Goldwater Institute takes on Sheriff Joe

Clint Bolick, formerly the primary litigator for the Institute for Justice, is taking on some good causes as a litigator for the Goldwater Institute's new Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation. He's currently fighting against the City of Phoenix's unconscionable and unconstitutional multimillion-dollar subsidy to the developers of the CityNorth project, and now he's taking on popular Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

In an article posted today called "Who's in Charge?", Bolick points out two cases of apparent misuse of funds by Arpaio--using RICO funds to send staff to Honduras, and sending out nearly 200 deputies and "posse" members on "saturation patrols" that appear to be trespassing the jurisdiction of the Phoenix Police Department. Meanwhile, Bolick notes:

Whatever the rationale the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office had for those actions, both diverted scarce resources away from vital law enforcement duties that fall within the Sheriff’s Office’s core duties:

• Unserved warrants, including those for violent offenders, number an estimated 70,000.
• Dozens of criminal defendants have missed court appearances because deputies in charge of moving inmates were told to skip shifts due to excessive overtime.
• The Sheriff’s Office closed three regional booking facilities in Surprise, Avondale, and Mesa, forcing police officers in all 26 Maricopa County jurisdictions to book criminal suspects at the Fourth Avenue jail in downtown Phoenix. The greatly increased transportation time removes officers from the streets and induces them to simply cite and release criminals.

Arpaio has a long history of showy but useless or even counterproductive law enforcement activities, as well as costing the taxpayers millions by getting the MCSO sued repeatedly for wrongful death and injury cases as a result of abuse of inmates. But Maricopa County residents keep voting him back in, because he claims to be tough on crime and is often a good self-promoter. I hope that events like last October's arrests of the owners of New Times and now Clint Bolick going after him will finally lead to his non-reelection for County Sheriff this year.

Dan Saban, who's running against Arpaio, is saying all the right things about integrity, civil rights, and combating waste, though he also seems to take a hard line on illegal immigration (which is another area where Arpaio has taken a hard line and engaged in some theatrical activities). He looks like a marked improvement to Arpaio.

UPDATE (April 2, 2008): Looks like Goldwater lost round one today on CityNorth, a project where the city is giving $97.4 million in taxpayer subsidies to the developers of a shopping mall over the next 11 years, and claiming that it is for the 3,180 parking spaces in the parking garage the project is building, 200 of which are reserved for carpoolers using park and ride city bus services for the next 45 years. If the subsidy is considered to be for those 200 spaces, that comes out to $487,000 per space over the 45-year period, or $10,822.22 per space per year. The average parking space annual lease price in Phoenix is $684, and ASU recently estimated that a parking garage would cost $14,000 per space to build. In other words, if instead of paying nearly $100 million to CityNorth, the city instead had purchased land and built its own parking garage, the construction would have cost less than what the city is paying for the first two years worth of the 45-year lease on the 200 spaces. And that doesn't count the additional $10,000/week of taxpayer funds that has been spent on lawyers fighting for this subsidy.

The Goldwater Institute has announced that it will appeal.

UPDATE (April 9, 2008): The New York Times has editorialized that Arpaio should be subpoenaed about his anti-illegal-immigrant sweeps:

For months now, Sheriff Joe has been sending squads of officers through Latino neighborhoods, pulling cars over for broken taillights or turn-signal violations, checking drivers' and passengers' papers and arresting illegal immigrants by the dozen.

Because he sends out press releases beforehand, the sweeps are accompanied by TV crews and protesters — deport-'em-all hard-liners facing off against immigrant advocates. Being Arizona, many of those shouting and jeering are also packing guns. Sheriff Joe, seemingly addicted to the buzz, has been filmed marching down the street shaking hands with adoring Minutemen.

If this doesn't look to you like a carefully regulated, federally supervised effort to catch dangerous criminals, that's because it isn't. It is a series of stunts focused mostly on day laborers, as Sheriff Joe bulldozes his way toward re-election.

The sheriff says he is keeping the peace, but it seems as if he is doing just the opposite — a useless, reckless churning of fear and unrest.

Flying Spaghetti Monster lands outside Tennessee courthouse

A very nice sculpture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has joined other monuments outside a Cumberland County, Tennessee courthouse which is acting in good compliance with the First Amendment. (Apparently NOT an April Fool's joke--although Wired's blog posted on April 1, it was announced a day earlier at the official FSM website.)

Another liar as Attorney General

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars reports on some recent statements by Attorney General Michael Mukasey during a speech about political corruption, in which he lied about FISA's impact on wiretapping, falsely claiming that FISA law had to be violated because it would require the methods of wiretapping being used to be discussed in open court.

The mainstream media seems to be mostly giving him a pass on his falsehoods.

UPDATE (April 5, 2008): Glenn Greenwald uncovers more evidence that Mukasey is a liar, fabricating pre-9/11 events that didn't happen.

Fitna: The Film

I've put up a post at the Secular Outpost about Dutch MP Geert Wilders' new film criticizing the Koran, "Fitna," which has, unsurprisingly, resulted in governmental demands for YouTube to remove the video and calls for boycotts of Dutch goods.

Read it at the Secular Outpost.

Also see P.Z. Myers' commentary on it at Pharyngula.

March's Market Update

Maricopa County had another record month for notices of trustee's sales. 5370 pre-foreclosure notices sent out to Phoenix area home owners...

Remember that last month's figure was 5048 notices, while the number of homes sold in February was only 3448...

These numbers, not surprisingly, continue to exert downward pressure on home prices in the valley. January's median price of $220,000 fell to $213,800 in February...

Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes

Google today announced that its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have teamed up with Richard Branson of Virgin to form "Project Virgle," a project to form the first permanent human colony on Mars.

Read more.

Arizona paramedics change treatment of cardiac arrest

CNN reports that Arizona's paramedics have changed their processes for dealing with cardiac arrest victims, going against the recommendations of the American Heart Association, and the result has tripled the long-term survival rate:

Until three years ago, Arizona's success rate in cases like this was no better than most of the country. This past month, however, physicians in the state reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that a new regimen by paramedics has tripled the success rate, to more than 5 percent. Among patients whose collapse from cardiac arrest was observed, long-term survival went from 4.7 percent to 17.6 percent.

In a bold departure from standard practice, paramedics in most Arizona cities do not follow the guidance of the American Heart Association. Instead, they follow a protocol that was developed at the University of Arizona's Sarver Heart Center, largely by Dr. Gordon Ewy.

Even after cardiac arrest, Ewy said, there's enough oxygen in the body to feed the brain and keep a person alive for several minutes. But that air helps only if someone compresses the heart to circulate blood. In traditional CPR, rescuers alternate 30 chest compressions with two long "rescue breaths." Paramedics are trained to start by checking the airway, and insert a breathing tube at the start of resuscitation. These extra steps, said Ewy, waste precious time.

In Arizona, paramedics skip the breathing step. They simply alternate two minutes of pumping on the chest -- 200 compressions -- with a single shock from a defibrillator.

This is similar to a story Newsweek reported last summer, which indicated that giving oxygen to cardiac arrest patients is the wrong thing to do. It's nice to see Arizona on the cutting edge, here.

More cases of suppression missed by "Expelled"

I previously noted that none of the cases of alleged persecution of intelligent design advocates in the film "Expelled" come close to the case of political persecution of an advocate of evolution, Chris Comer, who lost her job at the Texas Education Association for sending an email announcing an academic talk by a critic of intelligent design.

Troy Britain now lists some additional cases where intelligent design advocates are the persecutors:

• Nancey Murphy of the Fuller Theological Seminary, who

  said she faced a campaign to get her fired because she expressed the view that intelligent design was not only poor theology, but “so stupid, I don’t want to give them my time.”

  Murphy, who believes in evolution, said she had to fight to keep her job after one of the founding members of the intelligent design movement, legal theorist Phillip Johnson, called a trustee at the seminary and tried to get her fired.

• In the mid-1990s, Christian biochemist Terry M. Gray also ran into problems associated with Phillip Johnson. When he wrote a negative review of the book in which he stated that humans have primate ancestors, he was charged with heresy by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and forced to write a recantation in order to maintain his membership in the church.
• Christian physicist Howard Van Till, a critic of creationism and intelligent design, was criticized by the board of trustees at Calvin College for his views. Although his career was not ended, he ultimately abandoned his faith after the repeated insistence by his critics that his views were not compatible with it. I've heard that Duane Gish, former vice president of the Institute for Creation Research, was an individual who contributed to attacks on Van Till to try to get him removed from his position.
• Troy doesn't (yet) mention this case, but Panda's Thumb has written about Richard D. Colling, a biologist at Olivet Nazarene University, who has been forbidden to teach intro-level biology classes and his book, Random Designer, has been banned from use at his school. Although trustees attempted to have Colling fired, he has maintained his tenured position with the support of the university president--but apparently that support is not sufficient to allow him to teach introductory biology classes to undergraduates or teach from his own book.
  

It seems there is quite a different movie still to be made here, about religious persecution of scientists who dare to argue for evolution.

UPDATE (April 20, 2008): Blake Stacey has put together a more extensive list.

Thinking Christian blog blocks my comment

Tom Gilson closed the comments at his Thinking Christian blog post about P.Z. Myers calling in to the presenter line on an "Expelled" event conference bridge, preventing me from posting this comment:

The claims of "Expelled" about individuals who have allegedly been persecuted are bogus--Gonzales was denied tenure because he wasn't publishing research, Sternberg wasn't persecuted at all, and Crocker simply didn't have her contract renewed (and deservedly so--she was both a bad teacher and was making horrible creationist arguments, as has been documented with her PowerPoint slides online).

On the other hand, Chris Comer really was removed from her position as Director of Science at the Texas Education Agency for simply sending out an email announcing that Barbara Forrest was giving a talk about "Creationism's Trojan Horse." The ID advocates have no case of persecution that approaches that in severity.

He also deleted a link that Norman Doering included in a comment, and banned Norman from his blog. Norman's comment was this:

Tom Gilson wrote:

The connection between Darwinism and the Holocaust is not a lie when it is understood the way thoughtful people have presented it.

Feel free to present that “thoughtful way” here:

http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2007/04/if-hitler-was-darwinist.html

But Tom deleted the link because clicking on the link first gives a content warning from Blogger. Norman's post is well worth reading, as I pointed out in a comment on Tom's blog that made it under the wire before he closed comments:

Tom: It’s too bad you deleted Norman Doering’s link to his blog post. It’s actually a quite interesting post about how the Nazis actually banned writings promoting Darwinism, and how it was creationist Edward Blyth’s ideas that led to eugenics. Norman also points out multiple passages from Hitler’s _Mein Kampf_ which look more like something written by a creationist than an evolutionist.

By the way, Gilson claims that P.Z. Myers "crashed" the conference call. In fact, he was invited to attend, as was the entire Panda's Thumb blogging crew--just not to be a presenter on the call.

Mike Rinder left Scientology

From an interesting Radar magazine article about the "Anonymous" protests against Scientology and various high-level defections (including church head David Miscavige's niece, which I've already reported here), I learn that Mike Rinder, former head of Scientology's Office of Special Affairs, defected last year. Rinder was the main public spokesperson for the Church of Scientology. Chuck Beatty, a 27-year veteran of the Church, observes in the article that Rinder leaving Scientology is like Goebbels leaving the Nazi Party.

Rinder, an Australian who joined the Scientology Sea Org at the age of 18, left the Church in the summer of 2007.

Congratulations, Mr. Rinder. Welcome back to reality. I hope you will speak out about your experiences.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)