Wouldn't politics be better if we stop defining campaigns by trashing the other guy?

Tell Bush.

Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented -- both in speeches and in advertising.

Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush's campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75 percent of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads -- or 27 percent of his total. The figures were compiled by The Washington Post using data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group of the top 100 U.S. markets. Both campaigns said the figures are accurate.

The assault on Kerry is multi-tiered: It involves television ads, news releases, Web sites and e-mail, and statements by Bush spokesmen and surrogates -- all coordinated to drive home the message that Kerry has equivocated and "flip-flopped" on Iraq, support for the military, taxes, education and other matters.

Feda what, Feda who?

Recently read an American Prospect article from last spring. Very worth checking out.

Richard Briffault writes about the Rehnquist Court's unbalanced expansion of the federalism principle. (Federalism, itself, being that fairly broad and problematic word for a legal theory.) We can agree, for now, that the idea asserts a greater power to state sovereignty and less space for federal regulation. In the language of the Court, the fed government cannot "commandeer" the regulatory power of the states. Thus, for example, the Court struck the portion of the handgun regulating Brady bill that required state police to enforce the federal law.

Briffault writes:

The Rehnquist Court's jurisprudence in this area has had a strained and curious quality. Although the five conservative justices claim to be strict constructionists, their federalism decisions are not rooted in the text of the Constitution. Nor are they particularly attentive to the values at the core of the federalist model of government: respect for interstate diversity, political experimentation and grass-roots participation. Instead, these decisions are extremely formalistic, taking state power as an end in itself rather than a means for promoting the rights and interests of the people.
At the same time, the broader body of the Court's work displays an inconsistent interest in empowering the states. Most famously in Bush v. Gore but also in a variety of cases challenging state regulation of such things as cigarette advertising and HMOs, most of the justices who in other settings support states' rights have sought to curtail state powers, cut off state initiatives and limit the states' ability to vindicate political rights. Rather than demonstrating a principled commitment to the autonomy of the states, the justices' opinions shift with the context -- leaving the Court open to the charge that, like many politicians, it is using states' rights as a doctrinal rallying cry for other political ends. The Court's conservative majority has moved along three paths to limit the power of the federal government. First, the Court has been restricting the subjects on which Congress can legislate. Second, it has prohibited Congress from requiring state and local governments to help enforce national laws. And third, it has denied individual citizens the ability to sue states that violate national laws.

Reasonable people will differ on the classic federalism questions, regarding simply the federal power to make certain laws...should the commerce clause (which states that the federal government can make laws where interstate commerce is concerned) allow for broad ranging federal regulation. ie...do school yards so effect interstate commerce that the federal government could regulate the proximity of handguns to those schoolyards?
The Court said no, and I think there you have a fair discussion of the commerce clause.
The problem of inconsistency arises when we ask why we want states or the federal gov to have the regulatory power in particular fields.

States, it is said, (Justice Brandeis said it) can be "laboratories of democracy," experimenting with policies and providing for real participation.

I agree. Only, it is now local government that can truly meet Brandeis' laboratory; so, those big states rights folks ought to hit zoom on mapquest a time or two. In any event, the idea is a good one.
But if that is the idea, why won't the Rehnquist court let states expirement?

Indeed, the Court's federalism cases suggest an indifference to the states' potential to act as democratic, locally accountable policy makers within our federal structure. And this impression is bolstered by other cases in which the Court has given the states short shrift. In the most obvious example -- the Florida 2000 presidential recount -- the Court dramatically intervened in an area traditionally left to the states, rejected the efforts of a state supreme court to provide more vigorous protection of the rights of Florida voters whose ballots had not been tabulated by local ballot-counting machinery, and opened the door to nationalization of election administration. Led by the Rehnquist bloc, the Court twice overturned the state supreme court's actions with little apparent concern about the implications for federalism.

In other settings, too, this group of justices has attached little weight to the value of enabling states to make policy decisions concerning matters important to their citizens. In Lorillard Tobacco v. Reilly, for instance, the Court invalidated Massachusetts regulations that sought to address the problem of youth smoking. Massachusetts had prohibited outdoor cigarette advertising near schools, public parks and playgrounds, and it had required point-of-sale advertising near those places to be more than five feet from the floor (and thus out of the reach of young children). The tobacco industry claimed that the Massachusetts rules were preempted by the federal cigarette labeling law, which requires a surgeon general's warning on cigarette packs and bars additional state regulation of cigarette advertising. Lower courts in this and several other cases had held that the federal law preempted only state regulation of the content and not the location of cigarette advertising. But in an opinion joined only by the five proponents of the new judicial federalism, the Supreme Court agreed with the industry that the limited, ambiguous language of the federal law entirely barred all state initiatives concerning cigarette advertising.

Similarly, in Rush Prudential HMO v. Moran, an HMO claimed that an Illinois law providing for an independent medical review of certain denials of benefits by HMOs was preempted by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), the federal law regulating employee pension and health benefits. ERISA generally displaces state laws regulating employee benefit plans. However, the Illinois law was not at odds with any specific provision of ERISA, which does not address HMOs at all. Moreover, ERISA provides that state laws regulating insurance are exempt from preemption. Nonetheless, the Court divided over the issue. Four of the five justices who support states' rights in the commerce clause, 10th Amendment and sovereign immunity settings concluded that the Illinois HMO law was preempted by ERISA. Though the Illinois law has counterparts in 40 other states, the four dismissed concerns about the impact that such a decision would have on the states' ability to develop policy in an area of vital importance to their residents. Only Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's defection from the bloc saved the Illinois statute.

Good article.

In Re Jon...
Some Trojan thoughts spurred from Jon's comments in response to Hesiod (see below).

On the lover relationship between achilles and patrocalos: Jon, could you expand on the origins of that a little? Hesiod (the blogger) suggests its more an invention from relatively lately...whereas I'd thought it was more a classical Athenian ideal of love between men. The relation seems important, moreover, as to your point of debate with Hesiod's analysis of the motivation for Achilles to kill Hektor...Hesiod says shame, you say revenge.

Could it be both? Achilles stays out of the fight, at least to some extent, because being killed in battle after being shamed by Agamemnon would leave him in a bad stead for eternity. Rather than the great warrior, he'd be remembered as the guy who lost his slave girl. Could shame also result from a realization that sulking in his tent don't look so good either? (said realization caused from Patrocalos' death?

Still, I'm mostly with you on the revenge motivation. But expand on it please.

here's an attempt at a neutral runthrough of Thornton...to illicit your opinionated response (i'll quote alot so as to be true to the court's ruling):

Majority Opinion (Rehnquist wrote it):

In a prior case (Belton), the court "held that when a police officer has made a lawful custodial arrest of an occupant of an automobile, the Fourth Amendment allows the officer to search the passenger compartment of that vehicle as a contemporaneous incident of arrest. We have granted certiorari twice before to determine whether Belton' s rule is limited to situations where the officer makes contact with the occupant while the occupant is inside the vehicle, or whether it applies as well when the officer first makes contact with the arrestee after the latter has stepped out of his vehicle."

Here go the facts:
"Officer Deion Nichols of the Norfolk, Virginia, Police Department, who was in uniform but driving an unmarked police car, first noticed petitioner Marcus Thornton when petitioner slowed down so as to avoid driving next to him. Nichols suspected that petitioner knew he was a police officer and for some reason did not want to pull next to him. His suspicions aroused, Nichols pulled off onto a side street and petitioner passed him. After petitioner passed him, Nichols ran a check on petitioner's license tags, which revealed that the tags had been issued to a 1982 Chevy two-door and not to a Lincoln Town Car, the model of car petitioner was driving. Before Nichols had an opportunity to pull him over, petitioner drove into a parking lot, parked, and got out of the vehicle. Nichols saw petitioner leave his vehicle as he pulled in behind him. He parked the patrol car, accosted petitioner, and asked him for his driver's license. He also told him that his license tags did not match the vehicle that he was driving.
Petitioner appeared nervous. He began rambling and licking his lips; he was sweating. Concerned for his safety, Nichols asked petitioner if he had any narcotics or weapons on him or in his vehicle. Petitioner said no. Nichols then asked petitioner if he could pat him down, to which petitioner agreed. Nichols felt a bulge in petitioner's left front pocket and again asked him if he had any illegal narcotics on him. This time petitioner stated that he did, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out two individual bags, one containing three bags of marijuana and the other containing a large amount of crack cocaine. Nichols handcuffed petitioner, informed him that he was under arrest, and placed him in the back seat of the patrol car. He then searched petitioner's vehicle and found a BryCo .9-millimeter handgun under the driver's seat."

Rehquist then reviews the legal rules that are already in place:
1. scope of a search allowed while arresting someone: "the area immediately surrounding him. This rule was justified by the need to remove any weapon the arrestee might seek to use to resist arrest or to escape, and the need to prevent the concealment or destruction of evidence."

2. As for cars: "We therefore held that 'when a policeman has made a lawful custodial arrest of the occupant of an automobile, he may, as a contemporaneous incident of that arrest, search the passenger compartment of that automobile.'"

So that's where we are with the case called Belton, where the person is arrested after stopped in his car. The question is, does it change things if the person has just left his car when the police initiate contact?

"In all relevant aspects, the arrest of a suspect who is next to a vehicle presents identical concerns regarding officer safety and the destruction of evidence as the arrest of one who is inside the vehicle. An officer may search a suspect's vehicle under Belton only if the suspect is arrested."

(Note that last sentence...it's important to remember, as I did not point out, that this is only about searches incident to arrest, as opposed to merely upon suspicion.)

------
Scalia and Ginsburg concurred, but with these caveats:

In a past case, the court "held that a search incident to arrest was justified only as a means to find weapons the arrestee might use or evidence he might conceal or destroy. We accordingly limited such searches to the area within the suspect's ' 'immediate control' --i.e., 'the area into which an arrestee might reach in order to grab a weapon or evidentiary ite[m].'"
In Belton, the court "set forth a bright-line rule for arrests of automobile occupants, holding that, because the vehicle's entire passenger compartment is 'in fact generally, even if not inevitably,' within the arrestee's immediate control, a search of the whole compartment is justified in every case.
When petitioner's car was searched in this case, he was neither in, nor anywhere near, the passenger compartment of his vehicle. Rather, he was handcuffed and secured in the back of the officer's squad car. The risk that he would nevertheless "grab a weapon or evidentiary itemm] 'from his car was remote in the extreme. The Court's effort to apply our current doctrine to this search stretches it beyond its breaking point, and for that reason I cannot join the Court's opinion.'"

Scalia, though, allows the search via a general notion that cops can search with an evidence gathering interest after a lawful arrest:
"In this case, as in Belton, petitioner was lawfully arrested for a drug offense. It was reasonable for Officer Nichols to believe that further contraband or similar evidence relevant to the crime for which he had been arrested might be found in the vehicle from which he had just alighted and which was still within his vicinity at the time of arrest. I would affirm the decision below on that ground."

-----

Souter and Stevens dissent:

When Belton was decided, Stevens writes, "I was persuaded that the important interest in clarity and certainty adequately justified the modest extension of the Chimel rule to permit an officer to examine the interior of a car pursuant to an arrest for a traffic violation. But I took a different view with respect to the search of containers within the car absent probable cause, because I thought 'it palpably unreasonable to require the driver of a car to open his briefcase or his luggage for inspection by the officer.'"

"The bright-line rule crafted in Belton is not needed for cases in which the arrestee is first accosted when he is a pedestrian, because Chimel itself provides all the guidance that is necessary. The only genuine justification for extending Belton to cover such circumstances is the interest in uncovering potentially valuable evidence. In my opinion, that goal must give way to the citizen's constitutionally protected interest in privacy when there is already in place a well-defined rule limiting the permissible scope of a search of an arrested pedestrian. The Chimel rule should provide the same protection to a 'recent occupant' of a vehicle as to a recent occupant of a house."

"Without some limiting principle, I fear that today's decision will contribute to 'a massive broadening of the automobile exception,' when officers have probable cause to arrest an individual but not to search his car."

Can the Federal Government overturn Oregon's Death with Dignity Act?
No, says the 9th Circuit. And for that matter:

"The Attorney General's unilateral attempt to regulate general medical practices historically entrusted to state lawmakers," Judge Richard Tallman wrote for the majority, "interferes with the democratic debate about physician-assisted suicide and far exceeds the scope of his authority under federal law."

As the Times story points out, Senator Ashcroft, in 1997, asked Attorney general Reno to prosecute doctors that acted in accordance with an Oregon law allowing certain assistence in suicide. Reno regarded this a state matter, not to be intruded upon by federal action. As Attorney General, Ashcroft promptly changed the course, saying that doctors that prescribe lethal drugs could face prsecution. Today, the 9th Circuit overruled that directive.

Really, this is another instance of state versus federal power, I believe. Choose your side. That, or don't pretend to hold the issue of federal vs state power so dearly, only to abandon those principles when a particular issue arises.

On this issue, I'm undecided. Fortunatly for my piece of mind, though, I am not dedicated to either federal or state sovereignty. I tend to think certain issues are better met federally, while others are better met locally. indeed- I'm not so much for state power at all. More Federal and Local. Another discussion though.

If I were to give a Troy movie review, I would copy Mr. Counterspin Central. Read his two posts, here and here.
The author is, you will note, "hesiod."

Shorter Brooks...it's their fault.

From David Brooks' op-ed today:

It's a huge gamble to think that the solution to chaos is liberty. But it's fitting that during the gravest crisis of his presidency, President Bush reverted to his most fundamental political belief. He began this war in Iraq repeating the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence, that our creator has endowed all human beings with the right to liberty, and the ability to function as democratic citizens. He said last night with absolute confidence that the Iraqis are democrats at heart.

Bush is betting his presidency, and the near-term future of this nation, on that central American creed.

It's an epic gamble. Because, let's face it, we don't know whether all people really do want to live in freedom. We don't know whether Iraqis have any notion of what democratic citizenship really means. We don't know whether they hear words like freedom, liberty and pluralism as deadly insults to the way of life they hold dear. We don't know who our enemies are. Are they the small minority of Baathists and jihadists, or is there a little bit of Moktada al-Sadr in every Iraqi's breast?

Brooks picks up the spin that the administration has been using for some time. They (and he) seem to want to debate some heartless strawman that thinks all human beings are not endowed with a right to liberty and the inherent ability to function democratically. Just as Bush repeatedly implies that his dissenters argue this strange point, Brooks makes it into Bush's "most fundamental political belief." Would someone please show me the speech where a Democratic contender argues against this Jeffersonian creed?
Ahh....but we are treated to that very view in Brooks' column. For, if Iraq fails to form into a liberal democracy, it is their fault, says Brooks. Maybe, he ponders, Iraqis do not share the desire we take, here in the States, for granted...the desire for self government. And the failure, if that is the result, to produce such a government does not fall on the coalition's handling of internal affairs in Iraq. No. It is the Iraqis inability (or immaturity...you choose the term) to appreciate the creed that Americans hold so dear.

Welcome to Mike

Today, Owens Rhetoric adds a guest blogger that we anticipate having with some frequency. Mike Hickman and I too often have wonderful physical conversations to not spread the words into the digital world. We share a great many ideals, and diverge in just as many directions. He will be a fun contibutor to the site. Just look to the bottom of the post lest we have our motivations confused.

Again, with some frequency, I will have Mike on to discuss a particular topic. This will allow us to go head to head without the burden on the too skinny comments section. That said, the comments are still fair, and valuable game. Please bring as many thoughts as possible to the table.

This week, we will discuss Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, a work addressing the emerging (or, now emerged) communicative world of television. It basically compares the tv-world to the typographic world. Mike and I will each write out a mini review, then pick up conversation. Respond to each post with abandon.

Cheers, and welcome once again Mike. Look forward to some fun times.

Smart Detention
For both a nice legal overview of detentions, and a suggestion for what we might do in detaining suspected terrorists, see Jeff Rosen's article in The New Republic.
Rosen criticizes the current methods

In the past, U.S. law distinguished between lawful combatants, who were held as prisoners of war until the end of hostilities, and unlawful combatants, who were tried by military tribunals. But the administration has created a new category called "enemy combatants," who may never be tried by the military or the civilian justice system, and who may be detained indefinitely--until the end of a war on terrorism that could never end. And, while other Western democracies have imposed legislative and judicial oversight on the preventive detention of terrorism suspects, the Bush administration--arrogantly and inexplicably--has refused to acknowledge any role for Congress or the courts.

but acknowledges a need for a new detenation plan

if the administration's actions have no clear precedent, neither do the threats the United States now faces. Justice Department lawyers argue, plausibly, that the United States needs to devise a system of preventive detention so it can mine the intelligence value of suspects without having to provide Miranda warnings and lawyers from the moment of arrest. And administration critics, such as former Attorney General Janet Reno, are wrong to suggest, in their Supreme Court briefs, that the president should be forced to resort to the ordinary criminal justice system to try all American citizens who have gone abroad to train with Al Qaeda.

Good read, and thorough.

Goodbye Elvin.

Sometimes you're sitting at your desk when a pulsing sweaty tune plays through while you can't resist cranking the volume. You might start accidently tapping little o's on your computer screen oooooooo
before moving to the desk proper. maybe knock on a book for the higher sound. you start drumming with palms and fingertips. every now and again landing a foot for the emphasized thud.
if you're like me, this impromptu desk solo goes into maniacal beats sounding like utter rucus to any foreign ear. i would hate it if i heard it walking by. but at least there's passion.

Elvin Jones had all the passion and childplay, but was good. damn good. and you knew it to hear it. The self taught drummer, famous to most via his work with the Coltrane quartet in the early 60's, was a short little animal of a drummer. Really. Animal from the Muppets was no doubt a favorable shout to Mr. Jones.

He's passed on now. Goodbye, and thanks for the tunes.

The sad truth that a major contributor to the idea that war in Iraq couldn't wait is now seen for the fraud he is should have been a realization long before now. Ahmad Chalabi fed us crap for self promotion- but was relied upon by an administration that tended towards war in Iraq. Folks, this should have been clear.

Watch this episode of PBS's Frontline, from last year. Watch it, and tell me why we should have trusted Chalabi. Watching this, one remembers that, every now and then, you can trust your gut about a person.
And this is a transcript of his interview on Frontline.

Judicial Appointments:
If you have any interest in the "compromise" reached by Senate Democratics and the President, Professor Solum has the goods. He concludes the compromise has little meaning, but the precedent to that conclusion is worth reading.

What did Brown do?; the Weight of and Opinion.
Cass Sunstein reflects on various responses to Brown v. Board of Education in the most recent New Yorker.

Not everyone thinks that it has aged well. Many progressives now argue that its importance has been greatly overstated-that social forces and political pressures, far more than federal judges, were responsible for the demise of segregation. Certainly, Brown has disappointed those who hoped that it would give black Americans equal educational opportunities. Some scholars on the left even question whether Brown was rightly decided. The experience of the past half century suggests that the Court cannot produce social reform on its own, and that judges are unlikely to challenge an established social consensus. But experience has also underlined Brown's enduring importance.

So what did Brown do? And more generally, what do the Court's decisions do?
Quickly, we can note the small, actual effect of Brown- and Sunstein gets at this in the article. Six years after Brown, none of the 1.4 million black children in the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) attended racially mixed schools. In the Brown II decision (a year after the first), the Court demanded that segregated schools move in "all deliberate speed" to integrate...a motion soon revealed as pedestrian rather than sports car.
In lieu of direct causation, Sunstein notes (citing some recent work) the catalyst theory:

But Klarman doesn't claim that Brown was irrelevant to the desegregation struggle. In his view, the decision catalyzed the passage of civil-rights legislation by, in effect, heightening the contradictions: inspiring Southern blacks to challenge segregation-and Southern whites to defend it-more aggressively than they otherwise would have. Before Brown, he shows, Southern politics was dominated by moderate Democrats, who generally downplayed racial conflicts. The Brown ruling radicalized Southern politics practically overnight, and in a way that has had lasting consequences for American politics.
...
Because "the post-Brown racial fanaticism of southern politics produced a situation that was ripe for violence," he writes, Northerners soon found themselves outraged by televised scenes of police brutality against peaceful black demonstrators. The civil-rights legislation of the sixties, including the very laws that led to the enforcement of Brown, arose from a sort of backlash to the backlash. Given these complicated causal chains, how important to our civil-rights history, in the end, was Chief Justice Vinson's fatal heart attack? Not very, in Klarman's accounting: "Deep background forces"-notably, the experience of the Second World War and the encounter with Nazi racial ideology-"ensured that the United States would experience a racial reform movement regardless of what the Supreme Court did or did not do."

All this brings me to a favorite topic: what power do (and more importantly, should) the courts have to shape social norms? The last lines quoted above suggest Brown was only so many words with little to no causal relation to civil rights. This might be so- as the empirical evidence of its effect can illustrate.

Then again, perhaps Brown is among the most important elements to the painfully slow civil rights struggle that persists today. And we have empirical evidence too: Brown is one of the most popularly regarded cases. People evoke it all the time. It doesn't matter whether they evoke the correct legal positions, nor whether they duly cite Brown II and the non-response Brown accomplished.

(I tend to think Brown did shape some legal aspects to civil rights. The equality principle argued over in the case had been in existence for close to a hundred years- but still needed, as it does today, some work. The Court wrote that separate "educational facilities are inherently unequal;" thus violating the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This is significant beyond the feel-good equality principle. Plessy v. Ferguson (overturned by Brown) also demanded equality. It just allowed that equality to reside in separate quarters. Brown made the sociological comment that this doesn't work (although that position is still argued by, amongst others, historically black colleges.))

Back to theory, and away from Brown, some questions:
1) Can the Court shape social norms?
While majoriy decisions are not going to change minds on big social questions (homophobes aren't healed of that problem via Kennedy's Lawrence v. Texas decision), I think the decisions play a rather large role in shaping national norms.

2) Should the Court shape social norms?

yes

Marriage and Integration Andrew Sullivan appears in today's Times:

Today is the day that gay citizens in this country cross a milestone of equality. Gay couples will be married in Massachusetts - their love and commitment and responsibility fully cherished for the first time by the society they belong to. It is also, amazingly enough, the day of the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that ended racial segregation in schools across America. We should be wary of facile comparisons. The long march of African-Americans to civil equality was and is deeply different from the experience and legacy of gay Americans. But in one respect, the date is fitting, for both Brown and this new day revolve around a single, simple and yet deeply elusive idea: integration.

Sullivan sees two integrations: 1) the human integration. Gays, he writes, grow up in an institution that they are, in turn, barred from furthering. 2) civil integration. Sullivan write that, in Massachusetts, many couples are not celebrating gay marriage...but marriage.

What these couples are affirming is not something new; it is as old as humanity itself. What has ended - in one state, at least - is separatism. We have taken a step toward making homosexuality a non-issue; toward making gay citizens merely and supremely citizens.

Sullivan's most powerful passage is this:

I remember the moment I figured out I was gay. Right then, I realized starkly what it meant: there would never be a time when my own family would get together to celebrate a new, future family. I would never have a relationship as valid as my parents' or my brother's or my sister's. It's hard to describe what this realization does to a young psyche, but it is profound. At that moment, the emotional segregation starts, and all that goes with it: the low self-esteem, the notion of sex as always alien to a stable relationship, the pain of having to choose between the family you were born into and the love you feel.

Visiting Grandma. I'll be away for the next little while visiting my grandma. Here's a prelude, though, to the next post...and something i'm working through in my mind: some states are passing what are called consciencious objector statutes. Imagine you are a pharmacist opposed to certain morning after birth control pills because of your view that these pills amount to abortion. should you be able to deny the otherwise legal medication to a patient because of your personal objection?

hug a financial analyst. Jayson Littman, daytime fanincier, spends his sunday afternoons in Washington Square Park offering free hugs. here's the Times:

Between hugs, Mr. Littman spelled out his rules: "No dates, no numbers, no money. This is a nonprofit organization."

Mr. Littman's other rule is no discrimination: anyone who wants a hug gets one. He hugs the homeless.

"Need a hug?" he asked a woman smoking a sweet-tipped cigar.

"I don't, but you sure look like you need one," she replied, wrapping her arms around him. "He looked lonely," the woman, Jo Copasso, 43, said later.

On typical Sundays, Mr. Littman is accompanied by his friend Sipai Klein, who also gives out hugs. But because of Mother's Day, Mr. Klein could not be there yesterday. Mr. Littman said he was "not in touch" with his own parents, who live in Brooklyn. The subject causes a brief, sad lull before he charges on.

"How about a free hug?" he hollered at a man, woman and small boy dressed all in black. "How about not?" the boy shot back.

"I'm trying to cut down," said a banker from Kenya.

"Nothing's free," said another man, as he brushed past with his golden retriever.

The rejections seemed to bounce right off Mr. Littman's toothy smile.

"Ahhhhh!" screamed Faith Smith, 15, of Queens, as she sprinted toward Mr. Littman's open arms and delivered an almost crushing embrace.

"Nobody wants to give him a hug,'' she said. "I feel so bad."

Melanie Griot, 27, watched Mr. Littman for 20 minutes before succumbing to his arms. "I had a really bad morning," said Ms. Griot, an aspiring writer who had had a fight with her boyfriend.

Altered Sinclair. Eric Alterman comments on Sinclair Broadcasting's decision to not allow Nightline's reading of each dead soldier from Iraq.

Barry Faber, Sinclair vice president and general counsel, told the Washington Post that they had chosen to censor Nightline because they believed the program's "motivation is to focus attention solely on people who have died in the war in order to push public opinion toward the United States getting out of Iraq." Faber suggested that the reading of the names of the dead would "unduly influence people." Using the same bait-and-switch routine the Administration deployed to justify its unprovoked attack on Iraq, a Sinclair press release demanded to know why Koppel did not read "the names of the thousands of private citizens killed in terrorist attacks since and including the events of September 11, 2001. In his answer, we believe you will find the real motivation behind his action scheduled for this Friday." Well, the answer is, he did--on the first anniversary of 9/11--but don't bother Sinclair with facts. "The average viewer who watches the show is not going to remember that," Faber replied to Post reporter Lisa de Moraes, who pointed it out to him. To point out that no connection has been established between Iraq and 9/11 seems almost persnickety in this context, except that it was used to justify the war and is still trotted out by that unreconstructed fabulist, Vice President Cheney, among other war defenders.

Democratic belief in democracy and a Return to Edwardian economic rhetoric. Two commentaries from The New Republic several weeks ago are too good to let pass by. First, the authenticly Democratic belief in spreading the word:

In Peter Beinart's column, the editor worries that might abandon the one thing we have all agreed upon in Bush's post-missing-WMDs-justifications for going into Iraq: spreading liberal democracy. Here are key graphs:

That worldview is democratic universalism--the belief that every people, no matter how alien their culture or despotic their history, desires liberal democracy. During the cold war, this quintessentially American faith was tempered by a global ideological foe that also claimed to represent the aspirations of mankind. But, when Soviet communism collapsed, so did American inhibitions about telling authoritarian governments what was best for their people. The Clinton administration made democracypromotion the centerpiece of its policy toward the Third World. And, even after the Somalia fiasco suggested the limits of America's ability to implant liberal democracy in weak states, the Clintonites kept trying--in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor.

For a time in the 1990s, Republicans worried that America's democratic missionizing was stretching our military too thin and breeding resentment. In a debate with Al Gore in 2000, candidate George W. Bush said, "I just don't think it's the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, 'We do it this way, so should you.'" But, after the September 11 attacks, when Bush needed an ideological foundation for the war on terrorism (and later, a post-hoc justification for war against a WMD-less Saddam Hussein), he too turned to democratic universalism. The United States, Bush has argued again and again, will help the people of the Middle East fulfill their democratic desires--thus undermining Al Qaeda's appeal. And, while many Democrats have criticized Bush's reliance on unilateral, military means, few oppose Bush's goals themselves. The suggestion that Iraqis, or others in the Middle East, may not really want democracy has remained largely taboo in Washington, a violation of the democratic-universalist ethos that both parties share.

Beinart worries the right + left consensus that All people deserve (nay, are full under) liberal democracy may soon decay on the right side of the board:

But some on the right have begun flirting with a far more subversive interpretation of events: that perhaps Iraqis don't want democracy after all. While Bush in his prime-time press conference virtually called people who think Muslims cannot achieve democracy racists, National Review Online this week published a piece by freelancer Steven Vincent arguing that "there is something unstable and ungovernable at the heart of Shiism--something that is not specific to Sadr's intifada, but which in fact runs through the entire religious sect." And more prominent conservatives have also lapsed into cultural pessimism. On "Fox News Sunday," Brit Hume wondered "whether the Iraqi people have it within them to do what it takes to establish, participate in, and run a democracy." On his show the next day, Bill O'Reilly raised similar questions. "The future," he declared, "really all hinges on the Iraqis themselves. If they fight for their freedom, they'll get it. If they support the terrorists and the religious fanatics, they'll be enslaved again." In other words, it's at least possible that Iraqis want to be enslaved.

As my colleague Spencer Ackerman notes on his Web log this week (www.tnr.com/blog/iraqd), John Kerry has also begun subtly reflecting this new pessimism, eschewing the word "democracy" in his April 13 Washington Post op-ed in favor of a merely "pluralistic" Iraq. But liberals can scale back their expectations of what is now possible in Iraq without abandoning democratic universalism--they can simply say the Bush administration has bungled the job. It is conservatives, who remain generally unwilling to criticize the administration's postwar stewardship, who will more likely be forced--if the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate--to blame Iraqis instead. If the Iraq project fails, and John Kerry wins the presidency, it's quite possible to imagine a headlong return to the right-wing cultural relativism of the late '90s.

That would be a tragedy, not least because, fundamentally, I think President Bush is right that Iraqis want democracy.

A very good piece. For the right, it challenges some old notions found in a pre-presidential Bush; to wit, a fear of boldly spreading OUR way of governing. For the left, it challenges the libertarian wing of the left...that generally shares the to-each-its-own philosophy.

2) Remembering Edwards:
The Democratic Party needs to get away from short term, albeit spectacular, indices of the economy (jobs, namely) and focus on the fundamental WRONGNESS of Bush economics. The TNR editorial does a fine job of making this point. (And, note to Kerry...read the paper, the jobs will rise again). Here is TNR(with emphasis via me):

But the biggest problem is that, by concentrating on a grab bag of disparate indicators assembled only because they're all negative, Kerry is missing an opportunity to focus attention, broadly but clearly, on the ongoing pattern of fiscal recklessness and economic injustice that has consistently characterized the administration's policies. Yes, there are times when running on voters' anxieties--whether or not they have anything to do with administration mismanagement--is the only option a presidential challenger has. In 1992, for example, George H.W. Bush's generally sound management of the economy left Bill Clinton with no other choice.

But 2004 is not 1992. And, unlike the first Bush administration, the current one has taken every opportunity to reward the wealthy interests that finance its election efforts at the expense of the public good: a reduction of the top marginal income tax rate, a planned repeal of the estate tax, a large reduction in the tax on dividend income and capital gains, a "Medicare reform" bill that doubles as a windfall for pharmaceutical companies, an energy policy heavily skewed toward fossil-fuel industries--the list goes on and on. Which is to say, whether or not college tuition rises this year, there are plenty of grounds on which to criticize the administration's economic stewardship.

John Edwards, Kerry's main rival in the Democratic primary race, developed a pithy and effective way of critiquing this agenda. The administration, Edwards argued, had embarked on a relentless effort to shift the country's tax burden from those who live off of their wealth to those who work for a living, and, more generally, to enforce one set of rules for the wealthy and another set for the poor and middle classes. Of course, each candidate has to articulate a critique that works for them, and it's unlikely that a Brahmin like Kerry would sound particularly believable aping Edwards, the son of a North Carolina mill-worker. But, unless Kerry can translate these same ideas into his own words--perhaps using the Kennedy-esque language of shared mission and shared responsibility he tends to favor--his chances of making inroads on domestic issues look worse and worse. As the recent jobs number demonstrates, economic circumstances may change between now and the election. President Bush's economic agenda won't.

These are two important columns for Democratics, and our nominee, I hope, will take heed.

The Brind'Amour review. Want to read a hockey center's weekly review of current flicks? My Caolina Hurricanes, faced with a long off-season, have delivered. Check our Rod Brind'Amour's weekly review.

Professor Lazarus has a piece on Brown v. Board in FindLaw. Conclusing thus:

Even more important, Brown's legacy is not properly discounted (as some seem to) because the decision did not achieve a magical transformation of law or society. This is far beyond the power of any single judicial decision, or even collection of decisions.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of the Supreme Court's work is hostage to the commitment of the President and Congress and, most important, to the receptiveness of the American people to legal principles announced. In the case of Brown, that commitment has too often been equivocal.

Rather, what makes the legacy of Brown so profound - what makes blacks of a certain generation speak of it with such awe and reverence - is its embodiment of an ideal of racial and social justice.

That ideal has eluded every society since the beginning of time. It is a Platonic form to be yearned for, that may never quite be achieved.

But prior to Brown, as a matter of national law, there was not even a yearning. Brown changed that, forever. It gave Americans a measuring stick for their aspiration to be a country truly just and free - and, better yet, it created a stick that could be seen, and held, and wielded, by a racial group ground down by 400 years of legal subjugation. (Moreover, in arguing the case before the Supreme Court for the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall became an indelible role model for all that for which he argued.)

This is an achievement well worth celebrating, and will be again in another 50 years, and 50 years beyond that, and for as long as we can remember the evil that bigotry is.

I've been reading up on Brown, and its reception and modern thoughts on the case. I have to admit to being a bit lost.
In the above bit from Lazarus, you see the expansive meaning that Brown has been bestowed...willing or unwilling. In many respects, I but the meaning. To wit, Brown itself was, perhaps, more important socially than legally--remembering that the decision had little effect, and it took a "Brown II" to actually enforce the thing.
But, as mentioned some posts down, I am having trouble getting at the legal kernel of Brown. The case overturns Plessy v. Feerguson's acceptance of segregation so long as schools are in fact equal. Thus, Brown demands integration in order to reach equality. This point still seems lost on us today, if I'm seeing Brown's ruling clearly...in that many commentators put quality education in front of integrated settings. Ask around, and see what is the priority. I'm hearing something along the lines of: 'before we send kids an hour away from home just to even up the numbers, we should be focused on getting quality schools.'

Perhaps Quality is more important than eqality. But if Equality is a value we shoot for, Brown holds that integration is essential.
As I've mentioned, this poses problems for what I would have generally supported; namely, historically black colleges. I reckon, where the schools are private, we have no problem...but what of the public schools?