In the Trump Tank

The Supreme Court won't actually rule that the President is immune from prosecution. Think what Joe Biden could then do!

But they're all lawyers, so they understand that Trump's defense is completely factually and legally bankrupt. We've all seen and heard the proof, and it's unassailable. He attempted insurrection and the nullification of a legitimate election to retain power, he kept and refused to return national security documents and Presidential records that were in no sense personal documents, he exposed at least some of them to uncleared civilians and foreigners, he falsified business records (as he surely has his entire career), and he sexually assaulted Jean Carroll (not to mention many others, most likely).

The Republican Supremes know that Trump's defense is to run out the clock. Rich people use this defense to wear down prosecution all the time, and that's a fundamental problem for our legal system. It's why, for example, hardly any big corporation admits guilt in a settlement, and why the SEC among many other regulatory agencies almost always settles out of court instead of going to trial. It's also why no one significant ever did time for the manifest criminal financial behavior that led to the Great Recession in the aftermath of the subprime (and other) mortgage crisis.

Aileen Cannon, for all her reputation as being out of her depth in the documents case, cottoned onto Trump's interest and jumped enthusiastically into the tank long before the Republican Supremes. Delay? She's all over that!

What's my evidence?

If resolving a case helps Trump, the Supremes get right on it. They were never going to allow Colorado and other states to exclude Trump from the ballot, and they made that ruling tout suite. So, despite its plain history in the aftermath of the Civil War, they declared Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment not to be self-enforcing. Done and dusted.

On Presidential immunity though, they declined Jack Smith's filing for immediate certiorari. Hey, that gave them time to think up a path through the law that helps Trump. And, guess what, it's more delay!

Of course, Trump's interlocutory appeal for immunity will go nowhere in the law. It's a ridiculous, frivolous claim. The Supremes could have said so in their order declining cert, but that wouldn't help Trump delay and deny justice. Also, Trump's lawyers cannily filed an immunity motion in Cannon's courtroom, which means that eventually there will likely be competing rulings in different Federal Circuits, and only the Supreme Court can resolve those.

And, of course, it's not evidence about the Supreme Court, but it's evidence of the tactics of the Trump legal team: the Fani Willis/Nathan Wade affair. It has no real bearing on the case, but, Fani WTF?! It's a Bill Clinton level inability to stay focused. Eyes on the prize! Someone needs to get to trial before the fall, and you were our best hope. Instead, you couldn't keep your hands off someone who worked for you!

What we need: faster appeals courts, a limit to the number of issues a defendant can raise as interlocutories, and many fewer privileges for the powerful. I'm not holding my breath.

Government of laws?

All the talking heads seem to agree that the President is actually immune from prosecution if his acts are "within the outer perimeter of his duties." All of them, even on MSNBC.

This consensus is massively wrongheaded.

The President is legally responsible for following the laws, especially within the limits of his duties.

Otherwise, we're electing a king who only lives with the separation of powers to the degree he wants to.

And you know Trump never agrees to anyone's authority over him. It's no accident that he clearly wants to be dictator.

Is it a Constitution if the President won't obey it?

Written on November 11, 2018!

It's not just taxes that the wealthy reserve for the little people. Why would they stop there?

It's the rule of law. Rich people don't have to obey. The rest of us do.

Sure, we white guys can catch a break, as ever. We can gun down a black security guard who's a good guy with a gun. Oops! Sorry.

Not sorry enough to do anything to end the systematic killing of innocents that's so proportional to darkness of skin. Just sorry enough to say that blue lives matter. Not sorry.

Don't even start on the extrajudicial killing of slightly non-innocents for misdemeanors, for the pettiest of petty crimes that never carried the death penalty in any legal regime less oppressive than the slavering slavers of the Confederacy.

Black lives don't matter, which is exactly why we need an aspirational hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter. This is obvious to everyone who doesn't have his white head up his cinnamon-colored asshole.

Wait! I came here to talk about the rule of law and big and little people, which I guess I have, but Trump is my target, not his base.

Trump personally is many things, all of them bad. He's completely amoral. He never met a rule - of law, of etiquette, of common decency, of any social norm - that he would obey without being forced to. Tax returns, I'm sure, have been a lifelong game for him, which is one of the reasons we haven't seen them. We've seen enough, though, to know that he's a punk with a pen, stealing anything that's not nailed down. See the New York Times report on his persistent, law-flouting tax frauds. (How did that get forgotten so fast?)

The founders of the United States built a framework of liberty through law. Every previous President has pushed the bounds of what's legal. Those bounds can be a bit fuzzy, true, but they've all tried stuff that no one had ever gotten away with.

Trump's different. He doesn't accept any limits. The only power he knows how to wield is personal and absolute. He doesn't grasp enough details to negotiate a mutually acceptable deal. He only forces.

That's why there's been a Constitutional crisis since the day he took the Oath of Office. Of course, for him, it was only a Suggestion of Office that he promptly forgot as soon as his hand lifted off the Bible - unburned, so he must be the chosen one of God. Of course, he can't remember a single passage from the Bible, not even the usual bits of the Pentateuch whose vengefulness so thrills self-labeled, so-called winger Christians.

So, it's not a question whether Trump will openly break with the Constitution and all the law it undergirds. It's only a question of when.

My money's on January 3, 2019, or whatever day the Democrat-led House of Representatives starts its oversight. Trump will gleefully refuse, and we'll be off to the federal courts, now thoroughly stacked with toadies who will cave.

It's bad. It's going to get worse. Because the House doesn't have the authority to call out the military against a coup from within the Executive.

Suspicions

Because the Congressional Republicans never acquiesce, I'm suspicious of the debt ceiling deal they've floated and voted. The press, true to its fetish for agreements, no matter how awful, is happy.

Of foremost concern to me, it's not clear what's in the deal. The New York Times has reported it badly, as if it's a standard cooling off move that leaves everything unchanged for three months. To careless readers, the story looks like a debt ceiling increase:

House Republicans said Friday that they would agree to lift the federal government’s statutory borrowing limit for three months.

and, sure enough, past debt ceiling increases are recalled with identical phrasing:

The change in tack represented a retreat for House Republicans, who were increasingly isolated in their refusal to lift the debt ceiling.

But there's no dollar amount anywhere, which ought to make everyone as suspicious as I am.

Turns out, this omission should have been central to the story, as it was in the Washington Post, for the GOP has merely agreed to suspend enforcement of the debt ceiling to a specific date:

[E]ven as House Republicans voted to suspend enforcement of the debt ceiling through May 18, their budget chairman [Paul Ryan] vowed to use the coming deadlines to force President Obama and Senate Democrats to deliver “a big down payment on the debt crisis.”

Not only did Jonathan Weisman of the Times get the mechanism wrong, he got something as simple as the time frame wrong - four months, not three.

I haven't yet figured out how the House Republicans will use the change to their negotiating advantage, but you had better believe they will. What was once a soft date that the Treasury could maneuver around is now a hard date that the Obama administration has already pledged to respect, when it announced that it would not use the Fourteenth Amendment debt guarantee to abrogate the debt ceiling statute, nor vastly expand the platinum coin authority of the Mint.

Hacks like Weisman will be back on May 17 with pressure for a deal, no matter how bad.

Like Bolsheviks, Nazis, Viet Cong, and Khmer Rouge

The Taliban know that every girl who learns to think and every father who teaches his daughter to think, subverts  the backwardness and evil of fundamentalist Islam. Thinking is a threat to their fervently chosen ignorance. The Taliban are more than willing to kill in defense of their radical refusal to grow into liberal society.

Sirajuddin Ahmad, the spokesman for the Taliban in the Swat Valley, said that Ms. Yousafzai became a target because she had been “brainwashed” into making anti-Taliban statements by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai.

“We warned him several times to stop his daughter from using dirty language against us, but he didn’t listen and forced us to take this extreme step,” he said.

Both father and daughter remain on the Taliban’s list of intended victims, he said.

This reminds me Kurtz's apologia in "Apocalypse Now":

I remember when I was with Special Forces... seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I wanted to do!

Kurtz's eventual response was a descent into the heart of darkness, into monstrous depravity, into insane homicide.

What should our response be? Could we retain our moral character, retain our judgement, which Kurtz called our defeat, and nonetheless issue a secular fatwa that anyone who harms Malala Yousafzai or her father Ziauddin will be subject to a U.S. lethal finding?

Moderation needs space and time and tolerance to grow. Extremists of all stripes know this and murder moderates. Would it benefit moderates to exact a deadly cost from the extremists, or would it simply drive others into their arms?

America is already using drones for targeted assassination as a tool of war, if not statecraft, despite a long-standing inclination not to - in reaction to out-of-control spy agencies during the Cold War. Israel has used assassination. Killing the guilty, the enemy, the vicious murderer of your children has visceral appeal, and there's often no civil authority in these cases. Has that been for the good or the bad? It's hard to tell.

It's hard to imagine our government could responsibly manage vengeance orders, when it can't manage a just civilian death penalty. It can't even manage political asylum very well.

But I know that I wish Sirajuddin Ahmad dead. The shooters who have gravely wounded Malala, I wish dead. Their commanders, dead.

Traditional war-making has proven a very poor tool to accomplish those just deaths without a mortgage of further deaths uncounted. This reasoning is how liberals like me get to law as the best tool to accomplish punishment of the guilty. It lacks the immediacy of gunning down your enemies, but it lasts better.

Public domain photo from the Library of Congress, found here.

Pity the poor frothing wingnut

Obamacare, take the test.

If you don't get at least 8 out of 10, you need to study the actual law before you pontificate.

Yes, I scored 10 of 10.

Why Republicans want to end academe

They don't control it:

The U.S. Supreme Court should uphold a law requiring most Americans to have health insurance if the justices follow legal precedent, according to 19 of 21 constitutional law professors who ventured an opinion on the most-anticipated ruling in years.

For now, anyway...

Virulent ignorance

Why is it that the angriest anti-immigrant blatherers can't bother themselves to learn the most basic facts about immigration, illegal or legal?

Dobbs repeatedly suggested that undocumented immigrants should just come out of the shadows and apply for citizenship. He failed to understand that the point of the current debate is that they can't.

(h/t Atrios)

Rick Perry as Pontius Pilate

Not that Todd Willingham was Jesus, but he was murdered by the state of Texas after Gov. Rick Perry refused to reconsider debunked evidence and the conviction it led to.

Some of the harshest criticism in Baird's writing is directed at Perry. The governor's role in refusing to postpone Willingham's execution was closely examined by The Huffington Post during his presidential campaign.

"By 2004 there was no doubt that every single indication of arson had been debunked by the scientific community," Baird wrote. "This fact was staring Governor Perry in the face; nevertheless, he refused to grant a reprieve."

Perry has stood by decision when questioned previously about Willingham. His office didn't flinch from the latest criticism.

"Nothing the Austin court could have done would change the fact that Todd Willingham was convicted and sentenced to death by a jury of his peers for murdering his three daughters," said a statement from his spokeswoman Lucy Nashed. "He had full access to every level of the appeals process, and his conviction was reviewed and upheld by multiple levels of state and federal courts. ... The governor reviewed all of the facts of the case and agreed with the jury, and state and federal courts that Willingham was guilty."

The forms were obeyed - such as they are in Texas - so putting an innocent man to death is peachy. The Republican Party...

Life terms

The New York Times has long been arrogant. (Wingnuts and I can agree on that.) If you've ever seen executive editor (now emeritus) Bill Keller interviewed, you know he's completely buried in a Timesman's self-importance. The scenes in The Paper where Michael Keaton's tabloid editor interacts with Spalding Gray's thinly disguised Times editor don't seem exaggerated at all.

The Times has long had a reputation as slow to pay stringers, assuming it doesn't merely assign a staff reporter to your story idea for the price of an insincere thank you. This is a paper that has persistently tried to screw its freelancers out of any share whatsoever of the digital rights to their work.

Still, the Times is the best news provider in America, and it's incumbent on me to read it to stay well-informed. I'll still notice the bullshit that Keller would defend to hair-splitting lawyerly exhaustion - say, Judith Miller on Iraq or Jeff Gerth on Whitewater. Even though the brand is more important to management than the truth, the Times still does reporting and finds the truth often enough to be worth reading - assuming you keep your bullshit detector tuned up.

The new attempt to erect a paywall has been a challenge for me. At first, I had enough computers and enough browsers to read all I wanted, but that window is closing. I've long argued - following many others - that subscribers never paid for the news, they only paid for the newsprint, why should we now pay for pixels? Our subscription fees used to pay for printing and distribution costs alone, and those costs on line are drastically smaller now than they were in the dead tree era.

Yet just as the media need to change their business model, I probably need to change my expectations. Ad revenue, the traditional honey pot of journalism, has shrunk due to the Internet. Keller may think blogs are the problem. Instead, print media companies have utterly failed to notice that their competitive advantage is not opinion - blogs do that free and often without the strange taboos and Village fealties of mainstream outlets - but rather factual news reporting. Those of us who want facts, not the latest bullshit from seldom-right but often right-wing pundits, will just have to buy them. God knows the advertisers have no interest in any truth that might possibly inconvenience them in selling their wares.

Facts are hard. Facts take work to unearth. Facts are worth paying for. Opinions? Shit, I've got way too many of my own to need to pay for anyone's. Except for Paul Krugman's.

All in all, the Times has a quality product, and that justifies some of their arrogance.

But the terms of their agreement are onerous and one-sided:

The New York Times reserves the right to modify the content, type and availability of any digital product at any time.

Only one person may use each account or accounts (user name and password) associated with a purchased product, unless we agree otherwise.

There's an adjustment to a new age! No leaving your iPad on the coffee table as if it were a paper edition.

The Times won't even tell you the price up front. You have to start ordering before you can be sure what it costs:

When you purchase a digital product, the price will be made clear during the order process. You agree to pay the price that is stated at the time of your order, as well as any applicable taxes. You also agree to the billing frequency stated at the time of your order.

Your subscription is permanent:

All NYTimes digital subscriptions are renewed automatically. ...

If your credit card expires or your payment method is otherwise invalid, your subscription or product will not automatically be terminated. You will remain responsible for all charges.

You will be responsible for all costs we incur in connection with the collection of unpaid amounts, including court costs, attorneys' fees, collection agency fees and any other associated costs.

You have to call them to terminate. They, of course, accept no obligation to answer the phone.

The Times incurs no obligation whatsoever:

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate your subscription or product for any reason, with or without notice and without further obligation. You will not be entitled to a refund in these circumstances. If any or all of our digital products are temporarily unavailable, you will not receive a refund. We reserve the right to issue refunds or credits at our sole discretion. ...

We reserve the right to make changes to our digital products at any time. If we temporarily reduce or eliminate the charge for content or access that you are currently paying for under different terms, you will not receive a refund.

If any or all of our digital products are temporarily unavailable, you will not receive a refund. We reserve the right to issue refunds or credits at our sole discretion. If we issue a refund or credit, we are under no obligation to issue the same or similar refund in the future.

Included in the terms is a sly attempt to expand copyright protection to prohibit fair use, much as the AP has tried to forbid quoting of their stories:

The Services and Contents are protected by copyright pursuant to U.S. and international copyright laws. You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce (except as provided in Section 2.3 of these Terms of Service), create new works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the Content or the Services (including software) in whole or in part.

The law guarantees me the right to quote the Times when I comment on it, but the Times wants a more restrictive contract with me. That's legal of course. Let them try to enforce it.

The "privacy" policy requires that you provide information which the Times cannot possibly justify requiring:

Registration for the NYT Services requires that you supply certain personal information, including, in most cases, a unique e-mail address and demographic information (ZIP code, age, sex, household income (optional), job industry and job title) to register. [emphasis added]

And if the corporate structure changes, information about you is an asset - no mention of that asset being constrained to the existing policy:

In the future, we may sell, buy, merge or partner with other companies or businesses. In such transactions, we may include your information among the transferred assets.

The Times is part of the American oligarchy, which permits them to get away with this sort of one-sided, albeit legal, abuse of the legal system. They can hire the sharpest New York intellectual property lawyers to write tens of thousands of words into an adhesion contract that edges right up to unconscionability in its limits on what customers can do with a simple product, when we as individuals can't even sanely read and understand those terms without hours of investment and hiring our own lawyer.

The law is supposed to be even-handed. Obviously, as O.J. Simpson, Wall St. bankers, and the New York Times know, it isn't.

Equal justice under lawlessness

Click image for full Gustavo Rodriguez/El Nuevo Herald cartoon.

Fixing the game

Republicans don't believe in democratic governance. They believe in ruling us:

In the 30 years since coming to power here, Republicans have used their initial ascent to power to seal themselves into office as tightly as the pharaohs. Smart commentators have noted how lawless the conservatives are in making substantive decisions, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is how they use their tenure to make it increasingly impossible to oust them.

Read it all. Depressing as it is, it's better to know and act from reality, rather than some fantasy that they too value self-government.

Never give up a lie

The bullshit continues, this time in Georgia, where an administrative judge believes he has the power to compel the President to appear and prove the birthers wrong. Even though he has done this over and over and over again.

It's time to start fucking these people up, by which I mean ruining their fucking lives, not injuring their bodies. The judge, the plaintiff, the plaintiff's attorney (Orly Taitz, the Fred Phelps of birtherism, rebuffed at every turn and even sanctioned for it but still insane enough to continue her abuse of the legal system), and anyone who funded this nullificationism. It's time to find out what they've done wrong and make it known - to their wives, to their creditors, to the press.

It's long past time to stop being nice, to start taking no prisoners. Figuratively.

Start with Orly Taitz. Find the lies in her naturalization record - maybe she's a planted late Soviet era sleeper - revoke her citizenship, and deport her worthless insane ass back to Russia.

Yeah, it's going on in Alabama too. Neo-confederate assholes.

Republicans can only win in the long run if they lie and cheat.

The last piastre

Emboldened by the prospect that SOPA will pass and bring with it copyright vigilantism, the Grey Lady is ready to make us all pay:

(Aside: Is anyone considering anti-trust proceedings? The dead tree media suddenly and coincidentally all got serious at once about squeezing some piastres out of their freeloading Internet readers.)

The Times hints condescendingly that it might restore actual fealty to facts in favor of its current wingnut-fearing neutral view of bullshit and the faux balance that results. (Although, isn't a blogger pretty much the definition of truth vigilante?) But then Jill Abramson defensively quashes that hint much more swiftly than any reporting error.

We foolish readers misunderstood!

First, though, I must lament that “truth vigilante” generated way more heat than light. A large majority of respondents weighed in with, yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth.

That was not the question I was trying to ask. My inquiry related to whether The Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut “facts” that are offered by newsmakers when those “facts” are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.

At least the condescension is consistent.

If the Times doesn't demand a factual basis for the dialog in its pages, it fails utterly to do journalism. Maybe its editors don't care about that, but they should care that reality-based, skeptical reporting is the only function they have that can't be performed more cheaply and almost always better on the Internet.

Maybe they're just going to shut down every blog that links to them, once SOPA passes. That would be a whole different kind of truth vigilante. Still...

Romney lies, you can see it in his eyes.

Start making sense

Found this interesting:

In middle childhood, the brain is at its peak for learning, organized enough to attempt mastery yet still fluid, elastic, neuronally gymnastic. ...

Middle childhood is the time to make sense and make friends. “This is the period when kids move out of the family context and into the neighborhood context,” Dr. Campbell said.

The all-important theory of mind arises: the awareness that other people have minds, plans and desires of their own. Children become obsessed with social groups and divide along gender lines, girls playing with girls, boys with boys. They have an avid appetite for learning the local social rules, whether of games, slang, style or behavior. They are keenly attuned to questions of fairness and justice and instantly notice those grabbing more than their share.

For me, the years between toddlerhood and puberty were filled with growth.  My mom taught me to read at 5, which opened the world to me.

She and my dad also inculcated fairness in me, although I think I had been born with a strong streak of it. The central issue of the time and place - Memphis, Tennessee in the mid-1960s - was race, and they were rare white liberals in our all-white neighborhood.

I ruefully remember telling my friends "that's illegal" a lot. I didn't know much about the law - how could I at that age? But I had a well-taught but still precocious grasp of the golden rule to compensate for my poor ability to keep track of the complicated rule-based codes of Christianity and etiquette. Forks and graven idols didn't matter to me a whit, but my vocabulary-challenged view of legality was really a sense of justice that I carry to this day, albeit more developed.

We moved several times, so I had new starts in which I could experiment with my social position. I was never an alpha (except in the classroom), but I could hold my own, and eventually I found sports as a path into kid society. At Little League try-outs, a schoolmate gibed, "Science and baseball don't mix." He had a forgettable Little League career; I became the best hitter in the league.

To fit in even better, I learned to identify the make and model of many cars - somehow important in elementary school - learned to bullshit from what little I knew of the automotive world into more. What does it mean to wind it out? I learned from the sound effects of other boys without ever having driven anything faster than a 3-speed spider bike.

Steeped in Darwin, also through my mom, I had that sudden aha moment when I realized the mythic nature of Christianity, at least the Bible Belt Christianity that surrounded me. Jonah and the whale, heavenly streets of gold, Noah's ark? All fanciful, just like Loki's liver or Athena's birth or Santa Claus. By the time I was confirmed, with puberty no doubt already well under way, I made reservations from doctrine at the altar. I was a cafeteria Methodist!

I also remember how different rich people were from poor. Boys in the richer neighborhood cared about cars. Boys in the poorer neighborhood had seen education as their meal ticket.

By the time I was 12, my identity was formed. There were many gaps to fill in, but the boy I was then is clearly the same as the man I am today.

(And I love the A.A. Milne reference in the page URL.)

Kindred spirits

Rush and Newt go way back. Steve Kornacki speculates about why Rush is helping Newt with wingnuts and teabaggers now.

But maybe they both just recognize each other as their kind of asshole. Both these guys are hugely more hypocritical than even the typical winger.

Newt pilloried Bill Clinton while, for the second time, he was having an affair that would lead him to divorce one wife in favor of his new lover. Rush pilloried Clinton while taking Viagra on a trip to the Dominican Republic, unaccompanied by any woman, which looked an awful lot like sex tourism.

Rush and Newt are both law and order conservatives, yet both have run afoul of the law. Rush was a pain pill addict whose possession of pills and prescriptions gained under false pretenses would have meant jail time for a mere mortal. Newt repeatedly violated the lax ethical standards of Congress.

Hypocritical assholes on this scale need each other.

Frank Langella theory of executive authority

Rick Perry (R-Duhbya was a genious) believes - if he could only get elected President - he could unilaterally abrogate standing law. Can we go ahead and make Texas governors ineligible to be President? By Perry's hazy, ignorant idea of the Constitution, Barack Obama could make that happen with the stroke of a pen.

This moron doesn't believe in law. He believes in power, wingnut power.

Sectarian laws

Granted that the well-fanned flames of anti-shariah panic spring from bigotry in almost every instance.

The more tangible effect of the movement, opponents say, is the spread of an alarmist message about Islam.... The anti-Shariah campaign, they say, appears to be an end in itself, aimed at keeping Muslims on the margins of American life.

The loons who oppose any mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, don't do it because they are in fact in any danger at all. They do it because they hate Muslims, don't want them living next door, and don't want them worshipping any god but theirs.

They've reached the point where most of them will grudgingly give Catholics a pass, at least until they get the Southern Baptist theocracy they want established. And this will differ from shariah how exactly? I am the lord thy god, and thou shall have no other gods before me. It's such a huuuge difference to smite a heretic in the name of god, instead of the name of god in Arabic.

But I digress.

The truth is that, despite anti-shariah's genealogy of bigotry, I don't want any ecclesiastical law - not canon law, not rabbinic law, and especially not shariah - to determine the outcome of cases in American courts. I want secular law to dominate. I'm happy to have diverse ethnic and religious people in America, but America is a shared political idea of common liberty under law. It shouldn't be a place where one neighborhood has rights for women and one neighborhood can treat them as chattel.

Sure, we have only attained this enlightenment ourselves recently. That only means we shouldn't draw self-flattering conclusions about how wonderful we are, not that we should surrender the real progress we've made as if it weren't really progress after all.

One actual case I've heard of in which shariah was considered (in Florida, of all places, if I remember correctly) was a family law case submitted to an Islamic arbitrator by mutual consent of the parties. Since both the man and the woman were represented by American lawyers, that sounds pretty reasonable. Still, think of the social pressure on the woman to accept her lesser legal standing and thus to achieve a lesser outcome. A Muslim woman who immigrates to America should (and does) gain all the rights of the American woman she has become.

Here's another case in which justice was delayed, though not denied:

Critics most typically cite a New Jersey case last year in which a Moroccan woman sought a restraining order against her husband after he repeatedly assaulted and raped her. The judge denied the request, finding that the defendant lacked criminal intent because he believed that his wife must comply, under Islamic law, with his demand for sex.

The decision was reversed on appeal.

America is in no danger whatsoever of the establishment of widespread shariah. None. The anti-shariah movement is built to frighten and manipulate credulous wingnut fools. Keeping them in a constant state of uproar and fear - so typical of conservatives - is an electoral strategy designed as red meat for the bigoted, nativist base of the Republican Party.

The correct political reply from the left is not to defend shariah. We don't want to own this sort of statement:

“There’s a conflation between the idea of Islam being a universalist, proselytizing religion and reducing it to a totalitarian movement,” said Mohammad Fadel, an associate professor specializing in Islamic law at the University of Toronto. “All good propaganda is based on half-truths.”

Islam is not a universalist religion. It's not inclusive. It's absolutist. Its social and political incarnations in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa practice by and large only the barest religious tolerance - if any. Speaking of propaganda based on half-truths...

Perhaps our political response should start by mocking the silly fears of ignernt teabaggers. But mainly it's to say quite calmly and directly that we all live under the Constitution and English Common Law, and that we don't need any precedents, statutes, or case law from any religious legalisms. For example, we don't need Michele Bachmann submitting to her husband like a good little religious wife - fundamentalist Christian or Muslim, take your pick, we don't want either.

Update: Outrage piled upon outrage, so thick and high I could quote almost any single paragraph. Here are two short ones:

Ms. Mohammedi’s uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out.

“What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,” said the father, Kher Mohammed.

Do we actually imagine in a century we could fix this lawless backward society? It would take a mythic race of avenging Amazons killing every uncle who murdered his niece and every father who acquiesced. As brutally and publicly as possible.

Interesting, frank, honest

Gay marriage isn't all sweetness and light:

At the end of the morning, Justice Sunshine lived up to his name and granted us relief from our bond. My ex and I, after not having spoken for several years, jumped for joy in the hallway of that court, weeping with relief. She flung her arms around Allen and shook Todd’s hand. Then she capped six and a half years of waiting with a classy punch line: “Now don’t you kids rush into anything.”

Just like any other marriage.

Wait, you mean torture's a crime?

Apparently, torture is illegal. Who knew the U.S. would prosecute it?

Torres said that if Nezirovic is convicted of the naturalization fraud charges, the immigration office will take him into custody and start deportation proceedings after he serves any prison sentence handed down by the federal judge. ... Nezirovic could then be tried for detainee abuse in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Torres said.

Oh, it's not the torture, it's the lying.