Category: The Americas

Please, people, get the Alito debate right

The SEPTA strike finally ended early this morning. In a way, losing mass transit was beneficial: with a 90-minute commute on foot, I had some forced spare time to listen to podcasts on my way to and from campus, including Face The Nation and Meet The Press. The episodes two weekends ago, coming in the wake of the Scooter Libby indictment, were most amusing.

But this weekend, it was all about Alito. And I had to hear Democrats on both shows go on about how “he wanted to strip-search a 10-year-old.” The case was Doe v. Groody, 361 F.3d 232 (3d Cir. 2004), text available here. Now, I know these senators must know better—they went to law school, for feck’s sake. So let’s get this straight.

  • The searches took place as part of a drug bust. The suspected dealer is referred to as “John Doe.”
  • When the police applied for a search warrant, they asked several times to be able to “search all occupants of the residence and their belongings to prevent the removal, concealment, or destruction of any evidence requested in this warrant.” In fact, it says “all occupants” several times, as if to scream “DON’T LET ANYONE GET AWAY!”
  • When they got the warrant, the box marked “premises and/or persons to be searched” said “John Doe” and gave some of his personal information. This information filled up the entire box on the form.
  • The police conducting the raid knew there were going to be women in the house, and didn’t want the suspected dealer to hide the goods on the women, so they got a female meter maid to go in with them.
  • The meter maid took the wife and daughter of the suspect into the bathroom and had them strip down to show they didn’t have anything hidden in their clothes.
  • After this happened, the victims sued the police officers individually under Section 1983. The police officers argued that they should get qualified immunity because they didn’t violate “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”
  • The district court rejected this argument and decided the officers should be liable. They appealed. Alito was one of the three-judge panel who got the appeal.
  • Two of the judges voted to affirm the district court’s decision, since the warrant only said “John Doe.” Alito dissented on the grounds that the officers clearly intended to get a warrant to search everyone, and had a decent reason to believe they were given the right to do so.

Now, criticizing Alito on this last issue is one thing, but he certainly isn’t in favor of strip-searching children left and right. All he wanted was to keep police officers from being sued when they were doing something they thought they were authorized to do. If you want to go after perverts in the government, go after Scooter.

What if the Flatlander has no home to return to?

I was reading this article about the humorous inability of the crazy Minutemen border patrol to even locate the Canadian/Vermont border, much less to patrol it, when I noticed a very curious term in the final sentence.

Even the Minutemen concede that their welcome hasn’t been perfectly warm. During their first patrol weekend, Buck said he found a note with a native Vermonter’s derogatory term for outsiders — indicating that someone thought they were already on the wrong side of a border.

“Flatlander, go home,” Buck said the note read.

Not having ever even been to Vermont, I have never been called a Flatlander (although after showing my vast gulf of ignorance regarding their state, I fully expect to have the epithet hurled at me vehemently should I ever visit. Of course, I turned to Google for an explanation, and here is what I found.

The term flatlander derives from ‘flatland’, which describes a geographical location as land that is predominantly flat. A flatlander would be a person who is from this type of a region.

To a Vermonter, the term flatlander takes on a whole new meaning. In the simplest terms, it means a person from outside the confines of Vermont. Often times, the actual geographical location of an outsider can be mountainous, but this weighs little on Vermont’s opinion. There is a gray area of where the flatlander boundaries exist, but to some die-hards, a flatlander is anyone not born in the state of Vermont. Others only consider the states south of Vermont that are located within New England. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island fall victim to the term by this definition, but it is unlike Vermonters to leave out New Jersey on their definition of flatlander. And for some, a flatlander is anyone with white plates on their car.

Flatlander is used as a negative slander on non-native Vermonters or visitors. In it’s basic concept, the term implies a person who visits the state or lives here that brings negative qualities from their home to our state. It is a person who is unfamiliar with traditional Vermont ways. Nathan Mansfield, a native Vermonter, defines the term as “Thinking they [a flatlander] can meld their beliefs of what Vermont is into our reality.” Unfortunately for the flatlander, even if they assimilate to Vermont culture and reside here for 50 years, they can never rid themselves of this label.

Makiko Tanaka is amusing

I’m binging on rotten.com tonight, and came across the following brief anecdote in their profile of President Bush (scroll to bottom):

17 Jun 2001 – Japanese Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka returns to German Town High School in Philadelphia, where she studied for two years as a high school student. During a conversation with her former classmates, Tanaka gives her concise assessment of President George W Bush: “He is totally an asshole.”

I offer a cash reward to anyone who can find audio or video of this.

My moving nightmare — a quiz for my readers in law school

If only this guy would rent to me...
My plans were to be blogging from my new place in Rockville by now, but as you will see below that was not in the cards. The following is a 100% true story of what happened to me yesterday. Names have been changed.
Continue reading My moving nightmare — a quiz for my readers in law school

In the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma

Every day it’s some other city/state/country/faction/nominee being destroyed. It figures that Broward County, where I grew up and lived through a hurricane and a tropical storm, was smacked silly by Hurricane Wilma.

One of my friends from high school sent over some photos from our neighborhood by the beach. You can see the crazier shots here.

Addendum: I just read that a geisha is overseeing the restoration of power. This post was Japan-related all along! Who knew?

“My Japan”

A conversation with a friend last night reminded me of this incredible WWII propaganda film. It was made to sell U.S. war bonds in the final months of the war, and it features an American actor playing a Japanese narrator, explaining why the Americans will never win the war.

During the first couple of minutes, it’s abysmally stupid, as the narrator talks about flowers and bunnies and “Mount Fujama” (a mispronunciation of “Fujiyama,” itself a mistransliteration of “Mount Fuji”). By the middle, though, the film is brutally effective at its aim: terrifying the average American, who was almost sure that Japan had no chance of surviving, into thinking that Japan might pull through and deal incredible damage to America in the process. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the war era.

(There are a few nauseating racial stereotypes in the film, but not the kind you’re probably used to seeing in WWII propaganda. In fact, the film goes out of its way to debunk some of the classic images of short, bespectacled “Jap” soldiers, and that adds to its effectiveness.)

Google and Taiwanese sovereignty

I originally started writing this post in response to this post on Ridingsun and never quite got around to finishing it, but now that Google has announced they are changing their designation of Taiwan from “Taiwan, province of China” to merely “Taiwan,” I figure I’ll just publish it.

The official US position is stated in the Taiwan Relations Act, passed in 1979, and has never been changed since.

Don’t forget Taiwan’s government is still known as the Republic Of China, and according to its constitution still considers itself a claimant to sovereignty over all of China, of which Taiwan is just a single province.

If you look at the actual text of the ROC constitution, Article 2 states
“The president and the vice president shall be directly elected by the entire populace of the free area of the Republic of China.”

By limiting voting to the populace of the “free area”, i.e. Taiwan and the surrounding islands, the implication is that mainland China is “unfree territory of the Republic of China.”

Article 11 also states
“Rights and obligations between the people of the Chinese mainland area and those of the free area, and the disposition of other related affairs may be specified by law.”
again, making clear that Taiwan still legally considers itself part of China (although apparently the best part).

If constitutional interpretation is too dry, you can follow the reasoning at the blog Those Who Dare.

Or simpler yet, they can just look at the vehicular traffic on Taiwan’s roads and take note of the license plates that read Taiwan Province.

Yes, the current president’s party (I hesitate to say ‘ruling party’ since they control oly a single branch of the government, all branches of which are basically stuck in deadlock due to partisan bickering) endorses formal independence from China, but unless they succeed in revising the constitution and changing the country’s official name, it’s very unrealistic to expect foreign businesses to do so.

Incidentally, I would be thrilled to see the ROC officially change its name to Republic of Taiwan, so don’t think that I’m actually in favor of reunification. Just try and realize this isn’t just a matter of Taiwan’s independence not being recognized internationally, it stil isn’t even recognized domestically.

Numismania

We’ve known for years that North Korea has been printing counterfeit money, but the BBC reports that we finally have proof.

The United States has formally accused North Korea of forging millions of dollars of high-quality counterfeit US dollar notes, known as supernotes.

A US court indictment said seven men, including senior Irish republican Sean Garland, distributed the fakes, which all had a face value of $100.

There is still no word on whether or not North Korea has been accused of counterfeiting the new US ha’penny coin.

Kabuki update

Continuing from the first installment.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo gives us this confused example:

One interesting dimension of this Kabuki theater exercise is that it’s not even completely clear which part of the Republican caucus open defections could come from.

Josh, if you have no idea how it’s going to turn out, why are you calling it Kabuki?
John G Scherb, of PeaceJournalism.com, slips his reference into an essay on the Taiwan arms deal question.

And no one, save for a few
wizened China experts, really cares about it because nothing really
changes. It’s a Kabuki dance, an elaborate ritual that benefits a few,
ups the world tensions a notch or two, and then is quickly forgotten.

The web site claims to be based in Nepal, whose citizens, being far closer to China than the typical clueless Westerner would seem to be in a position to know enough about Chinese culture to realize that a: Kabuki is from Japan and not China, and b: that Kabuki, while highly scripted, is not what I would call a ‘ritual,’ and is a rather awful metaphor for what he’s discussing. After all, if it were ‘quickly forgotten,’ why is it the metaphor of choice for creatively braindead political columnists?

I don’t want to knock PeaceJournalism.com too much though-after all they do have this pretty awesome proposal for THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL CONTACT ACT, to be enacted by the US Congress.

The last entry for today is courtesy of Wayne Madsen at Global Research.ca, writing about the Plame/Rove/Darth Sidius scandal that’s gripped the imagination of the most boring people in America. Madsen actually describes two different situations as Kabuki.

Not surprisingly, the White House spin Kabuki dancers, fully expecting a Friday announcement from Fitzgerald, altered course and announced that Bush would not name a replacement for O’Connor until some time next week.

While Mr. Madsen is guilty of yet another horrifically bad Kabuki metaphor, at least he gives us this rather amusing photo collage to illustrate his lack of a point.
kabuki dance
The White House Kabuki dance with Patrick Fitzgerald

What is the alternative? How can reporters possibly describe politics without the richness of inappropriate metaphors?

Take this photo, which was plastered all over the front page of every newspaper in Taiwan yesterday. The typical American political reporter or pundit would probably describe this as the result of a Kabuki dance, or possibly, if they considered themselves more of an elitist prick (i.e. a George Will, or Christopher Hitchens) perhaps even a Noh play. A more accurate description, however, would be to say that Chang Sho-wen got the shit beat out of him, and that Taiwanese legislators routinely beat the shit out of each other.

Of course, not all mention of Kabuki in the press is inherently gratuitous. For example, take this brief news item from The Japan Times.

Mitsukoshi Ltd. and Shochiku Co. said Tuesday they will form a business alliance to develop kabuki-related products.

The department store chain and Japan’s major movie distributing firm will jointly set up a project team to share their strategies on the kabuki business, including developing souvenirs, planning play-watching trips and selling play tickets to customers of each company.

Shochiku has positioned the traditional performing art as its core business since its foundation in 1920, while Mitsukoshi has been organizing various kabuki events with the film distributor’s support since 1946.