Holy smokes--Dick Cheney just shot his hunting partner. Not just once, mind you, but according to reports, "sprayed him with shotgun pellets."
Is this the same guy who swears that tax cuts boost federal government revenue, whose former company is making Christ-knows-how-much money off of the war in Iraq*, and who has various senators demanding an investigation into his role in l'affaire Plame?
Couldn't he have just told the poor guy to go f* himself?
Dick, bubele, listen to me: sit in a chair and do nothing for a while. It can only help.
*Please do not email BlogTrog to rant about how Cheney is no longer associated with Halliburton. I believe he still profits from stock options and he still collects deferred compensation.
Sources
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060212/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cheney_hunting_accident
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1247748,00.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/02/10/AR2006021001855.html
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Malleable freedoms
When is it OK to violate First Amendment rights? When someone wears a t-shirt under her jacket to the House Chamber? When cartoons depicting a religion in an ugly light are shown in a newspaper? Do we base the value of that violation on how many people it offends? How deeply it offends?
I see similarities between Cindy Sheehan's removal from PUS's speech the other night and the brouhaha in European newspapers over an anti-Muslim cartoon. We can argue about subject matter discrimination and viewpoint discrimination but in the land of the Supremes, the latter almost always triggers strict scrutiny (as do questions of race), while the former often gets intermediate scrutiny. (So do cases about gender: Sing it with me ladies--We're still number 2!) Issues requiring strict scrutiny almost never make it unscathed through that scrutiny. They're seen as highly suspect in the first place, and the gov has to prove not only that it had some compelling interest in discriminating against the point of view but also that the method used was necessary to achieve that compelling interest.
So if we look at dissent in the House Chamber, and no one argues about whether the wearing of a particular shirt is an expression of dissent, we could argue whether there was compelling interest of the gov to quash dissent. Obviously Fellow Trogs know where I come down on that. However, even if we were to shoehorn past that issue and determine the gov did in fact have some "compelling" (cough) interest, it could have been achieved by, for example, asking Sheehan to cover her shirt, instead of bodily removing her, arresting her and jailing her. It becomes a question of the method used, which I think was completely unnecessary to achieve the objective.
The other issue is trickier b/c while it involves religion, it also an inherent shaky balance of a national culture subsuming another one; in this case, one based on a religion. Nonpluralistic societies struggle with this idea and how to balance competing interests. On the one hand, people should be allowed to see an editorial cartoon and come to their own conclusions. On the other, what is the value of allowing a national ethnicity to subsume yours if you can still be otherized whenever it suits the dominant culture to do so?
In listening to this issue play out, I hear arguments about freedom of expression and I hear slamming of Islam, but I hear very little about this last idea, and frankly, the refusal of any of the European countries struggling with this to have an out-front discussion about it just ensures its continuance.
I see similarities between Cindy Sheehan's removal from PUS's speech the other night and the brouhaha in European newspapers over an anti-Muslim cartoon. We can argue about subject matter discrimination and viewpoint discrimination but in the land of the Supremes, the latter almost always triggers strict scrutiny (as do questions of race), while the former often gets intermediate scrutiny. (So do cases about gender: Sing it with me ladies--We're still number 2!) Issues requiring strict scrutiny almost never make it unscathed through that scrutiny. They're seen as highly suspect in the first place, and the gov has to prove not only that it had some compelling interest in discriminating against the point of view but also that the method used was necessary to achieve that compelling interest.
So if we look at dissent in the House Chamber, and no one argues about whether the wearing of a particular shirt is an expression of dissent, we could argue whether there was compelling interest of the gov to quash dissent. Obviously Fellow Trogs know where I come down on that. However, even if we were to shoehorn past that issue and determine the gov did in fact have some "compelling" (cough) interest, it could have been achieved by, for example, asking Sheehan to cover her shirt, instead of bodily removing her, arresting her and jailing her. It becomes a question of the method used, which I think was completely unnecessary to achieve the objective.
The other issue is trickier b/c while it involves religion, it also an inherent shaky balance of a national culture subsuming another one; in this case, one based on a religion. Nonpluralistic societies struggle with this idea and how to balance competing interests. On the one hand, people should be allowed to see an editorial cartoon and come to their own conclusions. On the other, what is the value of allowing a national ethnicity to subsume yours if you can still be otherized whenever it suits the dominant culture to do so?
In listening to this issue play out, I hear arguments about freedom of expression and I hear slamming of Islam, but I hear very little about this last idea, and frankly, the refusal of any of the European countries struggling with this to have an out-front discussion about it just ensures its continuance.
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