Timber!
The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin reports that thanks to new federal rules, logging national forests just got easier:

...Sally Collins, associate chief of the U.S. Forest Service, said the changes will replace a bureaucratic planning process with a more corporate management approach that will allow officials to respond to changing ecological and social conditions.

The new rules give economic activity equal priority with preserving the ecological health of the forests in making management decisions and in potentially liberalizing caps on how much timber can be taken from a forest. Forest Service officials estimated the changes will cut its planning costs by 30 percent and will allow managers to finish what amount to zoning requirements for forest users in two to three years, instead of the nine or 10 years they sometimes take now.
(links added)

There was predictable belly-aching by environmentalists like Defenders of Wildlife and the related Save National Forests, but Chris West of the American Forest Resource Council puts it all in perspective with the right doublespeak:

"This will get the Forest Service caring about the land and caring about the people, instead of caring about the process and serving the bureaucracy," said West, who represents lumber and paper companies as well as landowners in 13 western states.

That is really some gifted spin, keep an eye on Mr. West. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:14:00 PM -- |    

 
The road back, continued
I've come across another couple of Mother Jones articles worth reading, via Blog for America.* The first one, "Life of the Party," by Michael Kazin, had a lot of good points, but I want to highlight one good general point and one good specific one. The general one was about the decline of labor:

Since the 1960s, the decline of organized labor has eaten away at the Democratic Party’s populist foundation. Strong unions didn’t just furnish Democrats with an ample supply of precinct workers. They established social class, rather than faith or “moral values,” as the crucial difference between their party and the GOP.

This echoes one of the principal points of a great book I've just read, Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?" The book has been viewed by some as a diagnosis of red-state-itis; that's true in some ways, but it's really more about how a national disease has progressed furthest in places like Kansas -- Frank's home state, and the one he can report about best. The disease flourishes in places where unions seem to have lost their last footholds, and Democrats have little to offer people who separate "business" from "politics" about the same way many Democrats do: business cycles and practices are forces of nature, politics is about everything else -- abortion, Hollywood, liberal elites, and so forth.

Kazin's specific point might have been a little mundane, but it's a practical illustration of a moribund organization that I could vouch for, too:

I spent Election Day making calls from my Washington suburb to inner-city Clevelanders whom the Democrats believed to be currently registered. The list I was given was rotten with the deceased and the departed. At least half the phone numbers on it were wrong.

I had much the same experience day in and day out, both at Kerry's headquarters and on the final day of the campaign at the AFL-CIO phone bank. Now some of this is to be expected, but it persisted well into the GOTV phase, and led me to believe the phone number lists are not well maintained between elections and not very well processed during campaigns either.

And if the lists were bad at those two locations, they weren't going to be great elsewhere, either. I did a bit of phonebanking at Harrisburg after coming back from the door to door canvass. Again: way too many wrong numbers, disconnected numbers, strongly pro-Bush voters -- especially at that point in the campaign, with only days left before the election. Kazin speaks aptly of a movement that was "haphazardly coordinated and badly in need of the direction only a strong, motivated party can provide." There's too much emphasis on brief, unsustained bursts of energy, and not enough on the long, patient accumulation of strength. Phone lists should be culled, refreshed, sorted, and evaluated every quarter, not every four years.

Todd Gitlin's "A Gathering Swarm" provided the flip side of that assessment. Call it the early days of a better nation, or at least a better Democratic Party. Using Scranton, Pennsylvania as his example, he described the sense of enthusiasm and getting-back-togetherism of what he calls "machine" and "movement"-- the old Democratic Party union stalwarts and new anti-Bush enthusiasm.

Volunteers fell into distinct issue camps. Locals tended to care most about jobs seeping away; visitors were more preoccupied with Iraq. But during canvassing expeditions, they all stuck to the discipline -- don't get involved in heavy discussions on the block, just figure out which way people are leaning and move on.

Gitlin summarizes:

There was a rising. It was defeated, but it was not a figment of a utopian's imagination. It was a popular upwelling. An actual movement is not only a sum of names, mobilizations, celebrity riffs. It is the sum of acts undertaken by persons who, one at a time, feel called in a thousand little ways to do something.

Amen. But there was also this bit of truth:

This year's mobilization was galvanized by a rare convergence of two huge circumstances: a grand emergency combined with a live chance that focused interventions might just avail. Before Election Day, on one of those effervescent days when the stream of volunteers was steady and strong and a Kerry presidency did not seem hallucinatory, I asked a number of Scranton visitors whether they could imagine turning out to lobby, say, for health care legislation stuck in a recalcitrant Congress, or for some other liberal objective. A few said yes, but many more said, realistically, no. And that was under an optimal assumption.

That will need to change. On a related note, I wholeheartedly approve of Josh Marshall's idea of punishing any elected Democrats who support Bush's Social Security abolition plans, by denying them funding and even opposing them in primaries. And I'll put some money down on that the first chance I get. But more importantly, I want to support Democrats who will fight Bush on this. How do I do that? Where do I sign up? How do we do it?


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* BfA poster Tara Liloia says you'll need to use the access code access code "MJCH5A" to read these articles by Thursday. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:22:00 AM -- |    

 
Executive Order approving torture in Iraq?
The ACLU has obtained and released a number of documents -- chiefly e-mail correspondence of FBI personnel -- that shed some new light on the many episodes of detainee abuse that have disgraced this country. It's hard to pick a document to focus on:

• strangulation and lit cigarettes in a detainee's ear (reported 6/25/04)
• stress positions including being handcuffed in a fetal position in intense cold (reported 8/2/04). Look, folks, "stress positions" are what the North Vietnamese did to McCain; it's torture.
• “They tortured me and cuffed me in an act called the scorpion, and pouring cold water on me[.]" The man said he was later dropped on barbed wire (reported 6/29/04)

Even if dogs, sexual humiliation, or sleep deprivation don't rise to one's particular uninformed definition of torture, I assume we can all agree that being dropped on barbed wire or having a lit Marlboro jammed in your ear does.

But I also agree with the comments over at the TalkLeft post about this that the main revelation here is strong circumstantial evidence of an Executive Order condoning stress positions, dogs, and sleep deprivation. If so, it looks to me like the confusion between the war on terror and the war in Iraq wasn't just a rhetorical device, it crept in to Bush's own muddled decisions. On May 22, 2004 -- about a month after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke into the headlines -- the FBI "On Scene Commander - Baghdad" wrote:

the parameters of of the Executive Order (e.g., sleep deprivation, stress positions, loud music, etc).... interrogations utilizing the techniques authorized by the Executive Order. Examples are loud music, interrogators yelling at their subjects, prisoners with hoods on their heads, etc.

...The things our personnel witnessed (but did not participate in) were authorized by the President under his Executive Order. .... I wish to make clear our personnel have been present at various facilities when interrogation techniques made lawful by the Executive Order, but outside standard FBI practice, were utilized. While our personnel did not participate in these interrogations, they heard/saw indications that such interrogations were underway. [...]

We are aware that prior to a revision in policy last week, an Executive Order signed by President Bush authorized the following techniques among others: sleep "management," use of MWDs (military working dogs), "stress positions" such as half squats, "environmental manipulation" such as the use of loud music, sensory deprivation through the use of hoods etc.
(emphases added)

(Ironically, the point of the FBI memo was to inquire whether such procedures no longer constituted "abuse" they were required to report.) Unless the FBI commander is misidentifying, say, the "torture memo" as an Executive Order -- or had it misidentified to him/her as such -- there's a piece of the puzzle that is missing here. I want to see that Executive Order.

"publius," the anonymous author of "Legal Fiction," concludes an eloquent, long post:

But no one seems to care. We’re torturing and murdering prisoners and no one seems to care. It is becoming more and more clear that this torture was directed from on high, and no one seems to care. It’s time to get madder about this, especially if you’re a conservative. The torture undermines the war, threatens your foreign policy visions, jeopardizes our soldiers, exposes them to danger and death, undermines the rule of law, and violates the core tenets of your religion.

It’s time stand up for your values or shut up about ours.

Personally, I want this country -- including its conservatives -- to at least begin to think about impeachment. The Geneva Conventions, quaint and obsolete though they may be, are still the law of our land, as are statutes against torture. But I'm not holding my breath for the GOP to grow a conscience or a brain. So I'll do O'Reilly, Lileks, Reynolds et al the favor they so deeply want and drop the "Happy Holidays" for this:

Merry Christmas, America. Sleep in heavenly peace. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:50:00 PM -- |    

 
Christmas in DC
We've enjoyed a couple of nice events before Christmas here in the DC area; one is still happening, and I hope you'll get a chance to see it if you're in the area.

Washington Ballet: Nutcracker
Last weekend we watched the Washington Ballet's Nutcracker. This is an annual tradition for us, but this year was especially nice because the company is restaging the production to 1882 Georgetown, with the familiar scenes set with American themes instead of the usual Russian or French ones. For example, Frederick Douglass' familiar profile is among the guests in the opening party scene, the tin soldiers wear American uniforms of the Revolutionary War, while their opponents are British redcoat rats -- led by a splendidly regal rat king George the Third.

The dancing was excellent, and the wonderful old Warner Theater doesn't really have any bad seats, so you'll have a pretty good view no matter what. And I personally really enjoy the music; I think Tchaikovsky's suite is one of those things that becomes unjustly underrated just because it's familiar.

Performances continue through next Sunday, the 26th; contact Ticketmaster for ticket information.

Mount Vernon by Candlelight
We joined some friends from pre-school days for this very nice event at George Washington's Mount Vernon home and estate. What's different about this visit to the historic grounds is that it was an evening visit, with a bonfire lit near the entrance to warm other visitors and ourselves as we waited for our turn to visit Mount Vernon itself. Mulled apple cider and a rather good three person caroling group helped pass the short wait.

The site is run by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, which is quite exact in its attention to historical detail, and supports real documentary and archaeological research to sharpen understanding of how Mount Vernon worked and what kind of people George and Martha Washington, their servants, and their slaves were. So there were no Christmas trees or (if I recall correctly) Christmas wreaths; tour guides were dressed in period clothes and did a good job of speaking in the stilted, formal manner of the time and social class.

While the candlelight tours are over for the year, special Christmas tours last all December, and also include the third floor, which is usually off limits to visitors. It has a storage room for dishware, some extra bedrooms, and the cupola, a piece of architecture designed to help keep the house cool by giving hot air a place to escape in the summer time.

Mount Vernon is a wonderful place to take visitors or family; it's run with dedication and care by an exceptional organization; I can't recommend it highly enough. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:40:00 PM -- |    

 
But for Fox!
Happened to check by Douglas Turnbull's blog "The Beauty of Gray" to see if anything had changed. Nope. But his last post -- "Zell Miller, your life is calling..."-- is eerily prescient. It was still before primary season, but Zell Miller was already busy burning his bridges to every Democratic presidential aspirant. Turnbull wrote:

...one angle that might be worth watching is whether Miller is trying to position himself for his post-Senate career. He’s said he’s not going to be seeking re-election in 2004, which means he’s ready to enter the private sector and cash in, like many ex-politicians. [...] Or, perhaps, he had his eye on some other job in which it would behoove him to curry favor with the governing Republican party.

Well, the full scope of Zell's ambitions are now revealed: he's found a home as a "contributor" for Fox News Channel. I'm reminded of a passage from A Man For All Seasons. When Thomas More discovers that a friend has been bribed to commit perjury costing More his life, he comments, "For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... But for Wales!"

According to the Washington Post, Kevin Magee, FNC's vice president of programming, commented, "We will plug him in wherever we can use him." No mention was made of Magee's pointed tail flicking back and forth with excitement, suggesting Miller isn't one of the really expensive motion activated hacks Fox deploys. posted by Thomas Nephew at 8:45:00 PM -- |    

 
Our "challanged" leadership
I like it when people who want to screw up Social Security can't be bothered to sweat the details. They claim Social Security is in crisis, but let's remember they also said Saddam had WMD programs. Come to think of it, Rumsfeld has confused Iraq and Iran a few times. Maybe these are all spelling and reading problems?

Via Southknoxbubba. By the way, happy belated birthday to him and happy anniversary to him and his wife. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:00:00 AM -- |    

 
The law elsewhere
Brett Marston recently highlighted a case from Germany that illustrates that country's different standards for how to discuss someone in the public sphere. A soccer official, Gerhard Mayer-Vorfelder, succeeded in stopping a radio show from implying he was alcoholic; a court agreed that his 2nd Article right to "free development of his personality" outweighed the TV show's 5th article right to free expression.

There's more to it, and the cases are different in many ways, but this seemed to be similar to another recent case in which a German newspaper editor, Michael Naumann, was fined 9000 Euros for claiming a German prosecutor had "lost his marbles." In either case, German law seems, as Brett puts it, "more restrictive of speech in the name of other norms than U.S. law, and U.S. culture in general."

But the case of Hendrik Schön shows a flip side of the same coin. Schön was once a promising German physicist working for Lucent Labs, who claimed to have made astonishing discoveries in the field of superconductivity. As PhysicsWeb explains, he hadn't. Instead, he'd falsified data claiming he had, and was found out because his results were too perfect and unreplicable.

The connection, of a sort, comes in the consequences. In addition to being fired, Schoen has had his doctorate revoked by the University of Konstanz -- despite no evidence that he'd falsified his doctoral work. The New Scientist concludes:

The case highlights the special standing that doctorates have in Germany. In addition to being a technical qualification, a doctorate is considered a guarantee of moral standing. 'If you do not adhere to these standards, the university has the legal right to withdraw the award,' says Wolfgang Dieterich, chairman of the department of physics at Konstanz. The university now formally teaches proper scientific conduct, but only began the course after Schoen received his PhD. Schoen is the first physicist in living memory to lose his doctorate in Germany.

It's just another data point. But it suggests that just as the famous and the accomplished -- or is it merely the powerful? -- enjoy greater privileges in Germany, so must they also live up to greater expectations than in America.

Differences like these make me wonder how much of another country's law and legal thought is really transferable to our own. This, I'm told -- again via Marston -- is a matter of controversy in legal circles on the heels of some citations of foreign law in an amicus brief filed by Human Rights Watch and others in Lawrence v. Texas. I guess I'd side with the conservatives: laws are of, by, and for the people governed; their force and justice are narrowly confined to those people, and should therefore carry little or no weight beyond their borders.

But more fundamentally, it seems to me that there are layers upon layers of spoken and unspoken assumptions that go into law, and it's difficult at best to know what conclusions should be encouraged in the context of our traditions by arguments plucked from other ones. That's not to say the effort shouldn't be made to compare and contrast laws and legal traditions from around the world, and learn from them. But I agree with Posner: "The problem is not learning from abroad; it is treating foreign judicial decisions as authorities in U.S. cases, as if the world were a single legal community." It seems clear the world is anything but that, if even comparable societies like Germany and the U.S. can remain so surprising to eachother.


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EDIT, 10/20: "Differences" sentence improved. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:06:00 AM -- |