Sense and Nonsense

Lower the Drinking Age

Maybe you saw the article in this morning's New York Times about the move by a group of college presidents to push for a lowering of the drinking age to 18.  Their point is a good one.  They argue that having the drinking age at 21 has not worked, that it "has fostered a culture of clandestine binge drinking and that students’ use of fake identification has eroded their respect for the law."  Anyone who has spent any time at all on a college campus knows how serious this problem is. 

Megan McArdle, siding with the college presidents, repeats the common observation about the idiocy of perpetuating a situation in which someone can be sent off to war in Iraq but not allowed to buy a beer.  But she then addresses the question of how to handle drunk drivers, pointing to some very sensible ideas on that.

Outlawing an Herbal High

Today's Boston Globe reports that the Massachusetts state legislature is working on a bill to outlaw salvia, an herb that "produces short, intense hallucinogenic trips when smoked." 

Salvia is legal now in Massachusetts, as it is in most states.  It should stay that way.  For reasons why, see James Tierney's article in the Boston Phoenix.

More Perversions of Justice

Remember that great movie from 2003 with John Cusack, Runaway Jury?  Gene Hackman plays a jury consultant, a sleaze-for-hire who helps advise the defense on selection of a jury that will maximize the possibility of an acquittal.  Think it's fiction?  Think again.

Diane Dimond has a great article at The Huffington Post about how these jury consultants operate and what they deliver.  And what is that?  A perverted system.  Read her article to see how.

End to the "State of Exception"?

Scott Horton has written an excellent article for Harper's on yesterday's Supreme Court decision in the Boumediene case. An excerpt:

For the past seven years, Americans have witnessed an effort to engineer a “state of exception” to the American constitution. Its key element has been a new definition of war—the “war on terror”—which has neither territorial nor temporal boundaries. This war, as the Bush Administration crafted and advanced it, never served the security interests of the United States. Military analysts and advisors were firm from the outset in opposing it.

"Executive Privilege on Steroids"

David Iglesias has an interesting article over at Slate in which he takes the Bush Administration to task for its egregious claims of executive privilege.  Starting with a look at the Nixon privilege claims  in the Watergate tapes case (and the Supreme Court's decision on that in Nixon v. U.S.), Iglesias goes on to examine Bush's claims of privilege in an effort to keep his advisers from having to appear before Congress to testify on the matter of the Administration's firing of U.S. Attorneys.

Bankable excerpt:

The Bush administration stretched that privilege like cheap spandex in an attempt to have it cover "free and open discussions and deliberations [that] occur among his advisors and between those advisors and others within and outside the Executive Branch."

Radicals at Ranch Tierney

To those of you who suspect that too much radical-flavored KoolAid has been served over the years here at Ranch Tierney, this post will give you more evidence for that view.

Our son James is heading to law school next year.  This year he's been working in Cambridge for a prominent civil-liberties attorney, Harvey Silverglate.  He's also been doing a lot of writing. His most recent article appeared today on the website of the Boston Phoenix. It's titled "The Bong Show."  He addresses the effort by some Massachusetts legislators to criminalize salvia -- "a 'god-creating' substance that causes vivid spiritual feelings, altered perception, and hallucinations."  (Holy cow!) He takes a look at our experience with criminalization of substances and suggests this may not be the best way to go. Great article.

Get that young man a bong!

Judicial Elections: Perversions of Justice

A week ago Sunday, a post here mentioned John Grisham's new novel, The Appeal, which I just finished reading.  The general topic of the novel is the misguided practice, in place in thirty-eight American states,  of electing appellate-level judges.  Grisham's book is dark and cynical, describing a toxic, debased political system.  But there's nothing unreal about it.  A recent column in the Wall Street Journal by John Fund, a WSJ columnist, extols the outcome of an election in Wisconsin last week, in which voters threw out a liberal Supreme Court justice in favor of a conservative county judge whose campaign was backed by wealthy business interests. Fund ends his rhapsody on this sanguine note: "This fall, voters in other states ranging from Louisiana to Michigan will face pivotal elections over what direction their own state supreme courts will go. Inevitably, a chorus will complain about the amount of money spent on those races by outside groups.  No doubt the campaigns will be messy.  But that's a small price to pay to ensure that voters remain a check on the judiciary."  Anyone with even a remote understanding of the legalized corruption countenanced by current campaign-finance laws will not share Fund's upbeat assessment.  And for those without such an understanding, Grisham's novel offers a sobering primer on the subject.