We all knew it was nonsense, but George W. Bush DID campaign as a so-called "compassionate conservative." That sounded good for many people: compassionate, but conservative. Whatever that means. Apparently, it meant very little.

The Federal government has a health care program for poor children, called SCHIP. Congress voted to expand it. Bush said no. So for now, many children will continue to go without health insurance. It's a mystery how he gets away with this, and maybe Bush won't, but a sure sign that our political culture quickly forgets about stuff like this is the arsenic policy of 2001, prior to 9/11, when Bush "announced plans to rescind a Clinton-era regulation limiting the amount of arsenic allowed in drinking water." We all howled when the arsenic decision was made, but who remembers now?

Our system of goverment means that someone's got to make these tough decisions. That person is in the form of President Dingbat. Bush told an audience the other day: "My job is a decision-making job. And as a result, I make a lot of decisions. And it’s important for me to have an opportunity to speak to you and others who would be listening about the basis on which I have made decisions, to explain the philosophy behind some of the decisions I have made."

The buffoonery surrounding American health care policy allows the President to get away with suggesting over the summer that we all, in fact, really do have health insurance. "The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.” So if the children are dying or suffered a serious injury, they can go to the hospital for health care. If they have a fever or need routine check-ups that can forestall more serious health problems down the road, they can also go to the emergency room. Except that the emergency room does not provide routine treatment and check-ups. Only a god-damned moron would suggest that access to the emergency room qualifies as guaranteed health care.

"This government does not torture people," President Bush said in an Associated Press article. But previously secret documents unearthed by the New York Times on October 4 say otherwise, confirming once again the downhill slide into the shitpile that the Bush administration has dragged all of us into. Here's the Times' expose:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Did you get that? The double-secret torture policy has been on the books for quite some time. The dance has already started: the Bush administration still says we don't torture. Our instincts say that torture works and that the ticking time-bomb can be dismantled if we force a terrorist to tell the truth. But experts actually disagree that torture works, including people with experince in the military and foreign policy. The idea is that someone will say anything to make the torture stop, and then investigators will waste time exploring that "admission" when the time is better spent tracking down real leads. Also, the most committed terrorists will not say anything useful. Meanwhile our use of torture around the world creates a blowback: our own soldiers are tortured in retaliation. These are our brothers and sisters.

If the plumber that I hired to fix the shower came into the house with a scowl on his face and reeked of enough seething anger to melt the paint off the wall, I would think twice before hiring him again. Same goes for the automobile mechanic and the dog groomer. So why isn't anyone shocked that the angriest man on Earth is one of nine people authorized to interpret and give meaning to the United States Constitution?

I'm talking about Clarence Thomas, who came out of hiding this month with the release of his autobiography. His media blitz (to conservative talk show hosts who asked him softball questions and commiserated with him) revealed a profoundly angry man who is still seething over the racism he experienced as a young man and the sexual harassment allegations which nearly destroyed his Supreme Court candidacy in 1991. Anger may be a good motivator, but not all the time. It's time to get this man to a shrink.

Clarence Thomas testified before the U.S. Senate in 1991 when the first President Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court. Thomas is now whining that it was racist for people to question his qualifications at the time, since no one ever asks that question of white nominees. But how many white nominees are only 43 years old with minimal judicial experience before serving on the Supreme Court, authorized to issue binding opinions on civil rights and liberties for the next 30 years? Thomas has said that his critics unfairly judged him and that they are no better than the Ku Klux Klan which terrorized black people in the south when Thomas was growing up. But no one in his right mind would disagree with the following proposition: the only reason he was appointed to the Supreme Court was because of his race. Many, many judges in this country had more experience than Thomas, and dozens of law professors and practicing lawyers certainly had a more scholarly background.

At the time, people said that Thomas would find his voice and remember his roots. I knew that would never happen. You don't sell out by working for the reactionary Reagan administration and then turn around and stab your political benefactors in the back. Thomas has turned into the most conservative and reactionary Supreme Court Justice in my lifetime. Anyone who disagrees with this is simply not paying attention.

As usual, media coverage of Thomas's media blitz has been more superficial than substantive. I hear nothing but his belated complaints about the despicable men in the U.S. Senate who advanced a racist stereotype and believed Anita Hill's testimony that Thomas sexually harassed her. But I hear nothing about the appalling record that Thomas has complied on the Court. Let's review his record.

Leaving aside Thomas's terrible rulings in which other members of the Court agreed with him -- such as his unprecedented decision to stop the recount in the 2000 presidential election and other rulings which have scaled back the cause of civil rights and racial justice -- a review of Thomas's viewpoints shows the following:

1. When he testified before the U.S. Senate on his confirmation, he said that he used to watch prisoners being shackled into the Courthouse over the years, and he thought to himself, "There but for the grace of God go I." But only a few months later, as a Justice, he ruled that inmates who get the shit kicked out of them cannot sue the prison guards under the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Constitution. The legal community was appalled at this judgment. But by then, it was too late. He was on the Court and just beginning the sharpen up his repertoire.

2. In June 2007, issuing a separate ruling in a free speech case involving a high school student, Thomas decided that public school students should have no rights whatsoever under the First Amendment. The reasoning was that when the Constitution was created in 1787, the prevailing view at the time was that students should be seen and not heard and that viewpoint must govern how we interpret the First Amendment over 200 years later. This is called "originalist" thinking, i.e., interpreting the Constitution as if it's frozen in time so that the world view in 1787 is the only way to understand the Constitution in the modern era. This is like the fundamentalist Bible scholars who take that document literally and remain rigid and arrogant to the core.

3. When the Supreme Court took up the Pledge of Allegience case a few years ago, he actually disagreed with the other conservatives on the Court and decided instead that the Pledge violates the constitutional separation of church and state because the Pledge refers to "under God." But he only felt that way because Supreme Court precedent, in his view, went so far as to restrict a religious reference in a daily schoolhouse ritual. But, Thomas said, all those cases have been wrongly decided and should be overturned right away. That would throw out decades and decades of case law precedent in order to, once again, bring the religious separation clause back to 1787. He then said something else that very, very few scholars agree with or even gave much thought to: he thinks that the provisions in the Constitution mandating separation of church and state do not in any way restrict the States from joining church and state. He said this clause only affects Federal government decisionmaking. So, the much-respected separation of church and state, according to Thomas, does not apply to the great majority of government decisionmaking. This is nuts.

This is the tip of the iceberg. No one anticipated that Thomas was this reactionary when he was nominated to the Supreme Court. He did not tell us that he saw the world this way. As a Supreme Court Justice, no one else on the Court agreed with Thomas on the outrageous legal views outlined above. He was a lone dissenter as the other conservative Justices politely declined to sign onto his wild opinions. Legally, Thomas' influence on these issues is no different from writing them onto a paper airplane and flying it out the window. But Supreme Court Justices write these lone opinions in the belief that someday a more enlightened Court will see the light and adopt these views as the law of the land. It has happened before. Thomas hopes it will happen again. What would Clarence Thomas' United States look like? I don't even want to know.

Bruce Springsteen has a new album out. I haven't heard it, but apparently he is continuing to perform political music. His recent interview with 60 Minutes is right on target. Why is it only the anti-war performers who are seen as un-patriotic?

He was asked, "What's on your mind? What are you writing about?" He answered:

"I guess I would say that what I do is I try to chart the distance between American ideals and American reality. That's how my music is laid out. It's like we've reached a point where it seems that we're so intent on protecting ourselves that we're willing to destroy the best parts of ourselves to do so," Springsteen says.

"I think that we've seen things happen over the past six years that I don't think anybody ever thought they'd ever see in the United States. When people think of the American identity, they don't think of torture. They don't think of illegal wiretapping. They don't think of voter suppression. They don't think of no habeas corpus. No right to a lawyer … you know. Those are things that are anti-American."

When the interviewer suggests that some may interpret the music as un-patriotic, Springsteen replies:

"Well, that's just the language of the day, you know? The modus operandi for anybody who doesn't like somebody, you know, criticizing where we've been or where we're goin'," Springsteen says. "It's unpatriotic at any given moment to sit back and let things pass that are damaging to some place that you love so dearly. And that has given me so much. And that I believe in, I still feel and see us as a beacon of hope and possibility."

He was also asked, "What needs to be said, in this country at this moment, in your opinion, what needs to be said?" He answered:

"I think we live in a time when what is true can be made to seem a lie," Springsteen says. "And what is lie can be made to seem true. And I think that the successful manipulation of those things have characterized several of our past elections. That level of hubris and arrogance has got us in the mess that we're in right now. And we're in a mess. But if we subvert, the best things that we're about in the name of protecting our freedoms, if we remove them, then who are we becoming, you know? Who are we, you know? The American idea is a beautiful idea. It needs to be preserved, served, protected and sung out. Sung out."

In winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in fighting global warming, Al Gore only confirms my theory that the presidency (and vice presidency) brings out the worst in people and that we do our best work after leaving the White House. The Amercan political system is so corrupt and vile and even good people do horrible things when they ascend to the presidency and vice presidency. Al Gore is better off not running for President again, if only because he can now speak his mind more freely. His last book, The Assault on Reason, tore George W. Bush a new one and told it like it was. Was this the same guy who sat next to Bill Clinton for eight years as Wall Street's favorite president? Yes, it was the same guy. Below is the best column I could find on Al Gore and the Peace Prize, and what it all means.

October 13, 2007 Op-Ed Columnist The Trivial Pursuit By BOB HERBERT Yesterday began with the gratifying news that Al Gore, derided by George H.W. Bush as the “Ozone Man,” had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The first thing media types wanted to know was whether this would prompt Mr. Gore to elbow his way into the presidential campaign. That’s like asking someone who’s recovered from a heart attack if he plans to resume smoking.

Mr. Gore, who won an Academy Award for his documentary on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and an Emmy for his cable TV network, Current, knows better than anyone else how toxic and downright idiotic presidential politics has become.

He may be one of the most intelligent, thoughtful, talented men in America and remarkably well-equipped to lead the nation, but it’s Mr. Bush’s less-than-curious, less-than-distinguished son, George W., who is president.

There are all kinds of ironies wrapped up in the title of Mr. Gore’s latest book, “The Assault on Reason.”

When I heard that Mr. Gore had won the Nobel, my thoughts wandered to the younger Mr. Bush and to Rudolph Giuliani, who is leading the current field of Republican presidential candidates.

Mr. Bush came to mind because, for all of the obvious vulnerabilities he exhibited in 2000, it was not him but Mr. Gore who was mocked unmercifully by the national media. And the mockery had nothing to do with the former vice president’s positions on important policy issues. He was mocked because of his personality.

In the race for the highest office in the land, we showed the collective maturity of 3-year-olds.

Mr. Gore was taken to task for his taste in clothing and for such grievous offenses as sighing or, allegedly, rolling his eyes. It was a given that at a barbecue everyone would rush to be with his opponent.

We’ve paid a heavy price. The president who got such high marks as a barbecue companion doesn’t seem to know up from down. He’s hurled the nation into a ruinous war that has cost countless lives and spawned a whole new generation of terrorists. He continues to sit idly by as a historic American city, New Orleans, remains wounded and on its knees. He’s blithely steered the nation into a bottomless pit of debt.

I could go on.

Mr. Gore actually polled the most votes in 2000, but he was criticized for not having whipped Mr. Bush decisively enough to have avoided the madness in Florida.

Mr. Gore knows the system is in trouble, and not just because of the way he lost in 2000. The last time I spoke to him, a few months ago, he said: “Having served in the White House with the Gingrich Congress, and having watched the best of intentions so often turned into small changes ballyhooed as revolutionary, sometimes having no lasting mark, I really do believe that fixing the dynamic of democracy is an urgent task.”

That’s just the kind of thoughtful comment that can’t get a real hearing in our sound-bite politics. The result is that reality, untidy and complex, is almost always trumped by well-crafted phoniness.

Which brings us to Mr. Giuliani.

The entire basis for this former mayor’s candidacy is his contention that he is some kind of expert, a veritable guru, on matters related to terrorism.

“I understand terrorism,” he says, “in a way that is equal to or exceeds anyone else.”

And yet in the two most important decisions he has made with regard to terror, he has miserably failed.

Mr. Giuliani foolishly insisted, against expert advice, on placing New York City’s state-of-the-art emergency command center on the 27th floor of a 47-story building that was known to be a terror target and that was destroyed in the World Trade Center attack.

And he pushed hard for the corrupt and grotesquely underqualified Bernard Kerik to be appointed to the top antiterror post in the Bush administration, secretary of homeland security.

In an episode that humiliated the president, the nomination had to be scrapped after boatloads of damaging information began to emerge about Mr. Kerik. (He has since pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors and remains under federal investigation.)

But Mr. Giuliani, who shares with Mr. Bush a Manichaean view of the world and an aggressive, authoritarian temperament, remains not just a viable candidate, but the G.O.P. front-runner.

Al Gore is a serious man confronted by a political system that is not open to a serious exploration of important, complex issues. He knows it.

“What politics has become,” he said, with a laugh and a tinge of regret, “requires a level of tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I have found in short supply.”

The best singer you've never heard of is Nick Drake, an English folksinger who died young in 1974. His albums did not sell, but they sell today through word of mouth. Someone once wrote that Drake represents the high point of British folk music. I tend to agree. Give the YouTube graphic a few seconds to load.

A retired U.S. military leader last week strongly criticized the Iraq war. This was no ordinary general. Lt. Gen. Sanchez commanded coalition troops on the inside and obviously worked closely with the Bush maladministration in prosecuting the war. Here's the AP article:

The U.S. mission in Iraq is a "nightmare with no end in sight" because of political misjudgments after the fall of Saddam Hussein that continue today, a former chief of U.S.-led forces said Friday.

Retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who commanded coalition troops for a year beginning June 2003, cast a wide net of blame for both political and military shortcomings in Iraq that helped open the way for the insurgency — such as disbanding the Saddam-era military and failing to cement ties with tribal leaders and quickly establish civilian government after Saddam was toppled.

He called current strategies — including the deployment of 30,000 additional forces earlier this year — a "desperate attempt" to make up for years of misguided policies in Iraq.

"There is no question that America is living a nightmare with no end in sight," Sanchez told a group of journalists covering military affairs.

Sanchez avoided pointing his criticism at any single official or agency, but it appeared a broad indictment of White House policies and a lack of leadership in the Pentagon to oppose them. Such assessments — even by former Pentagon brass — are not new, but they have added resonance as debates over war strategy dominate the presidential campaign.

Sanchez went on to offer a pessimistic view on the current U.S. strategy against extremists will make lasting gains, but said a full-scale withdrawal also was not an option.

"The American military finds itself in an intractable situation ... America has no choice but to continue our efforts in Iraq," said Sanchez, who works as a consultant training U.S. generals.

Another military leader recently also provided a scathing critique of the war:

During a round table discussion on “the Fight for Oil, Water and a Healthy Planet” at Stanford University on Saturday, Gen. John Abizaid (Ret.), the former CENTCOM Commander, said that “of course” the Iraq war is “about oil“:

“Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that,” Abizaid said of the Iraq campaign early on in the talk.”

The war is as much a part of our lives now as baseball. The rhythm of the baseball season is similar to the rhythm of war. Some bad news, some good news, mostly bad news, and God knows what the hell the President is talking about and who believes him anyway? But we know very little about the war because battlefield scenes are not televised and we still can't see caskets coming home from Iraq. So the war is like a movie that's always playing next door. Occasionally the volume is too loud, but for the most part it's background noise, something we've come to live with.

Our level of cynicism is so high that we understand the government lied through its teeth to push for war and that the American people wanted some kind of convincing response to 9/11, even if we attacked the wrong country. It's like a kid who shoots up the high school and kills 15 innocent classmates after being teased by the jocks. It's always the same excuse: "I had to do something." The difference is that the kid with the guns goes to jail and the President gets re-elected.

People my age always complain that modern music sucks. Actually, the people who make these complaints suck. There is always good stuff coming out. All you need is a friend who can send you new music that you don't have time to search out. This band, Camera Obscura, I know nothing about, except that they are not from the 1960's. But that doesn't mean they don't know about the 1960's. They obviously do. This video is corny but in a self-conscious kind of way. Which makes it grand.

The general public does not read court decisions, and that is a shame, because some of these decisions can be best-sellers. If you consider that some of the most successful authors of the last 20 years are legal fiction writers, it's a shame that some of the court rulings never become widely publicized considering the drama and human depravity that often surfaces through even a single lawsuit over civil rights or some other injustice.

The Federal courts do us a favor in writing their decisions: they write out the events leading up to the lawsuit at great length, really giving us a sense of what happened and why the case is important. A judge who can write well is able to suck the reader into reading the decision and a skilled legal writer can also write out the legal concepts in a way that makes sense to normal people.

In addition to this blog, I also maintain a legal blog covering the civil rights decisions of the United States Court of Appeals in Manhattan. Last week, my eyes lit up when I checked the daily decisions and saw that one case involved a guy who claimed he was forced to confess to a crime that he did not commit. This scenario surfaces from time to time for murders and other crimes, but this case was different because it involved the crime of the century: the 9/11 hijackings which launched this country into a new era.

The long and the short of it was that an Egpytian national, Abdallah Higazy, was staying in a hotel in New York City on September 11 and the hotel emptied out when the planes hit the towers. The hotel later found in the closet of his room a device that allows you to communicate with airline pilots. Investigators thought this guy had something to do with 9/11 so they questioned him. According to Higazi, the investigators coerced him into confessing to a role in 9/11. Higazi first adamantly denied any involvement with 9/11 and could not believe what was happening to him. Then, he says, the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy's life is worth garbage at that point, but ... well, that's why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States.

So Higazy "confesses" and he's processed by the criminal justice system. His future is quite bleak. Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back. This is like something out of the movies. The radio belonged to the pilot, not Higazy, and Higazy was free to go, the victim of horrible timing. Higazi was innocent! He next sued the hotel and the FBI agent for coercing his confession. The bottom line in the Court of Appeals: Higazy has a case and may recover damages for this injustice.

As I read the opinion I realized it was a 44 page epic, too long for me to print out. I blogged about the opinion while I read it online and then posted the blog as I ate lunch. Then something strange happened: a few minutes after I posted the blog, the opinion vanished from the Court of Appeals website! I had never seen this before, and what made all the more strange was that it involved a coerced confession over 9/11. What the hell was going on?

I let some other legal bloggers know about this, particulary the How Appealing blog and Appellate Law and Practice. They both ran a commentary on the missing opinion. Then someone sent How Appealing a PDF of the decision (probably very few of them were floating around since the opinion was posted for a brief period of time) and How Appealing posted the decison.

Then things got even stranger. The Court of Appeals actually phoned How Appealing to request that he remove the opinion from his website since it contained classified information. The Court said that a revised opinion would come out the next day without the classified information. How Appealing actually refused to remove the opinion. Through it all, hundreds of people came to my legal blog to see my summary of the opinion. It was either my blog or printing out and reading a 44 page epic.

The next day, the Court of Appeals reissued the Higazy opinion. With a redaction. The court simply omitted from the revised decision facts about how the FBI agent extracted the false confession from Higazy. For some reason, this information is classified. Just as the opinion gets interesting, when we are about to learn how an FBI agent named Templeton squeezed the "truth" out of Higazy, the opinion reads at page 7: "This opinion has been redacted because portions of the record are under seal. For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy's statements were coerced."

So the opinion, while interesting, is much less interesting because now we don't know how the FBI extracts false confessions from people. Looking at things from another angle, we don't know how the FBI gets suspected terrorists to tell the truth. Except that we do know this, because the opinion is still available from the How Appealing website. The horse is out of the barn, and the classified portion of the opinion is embedded in the Internet for all eternity. Not only is this decision not to remove the premature opinion now a subject of debate (people tend to think that How Appealing did the right thing in keeping the opinion available), but now we can see the part of the ruling that the Court redacted:

Higazy alleges that during the polygraph, Templeton told him that he should cooperate, and explained that if Higazy did not cooperate, the FBI would make his brother “live in scrutiny” and would “make sure that Egyptian security gives [his] family hell.” Templeton later admitted that he knew how the Egyptian security forces operated: “that they had a security service, that their laws are different than ours, that they are probably allowed to do things in that country where they don’t advise people of their rights, they don’t – yeah, probably about torture, sure.”

Higazy later said, "I knew that I couldn't prove my innocence, and I knew that my family was in danger." He explained that "[t]he only thing that went through my head was oh, my God, I am screwed and my family's in danger. If I say this device is mine, I'm screwed and my family is going to be safe. If I say this device is not mine, I’m screwed and my family’s in danger. And Agent Templeton made it quite clear that cooperate had to mean saying something else other than this device is not mine.”

Higazy explained why he feared for his family:

The Egyptian government has very little tolerance for anybody who is —they’re suspicious of being a terrorist. To give you an idea, Saddam’s security force—as they later on were called his henchmen—a lot of them learned their methods and techniques in Egypt; torture, rape, some stuff would be even too sick to . . . . My father is 67. My mother is 61. I have a brother who developed arthritis at 19. He still has it today. When the word ‘torture’ comes at least for my brother, I mean, all they have to do is really just press on one of these knuckles. I couldn’t imagine them doing anything to my sister.

And Higazy added:

[L]et’s just say a lot of people in Egypt would stay away from a family that they know or they believe or even rumored to have anything to do with terrorists and by the same token, some people who actually could be —might try to get to them and somebody might actually make a connection. I wasn’t going to risk that. I wasn’t going to risk that, so I thought to myself what could I say that he would believe. What could I say that’s convincing? And I said okay.

That's how they do it, folks. If a foreign national is suspected of terrorist activity, the FBI will threaten to have a brutal foreign government punish his family. And punishment in a place like Egypt is not like punishment here. Punishment here consists of solitary confinement and a very long prison term. Punishment over there is torture.

The Constitution makes it illegal for the government to impose cruel and inhuman punishment. That rule is easier said than done. The assumption is that most punishments are appropriate because they were enacted by elected representatives, and some Justices on the Supreme Court take a hard-line view on cruel and inhuman punishment, interpreting the Constitution to mean what the drafters thought in the late 1700's, when the Constitution was written. That means if the drafters thought it was OK to impose the death penalty for certain crimes short of murder, then the death penalty cannot be cruel and inhuman for those crimes today.

Fortunately, the prevailing view among the courts is that the cruel and inhuman clause of the Constitution should be interpreted in light of evolving standards. This means that as times change, punishments should change, also. That's why the Supreme Court is slowly scaling back the death penalty, particularly with respect to the death penalty for minors and the mentally retarded.

Another development in the evolving interpretation of cruel and inhuman punishment arose on Friday, when a Georgia court released a man from prison who was arrested for having oral sex with a 15 year old. The guy was 17 years old at the time. The court said that a 10 year prison sentence is cruel and inhuman under the circumstances.

Among the court's reasoning: "teenagers should not be classified among the worst offenders because they do not have the maturity to appreciate the consequences of irresponsible sexual conduct and are readily subject to peer pressure; and that teenage sexual conduct does not usually involve violence and represents a significantly more benign situation than that of adults preying on children for sex."

The court also compared the punishment for this kind of sexual behavior with other crimes which carry a less severe punishment, summarizing along the way a good cross section of the kinds of human depravity the courts have to live with each and every day:

A comparison of Wilson’s sentence with sentences for other crimes in this State buttresses the threshold inference of gross disproportionality. For example, a defendant who gets in a heated argument and shoving match with someone, walks away to retrieve a weapon, returns minutes later with a gun, and intentionally shoots and kills the person may be convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to as little as one year in prison. A person who plays Russian Roulette with a loaded handgun and causes the death of another person by shooting him or her with the loaded weapon may be convicted of involuntary manslaughter and receive a sentence of as little as one year in prison and no more than ten years. A person who intentionally shoots someone with the intent to kill, but fails in his aim such that the victim survives, may be convicted of aggravated assault and receive as little as one year in prison. A person who maliciously burns a neighbor’s child in hot water, causing the child to lose use of a member of his or her body, may be convicted of aggravated battery and receive a sentence of as little as one year in prison. Finally, at the time Wilson committed his offense, a fifty-year-old man who fondled a fiveyear- old girl for his sexual gratification could receive as little as five years in prison, and a person who beat, choked, and forcibly raped a woman against her will could be sentenced to ten years in prison. There can be no legitimate dispute that the foregoing crimes are far more serious and disruptive of the social order than a teenager receiving oral sex from another willing teenager

Here's the article from the New York Times:

Man Convicted as Teenager in Sex Case Is Ordered Freed by Georgia Court

By BRENDA GOODMAN
New York Times

ATLANTA, Oct. 26 — After more than two years in prison for having consensual oral sex with a fellow teenager, Genarlow Wilson shook the hand of a warden Friday at the Al Burruss Correctional Training Center in Forsyth, Ga., and smiled shyly as he walked into the arms of his waiting mother and young sister.

Mr. Wilson’s mother had skipped up to the prison door to wait for him.

“I ran around inside the house 20 times,” said Juanessa Bennett, his mother, describing her reaction to hearing that her son would be set free.

Mr. Wilson, who is now 21, was released just hours after the Georgia Supreme Court ended his 10-year prison sentence. The court said the sentence for the act, which was considered a felony at the time, violated the Constitution’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

In a 4-to-3 ruling, the court’s majority said the sentence was “grossly disproportionate” to the crime, which “did not rise to the level of culpability of adults who prey on children.”

The Higazy story is winding down. As fully described here, a few weeks ago the Federal Court of Appeals in Manhattan posted a decision on its website involving an Egyptian national, Higazy, who was coerced into confessing to his involvement in the September 11 hijackings. Higazy was later exonerated when an airline pilot claimed ownership of a two-way radio which authorities thought belonged to Higazy.

The Court of Appeals said that Higazy could sue the FBI agent for coercing his confession in violation of the Constitution. The FBI threatened Higazy's family in Egypt. As we don't hear much about these tactics within our borders, that was news in and of itself. It was also newsworthy because coerced confessions are against the law and the case arose in the context of September 11. But what made the case even more interesting was two things: after only a few hours (when I had already blogged about the case), the Court pulled the case from its website and reposted it the next day without the good stuff: Higazy's testimony about how the FBI threatened his family. Even newsier, in my view, was the Court of Appeals' request that another legal blogger remove the original decision from his website since it contained classified information. That blogger, How Appealing, declined to remove the decision. In hindsight, it looks to many of us that the redacted information was just too embarassing to the FBI.

This story really had it all. Coerced confessions, September 11, a premature court opinion, redacted allegations about improper government coercion and what had to be the court's unprecedented request to remove something from a legal blog. But for some reason, while this story spread across the political and legal blogosphere (with some great commentary, by the way), the traditional media largely ignored it, except for the Washington Post and my local paper, which had the news judgment to know that a national story always has a local angle. Columbia Journalism Review was also curious about the media silence.

We have become officially immune to stories about American complicity in coercion and torture, at home and abroad. The "new normal" occasioned by September 11 means that anything goes. Torture, coercion, lies. No one gets in trouble for advocating "tougher" interrogation techniques. It's a political liability to suggest otherwise. The Republican presidential candidates are unwilling to rule out torture, like waterboarding and other techniques that cannot possibly produce reliable information about threats to American national security. The Democrats are slowly but surely giving Bush what he wants in the way of warrantless wiretaps, terrified of looking "weak on terror." The steady stream of news confirming the ugliness of the Iraq war and related behavior (much of it chronicled here) are become too much for us to bear. This is no longer a case of the American people not knowing any better. We now know what's out there, but we don't want to know.

That makes the blogosphere so much more important. Bloggers are like the reporters that I worked with in college, when we interned for a newspaper in Albany covering every meeting in the Capitol, from mundane budget committee hearings to the governor's press conferences. From time to time, college students would stumble upon a story that everyone overlooked simply by virtue of their presence at a meeting or legislative debate that no one else bothered to attend. Bloggers who pay attention to every detail will find something that no one else caught. But if the traditional media ignores it, then 95 percent of the population will never know it happened. And then it's like it didn't happen at all.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, when 60 Minutes was caught using a questionable document to prove its charge that Bush had wiggled out his National Guard responsibilities, a conservative blogger figured out that the typeface on the memo did not exist in the early 1970's. A blogger broke the story which made CBS look bad and emboldened Bush supporters to vote. In contrast, a few weeks ago, when bloggers like myself and others broke the story of the unprecedented redaction of embarassing FBI shenanigans from a court ruling, the media snoozed through it. While 60 Minutes was stretching the truth to prove something which most of us already knew to be true (that Bush finagled his way out of military service), the Higazy/court story exposed by the bloggers told us something we did not know: that even the courts are bending over backwards to accommodate the government in the post-9/11 world, even on questions that do not appear to threaten security. Read Higazy's testimony here and tell me how this places our security at risk.

Here is what we did learn when the Higazy story was circulating around the Internet: Rudy Giuliani betrayed his New York roots in pulling for the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. New Yorkers hate the Red Sox for reasons that are too complicated (or trivial) to discuss here. The New York City tabloids ran simultaneous photo-shopped front pages on this vital issue, calling Rudy a traitor. Even the New York Times piled on Rudy. Yeah, that was important.