The Tedder P. Schoenhopfer Policy Exchange

Learn how to make an Aluminum Foil Reflector Beanie that can shield your brain from most electromagnetic psychotronic mind control carriers.

True, we may not have chestnuts roasting on an open fire, but we are taking it pretty darn easy. Here is Susan, catching up on her reading.

Here’s Marshall with cuddly-wuddly-Shevvie.

From an email:

Neighbors and Friends:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. We also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2006, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. And without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee. By accepting these greetings you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for herself or himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

This is an interesting article emailed by Uncle Mike on airplane security in Wired.

Consider CAPPS and its replacement, Secure Flight. These are programs to check travelers against the 30,000 to 40,000 names on the government’s No-Fly list, and another 30,000 to 40,000 on its Selectee list.

They’re bizarre lists: people — names and aliases — who are too dangerous to be allowed to fly under any circumstance, yet so innocent that they cannot be arrested, even under the draconian provisions of the Patriot Act. The Selectee list contains an equal number of travelers who must be searched extensively before they’re allowed to fly. Who are these people, anyway?

The truth is, nobody knows. The lists come from the Terrorist Screening Database, a hodgepodge compiled in haste from a variety of sources, with no clear rules about who should be on it or how to get off it. The government is trying to clean up the lists, but — garbage in, garbage out — it’s not having much success.

The program has been a complete failure, resulting in exactly zero terrorists caught.

This isn’t surprising. Another excerpt (but it’s really worth reading the whole article):

I know quite a lot about this. I was a member of the government’s Secure Flight Working Group on Privacy and Security. We looked at the TSA’s program for matching airplane passengers with the terrorist watch list, and found a complete mess: poorly defined goals, incoherent design criteria, no clear system architecture, inadequate testing. (Our report was on the TSA website, but has recently been removed — “refreshed” is the word the organization used — and replaced with an “executive summary” (.doc) that contains none of the report’s findings.

OK, I think once you read this post, you’ll understand why I’ve put off telling you about my Supreme Court trip for so long. Then again, maybe you just want to hear about the Justices and not the substantive issues, in which case you don’t have to read this part. The following is a brief primer on 20th century death penalty caselaw, an understanding of which is necessary in order to get what’s going on in the two cases I describe. Then, I have a summary of both cases. Let me know if you have any questions about this stuff; it’s really hard for me to gauge how confusing (and how interesting) these issues are to nonlawyers. In a subsequent post I will tell you about oral arguments and my tour of the courthouse.

Quick death penalty primer

Early death penalty statutes provided juries with untrammeled discretion in deciding who to sentence to death. Essentially any murder or rapist was death-eligible. In 1972, the US Supreme Court decided Furman v Georgia, holding that the death penalty was so arbitrarily applied, so “wantonly and freakishly imposed,” that it constituted “cruel and unusual punishment” under the 8th Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. (Some Justices argued that the death penalty was applied in a racially discriminatory manner; interestingly, the brief holding of the case was “per curiam,” i.e. “by the court,” and individual Justices filed five separate concurring opinions.) Furman stands for the idea that states must sufficiently narrow the set of crimes which warrant the death penalty. Post-Furman, a sort of odd body of caselaw has emerged; most notably for now, Lockett v Ohio held that juries must be allowed to consider any mitigating evidence the defense presents. So, Furman, Lockett, and their progeny try to reconcile the problems of arbitrary imposition of the death penalty and lack of individualized consideration by allowing the jury some “guided discretion.” We want to give juries enough discretion, but not too much.

A capital trial has two phases: the guilt/innocence phase and the sentencing phase. The guilt phase is like a normal trial; the point is to determine whether the person is actually guilty of the crimes committed. If so, we move on to determine whether the death penalty is warranted in this case. In order to meet the Court’s narrowing requirement, states provide a list of “aggravating factors” which render the defendant death eligible, distinguishing capital murder from first degree murder. For example, New Jersey uses the following aggravating factors [this list is edited but not in substance]:

(more…)

Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday, dear Jon,
Happy Birthday to you!

Suzy is lucky to have Russell Feingold as her Senator. He just led the charge against or for cloture on the Patriot Act — whichever was the good thing, he got enough votes.

Apologies to those who are anxiously awaiting a recap of my Supreme Court trip. I will write it once I finish with this studying phase. For now, here are some mundane household questions to get the conversation started.

1) What is a good, easy way to better insulate windows and doors?
2) How often do you wash the following?:
a) Coffee maker
b) Towels
3) How much should I tip the newspaper delivery guy? He left a self-addressed envelope in Sunday’s paper.

People might get the impression that there is only one politically active Crumiller, so this post is written to dispel that notion. As you can see in this photo, I had also met with now-Senator-appointee Bob Menendez.

And just yesterday I met Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana at an exploratory-type event near Princeton. Today I am going to an event with Senator Hillary Clinton. Presumably she will want to hear all of my advice.

Robert Menendez is going be our new senator in January. Here he is at a fundraiser we had for our county clerk candidate, Paula Sollami-Covello, who is standing in the back. She won. Her husband is the person on the right, Menendez on the left.

But meanwhile, I went to a meeting last night and fought corruption (heh).

Before reading, if you haven’t signed the Rush Holt petition for verified voting please click here — it’s super fast, easy and does good.

Warning Bell in Ohio — Tova Andrea Wang, The Century Foundation, 12/6/2005

A federal court in Ohio has just issued a decision that has potentially enormous significance for elections all over the country. In The League of Women Voters et al. v. Blackwell, a federal judge denied a motion to dismiss by the Governor and Secretary of State. Instead, he ruled that if the League and other voting rights organizations can demonstrate there were “systemic breakdowns” in the election system that led to widely disparate levels of voting access throughout the state in 2004 (and for over three decades before that), the state likely violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

In the Sicilian after 1. e4, c5 2. Nf3, e6 3. d4, cxd4 4. Nxd4, a6 — I think 5. c4 is White’s best, and after …Nf6 6. Nc3, Bb4 7. Bd3, Qc7 8. 0-0, Nc6, the issue I’m having is that instead of the main line 9. Nxc6, White appears to have an improvement, not in the books, with 9. Nc2, after which the N can eventually go to e3, reinforcing the critical square d5. This looks +/= to me. Any suggestions?

p.s. I’m really just testing to see if anyone is reading any of these posts.

This post is just an quick initial test-case of what may be several posts dealing with an issue that has been bothering me for quite a while.

Please take note that I am not questioning President Bush’s faith. But I also believe that it is not unfair for us to compare words with deeds, because in the words of Jesus Christ, who (within my world view) is the highest authority of all: “Beware of [leaders], who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles?”