An Independent Judiciary

Pakistani Justice Breaks Silence

The deposed chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, has sent a letter to a number of foreign leaders reminding them that, despite his recent travels, Musharraf is not a good man.

Throughout the letter, Mr. Chaudhry referred to the president as General Musharraf, underlining the constitutional questions surrounding the legality of his leadership. Mr. Musharraf was army chief when he took power in a bloodless coup in 1999 and was elected president in 2002 and again last October by national and provincial assemblies. Legal challenges remain related to his dual military-civilian role, as well as to whether he had already served the constitutionally allowed number of terms.

Musharraf is a dictator, and he's trying to play up that that he was (nominally) elected. He tries to down play the harsher things he does. And apparently, while on his travels, he talked trash about the judiciary he has dissolved.

Chaudhry is under house arrest, of course they don't call it that, just like we don't call them prisoners of war. But there are people with guns outside the house that don't let anyone in to talk to him and don't let him out. His daughter snuck the letter out.

Mr. Chaudhry insisted that he would continue his struggle for the independence of the judiciary. “There can be no democracy without an independent judiciary, and there can be no independent judge in Pakistan until the action of Nov. 3 is reversed,” the letter read. “Whatever the will of some desperate men, the struggle of the valiant lawyers and civil society of Pakistan will bear fruit. They are not giving up.”

Despite all the things that have gone wrong in Pakistan, there are still people who are willing to say things like this, to talk about democracy with such hope. People who don't see the will of the people as something that can be bought, sold, ignored, or twisted beyond recognition. There are people who see democracy as an idea that could really work for them.

I suppose thats part of the reason I keep coming back to Pakistan on Thursdays, I want our democracy to work, to really reflect our will. But Pakistan is just approaching democracy, where as we are in an older democracy and we've become so desensitized to it that we can't see the cracks.

The Last Stump Speech

Edwards Drops Out of Democratic Race

As you probably already know, John Edwards has dropped out. I was at his last stump speech last night at the Carpenters Union Hall here in St. Paul. The wind chill was hovering around -40 F, but the room was packed and overflowing into the hall. I'm sure now that he knew that it was his last night on the campaign trail. So I wish I could tell you that he told us something, gave us a hint or threw in something new. But I don't think he did.

That isn't to say that it was a bad or boring speech, it was a good speech and he knew the crowd. He mentioned Paul Wellstone, talked about universal health care, and getting out of Iraq. The one thing he mentioned that caught my attention was a line about wanting to change the pay-day-loan laws. Thats the sort of thing that speaks to his populism. Pay-day-loans are one of those things that keeps people poor and indebted. Its one of those things keeps sucking people down down down and breaking that cycle could really help people.

There were some people in the crowd that would call out "Shame!" as he talked about the money that the HMO CEO's make while so many people are underinsured. That was an interesting response I've never heard from my usually taciturn fellow Minnesotans. But it caught a bit. People booed and hissed at the right points too. Thats another thing I've not heard much of. My father will hiss at speakers and talking heads, but to hear a whole room hiss, its kinda creepy.

I don't think I'll be able to see Obama when he comes, from what I've read the lines have been absurd. I will try to see Hillary when (if?) she comes.

When you get down to it, common sense has left the capitol.

Fighting for Safety

There are times when a issue gets weighed down with so many interest groups that the obvious answers get lost. Take this example, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (which has as many issues as the FDA) is trying to stop people's couches from catching fire when people fall asleep smoking.

For years, there has been an obvious way to address accidental fires: requiring tobacco companies to make cigarettes, which are the leading cause of fatal fires, self-extinguishing. But tobacco was exempted from CPSC jurisdiction when the agency was created in 1972, and a 1994 attempt to give the agency authority over cigarettes failed.
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The alternative was to focus on the furniture that was catching fire. And the tobacco industry, which wanted to avoid further regulation of cigarettes, did its best to steer the CPSC in that direction.

You can stop the fire either at the origin or by controlling the fuel. (Technically you could control the oxygen, but that doesn't really work in this scenario.) That sets up the two main interested groups, the tobacco companies and the furniture makers. But then you look at how to make the furniture less flammable and you see that the most common way is to use brominated compounds. So that adds in the chemical companies that produce these brominated flame retardants (BFRs) have a stake in the game. But that pulls in the scientists that are worried about the effects the BFRs could have on the biochemistry of both humans and the environment. The scientists have some reason to be worried; before BFRs, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) were used as fire retardants and those have some serious heath issues.

Whew. The tobacco companies have historically been quite good at lobing the various branches of government to look past the obvious problems with their product. This is no different.

Increased awareness of the health risks of fire retardants, meanwhile, confronted the CPSC with a dilemma: how to strike a balance between the need to prevent fatal fires and the risk of exposing millions of consumers to potentially harmful chemicals. It was enough of a conundrum to drive away consumer groups, which in recent years have chosen to sit out of the upholstered furniture debate.

The answer is obvious to me. Add the risk of setting yourself on fire to the list of risks you take when you take up smoking. There isn't a good way out of this problem other than making the population less stupid. Getting the tobacco companies to do things takes too long and the chemical option is not safe. The only way out is education and coming to terms with the fact that there are some things that the government can't do.

Besides shouldn't the CPSC be focusing their energy on all the questionable products that are coming over from China? The ones with melamine and lead and who knows what else? I think that might be a better use of their time and our taxes.

Walls fall.

Palestinians Topple Gaza Wall and Cross to Egypt

Yesterday, Hamas blew open the wall between the Gaza strip and Egypt. Palestinians are streaming across to buy building supplies, food, satellites for TV, sheep and more. With the boarders into Israel still shut, the holes in the wall at Rafah are the best route for goods.

Mahmoud Zahar, a senior Hamas official in Gaza, refused in an interview to take direct responsibility for ordering the Egyptian border opened, but said: “We are creating facts. We have to try to change the situation, and now we await the results.”

What an interesting way to put it, we are creating facts. It could be a quirk of translation, but it has a very "I'm taking control of my destiny" ring to it.

“I told them: ‘Let them come in to eat and buy food, then they go back, as long as they are not carrying weapons,’ ” President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt told reporters at a book fair in Cairo. This came after his forces had pushed back protesting women from the Rafah crossing on Tuesday.

For their part, Israeli officials said that, if controlled, the border opening to Egypt might allow Israel to lock the door to a Hamas-run Gaza and let the Egyptians handle the poverty and problems of the 1.5 million people there.

How much is this going to change the situation there? The Gaza strip is controlled by Hamas and now has an open boarder with Egypt, while the West Bank is controlled by Fatah and still has boarders open with Israel. I don't know enough about the politics of the region to guess.

By the way, the slide show of pictures is very neat. Seeing people stand on rubble that used to be walls is always compelling. There is something about the idea of these sturdy things falling and not holding anyone back anymore.

Ever seen a pipe burst?

Water main break closes North Side streets

Hmmm... infrastructure again.

A 36-inch water main burst on Chicago's North Side overnight, collapsing a major street, partially submerging parked cars and rerouting CTA service. For a while, a virtual river ran through a popular neighborhood.

The 80-year-old cast-iron main burst about 1:30 a.m. near Montrose Avenue and Wolcott Street, forcing police to close an area of several square blocks. The CTA briefly shut its Brown Line Montrose station and rerouted two buses.

I have no idea if 80 is old for a cast iron pipe, or if this was just one of those one in a million deffects that wasn't tested for in the 1920's.

"It wouldn't be surprising to see that that the weather played a role," LaPorte said. "It went from very cold over the weekend to warmer temperatures that can cause weakness in the pipe."

I wonder how much variation in temperature there is in the ground under the streets in Chicago.

Rachel Maddow is on Countdown right now, talking about how infrastructure investments can work as an economic stimulus package. That sounds like a great idea, employ people and fix our bridges at the same time. It worked for FDR, I would think that it would work for the next president. Build bridges, community centers, clean up land, plant trees, and on and on. Give the local governments some money earmarked for infrastructure and community projects.

I'm just thinking out loud on this one.

Small town turns down Nobel laureate

Climate Talk’s Cancellation Splits a Town

When you don't know who you're dealing with, its much easier to make a fool of yourself.

But when some residents complained that his presentation here would be one-sided because no opposing view would be offered, the superintendent of Choteau School District No. 1, Kevin St. John, canceled it.
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Those who complained misunderstood the content of the talk, Mr. St. John said, but there was no time to explain to all of them that Dr. Running was a leading scientist rather than an agenda-driven ideologue.

A portion of the community seemed to think they were turning down someone crazy tree hugger. But this isn't about laughing at the people of the town for acting like back water hicks; this is about the fact that the superintendent caved into the pressure and treated the scientific consensus as a merely one opinion that would need another to balance it out. Truth is not determine by a vote.

Some students however are smart enough to recognize when their elders are not as wise as they claim.

The controversy here intensified when a local student’s article criticizing school officials was published Monday on the student-created “Class Act Page” of The Great Falls Tribune, a statewide daily.

“I was insulted as a high school student prepared to enter the world I need to hear both sides of the story,” the student, Kip Barhaugh, 17, said in an interview Tuesday. “I don’t feel there is another side. Global warming is not a controversial issue, it’s a fact. We need to be prepared to deal with it.”

Hearing this makes me slightly more optimistic. Just because the other generations are still fighting a pointless "debate" about global warming, doesn't mean we can't see the truth of the situation. We've already figured that part out and are moving on to the real questions; how are we going to take care of this problem?

That sound you here is an entire generation sighing and rolling their eyes as their parents argue about whats happening and why, when they've already started changing the light bulbs and researching how to switch the truck to veggie oil.

Huckabee's Theocratic Tendencies

I've been manning the copy machines at my mother's office for the past few days, hence the lack of posts. But there was a comment made by Mike Huckabee recently that everyone should find disturbing.

While Huckabee's people are trying to say that Huckabee was talking only about a marriage amendment and calling a fetus a person. Not that I agree with any of that, but it sounds like so much more than that. He's saying that the laws of this country should change in order to be in line with the laws prescribed in the Bible.

Spin as they might, what Huckabee said is out.

"...and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards."

Whats that line in the Bible about serving two masters? When the choice in Huckabee's mind is between the ever changing (dare I say evolving?) laws of man and the immutable laws of his god, it should come as no surprise that the reverend chooses his god. While its all well and good for him to chose his god's laws so long as they don't run counter to our laws, our laws say that he can't make that choice for the rest of us. But thats what he's saying he would do if given the power; he would chose the laws of his god for all of us.

I shouldn't have to tell you what's wrong with that.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...