Reality's well-known liberal bias

A couple of good examples. One, Newt Gingrich on Jon Stewart's show:

Gingrich: The American public doesn't understand reading Miranda rights to terrorists in Detroit when it's fairly obvious they're terrorists.

Stewart: The only thing I would say to that is, didn't they do the same with Richard Reid, who was the shoe bomber?

Gingrich: Richard Reid was an American citizen.

Actually, as Kevin Drum points out, "Reid was a British citizen, born in London, and radicalized at the Finsbury mosque." Maybe Gingrich really meant to say "Richard Reid had a white-sounding name"?

Two, Jonathan Zasloff observes:

A majority of the Senate today voted to confirm Craig Becker, President Obama’s nominee to chair the NLRB, but they only won 52 to 33, so the motion was tabled.

Senator Orrin Hatch called on Obama not to use a recess appointment, saying that in light of the vote, such a move would “circumvent the will of the Senate.”

Zasloff quoted from Hatch's own website, where the senator also said, "“The Senate spoke with a loud, clear and bipartisan voice that Craig Becker’s views are outside of the mainstream and that he would not be able to serve as an impartial member of National Labor Relations Board."

The habit of being able to lie with impunity -- knowing that the stenographic media will not call you on it -- seems deeply ingrained.

Second Second Sex second-rate

Alas, the wait is over for the new English translation of Beauvoir's masterpiece -- but Toril Moi finds that it kinda sucks:

However intensely Anglophone feminists debated The Second Sex, the English translation, by H.M. Parshley, did not become an issue until 1983, when Margaret Simons, a professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, drew attention to it in her essay, ‘The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir’. Beauvoir had offered Parshley no help; she was already hard at work on The Mandarins before he was half-way through his translation. Now Simons estimated that Parshley had cut at least 10 per cent of the original text, and showed that the most savage cuts affected Beauvoir’s account of exceptional women in history. She also demonstrated that Parshley had made a hash of Beauvoir’s philosophical vocabulary. After reading Simons’s essay, Beauvoir replied: ‘I was dismayed to learn the extent to which Mr Parshley misrepresented me. I wish with all my heart that you will be able to publish a new translation of it.’

* * * Parshley should not be seen as the villain of the piece. A professor of zoology at Smith College, he was genuinely enthusiastic about Beauvoir’s book. It was the publisher, not Parshley, who insisted on cutting the text; in the end he cut 145 of the original 972 pages, or almost 15 per cent of the original.

The strength of Parshley’s 57-year-old translation is that it is lively and readable. Parshley was, on all evidence, an excellent writer of English. When he understood the French, he usually found the right phrase and managed to convey nuances of irony and poetry. The most serious weaknesses are the unannounced cuts; but his complete lack of familiarity with Beauvoir’s philosophical vocabulary and the deficiencies in his knowledge of French also undermine his version of the book.

Demand for a new translation gathered force, but the publishers resisted. In 1988, Ashbel Green, then Knopf’s vice president and senior editor, summarised their view: ‘Our feeling is that the impact of de Beauvoir’s thesis is in no way diluted by the abridgment.’ After all, the book was making money: ‘It’s a very successful book that we want to continue publishing.’

In August 2004, Sarah Glazer published an article about the situation in the New York Times. Whether her article was the deciding factor is hard to say. In any case, at the end of 2005 Ellah Allfrey, then an editor at Cape, the British publisher of The Second Sex, persuaded Knopf to split the cost of a new translation. According to Le Monde the final cost was €35,000 (£30,000 or $50,000), one third of which was paid by grants from the French state.

Given the profile of the book, Beauvoir specialists hoped that the publishers would turn to a first-rate translator with a track record in the relevant field * * * Instead, the publishers chose Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, two Americans who have lived in Paris since the 1960s and worked as English teachers at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques. They have published numerous textbooks in English for French students (My English Is French: la syntaxe anglaise), and many cookery books (Cookies et cakes and Sandwichs, tartines et canapés among others). Their track record in translation from French to English, however, appears to be slim (I have found only two catalogue essays for art exhibitions in Paris, both translated by Malovany-Chevallier).

At this point, it seems proper to interject, "you have to be fucking kidding me."

In a 2007 interview with Sarah Glazer, published in Bookforum, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier dismissed doubts about their competence. They explained that they first heard about the problems with the English translation at the 50th anniversary conference on The Second Sex in Paris. After the conference, they contacted a former student, Anne-Solange Noble, the director of foreign rights at Gallimard, to propose themselves for the job, and in due course Noble told Allfrey that she ‘already knew the perfect translators’.

Now we have the new translation. Many will turn to it with high hopes. Is it the definitive translation? Does it convey Beauvoir’s voice and style? Unfortunately not. Here is a sentence, chosen almost at random:

Ordinarily she can be taken at any time by man, while he can take her only when he is in the state of erection; feminine refusal can be overcome except in the case of a rejection as profound as vaginismus, sealing woman more securely than the hymen; still vaginismus leaves the male the means to relieve himself on a body that his muscular force permits him to reduce to his mercy.

The sentence doesn’t stand out as immediately ‘wrong’. On my first reading, I felt that I got Beauvoir’s point, but only after a struggle, for the sentence is cumbersome, and several expressions, above all ‘the state of erection’, and ‘relieve himself’ struck me as strange. I checked the French:

Normalement, elle peut toujours être prise par l’homme, tandis que lui ne peut la prendre que s’il est en état d’érection; sauf en cas d’une révolte aussi profonde que le vaginisme qui scelle la femme plus sûrement que l’hymen, le refus féminin peut être surmonté; encore le vaginisme laisse-t-il au mâle des moyens de s’assouvir sur un corps que sa force musculaire lui permet de réduire à merci.

The translation turns out to have a number of problems. ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ should be ‘the man’ and ‘the woman’, since we are dealing with generic examples (as in ‘the woman leads, the man follows’), not with universals (‘woman is night; man is day’). ‘Feminine refusal’ is also wrong: we are not dealing with a specific kind of refusal (the feminine as opposed to the masculine kind), but with the woman’s refusal or resistance. (Beauvoir is not trying to tell us how the woman resists, just that she does.) The sentence structure and the punctuation are awkward. There are several translation errors: s’assouvir doesn’t mean to ‘relieve oneself’ but to ‘satisfy’ or ‘gratify’; in this context profonde means ‘underlying’ or ‘deep-seated,’ not ‘profound’. The phrase ‘reduce to his mercy’ piles up errors: à merci is not the same thing as à sa merci; réduire in this context doesn’t mean ‘reduce’ but rather ‘dominate’ or ‘subdue’; thus réduire à merci actually means ‘subdue at will’. And force musculaire means ‘muscular strength’ not ‘muscular force’, which is a phrase mostly used by scientists trying to explain the physics of muscle contractions; permettre here means ‘enable’ or ‘allow’, not ‘permit’.

This isn’t an isolated example. After taking a close look at the whole book, I found three fundamental and pervasive problems: a mishandling of key terms for gender and sexuality, an inconsistent use of tenses, and the mangling of syntax, sentence structure and punctuation.

More examples at the link, if you have the stomach for 'em. Jessa Crispin is not going to be happy about this.

Where are the feminist millionaires to hire a couple of smart translators and set them up at Yaddo or wherever to produce a competent translation? Or, more easily, a revision of Parshley that restores the cuts and cleans him up?

Same as the old boss

It's becoming more and more clear that Obama really never had much of an issue with Bush and Cheney's torture regime. Scott Horton notes the announced replacement for Phil Carter at Detainee Affairs:

Few Washington developments in recent weeks establish the parameters of “change you can believe in” better than this: following the resignation of Phil Carter, the White House is reportedly prepared to tap William Lietzau as the new deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs. Lietzau served as an aide to William J. Haynes II, the David Addington protégé who was Donald Rumsfeld’s lawyer at the Pentagon. In this role, he played a central role in creating a harsh new environment for prisoners taken in the war on terror, including the crafting of rules for a military commission that were subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court.

Haynes probably belongs in prison, and his aides would be the last place any decent administration would look for such an appointee.

Horton links to a Spencer Ackerman article on the appointment, quoting some favorable opinions on Lietzau, but not doing anything to disturb the inference that Obama's administration prefers continuity to change when it comes to such issues.

Inmate finds Jesus law in prison

Via Orin Kerr, this really cool story of Shon Hopwood, who wrote two successful cert petitions for fellow inmates while in prison for bank robbery, and who upon release was able to cite Seth Waxman as a job reference.

No one was hurt in Mr. Hopwood’s bank robberies, but he and his accomplices “scared the hell out of the poor bank tellers,” Judge Richard G. Kopf of Federal District Court in Lincoln, Neb., said in sentencing him to prison in 1999.

The judge was skeptical about Mr. Hopwood’s vow that he would change. “We’ll know in about 13 years if you mean what you say,” Judge Kopf said.

The law library changed Mr. Hopwood’s life.

“I kind of flourished there,” he said. “I didn’t want prison to be my destiny. When your life gets tipped over and spilled out, you have to make some changes.”

Dat Who

TBA was bemused that today's NFL, when it wants a safe halftime performance by people who won't flash their tits or use words like "tits," turns to yesterday's bad-boy rockers grown geriatric, exactly the kind of people that no sane exec would've dreamed of putting on live TV back in their prime, and for good reason too.

Even Townshend's taking his guitar to the surrounding light-up thingies would've been welcome. It was a bit like watching gray-muzzled dancing bears for which only a light chain was needed at most.

Judiciary violates separation of powers to defend separation of powers?

Having had time to think about last week's MSSC order, TBA sees some problems with it.

Some have criticized it as an "advisory opinion" decided without a case or controversy before the court.

However, the MSSC wears two hats: it's the high court of the state, *and* it's the highest authority over the judicial branch, in an "administrative" sense.

That I take it is why it issued an "administrative order," not an opinion.

The problem however is that its order purported to command the State Fiscal Officer not to impose certain cuts. I don't see how the court had that authority in its administrative capacity, any more than the Governor has the authority to order a circuit court judge to rule on a motion.

Better would have been to make the court's position crystal-clear without that part of the order, and then let the normal judicial process roll if the SFO decided to implement the cuts anyway. The lower courts would know exactly what the MSSC thought about the issue and would either rule accordingly (98% chance) or sass the court and get reversed (2%).

But it would be interesting to see whether and how an executive-branch officer can be held in contempt of an *administrative* order issued by the MSSC, which in that capacity has, I would think, zero authority over the SFO. In other words, for all its trumpeting about "separation of powers," the court's order itself violates that separation.

Since however he's stated that he's not going to take a chance and find out, guess we won't find out, this time.

... Stolen from our comment over at Bardwell's.

The spirit of the common law

Sir, the law is as I say it is, and so it has been laid down ever since the law began; and we have several set forms which are held as law, and so held and used for good reason, though we cannot at present remember that reason.

-- Chief Justice Fortescue, in Y.B. 36 Hen. VI, ff. 25b-26 (1458), quoted in Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage (2d ed.) at 387.

... Garner adds that "in Texas, for example, where most defensive pleadings contain the phrase, not one lawyer in fifty can explain what the phrase means."

In their defense, it's true that one of a lawyer's fears is omitting some "magic words" which he doesn't understand, but which it turns out the court both understands and rules against his client due to the omission thereof.

They're discussing Schopenhauer at their next meeting

TBA happened upon this self-description:

The Junior League of Jackson is an organization of women committed to promoting voluntarism ...

I'm guessing that's "the principle of relying on voluntary action rather than compulsion," as opposed to "a theory or doctrine which regards will as the fundmental principle or dominant factor in the individual or in the universe."

Still, even on the former definition, it seems the JL is more about practicing voluntary social action than about abstractly favoring it over compulsory action. "Volunteerism" would've worked just fine.

With Mom and Dad in jail, Junior is SURE not to drink!

My 14yo's school sent me an e-mail yesterday, urging me to support passage of Mississippi House Bill 722, the "Social Host" bill as they call it:

Summary of the Bill - The “Social Host Bill is designed to prohibit adults from allowing a party to take place at a private residence/premises where alcohol is being consumed. This applies to any adult who knows or who should reasonably know that alcohol is being consumed. Violators of this act are punished with a misdemeanor and would receive criminal penalties in the form of a $1,000 fine and/or county jail imprisonment up to 90 days.”

I wrote back that I wasn't quite sure which of my son's friends' parents I would want to see jailed under such a law, but I appreciated learning the school's attitude towards the parents.

Call me an unreconstructed Democrat bleeding-heart, but I do not think that criminal penalties for parents are a particularly appropriate tactic here. And while there are doubtless crimes where one "reasonably should have known" this or that, the standard still makes me uneasy. My kid has a sleepover and they creep out of bed at 2 a.m. to sneak some bourbon out of the cabinet. Should I reasonably have known they would do that? Why didn't I have the cabinet locked? Why did I even have alcohol in my house? Do I want a jury to make these decisions?

Anyway, here's a list of the Judiciary A committee members whom I've been urged to write to and encourage to make parental negligence a crime. I may work up a letter, but not one the school had in mind. (Bonus question: why does a House committed have 30-odd members?)

Judiciary A committee-

Edward Blackmon-chairman
eblackmon@house.ms.gov

Angela Cockerham-vice-chairman
acockerham@house.ms.gov

Mark Baker mbaker@house.ms.gov

Earle Banks ebanksjax@aol.com

Jim Beckett jbeckett@house.ms.gov

Cecil Brown cbrown@house.ms.gov

Kimberly Campbell Buck
kcampbell@house.ms.gov

Credell Calhoun ccalhoun@house.ms.gov

Gary Chism gchism@house.ms.gov

Bryant Clark bclark@house.ms.gov

Alyce Griffin Clarke
aclarks@house.ms.gov

Linda Coleman lcoleman@house.ms.gov

Mary Coleman mcoleman@house.ms.gov

J. P. Compretta jcompretta@house.ms.gov

William Denny, Jr.
bdenny@house.ms.gov

Jim Ellington jellington@house.ms.gov

Tyrone Ellis tellis@house.ms.gov

James “Jim” Evans
jevans@house.ms.gov

Andy Gipson agipson@house.ms.gov

Philip Gunn pgunn@house.ms.gov

Steve Holland sholland@house.ms.gov

Greg Holloway, Sr. gholloway@house.ms.gov

Robert Johnson, III rjohnson@house.ms.gov

Bennett Malone bmalone@house.ms.gov

Rita Martinson rmartinson@house.ms.gov

Kevin McGee
kmcgee@house.ms.gov

America “Chuck” Middleton
amiddleton@house.ms.gov

Bobby Moak
bmoak@house.ms.gov

John L. Moore jmoore@house.ms.gov

Harvey Moss
hmoss@house.ms.gov

David Norquist dnorquist@house.ms.gov

Jimmy Puckett jpuckett@house.ms.gov

Tommy Reynolds
treynolds@house.ms.gov

Walter Robinson wrobinson@house.ms.gov

Ray Rogers rrogers@house.ms.gov

Ferr Smith fsmith@house.ms.gov

Greg Snowden
greg@gregsnowden.com

Jessica Upshaw jupshaw@house.ms.gov

Percy Watson pwatson@house.ms.gov

Tom Weathersby tweathersby@house.ms.gov

Adrienne Wooten
awooten@house.ms.gov

Assassination is the continuation of law enforcement by other means?

This blog would become even more tedious if we cataloged our disappointments with Obama, but even in such times as these, president-ordered assassinations of Americans abroad ought to merit a word.

The director of national intelligence said the factors that "primarily" weigh on the decision to target an American include "whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans."

So, not a matter of killing an American who's on the battlefield in the enemy's ranks - no one would question that - but rather, an American "involved in a group." If you're an American suspected of being tied to al-Qaeda, then you may get a Hellfire missile in your bedroom.

Glenn Greenwald:

... wouldn't it be preferable to at least require the President to demonstrate to a court that probable cause exists to warrant the assassination of an American citizen before the President should be allowed to order it? That would basically mean that courts would issue "assassination warrants" or "murder warrants"--a repugnant idea given that they're tantamount to imposing the death sentence without a trial--but isn't that minimal safeguard preferable to allowing the President unchecked authority to do it on his own, the very power he has now claimed for himself? And if the Fifth Amendment's explicit guarantee--that one shall not be deprived of life without due process--does not prohibit the U.S. Government from assassinating you without any process, what exactly does it prohibit?

I wonder how the Republicans feel about Obama's power to order such assassinations? Travel plans, Ms. Palin?

(H/t Baumann, in for Kevin Drum. If the post title's allusion has to be explained, it probably wasn't all that great to start with.)

A modest legislative proposal

Via Will Bardwell, Emily Wagster Pettus -- fast becoming the dean (diva?) of the Mississippi journalism community -- makes a good catch:

Unfortunate title of a bill pending in the Mississippi Legislature: "Hunting; provide for a hunting season for terminally ill children." ... Sounds like one of those bad headlines on Leno.

I dunno -- is Barbour behind this? Because it might just be another way to reduce Medicaid costs.

Cancel your Amazon account! - UPDATED

Search "delete account" at their Help site and you'll find out how.

Via Making Light, I learned of Amazon's pulling every "Buy" link for any book published by Macmillan, due to an argument between the two companies over e-book pricing. No, really, this happened:

As Venture Beat and other blogs have noticed Friday evening, books from Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the United States, have vanished from Amazon.com.

The question is why.

I’ve talked to a person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute who says the disappearance is the result of a disagreement between Amazon.com and book publishers that has been brewing for the last year. Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15. Amazon is expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books, said this person, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter.

First the 1984 debacle, and now this. Which is just crazy. Egomaniacally crazy.

N.b. that Amazon pretty quickly changed its mind. Whatever. That they even thought that screwing their customers and the authors whose books their customers buy was acceptable ... that was waaaaaayy too much. As I just e-mailed them when cancelling my account, they're supposed to be making money by serving their customers, and they obviously have forgotten what that means.

There are just too many places on the internet to buy books etc. without having to buy them from a company like Amazon. I will spend a little more for my books and stuff, probably. And I will be happy to do so.

... Amazon's spin: We were being bullied!

Macmillan, one of the "big six" publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

If Amazon didn't want to sell Macmillan's e-books for $15 a pop, that was fine, though I would think the market could decide whether the e-books were worth that.

But pulling ALL Macmillan titles? That's gangsta.

UPDATED with link to real legal analysis! (via Stross).

... and forsaking all others, subject to paragraph 7, clause 3 ...

Jonathan Chait notes that Jenny Sanford, soon-to-be-ex-wife of Gov. Mark "Brazilian" Sanford, admits that Sanford didn't break his wedding vows:

South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford recalls how she made the "leap of faith" to marry husband Gov. Mark Sanford even though the groom refused to promise to be faithful, insisting that the clause be removed from their wedding vows. ...

"It bothered me to some extent, but ... we were very young, we were in love," she said in an exclusive interview with Barbara Walters to air on "20/20" Friday. "I questioned it, but I got past it ... along with other doubts that I had."

Chait's snark cannot be excelled by TBA:

This revelation does open up a few questions. Such as, hey Jenny Sanford, interested in a friendly game of no-limit poker? Or how about a business proposition? Send me all your alimony money and I'll tell you what it is. I'm not going to fleece you. Wait, I can't promise that. Just send me the money.

Also, given that news reports have long described Jenny Sanford as "the real brains behind the operation," one must wonder just how dumb Mark Sanford must be. What exactly does it mean to be the brains of this particular operation? Does she have to feed him?

As TBA always says, only two people know what goes on inside any given marriage.

The bookshelf (and a reckoning)

Joe Haldeman, The Forever War: One of those books I really should have read 20 years ago. Haldeman's account of interstellar war at relativistic speeds is the metaphor of all metaphors for a soldier's alienation from the home front, and from "his" own war. And his treatment of homosexuality would be remarkable today, let alone in 1974. God knows what the Ridley Scott adaptation will make of it.

Jean Edward Smith, Grant: Better thus far than Smith's bio of FDR. I'm into the beginnings of Congressional Reconstruction, and a little amazed at how much my previous reading was treading the track of the Lost Cause school of historians. (Tho for a biographer of John Marshall, Smith is thus far proving reticent about such issues as the constitutionality of the Tenure of Office Act.) Smith admires Grant's character, and rightly so, but I would like to see a bit more psychology -- for a man as simple and unassuming as Grant, he had a waspish pen in his Memoirs, hinting at something more complex under the surface.

Kurt W. Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age: As I'd hoped, this little book goes beyond biography of Hopper to an account of the early days of computing, and the institutional/economic/governmental forces that shaped its development. A topic I knew nothing about, so Beyer is very informative, to me.

Daniel Farber, Lincoln's Constitution: Another little book, usefully and cogently recounting the debates, then and now, over the constitutionality of secession and of Lincoln's actions. Generally supportive of Lincoln while conceding that he overstepped sometimes, Farber concludes with a neat distinction that while Lincoln probably went beyond the law on occasion, but never held himself above the law -- he always was vulnerable to Congress's refusal to ratify his actions, which however never came up. Comparison and contrast with George W. Bush's violations of law, and Congress's effective ratification of them, would make another good book.

Stephen W. Sears, Gettysburg: Reread this in anticipation of visiting the battlefield. It's a straightforward account, more accessible than Coddington's Gettysburg Campaign or Trudeau's Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage. Why Lee would not listen to Longstreet and either flank the Federals or dare them to come on, remains a mystery I suppose.

... And a reckoning: how many of these damn "Bookshelf" books have I actually finished? Not counting the present post, 31 of 37. Better than I feared. All too easy to flit from book to book. That biography of Lord Salisbury in particular, while interesting whenever I read it, is quite the incubus.

To live judge is to err

Passed along to us via e-mail from someone who heard a couple of justices on the Mississippi Supreme Court speaking at some engagement:

I heard Dickinson and Randolph speak last week. They said that there is error in every case and that the standard they apply in deciding whether to affirm or reverse is this: Judgment Fairly Obtained - Affirmed vs. Unfairly Obtained - Reversed.

This appears to be nothing more than a restatement of the familiar distinction between "error" and "reversible error":

No trial is free of error; however, to require reversal the error must be of such magnitude as to leave no doubt that the appellant was unduly prejudiced. The record before us reveals no reversible error. No trial is perfect, all that is guaranteed is a fair trial.

Davis v. Singing River Elec. Power Ass'n, 501 So. 2d 1128, 1131 (Miss. 1987).

Appellate attorneys sometimes err by resting satisfied with showing that the trial court erred. That is necessary but not always sufficient. The appeals court does not want to think it is reaching the legally correct but unfair result (it happens, but they don't like it). Don't just argue that the trial court erred; argue that the error caused an unfair result -- or, per contra, argue that no unfairness resulted, if you're defending the judgment.