Who's Government Funded?; More Shared Sacrifice: Students Bear Burden; Jury's out for Professors; Massive Debt? Thank GW Bush; Bluffing out Confessions

It's hard to tell which party represents the average workers and which party receives the average workers' votes. It's a bit mind boggling when a 57 year old disabled veteran on Social Security, receiving Veteran's Insurance, and receiving meals-on-wheels votes republican. That's called voting against one's own self-interest and it happens all of the time especially since many of the folks who benefit from government social programs don't believe that they are receiving government assistance.

Suzanne Mettler of Cornell University found precisely that. In "Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era" Mettler uncovered that large percentages of people receiving government assistance actually believed it was not government assistance (e.g. the guy with the "Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare).  Turns out that's not so rare.

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So we're all in this together.  That's true if "together" has semantically shifted and now means the poor are screwed.  The burden of the sacrifices pushed for in Washington by the tea baggers and republicans are again targeted at a minority class who receive assistance that accounts for a negligible amount of government spending: graduate students.

Even though the Prez wants more access to higher education, he's willing to waive the nominal amounts spent by the fed on interest accrued on graduate student loans as part of the cuts in the recent debt discussions and compromise.  Even though Pres. Obama seemingly fought with little effort, these cuts are purely republican reductions.  Republicans are forced to cut to any social programs that benefit citizens because they are unwilling to raise more revenue or cut military spending.  The cuts to student aid will save the government $18 billion over the next ten years.  And it will mean graduate students will be spending a lot more time at their parents' homes.  Another very good reason why parents of graduate students should be voting against republicans.

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Also in higher education, a new study found that socioeconomic equity in America is but a myth.  The evidence is in the pudding of elite colleges and universities.

For many years the one thing America really had going for it, one advantage over the rest of the world, was the higher education sector.  Poor, rich, minority, majority - the level playing ground was the university setting.  That is quickly evaporating.  The costs associated with higher education are rising making equity in higher education a thing of the past.

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Evidently professors are too liberal to serve as jurors and the Nevada Supreme Court agrees. 

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Thanks to Lori Montgomery for this article devoted to the causes of our current debt crisis.  If there are people you know who think Obama is responsible for the mess we're in, get them a copy of this article; it's more articulate than anything in the Wisconsin State Journal.

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Almost last but not least is this fascinating study on false confessions.  Saul Kassin and Jennifer Perillo of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice instructed a group of university students that they were taking part in a test of their reaction times.  The students were asked to press keys on a keyboard but not to push the ALT key because depressing the ALT key would cause the computer to crash and all of the data to be lost.

The computer, in fact, was designed to crash no matter which keys were pushed.  When this happened, the student was accused of pushing the illicit key.  When prodded to confess, a quarter of the students confessed to pushing the error causing button when in actuality only one student had pushed the ALT button.

"Results suggest that the phenomenology of innocence can lead innocents to confess even in response to relatively benign interrogation tactics."

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March 28th in History

March 28, 1979 America's worst commercial nuclear accident occurred inside the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island plant near Middletown, Pa.  The accident began about 4:00 a.m. on March 28, 1979, when the plant experienced a failure in the secondary, non-nuclear section of the plant. The main feedwater pumps stopped running, caused by either a mechanical or electrical failure, which prevented the steam generators from removing heat. First the turbine, then the reactor automatically shut down. Immediately, the pressure in the primary system (the nuclear portion of the plant) began to increase. In order to prevent that pressure from becoming excessive, the pilot-operated relief valve (a valve located at the top of the pressurizer) opened. The valve should have closed when the pressure decreased by a certain amount, but it did not. Signals available to the operator failed to show that the valve was still open. As a result, cooling water poured out of the stuck-open valve and caused the core of the reactor to overheat. 

As coolant flowed from the core through the pressurizer, the instruments available to reactor operators provided confusing information. There was no instrument that showed the level of coolant in the core.  Instead, the operators judged the level of water in the core by the level in the pressurizer, and since it was high, they assumed that the core was properly covered with coolant. In addition, there was no clear signal that the pilot-operated relief valve was open. As a result, as alarms rang and warning lights flashed, the operators did not realize that the plant was experiencing a loss-of-coolant accident. They took a series of actions that made conditions worse by simply reducing the flow of coolant through the core.

Because adequate cooling was not available, the nuclear fuel overheated to the point at which the zirconium cladding (the long metal tubes which hold the nuclear fuel pellets) ruptured and the fuel pellets began to melt. It was later found that about one-half of the core melted during the early stages of the accident. Although the TMI-2 plant suffered a severe core meltdown, the most dangerous kind of nuclear power accident, it did not produce the worst-case consequences that reactor experts had long feared. In a worst-case accident, the melting of nuclear fuel would lead to a breach of the walls of the containment building and release massive quantities of radiation to the environment. But this did not occur as a result of the three Mile Island accident.

Detailed studies of the radiological consequences of the accident have been conducted by the NRC, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services), the Department of Energy, and the State of Pa.. Several independent studies have also been conducted. Estimates are that the average dose to about 2 million people in the area was only about 1 millirem. To put this into context, exposure from a chest x-ray is about 6 millirem. Compared to the natural radioactive background dose of about 100-125 millirem per year for the area, the collective dose to the community from the accident was very small. The maximum dose to a person at the site boundary would have been less than 100 millirem.

1978 In Stump v. Sparkman, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-3 to uphold the judicial immunity of an Indiana judge against a lawsuit brought by a young woman who had been ordered sterilized by the judge when she was a teenager.

In 1971 Judge Harold D. Stump, of the Circuit Court of DeKalb County, Indiana, acted on a petition filed by Ora Spitler McFarlin, the mother of fifteen-year-old Linda Spitler. McFarlin sought to have her daughter sterilized on the ground she was a "somewhat retarded" minor who had been staying out overnight with older men.

Judge Stump approved and signed the petition, but the petition had not been filed with the circuit court clerk and the judge had not opened a formal case file. The judge failed to appoint a guardian ad litem for Spitler, and he did not hold a hearing on the matter before authorizing a tubal ligation. Spitler, who did not know what the operation was for, discovered she had been sterilized only after she was married to Leo Sparkman and unsuccessfully tried to have children. Linda Sparkman (nee Spitler) then sued Judge Stump.

The Supreme Court ruled that Stump was absolutely immune because what he did was "a function normally performed by a judge," and he performed the act in his "judicial capacity." Although he may have violated state laws and procedures, he performed judicial functions that have historically been absolutely immune to civil lawsuits.

In a dissenting opinion, Associate  Justice Potter Stewart argued that Stump's actions were not absolutely immune simply because he sat in a courtroom, wore a robe, and signed an unlawful order. In Stewart's view the conduct of a judge "surely does not become a judicial act merely on his say so. A judge is not free, like a loose cannon, to inflict indiscriminate damage whenever he announces that he is acting in his judicial capacity."

Ten years ago the authors of a book on the Oklahoma City bombing revealed that during prison interviews, Timothy McVeigh had shown no remorse for what happened, and called the 19 children who died "collateral damage."


Thought for today "Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it." — T.S. Eliot, American-Anglo poet and critic (1888-1965)

Over and out.

Supreme Court tensions boil over

Prosser says he was goaded into insulting chief justice

By Patrick Marley of the Journal Sentinel

March 19, 2011 |(1097) Comments

Madison - As the deeply divided state Supreme Court wrestled over whether to force one member off criminal cases last year, Justice David Prosser exploded at Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson behind closed doors, calling her a "bitch" and threatening to "destroy" her.

The incident, revealed in interviews as well as e-mails between justices, shows fractures on the court run even deeper than what has been revealed in public sniping in recent years. Problems got so bad that justices on both sides described the court as dysfunctional, and Prosser and others suggested bringing in a third party for help, e-mails show.

Prosser acknowledged the incident recently and said he thought it was becoming public now in an attempt to hurt him politically. Prosser faces Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg in the April 5 election.
He said the outburst came after Abrahamson took steps to undermine him politically and to embarrass him and other court conservatives.

"In the context of this, I said, 'You are a total bitch,' " Prosser said.  "I probably overreacted, but I think it was entirely warranted. . . . They (Abrahamson and Justice Ann Walsh Bradley) are masters at deliberately goading people into perhaps incautious statements. This is bullying and abuse of very, very long standing."

The Feb. 10, 2010, incident occurred as the court privately discussed a request to remove Justice Michael Gableman from a criminal case.

"In a fit of temper, you were screaming at the chief; calling her a 'bitch,' threatening her with '. . . I will destroy you'; and describing the means of destruction as a war against her 'and it won't be a ground war,' " Bradley wrote in a Feb. 18, 2010, e-mail to Prosser and others.

"In my view, a necessary step to address the dysfunction is to end these abusive temper tantrums.  No one brought in from the outside is going to cure this aspect of the dysfunction."

Three days later, Justice Patience Roggensack wrote to Bradley, criticizing her for copying judicial assistants on her e-mail.  "You were trying to make David look bad in the eyes of others, as a person who uses language that we all find offensive - and I include David in that 'we,' " Roggensack wrote. "Do you think that copying others on your e-mail increased the collegiality of the court or decreased it?  You are a very active participant in the dysfunctional way we carry-on. (As am I.) You often goad other justices by pushing and pushing in conference in a way that is simply rude and completely nonproductive. That is what happened when David lost his cool. He is not a man who attacks others without provocation. Until you realize that you are an active part of the provocation, not much will change. Perhaps a third party will help you realize that you are not part of the solution; you are part of the problem."

The next day, Feb. 22, 2010, Bradley wrote Roggensack.  "Regardless of our disagreements, there is no justification for this abusive behavior," Bradley wrote. "Blaming his abusive behavior on others merely enables it."

Abrahamson and Roggensack did not return calls about the incident.

At the time, passions ran high on the court because the justices had to decide an ethics allegation against Gableman, as well as requests by defense attorneys to force him off nine cases because they believed he was biased against criminal defendants.

Gableman remained on the cases after the justices split 3-3 on the issue. Months later, they split along the same lines on his ethics case.

Abrahamson, Bradley and Justice N. Patrick Crooks voted to find that Gableman violated the judicial ethics code by misstating facts in a campaign ad; Prosser, Roggensack and Justice Annette Ziegler voted to find that he did not violate the ethics code. With no agreement, the case was then abandoned.

Bradley allowed the Journal Sentinel to review the e-mails at the newspaper's request. She blacked out the name of a case mentioned in the e-mails.

She said Prosser's outbursts have occurred on and off over the years, but there has not been one of similar magnitude since the incident described in the e-mails.

Prosser said he'd helped Abrahamson and Bradley in past campaigns but believed they were trying to get him off the court in the upcoming election. Bradley said she had not talked to Kloppenburg about her campaign, but did discuss the "pros and cons and realities" of a court campaign with others, including Marla Stephens.
Stephens, the appellate director for the state Public Defender's Office, ran for the court but did not advance past last month's primary.

Said Prosser: "There is not the slightest doubt that Ann wrote that e-mail to hurt me in this campaign - and here it is surfacing three weeks before the campaign."

Bradley denied that. "I never intended that this would be public," she said. "I just wanted it to stop."
She said she agreed to an interview in part because Prosser had been portrayed as even-keeled during the campaign.

"You can say a lot of good things about David Prosser - and I do, and he is a good man - but you cannot accurately say he has a steady, even temperament," she said.

Kloppenburg has used the divisions on the court as an issue in her campaign against Prosser.  "People in Wisconsin want the Supreme Court to focus on the important work we elect justices to do," Kloppenburg said in an e-mail. "Politics, personality and partisanship that distract from that work are counterproductive and clearly show why the Supreme Court needs new blood."

Asked what he meant when he said he would destroy the chief, Prosser said he meant that he would "tell the truth" publicly about her. Indeed, criticisms of Abrahamson have become prominent in Prosser's campaign.  In an interview last month with Journal Sentinel editors and writers, Prosser portrayed a court where factions have formed around and against Abrahamson, whom he described as a brilliant legal scholar and shrewd politician who marginalizes conservative justices and draws attention to the court's split.

"Who is it who takes these things public all the time?" Prosser asked. "It's the chief justice. . . .  She's done some wonderful things, but the rest of us have nothing to contribute" in her eyes.

As Prosser tells it, this isn't the first time Abrahamson has presided over a divided court, and he wasn't always on the opposite side from her. Shortly after he was appointed to the court in 1998, he said, four other justices proposed what he described as "a plot to depose the chief," form an executive committee to run the court and recruit a candidate to run against Abrahamson the following year.

Prosser said he refused to back the plan, because he found it "grossly inconsistent with the constitution" and because Abrahamson "treated me very well." The quartet - Crooks and former Justices Bill Bablitch, Donald Steinmetz and Jon Wilcox - later publicly criticized Abrahamson as confrontational and dismissive and accused her of exceeding her authority.

After winning re-election, Abrahamson thanked Prosser for his support but stressed she didn't owe him anything, Prosser said.

Prosser said the divisions on the court grew worse after Louis Butler was appointed to the court in 2004. Prosser said Crooks swung over to Abrahamson's faction and joined the chief, Bradley and Butler in forming a majority that "completely changed the direction of the court" and was intolerant of other justices' views.
That majority ended in 2008, when Gableman defeated Butler. Crooks declined to comment.

When Ziegler was elected in 2007, after a race in which she was accused of conflicts of interest, Prosser said Abrahamson tried to deny her a formal investiture ceremony. The chief later relented, but Prosser said Ziegler "was treated differently, as a pariah."

In 2008, the court took the unprecedented step of formally reprimanding Ziegler, ruling she had violated the judicial ethics code as a Washington County Circuit Court judge, by presiding over cases involving a bank where her husband served on the board of directors.

Patrick Marley reported from Madison and Larry Sandler reported from Milwaukee.