Gov. Charlie Crist admist he smoked pot when younger, but doesn’t believe the laws for nonviolent drug-offenders should be changed because “I don’t want to sacrifice public safety.”

So, does he believe he should have been arrested and given the same kind of sentence drug felons today receive? Would that have been better for public safety?

If he doesn’t believe this, what makes him any different from the people getting busted today?

A couple of articles I read recently—here’s the one I have a link to — say that despite all the furor the recording industry has raised over file sharing, downloads and now YouTube playing music without paying royalties, the artists aren’t seeing a dime.
According to the link above, managers for several artists say their clients haven’t seen a dime out of the YouTube settlements made a year and a half ago. Explanations offered by the industry are that YouTub isn’t generating much money, or it’s slow in paying, but since the record companies refuse to divulge any details of what the royalties are or how the deal is structured, it’s hard to tell.
Another article said the same problem has cropped up with the legal settlements over the various file-sharing programs: The program-makers coughed up money, but it’s not reaching the creators.
Or here’s something that happened last year that took my breath away: The Recording Industry Association of America established that anyone playing digital music, even if it’s on your own personal internet station, has to pay a royalty to RIAA. Of course, if you’re playing your own royalty, you get the money back … but RIAA won’t pay unless you sign up, fork over a fee and join the group first.

•Keith John Sampson, a student and janitor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis was seen reading a book called “Notre Dame vs. the Klan” — about Notre Dame University’s clash with the antiCatholic KKK — by a black coworker who complained to the school authorities that reading a book about the KKK was a form of racial harassment. Unfortunately, the university sided with the complainant, telling Sampson not to read the book at work again, though officials generously decided not to initiate any punishment.
I could understand the coworker jumping to conclusions and complaining about Sampson, but for the university to agree with the complaint? Unless some hidden dimension comes up to the story, that’s amazingly idiotic.
•Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern on homosexuality: “Studies show, no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted for more than, you know, a few decades. . .
I honestly think it’s the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam.”
What can one say except no, it isn’t? But bonus stupid points to Kern for identifying Islam, not just terrorism, as a threat to America.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on the show 24 and Jack Bauer’s use of torture: “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives …Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Scalia subsequently goes on to say how pleased he was with one sequence where Bauer convinces a terrorist that unless he talks, his family will be executed.

This wouldn’t be worthy of discussion if Scalia hadn’t told the BBC last month that he not only thinks torture acceptable when lives are in imminent danger–the “ticking bomb” scenario–but once you accept that, you have to consider it valid to use torture on people for general information (I’ll be discussing this further in Saturday’s column).

Actually, no we don’t. As someone once put it, it’s possible to come up with a situation in which you have to kill a child to save hundreds of lives—let’s say because a terrorist with a nuclear bomb is using the kid as a shield while he presses the detonator. It does not therefore follow that this makes shooting children in other situations (or like Jack Bauer, threatening to shoot them) an alternative that should be considered.

And then we have Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff saying “I thought that there was one element of the shows that at least I found very thought-provoking, and I suspect, from talking to people, others do as well… I think when people watch the show, it provokes a lot of thinking about what would you do if you were faced with this set of unpalatable alternatives, and what do you do when you make a choice and it turns out to be a mistake … It’s very easy in hindsight to go back after a decision and inspect it and examine why the decision should have been taken in the other direction. But when you are in the middle of the event, as the characters in ‘24′ are, with very imperfect information and with very little time to make a decision, and with the consequences very high on a wrong decision, you have to be willing to make a decision recognizing that there is a risk of mistake.”

In other words, we can’t wait to prove all those enemy combatants are innocent because if they’re guilty and if there’s a bomb out there and if we don’t torture them to find out what they know then something bad might happen so anyone who objects to Bush authorizing the torture of innocent people obviously hates America and loves bin Laden. So there.

I watch 24, I like 24. But I don’t watch it because it makes me think about the ethics and legality of the use of torture in real life, any more than people who watch The Punisher are intrigued by the ethics of when to resort to vigilante justice. I watch it because it’s entertaining and well-made enough and fictional, none of which is the case with real torture. And for all the pretense it confronts us with serious issues about torture, it’s pointedly avoided many of them: Nobody has ever given a false confession to stop the pain or made up information, for instance.

As for the “Would you prosecute Jack Bauer?” question, I think if a CIA agent actually did save LA from a nuclear bomb by the use of torture, no jury in the country would convict him. But Chertoff to the contrary, we’re not dealing with ticking-bomb cases under the current administration, we’re dealing with the Maybe there’s a bomb, Maybe they know something, Maybe the consequences of not torturing will be bad.

That’s not good enough. Not for America.

This weekend, Bush vetoed a bill that would have restricted the CIA to the same interrogation techniques allowed in the Army Field Manual. In other words, banning torture, including techniques such as waterboarding in which water is forced down your throat as if you were drowning (the phrase “simulated drowning” makes it sound much too harmless for my taste).

When the horrible mess that is the Bush presidency is dissected by future historians, I’m sure the Iraq War will be the mistake by which he goes down in history. But history shouldn’t forget that the president of a country that once aspired to be a shining city on a hill has fought to mainstream and legalize torture. Even without the Iraq war, Bush deserves infamy for that.

Tenn. State Senator Doug Henry, on allowing a rape exemption on anti-abortion laws: “Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse. Today it’s simply, ‘Let’s don’t go forward with this act.’ ”

In other words, if a woman isn’t chaste—however Henry defines chastity—she had it coming. Which was pretty much the attitude back when Henry was “learning these things” which is why successful rape prosecution was so much rarer than it is today.

And if a woman says “don’t go forward” that doesn’t mean it’s against her will if the man doesn’t stop?

Henry subsequently apologized and insisted he wasn’t saying what it appears he’s saying, but it appears he’s saying it.

Yesterday I pointed out that the “ticking bomb” scenario Scalia invokes to justify torture hasn’t actually happened in the war on terror. Turns out Scalia doesn’t think torture shoudl be limited to the ticking bomb at all: “I certainly know you can’t come in smugly and with great self-satisfaction and say, ‘Oh, this is torture and therefore it’s no good.’ You would not apply that in some real-life situations. It may not be a ticking bomb in Los Angeles, but it may be: ‘Where is this group that we know is plotting this painful action against the United States? Where are they? What are they currently planning?’”

So instead of allowing torture where it’s absolutely necessary to stop an imminent attack, Scalia thinks torture is OK if it will get us any sort of useful information.

Would he consider the same principle valid in roughing up police suspects? Forcing drug dealers to talk? Since he stated specifically there’s no Constitutional prohibition on using torture to obtain information (since in his view, that’s not technically a “punishment”), I have a depressing feeling it wouldn’t bother him at all.

“Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution?” Supreme Court Justice Scalia asked a BBC interviewer recently. “It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that. And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game.”

Actually, no it wouldn’t be absurd, since a)torture is illegal, and b)none of the torture our government has performed to date has fallen under the “ticking bomb” scenario. As happened with France (when it used torture in Algeria in the fifties) and Israel (torture used by Mossad) the theoretical “ticking bomb” rapidly mutates into “well, we know they’re planning another attack and this person might know something about it, so let’s torture him and find out! And if he doesn’t admit to anything, that means he’s resisting, so let’s torture harder!” Plus, of course, a lot of people we’ve tortured, or shipped overseas for torture, had no involvement in terrorism whatsoever.

Scalia also asserted that the Bill of Rights’ ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” doesn’t prohibit torture being used to get information since in those cases it’s not a court-imposed punishment.

And of course, the dismissal of torture as “smacking someone in the face” is just disgusting, given that we have documented accounts of beatings, burnings, the use of stress positions, sleep deprivation and, of course, waterboarding.

Of course, Scalia is the man who once wrote he doesn’t like democracy because it gives people the idea that the government answers to them, when under monarchy, everyone knew the rulers answered only to God.

And this man sits on the highest court in our land. Lovely.

Quote courtesy of digby’s blog .

•Mexico: In a Zapotec (Indian) village, a woman named Eufrosina Cruz ran for mayor last year, despite the fact that local law—based on traditional Zapotec custom—doesn’t allow women to vote or run.
Cruz received several votes, but the town board tore them up on the grounds only a citizen can run for office and she’s not a citizen, she’s a woman.
•Two women have been sentenced to be stoned to death in Iran for adultery. An Iranian man has been sentenced to the same penalty in an unrelated case.
•Human rights groups say 79 Iraqi women were murdered in Basra last year for violating Islamic law. Another 50 women were murdered in honor killings.

Attorney General Mukasey stated this week that since the Justice Department signed off on the CIA’s waterboarding prisoners in the first two years after 9/11, it would be improper to investigate it now:”That would mean the same department that authorized the program would now consider prosecuting someone who followed that advice.”

As hilzoy points out at obsidian wings that means that all the president has to do is have the DOJ rubber-stamp his decisions—and that seems to be the primary qualification for Bush’s attorneys general—and presto, the matter can never be investigated again. Heck, even if the DOJ’s ruling was sincere, but completely misinterpreted the law, that would put the matter beyond investigation (in subsequent testimony, Mukasey says that even if the actions were criminal and the DOJ’s advice was so wrong it amounted to malpractice, the officials acting on it are still beyond investigation).

That wouldn’t fly for any ordinary person: If you do something because your attorney told you incorrectly it was legal, you can’t use that as a defense in court. It shouldn’t fly for our government either.