Witnessing "experts"

Tom Ricks flags this article on "counter-terrorism instructors" who "certify" cops after inculcating them in the Glenn Beck School of Islamofascist Studies.

Kharoba told the class that there are two types of Muslims in America: "honest ones who Americanize their names, and those who use long Arabic names as a smokescreen. 'If I pull someone over at a traffic stop,' said Kharoba, 'I'll ask for a couple of IDs. And if I see different spellings of a name, my Christmas tree is lit up. That's probable cause to take them in.'"

This from a guy named "Kharoba"? What is that, Scottish? Ricks has more, or you can read the whole thing.

Mark Kleiman thinks what this story tells us about police "certification" as experts:

One point the piece doesn’t note: Having gone through this nonsense “training,” the officers will then be able to qualify themselves as “expert witnesses” in court. I’ve heard some astonishingly bad testimony from alleged police drug experts, claiming expertise from “trainings” just like this one. Judges seem quite incurious as to the content of the process that makes someone an “expert,” and it seems to be the convention that lawyers for the other side attack the testimony but not the capacity of the witness to offer an expert view in the first place.

I wonder how much discovery criminal-defense lawyers get into police "expert" qualifications? Not as much as in civil proceedings, I think.

... Oh, "Kharoba" is a Jordanian name. I guess it's a short Arabic name, which seems to place Mr. Kharoba in some third category.

You're their leader, Obama -- follow them

Widely reported is the new NBC/WSJ poll on how Americans want to handle the deficit:

[The survey] listed 26 different ways to reduce the federal budget deficit. The most popular: placing a surtax on federal income taxes for those who make more than $1 million per year (81 percent said that was acceptable), eliminating spending on earmarks (78 percent) [because no one knows what an "earmark" is but it sounds bad], eliminating funding for weapons systems the Defense Department says aren’t necessary (76 percent) and eliminating tax credits for the oil and gas industries (74 percent).

The least popular: cutting funding for Medicaid, the federal government health-care program for the poor (32 percent said that was acceptable); cutting funding for Medicare, the federal government health-care program for seniors (23 percent); cutting funding for K-12 education (22 percent); and cutting funding for Social Security (22 percent).

The Democrats in Congress, perhaps because they are millionaires themselves, absolutely will not get behind the public. Obama needs to do it.

The article goes on to note that jobs, not budget cuts, are the major concern for the public, and then suggests why the GOP can't or won't listen (besides the obvious, that they are elected to make the rich richer and the poor poorer):

Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, says these results are a “cautionary sign” for a Republican Party pursuing deep budget cuts.

He points out that the Americans who are most concerned about spending cuts are core Republicans and Tea Party supporters, not independents and swing voters.

“It may be hard to understand why a person might jump off a cliff, unless you understand they’re being chased by a tiger,” he said. “That tiger is the Tea Party.”

With any luck, the GOP wins in 2010 may be a blessing for the Dems in 2012, as the public gets a reminder of what the GOP stands for. But Obama has to do more than sit on his hands.

When you put it like that, Your Honor ...

It's sometimes fun to read the first sentence of an appellate decision and guess who won. This example (via Bashman) does not disappoint:

The question this appeal presents is whether Florida’s license requirement for interior designers practicing in commercial settings within the state violates the United States Constitution.

If you're thinking that doesn't sound too good for the renegade interior designers, you are correct.

Dorothea de Lieven

The waltz, originally a German country dance, appeared in revolutionary France in 1793, and spread from Napoleon's Court to St. Petersburg and Vienna. Madame de Lieven brought it to England in 1812, but did not venture to dance it at Almack's until Tsar Alexander, on his visit to London in 1816, danced it there with her. A dance in which the man seized his partner around the waist and clasped her to him, in public, had not been known in polite society since the sixteenth century, and it naturally created a sensation; and in the atmosphere of Almack's in Regency days, it could hardly have the innocent significance which it had, as an already established custom, in staid Victorian times. Even after the Tsar had set an example, most members hesitated to dance the waltz; but Captain Gronow states that in course of time Palmerston might be seen 'describing an infinite number of circles with Madame de Lieven', and the Austrian chargé d'affaires, Baron Neumann, waltzed regularly with the Princess Esterhazy.

-- Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston, at 43.

The Princess Lieven (a German married to a Russian noble) was at different times the mistress of Guizot and of Metternich, and had more to occupy her mind than waltzes:

Princess Lieven “succeeded in inspiring a confidence” with prominent men “until now unknown in the annals of England”, wrote Russian foreign minister Count Nesselrode. Her friendships with George IV, Prince Metternich, the Duke of Wellington, George Canning, Count Nesselrode, Lord Grey, and François Guizot gave Dorothea Lieven the opportunity to exercise authority in the diplomatic councils of Great Britain, France, and Russia. She was a political force, a position reached by no other contemporary female.



The Princess participated, either directly or indirectly, in every major diplomatic event between 1812-1857. She knew “everyone in the Courts and cabinets for thirty or forty years”; she “knew all the secret annals of diplomacy”, wrote a French diplomat. Palmerston seems to have resented her interference, writing " a busy woman must do harm because she can do no good."

That was ungracious of Palmerston to his erstwhile dancing partner and, it may be, mistress.

There seem to have been a couple of English biographies of her, none in print. This 1903 review by Sydney Smith of one volume of her many letters (they are important sources for diplomatic history) goes into her biography in some detail, including her introduction of the waltz to England -- in 1816, says Smith.

... Nicholas I's deficiencies as a human being have been well recorded by Edward Crankshaw and others, but Smith's review provides a new example. The Tsar did not approve of the princess's leaving Russia to settle in Paris, after two of her sons had died in St. Petersburg:

Incredible as it may seem, he did not permit her husband to announce to her the death of a third son, which she only learned through a letter addressed to him being returned to her through the post with the word 'Dead' written on the envelope.

... And she was a Lutheran! Philip Mansel, Paris Between Empires: Monarchy and Revolution 1815-1848, at 334. Her [husband's] family was Baltic German, tho she seems to have identified strongly with Russia. [Correcting basic stupidity on my part.]

Maybe it's not an empire when you're just keeping the coloreds in line

Apropos of Huckabee Hound's latest "Obama grew up in Kenya" dog-whistle -- hey, is it really a dog-whistle if the rest of us can hear it too? -- Andrew Sullivan finds himself puzzled:

And as a Brit, I have to say I find it remarkable to hear Americans of all people deny that the British Empire was, in fact, imperialist. Well, wasn't it? I mean: how else would you describe British rule in Kenya? Enhanced occupation techniques?

A question Google *doesn't* answer

I'm reading Robert Blake's life of Disraeli, and quoted is a line from an 1868 Commons debate in which Dizzy is rebuking some Tory rebels who'd moved to his right:

When the bark is heard from this side the right hon. Member for Calne (Mr. Lowe) emerges, I will not say from his cave, but, perhaps, from a more cynical habitation. He joins immediately in the chorus of reciprocal malignity— ‘And hails with horrid melody the moon.’

In quotes, right? A line from a poem, apparently. But what poem, by whom?

One would guess Scott or Byron. But online searching yields nothing except quotations of the Commons debate.

"And we don't mean look like James Franco at the Oscars."

Marauding Gay Hordes Drag Thousands Of Helpless Citizens From Marriages After Obama Drops Defense Of Marriage Act

WASHINGTON—Reports continue to pour in from around the nation today of helpless
Americans being forcibly taken from their marital unions after President Obama
dropped the Defense of Marriage Act earlier this week, leaving the institution
completely vulnerable to roving bands of homosexuals. "It was just awful—they
smashed through our living room window, one of them said 'I've had my eye on
you, Roger,' and then they dragged my husband off kicking and screaming," said
Cleveland-area homemaker Rita Ellington, one of the latest victims whose
defenseless marriage was overrun by the hordes of battle-ready gays that had
been clambering at the gates of matrimony since the DOMA went into effect in
1996. "Oh dear God, why did they remove the protection provided by this vital
piece of legislation? My children! What will I tell my children?" A video
communique was sent to the media late yesterday from what appears to be the
as-yet unidentified leader of the gay marauders, who, adorned in terrifying
warpaint, announced "Richard Dickson of Ames, Iowa. We're coming for you
next. Put on something nice."

There's a reason it's not called "audio-visual argument"

Howard Bashman muses on handouts or visual aids at oral argument:

For reasons that I'd be more than happy to discuss further in the event that anyone is interested, I'm not a huge fan of using handouts or demonstrative exhibits at an appellate oral argument.

Moments before my en banc oral argument was to begin Wednesday at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, opposing counsel handed me a collection of documents that he proposed to distribute to the judges to walk them through his presentation. That was, frankly, the first time that I had had that happen to me or seen that happen in more than 20 years of appellate work.

The representatives of the Third Circuit's clerk's office in the courtroom would not allow the handout to be distributed to the judges without my consent. I decided not to consent, because the best use of my time in the moments before the oral argument was not perusing opposing counsel's proposed handout, and there was nothing that had precluded opposing counsel from finding out earlier in advance of the oral argument that my consent was needed and then requesting my consent at that earlier time.

Hard to fault him there, tho I'm sure his opposing counsel has tried. No excuse for not having those documents handy a week in advance -- or for that matter, attaching them to a brief.

Via Bashman, here also is an Indiana lawyer's post about state-court practice there regarding visual aids.

I generally share Bashman's view, tho NMC posted a counterexample ... along with a couple of instances that prove the rule.

Why the Ten Commandments?

The Volokh blog notes a Virginia public high school's prohibition of students' posting the Ten Commandments (but not other, non-religious speech) on their locker doors. The ACLU quite rightly has sent the school an educational, smarten-up-before-we-sue-you letter.

This reminds me of the weirdness of American Christianity.

Posting the Ten Commandments in schoolrooms and courtrooms is a perennial legal issue. An Alabama chief justice had a giant "idol" of the Commandments erected in his supreme court. It's not just Protestants either; my kid's Catholic school has the Commandments posted beside the school office.

Why is no one posting, say, the Beatitudes? Or the Golden Rule? (You do see the latter sometimes, but it's played no role in the culture wars like the Commandments.) Why do the nation's self-proclaimed defenders of Christianity give pride of place to the Ten Commandments?

There could have been some legal basis, i.e. the Commandments are "Judeo-Christian" and thus not "just" Christian; but I don't think current Constitutional law makes much distinction there, if it ever did.

No, I think there's a political message there: society is bad and needs to get back to following the Law of God. The message that the meek and the poor are blessed, by contrast, doesn't serve many people's agendas.

I mean, I've never seen Qaddafi and Iron Man in the same room ...

Saw this pic at Sullyblog, and it disturbed me.

Because however clever it was to kidnap Qaddafi and insinuate Robert Downey, Jr. in his place, shouldn't Downey have stopped short of tanks and bombers to keep his cover? Enough is enough!

... This post reminded me to look up the fate of the greatest double agent ever, the secret policeman whose cover went SOOOOOO deep as to orchestrate the assassination of the head of the secret police. I'd always assumed he was executed, but he got away to Germany; died in Berlin in 1918. There oughta be a movie.

Q. How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A. 0.99999...

Well, these deck chairs are looking good now, if only the ship weren't tilting!

New York’s top court officials will bar the state’s hundreds of elected judges from hearing cases involving lawyers and others who make significant contributions to their campaigns, a move that will change the political culture of courts and transform judicial elections by removing an important incentive lawyers have for contributing.

And creating a new incentive to contribute. How many defense firms would contribute $2500 a head to Tomie Green or Winston Kidd to enforce her recusal? How many plaintiff's lawyers would've given $2500 to stay out of Swan Yerger's courtroom? And wouldn't Billy Joe Landrum make out like a bandit under this system?

From the NYT, via LGM, some of whose commenters grasped this point immediately; the NYT article did not mention it at all.

The problem with judicial elections is not going to be solved by limiting contributions. It's going to be solved by getting rid of judicial elections.

An armchair revolutionary (in the best possible sense)

The NYT has a fascinating little profile of a man studied intently by some of the Egyptian protesters -- Gene Sharp from Boston, MA.

Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt.

When Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from a failed effort in 2005, its leaders tossed around “crazy ideas” about bringing down government, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist. They stumbled on Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced.

When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which trains democracy activists, slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharp’s “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” a list of tactics that range from hunger strikes to “protest disrobing” to “disclosing identities of secret agents.”

Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist who attended the workshop and later organized similar sessions on her own, said trainees were active in both the Tunisia and Egypt revolts. She said that some activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp’s work into Arabic, and that his message of “attacking weaknesses of dictators” stuck with them. * * *

Autocrats abhor Mr. Sharp. In 2007, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela denounced him, and officials in Myanmar, according to diplomatic cables obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, accused him of being part of a conspiracy to spark demonstrations intended “to bring down the government.” (A year earlier, a cable from the United States Embassy in Damascus noted that Syrian dissidents had trained in nonviolence by reading Mr. Sharp’s writings.)

In 2008, Iran featured Mr. Sharp, along with Senator John McCain of Arizona and the Democratic financier George Soros, in an animated propaganda video that accused Mr. Sharp of being the C.I.A. agent “in charge of America’s infiltration into other countries,” an assertion his fellow scholars find ludicrous.

“He is generally considered the father of the whole field of the study of strategic nonviolent action,” said Stephen Zunes, an expert in that field at the University of San Francisco. “Some of these exaggerated stories of him going around the world and starting revolutions and leading mobs, what a joke. He’s much more into doing the research and the theoretical work than he is in disseminating it.”

Presidential-Medal-of-Freedom material, one would think. Perhaps Obama's saving that for some of the CIA's torture veterans.

"Curveball" gloats at pwn'g Germans, U.S.

Via Tom Ricks, the Iraqi defector who lied about Saddam's alleged WMDs now gloats that he made all that shit up, and it worked!

As Curveball watched Powell make the US case to invade Iraq, he was hiding an admission that he has not made until now: that nearly every word he had told his interrogators from Germany's secret service, the BND, was a lie.

Everything he had said about the inner workings of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons programme was a flight of fantasy - one that, he now claims was aimed at ousting the Iraqi dictator. Janabi, a chemical engineering graduate who had worked in the Iraqi industry, says he looked on in shock as Powell's presentation revealed that the Bush administration's hawkish decisionmakers had swallowed the lot. Something else left him even more amazed; until that point he had not met a US official, let alone been interviewed by one.

"I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime," he told the Guardian in a series of interviews carried out in his native Arabic and German. "I and my sons are proud of that, and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy."

Exiles lie! Who would have thought it?

As to their vain hopes and promises, such is the extreme desire in them to return home, that they naturally believe many things that are false and add many others by art, so that between those they believe and those they say they believe, they fill you with hope, so that relying on them you will incur expenses in vain, or you undertake an enterprise in which you ruin yourself.

-- Machiavelli, Discourses, 2:31. See, the problem with Bush and Cheney is they weren't Machiavellian enough.

... In comments, CharleyCarp points us to a 2008 story on Curveball:

Along with confirmation of Curveball's identity, however, have come fresh disclosures raising doubts about his honesty -- much of that new detail coming from friends, associates and past employers.

"He was corrupt," said a family friend who once employed him.

"He always lied," said a fellow Burger King worker. * * *

In early 2002, a year before the war, he told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Hussein's regime.

They couldn't decide if he was dangerous or crazy.

"During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad," said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. "But he always lied. We never believed anything he said."

Another Iraqi friend, Ghazwan Adnan, remembers laughing when he applied for a job at a local Princess Garden Chinese Restaurant and discovered Alwan washing dishes in the back while claiming to be "a big deal" in Iraq. "How could America believe such a person?"

As Charley notes, the CIA evidently was not up to the smarts of some Burger King employees.

Must be that lifetime-appointment thing

The Clarion-Ledger on Justice Graves's confirmation by the Senate:

Mississippi Supreme Court Justice James Graves says he'll feel pressure to do a good job on the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

Finally.