Opinion-Columns.com

Where Are You, John L. Lewis?

Well, he’s been dead these past thirty-six years, but John L. Lewis was a giant of a labor leader for the United Mine Workers.  There seem to be no such giants today, they’re all bean-counters and politicos and the huge argument that’s splitting the Service Employees and Truckers away from the AFL/CIO is mostly about beans and politics.  Unionization is taking a hit, probably because it deserves one.  Lewis came out of his corner swinging because mine workers were in the poorest paying and most dangerous jobs in the country. They had issues. For the most part, union workers today enjoy wages, hours, pensions and job security that are unprecedented and put them on top of the world, worker-wise.

The top of the world leaves no room to go up anymore. The top of the world is driving business off-shore and companies such as General Motors into bankruptcy. Labor is disintegrating because the model that built it was inferior wages and lousy working conditions and that model no longer (or barely) exists. 

Labor and the union movement will change as business conditions change or it will die. 

Recent negotiations with the airlines are an elegant case in point, with labor concessions coming so late and so grudgingly that major carriers were forced to seek the protection of the bankruptcy courts.  And so, on this last day of July, storm-clouds are gathering over what’s left of the union movement, begun a hundred years ago in Chicago with the birth of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World).  Fitting that its rending is a Chicago event as well.  The IWW still exists, gone from street-battles with industry-backed goons to its current “call in day to Starbucks” and I guess that says it all. John L. Lewis wouldn't have thought much of calling in to Starbucks.

There is only one equitable place left for union representation and that is on the boards of directors of the companies whose workers they represent.  Labor and management can no longer afford to stand at odds with one another.  A win for one can no longer be a loss for the other.  The new paradigm is creative partnerships that allow business and industry to thrive and make labor a shareholder, as wooed as Wall Street, as valuable to growth as the quarterly uptick. 

If creative partnership is too much a buzzword, forgive me that.  Labor has always known what is wrong with the mechanism, be it on the factory floor or the crowded cubicles where computer programs rule the workday.  You want to know why things don’t work, why profits are so elusive, why absenteeism and burnout are costing more than raw materials? Ask at the bottom.  You want to know why job satisfaction is so poor that only wages keep the boat afloat?  Send the consultants home and ask at the bottom.  The bottom is where truth lies and profit can yet be mined.

If it is possible (and it is if anyone cares) to bring the wisdom of the bottom to the board room, then all things are possible, none of them confrontational.  If it is possible (and it is if anyone cares) to expand the ‘quality-circle’ to a diameter that includes the very top of management, then there is hope for a reversal of off-shoring.  Then there is a case for unions to grow once more because they will find themselves with a relevant issue and a powerful incentive to profit.  Look at John L’s picture and realize you’re looking back fifty years.  There hasn’t been a truly relevant issue in all that time. 

But there is now, if the split-off unions have sense enough to see it.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Sense and Nonsense

The Senate finally approved an exemption for gun manufacturers that frees them from liability when someone misuses their product.  Makes a lot of sense and it’s long overdue.

The nonsense is that we still have no practical control over guns in this country.

Scenario:  260 residents of Smalltown, U.S.A convene their annual Town Meeting.  There's a great turnout, all of them there because they each and every one of them honor and believe in the democratic process and it’s stood Smalltown in good stead since the Revolutionary War.

This year the docket includes a vote on gun control within the township.  Among the citizenry are the normal percentage of hunters, skeet and target-shooters and folks who keep a pistol in the bedside table.  Charlie Walker goes to Maine every fall to hunt moose, but that's just Charlie and so far he's not actually shot one.

It’s not about banning guns, it's about control and the control is only necessary because a gun shop opened on the south edge of town that sells some very strange stuff and has attracted customers from across the state. There's a machine-gun range a mile and a half out of town. People are nervous. Smalltown's always been sort of a small-town place. The debate centers around whether or not to allow Saturday-night specials, StreetSweeper shotguns, assault weapons, large-magazine automatic pistols and armor-piercing ammunition within the township. There are four people in Smalltown who purport to have an interest in the ‘recreational aspects’ of such weaponry. 70% of the residents (182) vote against allowing the above. Four vote to allow it within the township.  74 just want to get home and get their feet up.  The Chairman gavels for quiet after the vote and allows the weapons.

Excuse me?  Four overrule 182?  That’s democracy at work?

Smalltown, as you’ve already guessed is a microcosm of America, its 260 souls representing the 260 million of the country.  The four represent the 4 million members of the National Rifle Association.  The 182 million who statistically represent those praying for some kind of intelligent de-weaponizing of the streets continue, through the intimidation of their representatives, to be beaten into submission by the NRA lobby.

Smalltown doesn’t understand what’s going on and because they are overwhelmingly law-abiding and are unlikely to be among the percentage of victims, useful controls continue to elude our them.  As usually happens when good law is simply not available, bad law tries to take up the slack and that’s what happened with the proposed legislation to make manufacturers responsible for crimes committed with their products.  It didn’t pass and (my view) shouldn’t have passed.

But I’ve been mugged; taken from behind and had a gun shoved up against my neck by street toughs high on drugs.  Listened to the click of the hammer being cocked.  Armlocked across the neck, my wind entirely shut off, I listened while they debated whether to shoot me as my pockets were ripped out and my wristwatch stripped.  Thrown half-conscious to the pavement, I survived.  It wasn’t pleasant.  Had I been armed, it wouldn’t have served any purpose.

I believe we have a citizen’s right to own firearms.  I don’t think I have a right to the kind of weaponry Smalltown debated at their Town Meeting.  Because the NRA is so intransigent on what should be common-sense issues, they enhance their growing reputation as wild-eyed gun nuts and that encourages a continuing stream of bad legislation.

At this rate, one day we will have our bad law.
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There are lots more things that make me nuts, all of them on my personal web site.

Elmore Leonard and the Supreme Court

I just don’t know why people don’t get it.

Read my lips folks; what an attorney argues for a client is not necessarily or even usually what he believes in his heart.

Okay, now to the Elmore Leonard link to all this and why it may serve to put the Roberts nomination in some kind of perspective.  Big disclaimer here:  I don’t know his politics and have no idea what Elmore thinks about John G. Roberts and this is in no way to be taken as any kind of endorsement.  But anyway . . .

. . . I am a great fan of Elmore Leonard’s writing and for those of you who may not have read him, you might have seen the movie Get Shorty, or that Paul Newman reputation-maker of the 60’s, Hombre, a classic.  Both films from his books. Hell of a writer.  Nice guy.  I can say that because Elmore was here in Prague a couple years back for the Prague Summer Writer’s Workshop and we chatted at a signing he was doing at the Big Ben Bookstore.  But he made a point earlier in the week, during one of the panels he was on, when the conversation turned to readers and their misperceptions of writers.  Stay with me, this all connects.

Leonard told about a complaint he’d gotten from a reader of one of his books (I’ve forgotten which).  The guy was incensed that Elmore continually referred to black people as ‘niggers.’ “I never realized you were a racist,” the man ranted, “and I will never buy another of your books.”

Elmore wrote him back that he was not a racist . . . that his character in the book was a racist and that particular prejudice was essential to an accurate literary portrait of the man. “I am not a murderer, either,” Elmore wrote him, “but there are murderers in my novels, just as there are philandering husbands, gay men, prostitutes and other social misfits, none of which I happen to be.  To insist my personal moral beliefs into my writing would be to cripple myself as an author. ” All of this is paraphrased, I didn’t have a tape-recorder.

John G. Roberts’ work for and during the Reagan administration was done for his client and his client happened to be interested in promoting certain social agendas and limiting certain others.  That was the work.  That’s what lawyers do.  Roberts is apparently a conservative guy and his personal opinions are quite likely to run along many lines, depending upon the circumstances. To insist his personal moral beliefs into his client relationships would be to cripple himself both as a lawyer and as a judge. 

He has said that repeatedly and his judicial opinions bear that out. There isn't much more one can ask of a nominee.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Hospitals, Places Where You Go to Get Sick

It bugs me to have to visit someone in the hospital and, until recently, being bugged was a manner of speech, but it has now taken on darker implications. Hospitals have become the places where you go to get sick instead of become well.

There’s lots of reasons:

• Heating, ventilating and air-conditioning systems that are virtually sealed in buildings where the windows no longer open.  That keeps recirculated air on an endless loop, so patients end up breathing every other sick person’s exhalations.
• Over use (for decades) of anti-biotics for every case of sniffles.  This constancy of what amounts to prescription abuse created a whole new class of viruses that are resistant to anti-biotics and they’re killing patients.
• Plain old sloppy housekeeping practices.
• Doctors and nurses wearing rubber gloves to keep them safe from communicable diseases, but who don’t change gloves often enough to keep patients safe.
• Not enough periodic hand washing.

Ceci Connolly’s Washington Post article points to Pennsylvania’s study (the first among the states) that showed 12,000 Pennsylvanians contracting infectious diseases in hospital during 2004.  They didn’t come to the hospital with those diseases, they caught them there.  At least 1,500 of those patients died.  Unnecessarily.  Of something they didn’t have when they came in the door.

Because of underreporting (not hard to understand in this litigious society) the actual totals may be as high as ten times that number.  The numbers-crunchers point out that Pennsylvania accounts for just 4% of the national population and thus 100 unlucky hospitalized victims may be dying on a daily basis across the country. That’s 37,000 needless deaths every year and the number is growing rather than declining.

Common strep infections are poised on the knife-edge of one or two antibiotics left that are effective against them and, if strains resistant to these couple remaining drugs appear, hospital deaths will soar. According to a recent AP article, “Hospital infections, which kill about 90,000 people a year, are fueled by bacteria that are growing more and more resistant to the drugs commonly used against them. The top six bacteria found in hospitals are each resistant to at least one drug.”

The average cost of treating a Pennsylvania hospital patient who contracted a needless infection was a stunning $29,000.00.  It takes one’s breath away.  How is it possible to spend twenty-nine grand on curing an infection? 

So, take your pick between 37,000 and 90,000 but they’re each an outrageous number of preventable deaths.  If the top figure is anywhere near correct (and the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta says it is), it’s larger than all accidental deaths combined, including automobiles.

Not only is the nation’s health care system bankrupting us, it’s killing us at an unheard of rate.

The answer of course is to stay out of the hospital.  It’s everyone’s best bet as a place to become sick rather than get well.
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There are lots more things that make me nuts, all of them on my personal web site.

Advocacy Trumps Philosophy

There’s a mistaken view that nominee John Roberts’ advocacy on behalf of his various clients tells us something useful about how he will acquit himself as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

It ain’t necessarily so and those who would try to read the tea-leaves of his lawyering life (including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee) are ill advised. There is a line between representing the interests of a client and allowing one’s personal philosophy to interfere with that representation.  That line is not only a matter of fair representation, it is actionable against attorneys who confuse the one issue with the other.

Thou shalt not stick your personal nose into a client’s legal business. 

Put another way, a lawyer’s duty is to the law, else how would the unsavory and unattractive of the world get justice?

Those who have their own agenda, and that includes almost everyone opposed to this current president of ours, were and are powered-up to fight this nomination.  Actually, they were powered-up to fight any nomination by GWB and now they’re flummoxed by the choice he’s made.  It’s a national example of being ‘all dressed up with nowhere to go’ and so they flock to the archives and try to make a connect between an advocacy (active support; especially the act of pleading or arguing for something) and a philosophy (any personal belief about how to live or how to deal with a situation).

I myself am not all that happy over some of Roberts’ decisions as a judge, particularly his participation in the three-judge panel that overturned lower-court rulings about our terrorist prisoners.  But I understand that the lower-court opinion was flawed as a matter of law and that is quite a different thing than agreeing with and advocating the abuse of prisoners. 

The quite different thing is what needs to be evaluated in judging this candidate.

Finally, there is the matter of ‘a better man than we might have got.’  In a perfect world, the Supreme Court would be our national repository of ‘the best of the best.’  It is not.  It is often the best we can get or the best we can approve.  Outgoing Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said John Roberts was a ‘brilliant choice.’

Those who would so love to see another O’Connor should at least pay some attention to her opinion.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

From an Undisclosed Location, a Message in a Bottle

We established (unscientifically but beyond doubt) that the undisclosed location Dick Cheney keeps retreating to (and emerging from) is not a nuclear-safe bunker, but deep within his own brain.  This most private of retreats is where he has his eureka moments and the resultant disclosures are sometimes bold and CNN-like, sometimes surreptitious. 

Those are his message-in-a-bottle connivances and because this is a conniving vice president, they are worth watching.  In yesterday’s commentary I mentioned that I could hardly wait for the ‘next exciting chapter coming down the pipeline from an undisclosed location.’ 

Little did I think it would be so soon.

Thursday evening (July 21st) our intrepid carrier-of-the-truth sat down with three runaway Republican Senators for some Cheney-style steamrollering.  John Warner, Lindsey Graham and John McCain all tried to keep straight faces and be respectful as the vp took them to the woodshed for their support of and contribution to the proposed legislation . . . it is in fact, a McCain document. 

The meeting in itself is not unusual.  The White House regularly lobbies Senators and Representatives on issues it deems important.  What is unusual is the whimsy of Cheneys message-in-a-bottle. That and the fact that these guys are all Republicans of the major-league variety.  Heavyweights, scolded by a lightweight. The legislation at issue would bar the U.S. military from engaging in . . .

• Cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees
• Hiding prisoners from the Red Cross
• Using interrogation methods not authorized by a new Army field manual

. . . and the vice-presidential arm-twisting had to do with defeating that legislation (which is asking a bit much of the author). 

Cheney represents himself as four-square in favor of all of the above.

The Army, of course, has been absolutely run through the wringer by this administration insofar as its pride, honor and traditions are concerned.  Several hundred years of military code have been reduced to tatters, denigrated and dragged through the mud by the unique current relationship between a professional military and its civilian commander in chief. 

That’s never happened before. 

Presidents quite properly assert their constitutional civilian control over the military as Truman did when he fired MacArthur.  It's a pillar of our freedom from dictatorship.  But presidents have thus far managed that responsibility while simultaneously upholding the highest traditions and conduct within the services.

No more.  This president has abdicated that responsibility to the Neverland of the vice-president’s musings and strange they are.  The Army, its code of prisoner ethics and military justice in shreds, has come up with a new set of rules and limits on interrogation methods, standardizing them in a new field manual.  The Senate, outraged by being continually blindsided in a seemingly never-ending exposure of abuse, seeks to cast that policy in bronze. 

Cheney hollowly argues that such legislation would usurp the president’s authority, which is exactly what the Senators expect to do.  They can hardly wait to get on with the usurping.  He quavers that cruelty, inhumanity and degradation are the American way to protect ourselves effectively from terrorist attack. The president, shooting himself in the foot at the same time he’s trying to stamp it like an angry child, warns darkly that he will veto the $442 billion defense bill if he doesn’t get his way. 

What a laugh.  He would probably do it and then complain he doesn’t have the money to fight this personal war of his.  These two guys, Heckle and Jeckle, #1 and #2 are so far out on a testosterone-trip as to be unreachable.

McCain has been a prisoner of war.  Cheney has never been a prisoner of anything but his own ego, greed and hubris.  It must be very hard for McCain to sit and listen to such a man.

More about politics in America at my personal web site.

Notes From an Undisclosed Location

I know, I know, Dick Cheney’s comment that the Iraqi insurgency was in its “last throes” is old news, but the continuing kidnappings of diplomats, first the Eqyptian and now the Albanian, has apparently not been made known in undisclosed locations.  The bombings increase in number and severity each week and if you haven’t seen the July 4th Doonesbury, be sure to check it out in the archives.

Actually, it seems the “undisclosed location” we hear so much about is not a place (as we might have thought) but a state of mind.

Who knew?

Retreating into his own head, where the constant accusations of war profiteering at his alma mater corporation are merely misunderstandings of how business is done, Cheney finds comfort in fiction.  The man is a novelist.

Who knew?

Guantanamo isn’t the tie-em-to-the-floor and waterboard-em-till-they-talk internment center of front page revelation and Senate investigation.  There are no mistreatments there, no attack dogs, no humiliations, no confinement without end and certainly no reasons to answer such biased and unfounded allegations.  Speaking to Wolf Blitzer at CNN, Cheney said “There isn’t any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we’re treating these people.”

Yeah, Dick.  That’s not an answer, that’s the problem.  Reaching way back into the dim recesses of his undisclosed mental location, the Dick-Man continued to extrapolate “They’re living in the tropics.  They’re well fed.  They’ve got everything they could possibly want.” 

Who knew?

I thought (obviously without the vice-president’s keen sensitivity) that perhaps, just perhaps, we ought to do what court after court has required us to do and start trying these people for whatever crimes we purported to hold them accountable.  Embarrassingly, I had failed to realize they were on extended vacation.  Musing on his victories, the vp spoke eloquently of the 50 million people he had liberated in Iraq and Afghanistan. $200 billion (plus or minus another $200 billion, because nobody knows) comes to somewhere between $4,000 and $8,000 for every man, woman, child and insurgent in the two countries. 

“That’s not the issue,” the Dick-Man would respond, slamming the same rhetorical door he repeatedly slammed in Colin Powell’s face.  The Issue, in Dick-Man’s undisclosed mental location, is whatever he chooses it to be at the moment.  That’s called a ‘plot-twist’ in literary jargon.  Take expectation right up to a brink and then deny the foreshadowing, bring your reader to a new and unsuspected realization.  Larry King continues to flog the vp’s novelistic tendencies, as do the major talk-shows.  It’s free and as entertaining as Jay Leno’s monologue, so why not? 

Why not, indeed?

In true Harry Potter style, I can’t wait for the next exciting chapter coming down the pipeline from an undisclosed location.

Read more of my rants on the war in Iraq at my personal web site.

Too Ready for Too Long to Back Down Now

My inbox exploded with e-mails this morning as perhaps yours did.  The well-cocked guns of right and left, the complicated campaigns of liberal and conservative and the finger-tapping and finger-pointing legions long prepared for this fight have been set loose upon the Internet.

The starting gate's flung open, bells clanging, Bush has named his nominee to fill Sandra Day O’Connor’s vacancy in the Supreme Court.

The John Roberts nomination, at first blush, looks as reasonable as one might expect of a very conservative president.  No one could have expected a centrist; this president is not a representative of the center.  According to a Washington Post editorial, before sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C., Roberts was among the country’s best-regarded appellate lawyers.  Sounds like solid experience for sitting on what amounts to the nation’s highest appellate court.  He’s not made a lot of ideological noise either on or off the court, a conservative with ‘admirers among liberals.’  I like those credentials enough to not shoot from the hip until I learn more.

But the well-cocked guns are impatient and have already gone off, because that's what well-cocked guns do.  All that preparation for disaster, whether it was seen as a disaster of the left or a disaster of the right, has to go somewhere, if only into my In-Box.  Too much sound and fury to be quietly vented.  Bush has thrown a low-outside pitch, just clipping the edge of the strike-zone and all that steam can’t just be left to its own devices. 

We’re girded for a fight and by God we have to have one.

But I have noticed over a fairly long lifetime that the fire and brimstone conservatives we’ve sent to the Supreme Court, as well as their do-gooder liberal counterparts, have never been as bad as we feared or as good as we hoped.  A strange thing happens when a man has finally been anointed by the Senate and sent to the robe-room of the Court.  Slipping into this or that hallowed chair and casting an eye across the upcoming calendar, the man the president sent becomes the man he has always known himself to be.  And that is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, a thoughtful and serious holder of the nation’s faith in its timeless constitution.

The Constitution is a document of what men wrote and the Court is an interpreter of what men meant. Thoughtful interpretation in the place of zealotry is what makes civilized society. 

I belong to various and sundry Internet lobbying (for want of a better name) organizations and they are fairly screaming their various exhortations for me to do this or object to that before it is too late.  Judge Roberts wrote and argued briefs for clients (including the government) that many would classify as anti-this and anti-that, but he has never said whether or not he agreed philosophically with those positions.  A good lawyer represents his client and the best of them do not reveal their individual prejudices in that effort.  We may find out more about this man if we listen to him.  In Sam Goldwyn’s language, the Internet lobbyists, at least for the time being, will have to ‘include me out.’

It’s no secret that there are many things our president has done that I’m not happy with.  I want to hear what John G. Roberts has to say for himself before the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

It’s possible George Bush may have sent us a winner.

See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

America Dishonored

For the first time that I know of, an American president has been declared to be a source of law instead of beholden to it. Perhaps I missed something in Civics 101, but it was my understanding that the legislature writes laws, the Supreme Court evaluates their compliance with the Constitution and the President (we hope) abides by them.

Not so in Bush-war.  In Bush-war, Geneva conventions and international agreements are for suckers. In Bush-war we make our own rules as we go and if we’re caught off base we stone-wall and then deny and if that doesn’t work we tie up the records as ‘classified’ and see if the country doesn’t just tire of the whole matter and go back to summer reruns. In Bush-war we illegally hold, illegally interrogate and illegally try our prisoners.  In Bush-war there is no limit to the methods by which we dishonor our country.

An appellate court, friendly to the administration, by three-member panel instead of the full court, last week swept aside a lower court's decision in what amounted to a general endorsement of a legal theory.  That theory postulates that the president has broad powers under the Constitution to decide how military detainees are to be handled during a time of conflict. Don’t tell me this administration doesn’t know how to pick its courts.

The panel said courts should defer to President Bush's decision in 2002 that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to detainees Bush declares as enemy combatants and that, in any event, the conventions are not enforceable by U.S. courts in lawsuits brought by foreigners.

Excuse me? The Geneva Conventions are not enforceable by U.S. courts?  The U.S. is signatory to the conventions. How much more enforceable can you get than that?

Looked on (by the administration) as a big win for the administration, the only losers are

• Our credibility as a nation of law
• Our reputation in the world as a humane member of the society of nations
• Our military honor and adherence to the Uniform Code of Military Justice
• Our captured kids in any war
• Our opinion in any dispute involving international crimes
• Our ability under treaty to extradite criminals
• Every man in uniform, from recruit to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who hangs his head in shame
• Our national pride in justice as a definition of America

The winner is the lying son-of-a-bitch who presently holds down the position of Secretary of Defense; the now Attorney General, an assailant of justice who crafted a definition of torture he should be made to endure; a Vice-President so evil, crooked and shameless that he ought to permanently remain in an undisclosed location and, finally, a President who is philosophical father to them all, George Walker Bush.

The briefs presented to this shamefully contrived panel were not lightweight.  Seven retired senior military officers and lawyers warned in a joint statement that if the commissions are allowed to proceed unchecked, foreign tyrants will organize similar court hearings for U.S. military personnel and "hide their oppression under U.S. precedent."  A group of 305 current and former European politicians, said in their court brief that letting the commissions proceed as planned would place the United States in breach of international law and undermine the due process rights of individuals affected by the war on terrorism.

In the face of that, the Justice Department argued weakly that if Bush’s kangaroo-court commissions (my definition, not theirs) are not allowed to go forward, security breaches could result, slowing the war on terrorism.  It might have suggested that if the commissions are allowed, the Justice Department will no longer deserve its name.  Imagine the video . . . a jihadist holding a soldier by the hair, announcing that, like Bush, he was declaring his own justice and then beheading the prisoner?  This kind of scene will no doubt happen anyway, but this spineless, silly, outrageous panel of judicial idiots has just given the enemy an equal status in law.

And to think we actually almost impeached a president for a blow-job.

There are lots more things that make me nuts, all of them on my personal web site.

Tribal Abuse Follow-Up

Writing commentary, I knock out a column on something that catches my attention and then move on.  Occasionally those past columns slip my mind and then I’ll see something in the paper and have a ‘holy cow’ moment.  Such a moment occurred recently when I caught Evelyn Nieves excellent article about Judge Royce Lamberth’s scorching indictment of the Interior Department in its treatment of Indians. The dust had hardly settled on my commentary, Indian Abuse Comes Home to Roost.

Royce ordered the Interior Department to include notices in its various correspondences with Indian tribes that the government’s information ‘may not be credible.’  That, of course, is the textbook definition of incredible; something that is not credible.  We kid and joke and commiserate about our government not being credible, but it’s usually just partisan comment bitching about Democrats or Republicans up to their evil doings.  It’s pretty sobering to hear from a U.S. District Court judge that our government is not credible.

I guess Lamberth finally lost his patience. He’s sat for over ten years now, hearing the Interior Department dodge various issues.  Ten years is a long time to sit and judges get testy. He wrote last week that “for those harboring hope that the stories of murder, dispossession, forced marches, assimilationist policy programs, and other instances of cultural genocide against the Indians are merely the echoes of a horrible, bigoted government-past that has been sanitized by the good deeds of more recent history, this case serves as an appalling reminder of the evils that result when large numbers of the politically powerless are placed at the mercy of institutions engendered and controlled by a politically powerful few.”

Wow! I wonder what he’d say if he was really angry?

Nieves’ article goes on to mention that Lamberth has held Bush Interior Secretary Gale Norton, as well as Clinton’s Bruce Babbitt in contempt of court.  Lamberth added these words to his frustrated recounting of the trial; “The entire record in this case tells the dreary story of Interior’s degenerate tenure as Trustee-Delegate for the Indian trust, a story shot-through with bureaucratic blunders, flibs, goofs, and foul-ups, and peppered with scandals, deception, dirty tricks and outright villany, the end of which is nowhere in sight.”

Like most lawsuits, this one is about money.  The Interior Department is no doubt scared to death that the interest alone on 126 years of deceit is going to be a pile of money. 

So be it.

For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.