My, nothing like getting nominated to head an agency to put it in full blown Cover Our Nominee's Ass mode, is there?
The Justice Department published a revised and expansive definition late yesterday of acts that constitute torture under domestic and international law, overtly repudiating one of the most criticized policy memorandums drafted during President Bush's first term. In a statement published on the department's Web site, the head of its Office of Legal Counsel declared that "torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and international norms" and went on to reject a previous statement that only "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death" constitute torture punishable by law.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin said instead that torture may consist of acts that fall short of provoking excruciating and agonizing pain, and thus may include acts that cause physical suffering or lasting mental anguish. His opinion has the explicit aim of eliminating any notion that those who conduct harmful interrogations may be exempt from prosecution.
This second effort by the Bush administration to parse the legal meaning of the word "torture" was provoked by the damaging political fallout from the disclosure this summer of the first memo, drafted in August 2002 and criticized by human rights lawyers and experts around the globe. [...] The earlier memo figured prominently in complaints by Democrats and human rights groups about White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, who oversaw its creation and is Bush's nominee to become attorney general for the second term. The new memo's public release came six days before the start of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Gonzales's nomination.
The timing, no doubt, is entirely coincidental. The fact that we've had month after month after month of abuse revelations somehow did not spur the administration to reconsider and clarify its policy previously. The fact that Democrats were going to belabor Gonzales vigorously about the head and shoulders with this policy was, of course, entirely irrelevant, no doubt. And the fact that they'd be joined those few congressional Republicans who still believe that the Constitution and the country's signature on and ratification of international treaties ought to mean something -- also entirely beside the point, no doubt. The fact that he would have been so battered and bruised by those hearings that this Senate -- which has already shown surprising independence from the President, after four years of ardent lapdoggery -- might well have declined to confirm him is also irrelevant, I'm certain.
Of course, the fact that the timing is what it is will no doubt produce some wonderfully cynical comments from those selfsame Democrats and Republicans. One can but hope, in any event.
Posted by iain at 10:59 PM
How very ... odd.
The judge who will decide the constitutionality of California's ban on same-sex marriage has refused to let San Francisco submit expert studies to counter their opponents' authorities, who contend that children need opposite- sex parents and that homosexuals can be cured.
The city fears that the presence of those declarations, without opposing evidence, might be used by an appellate court to justify the state's definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, a city lawyer said Monday. "We don't want that hateful stuff to go into the record without being responded to," said Deputy City Attorney Kathleen Morris, citing a declaration by a psychiatrist who described homosexuality as a mental disorder. Morris said the city still hopes to get its own declarations into the record reviewed by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer and the courts that review his ruling.
Last week, Kramer refused to remove the declarations by opponents of same- sex marriage from the case file or to let the city present contrary authorities. He said he intends to base his ruling on legal arguments, not factual disputes -- a signal that the judge may not think the statements already submitted contain anything that needs to be refuted. But that doesn't necessarily mean that Kramer or an appellate court will disregard the declarations. A lawyer for opponents of same-sex marriage said the purpose of the sworn statements was not to establish facts about marriage or families but to show Kramer that there were possible rational grounds for the marriage law.
If the judge agrees with the legal test urged by defenders of the state law, "the city would have to show that all possible bases for the marriage laws were irrational,'' said Byron Babione, senior legal counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund. The ADF represents the Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund, one of two organizations joining the state in defense of the law...
If the judge doesn't think that the statements contain information that needs to be refuted, and if he knows already that he doesn't plan to use them in his decision, then why would he allow them into the record? What would be the point?
Posted by iain at 04:05 AM
Oh, my.
A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the Defense Department as "torture" and a June 2004 "Urgent Report" to the Director of the FBI that raises concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.
"These documents raise grave questions about where the blame for widespread detainee abuse ultimately rests," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "Top government officials can no longer hide from public scrutiny by pointing the finger at a few low-ranking soldiers."
The documents were obtained after the ACLU and other public interest organizations filed a lawsuit against the government for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request.
The two-page e-mail that references an Executive Order states that the President directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and "sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc." The ACLU is urging the White House to confirm or deny the existence of such an order and immediately to release the order if it exists. The FBI e-mail, which was sent in May 2004 from "On Scene Commander--Baghdad" to a handful of senior FBI officials, notes that the FBI has prohibited its agents from employing the techniques that the President is said to have authorized.
So the president may have actually signed an executive order authorizing torture.
I wonder that anyone could get the president to sign any such instrument. Surely everyone near him would understand that he could not be seen to come near any such thing, no matter how gungho the American public might be for such things. (Given recent polls indicating a plurality of Americans is perfectly happy to restrict Muslims' rights, I can't imagine that actual torture -- especially torture taking place in far off lands -- would actually bother the body politic all that much, especially if the torturers were bright enough not to take pictures of the torture to splash all over the evening news.)
Here's the truly odd thing. You'd think that, given that it seems that Our Glorious Leader's fingerprints are now firmly all over the "torture 'em until they drop, and we don't give a rat's ass if it gets us any useful information" policy ... you'd think that would be the lead in any story about the memos uncovered by the ACLU, wouldn't you?
You'd be wrong.
Detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were shackled to the floor in fetal positions for more than 24 hours at a time, left without food and water, and allowed to defecate on themselves, an FBI agent who said he witnessed such abuse reported in a memo to supervisors, according to documents released yesterday.
In memos over a two-year period that ended in August, FBI agents and officials also said that they witnessed the use of growling dogs at Guantanamo Bay to intimidate detainees -- contrary to previous statements by senior Defense Department officials -- and that one detainee was wrapped in an Israeli flag and bombarded with loud music in an apparent attempt to soften his resistance to interrogation. [...] The accounts, gleaned from heavily redacted e-mails and memorandums, were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union as part of an ongoing lawsuit. They suggest that extremely aggressive interrogation techniques were more widespread at Guantanamo Bay than was acknowledged by military officials.
The documents also make it clear that some personnel at Guantanamo Bay believed they were relying on authority from senior officials in Washington to conduct aggressive interrogations. One FBI agent wrote a memo referring to a presidential order that approved interrogation methods "beyond the bounds of standard FBI practice," although White House and FBI officials said yesterday that such an order does not exist.
Buried all the way down in the fifth paragraph. Hmm.
So. Assume for the sake of argument that the secretary of defense signed an executive order authorizing torture and that the president did not -- and I freely admit, given the rather extraordinary degree to which The Leader's people protect him from the consequences of his actions, this does make more intrinsic sense, if not any cover-your-various-asses sense. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is the person about whom our Glorious Leader said, and I quote:
"You know, sometimes perhaps his demeanor is rough and gruff, but beneath that rough and gruff, no-nonsense demeanor is a good human being who cares deeply about the military and deeply about the grief that war causes."
As Criticism Grows, Bush Offers Support of Rumsfeld
By THOM SHANKER
New York Times (login/registration required)
Published: December 21, 2004
Right. A "good human being" who believes in shortchanging our own soldiers of the armor they need, and torturing foreigners.
Heaven spare us from many more such "good human beings"; I don't think we could long stand them.
You know, you just can't make stuff like this up, can you?
In an incident the YMCA is calling "a very regrettable scheduling error," kids arriving for an early-morning swim meet Sunday walked into a gender-bending scene of the kind most of them wouldn't be allowed to watch on TV.
Several of the kids' angry parents clashed with participants in a transgender fashion show, which had been under way at the New City YMCA since about midnight, resulting in a chaotic melee that was eventually broken up by private security guards and East Chicago District police. A YMCA member had reserved the entire facility, at 1515 N. Halsted, from 11 p.m. Saturday through 8 a.m. Sunday for a fashion show and ball, which featured cross-dressing and transgender models in a competition similar to the ones shown in the 1991 documentary "Paris Is Burning." But the facility had also been booked to host the youth swim meet, scheduled to begin at 7 a.m. Sunday. When the swimmers -- mostly elementary and junior high school-age kids -- and their parents started showing up shortly after 6 a.m., many of the parents were upset to see the "House of Escada" fashion show and dance in full swing.
"It was like they didn't want the kids to see the gay people at all," said Kashma Avery, in a recorded interview provided by WBBM-AM (780). Avery was in charge of a 13-member security detail for the ball, which he said was attended by about 400 people, most of them gay men.
Well, no, I shouldn't imagine that they did want their kids to see gay people. In drag. At 7AM. No. Although, to be fair, I would imagine that the issue was not so much the degree of gaiety as seeing men in dresses undressing in the locker rooms, which could perhaps be a tad confusing. (Even as an adult, watching a female impersonator deal with a gaff -- a variety of implements used to pull the penis and its accoutrements back between the legs and way up there yes indeedy! -- can be a tad disconcerting.)
That particular issue aside, you just have to wonder: what sort of fashion show (transgender or otherwise) takes nine freakin' hours to get through? And why would you want it to run overnight in the first place?
Posted by iain at 01:44 PM
Media Relations: comics read in 2004: good stuff, bad stuff, in-between/ December 17, 2004
Posted by iain at 11:44 AM
May 5, the day that changed Aliakbar and Shahla Afshari's lives, began like most others. They shared coffee, dropped their 12-year-old son off at Cheat Lake Middle School here, then drove to their laboratories at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a federal agency that studies workplace hazards.
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But that afternoon, their managers pulled the Afsharis aside and delivered a stunning message: they had failed secret background checks and were being fired. No explanations were offered and no appeals allowed. They were escorted to the door and told not to return.
Mrs. Afshari, a woman not prone to emotional flourishes, says she stood in the parking lot and wept. "I just wanted to know why," she said.
Seven months later, the Afsharis, Shiite Muslims who came from Iran 18 years ago to study, then stayed to build careers and raise three children, still have no answers.
They have been told they were fired for national security reasons that remain secret. When their lawyer requested the documents used to justify the action, he was told none existed. When he asked for copies of the agency's policies relating to the background checks, he received a generic personnel handbook.
Without any official explanations of why they failed their background checks, they came up with their own theory: their attendance, more than five years ago, at two conventions of a Persian student association that has come under F.B.I. scrutiny, once with a man who was later investigated by the bureau.
The Afsharis' case comes at time when immigrants from many nations, but particularly Islamic ones, are facing tougher scrutiny from government agencies.
Unable to clear their names or find new employment in their field, the Afsharis on Thursday resorted to that most American of recourses: they sued the institute and its parent agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services, demanding back pay and reinstatement or the chance to appeal. [...] The Afsharis contend that their only link to the student group under federal scrutiny, the Muslim Students Association (Persian Speaking Group), is that they took their children to national conventions in Chicago in December 1998 and Washington in December 1999.
Senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including the former director Louis J. Freeh, have said the group, sometimes referred to by the Farsi name Anjoman Islamie, is made up largely of anti-American fanatics, maintains close ties to the government of Iran and has been used as a front for Iranian intelligence. But it is not on the State Department's list of banned foreign terrorist organizations, and it operates openly in the United States.
So let's see:
Apparently, now the government has decided that it should investigate people on the basis of their years-ago attendance of an entirely legal convention of an entirely legal organization, and that on the basis that they attended said convention of said organiztion, fire them.
Well, I suppose that's not terribly surprising. After all, they've been purging Democrats from Justice and Defense -- albeit in more legal and aboveboard ways than this. One wonders how long it will be before the administration decides that everyone who is not one of the Republican faithful is some sort of terrorist risk. How long it will be before it mandates that all state organs, whether federal, state or municipal, must administer loyalty oaths, making people swear allegiance to Our Glorious Leader and everything for which he stands one nation under Dubya with liberty and justice for the Republican faithful and everyone else can just go to hell. (Or federal prisons, which are a reasonable facsimile thereof.)
Posted by iain at 12:32 PM
Hmm.
Leaders of the gay rights movement are embroiled in a bitter and increasingly public debate over whether they should moderate their goals in the wake of bruising losses in November when 11 states approved constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriages. In the past week alone, the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay and lesbian advocacy group, has accepted the resignation of its executive director, appointed its first non-gay board co-chairman and adopted a new, more moderate strategy, with less emphasis on legalizing same-sex marriages and more on strengthening personal relationships.
The leadership of the Human Rights Campaign, at a meeting last weekend in Las Vegas, concluded that the group must bow to political reality and moderate its message and its goals. One official said the group would consider supporting President Bush's efforts to privatize Social Security partly in exchange for the right of gay partners to receive benefits under the program. "The feeling this weekend in Las Vegas was that we had to get beyond the political and return to the personal," said Michael Berman, a Democratic lobbyist and consultant who was elected the first non-gay co-chairman of the Human Rights Campaign's board last week. "We need to reintroduce ourselves to America with the stories of our lives."
But others involved in the drive for gay and lesbian equality say the Human Rights Campaign's approach smacks of pre-emptive surrender and wrong-headed political calculation. "For a certain segment of the movement, for which I would certainly elect the H.R.C. as poster child, it means that the error was that we were wanting too much too fast," said Jonathan D. Katz, executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale. "It is entirely characteristic for them to believe that what is required is a sort of retrenchment and a return to a more moderate message. They are, of course, completely wrong."
Mr. Katz and other aggressive advocates of gay rights said they believed that marriage rights were the key to winning fundamental equality for gay men and lesbians and that retreat from that struggle was self-defeating.
Well ... here's the thing.
I never had so much of a quarrel with the content of the gay marriage battle as the previous timing. It was clear that we were going to be used as the whipping boys for the right wing to stir up the faithful to get them to vote, and really, the election was going to be close enough without that.
But.
Looked at fairly, that particular issue would never have had an easy time, no matter when in the election cycle it occurred. The right wing would always be able to use it as it was used, and having it pop up earlier or later within a four-year period really wouldn't have mattered that much to the results. The very concept of some sort of legal parity would always have terrified and revolted the same group of people who were terrified and revolted by it this time through.
That said ... if HRC is seriously considering supporting privatizing Social Security in exchange for the rights of gay partners to receive benefits, then that is a spectacularly wrong-headed strategy. They would be willing to sacrifice the interests of all of the elderly poor and many widows/widowers of this country -- all of those people, mind -- to gain access to those benefits. More importantly, they would be portrayed as doing such, which would alienate a great many moderate people (and not a few gays and lesbians of all political stripes) who might otherwise be willing to support what they thought of as a reasonable request for equality.
Yes, I do understand that the idea is that it would be a sort of political tradeoff -- although, if HRC truly thinks that Bush wouldn't eagerly accept their support with one hand while selling them out with great enthusiasm with the other, then, again, they are absolute and utter fools. (Just ask the Log Cabin Republicans.) That isn't the sort of deal this president could ever honor, given his power base. It's not the sort of deal he would have the least interest in honoring.
The idea behind Social Security is that it's meant to provide a sort of minimum level secure income. While stock investments can produce quite high payoffs, they can also produce some spectacular busts. The one thing the stock market is not is secure. It is only simple justice that the widows and widowers of gay people should be allowed access to those same benefits. But it is not just or fair to sacrifice the interests of the program as a whole to gain those benefits.
(Something of a side note: only legal spouses and children are allowed access to social security dependent benefits. For example, I'm pretty sure that longterm live-in heterosexual partners can't designate their surviving partner to receive social security benefits. Allowing gay widows and widowers access to survivor benefits is, frankly, something Bush could not do, absent getting Congress to repeal the federal DOMA. And that, they simply will not do any time in the near future.)
It is interesting to note that the people pushing the privatization of Social Security are, for the most part, only those who will never need the program. The stock market is itching to get its hands on trillions of dollars of funds. The people actually directly affected by this, however, for the most part seem to be saying, "Um ... no. No, we just don't think so. Please stop."
Not that anybody's listening, of course.
Posted by iain at 12:11 PM
First Indiana and Texas, and now Utah. There must be something in the air to produce nearly identical rulings from three dedicatedly conservative states.
After considering Utah law and the best interests of a 3-year-old girl, 3rd District Judge Timothy Hanson has decided the child is better off with two mothers. One is her birth mother, who conceived her through artificial insemination while in a lesbian relationship. The other is the birth mother's former partner, joined to her in a Vermont civil union before the girl's birth.
Hanson ruled state laws allow the former partner to maintain a parent-child relationship with the girl through visitation. The case is now before the Utah Court of Appeals, which will examine how much protection Utah law provides to gay or unmarried couples raising children related to only one partner.
The conservative Alliance Defense Fund, which litigates cases involving religion, publicized its role in the case Tuesday by describing it as a battle for parents' rights waged by a churchgoing woman who has abandoned her lesbian past.
But Hanson has said the case does not turn on the debate over gay marriage or gay adoption. "What this case is about, is whether or not a child is better off in this rather uncertain world, with as many people as possible taking an interest in the child, both financially and emotionally," the judge said in an October court hearing. "I do not believe that any clear-thinking person could rationally say that a child is not better off with as many people who care about that child as part of her life," he said.
One wonders what the various conservative groups and attorneys general litigating all this think of judges in these far-flung places all coming out with rulings that say that more parents are better than fewer when it comes to childrearing, even when those parents are the same sex. Especially since those rulings are coming only about a month after several states -- including Utah -- passed laws saying that no, gays aren't people entitled to all the rights and privileges of everyone else living in that state.
According to a wire service version of the article at the Casper Star Tribune site -- the later part of the Salt Lake Tribune's version appears to be badly edited -- Barlow applied for a stay of the district court judge's order, and was refused:
A state judge has ruled that two mothers were better than one, but the state appeals court is considering how much protection Utah law provides to gay or unrelated partners raising children related to only one partner. Third District Judge Timothy Hanson awarded visitation rights to the former gay partner of a Utah woman who turned straight and said she got religion. [...] Barlow had asked the appeals court to halt visitation until the case is decided, arguing Jones has had no significant contact with the child in over a year; the court denied the request Friday.
from the Salt Lake Tribune article in reference to the application for a stay: ...But in issuing a one-page ruling Friday, Court of Appeals Judge Gregory K. Orme declined. He cited the "careful, measured way the trial court has crafted the visitation order," and said "any creation of harm is itself speculative."
(The Salt Lake Tribune article lacks any mention of the actual request for a stay, but talks about the results of the request, which makes the last few paragraphs of the article very confusing.)
Purely a side note: The wire service article at the Casper Star Tribune takes a peculiarly sardonic tone where it mentions that Barlow "turned straight and said she got religion". One might think that the writer of the wire article suspects that Barlow might be saying these things about herself purely to make her case stronger.
In any event: according to various parts of Utah, it seems we're good enough to raise children, but not good enough for marriage.
A puzzlement.
Posted by iain at 12:10 PM
Well, well, well. How times do change.
The homecoming queen wore a tux.
Her classmates said wear a dress, just this once, but Luz Duarte doesn't wear dresses -- or even girls' pants -- and she didn't think the school-wide homecoming assembly was the place to start.
"You know, what? No," she said.
"If I'm going to go up there, I'm going to go as myself."
That approach has worked surprisingly well for Duarte, 18, a senior at West Leyden High School in Northlake and one of the first openly gay students in the Chicago area to be elected homecoming queen.
When she told her classmates she was gay in 7th grade, the reaction was mostly positive.
"Everybody thought it was cool. They had never met a gay person," Duarte says, and their response was, "Ohmigod! Are you serious?"
The interest wasn't all good. "They made me feel like I was an alien from outer space and they wanted to dissect me," Duarte says.
But, still, too much attention was better than the loneliness and depression she experienced when she kept her sexual orientation to herself.
"When she came out, it was like a flower blossomed," says her mother, Maritza, a credit union manager.
It seems that the US Supreme Court is -- finally -- getting a bit exasperated with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (the state's final court of appeal for criminal cases) and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
In the past year, the Supreme Court has heard three appeals from inmates on death row in Texas, and in each case the prosecutors and the lower courts suffered stinging reversals. In a case to be argued on Monday, the court appears poised to deliver another rebuke. Lawyers for a Texas death row inmate, Thomas Miller-El, will appear before the justices for the second time in two years. To legal experts, the Supreme Court's decision to hear his case yet again is a sign of its growing impatience with two of the courts that handle death penalty cases from Texas: its highest criminal court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans.
Perhaps as telling is the exasperated language in decisions this year from a Supreme Court that includes no categorical opponent of the death penalty. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in June that the Fifth Circuit was "paying lip service to principles" of appellate law in issuing death penalty rulings with "no foundation in the decisions of this court."
In an unsigned decision in another case last month, the Supreme Court said the Court of Criminal Appeals "relied on a test we never countenanced and now have unequivocally rejected." The decision was made without hearing argument, a move that ordinarily signals that the error in the decision under review was glaring. [...] In the Miller-El case, appellate lawyers and legal scholars are buzzing over what they say is the insolence of the Fifth Circuit.
In an 8-to-1 decision last year, the Supreme Court instructed the appeals court to rethink its "dismissive and strained interpretation" of the proof in the case, and to consider more seriously the substantial evidence suggesting that prosecutors had systematically excluded blacks from Mr. Miller-El's jury. Prosecutors used peremptory strikes to eliminate 10 out of 11 eligible black jurors, and they twice used a local procedure called a jury shuffle to move blacks lower on the list of potential jurors, the decision said. The jury ultimately selected, which had one black member, convicted Mr. Miller-El, a black man who is now 53, of killing a clerk at a Holiday Inn in Dallas in 1985.
Instead of considering much of the evidence recited by the Supreme Court majority, the appeals court engaged in something akin to plagiarism. In February, it again rejected Mr. Miller-El's claims, in a decision that reproduced, virtually verbatim and without attribution, several paragraphs from the sole dissenting opinion in last year's Supreme Court decision, written by Justice Clarence Thomas.
"The Fifth Circuit just went out of its way to defy the Supreme Court on this," said John J. Gibbons, a former chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, who joined a brief supporting Mr. Miller-El. "The idea that the system can tolerate open defiance by an inferior court just cannot stand."
It will be interesting to see exactly how the Court addresses this case. They are likely to be, judicially speaking, rather spectacularly pissed off.
The government is currently talking about splitting the 9th Circuit, containing California and the rest of the west coast. Given the admittedly impressive volume of work -- according to the Times article, it deals with 862 cases per judge, compared to an average of 462 per judge in the other circuits -- it might be more reasonable to split the fifth circuit into Texas and everyone else. Or perhaps, more profitable to discover why the 5th circuit, despite having significantly fewer people inside it, has so very many more cases coming to it than the sprawling 9th Circuit. That would indicate some rather severe problems within the Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi state court systems, and probably their federal districts as well.
Interestingly, and apparently more or less independently, the normally prosecutorially-biased Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is favoring the formation and increased funding for what are called "Innocence clinics".
After years of criticism for favoring prosecutors, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is supporting a proposal for a project to investigate prisoners' claims that they were wrongfully convicted.
The project could involve a network of clinics, like those at the University of Houston and the University of Texas at Austin, that investigate inmate claims.
The appeals court will ask lawmakers to increase its 20 (M) million-dollar fund to teach defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges about handling innocence claims, according to Judge Barbara Hervey.
Of course, the difficulty will be in getting the clinics fully funded by the state of Texas. In this day of competing priorities and severely limited state funds -- and Texas' state funding is generally worse than most others, due to their lack of taxes -- it will be difficult to convince state legislators that they should care in the slightest about people who have, after all, been convicted of various crimes. The fact that they may not, in fact, have committed those crimes will be largely beside the point.
But one can hope.
Posted by iain at 11:25 AM
This list contains the "Top 1000" titles owned by OCLC member libraries -- the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the "purchase vote" of libraries around the globe.
According to its "About OCLC" page, the OCLC Online Computer Library Center is "a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing information costs. More than 50,540 libraries in 84 countries and territories around the world use OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend and preserve library materials. [...] OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat—the OCLC Online Union Catalog."
So we're talking about one hell of a lot of libraries, countless multitudes of books, all put into one mega-mambo database. Allowing for title and edition variants, putting together a top 1000 list was, if not a piece of cake, not quite the mindnumbing task from hell that it would have been a while back.
Most of the individual works in the top 400-500 items are either frequently purchased and updated reference works, or Great Lit by Dead People or Well Known Children's Books, with the odd Excessively Popular Book by Some Live Person sneaking in. (Harry Potter. Imagine that.) A rather surprising amount of music -- I would assume scores rather than recordings, given the listings.
And then there's #18. What's up with that, anyway?
via News From Me.
Posted by iain at 02:25 PM
Well. I am impressed. You'd think the US Constitution just took a right at the north border of Alabama and missed it altogether, wouldn't you?
An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university libraries.
A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda." [...] Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed. "I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said. [...] The bill also would ban materials that recognize or promote a lifestyle or actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws of Alabama. Allen said that meant books with heterosexual couples committing those acts likely would be banned, too.
So ...those would be the sodomy and misconduct laws that were overturned nationwide by the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas. The sodomy laws that effectively no longer exist or apply. Right. (Say one thing for the man: he's even-handed. No man-on-man or woman-on-woman sex, and if it's anything but your basic heterosexual missionary position eyes-closed think-of-the-good of-your-country and don't you DARE enjoy it sex, he's agin' it.)
Mind, I don't think this stands a snowball's chance of going anywhere. Even if Alabama's legislature passes the law, and even if the governor signs it, libraries and booksellers would challenge it as unconstitutional censorship before the ink dried, and they would win. (With a little luck, the various courts along the way would get increasingly snooty about it.)
It might even pass, though. After all, Alabama is the state which bans all possession and sale of vibrators within its state borders. Wouldn't want people to actually enjoy nonreproductive sex with the aid of mechanical devices, after all. Wouldn't want people to have nonreproductive sex, period. Breed, straight people, breed! It's what you're there for! ... er, well, yes.
Anyway, I think it can safely be said that Alabama's legislature has an interestingly narrow view of personal liberties. One wonders how long it will be before they really do start acting as thought police. And how long it will be before this sort of thinking shows up elsewhere in the country.
Posted by iain at 05:02 PM
