Plead the First

Today at work some friends and I went to Rearn Thai for lunch. They have a new location, conveniently situated directly across the street from the old location. The food is pretty much the same (which is a good thing), but the new building is very different.

Their previous location had a cozy feel with many Asian touches in the decor. The new place is quite the opposite. Though the exterior has the sweeping curves of a traditional Asian-style roofline, the interior has a high, two-story ceiling, large wrap-around windows, and a much more modern feel. Aside from the Asian-subtitled program playing on the TV and an ornate wooden screen in the entrance, the restaurant would have been just as well suited for almost any other style of food.

Over plates of noodles, rice and meat of varying degrees of spicyness, my friends and I wondered why they went in the direction they did with the new building. We mostly questioned the practical considerations. With the combination of the two-story dining area and the tall windows that spanned nearly three entire walls, the heating costs in the winter are going to be enormous. The aesthetic wisdom of all the windows was questioned as well – one friend pointed out that on that particular section of Market Street, the view you are treated to consists mainly of cars hurtling by the Duron Paint store across the street at 50 miles per hour. Finally, the dining area actually seems to be smaller than the one at the previous location. It took about 10 minutes for us to be seated, and I saw several people come in and then leave rather than endure the wait. It’s going to make it harder to pay those heating bills if they can’t fit in as many customers.

It’s still a nice place to eat, as the food is very tasty, but I wonder if their decisions regarding their new building are going to end up hurting the business.

This has popped up several places already, but I think it’s very important that people are aware of it. Bush has provided more evidence that he thinks he’s above the law:

President Bush agreed with great fanfare last month to accept a ban on torture, but he later quietly reserved the right to ignore it, even as he signed it into law.

Acting from the seclusion of his Texas ranch at the start of New Year’s weekend, Bush said he would interpret the new law in keeping with his expansive view of presidential power. He did it by issuing a bill-signing statement – a little-noticed device that has become a favorite tool of presidential power in the Bush White House.

In fact, Bush has used signing statements to reject, revise or put his spin on more than 500 legislative provisions. Experts say he has been far more aggressive than any previous president in using the statements to claim sweeping executive power – and not just on national security issues.

“It’s nothing short of breath-taking,” said Phillip Cooper, a professor of public administration at Portland State University. “In every case, the White House has interpreted presidential authority as broadly as possible, interpreted legislative authority as narrowly as possible, and pre-empted the judiciary.”

How’s that for “activist”?

“They don’t like some of the things Congress has done so they assert the power to ignore it,” said Martin Lederman, a visiting professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. “The categorical nature of their opposition is unprecedented and alarming.”

The White House says its authority stems from the Constitution, but dissenters say that view ignores the Constitution’s careful balance of powers between branches of government.

“We know the textbook story of how government works. Essentially what this has done is attempt to upset that,” said Christopher Kelley, a presidential scholar at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, who generally shares Bush’s expansive view of executive authority. “These are directives to executive branch agencies saying that whenever something requires interpretation, you should interpret it the way the president wants you to.”

This is one more bit of a disturbing pattern that has seen Bush “joke” about having a dictatorship, and claiming to be above the law where wiretaps are concerned. Don’t think it’s anything to be worried about?

They may soon have an ally on the Supreme Court. As a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito wrote a 1986 memo outlining plans for expanded use of presidential signing statements.

All hail the King.

Ed Brayton, from Dispatches from the Culture Wars, rips into a rant posted at stoptheaclu.com. The author of the rant, Gribbit, contends at one point that “The Great Society” is a failure, and complains about Democratic policies to “re-distribute the wealth of this nation.” Brayton responds:

Here’s a pop quiz for Gribbit – with full control of the White House and Congress, what have the Republicans done to counter that redistribution of wealth? Answer: made it worse. Far worse. Not only did they pass the largest new entitlement program since the Great Society (and lie about the ultimate cost of it), they also passed legislation that transfers well over $100 billion from predominately middle class taxpayers into the accounts of major corporations through tax subsidies, immunity from liability, tax breaks and much more. It’s interesting to me that so many conservatives believe that only welfare programs qualify as “income redistribution”, ignoring the vast amounts of corporate welfare in the Federal budget.

Gribbit also repeatedly compares the ACLU and Democrats to Communists, to which Brayton replies:

The “communist” epithet is just plain idiotic. The hallmark of a communist state is the government’s authority to spy on their citizens with unchecked authority, imprison them without due process, and use the coercive authority of the state to deny them the right to live their lives free.

Sound like any administrations you know?

Of course, the tired cry that the ACLU wants to stifle all religious expression makes an appearance, and is addressed:

Even if you think that the ACLU sometimes goes too far in objecting to anything that could possibly be interpreted as government endorsement (and I happen to think that myself), these still are not attempts to violate individual free exercise of religion and it is absurd to claim that they are. It becomes doubly absurd when they ignore the consistent support that the ACLU has shown for real public expression of religion. They have defended the right of ministers to preach on the street, on public sidewalks and on public property, all over the nation. They have defended the right of students in public schools to hand out religious literature to their classmates, to wear clothing with religious messages on them, and to organize bible clubs and prayer groups. They’ve defended the right of religious groups and churches to use public property on an equal basis with other groups. I’ve documented dozens of such cases here.

There’s a lot more, and Brayton does a good job as usual, so please read the whole thing.

From now on, if you plan on saying anything annoying online, you’d better do it under your real name:

Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

This seems like a ridiculous violation of the first amendment, and it’s especially dangerous because of the vague wording. Who determines what is “annoying”? And in what manner must I establish my “true” identity? For instance, I could post under my first name, but it’s common enough that it wouldn’t really single me out. However, I’ve never seen another “PotatoStew” posting anywhere, so that name could be said to uniquely identify me. Does one need to post under a first and last name in order to be allowed to annoy? What about folks with common first and last names: Do they need to post an address or phone number in order to legally annoy others on the internet?

Maybe one should be required to purchase an Annoyance License to legally annoy others. It could be stamped with an “Annoying ID Number” that you could include with your online posts. There could be different tiers available: A $25 license lets you be a minor annoyance, but if you purchase the $50 license you can be a major pain-in-the-neck.

:::

Update: In the comments, Darkmoon points to this link in which some folks claim that the original article misinterprets the law, saying that it’s really nothing unusual. I haven’t had a chance to verify what they’re saying there, but it’s nice to know I may be able to safely continue to annoy others.

Embattled Greensboro Chief of Police David Wray was locked out of his office on Friday. The police force is giving some major pushback on his rotating shifts policy. And the Greensboro Police Officer’s Association doesn’t seem too fond of him. That gun in the cartoon may not be the only thing being fired.

Update: Wray dodges the bullet by resigning.

Four-year-olds may often be terrors, but do we really need to be concerned that they may be terrorists?

Edward Allen’s reaction to being on the government’s “no-fly” list should have been the tip-off that he is no terrorist.
“I don’t want to be on the list. I want to fly and see my grandma,” the 4-year-old boy said, according to his mother.

Sijollie Allen and her son had trouble boarding planes last month because someone with the same name as Edward is on a government terrorist watch list.

Solid evidence that Bush and the TSA are keeping us safe. From boogers, or temper tantrums, or something.

She said a ticket agent told her: “You’re lucky that we’re letting you through instead of putting you through the other process.”

Indeed. I wonder how the little guy would have fared at Guantanamo?

Wednesday, the newly-elected Dover Area school board nixed their predecessors’ Intelligent Design policy:

On a voice vote, and with no discussion beforehand, the newly elected Dover Area School Board unanimously rescinded the policy. Two weeks earlier, a judge ruled the policy unconstitutional.

“This is it,” new school board president Bernadette Reinking said Tuesday, indicating the vote was final and the case was closed.

Unfortunately, that won’t be the end of it for the rest of the country. One of the next possible fronts in the battle may be Ohio:

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which helped bring the Dover lawsuit, has obtained boxes of records from the Ohio Department of Education pertaining to the state school board’s adoption of a controversial science lesson plan nearly two years ago, as reported in The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

That action is a prelude to a possible challenge of the lesson, “Critical Analysis of Evolution,” which critics contend is warmed-over intelligent design.

The phrase “warmed-over intelligent design” is an interesting one, and it’s an idea that was echoed by Ken Miller in a talk he gave on January 3rd at Case Western Reserve University. To paraphrase, since I can’t find a transcript, he pointed out that Ohio’s science standards don’t specifically mention Intelligent Design or Creationism. Instead, they aim to “teach the controversy” by pointing out the gaps and criticisms of evolutionary theory, and by drawing attention to the fact that not everyone agrees with the idea of evolution. By avoiding any requirements to teach ID, the authors of the standards apparently hope to undermine the teaching of evolution while dodging legal challenges such as the one that derailed the Dover ID effort.

It’s both encouraging and sad at the same time. Encouraging in that ID proponents have had to continually water down and whittle away at the meat of their philosophy in order to try to slip it into schools. What started out as “biblically-literal, 6000-year-old-earth, man-and-dinosaur-roaming-the-earth-together Creationism” morphed into Intelligent Design (“There’s absolutely a Creator, but no, of course it’s not necessarily God – what gave you that idea?”), and is now turning into “Teach the Controversy”.

The sad part is that ID proponents, who obviously believe in God and the Bible, are willing to resort to so much subterfuge to get their ideas taught in the classroom.

Update: The Panda’s Thumb has links to the Ken Miller talk that I mentioned above – Real Player or Windows Media Player.

MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s blogging service, has been helping the Chinese government suppress dissenting voices by monitoring and censoring Chinese blogs that use the MSN service. According to Rebecca MacKinnon, they’re getting more aggressive and have even shut down one popular, outspoken blogger.

I never liked MSN Spaces anyway – they list comments in reverse-chronological order. This, however, seems like an even better reason to dislike them.

(Via DailyKos)

This is coming a little late, since I was away when the ruling was announced in the Kitzmiller case, but I wanted to make a brief comment on it anyway.

Of the possible decisions that could have been made, Judge Jones made a pretty strong ruling. Rather than confining himself to merely saying that the Dover Area school board had religious motives in mind (which I think it was pretty obvious that they did), he ruled that teaching Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolution is actually unconstitutional. That’s a pretty strong statement against what the school board was trying to do. The lawyers for the plaintiffs seemed to do a great job of showing the connection between old-school Creationism and ID, which I’m sure went a long way towards enabling such a decision.

I also was pleased to see that the ruling specifically stated that ID is not science. Ironically, Biblical Creationism was probably slightly more scientific than ID (though still not science) in at least one respect: It made some testable claims, such as the Universe being only around 6000 – 10,000 years old and men living at the same time as dinosaurs.

Ed Cone has more.

I was away visiting family for Christmas, but I’m back now. Posts may be sporadic until I get back into the swing of things. Hope I didn’t miss anything too important!