I chided President Obama this week for his remarks on the Supreme Court and the role of “unelected” judges.  The president, wisely, has since chosen to clarify his statement, and express his (correct) view — that courts should be hesitant to overturn acts of Congress — in a much more appropriate way.  Now the problematic behavior is coming from the other branch, with a federal appeals court going out of it way to pick a fight with the president. Talk about judicial activism — this is a judicial temper tantrum. Read full article > >

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Ruth Marcus: Disorder in the court

NBC has completed its investigation into the mishandling of the police dispatcher’s conversation with George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case . And the process ends with a finding of error, plus an apology. Here is the statement just issued by the network: Read full article > >

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NBC issues apology on Zimmerman tape screw-up

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Saturday sharply criticized Newt Gingrich’s remark this week that the Palestinians are an “invented” people , calling the statement by the former House speaker and GOP presidential contender “divisive and destructive.” “Next Gingrich is wrong to think his attempt to turn the Palestinians into a non-people with no claim to a state will appeal to his audience on the Jewish Channel, on which they are apparently to be aired on Monday,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said in a statement. Read full article > >

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Gingrich remarks on Palestinians ‘divisive and destructive,’ Levin says

Carrier IQ, the company that has been accused of installing surveillance software on smartphones, clarified what its program does in an updated statement to the press late Thursday. “We measure and summarize performance of the device to assist Operators in delivering better service,” the statement read. “While a few individuals have identified that there is a great deal of information available to the Carrier IQ software inside the handset, our software does not record, store or transmit the contents of SMS messages, email, photographs, audio or video.” Read full article > >

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Carrier IQ clarifies its functions

The Securities and Exchange Commission did not have authority to dispose of investigation documents that the agency had been routinely purging since 1993, the National Archives and Records Administration said. The Washington-based agency that oversees federal record-keeping said in a statement Thursday that it opened an investigation last year after an SEC employee claimed the agency was illegally destroying files pertaining to “matters under inquiry,” or MUI. The SEC destroyed the documents without approval, the statement said, but it has since halted the practice. Read full article > >

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SEC’s document purging wasn’t authorized, archives agency says

“Let’s keep in mind: These detainees, they’ve had things they’ve never had before. Do you know what the biggest problem in Gitmo is right now? It’s obesity. They’re eating better than they’ve ever eaten before and they have better medical care, they have better — they have legal counsel. I mean, you know, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Let’s draw it here.” — Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), May 13, 2011 Inhofe made this statement Friday during an appearance on “Fox and Friends,” making the case that the detainees housed at Guantanamo Bay should not receive family visits. The Washington Post reported two days earlier that this “unprecedented step” was being considered “to ease the isolation of inmates who in some cases have been held at the U.S. facility for close to a decade.” Read full article > >

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Inhofe’s claim that ‘obesity’ is the biggest problem at Guantanamo Bay

Al Qaeda appeared to confirm Osama bin Laden’s death in a statement, which was posted on jihadist Web forums on Friday and attributed to the terrorist organization. In the statement, the group also vowed retaliation against the United States and other…

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Al Qaeda Confirms bin Laden’s Death

I hope that my affection for NPR is quite clear. I think the programming they produce is invaluable. I really don’t know what I’d do without Talk of the Nation or Fresh Air. With that said, I don’t know how you defend this : The NPR fund-raiser who was taped, Betsy Liley, believed she was talking to prospective donors from a group called the Muslim Education Action Center. In the recording, one of the fake donors asks her if a proposed $5 million donation could be kept secret from the federal government, even if NPR’s books are audited.   At one point he says, “It sounded like you were saying that NPR would be able to shield us from a government audit — is that correct?” Ms. Liley responds, “I think that is the case, especially if you were anonymous, and I can inquire about that.”   In a statement late Thursday, NPR disavowed the comments, saying that the statement by Ms. Liley, its senior director of institutional giving, was “factually inaccurate and not reflective of NPR’s gift practices.” It said, “All donations — anonymous and named — are fully reported to the I.R.S.” As of that last statement, NPR isn’t defending it. I guess we can talk about the heinous and disreputable acts of James O’Keefe. You guys are welcome to it. We can also talk about how water tends to leave you wet. For me, the trenchant fact remains that NPR’s officers were in conversation over a multi-million dollar donation with people who they didn’t really know. I understand that NPR never signed on to take the money, and that toward the end they started to get suspicious. It still looks really sloppy to me.  But that said, I’m a journalist. Within five minutes of talking to any source, I tell them how I got to them (who sent me, where I came across their name) and where I’m from. If I’m writing about an organization like NPR, and someone their has consented to an interview, they have PR people who’ve googled me before any interview is scheduled. If they haven’t, they aren’t very good at their job. Perhaps it’s different in fundraising, but given the stakes, it’s hard to imagine it would be. With that said, I’m more interested in hearing from people who work in fundraising. Is it normal to enter this blindly into discussions over multi-million dollar gifts? Should it be so?

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More on NPR

Wonder what kind of severance package comes after less than six months? Time Inc. Chief Executive Jack Griffin is leaving after less than half a year on the job, the company announced in a memo Thursday. In the statement, Time Warner Chief Executive…

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Time Inc. CEO Out After Six Months

Last week, after my row with abortion and slavery, I received a number of missives from people quick to note their alleged lack of sympathy for the likes of Rick Santorum, but quicker still to insist that one of the most prodigious slave societies in human history really was a lot like the termination of fetal life. To wit: Your main logical flaw seems to be here: you fail to recognise that there is more wrapped up in the statement “the right to exist” than its most literal reading. Your argument is correct if the most literal reading of the statement — that “the right to exist” means simply “the right to be alive” — is the one that Mr. Klein meant. You make it quite clear that slaveholders wanted their slaves to remain alive. This reading, however, cannot be what Mr. Klein meant. I would suggest that what he meant was something more like “the right to exist as a full human person, with the right to exercise the same freedoms (or more accurately, the right to eventually exercise the same freedoms) and dignity that any other person has.” It’s an interested reading–one that changes the argument by broadening it out to the outermost limits of analogical absurdity. Denial of the right “to exercise the same freedoms and dignity that any other person has” is not what makes slavery distinctive, nor is it particular to slaves. The vast majority of people in this country belong to a class that, at some point, was denied ”the same freedoms and dignity that any other person has.” Indeed, I fear pro-lifers have been much too modest. By their logic, zygotes are analogous not just with slaves, but with Native Americans, freedmen, women, gays, immigrants, children and property-less white men. Perhaps this is the point, in which case I await the latest fetal rights rallying cry—”Abortion is just like America”–with all the requisite enthusiasm.  Absurdities aside, it must be said then that logical consistency isn’t the goal here, nor is a particularly thorough understanding of American slavery. The point is an attack rendered through sensational association. It is tactic meant to provoke, not to cohere. But that said, the more penetrating case against this is not the sort that can be marshaled through basic reasoning skills and, as a commenter once put it, a cliff-notes version of history. That case relies on a kind of imagination.  One way of understanding the Antebellum South is through objective facts and statistics–the majority of people in South Carolina were enslaved, or slaves represented more wealth than any other asset in America at the onset of the Civil War. I employed that sort of evidence in my original case. But what gives the thing its texture, its weight, what brings it all alive are the words of  Laura Spicer’s lost husband , or  Jourdan Anderson : Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable.  Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this.  There’s a specific mixture of hatred and affection here, an understatement and irony undergirding the great irony (slavery in the self-styled land of the free), an intimacy that is virtually, if not surely, familial. You read enough primary documents of the era (I’ve now been doing this for two years) and you start to see a line in how people related, something that can’t be summed up by simply saying, “Slavery was a denial of rights” or “Slavery was a denial of personhood.”  These are the quick, easy, and glancing statements made to put the thing in a utilitarian context. It is history flattened and then weaponized, an arsenal of debating points that can called upon in the war against homophobic uncles, racist Facebook friends, radical feminists, Tea Partiers, profligate meat-eaters and other people whom we do not like.  This is not so much about how we discuss slavery and abortion, as it is about how we try–with so many things–to fit the world into our political context. It is about a narrow debate-club approach that, as Neitzsche says, attacks “the individuality of the past…for the sake of correspondence.” To the extent that I have taken the narrow words of an ex-senator and drawn them out more than some would like, I am fueled by a worry of what we do in the name of correspondence. I don’t believe it ends here with my chosen endeavors. One can see how this sort of thinking, the notion that this time is like the preferred last time, could be extended out until you find yourself under heavy fire wondering how it could be that you were not welcomed with rose petals and greeted as liberators. 

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Greeted as Liberators

As Egypt is spiraling out of control, President Obama “reiterated our focus on opposing violence and calling for restraint; supporting universal rights and supporting concrete steps that advance political reform within Egypt.” This statement, coming at…

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Obama Edges Away From Mubarak

Basque separatists Eta call a permanent ceasefire in its fight for independence from Spain, but the Spanish government downplays the statement.

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Eta calls ‘permanent ceasefire’

Okay, I don’t usually blog on the Sabbath day (the Torah says Tweeting is okay, because it’s so short), but I can’t resist posting what I think might become Henry Kissinger’s epitaph. This statement was captured on Richard’s Nixon secret White House recording system, and just now released by the Nixon library : “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” “I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.” Because it is the Sabbath day, I will use a religious expression to characterize this statement: Holy shit. I particularly love, by the way, the “maybe” in that last sentence fragment. Nixon is also quoted as saying that Jews share an inferiority complex: Nixon listed many of his top Jewish advisers — among them, Mr. Kissinger and William Safire, who went on to become a columnist at The New York Times — and argued that they shared a common trait, of needing to compensate for an inferiority complex. “What it is, is it’s the insecurity,” he said. “It’s the latent insecurity. Most Jewish people are insecure. And that’s why they have to prove things.” I suppose he’s right, at least on the narrow subject of Henry Kissinger.

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Henry Kissinger to Soviet Jewry: Drop Dead