sfarber

Forty-one years, if necessary, and in the case of ex-Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen, forty-one years to the day was what it took before a Mississippi jury decided to find him guilty of three counts of manslaughter for the deaths of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, 20, Michael Schwerner, 24, and James Earl Chaney, 21, who disappeared on this day, in 1964. There was some disappointment that the jury was unable to reach a verdict finding Killen guilty of murder, and while jurors questioned refused to characterize the verdict as a compromise, let’s get real: I heard reports...

Such is an implicit question asked in this candid essay constituting our visit to Beijing’s People’s Daily; the $12 trillion question is whether Americans are by and large concluding, given the rise of China and India and their ability to pick off some of our lower-skilled industrial jobs (and in the case of India, some white collar jobs too) that free trade is not nearly as good a thing for America as once thought. Certainly, this is a question perennially asked by one of the Democratic Party’s leading (and declining) sub-constituencies, industrial trade unions. They insist that all free trade...

This week’s visit to Pravda (it’s been a while!) gives us this discussion of what appears to be a growing tourist Mecca in the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine… I’m talking about Chernobyl. It’s been near 20 years since the world’s most devastating nuclear power plant accident killed thousands (or was it tens of thousands… given Soviet era obfuscations, no one can be sure…), and resulted in the abandonment of this city of nearly 50,000… An apparent natural paradise (albeit one with lethal radiation in all directions) appears to have sprouted up, amidest abandoned apartment blocks and government buildings. Some...

Iraqi politicians have been behaving in a very… politic… manner, by expanding the committee slated to draw up Iraq’s new permanent constitution to include an additional 15 Sunni members, and to propose that the constitution be passed “by consensus”. This is clearly designed to ameliorate the gross underrepresentation of Sunni members in the overall national assembly, as a result of the direct proportional representation system demanded by Grand Ayatollah Sistani and capitulated to by the Bush Administration; because Sunni areas are, in general, poorly secured compared to the rest of Iraq, very few Sunnis voted, and Sunni parties were, by...

That hotbed of anti-American sentiment, the House of Representatives, voted to repeal one of the more “high-profile” and irritating provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act (passed by a chicken-shit Congress in the immediate aftermath of 9-11), removing the provision allowing warrantless searches of library and bookstore records. My understanding from no less an official than John Ashcroft was that this provision was not at all worrisome, because the federal government hadn’t used it… Apparently, the House, in an approving an amendment sponsored by Vermont Socialist Rep. Bernie Sanders (it did not exempt internet use a libraries… just what books got...

Finding that Michael Jackson’s celebrity cachet is still all there, as a matter of California law (specifically a unique provision contained at Cal. Penal Code Section 6-418(b)(2), which provides simply “celebrities are above the law”), a jury in Santa Maria, CA acquitted the “king of pop” on all charges associated with the child molestation prosecution he faced. (Juries are still out, apparently, in the nearby towns of Nino and Pinta.) Well, let the jokes fly: Michael “beat it”. He can moonwalk right out of the court house. Whatever. The jury was, as I feared, duly awestruck by the big-time celeb,...

Let’s hear it for our Chinese overlords, who, according to this from our friends at The People’s Daily, are building a 200 kph (around 130 mph) railway between two of their Northern provincial capitals. The complicated project, which will include numerous mountain bridges and tunnels, is expected to be completed by around 2008. It’s the sort of thing Americans were good at at one time (I recall reading that a significant part of New York City’s IRT subway system was completed in under two years, as was the Empire State Building), but, for a variety of reasons… aren’t quite as...

Bruce the Veep forwards us this follow-up from (dog run member) The Times of London, giving us this report of British officials who concluded as of July 2002 (a month before I conlcuded it) that the Bush Administration had decided to have a war with Iraq, with facts and legal justification to follow… There were two reasons that the officials concluded that the Blair government was committed to being the Bush Administration’s Bitch on this: (1) Blair had evidently made a personal promise to commit British support to any American action to remove the Saddam Hussein government some months earlier...

And so the G8 group of rich, industrialized nation, at a meeting in Britain, in an announcement made by Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (and next PM) Gordon Brown, agreed to forgive billions of dollars in debt owed to the rich nations by poor, overwhelmingly sub-Saharan African nations, which would amount to a savings estimated at $1.5 billion per year. This, at least, appears to be something new and something for real, as opposed to our President’s pronouncements in recent days of impressive sounding aid programs to Africa that amount to nice-sounding-restatements of… existing programs. And it may make some...

The United States Senate completed the Democratic sellout/implosion associated with the now-proven-to-be-totally-hollow threat of ongoing judicial filibusters against “extremist” conservative judges, by approving the nomination of California State Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown (56-43) to a for-life seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, widely viewed as the second most important court in the nation and a frequent springboard to the Supreme Court itself. There are those of us of the view that most who don the black robe of a federal judge recognize the limitations of their judicial office: the principle of...