Free Roxana Saberi

Roxana Saberi, age 31, is an American journalist of Iranian and Japanese descent who was arrested in February 2009, and is being held in Iran on charges of espionage, which her lawyer and the U.S. Dept. of State call baseless.

Saberi is a freelance journalist who moved to Iran six years ago, and reports for NPR, the BBC, and other news organizations.

She grew up in Fargo, N.D., the daughter of Reza Saberi, who was born in Iran, and Akiko Saberi, who is from Japan. She was chosen Miss North Dakota in 1997 and was among the top ten finalists in Miss America 1998. She graduated from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., with degrees in communication and French.

She holds her first Master’s Degree in Journalism from Northwestern University and her second Master’s Degree in International Relations from Cambridge University.

She is currently working on yet another Masters degreee in Iranian studies and international relations.

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that in 2008, Iran was the sixth-leading jailer of journalists.

(From Free Roxana Saberi)

Medicine: Survival vs. Quality of Life

Getting Tough: Immigrants Deported by U.S. Hospitals, by Deborah Sontag, in today's New York Times, says, "Many hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because nursing homes won’t accept them without insurance."

The poor immigrants are sometimes grateful, willing to face reduced life expectancy in exchange for the gift of being able to go home.

Luis Jiménez, an illegal Guatamalan immigrant, suffered serious brain injury when he was hit by a drunken driver in a Florida car accident. Sontag says:

A community hospital saved his life, twice, and, after failing to find a rehabilitation center willing to accept an uninsured patient, kept him as a ward for years at a cost of $1.5 million.

What happened next set the stage for a continuing legal battle with nationwide repercussions: Mr. Jiménez was deported — not by the federal government but by the hospital, Martin Memorial. After winning a state court order that would later be declared invalid, Martin Memorial leased an air ambulance for $30,000 and “forcibly returned him to his home country,” as one hospital administrator described it.

Since being hoisted in his wheelchair up a steep slope to his remote home, Mr. Jiménez, who sustained a severe traumatic brain injury, has received no medical care or medication — just Alka-Seltzer and prayer, his 72-year-old mother said. Over the last year, his condition has deteriorated with routine violent seizures, each characterized by a fall, protracted convulsions, a loud gurgling, the vomiting of blood and, finally, a collapse into unconsciousness.

Many people will instinctively want to find the bad guys in this situation - the hospitals, the various governments, the illegal immigrants, their lawyers - but casting villains just short-circuits the genuine work of understanding the problem. I think when you see a story like this about people that you know are, on the whole, trying to act constructively, it can help you realize that pointing fingers isn't a good thing to do generally (as Jesus taught.)

Through legal action on Mr. Jiménez 's behalf, Sontag says, a lawyer, a paralegal, a priest and a bioethicist traveled to the Cuchumatán Mountains of Guatamala to assess his options. But the team "reached a conclusion that surprised them: There was no real compelling reason to think of bringing him back to Florida.”

“The first striking thing was his disposition: He was very, very happy,” said the Rev. Frank O’Loughlin, who pastored migrant workers in South Florida for decades. “Then, the second thing, he was well cared for.”

Sontag quotes team member Marnie R. Poncy, who is a both a nurse and a lawyer: "His quality of life is better than it would be in an American nursing home.... But I hazarded a guess that his longevity of existence was probably severely curtailed."

I gather this is the classic trade-off. Western medicine and the law around it seem to aim at extending life expectancy, even at the expense of quality of life, until someone is considered ready for hospice care.

I think a very large number of ordinary people would like to give more weight to quality of life, even when they know the consequences for shortened life expectancy, but their individual wishes currently have no avenue to reach a critical mass legally compelling enough to change the obligations that health care institutions, and the courts, feel bound by.

The ordinary peoples' lack of a voice in this is not because lawyers or anybody else are being evil, it's just the way our institutions have historically evolved. I think peoples' wishes in this respect, to have medicine focus more on quality of life, will be better heard as they support organizations and publications and laws that advance a spiritual, rather than a material, point of view.

Churches and other religious organizations probably have to be in the forefront of any successful movement in this direction, because the churches have a better chance of not being branded as "Kevorkian."

Your Faith Has Made You Whole

I was asked the other day whether I am Christian, and I said I'm Christian but I'm not a Christian.

While Jesus was surely one of the best things to ever happen to the world, Christianity might be seen as one of the worst. One of the most harmful beliefs promulgated under the name of Christianity is that we must see Jesus as the source of salvation. I don't think Jesus taught this.

The story is told in three of the gospels of the woman who said to herself that if she could only but touch the hem of his garment, she could be healed. As it is told in Mark: 5, 24-34:

[24] And Jesus went with him; and much people followed him, and thronged him.[25] And a certain woman, which had an issue of blood twelve years,[26] And had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse,[27] When she had heard of Jesus, came in the press behind, and touched his garment.[28] For she said, If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole.[29] And straightway the fountain of her blood was dried up; and she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague.[30] And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes?[31] And his disciples said unto him, Thou seest the multitude thronging thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me?[32] And he looked round about to see her that had done this thing.[33] But the woman fearing and trembling, knowing what was done in her, came and fell down before him, and told him all the truth.[34] And he said unto her, Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague.

In this and other situations, Jesus told people, "Your faith has made you whole." Many people, I gather, people take this to mean that it is faith in Jesus that made them whole. But I believe Jesus was telling the woman that, even though she thought, "If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole," that in fact it was her own faith that had made her whole.

The Arbitrary and Capricious FCC

Responding, no doubt, to my 2006 analysis of The Erratic FCC's recent history of un-noticed departures from the agency's own guidelines, the federal Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in CBS Corp. v. FCC, today vacated as “arbitrary and capricious” the FCC’s $550,000 indecency fine against CBS for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl.

The court cited the FCC’s “arbitrary and capricious change of policy on the broadcast of fleeting indecent material,” departing from the FCC’s own policy guidelines, promulgated in 2001:

In its 2001 policy statement, the Commission described the “principal factors that have proved significant in [its] decisions to date” as: “(1) the explicitness or graphic nature of the description or depiction of sexual or excretory organs or activities; (2) whether the material dwells on or repeats at length descriptions of sexual or excretory organs or activities; (3) whether the material appears to pander or is used to titillate, or whether the material appears to have been presented for its shock value.” [emphasis in original]

The court said:

Like any agency, the FCC may change its policies without judicial second-guessing. But it cannot change a well established course of action without supplying notice of and a reasoned explanation for its policy departure. Because the FCC failed to satisfy this requirement, we find its new policy arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act as applied to CBS.

The opinion quotes a previous Third Circuit case, Trinity Broad. of Fla., Inc., 211 F.3d at 628:

Because ‘[d]ue process requires that parties receive fair notice before being deprived of property,’ we have repeatedly held that ‘[i]n the absence of notice–for example, where the regulation is not sufficiently clear to warn a party about what is expected of it–an agency may not deprive a party of property by imposing civil or criminal liability.’

The court said:

Because the Commission fails to acknowledge that it has changed its policy on fleeting material, it is unable to comply with the requirement under State Farm [Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Ass’n v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co., 463 U.S. 29, 41 (1983)] that an agency supply a reasoned explanation for its departure from prior policy.

The court cites Ramaprakash, 346 F.3d at 1125:

[F]ailure to come to grips with conflicting precedent constitutes an [agency’s]
inexcusable departure from the essential requirement of reasoned decision making.”);

and LeMoyne-Owen College v. NLRB, 357 F.3d 55, 61 (D.C. Cir. 2004):

[W]here, as here, a party makes a significant showing that analogous cases have been decided differently, the agency must do more than simply ignore that argument.

“Consequentially,” the court said, “the FCC’s new policy of including fleeting images within the scope of actionable indecency is arbitrary and capricious under State Farm and the Administrative Procedure Act, and therefore invalid as applied to CBS.”


In an aspect of the ruling separate from the conclusion that the FCC had departed from its guidelines, the court questioned the agency’s conclusion that CBS’s actions constituted a “‘willful’ violation of the indecency provisions.”

One of the principle factors laid out in the FCC’s 2001 policy guidelines, quoted above, is “whether the material appears to pander or is used to titillate, or whether the material appears to have been presented for its shock value.” But the agency’s recent history of decisions to penalize broadcasters has sometimes been driven by the fact that viewers have been shocked, rather than by whether the broadcasters willfully intended to shock, titillate, and pander. (See The Erratic FCC.) The court in CBS Corp. v. FCC found that “further clarification from the FCC is necessary before it may be determined whether the agency correctly concluded that CBS’s actions constituted a ‘willful’ violation of the indecency provisions.”

Second Amendment: The Court Unguided

The Second Amendment to the Constitution reads:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the
right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Clause One (the prefatory clause):

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,

Clause Two (the operative clause):

The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

On June 26, the Supreme Court held, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that the District of Columbia's ban on handgun possession in the home, and its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense, violated the Second Amendment. The Court held that:

• The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.
  
• The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause.

My naive reading of the Second Amendment is that Clause One could be read as a condition or as a rationale.

Were the Framers asserting that a well regulated militia is (now and always?) necessary to the security of a free State, as a rationale in support of a permanent individual right to bear arms, or were they conditionally asserting the right to bear arms, for as long as a militia is necessary for security?

The syntax is analogous to: "Tobacco being a critically important crop to our economy, cigarettes for export shall not be taxed," which could be read as saying, "As long as tobacco is critical to the economy, exports shall not be taxed;" or as "Since tobacco is permanently important to the economy, exports shall never be taxed."

If the right to bear arms is asserted conditionally, and if the condition no longer exists, then the right in Clause Two is no longer asserted. The right is not denied (Clause One not being an "If and Only If" condition), but it is no longer asserted.

If read as a rationale (which I gather has been the usual reading) then the right is still asserted, but is no longer supported by the Amendment's rationale if a volunteer, self-armed militia is no longer necessary to the security of a free state.

District of Columbia v. Heller explicitly construed the Amendment to read: "Because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." By not reading the prefatory clause as a limiting condition, the Court read the right as still asserted, even if unsupported by its original rationale.

The framers could have asserted the right without any rationale or condition. The fact that they framed a rationale/condition is significant. If that rationale is no longer operative, it affects the reading of the right. Given an absent condition / inoperative rationale, I think the Court was on its own. It was not forbidden from upholding the right to bear arms, but it was not compelled by the Second Amendment to do so.

Not everyone takes it as a given that the condition is absent or that the rationale is inoperative. Where I live in the hills east of Parkersburg, West Virginia, most or all of my neighbors are armed, and have told me that I should be armed. Their implied rationale seems to be that the law-abiding citizens of a community should be ready as an informal militia so that the community is ready to deal with lawlessness. They do feel an armed volunteer militia is necessary to the security of the community.

In Philadelphia and New York, a volunteer militia called the Guardian Angels patrols the subways and some neighborhoods. They are uniformed, at least to the extent of wearing a distinctive T-shirt and beret, but they are not armed. Some people would prefer that they were armed.

(Ironically, my local community here seems unlikely to be in any danger which would require an armed volunteer militia, while neighborhoods of Philadelphia and New York are in real danger which might seem to call out for a permanent, armed, volunteer militia of law-abiding citizens.)

Of course, these local volunteer militias are not the "well regulated" militias referred to by the Second Amendment, whose weapons were supplied by citizen volunteers, but which were sanctioned by and relied on for security by the early states. It seems unlikely that the Court will, in the foreseeable future, see local, non-state-sanctioned militias as fulfilling the condition/rationale the Constitution attaches to the right to bear arms.

The Court found its own rationale. It said that "the inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right."

The citing of "inherent" rights is regarded with suspicion by many people across the political spectrum, including me. If some rights are "inherent" and some rights are not, who identifies the "inherent" ones?

On the other hand, calling rights "inherent" can be read as a nod to the position that all rights and liberties are inherent until or unless the government can show a legitimate need to abridge those rights for the public good. This is my point of view, and I choose to accept the Court's assertion of an "inherent right" to bear arms as a way of saying that the District of Columbia has shown no legitimate need to deny that right.

Scalia's reliance on a "pre-existing" and "inherent" right of self defense means that he is not relying on the Constitution for legal authority: He affirms that the Constitution does not confer but only secures the right to self defense. He is essentially not relying on legal authority at all, but on a right that is prior to and independent of the law.

Obama Dream

I dreamed last night that I was in a stadium for an event - I think Barack Obama was going to be speaking. I sat on the concrete steps of the stadium. Michelle Obama sat down on a bleacher seat next to me and their son, about twelve years old (I know they don't have a son in reality) was sitting in a bleacher seat on the other side of me. We said hello, and in response to something I said her son began to relate a story he had heard about his father's younger days. He hesitated, and his mother told him it was ok to tell the story. He said that Obama had been on a sports team in school - I think he said he had been a catcher on his college baseball team - and the other players had eventually complained to the school about Obama insistently pushing them, as a group, to improve themselves, through some kind of group work he advocated whose nature I don't remember, but which I remember as being something innovative, not run-of-the-mill.

I sent the dream to an interesting site I ran across called "I Dream of Barack: Real Dreams People Have Had About Barack Obama," where about 150 people so far this year have described their dreams about Barack Obama.

Threat of Inflation Hamstrings Central Banks

The world's central banks seem to be in a classic dilemma, brought into focus by unsettled world reaction to the Federal Reserve's decision Wednesday to hold short-term interest rates constant: If central banks raise interest rates, they may cripple economic growth threatened by inflation; if they don't raise rates, inflation might spiral out of control. See "Inflation Menace Has Echoes of Volcker's Days."