I thought it was because I was getting more of my news from the Internet, but articles like Miller’s Latest Tale Questioned, which recounts the behavior of a New York Times reporter who apparently shilled for the Iraq-is-full-of-WMD crowd, make me wonder if maybe the problem isn’t simply that the NYT just isn’t as good as it used to be.
Maybe they should bring back the old 8-column layout?
There is obviously something slightly egotistical about starting a blog—the assumption that someone, somewhere, maybe with luck a number of someones all over, might care about what I have to say. I was prepared to plead guilty to that one. In my defense I’d say that the primary purpose was more to join what seems to be an ongoing conversation rather than simply to climb a soap box.
That said, at least in these early and little-travelled days, it’s weirdly interesting and pleasurable to see who is linking to this site .
And one link in particular is just inscrutably odd and tantalizing. It reads, in its entirety, as follows:
"Prof. Michael Froomkin has a blog. I will link to it for reasons I cannot say."
This picture bothers me. In fact, this whole web site is disturbing.
I do not like it when my senses report things to me that are clearly false. I do not like it when staring at a picture induces seasickness. I do not like it one little bit.
While popular attention is focused on whether (or, rather, how much) George W. Bush lied to stampede the country into invading Iraq, and blogging elites are comparing notes on the Administration’s bald-faced attempts to deny they ever, ever said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a much less-heralded commission is quietly fighting a bureaucratic war with the Administration. The outcome of that struggle will shape the final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States —AKA the 9/11 commission, which has just issued its second interim report .
As the Washington Post reports, the Administration is stonewalling the 9/11 Commission for all it’s worth. It is not at all obvious how this one will play out, and some of the early signs are not good—according to the Post,
The slow pace in acquiring documents and testimony — along with the commission’s decision to refrain from issuing findings until it is closer to completing a report — has angered many families of victims of the terrorist attacks. Representatives from one group, the Family Steering Committee, issued a “report card” yesterday awarding the commission a “D” in most areas and urging it to better inform the public.
The 9/11 commission is co-chaired by former representative Lee Hamilton, a man of integrity, so there’s still hope for a fair and informative report. One to watch.
I don’t teach Criminal Law. I’ve never practiced criminal law. But it doesn’t take much expertise to suspect that our criminal justice system is disastrously flawed. Stories like this one are, I fear, too routine. The hell of it is, large parts of the system are full of well-meaning people. Not all of them—no system is—but even so. The problems are, I think, systemic more than anything else.
Here in Florida, as in much of the nation, we have a prison-building craze; meanwhile, the United States already leads the world in the percentage of its population behind bars. According the Justice Dept. there were 2,019,234 people incarcerated last April. It’s probably more now. And let’s not even get into the racial composition of the prison population, or the racial (and electoral) consequences of felony convictions.
The callousness of the justice system is in some part—although how big a part is a nice question—a result of its being overloaded and under-funded. And while throwing more money at the problem might improve the job prospects for graduating law students, something I am generally in favor of, I don’t think that there is any chance this state, or this nation, would spend what it would take.
The US is a diverse, mobile, multi-cultural society. Those are among its strengths. As a result of these properties, however, it probably lacks some traditional means of inspiring self-regulation and order among its citizens that exist in those increasingly rare homogenous nations with strong national traditions governing public and private behavior. Indeed, the US is composed of citizens who probably don’t all share the same exact idea of what that regulation and order should look like. In those circumstances, I’m prepared to believe that the US may need to regulate through crime more than might otherwise be necessary in, say, Japan.
But not this much.
The choices are inescapable: either we live with a broken system, or fund the system, or take some of the strains off the system. The first is likely, but horrible. The second is unlikely and would probably mean de-funding something else that we need. So I’m tentatively persuaded that we need to investigate the third option. That means a painful conversation about which things we currently call crimes might be taken off the statute books. And what sort of investments other than in new prisons (schools! teachers! schools! teachers!) might make the taxpaying life seem more realistic and attractive to the young people who commit a disproportionate share of violent crime.
If the deal were, decriminalize all so-called victimless crime (drugs, mainly), spend part of the savings on schools and teachers, and part on having more cops walking dangerous streets to make them safe enough for old people to walk without fear, I’d take it in a minute. But no one is offering me that deal. It may be because drug laws are the true third rail of politics. Or, it may be that the problems go a lot deeper, and that wouldn’t be enough. OK, now I do need an expert…
I’m having an odd problem with Movable Type, the great free software that powers this blog. The template that provides the monthly archives is acting up. It works fine in Mozilla—showing me the whole month’s worth of stuff—but when I test it in IE (under Windows), it only shows the earliest post for the month. Yet, when I view the source code, the text for the month is all there. It’s just not getting shown by the browser. I’ve downloaded the archive page, and the same thing happens when I view it as a local file. (I suspect I’m having a similar problem with the daily archive but haven’t tested as much.)
Anyone out there who can shed light on this?
Update: Thanks to a very helpful reader, it’s fixed! It seems I had a bad closing-comment tag, and IE is just fussier about those.
