 On Point Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes his On Point column most weekdays. He is also an author and freelance writer. Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com. |
March 2007 | Main | May 2007
Seven University of Colorado professors have issued a warning to their colleagues who were brave enough to serve on a committee that condemned a plagiarist and fraud. If that committee’s report on Ward Churchill isn’t retracted, the seven promise, they’ll consider “filing charges of research misconduct against the authors.”
Seven University of Colorado professors have issued a warning to their colleagues who were brave enough to serve on a committee that condemned a plagiarist and fraud. If that committee’s report on Ward Churchill isn’t retracted, the seven promise, they’ll consider “filing charges of research misconduct against the authors.”
This ominous pledge is also signed by two non-CU professors, one from Cornell and the other from Kansas, and alleges five specific “violations” of scholarly norms in the anti-Churchill report.
A last-ditch attempt to turn the tables? Of course, and from professors who in at least some cases share Churchill’s political outlook. But fear not: Even if the committee’s report were as rotten as this gaggle of Churchill defenders contends, it would still provide more than enough basis for the professor’s eventual, much-delayed firing. Indeed, the committee’s conclusion that Churchill is a serial plagiarist is not even challenged. Apparently that is now conceded by all sides.
To fairly assess all five allegations against the committee, I’d have to return to every source cited by each side; that wasn’t possible for this column. But I was nonetheless able to review the source that is the basis for one of the pro-Churchill group's claims. The verdict: It’s a trumped-up charge.
The pro-Churchill professors accuse the investigating committee of “suppressing text from a cited source that contradicts the report’s argument” in discussing an epidemic among the Mandan Indians in the 1830s.
As you might recall, the committee last year concluded that Churchill misled readers in footnoting his baseless claim that “the U.S. Army distributed smallpox-laden blankets as gifts among the Mandan.” In inventing this tale, Churchill pointed to pages 94-96 of Russell Thornton’s book American Indian Holocaust and Survival.
As the committee noted, “Thornton says something quite different about the Fort Clark situation. ... he does not mention blankets or suggest deliberate infection on the part of the U.S. Army or the American Fur Company. Professor Churchill therefore misrepresents what Thornton says.”
So what’s the problem? According to the Churchill apologists, “the Thornton text in this very same section does contain extensive mention of deliberate infection when Thornton cites the speech by Mandan leader Four Bears on p. 98-99.”
Talk about a ridiculous argument. In fact, Thornton offers only three possible ways the Indians could have been infected. None involves the Army, blankets or deliberate infection.
Two pages later he recounts a speech allegedly given by Four Bears after he’d contracted smallpox himself. Four Bears is furious with white men and urges his fellow Indians to kill them all. But he too does not mention the Army or blankets. Nor is it clear from this passage that he believes he was deliberately infected, contrary to what the Churchill defenders insist.
In issuing a report of 124 pages, the committee investigating Churchill undoubtedly made a few mistakes. We can safely say, however, that “suppressing text from a cited source that contradicts the report’s argument” wasn’t one of them.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
‘First the fish began to disappear.”
Uh oh. We’re in for high drama. This will be a modern tale of plagues, beginning with vanishing fish in a bay in Indonesia, as recounted by The New York Times in a front-page article that helped set off an international furor 21/2 years ago.
‘First the fish began to disappear.”
Uh oh. We’re in for high drama. This will be a modern tale of plagues, beginning with vanishing fish in a bay in Indonesia, as recounted by The New York Times in a front-page article that helped set off an international furor 21/2 years ago.
“Then villagers began developing strange rashes and bumps,” reporters Jane Perlez and Evelyn Rusli declared. “Finally in January, Masna Stirman, aided by a $1.50 wet nurse, gave birth to a tiny, shriveled girl with small lumps and wrinkled skin” — who eventually died.
The article quickly closed the loop: “The infant’s death came after years of complaints by local fishermen about waste being dumped in the ocean by the owner of a nearby gold mine, the Newmont Mining Corp., the world’s biggest gold producer, based in Denver.”
The 2,200-word article on Sept. 8, 2004, was replete with one damning claim after another. Perhaps the most shocking involved medical examinations in Buyat Bay, near the mine: “Thirty of the villagers had tumorlike growths, said one of the doctors, Jane Pangemanan. ‘I was shocked by what I saw,’ she said in an interview. Of the 60 people she examined, about 80 percent showed symptoms of poisoning by mercury and arsenic, she said.”
The only problem with those lurid accusations is that they amounted to a hoax. That’s what one company official had the guts to call them in the early going, and that assessment has been vindicated by this week’s acquittal in an Indonesian court of Newmont’s Richard Ness and the company on charges of violating that country’s pollution laws. Even without the verdict, the charges had been crumbling on their own for two years.
Pangemanan herself signed a statement retracting her claims just five months after the Times article, although I could find no timely mention of this in the Times archives. More than a month later, Perlez reported the retraction, but by way of informing Times readers that the doctor had come to regret reversing course.
If Pangemanan regretted her retraction, she could have rectified the error when she testified at Newmont’s trial. Instead, she confirmed she had not identified mercury or arsenic poisoning.
And what of Perlez, the woman whom Ness once dubbed “the other Jane,” co-author of the original Times bombshell as well as major followups? She received an Overseas Press Club Award for what Editor & Publisher called her “exposé of abuses by a mining corporation in Indonesia.”
Life isn’t fair, of course, but why does it have to be ridiculous?
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
I’ve never seen one of those videos featuring a beheading from Iraq — never will, either, if I have anything to say about it. But my taste isn’t shared by all. Some people who aren’t voyeurs or sadists consider those videos a way to plumb the evil of radical Islamists. If it helps them that way, more power to them.
I’ve never seen one of those videos featuring a beheading from Iraq — never will, either, if I have anything to say about it. But my taste isn’t shared by all. Some people who aren’t voyeurs or sadists consider those videos a way to plumb the evil of radical Islamists. If it helps them that way, more power to them.
Are they being used by the fanatics who filmed the murders? Of course not — any more than those who saw the photos and videos taken by Seung-Hui Cho are tools of his ambition.
In his Rocky column Saturday, media critic Dave Kopel wrote, “It would have been better if all the Denver media had refused to print the posed photos anywhere, and also refused to link to his videos from their Web sites.” If it was wrong for the Denver media even to provide links to the material, then it was obviously wrong for others to do so, too. Kopel, along with a surprising number of other critics this past week, argues for a total blackout on the package Cho sent to NBC News. The rationale: preventing copycat crimes and in deference to the victims’ families.
Now, it’s one thing to demand the media “keep that stuff out of my face” — to banish Cho’s posed pictures from the front page (and even inside pages) and decline to air any video. I might disagree — OK, I do disagree — but the critics offer admittedly strong arguments for limiting the killer’s exposure.
What I don’t get at all, however, is the eagerness of some to block even self-initiated access to the material on the Internet, thus leaving the public at the mercy of descriptions from network executives, forensic psychologists or the FBI.
Sorry, but this member of the public doesn’t want to depend solely on elite guardians to characterize the material for him. The era when that was the norm is over — or at least it’s on the ropes thanks to the way the Internet tends to cut out the middleman.
I heard only a few seconds of Cho’s lunatic rants, by the way, and have no desire to witness the rest. But it’s important to me to know that in the event of a serious public dispute over something in it, I could settle the matter for myself in a matter of a few computer clicks.
Ballot ballet
Once again I’ve cast more than a single ballot in a local election. And once again it’s given me an uneasy feeling about the integrity of mail elections.
On Monday I dropped off three ballots at the Wellington Webb building in downtown Denver. It’s legal to mail or deliver a ballot that isn’t yours, of course, although you have to sign in and record the number you produce in person.
But how would they know how many ballots I’d dumped in a trash bin out back?
What if I’d promised to deliver a dozen ballots from a nursing home where a relative of mine resided — saving each voter the escalating postage — and then quietly discarded those I suspected disagreed with my own electoral choices?
There are simply too many points at which a mail ballot may be in the control of someone other than the voter or the office tabulating the results. And one of these days we’ll discover that it matters.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
Could someone from the Ritter administration tell us again, please, why the Colorado Oil and Gas Commission had to be reformed? Ah, yes: According to Harris Sherman, the state’s natural resources chief, the commission suffers from the impression that the industry is regulating itself.
Could someone from the Ritter administration tell us again, please, why the Colorado Oil and Gas Commission had to be reformed? Ah, yes: According to Harris Sherman, the state’s natural resources chief, the commission suffers from the impression that the industry is regulating itself.
Sherman is a sharp, capable fellow who knows the industry employs an army of experts to help it comply with reams of regulations. But what he was referring to, in part, is the fact that all but two of the oil and gas panel’s seven members must have a background in the industry; by contrast, a bill steaming ahead in the Senate with the governor’s support would require only three of nine commission members with such a background.
If the appearance of self-regulation is so important, however, and only a third of the oil and gas commission will soon need to boast expertise in the field, surely the same principle should be extended elsewhere.
After all, Colorado is home to a variety of boards dominated by the profession they oversee. A decisive majority of the Colorado Board of Veterinary Medicine are veterinarians, for example.
The Board of Dental Examiners is stacked with dentists and dental hygienists. Lawyers regulate themselves. And — to provide just one more example — while the Board of Medical Examiners actually includes four “public” members, they are easily overwhelmed by the larger number of docs.
The Ritter administration will no doubt want to address this scandalous state of affairs, and soon. For starters, why not require that two-thirds of the dental board be ... oh, I don’t know, how about car mechanics? That will certainly put any worries about self-regulation to rest.
Black flight?
Two months ago, the Rocky quoted Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald, D-Coal Creek Canyon, as claiming that charter schools cater to “white flight.” This week the Rocky reported that “about 13 percent of black students in (Denver Public Schools) attend charters, more than twice the rate of Hispanic or Anglo students.”
Would the Senate president also like to criticize black flight? Would anyone? Could we for once stipulate that parents who enroll their kids where they think they’re likely to thrive deserve something better than sneers?
Deadly ethanol?
Imagine the reaction in the environmental community to a study finding that a product touted by several corporations would “increase ozone-related mortality, hospitalization and asthma by about 9 percent in Los Angeles and 4 percent in the U.S. as a whole” compared to the existing product it would replace?
There would be concern expressed, without question. Indignation and outrage, in all likelihood. Possibly even demands to remove the suspect product from the marketplace.
But in fact there is such a new study. It was authored by a Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering, and it says that the culprit in question is, well, ethanol, the elixir slated to wean us from our fossil-fuel “addiction.”
The full sentence that was excerpted above appears on the opening page of professor Mark Z. Jacobson’s study: “It was found that E-85 (85 percent ethanol fuel, 15 percent gasoline) may increase ozone-related mortality, hospitalization and asthma by about 9 percent in Los Angeles and 4 percent in the U.S. as a whole relative to 100 percent gasoline.”
Of course, slowing down the E-85 bandwagon would disappoint the corn and ethanol lobbies, not to mention the politicians and their green allies who’ve elevated ethanol to an honored spot in the environmental hall of fame. So let’s be nice and not upset them by mentioning the study again.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
The first rule of an American tragedy: Exploit it for your own ends.
Perhaps you have an agenda, pro or con, involving guns. Perfect. Shout it out while the victims’ bodies are still warm. That’ll get the public’s attention.
The first rule of an American tragedy: Exploit it for your own ends.
Perhaps you have an agenda, pro or con, involving guns. Perfect. Shout it out while the victims’ bodies are still warm. That’ll get the public’s attention.
Perhaps Virginia Tech reminds you of Iraq and the fact that most Americans, in your view, are too insensitive to notice. Don’t miss your chance to point out our blindness. If at all possible, thrust your moral superiority into our faces before the killer has even been ID’d. Why squander the moment?
Or maybe the massacre proves to you that U.S. institutions are failing to take security seriously more than five years after 9/11, or that Cho Seung- Hui’s status as a South Korean native exposes a broken immigration system. Jump right in.
And don’t, please, fumble the opportunity to denounce the Virginia Tech president and police chief as blundering fools for failing to shut down the campus in time to prevent the second round of shootings. Naturally, that’s the action you would have taken without any benefit of hindsight. Why, it’s only “common sense” (to quote a morning talk show host on Sportsradio 950 who seemed especially sure of himself).
Or maybe you’ve got a plaintiffs attorney’s mentality, convinced that deep pockets must be looted after every tragedy lest the world slip out of joint. By all means go for it. After all, as one law professor exulted, “A lawsuit and a substantial jury verdict would help put all universities on notice that they must be fully prepared for such shooting incidents ...”
They must be “fully prepared,” that is, for a heavily armed maniac on a mission to murder with absolutely no regard for his own life. Sure, that’s reasonable. Maybe they could assign a bodyguard to every student.
Don’t misunderstand: All of us argue by use of examples, so it’s inevitable that Virginia Tech will be cited to buttress this or that belief. But the next time something so terrible happens, couldn’t our political warriors have the decency to wait, say, 24 hours before transforming it into just the latest talking point?
Not a whit of bigotry
For once I’ve got to defend Sen. Sue Windels. The Arvada Democrat’s hostility to charter schools may be an insult to parents who simply want the best possible education for their kids, but she has every right to describe some students who opt for online schools as “lazy” without opponents playing the race card and calling for her head.
Some students are lazy. That should not be a news bulletin. Whether online schools harbor more lazy students than elsewhere is questionable, but there’s nothing that smacks of bigotry in Windels’ claim that some kids “see online as a ‘quick, easy’ way to get a diploma without having to put in all the seat time and effort.”
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
What I remember most about a day eight years ago this week is the deep, enervating sadness that enveloped our community after 13 people were murdered at Columbine High School.
What I remember most about a day eight years ago this week is the deep, enervating sadness that enveloped our community after 13 people were murdered at Columbine High School.
People are massacred by the dozens almost daily in Iraq and elsewhere around the globe. We are horrified, sympathetic, but rarely are we shaken to the bone. We need to be near the crime, the victims and the survivors to fully appreciate what such senseless slaughter means. It’s human nature. We can’t be oppressed with grief for all of human suffering. Our circuits would overload.
Now the people of Blacksburg, Va., must endure a special sadness. Most of us can’t really share in it from our vantage point so far away, but we can remember how we felt when it struck here. And for perspective, we can note that Columbine wasn’t even half as bloody as the horror that just befell Virginia Tech.
Will Dems go it alone?
If Gov. Bill Ritter was hoping for a bipartisan coalition to back his proposal to freeze property tax rates, he can forget about it now that every Republican state senator and every representative save one has signed a letter opposing the idea.
“Let us be clear,” the letter declares. “We stand opposed to your property tax increase ... We have to move beyond 20th century measures like property tax hikes if we wish to address our 21st century needs.”
And what would a 21st century system of school finance look like? The letter is strikingly coy in that regard, no doubt in part because most Republicans have no idea.
In addition, they’re a fairly diverse lot. Some have supported padding state revenues with measures such as Referendum C. Others would rather endure a root canal than transfer another dollar from private hands to the government. But they all recognize political kryptonite when they see it and are more than happy to let Democrats handle it on their own.
Democrats run state government, after all. They have the votes to overcome any Republican opposition to Ritter’s plan. The only question is whether they have the courage to go it alone.
According to polls conducted for the Tax Foundation (the outfit that calculates the Tax Freedom Day each year, when Americans stop working for government and begin working for themselves), the property tax is considered the “least fair” state and local tax. Why that’s so is a bit of a mystery. One expert cited by the foundation claims it’s because the property tax is “highly visible” and because “you can see if you’re getting your money’s worth” in terms of schools, city services and so on.
I tend to think it’s also because homeowners resent how property taxes can sharply escalate without any similar bump in their own incomes. They might not feel any wealthier, yet end up shelling out more in taxes every year based on the rising value of an asset they have no desire to sell.
Coloradans haven’t experienced that helpless feeling of escalating property taxes in quite a while, thanks to a law pushing mill levies down. Freezing rates might sound innocuous — and Ritter is right about the perilous state of the education fund — but a freeze would leave Coloradans vulnerable to a ride on a tax escalator during the next surge in residential property values.
There’s got to be a better way, even if Republicans aren’t able to identify it.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
If you’re someone who suspects that most middle-aged white guys talk like Don Imus when among friends — spewing venomous jokes about blacks, women, Jews and gays — then don’t miss the chance to reinforce your nightmare fantasy next week with a trip to Colorado Springs.
If you’re someone who suspects that most middle-aged white guys talk like Don Imus when among friends — spewing venomous jokes about blacks, women, Jews and gays — then don’t miss the chance to reinforce your nightmare fantasy next week with a trip to Colorado Springs.
Yes, it’s time again for the annual White Privilege Conference, which is hosted this year by the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and whose sponsors include the University of Denver’s Center for Judaic Studies and the Southern Poverty Law Center, among other groups. No self-respecting progressive will want to miss it.
Fine, you say, but what about would-be participants who are, well, white? Should they be concerned about a possible accusatory tone?
Relax. “This conference is not about beating up on white folks,” its Web site proclaims. Why, perish the thought! No, “this conference is about critically examining the society in which we live and working to dismantle systems of power, prejudice, privilege and oppression.”
Not to mention the systems of “white supremacy and oppression” — yes, that word “oppression” again, just in case you doubted that contemporary America is a plantation-like hellhole.
So much consciousness-raising about grinding oppression could get you down, of course, but never fear. The conference plans to relieve the stress with top-drawer entertainment.
On Saturday, for example, a “youth celebration” will feature several “national acts,” including Boots Riley, “co-founder of hip hop group The Coup,” whose albums include such landmarks as Kill My Landlord and Pick a Bigger Weapon. That latter work has been praised by Rolling Stone, we’re told, as “the rare album that makes revolution sound like hot fun on a Saturday night,” which sounds about right.
You won’t want to miss the keynote speeches, either.
For example, Paula Rothenberg will address the “struggle over victimhood.” More specifically, according to the conference guide, she’ll explore “What is at stake in the struggle over who can claim victim status as we carry out a conversation about white privilege.”
We could continue with our program tour, but enough of the fun. ... Did they say “the struggle over who can claim victim status”? Are these people serious? Don’t they realize how damaging it is to indoctrinate young people with the conviction that success in this country is a rigged game?
Do they really imagine that the greatest obstacle to the overall achievement of any group is “this system of white privilege” — as opposed, say, to broken and dysfunctional families, lousy schools or destructive personal choices reinforced by a localized culture of failure?
Most white guys past their prime don’t talk like Imus and have no desire to, and now Imus himself has been fired. His sole enduring legacy, unfortunately, is to feed the victimhood lobby, in all of its multiplying forms, with more grist for their destructive mills.
Reach Vincent Carroll at Carrollv @RockyMountainNews.com.
The most remarkable fact about the Duke lacrosse fiasco is not that it took nearly a year for obviously flimsy charges to be dropped against the players. That’s a long time, but it was only in January that the North Carolina attorney general took over the case from the corrupt Durham County district attorney.
The most remarkable fact about the Duke lacrosse fiasco is not that it took nearly a year for obviously flimsy charges to be dropped against the players. That’s a long time, but it was only in January that the North Carolina attorney general took over the case from the corrupt Durham County district attorney.
Nor is it the fact that District Attorney Mike Nifong would so crudely exploit stereotypes of well-to-do white male athletes in order to entice black votes in a re-election campaign. Race-baiting is a time-honored political tactic, although one deployed more frequently decades ago — and then mostly against blacks, of course.
The most remarkable feature of this legal debacle isn’t even the cheerleading for the prosecution that could be found in such major media as The New York Times. As biased and credulous as many reports were, a few were first-rate. For example, the late Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes deftly demolished the prosecution’s case in a report last fall.
No, the most astonishing fact, hands down, was and remains the squalid behavior of the community of scholars at Duke itself. For months nearly the entire faculty fell into one of two camps: those who demanded the verdict first and the trial later, and those whose silence enabled their vigilante colleagues to set the tone.
K.C. Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College, has followed every twist in the Duke scandal on his Durham-in- Wonderland Web site. He chronicles the faculty’s performance as the hysteria mounted.
“In late March (2006),” Johnson writes, “Houston Baker, a professor of English and Afro-American Studies, issued a public letter denouncing the ‘abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us’ and demanding the ‘immediate dismissals’ of ‘the team itself and its players.’ A week later, on April 6, 88 members of Duke’s arts and sciences faculty signed a public statement saying ‘thank you’ to campus demonstrators who had distributed a ‘wanted’ poster of the lacrosse players and publicly branded the players ‘rapists.’ By contrast, no Duke professor publicly criticized Nifong’s conduct.”
David Evans, one of the accused, told 60 Minutes that he moved out of the house where the rapes of a black stripper allegedly occurred because of menacing mobs. The Duke president, no profile in courage, canceled the lacrosse season and fired the coach. As recently as a few months ago President Richard Brodhead was still defending the 88 professors who trampled on the presumption of innocence, going so far as to describe some of them as victims, too.
A few Duke professors did acquit themselves well or eventually locate some semblance of a spine. Law professor James Coleman denounced Nifong’s handling of police lineups. Seventeen members of the Duke economics department signed a letter in January criticizing Nifong and assuring student athletes they were welcome in their classrooms.
But for the most part the faculty either supported the branding of three athletes as racists and rapists, didn’t care enough about their plight to speak out, or were cowed into suppressing any call of conscience.
Would those athletes, facing a similarly dubious claim of rape, have fared any better at America’s other elite universities? The idealist yearns to answer yes. The realist, sad to say, knows better.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
If you had a multibillion-dollar project whose price tag seemed poised to escalate out of control, would your first instinct be to boost labor costs?
It would? Brilliant! You too qualify for a seat in the Colorado legislature.
If you had a multibillion-dollar project whose price tag seemed poised to escalate out of control, would your first instinct be to boost labor costs?
It would? Brilliant! You too qualify for a seat in the Colorado legislature.
Sen. Bob Hagedorn, D-Aurora, is sponsoring a bill to eliminate a requirement that half of the Regional Transportation District’s bus service be run by private contractors. He’d replace that mandate with a 55 percent ceiling on private service, while leaving the matter exclusively up to the RTD board.
Pay no attention to those looming cutbacks on FasTracks, senator. And by all means ignore the fact that RTD is calling on outside consultants to get a handle on how far original estimates were off, as well as to assess ideas for holding down future costs.
Even under Hagedorn’s bill, of course, private operators could continue providing half of RTD’s bus service if that’s what the agency board decided. But why would lawmakers subject the board to renewed pressure from the transit union — which would dispense with private contractors altogether — at a time when every dollar in RTD’s gargantuan budget is actually going to count?
It was nearly two decades ago that lawmakers ordered RTD to contract out at least 20 percent (later raised to 50 percent)of its bus service. Without that law, which saved tens of millions of dollars in its first few years alone, the agency might not have had the revenue to build the southwest rail line, which in turn became the model touted during the FasTracks election.
Now that RTD is once again desperate for revenue, reversing course on private routes should be the last thing lawmakers want the agency to do.
Someone punch his ticket
When an e-mail by Rep. Mike Merrifield came to light that confirmed what everyone already suspected (his contempt for those who favor charter schools), he was clobbered for days by angry commentators. Fair enough. The Colorado Springs Democrat deserved it.
But after Rep. Jim Riesberg, D-Greeley, admitted something far more surprising during debate late last month — that he rides RTD trains for free — hardly any critics piped up.
The Denver Post’s Dan Haley, who broke the story, might have penned the best line, wryly reminding Riesberg that “It’s an honor system.”
Or maybe that was news to the representative.
After all, Riesberg’s comments suggested he thought riders were free to use a ticket over and over if it isn’t collected. “I’ve had a RTD ticket in my pocket for years and it’s never been punched and I’ve never had to buy a second one,” he said while chiding RTD for not enforcing payment. “You don’t need to pay a fare to get on RTD.”
When shopping, does Riesberg only pause at a cash register in stores like Costco, where employees are stationed to check receipts? If he absent-mindedly walked out of Safeway without paying for a roast and no one stopped him, would that be Safeway’s fault or his?
“If money to expand their (parking) lots is an issue,” Riesberg exclaimed, “RTD could charge to ride.” Ah, but they do, Rep. Riesberg. Honestly. They do.
Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Would the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq next year unleash a full-scale Sunni-Shiite civil war with savage ethnic cleansing — a Rwanda on the Euphrates? That prediction is virtually a mantra among those who oppose setting a timetable for withdrawal . . .
Would the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq next year unleash a full-scale Sunni-Shiite civil war with savage ethnic cleansing — a Rwanda on the Euphrates? That prediction is virtually a mantra among those who oppose setting a timetable for withdrawal (such as the timetables in bills passed recently by the House and Senate).
But of course no one really knows what would happen if American troops decamped. Yes, there are reasons to fear a bloodbath, particularly given the appalling slaughter of the past 12 months. But there are also reasons to believe the conflict might not escalate to that point, either — reasons that merit more than an airy dismissal from previous critics of a timetable (such as myself).
Steven Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations recently summarized the argument in a paper recommending disengagement of most combat forces during the next 12 to 18 months.
“The real question is how much worse the bloodshed can get,” Simon wrote. “A credible — although many might say optimistic — forecast is that the lack of organizational capacity, broad communal consent, and heavy weapons on either side militates against a drastic increase in the already appalling casualty rate. Crucially, the largely Sunni areas are of little interest to the Shia as objects of desire or conquest. And without artillery, armor, and attack aircraft, Shia forces will be far less capable of reducing Sunni majority cities, such as Fallujah, to rubble, in the way that Serbs dealt with Croatian or Muslim urban areas in the former Yugoslavia. Ethnic cleansing in mixed areas will continue to advance, the large flow of refugees and internally displaced will continue to mount, massive bombings and death squads will continue to claim many lives, but crucial conditions for nationwide genocidal violence are as yet absent.”
Americans are naturally haunted by what followed our departure from Indochina — everything from genocide to flotillas of refugees. But the past is not always prelude, especially in anything as unpredictable as war.
The pot and the kettle
Broadcasting celebrity Don Imus deserves just about anything he gets — including firing, if it comes to that — for his racist description of the Rutgers women’s basketball team (“That’s some nappy-headed ’ho’s there, I’m going to tell you that.”) If there is one thing he does not deserve, however, it’s being lectured to by another man at least as prone to racist remarks as Imus himself.
Once again the Rev. Al Sharpton has positioned himself as the judge of racial propriety while news reports fail to point out his own disgusting past.
Not only has Sharpton taken the lead in demanding Imus’ firing, but Imus actually appeared on Sharpton’s radio show Monday to explain himself.
Sharpton, let’s recall, is the man who infamously declared, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house” while stoking ethnic tensions in New York City in 1991; and whose inflammatory comments a few years later about a white store owner in Harlem supplied the backdrop in which a gunman invaded the store and burned it down, leaving several dead.
This is also the Sharpton who in the 1980s participated in the rape hoax involving Tawana Brawley and falsely identified prosecutor Steven Pagones as one of the white men who supposedly abducted her.
If it’s time to banish Imus from the airwaves, then surely Sharpton’s time has come as well.
Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Rumor has it that Rudy Giuliani is a former U.S. attorney who knows a thing or two about constitutional law.
Rumor has it that Rudy Giuliani is a former U.S. attorney who knows a thing or two about constitutional law. Rumor likewise says he’s a front-runner for the Republican nomination for president, who must woo conservative primary voters if he has a chance to win.
Given these rumors, which happen to be true, the wonder is that Giuliani doesn’t realize that government is under no obligation to subsidize Americans’ enjoyment of their constitutional rights.
You have a right to free speech, but government doesn’t have to buy you a newspaper to run, a soapbox for the park, or a computer for composing e-mail.
We all enjoy a right to own property, but the fellow with no more to his name than the knapsack on his back has not been deprived of his liberty.
So why does Giuliani believe the right to abortion — that most dubious of constitutional imperatives — should be subsidized?
“Ultimately (abortion) is a constitutional right,” he recently told a CNN reporter, “and therefore if it’s a constitutional right, ultimately even if you do it on a state-by-state basis, you make sure that people are protected.”
“So,” responded the reporter, “you support taxpayer money or public funding for abortion in some cases?”
“If it would deprive someone of a constitutional right,” replied Giuliani. “Yes, if that is the status of the law, then I would, yes.”
Giuliani later was quick to point out that he does not support changing the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding of abortion except in cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is at risk. But the damage is done. He missed a golden chance to walk away from his 1989 support of taxpayer funding for abortion — a radical position that mainstream voters of both parties rarely espouse.
I’ve been arguing that Giuliani appeals to Republicans on so many issues that social conservatives might defy conventional wisdom and give him a pass on his pro-abortion stance. But the odds on that possibility just grew longer.
Obnoxious, but protected
“More basically,” says The Denver Post, “we urge the legislature to add political robocalls to the list of commercial solicitations that can’t be sent to Coloradans who have signed on to the no-call list.”
Add political robocalls to the list of commercial solicitations? Now that’s a neat trick. The Post says “computers have no constitutional rights” — what a relief! — while only “political calls by people are protected speech.”
Does that mean a political message sent by computer e-mail to more than one address is a “commercial solicitation,” too? Is an editorial in a newspaper (which couldn’t be published these days without computers) delivered to multiple homes also unprotected speech?
Political robocalls are often obnoxious speech, no doubt, but obnoxious political speech is just as secure under the First Amendment as the genteel words of the most polished pundit.
And by the way, do robocalls that attack a candidate, ballot measure or legislation ever actually work?
It’s one thing to answer the phone to hear the recorded voice of a popular figure such as John Hickenlooper genially pushing, say, a tax for preschool. Even if you disagree, you’ll probably listen. But the crude robocalls that so bother critics only make sane listeners want to do the opposite of whatever the phone call urged.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
Time magazine continues its descent into a parody of the 1970s’ Whole Earth Catalog with its current issue highlighting “The Global Warming Survival Guide.”
Time magazine continues its descent into a parody of the 1970s’ Whole Earth Catalog with its current issue highlighting “The Global Warming Survival Guide.”
To be sure, Time’s list of “51 Things You Can Do to Make a Difference” manages to engage a few serious topics, such as a possible carbon tax vs. the “cap-and-trade” of carbon emissions.
But the list is also chock full of lifestyle suggestions that are trivial, dubious or even silly, and which do nothing but confirm the moral superiority of those who adopt them — in their minds, of course. Each item even includes a rating for its “feel-good factor.”
Time’s feature also confirms that a growing number in the green movement have become latter-day versions of Francis of Assisi, eager to repudiate worldly goods and embrace a life of asceticism — or what passes for asceticism in today’s pampered world.
“Live simply,” Time exhorts. “Meditate. Consume less. Think more. Get to know your neighbors. Borrow when you need to and lend when asked.”
When else would I borrow — when I don’t need to?
There’s much more of this drivel. You should: Mimic UPS by planning your driving routes to “avoid making left turns”; “shut off your computer”; “pay your bills online” (what happened to shutting off my computer?); “remove the tie” (so we can let summer office temperatures drift upward, say, to the 82.4 degrees that Time reports the Japanese government adopted in 2005; can you spell “s-t-i-f-l-i-n-g”?); “move to a high-rise” (sure, right away); “Take Another Look at Vintage Clothes” (Time means secondhand clothes); plant a bamboo fence (don’t ask); and “Ditch the McMansion” gives you a flavor of the various offerings.
Meanwhile, much of the text reeks of snotty condescension. “Think more”? How does Time know how much you and I think? How does it know that “oversize houses” — whatever they are — are “architecturally offensive”? All of them? Are those tiny (Time would probably say “cozy”) 1950s tract homes architectural gems?
Maybe Francis of Assisi was equally annoying when he started his great anti-materialism movement. But at least it included an order of friars dedicated to good works and the welfare of the poor, sick and persecuted. And Francis, bless his heart, never preached a single sermon against left turns.
Prosperity’s calming effect
The syndicated columnist Robert J. Samuelson recently pointed out that “Poor countries won’t sacrifice economic growth — lowering poverty, fostering political stability — to placate the rich world’s global warming fears. Why should they? On a per-person basis, their carbon dioxide emissions are only about one-fifth the level of rich countries.”
Samuelson might have added that economic growth fosters political stability in prosperous countries as well. Does anyone doubt that the quintupling of per capita income in the United States during the 20th century dampened social strife?
So while Time might lament the fact that “in the U.S., big houses are becoming the norm,” it is precisely the prospect of escaping from a tiny bungalow or tenement that helps maintain our civic peace.
Policies that try to force Americans into expensive (per square foot) high-rises are not only of dubious environmental benefit, in the long run they’re political dynamite. “Living simply” might have broad appeal, but its actual practice is best reserved for saints.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
“There is no question that (Craig DeBiase) utilized his high school coaching position to seduce high school girls. No question this was and is highly improper.”
— Denver District Judge Herbert Stern
At least the judge got that much straight. . .
“There is no question that (Craig DeBiase) utilized his high school coaching position to seduce high school girls. No question this was and is highly improper.”
— Denver District Judge
Herbert Stern
At least the judge got that much straight while he was busy releasing the former Machebeuf girls basketball coach from prison after only 16 months.
Notice Stern referred to “girls.” Although DeBiase was convicted in a plea agreement of assaulting one girl, he is actually a predator who, the prosecution emphasized, had been pursuing female students in his care for nearly 15 years.
“He has done this again and again,” prosecutor Kerri Lombardi said at his trial two years ago. “He preyed on victims who were young and vulnerable.” No doubt that’s one reason Stern originally sentenced him to 15 years to life.
Critics of Colorado’s tough sentencing laws probably have a different opinion of the judge’s decision to resentence DeBiase to probation. After all, he’ll remain in therapy and under intense supervision and may very well be an excellent candidate for community-based treatment, just as Stern suggests. Reformers are repeatedly telling us we’ve got to get prisoners out of cells and into alternative supervision.
But even if DeBiase succeeds in rehabilitating himself, even if he’ll vacate a badly needed prison cell — heck, even if 15-to-life is too harsh — is 16 months to become the going standard for a serial sexual predator?
Surely even some reformers would rebel at that possibility.
A sound dissent
Some of the most important, contentious debates of the 21st century will involve setting policy on global climate change. We could do little as a society or we could do lots. At the aggressive end of the spectrum, we could make driving very expensive or even phase out the internal combustion engine by government fiat.
It would be nice if such decisions were reached democratically, through elected leaders in Congress and the White House. That in part is what Chief Justice John Roberts was getting at Monday in his dissent from the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision prodding the Environmental Protection Agency to get moving on regulating greenhouse gases.
“Global warming may be a ‘crisis,’” Roberts wrote, “even ‘the most pressing environmental problem of our time.’ Indeed, it may ultimately affect nearly everyone on the planet in some potentially adverse way, and it may be that governments have done too little to address it. It is not a problem, however, that escaped the attention of policy-makers in the executive and legislative branches of our government, who continue to consider regulatory, legislative and treaty-based means of addressing global climate change.”
Because Roberts’ faction failed to carry the day, we may be in for a court-driven regulatory answer to global warming as opposed to a democratic-driven response. True, the court did not dictate what the EPA must do to curb greenhouse gases emitted from vehicles; the majority even said the agency needn’t act at all if it provided a “reasonable explanation” that is science-based.
But the majority’s impatience with the EPA was palpable. Moreover, since the EPA in fact offered, in part, a scientific explanation for its hands-off approach, it’s possible the court won’t be satisfied with anything less than dramatic regulations. And since those rules will in turn be challenged, judges are likely to end up supervising and shaping a key element of the nation’s global warming strategy, which is not their proper role.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
What a mismatch on Sunday’s 60 Minutes: In one corner of the debate stood (or sat, as it happens) Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey, arguing that prosecutors should be allowed to use every reasonable tool to catch vicious predators.
What a mismatch on Sunday’s 60 Minutes: In one corner of the debate stood (or sat, as it happens) Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey, arguing that prosecutors should be allowed to use every reasonable tool to catch vicious predators.
In the other corner was Stephen Mercer, a Maryland attorney specializing, we were told, “in issues involving DNA.” Mercer insisted that prosecutors be obliged to tie one arm behind their backs so government doesn’t subject “a whole new class of innocent people to genetic surveillance.”
Genetic surveillance? Sounds positively Orwellian. And notice how Mercer referred to a “new” class of people threatened with genetic surveillance, as if it were common knowledge that this sort of sinister abuse is old hat.
So what is the nefarious scheme that Morrissey has in mind? Well, when investigators obtain DNA from a crime scene and run a database check, sometimes they locate a partial match. Sometimes the match is so close that the true perpetrator must be a close blood relative of the person in the database. When this happens, Morrissey believes, law enforcement should be given the name of the individual so his family can be checked out.
But of course. The shocker here is not that Morrissey advocates following compelling clues, but that it’s actually controversial. Yet until Morrissey began to raise Cain, it was against the FBI’s policy to release such information. Fortunately, according to 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl, the FBI has relented somewhat and now leaves the decision up to the states.
Critics don’t limit themselves to lurid warnings of genetic surveillance. They also play the race card. DNA tracking within families “really amplifies existing inequalities in the criminal justice system,” Harvard’s David Lazar recently told The Denver Post, because minorities are more likely than whites to have DNA in a law-enforcement database.
Such worries would make sense if DNA were a crude legal tool, the equivalent of eyewitness testimony. But what inequality is amplified by locking up genuine criminals?
Morrissey is no jackboot prosecutor. He’s just a professional determined not to ignore evidence in plain sight.
Same old story
Tim Wirth, Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu and a host of other luminaries assured us a year ago that the United Nations had a crackerjack plan for replacing its morally corrupt Commission on Human Rights. Well, the new Human Rights Council wrapped up its fourth session Friday, and its record would have made the old commission proud.
Like its predecessor, the council consistently lets the worst human-rights offenders (think Sudan, for example) off the hook, while passing one eye-glazing resolution after another with little or no useful content.
“In its nine months of existence,” reports the feisty nongovernmental group UN Watch, “the council has condemned only one country in the entire world for human rights violations: Israel. At this session, the council passed yet another resolution — its ninth — against the Jewish state.”
Yes, but you can’t accuse the council of failing to rise to the occasion when its own reputation is on the line. The executive director of UN Watch managed to testify before the council, and his words were so scathing that the council’s incensed president declared he would “not tolerate any similar statements” again. Indeed, he pledged that “any statement you make in similar tones to those used today will be taken out of the records.”
It’s nice to see a council official getting exercised about something.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.