The Sad Case Of Clarence Thomas

The Founding Fathers got little wrong. With the conspicuous exception of ducking the slavery issue, which would inextricably lead to the Civil War, they constructed a Constitution with extraordinary foresight. But given the troubling case of Clarence Thomas, lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices isn't looking like such a hot idea these days.

In granting lifetime tenure, the Founders believed that it would be more difficult for outside parties to influence the high court, but they failed to take into account that life expectancies would grow by leaps and bounds. Indeed, the average tenure of a justice was under 15 years from the founding of the republic until 1970 and since then is over 26 years.

Justice Thomas was 43 years old when he was nominated to the court, meaning that he could hypothetically serve or 30 or 40 years before stepping down. That is an awful thought.

Thomas once was fond of saying that affirmative action marked him as an inferior man, and it turns out that he is. He has not written a significant opinion in his 20 years on the court and has not uttered a word during oral arguments in five years.

Add to that an unapologetic judicial activism that he shares with Justice Scalia, as well as the deep ethical hole that he has dug in failing to disclose his conservative activist wife's income for the last 20 years and speechifying before conservative political advocacy groups that will result in him having a whopping conflict of interest when the court is eventually asked to rule on the Obama health-care reform law since the groups are against it and he certainly will be, as well.

Mind you that Thomas and Scalia are not the first activist justices.

William Douglas, a flaming liberal who with a tenure of 36 years was the longest-serving justice, frequently overstepped bounds, but Thomas and his wife, Virginia, are setting new standards insofar as the wealth of the Thomas household is now directly related to his decision-making on the court such as when he ruled for Citizens United in a disgraceful freedom-of-speech decision. The group has close ties to groups that Mrs. Thomas has and still works for in paid and not voluntary positions. She also has declared herself an "ambassador" for the Tea Party, which also is working to overturn the health-care reform law.

It is fair to say that Clarence Thomas isn't going anywhere soon and won't recuse himself when the court hears the health-care reform case. But neither will he have anything to say during oral arguments.

He responded to his critics last weekend in a manner that can only be described as scary.

Thomas told a conservative group that he and his wife "believe in the same things"” and "“are focused on defending liberty," while his critics are bent on undermining the ability of Americans to defend their liberties.

That sound you hear is the Founding Fathers kicking themselves in the butt.

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate
(2010)

Why A Libyan No-Fly Zone Is A No-Go

National security ace Thomas Ricks lists six no-nonsense reasons why a no-fly zone over Libya is a non starter:

(1.) Imposing a no-fly zone is an act of war. For example, it would require attacking Qaddafi's air defense systems-not just anti-aircraft guns and missile batteries, but also radar and communications systems. We may also need some places out in the desert to base helicopters to pick up downed fliers. So, first question: Do we want to go to war with Qaddafi?

(2.) Hmmm, another American war in an Arab state -- what's not to like?

(3.) How long are we willing to continue this state of war? What if we engage in an act of war, and he prevails against the rebels? Do we continue to fight him, escalate -- or just slink away? And what do we do about aircrews taken prisoner?

(4.) And if we are going to go to war with his government, why not just try to finish the job quickly and conduct air strikes against him and his infrastructure? In this sense, a no-fly zone is a half measure, which generally is a bad idea in war. Why risk going to war and losing? That is, if we are willing to do air strikes, why not go the whole way and use ground troops now to go in and topple a teetering regime? I actually would prefer this option.

(5.) See what I mean?

(6.) No, the Iraqi no-fly zones are not a good precedent to cite. . . . [O]ne reason that no American aircraft were shot down in the Iraqi no-fly zones was because Saddam Hussein really did not want to-that is, he did not want to provoke America.

Photograph by Robert Schmidt/AFP-Getty Images

Jerry Remmers (1937-2011)

MORE HERE AND HERE.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

ROBERT WYATT & HORSE
By Alfie Wyatt
Hat tip to Ordinary Finds

Science Sunday: Report On Christchurch

Part of the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament lies in ruins.

By COUNTRY BUMPKIN

A friend who lives in Christchurch, and who has moved out with his family until things settle down, points out that the violence of the lateral forces of the February 22 earthquake were unprecedented.

Measured as a fraction of gravitational pull, the horizontal force of the quake was 1.88 times the force of gravity. Building codes, he tells me, allow for horizontal force of 0.6g, at least in Wellington where everyone thought the next major quake would strike and where a good deal of building strengthening has been done. Not so.

Christchurch copped it back in September with lateral force of 1.26g, and a Richter scale reading of 7.1. The Christchurch quake's Richter force was a mere 6.3, but now over 200 people are dead, and of those a substantial proportion are foreign nationals. The pupils of an English-language school are still buried in the ruins of an office block which was never designed to withstand such forces, as are about 22 tourists under the collapsed steeple of Christchurch's chief building, Christ Church, which stands (more or less -- it may have to come down) right in the heart of the city and represents all that is British about the colonial heritage of this once-beautiful town.

One of the curious side-effects of the quake is soil liquefaction (video here). Large areas of the city have been flooded with water and sand. Teams of volunteers have been helping sweep up the sand for carrying away, and dumps have been set aside for it. People are saying that some 200,000 tons of sand have been moved. We've been seeing pictures on TV of sand mountains high enough to take your breath away.

Christchurch has had around 5,000 aftershocks since the first big quake back in September. The February 22 event is said to be one of them, and to that extent more or less predictable though its force and timing could not have been foreseen.

Will there be more, then? No-one really knows.

One day there is no doubt that Wellington will have an event of this magnitude, and one wonders of course whether the statistical chances of that have changed. There's really nothing to do but wait and see, and have an emergency kit ready to get one through until help arrives.

* * * * *

The organization and execution of the response in Christchurch seem to have been magnificent. Rescue specialists from around the world turned up in droves, and although a few people are still waiting for electricity and water and sanitation -- the full restoration of which will take months or years -- life is slowly returning to the city.

The need to rebuild much of the Christchurch city central business district raises some interesting avenues for guesswork, which goes something like this:

* Do professions like accountants and lawyers, or business administrations need expensive office space in the heart of the city?

* In the age of the Internet, can their work be spread outside, even to employees' or partners' homes?

* Can the reconstructed commercial space then be shrunk to fit the purpose of only occasional meetings or other reasons for people to congregate together?

* Would such arrangements hamper the ability of people to bounce ideas off each other as they do now when they gather around the water cooler?

* If business of this type disappeared into the suburbs, or to Club Med, what would be the prospects for retailers, and cafes, and bakeries, and pubs, and taxis, and all the other trades which depend on a busy town center to make their livings?

Can such change, if it happens, be planned for? I have my doubts about this, because no-one can foretell the future in such detail. So, if it can’t be planned then how will it come to pass?

I feel those words, which have largely disappeared from the New Zealand vocabulary -- "market forces" -- coming on!

* * * * *

The other big issue surfacing now is the matter of political attitudes and stances.

After many years of backbiting, rudeness, stupidity, backside-covering, short-sightedness, and many more nouns of this kind, New Zealanders have suddenly shown that they can pull together. Christchurch schoolchildren are taking lessons in Auckland; those whose homes have been destroyed have been taken in -- often by strangers -- and provided with shelter; opposition to the government’s policies for help and recovery has been toned down (except for a few of the more stupid left-wing bloggers). Can this test of the New Zealand character stick and carry the country forward on what Winston Churchill on another occasion called "the broad, sunlit uplands . . . "?

One would like to think so.

Country Bumpkin is the nome de plummage of my cousin, a
bibliophile and man of the world who lives in New Zealand.

Photographs (top to bottom) by David Wethey/NZPA via AP, Richard
Cosgrove/Christchurch Press via Reuters, Mark Mitchell/New
Zealand Herald via AP, Martin Hunter/Getty, Iain McGreggor/
Christchurch Press via Reuters, Mitchell/AFP-Getty, Hunter/Getty,
Brett Phipps/New Zealand Herald via AP.

Your Week In Republican Mau Mauing

If there was any doubt that Mike Huckabee speaks for what is left of the Republican Party base, the presidential wannabe hit a grand slam this week in being willfully clueless about Barack Obama's background.

As in, you know, there are questions about where the president was born. ("I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough.)

As well as questions about his character because of where he grew up. ("If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya, with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution is very different than ours, because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.")

Fuggedabout the fact that it has been proven beyond certainty that Obama was born in the foreign country of Hawaii and that he actually spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, and not Kenya, with a father who was born in that African nation.

When the former Arkansas governor and Southern Baptist was called out for these borderline racist remarks, he said he had been misunderstood and then dug a deeper hole for himself. ("I have said many times, publicly, that I do think he [Obama] has a different worldview and I think it is, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.")

For the record, there are both Boy Scout troops and Rotary Clubs in Honolulu, where Obama went to high school after returning from Ken . . . er, Indonesia.

No matter. You go, Mike, go!

Cartoon du Jour

David Horsey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

THE DERELICT OVAL
By Sven Fennema

Cartoon du Jour

Don Wright/Palm Beach (Fla.) Post

Peter R. Gomes (1942-2011)

MORE HERE.

Photograph by C. Fernsebner

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

WOLF DAUGHTERS
By Kio Murakami

That Fracking Tom Corbett Is At It Again

A PENNSYLVANIA FRACKING SITE

We're burning the furniture to heat the house.

~ JOHN H. QUIGLEY

No matter what you think about the merits of drilling into shale deposits to pump out natural gas, and some environmentalists are actually enamored of the concept because natural gas is cleaner than coal, it is a disaster waiting to happen. No, make that already happening.

But if you're newly-minted Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, allowing drilling companies to frack wherever they want in the Keystone State with few constraints or even taxes (like levying a few for extraction) is a payback inasmuch as these companies helped bankroll his gubernatorial campaign to the tune of $875,720.

Michael Krancer, Corbett's new secretary of the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, has an utterly inappropriate business-first policy, something that John Quigley, his predecessor under Governor Ed Rendell, most definitely did not.

"A moribund economy is the enemy of environmental protection," Krancer says without irony.

Quigley, meanwhile, notes than in shifting away from coal toward natural gas, "we're trying for cleaner air, but we're producing massive amounts of toxic wastewater with salts and naturally occurring radioactive materials, and it's not clear we have a plan for properly handling this waste."

It is clear that no one has a plan, which makes Corbett's intention to make good on a campaign promise to rescind Rendell's ban on fracking in state parks, as well as requiring impact analyses prior to drilling in state forests, all the more outrageous.

I do, however, have a plan:

Recalling to mind the boast of a power company flack that he was so confident that the waters around Three Mile Island were safe after the partial reactor core meltdown in 1979 were safe that he'd drink it, Corbett should show his faith by drinking the water from each of the communities whose groundwater supplies are likely to be contaminated from fracking.

Cartoon du Jour

John Cole/Scranton (Pa.) Times-Tribune

There Is A God: The Mets Are A Mess

MORE HERE.

Jane Russell (1921-2011)

MORE HERE.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

QOUTH THE RAVEN -- NEVERMORE!
By Mario Grobenski

Not So Fast On The Mideast High-Fiving

Qaddafi supporters rally in Sebratha, west of Tripoli

While I welcome the changes sweeping the Middle East as much as any freedom lover and the interim government in Egypt seems to be making good on its promises in particular, it is way too premature to pop the champagne corks.

Several developments make this so:

* The snail-like speed with which the international community has reacted to events in Libya, where strongman Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi is fighting back against pro-democracy forces with bullets and bombs.

Although I oppose armed intervention, the U.S.'s reaction has been particularly pathetic as it has only begun to move naval vessels toward Libya and freeze its $30 billion in assets two weeks after the revolt began.

* The absence of Al Qaeda as a player in regional developments, possibly because the terrorist group's stock in trade -- violence and religious fanaticism -- have been largely absent.

Some pundits are declaring that Al Qaeda is at a crossroads, but it is more likely that these jihadists eventually will find a way to exploit the disappointments that will inevitably follow the first flush of victory in some countries.

* In fact, religious fanatics have not suddenly disappeared in Egypt and elsewhere. It it just that news network cameras have created that impression by focusing on protesters who seem more Western than fundamentalist in appearance.

Bahrain, where the ruling elite sicced Sunni fanatics on Shiite demonstrators, is a case in point, while the exact opposed has occurred in Iraq with Shiites pouncing on Sunnis. And there is a movement to replace the presidential government with an Islamic state in Yemen.

* * * * *

The relationship between Western nations and Qaddafi, who has clung to power for 41 years, is especially problematic.

During those four long decades he has exported terrorism and repeatedly oppressed his own people, but the tut-tutting from European capitals in particular always has been undercut by the reality that Libya has the largest crude oil reserves in Africa. Qaddafi also has been adept at making some concessions, including dismantling his country's nascent nuclear and chemical weapons program.

And speaking of oil, it is widely believed that a popular uprising in Saudi Arabia, which has the world's largest reserves, would trigger a worldwide recession.

But there is a more fundamental problem:

Practitioners of realpolitik have preached that the Middle East is not ready for democracy and the attendant belief in human rights, as well as strongmen like Qaddafi being the only "bulwark between the region and Islamic revolution," as The Economist puts it.

It will be instructive to revisit the pro-democracy movements in a few months to see if the cynics turn out to have been correct.

Photograph by Moises Saman for The New York Times

Cartoon du Jour

Lisa Benson/Victor Valley (Calif.) Daily Press

Fred Buckles (1901-2011)

MORE HERE.

Photograph by Alex Ogle/AFP-Getty Images

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

HORSES
From Sainspiration

Income Inequality Is America's Shame & Both Political Parties Share The Blame

OH, FOR THE GOOD OLD DAYS

The rise of the Tea Party amidst the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party has merely exacerbated what some of us have known for many years: America is going to hell in a handbasket.

If you, like me, are of the librul persuasion, it is tempting to lay America's sundry and growing woes -- so vividly shown in the chart below this post -- at the feet of the Bush administration and the aforementioned ultra conservatives, let alone that Republicans have been in power 20 of the last 30 years. But this has been a group effort. Bipartisanship at its worst, if you will.

That our political leadership continues to pay lip service to America's greatness when it has slipped to near or the bottom among industrialized nations in categories such as income inequality, life expectancy, prison population and student performance betrays a deep denial across the political spectrum.

The issue of income inequality has to rank as the most serious because so many societal ills flow from it. Yet aside from academic wonks and a handful of economists, no one in Washington is acknowledging this elephant in the room, let alone beginning to address it in a meaningful way, while many Republicans are openly disdainful of the working poor and people whose toe hold on the middle class is slipping.

This crisis is exacerbated by the Tea Party-led mania for cutting government programs willy nilly. Proposed cuts to programs like Head Start and Pell grants for college students, as well as more sweeping cuts to education in general, fall disproportionately on the backs of the poor, which inevitably will make the poor poorer while making the rich . . . well, you know how that works.

* * * * *

How bad is income inequality?

Well, in 1915 when take-home pay was measured for the first time, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans had 15 percent of the wealth, and the disparity ticked up a bit and down a bit through boom and bust cycles until the 1970s when wages began to stagnate significantly and jobs began going overseas. Today the wealthiest 1 percent take home 25 percent of the wealth and the gap steadily widens.

Wait. It gets even worse when you consider that:

* 80 percent of America's assets are in the hands of 20 percent of the population.

* During the 1960s, CEOs earned on average $42 for every $1 earned by wage workers, while today the ratio is $344 to $1.

* Since 1983, 43 percent of the new financial wealth created by the economy has accrued to the wealthiest 1 percent and a full 94 percent was absorbed by the top 20 percent, leaving just 6 percent of the financial wealth created since the 1980s the bottom 80 percent of Americans.

* The U.S. is now on par with countries like Uruguay and Cameroon.

* * * * *

Then there are efforts to bust unions in Wisconsin, New Jersey and Ohio, among other states with Republican governors.

Why unions? Because their rank-and-file are typically from the middle class and often got there because of their right to organize and bargain for decent wages, working conditions, and health and pension benefits.

The exploits of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, the Republican darling of the moment despite his RINO credentials, are especially loathsome since it is his intention to balance the Garden State's out-of-whack budget on the backs of policemen, firefighters, teachers and state employees rather than do what was once the sensible alternative: Ask these unions members to give something back while increasing the tax burden for the state's large upper crust or hiking the gasoline tax, which at a ridiculously low 14.5 percent per gallon is the third lowest in the U.S. and hasn't been increased since 1988.

Then there are concerted efforts to abolish or outlaw anything to do with vaginas that involve federal funding, but that's a story for another day.

* * * * *

It is confounding that President Obama, whose agenda is substantially middle-class friendly, has not made income inequality a bigger issue.

No, the Democrats do not typically engage in class warfare as their Republican brethren so shamelessly do. And yes, Obama compromised with the GOP to allow the Bush tax cuts for the rich to roll over into his tax-cut bill.

But if Obama claims to be the leader of all the people, it is long past time that he began acting that way.

America's Shame Close Up & Personal

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE.

Source: IMF via The New York Times

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate

Suze Rotolo (1943-2011)

MORE HERE.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

FROST
By Susanne Katzenberg
Hat tip to Woods' Lot