This sounds like a poorly thought out plot element from a bad movie:
Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many — truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers — have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went no further than grade school.
But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York State. People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been denied protection from abuse.
These are New York’s town and village courts, or justice courts, as the 1,250 of them are widely known. In the public imagination, they are quaint holdovers from a bygone era, handling nothing weightier than traffic tickets and small claims. They get a roll of the eyes from lawyers who amuse one another with tales of incompetent small-town justices.
A woman in Malone, N.Y., was not amused. A mother of four, she went to court in that North Country village seeking an order of protection against her husband, who the police said had choked her, kicked her in the stomach and threatened to kill her. The justice, Donald R. Roberts, a former state trooper with a high school diploma, not only refused, according to state officials, but later told the court clerk, “Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then.”
A black soldier charged in a bar fight near Fort Drum became alarmed when his accuser described him in court as “that colored man.” But the village justice, Charles A. Pennington, a boat hauler and a high school graduate, denied his objections and later convicted him. “You know,” the justice said, “I could understand if he would have called you a Negro, or he had called you a nigger.”
And several people in the small town of Dannemora were intimidated by their longtime justice, Thomas R. Buckley, a phone-company repairman who cursed at defendants and jailed them without bail or a trial, state disciplinary officials found. Feuding with a neighbor over her dog’s running loose, he threatened to jail her and ordered the dog killed.
“I just follow my own common sense,” Mr. Buckley, in an interview, said of his 13 years on the bench. “And the hell with the law.”
Kidding aside, I haven’t spent anywhere near enough time in the city of Seattle. The first time I was there, I was in my early twenties, at the tail end of a cross country Greyhound bus trip. And if you’ve never experienced the particular intersection of poverty and wanderlust that leads one to voluntarily travel cross country via Greyhound you should consider yourself lucky, but that’s another story. All I really remember about Seattle from that trip is that I stayed in a fleabag hotel above a strip club, and that it rained the entire time, and that I didn’t actually have enough money to do crazy tourist things like, you know, eat very much.
I hadn’t been there since, until this last year, when I made it out twice — once to give a talk for an ACLU event, and once for a booksigning at Elliott Bay. This time around, each time, I felt like an honored guest. KUOW in Seattle was one of only two NPR stations that gave me airtime on the last book tour (the other was WNYC in New York) — for whatever reason, NPR stations tend to give me the cold shoulder, but at KUOW I was greeted with open arms. They went so far as to record audio versions of several cartoons, which were mixed in during the live interview (there’s a podcast here, but you have to listen to the whole interview to hear them). The crowd at Elliot Bay was one of the most enthusiastic I’ve ever spoken to, and later that night I shared a hotel elevator with Stephen Hawking. All in all, much more fun than the whole Greyhound bus/fleabag hotel experience.
And of course, you can’t discuss Seattle (if by “you” I mean “I”) without giving a shout out to one of its greatest cultural treasures.
There’s really a sense of helpless fury, for the millions of us who saw this disaster coming and tried to raise our voices in warning, only to be shouted down by dimwits and thugs chanting poorly-reasoned slogans and waving flags.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.
The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.
We are, in a sense, at the moment of truth. The sadistic and/or bizarre acts committed in Guatanamo, Abu Ghraib and the CIA’s secret prisons can be written off as the crimes of a few bad apples with names like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld — or, more charitably, as the consequences of a string of bad and brutal decisions made under emergency conditions by men who were terrified by all the things they didn’t know about Al Qaeda. Either way, they were not acts of national policy, endorsed and approved by Congress after open, public debate. But, thanks to the Hamdan decision, the question is now formally on the table . . . So now we’ll find out, I guess, what we’re really made of as a nation — down deep, in our core.
Whiskey Bar
A Tortured Definition
September 15, 2006
The bad news is that Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects. He will do so by issuing his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in an executive order and by relying on questionable Justice Department opinions that authorize such practices as exposing prisoners to hypothermia and prolonged sleep deprivation.
Under the compromise agreed to yesterday, Congress would recognize his authority to take these steps and prevent prisoners from appealing them to U.S. courts. The bill would also immunize CIA personnel from prosecution for all but the most serious abuses and protect those who in the past violated U.S. law against war crimes.
Washington Post
The Abuse Can Continue
September 22, 2006
And if anyone was still harboring the illusion that the Democratics in Congress were finally going to shed their invertebrate past, that if any issue would inspire them to rise to the challenge of their era, then certainly something as fundamental as a torture bill would do the trick, well — ha ha! Joke’s on you!
Think they’ll ever give up, ever stop trying to rewrite history, to pretend that the guy who ignored the Clintonistas’ early warnings, ignored the Hart-Rudman Commission, and ignored a PDB entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” — think they’ll ever stop trying to pretend that the responsibility for 9/11 lies entirely with his predecessor?
Wallace: When we announced that you were going to be on Fox News Sunday, I got a lot of e-mail from viewers. And I have to say I was surprised, most of them wanted me to ask you this question. Why didn’t you do more to put bin Laden and al-Qaeda out of business when you were president? There’s a new book out, I suspect you may have already read, called The Looming Tower. And it talks about the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, bin Laden said “I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of U.S. troops.” Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the Cole.
Clinton: OK let’s just –
Wallace: May I just finish the question sir? And after the attack, the book says, that bin Laden separated his leaders, spread them around because he expected an attack and there was no response. I understand that hindsight is always 20/20 –
Clinton: No, let’s talk about it.
Wallace: But the question is, why didn’t you connect the dots and put him out of business?
Clinton: Let’s talk about it. I will answer all those things on the merits, but first I want to talk about the context in which this arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network. ABC just had a right-wing conservative running their little pathway to 9/11, falsely claiming it was based on the 9/11 commission report with three things asserted against me directly contradictory to the 9/11 commission report. And I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who
now say I didn’t do enough claim that I was too obsessed with bin Laden.
All of President Bush’s neo-cons that I was too obsessed with bin Laden, they had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say I didn’t do enough, said
I did too much, the same people. They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after we were involved in Black Hawk Down and I refused to do it and stayed six months and had an orderly transfer to the United Nations.
OK, now let’s look at all the criticisms, Black Hawk Down, Somalia, there is not a living soul in the
world who thought Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk Down or was paying any attention to it, or even knew al-Qaeda was a going concern in October 93.
Wallace: I understand.
Clinton: No, no, wait. Don’t tell me that — you asked me why didn’t I do more to bin Laden, there was not a living soul, all the people who now criticize me wanted to leave the next day. You brought this up, so you get an answer. But you — secondly …
Wallace: .. bin Laden says, but it showed the weakness of the United States.
Clinton: Bin Laden may have said it — but it would have shown the weakness if we left right away. But he wasn’t involved in that, that’s just a bunch of bull. That was about Muhammad Aidid, a Muslim warlord, murdering 22 Pakistani Muslim troops. We were all there on a humanitarian mission; we had no mission, none, to establish a certain kind of Somali government or keep anybody out. He was not a religious fanatic …
Wallace: Mr. President …
Clinton: … there was no al-Qaeda …
Wallace: With respect, if I may, instead of going through ‘93 and …
Clinton: No, no — you asked it. You brought it up.
Wallace: May I ask you (INAUDIBLE) question, and then you can answer?
Clinton: Yes.
Wallace: The 9/11 commission, which you talk about — and this is what they did say, not what ABC pretended they said …
Clinton: What did they say?
Wallace: They said, about you and President Bush, and I quote, “The U.S. government took the threat seriously, but not in the sense of mustering anything like the kind of effort that would be gathered to confront an enemy of the first, second or even third rank.”
Clinton: First of all, that’s not true with us and bin Laden.
Wallace: Well, I’m telling … (CROSS TALK)
Clinton: Let’s see what Richard Clarke said. Do you think Richard Clarke has a vigorous attitude about bin Laden?
Wallace: Yes, I do.
Clinton: You do, don’t you?
Wallace: He has a variety of opinions and loyalties, but yes. (CROSS TALK)
Clinton: He has a variety of opinions and loyalties now, but let’s look at the facts: he worked for Ronald Reagan, he was loyal with him; he worked for George H.W. Bush, he was loyal to him; he worked for me, and he was loyal to me; he worked for President Bush, he was loyal to him. They downgraded him and the terrorist operation.
Now, look what he said — read his book and read his factual assertions — not opinions, assertions. He said we took vigorous action after the African embassies, we probably nearly got bin Laden …
No, no — I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill him. The CIA was run by George Tenet that President (Bush) gave the medal of freedom to, and he said he did a good job setting up all these counter terrorism things. The country never had a comprehensive anti-terror operation until I came there.
Now if you want to criticize me for one thing, you can criticize me for this: after the Cole, I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban and launch a full-scale attack search for bin Laden. But we needed basing rights in Uzbekistan — which we got after 9/11. The CIA and the FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible. While I was there, they refused to certify. So that meant I would have had to send a few hundred special forces in in helicopters, refuel at night. Even the 9/11 commission didn’t do that.
WASHINGTON - Now the death toll is 9/11 times two. U.S. military deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan now match those of the most devastating terrorist attack in America’s history, the trigger for what came next. Add casualties from chasing terrorists elsewhere in the world, and the total has passed the Sept. 11 figure.
Story. Of course, if we step outside of our America-centric bubble and add in the Iraqis who have died in this thing, I don’t know how many 9/11’s we’re up to at this point.
According to two conservative websites, White House political strategist Karl Rove has been promising GOP insiders that there will be an “October surprise” before the midterm elections.
“In the past week, Karl Rove has been promising Republican insiders an ‘October surprise’ to help win the November congressional elections,” reports Ronald Kessler for Newsmax.
Thanks are due to generous readers who recently sent some Neil Young CDs off the Amazon wish list. And somewhat overwhelmed thanks are certainly due the person who sent the Complete Far Side compilation. Your generosity is excessive, but not unappreciated.
Surprise, surprise. The “rebel” Republicans weren’t so rebellious after all. They’ve spent the last week or two grandstanding and insisting on their opposition to the President’s torture and mock trials, but when it came time to choose between their (supposed) principles and helping their party present a united front in an election year, they sold out. Of course the ever-compliant media will bless this compromise since St. McCain can do no wrong. Even when he’s acting like a partisan ass, he’s somehow a non-partisan maverick. As usual, Digby’s got the right take on all this :
Can anyone in the know explain to me how letting McCain run with this torture debate benefitted the Democrats in any way?
Here’s how the optics look to me:
McCain, the Republican rebel maverick, showed that Republicans are moral and look out for their troops.
Bush, the Republican statesman and leader, showed that he is committed to protecting Americans but that he is willing to listen and compromise when people of good faith express reservations about tactics.
The Democrats showed they are ciphers who don’t have the stones to even say a word when the most important moral issue confronting the government is being debated.
Unless the Dems ready to threaten to filibuster a national security bill a month before an election — which I doubt — I expect that the Republicans are going to rush this through the conference and force through this piece of shit bill in a hurry, just like they forced the AUMF through in October 2002 and give the republicans a big honking “victory” in the GWOT.
The Dems are all going to be twisted into pretzels and look like they have no backbones as they struggle with a united GOP saying that McCain and Huckleberry Graham made sure “the program” is moral and necessary. Vote for it for for the terrorists. So they’ll end up voting for it without getting any benefit from it.
Digby’s not the only one ready to call this one a defeat for Democrats but it shouldn’t be too hard for them to regain control on this issue (provided that a couple of them grow a spine). A decent rebuttal would go something like this :
“Senators McCain and Graham may have sold out on this issue, but the Democratic party still believes that torture is torture, no matter what the President may choose to call it. We in the Democratic party aren’t willing to sacrifice our humanity in order to protect our way of life, because to do so would destroy the moral foundation upon which this great nation was founded. The inhuman treatment of suspects by this administration is deplorable and if Senator McCain is no longer opposed to torture, then we’ll have to continue this fight without him.”
Don’t let the conventional wisdom coalesce around the notion that rubber stamping the President’s bill is a compromise. The GOP “rebels” are cowards for buckling under the pressure of their President and their party. The only compromise was the one made when those Senators sold their souls.
Via buyouts involving Boise Cascade and the old Cuban Electric corporation, OfficeMax, which didn’t exist until almost 30 years after the revolution, is now Cuba’s single biggest claimant.
Behind the Wall St. Journal’s subscription barrier, although a chunk is here.
Obviously, books can’t have DVD extras, but that doesn’t mean Prisoner of Trebekistan can’t try.
I’ve updated the Extras page over at Trebekistan.com to include stuff left out of the book as far as Chapter Three, including, among other tidbits:
• Page 9: Alex’s star is at 6501 Hollywood Boulevard, near Vincent Price, Ann Margaret, and a convenient liquor store.
• Page 12: “Merv” is also a city along the Silk Road in Turkmenistan. Nobody told me this in school, but in the 12th century, Merv was the biggest city on earth.
• Page 15: The Jeopardy! p-TING! noise when the final category is revealed is two F notes, an octave apart. The first tone is F above middle C. Oddly, scientists have found that dying stars pulse at precisely this frequency just before exploding into supernovae. If you’ve seen my games, you understand why I’m not sure this is a coincidence.
More to come as I work through the book. Of course, some tidbits will only make sense if you pick up the book, but most should be fun by themselves. Enjoy!
