Specter of Incompetence

All the major news outlets have jumped on the FBI story, but predictably they are downplaying the seriousness of the civil rights violations and dutifully reporting the FBI’s lame excuses as factual. CNN was apparently so concerned about the disappearance of the Fourth Amendment that it left the story up in a prime location on its web site for almost a whole hour before it was replaced by some ground-breaking journalism on how the new daylight savings time is bound to confuse masses of McDonalds addled Americans this week-end. Here are some fun facts about the National Security letters and the DOJ’s audit:

· The audit said there were no indications that the FBI's use of the letters "constituted criminal misconduct." (Now there’s a surprise)
· The FBI has made as many as 56,000 requests a year for information using the letters since the Patriot Act was passed in October, 2001, the audit found. (And how many pertained to terrorism? We’ll never know since its classified)
· A single letter can contain multiple information requests, and multiple letters may target one individual.
· The audit found that in 2004 and 2005, more than half of the targets of the national security letters were U.S. citizens.
· The audit also found problems with "exigent letters," which are supposed to be used only in emergencies when time may not permit the NSL procedure to be followed.
· The audit found exigent letters were not used in emergencies and gave the agency access to telephone records it should not have had.

Director Meuller has been designated as fall guy by the administration and seems prepared to commit public seppuku within the next few days. Republican Senator Arlen Spector, who’s having a really bad week what with finding out that he was the one responsible for the provision in the Patriot Act authorizing Bush to appoint attorneys general into the Patriot Act declared, "There will be oversight hearings," Not prosecutions. Not indictments. Oversight hearings. He also said the Patriot Act may have to be changed and power given the FBI curtailed because "they appear not to be able to know how to use it."

My question is, "Who really doesn’t know how to use his power Senator?" You were the one that granted the FBI this power to begin with. Despite warnings from civil libertarians and, well, regular libertarians, you abdicated your responsibility to the American people and helped ram the Patriot Act down America’s throat. Now you are all over the media whining about how the FBI is out of control? Who do you think you’re fooling? Lest we forget, Specter has been fooling Americans for quite a long time. His dicey relationship with the truth started way back when he was a member of the Warren Commission and the principal architect of the single-bullet theory. But that’s a story for another day.

Uncivil Liberties II

Ever have one of those days when you read the paper and all the stories you read seem to be connected to each other in some way? Today’s Times has a front page article on how Gonzalez’s DOJ is about to issue a “scathing” report criticizing how the FBI has been abusing its power to issue administrative subpoenas. These subpoenas have allowed the feds to obtain thousands of telephone, business and financial records without any prior judicial approval. The DOJ issuing a report criticizing the FBI is sort of like Hitler writing Stalin a letter criticizing his treatment of political prisoners. Nevertheless, the embattled Justice Department has apparently decided to do something to burnish its image which has been seriously tarnished by the attorney general firing scandal. Of course, I would argue that DOJ’s image took a nose-dive shortly after Ashcroft started shilling for the Patriot Act in 2002; after all it was the Patriot Act which granted the FBI the discretion to issue these extra-judicial subpoenas in the first place.

DOJ’s report apparently concludes that the procedures put in place by the FBI to govern the program are being ignored by the agency. Sound familiar? Read yesterday’s post pertaining to the NYPD. The report also alleges that the program lacks effective management, monitoring and reporting procedures. It seems that big brother has trouble behaving itself when granted unfettered and unsupervised power to violate the rights of the people. This is true at the local level (see, NYPD) as well as the national level. So what are these National Security Letters? Unlike search warrants, they are issued without prior judicial approval and require only the approval of the agent in charge of a local F.B.I. office. From the Times:

“The use of national security letters since the September 2001 attacks has been a hotly debated domestic intelligence issue. They were once used only in espionage and terrorism cases, and then only against people suspected as agents of a foreign power.

With the passage of the Patriot Act, their use was greatly expanded and was allowed against Americans who were subjects of any investigation. The law also allowed other agencies like the Homeland Security Department to issue the letters.”

I fail to see how the Fourth Amendment even exists at the Federal level where the FBI has been granted the authority to conduct extensive searches of records merely by asserting that an individual is subject to an investigation. The Democrat’s need to make repealing this sort of nonsense the centerpiece of the Democrat’s need to make their legislative agenda. The Patriot is encouraged by the fact that the Democrats appear to be finding the ground beneath their feet and exercising the position of their majority to push for hearings on a variety of issues, but it isn’t enough. The liberal caucus in the party must become more aggressive and continue its efforts to pry the lid off the DOJ, no matter what nastiness comes crawling out.

Another story in the Times reported that violent crime rose by double-digit percentages in cities across the country over the last two years. The Times failed to note that the increase occurred despite the overwhelming increase in law enforcement power (see above, and below)and a huge influx of money. According to the Times, “Local police departments blame several factors: the spread of methamphetamine use in some Midwestern and Western cities, gangs, high poverty and a record number of people being released from prison. But the biggest theme, they say, is easy access to guns and a willingness, even an eagerness, to settle disputes with them, particularly among young people.” Bullshit. The real culprit here is the government’s approval of violence as a means to solve social problems. From the “pacification” of Baghdad to the extra-judicial torture of unindicted suspects, to the unfettered power granted the police, the message has gone out across the land that the government approves of violence. Until we stop our insane slide into brutality and totalitarianism, the crime rate will continue to rise. One can only hope that the people will at some point realize that there is a better target for their ire than their neighbors.

Uncivil Liberties

Those of you who live in New York are no doubt familiar with the right-wing drift of the police department since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Some of you may be familiar with the Handschu litigation. A consent decree, negotiated in 1985, ostensibly ended the 1971 lawsuit which had accused the NYPD with harassment of political organizations by the NYPD’s “Red Squad.” From ACLU’s web site, “The case began as a challenge to various police practices that involved the maintenance of dossiers on political activists and the use of various undercover and surveillance techniques to monitor the activities of political organizations and individuals. The case was settled with a consent decree entered in 1985, in which the Police Department was prohibited from investigating political and religious organizations and groups unless there was "specific information" that the group was linked to a crime that had been committed or was about to be committed. The decree also established a system of record-keeping and procedures for approval of investigations by a three-member body, called the Handschu Authority. The system was designed to create a "paper trail" in order to ensure against abuse.”

In 2002 the NYPD sought modification of the consent degree asserting that the changed global circumstances in a post 911 world warranted a loosening of the terms of the decree and favored granting the police more latitude to conduct surveillance to thwart the evil terrorists who were at that very instant plotting to destroy various New York landmarks. On February 11, 2003, the same Federal District Court court that crafted the original decree approved modifications to the agreement conditioned upon the Police Department developing new guidelines consistent with those developed by the U.S. Department of Justice for investigations conducted by the F.B.I. The Police Department’s modified guidelines were accepted by the District Court on April 8, 2003. (Doesn’t that make you feel safer? The NYPD had merely to meet the FBI’s standards for protecting American’s civil liberties. Makes you wonder about their prior standards).

Rather than the NYPD going out and rounding up actual terrorists, they used their newly expanded power almost immediately to begin spying on political protests and Critical Mass bike rides. During anti-Iraq war demonstrations in February and March 2003, the NYPD employed certain "debriefing" practices in which arrested protesters were subjected to inappropriate interrogation into their past political associations. The NYPD’s conduct prompted the judge to make the NYPD’s own guidelines a part of the decree, thereby rendering the NYPD bound to follow its own internal regulations; something that under developed municipal law the department is ordinarily not required to do.

Despite these restrictions, the NYPD continued its unlawful activities by engaging in photographic and video surveillance of protestors during the Republican National Convention and during the monthly critical mass bike rides. The NYPD’s clear violations of its own rules necessitated a trip back to Court which brings me (finally) to the subject of today’s post.

Several weeks ago Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. issued a blistering 47 page decision threatening the city with contempt if it again violated its own guidelines by videotaping or photographing political protestors without some evidence that a crime was to be committed. He noted that he originally made the guidelines part of his 2003 Order modifying the decree, “after senior N.Y.P.D. officers misbehaved themselves by ordering that arrested protesters held in precinct station houses be interrogated in inappropriate ways before being released.” As for the guidelines themselves, they require that before the police would be allowed to record people at public gatherings they would have to show that some unlawful activity might occur and they would still be required to apply for permission to the deputy police commissioner in charge of the Intelligence Division.

The Corporation Counsel’s office has taken a page from the Bush administration by advancing the argument that the Federal Court has no authority to limit the NYPD's surveillance activities. In it's brief the City argued that although Judge Haight was apparently within his rights to modify the decree (after all they requested the modification), he was wrong in asserting that the new rules could be enforced by the Court. The logical inconsistency makes my head spin. They further averred that “the N.Y.P.D. never had any intention of agreeing to the incorporation of detailed operational guidelines into the consent decree subjecting itself to contempt for a plethora of potential violations.” The hubris! The City can't have it both ways. Let's review: The NYPD pushed for a loosening of the original consent decree’s restrictions, which was granted. They then came up with their own internal guidelines as required by the Court. These guidelines were incorporated into the consent decree by the Judge. The City consistently violated its own guidelines, and now advances the argument that the Judge has no right to enforce the decree because it never had any intention of following the guidelines it drafted for the purpose of amending the decree! Simply shocking. If Haight has any balls he’ll cite the City for contempt and sock Corporation Counsel with sanctions for advancing such a frivolous argument and wasting the Court's time.

Visit Kevin's New Blog Before He Kills Me

My dear friend and erstwhile law school buddy portinexile a/k/a/ Kevin has a new blog that you should all go and check out. http://portinexile.blogspot.com/ Kevin is “Just trying to hold it together for now and get back in the game.” Whatever game he wants to get back into, I suggest you all help him along by visiting his site and commenting on his posts. I promise that he is a more prolific poster than the Patriot has been lately.

Domestic Disturbances

It looks like the story about the Bush Administration’s purge of local federal Attorney General offices has some legs after all. The House and Senate have both scheduled hearings for this week just as evidence surfaces that the removals were politically motivated after all. I also doubt its coincidence that the DOJ apparatchik responsible for the firings has just announced his resignation. As odious as the replacement of otherwise qualified AGs with Karl Rove’s golf buddies appears there is a more disturbing issue. Namely, from where is the President deriving his authority to stage his mini night of the long knives? Can you guess? Yes, it’s our old friend the Patriot Act. An article on Slate.com today asks the pertinent questions, “[w]ho changed the Patriot Act to make it easier to replace U.S. attorneys without oversight, and how did it happen with nobody looking?” As usual, the provision in the Act which granted the President power to replace U.S. Attorneys was designed to consolidate executive power and diminish the power of the other branches by removing both judicial and congressional oversight of interim U.S. attorney appointments and letting DOJ anoint them indefinitely. According to the Slate article, “[t]his served three important goals: consolidating presidential power, diminishing oversight, and ensuring that "interim" prosecutors had permanent jobs.” The President’s power to appoint these indefinite lackeys was written into the law when Congress reauthorized the Patriot Act last year. Senators on both sides of the isle have come up with increasingly lame excuses for why they rubber-stamped the President’s power grab. From Arlen Spector: “"The first I found out about the change in the Patriot Act occurred a few weeks ago when Sen. [Dianne] Feinstein approached me on the floor." From Chuck Schumer: [The Republicans] "slipped the new provision into the Patriot Act in the dead of night." So, the best our elected officials could come up with to explain their abdication of responsibility as a co-equal branch of the government is something along the lines of “I don’t know how it got there” and “I didn’t read it but voted for it anyway.” Well done ladies and gentlemen, well done.

The provision was actually introduced by the DOJ through a Rove operative named Michael O’Neill who joined Republican senator Arlen Spector’s staff right about the time he was being pilloried by the White House for being soft on supporting the President. (O’Neill also formerly clerked for Clarence Thomas) So Spector’s excuse is really that O'Neill had merely been following orders from the Department of Justice when he snuck new language into the Patriot Act that would consolidate executive branch authority without informing Spector about what he was doing. Or, as Slate put it, “either the DOJ snookered O'Neill, O'Neill snookered Specter, or Specter snookered his colleagues. But any way you slice it, the executive seems to have encroached on congressional turf in order to expand executive turf.”

The most disturbing but perhaps least surprising thing about this is that this administration is willing to subvert not just the Democrats but even Hill Republicans to push its agenda. I wonder what else was slipped into the Patriot act while Congress was sleeping?

An Open Letter to the Legal Aid Society

My Dear Friends,

I wanted to express my deep appreciation for all of your support over the past month. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t received a card, a heartfelt note or a phone call from someone at Legal Aid asking how Jack and I are getting along and offering whatever help it is within their power to give. It is clear by the overwhelming response to Becky’s passing that she touched all of our hearts, and by extending yourself in this difficult time you have touched mine.

What is especially comforting to me is how the Legal Aid community’s overwhelming response to her passing validates her core belief in the essential goodness of humanity. It takes a special sort of person to do the kind of work that you all do on a daily basis. The case load is unmanageable, the stress level is often intolerable and the clients aren’t exactly falling all over themselves to shower you with their undying appreciation. As you can imagine (and as some of you have overheard) I had endless conversations with Becky about her cases and about working as a public defender in general. The one thing that stands out in my mind is that no matter how objectively awful her client appeared on paper, and no matter how overworked and burnt out she was, at some point in our conversation she would comment that her client was essentially a good person who did a bad thing and how it isn’t fair to take measure of a man by looking at his worst acts.

That is the sort of view of humanity that Becky had and it’s a view that is in short supply in today’s world. It has been my experience that it is a view of the world that can be more readily found at organizatoins like Legal Aid than in most other areas of the legal profession. Your generous financial contributions and offers of support to Jack and I are a reflection of that world-view and they are appreciated from the bottom of our hearts.

Mark & Jack

Happy One Month Birthday Jack

A really crappy month, but we made it. Hugs to you too.

Afghani Brown is Bringing Me Down

While the Administrations imperialist war in Iraq grinds on with nary an end in sight, the former bright star in our militaristic firmament, Afghanistan, is sliding into chaos. A newly resurgent Taliban, assisted by fresh Al Qaeda operatives from Pakistan, have been slowly retaking large parts of the countryside. Where has the mainstream media been while this has been going on? Focused on the disposition of the mortal remains of Anna Nicole Smith, naturally.

Salon has an article today which examines exactly how screwed up things are in the Hindu Kush. I quote, “Last November, a CIA analysis of the Karzai government found it was losing control, and American ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald Neumann warned then that the U.S. would "fail" if the plan for action didn't include "multiple years and multiple billions." Our gains, once held firmly, have been lost and the coming year may portend Afghanistan's future, with ominous rumors about a spring offensive by insurgents floating down from the mountains.” Yet the administration continues to pour resources, military and civilian, into Iraq and the acceptable range of opinion expressed in the mainstream media has been again limited to the against the war/against the troops bullshit that has been force-fed to the country by the fascist Republicans since day one.

What explains the administrations reluctance to engage in battle some actual terrorists in the never-ending “war on terror”? While Al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq prior to the United States invasion in 2003, Afghanistan is a thicket of nasty types who have been utilizing America’s folly in Baghdad to increase their strength and numbers. It seems our priorities are completely reversed from where they should be. I suppose a never ending war on terror supports all sort of economies and businesses. Actually winning it would eliminate the justification for surveillance of American citizens and the abolition of the rule of law and cost Cheney and his cronies a few billion in lost wealth.

On the left, the netroots profess to be shocked, (shocked!) that the Democrats who were elected in November have spent most of their time arguing about who gets to stand where in the circular firing squad they’ve been forming since the day after the ballots were counted. Regular readers of this blog know full well my opinion of the Democrats ability to take their heads out of the corporate trough long enough to resist anything this administration has cooked up in its extrajudicial pajama parties.

Things over there are bad but they could get much, much worse. If Congress has even a shred of decency left in its corrupt and decaying body it should cut of the money to Iraq and hold impeachment hearings.

Risk

Being in the insurance business I have occasion to meditate on the essence of risk. Insurance companies after all are little more than glorified bookies and actuaries are akin to Vegas odds makers. These companies take a look at statistics of say, scuba diving accidents and run them through an algorithm to see exactly how risky it is and how much to charge to insure the risk. This helps explain why scuba diving insurance costs less than $100 per year; it simply isn't that dangerous. Many things we do every day are far riskier than scuba diving. Driving a car, crossing the street, all pose a risk of serious injury or death far exceeding the risk posed by strapping on a tank and regulator and heading for the briny deep. When people die diving, their deaths are often sensational in some odd way, i.e. they're eaten by a shark or left to flounder in the sea when the boat takes off, that sort of thing. This attracts the media like a bull shark to a floundering swimmer and everyone gets the wrong idea.

I’ve decided I’m going to keep diving. This is no small decision now that I am a single parent and thereby have sole responsibility for my son. Nevertheless, the arguable risks inherent in the sport are manageable if one possesses the right training and the right equipment and I believe that I have both. I will admit that there is a part of me that is afraid to leave the house lest something unfortunate happen to me and my son be rendered an orphan, but clearly I can’t live my life hiding from my own mortality. Who knows what the future holds? I retired my crystal ball at the end of last month. Perhaps, as a concession to the odds, I’ll steer clear of cave diving and 240 foot technical wreck diving, but regular trips to deep destinations remain on the agenda.

Habeas Corpus, Round Two

Well this week has kept the Patriot very busy, what with Anna Nicole’s will, Britney’s hair shaving escapades and the idea of tire-sized calamari rings from a giant squid found off the coast of Australia, not to mention the second round of American Idol. While America distracts itself with this meaningless blather, the Bush administration won a major victory in Federal Court when a U.S. appeals court Tuesday threw out the legal claims brought on behalf of the hundreds of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and ruled that they do not have a right to plead their innocence in an American court. In a particularly disingenuous 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal District held that the Constitution does not extend the right of habeas corpus to noncitizens who are held outside the sovereign territory of this country. "Cuba -- not the United States -- has sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay," wrote Judge Raymond Randolph. I’m sure this will be news to the Cuban government; I wonder if they’re measuring for drapes and picking out furniture? Shayana Kadidal, an attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York noted quite accurately that, "This decision empowers the president to do whatever he wishes to prisoners without any legal limitation, so long as he does it offshore. (It) encourages such notorious practices as extraordinary rendition and contempt for international human rights law." Not that the Bush administration was ever troubled by contempt for international law. However, now that the elections are behind them, several Democratic senators have said they will amend the Military Commissions Act to restore the traditional right to habeas corpus for all. Their efforts would face an almost certain veto by the President Bush and it is doubtful that 2/3rds of the senate can be marshaled to override it.

Control, or Lack Thereof

One interesting side-effect, if you will, about going through the grieving process and interacting with others who have been through something similar is how absolutely tragic most people’s lives are. I mean, there are thousands of people who have experienced such fucked up bad luck that its amazing that they haven’t jumped off a bridge. I mean, if anyone is a candidate for that it’s me, but I don’t hold a candle to some of these people; entire families killed in car accidents except for one parent, that sort of thing. What is even more amazing is how everyone else thinks they’re somehow immune from it. We run around thinking how we control our lives and really any sense of control we have is completely illusory. We can perhaps control the little things, what sort of toothpaste we buy or what flavor of muffin we choose in the morning, but the big shit, the really big shit, is so beyond our ability to influence that to cede the point is almost incomprehensible. We expect to be able to mange our world; it’s our legacy as Americans for heaven's sake. It’s our birthright as New Yorkers. Despite my apparent laid back hippie persona (ahem), I actually have a bit of the control freak in me and the fact that this was something I couldn’t predict, manage or fix is making me a little crazy. The last time I felt this way was on 9/11 when I was running away from Tower 2. Remember my friends, life is not something we can put into little boxes and the Gods laugh at our plans.

Jack

Here's a recent photo of the best looking young fellow I know:

Perversion of Justice

If you had any doubt that prosecutors in this country have too much power and use it indiscriminately, you should check out this article in today’s Times. Briefly, a substitute teacher in Norwich Connecticut is facing 40, (yes 40) years in prison after she was convicted of inadvertently exposing her students to pornographic pop-ups when she couldn’t figure out how to turn off the classroom computer which was apparently infested with spyware. Is Connecticut truly such a backward place that a jury of 12 citizens is willing to send this teacher to prison for the rest of her natural life for being a Luddite? And what of the district attorney’s office who took this case to trial? They offered her a plea which carried no jail time, which she rightly refused. A clearer abuse of prosecutorial discretion is hard to find. Unfortunately her lawyer seemed not too bright either insofar as he failed to disclose his expert witness’s testimony prior to trial; an oversight which led to the judge suppressing most of his testimony. I sincerely hope that this poor woman’s appeal is successful. The violence emanating from Iraq every night, viewed on network television, is in my opinion far more damaging to “the children” than any porno pop-up.

Again, Anew

It is difficult for me to focus on the affairs of the world when the affairs of my personal life have been completely upended. Nevertheless, when I ask myself the eternal question, “What would Becky do?” the answer comes quickly. Fight on. Battling the power of the corrupt state was her raison d’etre, although at times we both were ready to toss in the towel and go live in the woods. Jack and I might get there yet, who knows. It is difficult to raise a child with values in a society that elevates the importance of money and power over people and community. The journey will be long and hard. Thankfully there are still good people who haven’t been swallowed up by our consumerist culture and burdened under the yoke of the corporate oligarchy. They are few in number but strong in spirit. Many of them have come to our aid in recent weeks and we appreciate everything they have done for us. I speak specifically of Becky’s colleagues at Legal Aid but in a larger sense the entire activist legal community in New York who’s outpouring of support, both financial and moral has made this time a little easier. Jack and I thank you all from the bottom of our hearts. So, onward.

Sadness

Many, if not most of you are aware that my beautiful wife made the crossing to a better place on January 29, 2007 due to the presence of a previously undiscovered malformed blood vessel in her brain stem which ruptured after she went into labor. There was no warning and her pregnancy was by all accounts completely normal. Our son, Jack Becket Rutkowski was born by c-section and is a healthy and vibrant fellow. My intense grief at losing my life-partner is tempered by the realization that I have this beautiful gift that Becky left me and he is truly the center of my life now. The following is the printed version of the eulogy delivered by Kristin Bremmer at her funeral mass. I personal tribute by me will follow when I think I can write it. Thank you all for your support during this trying time.

****
I can’t possibly put into words the searing pain that I feel now. Becky was my best friend for the last 20 years and the loss that we all feel is a measure of the depth of the impact her life had on all of our lives. It is truly a tremendous honor that Becky’s family has asked me to speak here today.

Out of everyone we knew, Becky always had it together. She was the smartest, the prettiest and the kindest; but, she was also the most unassuming. She was the most beautiful person on the inside and the out. She was the quiet rock in the midst of a bunch of loud mouths. We would laugh that she was our front man because she made us all look better.

Becky was a true friend.

Her kind gentle soul was always there for us. She was there for the highest highs and the lowest lows. She took care of us. Becky understood friendship and we were fortunate that she was in our lives. To me – Becky was a true friend, a confidante, and a sister. With Becky as a friend, I never felt alone – she was a comfort, an ear to listen, and a soft voice of compassion. Becky’s friendship changed me – I learned to trust in my friends and I learned how deeply friends care.

Becky loved her family.

In my years with Becky, I learned of her deep love for her family despite long distances. Mr. and Mrs. Z. recently traveled to my hometown to investigate moving closer to Mark and Becky. The love they have for their daughter and the excitement of a new grandchild was evident. I selfishly hoped they would move to Pennsylvania so I could see Mark and Beck more frequently. Becky spoke often of her sibling’s expanding families – to her – family was an essential part of who she was. Her relationship with her sisters, Chris and Ann, and her brother, Adam, always seemed so much more -- they were her friends. And, she delighted in their children.

Becky was a great lawyer.

What characterized Becky were her principles. She put her beliefs into practice. She was an activist. She protested against those things that conflicted with her principles. During conversations with her she always directed you toward the most ethical view without being judgmental. Her gentle presence made her arguments all the more convincing because you knew they were coming from the right place.

Becky viewed her career as a public defender as a calling. She represented the poor, the troubled, those that society had thrown away. She was all about compassion, mercy, and justice. She believed that all people had dignity – that all people, no matter what they had done – had worth and deserved a voice, an advocate. She went into law, and, specifically, into criminal defense, to serve the poor, to serve the outcasts, to insure fairness and dignity and justice. She saw the good in all people and her gentle kindness, keen intelligence touch the lives of the hundreds of people she represented.

Becky was a great wife.

Mark and Becky have always been one word – one person. Their marriage was truly the merging of two people. They set the example of commitment. They made it through good times and bad and their love always came out on top. She viewed marriage as a union greater than herself. Everyone would agree that Mark is truly the luckiest man alive to have had Becky by his side.

In the last nine months Becky has literally been beaming with joy. I’ve never seen Becky happier than she was last Saturday. She was laughing with her friends, talking about her family, and discussing baby names. It was clear how much she loved her baby. I know she is smiling down upon Jack from Heaven. She is not to worry because he is the most loved child ever. Jack is truly a miracle and is blessed to have Becky for a mother because her beauty, intelligence and loving presence is passed down to him.

Mark, I know your loss is profound. You are not alone. Everyone here shares that loss with you. We love Becky and we love you. You are surrounded by a large circle of family and friends.

Devi

Well we went to Devi last night and I must admit the food lived up to the hype. Devi is the Sanskrit word for Goddess. She is synonymous with Shakti, the female aspect of divinity, and is conceptualized in the Shakta tradition as the driving force without which the male aspect, which represents consciousness or discrimination, is impotent.

Devi (the restaurant) was tastefully decorated in earth and wood tones with subdued lighting emanating from colorful globes hanging from the ceiling at different heights. The walls in the upstairs dining area were upholstered in rich fabrics and the space had a generally homey and warm feeling. From the web-site: “Architect Larry Bogdanow integrates elements of home and temple using richly colored Indian textiles and beautifully carved wooden architectural elements to create a sumptuous setting.” The décor is about as far removed from dangling jalapeno lights which festoon many of the6th Street Indian joints as one can imagine. During the course of our hour-long meal the two level restaurant slowly filled up with beautiful people, although the noise level remained subdued.

The restaurant week offerings generally came from the regular menu, although there were a couple of exceptions, and the portions were more than adequate although I would recommend ordering one other item and maybe a bread to round out the meal. We started with a complementary amuse bouche; a spicy potato croquette in a Tamarind sauce. For my appetizer I had the Lamb-Stuffed Tandoori Chicken which was tender dark meat chicken stuffed with ground lamb, spinach and goat cheese and served with a tasty tomato chutney. Presentation was artful and the sauce was a perfect complement to the spicing on the chicken. Mrs. Patriot had some kind of potato based croquette, the name eludes me. It was tasty enough but was too close in flavor to the amuse and not too distinctive from something you could find elsewhere in the City. Main courses were Tandoor-Grilled Lamb Chops with pear chutney and curry leaf potatoes, also reportedly excellent (Mrs. P wouldn’t let me get a fork anywhere near them) and a Farm-Raised Andhra Chicken Curry, moist and flavorful but not at all fiery, served with a timbale of gently spiced rice. What curry sauce remained on my plate was greedily sopped up by a side order of Onion-Parmigiano Kulcha ($5), an idea which came off quite nicely although the cheese is perhaps a bit too piquant an ingredient for inclusion in a bread who’s principal role at the meal is to act as a vehicle for orphan sauces. Not that it wasn’t delicious though.

Our other foray into the regular menu was a well executed Kararee Bhindi, a crispy tangy okra salad, with tomatoes and red onions. The tomato and red onions were raw and they served as a perfect foil to the salty/spicy/crunchiness of the thinly sliced deep-fried okra. The texture of the salad almost reminded me of the Vietnamese dish Mee-Grob Lard-Na and the flavor was spicy and addictive.

For desert we both had the The Emperor’s Morsel, a crispy saffron bread pudding topped with cardamom cream and candied almonds. This was probably the best Indian dessert I have ever had. The pancake/cream combination was reminiscent of a Belgian waffle and made for a most satisfying conclusion to the meal.

The total for two ordering from the Restaurant Week Menu and adding on for the bread, Okra salad and one unmemorable glass of Pinot Noir came to a reasonable (for Manhattan) $106 before tip. Service was attentive, if perfunctory, and the pace of the meal a bit brisk, but during this week its not really fair to hold the waiters to the same standards as the rest of the year. Highly recommended.

What Would Gandhi Do?

Tonight is my first foray into NYC’s Restaurant Week 2007, a magical time when many of the City’s higher-end eating establishments throw open their doors to the unwashed masses by offering “reasonably priced” $35 prix fix dinner menus. Like most everything else in New York that initially seems like a good bargain, participants in the yearly event usually ends up feeling conned. Diners expecting to be served the same haute cuisine as their better heeled brethren who eat in such places the remaining 51 weeks of the year are in for a disappointment, as numerous testimonials to mediocre food and surly service abound.

Nevertheless there are some notable bright spots in the City’s firmament during this dark week, one of which is the upscale Indian joint Devi. Legions of happy Restaurant Week veterans rave about the quality of the food and superiority of the service. I’ll let you know how it goes. I have a deep aversion to eating anywhere where dinner costs more than what I could make an hour as a contract attorney. I’ve always felt that one of the things I like about New York, one of the things that make the rest of this urban cesspool worth living in is the fact that two people can eat delicious meals from every ethnic cuisine in the world for less than the cost of an alternate side of the street parking ticket. I find no need to suffer through the theatrical sighs of snotty waiters and the hype and incessant marketing of celebrity chefs when one of the best lunches you can find in New York can be purchased from a lady selling chicken tamales out of a cooler on Atlantic Avenue. However, I’ll stow my rabble-rousing because tonight is Mrs. Patriot’s birthday and she likes to put on the fancy every now and then. And I do like Indian food, even Indian food that costs more than the annual salary of most Indians...

The First Amendment

There’s an interesting article in Salon today about Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unibomber and his fight to retain control over his manifesto and various other writings. One would think that under the First Amendment Ted would be able to maintain possession of his intellectual property, but convicted criminals rights are truncated by the government on a piecemeal basis, often reflecting whatever best suits the whim of the government in a particular case.

The legal issue presented is bigger than the Unabomber case but is hidden and minimized by the emotional reaction by the victims to the idea of Kaczynski maintaining control over his written work. The real question is whether the government gets the copyright when it seizes a prisoner's personal writings after a criminal conviction. Should the current litigation surrounding this issue answer the question in the affirmative, be on the look out for future government use of the precedent as a tool to bury the ideas of those it manages to convict under the various anti-terrorism statutes passed in recent years.

A Little Noticed Provision in the Patriot Act

Here’s a story to watch. I’ll let Senator Feinstein explain how the Bush brownshirts are trying another end-run around the Constitution:

“It has come to our attention that the Bush Administration is pushing out U.S. Attorneys from across the country under the cloak of secrecy and then appointing indefinite replacements without Senate confirmation. We know that this is not an isolated occurrence, but we don’t know how many U.S. Attorneys have been asked to resign – it could be two, it could be ten, it could be more. No one knows,” Senator Feinstein said.

“And, we have no idea why this is happening. The Attorney General could have legitimate reasons for asking for specific resignations, or this could be motivated by political concerns or worse, derailing on-going investigations. Again, we just don’t know.

“We believe that this use of expanded executive authority to appoint interim replacements indefinitely undermines essential constitutional checks and balances. It creates unnecessary instability in these offices and has dramatic implications for important cases currently underway. Given all that is going on with this country and the message from the American people this past election, I am surprised that the Administration would pursue a strategy to circumvent the Senate confirmation process and unsettle these important positions.

“U.S. Attorneys around the country are working on public corruption cases, terrorism cases, narcotics and drug trafficking, fighting gangs and violent crime. Which of these cases are impacted by the Attorney General’s actions has yet to be determined,” Senator Feinstein continued.

“The bottom line is this: U.S. Attorneys are handling major cases that need continuity and leadership. The bill we are introducing today would restore temporary appointment authority to the District Court in which a vacancy arises until a new nominee can be sent to the Senate for confirmation.”

And from Senator Leahy, a former prosecutor. “Political gerrymandering of these important posts is wrong and an affront to our criminal justice system. It is vital that those holding these critical positions be free from any inappropriate influence and subject to the check and balance of the confirmation process.”

In a little noticed provision included in the Patriot Act (man, am I starting to HATE that expression), the Administration’s authority to appoint interim U.S. Attorneys was greatly expanded. The law was changed so that if a vacancy arises the Attorney General may appoint a replacement for an indefinite period of time – thus completely bystepping the Senate confirmation process.

Perhaps most significant, Senators Feinstein and Leahy, have learned that the Department of Justice has asked several U.S. Attorneys from around the country to resign their positions prior to the end of their terms *without cause*. The number of U.S. Attorneys, currently or historically, who have been asked to resign their positions without cause is still unknown.

My guess is that Rove and the rest of the right wing Nazis are plotting to steal the 2008 election and are getting their people in place early on. An added bonus to the fascists is the ability to control local federal prosecutors when the administration and the army start rounding up disloyal Americans and herding them off to the torture chambers. Look for a complete repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, although the act has been dying a slow death for several years.

On Being and Miracles

The Patriot has been a very lazy poster lately. There has been so much to do in anticipation of the little one arriving. Suffice it to say that in lieu of apologizing at the time between posts every week I would ask you to accept the reality that the posts will be appearing at longer intervals over the next 18 years than they have over the last 18 months. Nevertheless, the beat goes on, does it not?

I just started reading a book with selected writings of St. Augustine. I’ll let you know what I make of it in a while. I got into Augustine not through the Church, but rather through a Zen Teshio, or “Dharma Talk” I was listening to on my I-Pod yesterday. (Yes, even Zen masters have podcasts these days.) Zen master John Daido Loori, the Abbott of Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper New York has authored a modern day collection of Zen Koans which utilize western myth and religions themes to assist the American Zen student find his way without having to study Japanese or Chinese linguistics to understand the historical context of the Koan.

Loori gives Teisho’s usually on the last day of a seven day Zen intensive known as a Sesshin. Loori created one Zen koan out of the incident in Chapter 6 of Mark where Jesus walks on water and encourages Peter to do the same. Peter falters once he feels the effects of the storm and Christ admonishes him for his lack of faith. The traditional Augustinian interpretation of the incident posits the stormy sea as the world at large and Peter as the Church whose success staying above the waves is dependent on the body’s members faith in the power of the almighty, i.e “Meanwhile the ship which carries the disciples, that is, the Church, is tossed and shaken by the tempests of temptation; and the contrary wind, that is, the devil her adversary, rests not, and strives to hinder her from arriving at rest. But greater is "He who maketh intercession for us." For in this our tossing to and fro in which we toil, He giveth us confidence in coming to us, and strengthening us; only let us not in our trouble throw ourselves out of the ship, and cast ourselves into the sea. For though the ship be in trouble, still it is the ship. She alone carrieth the disciples, and receiveth Christ. There is danger, it is true, in the sea; but without her there is instant perishing.”

Loori, in contrast, uses the biblical story to highlight the problems with using miracles as the basis upon which to build a faith-based religion. Christ had the power not only to walk on water, but to heal and resurrect the dead. The belief that Chist himself rose from the dead is central to the Christian faith. But what of our every-day minds? The minds we use to wipe our asses and do the dishes? If God/Buddha nature is everywhere, isn’t he equally present in our day-to-day lives as he is when he manifests himself to us through signs and miracles? As westerners without a widespread mystical tradition we seem to prefer to find God in the magical world, not in the toilet. Everyday mind, to us, is too mundane. Walking on water? THAT’s miraculous. Raking leaves and doing the dishes? That’s mundane. Of course the obvious problem with focusing on the miracles is that we immediately get too caught up in the magic and completely miss the point. Not to mention once one creates the dichotomy between "magic" and "mundane" one elevates God to the heavens and has immense trouble seeing that God as inside of oneself.

Loori relates the story of a Zen master who, met another pilgrim on the way to a holy site in China. After a while the two travelers, laughing and joking like old friends the whole way, came to a wide river. The master stopped, but the other pilgrim carried on walking on the water to cross to the other side. When he was part way he turned to the master to beckon him across. The master called out, “You deceiver, I thought you were a man of value! If I had known that you would pull a stunt like that I would have cut you off at the ankles.”

Far from encouraging visions, which are so cherished in many religions, (one only has to see the hysteria that surrounds the supposed sightings of the Virgin Mary,) in Zen it is said, “If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.” This is what the sentence, “From the beginning all beings are Buddha,” truly means. Visions of God, miracles, are at best unnecessary and at worst, throw up a roadblock in front of us as we try to travel the path. We are all, each one of us, as Jesus said, “the Light of the World,” But, alas! although we ourselves are the light, we search for ourselves in the shadows of experience and look for signs of God in the miracles of saints.

A Zen Roshi(master) named Albert Low once said, “Many people feel that if they could change their life circumstances they would be happy. If they could have the right job, more money, a different spouse or no spouse, then all would be la vie en rose. Others believe that they should change themselves: become more tolerant, more loving, have better concentration. [The reality is that], everything, as it is, is perfect, but you must stop seeing it as if in a mirror, as if in a dream.” Anything which distracts us from complete union with the universe (God/Buddha/Almighty/Mohammed) should be acknowledged and left behind.

Oyez, Oyez

I suppose there are things to rant about after all. CNN is reporting that Chief Justice William Rehnquist was hopped up on pain-killers for most of the 1970s while he as an associate Supreme Court Justice. Apparently the FBI had an extensive file on the erstwhile Chief and assisted the Nixon and Reagan administration in ensuring no damaging facts would come out which would sink his candidacy at Senate hearings in 1970 and 1986 when he was promoted to the Chief Justice position.
The documents show that the FBI was aware in 1971 that Rehnquist had owned a home in Phoenix with a deed that allowed him to sell only to whites. The restrictive covenant was not disclosed until his 1986 confirmation hearings, at which Rehnquist said he became aware of the clause only days earlier. Apparently he lied to Congress in the hearings.

“Also detailed in the declassified file was Rehnquist's 1981 hospital stay for treatment of back pain and his dependence on powerful prescription pain-relief medication. The FBI investigated his dependence on Placidyl, which Rehnquist had taken for at least 10 years, according to a summary of a 1970 medical examination. When Rehnquist checked into a hospital in 1981 for a weeklong stay, doctors stopped administering the drug, causing what a hospital spokesman at the time said was a "disturbance in mental clarity."

The FBI file, citing one of his physicians, said Rehnquist experienced withdrawal symptoms that included trying to escape the facility and discerning changes in the patterns on the hospital curtains. The justice also thought he heard voices outside his room discussing various plots against him. The doctor said Placidyl is a highly toxic drug and that she could not understand why anyone would prescribe it, especially for long periods.

In one previously secret memo from 1971, an FBI official wrote, "No persons interviewed during our current or 1969 investigation furnished information bearing adversely on Rehnquist's morals or professional integrity; however ..." The next third of the page is blacked out, under the disclosure law's exception for matters of national security.

"It would be nice to know what is still classified, three decades later," Charns said”

Wow. Mr. War on Drugs was flying high as a kite for a decade while his conservative clerks from Harvard wrote opinions that upheld long jail sentences for drug offenses. Then he lied to Congress about living in a community of racists to get confirmed to the highest judicial office in the land. God knows what other perversities he engaged in which are still classified. I wish I could have been in the hospital room listing to him rant about the psychedelic patterns on the drapes. Hilarious.

Happy New Year

The Patriot has been quiet lately, partly out of post-holiday anomie, partly because things at work have picked up, partly because I’m sick of commenting as the country slides into the toilet and the world into sectarian anarchy. But anyway…

I have tried to keep my personal life out of the discussions here because, as my wife is fond of pointing out, it’s not all about me. Yet as the date of my child’s birth draws closer I find that I am much less interested in playing pundit than I am in meditating on what is truly important in life, the nature of fatherhood, mortality, and which stroller goes with what car seat. B’s due date is February 10, 2007, a scant five weeks from now. I think part of the reason for this has to do with the fact that for several months I have been in a state of denial about the looming reality of parenthood. Me? Have a child? Ridiculous. As a 38 year old New York City male I have allowed myself a quite care-free Generation X lifestyle which eschewed responsibility at every turn. I wasn’t quite capable of taking care of myself, let alone a small being who will have to rely on me for its very existence.

I trotted off to law school at age 29, blissfully unaware of the financial hardships and marital stress such a decision would create, especially since my similarly unaware spouse did the same thing a year ahead of me. Now after five years of abject misery as a litigation attorney, dealing with the most intensely irritating people one could ever imagine, I’ve taken a step back and accepted a more or less non-legal position where I have the relative freedom of an eight hour work day which leaves me some life-room contemplate a next step.

So as I stand at the nexus of a career crisis, if all goes well a small baby will leap into my life on February 10 and change my perception of what is truly important and what is just ordinary bullshit. I don’t have any idea what to expect so I’m approaching it with a somewhat Buddhist lack of expectations. Ranting and raving about the screwed up world will continue. After all, the future of the planet seems more important when there you have a more intimate tie to a future generation. One wishes the jerk-offs running the show could embrace a similar perspective.

Thought For Today

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
- Elie Wiesel

It's a Tie

It appears as though the number of American servicemen and women killed in Iraq has today exceeded the number of New Yorkers who were killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The White House is distancing itself from any correlation between these two statistics, which is kind of ironic considering that they were the ones who drew the false connection between Iraq and 9/11 in the first place. Further evincing their ignorance, the right wing-nut’s response has been to ask how many Americans would have died had the U.S. not invaded Iraq. From the Lawyers, Guns and Money blog:

“Well, the answer is indeed unknowable, but given that Iraq had no substantial connection to Anti-American terrorism and posed no security threat whatsoever to the United States, the overwhelmingly likely answer is "zero." Whatever Iraq was, it wasn't "fighting back" against the Islamic radicals who actually attacked New York.

Of course, if it was only Republican pundits who don't actually know anything about foreign policy who think that replacing a secular dictatorship with an Islamist quasi state was an effective way of "fighting back" against Islamic terrorism, this would be relatively harmless (although pathetic.) The truly appalling thing is that people actually in charge of American policymaking also didn't demand any logical connection between a given military response and the actual threat facing the country, and as a result nearly three thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died for nothing.”

I'm a Ford, Not a Lincoln

Interesting things in the news the last few days, no? The King of Soul made the crossing on Christmas day, followed a few days later by Gerald Ford, who presumably will be joining Nixon’s foursome on the great golf-course in the sky. Ford was a Republican party hack who’s decision to grant a pardon to Richard Nixon just 30 days after taking office denied the nation its badly needed closure and set the stage for the cynical attitude towards politics which permeates the nation to this day. Ford announced his decision September 8, 1974, saying he hoped the pardon would "shut and seal this book" on Watergate. Burying the scandal in such a matter ensured there would be no lengthy prosecution of Nixon which could have created a lasting enmity toward the Republican Party. Ford himself said that the "years of bitter controversy and divisive national debate" over Watergate would make it impossible for Nixon to get a fair trial for months or even years. He went on to state that even though Nixon was a longtime friend, there were more important issues than his fate. "During this long period of delay and potential litigation, ugly passions would again be aroused. And our people would again be polarized in their opinions. And the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad," he said.

We should all be so lucky as to have our good friends assist us in eluding justice when charged with a crime. One wonders how receptive the nation would have been to Reagan’s election in 1980 had the breadth of Nixon’s crimes been aired in a national trial a year or two before. In my opinion Ford was more interested in preserving the institution of the Republican Party than adherence to any lofty ideals of Americanism. If there’s one thing a Republican politician can’t stand its people being “polarized in their opinions”, especially when one of their own has their neck in the noose.

Here is an excerpt from a letter sent to Digby in response to his Ford eulogy which says it more eloquently than I could:

"Though I'm willing to give Ford the benefit of the doubt that it was made for the best of reasons, The Pardon is unpardonable.

The great lesson of Watergate was that the Rule of Law is greater than the political power of men or parties. Ford's decision to short circuit this lesson resulted in the fact that ultimately, politics went on as usual. Money rules, dirty tricks are allowed and there is little consequence for misdeeds. If you liked Iran-Contra, Lee Atwater, Willie Horton, McCain/Bush in SC, Karl Rove, Mellon-Scaife, the Arkansas Project, Florida in 2000 and Swiftboating, well then you probably liked The Pardon. It was our best opportunity squandered to reform the political process.

I cannot forgive Gerald Ford for this.
not the senator | 12.27.06 - 1:44 pm |

At the end of the day, Nixon got a hero’s funeral and Ford will be remembered as the savior of the nation. History is truly written by the winners.

A Christmas Carol

Oh come all ye Grateful Deadheads to the concert.
Oh come Grateful Deadheads and camp in the street.
Bring rolling papers, don't forget your sleeping bags.

Oh come get us some floor seats.
We followed them for four weeks.
Oh come get us some floor seats, to see the Lord.

Come all ye hippies, throwbacks to the '60's.
Paint flowers on your van and don't wash your feet.
Wear your bell-bottoms and your tie-dyed t-shirts.

Oh come let us adore them. We quit our day jobs for them.
Oh come let us adore them. Garcia's the Lord.

Pardon me.

The “President” pardoned an extraordinary number of people this holiday season. Without reading too much into it, I note that most of the pardoned were incarcerated for crimes for which Bush himself probably should have served time. Fraud, cocaine trafficking, bribery and ripping off the federal government comprised most of the crimes which GW thought worthy of pardon. Bush has issued 113 pardons and commuted three sentences in his nearly six years in the White House, a large number considering his natural inclination to throw everyone in jail without a trial. However, Bush remains among the stingiest of presidents on pardons. Clinton issued 457 in eight years in office. Bush's father issued 77 in four years. Reagan issued 406 in eight years, and Carter issued 563 in four years. Since World War II, the largest number of pardon and commutations , 2,031 came from Truman. What I found interesting is that most of those pardoned had served their sentences long ago and were simply looking to clear their records, something Bush can clearly relate to. My personal favorite pardon from our draft dodging chief executive was a nod to out men and women in uniform. Pardoned in time for this Christmas season was one Eric William Olson of Ojai, California who was charged and convicted of “conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute, possession with intent to distribute, possession, and use of hashish.” Sentenced February 21, 1984, by an Army general court-martial to confinement at hard labor for one year, reduction in pay grade, and a bad conduct discharge, his pardon presumably reinstated his military benefits; only fitting when you consider what Bush has put the Army through the last few years. Lest one confuse Bush granting a pardon with him showing actual human emotion, one should remember that a pardon amounts to federal forgiveness for one's crime, while a commutation cuts short an existing prison term. Bush only commuted three sentences. Merry fucking Christmas Mr. President.

Have a Very Jerry Christmas

New York Stories

Sorry I’ve been so lazy lately but work has picked up, the holidays are marching in on grim little goose-steps and as it gets closer to the baby due date I have become much more distracted from current events. Also, New York City becomes generally unlivable from Thanksgiving to New Years. There are more tourists in lower Manhattan during the holidays than rats on the Lower East Side or cockroaches in Inwood. It’s even worse this year thanks to the downward slide of the dollar and the steady parade of Englishmen hopping across the pond to buy video cameras and such. You can’t even get near J&R without tripping over groups of Italians haggling over the cost of I-Pods and laptops.

On our way back from baby class last night we had an exceptionally memorable cab ride. The first thing I noticed was that the driver, who’s head I could barely make out in the dim light of the interior couldn’t have been more than 4 feet tall. I gave him a quick once over before getting into the cab, just to make sure he wasn’t a 12 year old out trying to make a few bucks for crack money while his daddy was passed out somewhere in Astoria.

When we get in the cab it took a minute before several things registered. First, the temperature in the cab must have been over 100 degrees. I went from freezing to heatstroke in about 20 seconds. Second, it really smelled. Not like a food smell, more like a person-is-stuffed-under-the-carpet-and-rotting smell, mixed with cheap, obviously foreign tobacco. The driver, and I use the term loosely, headed in the general direction of downtown at a pace somewhere between a walk and a bicycle ride. Once we got on the FDR Drive a steady succession of cars passed us with the usual curses and horn honking. It was then I noticed that the driver was trying to eat some sort of greasy sandwich, WITH BOTH HANDS as he inched down the highway. I was fascinated simply watching his utter disregard for the rules of the road, his passengers, the other drivers and his own health all at the same time. Then I noticed that his hands were shaking. Bad. Like DTs bad. Like I need several drinks or I’m going to fall over bad. To calm the demon voices he turned on talk radio REALLY LOUD. All of this was done in silence. Not a word passed his lips. Mercifully, we got stuck in a massive traffic jam around the Seaport and spent the rest of the trip inching down the road where a collision would have done nothing but interrupt the driver’s dinner. At least he knew where the Ferry terminal was. I haven’t had a ride like that in a while. Kind of made me miss the old school drivers who would argue politics and share a drink with you on late night rides home.

Church & State & Blogs

I have had some negative feedback from a couple of readers about my recent postings on Catholic theology. Since two readers apparently comprise a significant percentage of this blog’s audience, I will consider your thoughts in future postings. I find debate on obscure theological points to be fascinating but I can see how it might be less so for others. In order to provide some context to my political opinions you all should probably be aware that that the political position I come from is basically that of a Catholic anarchist; I reject the current form of capitalism as practiced in the United States as inhumane and unsustainable and favor a return to a looser, collective style of governance with an emphasis on self-sufficiency and living lightly on the land. The link on the sidebar about distributivism is a good place to start if you are looking to understand my economic philosophy, although I transcend all ideologies and embrace my own brand of anarchism because I basically have the massive ego of a trial lawyer.

So in the Times this morning was yet another tale of the evangelical nut-jobs forcing their way into the public schools trying to save the students from their definition of evil. Two things made this story especially noteworthy. First, the school at issue is located in Edison New Jersey about ten miles from Manhattan; Second, most of the parents and students interviewed support the teacher over the student who reported the teacher’s illegal activity. Now this was supposed to be a class on the history of the constitution but the teacher apparently thought class to be an appropriate forum to disseminate his opinion that, “[E]volution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven.” It should be noted that the teacher is also a preacher at some mega Protestant church or other. What this has to do with the Constitution I don’t know. What it has to do with the religious right’s agenda to subvert the Constitution’s separation of Church and state is much clearer.

Thou Shalt Not Kill

Why on earth do conservative Christians support the death penalty? Can someone explain to me why it is that these right-wingers get so energized on right-to-life issues yet have no problem with the concept of strapping a man to a table and pumping him full of lethal chemicals?

Anyone who has ever read a minute by minute description about what it is like to witness an execution cannot possibly support this barbarity. Yesterday, the Florida Department of Corrections executed one Angel Diaz who was convicted of murdering a Miami topless bar manager 27 years ago.

The execution took 34 minutes and Diaz didn’t go quietly. and Diaz appeared to grimace before dying Wednesday, 34 minutes after the first dose. Diaz appeared to grimace and then move around on his gurney for 24 minutes after the first injection. His eyes were open, his mouth opened and closed and his chest rose and fell. He was pronounced dead 10 minutes after his last movement.

Diaz's final appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court challenged the chemicals used in the state's procedure, saying they constitute cruel and unusual punishment. His appeals were rejected about an hour before his execution began. Attorneys for him and other condemned inmates have been unsuccessfully challenging Florida's three-chemical method, saying it results in extreme pain that an inmate cannot express because one of the drugs is a paralyzing agent.

Diaz denied killing the victim just prior to his own murder at the hands of the State. It is of note that there were no witnesses to the murder of Joseph Nagy which took place during a robbery at the Velvet Swing Lounge in 1979. At the time of the killing, most of the club's employees and patrons were locked in a restroom. Diaz's girlfriend later told police he was involved and his fingerprint was found on a matchbook at the scene.

Despite his relative lack of education, Diaz insisted on representing himself at his murder trial with fairly predictable results. His accomplice to the robbery testified against him to avoid the death sentence and he got sentenced to 20-life. Diaz’s conviction was also won on the testimony of a jailhouse snitch who testified that Diazx told him that he did the shooting, testimony that he later recanted. His recantation was deemed not credible by the Florida Supreme Court. Apparently any testimony by a jailhouse snitch that supports the state’s version of events is deemed credible but any testimony supporting the defendant is not. Irrespective of the testimony, the Court held that the sentence would stand even though it was possible that Diaz’s accomplice did the actual shooting. Florida’s felony murder law permits death sentences for those who participate in crimes resulting in murder, regardless of who does the killing.

The prosecutor of the case pretty much summed up the state’s attitude towards Diaz and towards all defendants when he claimed, ''There are cases where the murder itself cries out for the ultimate punishment, Then there are other murders where the person himself, like Angel Diaz, cries out for the death penalty.''

I don’t know what church that prosecutor goes to but I sincerely hope he isn’t a Catholic. Benedict XVI, whilst Prefect of The Congregation for The Doctrine of The Faith, stated that that capital punishment is completely irreconcilable with the Christian Catechism and Catholics cannot, in good conscience, support it.
This position is even more restrictive than the Catechism would allow, since the Church cedes to the state the right to take a human life in the very limited circumstance where the state is unable to protect the public from an individual. It should be pointed out that this is an extremely small exception to the general rule that capital punishment should not be allowed. “[A]s a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm -- without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself -- the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent." (John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 56)”

The Sound of Music

This blog is going to tack Catholic for a while since the inner workings of the Church have lately been more interesting to me than anything going on in politics. Especially this obsession the Democrats have with Barack Obama. What’s up with that? I think the party is so star struck that it is underestimating the country’s latent racism. Hopefully I’m wrong but it will be hard to tell. Racist bias is a notoriously difficult issue to get accurate polls on since racists tend to lie to pollsters when asked if they’re racists. Whatever, I’ll be voting Green anyway.

I’ve been thinking about how the sad state of the Catholic liturgy has probably been partly responsible for driving Cradle Catholics away from the Church. As a part-time musician I have been especially annoyed at what passes for music in Church these days. A little Googling on the issue showed me that I was not alone in my critique:

“The awful stuff that has passed for liturgical music in the Catholic Church for the past thirty-five years is a continuing disgrace and embarrassment. The insipid "hymns" and utterly trite musical settings of parts of the Ordinary of the Mass suddenly appeared from nowhere sometime shortly after Vatican II.
Overnight, fifteen hundred years of some of the most beautiful, inspired music in all of Western culture was thrown out and replaced by what sounds like bad 1960's folk-pop-elevator music. In fact, it's worse than that. Nothing in pop music ever sounded quite as loathsome as what is played and sung in the church today.” http://www.tommcfaul.com/escritaria/litmusic.html

Pretty strong stuff. The likely explanation is that the Church has simply aped the secular West's obsession with "accessibility", "inclusiveness", "democracy" and "anti-elitism". The effect of this on liturgy has been a triumph of bad taste and banality and an apparent vacating of the sacred spaces of any palpable sense of the presence of God.

Try to imagine what it would be like if the rest of the Church's art were dumbed-down to this degree. Imagine the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel redone in a more modern style. Would the clergy and faithful stand for such a desecration? I doubt it. Apparently music is considered a less important art form in the eyes of the modern church. But why? How did bad folk guitars and bongos replace choirs and Gregorian chants in the United States.

Here is an interesting explanation:

http://www.crisismagazine.com/january2002/feature2.htm

Dorothy Day

Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The Catholic Worker movement was born out of the meeting of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day on this day, December 8, 1932.

Dorothy wrote a series of reflections on Advent in 1966. Here are some of her thoughts on week two, which begins this Sunday:

{I]t is not to discuss solutions proffered by government or city agencies that I wish to write. War, and the poverty of peoples which leads to war, are the great problems of the day and the fundamental solution is the personal response which each of us makes to the message of Jesus Christ. It is the solution which works from the bottom up rather than from the top down, and makes for readiness to join in larger regional solutions like the organizing of farm workers with Cesar Chavez, community solutions of Saul Alinsky, village solutions like Vinoba Bhave's in India, etc.
The wonderful thing is that each one of us can do something about the problem, each one of us can give his response and can go as far as the grace of God leads him; and God "ordereth all things sweetly," and there is no need to be afraid as to where such a response will lead US.

"Ask and you shall receive," Jesus told us, and this asking may be just that question "What shall we do?" Samuel asked it, St. Paul asked it--"Lord, what will you have me do?" and they seemed to get direct answers. Paul was struck blind, literally and to everything else around him except that one great fact, "whatever ye do to the least of these My brethren, ye do to Me." If you feed them, clothe them, shelter them, visit them in prison (or go to prison and so are with them!), serve the sick, in general perform the works of mercy, you are serving Christ and alleviating poverty by direct action. If you are persecuting them, killing them, throwing them in prison, you are doing it to Christ. He said so.

When the crowd was moved by John the Baptist and asked, "What shall we do?" he said to them, "He who has two coats give to him who has none." He also said, "Do injury to no man. Be content with your pay." Or with no pay at all. If you are voluntarily giving away what you have, giving your coat, don't expect thanks or the reform of the recipient. We don't do it for that motive, with the expectation of reward. We must do it for love of Jesus, in His humanity, for love of our brother, for love of our enemy.

Charles Peguy in one of his poems, God Speaks, tells the story of the prodigal son and comments, "That's the kind of a Father we have, who loves even to folly, who forgives seventy times seven, who rushes out to embrace and feast the prodigal son." This is the kind of love we must have for the poor. The kind of love which will give away cloak also if coat is demanded of you.

Nobody is too poor to help another. The stories in the New Testament are of the widow's mite, of the little boy's loaves and fishes, of the cloak, of the time given when one is asked to walk a second mile.

Another Russian story which profoundly moved me was The Honest Thief, by Dostoievsky of the hardworking tailor who lived in a corner of a room, and yet who took in one of the destitute he encountered. The guest begged and drank and the tailor suspected him of stealing his one treasure, an old army coat. He spoke to him harshly, but when the thief ran away, the tailor searched him out and brought him back to his corner to nurse him in his illness. "Love is the measure by which we shall be judged." And by not judging we too shall not be judged.

I am thinking of how many leave the Church because of the scandal of the wealth of the Church, the luxury of the Church which began in the very earliest day, even perhaps when the Apostles debated on which should be highest in the kingdom and when the poor began quarreling as to who were receiving the most from the common table, the Greek Jews or the Jerusalem Jews. St. Paul commented on the lack of esteem for the poor, and the kowtowing to the rich, and St. John in the Apocalypse spoke of the scandal of the churches "where charity had grown cold."

Thank God for the sacraments, the food of life which we can receive to strengthen us. Thank God for the Word made flesh and for the Word in the Scriptures. Thank God for the Gospel which St. Therese pinned close to her heart, and which the murderer Raskolnikoff listened to from the lips of a prostitute and took with him into the Siberian prison. The Word is our light and our understanding, and it is also our food.

Papal Infallibility

I was originally planning a post that asserted that whether one believes in the Catholic Church's position on contraception as expressed in Pope Paul VI's humanae vitae depends on whether one can accept the legitimacy of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Then a friend who is obviously better versed in the language of the theologians than I reminded me that the decision against contraception handed down in Humanae Vitae belongs to the "authentic" ordinary Magisterium of the Catholic Church. That is, it is presented as "non-infallible" teaching, in which the Magisterium does not give us any absolute guarantee that the teaching is immutably true and therefore forever irreformable. Of course by the time I realized my mistake I had already written a lengthy post on papal infallibility so I'm posting it anyway:

Two dogmas were proclaimed at Vatican Council I on July 18, 1870. The dogma of the primacy of papal jurisdiction means that the pope has universal jurisdiction. He has "direct sovereignty over the entire church” (It is interesting to note that the world's bishops, up to that point the local manifestation of the Church at that instant lost almost all their independent decisoin making power; this arrangement continues to the present day, I believe, to the detriment of the Church.)

The second dogma proclaimed that day, papal infallibility, asserts that the pope is incapable of error when he makes "ex cathedra" decisions on matters of faith and morals. Of course what constitutes a decision based on “faith and morals” expands and contracts depending on papal need. Theologians like Hans Kung note that the fluidity with which the definition of ex catheta is applied is a handy tool for the Vatican bureaucracy to consolidate power in Rome and squelch dissent by pesky bishops and theologians.

The first recorded attribution of infallibility to the pope was articulated by a Franciscan priest in 1279. It was by no means an accepted doctrine within the church. The (presumably also infallible) Pope John XXII went so far as to declare the doctrine the "work of the devil". While not universally accepted, the doctrine nevertheless became an important tool against the reformation, although the bishops of France and Italy rejected it. However it wasn’t until Gregory XVI (1831-46) that an actual Pope made the claim that popes were infallible. Gregory was also known as a champion against modernism. His encyclical, Mirari, viewed freedom of conscience as "a false and absurd concept”. He also found the concept of freedom of the press as abhorrent and democracy to be antithetical to the Church.

Pius IX was the Pope who elevated the notion of Papal infallibility to dogma. He was a man of temporal as well as spiritual ambition. While Pius is the Pope who, on his own authority, elevated the doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception, he was also the last Pope to publicly execute someone in the Piazza del Popolo. (Italian revolutionaries Monti and Tognetti were beheaded for attempting to blow up some papal property). Pius was no friend of either democracy or modernism. In his encyclical Quanta Cura (1864), he condemned many of the freedoms Americans hold dearest: freedoms of conscience, speech, the press, and religion. He rightfully recognized that American style democracy gravely threatened the Papacy.

Pius’s motivations for pronouncing the doctrine of Papal Infallibility were decidedly temporal. The loss of the Papal States provided an impetus to expand his spiritual authority as a replacement for his political power in Italy. There was a hope that this principle of authority would bring about the return of lands already lost by the Papacy. He also believed that the principle of authority would help counteract the secular principles of the French Revolution.

So what sort of a man was Pius IX? History records that he surrounded himself with mediocre, unbalanced, sometimes even psychologically disturbed people. His fury in private audiences would become so violent that older prelates suffered heart attacks. He was described as having a heart of stone and at times normal feelings of affection, gratitude, and appreciation would be totally absent -- heartless indifference. Many bishops had the impression that the pope was insincere, that he was striving to get infallibility approved by the use of trickery and cunning. In the presence of many witnesses, one bishop called him false and a liar.

The historian Ferdinand Gregorovius noted in his diary, "The pope recently got the urge to try out his infallibility....While out on a walk he called to a paralytic: `Get up and walk.' The poor devil gave it a try and collapsed, which put God's vicegerent very much out of sorts.”

Part II will discuss how this doctrine gave birth to Paul VI's humanae vitae and the historical and political context surrounding it's promulgation.

Secularism and the Pope

The Holy Father Benedict the XVI was hoping to overcome the west’s current infatuation with the likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris by pointing out the danger of fundamentalist secularism. The following is from an article in the International Herald Tribune:

"Benedict opposes secularism because it is both absolute and arbitrary. In the name of being neutral with regard to values, secular ideology eliminates all rival world views from the public sphere. By denying the existence of objective moral truths, it elevates self- assertion as the measure of all things. Social life is reduced to the arbitration of conflicting self-interest — a process in which the most powerful always win.

Ultimately, this arbitrary absolutism produces a society ruled by an unholy alliance of utilitarian ethics and the proxy politics of the managerial class. This collusion destroys the very idea of common action and a binding collective discernment. Thus does the pope attribute the failure of Europe's common political project to the growing secularization of European culture. "

Indeed. Any secular ideology that elevates the “self” over the collective good is bound to result in the government’s function being reduced to the arbitration of conflicting self-interests. It’s already happening in this country. Hell, this entire country is based on self-interest. We only come together as a community in time of national tragedy when the government needs to massage the collective good to get us into a war. We all know whose self-interests are being protected by this government, right? Not yours. Not mine.
And we shouldn’t look to the nutty religious right to help us redevelop our collective conscience either. Last Thursday the president-elect of the Christian Coalition declined the job, saying the organization wouldn't let him expand its agenda beyond opposing abortion and gay marriage.
The Rev. Joel Hunter, said he had hoped to focus on issues such as poverty and the environment. "These are issues that Jesus would want us to care about," said Hunter, a senior pastor at Northland Church in Longwood, Fla. Apparently there is no room for Jesus in the Christian Coalition’s platform at present.
With all the immense flaws that the Catholic Church has exhibited over the last few years, it has two strong things going for it; a rich tradition of caring for the poor and the current Pope.

Drop the Chalupa

Oh Lord, its getting on a week since I last posted here. Since the election my heart hasn’t been in it, I’m afraid. The holidays are upon us and I’m experiencing my annual holiday induced depression brought on by the incessant crush of people in lower Manhattan buying every conceivable thing in sight and looking like crazed crack addicts as they rifle through the bins at Century 21. The end of the diving season and the dark weather aren’t helping much either. Some days I feel like throwing in the towel, getting a job on Wall Street and buying a Play Station 2. It would be so easy to slip under the waves in the sea of pre-Christmas advertising and become absorbed by the briny depths of American consumerism. New car, caviar, four star daydream…..ah, screw it.

Well it’s good to know that there are some constants in our ever changing world. One constant is the fact that Taco Bell is a reliable vector for e-coli. The 50 or so individuals currently shitting out their intestines in New Jersey and Long Island probably never thought too much about where the ground “beef” was coming from in their Nachos Bel Grande. As someone who has recently recovered from a debilitating food-borne illness, and having done some recent research on the safety of the United States food supply I can attest to the fact that cavalierly grazing around town at the likes of Burger Thing, Pizza Slut and Taco Hell is a recipe for disaster. Get it? Recipe for disaster?

It turns out that the current e-coli outbreak isn’t the first for the venerable Taco Bell. In fact, a previous outbreak a few years ago caused the chain to begin shipping all of their ground beef to the stores fully cooked. Looks like someone was sleeping at the ground-beef-cooking-machine.

So, what's in all that ground beef found in the country’s tacos and hamburgers anyway? As we learned from fast food nation, the ground beef used in the fast food world comes from the meat of worn-out dairy cows (generally the least healthy cattle stock), who spend their days packed in feedlots full of pools of manure. Each burger/taco contains parts of dozens or even hundreds of cows, increasing the likelihood that a sick one will spread its pathogens widely.

Until 1997, those cows, by nature designed to be herbivorous, were fed "livestock waste" including the rendered remains of dead sheep and cattle, along with the remains of millions of dead cats and dogs purchased every year from animal shelters. Fortunately the law was changed: Now they're fed only the remains of horses, pigs and poultry.

Taco Bell said it worked with health officials to have the affected restaurants inspected and reopened. In an unfortunately worded public statement, Taco Bell’s spokesperson Tim Jerzyk reassured a jittery public by commenting that , "The E. coli strain appears to have passed through our system," Passed through our system? I suppose he wouldn’t think it so funny if he was the one of the unfortunate customers who experienced the sudden onset of abdominal pain and severe cramps, followed within 24 hours by bloody diarrhea after enjoying a poisonous Crunchwrap Supreme.

Oh well, I’m sure that Taco Bell is ready to return to serving the wonderful meals Taco Bell consumers have come to know and love, which feature only trace amounts of animal feces. Hasta la vista.

Speak Softly but Carry a Big Stick

I’ve been reading a lot about Theodore Roosevelt lately. I’m usually not one to glorify American Presidents or the system they support, but Roosevelt is an interesting character. He was a patrician and an imperialist and was somewhat obsessed with war-making, but he also had the capacity to surprise with his progressive ideas about the environment and the dangers of big business run amok. He also appointed Oliver Wendell Holmes to the Supreme Court and was the first US President to entertain an African American at the White House. Some quotes follow.
On the office of the presidency:

“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."
"Theodore Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star", 149
May 7, 1918
On the environment:

Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying the 'the game belongs to the people.' So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The 'greatest good for the greatest number' applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method."
A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open, 1916.

On the American voter:

“A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user."
An Autobiography, 1913

There are no men like Roosevelt around today in the body politic. All our current politicians are interested in is self-enrichment and power. Democrats, Republicans, all mediocre men with little interest beyond lining their own pockets.