From Carter’s blog on military issues (discussing comments by John McCain in the Republican debate): “This is about us, not them. It’s an issue of national honor. The detention and interrogation tactics promoted by this administration have stained our national honor and undermined our national security by handing an unbelievable information and psychological victory to our enemies. At the core of the current global struggle against terrorism is a war of ideas, and John McCain understands that preserving your national honor and integrity is essential for winning that war.”
Carter is a veteran turned lawyer and writer, and his blog is fascinating.

Another weakness in Ron Hart’s argument on the death penalty (blogged about below) is that he’d also favor applying it to rape.

Brutal though rape is, I personally don’t believe in execution for anything but murder. However, my real objection to Hart’s idea is that it’s a guaranteed get out of jail free card for rapists.

Rape isn’t an easy crime to convict someone of. A decade or so ago, a woman was taken out of a Florida bar at knifepoint, raped and stabbed multiple times (she survived). The jury found the defendant not guilty, and the jurors said later that based on the woman’s sexy outfit, she’d obviously gone to the bar looking for sex — presumably meaning that therefore, she had no grounds for complaint if someone decided to sleep with her, even if he had to stab her to do it.

I could rattle off other examples, but the point is, juries are often reluctant to convict under the laws we have now: They may wonder about the woman’s clothing, her lifestyle, did she know the defendant, was it actually consensual, was the victim maybe a little slutty or kinky (some rapists have acknowledged the act, but claimed it was consensual rough sex)? What if the defendant is a respected member of the community, a sports hero or “too handsome to have to rape anyone?” All these things have been known to sway juries. How much worse would rape trials become if juries knew that finding the defendant guilty would send them to the chair (or the gas chamber, or the needle)?

A lot worse, I suspect: Barring the kind of evidence required under Islamic sharia law (where it takes four corroborating eyewitnesses to the act), juries would bend over backwards to avoid a conviction. Instead of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the effective standard would become “beyond any doubt whatsoever”: The victim’s sexual history, the idea she didn’t fight back “enough,” the rapist’s claim it was all a big misunderstanding (”I swear she gave consent right before she passed out from the gin—I suppose I should have realized how drunk she was, but …”), the belief some people have that guys just can’t help it if a woman turns them on, all those could be factors into the case.

Heck, how many prosecutors would even want to take a rape case faced with those odds?

Hart means well, but the death penalty for rape is a very bad idea.

My Thanksgiving viewing this year—selected, as usual, from the laser-discs my brother buys and trades—was a little untraditional. Let’s face it, Victor Frankenstein transplanting brains doesn’t exactly scream “Thanksgiving” (though give Peter Cushing a scalpel and I’m sure he could slice up a turkey smooth as silk) but when confronted with a huge pile of Hammer horror films, it’s hard to resist.
Christmas, though, I’m strictly a traditionalist. So as the season begins Dec. 1 (no matter how much the radio stations try to fool me into thinking it’s already started), here’s some of my favorites:
•Christmas in Connecticut. The ever delightful Barbara Stanwyck plays a columnist, “America’s most beloved homemaker,” who has successfully hidden the fact that instead of a farm-wife, mother and accomplished cook, she’s really a kitchen-illiterate single woman living in a New York apartment. Then overbearing publisher Sidney Greenstreet announces she’s going to take a lonely, wounded soldier into the heart of her family for Christmas …
•A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (no, no, no, NOT the movie!). Need anything be said?
•Scrooge. Albert Finney plays Scrooge in a musical of which I’m extremely fond, possibly more than the film deserves.
•A Christmas Carol. Alistair Sim plays the definitive Scrooge in this fine British version, showing him as a greedy miser but also a human being in need of redemption.
•The Real Ghostbusters: Xmas Marks the Spot. In this cartoon spinoff of the Ghostbusters, the guys are transported to the 1800s and save an old man from three ghosts tormenting him on Christmas Eve … And when they return to the present, they discover Scrooge was so inspired by the defeat of the ghosts, he went on to convince the entire world to give up Christmas.
•Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol. Jim Backus plays shortsighted Mr. Magoo in an animated version of Dickens. Cheap animation, but this is a surprisingly good musical.
•A Christmas Story. “It was—soap poisoning!”
Okay, you out there—what are your favorites?

Monday’s Daily News editorial on various proposed FCC regulations for cable television included a discussion of the idea that cable companies be forced to offer us “a la carte” programming — we pay for the channels we want, and no others — rather than the current system, where taking Turner Classic and SciFi (two that I like) means paying for Golf Channels, ESPN channels and other things that I couldn’t care less about (the Golf Channel seems like something Satan would force the damned to watch).
My employer being a libertarian company, I won’t dispute the argument that government shouldn’t regulate such things, but I’ll sure as heck disagree with the editorial’s conclusion that the a la carte approach is inherently a bad idea.
The editorial’s objections are first, that this regulation assumes “people in offices in Washington, DC, know what consumers want better than consumers.” Second, that “this might lead to less diversity rather than more” because channels that might not have the viewers to survive on their own will sink into oblivion if they’re not bundled together.
In response to the first objection, has the writer found some survey which shows consumers WANT to pay for channels they don’t like, because that’s the only way I can interpret this line of logic. Tell you what, lets have Cox Cable offer us a choice — bundled vs. a la carte — and we’ll see how consumers respond.
As it stands, if cable executives are forcing us to pay for channels we never watch, aren’t they the ones ignoring consumers’ wishes?
As for the less-diversity argument, this ignores that many channels are owned by the cable companies; bundling isn’t some way for starry-eyed entrepreneurs to launch their dream channel, it’s more like a way for cable companies to start or buy low-rated channels, then make people pay for the privilege of not watching them. If they believe the channel is really worthwhile, surely they can work out their own deal for broadcasting their own property?
I admit, I’d hate it if a la carte kept SciFi, for example, from becoming a fixture of my viewing, but I’d take that chance in return for not paying for sports channels, news channels, QVC, Oxygen, and so on. What the Daily News is advocating is the equivalent of Destin Commons forcing me to buy lunch there if I want to shop at Books a Million (”This new restaurant is struggling, you can’t expect it to survive on its own!”) or Publix demanding I buy steak whenever I pick up frozen blueberries.
As I said, I won’t dispute the libertarian principle of non-interference (at least, not in this venue), but I have no patience with the argument that non-interference, in this case, is improving my cable viewing.

There’s nothing that makes me happier to be a liberal than when some conservative announces that things like human rights, respect for the Fourth Amendment and opposition to torture are left-wing positions, as Bill O’Reilly did last month. Yes, O’Reilly seemed to think he was slamming liberals, but if being pro-torture and pro-warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is the right-wing stance, I think that says more about conservative flaws than liberal ones.
Ditto Ron Hart’s column on the previous weekend in which he announces that the possibility of sending someone innocent to the gas chamber is “the cost of doing business” and that using this as an argument against the death penalty is “a liberal knee-jerk reaction.”
So in other words, Ron Hart—allegedly a libertarian—believes that it’s acceptable for government to execute innocent people in order to make the execution of guilty ones more efficient. The rights of that innocent person to life, liberaty and the pursuit of property should be sacrificed to the greater good of society.
The next time Hart claims he’s against giving government too much power, please remember this and laugh at him.
It also mocks his claim that he supports the death penalty because it saves innocent lives. Killing someone who didn’t commit a crime guarantees one life lost, and possibly more, because the real killer is still out there, somewhere and nobody’s going to be looking for him.
Hart goes on to recite the usual arguments of death penalty supporters: Murderers shouldn’t be able to live for years on death row while they work through their appeals, the government shouldn’t have to spend lots of money paying attorneys to defend the indigent and innocent people aren’t going to be convicted anyway: Nobody would be put on trial if there wasn’t “overwhelming evidence,” juries can be trusted to find the truth, and groups opposing the death penalty will knock down any false cases.
In other words, Hart’s position isn’t only that we should have a death penalty—which is a reasonable position—but that we shouldn’t worry about executing innocent people, which is a monstrous position. Like many death penalty supporters, Hart doesn’t just want executions, he wants the execution process sanctified as flawless, moral and devoid of any drawbacks.
The trouble is, his argument is complete hogwash. Innocent people have been convicted, many, many times, and sometimes the only reason they didn’t get the chair is because after 18 or 20 years of sitting on death row, DNA tests or witnesses recanting cleared their name.
There are also multiple examples of prosecutors whose case only looked ironclad because they concealed evidence, hid facts from the defense or accepted perjured testimony. In some cases, even after DNA evidence has cleared a suspect, the prosecutors keep fighting to keep them in jail.
One man on Florida’s death row, for instance, was cleared by DNA testing but the prosecution argued that since the tests took place before state law requiring release in such cases, there was no legal obligation to let the man out.
In some rape-murder cases, when DNA evidence cleared the accused after the trial, prosecutors argued that “Oh, we never mentioned it before, but obviously he had a partner who left the DNA behind, so the accused is still guilty, obviously.”
Funny, aren’t libertarians the ones who distrust government power? Who warn us that officials might exploit their power for their own advantage? And in a high-profile murder case, there are definite advantages to putting someone in jail on dubious evidence (”See! I’m keeping you safe! Vote for me at the next election!”) as long as you don’t get caught.
If Hart thinks killing the innocent is an acceptable cost of doing business, remind me to never, ever, ever go into business with him.

In a Nov. 14 panel on Fox News, conservative pundit William Kristol, in discussing the situation in Pakistan, gave us the amazing revelation about President Musharaff — whom he calls a “friendly and decent dictator” — that “The problem with these friendly dictators is they end up wanting to hang on, they like being dictators beyond when it is in their country’s national interest, and beyond when it is in our interest.”

In the first place, is this supposed to be some sort of intelligent insight? Of course dictators want to hang on: The nature of being a dictator is that you seize power and then keep it as long as humanly possible.Apparently that’s not something Kristol objects too as long as it’s in “our interest” to hang on to power. Which is no surprise; as much as our presidents, pundits and politicians talk about freedom and democracy, Washington never shows any qualms supporting oppressive governments — Noriega, Saddam, Marcos, the Saudi royal family, South Africa’s apartheid regime — when it seems to support our interest (it usually doesn’t, but that never occurs to anyone until too late).

Thus, for Kristol, the problem of “friendly and decent dictators” isn’t that the public no longer has the power to elect it’s leaders, the denial of human rights, the locking up of government critics, it’s that those darn dictators keep doing these things when we want them to stop and walk off into the sunset, as if American geopolitical goals would mean more to “friendly” dictators than their own self-interest. That’s the kind of assumption that leads to us supporting dictators in the first place.

Why, exactly, is anyone listening to this guy?

According to KDKA-TV’s Web site, the Army has requested thousands of soldiers who’ve been crippled in combat give back part of their signing bonus. Due to their injuries, you see, they won’t be able to complete the length of service they signed up for, so they’re being asked to pay part of the bonus back—in the case of the Pittsburgh-area man profiled in the station’s story, $3,000 back.
That’s contemptible.

What is the point in flying to California to see family if I can’t have a window seat to look out at the mountains?
Okay, the point is I’m now in California and seeing my amazing 13-year-old niece, and my brother and sister-in-law, but I so love staring out the window and watching the mountains below, it pains me to fly without that.
(In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m on vacation this week).

I never imagined British playwright and wit Noel Coward was Satan’s weapon against the youth of the Emerald Coast.
The Daily News reported this morning that after protests by Walton County parents, the South Walton High School principal ruled that the drama department can’t stage Noel Coward’s comedy, “Blithe Spirit” since the play can’t be “sanitized” without violating copyright law.
The play, for those who don’t know, is the story of a man who holds a seance that turns out to be a seriously bad idea: The ghost he summons up is that of his dead first wife, who still considers herself his real wife and doesn’t take kindly to the fact he’s married again. Hilarity, as they say, ensues.
Having seen the show, I’ve never thought of it as something that needs “sanitizing” for high school — as you might gather from the synopsis, we’re not talking “Showgirls” or “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” here. But the protesters, it seems, were just filled with fear that this play was a viper the school had clasped to its bosom:
•It will encourage exploration of the occult!
This is, of course, the standard response from Christian groups to any fictional work that has any supernatural overtones: If your kids read Harry Potter, next thing you know, they’ll be sacrificing babies to Baphomet.
Being someone who’s read books like that since childhood,, and has multiple friends who’ve done the same—none of whom turned out to be devil worshippers, occultists or spiritualists—I find this pretty silly. Even if someone did try to hold a seance, Spiritualism doesn’t actually work (one of the founders admitted years later that she faked all the manifestations); using a ouija board is about as effective as reciting spells from Dr. Strange comics.
•The play will affect students’ views on monogamous relationships.
And how does that work, I wonder: “Wow, that guy had a ghost wife and a live wife—that seems so cool, I’ll try polygamy!” Noel Coward’s a funny, clever playwright, but I can’t imagine anyone looking to Blithe Spirit for life lessons.
Of course this is a phobia shared by pretty much everyone of every political stripe who looks at fiction primarily as a political/religious tract. The Ayn Rand Institute, for instance, gets just as hysterical about what it thinks the Goosebumps kids’ series “teaches.”
•”It’s a demonic action … spreading through our schools,” according to one pastor.
Um, no.
•”There isn’t any hope in the play,” one drama student who dropped out of the show told the School Board. “We need hope. There are kids struggling with depression, with drugs.”
Amazing. Someone who can review a Noel Coward comedy as if it were The Seventh Seal.
I’m quite sure there are South Walton students with heavy personal problems but I don’t think it’s fair to blame Coward for not writing a play that can cure depression or drug addiction. Much as I love live theater, no stage show yet written can do that.
•”All this play is is just pure garbage” according to another of the pastors.
No, it’s a well-written, amusing show. No more than that, but no less.
Hopefully none of the protesters will notice that the substitute show, “Harvey,” has an amiable drunk watched over by a benevolent but not particularly Christian supernatural being, or we’ll probably have to go through this again.

The blogger Patterico, on waterboarding: “It’s 2 1/2 minutes of a mild form of torture with no lasting physical effects, performed on an undoubtedly evil terrorist and mass murderer, to obtain information certain to obtain thousands of lives. When someone says that such mild torture would be morally unjustified, that answer to me lacks common sense.”

I know Patterico isn’t the only one to share that view, but what I’m wondering is, doesn’t this also justify some other country torturing our people when they’re captured?

Suppose Iran captures a spec ops units inside their borders. They know there are highly-placed people in America advocating for an attack on Iran; they know the attack could cost thousands of lives; and while our soldiers aren’t evil, it’s quite possible the Iranians would see them as such under the circumstances. So by Patterico’s logic, wouldn’t the Iranians be justified in waterboarding our military to learn what they know about any imminent attack? And if not, why not?

While I think that’s a valid question, I also think the whole hypothetical discussion is irrelevant. As I’ve noted before, the “ticking bomb scenario” has nothing to do with any torture case that’s turned up so far in the War on Terror, so it doesn’t serve any real point. I could probably come up with a hypothetical situation in which a suicide bomber saves thousands of lives by his actions, but that would say absolutely nothing about the way suicide bombing is used in the real world.