Cellular Cacaphony

My Tribune column is still not back on schedule; this Sunday's Lack-of-Perspective section is a July 4 spectacular, and I hadn't planned on writing a July 4th themed piece. So instead I'll write over the weekend and it'll run on Wednesday. Then maybe I'll be back on the next Sunday.

If you want to read the column to which I'm reacting, it's here. If you want the newspaper version of my piece, it's here. I got a "block quote" of the fifth paragraph: "The creative argument that we should let infertile couples 'adopt' . . . humorous delusion." How about that--a newspaper using "fallacious" and "delusion" in the same article. What do they take me for, Christopher Hutchins or something?


STEM-CELL RESEARCH FOE'S ARGUMENTS FALLACIOUS
East Valley Tribune, June 27, 2004

Last Sunday, Phillip Moon took The Tribune to task for sullying the memory of Ronald Reagan by joining with Nancy Reagan in calling for the Bush administration to lift its ill-conceived ban on stem cell research. I mean, really -- who knows better what Ronald Reagan would have wanted, his widow, or an adjunct physics professor at Chandler-Gilbert Community College? Think about it, and get back to me.

This is the latest right-wing rhetorical tactic, lecturing Nick Berg’s father claiming to know better what his son really thought, and droning interminably about Bill and/or Hillary Clinton’s real motives. I guess if the “facts on the ground” aren’t going well, conservatives have to claim psychic mind-reading abilities, even of the dead. Also, it’s not like anyone believes that conservatives’ current hero, George W. Bush, can hold more than one thought in his head.

In opposing stem cell research, Moon claims to know better than Nancy what Ronald Reagan would have wanted because he “went so far as to write a 100 page pro-life essay” in 1983. This is an interesting epistemological problem: Who really thinks Reagan actually wrote a 100-page essay, as opposed to signing something somebody else wrote?

Moreover, Reagan’s political genius was that he could just utter sentiments, but never had to act on them, to satisfy the anti-abortion crowd. Exhibit A: Who appointed Sandra Day O’Connor, the swing vote preserving the right to choose, to the Supreme Court? Reagan was too good a politician to give his base real substance on this issue, and a good enough politician that his base settled for pandering. If only W had that talent, but (and fellow Democrats, repeat after me), “He’s no Reagan.”

Stem cell research opponents like Moon try to muddy the issue by making up facts, as Bush did in claiming that researchers already had access to many robust stem cell lines before the ban took effect. That was false then, and it’s false now. At least Moon, unlike Bush, abandons the other false claim that adult stem cells would work about as well.

But people making the absolutist argument -- any fertilized embryo is human life just the same as you and me -- founder on the shoals of in-vitro fertilization. Moon makes a creative argument, that we should let infertile couples “adopt” these embryos! That’s cute, but a total misunderstanding of how IVF works. In-vitro fertilization depends on numbers: Doctors use a squadron of fertilized embryos to improve chances that one actually succeeds. Moon’s claim that “it would be very easy to get these innocent frozen embryos into loving homes” is a humorous delusion.

So if Moon, channeling Reagan’s spirit, claims that every single embryo is as human as you or me, he can’t just argue against stem cell research. IVF itself causes the destruction of fertilized embryos, and under the absolutist position, also should be illegal -- even though that argument is a political loser.

We utilitarians have the easier time; using Bush administration logic, we don’t have to prove that stem cell research will cure Alzheimer’s; we just have to show that there’s a “relationship,” or “links” or “connections” -- all the proof Bush needed to send 800+ members of our armed forces to death in Iraq.

You absolutists, however, lose the argument by making the utilitarian and political compromises needed to keep in-vitro fertilization legal. Plus, you’re fighting the wrong battle. If you ban IVF, then we lose the best argument for allowing stem cell research -- and the source of these precious embryos.

Why not try to change the terms of the debate? All you conservative clairvoyants: Isn’t that what Reagan would have wanted?

Say Goodnight, Ralph

I promised more news on Schultz v. Nader when it happened, and it happened this morning. Prior to the start of the trial this morning, the Nader attorneys withdrew his petitions and did not contest the lawsuit; he's off the ballot in Arizona. Here's the AP report.

I haven't posted a column for a while because my publishing schedule got messed up. My column that should have run on June 20 somehow didn't get to the editor's email, so it ran on June 25 instead--but I was out of town, so it's just being posted today.

If the column seems a bit tepid, remember that two weeks ago was a slow week. I didn't want to write about Rumsfeld admitting to violating international law two weeks in a row--another day, another legal outrage. Ho hum. Hey--if the Bush administration can say the Constitution gives it the authority to override treaties and statutes, can't San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome say the same thing and keep issuing those same-sex marriage licenses? Or can only Republican executives self-interpret the Constitution--at least until the Supreme Court has had enough?

Now for the column. I don't agree with the headline; I didn't assert that there was a connection between vaccines and autism, but I gave the claim a hearing, and I suppose you have to take responsibility for that. Kind of like what Rush Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal editorial page aren't doing about giving a respectful hearing to claims that Vincent Foster was murdered.

Newspaper version here.


EVENTS OVERTAKE MY EARLIER STAND ON VACCINES
East Valley Tribune, June 25, 2004

You could convince most Democrats to name more stuff after Ronald Reagan -- anything named after Reagan then couldn’t be named after George W. Bush -- but the best liberal tribute to Reagan is fact-checking yourself, after the fact. After all, as Reagan once said, “Facts are stupid things.”

Of course, Reagan was mangling a quote from John Adams’s legal papers from his defense of the soldiers in the Boston Massacre trial in 1770: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

I prefer the original version to the “cover.”

So in honor of President Adams (also the superior original version), I need to admit my mistake and retract part of a column from November 2002. I ranted about three unrelated provisions slipped at the last minute into the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security, without debate and without any apparent connection to homeland security: a major appropriation to Texas A&M University; a repeal of a ban, adopted with great fanfare a couple months earlier, on government contracts with companies that relocate overseas to avoid paying U.S. taxes; and a provision giving immunity to pharmaceutical companies in potential lawsuits over childhood vaccine preservatives.

I got that last one wrong, in two ways. First, I never thought that Congress would revisit the immunity issue; the GOP majority would just ride out the criticism for a favored industry. But Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, stuck to her guns, and the provision got repealed. We’ll leave it to historians to determine how much ill-informed outcry like mine was needed to force Congress to follow through on the promise to reverse the provision.

Second, subsequent developments have proven invalid the scientific theory underlying my outrage, that “preservatives used in childhood vaccines -- but not tested on kids beforehand -- may have helped caused diseases and behavioral problems like autism.” In April, the medical journal The Lancet withdrew its 1998 article that claimed to show a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. Other studies, such as a 2001 Institute of Medicine report, found no connection, and other researchers had criticized the 1998 study’s methodology and data, but now the principal evidence suggesting a link has been discredited.

The Lancet editors learned that the British researchers who conducted the study were funded by a legal-aid service looking into whether families could sue the vaccine manufacturers. The journal’s editor called the undisclosed funding a “fatal conflict of interest,” and said the article should not have been published.

Yes, I only wrote “may cause,” and I still don’t think such unrelated provisions belonged in the Homeland Security bill -- what, you don’t recall the impassioned debate about vaccine-liability issues during the 2002 campaign? -- but proponents of the vaccine-autism link now have lost the principal support for that theory.

Proponents still have what we could call “negative support,” as anyone can find problems with any contrary study, and researchers still may be investigating links to neurological impairments other than autism. It’s also always harder to prove a negative, especially to people who really, really want to believe.

But ultimately, science can’t fall to the level of so-called “intelligent design” theory, whose proponents have nothing positive to assert but instead base their arguments entirely on nit-picking of evolution, or of Iraq war supporters, who also are convinced that we can justify war because “the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.”

For parents reading this far, the moral is: forget the politics, the essential scientific debate is over. Please, please get your kids vaccinated.

Hey, I'm Just Bragging Because We're Doing It

While many Democrats are complaining about Ralph Nader--if you want chapter and verse, this Eric Altermann post is a good place to start--my partners and I are actually doing something about it. My law firm is suing Nader to knock him off the ballot in Arizona. There are a number of interesting legal questions in the case, and one really interesting political question--who are the Republicans going to pay to represent Nader to try to keep him on the ballot here? I'm not kidding. Nader may be under the total delusion that he'll take votes from Bush, but the Republicans sure don't think so.

Here's my partner Andy Gordon in today's ABC News The Note:

Yesterday two Arizona voters -- with the support of the Arizona Democratic Party -- filed a legal challenge to independent Ralph Nader's bid to get on a state's Nov. 2 presidential ballot. The suit states more than 70 percent of the 21,512 signatures Nader's campaign filed June 9 were defective. Nader needed 14,694 valid signatures to qualify him for the ballot. According to the suit only 6,045 are valid. Further, it alleges all the petitions should be thrown out because Nader named a "placeholder" as his vice presidential candidate and required paperwork was not filed with the nominating petitions. LINK and LINK

The Washington Post's Dan Balz and Hamil Harris point out that after largely ignoring Nader in 2000, Democrats have adopted a different strategy: taking him on. LINK

Andy Gordon, the attorney who headed up the pro-bono legal effort to file the Arizona suit, tells ABC News, when word of his project began to spread "calls came pouring in" to help. LINK

But Nader spokesguy Zeese says he and the campaign are not worried.
*****
Watch this space for more news about Schultz v. Nader.
(Revised with additional links after initial posting.)

A Government of Laws, Not Men: Another Outdated Concept

It's time for "outrage about the outrage" on the right. You can hear them already, complaining that there's certainly been way too much attention paid to the fact that the Bush administration developed policies to minimize the definition of torture, and to expand its use, and that the administration believes that the president can do what he likes, regardless of statutes or treaties, because he says so. It's crowding out what's really important, you know. Why, the coverage is so over-the-top, and so taking attention away from what really matters, you might not have realized that Ronald Reagan died.

Newspaper version available here for a month or so.


BUSH TORTURE RULES EQUATE U.S. WITH N. VIETNAM
East Valley Tribune, June 13, 2004

Thanks to the Bush administration and its lawyers, the North Vietnamese no longer have anything for which to apologize to Sen. John McCain. Sure, he suffered severe pain and outrageous abuse while a prisoner of war. But the Bush administration now says none of it constituted “torture.”

The Bush lawyers say that interrogators can inflict severe pain on a detainee, so long as there’s no clear intent to harm the prisoner on a long-term basis. But the Bush administration’s theory that “it isn’t torture if you really meant something else” (thereby creating a new category, “accidental” torture) apparently wasn’t disgusting enough. Their lawyers went further, claiming that interrogators can inflict severe pain with impunity unless they know for certain they’ve caused “prolonged” physical or mental effects. Maybe those broken bones heal soon enough that to Bush’s lawyers, it’s not actually torture.

But if those loopholes were still considered too restrictive, the Bush administration also claims that the Constitution doesn’t apply to the commander in chief in wartime. Never mind that there’s no declaration of war, or that this “war on terror” probably never ends; the Bush administration believes that a “war president” has an “inherent” power to ignore federal law and treaties. If George W. Bush says so, the United States can use torture.

Without any apparent irony, the Bush administration says that the president could instruct interrogators to torture suspects, and that in any prosecution, the torturers could beat the rap by claiming that they had to follow orders -- the “Nuremberg defense.” Who needs Michael Moore when the Bush administration cites the Nazis as justification?

Isn’t it nice we’re no longer ruled by moral relativists? Unfortunately, the key word there is “ruled.” The Bush administration believes that because we’re at war, Bush may be called president, but he’s really an emperor. I’m glad all you libertarians and “small government conservatives” (ha!) are comfortable with the Bush administration’s view of treaties, statutes, and the Constitution. Loss of our nation’s moral standing is but a small price to pay for getting rid of that terribly inconvenient “government of laws, and not men” folderol.

The legal memos make it clear that what we’ve seen in the Abu Ghraib prison photos wasn’t the work of a few “bad apples.” Instead, the top legal guns in the administration strained to create justifications for acts that, in the words of the Houston Chronicle, “are clearly beyond the bounds of a civilized nation.” The use of nudity and sexual humiliation; the use of personal medical records; psychological threats; the attack dogs -- all of it was approved and authorized by the Bush administration to “soften up” prisoners for interrogations.

The administration’s novel “intent” requirement also means that if we use amateur torturers, who conveniently don’t know what they’re doing, their ignorance gives them legal immunity unavailable to an “expert.” Maybe there’s a command-and-control reason the pictures we’ve seen involved an ill-trained Reserve unit. Under the Bush doctrine, amateurs have more leeway to torture than do pros. Their lawyers told them so.

Putting POW’s in cages, breaking bones, depriving them of food and medical care -- our government says what happened in Vietnam then is O.K. in Iraq and Guantanamo today, and our government’s lawyers will tell you how to get away with it. And if you’re caught, the Bush administration says the president can suspend the laws if he, and he alone, says the ends justify the means.

If the North Vietnamese had lawyers as “accommodating” as the Bush administration’s, who knows if John McCain would have had a future in politics? And in our next war, now our enemies know where to get their legal advice.

Selective Disclosure

My weekly column ran Thursday instead of Sunday, due to getting bumped for a debate on state trust lands on Sunday and then needing a couple days to tweak about 6 words to satisfy my editor. He's now calling for disclosure and a Congressional investigation of the Bush administration's "torture memos" (the subject of this Sunday's forthcoming column from me) so at least the Tribune is being consistent about disclosure. In a remarkable show of bitter partisan unity, Bob Robb at the Republic wrote today that the state grand jury report should not be released, so there's at least one principled small government conservative out there. But that's been about it.

The third paragraph in the column is my editor's; he rejected the contention that the paper was being inconsistent because it called for release of the state grand jury report but hasn't said anything about the federal investigations of the Bush administration. He said that I was attacking a straw man--until I noted that earlier this year, they'd run an editorial attacking all Democrats for not denouncing some remarks on the dailykos.com website. So I got the criticism back in, although not exactly how I would have phrased it.

Anyway, the newspaper version is available here, for about 30 days. Columns older than that are always available at http://liberaldesert.blogspot.com (note: it works better without the "www").


GOP SELECTIVE IN DEMANDS FOR DISCLOSURE
East Valley Tribune, Jun. 10, 2004

If Republicans want grand jury testimony released in Arizona, what reason could Republicans have for not wanting to release grand jury testimony in Washington, DC?

With the hubbub over Rick Romley’s appointee turning a criminal grand jury into his own private investigation of the Lewis Prison hostage crisis, you could forget that a federal grand jury is investigating the Bush administration’s leak of a deep-cover CIA agent’s identity. If the public’s right to know means that grand jury testimony isn’t secret in hopes that it embarrasses a Democratic governor, why can’t we Democrats get to pore over secret grand jury testimony in hopes that it might embarrass a Republican president?

(And while the Tribune has editorialized for release of the state grand jury findings on the prison standoff, why has it been silent on the federal grand jury issue?)

Of course, Republicans will labor mightily to find a way to distinguish between “grand jury testimony” and “grand jury testimony.” You can hear the arguments: Grand jury testimony is secret, and contains only one side of the story; targets and witnesses can’t question other witnesses, but only can answer the prosecution’s questions. Therefore, it would be wrong to release grand jury testimony investigating actual crimes committed by members of the Bush administration. But where the grand jury has concluded that no crimes should be prosecuted here in Arizona, the secrecy and one-sidedness of the testimony doesn’t matter if release might be useful -- for Republicans, anyway.

Yes, the Arizona grand jury voted unanimously to release their report. Let’s give the federal grand jurors the same opportunity to vote that their state compatriots got. Do you think the grand jurors just spontaneously and magically came up with the idea of voting to release their report, without any suggestion from a Romley appointee? If you do, then you really shouldn’t watch “reality TV” without professional supervision.

It’ll be interesting to hear the hair-splitting necessary to release the “useful” parts but not anything that will show exactly how Romley’s office turned a criminal grand jury into a substitute for a GOP legislative committee investigation. It’ll also be interesting to see how people who argue that Bush wasn’t in office long enough to do anything to prevent 9/11 and how it’s all Clinton’s fault will argue that conditions in state prisons were totally Napolitano’s responsibility and the previous director of Arizona Department of Corrections, Terry Stewart -- a consultant to the grand jury -- had absolutely no responsibility for anything.

If the 9/11 Commission had hired Clinton’s anti-terrorism coordinator (you remember Richard Clarke, don't you?) as its sole consultant, we might have some partisan parity here. And maybe that analogy gives you an idea of how badly, and baldly, these GOP grand jury shenanigans stink.

The way these things inevitably work, the grand jury report will become public, one way or another. All I ask in return is that when DC grand jury testimony looking into these Bush administration scandals -- the “outing” of the CIA agent, the blabbing of the secret information about breaking the Iranian codes to Ahmad Chalabi, and the Boeing tanker deal, for starters -- begins leaking, we are spared the pious lectures about the absolutely vital need for keeping all grand jury testimony secret.

But using the grand jury raises an interesting point about Arizona legislative oversight. The GOP legislative leadership apparently didn’t consider their members up to the job of investigating the prisons. Instead, leadership preferred an investigation by people picked randomly from the driver’s license rolls.

Wags sometimes jest that we could improve the Arizona Legislature by picking names blindly from the phone book. When it came to investigating the prison crisis, that’s exactly what Speaker Jake Flake and Senate President Ken Bennett did. Some jokes aren’t quite as funny when they turn out to be true.