A.C.L.U. Lawyers Mine Documents for Truth
By SCOTT SHANE
copyright by The New York Times
Published: August 29, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/world/30intel.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — In the spring of 2003, long before Abu Ghraib or secret prisons became part of the American vocabulary, a pair of recently hired lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union noticed a handful of news reports about allegations of abuse of prisoners in American custody.
The lawyers, Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, wondered: Was there a broader pattern of abuse, and could a Freedom of Information Act request uncover it? Some of their colleagues, more experienced with the frustrations of such document demands, were skeptical. One made a tongue-in-cheek offer of $1 for every page they turned up.
Six years later, the detention document request and subsequent lawsuit are among the most successful in the history of public disclosure, with 130,000 pages of previously secret documents released to date and the prospect of more.
The case has produced revelation after revelation: battles between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military over the treatment of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp; autopsy reports on prisoners who died in custody in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Justice Department’s long-secret memorandums justifying harsh interrogation methods; and day-by-day descriptions of what happened inside the Central Intelligence Agency’s overseas prisons.
“This is certainly a landmark case in every respect, including in the history of the Freedom of Information Act,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and an expert on the act.
But Mr. Aftergood said the case also illustrated how costly litigation was often necessary to unearth documents the government preferred to protect. “The law gives you standing to fight,” he said. “It doesn’t guarantee victory.”
In fact, the A.C.L.U. and its partners, a New Jersey law firm, Gibbons P.C., and four other advocacy groups, estimate that they have put more than 10,000 hours of legal work into the case. The parties have filed more than 100 motions before Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the United States District Court in Manhattan; appeared for formal court arguments a dozen times; and twice taken disputes to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. And now, for the first time, the government is seeking a hearing before the Supreme Court.
The total costs in lawyers’ time and other expenses may exceed $2 million, and under the law, the plaintiffs are entitled to seek reimbursement from the government if they “substantially prevail” in their quest — a standard almost certainly met in this case.
The Freedom of Information Act has a mixed reputation with advocates, journalists and companies who use it regularly. It can be notoriously slow to generate results, and in the case of classified documents — the vast majority of the records at issue in the A.C.L.U. case — the pages often come back with all or most of the content blacked out.
Agencies sometimes do not take a case seriously until the requestor takes the government to court. The A.C.L.U.’s initial October 2003 request for documents on the treatment of prisoners produced a single document — an innocuous set of State Department “talking points” — before the organization filed suit in June 2004, joined by the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace.
Documents began to flow only after September 2004, when Judge Hellerstein issued a ruling criticizing the “glacial pace” of the government’s response and added, “If the documents are more of an embarrassment than a secret, the public should know of our government’s treatment of individuals captured and held abroad.”
Mr. Jaffer, 37, a Canadian-born lawyer who left a lucrative practice with a private firm to join the A.C.L.U., said, “Maybe our inexperience was a good thing, because we actually thought we might get something.”
Ms. Singh, 40, the daughter of the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, graduated from Yale Law School, is married to an American and holds dual Indian and American citizenship.
Ms. Singh recalls being teased by a senior colleague in 2003 who asked, “ ‘Are you clearing out shelf space for all the documents you’ll get?’ ” The joke backfired, as reams of paper began to arrive. The organization eventually had to create a new computer system to handle the large electronic database, and in 2007 the two lawyers published a book-length collection of the documents obtained by then, called “Administration of Torture.”
The largest share of documents (2,814) have come from the Defense Department, the A.C.L.U. said, followed by the State Department (998), the F.B.I. (872), other units in the Justice Department (145) and the C.I.A. (49).
A C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said the agency “takes very seriously — and devotes considerable resources to meeting — its legal obligations under the Freedom of Information Act” and has released tens of millions of pages of documents over the years.
But the recent C.I.A. disclosures caused deep unease inside the agency. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director, said releasing documents the agency had designated as top secret could undermine crucial cooperation from foreign intelligence services. The decision by President Obama in April to release Justice Department memorandums describing C.I.A. interrogation methods is leading to a cascade of disclosures, General Hayden said.
Four former C.I.A. directors and the current one, Leon E. Panetta, had all argued unsuccessfully against the release, which had not yet been ordered by the court in the A.C.L.U. case, though the plaintiffs’ lawyers said they believed that the release would eventually happen.
“We got publicly rolled,” General Hayden said. “So our foreign partners may say there is no value to our promise in the future that ‘Don’t worry, we can keep this secret.’ ”
In May, Mr. Obama decided to fight the release of hundreds of photographs of abuse, saying they could encourage attacks on American troops abroad. It is the photo issue that the administration is taking to the Supreme Court.
The A.C.L.U.’s success has led some news organizations to take a new look at the potential of the Freedom of Information Act to expose government secrets. But the A.C.L.U. lawyers note that their effort has repeatedly fed off the work of investigative reporters who have identified cases of abuse, legal opinions and other documents that the organization then pursued in court.
Their lawsuit continues. On Monday, the government faces yet another court-imposed deadline to turn over more documents — including the 2001 presidential directive authorizing the secret prisons — or explain why they must be withheld.
2 Detainees Released to Portugal
LISBON (AP) — Two Syrians previously held at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have arrived in Portugal as free men, the government said Saturday.
The Internal Administration Ministry said there were no charges against the two, who were not identified. “They expressed an interest in being given shelter by Portugal, are not subject to any charges, are free men and will live in residences granted by the state,” the ministry said in a statement.
The Syrians can move freely around the country and can leave it if they obtain visas, the ministry said.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
In Kennedy, the Last Roar of the New Deal Liberal
In Kennedy, the Last Roar of the New Deal Liberal
By SAM TANENHAUS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: August 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/weekinreview/30tanenhaus.html?th&emc=th
“AN important chapter in our history has come to an end,” Barack Obama said in his first public remarks on the death of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. “Our country has lost a great leader, who picked up the torch of his fallen brothers and became the greatest United States senator of our time.”
PIVOT POINT A vanquished Senator Edward M. Kennedy shaking hands with the victor, President Jimmy Carter, at the Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden in 1980.
What Mr. Obama didn’t say — and perhaps didn’t need to — was that the closed chapter was the vision of liberalism begun by the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, extended during the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson and now struggling back toward relevance. It holds that the forces of government should be marshaled to improve conditions for the greatest possible number of Americans, with particular emphasis on the excluded and disadvantaged. It is not government’s only obligation, in this view, but it is the paramount one.
No major political figure of the past half-century was so deeply invested in this idea as Mr. Kennedy was. It underlay the staggering number of bills he created or sponsored in his long Senate career, whether in medical care or education, on behalf of immigrants or labor unions. And it underlay Mr. Kennedy’s crusade for universal health care — “a right, not a privilege,” as he declared at the Democratic National Convention last August.
The belief in government as the guardian of opportunity and advancement is not a complicated one, but it is fraught with ambiguities — including the risks incurred when government grows too large and also too expensive. Indeed, the peak years of Mr. Kennedy’s Senate career, the 1980s and ’90s, coincided with the ascendancy of a countervision, captured in Ronald Reagan’s assertion: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”
In that period, many Democrats began to rethink the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. Many distanced themselves from “the L word.” And Mr. Kennedy appeared out of step. As the authors of “Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy,” observe, “Even in his own party, his liberalism had seemed, at times, outmoded as the ‘third way’ of the Clintons gained ascendance in the Washington of the 1990s.”
So too in 2008 the party’s top presidential contenders dependably referred to themselves as “progressives.”
Still, Mr. Kennedy was unwavering. It is hard to imagine any contemporary Democrat taking the podium as Mr. Kennedy did last summer in Denver to reprise the celebrated oration he had made at the 1980 convention in New York. But Mr. Kennedy did — without apology. The passage of time, and the reordered political landscape, had not obscured his causes or dimmed his rhetoric.
His roots in old-fashioned liberalism went deep. Like his brothers, he was reared in the towering shadow of President Roosevelt, who was first elected president in 1932, the year Edward Kennedy was born.
But the older Kennedy brothers drifted away from New Deal politics. John F. Kennedy stood at the center of a new post-ideological pragmatism. In 1962, the year Edward Kennedy was first elected to the Senate, President Kennedy asserted that while “most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint — Republican or Democrat, liberal, conservative or moderate,” in reality the most pressing government concerns were “technical problems, administrative problems” that “do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.”
Robert F. Kennedy, in contrast, was drawn to passionate movements, but his devotions could shift with the political winds. An anti-Communist in the 1950s — when he worked briefly on the staff of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy — Robert later embraced the “New Politics” of the late 1960s, with its strong flavor of anti-establishment protest. In the 1968 election he seemed to be simultaneously courting militant leftists and aggrieved white ethnics stirred by the populist demagoguery of the segregationist George Wallace.
It was Edward, the youngest brother, whose “true compass” — to borrow the title of his forthcoming memoir — pointed unerringly toward New Deal liberalism. He became its champion for the remainder of his life.
This earned him a reputation for being the populist Kennedy, gifted with the common touch. Certainly he enjoyed politics at the retail level — plunging into the crowd, shaking hands.
But Mr. Kennedy’s accomplishments in the political arts were mixed. He excelled at stumping for others, as he did in his brothers’ presidential campaigns. And he performed impressively for Mr. Obama in 2008. Just before the deluge of primaries in early February, when the contest between Mr. Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton was tight, Mr. Kennedy drew large crowds in California and New Mexico, where shouts of “Viva Kennedy” greeted his visits to the barrios.
But on other occasions Mr. Kennedy faltered. His intemperate denunciation of Judge Robert H. Bork in 1987 helped poison the atmosphere of Supreme Court appointments up to the present day.
His one signal talent was for legislation, the painstaking, glacial business of shaping bills and laws. He learned at the feet of Senate giants like Richard Russell, who had also been a mentor to another superb legislator, Lyndon Johnson.
The friction between Mr. Kennedy’s uncertain feel for politics and his instinctive command of governance led to his gravest miscalculation, his ill-executed attempt to unseat his party’s incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, in the 1980 primaries.
“No real difference of politics separated Kennedy from Carter,” Theodore H. White noted when he revisited the episode in 1982.
Mr. White, curious to grasp the motives behind this quixotic mission, pressed Mr. Kennedy about it. At first Mr. Kennedy haltingly mentioned Mr. Carter’s failed leadership and squandered opportunities. But when prodded further, he delivered “a stunning discussion of just how laws are passed, of how Carter’s amateur lobbyists had messed up program after program by odd legislative couplings of unsorted programs,” Mr. White wrote. “Then, details cascading from him more and more rapidly, he concluded in an outburst of frustration” that Mr. Carter was incompetent. “Even on issues we agree on, he doesn’t know how to do it,” Mr. Kennedy told Mr. White, who likened his attitude to “the contempt of a master machinist for a plumber’s assistant.”
The paradox was that by challenging Mr. Carter, Mr. Kennedy weakened him in the general election, and thus assisted in the victory of Mr. Reagan, who promptly ushered in the conservative counterrevolution, founded on distrust of government, that Mr. Kennedy spent the next three decades battling, losing as often as he won.
The literary critic Lionel Trilling once wondered why so many liberal intellectuals he knew seemed unnerved by any mention of death. Might it be, he speculated, because death was, “in practical outcome, a negation of the future and of the hope it holds out for a society of reason and virtue?”
Mr. Trilling had in mind the “progressives” of the 1930s and ’40s, who were lit with utopian dreams and intoxicated, in many instances, by the Soviet “experiment.”
Mr. Kennedy’s liberalism had its basis in something different — New Deal meliorism, with its hopeful spirit of reform.
And he brought to it in its later stages a quality of chastened knowledge, the hardiness of the survivor. Mr. Kennedy was, of course, uniquely versed in the concrete facts of death. All three of his brothers died young, two slain by assassins’ bullets. And for 40 years he bore the guilt of the death he caused in Chappaquiddick in 1969.
Becoming “the greatest senator of our time” could not atone for this. Nor could it redress Mr. Kennedy’s many other trespasses — the boozing and womanizing and the suffering it brought.
But if the art of governance did not redeem Mr. Kennedy, it irradiated him, and the liberalism he personified. At a time when government itself had fallen into disrepute Mr. Kennedy applied himself diligently to its exacting discipline, and wrested whatever small victories he could from the machinery he had learned to operate so well. Whether or not his compass was finally true, he endured as the battered, leaky vessel through which the legislative arts recovered some of their lost glory.
By SAM TANENHAUS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: August 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/weekinreview/30tanenhaus.html?th&emc=th
“AN important chapter in our history has come to an end,” Barack Obama said in his first public remarks on the death of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. “Our country has lost a great leader, who picked up the torch of his fallen brothers and became the greatest United States senator of our time.”
PIVOT POINT A vanquished Senator Edward M. Kennedy shaking hands with the victor, President Jimmy Carter, at the Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden in 1980.
What Mr. Obama didn’t say — and perhaps didn’t need to — was that the closed chapter was the vision of liberalism begun by the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, extended during the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson and now struggling back toward relevance. It holds that the forces of government should be marshaled to improve conditions for the greatest possible number of Americans, with particular emphasis on the excluded and disadvantaged. It is not government’s only obligation, in this view, but it is the paramount one.
No major political figure of the past half-century was so deeply invested in this idea as Mr. Kennedy was. It underlay the staggering number of bills he created or sponsored in his long Senate career, whether in medical care or education, on behalf of immigrants or labor unions. And it underlay Mr. Kennedy’s crusade for universal health care — “a right, not a privilege,” as he declared at the Democratic National Convention last August.
The belief in government as the guardian of opportunity and advancement is not a complicated one, but it is fraught with ambiguities — including the risks incurred when government grows too large and also too expensive. Indeed, the peak years of Mr. Kennedy’s Senate career, the 1980s and ’90s, coincided with the ascendancy of a countervision, captured in Ronald Reagan’s assertion: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”
In that period, many Democrats began to rethink the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. Many distanced themselves from “the L word.” And Mr. Kennedy appeared out of step. As the authors of “Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy,” observe, “Even in his own party, his liberalism had seemed, at times, outmoded as the ‘third way’ of the Clintons gained ascendance in the Washington of the 1990s.”
So too in 2008 the party’s top presidential contenders dependably referred to themselves as “progressives.”
Still, Mr. Kennedy was unwavering. It is hard to imagine any contemporary Democrat taking the podium as Mr. Kennedy did last summer in Denver to reprise the celebrated oration he had made at the 1980 convention in New York. But Mr. Kennedy did — without apology. The passage of time, and the reordered political landscape, had not obscured his causes or dimmed his rhetoric.
His roots in old-fashioned liberalism went deep. Like his brothers, he was reared in the towering shadow of President Roosevelt, who was first elected president in 1932, the year Edward Kennedy was born.
But the older Kennedy brothers drifted away from New Deal politics. John F. Kennedy stood at the center of a new post-ideological pragmatism. In 1962, the year Edward Kennedy was first elected to the Senate, President Kennedy asserted that while “most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint — Republican or Democrat, liberal, conservative or moderate,” in reality the most pressing government concerns were “technical problems, administrative problems” that “do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.”
Robert F. Kennedy, in contrast, was drawn to passionate movements, but his devotions could shift with the political winds. An anti-Communist in the 1950s — when he worked briefly on the staff of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy — Robert later embraced the “New Politics” of the late 1960s, with its strong flavor of anti-establishment protest. In the 1968 election he seemed to be simultaneously courting militant leftists and aggrieved white ethnics stirred by the populist demagoguery of the segregationist George Wallace.
It was Edward, the youngest brother, whose “true compass” — to borrow the title of his forthcoming memoir — pointed unerringly toward New Deal liberalism. He became its champion for the remainder of his life.
This earned him a reputation for being the populist Kennedy, gifted with the common touch. Certainly he enjoyed politics at the retail level — plunging into the crowd, shaking hands.
But Mr. Kennedy’s accomplishments in the political arts were mixed. He excelled at stumping for others, as he did in his brothers’ presidential campaigns. And he performed impressively for Mr. Obama in 2008. Just before the deluge of primaries in early February, when the contest between Mr. Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton was tight, Mr. Kennedy drew large crowds in California and New Mexico, where shouts of “Viva Kennedy” greeted his visits to the barrios.
But on other occasions Mr. Kennedy faltered. His intemperate denunciation of Judge Robert H. Bork in 1987 helped poison the atmosphere of Supreme Court appointments up to the present day.
His one signal talent was for legislation, the painstaking, glacial business of shaping bills and laws. He learned at the feet of Senate giants like Richard Russell, who had also been a mentor to another superb legislator, Lyndon Johnson.
The friction between Mr. Kennedy’s uncertain feel for politics and his instinctive command of governance led to his gravest miscalculation, his ill-executed attempt to unseat his party’s incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, in the 1980 primaries.
“No real difference of politics separated Kennedy from Carter,” Theodore H. White noted when he revisited the episode in 1982.
Mr. White, curious to grasp the motives behind this quixotic mission, pressed Mr. Kennedy about it. At first Mr. Kennedy haltingly mentioned Mr. Carter’s failed leadership and squandered opportunities. But when prodded further, he delivered “a stunning discussion of just how laws are passed, of how Carter’s amateur lobbyists had messed up program after program by odd legislative couplings of unsorted programs,” Mr. White wrote. “Then, details cascading from him more and more rapidly, he concluded in an outburst of frustration” that Mr. Carter was incompetent. “Even on issues we agree on, he doesn’t know how to do it,” Mr. Kennedy told Mr. White, who likened his attitude to “the contempt of a master machinist for a plumber’s assistant.”
The paradox was that by challenging Mr. Carter, Mr. Kennedy weakened him in the general election, and thus assisted in the victory of Mr. Reagan, who promptly ushered in the conservative counterrevolution, founded on distrust of government, that Mr. Kennedy spent the next three decades battling, losing as often as he won.
The literary critic Lionel Trilling once wondered why so many liberal intellectuals he knew seemed unnerved by any mention of death. Might it be, he speculated, because death was, “in practical outcome, a negation of the future and of the hope it holds out for a society of reason and virtue?”
Mr. Trilling had in mind the “progressives” of the 1930s and ’40s, who were lit with utopian dreams and intoxicated, in many instances, by the Soviet “experiment.”
Mr. Kennedy’s liberalism had its basis in something different — New Deal meliorism, with its hopeful spirit of reform.
And he brought to it in its later stages a quality of chastened knowledge, the hardiness of the survivor. Mr. Kennedy was, of course, uniquely versed in the concrete facts of death. All three of his brothers died young, two slain by assassins’ bullets. And for 40 years he bore the guilt of the death he caused in Chappaquiddick in 1969.
Becoming “the greatest senator of our time” could not atone for this. Nor could it redress Mr. Kennedy’s many other trespasses — the boozing and womanizing and the suffering it brought.
But if the art of governance did not redeem Mr. Kennedy, it irradiated him, and the liberalism he personified. At a time when government itself had fallen into disrepute Mr. Kennedy applied himself diligently to its exacting discipline, and wrested whatever small victories he could from the machinery he had learned to operate so well. Whether or not his compass was finally true, he endured as the battered, leaky vessel through which the legislative arts recovered some of their lost glory.
After Century of Growth, Tide Turns in Florida
After Century of Growth, Tide Turns in Florida
By DAMIEN CAVE
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: August 29, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/us/30florida.html?th&emc=th
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — The smiling couple barreling ahead on the cover of Liberty magazine in 1926 knew exactly where to go. “Florida or Bust,” said the white paint on the car doors. “Four wheels, no brakes.”
Sandra Woodward, 25, who grew up in Hollywood, said she was considering leaving.
So it has been for a century, as Florida welcomed thousands of newcomers every week, year after year, becoming the nation’s fourth-most-populous state with about 16 million people in 2000.
Imagine the shock, then, to discover that traffic is now heading the other way. That’s right, the Sunshine State is shrinking.
Choked by a record level of foreclosures and unemployment, along with a helping of disillusionment, the state’s population declined by 58,000 people from April 2008 to April 2009, according to the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research. Except for the years around World Wars I and II, it was the state’s first population loss since at least 1900.
“It’s dramatic,” said Stanley K. Smith, an economics professor at the University of Florida who compiled the report. “You have a state that was booming and has been a leader in population growth for the last 100 years that suddenly has seen a substantial shift.”
The loss is more than a data point. Growth gave Florida its notorious flip-flop and flower-print swagger. Life could be carefree under the sun because, as a famous state tourism advertisement put it in 1986, “The rules are different here.”
But what if they are not? Or if those Florida rules — an approach that made growth paramount in the state’s sales pitch, self-image and revenue structure — no longer apply?
“It’s got to be a real psychological blow,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who predicted that census data in December would confirm the findings. “I don’t know if you can take a whole state to a psychiatrist, but the whole Florida economy was based on migration flows.”
Recall what once passed for normal. Florida grew from 2.8 million people in 1950 to 6.9 million in 1970, and by about three million people each decade after that. Even during stagflation in the ’70s, Florida added about 200,000 people a year. More recently, from 2004 to 2006, Florida added about 1,100 people a day, as housing construction’s proportion of the state economy grew to twice the national average.
Now consider Broward County in 2009. The county, between Miami and Palm Beach, was one of the first areas to shrink — losing 21,117 people from April 2007 to April 2009, according to University of Florida data — and its experience offers a glimpse of what could be on the way elsewhere.
Hollywood, in particular, embodies what the Sunshine State was and might become. It was founded in the 1920s as “the dream city of Florida” by a transplant from Washington State named Joseph Young who built ranch-style homes. After growing predictably — from 22,978 people in 1955 to 139,357 by 2000 — Hollywood has lost 1,562 people over the past year, according to the University of Florida count.
That amounts to only 1 percent, roughly in line with the rest of the county, but residents say their rhythms have already changed. Here and in other places adapting to the end of double-digit growth, the days include less noise, work and spontaneity, and more goodbyes, doubts and fears of the future. It is, by all accounts, a life lived under capacity.
Sandra Woodward, 25, grew up here, happy and proud. A secretary with dreams of working in education, she said eight houses on her block are in foreclosure. She knows 20 families who have left Florida in the last two years.
On Monday, she waited for her son to finish his first day of kindergarten at her alma mater, Hollywood Park Elementary. About 10 years ago, Ms. Woodward said, gesturing toward the parking lot, temporary trailers were needed, as the school was over-enrolled. This year, the principal counted 469 students registered — 124 fewer than the school can handle.
“I used to go up north to visit my family, and they all wanted to come here, to be part of this,” Ms. Woodward said. “Now I’m thinking about leaving, too. It’s scary.”
Some parents, like Kim Yager, 27, who has three children at the school, welcomed the drop-off. “It means smaller classes,” she said.
But as cities like Detroit well know, declines in population also compound downturns and hurt quality of life. Florida, in particular, was not built for emptying. Its government, since a 1924 constitutional amendment banned a state income tax, relies heavily on sales and property taxes, which are more closely linked with population growth.
Without it, and as housing prices and property tax revenues have fallen, municipalities have been forced to scramble. Broward County’s schools, which have been losing students for several years, opened Monday with 100 fewer teachers and a budget of $3.6 billion, down from about $5 billion in 2008.
Facing a deficit of $109 million, the county’s commissioners have reduced hours at libraries and parks, while the sheriff agreed to cut at least 177 positions.
The mood is dismal. Jim Findlay, 66, head of the rare books section in Broward County’s main library, said he had noticed more competitiveness among his colleagues as they wait for expected layoffs. He said he missed the time when moving trucks meant arrivals, not departures.
“It weighs on me because there has always been this hope, this expansiveness, this welcome of the new, this welcome of the unusual and eccentric in Florida,” he said. “That seems to have come to a halt.”
Or stagnating. In downtown Hollywood, chefs now stand outside with their arms crossed at dinnertime waiting for customers that never come. There are 10 shuttered businesses in the two blocks of Hollywood Boulevard north of Young Circle, the city’s main shopping district.
Jack Smile, 54, a co-owner of the Jeweled Castle, “a new-age department store,” said that many of the closed stores had been opened by people who thought that anything would work because it is Florida, where new buyers are a constant.
He started out the same way 14 years ago after leaving New York. “I came down here to work less and make more money,” Mr. Smile said. “But the tables turned.”
He has survived by bargaining with customers, and by selling stress kits of incense and oils. Gary Mormino, a historian at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, said baby boomers may be the state’s best shot at another upswing. “The big question is will they choose the same type of retirement as their parents,” he said.
Already, the state’s hold on retirees is weakening, with thousands of disenchanted “halfbacks” moving to Georgia and the Carolinas in recent years. Mr. Smith at the University of Florida nonetheless predicts modest population increases when the economy picks up — growth of 150,000 to 200,000 people annually.
Even that would be a downward adjustment from recent history. Yet, for Mr. Smile, any increase would be an omen of hope.
“We’re holding onto the magic,” he said, standing behind a counter with $3 Fairy Dust and a Buddha promising prosperity. “The magic is here.”
By DAMIEN CAVE
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: August 29, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/us/30florida.html?th&emc=th
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — The smiling couple barreling ahead on the cover of Liberty magazine in 1926 knew exactly where to go. “Florida or Bust,” said the white paint on the car doors. “Four wheels, no brakes.”
Sandra Woodward, 25, who grew up in Hollywood, said she was considering leaving.
So it has been for a century, as Florida welcomed thousands of newcomers every week, year after year, becoming the nation’s fourth-most-populous state with about 16 million people in 2000.
Imagine the shock, then, to discover that traffic is now heading the other way. That’s right, the Sunshine State is shrinking.
Choked by a record level of foreclosures and unemployment, along with a helping of disillusionment, the state’s population declined by 58,000 people from April 2008 to April 2009, according to the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research. Except for the years around World Wars I and II, it was the state’s first population loss since at least 1900.
“It’s dramatic,” said Stanley K. Smith, an economics professor at the University of Florida who compiled the report. “You have a state that was booming and has been a leader in population growth for the last 100 years that suddenly has seen a substantial shift.”
The loss is more than a data point. Growth gave Florida its notorious flip-flop and flower-print swagger. Life could be carefree under the sun because, as a famous state tourism advertisement put it in 1986, “The rules are different here.”
But what if they are not? Or if those Florida rules — an approach that made growth paramount in the state’s sales pitch, self-image and revenue structure — no longer apply?
“It’s got to be a real psychological blow,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who predicted that census data in December would confirm the findings. “I don’t know if you can take a whole state to a psychiatrist, but the whole Florida economy was based on migration flows.”
Recall what once passed for normal. Florida grew from 2.8 million people in 1950 to 6.9 million in 1970, and by about three million people each decade after that. Even during stagflation in the ’70s, Florida added about 200,000 people a year. More recently, from 2004 to 2006, Florida added about 1,100 people a day, as housing construction’s proportion of the state economy grew to twice the national average.
Now consider Broward County in 2009. The county, between Miami and Palm Beach, was one of the first areas to shrink — losing 21,117 people from April 2007 to April 2009, according to University of Florida data — and its experience offers a glimpse of what could be on the way elsewhere.
Hollywood, in particular, embodies what the Sunshine State was and might become. It was founded in the 1920s as “the dream city of Florida” by a transplant from Washington State named Joseph Young who built ranch-style homes. After growing predictably — from 22,978 people in 1955 to 139,357 by 2000 — Hollywood has lost 1,562 people over the past year, according to the University of Florida count.
That amounts to only 1 percent, roughly in line with the rest of the county, but residents say their rhythms have already changed. Here and in other places adapting to the end of double-digit growth, the days include less noise, work and spontaneity, and more goodbyes, doubts and fears of the future. It is, by all accounts, a life lived under capacity.
Sandra Woodward, 25, grew up here, happy and proud. A secretary with dreams of working in education, she said eight houses on her block are in foreclosure. She knows 20 families who have left Florida in the last two years.
On Monday, she waited for her son to finish his first day of kindergarten at her alma mater, Hollywood Park Elementary. About 10 years ago, Ms. Woodward said, gesturing toward the parking lot, temporary trailers were needed, as the school was over-enrolled. This year, the principal counted 469 students registered — 124 fewer than the school can handle.
“I used to go up north to visit my family, and they all wanted to come here, to be part of this,” Ms. Woodward said. “Now I’m thinking about leaving, too. It’s scary.”
Some parents, like Kim Yager, 27, who has three children at the school, welcomed the drop-off. “It means smaller classes,” she said.
But as cities like Detroit well know, declines in population also compound downturns and hurt quality of life. Florida, in particular, was not built for emptying. Its government, since a 1924 constitutional amendment banned a state income tax, relies heavily on sales and property taxes, which are more closely linked with population growth.
Without it, and as housing prices and property tax revenues have fallen, municipalities have been forced to scramble. Broward County’s schools, which have been losing students for several years, opened Monday with 100 fewer teachers and a budget of $3.6 billion, down from about $5 billion in 2008.
Facing a deficit of $109 million, the county’s commissioners have reduced hours at libraries and parks, while the sheriff agreed to cut at least 177 positions.
The mood is dismal. Jim Findlay, 66, head of the rare books section in Broward County’s main library, said he had noticed more competitiveness among his colleagues as they wait for expected layoffs. He said he missed the time when moving trucks meant arrivals, not departures.
“It weighs on me because there has always been this hope, this expansiveness, this welcome of the new, this welcome of the unusual and eccentric in Florida,” he said. “That seems to have come to a halt.”
Or stagnating. In downtown Hollywood, chefs now stand outside with their arms crossed at dinnertime waiting for customers that never come. There are 10 shuttered businesses in the two blocks of Hollywood Boulevard north of Young Circle, the city’s main shopping district.
Jack Smile, 54, a co-owner of the Jeweled Castle, “a new-age department store,” said that many of the closed stores had been opened by people who thought that anything would work because it is Florida, where new buyers are a constant.
He started out the same way 14 years ago after leaving New York. “I came down here to work less and make more money,” Mr. Smile said. “But the tables turned.”
He has survived by bargaining with customers, and by selling stress kits of incense and oils. Gary Mormino, a historian at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, said baby boomers may be the state’s best shot at another upswing. “The big question is will they choose the same type of retirement as their parents,” he said.
Already, the state’s hold on retirees is weakening, with thousands of disenchanted “halfbacks” moving to Georgia and the Carolinas in recent years. Mr. Smith at the University of Florida nonetheless predicts modest population increases when the economy picks up — growth of 150,000 to 200,000 people annually.
Even that would be a downward adjustment from recent history. Yet, for Mr. Smile, any increase would be an omen of hope.
“We’re holding onto the magic,” he said, standing behind a counter with $3 Fairy Dust and a Buddha promising prosperity. “The magic is here.”
U.S. Says Pakistan Made Changes to Missiles Sold for Defense
U.S. Says Pakistan Made Changes to Missiles Sold for Defense
By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: August 29, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/world/asia/30missile.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — The United States has accused Pakistan of illegally modifying American-made missiles to expand its capability to strike land targets, a potential threat to India, according to senior administration and Congressional officials.
The charge, which set off a new outbreak of tensions between the United States and Pakistan, was made in an unpublicized diplomatic protest in late June to Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and other top Pakistani officials.
The accusation comes at a particularly delicate time, when the administration is asking Congress to approve $7.5 billion in aid to Pakistan over the next five years, and when Washington is pressing a reluctant Pakistani military to focus its attentions on fighting the Taliban, rather than expanding its nuclear and conventional forces aimed at India.
While American officials say that the weapon in the latest dispute is a conventional one — based on the Harpoon antiship missiles that were sold to Pakistan by the Reagan administration as a defensive weapon in the cold war — the subtext of the argument is growing concern about the speed with which Pakistan is developing new generations of both conventional and nuclear weapons.
“There’s a concerted effort to get these guys to slow down,” one senior administration official said. “Their energies are misdirected.”
At issue is the detection by American intelligence agencies of a suspicious missile test on April 23 — a test never announced by the Pakistanis — that appeared to give the country a new offensive weapon.
American military and intelligence officials say they suspect that Pakistan has modified the Harpoon antiship missiles that the United States sold the country in the 1980s, a move that would be a violation of the Arms Control Export Act. Pakistan has denied the charge, saying it developed the missile itself. The United States has also accused Pakistan of modifying American-made P-3C aircraft for land-attack missions, another violation of United States law that the Obama administration has protested.
Whatever their origin, the missiles would be a significant new entry into Pakistan’s arsenal against India. They would enable Pakistan’s small navy to strike targets on land, complementing the sizable land-based missile arsenal that Pakistan has developed. That, in turn, would be likely to spur another round of an arms race with India that the United States has been trying, unsuccessfully, to halt. “The focus of our concern is that this is a potential unauthorized modification of a maritime antiship defensive capability to an offensive land-attack missile,” said another senior administration official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter involves classified information.
“The potential for proliferation and end-use violations are things we watch very closely,” the official added. “When we have concerns, we act aggressively.”
A senior Pakistani official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity because the interchanges with Washington have been both delicate and highly classified, said the American accusation was “incorrect.” The official said that the missile tested was developed by Pakistan, just as it had modified North Korean designs to build a range of land-based missiles that could strike India. He said that Pakistan had taken the unusual step of agreeing to allow American officials to inspect the country’s Harpoon inventory to prove that it had not violated the law, a step that administration officials praised.
Some experts are also skeptical of the American claims. Robert Hewson, editor of Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, a yearbook and Web-based data service, said the Harpoon missile did not have the necessary range for a land-attack missile, which would lend credibility to Pakistani claims that they are developing their own new missile. Moreover, he said, Pakistan already has more modern land-attack missiles that it developed itself or acquired from China.
“They’re beyond the need to reverse-engineer old U.S. kit,” Mr. Hewson said in a telephone interview. “They’re more sophisticated than that.” Mr. Hewson said the ship-to-shore missile that Pakistan was testing was part of a concerted effort to develop an array of conventional missiles that could be fired from the air, land or sea to address India’s much more formidable conventional missile arsenal.
The dispute highlights the level of mistrust that remains between the United States and a Pakistani military that American officials like to portray as an increasingly reliable partner in the effort to root out the forces of the Taliban and Al Qaeda on Pakistani territory. A central element of the American effort has been to get the military refocused on the internal threat facing the country, rather than on threat the country believes it still faces from India.
Pakistani officials have insisted that they are making that shift. But the evidence continues to point to heavy investments in both nuclear and conventional weapons that experts say have no utility in the battle against insurgents.
Over the years, the United States has provided a total of 165 Harpoon missiles to Pakistan, including 37 of the older-model weapons that were delivered from 1985 to 1988, said Charles Taylor, a spokesman for the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.
The country’s nuclear arsenal is expanding faster than any other nation’s. In May, Pakistan conducted a test firing of its Babur medium-range cruise missile, a weapon that military experts say could potentially be tipped with a nuclear warhead. The test was conducted on May 6, during a visit to Washington by President Asif Ali Zardari, but was not made public by Pakistani officials until three days after the meetings had ended to avoid upsetting the talks. While it may be technically possible to arm the Harpoons with small nuclear weapons, outside experts say it would probably not be necessary.
Before lawmakers departed for their summer recess, administration officials briefed Congress on the protest to Pakistan. The dispute has the potential to delay or possibly even derail the legislation to provide Pakistan with $7.5 billion in civilian aid over five years; lawmakers are expected to vote on the aid package when they return from their recess next month.
The legislation is sponsored by Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the top Democrat and Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, as well as Representative Howard L. Berman, a California Democrat who leads the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Congressional aides are now reconciling House and Senate versions of the legislation.
Frederick Jones, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry, declined to comment on the details of the dispute citing its classified nature but suggested that the pending multifaceted aid bill would clear Congress “in a few weeks” and would help cooperation between the two countries.
“There have been irritants in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship in the past and there will be in the future,” Mr. Jones said in a statement, noting that the pending legislation would provide President Obama “with new tools to address troubling behavior.”
By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: August 29, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/world/asia/30missile.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — The United States has accused Pakistan of illegally modifying American-made missiles to expand its capability to strike land targets, a potential threat to India, according to senior administration and Congressional officials.
The charge, which set off a new outbreak of tensions between the United States and Pakistan, was made in an unpublicized diplomatic protest in late June to Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and other top Pakistani officials.
The accusation comes at a particularly delicate time, when the administration is asking Congress to approve $7.5 billion in aid to Pakistan over the next five years, and when Washington is pressing a reluctant Pakistani military to focus its attentions on fighting the Taliban, rather than expanding its nuclear and conventional forces aimed at India.
While American officials say that the weapon in the latest dispute is a conventional one — based on the Harpoon antiship missiles that were sold to Pakistan by the Reagan administration as a defensive weapon in the cold war — the subtext of the argument is growing concern about the speed with which Pakistan is developing new generations of both conventional and nuclear weapons.
“There’s a concerted effort to get these guys to slow down,” one senior administration official said. “Their energies are misdirected.”
At issue is the detection by American intelligence agencies of a suspicious missile test on April 23 — a test never announced by the Pakistanis — that appeared to give the country a new offensive weapon.
American military and intelligence officials say they suspect that Pakistan has modified the Harpoon antiship missiles that the United States sold the country in the 1980s, a move that would be a violation of the Arms Control Export Act. Pakistan has denied the charge, saying it developed the missile itself. The United States has also accused Pakistan of modifying American-made P-3C aircraft for land-attack missions, another violation of United States law that the Obama administration has protested.
Whatever their origin, the missiles would be a significant new entry into Pakistan’s arsenal against India. They would enable Pakistan’s small navy to strike targets on land, complementing the sizable land-based missile arsenal that Pakistan has developed. That, in turn, would be likely to spur another round of an arms race with India that the United States has been trying, unsuccessfully, to halt. “The focus of our concern is that this is a potential unauthorized modification of a maritime antiship defensive capability to an offensive land-attack missile,” said another senior administration official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter involves classified information.
“The potential for proliferation and end-use violations are things we watch very closely,” the official added. “When we have concerns, we act aggressively.”
A senior Pakistani official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity because the interchanges with Washington have been both delicate and highly classified, said the American accusation was “incorrect.” The official said that the missile tested was developed by Pakistan, just as it had modified North Korean designs to build a range of land-based missiles that could strike India. He said that Pakistan had taken the unusual step of agreeing to allow American officials to inspect the country’s Harpoon inventory to prove that it had not violated the law, a step that administration officials praised.
Some experts are also skeptical of the American claims. Robert Hewson, editor of Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, a yearbook and Web-based data service, said the Harpoon missile did not have the necessary range for a land-attack missile, which would lend credibility to Pakistani claims that they are developing their own new missile. Moreover, he said, Pakistan already has more modern land-attack missiles that it developed itself or acquired from China.
“They’re beyond the need to reverse-engineer old U.S. kit,” Mr. Hewson said in a telephone interview. “They’re more sophisticated than that.” Mr. Hewson said the ship-to-shore missile that Pakistan was testing was part of a concerted effort to develop an array of conventional missiles that could be fired from the air, land or sea to address India’s much more formidable conventional missile arsenal.
The dispute highlights the level of mistrust that remains between the United States and a Pakistani military that American officials like to portray as an increasingly reliable partner in the effort to root out the forces of the Taliban and Al Qaeda on Pakistani territory. A central element of the American effort has been to get the military refocused on the internal threat facing the country, rather than on threat the country believes it still faces from India.
Pakistani officials have insisted that they are making that shift. But the evidence continues to point to heavy investments in both nuclear and conventional weapons that experts say have no utility in the battle against insurgents.
Over the years, the United States has provided a total of 165 Harpoon missiles to Pakistan, including 37 of the older-model weapons that were delivered from 1985 to 1988, said Charles Taylor, a spokesman for the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.
The country’s nuclear arsenal is expanding faster than any other nation’s. In May, Pakistan conducted a test firing of its Babur medium-range cruise missile, a weapon that military experts say could potentially be tipped with a nuclear warhead. The test was conducted on May 6, during a visit to Washington by President Asif Ali Zardari, but was not made public by Pakistani officials until three days after the meetings had ended to avoid upsetting the talks. While it may be technically possible to arm the Harpoons with small nuclear weapons, outside experts say it would probably not be necessary.
Before lawmakers departed for their summer recess, administration officials briefed Congress on the protest to Pakistan. The dispute has the potential to delay or possibly even derail the legislation to provide Pakistan with $7.5 billion in civilian aid over five years; lawmakers are expected to vote on the aid package when they return from their recess next month.
The legislation is sponsored by Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the top Democrat and Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, as well as Representative Howard L. Berman, a California Democrat who leads the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Congressional aides are now reconciling House and Senate versions of the legislation.
Frederick Jones, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry, declined to comment on the details of the dispute citing its classified nature but suggested that the pending multifaceted aid bill would clear Congress “in a few weeks” and would help cooperation between the two countries.
“There have been irritants in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship in the past and there will be in the future,” Mr. Jones said in a statement, noting that the pending legislation would provide President Obama “with new tools to address troubling behavior.”
It's Back to School Week
It's Back to School Week
In the school I went to, they asked a kid to prove the law of gravity. He threw the teacher out the window. - R. Dangerfield
Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years. - Gracie Allen
In the first place God made idiots; that was for practice; then he made school boards.- Mark Twain
I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I'm going to be if I grow up. - Lenny Bruce
My school was so tough the school newspaper had an obituary section.- Norm Crosby
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality. - Beatrix Potter
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I never did very well in math-I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally. - Calvin Trillin
My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers. - Woody Allen
In the school I went to, they asked a kid to prove the law of gravity. He threw the teacher out the window. - R. Dangerfield
Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years. - Gracie Allen
In the first place God made idiots; that was for practice; then he made school boards.- Mark Twain
I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I'm going to be if I grow up. - Lenny Bruce
My school was so tough the school newspaper had an obituary section.- Norm Crosby
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality. - Beatrix Potter
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I never did very well in math-I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally. - Calvin Trillin
My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers. - Woody Allen
Saturday, August 22, 2009
An odd silence on gay marriage
An odd silence on gay marriage
By Carlos T Mock, MD
August 22, 2009
The case for allowing gays to marry begins with equality, pure and simple.
The Gay and Lesbian community is not asking for the right to have religious organizations recognize their unions. As a matter of fact, some religions are already performing same sex marriages: both the Reform and Reconstructionist Jewish movements support gay and lesbian rights, including the right of same-sex couples to wed; In 1996, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations passed a resolution in support of same-sex marriage; In 2005, the General Synod of the United Church of Christ voted to legally recognize and advocate in favor of same-sex marriage. However, in spite of the wonderful ability to wed in these religious ceremonies, Gay and Lesbian couples get no civil rights through them.
The case against same sex marriage, according to the religious right, is that this would damage an important social institution. Yet, the reverse is surely true. Gays want to marry precisely because we see marriage as important: we want the symbolism that marriage brings, the extra sense of obligation and commitment, as well as the social recognition. Allowing gays to marry would, if anything, add to social stability, for it would increase the number of couples that take on real, rather than simply passing, commitments. The weakening of marriage has been heterosexuals' doing, not gays', for it is their infidelity, divorce rates and single-parent families that have wrought social damage. As a matter of fact, Massachusetts, the first US state to grant same sex marriage licenses, has the lowest divorce rate in the U.S.
The importance of marriage for society's general health and stability also explains why the commonly mooted alternative to gay marriage-a so-called civil union-is not enough. Yet, those civil unions would be both wrong in principle and damaging for society. Marriage, as it is commonly viewed in society, is more than just a legal contract. Moreover, to establish something short of real marriage for some adults would tend to undermine the notion for all. Why shouldn't everyone, in time, downgrade to civil unions? Now that really would threaten a fundamental institution of civilization.
As a nation that was built in the separation of Church and State, Gays and lesbians are not trying to force any religious institution to recognize our marriages (really, we don’t care!)—just the federal and state governments. Gay and lesbian Americans feel they need and deserve the perquisites and protections that accompany a civil legal marriage. Federal law links many important perquisites to marital status, including Social Security survivor benefits, tax-free inheritance, spousal immigration rights and protections against mutual incrimination. All of these benefits are currently denied to same-sex couples, even those living in states that permit same-sex marriage or civil unions.
In 2003, the U. S. Supreme court Lawrence v. Texas Sodomy declared unconstitutional sodomy laws. The majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, explicitly reversed Bowers v. Hardwick. (On June 30, 1986, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick, that homosexual citizens had no constitutional right to privacy.) What is significant about this decision is that under the common law, the existence of rights of sexual partners are recognized through the marriage contract. That is, in common law there is no stand-alone right to engage in sexual activity, be they male or female, adult or minor. But, it is a basic legal principle under the common and statutory laws that everything that is not forbidden by the common and statutory law is allowed. As sexual acts usually take place in private, few cases involving engagement in sodomy and fornication come before the courts, and no precedent was established under the common law forbidding fornication; with sodomy, the common law is mixed. This was most notable in Judge Scalia dissension: with this decision, Scalia concluded, the Court "has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda." While Scalia said that he has "nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means," Scalia argued that the Court has an obligation to decide cases neutrally. In Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, a later case decided by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, held that the Massachusetts Constitution requires that marriage be available to homosexual as well as heterosexual couples.
Now that The Lawrence decision has made our relationships “officially” legal—our rights need protection like those of any other U. S. citizen—therefore the 14th Amendment to the constitution applies fully to homosexuals: this amendment provides a broad definition of citizenship, overruling Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) which had excluded slaves and their descendants from possessing Constitutional rights. The amendment requires states to provide equal protection under the law to all persons within their jurisdictions and was used in the mid-20th century to dismantle racial segregation in the United States, as in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Its Due Process Clause has been the basis of much important and controversial case law regarding privacy rights, abortion (Roe v. Wade), and other issues.
This is the only legal compromise for same sex “civil “marriages—we are legal citizens of the U. S. of A. and pay taxes and FICA like every other citizen in the country. Until we are allowed the “civil right” to wed, we will be second class citizens—we will be deprived of more than 1,138 federal rights that accompany civil marriage, and some additional 300-600 per individual state. That means your run-of-the-mill-marriage-license-carrying heterosexual couple has access to over 1,400 rights, benefits, and protections that gay and lesbian citizens are unable to obtain! This is a clear violation of the 14th amendment to the U. S. Constitution that provides equal protection under the law to all persons regardless of sexual preference or gender orientation!
Civil unions are not enough!
In Loving v. Virginia, (1967) where The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions in a unanimous decision, dismissing the Commonwealth of Virginia's argument that a law forbidding both white and black persons from marrying persons of another race, and providing identical penalties to white and black violators, could not be construed as racially discriminatory. The court ruled that Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute violated both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the Court's decision, Chief Justice Warren wrote:
“Marriage is one of 'the basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival . . . To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law.”
By Carlos T Mock, MD
August 22, 2009
The case for allowing gays to marry begins with equality, pure and simple.
The Gay and Lesbian community is not asking for the right to have religious organizations recognize their unions. As a matter of fact, some religions are already performing same sex marriages: both the Reform and Reconstructionist Jewish movements support gay and lesbian rights, including the right of same-sex couples to wed; In 1996, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations passed a resolution in support of same-sex marriage; In 2005, the General Synod of the United Church of Christ voted to legally recognize and advocate in favor of same-sex marriage. However, in spite of the wonderful ability to wed in these religious ceremonies, Gay and Lesbian couples get no civil rights through them.
The case against same sex marriage, according to the religious right, is that this would damage an important social institution. Yet, the reverse is surely true. Gays want to marry precisely because we see marriage as important: we want the symbolism that marriage brings, the extra sense of obligation and commitment, as well as the social recognition. Allowing gays to marry would, if anything, add to social stability, for it would increase the number of couples that take on real, rather than simply passing, commitments. The weakening of marriage has been heterosexuals' doing, not gays', for it is their infidelity, divorce rates and single-parent families that have wrought social damage. As a matter of fact, Massachusetts, the first US state to grant same sex marriage licenses, has the lowest divorce rate in the U.S.
The importance of marriage for society's general health and stability also explains why the commonly mooted alternative to gay marriage-a so-called civil union-is not enough. Yet, those civil unions would be both wrong in principle and damaging for society. Marriage, as it is commonly viewed in society, is more than just a legal contract. Moreover, to establish something short of real marriage for some adults would tend to undermine the notion for all. Why shouldn't everyone, in time, downgrade to civil unions? Now that really would threaten a fundamental institution of civilization.
As a nation that was built in the separation of Church and State, Gays and lesbians are not trying to force any religious institution to recognize our marriages (really, we don’t care!)—just the federal and state governments. Gay and lesbian Americans feel they need and deserve the perquisites and protections that accompany a civil legal marriage. Federal law links many important perquisites to marital status, including Social Security survivor benefits, tax-free inheritance, spousal immigration rights and protections against mutual incrimination. All of these benefits are currently denied to same-sex couples, even those living in states that permit same-sex marriage or civil unions.
In 2003, the U. S. Supreme court Lawrence v. Texas Sodomy declared unconstitutional sodomy laws. The majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, explicitly reversed Bowers v. Hardwick. (On June 30, 1986, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick, that homosexual citizens had no constitutional right to privacy.) What is significant about this decision is that under the common law, the existence of rights of sexual partners are recognized through the marriage contract. That is, in common law there is no stand-alone right to engage in sexual activity, be they male or female, adult or minor. But, it is a basic legal principle under the common and statutory laws that everything that is not forbidden by the common and statutory law is allowed. As sexual acts usually take place in private, few cases involving engagement in sodomy and fornication come before the courts, and no precedent was established under the common law forbidding fornication; with sodomy, the common law is mixed. This was most notable in Judge Scalia dissension: with this decision, Scalia concluded, the Court "has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda." While Scalia said that he has "nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means," Scalia argued that the Court has an obligation to decide cases neutrally. In Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, a later case decided by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, held that the Massachusetts Constitution requires that marriage be available to homosexual as well as heterosexual couples.
Now that The Lawrence decision has made our relationships “officially” legal—our rights need protection like those of any other U. S. citizen—therefore the 14th Amendment to the constitution applies fully to homosexuals: this amendment provides a broad definition of citizenship, overruling Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) which had excluded slaves and their descendants from possessing Constitutional rights. The amendment requires states to provide equal protection under the law to all persons within their jurisdictions and was used in the mid-20th century to dismantle racial segregation in the United States, as in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Its Due Process Clause has been the basis of much important and controversial case law regarding privacy rights, abortion (Roe v. Wade), and other issues.
This is the only legal compromise for same sex “civil “marriages—we are legal citizens of the U. S. of A. and pay taxes and FICA like every other citizen in the country. Until we are allowed the “civil right” to wed, we will be second class citizens—we will be deprived of more than 1,138 federal rights that accompany civil marriage, and some additional 300-600 per individual state. That means your run-of-the-mill-marriage-license-carrying heterosexual couple has access to over 1,400 rights, benefits, and protections that gay and lesbian citizens are unable to obtain! This is a clear violation of the 14th amendment to the U. S. Constitution that provides equal protection under the law to all persons regardless of sexual preference or gender orientation!
Civil unions are not enough!
In Loving v. Virginia, (1967) where The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions in a unanimous decision, dismissing the Commonwealth of Virginia's argument that a law forbidding both white and black persons from marrying persons of another race, and providing identical penalties to white and black violators, could not be construed as racially discriminatory. The court ruled that Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute violated both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the Court's decision, Chief Justice Warren wrote:
“Marriage is one of 'the basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival . . . To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law.”
Chicago-area home sales improve in July, but median price drops - City doesn't follow trend; sales decline 11.3%
Chicago-area home sales improve in July, but median price drops - City doesn't follow trend; sales decline 11.3%
By Mary Ellen Podmolik
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
August 22, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/realestate/chi-sat-home-sales-0822-aug22,0,3098769.story
With bargain hunters and first-time buyers fueling the market, July home sales in the Chicago-area posted a sixth consecutive monthly gain and the first year-over-year increase in three years.
The last time sales in the Chicago area, as well as the state, broke even with the year-earlier period or showed a gain was March 2006, the Illinois Association of Realtors said Friday.
Local sales of existing single-family homes and condos rose to 7,427 properties in July, the association said. Sales were up 0.3 percent from July 2008 and 4 percent from June.
The median sales price in the Chicago area was $213,500 in July, up 1.7 percent from $210,000 in June 2009. The median price was down 16.3 percent from $255,000 in July 2008.
The median price is the price at which half the homes were sold for more and half for less.
"It appears that there are more problems at the high and low ends of the market, but there is evidence that distressed sales, through foreclosure and short sales, decreased in May and June to the 31 to 33 percent range of total sales, from a high close to 50 percent during the first part of the year," said Geoffrey J.D. Hewings, director of the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory at the University of Illinois.
There is some trepidation on the part of real estate agents that the market will sour with the expiration of the first-time buyer's credit. To qualify for the credit of up to $8,000, buyers must close on home purchases before Dec. 1. The housing industry has called on lawmakers to extend the tax credit and expand its eligibility to all buyers.
Typically, August is a slow month for the industry, but so far the activity has been encouraging.
"I don't think we're going to see the market trends now follow the normal path," said Donna Zupancic, an agent with @Properties in Evanston. "It's definitely more busy. We're showing a lot of houses. I've shown as many as 40 to 45 houses to one buyer, but they're much more confident. I would put a house on the market now without batting an eye."
Housing sales in Chicago did not share in the uptick and remain challenged. Sales fell 11.3 percent from July 2008, to 1,975 properties, and were down 0.4 percent from June. The median price, while rising 1.1 percent from June to July, to $245,000, was down 18.3 percent from July 2008.
Distressed properties are being bought but lending requirements remain a key challenge to the market, said David Hanna, a Chicago real estate agent and president of the Chicago Association of Realtors. "We are a long way from seeing a stable real estate market in Chicago," he said.
As a whole, home sales in Cook County rose 2.5 percent from July 2008. Other counties that saw year-over-year gains included Kendall County, up 19.7 percent; Lake County, up 6.5 percent; and Will County, up 1.1 percent. The other five counties in the Chicago area posted year-over-year declines, ranging from 0.6 percent in DuPage County to 17.4 percent in McHenry County.
Without exception, median sales prices fell in all counties, and two of the counties that reported the best sales performance, Kendall and Lake, saw their median sales prices fall 24.7 percent and 22.2 percent, respectively.
Agents report some homes that had been on the market and then were removed, have been re-listed and at significantly lower prices.
"That's the key right now," said Bob Kroll, an agent at Century 21 Pride in New Lenox. "If you've got a realistic seller and a realistic buyer, you're going to get a sale."
Statewide, July sales of 11,407 homes were flat with a year ago, and were up 4.2 percent from June.
mepodmolik@tribune.com
By Mary Ellen Podmolik
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
August 22, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/realestate/chi-sat-home-sales-0822-aug22,0,3098769.story
With bargain hunters and first-time buyers fueling the market, July home sales in the Chicago-area posted a sixth consecutive monthly gain and the first year-over-year increase in three years.
The last time sales in the Chicago area, as well as the state, broke even with the year-earlier period or showed a gain was March 2006, the Illinois Association of Realtors said Friday.
Local sales of existing single-family homes and condos rose to 7,427 properties in July, the association said. Sales were up 0.3 percent from July 2008 and 4 percent from June.
The median sales price in the Chicago area was $213,500 in July, up 1.7 percent from $210,000 in June 2009. The median price was down 16.3 percent from $255,000 in July 2008.
The median price is the price at which half the homes were sold for more and half for less.
"It appears that there are more problems at the high and low ends of the market, but there is evidence that distressed sales, through foreclosure and short sales, decreased in May and June to the 31 to 33 percent range of total sales, from a high close to 50 percent during the first part of the year," said Geoffrey J.D. Hewings, director of the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory at the University of Illinois.
There is some trepidation on the part of real estate agents that the market will sour with the expiration of the first-time buyer's credit. To qualify for the credit of up to $8,000, buyers must close on home purchases before Dec. 1. The housing industry has called on lawmakers to extend the tax credit and expand its eligibility to all buyers.
Typically, August is a slow month for the industry, but so far the activity has been encouraging.
"I don't think we're going to see the market trends now follow the normal path," said Donna Zupancic, an agent with @Properties in Evanston. "It's definitely more busy. We're showing a lot of houses. I've shown as many as 40 to 45 houses to one buyer, but they're much more confident. I would put a house on the market now without batting an eye."
Housing sales in Chicago did not share in the uptick and remain challenged. Sales fell 11.3 percent from July 2008, to 1,975 properties, and were down 0.4 percent from June. The median price, while rising 1.1 percent from June to July, to $245,000, was down 18.3 percent from July 2008.
Distressed properties are being bought but lending requirements remain a key challenge to the market, said David Hanna, a Chicago real estate agent and president of the Chicago Association of Realtors. "We are a long way from seeing a stable real estate market in Chicago," he said.
As a whole, home sales in Cook County rose 2.5 percent from July 2008. Other counties that saw year-over-year gains included Kendall County, up 19.7 percent; Lake County, up 6.5 percent; and Will County, up 1.1 percent. The other five counties in the Chicago area posted year-over-year declines, ranging from 0.6 percent in DuPage County to 17.4 percent in McHenry County.
Without exception, median sales prices fell in all counties, and two of the counties that reported the best sales performance, Kendall and Lake, saw their median sales prices fall 24.7 percent and 22.2 percent, respectively.
Agents report some homes that had been on the market and then were removed, have been re-listed and at significantly lower prices.
"That's the key right now," said Bob Kroll, an agent at Century 21 Pride in New Lenox. "If you've got a realistic seller and a realistic buyer, you're going to get a sale."
Statewide, July sales of 11,407 homes were flat with a year ago, and were up 4.2 percent from June.
mepodmolik@tribune.com
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