If the USA government policy relative to travel to Cuba wasn’t dictated by the rich Cuban expatriates in Florida and New Jetsey, who give lots of money to politcians, I could have purchased my airline ticket online with my USA credit card and would have received notice of the cancelation.

Oh well, here I am spending the night in Veracruz, with my hotel and taxi fare, to and from, the airport paid by Mexicana.

The only problem is my three friends who I was supposed to rendezvous with in Cancun who have never been to Cuba before.

Please keep in mind I am posting with my “smart phone”, which is not yet smart enough to include a spell checker. So I ask you forgive my editing errors.

Though I’ve had a very pleasant afternoon here, of which I will post more later, it’s really hot and humid here.

Given that USA consumers provide the chief market for the products moved by the Mexican based drug cartels, most of the six thousand killings in Mexico may be directly attributed to the misguided USA prohibition of now illegal drugs. Prohibition, as was learned during the prohibition of alcohol in the USA from 1920 to 1933, accomplishes nothing except to raise the price of a product to the point of enabling black market entrepreneurs, who are often not reluctant to eliminate their competitors with extreme prejudice.

The rates of prohibited drug use have not been materially changed through prohibition. Prohibition has made criminals of millions of otherwise law abiding folks, increased police corruption, increased the USA prison population by millions, and spawned an industry engaged in the promotion of the construction and filling of prisons. And it has created a situation where police agencies are essentially working on commission, seizing property and selling the property to further militarizing policing in the USA and the consequent increase in “Botched Paramilitary Police Raids” which have resulted in the killing and destruction of the property of innocent citizens.

The drug cartels in Mexico, Colombia, the Bahamas, and elsewhere would be put out of business in short order, and those countries returned to civil rule, if USA drug policy was changed to return the price of now illegal drugs to their true market prices.

It is perfectly permissible in the USA for one to be whacked out daily on  legal psychotropic drugs, such as Prozac, Valium, and etc., so long as one pays the doctors and pharmaceutical companies; but one goes to prison for growing marijuana in the back yard.   The policy makes no sense, unless, of course, you one of the folks enriched by it.

Dan M. Kahan, Deputy Dean and Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law at Yale, presented a fascinating exposition relating to John Yoo’s failure to accept “moral responsibility” in producing the “torture memo” to justify the Bush administration policy of torture; and Jack Goldsmith, appointed in 2003 to head the Justice Dept. Office of Legal Counsel, exercising the “moral responsibility” of repudiating Yoo’s tortured legal reasoning, a noble act for which he was rewarded with his dismissal from the Justice Department. Along the way Kahan compares the training of folks in the ambiguous art of chicken sexing with that of imbuing a “situation sense” in student attorneys in the hope they will become “good rather than bad lawyers.”

It is a fascinating read for those interested and who have fifteen or so minutes. An excerpt to whet your appetite.

In the poultry industry, it is very important to separate out male and female chicks almost immediately after birth: the males are less valuable – they can’t lay eggs and their meat isn’t nearly so tender – and they end up competing with the female chicks for food. So you need to pick the males out and get rid of them. This job falls to the professionally trained chick sexer, who turning the chicks over gently in his or her hand is able to sort out male from female at a rate of 1,000 per hour and at an accuracy rate of 99%.

What makes this feat so astonishing, though, is that there just isn’t any readily discernable, or at least articulable, difference in the anatomy of newborn chicks. All zoologists agree that this is so. If you ask a professionally trained chick sexer what he is looking for, don’t expect a satisfying answer. Either he’ll confabulate, telling you some fantastic and silly story about the inability of the male chick to look him straight in the eye. Or more candidly, he’ll just shrug his shoulders.

But while the nature of the chicksexer’s skill may be inexplicable, how he acquired it isn’t. To become chicksexers, individuals go off for an extended period of study with a chick sexing grandmaster. He doesn’t give lectures or assign texts. Instead he exposes his pupils to slides– “male,” “female,” “male,” “male,” “female,” “female,” “male” – continuing on in this way until the students acquire the same special power to intuitively perceive the gender of a newborn chick, even without being able to cogently explain how.

What in the world does this have to do with law, you are asking yourself of a professor’s lecture, once again. Well, what I want to suggest is that what’s going on in the chick-sexing profession is the very same thing that goes on in
the legal profession. The formal doctrines and rules that make up the law – unconscionability, proximate causation, character propensity, unreasonable restraints of trade – are just as fuzzy and indeterminate as the genetalia of dayold
chicks. And yet just as the trained chick sexer can accurately distinguish female from male, so the trained lawyer can accurately distinguish good decision from bad, persuasive argument from weak. Ask the lawyer for an explanation, and in his case too you’ll get nothing but confabulation – “plain meaning,” “congressional intent,” “efficiency” – or what have you.

In addition, the lawyer attains her skill – to recognize what she can’t cogently explain – in much the same way that the chick sexer does: through exposure to a professional slideshow, this one conducted by law grandmasters, including law professors but also other socialized lawyers, who authoritatively certify what count as good and bad decisions, sound and unsound arguments, thereby inculcating in students and young practitioners the power of intuitive perception distinctive of the legal craft.

Now, by this point in my argument, you’ll likely recognize that my analogy between legal reasoning with chick sexing is just a colorful rehearsing of legal realism. As developed at Yale Law School in the 1920s and 1930s, legal realism was less interested to demonstrate that legal rules are formally indeterminate than to explain how lawyers nonetheless form such uniform and predictable understandings of what those rules entail. Llewellyn attributed this ability to what he called “situation sense,” an intuitive perceptive faculty born of immersion in professional and cultural norms – the slide show of law. Contemporary social psychologists use the concepts of pattern recognition and prototypical reasoning to describe the same cognitive processes – which are pervasive in all fields and facets of life, not just law and the poultry industry.

Well, if you accept this central insight of legal realism, as I do, then you will readily understand that effective legal training has very little to do with learning the mass and detail of formal legal rules. Instead, it has everything to
do with acquiring situation sense.

———-

A little over a decade ago, a brilliant 25 year-old [John Yoo] was standing where you are. Less than a decade later… [John Yoo] found himself serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General… battling internal opposition from career military officers and lawyers, [John Yoo] wrote a legal memorandum which construed the law to permit the use of interrogation techniques that the U.S. had for decades understood to be banned by the Geneva Convention. Because of the institutional stature and formal authority of the OLC within the Executive Branch; because of the function the memo was intended to play in resolving a debate among other governmental officials of immense authority; and because of the impact of 9-11 in provoking societal reconsideration of the relationship between civil liberties and national security, this Yale-trained lawyer did have every reason to believe that his memo, all on its own, would have a profound and shaping impact on the professional and cultural understandings that are our law. Yet he pretended this wasn’t so. When asked by an appalled career military intelligence officer whether the memo meant the President could order torture, he answered, “Yes, but I’m not talking policy. I’m talking law here.”

The analysis reflected in the so-called Torture Memo did not, in fact, become part of our professional and cultural understandings, our situation sense. But… credit for that belongs to another individual lawyer, who as a 20-something also stood where you now are about a decade and a half ago…. In 2003 he took over as head of the Office of Legal Counsel. And to the shock of his patrons, he immediately issued a directive advising the military intelligence services that they couldn’t rely on the so-called Torture Memo… at a time when high-ranking political appointees in the Justice Department and Pentagon were continuing to place decisive reliance on the Torture Memo. As a result, this lawyer had every reason to believe the Memo’s understanding of the law would persist, and that it would pervade and shape the shared professional and cultural understandings of lawyers, unless he as a lawyer took responsibility for repudiating it. So he did.

This lawyer, Jack Goldsmith, was ultimately pushed out of OLC…. Now that Goldsmith is there [at Harvard Law School], I suspect it’s much less likely that any of its future graduates will try, in cowardly fashion, to evade moral responsibility for their actions by insisting that law is nothing but a set of formally binding rules. And I have hope that as a result of [Goldsmith’s] actions, it’s much less likely any of you ever will either.

This was my last chance to teach you some law, Yale style. These were my final two slides: one bad lawyer, one good. What made the bad one bad wasn’t that he knew “less law.” It was that he, unlike the good lawyer, refused to take moral responsibility when he found himself in a position where his individual actions as a lawyer were likely to have a decisive role in shaping our profession’s situation sense, and thus in shaping the law itself.

Because you today are standing where these two lawyers stood, because you are standing where number members of Congress, Justices of the Supreme Court, and Presidents of the United States have all stood too, I feel petty certain that a number of you too will be in that position some day. If you are, how good a lawyer you are won’t be determined by how many rules you’ve learned; it will turn on how good a person you are. My apology for not teaching you more “law” is that I thought it was much more urgent to try to teach you that.

The day commemorates the initial victory of Mexican forces over the French invaders at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.

The French, with the USA busy with its Civil War, invaded Mexico, initially with the support of Spain and Britain, after Mexican President Benito Juárez suspended interest payments on Mexico’s debt to foreign nations on July 17, 1861.   The Spanish fleets arrived in the Mexican port of Veracruz in December of 1861, with the French and British arriving in January 1862.   The Spanish and British withdrew within a few months after realizing  the French intention of conquering Mexico with the intention of exploiting the country’s mineral resources.

Eventually, in June of 1863, French forces took Mexico City and Austrian Archduke Maximilian was installed as Emperor in May, 1864.

The USA had supported the Mexican republicans and President Juárez; and with the end of the Civil War in 1865 50,000 USA troops, under General Philip Sheridan, were sent to the Mexican border to intimidate the French and aid the Mexican republican fighters.    Finally in 1866, after a series of Mexican republican victories over the French troops, as well as Austrian and Belgian mercenaries, things began to unravel for Emperor Maximilian.

The Austrian and Belgian mercenaries left Mexico in late 1866, the French evacuated Mexico City in February, 1867, Maximilian was captured in May and executed on June 9, and the Mexican republic was restored, Juárez was restored to the presidency, and the 1857 constitution restated.

Incidentally, the 1857 constitution, amongst other provisions, confiscated the landholdings of the Catholic church, established civil marriages, eliminated capital punishment, provided freedom to any slave entering Mexico, and forbade the participation of priests in politics.   The prohibition of the clergy wearing their vestments in public was rescinded only very recently, during the Fox administration I think.

May 2, 2008

BILL MOYERS:Welcome to the Journal.

I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam, “Who’s telling the truth over there?” “Everyone, he said. “Everyone sees what’s happening through the lens of their own experience.” That’s how people see Jeremiah Wright. In my conversation with him on this broadcast a week ago and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage. Over 2000 of you have written me about him, and your opinions vary widely. Some sting: “Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American hating radical,” one viewer wrote. A “nut case,” said another. Others were far more were sympathetic to him.

Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright’s transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I’m not a psychologist. Many black preachers I’ve known — scholarly, smart, and gentle in person — uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course I’ve known many white preachers like that, too.

But where I grew up in the south, before the civil rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else; a safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed. I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed, “We the people.” Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Connor, and Jesse Helms. Even so, the anger of black preachers I’ve known and heard about and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic.

That’s not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances this week. What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle ? forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy. Hardly anyone took the “chickens come home to roost” remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that actions have consequences. My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright’s absurd charge that the United States deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being. But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated, while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test. Does this excuse Wright’s anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You’ll have to decide or yourself. At least it helps me to understand the why of them.

But in this multimedia age the pulpit isn’t only available on Sunday mornings. There’s round the clock media — the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help — people who for their own reasons set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn’t running for president with the man in the pew who was.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions, or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Jon Stewart recently played a tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the oval office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy; this is wrong — white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.

Which means it is all about race, isn’t it? Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettle some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. We are often exposed us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this ? this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner before our very eyes. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said “beware the terrible simplifiers”.

First there is Clinton’s naked pandering in calling for suspension of the federal gas tax through the summer, a proposal that would save the average consumer about $30. if the suspension actually cased gas prices to decrease, which, according to economists, almost unanimously, it would not, but would further enrich refiners.

Then there was the revelation yesterday, by Peter Dreier at the Huffington Post, “former journalist Sidney Blumenthal [who] has been widely credited with coining the term ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ used by Hillary Clinton in 1998″ and “a senior campaign advisor to Senator Clinton”, Sydney Blumenthal, has “almost every day over the past six months” sent out email messagges to media folks “that attack[s] Obama’s character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications.”

Yesterday, after super delegate Joe Andrew, whom Bill Clinton hand picked to lead the DNC, endorsed Obama, Howard Wolfson, a top staffer of the Clinton campaign, whose candidate drug her carpetbag to NY to run for the Senate, opined “Well, I’m not sure by the way that he’s [Andrew] actually from Indiana. I know he’s originally from Indiana, but –Senator Clinton has repeatedly demonstrated she is completely amoral. A stake must be driven through the heart of her campaign. Perhaps when Indianans learn of this video such will be done.

I am able to ignore ads on web sites but am sometimes irritated when the loading of a web site is delayed waiting for the ad server to load the ads. Adblock has taken care of that problem.

You may find it here.