That's my take on these. What's yours?

Softly, Softly, Catchee Monkey

At a time like this, the White House would probably prefer to avoid making any kind of a statement in reference to the University of Michigan's landmark affirmative-action case, currently before the Supreme Court.

Either way, they're pretty screwed by this thing, because showing favor to one side will ignite a firestorm of raging protests on the other. Looks to us like the spin team is floating some feelers, with the Washington Times hinting that Bush is planning to side with the white law students pressing the case—maybe, and Fox News saying that the administration is "mum so far" on the issue, but likely to oppose the law school's racial preferences program.

This approach sorta lets 'em have it both ways. They see how the editorials and pundits react, gauge public reaction in advance, and then proceed with caution. My opinion? I side with John McWhorter, who says:

If we are to solve the problem, and we all agree that the dominant theme in the solution is to be "high standards," then a set-aside policy, regardless of its good intentions, is in the brute logical sense antithetical to our goals. Incentive is key to top performance in any endeavor—this is a fact well known to psychologists and economists. My argument is simply that there is no logical basis for supposing that this truth is somehow suspendable when it comes to black students in school, black students being human, something which no amount of historical racism, or even present remnants of it, can belie.

Most of us are fairly comfortable with the idea that prayer in school exists, especially before major exams, but that it's most appropriate when privately conducted. School-led incantations and official religious services go too far in promoting an approved faith and suggest that if you're not with the program, you're some kind of heathen freak.

On the other hand, small gestures of faith are part of our society and it's unlikely to kill you if someone smiles at you and blesses you under the rubric of whatever deity they hold sacred. So we think it was a bit overboard for school officials at Westfield High in Springfield, Mass., to suspend six students for handing out candy canes on Christmas Eve. The students did ask for permission in advance...

The principal said no, but the students went ahead anyway, passing out about 450 canes with notes that said the "J" shape stood for Jesus and the red and white stripes symbolized Christ's blood and purity.

In a related story, Brian Rohrbough, the father of one of the slain students at Columbine High in Denver, says that school officials have rejected his attempt to put some religious words on "two 4-inch tiles that are part of a victims' memorial." The authorities at Columbine say putting up some tiles is OK, but not with anything that might remind students of the Harris-Klebold massacre.

Rouse disputed that the issue was whether students should be reminded of the killing. He said a plaque hanging in the school office says "God Weeps Over Columbine," and "they have a clock that is stopped at 11:10"—the moment the attack began.

We Could've Told 'Em That, Dept.

University professors must be a pretty bored bunch of guys, wasting time figuring out if people dislike pain, if loud noises make it hard to sleep, stuff like that. Or this study, run by a couple of geniuses from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who wanted to know if "it helps to have a white-sounding name when looking for work." So they sent out 5,000 resumes in response to want ads, and measured the response rate for particular names.

The professors analyzed birth certificates in coming up with what names to use. The white names included Neil, Brett, Greg, Emily, Anne and Jill. Some of the black names used were Tamika, Ebony, Aisha, Rasheed, Kareem and Tyrone

Nice Try, Pal

Stay-at-home dad Chris Shields of Eliot, Maine, was flipping through the paper when he noticed something odd: a $200-off coupon from his local Toyota dealership. He got out his calculator. "Let's see," he's thinking, "didn't say 'only one per customer'..." So he goes out and buys over 200 copies of the paper and starts clippin'.

On Jan. 4, Shields packed up his coupons in a black briefcase and made his way to the dealership in hopes of picking up a silver 2002 Sequoia Limited worth about $42,000. He said he was rebuffed with a suggestion that he get a lawyer.

5:42:09 PM       

That's what it feels like our elected officials are doing. But who cares? In most cases, your biggest problem is managing the complex choreography we call A Day in the Life of Me. You have to read this, do that, stop at the dry cleaners, pick up groceries, pay some bills, get dinner together, straighten up the house, answer some e-mail, hit the gym, and be dazzling in bed when night falls. It's altogether too much for any sane person to handle and whatever shenanigans are going on in politics are eminently dismissable unless they get in your way.

Well, Maybe This

You might make an exception for capital punishment. This could affect you and so we all tend to take a stand on it, one way or the other. Rob at Emphasis Added posted a forceful response to some of my comments on his essay regarding the subject, and I'm offering the following rebuttal.

The impetus for the discussion is, of course, Illinois Gov. George Ryan's mass commutation of sentences that changed 167 death row inmates into "lifers." His justification is understandable. Mistakes were made, suspects were tortured, and we can't be sure that every prisoner lined up for execution was, in fact, guilty, notwithstanding the possibility that all of them indeed were.

We can be reasonably sure, however, that some of the death row inmates who were spared by Ryan's decision genuinely deserved to be put to death:

Among the cases mentioned most often in Illinois is that of Fedell Caffey and Jacqueline Williams, who prosecutors said, after deciding they wanted a baby, stabbed to death a pregnant woman in her apartment and cut the nearly full-term fetus from her body. They also were found guilty of murdering the woman's 10-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son.

Nevertheless, the viewpoint of the Raven is that in this instance Ryan did the right thing. The details coming to light indicate that the Chicago police department's use of torture is systemic, employing electrodes on genitals, the KGB's infamous "dry submarine," and who knows what other Third-World interrogation techniques on suspects in its zeal to obtain confessions. Gov. Ryan gave the Illinois justice system a timeline to reform its procedures, and after they missed it he had no choice but to ensure that no further executions of innocent people would occur on his watch.

The larger issue concerns the question of whether wanting closure is equivalent to seeking revenge. One position is that there is no "closure" (an overworked but applicable term) to a murder. This viewpoint maintains that a death cannot be balanced by any means, and that retribution in kind if anything worsens the original offense. Against this we can posit the notion that when a killer takes a life, justice demands an action in return and incarceration alone is an insufficient response.

Consider the maxim that "while there is breath, there is hope." The 167 murderers who've obtained a new lease on their lives in Illinois would agree wholeheartedly. As long as they live, they can dream of escape, of a legal remedy, of some political upheaval that may win their release. They may procreate themselves from behind bars (as that New Jersey mobster did a few years ago), write books, give interviews, gain fame, correspond with the free world, and in so many other ways take solace from their continued existence. In that their futures are indefinite, they possess what they have denied their victims—life itself. Abolishing the death penalty is, I would argue, an armchair luxury. It wraps the abolitionist in a cozy glow of righteous comfort and ethical impregnability. "I value life" it proclaims, "because killing is wrong," and is eminently self-serving while it slaps the victims and survivors briskly in the face. The innocent dead demand more respect than that.

The Turning of the Worm

The University of California at Berkeley is the birthplace of America's Free-Speech movement, and isn't where we'd expect the principles of open dialogue to be summarily executed. Life is full of surprises.

Here's Candace S. Falk, director of the Emma Goldman Papers Project, who ran afoul of the University's non-existent and never-before invoked prohibition against political statements. Dr. Falk got into trouble when she published a fund-raising appeal to potential donors that included a few timely quotes from Emma Goldman, a Russian-born anarchist who was a passionate anti-war protestor and free-speech advocate.

In one of the quotations, from 1915, Goldman called on people "not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them." In the other, from 1902, she warned that free-speech advocates "shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next-door neighbors should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open."

This looks like a textbook example of a "chilling effect" in action. The administrators don't want to rock the boat in an economy where dollars are becoming harder to come by. Who knows what sort of retaliation they might face from Washington were they to allow anti-war rhetoric to eminate from their august halls. By the way, are we "fighting for freedom" this time around?

Plasticman

One more item in keeping with today's "heavy stuff." This concerns that myopic member of the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia—currently in a deathlock fight with Clarence Thomas over the title of "weakest link" on the bench.

Scalia was the main speaker at an event called Religious Freedom Day in Fredericksburg, Va., last Sunday, and started mouthing off about the separation of church and state. As you'd imagine, this Ronald-Reagan-appointed judge got big cheers when he said that "courts have gone too far to keep religion out of public schools and other forums," before leading several hundred people in a rousing chorus of "God Bless America." He's optimistic that the Constitution of the United States will allow a measure of pro-religious emendation because, as he put it:

"It is a Constitution that morphs while you look at it like Plasticman."

11:25:59 AM