Deep background on Watts' retirement: The Crusader broke the HRC Chair's back. The unconfirmed allegation is that the Administration, afraid of sparking an intra-party dispute over the military going into the midterms, told Watts in no uncertain terms that he wasn't going to get the Crusader back, and he needed to shut down his attempts to bring the controversial artillery system back online.

However, Watts couldn't easily quit the Crusader, especially not after putting together a codel, or Congressional delegation, to visit the artillery system's home stomping grounds, and after informing fellow Republicans that he couldn't possibly win re-election if the Crusader was killed. Tensions were exacerbated by redistricting politics: Oklahoma loses a seat in the next Congress, due to slow population growth recorded by the recent census, and Watts seems vulnerable, either getting shuffled over to Democratic-leaning districts, or placed in direct conflict with other Republicans, most notably Ernest Istook. (Istook is chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government, and the White House sees him as a critical ally in their attempts to create a multi-agency Department of Homeland Security. It's alleged, again without confirmation, that the Administration decided to provide support for Istook at the expense of Watts, in tacit exchange for legislative consideration.)

Watts had previously stated that he believed he was kept out of the leadership loop, despite being the fourth-highest ranking Republican in the House, and the brewing conflict with the White House convinced him it was time to hang up his members' pin and cash in his chips, reportedly for a corporate lobbying position on K Street.

 
The sheriff, um, shot the sheriff, or, rather, the political opponent who had beaten him in the Albany, GA election. Former sheriff and Atlanta homicide detective Sidney Dorsey was convicted of the murder of Sheriff-elect Derwin Brown, in a trial that also found the former law-enforcement official guilty of numerous corruption charges. Brown, killed in December 2000, had campaigned on a platform to end police corruption and malfeasance.

 
The counterattack against Wilentz continues in the National Review, where Berkowitz (he is getting around a lot, isn't he?) provides an excellent, scathing review of the Times' anti-Scalia thumbsucker.

I've always thought of Dilbert's Scott Adams as a kind of cartoon-strip casuist, the sort of ethical fool who Pascal so expertly skewers in his Provincial Letters. Adams' cartoons are filled with liars, con artists, criminals and knaves -- and they're the ones we're supposed to identify with. In his whiteboard jungle, evil needs no greater justification than the stupidity of others.

So, of course, the New York Times gives him a soapbox on the op-ed page.

Who needs businesses, anyway? After yesterday's announcement by Federated Department Stores that it was curtailing New Jersey operations because its corporate taxes doubled due to recent state tax law changes, we hear that Home Depot agreed to a $500,000 settlement, plus $25,000 in legal costs, with the state of Michigan for not price-tagging each item in its 115,000 sq. ft stores. In 1998, the company paid Michigan $250,000 for the same violations, and agreed in 1995 and 1996 to comply with the laws without incurring any penalties. Last year, a Massachusetts judge fined the company $13,625 after it was found that 1% of the items in its Quincy store were not tagged. The company argues that tagging every individual item is too labor-intensive, and that its practice of posting prices above the items does not confuse most customers.

Now, I don't know how it is in most states, but how low are the average coping skills of a populace that can neither read a price tag posted on a sales rack, nor find a store worker to ask for a price check? Is the burden incurred by Michigan consumers really equal to the $750,000 paid out by the company?

 
Larry Klayman's Judicial Watch has filed suit against Dick Cheney, other principals of Halliburton, and -- what a shock to find them here -- Arthur Andersen for inflating stock prices by manipulating accounting figures. According to the suit, Halliburton violated GAAP rules by noting "speculative revenue" (in particular, revenue not yet received from active contracts) as current income. Details here.

Speaking of corporate ethics, Slate takes on Bush's history at Harken, while The New Republic claims, a bit hysterically, that the Harken issue is "eerily reminiscent ... of what's been happening in the last few months at Enron [and] WorldCom"; Byron York retorts that Bush was out of the loop, and most of the other charges are fluff, but NRO admits that it looks bad anyway. Loose the hounds -- it's scandal time!

 
Charter schools are not vouchers, though Judd Greg and Dick Armey seem determined to blur the line, rhetorically if not legally. Actually, charter schools have had some beneficial effects here in Texas; it's been shown that, after an initial drop in test scores, kids who stay in charter schools show marked educational improvements. However, this obscures the fact that a lot of kids leave after the first semester or two because they end up in charter schools that, because of limited scrutiny, are incompetent at their educational mission. To my mind, this suggests that we're looking at a valuable tool, but one that requires more care and oversight than many proponents want to give it.

Anyone who thinks America has trouble keeping church and state separate should look at the supposedly freer countries of Europe, especially given the shutdown of irreligious websites by Italian police. Their crime? They "show[ed] a nun in suggestive clothes [and] other things in poor taste." It's juvenile, yeah, but criminal?

We report, but they decide: From MediaBistro comes this article (from May, yes), discussing how Fox's legal division shut down a Tampa affiliate's news report on possible rBGH health hazards. (You may remember this story. I don't, so here 'tis.) Even if you're not sold on the idea that there's a clear and present danger from hormone use on farms, it's unquestionable that Monsanto played dirty pool, and Fox was perfectly happy to cave in at the expense of their credibility. I'll say it again: if Fox is the only television outlet that counteracts the (unconscious) leftist bias of the other nets, they're going to do more harm than good to the conservative interest. (And I haven't even mentioned those "Elvis is alive" stories yet!)

The original script for the piece is here; the network's redacted version, with reporters' comments, is here.

Tally-ho: Two Reagan-era legal appointees, Charles Fried and Bruce Fine, begin the job of defending Scalia from Wilentz's hatchet job in today's NYT letters section.

 
Never say never again, especially where unions are involved. One has to wonder why the only side that doesn't get representation at the bargaining table is the fans themselves. (Obligatory second-day interest piece.)

Hoo-ah! On the heels of Bob Herbert's column bemoaning our unwillingness to sacrifice in times of war, comes the story that Arizona Cardinals player Pat Tillman has left the NFL to join the Army. The NFL is losing a great player, but the Army's getting one in return. (Link provided by World Wide Rant.)

Unaccountability, Part III: The Times editorial page suggests the Senate pass the Yucca Mountain plan, evidently so that we can go from Congress determing whether to force an unwilling state to take on an ill-considered nuclear dumping project, to an unelected bureaucracy making that decision for them. Best line: "[I]t would be irresponsible for the Senate — most of whose members have little detailed knowledge of the Yucca proposal — to decide this issue." Ain't democracy a beautiful thing?

 
Here's another piece subject to editing. It doesn't include a criticism of Scalia's article for FirstThings, which I believe to contain a deeply flawed interpretation of the Western philosophy of state power. More on that another time.
Count on Gail Collins to give us a slow-moving target for Monday in the form of Sean Wilentz's assailment on the religious views of Justice Scalia, as set out in the Justice's recent article for the conservative, mostly Catholic First Things.

Wilentz would, one assumes, be well-suited for this task. A respected historian, head of the American Studies program at Princeton, author of a deskful of books and articles, and recipient of dozens of prizes, he's a heavyweight intellectual, no question. But he'd better hope that the Times' editorial staff doesn't rope off a corner of that prime journalistic space for Scalia to step into, because Wilentz's article has a jutting glass jaw -- and Scalia, as his worthy foes on the bench will attest, rarely fails to land his punches.

Wilentz's editorial can be boiled down to an extended screed against religion appearing in public life in any way, shape, or form. To Wilentz, it is not enough that the state should be judiciously neutral in all matters of religion; religion should reciprocate by being completely neutral in all matters of state. It is this second, questionable premise that he attempts to carry forward, with rather dismal results.

Illustrative of this is a quote drawn from the first argument of the editorial:

Mr. Scalia seems to believe strongly that a person's religious faith is something that he or she (as a Roman Catholic like Mr. Scalia) must take whole from church doctrine and obey. ... Mr. Scalia apparently believes that Catholics, at least, would be unable to uphold, as citizens, views that contradict church doctrine.

There are two parts to this assertion. For the first, Wilentz derides the idea that "religious faith" should be based on "church doctrine." But he does not give any suggestion as to what he believes faith should be based on. For my part, I have considered and discarded in quick succession such possibilities as gumball machines, magnetic poetry kits, DEVO, the Department of Agriculture, a really good dry martini, and those voices in my head that seek to convince me Peter Jennings is the point man for an alien invasion, yet I'm reluctantly forced to conclude that the best source for a religion's faith is whatever source that religion determines it to be. Or, to put it another way, who the hell is Wilentz to tell Catholics what they should or shouldn't believe in, even if, to Wilentz's sardonic eye, such beliefs amount to "papist mind control?"

Next, Wilentz dismisses Scalia's statement that a person whose religious beliefs preclude him from supporting the laws of his country should not, and the state should not, place him in a position where he must violate those laws. But this is a noncontroversial point when properly phrased, lying at the heart of such precedents as the "dismissal for cause" of jurors whose opposition to the death penalty would prevent them from imposing it even in cases where the law explicitly requires them to do so.

The classic example is the absolute pacifism of Quakers, whose refusal to fight (or, in some cases, even provide tax monies to support war) prompted at least five colonies to exempt them from military service during the Revolutionary War, and for the government to institutionalize during the Civil War the concept of the "conscientious objector." Just as no absolute pacifist should choose to become a soldier, or the state force him to do so, so too should a judge unwilling to accept the laws of his state and country not rule from the bench.

Such a statement is not exceptional; the sticking point comes when defining the line where a judge stops interpreting law and begins creating it anew. For Scalia, that line is much closer than his brethren on the Court would believe. But Wilentz argues a categorical where even the most liberal judges accept nuance, and that alone dangerously destabilizes the core of his argument.

For Scalia, the death penalty represents a special case (for once) because every judge, just as every juror, is "part of the criminal-law machinery that imposes death." If a judge presides over a venue that has legalized the deah penalty, and he is unwilling to apply or uphold it in cases where he must, then he should not be a criminal court judge. Presumably, if Catholic aversion to the death penalty were binding, then truly observant Catholics would fall into that category.

Why is this concept so anathema to Wilentz? Simple: he, like many intellectuals, buys into the idea that religion really has no place in the public sphere. Judicious, well-considered opinions cannot be arrived at by way of religion, he implicitly argues, so when Scalia appeals to religion as a guide to determining matters of this world, all Wilentz can hear are the distant tolls of theocracy.

Wilentz seems to think that all Americans, from the very start, were absolute proponents of "the idea that political authority lay with anyone or anything other than the sovereign people." But the Framers were hardly united around a kind of Jeffersonian political agnosticism; at the very least, none of those heirs to the Enlightenment would ever have signed off on mob rule. Like Plato using geometric proofs in an attempt to demonstrate the divinity at the heart of man, the Framers made sure that their "self-evident" liberties could not be overruled by the passions of "the sovereign people."

The people were also expected to be Christian, and guided by essentially Christian principles. Nothing else could explain such legislation as the 1784 bill that came before the legislature in Virginia, the most religiously liberal state, saying that:

Whereas the general diffusion of Christian knowledge hath a natural tendency to correct the morals of men, restrain their vices, and preserve the peace of society; which cannot be effected without a competent provision for learned teachers, who may be thereby enabled to devote their time and attention to the duty of instructing such citizens, as from their circumstances and want of education, cannot otherwise attain such knowledge; and it is judged that such provision may be made by the Legislature, without counteracting the liberal principle heretofore adopted and intended to be preserved by abolishing all distinctions of pre-eminence amongst the different societies or communities of Christians....

Although this proposal aroused much controversy, it was illustrative of the thought of the day, a thought that saw religion as "the source of liberty, the soul of government and the life of a people," despite Wilentz's assertion that such thought was "a minority view, even an eccentric one." (Incidentally, Jonas Clark, the minister Wilentz quotes, was hardly a minor eccentric; a politician as well as a clergyman, he gave refuge to Sam Adams and John Hancock, and was a critical figure in the Massachusetts revolutionary movement and its governance after the war.)

His evident distaste for religion leads Wilentz to conclude that Scalia's "defense of his private prejudices ... should not be mislabeled conservatism. Justice Scalia seeks to abandon the intent of the Constitution's framers". But nowhere does Scalia say that the will of the Catholic Church should be imposed on the American people; indeed, Scalia affirms that "the Congress of the United States and the legislatures of the fifty states ... may, within their own jurisdictions, restrict or abolish the death penalty as they wish." He even goes so far as to say that "[I]f a state were to permit abortion on demand, I would -- and could in good conscience -- vote against an attempt to invalidate that law". These are the words of a strict constructionist, not a theocratic despot.

The evidence seems to suggest that, although the Framers were generally united on the need to keep the affairs of state and church separate, they did not believe that an individual's religious beliefs had no place in determining their political beliefs. Such an assertion, undermining the entire basis of their "rights of man," would have been utterly incomprehensible to most of them. Scalia has affirmed that his personal political beliefs are driven in large part by his religious beliefs, but he has also reaffirmed that, should those beliefs conflict with his duties, he would choose not to let the former overrule the latter, choosing professional exile instead. (Whether Scalia would choose exile over subtle redefining of what beliefs nad practices Catholics must uphold is anohter question entirely.) If Wilentz believes that this translates to an intent to "impose views about government and divinity that no previous justice ... has ever embraced," then perhaps he should re-examine his own prejudices.

 
Protagoras Bound: Jonah Goldberg has a thoughtful piece on the Fish controversy that takes postmodernists to task for ... well, for failing to leash their creation.

Having recently posted a long and virtually unreadable note defending Fish (or at least his postfoundationalism), it seems that I'm leaving myself open to charges of hypocrisy by lauding Goldberg's, er, attack on Fish. But sophisticated minds will readily recognize that by creating a deterritorialized space between the sign-signifier relationship that demarcates the capitalist-fascist lines between attacking and defending, I am actually ... you're not buying this, are you?

Actually, Goldberg attacks Fish and postmodernism on what I consider its weakest point: the tendency of naive postmodernists to take the theory to bizarre and dangerous lengths (Goldberg pithily says that for these people, "the total lack of a principle of restraint is more often mistaken for some kind of principle"). Just as later Sophists convinced their followers, pace Protagoras, that only power and pleasure were worthy pursuits, so too "[f]or lots of Americans, the idea that there are no objective standards of truth or morality is incredibly sophisticated and intelligent." To Goldberg, Fish's "doctrines haven't all been terrible for America, but their misapplication and over-application have."

I don't necessarily agree with Goldberg's contention that Fish is responsible for loosing a ravenous beast into the halls of academia, but I think that the political and social principles Fish does espouse -- a kind of muddleheaded liberalism drawn mostly from people like Chomsky and Said -- aren't keyed to fight off the worst "misapplications" and extensions of postfoundationalism, for which he arguably has a responsibility to combat. Has postfoundationalism been effectively refuted? No. But Goldberg has brought the point of the attack to his enemy's throat. It'll be interesting to see where the fight goes from here.

 
Spin up those windmills, 'cause here we go again: Mister Ebbers goes to Washington with a fiscal Twinkie defense: blame the auditors for not catching the illegal acts his company performed ... Volokh has two excellent pieces out today, one on a California FEHC decision that fined a woman for choosing not to live with someone because she didn't feel comfortable around African-American men (yeah, twittishness, but not actionable twittishness), and another on a "well-intentioned, [and] almost certainly unconstitutional" law by the same state to regulate the branding of halal foods ... In an article about America's culture of greed, Cal Thomas lauds J.C. Watts, "who has announced his retirement because he believes there are things in life more important than a congressional career." And that would be: earning more money for his family, according to what he told the GOP ... Once again, Microsoft confirms our worst suspicions, as Codd's Rules come back to bite them with a research paper exposing the SQL Server password encryption algorithm, plus a security flaw to boot ... Michigan's ISR reports that consumer confidence is slumping to the worst numbers of 2002, with increasing numbers of consumers expecting slowing economic growth and no decrease in unemployment numbers.

 
To forestall any questions: The new banner does not imply that American actions against terror necessarily represent a threat to civil liberties, or the Supreme Court. It's just all part of our new multimillion-dollar branding campaign, designed to give us that snappy, unreadable post-Fox "CNN Headline News" look. Let me know what you think; if enough people think the graphic elements are ill-placed, I'll get the image changed.

Okay, move along now. Nothing to see here.

America: "source of evil." Gore Vidal is still at it, arguing that the Administration was "suspiciously very ready with the Patriot Act as soon as we were hit. Ready to lift habeas corpus, due process, the attorney-client privilege. They were ready. Which means they have already got their police state. Just take a plane anywhere today and you are in the hands of an arbitrary police state." Oh, yeah -- the Supreme Court sold us out, the Bill of Rights is "running down," and the war in Afghanistan is all about Unocal's pipeline deal (Vidal claims of his rather shopworn allegation that "you won't get this anywhere at the moment," which proves that he has never been to Cafe Utne). Lots of tinfoil-hat goodness in this interview.

What's the difference between a Manchester soccer hooligan and a Manchester dean? Trick question: there isn't one. Nice to see that the guardians of academic freedom in Britain are following their traditional path of ruthlessly opposing any and all dissent. (I was tempted to title this entry "A Mensch For All Seasons.")

What's your contribution to life? Hip-hop devotees (yes, this is a non sequitur, why do you ask?) will be happy to hear that Jurassic 5 is back on tour to promote their upcoming album -- and, thanks to that extra candle I lit at the Jackson Square cathedral, they'll be dropping by Dallas and Austin in mid-August. If you haven't heard J5 before, even if you're not a fan of most rap and hip-hop, I can't recommend these guys enough.

As long as I'm clearing out music news, the same friend who first turned me onto J5 also let me know that Kaytee Bodle has a website (not much on it, gratuitous Tripod popups warning), and an MP3 site up at PBS. Before you ask why PBS is taking over Audiogalaxy's old gig, you may remember Kaytee from the American High documentary, which was taken over by public broadcasting after garnering rave reviews and mediocre ratings.

The audio quality of the recordings varies from acceptable to poor, and some of her attempts fall flat (like a folk version of the Vapors' "Turning Japanese"(!)), but when she hits the mark, it's got the makings of the best new-folk music. The mocking snideness of "The American High Song" (available here, not at PBS) is great stuff.

"A Chilling Vision." I don't read the Times on Sunday unless I have a cappuccino and a lot of time in the morning, and so I missed this editorial (or, to use an alternate phrase, "hatchet job") on Justice Scalia's religious beliefs. (If you don't have an NYT login, try this link.) I've wanted to discuss Scalia's First Things article (if you don't read the magazine, by the way, you really should), and now the Times' editorial page has thoughtfully given me a deeply flawed and vindictive vehicle with which to do so. Damned nice of them, if I do say so. In the meantime, should you wish to peruse the evidence, the full article is here.

 
Ecumenical or syncretic? To the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church (LCMS), the real question is, What's the difference? When Reverend David Benke participated in the Yankee Stadium memorial service with other Christians, Muslims, and Jews, his church suspended him for heresy, stating that "Joining in prayer with pagan clerics in Yankee Stadium was an offense both to God and to all Christians." (Link provided by Sassafrass Log.)

The LCMS is the theologically conservative wing of the Lutheran Church, at variance with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of American (ELCA). Their dogma is somewhat Pietistic, though much stricter in matters of doctrinal interpretation, and being amillenarians they tend to stay out of secular politics as much as possible. (Parenthetically, an interesting article on the variations of Christian activism in America is here. Agenda alert: Gary North is a politically active fundamentalist Christian, and so he has a vested interest in pruning back movements more interested in the civitas dei than the civitas terrena, and his bias shows.)

I'm rather ambivalent about the press coverage on this issue: on one hand, I think the Synod's demand of an apology from Benke a fatuous gesture, one that misconstrues the observance as a primarily religious rather than civic serivce. The clerics gathered to show their support as Americans, not to show America's support for their religions, and that, to me, makes all the difference. (The President of the LCMS, who recused himself from the decision, evidently agrees.)

However, the doctrinal interpretations of the LCMS are for them to decide. Even if thoughtful conservative Lutherans themselves disagree with the decision, there are other Lutheran churchs to join, or they can even decide to fracture the Synod (as a breakaway Episcopal group did here in DFW not so long ago). The fact is that the LCMS is, from the perspective of the civic polity, politically inactive and harmless. They do not openly agitate for a return to a "Christian America" free of other peoples or religions, and in fact believe that any attempts to legislate morality are irrelevant, since God's word can only be truly realized in God's Kingdom. The only effect of their dispute, then, is that the more finely they wish to split theological hairs, the more finely they will slice their own congregation.

So, my fruitless appeal to the Washington Post and other major media outlets: simmer down, let them be, leave 'em alone. Their decision quite simply doesn't involve us, and it's unseemly for the secular world to tread so heavily on a religious group that only wishes to wend its solitary way through a sinful world.