...he says none.
John McCain says there will be no "signing statements" if he becomes president. President Bush has made unprecedented use of the statements to declare he will not abide by provisions of bills that he signs into law.
It’s remarkable what life a patently meritless idea can have. On the question of signing statements, Barack Obama has it right: “No one [well, no one other than the members of the American Bar Association's task force that produced its ridiculous report] doubts that it is appropriate to use signing statements to protect a president’s constitutional prerogatives.” The relevant question, virtually everyone not on the ABA’s task force recognizes, is the soundness of an administration’s constitutional positions, whether they are expressed in signing statements or otherwise implemented, not the appropriateness of signing statements as a vehicle for expressing those positions.
Congress, not the president, makes laws. The courts, not the president, interpret them. The president may be convinced that a piece of legislation is unwise. But his judgment as to its un-wisdom is not a legal reason for his declining to execute it. (It may be a reason to veto it, and one of the objections to signing statements is that they are vetoes not subject to override.) And the president may have a definite view as to what the legislation means, and that view might include conclusions as to its constitutionality, but his is not the view that counts. He may be the commander in chief, but he is not the interpreter in chief. Indeed, with respect to interpretive authority, he is in no better a position than the proverbial man in the street or the baseball fan who prefers his own judgment about balls and strikes to the umpire’s; it’s just not his call.
Harvard students demonstrate in 1999 following a sexual assault case on campus.
Rape is the touchiest of topics, but it's a topic that is predominant on many university campuses. Rapes on America's college campuses are among the least reported crimes. According to some experts, as many as 85 percent of college rapes and assaults go unreported.
Eighty percent would be an enormous figure, but it's a difficult estimate to confirm. Could college rapes be overstated? Could the numbers be inflated for ideological reasons? Is it possible to diagnose a problem without accurate data? Or is the horrific nature of the crime of rape impossible to quantify?
Federal law requires colleges to publish reported crimes affecting their students. The numbers of reported sexual assaults -- the law does not require their confirmation -- usually run under half a dozen a year on private campuses, and maybe two to three times that at large public universities. So what reality does lie behind the rape hype? I believe that it's the booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the '60s demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora's box of boorish, promiscuous behavior that gets cruder each year.
Sexual violence remains as much a dirty secret on our campuses as it is in the larger society. It flourishes because to confront it, an institution must be willing to shine a bright light on aspects of itself that are both ugly and painful. One of the most important steps that must be taken is a comprehensive, led-from-the-top campaign to change the community climate such that victims of sexual violence feel comfortable to report attacks to authorities.
Paradoxically then, the first indication that an institution is courageously moving to end sexual violence is almost inevitably an increase in the official tally of that violence. This is not the kind of publicity that most college administrators strive to create.
The photo was taken on a 2006 Congressional trip to Africa.
Can we agree that the 2008 presidential campaign hit a new low point today? The Drudge Report posted a photo of Barack Obama in Somali garb, and said it had been circulated by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Obama's campaign attacked Clinton over the issue -- and the Clinton campaign responded by saying the photo shouldn't be seen as "divisive."
Whose campaign will be most hurt by the brouhaha? Is there more mud waiting to fly?
Jonathan Martin of Politico discusses the difficulty of deploying smear tactics against Obama, but I think he underestimates the degree to which anonymous chain e-mails and third-party (i.e., independent organizations, not political parties) advertising will be able to operate unchecked under the national media’s radar. To a large degree, the rumors swirling on the Internet are already doing this, and the MSM’s ham-fisted responses to the existence of the chain e-mails have not quashed the rumors, but almost lended them a degree of credibility, as if there is a real "issue" that Obama has to confront.
Politically speaking, however, it seems as if the "issue" has become real despite the completely false nature of the story.
Let’s take a moment to review: Obama’s campaign thinks Clinton is trying to be divisive by encouraging the Obama-is-a-Muslim myth. Clinton’s campaign thinks the Obama campaign is being divisive because it thinks Clinton’s campaign is being divisive. We love these spats as much as the next blogger, but Clinton’s stance is flimsy at best. While Obama cries foul, he also gets to show everybody that he is experienced enough to have gone on a diplomatic mission to a foreign country. Plus, he gets a high-profile platform to say he isn’t a Muslim. Clinton, meanwhile, is forced to play traditional-clothing catch-up while covering-up her staffers’ foolishness.
In December, the campaign asked two of its employees to resign after they proliferated rumors that Obama was a Muslim. If the campaign is consistent, we should see Clinton undress another staffer’s career in a few days.
Under fire?
Democrats are calling for a Federal Election Commission investigation of John McCain, who wants to withdraw from the federal campaign financing system -- even though he took a loan for the campaign based on his participation in the system. It's a senstive topic for McCain, who famously backed campaign finance laws disdained by many of his fellow Republicans.
So is McCain a hypocrite? Or is it time to scrap campaign finance restrictions?
Can the Federal Election Commission force Senator McCain to take tax funds and limit his spending? If so, what does it mean for his campaign? Has his campaign broken the law? Why can’t the FEC rule on Senator McCain’s predicament? And is Senator Obama behaving ethically? If you’ve followed a few of the stories, they all seem quite confusing. But we’re going to sort things out for you. So here you have it: all you need to know about Senator McCain and federal matching funds -- and then some...
I am not a lawyer, and thus have no opinion about whether McCain's loan violates the, um, McCain Feingold Act, or any other provision of federal law. But I did think that this was a pretty transparent attempt to violate its spirit. Campaign finance laws ask candidates to make a choice: either you take federal money, in which case you are subject to a number of restrictions, or else you don't take it, in which case you are not. Getting a loan by using the matching funds you have not yet received as collateral is a way of trying to have it both ways.
Whether or not this violates the law -- a law McCain authored -- I have no idea, but it is certainly an attempt to wriggle out of its requirements, and it ought to put paid, once and for all, to the idea of McCain as a straight-talking man of principle.
Even prisoners pray.
Iowa officials are ending a Bible-based treatment program at a state prison that has been the focus of a five-year federal court battle over the role of religion in government services. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis ruled in December that the program by Virginia-based Prison Fellowship advanced religion at government expense and that taxpayer money could not be used to finance the program.
I am convinced that what I saw in the punishment cell at Humaita Prison explains why its recidivism rate remains at 4 percent, while in the rest of Brazil it is a staggering 75 percent. The moral and spiritual approach to crime does work. The lesson for us here in America is that we cannot build our way out of the crime problem. We will stem the surging tide of crime only by a rehabilitation of the soul.
InnerChange also offers substance-abuse treatment and free computer training, hot commodities in a time of budgetary woes. This year, the GED program Ellsworth offers regular prisoners was cut in half, the substance-abuse program eliminated.
General-population inmates are still offered a computer class through the local community college, but as it costs $150, and men who are lucky enough to land a prison job make an average of 60 cents a day, the general population's six computers sit under dust covers most days. As Issac Jarowitz, an Ellsworth inmate who isn't in InnerChange, noted grudgingly, "The Christians do lots of stuff the state used to do, like vocational programs, but now they're only for believers."
"I tell them this is their ticket," Raymond said, gesturing to the InnerChange ID card that inmates wear on a "What Would Jesus Do?" neck chain, "to everything they need."
