42-year-old firefighter, was walking in Berliner Park in Columbus, Ohio, in May when he saw a woman sunbathing topless under a tree.

He approached her and they started talking and getting comfortable, the woman smiling and resting her foot on his shoulder at one point.

Eventually, she asked to see Garrison's penis; he unzipped his pants and complied.

Seconds later, undercover police officers pulled up in a van and arrested Garrison; he was later charged with public indecency, a misdemeanor, based on video footage taken by cops who were targeting men having sex or masturbating in the park. While topless sunbathing is legal in the city's parks, exposing more than that is against the law.

At Garrison's trial, his attorney argued that it was a case of entrapment. "Columbus police utilized this topless woman to snare this man," said Sam Shamansky. "He sees her day after day. He's not some seedy pervert."

I think this is a ridiculous thing for the police to be doing. Not only is it entrapment, I don't believe public indecency is such a scourge that even non-entrapping sting operations are justified to fight it. This is clearly not an operation concocted by somewhat focused on the idea of "protect and serve."

The 9th Amendment and Unenumerated Rights. Read through the comments.

It's interesting to see how a currently highly politicized concept can take a discussion in a direction that, without knowledge of the political concerns, would seem totally illogical. In this cae, the politicized concept is the current fear of "activist judges" and the power of "the Court." The arugment over unenmuerated rights gets turned on its head: people argue that recognizing unenumerated rights give more power to the Government vs. the People, because it gives the Court more power to overturn laws based on these unenumerated rights.

Without this fear, such discussions are at least generally stated in more straight-forward terms: unenumerated rights give more rights to the people, and limit "democracy" (the State). The idea that just because, within the State, power flows from the Legislative to the Judicial branch, that somehow increases the total power of the State is, to me, clearly foolish. Additionally, it totally ignores the fact that unenumerated rights greatly expand the liberty of the individuals.

It's also amusing to note the irony and hypocrisy created by this particular case. The two primary issues that have led to the recent concern over "activist judges" are gay marriage and prayer-in-schoools (abortion also plays a role here). Since these are all issues decided against "conservative" beliefs, conservatives began to have a concern about the Judicial branch. This lead them to actually begin to worry about the flow of power from the Legislative branch to the Judicial. The only way to justify this is to express concern over the Court overruling "the will of the people." The collective people. When this leads "conservatives" to invert an unenumerated rights argument to take the side of worrying about the rights of the collective over the rights of the individual, either the world has gone topsy-turvy, or conservatives making the switch are exhibiting hypocrisy.

On Unexpected Consequences. Jane Galt writes a post vaguely addressing the issue of gay marriage, mostly by making lots of points about unintended consequences. While I can't see any conclusion coming out of this (and neither can Jane), it's absolutely essential that you read this and keep the issues in mind. It's a very valuable truth, even if it makes things harder to decide.

Is this post going to convince anyone? I doubt it; everyone but me seems to already know all the answers, so why listen to such a hedging, doubting bore? I myself am trying to draw a very fine line between being humble about making big changes to big social institutions, and telling people (which I am not trying to do) that they can't make those changes because other people have been wrong in the past. In the end, our judgement is all we have; everyone will have to rely on their judgement of whether gay marriage is, on net, a good or a bad idea. All I'm asking for is for people to think more deeply than a quick consultation of their imaginations to make that decision. I realise that this probably falls on the side of supporting the anti-gay-marriage forces, and I'm sorry, but I can't help that. This humility is what I want from liberals when approaching market changes; now I'm asking it from my side too, in approaching social ones. I think the approach is consistent, if not exactly popular.

Read the comments section too. Lots of good arguments. Here's some of the best points:

• On Causation
• Possibility of Unexpected Positive Consequences
• On Mistaking the Cause
• More on Mistaking the Cause

I'm going to start using the political blog not just for partisan politics (which it mostly was during the Presidential election campaign), but for anything on matters pertaining to government, law, and politics.

Eugene Volokh on "Punishing Monsters". Eugene wrote an earlier post expressing support for using punishment that many would deem cruel in extreme cases, such as someone who raped toddlers. In defending his position, he manages to come up with a pretty compelling set of reasons why it's not necessarily wrong. As always, the devil's in the details, as his conclusion indicates:

One can certainly reach a different judgment than I do: Even if one thinks there's some moral benefit to executing the Eichmanns or even the serial rapist-killers, one might say that the benefit is small enough that it's exceeded by the risk of error, and the very serious moral cost of that error. As I mentioned at the outset, I am keenly aware that I may be wrong on this general question, and the matter that causes me the most trouble is precisely this one. Yet my tentative current sense is that for a small number of extraordinarily monstrous crimes, the need for retribution is so strong — and the risk of error can be made so low — that not just death but deliberately painful death is the proper punishment.

"How can you call yourself a political party?". Ann Althouse provides an excerpt from last night's Hardball.

MATTHEWS: Yes. Well, that's why you're losing. Why you're losing. now is, you can't even point to your leaders.

At least George Bush is the leader of the Republican Party.

GOODMAN: It's not about my leaders. It's about...

To be fair, reading the whole thing, it's more about Goodman's silly desire to appear on a show like Hardball and try to stay on their talking points than necessarily an inability for anyone to name Democratic leadership. (A lot of political people do this while going on show's like Hardball, the O'Reilly Factor, etc. It makes them look like automatons instead of people with ideas to me.) I think the lack of leadership and the lack of positive positions (rather than just negative reactions to Republican positions) are intertwined; I'm not sure if you could say which caused the other...

Focusing on the negative: the Left - from Ann Althouse.

hat I've noticed, over and over, is that the bloggers on the right link to you when they agree and ignore the disagreements, and the bloggers on the left link only for the things they disagree with, to denounce you with short posts saying you're evil/stupid/crazy, and don't even seem to notice all the times you've written posts that take their side. Why is this happening? I find it terribly, terribly sad.

While it would be easy to take this as an opportunity to bash liberals, I think there is a potential explanation. People frequently blog to spread the opinions they feel aren't being given a strong voice elsewhere. With a mainstream media that slants so far leftward, it's primarily extremist leftist nuts who have incentive to blog. Could that be why the reaction from leftist bloggers is so different?

Update: Josh Poulson writes a longer post going into detail on the mechanics of how the difference in perception of how much you're voice is heard might affect these kind of reactions.

Jeff Jarvis: Shame on the New York Times. Jeff provides a detailed rebuttal, as well as an ethical condmenation of this NYT article. Jeff, ever the optimist, considers this an attempt to improve journalism and the NYT:

: Let me make one thing very clear: I like, read, and respect The New York Times and I care about journalism and that is why it's worth going after this story: to turn journalism into a self-correcting mechanism, as we call our new medium.

I'm not feeling that optimistic. I take it, instead, as another sign journalism right now is a very sick industry. It seems likely that it will take something more drastic before the problem is fixed.

War on Terror not Global Issue - Mitch Kapor links to a NYT article stating that the War on Terror is not the most pressing issue in the world to most people outside America. Is the result of, or the cause of, America being the leader and primary participant in said War on Terror?

CMN comments in response to JaneGalt.

As I think Randy Barnett's work convincingly shows, the whole point of the 9th Am is that rights are innumerable. It's only government powers that are limited and numbered. We don't list your inviolable rights, because liberty means the inviolable right to do anything that doesn't violate someone else's rights, in which case one of the government's listed powers ought to cover it. The burden of proof should always be on the government in exercising its power, not the citizen in acting. Thus Barnett would relieve Scalia of the burden of deciding which rights are "fundamental," by saying, "They all are. You know the kind of scrutiny of government action you apply when free speech or religious practice is involved? Just use it all the time." The presumption is of liberty, the burden of proving entitlement is on the government. Make the government file the Brandeis brief. Make it prove that it has a legitimate end and is using narrowly tailored means to achieve it. If so, fine.

While I gave Ken's post the hat-tip on 9th Amendment point, this comment from Chris deserved it's own post. I find his argument (via Randy Barnett) very persuasive. But am I missing something? Does my heart lead me astray?...

Activism ain't just a river in Egypt - JaneGalt.net

This is undoubtedly true. But that doesn't mean that judicial activism doesn't exist; it just means that it's a bipartisan vice. Even if the normal political usage of the term isn't strictly objective, one can still define what judicial activism is--broadly, starting from the desired result, and then reasoning backwards to the decision, as the court did in Roe v. Wade, and a lot of other cases.

I think that's a bad thing, even when I support the result; while I'm ambivalent about Roe, I'm certainly not about Lawrence v. Texas (I'm in favour of the result, if you had to ask), and yet I think that Scalia probably had the right of it: the constitution nowhere empowers the federal government to decide what we may, or may not do in bed, nor to prevent the states from deciding.

An interesting, detailed essay on judicial activism. I'm not in agreement with everything, but it's a good starting point, so read it!

I agree in the details of the results: the "rights" created do not appear in the Constitution, and should therefore be relegated back to legislative action at whichever level of government is appropriate. But, I believe this because I believe that the desirable end-state is a government severely limited by a Constitution. This can only be acheived if the consitution is treated in a manner that gives it power: holding government strictly accountable to it, and only it. Made up rights weaken the power of actual rights in the Constitution, and make it harder to strictly enforce it.

I'm not certain I've disagreed yet. Here's where I differ: I'm not interested in the concept of the Consitution as merely providing the necessary framework for democracy to be exercised. I'm not interested in democracy at all. Democracy is the least-of-all-evils method of government. It is necessary, because it's the only form of government that is somewhat stable: all other forms have a built-in prejudice towards revolution. But Democracy is only desirable for this pragmatic reason. Otherwise, it has no particular tendency to produce the best results in terms of good government, and is not an ethical ideal to strive towards. I'm interested in a Constitution to provide a form of government conducive to free living, with democracy as the method of choice to deal with the times that we can't be left alone.

But enough of being the contrarian. Judicial activism is a danger to an enforcable Constitution, and should be fought against, even when it creates rights we find desirable. The proper procedure is to get back to a strict interpreation of the Constitution, and then add amendments (if you can convince enough of your fellow Americans) for rights that are both desirable and important.

Update: I should read the comments on blog posts before I make my own. Ken makes a good point:

There's a big problem in determining whether a particular judgement makes Constitutional sense or not: the text of the 9th Amendment.

It explicitly denies the very possibility that we can say that something definitely isn't a right of the people that the government is bound not to infringe. It tells us that there are rights that aren't explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, but doesn't offer any real clues as to what those rights are.

The Ninth Amendment does make it tricky to decide what is activism, and what is proper use of the Constitution. On the one hand, JaneGalt's focus on democracy would indicate limited application of the 9th; my preference towards a focus on the Constitution as a limited reagent would lead to a larger use of the 9th amendment. Nevertheless, I think it's necessary for the sake of properly framing the debates in American politics to distinguish between explicitly-protected rights in the Constitution, and those left un-stated, and treat them with a different level of protection.

Blue State Blues. Hilarious. Read it. Now.

"I'm not sure where we went wrong," says Ellen McCormack, nervously fondling the recycled paper cup holding her organic Kona soy latte. "It seems like only yesterday Rain was a carefree little boy at the Montessori school, playing non-competitive musical chairs with the other children and his care facilitators."

"But now..." she pauses, staring out the window of her postmodern Palo Alto home. The words are hesitant, measured, bearing a tale of family heartbreak almost too painful for her to recount. "But now, Rain insists that I call him Bobby Ray."

While not exactly about politics, the "press" plays an important role in politics. And its failures are therefore important to note. In this case, Mark Cuban notes the laziness of reporters in regards to the Pacers-Pistons-fans brawl.

A Thanksgiving Lesson. A discussion on Gov. Bradford of the Pilgrim's Plymouth Rock founding colony, and his statements on their initial attempt at communism.

Among Bradford's many insights it's amazing that he saw so clearly how collectivism failed not only as an economic system but that even among godly men "it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them." And it shocks me to my core when he writes that to make the collectivist system work would have required "great tyranny and oppression." Can you imagine how much pain the twentieth century could have avoided if Bradford's insights been more widely recognized?