Law Enforcement, Race and the Gun Culture – Part VII

This is the eighth post in this series, if you count the Discussion post. I recommend that you read or re-read the earlier posts.

Part I is here, Part II is here, Part III is here, the Discussion is here, Part IV is here, Part V is here and Part VI is here.

In the third part of this series I wrote:

I will come back to this in another context, but for now allow me to express my disappointment that our President, in his sixth State of the Union address did not speak about this subject. It is one of the few areas where he might be able to find common ground with Republicans.

I urge the reader to return to Part III and read the relevant portion.

I cannot resist noting that in raising this issue, I did so well before the New York Times picked it up. But since they finally did, allow me to refer my readers to the Times article entitled “Unlikely Cause Unites the Left and the Right: Justice Reform” and their editorial entitled “A Judge’s Idea for Grand Jury Reform.”

Even the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which has been the frequent target of liberal ire has joined in calling for reform.

I quote from their website: 

The United States currently incarcerates 1 in nearly 100 American adults. America’s incarceration addiction grew during the late 1980s and early 1990s as state and local governments passed “tough-on-crime” legislation. For example, California’s “three strikes” law called for mandatory sentencing of repeat offenders, and New York adopted the “Broken Windows” strategy that called for the arrest and prosecution of all crimes large and small.

I do need to interject at this point that the “Broken Windows” strategy, which is a cornerstone of the NYC policing strategy of Police Commissioner William Bratton, is one that I support, even though that was a factor in the untimely death of Eric Garner, but a minor violation should not bring about an arrest. A citation, like a traffic ticket, is the proper approach, and certainly, even in the absence of proper identification, the violence by the police can never be justified, particularly in dealing with what should be no more than a misdemeanor.

ALEC sets forth as its solution:

Research and practice over the past two decades by stakeholders across various jurisdictions shows that there are better ways to protect our communities than mass incarceration. States still need to be tough on crime, but in ways that emphasize personal responsibility, promote rehabilitation and treatment, and allow for the provision of victim restitution where applicable. Community supervision programs and strategies that serve as alternatives to incarceration can effectively hold offenders accountable while providing them with an opportunity to get back on their feet. These policies are proven to reduce the rate at which offenders return behind bars, in turn cutting the crime rate, protecting our communities, and achieving the best public safety return per taxpayer dollar.

ALEC members have approved model policies that help maintain public safety and reduce criminal justice spending:

▪                Recidivism Reduction Act

▪                Swift and Certain Sanctions Act

▪                Community Corrections Performance Incentive Act

▪                Community Corrections Performance Measurement Act

▪                Earned Compliance Credit Act

▪                Justice Safety Valve

We tend to assume that overcrowding and abuse of inmates in our prisons is likely to be most prevalent in jurisdictions that are illiberal. But, regretfully that is not the case.

The Bloomberg Administration managed to get a consistently favorable press. But now that it has been replaced, its atrocities are coming to light. The New York Times reports that at Riker’s Island under the Bloomberg Administration:

...brutality spiked … An influx of inmates with mental illnesses, a breakdown in discipline and a lack of interest by top officials in the Bloomberg administration all culminated in the crisis facing Rikers today. The rise in brutality by guards has been particularly stark. During Mr. Bloomberg’s last term in office, use of force by officers against inmates jumped by 90 percent.

ALEC reports that:

California’s prison population is one of the largest in the country.

leading to:

...a three-judge court rul(ing) that California must reduce its prison population by approximately 40,000 in two years

and at a cost of $9.3 billion and a cost per inmate: of $45,006

According to the Huffington Post: 

Since 1980, higher education spending has decreased by 13 percent in inflation adjusted dollars, whereas spending on California's prisons and associated correctional programs has skyrocketed by 436 percent. The state now shells out more money from its general fund for the prison system than the higher education system... 

Fifty-five percent of the growth of corrections spending is the result of the state simply putting more people in jail. Over the past three decades, the number of inmates in California facilities has increased eight times faster than the size of the overall population. 

The report notes that, while the average salaries for employees of the state's world-renowned higher education system have stagnated or even dropped with regard to inflation, prison guards have seen sustained salary increases. Correctional officers in California typically make somewhere between 50 and 90 percent more than comparable jobs in the rest of the country.

In Colorado:

Twelve of Colorado’s 21 facilities had inmate population above design capacity in 2011.

In Massachusetts:

The total custody overcrowding rate for DOC facilities as of June 25, 2012 was 146%. The overcrowding rate for medium security facilities was 155%.  

In my home state of New Jersey the Dept. of Corrections has an:

Annual budget: $1,000,000,000. 

Average annual cost per inmate: $34,600

And this is while our bridges are falling down and our roads are crumbling.

But the human costs are even greater, not only for the incarcerated but for their families and particularly their children. According to the Urban Institute: 

More than half of the 1.4 million adults incarcerated in state and federal prisons are parents of minor children. The vast majority of incarcerated parents are male (93%) and are held in state prisons (89%). Among the men held in state prison, 55 percent report having minor children. Among the women, who account for 6 percent of the state prison population, 65 percent report having minor children. Over half (58%) of the minor children of incarcerated parents are less than 10 years old.

Great distances typically separate children from their incarcerated parents. Women are housed in prisons an average of 160 miles from their children, while men are an average distance of 100 miles away. These distances serve as a barrier to prison visits by family members. More than half of incarcerated parents report never receiving a personal visit from their children  Contact in the form of phone calls and letters often proves problematic as well. The number of calls or letters per prisoner is typically limited by corrections policy. The high cost of collect phone calls, reflecting surcharges imposed by telephone companies or the departments themselves, can make this form of contact quite expensive. Despite these barriers, nearly 60 percent of mothers and
 40 percent of fathers report having weekly contact with their children while incarcerated. 

See here. 

For which credit goes to the inmates and their families, not to our policies.

As pointed out above, keeping in touch by phone is made almost impossible. The New York Times reports: 

For most people, talking on the phone is cheap. But for many families with a loved one behind bars, astronomical phone bills mean they have to choose between covering their living expenses and staying in touch.

The problem is that prisons and jails give companies like the industry leader, Global Tel Link, monopoly contracts in exchange for a share of the proceeds...

Global Tel Link, for example, charges $9.50 to make a $50 deposit, and $5 to issue a refund when someone is released from prison or jail. It’s hard to understand why Global Tel Link’s fees are so high, given that the company has 57 percent of the state prison market and its smaller competitors charge far lower fees.

The good news is that the Federal Communications Commission has new rules that will cap the cost of interstate calls at 21 to 25 cents a minute starting on Feb. 11. The F.C.C. also proposed to limit the account fees, but a federal court suspended that proposal after the phone companies sued.

So we can see that there is money to be made from the families of those incarcerated. Of course they want more in prisons.

But even beyond that we have had a trend toward privatizing prisons. The ACLU reports: 

Private prison companies, however, essentially admit that their business model depends on locking up more and more people... ” As incarceration rates skyrocket, the private prison industry expands at exponential rates, holding ever more people in its prisons and jails, and generating massive profits. 

And while supporters of private prisons tout the idea that governments can save money through privatization, the evidence that private prisons save taxpayer money is mixed at best – in fact, private prisons may in some instances cost more than governmental ones. Private prisons have also been linked to numerous cases of violence and atrocious conditions. 

Isn't it time we did something about it? And what better time than when the Right is for reform.

Why are we not seeing action at least on this front?

Comments, questions, or corrections are welcome, and will be responded to and distributed with attribution, unless the writer requests that he/she not be identified. However, please give your full name and the town and state in which you reside or have an office.

Law Enforcement, Race and the Gun Culture – VI

This is the seventh in this series, if you count the Discussion post. I recommend that you read or re-read the earlier posts.

Part I is here, Part II is here, Part III is here, the Discussion is here, Part IV is here and Part V is here.

I have not had the time to prepare continuation of this series since I published Part V on February 9^th.

Rather then allow this series to remain fallow I thought I would share with you some articles on the subject that I have come across. I reproduce them without comment.

From Amnesty International:

In the early morning of November 2, 1983, Darrell Cannon was taken from his home by a battery of now notorious white Chicago police detectives to a remote area on the far southside of Chicago where he was interrogated about the murder of a drug dealer… When Cannon persisted in denials, the detectives forced him into the back seat of their car, pulled down his pants, and repeatedly shocked him on his genitals with an electric cattle prod.

 The physical and mental scars that the victims like Darrell Cannon carry will never be healed, but with this reparations ordinance, at least they will finally begin the path to closure. Instead, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and several other Chicago Alderpeople will not support the reparations efforts.

Again from Amnesty International: 

Between 1972 and 1991, Chicago police under the direction of former Commander Jon Burge systematically tortured more than 100 people of color on Chicago’s South Side. During Burge’s reign of terror, over 110 African American and Latino men and women were subjected to electrical shocks on their genitalia or other body parts with a handmade shock box or cattle prod, suffocation with plastic bags, beatings with rubber objects or telephone books, and mock executions. The vast majority of the torture survivors were also subjected to verbal abuse where they were repeatedly called racist slurs and epithets throughout their interrogations.

 These heinous acts of torture were committed in order to extract confessions; confessions that were used to wrongfully convict scores of people. Eleven survivors of Chicago police torture were sent to Illinois’ infamous death row. This history of brutality is why Chicago has been dubbed by some as the Abu-Ghraib of the Midwest.

 Today, many of Burge’s torture survivors and their families continue to suffer from the psychological effects of the torture they endured. They have never received adequate compensation or assistance. Because of the statute of limitations, survivors have no legal recourse to obtain any redress, whatsoever. Moreover, there are approximately 19 survivors of torture under Jon Burge who continue to languish behind bars. They have never received evidentiary hearings to present evidence that substantiates their claims that they were tortured into confessing.

From the ACLU Civil Liberties Reporter: 

When I was 14, my grandfather sat me down for “the talk” – not the birds and the bees, but “the billy clubs and the bullets.” I brushed him off. I thought that in my majority-black hometown of Newark, racism would not reach me. Little did I realize that a healthy fear of the police would become a survival skill for a young black man.

My wake-up call came at 16.

As I noticed former friends slipping into the traps of my South Ward neighborhood, I was determined to be different. I joined debate club and the law academy, and played on the baseball team at University High School, and I never had run-ins with the police. 

But walking home one evening down Hawthorne Avenue my junior year, I spotted a Crown Victoria with tinted windows creeping up behind me. Unsettled, I sped up, hoping to reach the safety of my house. Instead, my quickened pace prompted the car to cut in front of me. Two Newark Police Department officers emerged. One was black. The other was not. He had his gun drawn.

“Get on the wall,” one yelled.

Terrified, with my arms up against the metal grate of Bragman’s deli, I asked, “What have I done, sir?”

“Where are you coming from?” an officer growled.

“Baseball practice,” I answered as an officer looked through my book bag.

One officer chastised me for presenting a school ID instead of an “authentic” one, which I didn’t have at 16. Finally, the cops told me to take a seat on the curb while they ran a check on my ID. For what seemed like an eternity, drivers passed and stared until the police finally let me go. Those slow moments were some of the most embarrassing, humiliating, and terrifying of my life.

Even with my grandparents’ lessons in the unwritten rules of conduct awaiting me because of my inherited blackness, I was shocked to be subjected to unprovoked harassment by minority police officers. I now felt unsafe in my neighborhood, and not because of the killings, carjackings and crime festering in my part of Newark. I felt scared because, for the first time in my life, I knew police abuse could happen to me and I realized that I was lucky my encounter with police only robbed me of my dignity.

It’s one thing to be scared of criminals. It’s another thing entirely to be scared of the people who are supposed to protect you. My appearance branded me a menace, even though I hadn’t done anything illegal. After being treated like a second-class citizen by the police, you start to believe you are one.

While I didn’t have strong feelings about the police before I was wrongly stopped and frisked, being abused the way I was made me want to avoid any contact with cops. Why would a Newarker who suspects illegal activity go to the police when he lives in fear of those same officers every day? A community that doesn’t trust the police is one where criminals can run amok, safe in knowing that the citizenry and police are at odds.

Abusive stop-and-frisk policies have no place in a democracy. As a kid, I faithfully believed that routine racial profiling would not happen to me the way it had to my grandfather. Now, seeing “the talk” through the lens of personal experience, I know better. I hope that one day, if I tell my own grandchildren about the dangers of interacting with police, they will be able to brush off my warnings because police abuse will have truly become a thing of the past.
My story is not an anomaly. The more of us who come forward to share what we’ve been through, the closer we’ll get to having a powerful voice in shaping the Newark Police into a department that respects everyone’s human rights, no matter what they look like.

Michael Hobbs is a lifelong Newarker who works at the Brick City Development Corporation. He shared his story at the launch of Newark Communities for Accountable Policing (N-CAP) on Sept. 25, 2014.

I share these stories with you without comment at this time.

When I find the time I will continue with the analysis of the American Justice System. I regret to say that the more research I do, the more disturbed I get. Please keep reading, and if you can find the time let me have your comments.

Comments, questions, or corrections are welcome, and will be responded to and distributed with attribution, unless the writer requests that he/she not be identified. However, please give your full name and the town and state in which you reside or have an office.

Law Enforcement, Race and the Gun Culture – IV

This is the fifth in this series if you count the Discussion post. I recommend that you read or re-read Part I here, Part II here, Part III here and the discussion here. 

While killings by police have been prominent in the news lately, it is but the tip of the iceberg. Brutality, and even simply disrespect, are equally unacceptable, and under the last mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and his police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, respect for the law hit a low ebb.

This took many forms. The Civilian Review Board, set up as a body independent of the police to take complaints about the police, investigate them and then send them to the Commissioner, was frequently ignored.

According to the New York City ACLU:

Of the cases referred to an administrative trial during this period, consistent with the CCRB’s recommendation, 64 percent resulted in no disciplinary action. (Emphasis added)

But I think that what has happened is that there has been far too much emphasis on police officers as being the main problem.

Law enforcement policy is made at the top and the outrageous policy of "Stop and Frisk" in NYC came right from the top, the mayor and the police commissioner. It was denounced for its racial profiling, but that was not all that was wrong with it. It was an outrageous violation of our Constitutional protections, and had it not targeted men of color, I suspect it would have been challenged much sooner and much more vigorously.

Amendment IV of the Constitution provides:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I cannot think of a more egregious violation of that portion of the Bill of Rights then for a person to be stopped on the street without cause, entirely at random, and to be forced to submit to a body search.

This was not done by rogue police officers, but on the orders of the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and his police commissioner, Raymond Kelly.

But the media, and even civil rights and civil liberties groups, have spent far too much time on the misconduct of the police. There are far more egregious parts of our Law enforcement apparatus.

Among these are the offices of the District Attorneys. As I set forth in my post "Law Enforcement, Race and the Gun Culture – II," When a DA wants an indictment he gets one, but DAs, who by the nature of their work need the cooperation of the police, rarely want to indict a police officer, and so we see the charade of a presentation to a Grand Jury, which in accordance with the DAs wishes, fails to indict. The Abner Louima case was an exception, but that was so egregious that it could not be ignored, but nevertheless was to the credit of the Brooklyn DA, whose office handled it, and the prosecuting attorney, Loretta Lynch, who represented the people in court, and who has now been nominated for Attorney General of the US.

But it may be that this case was so egregious that it could not be ignored.

But District Attorney offices are a very large part of what is wrong with our Criminal Justice System, not just for their failure to prosecute police officers who commit crimes, but worse their putting the winning of convictions, over seeking justice. Thus under our system of law, a defense attorney only has the responsibility to present his clients case, while the DA’s office is charged with seeking justice.

Unfortunately, this is rarely the case, with DAs seeking convictions, rather than justice, and failing to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense, as they are required to do by law. It is but the tip of the iceberg that is revealed in cases where convictions have been overturned, e.g. for every case overturned there are many false convictions that are not. I  quote from the Innocence Project: 

In 1985, John Thompson, a 22-year-old father of two, was wrongfully convicted of murder and sent to death row at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana. While facing his seventh execution date, a private investigator hired by his appellate attorneys discovered scientific evidence of Thompson’s innocence that had been concealed for 15 years by the New Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office.

 Thompson was released and exonerated in 2003 after 18 years in prison, 14 of them isolated on death row. The state of Louisiana gave him $10 and a bus ticket upon his release. He sued the District Attorney’s Office. A jury awarded him $14 million, one for each year on death row. When Louisiana appealed, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. This spring, Justice Clarence Thomas issued the majority 5-4 decision in Connick v. Thompson that the prosecutor’s office could not be held liable.

The requirement that prosecutors must turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense was settled by the Supreme Court in 1963 (Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83), which held that:

… prosecutors (must) disclose materially exculpatory evidence in the government's possession to the defense. "Brady material" or evidence the prosecutor is required to disclose under this rule includes any evidence favorable to the accused-- evidence that goes towards negating a defendant's guilt, that would reduce a defendant's potential sentence, or evidence going to the credibility of a witness.

 If the prosecution does not disclose material exculpatory evidence under this rule, and prejudice has ensued, the evidence will be suppressed. The evidence will be suppressed regardless of whether the prosecutor knew the evidence was in his or her possession, or whether or not the prosecutor intentionally or inadvertently withheld the evidence from the defense.

But this requirement is observed more in the breach than in its observance. The Innocence Project has found and I quote: 

Such violations have led to an incalculable number of wrongful convictions. Because of the often covert nature of prosecutorial misconduct, it is impossible to estimate how many innocent people have been affected. Furthermore, the vast majority of felony cases are resolved through plea bargaining and never go to trial. Prosecutors may have engaged in misconduct in those cases as well.

 In at least 63 of the wrongful convictions later overturned through DNA testing, innocent defendants alleged prosecutorial misconduct in their appeals or civil trials. Examples of misconduct include eliciting perjured testimony; destroying, concealing or fabricating evidence; making improper and inflammatory statements and more.

 Recent studies of these and other cases have shown that prosecutors are rarely found at fault, and even when they are, they are very rarely disciplined for it. A USA Today investigation found that only one federal prosecutor has been disbarred, even temporarily, for misconduct in the past 12 years despite 201 documented cases of violated laws or ethics rules. The federal prosecutor in that one case was suspended from practicing law for just one year. A study conducted by the Northern California Innocence Project supports these findings. In that study, over 700 California prosecutors engaged in misconduct from 1997 to 2009 and only seven of them were disciplined.

With no penalties for deliberately seeking wrongful convictions is it any wonder that prosecuting attorneys build careers around getting as many convictions as possible, without regard to guilt or innocence.

Most of the cases where exonerations have been obtained have been through DNA evidence. How many innocent people may be incarcerated, though innocent, where DNA evidence cannot prove their innocence, is impossible to tell.

According to the Innocence Project: 

There have been 325 post-conviction DNA exonerations in United States history. These stories are becoming more familiar as more innocent people gain their freedom through post conviction testing. They are not proof, however, that our system is righting itself.

 The common themes that run through these cases — from global problems like poverty and racial issues to criminal justice issues like eyewitness misidentification, invalid or improper forensic science, overzealous police and prosecutors and inept defense counsel — cannot be ignored and continue to plague our criminal justice system.

 •     Twenty people had been sentenced to death before DNA proved their innocence and led to their release.
•     The average sentence served by DNA exonerees has been 13.6 years.
•     About 70 percent of those exonerated by DNA testing are people of color.
•     In almost 50 percent of DNA exoneration cases, the actual perpetrator has been identified by DNA testing.
•    Exonerations have been won in 38 states and Washington, D.C.

For those who still think that justice is colorblind I call attention to the fact that with “people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States’ population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned” and 70% of those wrongfully convicted. (See above)

But what makes it even worse is that Parole Boards expect prisoners to express remorse for their crimes, which is rather difficult for the innocent to do. This dilemma is dramatically illustrated in an Iowa Law Review article at pages 524 & 527, where the prisoner, being innocent, could not express remorse for something he did not do, but as the case unfolded, and again I quote:

Goodman had always maintained his innocence and continued to do so in the aftermath of his conviction. Still, more than a decade later, when appearing before the Utah State Board of Pardons and Parole in 2000, Goodman “admitted his culpability for the murder in order to curry favor with parole officials.

But much later:

… in discussing the case … in the weeks following the disclosure of the DNA test, lawyers from the Utah State Attorney General’s Office noted Goodman’s admission of guilt at his 2000 parole hearing as one reason for their hesitancy to declare his innocence.

Thus the convicted innocent found himself damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t, a common occurrence in our crazy quilt system of “justice”.

How Kafkaesque such situations are! But we take pride in our pretense of evenhanded justice.

We have long claimed to believe that:

"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer", and this is enshrined by the English jurist William Blackstone in his seminal work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in the 1760s, which we claim to adhere to.

But as I have set forth above, in practice it is far from true. In future posts I will illustrate just how we have come to practice the opposite.

Comments, questions, or corrections are welcome, and will be responded to and distributed with attribution, unless the writer requests that he/she not be identified. However, please give your full name and the town and state in which you reside or have an office.

Potpourri

I have entitled this commentary potpourri from the musical term for medley because there are so many things I want to touch upon that I decided that I would, on this occasion, cover many subjects, rather than covering one in depth.

First of all at the risk of once again touching on that third rail of American politics the Middle East, and doing something I have never done before, I want to recommend a play to my readers. The play is Palestine. It is playing at The Fourth Street Theater until April 3rd.

It is a one person play, written and acted by Najla Said, who the New York Times described as a Palestinian-Lebanese-American Christian, and the daughter of Edward Said, the Columbia Professor, who along with Daniel Barenboim, the renowned Israeli pianist and conductor, founded the “the award-winning West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, made up of children from Israel, Palestine, and surrounding Arab nations.

The play in my view is non-political, (some may differ) but it gives an insight into the tragedy of the Middle East in a human dimension. I believe that all, regardless of their view on the complex issues of that area can benefit from these insights.

---------------------

Those of you who have been following my commentary must be aware that while I have been denouncing in angry terms the lies, distortions and calumnies of The Right in general and Republicans in particular, I have also increasingly been critical of the Left for their doctrinaire approach, which allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. See, e.g. “Doesn't Anybody Really Care?” and I have continued to take exception to some of the positions of organizations that I have long supported. Thus on March 9th I sent an e-mail to the ACLU, which I quote below:

“I am increasingly disappointed in the ACLU. I have been a member for many decades and have always been proud of that fact. I supported the ACLU when it was under attack for defending the right of Nazis to march and during other controversial decisions. Lately, however I have become ashamed and have considered resigning. The Unions decision to support corporation as having almost unlimited 1st amendment rights is repugnant to me. I do not believe that corporations should have any rights under the first amendment and that designating them as "persons,” even though long enshrined in the law, is fundamentally wrong. They are not like associations or partnerships and to pretend otherwise is dishonest.

“But while I agree with you on trying the 9/11 suspects in Civil Courts, I resent the inflammatory ads depicting the President as morphing into George Bush.

“I am reluctant to resign because much of what you do is needed. But I can not for long continue to support an organization that I believe is increasingly departing from my values.”

I also continue to take exception to the writings of Bob Herbert of the New York Times who, e.g. on March 8th wrote a column entitled: “The Source of Obama’s Trouble,” where Herbert continues to berate the President for pushing Health Care Reform when so many people are unemployed, as though reform in that area had no bearing on the needs of the underprivileged and unemployed. If Herbert at least offered some constructive suggestions that were economically and politically viable, he might be forgiven, but he offers nothing of the kind. Only negativity. Now when Herbert tackles specific problems such as in his “Cops vs. Kids” or in "Watching Certain People," where he pinpoints problems and offers solutions, I applaud him, but his carping and negativism does neither him nor his causes credit.

On the other hand Paul Krugman, who I have criticized in the past for unfair criticism, finally gets it right in “Senator Bunning’s Universe” when he writes: “What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.”

           Finally when WQXR was sold by the NY Times to NPR and continued to air the Lutheran Hour, I dispatched letters to both the ACLU and WQXR pointing out that since WQXR now receives public financing they have no right to air religious programs, since it violated the separation of church and state doctrine of the Constitution. It took many months before either responded but finally I received an answer from both assuring me that the practice had ceased as of the 1st of the year. They didn’t explain why the Constitution only worked by the calendar year.

---------------------

In the latest issue of Newsweek, John Meecham, one of its editors, and under consideration for a position as a host on a new PBS program, wrote an article entitled: “Democracy Is a Pesky Thing” in which he equated Fox News with the New York Times as examples of a Right leaning and Left leaning news source. I find such inappropriate comparisons deeply offensive. Fox News is a propaganda organ worthy of the communist newspaper Pravda, while the NY Times is one of the most respected newspapers in the world. In fact I find it hard to find a Left leaning publication that lies and distorts the way Fox does. Certainly, MSNBC, which might be considered the counter to Fox, has never indulged in the kind of demagoguery that Fox indulges in, and even such leftist publications as Mother Jones do not indulge in this practice.

To be sure the Times has a liberal editorial policy, periodically has articles that point to liberal solutions, and has more liberal columnists than conservative ones, but that is not the same as the use of lies and inflammatory messages that Fox indulges in. In fact in so far as the Times has been caught in falsehoods it has been in slandering liberals, see e.g. "The Media! (Watergate/Clinton)", "The Media II - Falsehoods about Gore" and "The Media III - Falsehoods about Kerry" and Judith Miller writing for the NY Times has become notorious for giving support to the fabrications that the Bush Whitehouse fed her about Iraq’s WMDs.

David Brooks in the NY Times tries to do something similar to Meecham, equating Left and Right. See: The Wal-Mart Hippies.

The frequent media attempt to show even handedness by equating outright lies with minor misstatements, instead of serving the greater end of truth, wherever it might lead, serves neither the media nor the American public.

---------------------

On the bright side the minions of the Right and the Republican Party in general, who very recently showed their lack of principle or even patriotism, when they turned the fight against terrorists into a political football, see: “Liberals Charged As Condescending!” have finally shown a commitment to principle and the rule of law for the first time in years when they criticized a video released by Lyn Cheney that questioned the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who worked in the past on behalf of detained terrorism suspects. According to the New York Times, “many conservatives, including members of the Federalist Society, the quarter-century-old policy group devoted to conservative and libertarian legal ideals, have vehemently criticized Ms. Cheney’s video, and say it violates the American legal principle that even unpopular defendants deserve a lawyer.”

Hurray, its been along time coming to see a principled position from that notorious quarter. Let’s hope we see it more often.

---------------------

         And the Washington Post reports that: “House Democrats ban earmarks for private contractors”. This is still another item of good news.