Month: February 2002

The European Union Enacts Toothless Sanctions Against Zimbabwe

The European Union finally took official action against Zimbabwe‘s Robert Mugabe after Mugabe ejected a Swedish diplomat who was heading a mission to observe Zimbabwe’s upcoming election. The EU’s sanctions, however, will have no real effect on Mugabe.

Mugabe is now banned from traveling to European Union nations, any assets he has in the EU will be frozen, and Zimbabwe is barred from buying arms from the EU. As The BBC’s Paul Reynolds summed up the likely reaction by Mugabe,

The European Union has therefore played its card. But it is not a particularly strong card, since Mr. Mugabe is unlikely to be much moved by not being able to travel to Europe.

These sort of sanctions might have been a little more helpful 18-24 months ago, but the situation in Zimbabwe is way beyond being influenced but such tepid sanctions. Or as Reynolds eloquently put it,

The European Union has huffed and now it has puffed.

But it is unlikely to bring Robert Mugabe’s house down.

Source:

Analysis: EU sanctions lack teeth. Paul Reynolds, The BBC, February 18, 2002.

Does Ralph Nader Oppose Shays-Meehan?

Last week the House of Representatives passed the Shays-Meehan campaign finance reform bill which is probably doomed to die in the Senate (which is a good thing). In a very confusing article, CNSNews.Com quoted Ralph Nader to the effect that he opposes Shays-Meehan, but is this accurate?

Quoting from the CNSNews.Com article,

Former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader . . . criticized the Shays-Meehan campaign finance legislation Monday, arguing it would infringe on free speech without ending corruption in the system.

“It’s like trying to stop water from running downhill. It will squirt away and keep running downhill and take our democracy with it,” said Nader Monday at a Washington news conference.

If accurate, this is a bit odd considering that |Public Citizens| was jumping for joy at the passage of Shays-Meehan last week with a headline on its web site in large type reading simply, “We Won!” In a press release, Public Citizen’s |Joan Claybrook| gushed said, “Finally, it seems that enough lawmakers have become as disgusted with the shakedowns as the rest of us. We are truly heartened that soft money may soon be eliminated from federal politics.”

Shays-Meehan is, of course, a) unconstitutional and b) a backdoor to censorship.

The bill would ban all soft money donations, apparently ignoring that fact that in Buckley v. Valejo the Supreme Court already ruled that such a ban was unconstitutional. Perhaps the “reformers” are hoping that the Supreme Court will have a change of heart, but in order to do so it would have to grant federal authority over non-federal activities of political parties and, if anything, the current incarnation of the Supreme Court is moving in the opposite direction.

It is also a bit odd to see liberals, leftists and some conservatives celebrating a bill that includes blatantly unconstitutional censorship. Under Shays-Meehan ads, it is illegal for corporations, labor unions or nonprofits to broadcast ads that mention the name of a candidate for federal office within 60 days of an election. If somebody digs up dirt on a politician after that 60 day threshold, advocates will just have to cross their fingers that the press will make a big stink about it. Many of the ads run by labor unions and the NAACP in 2000 attacking Republicans for their positions on race and labor would have been illegal under this bill.

Shays-Meehan also requires full disclosure about donations from all advocacy groups that run independent ads. So Jesse Helms will be able to have a list of everybody who donated to groups running advertisements criticizing him for his stand on race or AIDS. Yeah, that’s a big improvement.

Interestingly, like all good state restrictions on rights, Shays-Meehan invents a whole new vocabulary for criticizing or praising candidates for office. Rather than speech, ads mentioning candidates would be categorized as “electioneering communications.”

Not that this will ever happen because, again, this portion of Shays-Meehan is clearly unconstitutional and will get the boot from the Supreme Court. But it is still interesting nonetheless to seem some politicians and commentators fall all over themselves to declare this sort of retrograde legislation as “progress” and “reform.”

Sources:

Third parties decry campaign finance bill. Jim Burns, CNSNews.Com, February 19, 2002.

Senators mull campaign finance bill. Las Vegas Sun, February 18, 2002.

Public financing is key to true campaign finance reform. Marie Cocco, New York Newsday, February 14, 2002.

House Vote Heralds New Era; Bush Should Approve Campaign Finance Reform Measure. Joan Claybrook, Public Citizen, press release, February 14, 2002.

Pentagon’s Policy of Lying

Donald Rumsfeld should be fired for simply publicly proposing that the United States might plant false stories in foreign media in order to shape public opinion.

The United States already has a credibility problem in much of the Arab world — witness the editorials in that part of the world blaming Israel for the 9/11 attacks and argued that the United States was covering up Israel’s involvement.

And the best idea Rumsfeld can come up with to improve America’s image and credibility is by floating this idea that the Pentagon might plant fake stories to serve U.S. foreign policy interests?

Then again this does make some sense in light of a story that was barely reported in the United States but was picked up by the European press. Guess who was hired to head up this Information Awareness Office?

John Poindexter. That’s the same John Poindexter who was convicted in 1990 of conspiracy for his role in masterminding the diversion of money from weapons sales to Iran to illegally provide aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. Poindexter’s conviction was overturned in 1991 and George H. Bush pardoned Poindexter in 1992, preventing a retrial.

It’s unbelievable that a major player in the Iran-Contra scandal is back in government heading up an agency within the Pentagon.

Bush Administration’s Legal Priorities — Are Marijuana Smokers More Dangerous Than Terrorists?

Writing in National Review Online, Deroy Murdock slammed the Bush administration this week for its odd law enforcement priorities which seems to involve focusing on marijuana users rather than terrorists.

Murdock notes that the FBI warned a couple weeks ago of possible terrorist attacks occurring on or around Feb. 12. So did the FBI beef up security around landmarks and obvious targets? No, instead on February 12 Drug Enforcement Agency officers raided outlets in San Francisco and Oakland, California, where AIDS patients go to buy medical marijuana. As Murdock writes,

Three of the center’s associates face between five and 40 years in federal prison. Officials say James Halloran, 61, grew more than 1,000 marijuana plants in Oakland. That could cost him ten years to life behind bars. Compare these staggering potential terms to the actual penalties two men received January 31 for unwittingly helping 9/11 hijackers Abdulaziz Alomari and Ahmed Alghamdi secure bogus Virginia I.D. cards. Victor Lopez-Flores got 27 months in prison while Herbert Villalobos earned a four-month sentence. His previous 18 weeks in custody earned his immediate release.

The odd thing, of course, is that voters in California approved a medical marijuana initiative in 1996 and these marijuana clinics are operating legally under California law. Where is the Bush administration’s supports for state’s rights now?

Murdock concludes that, “Washington must rearrange its priorities. Neither cancer patients nor classic rockers who use marijuana will murder another 3,000 innocent civilians in cold blood. Every federal agent who stops pot smokers from lighting up is one less agent who can prevent Americans from blowing up.”

Source:

Wrong War: Wasted resources. Deroy Murdock, National Review Online, February 19, 2002.

Cloning Cats

Researchers at Texas A & M were in the news this week when word leaked that they managed to successfully clone a cat. A number of research efforts are underway to clone cats and dogs, but this was the first such success.

Much of the media coverage focused on the possibility of cloning pets. The Canadian Press quoted Texas A & M researcher Duane Kraemer as claiming that some people have already stored cells from their departed pets in the hope that cloning might one day bring back copies of said pets.

A more important possibility is the role that cloned cats may play in medical research. This possibility brought condemnation from the Humane Society of the United States‘ Wayne Pacelle who described the announcement as “unfortunate news” and told the Canadian Press that researchers should move away from using animals in medical research.

But research in cats has provided important information about a variety of issues related to human physiology, especially about vision. The way cats process vision is very similar to the processes in human beings. In fact, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their research in cats and monkeys that completely revolutionized understanding of how vision is processed.

Pacelle and animal rights activists are free to maintain that advances in human knowledge thanks to animal research are “unfortunate,” but they will have to excuse the rest of us for finding this to be incredibly exciting news.

Source:

Texas researchers announce successful cloning of a cat; dogs are next. Malcolm Ritter, Canadian Press, February 15, 2002.

More than nine lives for this cat. Antonio Regalado, The Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2002.