The Trinity toll road vote Attention, you Fraxinus-reading hordes who are (a) still checking in on this thing after more than a year of silence; and (b) Dallas voters: this Trinity toll road vote coming up is important. Fraxinus heartily recommends you vote yes on November 6 or during early voting, which runs through November 2.

(Early voting locations; polling places for the main election on Nov. 6)

In case you haven't been following the debate, a "yes" vote means that you support holding any road built in the Trinity floodway to four lanes and a 35 mph speed limit. A no vote, on the other hand, means you're okay with a six-lane high-speed tollway in between our flood protection levees, cutting through the park that is supposed to become a great civic asset and bring north and south Dallas together.

My view, to summarize what could be a very long conversation if I cornered you at a cocktail party, is that Dallas is not so rich in parkland nor so poor in highways that we should sacrifice a big chunk of green space to build a stupid road we don't need. Plus, building a highway in the floodway is insane.

I could spend hours debunking the claims made by the vote no/pave the Trinity groups, but you can get it all, and read much more detailed and cogent discussions at Trinityvote.com and in the Dallas Observer (particularly the writing of Jim Schutze, who deserves a Pulitzer). There's also some good stuff at the Lakewood/East Dallas Advocate's Backtalk blog.

(On the other side, there's a lot of slanted reporting and propagandistic editorials at the Dallas Morning News. Plus the occasional piece of solid journalism. And, to its credit, the News has run some good op-eds by toll road opponents, though not enough to balance out the mountain of pro-paving verbiage in the paper.)

Fraxinus now returns to its previous quiescence.  ¶ 9:24 PM 0 comments links to this post

  one small step With a bizarre lack of publicity or media coverage, Dallas has apparently signed the U.S. Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement. Almost certainly not due to my tireless advocacy, but still: huzzah!

Oh, and go see An Inconvenient Truth.  ¶ 11:13 PM 4 comments links to this post

  Shelter Island Bridge and Tunnel Authority Pretty good prank.  ¶ 7:51 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Reichenbach Falls This is the time in the course of this exercise in micropunditry when I decide I've been spending too many hours on it. I'm going to take a vacation from Fraxinus for a while. My apologies to a couple of commenters for bailing out in the midst of our lively discussions. To show you what a magnanimous guy I am, you get to have the last word. (For a while, anyway.)

Thanks for reading.  ¶ 8:35 PM 1 comments links to this post

  an opportunity for Texas parks International Paper Co. is putting 6.8 million acres of its vast timber holdings up for sale, and apparently more than 400,000 acres of them are in Texas. This is a tremendous opportunity for a public-land-poor state like ours. (About 94% of Texas lands are privately held; only 0.3% of Texas is state park land.) "Wide open spaces" is a phrase Texans like to use, but if you live in Dallas and actually want to get to one you have to drive four hours or more. What parks there are tend to be small, overdeveloped areas clinging to reservoirs, which are fine for certain types of recreation and wildlife but useless for others. When large undeveloped tracts (such as, presumably, most of IP's forest lands) become available, we should do everything possible to acquire them and make them part of the state park system.

The lack of public natural spaces is not the fault of Texas Parks and Wildlife -- we simply don't give them enough money. To deal with the problem in the long run, our legislators need to overcome their anti-tax dogma and impose a new tax, perhaps one on property transactions, the revenues of which would go to open space and parks acquisition and to parks and wildlife management.  ¶ 5:51 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Opposition to Alito The Alliance for Justice has released a letter from over 500 law professors opposing the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. The Alliance opposed the Roberts nomination as well, so it's not that great a surprise that they oppose Alito, but the academic community did not show this level of opposition the last time around. The letter makes a couple of points related to environmental issues -- first, on Alito's record on interpreting the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which is the authority relied on by Congress in enacting most of the nation's federal environmental laws:

Machine Gun Ban. In United States v. Rybar, Judge Alito argued in dissent that the federal ban on machine gun possession – which had been on the books in some form since 1934 – is unconstitutional Commerce Clause legislation. His colleagues accused him of disrespectfully requiring the “coordinate branches of government” to “play ‘Show and Tell’ with the federal courts at the peril of invalidation of a Congressional statute.” All of the other appeals courts that had considered the law in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1995 ruling in United States v. Lopez agreed with Judge Alito’s colleagues. Every court to have looked at the law since then has done the same, except one, and the Supreme Court summarily vacated that decision this year after issuing its decision in Gonzales v. Raich, which rejected Judge Alito’s cramped view of Congress’ law-making authority.

Also, the letter discusses Alito's position concerning citizens' standing to sue to enforce environmental laws:

Clean Water Act. In Public Interest Research Group, Inc. v. Magnesium Elektron, Inc., Judge Alito voted to make it harder than Congress intended for citizens to establish standing to sue for toxic emissions that violate the Clean Water Act; in fact, he agreed that Congress lacked the authority to authorize certain citizen suits. Several years later, by a 7-2 vote in Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw, with only Justices Scalia and Thomas dissenting, the Supreme Court effectively rejected Judge Alito’s position.

(Footnotes omitted from both excerpts. You can read the original here.)  ¶ 4:47 PM 0 comments links to this post

  monkey redux Speaking of monkeys, everyone should take a minute to read the classic Monkeytown, by Scott McCloud.

(And then speak the sacred monkey chant.)  ¶ 12:15 AM 0 comments

  war talk Yowza! We’re having some verbal fisticuffs lately at Fraxinus. What I thought was an innocuous post about peace among monkeys led to a rhetorical maelstrom, as loyal reader ABC took issue with, well, a lot. The story so far: my monkey post, ABC comment 1, my response, ABC comment 2, my response 2, ABC comment 3. For the rest, I’m taking the liberty of departing the comment section to respond, because I think forty-page comment sections are ungainly.

(The italicized stuff below is ABC’s.)

We begin with some bickering over name-calling.

Ah, the old reliable ad hominem argument. Any right wing-nut who dares impune the wholesome libertarian motives of the Left is nothing more than a bigoted, jack-booted thug. . . . [T]he people who the Left has allowed to become their de facto . . . spokesmen have rather cornered the market on ad hominemism. Nancy Pelosi, anybody? No? Then how about Howard Dean, Michael Moore, Paul Krugman, Ted Kennedy, Al Gore?

Exactly what ad hominem argument did I make? I know I’ve slung plenty of insults around (though I don’t think I did in the stuff you responded to), but my point was not that no one should use insults. My point was that you merely attacked the speakers (craven, treasonous, etc.) and ignored their arguments.

“Jackbooted thugs,” by the way, is what the noted-non-liberal Tom DeLay called the EPA. (Also, “the Gestapo of government.”)

As for Pelosi, Dean, et al., doubtless they have each said dumb things from time to time, but are you seriously suggesting that none of them makes substantive arguments, or that no one on the Right ever makes a personal attack?

Instead, they do seem craven, power hungry, unable to win at the ballot box, and frankly ashamed of Western civilization or at least too paralyzed by cultural relativism to stand up and fight a menace that has given ample evidence of its contempt for everything we should all hold very dear.

If you think any disagreement with you on national security issues constitutes cowardice, then it will be hard to have a rational discussion.

helping oppressed peoples realize freedom on their own shores was one of the reasons the president has consistently stated for launching this multi-pronged war

Okay, now we’re into some substance. Let’s look a little closer:

An examination of more than 150 of Bush's speeches, radio addresses and responses to reporters' questions reveal a steady progression of language, mostly to reflect changing circumstances such as the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction, the lack of ties between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network and the growing violence of Iraqi insurgents.

A war that was waged principally to overthrow a dictator who possessed "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised'' has evolved into a mission to rid Iraq of its "weapons-making capabilities'' and to offer democracy and freedom to its 25 million residents.

. . . Most of the rationales were on the table from the beginning. What changed was the emphasis.

Are you any more impressed with the naysayers who repeatedly, even still, claim that the "brutal Afghan winter" will do in the US military just as surely as it has done in all of history's other fools dumb enough to invade Afghanistan?

Haven’t really noticed that naysaying. (I must have forgotten to renew my subscription to Nattering Nabobs of Negativism Monthly.) I did find a 2001 CSM article, but it didn’t predict that the winter would defeat the U.S. (headline: “Afghan winter: US foe or ally?”).

Really, what concerns me about Afghanistan is that we may have failed to follow up the laudable, rapid military victory with a strong enough nation-building effort. Does Karzai’s authority extend beyond Kabul, or is the rest of the country given over to warlords, poppies, Taliban holdouts, and possibly a lurking Bin Laden?

How impressed are you with some of our supposed allies--I have a fine Bourdeaux to go with your spetzle and borscht--and their recent, oily history in Iraq?

First: why is this relevant? Did I say that Putin would be a better president than W.? (Not that I’ve looked deeply into Putin’s eyes or called him Pootie-Poot or anything, but I don’t trust the fellow. He, I suspect, is someone who seriously lusts for power. And who seems to be happy to let Iran get all nuked up.) Or are you saying that if you can identify another Western country that acts from impure motives, anything the U.S. government does is immune from criticism?

But to answer your question: not particularly impressed. And they should be helping out more in Afghanistan. Hmm, maybe if we had actually tried diplomacy instead of gratuitously pissing Europe off in dozens of ways (rejecting treaties, rejecting the idea of treaties, “old Europe,” etc.), we’d have had better luck.

"...but I think it's way too early to claim it as an ultimate victory for freedom." Well, who in the administration has claimed exactly that?

Not exactly those words, but Bush said:

In the coming weeks, the ballots will be counted, a new government formed, and a people who suffered in tyranny for so long will become full members of the free world. This election will not mean the end of violence. But it is the beginning of something new: constitutional democracy at the heart of the Middle East.

I’d say “full members of the free world” is mighty close to “ultimate victory for freedom,” but my point was really that the administration has always disregarded and continues to disregard the likelihood that a democracy in Iraq will put a government in power that will not be friendly to U.S. interests.

The opponents of this effort have from the onset seemed to demand that Iraq be a perfectly functioning society and democracy inside of six weeks from Saddam Hussein's fall.

Actually, what the opponents of the Iraq war really wanted was either that we not go to war, or that we not go to war so precipitately. The unrealistic expectations were more on the part of the neocons and other Administration hawks (e.g., Cheney: “greeted as liberators”).

The self-proclaimed paper of record "breaks" the story that the president has directed the NSA to use all its high-tech means to keep nutheads from blowing us up. Of course, the story is timed curiously to coincide with both the Iraqi election and the release of some hack's book.

I agree, the Times’ timing is odd. Why did they wait a year? We should have known sooner. It seems likely that the Times was forced to release the story because they were about to be scooped by the publication of the book. And speaking of elections, did the Times step on the story until after the U.S. vote in 2004?

Quick quiz: How many presidents over the last century have availed themselves of the secret wiretapping process to thwart our enemies, some of whom haven't been as obvious about their ill-will toward us as al Qaeda?

Because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was enacted in 1978, a maximum of five presidents could have used its secret process for wiretapping. The current Bush is the only one I know of who disregarded the requirements of the Act altogether.

How many presidents have taken other, arguably more invasive, steps to secure our safety, like suspending habeas corpus perhaps? Or throwing an entire segment of the citizenry into camps?

I’ve always been willing to cut Lincoln some slack on the habeas suspension, but most other wartime abuses of civil liberties in America – particularly the World War II internments – were tragic, unnecessary, and wrong.

Do you really think that intercepting nefarious attempts by a proven enemy to communicate plans for further destruction is going to lead to the People's Democratic Republic of America?

So as long as it doesn't lead to the PDRA, it's copacetic with you? For the record, the answer to your question is "no." But I think that the president is not above the law, that it is dangerous for the president alone to decide which laws apply to him, and whether we can even have a public debate about it, and that it's not too much to ask that the president follow a legally required secret judicial process to allow him to order a secret spy agency to secretly monitor communications of American citizens. I also – pardon my suspicious nature – doubt that the Administration is limiting its domestic spying to the circumstances you describe.

In having doubts about the FISA-free wiretap program, I stand with noted leftists like Senators Hagel, Snowe, Collins, Spector, Sununu, Lugar, Craig, Graham, and McCain; AEI scholar Norman Ornstein; Reagan admin. deputy AG Bruce Fein; columnists William Safire and George Will.

Glenn Greenwald has eloquently argued that the Administration is abandoning the conservative legal principles it claims to support in making its arguments for why the secret wiretaps are legal:

Listening to the Bush Administration and its defenders try to justify George Bush’s deliberate and ongoing violations of the law, one can’t help but notice that the Constitution and Congressional statutes sure do seem quite "flexible" in the hands of those seeking to defend him -- a particular irony given how stridently Bush followers rail against such legal theories in other contexts.

I suppose strict construction and relativism are in the eye of the beholder.

In fact, the Left seems to consistently ask the wrong questions. Instead of "how come we didn't find any WMD in Iraq?," how about "where are they now?" Because he had them, never accounted for their destruction, and the vaunted weapons inspectors never found them or any evidence of their demise. We all know the answer to the question, but we don't want to admit it because then we'll have to act on it.

Actually, I don't know this one. What weapons are you saying he had at the start of the war, and where did he send them?

Given the UN's impeccable record of getting tyrannical thugs to act nice and play by the rules (12 years and 16 resolutions against Hussein and bupkis), why is the president letting the usual UN-Oil-for-Food Capone-istas broker a deal with that obviously sensible Iranian fellow, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Again, I don't know. It could be that (a) repeatedly telling the U.N. to piss off, and (b) putting all our eggs in the Iraq basket have weakened our leverage with the U.N. and reduced our ability to intimidate Iran.

If the Left isn't all-consumed in its loathing of GWB, why then are they so seemingly suicidal when confronted with real and obvious threats to our civilization? I mean, on the whole, Western civilization allows us to live more to our liking then say the visions of the current Islamist threat to the world, right?

It’s not that we’re suicidal; it’s that we disagree with you on the way to avoid disaster.

Here is the very funny and very smart Adam Felber, writing on February 20, 2003, in response to someone who responded to an argument about the wisdom of the Administration’s rush to war by talking about how bad Saddam was:

Let’s put it this way: If Bush’s plan was to launch 25 nuclear missiles at Iraq tomorrow morning, you’d probably oppose it, I’m guessing. That would put you in the position where you found yourself both in favor of stopping Saddam and convinced that the President’s strategy was completely wrongheaded.

That’s where I am. That’s where the majority of rational “anti-war” Americans are. That’s what the debate should be about.

But it isn’t. Just like in the McCarthy era, the debate has been manipulated into a cartoonish either/or context.

("Cartoonish either/or context" = “why is the Left suicidal” and “do they really prefer Islamofascism to Western civilization.”) So. I think that a forceful response to terrorism is appropriate, but that Iraq was not an appropriately-directed blow to deal with the terrorism threat. Which is not to say that Saddam was innocuous. Using force against him (beyond the no-fly-zone force, I mean) could conceivably have been appropriate, but not the way we went about it.

Saddam’s Iraq was not a significant sponsor of international terrorism, and contrary to the Bush Administration’s repeated suggestions was not behind the 9/11 attacks. I can’t say for sure why the Administration was so hell-bent on invading Iraq, but I suspect that the main driver was the neocon/PNAC goal of reshaping the entire Middle East.

Which, I think, was a disastrous fantasy. The war in Iraq has been a catastrophic strategic blunder that has reduced our ability to deal with graver threats (Iran, North Korea), to work for a peaceful Middle East (Israel/Palestine), and to respond to humanitarian catastrophes (Darfur). It’s removed a tyrant, which is great, but the world is full of tyrants, and we cannot invade all of their countries. In dealing with tyrants, we have to consider both the costs and how likely we are to make things better than they are at present. The Iraq war has cost tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Likely outcomes include: national breakup and civil war, an authoritarian secular regime (meet the new boss . . .), or a fundamentalist Islamic regime allied with Iran. The war has strengthened Iran and has strengthened the hand of lunatic fundamentalists within Iran. To reach this point the U.S. government has countenanced the abuse of civil liberties and has played apologist for torture. We have lost the moral high ground we held after 9/11. In Iraq, the war may have created more terrorists than it destroyed. I don’t think it’s made us more secure. It may not even have been a just war.


But most of that is in the past now. I come back to one of my earlier points: what do we do now to get to peace in Iraq? I know you disagree with everything I said above, but what do you think we need to do next?  ¶ 11:42 PM 4 comments links to this post

  trashing the state It's good that litter on Texas roadsides has dropped by a third since 2001 -- from 1.25 billion pieces in 2001 to 827 million pieces in 2005. Which, alas, still works out to 2757 pieces of trash per mile of road. Ugh. We've got a ways to go yet, especially since 55 percent of Texans admit to littering.  ¶ 10:51 AM 0 comments