Wednesday, June 21, 2006

NBA fines and Finals

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban was fined $250,000 by the NBA Tuesday for what the league described as "several acts of misconduct" after Game 5 of the NBA Finals. Cuban walked out onto the court to get in the face of official Joe DeRosa about some of the calls. Then, according to the Miami Herald, he screamed at NBA commissioner David Stern and other league officials, who were seated at the scorer's table, "[Bleep] you! [Bleep] you! Your league is rigged!"

Maybe that was a baseless outburst of temper. Or maybe it was another example of Michael Kinsley's Law, "A gaffe is when you accidentally tell the truth."

It does raise some questions.

Like, for instance, what was the commissioner doing sitting at the scorer's table?

It didn't help the league's credibility when the Miami Heat players told reporters after Tuesday night's victory that Coach Pat Riley had predicted on June 8 that the Heat would win the championship on June 20. Fox Sports reported that Riley was so confident, he only packed one suit for the trip to Dallas.

America Wants to Know congratulates the Miami Heat and especially Shaquille O'Neal and Pat Riley. Out here in Laker-land, we're lonely without them, although we do have a lot more free time in June.

But we take note that in professional basketball, the way the officials call the game in the first quarter determines how the players will have to play throughout the game. Early fouls on key players force them to play less aggressively. In most magic tricks, the switch happens well before you think to look for it.

And if we were sports gamblers, we'd put our money on wrestling before we bet a dime on the NBA.


Copyright 2006

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Sunday, June 18, 2006

NASA's sad story

NASA's top officials congratulated themselves Saturday at a post-Flight Readiness Review press conference for being open-minded enough to listen to the space agency's experts tell them the shuttle is too dangerous to fly.

They've decided to fly anyway.

Stunned reporters asked them to clarify their statement. "How would I distill this for an editor," one asked. "You're saying you asked your engineers if the shuttle was safe to fly, and they said no, and you're flying anyway?"

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin spoke a little more slowly so the densest members of the press would get it.

"Yes," he said.

Dr. Griffin went on to explain that although many people who work only on the shuttle program don't think the vehicle should be allowed out of a locked hangar, the people who see the bigger picture, like himself, for instance, understand that the completion of the International Space Station requires a certain number of shuttle missions, and the last thing he wants to see is a crush of six missions in one year, sometime down the road, if they fall behind schedule now.

Dr. Griffin stressed that the crew is not at risk, in his judgment, because NASA will take pictures of the shuttle after the launch to see if it has been damaged by a flying chunk of foam in that unfortunate way that causes catastrophic immolation on re-entry.

He said the crew might be able to repair the shuttle, and if they can't repair it they could fly it to the International Space Station, and then NASA could fly another shuttle up to get them, and if all else fails there's that retro Russian emergency capsule that bounces into Siberia like an animated outtake from I Dream of Jeannie.

That's NASA's idea of a well-thought-out plan.

While Dr. Griffin said he's confident the space shuttle crew will not be at risk, he admitted that the shuttle itself might be lost to a foam-strike incident. If we lose another vehicle, he told reporters, he would say it's time to close the shuttle program down.

There are two things that are really sad about this story.

First, the NASA Administrator who is so willing to take risks to keep construction of the space station on schedule told USA Today last September that "it is now commonly accepted" that the space shuttle program and the International Space Station were mistakes. Michael Griffin said then that the agency's resources would have been better spent on space exploration than on the shuttle and the station, which cost more than a hundred billion dollars each and never leave the Earth's orbit.

And second, the foam strike problem that NASA's engineers can't solve was solved, or at least was significantly better, before environmental regulations forced NASA to stop using Freon in the foam manufacturing process. After the agency began using an ozone-friendlier process in 1997, the problem of foam shedding escalated dramatically.

No one at NASA cared to argue with the EPA or the environmental lobby. This is an agency that vowed never to repeat a 1998 science experiment that sent pregnant mice and baby rats up on the shuttle because schoolchildren were upset when they found out the experiment ended with scientists killing the animals to study their brains.

These are not rational scientific decisions. These are rational public relations decisions. They are not designed to lead to actual scientific progress. They're designed to lead to asinine, ignorant, childish, wishful, daydreaming visions of moon colonies. Oh, and tens of billions of dollars in government contracts in key electoral states like Florida and Texas.

That's what it should say on the astronauts' memorial. They died for pork.

Copyright 2006

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Thursday, June 15, 2006

No knock, no problem

Today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the U.S. Constitution does not require police holding a search warrant to knock before they enter a house. The majority said the evidence seized by police who march in unannounced does not have to be excluded at trial.

Before everyone goes wild and declares that the Bush judicial appointees have tipped us into a fascist police state, consider this:

The Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches and seizures, was never intended by the Constitution's framers to apply to local and state authorities.

In fact, we were midway into the 20th century before anyone suggested that it did.

It was the 1949 case of Wolf v. Colorado that declared the Fourth Amendment to be "incorporated" into the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars any state from denying due process of law to any person. The Supreme Court reversed a long history of precedents and ruled that the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures was so fundamental to due process of law that it must be enforced against the states as well as the federal government.

And it was not until 1961, in the case of Mapp v. Ohio, that the Supreme Court said evidence seized in an illegal search had to be excluded from a trial.

So the five justices who voted today to allow police to enter your house without knocking were really just returning to the view that this is a matter between you and your state government. It's your state constitution that should set the limits for local police. What makes sense to people in New York may not work for the people of Montana. And according to the founders, it shouldn't have to.


Copyright 2006

Source notes:

Wolf v. Colorado, 338 U.S. 25 (1949). Justice Frankfurter wrote: "The security of one's privacy against arbitrary intrusion by the police--which is at the core of the Fourth Amendment--is basic to a free society. It is therefore implicit in 'the concept of ordered liberty' and as such enforceable against the States through the Due Process Clause. The knock at the door, whether by day or by night, as a prelude to a search, without authority of law but solely on the authority of the police, did not need the commentary of recent history to be condemned as inconsistent with the conception of human rights enshrined in the history and the basic constitutional documents of English-speaking peoples."

Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961). Justice Clark wrote: "Having once recognized that the right to privacy embodied in the Fourth Amendment is enforceable against the States, and that the right to be secure against rude invasions of privacy by state officers is, therefore, constitutional in origin, we can no longer permit that right to remain an empty promise."

For more information and complete source notes, please see "How the First Amendment Came to Protect Topless Dancing." The essay is the appendix to The 37th Amendment, a novel set in 2056, forty years after the 37th Amendment has removed "due process of law" from the U.S. Constitution.

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Wednesday, June 07, 2006

A wall and a bus ticket: the new shape of immigration reform

President Bush made a high-profile trip to New Mexico and Texas Monday and Tuesday to lecture the country about the need for what he calls "comprehensive" immigration reform.

Speaking to Border Patrol officers in Artesia, New Mexico, the president insisted, in a voice so angry that he threw in an odd little half-laugh now and then as if trying to lighten it up, that the country must accept a guest-worker program and the gradual legalization of illegal immigrants.

The president's speech wasn't enough to help Democrat Francine Busby win San Diego's special election for jailed congressman Duke Cunningham's seat. An audio clip of Ms. Busby telling a Spanish-speaking audience that they didn't need papers for voting may have helped her lose to Brian Bilbray, a Republican lobbyist who surged past Ms. Busby in the polls after he came out against the president's immigration proposals.

That's right, the voters of San Diego chose a lobbyist over an immigration-rights supporter.

Any questions?

Members of Congress who aren't yet clear on the concept might want to note that on Monday, border-enforcement hard-liner Rep. Tom Tancredo won a GOP presidential straw poll in Michigan by a wide margin, defeating Rudy Giuliani, Condoleezza Rice and John McCain, among others. Sen. Sam Brownback, who supports the president's proposals for guest workers and citizenship, finished dead last with a single vote.

Still have questions?

Take note that Rep. Tom Osborne, the popular former Nebraska football coach, lost a GOP primary for governor after he supported a proposal to give in-state tuition rates to illegal immigrants. The incumbent governor, who vetoed the measure, beat him like a drum. Turnout was among the highest ever for a primary election in Nebraska, up from 21 percent in 2004 to more than 35 percent.

Even local politicians are feeling the heat. The mayor and several members of the Town Council in Herndon, Virginia, were just thrown out by voters after they supported a job center for illegal immigrant day-laborers.

It's over for immigration reform. The only thing supporters can do now is hope the Tancredo-Sensenbrenner administration has a plan to get us out of Iraq.


Copyright 2006

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Saturday, June 03, 2006

The marriage amendment: President Bush opens Pandora's box

President Bush used his Saturday radio address to announce his support for a constitutional amendment defining marriage in the United States as the union of a man and a woman.

He pointed out that state laws banning same-sex marriage have been overturned by the courts, and that the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which says the states don't have to recognize the legality of same-sex marriages performed in another state, could be overturned as well.

About this, there can be no doubt that he is correct. Whether you support or oppose the legality of same-sex marriage, it is a fact that the only way to ban same-sex marriage in the United States is to amend the U.S. Constitution.

That's because Article IV, Section 1 says this: "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State."

That means if Massachusetts says you're married, you're married in the whole United States. The Supreme Court would have to willfully disregard the plain meaning of the English language to interpret the Constitution any other way.

Of course, it wouldn't be the first time.

People who complain about judicial activism on the issues of abortion and gay marriage may be surprised to learn that judicial activism is responsible for a long list of rights that they might not be so willing to give up. Prior to 1925, when the "incorporation doctrine" first glimmered in the eyes of "activist" Supreme Court justices, the states had the power to restrict freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. They had the power to set their own standards for police searches and they were not required to provide criminal defendants with jury trials or defense attorneys. There was no right to remain silent, in the police station or in the courtroom.

The desegregation decisions also were the product of judicial activism, which reinterpreted the 14th Amendment to prohibit separate schools for children of different races. The 14th Amendment was passed in the 19th century by men who are quoted in the congressional record reassuring each other that it will never interfere with the practice of racial segregation in the schools of the Northern states.

So if we're going to go down the road of amending the Constitution to undo judicial activism, we'd better pick out the rights we want to keep and amend the Constitution to lock them down before something bad happens to them.

We should begin with an amendment to ban racial and gender discrimination, so we can stop worrying that basic equality rights will be interpreted out of the Constitution the way they were interpreted into it.

We need an amendment to secure privacy rights, and not just abortion rights. We need an amendment that prohibits the federal government from collecting and retaining information on innocent U.S. citizens without any control or oversight of how that information will be used in the future.

We need an amendment to prohibit the states from infringing freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion.

And we need a serious discussion on whether we want the detailed rules for police conduct and criminal trials made by the local and state governments or by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of course, the president doesn't really want a debate on judicial activism. What he wants is a vote that forces the Senate Democrats to go on record against a ban on same-sex marriage and reassures conservative Republicans that, despite the eye-popping expansion of the federal government, the wild spending, the NSA eavesdropping, and the push for a virtually open border, he's really their kind of guy.

If he can pull this off, he's got a great future in time-share sales.


Copyright 2006

Editor's note: You might be interested to read these:

Judicial Activism and the Constitutional Amendment on Marriage
The Cat, the Bag, and Justice Scalia
The Marriage Protection Amendment of November, 2006
Why There is No Constitutional Right to Privacy, and How to Get One
A Retirement Plan for Sandra Day O'Connor
How to Get Congress to Foot the Bill for Illegal Immigration, and Fast"
How the First Amendment Came to Protect Topless Dancing (column-length version)
How the First Amendment Came to Protect Topless Dancing (full essay)

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