Why Abortion is Moral -- By Elroy: "All of the arguments against abortion boil down to six specific questions. The first five deal with the nature of the zygote-embryo-fetus growing inside a mother's womb. The last one looks at the morality of the practice. These questions are:
1. Is it alive?
2. Is it human?
3. Is it a person?
4. Is it physically independent?
5. Does it have human rights?
6. Is abortion murder?
All of the arguments against abortion boil down to six specific questions. The first five deal with the nature of the zygote-embryo-fetus growing inside a mother's womb. The last one looks at the morality of the practice. These questions are:
1. Is it alive?
2. Is it human?
3. Is it a person?
4. Is it physically independent?
5. Does it have human rights?
6. Is abortion murder?
Let's take a look at each of these questions. We'll show how anti-abortionists use seemingly logical answers to back up their cause, but then we'll show how their arguments actually support the fact that abortion is moral.
1. Is it alive?
Yes. Pro Choice supporters who claim it isn't do themselves and their cause a disservice. Of course it's alive. It's a biological mechanism that converts nutrients and oxygen into energy that causes its cells to divide, multiply, and grow. It's alive.
Anti-abortion activists often mistakenly use this fact to support their cause. "Life begins at conception" they claim. And they would be right. The genesis of a new human life begins when the egg with 23 chromosomes joins with a sperm with 23 chromosomes and creates a fertilized cell, called a zygote, with 46 chromosomes. The single-cell zygote contains all the DNA necessary to grow into an independent, conscious human being. It is a potential person.
But being alive does not give the zygote full human rights - including the right not to be aborted during its gestation.
A single-cell ameba also coverts nutrients and oxygen into biological energy that causes its cells to divide, multiply and grow. It also contains a full set of its own DNA. It shares everything in common with a human zygote except that it is not a potential person. Left to grow, it will always be an ameba - never a human person. It is just as alive as the zygote, but we would never defend its human rights based solely on that fact.
And neither can the anti-abortionist, which is why we must answer the following questions as well.
2. Is it human?
Yes. Again, Pro Choice defenders stick their feet in their mouths when they defend abortion by claiming the zygote-embryo-fetus isn't human. It is human. Its DNA is that of a human. Left to grow, it will become a full human person.
And again, anti-abortion activists often mistakenly use this fact to support their cause. They are fond of saying, "an acorn is an oak tree in an early stage of development; likewise, the zygote is a human being in an early stage of development." And they would be right. But having a full set of human DNA does not give the zygote full human rights - including the right not to be aborted during its gestation.
Don't believe me? Here, try this: reach up to your head, grab one strand of hair, and yank it out. Look at the base of the hair. That little blob of tissue at the end is a hair follicle. It also contains a full set of human DNA. Granted it's the same DNA pattern found in every other cell in your body, but in reality the uniqueness of the DNA is not what makes it a different person. Identical twins share the exact same DNA, and yet we don't say that one is less human than the other, nor are two twins the exact same person. It's not the configuration of the DNA that makes a zygote human; it's simply that it has human DNA. Your hair follicle shares everything in common with a human zygote except that it is a little bit bigger and it is not a potential person. (These days even that's not an absolute considering our new-found ability to clone humans from existing DNA, even the DNA from a hair follicle.)
Your hair follicle is just as human as the zygote, but we would never defend its human rights based solely on that fact.
And neither can the anti-abortionist, which is why the following two questions become critically important to the abortion debate.
3. Is it a person?
No. It's merely a potential person.
Webster's Dictionary lists a person as "being an individual or existing as an indivisible whole; existing as a distinct entity." Anti-abortionists claim that each new fertilized zygote is already a new person because its DNA is uniquely different than anyone else's. In other words, if you're human, you must be a person.
Of course we've already seen that a simple hair follicle is just as human as a single-cell zygote, and, that unique DNA doesn't make the difference since two twins are not one person. It's quite obvious, then, that something else must occur to make one human being different from another. There must be something else that happens to change a DNA-patterned body into a distinct person. (Or in the case of twins, two identically DNA-patterned bodies into two distinct persons.)
There is, and most people inherently know it, but they have trouble verbalizing it for one very specific reason.
The defining mark between something that is human and someone who is a person is 'consciousness.' It is the self-aware quality of consciousness that makes us uniquely different from others. This self-awareness, this sentient consciousness is also what separates us from every other animal life form on the planet. We think about ourselves. We use language to describe ourselves. We are aware of ourselves as a part of the greater whole.
The problem is that consciousness normally doesn't occur until months, even years, after a baby is born. This creates a moral dilemma for the defender of abortion rights. Indeed, they inherently know what makes a human into a person, but they are also aware such individual personhood doesn't occur until well after birth. To use personhood as an argument for abortion rights, therefore, also leads to the argument that it should be okay to kill a 3-month-old baby since it hasn't obtained consciousness either.
Anti-abortionists use this perceived problem in an attempt to prove their point. In a debate, a Pro Choice defender will rightly state that the difference between a fetus and a full-term human being is that the fetus isn't a person. The anti-abortion activist, being quite sly, will reply by asking his opponent to define what makes someone into a person. Suddenly the Pro Choice defender is at a loss for words to describe what he or she knows innately. We know it because we lived it. We know we have no memory of self-awareness before our first birthday, or even before our second. But we also quickly become aware of the "problem" we create if we say a human doesn't become a person until well after its birth. And we end up saying nothing. The anti-abortionist then takes this inability to verbalize the nature of personhood as proof of their claim that a human is a person at conception.
But they are wrong. Their "logic" is greatly flawed. Just because someone is afraid to speak the truth doesn't make it any less true.
And in reality, the Pro Choice defender's fear is unfounded. They are right, and they can state it without hesitation. A human indeed does not become a full person until consciousness. And consciousness doesn't occur until well after the birth of the child. But that does not automatically lend credence to the anti-abortionist's argument that it should, therefore, be acceptable to kill a three-month-old baby because it is not yet a person.
It is still a potential person. And after birth it is an independent potential person whose existence no longer poses a threat to the physical wellbeing of another. To understand this better, we need to look at the next question.
4. Is it physically independent?
No. It is absolutely dependent on another human being for its continued existence. Without the mother's life-giving nutrients and oxygen it would die. Throughout gestation the zygote-embryo-fetus and the mother's body are symbiotically linked, existing in the same physical space and sharing the same risks. What the mother does affects the fetus. And when things go wrong with the fetus, it affects the mother.
Anti-abortionists claim fetal dependence cannot be used as an issue in the abortion debate. They make the point that even after birth, and for years to come, a child is still dependent on its mother, its father, and those around it. And since no one would claim its okay to kill a child because of its dependency on others, we can't, if we follow their logic, claim it's okay to abort a fetus because of its dependence.
What the anti-abortionist fails to do, however, is differentiate between physical dependence and social dependence. Physical dependence does not refer to meeting the physical needs of the child - such as in the anti-abortionist's argument above. That's social dependence; that's where the child depends on society - on other people - to feed it, clothe it, and love it. Physical dependence occurs when one life form depends solely on the physical body of another life form for its existence.
Physical dependence was cleverly illustrated back in 1971 by philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson. She created a scenario in which a woman is kidnapped and wakes up to find she's been surgically attached to a world-famous violinist who, for nine months, needs her body to survive. After those nine months, the violinist can survive just fine on his own, but he must have this particular woman in order to survive until then.
Thompson then asks if the woman is morally obliged to stay connected to the violinist who is living off her body. It might be a very good thing if she did - the world could have the beauty that would come from such a violinist - but is she morally obliged to let another being use her body to survive?
This very situation is already conceded by anti-abortionists. They claim RU-486 should be illegal for a mother to take because it causes her uterus to flush its nutrient-rich lining, thus removing a zygote from its necessary support system and, therefore, ending its short existence as a life form. Thus the anti-abortionist's own rhetoric only proves the point of absolute physical dependence.
This question becomes even more profound when we consider a scenario where it's not an existing person who is living off the woman's body, but simply a potential person, or better yet, a single-cell zygote with human DNA that is no different than the DNA in a simple hair follicle.
To complicate it even further, we need to realize that physical dependence also means a physical threat to the life of the mother. The World Health Organization reports that nearly 670,000 women die from pregnancy-related complications each year (this number does not include abortions). That's 1,800 women per day. We also read that in developed countries, such as the United States and Canada, a woman is 13 times more likely to die bringing a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion.
Therefore, not only is pregnancy the prospect of having a potential person physically dependent on the body of one particular women, it also includes the women putting herself into a life-threatening situation for that potential person.
Unlike social dependence, where the mother can choose to put her child up for adoption or make it a ward of the state or hire someone else to take care of it, during pregnancy the fetus is absolutely physically dependent on the body of one woman. Unlike social dependence, where a woman's physical life is not threatened by the existence of another person, during pregnancy, a woman places herself in the path of bodily harm for the benefit of a DNA life form that is only a potential person - even exposing herself to the threat of death.
This brings us to the next question: do the rights of a potential person supercede the rights of the mother to control her body and protect herself from potential life-threatening danger?
5. Does it have human rights?
Yes and No.
A potential person must always be given full human rights unless its existence interferes with the rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness of an already existing conscious human being. Thus, a gestating fetus has no rights before birth and full rights after birth.
If a fetus comes to term and is born, it is because the mother chooses to forgo her own rights and her own bodily security in order to allow that future person to gestate inside her body. If the mother chooses to exercise control over her own body and to protect herself from the potential dangers of childbearing, then she has the full right to terminate the pregnancy.
Anti-abortion activists are fond of saying "The only difference between a fetus and a baby is a trip down the birth canal." This flippant phrase may make for catchy rhetoric, but it doesn't belie the fact that indeed "location" makes all the difference in the world.
It's actually quite simple. You cannot have two entities with equal rights occupying one body. One will automatically have veto power over the other - and thus they don't have equal rights. In the case of a pregnant woman, giving a "right to life" to the potential person in the womb automatically cancels out the mother's right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
After birth, on the other hand, the potential person no longer occupies the same body as the mother, and thus, giving it full human rights causes no interference with another's right to control her body. Therefore, even though a full-term human baby may still not be a person, after birth it enjoys the full support of the law in protecting its rights. After birth its independence begs that it be protected as if it were equal to a fully-conscience human being. But before birth its lack of personhood and its threat to the women in which it resides makes abortion a completely logical and moral choice.
Which brings us to our last question, which is the real crux of the issue....
6. Is abortion murder?
No. Absolutely not.
It's not murder if it's not an independent person. One might argue, then, that it's not murder to end the life of any child before she reaches consciousness, but we don't know how long after birth personhood arrives for each new child, so it's completely logical to use their independence as the dividing line for when full rights are given to a new human being.
Using independence also solves the problem of dealing with premature babies. Although a preemie is obviously still only a potential person, by virtue of its independence from the mother, we give it the full rights of a conscious person. This saves us from setting some other arbitrary date of when we consider a new human being a full person. Older cultures used to set it at two years of age, or even older. Modern religious cultures want to set it at conception, which is simply wishful thinking on their part. As we've clearly demonstrated, a single-cell zygote is no more a person that a human hair follicle.
But that doesn't stop religious fanatics from dumping their judgements and their anger on top of women who choose to exercise the right to control their bodies. It's the ultimate irony that people who claim to represent a loving God resort to scare tactics and fear to support their mistaken beliefs.
It's even worse when you consider that most women who have an abortion have just made the most difficult decision of their life. No one thinks abortion is a wonderful thing. No one tries to get pregnant just so they can terminate it. Even though it's not murder, it still eliminates a potential person, a potential daughter, a potential son. It's hard enough as it is. Women certainly don't need others telling them it's a murder.
It's not. On the contrary, abortion is an absolutely moral choice for any woman wishing to control her body.
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Sunday, July 20, 2008
Dominionism, the movement to replace the Constitution with a theocracy
Dominionism, the movement to replace the Constitution with a theocracy: "What is Dominionism?
Straw Jeremiads and Apologists for Christian Nationalism
By Chip Berlet, (Senior Analyst, Political Research Associates), February 12, 2007
What is Dominionism?
Straw Jeremiads and Apologists for Christian Nationalism
By Chip Berlet, (Senior Analyst, Political Research Associates), February 12, 2007
At Talk to Action we try to remain respectful of religious and spiritual beliefs (and secular, agnostic and atheist beliefs), which we feel is the intent and content of the founding documents of our pluralist society. We also try to maintain a distinction between serious concerns over theocratic, dominionist, and Christian Nationalist tendencies, and hyperbolic claims that tend to demonize people of faith and exaggerate the problem in a way that paints all Christians with a broad brush.
Now the backlash against our concerns (and those of others worried about these trends) has reached a new level of sophistication in right-wing intellectual journals. In their recent articles, Ross Douthat in First Things and Mary Eberstadt in Policy Review serve as apologists for Christian Nationalist tendencies by creating what I call Straw Jeremiads, and then easily setting them on fire. Continue.
Soldiers of Christ II
Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters
By Chris Hedges, Harpers Magazine, Posted on Monday, May 30, 2005. Originally from May 2005
Hedges' combines first-hand reporting with interpretation in one of the first (and still few) widely read reports on dominionists inside and near our governments, working to parlay the religious right's swelling political power into theocracy. Click here for the report
Dominionism 101
The best click-to briefing on the basics of Dominionism resides on the Religious Tolerance website, whose definition begins:
Dominionism, Dominion Theology, Christian Reconstructionism, Theocratic Dominionism, and Theonomy are not denominations or faith groups. Rather, they are interrelated beliefs which are followed by members of a wide range of Christian denominations. They have no connection at all to Reconstructionist Judaism, which is a liberal group within Judaism."
The Religious Tolerance definition continues, noting that, generally speaking
Dominionism & Dominion Theology are derived from Genesis 1:26 of the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament):
"Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground.'"
Most Christians interpret this verse as meaning that God gave mankind dominion over the animal kingdom. Dominion theologians believe that that this verse commands Christians to bring all societies, around the world, under the rule of the Word of God.
We encourage you to read the entire Religious Tolerance page, by clicking here.
While Religious Tolerance presents the unalloyed tenets of dominionist theologians (execution for non-marital sex, blasphemy, heresy, for example), another excellent website, Theocracy Watch, presents essays and analysis focused on the ascendance of dominionism among Republicans in Congress. That's where the legislation creating a theocracy will be made, not according to a dominionist playbook, but as opportunity presents itself.
Theocracy Watch, sees a dominionist trend in the September 2005 "yes" vote by 210 Republicans (and 10 Democrats) to allow religious discrimination in hiring Head Start staff (HR 2123). Another indication of the theocratic trend of the Republicans is the high ratings they earn on "report cards" issued by such powerful religious-right organizations as the Family Values Coalition, Focus on the Family, and the Christian Coalition. Theocracy Watch also presents material on how fundamentalist activists are pressing their agendas on the state level. Please click here to open the Theocracy Watch page.
Center Closed to Make Way for Expanded Media Ministry
Email Letter from D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, June 08, 2007
In this email, Coral Ridge Ministries announces that, over a month ago, it shut down its Center for Reclaiming America for Christ. The email says: "This unanimous action by the members of the Board of Coral Ridge Ministries -- each one a close friend or associate of Dr. D. James Kennedy, who continues to recover from a cardiac arrest suffered in December -- came after a lengthy period of review. It was taken as part of a larger ministry restructuring designed to redirect Coral Ridge Ministries back to its core mission -- doing media ministry." It goes on to assure that Coral Ridge Ministries will continue to host an annual Reclaiming America for Christ conference. Click here.
The Crusaders
Christian evangelicals are plotting to remake America in their own image
by Bob Moser, Rolling Stone, April 5, 2005
It's February, and 900 of America's staunchest Christian fundamentalists have gathered in Fort Lauderdale to look back on what they accomplished in last year's election -- and to plan what's next. As they assemble in the vast sanctuary of Coral Ridge Presbyterian, with all fifty state flags dangling from the rafters, three stadium-size video screens flash the name of the conference: RECLAIMING AMERICA FOR CHRIST. These are the evangelical activists behind the nation's most effective political machine -- one that brought more than 4 million new Christian voters to the polls last November, sending George W. Bush back to the White House and thirty-two new pro-lifers to Congress. But despite their unprecedented power, fundamentalists still see themselves as a persecuted minority, waging a holy war against the godless forces of secularism. To rouse themselves, they kick off the festivities with "Soldiers of the Cross, Arise," the bloodthirstiest tune in all of Christendom: "Seize your armor, gird it on/Now the battle will be won/Soon, your enemies all slain/Crowns of glory you shall gain."
Meet the Dominionists -- biblical literalists who believe God has called them to take over the U.S. government. As the far-right wing of the evangelical movement, Dominionists are pressing an agenda that makes Newt Gingrich's Contract With America look like the Communist Manifesto. They want to rewrite schoolbooks to reflect a Christian version of American history, pack the nation's courts with judges who follow Old Testament law, post the Ten Commandments in every courthouse and make it a felony for gay men to have sex and women to have abortions. In Florida, when the courts ordered Terri Schiavo's feeding tube removed, it was the Dominionists who organized round-the-clock protests and issued a fiery call for Gov. Jeb Bush to defy the law and take Schiavo into state custody. Their ultimate goal is to plant the seeds of a "faith-based" government that will endure far longer than Bush's presidency -- all the way until Jesus comes back. Continue.
Reconstruction: the movement for Christian dominion
Theocrats in Toccoa
You don't believe as they do? You're in big trouble
By John F. Sugg, Creative Loafing (Atlanta's alternative news weekly), June 7, 2006
"Toccoa -- Two fellows materialized in Georgia last month and harangued 600 true believers on the gospel of a thoroughly theocratic America. Along with lesser lights of the religious right who spoke, the men called for nothing short of the overthrow of the United States of America.
Herb Titus and Gary North aren't household names. But Titus has led the legal battle to plant the Ten Commandants in courthouses -- including Georgia's Barrow County. North, an apostle of the creed called Christian Reconstruction, is one of the most influential elders of American fundamentalism. "
Sugg examines the intersections of Christian Identity and Christian Reconstruction, the former the "religion" of white supremacists, the latter also known as Dominionism. He writes:
Identity and Reconstruction are both anti-Semitic. One prominent Reconstruction theologian, David Chilton, parroting Identity dogma, has written: "The god of Judaism is the devil." Of course, the "mainstream" religious right can be equally anti-Semitic -- Jerry Falwell has said the Antichrist will be a Jew.
Reconstruction dominates many ultra-right Presbyterian congregations and has incredible sway over Southern Baptists and other conservative denominations. It's behind Sadie Fields and the Georgia Christian Coalition, Roy "The Ten Commandments Judge" Moore, and Tom DeLay.
Both Identity and Reconstruction revere the antebellum South as "God-directed." Slavery was sanctioned by the Bible and, therefore, should be reinstituted. "The last vestiges of Christian society were lost in the Civil War," Chalcedon spokesman Chris Ortiz wrote me last month.
Click here to read Sugg's essay.
Invitation to a Stoning
Getting cozy with theocrats
by Walter Olson, Reason Magazine, November 1998 Print Edition
For connoisseurs of surrealism on the American right, it's hard to beat an exchange that appeared about a decade ago in the Heritage Foundation magazine Policy Review. It started when two associates of the Rev. Jerry Falwell wrote an article which criticized Christian Reconstructionism, the influential movement led by theologian Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, for advocating positions that even they as committed fundamentalists found "scary." Among Reconstructionism's highlights, the article cited support for laws "mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards." The Rev. Rushdoony fired off a letter to the editor complaining that the article had got his followers' views all wrong: They didn't intend to put drunkards to death. Continue.
The 'Threat' of Theocracy
Somebody Take a Chill Pill
By Chuck Colson, Christian Post Guest Columnist, August 5, 2006
Lately, opponents of Christian cultural engagement have been using a new word to characterize us. In addition to oldies-but-goodies like “bigots” and “fanatics,” they’re now calling us “theocrats.”
At least four books have recently been published that warn about the “theocratic” menace to American democracy, and more are on the way. Somebody hand these people a Xanax.
The word theocracy is intended to draw an analogy between Christians who oppose things like same-sex “marriage” and Islamists such as bin Laden and the Iranian mullahs. One critic, Andrew Sullivan, writing in Time magazine, made the connection explicit when he coined his own variation on the theme: “Christianist.” Continue
Book Review: Clear and Present Dangers
Review of American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips by Alan Brinkley , New York Times Book Review, March 19, 2006
"Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right." Click here
Theocons and Theocrats
by Kevin Phillips, The Nation, posted April 13, 2006 (May 1, 2006 issue)
An article adapted from Phillips's American Theocracy. Click here
Bush's wayward march
Interview with Kevin Phillips
By Bill Steigerwald, Tribune-Review, April 15, 2006
"Q: You say the last two elections have transformed the Republican Party into "the first religious party in U.S. history." How is this religious influence in politics and government hurting the country?" Continue
A Nation Under God
By John Sugg, Mother Jones Magazine, December /January 2006
"Reconstruction is the spark plug behind much of the battle over religion in politics today. The movement's founder, theologian Rousas John Rushdoony, claimed 20 million followers-a number that includes many who embrace the Reconstruction tenets without having joined any organization. Card-carrying Reconstructionists are few, but their influence is magnified by their leadership in Christian right crusades, from abortion to homeschooling.
"Reconstructionists also exert significant clout through front organizations and coalitions with other religious fundamentalists; Baptists, Anglicans, and others have deep theological differences with the movement, but they have made common cause with its leaders in groups such as the National Coalition for Revival. Reconstruction has slowly absorbed, congregation by congregation, the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (not to be confused with the progressive Presbyterian Church [USA]) and has heavily influenced others, notably the Southern Baptists." Click here to read this very important report on the Mother Jones website.
See also: Click here for an excellent chart, "Expanding Universe," by Frederick Clarkson in the same issue of Mother Jones, which maps the religious right as an astronomical chart -- with pop-up descriptions of each stellar body.
A Mission To 'Reclaim America'
Some Evangelicals Want U.S. To Have 'Biblical Worldview'
by Jane Lampman, Christian Science Monitor, March 16, 2005
For the Reback daughters, the big attraction was the famous Ten Commandments monument, brought to Florida on tour after being removed from the Alabama judicial building as unconstitutional. The youngsters - dressed in red, white, and blue - clustered proudly around the display.
For more than 900 other Christians from across the US, the draw at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church last month was a national conference aimed at "reclaiming America for Christ." The monument stood as a potent symbol of their hopes for changing the course of the nation. Continue.
SECTION: Christian Exodus, seeking dominion state by state
A small far-right group is calling people to South Carolina, where the group plans to make electoral alliances with resident conservative Christians to take over -- and Christianize -- first local governments, then the state. They plan to disregard Supreme Court rulings. Click here to read more about Christian Exodus.
The Smalkowski family, victims of an Oklahoma theocracy
Oklahoma Atheist Family Resists Right-wing Christian Regime, Prevails
by JewsOnFirst.org, July 11, 2006
Bloggers have been telling the story of Chuck (Chester) Smalkowski for the past ten days -- since his acquittal in Texas County, Oklahoma on shockingly severe felony assault charges. The charges stemmed from Smalkowski's 2004 encounter with the principal of his daughter's school; he wanted to protest his daughter's being forced to join her basketball team's prayer circle. The Smalkowskis are atheists. Continue
Straw Jeremiads and Apologists for Christian Nationalism
By Chip Berlet, (Senior Analyst, Political Research Associates), February 12, 2007
What is Dominionism?
Straw Jeremiads and Apologists for Christian Nationalism
By Chip Berlet, (Senior Analyst, Political Research Associates), February 12, 2007
At Talk to Action we try to remain respectful of religious and spiritual beliefs (and secular, agnostic and atheist beliefs), which we feel is the intent and content of the founding documents of our pluralist society. We also try to maintain a distinction between serious concerns over theocratic, dominionist, and Christian Nationalist tendencies, and hyperbolic claims that tend to demonize people of faith and exaggerate the problem in a way that paints all Christians with a broad brush.
Now the backlash against our concerns (and those of others worried about these trends) has reached a new level of sophistication in right-wing intellectual journals. In their recent articles, Ross Douthat in First Things and Mary Eberstadt in Policy Review serve as apologists for Christian Nationalist tendencies by creating what I call Straw Jeremiads, and then easily setting them on fire. Continue.
Soldiers of Christ II
Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters
By Chris Hedges, Harpers Magazine, Posted on Monday, May 30, 2005. Originally from May 2005
Hedges' combines first-hand reporting with interpretation in one of the first (and still few) widely read reports on dominionists inside and near our governments, working to parlay the religious right's swelling political power into theocracy. Click here for the report
Dominionism 101
The best click-to briefing on the basics of Dominionism resides on the Religious Tolerance website, whose definition begins:
Dominionism, Dominion Theology, Christian Reconstructionism, Theocratic Dominionism, and Theonomy are not denominations or faith groups. Rather, they are interrelated beliefs which are followed by members of a wide range of Christian denominations. They have no connection at all to Reconstructionist Judaism, which is a liberal group within Judaism."
The Religious Tolerance definition continues, noting that, generally speaking
Dominionism & Dominion Theology are derived from Genesis 1:26 of the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament):
"Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground.'"
Most Christians interpret this verse as meaning that God gave mankind dominion over the animal kingdom. Dominion theologians believe that that this verse commands Christians to bring all societies, around the world, under the rule of the Word of God.
We encourage you to read the entire Religious Tolerance page, by clicking here.
While Religious Tolerance presents the unalloyed tenets of dominionist theologians (execution for non-marital sex, blasphemy, heresy, for example), another excellent website, Theocracy Watch, presents essays and analysis focused on the ascendance of dominionism among Republicans in Congress. That's where the legislation creating a theocracy will be made, not according to a dominionist playbook, but as opportunity presents itself.
Theocracy Watch, sees a dominionist trend in the September 2005 "yes" vote by 210 Republicans (and 10 Democrats) to allow religious discrimination in hiring Head Start staff (HR 2123). Another indication of the theocratic trend of the Republicans is the high ratings they earn on "report cards" issued by such powerful religious-right organizations as the Family Values Coalition, Focus on the Family, and the Christian Coalition. Theocracy Watch also presents material on how fundamentalist activists are pressing their agendas on the state level. Please click here to open the Theocracy Watch page.
Center Closed to Make Way for Expanded Media Ministry
Email Letter from D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, June 08, 2007
In this email, Coral Ridge Ministries announces that, over a month ago, it shut down its Center for Reclaiming America for Christ. The email says: "This unanimous action by the members of the Board of Coral Ridge Ministries -- each one a close friend or associate of Dr. D. James Kennedy, who continues to recover from a cardiac arrest suffered in December -- came after a lengthy period of review. It was taken as part of a larger ministry restructuring designed to redirect Coral Ridge Ministries back to its core mission -- doing media ministry." It goes on to assure that Coral Ridge Ministries will continue to host an annual Reclaiming America for Christ conference. Click here.
The Crusaders
Christian evangelicals are plotting to remake America in their own image
by Bob Moser, Rolling Stone, April 5, 2005
It's February, and 900 of America's staunchest Christian fundamentalists have gathered in Fort Lauderdale to look back on what they accomplished in last year's election -- and to plan what's next. As they assemble in the vast sanctuary of Coral Ridge Presbyterian, with all fifty state flags dangling from the rafters, three stadium-size video screens flash the name of the conference: RECLAIMING AMERICA FOR CHRIST. These are the evangelical activists behind the nation's most effective political machine -- one that brought more than 4 million new Christian voters to the polls last November, sending George W. Bush back to the White House and thirty-two new pro-lifers to Congress. But despite their unprecedented power, fundamentalists still see themselves as a persecuted minority, waging a holy war against the godless forces of secularism. To rouse themselves, they kick off the festivities with "Soldiers of the Cross, Arise," the bloodthirstiest tune in all of Christendom: "Seize your armor, gird it on/Now the battle will be won/Soon, your enemies all slain/Crowns of glory you shall gain."
Meet the Dominionists -- biblical literalists who believe God has called them to take over the U.S. government. As the far-right wing of the evangelical movement, Dominionists are pressing an agenda that makes Newt Gingrich's Contract With America look like the Communist Manifesto. They want to rewrite schoolbooks to reflect a Christian version of American history, pack the nation's courts with judges who follow Old Testament law, post the Ten Commandments in every courthouse and make it a felony for gay men to have sex and women to have abortions. In Florida, when the courts ordered Terri Schiavo's feeding tube removed, it was the Dominionists who organized round-the-clock protests and issued a fiery call for Gov. Jeb Bush to defy the law and take Schiavo into state custody. Their ultimate goal is to plant the seeds of a "faith-based" government that will endure far longer than Bush's presidency -- all the way until Jesus comes back. Continue.
Reconstruction: the movement for Christian dominion
Theocrats in Toccoa
You don't believe as they do? You're in big trouble
By John F. Sugg, Creative Loafing (Atlanta's alternative news weekly), June 7, 2006
"Toccoa -- Two fellows materialized in Georgia last month and harangued 600 true believers on the gospel of a thoroughly theocratic America. Along with lesser lights of the religious right who spoke, the men called for nothing short of the overthrow of the United States of America.
Herb Titus and Gary North aren't household names. But Titus has led the legal battle to plant the Ten Commandants in courthouses -- including Georgia's Barrow County. North, an apostle of the creed called Christian Reconstruction, is one of the most influential elders of American fundamentalism. "
Sugg examines the intersections of Christian Identity and Christian Reconstruction, the former the "religion" of white supremacists, the latter also known as Dominionism. He writes:
Identity and Reconstruction are both anti-Semitic. One prominent Reconstruction theologian, David Chilton, parroting Identity dogma, has written: "The god of Judaism is the devil." Of course, the "mainstream" religious right can be equally anti-Semitic -- Jerry Falwell has said the Antichrist will be a Jew.
Reconstruction dominates many ultra-right Presbyterian congregations and has incredible sway over Southern Baptists and other conservative denominations. It's behind Sadie Fields and the Georgia Christian Coalition, Roy "The Ten Commandments Judge" Moore, and Tom DeLay.
Both Identity and Reconstruction revere the antebellum South as "God-directed." Slavery was sanctioned by the Bible and, therefore, should be reinstituted. "The last vestiges of Christian society were lost in the Civil War," Chalcedon spokesman Chris Ortiz wrote me last month.
Click here to read Sugg's essay.
Invitation to a Stoning
Getting cozy with theocrats
by Walter Olson, Reason Magazine, November 1998 Print Edition
For connoisseurs of surrealism on the American right, it's hard to beat an exchange that appeared about a decade ago in the Heritage Foundation magazine Policy Review. It started when two associates of the Rev. Jerry Falwell wrote an article which criticized Christian Reconstructionism, the influential movement led by theologian Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, for advocating positions that even they as committed fundamentalists found "scary." Among Reconstructionism's highlights, the article cited support for laws "mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards." The Rev. Rushdoony fired off a letter to the editor complaining that the article had got his followers' views all wrong: They didn't intend to put drunkards to death. Continue.
The 'Threat' of Theocracy
Somebody Take a Chill Pill
By Chuck Colson, Christian Post Guest Columnist, August 5, 2006
Lately, opponents of Christian cultural engagement have been using a new word to characterize us. In addition to oldies-but-goodies like “bigots” and “fanatics,” they’re now calling us “theocrats.”
At least four books have recently been published that warn about the “theocratic” menace to American democracy, and more are on the way. Somebody hand these people a Xanax.
The word theocracy is intended to draw an analogy between Christians who oppose things like same-sex “marriage” and Islamists such as bin Laden and the Iranian mullahs. One critic, Andrew Sullivan, writing in Time magazine, made the connection explicit when he coined his own variation on the theme: “Christianist.” Continue
Book Review: Clear and Present Dangers
Review of American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips by Alan Brinkley , New York Times Book Review, March 19, 2006
"Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right." Click here
Theocons and Theocrats
by Kevin Phillips, The Nation, posted April 13, 2006 (May 1, 2006 issue)
An article adapted from Phillips's American Theocracy. Click here
Bush's wayward march
Interview with Kevin Phillips
By Bill Steigerwald, Tribune-Review, April 15, 2006
"Q: You say the last two elections have transformed the Republican Party into "the first religious party in U.S. history." How is this religious influence in politics and government hurting the country?" Continue
A Nation Under God
By John Sugg, Mother Jones Magazine, December /January 2006
"Reconstruction is the spark plug behind much of the battle over religion in politics today. The movement's founder, theologian Rousas John Rushdoony, claimed 20 million followers-a number that includes many who embrace the Reconstruction tenets without having joined any organization. Card-carrying Reconstructionists are few, but their influence is magnified by their leadership in Christian right crusades, from abortion to homeschooling.
"Reconstructionists also exert significant clout through front organizations and coalitions with other religious fundamentalists; Baptists, Anglicans, and others have deep theological differences with the movement, but they have made common cause with its leaders in groups such as the National Coalition for Revival. Reconstruction has slowly absorbed, congregation by congregation, the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (not to be confused with the progressive Presbyterian Church [USA]) and has heavily influenced others, notably the Southern Baptists." Click here to read this very important report on the Mother Jones website.
See also: Click here for an excellent chart, "Expanding Universe," by Frederick Clarkson in the same issue of Mother Jones, which maps the religious right as an astronomical chart -- with pop-up descriptions of each stellar body.
A Mission To 'Reclaim America'
Some Evangelicals Want U.S. To Have 'Biblical Worldview'
by Jane Lampman, Christian Science Monitor, March 16, 2005
For the Reback daughters, the big attraction was the famous Ten Commandments monument, brought to Florida on tour after being removed from the Alabama judicial building as unconstitutional. The youngsters - dressed in red, white, and blue - clustered proudly around the display.
For more than 900 other Christians from across the US, the draw at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church last month was a national conference aimed at "reclaiming America for Christ." The monument stood as a potent symbol of their hopes for changing the course of the nation. Continue.
SECTION: Christian Exodus, seeking dominion state by state
A small far-right group is calling people to South Carolina, where the group plans to make electoral alliances with resident conservative Christians to take over -- and Christianize -- first local governments, then the state. They plan to disregard Supreme Court rulings. Click here to read more about Christian Exodus.
The Smalkowski family, victims of an Oklahoma theocracy
Oklahoma Atheist Family Resists Right-wing Christian Regime, Prevails
by JewsOnFirst.org, July 11, 2006
Bloggers have been telling the story of Chuck (Chester) Smalkowski for the past ten days -- since his acquittal in Texas County, Oklahoma on shockingly severe felony assault charges. The charges stemmed from Smalkowski's 2004 encounter with the principal of his daughter's school; he wanted to protest his daughter's being forced to join her basketball team's prayer circle. The Smalkowskis are atheists. Continue
Friday, July 18, 2008
Fisker's Karma Plug-In Hybrid to Be Made in Finland | Autopia from Wired.com
Fisker's Karma Plug-In Hybrid to Be Made in Finland | Autopia from Wired.com: "Fisker's Karma Plug-In Hybrid to Be Made in Finland
By Chuck Squatriglia EmailJuly 15, 2008 | 1:29:01 PMCategories: Hybrids, Plug-In Hybrids
Fisker_karma
Fisker's Karma Plug-In Hybrid to Be Made in Finland
By Chuck Squatriglia EmailJuly 15, 2008 | 1:29:01 PMCategories: Hybrids, Plug-In Hybrids
Fisker_karma
The Finnish firm that builds the Porsche Cayman and Boxer will build the $80,000 Karma plug-in hybrid that Fisker Automotive promises to start putting in driveways within 18 months.
Valmet Automotive has built 1 million cars in its 38-year history, most of them for Saab, and Henrik Fisker says the company's experience with premium cars will ensure his four-door sedan is built the highest standards while meeting his aggressive production timeline.
"Valmet offers us the quality and speed necessary to meet our production goals, and given that more than half of Fisker Automotive's sales are expected to be outside of North America, Valmet represents an ideal international foothold," Fisker says.
OK, so he's got someone to build the car. But has he got a car to build?
The most anyone's seen of the car is a sweet prototype at the Detroit auto show, a few pics offered by publicists and a YouTube video. But Fisker tells Wired.com he's on track to deliver "about 100 cars" by the end of 2009. That's an aggressive timeline, but Fisker says he's got three prototypes under development and "will be doing final crash testing and certification during the next 12 months."
He won't discuss what's under the hood, citing his legal fight with Tesla Motors over the work he did - or, as Tesla would argue, didn't do - designing Tesla's forthcoming electric four-door sedan. But he's got Quantum Technologies designing the hybrid drivetrain and says he's lining up a manufacturer to provide major components and an internal combustion engine. He expects to unveil a production-ready model early next year.
"It's a fast timeline," he says of the car's development schedule. "But the total timeline is 2.5 years. It's not that unusual. The only way we have a chance is to be faster and better than the big automakers. If we try to do what Toyota does, we don't have a chance."
Auto industry experts and EV advocates tell us Fisker's deal with Valmet increase his odds of success, but they say he's still got several high hurdles to clear getting the Karma crash-tested and certified in so little time. The challenge, they say, isn't building one electric vehicle. It's building a lot of them.
Photo by Fisker Automotive.
By Chuck Squatriglia EmailJuly 15, 2008 | 1:29:01 PMCategories: Hybrids, Plug-In Hybrids
Fisker_karma
Fisker's Karma Plug-In Hybrid to Be Made in Finland
By Chuck Squatriglia EmailJuly 15, 2008 | 1:29:01 PMCategories: Hybrids, Plug-In Hybrids
Fisker_karma
The Finnish firm that builds the Porsche Cayman and Boxer will build the $80,000 Karma plug-in hybrid that Fisker Automotive promises to start putting in driveways within 18 months.
Valmet Automotive has built 1 million cars in its 38-year history, most of them for Saab, and Henrik Fisker says the company's experience with premium cars will ensure his four-door sedan is built the highest standards while meeting his aggressive production timeline.
"Valmet offers us the quality and speed necessary to meet our production goals, and given that more than half of Fisker Automotive's sales are expected to be outside of North America, Valmet represents an ideal international foothold," Fisker says.
OK, so he's got someone to build the car. But has he got a car to build?
The most anyone's seen of the car is a sweet prototype at the Detroit auto show, a few pics offered by publicists and a YouTube video. But Fisker tells Wired.com he's on track to deliver "about 100 cars" by the end of 2009. That's an aggressive timeline, but Fisker says he's got three prototypes under development and "will be doing final crash testing and certification during the next 12 months."
He won't discuss what's under the hood, citing his legal fight with Tesla Motors over the work he did - or, as Tesla would argue, didn't do - designing Tesla's forthcoming electric four-door sedan. But he's got Quantum Technologies designing the hybrid drivetrain and says he's lining up a manufacturer to provide major components and an internal combustion engine. He expects to unveil a production-ready model early next year.
"It's a fast timeline," he says of the car's development schedule. "But the total timeline is 2.5 years. It's not that unusual. The only way we have a chance is to be faster and better than the big automakers. If we try to do what Toyota does, we don't have a chance."
Auto industry experts and EV advocates tell us Fisker's deal with Valmet increase his odds of success, but they say he's still got several high hurdles to clear getting the Karma crash-tested and certified in so little time. The challenge, they say, isn't building one electric vehicle. It's building a lot of them.
Photo by Fisker Automotive.
The Car of Tomorrow Has an Extension Cord
The Car of Tomorrow Has an Extension Cord: "The Car of Tomorrow Has an Extension Cord
By Chuck Squatriglia Email 1 hour ago
The Car of Tomorrow Has an Extension Cord
By Chuck Squatriglia Email 1 hour ago
Forget hydrogen. The car of the future has an extension cord and a great big laptop battery.
The next evolution of the automobile will be plug-in hybrids that get their juice from a household electrical outlet. They'll start rolling into showrooms within in 18 months. Experts say plug-in hybrids could account for about 20 percent of vehicle sales within a decade -- and half of all sales by 2050.
"It all boils down to the three ways electricity is better than gasoline," says Felix Kramer of Cal Cars, a plug-in advocacy group. "It's cleaner, it's cheaper and it's domestic."
Advocates say plug-in hybrids are the best chance to address global warming and wean the nation from oil. Consumers remain unsure about electric vehicles. Ethanol's a shaky proposition because of the food-for-fuel debate. And it'll be decades before hydrogen is a viable option. That, advocates say, leaves plug-ins as the best option. They'll go up to 40 miles on a charge; but they'll also have a gas engine to keep you going beyond that at 80 to 100 mpg or more.
People have been converting conventional hybrids to plug-ins for years, but the auto industry has been slow to catch on. Now the big automakers and start-ups like Fisker Automotive are scrambling to build them despite questions about their cost and long-term reliability. Those are just two of the issues that automakers, battery manufacturers and utility companies will discuss next week at the international Plug-In 2008 conference in San Jose.
"The discussion is no longer one of 'if,' but of 'when' and 'how,'" says Chelesa Sexton, executive director of the advocacy group Plug-In America. "This has moved beyond the grass-roots level into the policy and business arenas."
It all starts in 2010. General Motors promises to have the Chevrolet Volt rolling into showrooms by then. Toyota says it will roll out a small fleet of plug-in Prius hybrids to see how they do. Volkswagen has similar plans for its plug-in Golf. And Fisker hopes to have a few dozen pricey Karma sedans in driveways within 18 months. Ford and others are moving more slowly, aiming for 2012 and beyond.
Automakers know plug-in hybrids are their best shot at meeting tightening federal fuel-economy regulations, and California's zero-emissions-vehicle mandate requires them to put nearly 60,000 of them on the road in six years. They're also responding to a seismic change in the market as record-high gas prices have consumers, fed-up with paying through the nose for gasoline, joining environmentalists to demand fuel-efficient cars.
"For the longest time, this was seen as a crunchy environmental California movement," Sexton says. "It never was, but now there's a broad coalition of people sitting at the same table to demand these cars. There's a collective frustration with the status quo."
Critics note that most of our electricity is generated by coal or natural gas and say plug-ins don't reduce carbon dioxide, they just move it around.
Mark Duvall of the Electric Power Research Institute says they're wrong. His research shows widespread adoption of plug-in hybrids could cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than 450 million metric tons annually by 2050. That's the equivalent of removing 82.5 million gasoline vehicles from the road. "There's significant CO2 reduction with plug-in hybrids over conventional vehicles and hybrids, and that reduction increases over time," he says.
Duvall's research and a study by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory suggest that the grid could easily supply as many as 168 million plug-in vehicles.
"We can handle as many plug-in hybrids as the auto industry wants to provide and people want to drive," he says. "The supply of electricity is almost limitless."
All those plug-ins would cut petroleum consumption from 20.6 million barrels a day to 16 or 17 million. But the lithium-ion batteries that will store that electricity remain the cars' Achilles heel.
The long-term reliability of lithium-ion batteries remains unknown, and by some estimates they cost as much as $15,000. That'll make selling plug-ins at a price most people can afford a tough proposition until the cars are made in volume -- and the cost of batteries comes down. GM says it doesn't expect to turn a profit on the $40,000 Volt anytime soon.
Sales undoubtedly will start off slowly. Analysts don't expect GM to sell more than 30,000 Volts annually for the first couple of years. Other automakers will see similar sales figures until the cost of batteries comes down.
"We're looking at small volumes initially," says Mike Omotoso of J.D. Power & Associates. "But we could see critical mass by 2015."
Advocates say politicians and policymakers can help by creating tax breaks to make it easier for consumers to buy the cars and automakers to build them. Such incentives -- coupled with perks like carpool-lane access -- helped hybrids gain a foothold, they say, and could do the same for plug-ins.
The Department of Energy has handed out more than $60 million since 2006 to advance hybrid and battery technology and hopes to disburse another $62.3 million by the end of next year.
Both Barack Obama and John McCain have hailed plug-in hybrids in general -- and the Volt in particular -- in recent weeks and promised to spur development of such cars if elected. And Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, has called for Washington to go further by launching a "New Manhattan Project" that would include getting plug-in hybrids on the road in large numbers.
"We have the plug," he says. "The cars are coming. All we need is the cord."
By Chuck Squatriglia Email 1 hour ago
The Car of Tomorrow Has an Extension Cord
By Chuck Squatriglia Email 1 hour ago
Forget hydrogen. The car of the future has an extension cord and a great big laptop battery.
The next evolution of the automobile will be plug-in hybrids that get their juice from a household electrical outlet. They'll start rolling into showrooms within in 18 months. Experts say plug-in hybrids could account for about 20 percent of vehicle sales within a decade -- and half of all sales by 2050.
"It all boils down to the three ways electricity is better than gasoline," says Felix Kramer of Cal Cars, a plug-in advocacy group. "It's cleaner, it's cheaper and it's domestic."
Advocates say plug-in hybrids are the best chance to address global warming and wean the nation from oil. Consumers remain unsure about electric vehicles. Ethanol's a shaky proposition because of the food-for-fuel debate. And it'll be decades before hydrogen is a viable option. That, advocates say, leaves plug-ins as the best option. They'll go up to 40 miles on a charge; but they'll also have a gas engine to keep you going beyond that at 80 to 100 mpg or more.
People have been converting conventional hybrids to plug-ins for years, but the auto industry has been slow to catch on. Now the big automakers and start-ups like Fisker Automotive are scrambling to build them despite questions about their cost and long-term reliability. Those are just two of the issues that automakers, battery manufacturers and utility companies will discuss next week at the international Plug-In 2008 conference in San Jose.
"The discussion is no longer one of 'if,' but of 'when' and 'how,'" says Chelesa Sexton, executive director of the advocacy group Plug-In America. "This has moved beyond the grass-roots level into the policy and business arenas."
It all starts in 2010. General Motors promises to have the Chevrolet Volt rolling into showrooms by then. Toyota says it will roll out a small fleet of plug-in Prius hybrids to see how they do. Volkswagen has similar plans for its plug-in Golf. And Fisker hopes to have a few dozen pricey Karma sedans in driveways within 18 months. Ford and others are moving more slowly, aiming for 2012 and beyond.
Automakers know plug-in hybrids are their best shot at meeting tightening federal fuel-economy regulations, and California's zero-emissions-vehicle mandate requires them to put nearly 60,000 of them on the road in six years. They're also responding to a seismic change in the market as record-high gas prices have consumers, fed-up with paying through the nose for gasoline, joining environmentalists to demand fuel-efficient cars.
"For the longest time, this was seen as a crunchy environmental California movement," Sexton says. "It never was, but now there's a broad coalition of people sitting at the same table to demand these cars. There's a collective frustration with the status quo."
Critics note that most of our electricity is generated by coal or natural gas and say plug-ins don't reduce carbon dioxide, they just move it around.
Mark Duvall of the Electric Power Research Institute says they're wrong. His research shows widespread adoption of plug-in hybrids could cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than 450 million metric tons annually by 2050. That's the equivalent of removing 82.5 million gasoline vehicles from the road. "There's significant CO2 reduction with plug-in hybrids over conventional vehicles and hybrids, and that reduction increases over time," he says.
Duvall's research and a study by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory suggest that the grid could easily supply as many as 168 million plug-in vehicles.
"We can handle as many plug-in hybrids as the auto industry wants to provide and people want to drive," he says. "The supply of electricity is almost limitless."
All those plug-ins would cut petroleum consumption from 20.6 million barrels a day to 16 or 17 million. But the lithium-ion batteries that will store that electricity remain the cars' Achilles heel.
The long-term reliability of lithium-ion batteries remains unknown, and by some estimates they cost as much as $15,000. That'll make selling plug-ins at a price most people can afford a tough proposition until the cars are made in volume -- and the cost of batteries comes down. GM says it doesn't expect to turn a profit on the $40,000 Volt anytime soon.
Sales undoubtedly will start off slowly. Analysts don't expect GM to sell more than 30,000 Volts annually for the first couple of years. Other automakers will see similar sales figures until the cost of batteries comes down.
"We're looking at small volumes initially," says Mike Omotoso of J.D. Power & Associates. "But we could see critical mass by 2015."
Advocates say politicians and policymakers can help by creating tax breaks to make it easier for consumers to buy the cars and automakers to build them. Such incentives -- coupled with perks like carpool-lane access -- helped hybrids gain a foothold, they say, and could do the same for plug-ins.
The Department of Energy has handed out more than $60 million since 2006 to advance hybrid and battery technology and hopes to disburse another $62.3 million by the end of next year.
Both Barack Obama and John McCain have hailed plug-in hybrids in general -- and the Volt in particular -- in recent weeks and promised to spur development of such cars if elected. And Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, has called for Washington to go further by launching a "New Manhattan Project" that would include getting plug-in hybrids on the road in large numbers.
"We have the plug," he says. "The cars are coming. All we need is the cord."
Felons Seeking Bush Pardon Near a Record - NYTimes.com
Felons Seeking Bush Pardon Near a Record - NYTimes.com: "Felons Seeking Bush Pardon Near a Record
Felons Seeking Bush Pardon Near a Record
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By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Published: July 19, 2008
WASHINGTON — Felons are asking President Bush for pardons and commutations at historic levels as he nears his final months in office, a time when many other presidents have granted a flurry of clemency requests.
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Among the petitioners is Michael Milken, the billionaire former junk bond king turned philanthropist, who is seeking a pardon for his 1990 conviction for securities fraud, the Justice Department said. Mr. Milken sought a pardon eight years ago from President Bill Clinton, and submitted a new petition in June.
In addition, prominent federal inmates are asking Mr. Bush to commute their sentences. Among them are Randy Cunningham, the former Republican congressman from California; Edwin W. Edwards, a former Democratic governor of Louisiana; John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban; and Marion Jones, the former Olympic sprinter.
The requests are adding to a backlog of nearly 2,300 pending petitions, most from “ordinary people who committed garden-variety crimes,” said Margaret Colgate Love, a clemency lawyer.
Ms. Love, who was the United States pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997, said the backlog was overwhelming the vetting system, meaning that many petitions might not reach Mr. Bush’s desk before he leaves office.
“I have cases that date from the Clinton administration,” Ms. Love said. “I have cases that I filed in the last two or three years and have not even gotten any word about the first step of the investigation being authorized. It’s unbelievable.”
A Justice Department office with about half a dozen officials reviews petitions and recommends whether requests should be granted, although presidents are free to disregard its views. Under the Constitution, Mr. Bush can issue a commutation, which reduces a sentence, or a pardon, which forgives an offense and erases the criminal record, to anyone.
But even if a felon’s petition reaches the Oval Office, legal specialists said that most of those seeking mercy from Mr. Bush should expect to be disappointed.
The Bush administration took office amid heavy criticism of Mr. Clinton’s last-minute pardons, most notably to Marc Rich, the fugitive financier whose ex-wife had donated to Mr. Clinton’s presidential library.
Against that backdrop, Mr. Bush has made little use of his clemency powers, granting just 44 pardons and two commutations. By comparison, over eight years in office President Ronald Reagan granted clemency 409 times and Mr. Clinton 459 times. More than half of Mr. Clinton’s grants came in his final three months.
Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, declined to be interviewed about clemency plans.
Erik Ablin, a Justice Department spokesman, said the administration was committed to “giving each clemency petition received the careful review that is necessary to make an appropriate recommendation.” Mr. Ablin noted that any cases left unresolved by Mr. Bush would stay open for his successor.
As the administration wrestles with the cascade of petitions, some lawyers and law professors are raising a related question: Will Mr. Bush grant pre-emptive pardons to officials involved in controversial counterterrorism programs?
Such a pardon would reduce the risk that a future administration might undertake a criminal investigation of operatives or policy makers involved in programs that administration lawyers have said were legal but that critics say violated laws regarding torture and surveillance.
Some legal analysts said Mr. Bush might be reluctant to issue such pardons because they could be construed as an implicit admission of guilt. But several members of the conservative legal community in Washington said in interviews that they hoped Mr. Bush would issue such pardons — whether or not anyone made a specific request for one. They said people who carried out the president’s orders should not be exposed even to the risk of an investigation and expensive legal bills.
“The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations,” said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. “If we don’t protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances.”
Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, would not say whether the administration was considering pre-emptive pardons, nor whether it would rule them out.
“We are going to decline to comment on that question since it is regarding internal matters,” Ms. Lawrimore wrote in an e-mail message.
The administration would also not disclose any views submitted on petitions. The first time Mr. Milken sought a pardon, for example, prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission opposed it.
New petitions for clemency are on pace to surpass 2,100 this fiscal year, which ends in September. The record is the 1,827 petitions filed in 2001, which included Mr. Clinton’s final months.
P. S. Ruckman Jr., a political science professor at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill., said records of annual clemency petitions dated only to 1860. However, Mr. Ruckman said, it is virtually certain this year’s mark will be the most in history because the population was smaller and there were fewer federal criminal laws in the country’s early years.
The Justice Department does not release a list of petitioners, but will say whether specific people have requested pardons or commutations. The New York Times submitted nearly two dozen names of prominent felons.
The department said it had not received petitions from several recently convicted political figures, including I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff; Jack Abramoff, the former Republican lobbyist; Bob Ney, a Republican former congressman from Ohio; and George Ryan, a former Republican governor of Illinois.
The department had also not received petitions from several people associated with major financial scandals in recent years, like at Enron, WorldCom and Adelphia, nor from Conrad M. Black, the conservative former newspaper publisher, nor Martha Stewart.
It also has no petition for Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos, two former Border Patrol agents whose case has become a cause célèbre among some conservatives. They were convicted of shooting a fleeing drug smuggler along the border with Mexico and trying to cover it up. The pair are ineligible to apply for clemency through normal procedures because their cases are on appeal.
But in January 2007, Mr. Bush told a Texas television interviewer that he would review the agents’ cases; presidents are free to give pardons and commutations to people who have not submitted a petition. In July 2007, for example, Mr. Bush eliminated Mr. Libby’s prison sentence even though he had not applied for a commutation.
Far more commutation petitions are being submitted than in the past, largely because of changes to federal sentencing in the 1980s: the abolition of parole and the institution of tough sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum terms. One of the charges against the Border Patrol agents, for example, carried a mandatory 10-year sentence.
Mr. Bush has received 7,146 petitions for a reduced sentence — more than five times as many as Mr. Reagan received. But the pardon office has not grown in proportion to the workload.
Ms. Love argued that the backlog and delays were “a major flaw in the justice system” because clemency is becoming more important. Sentences are longer, and the stigma of being a felon has increased because of added background checks for many things, including gaining employment and doing volunteer work, she said.
“If we really want to give people a second chance,” Ms. Love said, “then we have to include a pardon which is reasonably available to them. It’s not, now.”
Sarah Abruzzese contributed reporting.
Felons Seeking Bush Pardon Near a Record
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By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Published: July 19, 2008
WASHINGTON — Felons are asking President Bush for pardons and commutations at historic levels as he nears his final months in office, a time when many other presidents have granted a flurry of clemency requests.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Asking for ClemencyGraphic
Asking for Clemency
Among the petitioners is Michael Milken, the billionaire former junk bond king turned philanthropist, who is seeking a pardon for his 1990 conviction for securities fraud, the Justice Department said. Mr. Milken sought a pardon eight years ago from President Bill Clinton, and submitted a new petition in June.
In addition, prominent federal inmates are asking Mr. Bush to commute their sentences. Among them are Randy Cunningham, the former Republican congressman from California; Edwin W. Edwards, a former Democratic governor of Louisiana; John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban; and Marion Jones, the former Olympic sprinter.
The requests are adding to a backlog of nearly 2,300 pending petitions, most from “ordinary people who committed garden-variety crimes,” said Margaret Colgate Love, a clemency lawyer.
Ms. Love, who was the United States pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997, said the backlog was overwhelming the vetting system, meaning that many petitions might not reach Mr. Bush’s desk before he leaves office.
“I have cases that date from the Clinton administration,” Ms. Love said. “I have cases that I filed in the last two or three years and have not even gotten any word about the first step of the investigation being authorized. It’s unbelievable.”
A Justice Department office with about half a dozen officials reviews petitions and recommends whether requests should be granted, although presidents are free to disregard its views. Under the Constitution, Mr. Bush can issue a commutation, which reduces a sentence, or a pardon, which forgives an offense and erases the criminal record, to anyone.
But even if a felon’s petition reaches the Oval Office, legal specialists said that most of those seeking mercy from Mr. Bush should expect to be disappointed.
The Bush administration took office amid heavy criticism of Mr. Clinton’s last-minute pardons, most notably to Marc Rich, the fugitive financier whose ex-wife had donated to Mr. Clinton’s presidential library.
Against that backdrop, Mr. Bush has made little use of his clemency powers, granting just 44 pardons and two commutations. By comparison, over eight years in office President Ronald Reagan granted clemency 409 times and Mr. Clinton 459 times. More than half of Mr. Clinton’s grants came in his final three months.
Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, declined to be interviewed about clemency plans.
Erik Ablin, a Justice Department spokesman, said the administration was committed to “giving each clemency petition received the careful review that is necessary to make an appropriate recommendation.” Mr. Ablin noted that any cases left unresolved by Mr. Bush would stay open for his successor.
As the administration wrestles with the cascade of petitions, some lawyers and law professors are raising a related question: Will Mr. Bush grant pre-emptive pardons to officials involved in controversial counterterrorism programs?
Such a pardon would reduce the risk that a future administration might undertake a criminal investigation of operatives or policy makers involved in programs that administration lawyers have said were legal but that critics say violated laws regarding torture and surveillance.
Some legal analysts said Mr. Bush might be reluctant to issue such pardons because they could be construed as an implicit admission of guilt. But several members of the conservative legal community in Washington said in interviews that they hoped Mr. Bush would issue such pardons — whether or not anyone made a specific request for one. They said people who carried out the president’s orders should not be exposed even to the risk of an investigation and expensive legal bills.
“The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations,” said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. “If we don’t protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances.”
Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, would not say whether the administration was considering pre-emptive pardons, nor whether it would rule them out.
“We are going to decline to comment on that question since it is regarding internal matters,” Ms. Lawrimore wrote in an e-mail message.
The administration would also not disclose any views submitted on petitions. The first time Mr. Milken sought a pardon, for example, prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission opposed it.
New petitions for clemency are on pace to surpass 2,100 this fiscal year, which ends in September. The record is the 1,827 petitions filed in 2001, which included Mr. Clinton’s final months.
P. S. Ruckman Jr., a political science professor at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill., said records of annual clemency petitions dated only to 1860. However, Mr. Ruckman said, it is virtually certain this year’s mark will be the most in history because the population was smaller and there were fewer federal criminal laws in the country’s early years.
The Justice Department does not release a list of petitioners, but will say whether specific people have requested pardons or commutations. The New York Times submitted nearly two dozen names of prominent felons.
The department said it had not received petitions from several recently convicted political figures, including I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff; Jack Abramoff, the former Republican lobbyist; Bob Ney, a Republican former congressman from Ohio; and George Ryan, a former Republican governor of Illinois.
The department had also not received petitions from several people associated with major financial scandals in recent years, like at Enron, WorldCom and Adelphia, nor from Conrad M. Black, the conservative former newspaper publisher, nor Martha Stewart.
It also has no petition for Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos, two former Border Patrol agents whose case has become a cause célèbre among some conservatives. They were convicted of shooting a fleeing drug smuggler along the border with Mexico and trying to cover it up. The pair are ineligible to apply for clemency through normal procedures because their cases are on appeal.
But in January 2007, Mr. Bush told a Texas television interviewer that he would review the agents’ cases; presidents are free to give pardons and commutations to people who have not submitted a petition. In July 2007, for example, Mr. Bush eliminated Mr. Libby’s prison sentence even though he had not applied for a commutation.
Far more commutation petitions are being submitted than in the past, largely because of changes to federal sentencing in the 1980s: the abolition of parole and the institution of tough sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum terms. One of the charges against the Border Patrol agents, for example, carried a mandatory 10-year sentence.
Mr. Bush has received 7,146 petitions for a reduced sentence — more than five times as many as Mr. Reagan received. But the pardon office has not grown in proportion to the workload.
Ms. Love argued that the backlog and delays were “a major flaw in the justice system” because clemency is becoming more important. Sentences are longer, and the stigma of being a felon has increased because of added background checks for many things, including gaining employment and doing volunteer work, she said.
“If we really want to give people a second chance,” Ms. Love said, “then we have to include a pardon which is reasonably available to them. It’s not, now.”
Sarah Abruzzese contributed reporting.
American Exception - U.S. Is Alone in Rejecting All Evidence if Police Err - Series - NYTimes.com
American Exception - U.S. Is Alone in Rejecting All Evidence if Police Err - Series - NYTimes.com: "U.S. Is Alone in Rejecting All Evidence if Police Err
From left, Associated Press; Coffee County Sheriff's Office; Detroit Police Department, via Associated Press
Dollree Mapp, left, was the defendant in a Supreme Court case that concluded that only the suppression of evidence can address wrongdoing by the police. The justices will hear arguments on Oct. 7 about whether methamphetamines and a gun belonging to Bennie Dean Herring, center, should be suppressed because of a mistake by the officers who conducted the search. Booker Hudson, right, was at the center of an earlier Supreme Court decision in which Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to say that the exclusionary rule had outlived its original purpose.
U.S. Is Alone in Rejecting All Evidence if Police Err
From left, Associated Press; Coffee County Sheriff's Office; Detroit Police Department, via Associated Press
Dollree Mapp, left, was the defendant in a Supreme Court case that concluded that only the suppression of evidence can address wrongdoing by the police. The justices will hear arguments on Oct. 7 about whether methamphetamines and a gun belonging to Bennie Dean Herring, center, should be suppressed because of a mistake by the officers who conducted the search. Booker Hudson, right, was at the center of an earlier Supreme Court decision in which Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to say that the exclusionary rule had outlived its original purpose.
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By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: July 19, 2008
Bradley Harrison was driving a rented Dodge Durango from Vancouver to Toronto in the fall of 2004 with 77 pounds of cocaine in the trunk when a police officer pulled him over, found the drugs and arrested him.
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American Exception
Suppressing the Evidence
This series of articles examines commonplace aspects of the American justice system that are actually unique in the world.
Previous Articles in the Series »
Readers' Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
* Read All Comments (120) »
A year and a half later, an Ontario trial judge ruled that the officer’s conduct was a “brazen and flagrant” violation of Mr. Harrison’s rights. The officer’s explanation for stopping and searching Mr. Harrison — confusion about a license plate — was contrived and defied credibility, the judge said, and the search “was certainly not reasonable.”
In the United States, that would have been good news for Mr. Harrison. Under the American legal system’s exclusionary rule, the evidence against Mr. Harrison would have been suppressed as the result of an unlawful search.
But both the Canadian trial judge and an appeals court refused to exclude the evidence. Mr. Harrison was sentenced to five years in prison.
“Without minimizing the seriousness of the police officer’s conduct or in any way condoning it,” the Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled in Mr. Harrison’s case in February, “the exclusion of 77 pounds of cocaine, with a street value of several millions of dollars and the potential to cause serious grief and misery to many, would bring the administration of justice into greater disrepute than would its admission.” The case is now before the Canadian Supreme Court.
The United States is the only country to take the position that some police misconduct must automatically result in the suppression of physical evidence. The rule applies whether the misconduct is slight or serious, and without regard to the gravity of the crime or the power of the evidence.
“Foreign countries have flatly rejected our approach,” said Craig M. Bradley, an expert in comparative criminal law at Indiana University. “In every other country, it’s up to the trial judge to decide whether police misconduct has risen to the level of requiring the exclusion of evidence.”
But there are signs that some justices on the United States Supreme Court may be ready to reconsider the American version of the exclusionary rule. Writing for the majority two years ago, Justice Antonin Scalia said that at least some unconstitutional conduct ought not require “resort to the massive remedy of suppressing evidence of guilt.”
The court will soon have an opportunity to clarify matters. The justices will hear arguments on Oct. 7 about whether methamphetamines and a gun belonging to Bennie Dean Herring, of Brundidge, Ala., should be suppressed because the officers who conducted the search mistakenly believed he was subject to an outstanding arrest warrant as a result of careless record-keeping by another police department.
Elsewhere in the world, courts have rejected what the Ontario appeals court in Mr. Harrison’s case called “the automatic exclusionary rule familiar to American Bill of Rights jurisprudence.”
Australia also uses a balancing test. It considers the seriousness of the police misconduct, whether superiors approved or tolerated it, the gravity of the crime and the power of the evidence. “Any unfairness to the particular accused” in most cases, the High Court of Australia wrote in 1995, “will be of no more than peripheral importance.”
The European Court of Human Rights, a notably liberal institution, refused in 2000 to require the suppression of illegally obtained evidence. Using such evidence to convict a man charged with importing heroin into England, the court said, did not make his trial unfair.
In the United States, by contrast, evidence against criminal defendants is routinely and automatically suppressed when police misconduct is found. In the last week of June, for instance, courts in Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington state suppressed evidence in cases involving drugs, guns, burglary and child pornography under the mandatory version of the exclusionary rule.
Some specialists in comparative criminal law say that the decentralized nature of American law enforcement, with thousands of local police departments around the nation, requires a more rigorous and consistent approach to deterring misconduct. The law enforcement systems in Canada and England, by contrast, are notably less fragmented and may be subject to more stringent professional discipline.
But not always. The officer who pulled over Mr. Harrison’s car in Ontario thought the car should have had a front license plate, even though the car was from Alberta, which does not require one. “We respect the decision of the courts,” said Sgt. Pierre Chamberland, a spokesman for the Ontario Provincial Police, but “their criticism alone does not by default lead to an internal complaint.”
Supporters of the American practice say that only strict application of the exclusionary rule can effectively address violations of the Fourth Amendment, which bans unreasonable searches and seizures.
“The exclusionary rule deters police misconduct in a straightforward and effective way,” said a supporting brief filed by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in the case the Supreme Court will hear in October. “It reduces the value of evidence obtained as a result of Fourth Amendment violations, and thus eliminates what would otherwise be a powerful incentive for police to engage in such violations.”
Several justices have in recent years questioned whether the rule still makes sense in light of what they called the increased professionalism of the police and the availability of alternative and arguably more direct ways to punish misconduct, including internal discipline and civil suits.
Opponents of the rule say it is indirect, incomplete and in a way perverse. Even if it deters unlawful searches, exclusion of evidence, for instance, offers no remedy to innocent people whose rights were violated by unlawful searches.
More important, as Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote in 1954, the exclusionary rule “deprives society of its remedy against one lawbreaker because he has been pursued by another.” Or, in Judge Benjamin Cardozo’s famous mocking formulation in a 1926 decision for New York’s highest court rejecting the rule: “The criminal is to go free because the constable has blundered.”
That reasoning continues to resonate with some experts.
“Lots of scholars argue that the mandatory exclusionary rule ought to be re-examined,” said David A. Sklansky, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “Those scholars are not all on the right of the political spectrum.” Professor Sklansky said he believed that the rule’s benefits continued to outweigh its costs.
Most specialists continue to support the rule, said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. “The U.S. experience is a consequence of history,” Professor Kerr said. “It’s a response to the police not following the law in the absence of this remedy.”
The idea that exclusion is the proper response to police misconduct is of relatively recent vintage.
“Supporters of the exclusionary rule cannot point to a single major statement from the Founding — or even the antebellum or Reconstruction eras — supporting Fourth Amendment exclusion of evidence in a criminal trial,” Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale, wrote in The Harvard Law Review in 1994.
According to Professor Amar, the framers of the Fourth Amendment assumed that the right it guaranteed would be enforced through civil lawsuits, not exclusion. “Both before and after the Revolution,” he wrote, “the civil trespass action tried to a jury flourished as the obvious remedy against haughty customs officers, tax collectors, constables, marshals and the like.”
These days, law professors and defense lawyers say, civil suits are less likely to be effective. Criminals whose rights have been violated are not attractive plaintiffs, and they may not have the resources to litigate, particularly from behind bars. Civil suits must, moreover, overcome various legal doctrines limiting the liability of police officers and their employers.
The Supreme Court started requiring the exclusion of improperly obtained evidence in 1914 — but only in federal cases.
For many decades afterward, the Supreme Court refused to apply the principle to states, saying they could choose the appropriate remedy for police misconduct — including civil suits and criminal prosecutions — and were not required to suppress evidence. In a 1949 decision, the court justified that position in part with a rationale now disfavored in some circles: a survey of foreign law.
“Of 10 jurisdictions within the United Kingdom and the British commonwealth of nations,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote for the majority, “none has held evidence obtained by illegal search and seizure inadmissible.” The right to be free of arbitrary police intrusion is fundamental, Justice Frankfurter wrote, but the legal remedy for the violation of that right can vary.
It was not until 1961 that the Warren Court, in one of its signature decisions, concluded in Mapp v. Ohio that only the mandatory suppression of evidence could adequately address wrongdoing by the police in all cases, state and federal.
Seven Cleveland police officers had broken into and searched Dollree Mapp’s home without producing a warrant, manhandling her and rummaging through her personal papers. Though the Ohio Supreme Court concluded that the search had been unlawful, it affirmed Ms. Mapp’s conviction on obscenity charges based on materials the police found in her home.
That was too much for a majority of the Supreme Court to stomach. “The state, by admitting evidence unlawfully seized, serves to encourage disobedience to the federal Constitution which it is bound to uphold,” Justice Tom C. Clark wrote for the court. Only the exclusion of evidence could do the job, he said; other remedies had proved “worthless and futile.”
The Supreme Court has in recent years whittled away at the exclusionary rule by limiting its applicability and creating exceptions to it. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Scalia, neither of whom is enamored with citing foreign law, each noted in recent decisions that the American approach in this area is unique and has been universally rejected elsewhere.
In a third decision two years ago, Hudson v. Michigan, Justice Scalia seemed to say that the exclusionary rule had outlived its original purpose. The case involved a conceded violation of a rule requiring police executing a search warrant to knock and announce themselves.
Much had changed since the exclusionary rule was applied to states in 1961, Justice Scalia wrote. Police departments had become more professional, he said, and various kinds of civil suits against officials and the government had become available. “As far as we know,” Justice Scalia wrote for the court, “civil liability is an effective deterrent.”
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the four dissenters, said that exclusion remains the best and most reliable deterrent. He added that the logic of the majority’s objections was not limited to “knock and announce” violations but was “an argument against the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary principle itself.”
From left, Associated Press; Coffee County Sheriff's Office; Detroit Police Department, via Associated Press
Dollree Mapp, left, was the defendant in a Supreme Court case that concluded that only the suppression of evidence can address wrongdoing by the police. The justices will hear arguments on Oct. 7 about whether methamphetamines and a gun belonging to Bennie Dean Herring, center, should be suppressed because of a mistake by the officers who conducted the search. Booker Hudson, right, was at the center of an earlier Supreme Court decision in which Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to say that the exclusionary rule had outlived its original purpose.
U.S. Is Alone in Rejecting All Evidence if Police Err
From left, Associated Press; Coffee County Sheriff's Office; Detroit Police Department, via Associated Press
Dollree Mapp, left, was the defendant in a Supreme Court case that concluded that only the suppression of evidence can address wrongdoing by the police. The justices will hear arguments on Oct. 7 about whether methamphetamines and a gun belonging to Bennie Dean Herring, center, should be suppressed because of a mistake by the officers who conducted the search. Booker Hudson, right, was at the center of an earlier Supreme Court decision in which Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to say that the exclusionary rule had outlived its original purpose.
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* Reprints
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By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: July 19, 2008
Bradley Harrison was driving a rented Dodge Durango from Vancouver to Toronto in the fall of 2004 with 77 pounds of cocaine in the trunk when a police officer pulled him over, found the drugs and arrested him.
Skip to next paragraph
American Exception
Suppressing the Evidence
This series of articles examines commonplace aspects of the American justice system that are actually unique in the world.
Previous Articles in the Series »
Readers' Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
* Read All Comments (120) »
A year and a half later, an Ontario trial judge ruled that the officer’s conduct was a “brazen and flagrant” violation of Mr. Harrison’s rights. The officer’s explanation for stopping and searching Mr. Harrison — confusion about a license plate — was contrived and defied credibility, the judge said, and the search “was certainly not reasonable.”
In the United States, that would have been good news for Mr. Harrison. Under the American legal system’s exclusionary rule, the evidence against Mr. Harrison would have been suppressed as the result of an unlawful search.
But both the Canadian trial judge and an appeals court refused to exclude the evidence. Mr. Harrison was sentenced to five years in prison.
“Without minimizing the seriousness of the police officer’s conduct or in any way condoning it,” the Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled in Mr. Harrison’s case in February, “the exclusion of 77 pounds of cocaine, with a street value of several millions of dollars and the potential to cause serious grief and misery to many, would bring the administration of justice into greater disrepute than would its admission.” The case is now before the Canadian Supreme Court.
The United States is the only country to take the position that some police misconduct must automatically result in the suppression of physical evidence. The rule applies whether the misconduct is slight or serious, and without regard to the gravity of the crime or the power of the evidence.
“Foreign countries have flatly rejected our approach,” said Craig M. Bradley, an expert in comparative criminal law at Indiana University. “In every other country, it’s up to the trial judge to decide whether police misconduct has risen to the level of requiring the exclusion of evidence.”
But there are signs that some justices on the United States Supreme Court may be ready to reconsider the American version of the exclusionary rule. Writing for the majority two years ago, Justice Antonin Scalia said that at least some unconstitutional conduct ought not require “resort to the massive remedy of suppressing evidence of guilt.”
The court will soon have an opportunity to clarify matters. The justices will hear arguments on Oct. 7 about whether methamphetamines and a gun belonging to Bennie Dean Herring, of Brundidge, Ala., should be suppressed because the officers who conducted the search mistakenly believed he was subject to an outstanding arrest warrant as a result of careless record-keeping by another police department.
Elsewhere in the world, courts have rejected what the Ontario appeals court in Mr. Harrison’s case called “the automatic exclusionary rule familiar to American Bill of Rights jurisprudence.”
Australia also uses a balancing test. It considers the seriousness of the police misconduct, whether superiors approved or tolerated it, the gravity of the crime and the power of the evidence. “Any unfairness to the particular accused” in most cases, the High Court of Australia wrote in 1995, “will be of no more than peripheral importance.”
The European Court of Human Rights, a notably liberal institution, refused in 2000 to require the suppression of illegally obtained evidence. Using such evidence to convict a man charged with importing heroin into England, the court said, did not make his trial unfair.
In the United States, by contrast, evidence against criminal defendants is routinely and automatically suppressed when police misconduct is found. In the last week of June, for instance, courts in Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington state suppressed evidence in cases involving drugs, guns, burglary and child pornography under the mandatory version of the exclusionary rule.
Some specialists in comparative criminal law say that the decentralized nature of American law enforcement, with thousands of local police departments around the nation, requires a more rigorous and consistent approach to deterring misconduct. The law enforcement systems in Canada and England, by contrast, are notably less fragmented and may be subject to more stringent professional discipline.
But not always. The officer who pulled over Mr. Harrison’s car in Ontario thought the car should have had a front license plate, even though the car was from Alberta, which does not require one. “We respect the decision of the courts,” said Sgt. Pierre Chamberland, a spokesman for the Ontario Provincial Police, but “their criticism alone does not by default lead to an internal complaint.”
Supporters of the American practice say that only strict application of the exclusionary rule can effectively address violations of the Fourth Amendment, which bans unreasonable searches and seizures.
“The exclusionary rule deters police misconduct in a straightforward and effective way,” said a supporting brief filed by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in the case the Supreme Court will hear in October. “It reduces the value of evidence obtained as a result of Fourth Amendment violations, and thus eliminates what would otherwise be a powerful incentive for police to engage in such violations.”
Several justices have in recent years questioned whether the rule still makes sense in light of what they called the increased professionalism of the police and the availability of alternative and arguably more direct ways to punish misconduct, including internal discipline and civil suits.
Opponents of the rule say it is indirect, incomplete and in a way perverse. Even if it deters unlawful searches, exclusion of evidence, for instance, offers no remedy to innocent people whose rights were violated by unlawful searches.
More important, as Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote in 1954, the exclusionary rule “deprives society of its remedy against one lawbreaker because he has been pursued by another.” Or, in Judge Benjamin Cardozo’s famous mocking formulation in a 1926 decision for New York’s highest court rejecting the rule: “The criminal is to go free because the constable has blundered.”
That reasoning continues to resonate with some experts.
“Lots of scholars argue that the mandatory exclusionary rule ought to be re-examined,” said David A. Sklansky, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “Those scholars are not all on the right of the political spectrum.” Professor Sklansky said he believed that the rule’s benefits continued to outweigh its costs.
Most specialists continue to support the rule, said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. “The U.S. experience is a consequence of history,” Professor Kerr said. “It’s a response to the police not following the law in the absence of this remedy.”
The idea that exclusion is the proper response to police misconduct is of relatively recent vintage.
“Supporters of the exclusionary rule cannot point to a single major statement from the Founding — or even the antebellum or Reconstruction eras — supporting Fourth Amendment exclusion of evidence in a criminal trial,” Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale, wrote in The Harvard Law Review in 1994.
According to Professor Amar, the framers of the Fourth Amendment assumed that the right it guaranteed would be enforced through civil lawsuits, not exclusion. “Both before and after the Revolution,” he wrote, “the civil trespass action tried to a jury flourished as the obvious remedy against haughty customs officers, tax collectors, constables, marshals and the like.”
These days, law professors and defense lawyers say, civil suits are less likely to be effective. Criminals whose rights have been violated are not attractive plaintiffs, and they may not have the resources to litigate, particularly from behind bars. Civil suits must, moreover, overcome various legal doctrines limiting the liability of police officers and their employers.
The Supreme Court started requiring the exclusion of improperly obtained evidence in 1914 — but only in federal cases.
For many decades afterward, the Supreme Court refused to apply the principle to states, saying they could choose the appropriate remedy for police misconduct — including civil suits and criminal prosecutions — and were not required to suppress evidence. In a 1949 decision, the court justified that position in part with a rationale now disfavored in some circles: a survey of foreign law.
“Of 10 jurisdictions within the United Kingdom and the British commonwealth of nations,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote for the majority, “none has held evidence obtained by illegal search and seizure inadmissible.” The right to be free of arbitrary police intrusion is fundamental, Justice Frankfurter wrote, but the legal remedy for the violation of that right can vary.
It was not until 1961 that the Warren Court, in one of its signature decisions, concluded in Mapp v. Ohio that only the mandatory suppression of evidence could adequately address wrongdoing by the police in all cases, state and federal.
Seven Cleveland police officers had broken into and searched Dollree Mapp’s home without producing a warrant, manhandling her and rummaging through her personal papers. Though the Ohio Supreme Court concluded that the search had been unlawful, it affirmed Ms. Mapp’s conviction on obscenity charges based on materials the police found in her home.
That was too much for a majority of the Supreme Court to stomach. “The state, by admitting evidence unlawfully seized, serves to encourage disobedience to the federal Constitution which it is bound to uphold,” Justice Tom C. Clark wrote for the court. Only the exclusion of evidence could do the job, he said; other remedies had proved “worthless and futile.”
The Supreme Court has in recent years whittled away at the exclusionary rule by limiting its applicability and creating exceptions to it. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Scalia, neither of whom is enamored with citing foreign law, each noted in recent decisions that the American approach in this area is unique and has been universally rejected elsewhere.
In a third decision two years ago, Hudson v. Michigan, Justice Scalia seemed to say that the exclusionary rule had outlived its original purpose. The case involved a conceded violation of a rule requiring police executing a search warrant to knock and announce themselves.
Much had changed since the exclusionary rule was applied to states in 1961, Justice Scalia wrote. Police departments had become more professional, he said, and various kinds of civil suits against officials and the government had become available. “As far as we know,” Justice Scalia wrote for the court, “civil liability is an effective deterrent.”
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the four dissenters, said that exclusion remains the best and most reliable deterrent. He added that the logic of the majority’s objections was not limited to “knock and announce” violations but was “an argument against the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary principle itself.”
Potomac Watch - WSJ.com
Potomac Watch - WSJ.com: "GOP Reformers Face a Tough Fight
July 18, 2008; Page A11
GOP Reformers Face a Tough Fight
July 18, 2008; Page A11
The 11th commandment of politics is that elected officials shall not take sides in their party primaries. Then again, Missouri Republicans are burdened with so many sins, what's one more?
For an insight as to why the GOP is down and out in Washington, take a look at Jefferson City. That's where Sarah Steelman, the state treasurer, is running in an Aug. 5 primary for the Missouri governorship. And it's where her reform campaign against earmarks and self-dealing is threatening the entrenched status quo, causing her own party to rise against her.
So bitter are House Minority Whip Roy Blunt and Sen. Kit Bond at Ms. Steelman's attack on their cherished spending beliefs that last month they rallied the entire Missouri congressional delegation to put out a public statement openly criticizing her campaign against six-term U.S. Rep. Kenny Hulshof. Joining them in their support of Mr. Hulshof has been the vast majority of the state Republican machine. Ms. Steelman is clearly doing something right.
[GOP Reformers Face a Tough Fight]
AP
Missouri State Treasurer Sarah Steelman
Her sin is in fact to belong to that new mold of Republican – Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Sens. Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint – who know it's no longer enough to simply hawk lower taxes. In 10 years as a state legislator and treasurer, her target has been the slothful political favor factory that's led Republicans away from small-government principles and outraged conservative voters.
And, oh, the howls of misery. Ms. Steelman's Republican colleagues were livid with her attempt to strip them of comfy pensions, annoyed with her "sunshine law" requiring them to be more open in their dealings, furious at her attacks on their ethanol boondoggles, appalled that she criticized GOP state Speaker Rod Jetton for moonlighting as a paid political consultant. The final straw was her temerity to make her primary race about her opponent's Washington earmarking record.
For Mr. Blunt, this is also just a wee bit personal. His son, Matt, is the outgoing governor, and has been on the receiving end of a few Treasurer Steelman blasts. Last year she stopped payment on a $70,000 secret check his administration cut to settle a sexual harassment suit against an official. Her demand for transparency blew the case into the open, infuriating GOP colleagues.
There was also Ms. Steelman's attempted cleanup of an ethanol program. The treasurer announced her office would no longer provide below-market interest rates for ethanol plants that counted state officials or their relatives among investors.
Among companies barred was Show Me Ethanol, whose shareholders included Mr. Blunt's son Andy – one of the state's top lobbyists – as well as Republican state Rep. John Quinn and his wife, not to mention the wife of Republican U.S. Rep. Sam Graves. Instead of thanking Ms. Steelman for ridding it of this conflict, in May the Missouri state senate voted to overturn her policy. It did so with a head-count vote, so as to avoid a written record.
Undaunted, Ms. Steelman has made ethics reform the centerpiece of her campaign. Mr. Hulshof has been able to tout his own history as an ethics reformer, though the fervor with which his party's regulars have embraced him has undercut that message. His real weakness is that despite conservative credentials on taxes or social issues, he's run wild with the GOP crowd that just won't relinquish the pork. Which is of course why Mr. Blunt (who pioneered House earmarks) and Mr. Bond (who sits at earmark central, the Senate appropriations committee) love him.
Ms. Steelman's ads have noted Mr. Hulshof's support for the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere, the Maine Lobster Institute, the Perfect Christmas Tree exhibit and the Woodstock concert hall. Their first debate last week centered on Mr. Hulshof's spending record. In an interview with a local reporter, he felt so cornered that he asked the interviewer what earmarks have "to do" with being "governor" anyway.
Mr. Hulshof's congressional protectors have proved equally amusing. In their statement, Messrs. Blunt, Bond and Graves, as well as Reps. Jo Ann Emerson and Todd Akin, told the public it was perfectly OK Mr. Hulshof had voted for earmarks – because they'd voted for them too!
Ms. Steelman has her own weaknesses – among them ties to the trial bar – which Mr. Hulshof is highlighting. He's also neatly spun his establishment ties into a formidable campaign war chest. Despite this, polls show he retains only a modest lead, and 30% of likely Republican voters have yet to decide. The winner faces Democratic Attorney General Jay Nixon, who currently beats both in polls.
If Ms. Steelman's bid shows anything, it's how determined a wandering Republican Party, both nationally and locally, is to hold on to the bad habits that lost them their reputation. Beware to the reformer.
Write to kim@wsj.com
July 18, 2008; Page A11
GOP Reformers Face a Tough Fight
July 18, 2008; Page A11
The 11th commandment of politics is that elected officials shall not take sides in their party primaries. Then again, Missouri Republicans are burdened with so many sins, what's one more?
For an insight as to why the GOP is down and out in Washington, take a look at Jefferson City. That's where Sarah Steelman, the state treasurer, is running in an Aug. 5 primary for the Missouri governorship. And it's where her reform campaign against earmarks and self-dealing is threatening the entrenched status quo, causing her own party to rise against her.
So bitter are House Minority Whip Roy Blunt and Sen. Kit Bond at Ms. Steelman's attack on their cherished spending beliefs that last month they rallied the entire Missouri congressional delegation to put out a public statement openly criticizing her campaign against six-term U.S. Rep. Kenny Hulshof. Joining them in their support of Mr. Hulshof has been the vast majority of the state Republican machine. Ms. Steelman is clearly doing something right.
[GOP Reformers Face a Tough Fight]
AP
Missouri State Treasurer Sarah Steelman
Her sin is in fact to belong to that new mold of Republican – Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Sens. Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint – who know it's no longer enough to simply hawk lower taxes. In 10 years as a state legislator and treasurer, her target has been the slothful political favor factory that's led Republicans away from small-government principles and outraged conservative voters.
And, oh, the howls of misery. Ms. Steelman's Republican colleagues were livid with her attempt to strip them of comfy pensions, annoyed with her "sunshine law" requiring them to be more open in their dealings, furious at her attacks on their ethanol boondoggles, appalled that she criticized GOP state Speaker Rod Jetton for moonlighting as a paid political consultant. The final straw was her temerity to make her primary race about her opponent's Washington earmarking record.
For Mr. Blunt, this is also just a wee bit personal. His son, Matt, is the outgoing governor, and has been on the receiving end of a few Treasurer Steelman blasts. Last year she stopped payment on a $70,000 secret check his administration cut to settle a sexual harassment suit against an official. Her demand for transparency blew the case into the open, infuriating GOP colleagues.
There was also Ms. Steelman's attempted cleanup of an ethanol program. The treasurer announced her office would no longer provide below-market interest rates for ethanol plants that counted state officials or their relatives among investors.
Among companies barred was Show Me Ethanol, whose shareholders included Mr. Blunt's son Andy – one of the state's top lobbyists – as well as Republican state Rep. John Quinn and his wife, not to mention the wife of Republican U.S. Rep. Sam Graves. Instead of thanking Ms. Steelman for ridding it of this conflict, in May the Missouri state senate voted to overturn her policy. It did so with a head-count vote, so as to avoid a written record.
Undaunted, Ms. Steelman has made ethics reform the centerpiece of her campaign. Mr. Hulshof has been able to tout his own history as an ethics reformer, though the fervor with which his party's regulars have embraced him has undercut that message. His real weakness is that despite conservative credentials on taxes or social issues, he's run wild with the GOP crowd that just won't relinquish the pork. Which is of course why Mr. Blunt (who pioneered House earmarks) and Mr. Bond (who sits at earmark central, the Senate appropriations committee) love him.
Ms. Steelman's ads have noted Mr. Hulshof's support for the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere, the Maine Lobster Institute, the Perfect Christmas Tree exhibit and the Woodstock concert hall. Their first debate last week centered on Mr. Hulshof's spending record. In an interview with a local reporter, he felt so cornered that he asked the interviewer what earmarks have "to do" with being "governor" anyway.
Mr. Hulshof's congressional protectors have proved equally amusing. In their statement, Messrs. Blunt, Bond and Graves, as well as Reps. Jo Ann Emerson and Todd Akin, told the public it was perfectly OK Mr. Hulshof had voted for earmarks – because they'd voted for them too!
Ms. Steelman has her own weaknesses – among them ties to the trial bar – which Mr. Hulshof is highlighting. He's also neatly spun his establishment ties into a formidable campaign war chest. Despite this, polls show he retains only a modest lead, and 30% of likely Republican voters have yet to decide. The winner faces Democratic Attorney General Jay Nixon, who currently beats both in polls.
If Ms. Steelman's bid shows anything, it's how determined a wandering Republican Party, both nationally and locally, is to hold on to the bad habits that lost them their reputation. Beware to the reformer.
Write to kim@wsj.com
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