Sherry Chandler

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

The federal appeals court in Atlanta on Friday halted Troy Anthony Davis’ execution, the third time his life has been spared shortly before he was to be put to death.

. . .

The judges called the stay “conditional” and said they want to hear more from Davis’ lawyers and state attorneys. Davis must clear two difficult legal hurdles to win new appeals.

First, he must show that his lawyers could not have previously found the new evidence supporting his innocence no matter how diligently they looked for it. And he must show that the new testimony, viewed in light of all the evidence, is enough to prove “by clear and convincing evidence that … no reasonable fact finder would have found [him] guilty.”

The 11th Circuit added a twist. It asked the parties to address whether Davis can still be executed if he can establish innocence under the second standard but cannot satisfy his burden under the first, due-diligence question.

The court gave Davis’ lawyers 15 days to file their legal brief and state attorneys another 10 days to respond.

In July 2007, the state Board of Pardons and Paroles issued a stay less than 24 hours before Davis was to be put to death. Last month, the Supreme Court halted Davis’ execution with less than two hours to spare.

This whole process strikes me as cruel in the extreme. So many last-minute stays are torture for all concerned, and the article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes the emotional toil for the families of the condemned and of the murdered policeman. I can understand why those who are trying to save Troy Davis fight on. I can’t understand why the courts can’t simply give the man another trial. Such an action would save souls and public and spiritual resources.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose a child. I’ve always thought that would be the greatest sorrow life could bring. But the law should not be used as an instrument of revenge.

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Meanwhle, the Bush Administration continues to assert that it can choose which laws to obey and which to ignore. No head of any state should be above the law.

Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket

I am unjust, but I can strive for justice.
My life’s unkind, but I can vote for kindness.
I, the unloving, say life should be lovely.
I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.

Man is a curious brute — he pets his fancies —
Fighting mankind, to win sweet luxury.
So he will be, tho’ law be clear as crystal,
Tho’ all men plan to live in harmony.

Come, let us vote against our human nature,
Crying to God in all the polling places
To heal our everlasting sinfulness
And make us sages with transfigured faces.

— Vachel Lindsay, from General William Booth Enters into Heaven, and Other Poems (MacMillan, 1919)

The Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutic Daily for October 14, 2008 contains an abstracted report of a study led by Gabrielle R. Chiaramonte, Ph.D., of Weill Cornell Medical College. Chiaramonte et al found that primary care physicians differ in the way they diagnose men and women who present with symptoms that may indicate coronary heart disease:

Physicians perceived symptoms such as chest pain, shortness of breath, and irregular heart rate in women as psychogenic when stress was present, whereas the same symptoms were perceived as organic in men regardless of whether stress was a factor, researchers said.

“For women, the presence of stress [or] anxiety drives the interpretation of accompanying symptoms, so that symptoms such as chest pain or shortness of breath undergo a ‘meaning shift,’ [being] perceived as a manifestation of stress [or] anxiety and not as CHD symptoms,” Chiaramonte said.

In men, however, physicians tend to view anxiety and stress as a risk factor for CHD.

The study was done by having 230 PCPs (87 internists and 143 family physicians) read one of four patient vignettes and make a diagnosis. When the patient had stress symptoms, 18% of women and 57% of men received a diagnosis of CHD; 35% of women and 75% of men were referred to a cardiologist. This trend held whether the diagnosing physician was a woman or a man.

TCT Daily is a publication of the Cardiovascular Research Foundation.

From The Progressive:

The American Civil Liberties Union is raising questions about why the Pentagon has assigned a fighting unit to the United States itself.

On October 1, the Northern Command (NorthCom), for the first time ever, got its own dedicated Army force.

And not just any force. The unit the Pentagon assigned to NorthCom is

the 3rd Infantry, First Brigade Combat Team, which has spent three of the last five years in Iraq. One of its specialties is counterinsurgency.

“This is a radical departure from separation of civilian law enforcement and military authority and could, quite possibly, represent a violation of law,” said Mike German, ACLU national security policy counsel. “Our Founding Fathers understood the threat that a standing army could pose to American liberty.”

German also noted that Congress has “passed statutory protections to ensure that the Army could not be turned against the American people,” he said in the ACLU’s press release.

“The erosion of these protections should concern every American,” German said.

The ACLU is seeking documents from the Justice Department, the Pentagon, and Homeland Security that “authorize the deployment of military troops for domestic purposes.”

Here’s Issue 2 of Shape of a Box, a commentary that seems by happy coincidence to fit into my theme today:

The commenter is Rob Jacik, author of the book Doubt after Doubt: Doubting the Christian Faith. Rob blogs at Rob In a Rush.

Recently some one dear to me asked me to read William P. Young’s The Shack. It is not the kind of book I would be drawn to when following my own nose and if I had to talk about it as a novel, I’d have to say that it is pretty bad.

The man can’t write a tight sentence and he pulls his characters around by the leash of his message. Plus, he performs infuriating tricks like having his main (human) character exclaim “No kidding, Sherlock!” To which I have to say, if you have to bowdlerize your conversation with God you’ve lost me. And anyway, why not find an clichéd exclamation that you don’t have to bowdlerize. Just “no kidding” would have done.

In short, the whole thing reads like a Sunday School lesson, a question and answer session with the Christian God in his tripartite personnae: a black mammy, a vaguely Jewish handyman, and an Oriental will-o-the-wisp. [Added: I want to add here that these forms of God, being part of Mack the protagonist's own dream vision, are intended to be the forms of God that Mack needs to see at that time and not as what you might call a complete definition of God.]

And the questions lobbed have about as much substance as those you might hear at a televised political debate. Which is to say they seem picked to elicit answers that don’t get us too far from God’s talking points. I kept thinking I could ask God harder questions.

But I have a certain prejudice in this. I just really never have been able to tolerate being preached at. The Shack compares itself to Pilgrim’s Progress and I’ve always found that work to be a real yawner, too. So I’m not this novel’s audience.

Okay, so those are the negatives.

On the other side of the equation, as a book of popular theology, I have to say that The Shack provides a much-needed balance to the sheep-from-goats revenge-theology popularized by the Left Behind series. Full disclosure: I have never read a Left-Behind novel and, unless shackled in a stress position and forced to do so, I never will.

In The Shack, God is love.

The God of The Shack values mercy over justice.The Jesus of The Shack is more likely to cry with you over your losses than to melt the flesh off offending sinners. When asked about judgement, an avatar of God asks our avatar of humanity which of his children he will send to hell.

Forgiveness is an act that benefits the forgiver, in that it rids her of a burden of hatred and judgement. Finding God in your life is not the same as being religious, and in fact, religiously following a set of rules might hamper your spirituality.

One of the most delightful exchanges in the novel (and there are some delightful passages in spite of what I said earlier) occurs when Jesus proclaims that he never asked anyone to become a Christian or even to ask What Would Jesus Do? He did not, he said, intend to become a role model.

There has been a confluence in my reading toward reconciliation lately.

On Friday, I found this passage in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry:

Trigant Burrow cautions us, in his essay The Social Neurosis, not to “fall a prey to the common illusion that a disorder in social behavior is a disorder outside of man’s own organism.” The typical fallcy of normality, he believes, explains conflict “not as a condition of mind common to both contending parties, but as the ‘wrongness’ of the other fellow, the other group or the other nation.”

And over the weekend, this from William Stafford, in Writing the Autralian Crawl, when asked in an interview whether the four years he spent in an internment camp as a conscientious objector during World War II had defined him or “steeled” him as a man of stong convictions:

I suppose four years in a concentration camp, wherever it is, would make a difference, but the reason I reacted to “steeled” is that if we’re not careful—and that’s why I place my feet with care in this world—if we’re not careful, any extreme experience like being in a camp for four years, you know, drafted into it and held there, will so tilt us that we’re not ready. It seems to me the intellectual life and the life of the arts depends on a kind of readiness, and so many of my firends who were in this experience were in fact locked into an attitude toward society that is very disquieting to me. I mean you can become addicted to losing fights with any society you’re in, and I just feel nervous about it. I’m probably betraying more of that past in the way I respond to this, than in what I say about it. I feel nervous about overreacting to any experience.

. . . no matter what’s happening in society for me . . . I still learn from the people around me, as a writer. I don’t feel full of insights and ready to proclaim for sure, discoveries, but even under the extreme circumstance of being put into camp for four years, I found it interesting to talk to the people who were holding us there, you know, the bosses, and so I would have this feeling today that it’s not a cops and robbers problem in society, it’s a kind of mutual problem in society. . . . I don’t locate the trouble in the bad guys so much as I do in some kind of phase that maybe we’re all going through.

I’m not exactly sure where all this confluence will lead me. Someplace better than the last eight years, I hope. Certainly to a renewed effort to stop seeing the world as armed camps of good and evil.

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Added: Border fences are not a good thing.

Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side tells the story of how Dick Cheney and his counsel, David Addington, usurped George W. Bush and ran the “War on Terror” from the Office of the Vice President. It is the story of how Cheney and Addington were able to claim absolute extraleagal power for the Executive during a time of war and use that power to override the Geneva Conventions and habeas corpus, and to authorize torture, domestic spying, and “preventive” war.

It is also the story of a few brave souls within the administration who had scruples and were willilng to stand against these policies. All of these people were conservative. Nearly all of them supported the war in Iraq. Most of them had short careers.

They included, among others, Deputy Attorney General James Comey, the man who had the hospital room standoff with Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card. To a lesser degree, perhaps, Jack Goldmith, who took over the Office of Legal Counsel when Gonzales left to become Attorney General and who revoked John Yoo’s opinions that torture was legal. Air Force Reserve Colonel Steve Kleinman, an interrogator who resisted the “enhanced techniques” and was ostracized for his efforts. Alberto Mora, General Counsel of the United States Navy, and David Brant, head of the Navy’s criminal investigations, who fought the policies within the Pentagon.

There’s an interesting contrast here in the way personal history can influence actions. Both Mora’s parents had fled Coummunist regimes to come to the U.S., his mother from Hungary and his father from Cuba. His grandfather, also an exile, had been a lawyer in Hungary. It was he who taught his grandsom that “the law is sacred.”

For the Moras, injustice and abuse were not merely theoretical concepts. One of Mora’s great-uncles had been interned in a Nazi concentration camp, and another was hanged after having been tortured. Mora’s first memory, as a young child, was of playing on the floor in his mother’s bedroom and watching her crying as she listened to a report on the radio declaring that the 1956 anti-Communist uprising in Hungary had been crushed. “People who went through things like this tend to have very strong views about the rule of law, totalitarianism, and America,” Mora said. [p. 217]

John Yoo’s family had also fled a Communist regime but his experiences led him to draw conclusions that were in stark contrast to Mora’s:

Born in South Korea in 1967, Yoo had been brought to America as an infant by his immigrant parents, both of whom were psychiatrists who had survived the Korean war and become staunch anti-Communists. Quite directly, Yoo’s family owed its freedom and prosperity to Harry Truman’s controversial decision to wage the Korean War without obtaining congressional authorization. Had Truman not used military force, without Congress’s permission, Yoo reflected on occasion, he would not have attended Harvard College and Yale Law School, nor, escaped Communism. Yoo left early mentors feeling deceived about the depth and extremism of his views—he had learned apparently to mask them behind moderate-sounding language—but in time it became clear that he acted less as a lawyer judiciously guiding the government than as a single-minded advocate for a cause. [p.65]

(Yoo clerked for Clarence Thomas, by the way, which is a propos of nothing except that I think they are both the dregs of the U.S. legal system.)

Another conservative who stood up to the Bush adminstration on the issue of torture was John McCain. He did it by pushing through an amendment to the Defense Department budget in July 2005 that made it illegal for the Armed Forces to use any interrogation techniques outside of the limits set by the Army Field Manual. Whatever you may think of his subsequent actions (as in voting for the Military Commissions Act) or his campaign for the Presidency, he deserves credit for that legislation. Nobody else, Democrat or Republican, was giving Bush any significant resistance in those days.

The Dark Side is subtitled The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. All of the men I’ve mentioned here lost their battle in the War on American Ideals and it is a war that we, as a people continue to lose and will continue to lose unless we put pressure on whoever wins this election.

The New York Times today, under this headline—Bush Decides to Keep Guantánamo Open—indicates that Bush expects any new administration to continue to use the prison:

Mr. Bush’s top advisers held a series of meetings at the White House this summer after a Supreme Court ruling in June cast doubt on the future of the American detention center. But Mr. Bush adopted the view of his most hawkish advisers that closing Guantánamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or any time soon, the officials said.

The administration is proceeding on the assumption that Guantánamo will remain open not only for the rest of Mr. Bush’s presidency but also well beyond, the officials said, as the site for military tribunals of those facing terrorism-related charges and for the long prison sentences that could follow convictions.

The effect of Mr. Bush’s stance is to leave in place a prison that has become a reviled symbol of the administration’s fight against terrorism, and to leave another contentious foreign policy decision for the next president.

. . .

Mr. Cheney and his chief of staff, David S. Addington, have made it clear in the internal discussions this year that keeping Guantánamo open under a new president would validate the administration’s decisions dealing with terrorists, the officials said.

Guantanamo has always created more problems than it solved, and that in itself is as eloquent an argument as I can think of against Cheney’s strategy.

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Update: Hear Jane Mayer discuss her book, nominated for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, on Fresh Air.

Change comes from the bottom.

At YouTube

Link via The Politico

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Update: In Fine Print, a Proliferation of Large Donors :

Much of the attention on the record amounts of money coursing through the presidential race this year, including in Senator Barack Obama’s announcement on Sunday of his $150 million fund-raising haul in September, has focused on the explosion of small donors.

But there has been another proliferation on the national fund-raising landscape that was not fully apparent until the latest campaign finance reports were filed last week: people who have given tens of thousands of dollars at a time to help the candidates.

Enabled by the fine print in campaign finance laws, they have written checks that far exceed normal individual contribution limits to candidates, to joint fund-raising committees that benefit the candidates as well as their respective parties.

Many of these large donors come from industries with interests in Washington. A New York Times analysis of donors who wrote checks of $25,000 or more to the candidates’ main joint fund-raising committees found, for example, the biggest portion of money for both candidates came from the securities and investments industry, including executives at various firms embroiled in the recent financial crisis like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG.

The joint fund-raising committees have been utilized far more heavily this presidential election than in the past. Mr. Obama’s campaign has leaned on wealthy benefactors to contribute up to $33,100 at a time to complement his army of small donors over the Internet as he bypassed public financing for the general election. More than 600 donors contributed $25,000 or more to him in September alone, roughly three times the number who did the same for Senator John McCain.

And Mr. McCain’s campaign, which had not disclosed most of these donors until last week, has taken the concept to new levels, encouraging deep-pocketed supporters to write checks of more than $70,000, by adding state parties as beneficiaries of his fund-raising.

All told, each candidate has had about 2,000 people give $25,000 or more to his various joint fund-raising committees through September.

“What we’re seeing is an emphasis on the high-end check that we have not seen since the days of soft money,” said Anthony J. Corrado Jr., a campaign finance expert at Colby College in Maine.

Interesting revelations in a race between a man who says he’s running a different kind of campaign fueld by small donors and a man who was co-author of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill.

Read the rest for details, which may be significant.

Meanwhile, the man who claims money is free speech, Mitch McConnell, is running only 4 points ahead of his Democratic challenger, Bruce Lunsford, according to the latest KOS poll. [Update: Survey USA's latest poll says it's tied 48/48.] McConnell ranks 19th in the U.S. Senate for personal wealth and his campaign coffers are equally fat, so he can afford to buy obscene amounts of free speech. Most of it has been pretty hateful. He learned well from the Bushes.

It has been said that the Clinton economy floated all boats. If the Bush economy sinks a few, including McConnell’s, well, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good.

From Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama (my emphasis):

I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

See Echidne for a not-quite-so-right answer from Fareed Zakaria

Michael Pollan’s long letter to the President-Elect is a week old but still deserves your close attention. In the letter Pollan explains why food policy will be one of the most important issues facing the new president, whoever he may be:

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

Read it all.

Link compliments of rosswhite at Twitter

Listen to Pollan on Fresh Air.