Ruminate This, the gutsy, outspoken and totally rational brainchild of Lisa English, just got a bloglift for its move to MT and it looks great. Go take a read.

CalPundit got a lift too--Kevin's changed his photo on the front--and is soliciting opinions about the new one. We like the second one better, but think he should take a third and smile a little bit for the camera.

We've made a couple of addtions to our blogroll, journalist David Neiwert's Orcinus, Digby , Roger Ailes (not that one), Progressive Gold and TBogg.

Alterman quotes retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni who opposes a war with Iraq now. Zinni used to head the U.S. Central Command, in charge of U.S. forces in much of the Middle East and Central Asia, from 1997 to 2000, after which he was George W. Bush’s personal emissary to the Middle East peace process. And don't forget, tomorrow is the debut of:

What Liberal Media?

by Eric Alterman


Buy the Book Today!

Read the 13 page Introduction now and visit the website.

Salon has a new interview with Hunter Thompson, our favorite gonzo Journalist who says 9/11 "let the Bush crowd loot the country and savage American democracy." Hunter has a new memoir out, "Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century," already destined for the New York Times Best Seller list this weekend.

Kingdom of Fear
by Hunter S. Thompson

Buy the Book Today!

Publisher's Weekly describes it as, "Hunter Thompson, author of such classics as Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and other journalistic endeavors, has finally penned a memoir. Well, sort of. "

Last but not least, we've added two features to TalkLeft. One is a newsfeed on the lower right side of the site with positive articles about Gary Hart, who may or may not run for President, but who right now is our first choice if he does. (There's a few issues we don't know his stand on that could possibly alter this). The other is "The Hart Monitor" which are sporadic posts containing updates on his run or non-run, whichever it should be. We'll say once again that should Hart choose not to run for President, we hope the next President, who we are sure will be a Democrat, makes him Secretary of State.

Aspen, Colorado held a successful peace rally this Saturday. Numbers in attendance vary, but the organizers, Roaring Forke Peace Coaltition ran out of 1,000 ski bibs, that said "Make snow, not war." A group from Telluride also attended and brought 200 more which also were distributed among the crowd.

The keynote speaker was the good Doctor Hunter S. Thompson, described in the article as "mostly coherent" at the time of his 5 pm address. He spoke about "the pitfalls of war and the evils of an unchecked government."

The protesters then joined together for a peace march down Main Street.

The Coalition meets every Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Roaring Fork High School(Carbondale) in the Library. More events are planned.

A bill was introduced in the Kansas Senate today that would impose a two-year moratorium on the death penalty and appoint a commission to study the state's capital murder law.

Cost is said to be a factor--it costs over $1 million for court appointed counsel to defend a capital case, and another $1 million to prosecute.

Among the issues to be studied by the proposed commission are:

"-- Whether the race of the victim or defendant plays a role in bringing capital murder charges;

-- Whether there are disparities across the state in the way capital murder cases are handled;

-- What are the total costs to the state and local governments for capital murder cases;

-- Whether changes are needed in the law to ensure that no innocent person is condemned."

The commission would consist of seven members appointed by the Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice, the Governor and legislative leaders.

Atrios reminds us:

There are a lot of reasons to not support the Estrada nomination, but frankly there is a simple one which should be enough - his complete failure to be forthcoming about any controversial issue during his confirmation hearing. Take action. Contact your Senator. Stiffen their spines."

Don't miss Media Horse on the foolhardy Estrada nomination as well. It's like buying a pig in a poke (at least we think that's the expression.)

Law Professor Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on what direction the space debate should take us in his new Tech News Column. One of the courses he teaches is Space Law, so we give him extra credibility on the issue. He says,

the public debate should be on how to move ahead with an ambitious space program without committing ourselves to another big, bureaucratic program like the Space Shuttle, which never really took us where we wanted to go. Instead, we need to find ways to unleash the energies of the private sector, and to allow industries like space tourism to play a bigger role. It's capitalism that lowers costs, not government programs.....

A twenty-first century NASA should focus on new space launch technologies (including such "breakthrough" technologies as laser launch and scramjets), on interplanetary exploration (which won't have a commercial market for a while) and on other things that the private sector can't do. Those things that the private sector can do, like launching things to low-earth orbit, should be left to the private sector.....

I say that the debate will be over how to move ahead, rather than whether to move ahead, because I think that's how most Americans feel. As of Sunday afternoon, the email for my MSNBC site was running hundreds-to-one in favor of going on with an ambitious space program (and I mean literally "one" - I got only one email saying that we should just give up on space and stay home, and it was from a Canadian).

Count us in as one of the hundreds-to-one who want to see an ambitious space program.

Josh over at OxBlog heard Gary Hart speak in Oxford a few days ago. He gave the National Security speech we wrote about here. We disagree with Josh's criticism, which mainly seems to stem from a question he asked Hart at the end of the speech that did not get answered to his satisfaction. Josh is also not a liberal, judging from the blogs on his blogroll, and is a Bush and War supporter, judging from a quick perusal of a few posts on his blog that we just read, so again, we're not surprised he didn't agree with Hart.

Josh takes issue with Hart's position that before we go to war, Bush should answer a few questions, for example, how many casualties can be expected and how long will we be there. Josh says the questions are "sophistry" because no one knows the answer to them. We think that's exactly Hart's point--there are no answers and the American people shouldn't back a war where the answers to those kinds of questions are unknown. Here's what Hart said:

There is every reason now to believe that, within days, American forces—possibly with token support from allies—will invade Iraq. Under these circumstances, and acknowledging the unity of America behind our forces once committed, any attempt to outline a national security policy for the future, such as I undertake here, requires several observations to be made.

The American people deserve to know the costs of this commitment. They deserve to know which members of the international community openly support us, including with military resources. They deserve to know, most of all, casualty estimates on both sides. We have been told none of these things. It cost us 50,000 American lives in Viet Nam to learn the lesson that the American people must not be misled, lied to, or treated as incompetent on military engagements.

The United States military does not belong to the president; it belongs to the American people. Our support for its commitment to combat is crucial for its success. That support cannot be granted in the dark and without a candid statement by the commander in chief regarding the probable costs in human lives and national treasure of its commitment.

Further, as Hart said in his response to Bush's SOTUS

The President is still either unable or unwilling to provide concrete evidence of current Iraqi involvement in terrorism sufficient to justify possible substantial loss of American lives in a war in Iraq. He also is unable or unwilling to provide assurance to the American people that our homeland is sufficiently secure from terrorist attacks before such a war is initiated. As our Council on Foreign Relations Task Force Report of October 25 documented, America is still unprepared and still at risk. We should not go to war until America is prepared to defend itself at home from terrorist attacks that the Central Intelligence Agency has said will most probably occur when we go to war in the Middle East.

Josh says Hart's warnings about civil liberties violations and his comments about the growing fears of American Muslims that the WWII Japanese interment camps will be repeated are "hogwash." Not to the Muslims and Japanese. And not to us. The Indianapolis Star recently interviewed a Diversity Ambassador from Indiana University on the issue.

David Suzuki, IUPUI’s diversity ambassador, was born in the Tule Lake internment camp in Newell, Calif., just after the end of World War II His parents, though U.S. citizens, were imprisoned for about three years while the United States and the Allied forces were at war with Japan.

The Star asked Suzuki to compare the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II to the treatment of Arab-Americans and Muslims since the start of the war on terrorism and in anticipation of military conflict with Iraq.

"What similarities do you see between the internment of Japanese-Americans and the treatment of Arab-Americans and American Muslims today?"

"The extended detention of Arab-Americans without formal accusations, the authorization of military tribunals and the use of racial profiling indicate that we could be heading down the same road that the nation mistakenly took 60 years ago. Then, as now, racially motivated fear and hatred seem to be driving some people's actions."

We'd also point out that Hart never said internment camps are "imminent", a position Josh calls "absurd." However, they are a concern, particularly if another large attack on American soil occurs, and Hart predicts it will. Here's Hart's speech: Read for yourselves and decide.

We also heard Hart speak a few nights ago--on Denver's public television station. We reported on it here. One of the reasons we like Hart so much is for his expressed disapproval of Bush and Ashcroft's treatment of the detainees. We agree with Hart that by detaining American citizens without due process, including access to lawyers and hearings, we are violating our own laws. This issue is of far more concern to us than how Hart would enforce a U.N. peace-keeping mission.

So Rhodes scholar or not (and we certainly aren't one, but then again, Josh likely is neither a constitutional nor criminal defense lawyer,) we think you should consider the biased position from which he comes, listen to Hart yourselves and make up your own minds.

First it was handwriting, hair and fiber comparison. Then it was polygraphs and fingerprints. Now it's the law enforcement technique of bullet lead analysis to come under legal and scientific attack.

For over 20 years, the FBI has been using chemical analysis of bullet lead to match bullets to the gun they were fired from and even to the ammunition box they came from. This technique, like the others mentioned, has now come under scientific attack. "The problem, experts say, is that such methods evolved from hunches, trial and error, and anecdotal evidence rather than from accepted scientific practice, which requires controlled experiments and rigorous peer review of the results."

It seems that contrary to what FBI agents have testified to in court the past few decades, bullets that appear chemically identical can come from different batches of lead.

FBI experts have testified repeatedly in court that each time lead is melted and cast, its composition changes just enough to create a unique chemical signature for each batch.....Recent scientific studies have concluded that this premise is wrong. Studying blocks of lead used in the manufacture of bullets, researchers have found the same chemical makeup in batches made at different times. They also have reported that the concentration of trace elements can vary significantly in the same casting of lead. If the skeptics are right, the matches found by FBI lab technicians are meaningless.

A separate study, commissioned by a former FBI agent and a metallurgist who once worked together on the Unabomber case, was conducted by four researchers.

...The four researchers found that there is no such signature. Trace elements are often distributed unevenly within each casting, they reported, so that entire batches rarely bear a uniform chemical profile. As molten lead is cooled, the trace elements tend to concentrate, clumping silver, arsenic or tin toward the center, the study found. As a result, the researchers said, bullets created from the same block of lead can appear unrelated and bullets produced years apart can appear virtually identical.

Defense counsel around the country have begun contesting the FBI's technique--and some are trying to set aside clients' convictions where the technique may have played a principal role at trial.

Richard Saferstein, former chief forensic scientist for the New Jersey State Police, said in a recent interview that the problem with bullet-lead analysis is not with the lab work but with the conclusions drawn from it. The FBI, he said, has tended to overstate the significance of such evidence. "It's the image that the FBI projects, of course, more than the technology. That image, when you are talking to jurors, is impressive," he said. "You can't abuse that privilege. It comes back to haunt the agency and the profession."

In the early 1990's, Georgia, like many other states, enacted harsh laws providing for juveniles to be charged as adults for a variety of crimes. The Georgia legislature will be reconsidering the law, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in an editorial, urges its repeal.

Since Senate Bill 440 became law nine years ago, the state has sentenced 566 children aged 13 to 17 to mandatory 10-year terms. Two-thirds of those children were sentenced for sex crimes. But the predicted wave of juvenile crime never materialized. The law did not make the streets safer. Instead, it forced teenagers to come of age in adult prisons, where they learned to be more violent and antisocial.

Both prosecutors and public defenders oppose the law, saying it "amounts to giving up on children in their most formative years." These juveniles only remain in a juvenile facility until they are 17. Then they are transferred to the adult state prison, where there is no educational or treatment program designed for them.

A study in Florida showed that the rate of recidivism is higher for juveniles sent to an adult prison rather than a juvenile facility. As one long-time juvenile public defender said, "Putting kids in a system where they have to be vicious to survive is insane."

Aside from the draconian terms of imprisonment, the law does not allow reduced terms for those kids who are first offenders, remorseful, or who agree to cooperate with authorities. How's this for a horror story?

Edward Boyd urged his 16-year-old son, a first-time offender, to tell the truth after he was arrested for armed robbery. Using a BB gun, the teenager and two older youths held up a Milledgeville theater worker carrying a money bag with less than $50 in it.

For admitting the crime, the boy was sentenced to remain in prison until he is 26 years old.

The elder Boyd, a college administrator, says his son, now 17, is in the adult prison at Alto with a 48-year-old and a 28-year-old on either side of him. He sometimes fears for his life.

Two legislators, Sen. Vincent Fort (D-Atlanta) and Rep. Alisha Thomas (D-Austell), are trying to change the law. The editorial, in supporting repeal of the law, wisely observes,

At the end of next year, the first group of young adults who were sentenced under Georgia's harsh law will be released. Much of what they know about life they have learned from hardened criminals. Instead of protecting the public from dangerous juveniles, SB 440 may be producing hundreds more adult criminals. Lawmakers should repeal it.

We agree. The expertise of the family court and the juvenile court system serves a vital function in our society. It's time for legislators and politicians to learn that America cannot jail itself out of its juvenile crime problem.

Arrives in bookstores tomorrow....Read the 13 page Introduction now and visit the website.

Acclaimed author and journalist Eric Alterman's scathing and witty investigation into who really controls the media. Armed with data and in brisk, light-hearted prose, Alterman exposes the fallacy of the vast left-wing conspiracy that never was.

What Liberal Media?
by Eric Alterman


Buy the Book Today!

Here's Eric's tentative media schedule:

Television Appearances (tentative):
The O'Reilly Factor on Fox at 7 on 2/4
Crossfire, CNN at 7 on 2/5
John Gibson, Fox at 5 on 2/6
Nachman MSNBC at 5, on 2/7

Personal Appearances:
Seattle, WA: Mon., 2/17, 7pm: University Bookstore
Berkeley, CA: Tues., 2/18, 7:30pm: Cody's Books
San Francisco, CA: Wed., 2/19, 7pm: City Lights
Los Angeles, CA: Fri., 2/21, 7:30pm: skylight Books
New York, NY: Tues., 2/25, 7:30pm: Barnes & Noble (82nd & Bdwy)
Washington, DC: Thurs., 3/6, 7pm: Politics & Prose

A court in Iran has sentenced two pollsters to prison for conducting an opinion poll on U.S.-Iranian relations.

Abbas Abdi, a prominent reformist politician, was sentenced to seven years and his colleague, Hussein-Ali Qazian, received an eight-year prison term, the reports said.... The two men, along with several others from a similar institute, were arrested and tried after the release of the survey in September that indicated three-quarters of Iranians favored resuming ties with the United States.

The Pittsburgh Gazette is backing a bill pending before the legislature that would ban the death penalty for juveniles.

Many Americans will be shocked to learn that Iran, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and the United States are the only nations in the world that permit the execution of juveniles. This isn't the kind of company a liberal democratic society should desire to be included in. We urge our state representatives and our governor to get behind the movement to put a halt to this barbarism.

In conjunction with its newly launched "No Death Penalty for Juvenile Offenders" campaign, Amnesty International, USA is going to conduct a public opinion poll this month to gauge opinion on the issue of execution of juvenile offenders. The group believes support for it has waned. We certainly hope so.

A big thanks to Reverand Mr. George W. Brooks, Director of Advocacy, Kolbe House, Chicago, Illinois, who has kindly taken to forwarding us the most current new articles concerning the death penalty. You will be seeing more of them in our newsfeed to the left and undoubtedly more discussion here.

LA Police Chief Bill Bratton is ready to put his "broken window" policing strategy into action. Bratton has selected three areas of Los Angeles for starters: the Hollywood Strip, McArthur Park and downtown's Skid Row.

The "broken windows" policing strategy "holds that maintaining public order is at least as important as solving crimes and that attacking low-level offenses can reduce fear and prevent more serious offenses."

In Los Angeles, Bratton has not picked easy proving grounds. Hollywood has two-thirds of all prostitution arrests in the city. Skid row is home to the largest concentration of homeless and is in the LAPD division that logged more drug sales arrests than any other last year. The city already has spent millions trying to clean up MacArthur Park, in the middle of a poor, overcrowded, crime-plagued neighborhood.

"Parks are essential to the quality of life in a city," Bratton said. "If the small things are left undeterred, they turn into big things. So the homeless take over a portion of the park. Drug dealers follow. Drug dealers beget violence. It then begins to affect the whole business area and businesses begin to die."

A broken window signals that no one cares, the theory goes. Graffiti, vandalism and prostitution foster fear, and more serious crime follows. "What people see every day generates so much of their fear. Graffiti, homelessness and drug dealers. That's what drives people out of the cities," Bratton said. "It's all about quality-of-life issues."

Apparently, it has been in use selectively the past few months, and crime is already going down in LA. "The LAPD reports crime has begun to drop, following the pattern in New York, which experienced double-digit declines on Bratton's watch." In New York, Bratton went after squeegee users--the guys that used to come up to your car's windshields while you were at a red light and start washing your windows and then asked you for money. In LA, Bratton says, the equivalent are the beggars. With both he says, the issue is "quality of life."

Graffiti, homelessness and drug dealers. That's what drives people out of the cities....Some of it's benign. But it raises the degree of discomfort for the average person."

Bratton has appointed LAPD Capt. Michael Downing his point man to clean up Hollywood, which is plagued by drug sales and protstitutes.

[Downing is ] the man whose job it is to make sure things don't go wrong. The kind of risk-taker and innovator whom Bratton encourages, Downing, as commander of the Hollywood Division, launched "Operation Restore Hollywood" shortly before Christmas.

Narcotics and gang officers joined with a county interagency anti-drug task force, officers and a neighborhood prosecutor to pursue the pushers, many of whom work for the notorious 18th Street gang.

Downing was acting on the chief's philosophy: Bust a drug dealer or snag a tagger and you also may catch a killer. Officers believe they have affected more than drug sales. "Robberies are down 60%," Downing said.

Also on Bratton's list are the street hookers. LA just passed an ordinance allowing the police to seize and sell the soliciting johns' cars.

We haven't even gotten to McArthur Park and Skid Row yet, so go read the rest of this very interesting article for the problems in those areas and Bratton's intended solutions.

The biggest obstacle seems to us to be the lack of financial resources in LA. It's one thing to rid the streets of the homeless by putting them in shelters or giving them a place to live. It's another thing entirely if they are put in jail. Knowing Bratton as we do, we don't think he intends to put the homeless in jail. He's always expressed concern for civil liberties and we have no reason to doubt him.

Right after he took office, Bratton followed through with two previously authorized "massive" skid row sweeps. "An analysis of the resulting 185 arrests shows that violent, dangerous criminals were taken off the streets. Those arrested included violators and fugitives, as well as convicts with multiple offenses such as rape, incest, armed robbery, burglary and assault."

Since another hundred persons were issued citations for minor infractions during these sweeps, we assume, although the article doesn't say, that the sweeps did not result in non-violators being jailed solely for being homeless.

Some are skeptical of Bratton's chances for success. Our money's on him. We're going to keep our eye on the goings on in the LAPD, we'll report here, and if they raise the red flag of civil liberties violations, you'll hear us complain. But right now, as we expected, the Chief is beginning to work his magic for the betterment of LA.