Okay, imagine this: in the mid-1980s a woman named Cheryl Sullenger, an abortion opponent, attempted to blow up a Womens Health Clinic in San Diego. She was caught, and in 1988 she and five other co-conspirators were convicted in a federal court of conspiracy. She served time in prison. On her release, Sullenger was hired as a senior policy advisor by Operation Rescue–which leaves one to wonder what sort of policy advice the group was seeking.

In 2006 Sullenger filed a complaint with the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts against Ann Neuhaus, a doctor who offered a second opinion on a few late-term abortion cases. The law in Kansas requires a woman seeking a later-term abortion to obtain a second physician’s opinion. In eleven cases, Dr. Neuhaus found the patients had serious mental health issues and an abortion was advisable. Sullenger’s complaint claimed Dr. Neuhaus’ examinations weren’t thorough enough to merit that advice (though, of course, Sullenger believes a thorough examination would necessarily result in a decision against abortion). That complaint sat without a hearing until last week.

In the intervening years, though, Sullenger provided a guy named Scott Roeder with information regarding Dr. George Tiller, the doctor who provided the abortion services on which Dr. Neuhaus offered her second opinion. Roeder later murdered Dr. Tiller as he attended church. In Roeder’s car, the police found Sullenger’s Operation Rescue telephone number. He told authorities he’d spoken to Sullenger on several occasions about ‘justifiable homicide’ in regard to protecting the life of the unborn. Sullenger said she provided Roeder with the information about Dr. Tiller ‘to be polite.’ She wasn’t charged with any crime.

Several months ago the governor of Kansas–Sam Brownback, an abortion opponent–appointed a lawyer named Rick Macias to the State Board of Healing Arts. Macias had, at one time, represented Operation Rescue. And suddenly that complaint filed by Sullenger way back in 2006 got a hearing.

Can you guess what happened? Of course you can. On Friday the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts revoked the medical license of Dr. Ann Neuhaus.

Dr. Ann Neuhaus having her medical license revoked

Just to be clear, let me repeat this. A complaint filed six years ago by a woman convicted of attempting to bomb a medical clinic and who is an associate of a man convicted of assassinating a doctor who performed a legal medical procedure is heard by a committee appointed by a governor who is opposed to that legal medical procedure–a committee on which sits a lawyer who represented a group opposed to that legal medical procedure, and that committee decides to revoke the medical license of a doctor for the offense of offering a second opinion on eleven cases involving that same legal medical procedure.

That’s fucked up.

For the record, let me say I dislike the need for abortions. I wish nobody ever had to make that decision. But it’s a decision that belongs to a woman in consultation with her doctor. Let me also remind folks once again that this is a legal medical procedure. For now.

Let me also say there is something deeply un-American about people who are so intent on imposing their religious and moral values on everybody else.

There is something profoundly wrong with the modern Republican party.

Last week the House Committee on Natural Resources held a hearing on the process of mountain-top removal (MTR) coal mining. If you’re not familiar with that practice, it’s been used for a couple decades now, all over Appalachia–Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky. The name is incredibly self-descriptive; MTR involves clearing timber from a mountaintop and then dynamiting the peak. The mountaintop is literally removed. The coal is excavated and all the waste gets dumped into into the nearby valleys. The valleys, of course, are where the streams and creeks and brooks are located.

Not surprisingly, depositing massive amounts of coal debris into streams turned out to be in violation of the Clean Water Act. However, in 2002 coal company lobbyists managed to get the Bush administration to ‘clarify’ the Clean Water Act so that MTR debris wasn’t considered ‘waste.’

Problem solved! Clean water was restored to the areas at the stroke of a pen. Everybody wins!

MTR is horrible, of course. The Republican support for the practice is appalling. But that’s old news. It’s hardly a surprise that they’ll shift laws to benefit corporations over people. What IS surprising, though, is how incredibly skewed their priorities are. At the hearing last week an opponent to MTR (Maria Gunnoe) was scheduled to testify about the devastating effects the practice has on the people who have to live with the consequences of filthy water. Part of her testimony–which was made available to committee members beforehand–involved a slideshow of photographs by photojournalist Katie Falkenberg, who documented the lives of some of the people living in the affected areas.

Before she could testify, however, Gunnoe was approached by staffers working for Representative Doug Lamborn–a Republican who sits on the committee and, by coincidence, has close ties to the American Coal Council (Lamborn gave the keynote speech at last year’s ACC conference, in which he accused President Obama of fighting ‘a war against coal’). Lamborn’s staffers informed Gunnoe she wouldn’t be allowed to use one of Falkenberg’s photographs. This photograph:

Why did she have to remove that photograph? Because Lamborn thought it was child pornography. And indeed, after she delivered her testimony (which was given without the photograph) Gunnoe was detained for an hour by Capitol Police and questioned about the alleged ‘child pornography’..

Lamborn and other Republicans see nothing at all wrong with blowing up mountaintops and dumping waste in the groundwater used by poor people–but when looking at this photograph they don’t see a child forced to live in heartbreaking conditions; they see something sexual.

Anybody who sees anything sexual in this photograph is twisted. Anybody who looks at this photograph and thinks in terms of sexuality instead of basic human rights and living conditions is depraved and morally corrupt.

So let me say it again. There is something profoundly wrong with the modern Republican party.

A couple weeks ago, while nobody was paying attention, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s decision permitting convicted terrorist José Padilla to sue John Yoo.

Padilla, you may recall, was arrested in May of 2002. The government claimed he was planning to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the United States. He was held in a military prison without charge or due process for three and a half years, during which time he was subjected to ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques which included prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, sensory overload (extreme variations in temperature, loud noises, long periods of absolute darkness or light, exposure to noxious smells), administration of psychotropic drugs, sleep deprivation, prolonged shackling, stress positions and threats to his family–all of which have long been considered either illegal or torture.

The Bush administration was eventually required to release Padilla from military custody. In 2007, he was tried and convicted in a civilian criminal court. He was sentenced to serve 17 years for conspiracy to kill or maim, and for providing support to a terrorist organization. The accusation about the ‘dirty bomb’ for which he was originally arrested? No charges involving such a bomb were ever filed.

José Padilla

After his conviction, Padilla sued John Yoo, asking for US$1.00 in damages. That’s right, one dollar. Padilla wasn’t looking for actual justice; he just wanted to make a point.

Yoo, of course, is the former member of the Office of Legal Counsel (the office tasked with assisting the U.S. Attorney General in giving legal advice to the President) who wrote the infamous ‘torture memos’ which stated President Bush had the legal authority to order ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ to be used on suspected terrorists. A subsequent review of Yoo’s memoranda by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility stated Yoo had committed ‘intentional professional misconduct’ when he claimed the president could authorize torture; they recommended he be referred to the his state Bar Association for possible disciplinary action (i.e., disbarred). That conclusion was overruled by a more senior Bush administration lawyer.

And now Padilla’s suit against Yoo has also been dismissed. Why? Because according to the Ninth Circuit Court, “There was at that time considerable debate, both in and out of government, over the definition of torture as applied to specific interrogation techniques.” In other words, although there was universal agreement in the international legal community about whether those practices constituted torture, disagreement about the definition of torture in the Bush administration means Yoo can’t be held accountable. The court stated they “cannot say that any reasonable official in 2001-03 would have known that the specific interrogation techniques allegedly employed against Padilla, however appalling, necessarily amounted to torture.”

John Yoo

By the way, those ‘torture memos’ are also referred to as the ‘Bybee memos’ because although Yoo wrote them, the memoranda were signed by his superior, Jay Bybee. Bybee left the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 to become a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals–the court that just dismissed the suit against John Yoo. While Bybee wasn’t on the panel of judges who heard the case, one can’t help but note the irony.

Yoo’s response to the dismissal of the suit? “For several years, Padilla and his attorneys have been harassing the government officials he believes to have been responsible for his detention and ultimately conviction as a terrorist. He has now lost before two separate courts of appeals, and will need to find a new hobby for his remaining time in prison.”

That’s right…John Yoo is finally free of the years of cruel harassment he’s had to endure at the hands of José Padilla.

Today is Edward R. Murrow’s birthday. Murrow is lionized by journalists and students of journalism–and rightly so. He had the sort of career people make movies about (and, in fact, they did: Good Night, and Good Luck, 2005).

His first real brush with fame took place in 1940 during the Blitz, when the German Luftwaffe indiscriminately bombed England. Murrow, a reporter for CBS Radio, was stationed in London when the bombing began and he remained at his post, broadcasting live during the height of the Blitz. He ended each broadcast by saying “Good night, and good luck.” It wasn’t just a catchphrase; more than a million homes and buildings in London were destroyed during the Blitz, and some 20,000 Londoners were killed. Luck played a big role in who would still be alive come morning.

But it was Murrow’s stand against McCarthyism that sealed his fame. In the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy was using his position on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to browbeat anybody he even remotely suspected of treason, disloyalty, or subversion (which appeared to include anybody who disagreed or questioned Sen. McCarthy). Very few people were willing to stand up against McCarthy. Murrow was one of the few, broadcasting two special reports on McCarthy and his tactics. He ended the second report with this:

     We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

What made this remarkable, aside from the courage it took to confront McCarthy, was the fact that Murrow was known as a reporter–a newsman. Not an analyst, not a commentator, not a pundit–a reporter whose job was to report facts.

I’m mentioning this mainly because that approach to the news seems to have largely disappeared. Modern journalists tend to report what news-makers say; they rarely bother to report whether what is said is truthful or accurate. This allows folks like Mitt Romney to make outrageous claims (like, say, Romney’s claim that the Obama administration is engaging on a systematic assault on people of faith) without any fear of contradiction (or any fear of being revealed as a lying sack of shit).

Modern journalists seem to have abdicated their role as reporters of fact and have become instead mere recorders of statements. They do this in the mistaken belief that they’re being objective–that objectivity means reporting ‘both sides of a story.’ And to be sure, nonpartisanship is something to which journalists should aspire. But it’s not partisan to point out the facts when one side of the story is utter bullshit. For example, when gun rights advocate John Lott claims that “laws allowing for the concealed carrying of handguns causes levels of violent crime to drop,” it’s not partisan to point out that the report on which he bases that claim has been debunked because of fabricated data. Allowing a subject to make a statement that’s patently untrue and that relies on ‘data’ that somebody just made up isn’t being nonpartisan; it’s being stupid. Worse, it’s contributing to the stupidization of the general public.

I wouldn’t presume to put words in Edward R. Murrow’s mouth–no, wait. I will, in fact, be that presumptuous. If Murrow were alive to celebrate his 104th birthday, I suspect he’d be likely to say something like this: “Journalists,your job is to report, not just repeat.” And then he’d say “Good night, and good luck–and stop being such useless dicks.” I’m pretty sure that’s what he’d say.

An online friend made an interesting comment yesterday. Patrick is an intelligent guy–he’s no wide-eyed innocent, he’s been alive long enough to know how the world works and he’s traveled widely enough to see it works differently in different places. His comment about the Trayvon Martin case is astute and it would have made perfect sense, except for one thing: this took place in Florida. Here’s what Patrick said

I really don’t understand how this isn’t so clearly seen as what it is… a failure to investigate.

What also is striking about this is that Zimmerman was simply taken at his word. Had the dead boy been a white kid, Zimmerman probably would have been held until all evidence was in. But, of course, had the boy been white, it’s likely this never would have happened.

As I said, Patrick is an intelligent guy, but he’s making a mistake that a LOT of intelligent people are making. He’s assuming the police either fucked up or didn’t care enough to investigate.

The problem as I see it is less about the Sanford Police Department and more about the law. The police must have probable cause to believe a crime has been committed before they’re allowed to conduct an actual investigation. In the U.S., citizens have always had the right to use lethal force to defend themselves and their homes. If the police arrived at your home and found a dead body on your lawn, they’d be legally allowed (even required) to ask you questions–but they can’t truly investigate you in a serious, methodical, intensive way without some sort of cause to believe the shooting wasn’t justified. They have to have a positive reason to believe the shooting was against the law.

And that, believe it or not, is a good thing. We don’t want to give the police the authority to initiate an investigation of a citizen based on anything other than probable cause to believe a crime has been committed. The police have too much investigative power as it is.

The problem is the so-called Stand Your Ground laws have extended that right of self-defense in the home to–well, to everywhere. So while the police were able to temporarily detain and question George Zimmerman, they had no power or authority to begin an actual investigation into the matter. That step was precluded the moment Zimmerman said he believed his life was in danger and that he acted in self-defense. Without some obvious indication that Zimmerman was lying, the police response was necessarily limited.

It’s easy to blame George Zimmerman for killing an unarmed and completely innocent Trayvon Martin–because that’s exactly what he did. But it’s pointless to blame Zimmerman without looking at the social context that shaped the killing. Florida has very loose gun laws, which makes it possible for people like Zimmerman (who was arrested in the past for assaulting a police officer) to legally obtain a handgun. Florida’s laws also allowed him to obtain a permit to legally carry that weapon. Florida’s laws also allowed him to legally use that weapon in a situation that, until 2005, would have been considered criminal on the face of it. And finally, Florida’s laws limited the police response to the shooting.

There’s no doubt George Zimmerman is guilty of homicide–the killing of another person. But the law in Florida is such that he may not be guilty of murder–which is an illegal killing.

In Oliver Twist, the character Mr. Bumble is informed “the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction”. Mr. Bumble’s response: “If the law supposes that…the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.”

The law in Florida (and some two dozen other states) is “a ass.” It’s to be hoped that the law may have its eyes opened by this experience. It’s to be hoped, but not to be expected.