Blogs / Cosmic Variance

By Muriel Rukeyser.

Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform,
who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words,
whether it is the crash of lips on lips
after absence and wanting : we must close
the circuits of ideas, now generate,
that leap in the body’s action or the mind’s repose.

Over us is a striking on the walls of the sky,
here are the dynamos, steel-black, harboring flame,
here is the man night-walking who derives
tomorrow’s manifestoes from this midnight’s meeting ;
here we require the proof in solidarity,
iron on iron, body on body, and the large single beating.

And behind us in time are the men who second us
as we continue. And near us is our love :
no forced contempt, no refusal in dogma, the close
of the circuit in a fierce dazzle of purity.
And over us is night a field of pansies unfolding,
charging with heat its softness in a symbol
to weld and prepare for action our minds’ intensity.

So I was poking around Amazon.com looking at biographies of some of the founding names of thermodynamics and kinetic theory — Boltzmann of course was an interesting character, but there are a lot of good stories out there. The American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs obviously was a major player — among other things, he introduced the concept of the statistical ensemble, the primary tool by which we nowadays think of thermodynamic systems.

One of the notable biographies of Gibbs, it turns out, is by none other than Muriel Rukeyser. That’s a name that should be familiar to long-time blog readers, as she was the author of the delightful poem The Conjugation of the Paramecium. Any poet who spends her free time writing biographies of the titans of statistical mechanics is my kind of poet.

Turns out that Rukeyser led a pretty interesting life in her own right. She was a political activist, drawing on her own experiences as a feminist Jewish bisexual, but agitating for social justice in a number of different areas. She wrote for the Daily Worker, covered the Scottsboro case, and investigated an outbreak of silicosis among miners in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. You can have a look at her FBI file, if you have a morbid fascination concerning what the government might do with information about what friends you have and what organizations you belong to.

Happily, these days we have restored the balance of civil liberties, and the government would never spy on anyone except terrorists, leaving the rest of us free to write poetry and follow the evolution of distribution functions on phase space unperturbed by political considerations.

Barack Obama gave a major speech on race in Philadelphia today. Inflammatory statements by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, have been receiving a lot of media attention — they feed into fears that many Americans have about a black guy with a funny-sounding name. Obama has strongly condemned the statements, but refused to dissociate himself from his pastor.

Instead, as evidenced in this excerpt from his speech (which he wrote himself), Obama is choosing to respond with a nuanced and honest assessment of race-based resentment in America. It’s a novel strategy; we’ll have to see if the collective attention span of the media and public is up to the task of absorbing something like this.

… This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

A bit more below the fold.
(more…)

That’s the punishment you get in Saudi Arabia for being a woman and riding in a car with a man who is not in your family. Oh, after your gang rape. (Via Feministing.)

A court in the ultra-conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia is punishing a female victim of gang rape with 200 lashes and six months in jail, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

The 19-year-old woman — whose six armed attackers have been sentenced to jail terms — was initially ordered to undergo 90 lashes for “being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape,” the Arab News reported.

But in a new verdict issued after Saudi Arabia’s Higher Judicial Council ordered a retrial, the court in the eastern town of Al-Qatif more than doubled the number of lashes to 200.

A court source told the English-language Arab News that the judges had decided to punish the woman further for “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.”

But, lest you jump to conclusions, understand that it’s not only women who have to feel the occasional lash to be kept in line. It’s gay men, too!

About 50 people picketed Saudi Arabia’s embassy in London on Oct. 19 in protest against the nation’s reported floggings and executions of gay men.

On Oct. 2, two Saudi men convicted of sodomy in the city of Al Bahah received the first of their 7,000 lashes in punishment, the Okaz daily newspaper reported. The whippings took place in public, the report said.

I presume that the strong connections between totalitarian impulses, religious fundamentalism, and sexual repression have already been the subject of dozens of Ph.D. theses. There is a truly ugly part of human nature that feels a need to control the lives of others, and theocracy serves as a mechanism for amplifying those impulses into public actions.

I know it seems obvious, but two of today’s news stories brought home the absurdity of how people are judged.

On the one hand we have a Republican (who would have guessed?) Senator who is accused of soliciting sex in an airport men’s bathroom.

On the other is this priceless story about legislating against the wearing of too baggy clothes.

What is striking is that I don’t think the first should be news except that the Senator in question consistently votes against gay rights and gay marriage. His fellow Senators seem concerned with the actual behavior, which I think is irrelevant, and unconcerned with his hypocrisy, which I think is abhorrent.

But the individuals involved in the second story seem to ignore completely the behavior of the persons wearing the dangerously low-riding jeans. Even those defending these loose-legged louts seem to miss the point:

“The focus should be on cleaning up the social conditions that the sagging pants comes out of,”

No, the focus should be on how they behave, not on what they wear.

Being a good citizen is about how you behave to others – what rights you support or try to deny them, or how you treat them – not about how you choose to meet sexual partners or about how you dress.

Greetings from the International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science in Beijing. I once read, in Ray Monk’s biography of Bertrand Russell, about a year that Russell spent lecturing on philosophy in Beijing. He was extremely taken with the city and the country, predicting that it would flower into a leading role in the world. This momentarily puzzled me, as my vision of China didn’t seem in sync with Russell’s democratic ideals. But then common sense clicked in, and I realized that we were talking about a period just after World War One, during the Sun Yat-sen era. The new Republic of China was struggling to emerge out from Imperial rule, and the Communist takeover was decades in the future. One could have easily imagined that this sprawling country, united by a common language and a rich heritage of culture and innovation, would rapidly take its place among the free and prosperous nations of the world. The fact that it didn’t is one of the great tragedies of twentieth-century history.

These days China is increasingly prosperous, but not quite free. Upon landing at Beijing International Airport, one fills out the usual customs declaration form, full of admonishments against bringing in firearms or questionable agricultural products. But there is an extra item on the list of dangerous imports: writings, recordings, or other collections of information that could be judged as a threat to the political, moral, or social good of the nation. The didn’t actually ask to search my laptop, but the warning was there.

It’s well known that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) censors blogs, so I’ve been poking around using the internet connection here in my hotel room, trying to judge the extent to which this is true. (The flipside, of course, is the perilous situation of bloggers located in China; apparently they’ve been required to register in order to blog, but I don’t have the latest on that. I should mention that there are all sorts of blogs about China, not that I have any expertise about them.) Access to most websites is fine, but certain addresses are certainly being blocked. Of course it’s impossible for me to distinguish between the actions of the local ISP, the city of Beijing, or the Chinese government itself, but you draw conclusions using the data you have, not the data you wish you had.

Any blog on Blogspot is definitely off-limits (so I can’t visit Preposterous Universe for old time’s sake). You can type in the address or click a link, and the browser will think for a minute, and then return a “Problem loading page: The connection has timed out” error. My impression is that that’s been true for a long time, although apparently it’s been on and off for a while now. Typepad blogs are also off-limits, so no Cocktail Party Physics for me, although that might be a recent development. Livejournal seems to be unavailable, and likewise Xanga, but blogs hosted on Wordpress.com seem to be available. You can search on Google Blog Search or Bloglines, but Technorati is blocked. I haven’t found any individually-hosted blogs that were off-limits, although certain news sites like philly.com are mysteriously banned. The Eagles are in the middle of training camp, how am I supposed to keep up? Also, the New York Times is readily accessible, so make of that what you will. I also couldn’t reach the BBC, although I can actually watch the BBC news channel on my hotel room TV.

Google, of course, is available, in the wake of their somewhat-infamous deal struck with the Chinese government. But Wikipedia is a little confusing — blocked at times, available at others. Apparently this is an ongoing skirmish. I typed in “China” to Google, and the first link was the the Wikipedia page, so I clicked there, and saw it no problem. Then I typed “China internet” into the Wikipedia search box, and was given a list of pages, including Internet Censorship in the People’s Republic of China. But when I clicked there, it briefly began to load, before switching to a “The connection was reset” error. A little spooky, to be honest. Right now I seem to be able to see most Wikipedia pages, although apparently not those specifically about the PRC (although the main China page is still okay). You might think, no problem, I can just look at the Google cache pages for whatever Wikipedia article I’m interested in. But no, you can’t; nothing in Google’s cache seems to be available. So much for infamous deals.

None of which has prevented me from reading any of my favorite blogs. I just do what I always do, and read the feeds via Bloglines. They’re all perfectly visible, even for the blocked sites. Google reader works just as well. A lack of internet savvy on the part of the censors, or an intentional oversight? The one thing that one can’t do is leave comments (or start up your own blog, obviously), and maybe that’s the point.

(I also notice that when I visit google.com, I am not automatically redirected to the local version google.cn, which seems to happen in European countries. Is this because the hotel’s service provider is rigged for foreigners, and ordinary citizens have different rules? Not sure.)

It could be much worse, of course. I mean, here I am, typing away on my own blog, with little fear that the secret police are going to burst into my hotel room in the middle of the night to haul me away. But the biggest single reason I don’t have that fear is that I know that word would get around, and that it wouldn’t look good — free information protects free people. Amnesty International has a campaign, irrepressible.info, to protest against internet censorship around the world. The more noise people make about this issue, the more pressure governments will feel to keep the web free.

Update: In the United States, we prefer to have our censoring-for-political-content performed by corporations, rather than directly by the government. Different cultures, different systems.

My views on religion and its incompatibility with reason are far from a secret on this blog. Nevertheless, there are degrees of irrational behavior, and some religious practices are far more harmful to society than others. That’s why I was happy to see the possibility for some progress in a brief story on Salon’s broadsheet, which was reporting on a story by Yasmine Saleh in the Daily Star Egypt.

Egypt’s Grand Mufti Aly Gomaa issued a fatwa declaring it religiously acceptable for a woman to have her hymen surgically reconstructed [...]. On the surface that might not seem grounds for celebration, but consider that in certain regions, an unmarried woman who loses her virginity might very well become the target of an “honor killing.” Even better, though, is that Gomaa scoffed at the idea of considering a torn hymen as evidence that a woman has lost her virginity: “It is not rational for us to think that God has placed a sign to indicate the virginity of women without having a similar sign to indicate the virginity of men.”

Gomaa had even more to say to guys who might take issue with this radical idea

“Any man who is concerned about his prospective wife’s hymen should first provide a proof that he himself is virgin.” [...] “Islam does not care for the feelings of ignorant people, just as the law does not protect the idiots.”

Here’s to progress, even if it must be tiny bit by tiny bit.

Yesterday was Blog for Choice day. I didn’t get to participate, as I spent the whole day in meetings and airplanes. I had no choice! But at the end of the day, checking up on Bloglines from a hotel in Tucson, I found moving posts from Bitch Ph.D., Shakespeare’s Sister, Litbrit, and Lizardbreath from Unfogged, among numerous others.

Conventional wisdom among liberals and feminists is that being anti-abortion has little to do with a desire to protect helpless little blastocysts, and is really about denying women control over their bodies and lives. I always had trouble believing this, as I went to a nice Catholic school in which joining the “For Life” group was just as respectable a public-service move as joining Amnesty International. My friends at Villanova (including a large number of women) really, honestly, and in good faith did believe that fetuses were people with souls, and they needed to be protected. This didn’t quite amount to a well-thought-out and consistent philosophical position, admittedly; you’ll find very few such people who really want to punish abortionists just like we punish murderers, or who would save a petri dish of fertilized eggs from a burning building before saving a breathing baby, or who believe that heaven is filled with the souls of embyos that failed to implant in the uterus. But they really were just trying to do the right thing, according to social justice as they understood it. And they weren’t necessarily overly dogmatic about it; I helped organize a panel discussion on abortion that featured priests, biologists, and philosophers, which ended up being quite interesting (although it somehow failed to solve the world’s problems).

Ultimately, free of my protective collegiate cocoon, I realized that the conventional wisdom among liberals and feminists is completely correct! Although some people have anti-abortion feelings for straightforwardly moral reasons, for many more people (especially the most vocal), it really is about denying women their own agency. Curse those liberals and feminists, right again!

But I still remember my friends who were not like that, and I recognize that for many people abortion really is a clash of absolutes. You can say all you want that it’s the pregnant woman’s body, hands off, etc.; but if it were actually true that a fetus was a person with a soul who was entitled to all of the protections that any post-birth person was entitled to, none of that would matter. The heart of the matter is: people who believe that are wrong.

Which is why my favorite blog-for-choice post was Lindsay’s. She puts it pretty straightforwardly:

To me, it’s just obvious that fetuses aren’t people and that real-live people who have become hosts to unwanted pre-people should be able to take the necessary steps not to become the parents of actual people. Who the hell gave anyone the idea that this choice is a view that needs defending, as opposed to common sense? I don’t write posts explaining that you shouldn’t torture your dog, or steal from your employer. Shouldn’t it be obvious that you shouldn’t consign an innocent person to incubate a hunk of protoplasm until it becomes a baby?

It does seem pretty obvious, unless you really think that hunk of protoplasm is a person with all of the rights of any of the other people you meet on the street every day. Which, when you think about it, isn’t obvious at all. The only reason anyone thinks it’s true is because their definition of a “person” is completely divorced from common sense, and is instead informed by a supernatural notion of personhood in which a soul enters that single cell at the moment of conception. A notion that would seem completely absurd if it weren’t for religion.

Steven Weinberg famously said, “Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things — that takes religion.” This is a little bit harsh, of course, and I’d rather not get into the tiresome argument over whether the net effect of religious belief is to make people do more good things than bad things. But when squishy-liberal religious people ask why atheists bother making noisy public proclamations against their supernatural beliefs, it’s worth pointing out that such beliefs often do have consequences in the real world.

The idea that religion is the sole source of morality is silly — morality is invented by human beings, who are trying to negotiate their conflicting and incompatible desires in a world that doesn’t always play fair. The reason why it’s important to make the case that religious beliefs are false, even if adherents can point to examples where those false beliefs led people to be nice to each other and do other good things, is that false beliefs can just as easily lead people to treat each other badly. Given untrue hypotheses, it’s trivial to reach all sorts of untrue conclusions. Abortion is the perfect example. My friends back in college, with all of the good intentions in the world, would happily condemn a young and unprepared woman to an unwanted eighteen-year commitment, all because of their own misguided beliefs about nature and the supernatural. If we really want to make the world a better place, telling the truth about how it works is a good place to start.

I don’t read many conservative blogs. I enjoy some quasi-conservative libertarian-types — Marginal Revolution, Daniel Drezner, Balloon Juice, The Volokh Conspiracy. (Even if libertarian policy principles are kind of crazy, they are often smart and provocative.) But the hard-core rightosphere, places like Little Green Footballs and Powerline and Michelle Malkin, I just find creepy. (But I must point out that I’m box office at The Free Republic: see here, here, here, and here. Freepers find me fascinating.)

It’s truly a different world, and worth an occasional glance, just to be reminded that the set of “important news stories” can be entirely distinct from what I might think. For example, I’d been completely ignorant of the menace of the flying imams, the subject of literally hundreds of breathless blog posts. Not being an aficionado of modern religions myself, at first I thought they had something to do with yogic flying, but it turns out that’s something else entirely.

The story is that six Muslim clerics were removed from a US Airways flight from Minnesota to Phoenix a couple of weeks ago, accused of acting suspiciously. They were led away in handcuffs before being questioned and released, while their flight left without them. US Airways refused to let them travel on a different flight the next day; they eventually flew home on other airlines.

As far as I can tell, the suspicious behavior consisted of the following:

• Praying.
• Speaking Arabic.
• Saying “Allah” out loud, several times.
• Remarking unfavorably about US policy in Iraq.
• Sitting in seats “reminiscent of a 9/11 hijackers seating configuration.” I think that means they weren’t all sitting together — some were even in first class!
• Requesting seat-belt extenders, even though they weren’t really all that overweight.
• Moving about the airplane, before takeoff, to talk with each other.

That’s about it.

To me, it sounds like the US Airways flight crew overreacted a bit. The seat-belt extender business is apparently suspicious because they could potentially be used as weapons. Picture in your mind’s eye, six imams (one of whom was blind) swinging their seat-belt extenders like nunchucks, overpowering a planeload of pasty Midwesterners. The “moving around” also has a relatively prosaic explanation — one of the imams who had upgraded to first-class decided to offer his seat to his blind colleague, who declined the offer. See, if they had been cold-hearted atheists who didn’t have religion to tell them to be nice to each other, all of this could have been avoided.

But, ultimately, I don’t place too much blame on the flight crew for reacting as they did. A situation unfolding in real time is always unclear, and caution is warranted; better to inconvenience a few people than put an entire flight at risk. Although I don’t think the situation was handled well, it was an understandable overreaction, and should be something we can put behind us. Mistakes were made, sorry about that, can’t be too careful, etc.

The bloggers who jumped all over the original reports, though — they don’t think that way. They can’t think that way. It must have been a real threat, or their entire worldview is in jeopardy.

Debbie Schlussel is outraged that the imams haven’t been banned from flying on airplanes for all eternity. (For what, exactly?) Instapundit thinks that anti-Muslim sentiment is their fault. Michelle Malkin claims that one of the imams admitted supporting Osama Bin Laden! Okay, the alleged support was against the Russians in the early 1990’s, and was encouraged by the CIA at the time. But still! Pajamas Media thinks it must have been a “dry run.” Apparently, it eventually dawned on some people that praying loudly and shouting “Allah” would probably not be recommended doctrine if you actually did want to sneak onto an airplane and stage a surprise mid-air coup, so all that praying and talking in Arabic must have been part of a coordinated campaign to soften up security personnel before the next actual attack. Or something like that; I can’t keep all the theories straight.

The entire incident is reminiscent of the time in June 2004 when journalist Annie Jacobsen freaked out at the presence of a group of Middle Eastern men on a plane. Not only were the men completely harmless Syrian musicians, but it turns out that Jacobsen’s own behavior had potentially put the flight in danger, in the opinion of air marshals.

What would you do, if you were Annie Jacobsen? Realize that you had overreacted just a tad, and examine how deep-seated fears can lead to unwarranted conclusions? No, if you were Annie Jacobsen you would write a book about how we’re not nearly afraid enough of dark-skinned people on our airplanes.

We’re very proud, in this country, of our commitment to equality, liberty, and the rule of law. But a lot of Americans are living in fear right now, and are willing to sacrifice much of the freedom that makes this country what it is in order to combat that fear. How far are they willing to go? Newt Gingrich is campaigning against the First Amendment. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress (and the guest of honor at the conference the flying imams were attending), is accused by Dennis Prager of undermining American civilization because he will take the oath of office on a Koran instead of a Bible. When radio host Jerry Klein suggested — as a spoof — that American Muslims should be forced to wear identifying tattoos or armbands, reminiscent of Nazi measures against Jews, he was disgusted to hear many audience members call in to express their full-throated support for the idea.

This fear is real, and politicians will take advantage of it, shamelessly and unapologetically. I’m not worried that the U.S. will descend into actual authoritarian rule, as these things are understood worldwide. But encroachments on liberty in the name of security can be pernicious and severe even if they come very gradually. That’s a much bigger threat to our society than terrorism will ever be.

After almost six years of living under the worst president in U.S. history, and facing, on a daily basis, the ignorance and bigotry that arises in part from the pact that Republicans have made with the religious right, it is easy to blame all our ills on the excuses for leaders who run this country.

However, I’m reminded today that disgusting retrograde policies are not solely the domain of the Republicans. As reported in The Washington Post;

The federal government has refused to pay death benefits to the spouse of former congressman Gerry E. Studds (D-Mass.), the first openly gay member of Congress.

Studds married Dean Hara in 2004 after same-sex marriage was legalized in Massachusetts. But Hara will not be eligible to receive any portion of Studds’s estimated $114,337 annual pension …

And why won’t this man’s life partner be able to receive benefits?

because the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act bars the federal government from recognizing Studds’s marriage.

[...]

Under federal law, pensions can be denied only to lawmakers’ same-sex partners and to people convicted of espionage or treason, Graves said.

That’s right – thanks to the Clinton administration, this basic right of partnership can be denied only if the person involved is a spy, a traitor or, that equally heinous threat to the American way of life, gay!

So if I interpret this correctly, a member of Congress could be shot dead by police while stabbing a baby, and his opposite-sex partner would be eligible for the pension, but if he dies while on a quiet walk, his same sex partner isn’t eligible. Ain’t it great?

It should make us all sick.

The Senate has voted 65-34 in favor of S. 3930, “A bill to authorize trial by military commission for violations of the law of war, and for other purposes.” Here, “trial by military commission” means that, if you are an unlawful enemy combatant, you have no right to a trial by your peers or any other basic protections of the Bill of Rights. (Who counts as an “enemy combatant”? Whomever the government says. Even U.S. citizens who haven’t even left the country, much less engaged in combat? Yes.) And “other purposes” means torturing people.

I remember when Republicans used to look at government with suspicion. Now the motto of the Republican Party is “Trust us, we’re the government, we know what’s best and we don’t make mistakes.”

I have nothing to add to the discussion that hasn’t been said by more expert people elsewhere. I just wanted it on record, if the internet archives last a thousand years and I’ve been cryogenically preserved for the same length of time, that I was one of the substantial number of people who thought the bill was repulsive and anti-democratic. It will go down in history as one of those sad moments when a basically good nation does something that makes later generations look back and think, “What made them go so crazy?”

I can just quote other people. Jack Balkin:

The current bill, if passed [as it just was], will give the Executive far more dictatorial powers to detain, prosecute, judge and punish than it ever enjoyed before. Over the last 48 hours, it has been modified in a hundred different ways to increase executive power at the expense of judicial review, due process, and oversight. And what is more, the bill’s most outrageous provisions on torture, definition of enemy combatants, secret procedures, and habeas stripping, are completely unnecessary to keep Americans safe. Rather, they are the work of an Executive branch that has proven itself as untrustworthy as it is greedy: always pushing the legal and constitutional envelope, always seeking more power and less accountability.

Almost all the Republican Senators, of course, voted for the bill, Lincoln Chafee being the lone honorable exception. As Glenn Greenwald notes,

During the debate on his amendment, Arlen Specter said that the bill sends us back 900 years because it denies habeas corpus rights and allows the President to detain people indefinitely. He also said the bill violates core Constitutional protections. Then he voted for it.

Most Democrats were against (although not all, sadly). Hillary Clinton:

The rule of law cannot be compromised. We must stand for the rule of law before the world, especially when we are under stress and under threat. We must show that we uphold our most profound values…

The bill before us allows the admission into evidence of statements derived through cruel, inhuman and degrading interrogation. That sets a dangerous precedent that will endanger our own men and women in uniform overseas. Will our enemies be less likely to surrender? Will informants be less likely to come forward? Will our soldiers be more likely to face torture if captured? Will the information we obtain be less reliable? These are the questions we should be asking. And based on what we know about warfare from listening to those who have fought for our country, the answers do not support this bill. As Lieutenant John F. Kimmons, the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence said, “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive interrogation practices.”…

This bill undermines the Geneva Conventions by allowing the President to issue Executive Orders to redefine what permissible interrogation techniques happen to be. Have we fallen so low as to debate how much torture we are willing to stomach? By allowing this Administration to further stretch the definition of what is and is not torture, we lower our moral standards to those whom we despise, undermine the values of our flag wherever it flies, put our troops in danger, and jeopardize our moral strength in a conflict that cannot be won simply with military might.

Russ Feingold:

Habeas corpus is a fundamental recognition that in America, the government does not have the power to detain people indefinitely and arbitrarily. And that in America, the courts must have the power to review the legality of executive detention decisions.

Habeas corpus is a longstanding vital part of our American tradition, and is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

As a group of retired judges wrote to Congress, habeas corpus “safeguards the most hallowed judicial role in our constitutional democracy — ensuring that no man is imprisoned unlawfully.”

Mr. President, this bill would fundamentally alter that historical equation. Faced with an executive branch that has detained hundreds of people without trial for years now, it would eliminate the right of habeas corpus.

But words are cheap, and nobody stepped up to filibuster the bill. Democrats, as usual, put their fingers to the wind and decide to be spineless. The calculation seems to be that they won’t look sufficiently tough if they come out strongly against torture. They don’t get it. “Tough” means that you stand up for what you believe in, and that you’re willing to fight for it if necessary. How are you supposed to keep the country safe when you’re afraid to stand up to demagoguing Republicans? People know this, which is why it’s been so easy to paint Democrats as weak.

The “tough” stance of the Bush administration has taken Iraq, a country that formerly opposed al-Qaeda, and turned one-third of it over to al-Qaeda, in the process fueling Islamic radicalism and making the threat of terrorism significantly worse. If that’s what you get from “tough,” I’ll stick with “smart” and “principled” any day.