President Bush’s pick for attorney general, Michael Mukasey, enjoyed a lovefest at initial Senate confirmation hearings this week, but his responses to specific questions on torture and other civil liberties issues Thursday rightly raised eyebrows and concerns.
Mukasey wouldn’t give a straight answer when asked if water-boarding was torture. The closest he got was this: "If water-boarding is torture, torture is not constitutional."
You could drive a truck through the legal gap created by that "if."
"The United States’ chief law enforcement officer should be able to say — without hesitation — that strapping someone to a board, stuffing a rag in his mouth, and pouring water over his head so he fears drowning is torture," said Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch.
That this administration seems incapable of moral clarity should trouble America’s conscience.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
The decision by KDHE Secretary Rod Bremby to deny a permit for two coal-fired power plants in western Kansas will likely have repercussions around the nation, where the decision was being closely watched by the energy industry and regulators.
The Washington Post reported that with the denial, KDHE "became the first government agency in the United States to cite carbon-dioxide emissions as the reason for rejecting an air permit for a proposed coal-fired electricity generating plant."
Bremby’s decision was made possible by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this year supporting the regulation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
Kansas becomes the first — but likely not the last — state to use that ruling as a basis for denying coal-plant permits.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
The Portland, Maine, school board has approved making prescription birth control available in a local middle school. The pills would be available to students as young as 11 through the school nurse, without parental consent.
The school district was concerned with the number of pregnancies among middle schoolers. But the district shouldn’t be distributing birth control pills, especially without parental guidance. These are 11-year-olds.
Use of prescription birth control could expose girls’ still developing bodies to large doses of hormones. There is also the concern that distributing birth control, which does not protect against sexually transmitted diseases, essentially gives the nod to risky behaviors that most preteens do not understand.
The decision coincides with Topeka school district’s decision to stop making condoms available at Topeka High School, because district officials had not authorized the distribution.
Posted by Kristin Mehler
When all the votes were in Thursday, the House was 13 short of the two-thirds majority necessary to override President Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program expansion. The president deserves no credit for twisting the truth about the bill to justify his opposition. But the failure to override demonstrates the founders’ empowerment of the presidency, even when it’s held by someone with approval ratings in the low 30s. Now, lawmakers need to get busy on an SCHIP compromise.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The bigger the political news, the bigger the flood of reactions received by The Eagle editorial board from special interest groups. But an “open letter” to Nobel Peace Prize laureate Al Gore from the Maryland-based Paradigm Research Group was a surprise, urging Gore to tell the truth about “an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race for at least the past 60 years, and propulsion and energy technologies associated with extraterrestrial vehicles obtained by the United States military and under development for decades.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Here’s a media innovation worth watching: A new nonprofit group, Pro Publica, will pursue investigative journalism pieces uncovering corruption and wrongdoing in government and business, and provide them free to top newspapers and magazines.
Paul Steiger, who recently retired as managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, will lead the planned newsroom of two dozen journalists.
Many newsrooms would likely be leery about using these pieces, particularly if the group seems partisan. But it’s a worthy effort, considering how many newspapers and other media outlets have scaled back investigative pieces because of the time and expense involved.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
