Last year, in the heat of the primary, Barney Frank wrote a very important essay on the "partisan fights of the 90s." In light of the Obama Justice Department's decision to defend DOMA in Federal court, I would like to briefly revisit that essay.

Cross-posted from ProgressiveHistorians

If you want to understand President Obama's soul, read his books.  But if you want to understand his beliefs, read John Rawls.  The Harvard academic, who died in 2002, was the most important philosopher of liberalism in the twentieth century, mostly because, in so many ways, Rawls' ideas describe the world we live in.  That has never been more true than today, when our President has, consciously or unconsciously, exalted Rawlsian ideas to the position of the greatest possible good.

Care to hear more about this explanatory model that is so central to Obama's thought, whether he acknowledges the influence or not?  Read on.

Beginning with Amartya Sen's demographic calculations in the Eighties, estimates of how many women die each year in excess of demographic projections have been gradually refined.

The term "missing women" was coined in 1990, when Indian economist Amartya Sen calculated a shocking figure. In parts of Asia and Africa, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, 100 million women who should be alive are not, because of unequal access to medical care, food and social services. These are excess deaths: women "missing" above and beyond natural mortality rates, compared to their male counterparts.

His research began a flutter of activity in academic circles and by 2005, the United Nations produced a much higher estimate for how many women could be "missing": 200 million.

(Details of various methodolgies for estimating the number of "missing women" are discussed in The Elgar Companion to Development Studies, which is available online, beginning at page 389.)

Professor Siwan Anderson of the University of British Columbia is one of the principle researchers whose work supports the recent UN estimate 200 million "missing women," and some of her conclusions are very dark.

In China, Anderson says, most of the 141,000 excess female deaths by injury were suicides, making China the only place in the world where women are more likely than men to kill themselves, often by eating pesticides used for crops.

    And in India, a category called "injuries" yielded ominously high figures: 86,000 excess deaths in the age group 15-29 in 2000 alone. Anderson has done extensive research in India, and says the numbers beg the question of exactly how many deaths were so-called "kitchen fires" - often used to mask dowry-related killings, the result of a new bride being tortured by her new family until her parents pay their debts.

From Truthdig/LATimes:

"Reporting from Washington -- President Obama's pick to be the intelligence chief at the Department of Homeland Security withdrew from consideration on Friday amid signs that he could face opposition on Capitol Hill over his role in the CIA's interrogation of terrorism suspects."

...

Mudd became the latest candidate for a high-level intelligence position to be forced to withdraw after being tied to the CIA's use of severe methods to interrogate terrorism suspects.

From 2002 to 2005, Mudd served as deputy director of the CIA's counter-terrorism center, a unit that swelled in size in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and was responsible for running the agency's secret overseas prisons."

On January 20, 2002, six Algerian men who had been arrested in Bosnia arrived at the American prison on Guantanamo Bay. One of them, Lakhdar Boumediene, won a landmark case in the Supreme Court, and was subsequently released to France on May 15, 2009. Others, including Saber Lahmar, are still "detained."

Melissa Hoffer, one of the lawyers who represents the Algerian prisoners, has described the conditions of their imprisonment and the circumstances of their transfer from Bosnia to Guantanamo.

After a three-month investigation, the Bosnian federal prosecutor recommended to the Bosnian Supreme Court that all six be released. But again under heavy pressure from the United States, the Bosnians caved, and as the men were released from a jail in Sarajevo, the Bosnians turned them over to the United States.

"We could not understand what he was saying."

When we last saw Saber in November, he was in his sixth month of solitary confinement. Since August, he has seen us, his legal team, twice and a psychiatrist on three brief occasions. For a few minutes each day, he sees the camp guards who bring his meals. He has had no other human contact. The glaring lights in his cell are on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When we left the cell, we could hear Saber shouting -- brief, truncated cries.

We could not understand what he was saying.

 

In one of the seminal acts of anti-abortion terrorism, the Emma Goldman Clinic for Women in Iowa City was firebombed.

The Carter Justice Dept. ordered the local FBI station to drop everything else and solve the crime, an order which did not sit well with the Resident Agent, himself an anti-abortion zealot.

He came up with a theory which would justify his continuing surveillance of the local lefties, that the bombing had either been a ploy for fundraising, or the result of a lovers' spat, theories which he kept planting in the local press.

He proceeded to stalk my friend Steve Wilson (later changed his name to Jackson Clubb, who posted at kos as MadCityRag until his death a month ago) grilling his neighbors, etc. Jackson at the time was dating an employee of the clinic.

The firebombing was never officially solved. No charges were filed against Jack, probably because the US Attorney wasn't  buying the FBI agent's crap.

Legal news-junkies will immediately recognize that the title of this diary is a list of some notable decisions by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, instead of an obscure legal partnership in... Omaha, maybe.

"Discussion" of Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court in the mainstream media will probably buzz around Ricci, with some carry-over into Raniola, but if Sotomayor's opponents had any real regard for the truth of the situation (and they don't), they would forget about trying to convict the nominee of extra-judicial "empathy" in connection with her high-profile rulings in the area of work-place and employment discrimination, and concentrate instead on the only instance where Sotomayor may have actually jumped the tracks of judicial restraint, and written an opinion based on sympathy for a plaintiff and revulsion for one of the most miserable statutes (SLUSA) ever enacted in the ongoing transformation of federal law into a shield for the ultra-rich against the rest of us, and that would be Judge Sotomayor's opinion in Dabit v. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc., 395 F.3d 25 (2d Cir. 2005), and its sequels.

Apparently "empathy" has lost its status as a Presidential buzz-word, like so many other discarded buzz-words on the trail of linguistic trash which Barack Obama is gradually tracing across the English language.

Goodbye to "hope, change, and empathy," and hello to torture, trillion-dollar give-aways, cover-ups, murder, "preventive detention," and the rest of what we would probably have to call "the real Obama," if such a thing existed.

Now that apologists for Obama are trying to justify his plans for indefinite "preventive detention" with a perverted application of the Geneva Conventions' allowance for detaining prisoners of war for the duration of a war, and some especially devoted Obamabots are even claiming that international treaties like the Geneva Conventions supersede the Constitution, and can accordingly over-rule the due process provisions of the Bill of Rights, it's probably worth recalling that the Supreme Court has already definitively ruled against this ludicrous interpretation of Article VI of the Constitution in Reid v. Covert.

David E. Graham is the Executive Director of The Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School, US Army. He served in the US Army as a Judge Advocate for thirty-one years, specializing in International and Operational Law.

Rather than concentrating his attention on remedies available to "enemy combatants," Graham challenges the denial of habeas corpus implicit in the government's "unilateral determination that each of these detainees is an 'unlawful enemy combatant.'"

The definition of "enemy combatants" is unconstitutional, and likewise every procedure arising from it.

During the week of May 17, Paris Hilton was playing high-stakes poker in Cannes with her new boyfriend forever Doug Reinhardt, who formerly knocked boots with Amanda Bynes and escorted Lauren Conrad to the prom, in their pre-celeb pre-history.

In Washington a Democratic President announced plans to regulate the automobile industry only a few months after the automobile industry went bankrupt, and after only seven years of a bloody occupation, the Pentagon finally acknowledged that "the United States cannot succeed in Afghanistan if the American military keeps killing Afghan civilians."  

I guess you could call it progress, for the oblivion nation.

From Howard Bashman over at How Appealing, we learn today what the CIA supposedly wants.

"Amid Queries, CIA Worries About Future" (WaPo):