Outside again today in the cold. Took about a half mile to a mile for the legs to warm up, but I turned it up and managed five miles in 42:37 — a cool 8:31 pace.
Music: Bob Dylan, Love and Theft
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Lee Judge, the cartoonist for the Kansas City Star, sums up the Mukasey nomination with this brilliant cartoon.
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A few weeks ago, I heard from a friend who called me out for being critical of the war in Afghanistan. He asked: How did you conclude the war in Afghanistan is an abysmal failure?
My answer was to send him this story from the New York Times, which raised serious questions about the effectiveness of our mission in Afghanistan.
Then I read this column today in The Baltimore Sun by Thomas Schaller, which essentially calls the Afghanistan war a failure on a par with Iraq. Schaller opens by describing the situation on the ground– in language that sounds an awful lot like the situation on the ground in Mesapotamia.
If we have not already lost this war, surely we are barreling headlong toward defeat.
Americans, of course, would have preferred that things turned out differently. We supported the invasion because something needed to be done. Initially, President Bush’s decision to send in our troops was very popular. And, as is his wont, Mr. Bush continues to avoid any defeatist talk, reinforcing his belief that anything other than unvarnished optimism wouldn’t be presidential.
At a White House press conference this year, in fact, the president stated unambiguously that America’s goal should be “to help the people of that country to defeat the terrorists and establish a stable, moderate and democratic state that respects the rights of its citizens, governs its territory effectively, and is a reliable ally in this war against extremists and terrorists.”
But that’s just not happening, and Mr. Bush simply refuses to come to terms with realities that prevent the goals from succeeding. These realities cannot be wished or ignored away.
For starters, we know that violence and bloodshed are daily features of the lives of our troops and the people whose land we occupy. The fatality rates for American soldiers since January 2005 are twice what they were before that. Nonfatal injury rates have also skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, other injuries – of the type that have nothing to do with violence and everything to do with the suffering of daily tragedies, large and small – are undermining our ability to win the “hearts and minds” war. We exacerbate existing local tensions when we fail to meet civilians’ basic needs; we turn potential friends into enemies. If electricity is unavailable for all but a few hours each day and clean water is scarce, who has the time or inclination to ponder concepts such as freedom and democracy?
Worse, many innocents are living on the run, refugees either inside their country or abroad. That’s why there’s so much violence in border areas, where arriving terrorists are spoiling for a fight and traumatized families heading in the opposite direction try to avoid further victimization. Naturally, al-Qaida continues to stir the pot.
As Peter Bergen reports in “War on Error,” a recent, aptly titled New Republic piece, lethal violence is ramping up. “In 2006, IED attacks doubled, assaults on international forces tripled, and suicide bombings quintupled,” he writes. “And 2007 is shaping up to be even worse, with suicide bombings up 69 percent from last year.” The bloodthirsty operatives of al-Qaida, warns Mr. Bergen, are growing stronger and bolder.
Sounds like Baghdad in the summer, right? It’s not. It is Afghanistan, the good war, the first front in the battle against Islamo-fascism and international terrorism. Apparently, things are not going quite so well these days:
The sad, embarrassing fact is that six years after the United States and its coalition allies arrived in Afghanistan, that country remains chaotic and unstable. This despite the fact that one of the main reasons we went there in the first place was to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks; he remains at large.
As Mr. Bergen notes, Afghanistan is half again the size of Iraq and more populous, and yet we spend a pittance there compared with the tens of billions we dump monthly into Iraq. Would this resource imbalance have been different if the former were sitting atop huge oil reserves?
Afghanistan, as he says, is lost.
lost in the sense of failure but also in the sense of being forgotten. Even if by some miracle the situation in Iraq turned around 180 degrees during President Bush’s remaining 15 months, our self-described “war president” would still leave office having lost one far-more-winnable war.
And don’t bet on things turning around in Iraq, not in any meaningful way. So what will be the Bush legacy? Two lost wars? A mangling of America’s reputation abroad?
Take your pick.
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The American Bar Association issued a report this week that shows that the problems a state commission found with the death penalty earlier this year were not anomolies and were, in fact, systemic deficiencies that cannot be repaired.
Studying eight states, the ABA discovered:
- Every state studied appears to have significant racial disparities in imposing the death penalty, particularly associated with the race of the victim, but little has been done to rectify the problem.
- Judicial elections mean that electoral pressures may influence judicial decisions, and candidates for judges in many states discuss their views of the death penalty during campaigns.
- States often do not have policies in place to ensure that lawyers representing people with mental retardation or mental illness fully appreciate the significance of their clients’ mental disabilities. And states do not formally commute death sentences when an inmate is found incompetent, and they do not require instruction of jurors on the distinction between insanity as a defense and reliance on a mental disorder or disability to mitigate sentencing.
- In clemency proceedings, most states fail to specify the type or breadth of review, or to require the clemency decisionmaker to explain reasons for their decisions.
- Most states have had at least one serious incident of mistakes or fraud in crime laboratories. They often do not require that crime laboratories and medical examiner offices be accredited, or that crime laboratories make their standards and procedures public. The laboratories are often seriously underfunded and do not use the most sophisticated testing procedures.
- With respect to collection, preservation and testing of biological evidence, most states do not require preservation of the evidence through the entire legal process until the accused is either released from prison or executed. As scientific testing capability advances, evidence that could prove innocence may be destroyed.
- Testing statutes create onerous procedural hurdles impeding the ability of convicted persons to file for and obtain DNA testing.
- States do not require law enforcement agencies to adopt procedures comporting with national best practices on identification and interrogation, and most states do not require law enforcement agencies to videotape or audiotape custodial interrogations in murder cases.
- States are not establishing policies or requiring prosecutors’ offices to establish policies on exercise of prosecutorial discretion, or on evaluating cases that rely on evidence such as testimony of jailhouse snitches, or on eyewitness identification or confessions, considered as less reliable evidence. Many states don’t require specialized training for capital cases, and most states have not disciplined the prosecutors even when serious misconduct has been found.
- Some states fail to provide for appointment of defense counsel in post-conviction proceedings, and all states fail to provide for appointment of counsel in clemency proceedings. Capital indigent defense is generally significantly underfunded, and compensation paid to appointed capital defense attorneys is often inadequate. Many states require only minimal training and experience for defense counsel in capital cases.
- Some states do not require a meaningful proportionality review to determine whether death sentences are imposed on similarly situated defendants and few, if any, maintain databases adequate to achieve such a review.
- With respect to post-conviction review, many states provide unreasonably short time periods in which to petition the courts for review, and most states allow judges in such proceedings to adopt findings of fact and conclusions of law proposed by one party, potentially undermining the judge’s exercise of independent judgment. Some states assign post-conviction review of whether errors were made at trial to the same judge who presided at trial, and many states make it difficult to obtain discovery, or evidentiary hearings.
- Jury instructions often are poorly written and poorly conveyed, making it difficult for jurors to understand their roles and responsibilities. States often fail to provide instructions in writing, and instructions fail to define important terms, or to tell jurors that they may impose life sentences even if there are no mitigating factors or where aggravating factors are proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
The list of problems is long and consistent across state borders, similar to the problems found in Illinois, New Jersey and so many other places not studied. Five of the state study groups commissioned by the ABA caled for moratoriums — and the ABA is calling for a national moratorium.
And that’s fine as far as it goes.
But a moratorium is only useful if it leads to the eventual abolition of capital punishment — a barbaric punishment that has been abandoned by the rest of the western world and a growing number of countries in the developing world.
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More evidence that popular radio is not worth listening to from this column by Roger Friedman on FoxNews.com (I first saw this on Steven Hart’s Opinion Mill). According to Friedman, Clear Channel has opted not to play the No. 1 album in the country — Bruce Springsteen’s Magic — on its classic rock stations.
But it’s OK to play old Springsteen tracks such as “Dancing in the Dark,” “Born to Run” and “Born in the USA.”
Just no new songs by Springsteen, even though it’s likely many radio listeners already own the album and would like to hear it mixed in with the junk offered on radio.
Why? One theory, says a longtime rock insider, “is that the audience knows those songs. Of course, they’ll never know these songs if no one plays them.”
“Magic,” by the way, has sold more than 500,000 copies since its release on Oct. 2 and likely will hit the million mark. That’s not a small achievement these days, and one that should be embraced by Clear Channel.
But what a situation: The No. 1 album is not being played on any radio stations, according to Radio & Records, which monitors such things. Nothing. The rock songs aren’t on rock radio, and the two standout “mellow” tracks — “Magic” and “Devil’s Arcade” — aren’t even on “lite” stations.
The singles-kinda hits, “Radio Nowhere” and “Living in the Future” — which would have been hits no questions asked in the ’70s, ’80s and maybe even the ’90s, also are absent from Top 40.
What to do? Columbia Records is said to be readying a remixed version of “The Girls in their Summer Clothes,” a poppy Beach Boys-type track that has such a catchy hook fans were singing along to it at live shows before they had the album. Bruce insiders are hopeful that with a push from Sony, “Girls” will triumph.
I’m not so sure.
Clear Channel seems to have sent a clear message to other radio outlets that at age 58, Springsteen simply is too old to be played on rock stations. This completely absurd notion is one of many ways Clear Channel has done more to destroy the music business than downloading over the last 10 years. It’s certainly what’s helped create satellite radio, where Springsteen is a staple and even has his own channel on Sirius.
It’s not just Springsteen. There is no sign at major radio stations of new albums by John Fogerty or Annie Lennox, either. The same stations that should be playing Santana’s new singles with Chad Kroeger or Tina Turner are avoiding them, too.
Like Springsteen, these “older” artists have been relegated to something called Triple A format stations — i.e. either college radio or small artsy stations such as WFUV in the Bronx, N.Y., which are immune from the Clear Channel virus of pre-programming and where the number of plays per song is a fraction of what it is on commercial radio.
That’s why I rarely listen to commercial radio — I tend to tune in to WXPN or the local college stations — and probably never will again.
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Hank Kalet 
