May 30, 2007
Only in America can a state get what it votes against, maybe.
Utah’s Attorney General Mark Shurtleff’s opinion would require the Utah State Board of Education to implement school vouchers now, even though the state legislature did not intend the implementation now, and even though the people may reject the plan for vouchers in a November election.
According to the Shurtleff’s opinion, vouchers would have to be implemented despite the state’s rejection of them. The Deseret Morning News tried to explain the mess.
Complicating affairs is a “technical amendment” passed by the legislature after the original voucher authorization legislation, to correct problems in the first bill. The referendum is on the first bill; the amendment was billed as a “clean-up” bill fixing technical problems with the first bill. But the attorney general now says that the amendment can stand alone, and consequently the law would require the Board to implement a law they oppose, even if the people reject the law.
So, of course, the courts may be asked to parse out the truth and the law.
If you’re not confused yet, stick around. Mark Twain famously said no man’s life, limb, nor property is safe so long as the legislature is in session. Utah’s corollary is that nothing is safe even after the legislature goes home.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
May 19, 2007
City elections in Aurora, Texas, may need to be re-run after spectacular failures of two of three Diebold voting machines, and a fire that damaged the impounded units after 38 votes were completely erased and Diebold technicians were unable to hack results out of their own machines. Do you even need to be told the fire’s cause is undetermined?
Is your local government considering voting machines with no paper back up?
The voting machines don’t work even when there isn’t a great partisan prize at stake; the first explanation from the Justice Department for mess-ups in personnel there is that dismissed people were not aggressively enough pursuing a campaign against minority voting; a federal conviction of a campaign worker in Wisconsin turns out to have been a bogus case created by a U.S. attorney appointed to bring exactly such bogus cases . . .
How great must the assault on the Constitution and rights of Americans be, before there is a general clamor for justice, and change?
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Posted by Ed Darrell
May 7, 2007
Dr. Francis Beckwith, the Baylor University professor whose writings formed much of the justification for claims that intelligent design could be taught as science in public schools (prior to the Dover decision), announced he is returning to the Catholic Church and resigning as president of the Evangelical Theological Society.
Beckwith explains his faith switch at Right Reason. Contrast comments there with the snarky, uncharitable posts from the “evangelical” side, with Constructive Curmudgeon as an example. If this is the way ID advocates (such as Doug Groothuis) treat someone who merely changes sect, what would they do to someone who became rational on science?
Beckwith’s road at Baylor has not been a smooth one. One wishes him well when brickbats are already flying his direction, for silly reasons.
Educators and scientists, including especially those of faith traditions, may wish he had left the church of intelligent design instead. Perhaps he has, or will, if the attacks from fundamentalists keep up — similar to the way such attacks on Charles Darwin encouraged him to distance himself from the church.
How does this alter the Texas biology textbook fight discussion?
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Posted by Ed Darrell
April 26, 2007
In the middle of the Ray Donovan mess* I was dispatched one afternoon to the Labor Department to see Donovan’s press conference on some complaint the Senate Labor Committee had misrepresented the misrepresentations about testimony offered to the committee. Donovan was mad, but I didn’t realize just how mad until I was stopped at the door — my I.D. was flagged as persona non grata, apparently. Either that or they thought Sen. Orrin Hatch would try to sneak a subpoena in with his press guy.
A friendly reporter standing behind me in line added me to his crew, and I got the handouts.
That was retail, face-to-face scandal. Nothing like this:
Anything like “OllieNorthinthebasement.net?”
* It’s amazing how little of this history is available on line.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
April 14, 2007
April 16 marks the 60th anniversary of the Texas City Disaster. A large cargo ship being loaded with tons of ammonium nitrate caught fire and exploded, setting fire to other nearby ships, one of which exploded, and devastating much of the town. In all, 576 people died in Texas City on April 16 and 17, 1947.
View of Texas City from Galveston, across the bay, after the explosion of the French ship SS Grandcamp, April 16, 1947. Photo from International Association of Fire Fighters Local 1259
The incident also produced one of the most famous tort cases in U.S. history, Dalehite vs. United States, 346 U.S. 15 (1953). (Here is the Findlaw version, subscription required.)
The entire Texas City fire department was wiped out, 28 firefighters in all. The International Association of Fire Fighters, Local 1259 has a website dedicated to the history of the disaster, with a collection of some powerful photographs.
More below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »
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17 Comments | Disasters, History, Jurisprudence, Justice, Law, Texas, Texas history | Tagged: Disasters, History, Jurisprudence, Justice, Law, Local 1259 International Association of Fire Fighters, Texas, Texas City Disaster, Texas history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
April 4, 2007
Drug couriers, it appears, like to put off suspicion of their vehicles by putting a Bible on the dashboard as they travel. So, in a countermeasure, cops target cars with Bibles on the dash to be pulled over as suspected for couriering drugs.
Isn’t that a violation of someone’s First Amendment rights? Not according to the federal courts in Nebraska, no. The case is Frazier v. Lutter, a March 27 decision, which Prof. Friedman details slightly more.
Say what? Suddenly you have more sympathy for imams kicked off of airplanes?
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Posted by Ed Darrell
March 25, 2007
Statue of Millard Fillmore at the City Hall in Buffalo, New York.
From Millard Fillmore’s second State of the Union speech, December 2, 1851:
The public statutes of the United States have now been accumulating for more than sixty years, and, interspersed with private acts, are scattered through numerous volumes, and, from the cost of the whole, have become almost inaccessible to the great mass of the community. They also exhibit much of the incongruity and imperfection of hasty legislation. As it seems to be generally conceded that there is no “common law” of the United States to supply the defects of their legislation, it is most important that that legislation should be as perfect as possible, defining every power intended to be conferred, every crime intended to be made punishable, and prescribing the punishment to be inflicted. In addition to some particular cases spoken of more at length, the whole criminal code is now lamentably defective. Some offenses are imperfectly described and others are entirely omitted, so that flagrant crimes may be committed with impunity. The scale of punishment is not in all cases graduated according to the degree and nature of the offense, and is often rendered more unequal by the different modes of imprisonment or penitentiary confinement in the different States.
Many laws of a permanent character have been introduced into appropriation bills, and it is often difficult to determine whether the particular clause expires with the temporary act of which it is a part or continues in force. It has also frequently happened that enactments and provisions of law have been introduced into bills with the title or general subject of which they have little or no connection or relation. In this mode of legislation so many enactments have been heaped upon each other, and often with but little consideration, that in many instances it is difficult to search out and determine what is the law.
The Government of the United States is emphatically a government of written laws. The statutes should therefore, as far as practicable, not only be made accessible to all, but be expressed in language so plain and simple as to be understood by all and arranged in such method as to give perspicuity to every subject. Many of the States have revised their public acts with great and manifest benefit, and I recommend that provision be made by law for the appointment of a commission to revise the public statutes of the United States, arranging them in order, supplying deficiencies, correcting incongruities, simplifying their language, and reporting them to Congress for its action.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
March 13, 2007
Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE) is a great idea. Federal agencies are loaded with information useful to teachers and students, formerly available in print if one could find the appropriate phone number or get lucky with a mail sweepstakes. Now a lot of the information is compiled specifically for education, and the U.S. Department of Education has compiled a user-congenial site to help educators find the stuff.
Under “U.S. History and Topics” you may find a good deal of support for most social studies disciplines. The Women’s History Month focus highlights two topics from the Library of Congress and two from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Read the rest of this entry »
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1 Comment | Classroom technology, Curricula, Economics, Education, Freedom of Information, Geography - Physical, Government, History, History video sources, Justice, Law, Lesson plans, Presidents, Public education, Teaching, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
January 13, 2007
I used to marvel at the irony of attending Republican conventions in states and counties across the nation, where ceremonies would open with the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag, and the nation, ideals and government it stands for, and where speaker after speaker would then assault every aspect of that same nation and government. In the Vietnam era and a decade afterward, frequently these speeches would include rhetorical questions like, “Do we really need a First Amendment?” in reference to protestors, or the speech of anyone that the speaker found disagreeable.
This is a new height: The New York Times reports this morning that a top Pentagon official is bothered that lawyers defend prisoners in the U.S., especially prisoners at Guantanamo Bay — somehow forgetting that lawyers are obligated to do such things by their ethical canons, their state laws and state licensing rules, and by the Constitution. Then he urges corporations who use those same lawyers to stop paying them.
Is this a joke, or can someone who has sworn to uphold the Constitution actually be so clueless?
The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.
The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.
The Wall Street Journal joined in the assault on the Constitution in an editorial, according to the news story.
Stanley Kubrick is dead, or I’d think that this was just a review of a Stanley Kubrick follow-up to Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb.
Any corporation official who fires the company’s attorneys for representing Guantanamo Bay detainees should be fired himself — he’s acting contrary to the interests of his stockholders in getting rid of the best legal team he could hire.
How do such barbarians an anti-American people get to be officials in the Pentagon, and editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal?
More information:
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Posted by Ed Darrell
January 9, 2007
David Parker at Another History Blog updates and corrects our information on state pledges of allegiance: Texas is not alone, Georgia also has a state pledge.
Georgia does not require students to say the pledge daily, however.
These provisions are often hidden away in state laws that do not index well at the legal sites I use, Findlaw.com and the Cornell University Law Library’s Legal Information Institute. Consequently, it’s quite possible I have missed other state pledges. If you know of any others, please let me know.
And, in the meantime, go check out Prof. Parker’s post. The details make the story, as always.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
December 13, 2006
In the later years of his life, after he was elected a Member of Congress from Florida in 1963, Claude Pepper’s appearances on Capitol Hill always generated memories from politicos attending, of the 1950 campaign that took away his U.S. Senate seat a decade earlier. It was a nasty campaign. Because he had actually met Joseph Stalin, Pepper, a Democrat, was called “Red Pepper” by his opponent George Smathers, a moniker designed to produce a particular reaction in Florida’s conservative but uneducated voters. Smathers never hesitated to point out that Harvard-educated Pepper had learned “under the Harvard Crimson.” But that was just the start.
There are a few recordings of the breathless claims against Pepper by campaign stumpers, and they are fantastic. Pepper’s family morality was impugned — the speaker notes that Pepper’s sister was a “well-known thespian” as if it were some sort of a sin to be an actor. Pepper himself was accused of “matriculating in public” all through his college career. It would seem normal that a college student would enroll for classes, no?
Of course, the speaker was hoping the audience wouldn’t know the meaning of those large words, and might confuse them for something else less savory. Pepper’s opponent banked on the ignorance of a large portion of voters — and won.
Do campaigns on ignorance work today?
The Discovery Institute comes now with a press release that announces, in rather breathless fashion, that Judge John Jones used the plaintiff’s suggested findings of fact in his decision against intelligent design in schools, in Pennsylvania a year ago. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Ed Darrell
December 9, 2006
Remembering history so as not to repeat it has academic value, sure. In public policy, it can help change things for the better. And in some cases it can literally be life and death.
Six health care professionals — five nurses and a physician, all Bulgarians — are scheduled for execution shortly in Libya for a crime that would have been almost impossible for them to have committed. They were convicted of spreading HIV to patients. Health professionals are almost unanimous in pointing out that the timing of the onset of the disease indicates that the disease was transmitted before these people came to Libya, but government-operated facilities and government-paid health care workers.
More trouble for the ignorance-as-knowledge set: Evolutionary principles, applied, allow scientists to track the real origin of the infections, exonerating the convicted workers. In short, tracking the provenance of the viruses that infected the victims rules out almost all of the possibility that the accused health care workers could have played a role. Here is a link to a free .pdf paper which lays out the exculpatory science evidence, published by the eminent science journal Nature.
Will Libya’s government listen to the evidence? Nick Matzke, a research whiz at the National Center for Science Education, has a post at Panda’s Thumb laying out most of the facts, and providing links to high quality information sources. Health professionals worldwide urge Libya’s courts to legally exonerate and free the accused.
You can help. Mike Dunford at The Questionable Authority lays out actions you can take to urge Libya to free the health workers.
Please write today.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
October 29, 2006
There is a moral in this story. On Thursday, October 26, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald faced a woman proposed as an expert witness in the defense of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney accused of obstruction of justice.
The woman forgot history. Literally. She could not recall exactly what she had written in the past, and in a dramatic confrontation, she appeared to have forgotten that she had been cross examined by Mr. Fitzgerald in a trial before. Details from the Washington Post. How does her credibility stack up for the judge, do you think?
There were several moments when Loftus was completely caught off guard by Fitzgerald, creating some very awkward silences in the courtroom.
One of those moments came when Loftus insisted that she had never met Fitzgerald. He then reminded her that he had cross-examined her before, when she was an expert defense witness and he was a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in New York.
Libby’s defense team declined to comment.
Santayana’s ghost isn’t exactly smiling, but did take note.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
October 9, 2006
We’re talking past each other now over at Right Reason[*], on a thread that started out lamenting Baylor’s initial decision to deny Dr. Francis Beckwith tenure last year, but quickly changed once news got out that Beckwith’s appeal of the decision was successful.
I noted that Beckwith’s getting tenure denies ID advocates of an argument that Beckwith is being persecuted for his ID views (wholly apart from the fact that there is zero indication his views on this issue had anything to do with his tenure discussions). Of course, I was wrong there — ID advocates have since continued to claim persecution where none exists. Never let the facts get in the way of a creationism rant, is the first rule of creationism.
Steve Sack cartoon in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Discussion has since turned to the legality of teaching intelligent design in a public school science class. This is well settled law — it’s not legal, not so long as there remains no undisproven science to back ID or any other form of creationism.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Ed Darrell
September 24, 2006
In an otherwise informative post about a controversy over alternative certification for school administrators, at EdWize, I choked on this:
The Department leaders, Klein, Seidman and Alonso, lawyers all (perhaps Shakespeare was correct), are rigid ideologues who have alienated their work force as well as the parents of their constituents
Did you catch that? Especially the link to the Shakespeare line, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers?”
This is not exactly history we’re fisking here — it’s drama, I suppose. Still, it falls neatly into the category of debunkings, not too unlike the debunking of the story of Millard Fillmore’s bathtub.
The line from Shakespeare is accurate. It’s from Henry VI, Part II. But it’s not so much a diatribe against lawyers as it is a part of a satirical indictment of those who would overthrow government, and oppress the masses for personal gain.
It is Dick the Butcher who says the line. Jack Cade has just expressed his warped view that he should be king, after having attempted a coup d’etat and taken power, at least temporarily. Cade starts in with his big plans to reform the economy — that is, to let his friends eat cheap or free.
Dick chimes in to suggest that in the new regime, the lawyers ought to be the first to go — they protect rights of people and property rights, and such rights won’t exist in Cade’s imagined reign. Cade agrees. The purpose of killing the lawyers, then, is to perpetuate their rather lawless regime.
At that moment others in Cade’s conspiracy enter, having captured the town Clerk of Chatham. The man is put on trial for his life, accused of being able to read and keep accounts. Worse, he’s been caught instructing young boys to read. Read the rest of this entry »
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1 Comment | Freedom - Political, Good Quotes, Law, Public education, Teaching | Tagged: Accountants, Civil Rights, Education, freedom, Good Quotes, Human Rights, Kill all the lawyers, Lawyers, Quotes, Shakespeare, Teachers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 