The English language has repeatedly been destroyed by ideologues who manipulate the language to suit their needs. "Patriotism" is a word that has no real meaning, but if it did, it would include people who don't necessarily celebrate every war and worship our most authoritarian institutions, like the military and the executive branch and corporate America. Rarely are lefists -- much less liberals -- celebrated as patriots.

I do not regard warmongers as patriotic. Nor do I regard corporations and the practicioners of raw capitalism as patriotic or pro-American. People who use their neighbor's children to fight their wars and who pollute the oceans and dirty the air do not qualify as patriots but anti-patriots, using their authority to destroy society and even Planet Earth for profit.

Here are some of the unheralded patriots: people who truly made this society democratic and free. The folks who hang the flag on July 4 should be thanking these people. Yet I wonder if a significant percentage of the population even knows who they are.

William O. Douglas
William Brennan
Earl Warren
Thurgood Marshall

These guys were on the Supreme Court during the period we now call the Warren Court. Douglas served from 1939-1975. Brennan sat from 1956 to 1990, and Warren was Chief Justice from 1954 through 1969. Marshall sat from 1967 through 1991. The country as we know it would probably not exist without the Warren Court, which expansively interpreted the Constitution for the first time in the nation's history, opening up doors for racial and other political minorities, keeping the police honest, breathing life into the First Amendment and preventing this country from becoming a theocracy.

As the average Joe what makes this country special. He'll say we have the right of free speech and free association, the right to worship as we please, the right of privacy and to basically do whatever the hell we want to with our lives. He'll also say that we do not have a political police force or a gulag. Average Joe does not know that these freedoms may be outlined in the Constitution, but no one really brought these promises to life until the Warren Court came around, roughly from the late 1930's to the early 1970's, when the Court broke down barriers in every walk of life.

Thank William O. Douglas for being maybe the best Justice we ever had for First Amendment expression, and for recognizing the right to privacy in 1965. "Privacy" appears nowhere in the Constitution, but Douglas and the other Justices implied that the Bill of Rights, fairly read, promoted the right of privacy. Everyone values privacy. Few know where it comes from.

Thank Earl Warren for coming to the Supreme Court seemingly to strike down racial segregation in all its forms. It was Warren who wrote the seminal Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and other decisions which made blacks equal citizens for the first time.

Thank William Brennan for consistently finding in favor of the little guy over the course of 30 years on the Court, wheeling and dealing behind the scenes at the Supreme Court to get the five votes necessary to expand speech rights, associational rights, womens' rights and the rights of war protesters.

Thank Thurgood Marshall for being the greatest lawyer of the 20th Century. We go to work each day, but really, does it even matter if we show up? Would anyone care, or even notice? Do we accomplish anything meaningful in our work? Aren't we better off staying home to read up on social and political issues, maybe teaching ourselves how to paint or play a musical instrument? For Marshall, coming to work meant bringing the Constitution to life against social degenerates who would have felt more at home in Apartheid South Africa, or some other fascist hell-hole. While we duck and cover when someone wants to put another 40 pound jug on the water cooler, Marshall risked his life in the deep south, trying cases in hostile courtrooms. He was rewarded with a Supreme Court appointment, and from 1967 through 1969, thanks to Thurgood, the Supreme Court had a guaranteed liberal majority on nearly every issue that came before it.

All good things must end, though. Earl Warren was replaced by Warren Burger, a pompous Nixon flunky who worked to halt the gains made by the Warren Court. And Burger was the second coming of William O. Douglas in light of his replacement, William Rehnquist, who during the 1960's lobbied against antidiscrimination laws in Arizona and was widely believed to oppose the Court's seminal ruling in Brown v. Board of Education which (and you should know this) ruled that the government cannot shove black children into separate schools. Marshall was replaced by Clarence Thomas, a guy widely believed to have sexually harassed a subordinate and who has called for the wholesale repudiation of many of the Warren Court's precedents.

Other patriots include the anti-war protester, from Vietnam to the present. That long-hair with an "impeach Nixon" or "impeach Bush" sign is a patriot. The newspaper editors who published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, defying the degenerates in the Nixon administration who went to court to stop the papers from telling the truth. And the guy who absconded with the Pentagon Papers and brought it to the newspapers was a patriot, too.

George W. Bush was on vacation in August 2001, clearing brush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, riding his bike, watching the ballgame and playing with his dog. Yet, presidents never really take vacations. Sometimes, people fly in from Washington to brief the president on current events and to apprise him of the state of the world.

These briefings can be annoying. Sort of like when you're lounging on the back deck and someone is knocking on the front door. You have to get up, race through the house to answer the door and find a way to get rid of them so you can return to the lounge chair and your magazine.

The president, of course, cannot just tell the Washington interlopers to go away. He has to sit and listen to them, even if the weather is sunny and mild and he wants to ride his bike and play with the dog. Whatever we think of the Washington establishment, I seriously doubt they fly half-way across the country to brief the president on trivial matters.

On August 6, 2001, while George W. was relaxing in Crawford, some CIA officials came to the ranch to advise him that Bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States. That's the title of the Presidential Daily Briefing for August 6. There was no ambiguity about this briefing, and someone hearing about this threat would probably drop the golf club and get to work.

The briefing suggested that Bin Laden's terrorist organization wanted to hijack airplanes. Here's an excerpt from the President's Daily Briefing:

Al Qaeda members -- including some who are U.S. citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.
Two al-Qaeda members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our embassies in East Africa were U.S. citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a ---- service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group or bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.

Hindsight is 20-20, or so goes the cliche. But I would imagine that this briefing would set off alarm bells. By sheer coincidence, CNN ran a story on August 7, 2001 -- one day after the Daily Briefing memo -- about how Bush's vacation in Crawford was putting the spotlight on this small town. According to the article, "Bush is on what the White House calls a "working vacation," meeting with senior staff between time spent jogging and fishing on the 1,600-acre ranch. He planned a side trip to nearby Waco on Tuesday to visit Habitat for Humanity volunteers."

Some residents didn't like the attention. "Folks here say there is a misconception about their town -- "That we are all backwards, that we don't have a clue what is going on," Crawford resident Teresa Bowdoin said."

Of course, the most clueless person in Crawford was the President of the United States. Little did anyone know on August 7, 2001 that only one day earlier the president received a red alert that an international terrorist organization was planning to hit the United States.

In his new book, The One Percent Doctrine, prize-winning reporter Ron Suskind describes how Bush reacted to the August 6, 2001 briefing about Bin Ladin's determination to strike in the United States. Bush listened to the briefing, Suskind says, then told the CIA briefer: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

Interesting response by Bush. What did he mean by this? There is no way to spin this response in Bush's favor. This was a flippant response to serious news. It sounds like Bush was annoyed that people were disrupting his vacation and that he brushed away the CIA with the back of his hand after reporting to him that a terror strike was on the way, and that it might involve hijacked airplanes. One month later, as Bush stared into space like a deer on the highway upon hearing the news that the Twin Towers had been hit by hijacked airplanes , he must have thought about that Daily Briefing and wished that he had returned to Washington a little sooner.

We sometimes look to New York to lead the way on civil rights and compassionate public policy. At least that's what State officials would like us to believe. We New Yorkers pat ourselves on the back for our progressive way of thinking. But that's nonsense. New York may not be the deep south in the 1950's and 1960's, but when push comes to shove, the disenfranchised wind up in the gutter.

New York has been a flashpoint in the controversy over same-sex marriages ever since the Green Party mayor of my village (New Paltz) decided to officiate these unions in March 2004. He was prosecuted for marrying people without marriage licenses, but the charges were later dropped. Others brought lawsuits to challenge the constitutionality of New York's prohibition against same-sex marriages, and yesterday the State's highest court rejected those claims and held that it's legal for the State to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry and avail themselves of the many benefits associated with marriage, like tax advantages, insurance coverage and the right of marriage partners to make decisions about their spouses' medical treatment.

Here's the general framework for courts to apply in deciding whether to strike down marriage restrictions. Under the Constitution, there are certain "fundamental" rights, like the right to travel, the right to privacy, the right to raise your children as you see fit and the right to marry. The language we usually see in these court rulings is that a fundamental right is something that is "deeply rooted in our tradition." In 1967, the Supreme Court held that it was illegal for the State of Virginia to prohibit interrracial marriage. A few years later, the Court said flat out that "the right to marry is of fundamental importance for all individuals." For this reason, even inmates can get married. Even serial killers can get married while in prison.

If a right is "fundamental" under the Constitution, it cannot be abridged or restricted without a "compelling" reason. In street language, the government needs a damned good reason to restrict a fundamental right. Hatred of an entire class of people is not good enough. "We always did it this way" is not good enough. "Just because" is not good enough. Prejudice is not good enough. Public opinion is not good enough. The rationale for this is that some rights are so fundamental that it does not matter what the majority thinks. Constitutional rights cannot be put up for a majority vote.

When the same-sex marriage controversy wound up in the courts, we thought that an honest court would recognize that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to get married. After all, what compelling reason could justify the exclusion? The best parallel was the Supreme Court's ruling in 1967, Loving v. Virginia, which said that the government cannot restrict interracial marriages despite any arguments that it was always government policy to enforce these restrictions.

In the ruling handed down by the New York Court of Appeals, however, the above analysis was rejected through a legal contortion. The Court did not require the State to advance a compelling reason for the prohibition against same-sex marriages. It reasoned that while marriage among opposite-sex couples is deeply rooted in our tradition, same-sex marriage is a recent innovation. So, the Court of Appeals reasoned, same-sex marriage is unlike heterosexual blacks marrying whites. The problem with this reasoning is obvious: for centuries, the notion that heterosexual whites might marry heterosexual blacks was as repugnant to people as the notion that gays and lesbians can marry. The Court simply jumped through hoops to distinguish same-sex marriages from interracial marriages.

By ruling that same-sex couples have no fundamental right to marry, the Court of Appeals only required the State to justify its prohibition by advancing a "rational basis." This makes it much easier for the government to get away with its policy, but "rational" means "rational," right? It's not rational to deny two single adults the right to marry, same-sex or not, right?

Here is how the Court of Appeals found it rational for New York to prohibit same-sex adults from marrying:

The Legislature could rationally decide that, for the welfare of children, it is more important to promote stability, and to avoid instability, in opposite-sex than in same-sex relationships. Heterosexual intercourse has a natural tendency to lead to the birth of children; homosexual intercourse does not. Despite the advances of science, it remains true that the vast majority of children are born as a result of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman, and the Legislature could find that this will continue to be true. The Legislature could also find that such relationships are all too often casual or temporary. It could find that an important function of marriage is to create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born. It thus could choose to offer an inducement -- in the form of marriage and its attendant benefits -- to opposite-sex couples who make a solemn, long-term commitment to each other.

The Legislature could find that this rationale for marriage does not apply with comparable force to same-sex couples. These couples can become parents by adoption, or by artificial insemination or other technological marvels, but they do not become parents as a result of accident or impulse. The Legislature could find that unstable relationships between people of the opposite sex present a greater danger that children will be born into or grow up in unstable homes than is the case with same-sex couples, and thus that promoting stability in opposite-sex relationships will help children more. This is one reason why the Legislature could rationally offer the benefits of marriage to opposite-sex couples only.

There is a second reason: The Legislature could rationally believe that it is better, other things being equal, for children to grow up with both a mother and a father. Intuition and experience suggest that a child benefits from having before his or her eyes, every day, living models of what both a man and a woman are like. It is obvious that there are exceptions to this general rule -- some children who never know their fathers, or their mothers, do far better than some who grow up with parents of both sexes -- but the Legislature could find that the general rule will usually hold.

In other words, reckless sex between heterosexual couples can produce children. The State wants to prevent children from growing up without a mom and pop, so we induce the lovers to get married to save the children. The State can deny the same marriage right to gays and lesbians because although they can adopt children, they cannot naturally reproduce. The State Legislature can thus distinguish between same-sex marriage and heterosexual marriage. And, the Court ruled, the Legislature can rationally decide that children are better off with a mother and father rather than a father and father.

This is what counts for legal reasoning in New York. Lost in this equation is the irrational basis for regulating marriage in an "either-or" fashion. As Judge Judith Kaye wrote in her dissenting opinion, there are enough marriage licenses to go around. Why deny same-sex couples the right to marry just because heterosexual couples after a one-night stand might forego marriage and produce a child without a loving father?

Moreover, the justifications advanced by the Court of Appeals in speculating why the Legislature wants to prohibit same-sex marriage are academic. Do you really think that State legislators even give the issue extended thought? I doubt it. My sense is that they make it illegal for same-sex marriage because they are repulsed by homosexuality and cannot imagine lifestyles other their own. Or their religious biases force them to follow the Bible and punish homosexuals for who they are.

Let's cut through the crap here: same-sex marriage is illegal not because we want to help the children but because society as a whole does not like gays and lesbians and the prejudices that motivated many states years ago to prohibit interracial marriage are plainly at work in the same-sex context. We allow our prejudices to deny other people their rights and then we jump through intellectual hoops to justify those prejudices. It's a sad day that New York is a party to this horror. Yesterday's decision is a disgrace and an embarrassment and New Yorkers deserve better. More importantly, gays and lesbians deserve better.

Only rock and roll diehards really know who Syd Barrett was. He founded Pink Floyd and was its psychedelic leader for a few years before he left the band and became a famous acid casualty. He died of natural causes over the weekend and, as usual, the New York Times wrote up a thorough obituary, reprinted in full below.

Thanks to horrendous programming habits by corporate run radio stations, most of us know Pink Floyd as the 1970's supergroup whose records sold in the mega-millions. That incarnation of Pink Floyd gave us Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall and other records which are quite wonderful but have nothing to do with Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd, which in 1967 issued one of the great psychedelic albums of all time. It is also one of the most underrated records ever made.

Piper at the Gates of Dawn was a Syd Barrett album released under the Pink Floyd name. The name of this blog is Psychsound, short for Psychedelic Sound. Piper at the Gates of Dawn was the sound of psychedelia. Swirling keyboards, state of the art production, nonsensical lyrics and an Alice in Wonderland feel to the music, with hooks as tasty as ice cream and cotton candy. It is a must for anyone interested in the Sound of Psychedelia. I am not a skilled enough writer to accurately describe the music, except to say that if you like Strawberry Fields Forever and I Am the Walrus by the Beatles, you'll love Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The band also recorded some top-notch singles, like See Emily Play.

Syd Barrett accomplished very little musically after 1967. The conventional wisdom is that he incapacitated himself through LSD and other drugs and that he may have suffered from mental illness. That would explain the very strange but beautiful music. Normal people cannot make the kind of music that appears on the first Pink Floyd album; the lyrics are too strange. At one point, according to legend, he stood on stage and strummed his guitar mindlessly, freaking out the band. A sad footnote to his life is that he showed up unannounced while Pink Floyd was recording its Wish You Were Here album in 1975, but that he looked nothing like the youthful sparkly-eyed bandleader of the 1960's.

A sad reality of the 1960's rock scene was the debilitating effect that drugs had on the individual artists. Few bands from that era emerged unscathed. The list of so-called acid casualties includes Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who succeeded in bringing the music away from surfing and cars and into the vanguard of psychedelia. Arthur Lee, whose band, Love, recorded the greatest album of all time, Forever Changes, is also on the list, as is Skip Spence, who played with the Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape and wound up in a mental institution.

I discovered this music in high school, 15 years after it was recorded. My friends and I thought we were hot shit for listening to this great stuff about which our classmates had no clue. None whatsoever. But we were hot shit. Anyone who lived through the early 1980's can easily recall the garbage that made the hit parade, and the mindless synth-pop which supposedly would kill guitar music once and for all. But we knew better. We were onto something in digging out classics from the psychedelic era, and early Pink Floyd was at the top of the playlist. Syd Barrett helped us get through those miserable days of early 1980's pop music.

These days, with rock artists manufactured in test tubes by accountants on Park Avenue, it's hard to imagine what it was like to live through the psychedelic era, 1965-1968, when bands pushed the boundaries and brought music to new heights with each passing month, and the record companies seemed willing to release anything the bands saw fit. The music was never the same after that Era. We know from studying rock history that few eras last more than a few years. Maybe psychedelic music could not give us more than three years of quality material. Maybe it's because the successes these bands enjoyed went to their heads and they broke up or milked it further.

Sometimes personalities are more famous than the product. Everyone knows the name Frank Zappa. How many people have actually heard the music? Syd Barrett's name is a footnote to rock history, but it's not totally unfamiliar to us. The personality is famous as Syd supposedly lost his mind and became an acid casualty. But its all about the music. On Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Syd Barrett gave us music for the ages.

Here's the New York Times obituary:

Syd Barrett, a Founder of Pink Floyd, Dies at 60
By JON PARELES
Syd Barrett, the erratically brilliant songwriter and singer who created the psychedelic rock of Pink Floyd only to leave the band in 1968 with mental problems, died on July 7 at his home in Cambridgeshire, England. He was 60.

His death was confirmed by a spokesman for his former band, Doug Wright of LD Communications, who did not give a cause. Mr. Barrett had long suffered from diabetes.

A statement from Mr. Wright said: "The band are very naturally upset and sad to hear of Syd Barrett's death. Syd was the guiding light of the early band lineup and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire."

With Pink Floyd, and on two haunting solo albums, Mr. Barrett became a touchstone for experimental pop musicians. He was also renowned both as an LSD casualty and as a symbol of how close creativity can be to madness.

Mr. Barrett wrote most of the songs on Pink Floyd's debut album, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn." In Mr. Barrett's songs like "Astronomy Domine," whimsy and wordplay merged with a playful sense of structure and sound. "Let's try it another way/You'll lose your mind and play," he wrote in "See Emily Play."

He also helped to conceive the band's performances as spectacles. "We have only just started to scrape the surface of effects and ideas of lights and music combined," Mr. Barrett told the trade newspaper Melody Maker in 1967.

But under the pressures of rock stardom and after frequent use of LSD, Mr. Barrett had a breakdown in the late 1960's and spent most of his life as a recluse. Pink Floyd, with its bassist, Roger Waters, taking over as songwriter, went on to become a multimillion-selling arena-rock band in the 1970's. Pink Floyd sang about Mr. Barrett in one of its hits, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond."

Roger Keith Barrett, nicknamed Syd as a teenager, was born in Cambridge, England, on Jan. 6, 1946. He played the piano as a child and then took up the guitar, joining his first band at 16.

Pink Floyd began with boyhood friendships. Mr. Barrett attended the same elementary school as Mr. Waters. David Gilmour, who eventually replaced him as Pink Floyd's guitarist, was another teenage friend.

In 1965, while Mr. Barrett studied painting and fine art at Camberwell art school in South London, Mr. Waters, the drummer Nick Mason and the keyboardist Rick Wright were studying architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic. They recruited Mr. Barrett to join their blues band. Mr. Barrett combined the first names of two bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, to name the group Pink Floyd.

Blues-rock soon receded in Pink Floyd's music, giving way to songs that built on the Beatles' pop innovations and the expanded perceptions of the 1960's. The music followed Mr. Barrett's lyrics through meter changes, improbable interludes and the otherworldly sound effects the band was generating onstage at London clubs like UFO, a bastion of psychedelia. Mr. Barrett used an echo machine and slid a Zippo lighter along his guitar strings to create one of Pink Floyd's sonic signatures.

In early 1967, Pink Floyd signed to EMI Records. Its first two singles — "Arnold Layne," a fond song about a transvestite, and "See Emily Play" — reached the British Top 20. Pink Floyd made its debut album at Abbey Road Studios, as the Beatles worked on "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" next door. "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" was a definitive psychedelic album. Its songs mixed childlike wonder with portents of disaster, and its music veered off on exuberant tangents before returning to pop choruses.

Onstage, the music was more free-form and anarchic. Band members have said Mr. Barrett was unstable even before he began extensive drug use, and he developed a reputation for odd behavior. For one show, he tried to slick down his hair with a combination of Brylcreem and crushed Mandrax tranquilizer pills, which were melted by stage lights and started to ooze down his face as he played. Playing the Fillmore West on Pink Floyd's 1967 American tour, Mr. Barrett stood staring into space and detuning the strings on his guitar. The band cut short its American tour.

During 1967, Mr. Barrett was taking LSD every day, and that often left him incapable of performing. Mr. Gilmour joined Pink Floyd late in 1967, and by the spring of 1968, Mr. Barrett was out of the band. He wrote the song that closes "A Saucerful of Secrets," Pink Floyd's second album: "Jugband Blues," which includes a Salvation Army band playing on one section. "It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here," he sang, "and I'm most obliged to you for making it clear/that I'm not here."

Without Mr. Barrett, Pink Floyd's music changed. Whimsy gave way to majestic anthems on best-selling albums like "Dark Side of the Moon," a concept album about insanity.

Mr. Barrett was treated in psychiatric hospitals and quietly began recording songs and fragments of songs. Some were solo recordings with an acoustic guitar that other musicians were brought in to accompany; others were recorded with fellow musicians in the studio, or with Mr. Barrett working over finished backup tracks. The irregular structures of Mr. Barrett's songs frustrated studio musicians and various producers, but Mr. Waters and Mr. Gilmour eventually took over production and completed "The Madcap Laughs," released in January 1970.

Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Barrett returned to the studio to make "Barrett," released in November 1970. On both albums, Mr. Barrett sounds fragile but oddly serene, following his rhymes whether they lead to nonsense or revelation.

Mr. Barrett appeared on BBC Radio and played one brief show at the London Olympia in 1970 (accompanied by Mr. Gilmour), walking offstage after four songs. In 1972, he made a last attempt to lead a band, Stars, which played a half-dozen shows in England before disbanding. Recording sessions in 1974 were unproductive.

Since then, Mr. Barrett lived quietly, spending some of his time painting. He showed up at unlikely moments: he appeared unannounced, for instance, at a 1975 Pink Floyd session as the band recorded "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond." A British magazine reported that he was institutionalized for two years in the early 1980's. Outtakes from his solo albums were released in 1988 as "Opel," and a boxed set collecting all three solo albums, "Crazy Diamond," was released in 1993. He learned he had Type II diabetes in 1998.

Mr. Barrett's survivors include a brother, Alan, and a sister, Rosemary.

For someone with such a brief career, Mr. Barrett has never been forgotten. Indie-rockers have long tried to emulate his twisted craftsmanship, paying tribute in songs like Television Personalities' "I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives." Sir Tom Stoppard 's new play, "Rock 'n' Roll," invokes him as a lost free spirit.

The Dallas Morning News reports that doctors who perform abortions could be subject to the death penalty. The article is reprinted below. As much as we love the death penalty, especially in Texas, we are obsessed with abortion, for the right reasons and for the wrong reasons. We put up with a cat and mouse game between prospective judges and the politicians who are required to examine their views to see if they are fit to serve on the bench. The judges will not tell the Senators their views on any issue of importance as that strategy allows them to avoid discussing their views on abortion, an issue that only arises in the Supreme Court once or twice per decade. Then the judges get confirmed to the court and they voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that recognized a constitutional right to an abortion. Much of national and even local politics revolves around abortion.

But abortion is a particularly important issue for woman as it may represent the most important decision she makes in her lifetime. There's an old saying that if men could have children, abortion would be as legal as cigarettes and liquor. But there is an element of control here. Some men like to tell women what to do. Any claim by a right wing politician that abortion is bad because it constitutes the taking of a human life is fallacious. These same politicians send our children to unjust wars and condemn as treasonous those who have the nerve to ask questions about the war.

Books upon books have been written about the abortion wars. Legal scholars have made a career out of analyzing the Supreme Court's abortion rulings. My favorite story dates to 1992. That year, the Supreme Court shocked us all by re-affirming the right to abortion in a ruling that saw three Republican justices side with the pro-choice position on the theory that the Court cannot just reverse its prior rulings simply because older justices retire and new justices take their place. According to Wikipedia, Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, "changed his vote at the last minute and joined with fellow Reagan-Bush justices Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter to form a plurality that would uphold Roe." The law requires some degree of certainty and the court's legitimacy is threatened when it acts like a political body.

That ruling, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, was filled with angry insults from the conservative justices who were quite pissed off that the Court did not quash the right to abortion once and for all. The clerks who work for the justices -- recent law school graduates who conduct much of the research for the opinions and even write some of them -- had a party at the end of the Supreme Court term. By then, the liberal clerks and the conservative clerks were wary of each other. Someone apparently had too much to drink and the clerks actually had a fistfight at the party over the Casey decision. That's right, a fistfight at the Supreme Court.

Could M.D.s face death in abortions? DAs think some cases could bring capital charges; AG asked to clarify recent laws

Wednesday, July 12, 2006
By CHRISTY HOPPE / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – Doctors who perform illegal abortions in Texas could be subject to the death penalty because of the way the Legislature has strung together recent statutes, according to the state's top prosecutor association.

By defining a fetus as "an individual" in 2003, and then making it a criminal act in 2005 to perform certain abortions, legislators might have unintentionally created a scenario in which physicians could be charged with the death of a child younger than 6 – a crime subject to capital punishment, according to the Texas District and County Attorneys Association.

The group has traveled throughout the state to educate prosecutors about changes made in criminal laws in the last regular legislative session and has discussed the abortion situation in its materials as an "expansion of capital murder" and a new way "of committing capital murder."

On Wednesday, Rep. David Swinford, R-Dumas, asked Attorney General Greg Abbott for an opinion to help clarify the abortion laws and their punishment.

The chairman of the State Affairs Committee, which hears most abortion-related bills, said in his letter that he disagreed with district attorneys' group interpretation.

Which code to use?
He stated that the Legislature intended that violations of parental consent procedures or late-term abortions should be punished under the medical Occupations Code. That provides for no greater than a third-degree felony charge.

The prosecutors' group looked to the state's Penal Code.

"We're not advocating one way or another," said Robert Kepple, executive director of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. "But we're going to talk about it because it's part of the law and people need to know about it."

The presentation on new laws was put together by Shannon Edmonds, a former prosecutor and former assistant general counsel to Gov. George W. Bush, and is based on a solid interpretation of the statutes, Mr. Kepple said.

"From what everyone's said, no one had the intention that the law read like this. But it's a pretty clear interpretation," he said.

The attorney general has 180 days to issue an opinion, but Mr. Abbott's decision is not binding on a court or a district attorney.

Last year, Mr. Abbott found that a law that extended certain protections to a fetus did not allow prosecutors to pursue pregnant women who abuse drugs or alcohol. Even so, a Potter County district attorney prosecuted and won convictions against two women under the same statute. Appeals are pending.

"This is the same connection. Any DA can go after physicians for not getting the right documentation on a parental consent form," said Peggy Romberg of the Women's Health and Family Planning Association.

She said with the looming possibility that a prosecutor could go after a doctor, women in Texas might find it more difficult to find a place that will perform abortions.

"The fallout will be to have physicians stop providing care if they believe that their actions might be called into question and fall under homicide statutes," Ms. Romberg said.

"We already have a dearth of physicians because of the scrutiny and harassment they receive in their personal and professional lives," she said. "I think it will have a chilling effect on doctors."

Steve Levine, director of communications for the Texas Medical Association, said his group welcomes an attorney general's opinion.

"Any physician who violates that law obviously should not be subject to capital punishment," Mr. Levine said.

He declined to comment on whether the potential for prosecution might deter doctors from performing abortions.

Joe Pojman, director of the Texas Alliance for Life, said his group asked Mr. Swinford to get an attorney general's opinion because of the harsh interpretation of the law by the district attorney's association.

"It's not something we would support," Mr. Pojman said.

Intent of Legislature
"It may be strange hearing that a pro-life organization doesn't think abortion doctors should be prosecuted as much as conceivable, but we are very committed to the basic principle that the intent of the Legislature should be followed," he said.

Mr. Pojman pointed out that when abortion was illegal before Roe vs. Wade, the punishment for violations then was about five years.

"We've got to make sure that some rogue district attorney doesn't interpret the law in a way that the Legislature did not intend," he said.

Mr. Pojman said that a prosecution of a doctor might produce the chilling effect feared by Ms. Romberg, but that the existence of "an esoteric publication just for prosecutors" is unlikely to stop the abortion practice in Texas.

Part of the murkiness of the law is that abortion opponents were unable to move a separate bill to outlaw almost all third-trimester abortions – except in cases where the mother's life is in danger – and tighten the parental notification law to require written consent.

And so Rep. Will Hartnett, R-Dallas, attached those provisions as amendments to a bill dealing with the licensing and oversight of doctors. The amendment did not address the state's criminal code, which prosecutors argue govern almost all criminal acts.

"We didn't write the law," Mr. Kepple said. "It appears from all accounts that the language in here was unintended, but it was something that was written that way."

President Bush addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People yesterday and commented on how blacks have all but abandoned the Republican Party. He said, "I consider it a tragedy that the party of Abraham Lincoln let go of its historic ties with the African-American community." He added, "For too long my party wrote off the African-American vote, and many African-Americans wrote off the Republican Party."

You would think that if the leader of the Republican Party really cared about building bridges between the party and the black community, he would have tried to do something about it sooner. Not so. As the New York Times put it, with no sense of irony, Bush's "relations with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have been so strained that, until Thursday, he was the first president since Herbert Hoover to refuse to address the group."

Here is why Bush cannot endear himself to blacks anytime soon, and why his speech was nothing but a photo-op for a subliterate fratboy who has no business in the White House but is too incompetent to accomplish anything even if he stayed in the Oval Office from 9 to 5:

1. According to the Times, Jesse Jackson spoke to Bush backstage after the speech and urged him to begin "a meaningful dialogue'' with a broader range of black organizations. Bush's response: "He said, 'Well, talk with Karl Rove,' '' Mr. Jackson said, referring to Mr. Bush's chief political adviser. In other words, let my low-life Machiavellian backstabbing advisor take care of it.

2. He is also a liar. He told the NAACP: "I come from a family committed to civil rights. My faith tells me that we're all children of God, equally loved, equally cherished, equally entitled to the rights He grants us all." Bush's father is George H.W. Bush, who as a political candidate in the 1960's actually opposed the most far-reaching civil rights act of the 20th Century. According to Wikipedia, in running for the US Senate in 1964, "As the Republican nominee, Bush then aimed his campaign at the incumbent Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough, making an issue of Yarborough's support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."

George W's mother is no better. Again, Wikipedia: "On September 5, 2005, while visiting Hurricane Katrina relief centers in Houston, TX , she stated on the NPR program "Marketplace": "Almost everyone I've talked to says, 'We're gonna move to Houston.' What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas... Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality, and so many of the people in the arenas here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. This is working very well for them." Wikipedia reminds us that "Critics called these comments elitist and racist (the 15,000 evacuees in the Astrodome were mostly poor and black)."

3. He talks about education but he sounds like the uneducated. Here's what he said, and read this out loud to someone next to you and get their reaction: "We'll work together, and as we do so, you must understand I understand that racism still lingers in America. (Applause.) It's a lot easier to change a law than to change a human heart."

4. The audience can see right through him. When he said "And I understand that many African Americans distrust my political party," according to the transcript, the audience responded, "Yes! (Applause.)"

5. He said nothing about the Iraq War. But what can he say? It's a disaster. According to the Times the other day:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 18 — An average of more than 100 civilians per day were killed in Iraq last month, the United Nations reported Tuesday, registering what appears to be the highest official monthly tally of violent deaths since the fall of Baghdad.

The death toll, drawn from Iraqi government agencies, was the most precise measurement of civilian deaths provided by any government organization since the invasion and represented a substantial increase over the figures in daily news media reports.

Contributing to the trend cited by the United Nations, a suicide car bomber killed at least 53 people and wounded at least 105 in the holy Shiite city of Kufa on Tuesday after he lured a throng of day laborers to his van with the offer of work.

The attack, one of the bloodiest this year, struck at the heart of Shiite Islam — Kufa is a stronghold of the powerful Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and the site of a major shrine — and aggravated sectarian fury.

United Nations officials said Tuesday that the number of violent deaths had climbed steadily since at least last summer. During the first six months of this year, the civilian death toll jumped more than 77 percent, from 1,778 in January to 3,149 in June, the organization said.

This sharp upward trend reflected the dire security situation in Iraq as sectarian violence has worsened and Iraqi and American government forces have been unable to stop it.

In its report, the United Nations said that 14,338 civilians had died violently in Iraq in the first six months of the year.

What kind of society is it where the only people prosecuted in connection with the war in Iraq is a conscientious objector and not the criminals who initiated this unprovoked disaster in the first place?

Here is a U.S. soldier we can all be proud of. The New York Times over the weekend profiled a soldier who faces court-martial because he does not want to fight in Iraq. It's not that he's a coward. He volunteered to fight and wanted to go to Afghanistan. But since we are farting around in Iraq, we need soldiers there, too, so he was ordered to fight in that filthy war.

According to the Times:

When First Lt. Ehren K. Watada of the Army shipped out for a tour of duty in South Korea two years ago, he was a promising young officer rated among the best by his superiors. Like many young men after Sept. 11, he had volunteered "out of a desire to protect our country," he said, even paying $800 for a medical test to prove he qualified despite childhood asthma.

What happened to Mr. Watada? "I was still willing to go until I started reading," Lieutenant Watada said in an interview one recent evening.

On Jan. 25, "with deep regret," he delivered a passionate two-page letter to his brigade commander, Col. Stephen J. Townsend, asking to resign his commission. "Simply put, I am wholeheartedly opposed to the continued war in Iraq, the deception used to wage this war, and the lawlessness that has pervaded every aspect of our civilian leadership," Lieutenant Watada wrote.

This guy may have been a model soldier, but he had one flaw: he thinks for himself. The Times: "In retrospect, though, there may have been one ominous note in the praise heaped on him in his various military fitness reports: he was cited as having an 'insatiable appetite for knowledge.'" That appetite saw Mr. Watada read up on the road to the Iraq War, including James Bamford's book "A Pretext for War." As the Times describes the book, it "argues that the war in Iraq was driven by a small group of neoconservative civilians in the Pentagon and their allies in policy institutes. The book suggests that intelligence was twisted to justify the toppling of Saddam Hussein, with the goal of fundamentally changing the Middle East to the benefit of Israel."

Again, the Times: Next was "Chain of Command," by Seymour M. Hersh, about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. After that, Lieutenant Watada moved on to other publications on war-related themes, including selections on the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the so-called Downing Street memo, in which the British chief of intelligence told Prime Minister Tony Blair in July 2002 that the Americans saw war in Iraq as "inevitable" and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Lieutenant Watada said he also talked to soldiers returning to Fort Lewis from Iraq, including a staff sergeant who told him that he and his men had probably committed war crimes.

"When I learned the awful truth that we had been deceived — I was shocked and disgusted," he wrote in the letter to his brigade commander.

He faces a devastating penalty for his refusal to fight in this filthy war: possibly seven years in prison. In fact, the people who belong in prison are the ones who orchestrated this war and want to force people to fight in a war they don't believe in. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits "involuntary servitude." The Courts have interpreted this provision to prohibit slavery, but, really, it should cover a military draft and the situation with Lieutenant Watada.

There will be some who regard this guy as a traitor or un-American. But standing up for what you believe in is as American as baseball. Forcing someone to fight in an unjust war that he does not believe in is disgraceful, particularly since he can come home in a pine box or paralyzed or emotionally traumatized.

As Associated Press reported over the weekend, "The group Human Rights Watch said in a report released Sunday that U.S. military commanders encouraged abusive interrogations of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison scandal called attention to the issue in 2004. Between 2003 and 2005, prisoners were routinely physically mistreated, deprived of sleep and exposed to extreme temperatures as part of the interrogation process, the report said. 'Soldiers were told that the Geneva Conventions did not apply, and that interrogators could use abusive techniques to get detainees to talk,' wrote John Sifton, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. The organization said it based its conclusion on interviews with military personnel and sworn statements in declassified documents."

We should all have the choice whether to destroy ourselves and to kill or maim or torture others. How can we be forced to do this? This guy chooses not to. In my book, this guy is the real hero. Here's what I think: the ones who want to court-martial him are animals who belong in a cage.

Remember the dweebs you knew in high school, the ones who kissed the teachers' asses and became hall monitors? You know who I'm talking about, the ones who went to pep rallies and made us all sick? Well, they grew up to be Congressional Republicans.

There are three ways to deal with real problems in our world. One way is to deal with the problems. The other way is to ignore them. The third way is to make things worse.

We make things worse in this country by throwing gasoline on the fire and then ignoring the fire. Then we worry that the Dumpster might burn rather than worry about people inside the building. Two recent news stories highlight this pathological refusal to deal with reality.

Last week's heat wave inconvenienced us all but especially those who lost electricity. We often hear about people freezing to death but more people die from heat-related causes than the cold. People living in apartment buildings without adequate air conditioning will not live long, especially the elderly. A horrifying account of this phenomenon was reported in "Heat Wave," a book about the 1995 heat wave in Chicago which killed hundreds of people. Last week, approximately 100,000 people in New York City lost electricity and roasted in the 90-100 degree heat. Some people had no water. This happens all the time, and there are no provisions for these people. If our government bungled the Hurricane Katrina aftermath by sticking people in inadequate sports arenas, what does it say about our response to power outages when there is nowhere for people to go?

In the face of this crisis, what are the Congressional Republicans doing? Trying to prohibit the Federal courts from ruling on any cases challenging the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance. "We should not and cannot rewrite history to ignore our spiritual heritage," said Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn). "It surrounds us. It cries out for our country to honor God." That voters would elect a guy named Zach Wamp is bad enough. That Mr. Wamp is not ridiculed from coast to coast for saying this is even worse.

Mr. Wamp's colleague said, "This is an issue that clearly resonates to what we are about as a country," said House Republican Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). To put it bluntly, Mr. Blunt, maybe forcing kids to honor God every morning should not be our priority. Mr. Blunt, you're a schmuck.

Recall a few years ago when an atheist sued over the Pledge's reference to "under God." The Pledge does not need a religious reference and the Federal court in California struck "under God" in the school context. The Supreme Court reversed that ruling on technical grounds having nothing to do with the separation of church and state. So the issue of whether "under God" is legal is still up in the air.

"Court stripping" is a nefarious practice in which ideologues try to prevent the courts from resolving an issue. The Federal laws rarely allow for this. For example, a routine slip and fall case cannot generally be heard in Federal court because it does not involve a federal or constitutional issue. Personal injury is usually for the state courts because it involves state laws. But most civil rights cases are heard in Federal court, where the judges have life tenure and will not bend their rulings to conform to popular will.

According to Associated Press, Davison Douglas, a professor at the William and Mary School of Law, said constitutional scholars are divided over whether such congressional restrictions on judicial review would pass constitutional muster. He noted that "past efforts to bar all federal court review of hot-button social issues have consistently failed. Hence, if this bill is enacted, it would be a highly significant landmark in terms of congressional efforts to control the actions of federal courts."

Republican efforts to strip the Federal courts of their authority to rule on the Pledge of Allegiance resemble the pathetic attempts to pass a Constitutional amendment to prohibit flag burning. Much effort over a non-problem and strong-arming the world to their childing point of view favoring total adherence to authority and the avoidance of dissent. If these demagogues want their kids to say the Pledge of Allegiance with "under God," they can get up early and supervise a breakfast table Pledge of Allegiance, God and all, with their own children. But please don't shove God down our throats.

Associated Press reports that "The pledge bill was part of the House GOP's "American values agenda" that House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said would "defend America's founding principles." Another part of that agenda, a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, was defeated in the House on Tuesday."

Want some more? According to Associated Press, "Also on Wednesday, the House was voting on legislation that would designate a 29-foot-high cross as a federal war memorial to prevent it from being removed from public land in San Diego."

Civil rights are not self-enforcing. What that means is that you don't just enact civil rights laws and expect that people will comply with them on their own. Same goes for the Constitution. We all talk about how wonderful the Constitution is, but it's just a document waiting to be enforced by people who care about it. The way our society is structured, it's usually civil rights lawyers who take necessary action to make sure that the civil rights laws and the Constitution are complied with.

In 1976, Congress passed a law that said that if the civil rights plaintiff wins the case, her lawyer gets her legal fees paid by the defendant, usually a company or government agency. This way, the lawyers have an incentive to take the case without charge in the hopes that the payday comes when the plaintiff wins. The reason for this law was that without lawyers willing to take that chance, few civil rights lawsuits will be filed as the lawyer has no economic incentive to proceed, especially since most civil rights plaintiffs have no money to pay a lawyer. Lawyers cannot always work for free, so they would not bring these cases and instead focus on cases that will bring in the bucks, like personal injury and divorce cases.

I would say that the Attorneys' Fees Law of 1976 did as much to make this country free and democratic as the civil rights laws themselves, for without this law the civil rights statutes are almost meaningless as there's no one willing to represent civil rights victims in court.

Congress today is run by rightists who think that the public display of religious symbols is more important than granting people the health insurance they need to live productive and long lives. They also think that putting a Christmas tree on public property or having kids recite the Lord's Prayer in school is more important than making sure the troops in Iraq have enough body armor.

So it comes as no surprise that these radical conservatives want to push their religious preferences on everyone else. They have figured out a way to do it: by making it impossible for lawyers to get paid if they win one of these cases. That way, the cases are not pursued and the religious fanatics can do whatever they want. Some people may argue that I am overstating the case in stating that laws like this would be the first step in killing civil rights in this country. I don't think so.

Attorneys' Fees In Church Cases To Be Tested
BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
July 26, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/36773

A bill to prevent the award of attorneys' fees in establishment-of-religion cases brought in federal courts faces its first key test today in Congress.

The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on the legislation, called the Public Expression of Religion Act.

The sponsor of the bill, Rep. John Hostettler, a Republican of Indiana, said yesterday that the measure is designed to prevent organizations that bring church-state cases from intimidating local governments with the specter of a massive award of attorney's fees.

"It's the Sword of Damocles, you might say, that hangs over every one of these entities,"Mr. Hostettler said. He said he believes that local officials are giving in to groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, despite indications that the Supreme Court would be amenable to the use of religious themes in public monuments and buildings.

"I believe it'll pass tomorrow," he told The New York Sun. "There's a lot of excitement about this bill."

A veterans' group, the American Legion, has pushed hard for the legislation in order to preserve war memorials that include religious symbols such as crosses. One monument, a mountaintop cross in San Diego, has been the subject of litigation for more than 15 years. Last month, Justice Kennedy blocked a lower court order that the cross be taken down immediately.

"I'm appalled at the notion that the ACLU or any other purported public interest law firm would be suing veterans' memorials and then seeking taxpayer-funded attorney fee awards," a lawyer and unit commander with the American Legion, Rees Lloyd, said. Mr. Lloyd, a former ACLU staff attorney, accused the group of seeking to profit from such cases.

"The ACLU has lost all moorings and common sense and rationality and proportionality," he said. "It's become the Taliban of American liberal secularism."

The ACLU did not return calls seeking comment for this article.

The executive director of Americans United, Rev. Barry Lynn, said the proposed law is a back-door effort to discourage lawyers from bringing cases under the Constitution's establishment clause. "That's why the religious right likes this. They can't win on the merits, so they're trying to keep us out of court," he said.

Rev. Lynn said the "fee-stripping" restriction would apply not only to litigation over religious symbolism, but also over the teaching of creationism in public schools. "No other professional people are expected to work for nothing to get people their fundamental rights," he said.

In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a report which said that global warming is caused by human activity. This was bad news for the White House, as President Bush had reneged on his campaign promise to sign onto the international Kyoto Protocols dealing with global warming. Someone must have told Bush and Cheney that reduced emissions mean reduced profits for the corporate sector.

Bush had to send a message to his corporate sponsors that he would not take any action to deal with global warming, Environmental Protection Agency be damned. When asked about the report, he dismissively told the media: "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy." Here's how the question and answer went down at a White House press conference (taken from the White House web site):

Q Mr. President, good morning, sir. Do you plan any new initiatives on -- to combat global warming?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I've laid out that very comprehensive initiative. I read the report put out by a -- put out by the bureaucracy. I do not support the Kyoto treaty. The Kyoto treaty would severely damage the United States economy, and I don't accept that. I accept the alternative we put out, that we can grow our economy and, at the same time, through technologies, improve our environment.

Interesting response. We associate bureaucracy with the worst that government has to offer. Bureaucracy is what causes snafus with our health insurance, takes kids away from their parents, convicts the innocent, spends $500 on a toilet seat and generally screws up whatever it sets out to do. We all hate the bureaucracy. So when the EPA told Bush that global warming is rooted in human activity, he in effect threw the report in the garbage and told us it was just bureaucratic bullshit.

Meanwhile, the world burns. The only planet that gives us life. In California, the heat wave has killed 100 people. According to the New York Times:

A searing heat wave nearly two weeks old is responsible for more than 100 deaths across California, the authorities said Thursday. So overwhelmed is the local coroner's office here that it has been forced to double-stack bodies.

. . .

The toll of such casualties has no recent precedent in California. According to data provided by the California Department of Health Services, the greatest number of heat-related deaths in the state since 1989 had been 40, in 2000. A department spokeswoman, Patti Roberts, said data prior to 1989 were unavailable.

. . .

A doctor and his assistant toiled here on Thursday in the coroner's office, which recently grew to 50 beds from 25 after getting a bioterrorism grant but has rarely had 25 bodies. On Thursday morning there were 58. The morgue was converted from an eyeglass factory several years ago and has no air-conditioning in crucial areas. Decomposition has been a problem, Ms. Cervantes said, and bodies have piled up because of the lack of space.

The Associated Press reported a few weeks ago that "Warmer waters disrupt Pacific food chain." The article reads:

On these craggy, remote islands west of San Francisco, the largest seabird colony in the contiguous United States throbs with life. Seagulls swarm so thick that visitors must yell to be heard above their cries. Pelicans glide.

But the steep decline of one bird species for the second straight year has rekindled scientists' fears that global warming could be undermining the coastal food supply, threatening not just the Farallones but entire marine ecosystems.

Tiny Cassin's auklets live much of their lives on the open ocean. But in spring, these gray-and-white relatives of the puffin venture to isolated Pacific outposts like the Farallones to dig deep burrows and lay their eggs.

Adult auklets usually feed their chicks with krill, the minuscule shrimp-like crustaceans that anchor the ocean's complex food web.

But not this year. Almost none of the 20,000 pairs of Cassin's auklets nesting in the Farallones will raise a chick that lives more than a few days, a repeat of last year's "unprecedented" breeding failure, according to Russ Bradley, a seabird biologist with the Point Reyes Bird Observatory who monitors the birds on the islands.

Scientists blame changes in West Coast climate patterns for a delay in the seasonal upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich waters from the ocean's depths for the second year in a row. Weak winds and faltering currents have left the Gulf of the Farallones without krill, on which Cassin's auklets and a variety of other seabirds, fish and mammals depend for food.

"The seas are warmer. And the number of krill being produced is lower," said Bradley as he held a Cassin's auklet chick, the only one from a study of 400 nests he expected to survive.

"Normally we would have hundreds," he said.

. . .

"How many years in a row do you see this before you start raising your eyebrows?" said Frank Schwing, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Pacific Grove.

Meanwhile, the New York Review of Books recently summarized various books recently released on the issue of global warming. This is an article worth printing out and reading as it presents as comprehensive a summary of global warming as you'll want to read. Here's a taste of the analysis:

How much will sea level rise with five degrees of global warming? Here too, our best information comes from the Earth's history. The last time that the Earth was five degrees warmer was three million years ago, when sea level was about eighty feet higher.

Eighty feet! In that case, the United States would lose most East Coast cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Miami; indeed, practically the entire state of Florida would be under water. Fifty million people in the US live below that sea level. Other places would fare worse. China would have 250 million displaced persons. Bangladesh would produce 120 million refugees, practically the entire nation. India would lose the land of 150 million people.

The day will come, I'm sure, when civil liberties in this country are so eroded that this country will become unrecognizable. If you have read any of the books recently issued about the Bush administration which report the behind-the-scenes strategies of the reactionary ideologues in Washington, this prediction will not come as a surprise.

In his new book, The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind, the author explains the motivating force behind U.S. foreign policy since September 11: we must respond decisively and with great force even if there is a one percent chance that a rogue government or terrorist might get its hands on weapons of mass destruction. This explains the Iraq War: of course there was a one percent change that Iraq had WMD's. There is a one percent chance of anything happening at any time. But a one percent chance is what now drives U.S. foreign policy. Paranoia reigns supreme at the White House, according to Suskind, and the one percent doctrine can produce whatever war you want.

The one percent doctrine can also produce strict rules on civil liberties. Associated Press reported over the weekend that "U.S. citizens suspected of terror ties might be detained indefinitely and barred from access to civilian courts under legislation proposed by the Bush administration, say legal experts reviewing an early version of the bill."

When scared, the American public will put up with just about anything. In World War II, the government rounded up Japanese Americans and threw them into internment camps in California for the duration of the war. The Supreme Court said this was legal. The places were hell-holes. According to Wikipedia:

According to a 1943 War Relocation Authority report, internees were housed in " tar paper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind." The spartan facilities met International laws, but still left much to be desired. Many camps were built quickly by civilian contractors during the summer of 1942 based on designs for military barracks, making the buildings poorly equipped for cramped family living. In other areas, the internees had to build the barracks-like structures themselves.
To describe the conditions in more detail, the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in northwestern Wyoming was a barbed-wire-surrounded enclave with unpartioned toilets, cots for beds, and a budget of 45 cents daily per capita for food rations. Because most internees were evacuated from their West Coast homes on short notice and not told of their destination, many failed to pack appropriate clothing for Wyoming winters which often reached temperatures below zero Fahrenheit. Many families were forced to simply take the "clothes on their backs."

The phrase "shikata ga nai " (loosely translated as "it cannot be helped") was commonly used to summarize the interned families' resignation to their helplessness throughout these conditions. Although that may be the view to outsiders, the Japanese people knew that, in order to prove themselves as "loyal citizens", they must do what was asked of them by their government.

It's hard to imagine the government getting away with this today, but if we suffer another terrorist attack, who knows? What if the American people were able to give their true opinions about civilian roundups, without fear of any stigma associated with proposing draconian solutions?

Here's the rest of the AP story on confining enemy combatants in the U.S.:

According to the draft, the military would be allowed to detain all "enemy combatants" until hostilities cease. The bill defines enemy combatants as anyone "engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners who has committed an act that violates the law of war and this statute." Legal experts said Friday that such language is dangerously broad and could authorize the military to detain indefinitely U.S. citizens who had only tenuous ties to terror networks like al Qaeda ."That's the big question ... the definition of who can be detained," said Martin Lederman, a law professor at Georgetown University who posted a copy of the bill to a Web blog.

Scott L. Silliman, a retired Air Force Judge Advocate, said the broad definition of enemy combatants is alarming because a U.S. citizen loosely suspected of terror ties would lose access to a civilian court — and all the rights that come with it. Administration officials have said they want to establish a secret court to try enemy combatants that factor in realities of the battlefield and would protect classified information.