MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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United States

Souter's Harvard Talk

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Souter signing guest book inside Massachusetts Hall prior to delivering Harvard's 359th Commencement.

Text of Justice David Souter’s Harvard Commencement remarks (as delivered)

When I was younger, I used to hear Harvard stories from a member of the class of 1885. Back then, old graduates of the College who could get to Cambridge on Commencement Day didn’t wait for reunion years to come back to the Yard.  They’d just turn up, see old friends, look over the new crop, and have a cup of Commencement punch under the elms.  The old man remembered one of those summer days when he was heading for the Square after lunch and crossed paths with a newly graduated senior, who had enjoyed quite a few cups of that punch.  As the two men approached each other the younger one thrust out his new diploma and shouted, “Educated, by God.”

Even with an honorary Harvard doctorate in my hands, I know enough not to shout that across the Yard, but the University’s generosity does make me bold enough to say that over the course of 19 years on the Supreme Court, I learned some lessons about the Constitution of the United States, and about what judges do when they apply it in deciding cases with constitutional issues.  I’m going to draw on that experience in the course of the next few minutes, for it is as a judge that I have been given the honor to speak before you.

The occasion for our coming together like this aligns with the approach of two separate events on the judicial side of the national public life:  the end of the Supreme Court’s term, with its quickened pace of decisions, and a confirmation proceeding for the latest nominee to fill a seat on the court.  We will as a consequence be hearing and discussing a particular sort of criticism that is frequently aimed at the more controversial Supreme Court decisions:  criticism that the court is making up the law, that the court is announcing constitutional rules that cannot be found in the Constitution, and that the court is engaging in activism to extend civil liberties.  A good many of us, I’m sure a good many of us here, intuitively react that this sort of commentary tends to miss the mark.  But we don’t often pause to consider in any detail the conceptions of the Constitution and of constitutional judging that underlie the critical rhetoric, or to compare them with the notions that lie behind our own intuitive responses.  I’m going to try to make some of those comparisons this afternoon.

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TAKE NOTE, AMERICANS_Lessons from Across the Sea

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By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Sunday, April 3, 1994

Saraan Ajaye did not even know South Africa was a country until she took a human rights course a year ago.

Ajaye, a senior at the Bronx alternative high school Schomburg Satelite Academy, now sees the country’s gallop to democracy after three centuries of oppression as a civics lesson.

Never take your vote for granted, she said, pointing out how low turnout of African-American and Latino voters affected the outcome of the recent mayoral election. “As soon as I turned 18, I registered to vote,” she added.

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When David is the Goliath

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Israel Has Killed 3 Times As Many Civilians As They Have Hamas Fighters

Gaza Children Found With Mothers’ Corpses By ALAN COWELL

PARIS — The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday it had discovered “shocking” scenes — including small children next to their mothers’ corpses — when its representatives gained access for the first time to parts of Gaza battered by Israeli shelling. It accused Israel of failing to meet obligations to care for the wounded in areas of combat.

(Photo by Hatem Moussa/Associated Press) Palestinians gathered to receive flour at a United Nations food distribution center in Gaza City on Thursday.

(Photo by Hatem Moussa/Associated Press) Palestinians gathered to receive flour at a United Nations food distribution center in Gaza City on Thursday.

In response, the Israeli military did not comment directly on the allegation. In a statement, it accused Hamas, its foe in Gaza, of deliberately using “Palestinian civilians as human shields” and said the Israeli Army “works in close cooperation with international aid organizations during the fighting so that civilians can be provided with assistance.”

The Israeli military “in no way intentionally targets civilians and has demonstrated its willingness to abort operations to save civilian lives and to risk injury in order to assist innocent civilians,” the statement said, promising that “any serious allegation” would “need to be investigated properly, once such a complaint is received formally, within the constraints of the current military operation.”

Continue . . .

Closing arguments

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American Stories, American Solutions

Update: Babe, a commenter at The New York Times blog post about the ad, said this

What was most striking about Obama’s half-hour infomercial was that he never mentioned McCain’s name, in fact never spoke of him. We essentially heard a politician speak without throwing dirt, tossing around falsehoods about his opponent or indeed being negative in any way. What was the basis of the infomercial? Vignettes of people with problems and what Obama would do for them. The half hour was very well produced, obviously utilizing some top notch professionals, who managed to make all the amateurs look and sound good. It was an interesting contrast to McCain’s appearance on Larry King, spending most of his interview time to make insinuations about Obama’s veracity, campaign finances, associations and general qualifications for president. McCain truly seems frantic and desperate — and very old. I believe it would be a very sad day for America should get himself elected.

–Babe

A Clear Voice

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The United States is not speaking with a forked tongue about Russian atrocities in Georgia before the United Nations Security Council.

Russia and the U.S. traded hot accusations at the Security Council over Moscow’s aggressive handling of its military operation in Georgia’s breakaway province of South Ossetia and the bombing of Georgia proper.

Georgian diplomats at the U.N. asked for “immediate diplomatic and humanitarian intervention to protect georgian from russian ongoing aggression.” A U.S.-European resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire is pending but Russia is certain to veto it.

I am not sure how much U.S. Ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad was freelancing before the Security Council on Sunday and how much administration policy he was voicing:

“We must condemn Russia’s military assault on the sovereign state of Georgia, the violation of the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, including the targeting of civilians and the campaign of terror against the georgian population,” Khalilzad told the council.

Which brought an angry retort from Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin:

“This statement, ambassador, is absolutely unacceptable, particularly from the lips of the permanent representative of a country whose actions we’re aware of, including with regards to civilian populations . . .”

Churkin was obviously about to discuss U.S. atrocities in Iraq, including indiscriminate bombing of civilian population in that country over the course of the last several years. But, as we know that American ears are too delicate for truth about their own country, CNN U.N. Correnspondent Richard Roth broke in at this point, speaking over Churkin’s voice, with a useless observation about this being the most heated confrontation between the two superpowers since the cold war.

It is a useless observation because it sought to obscure how the Iraq war has degraded America’s moral standing the in the world. In the past, America could speak with moral authority on an issue such as this, and have the world pay attention. No more. Russian laughed in our face and told us to butt out.

It did not stop Khalilzad, of course, from speaking out forcefully. Khalilzad was famously reprimanded by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for appearing on a panel alongside the Iranian foreign minister at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland at a time when the Bush administration was not talking to Iran.

Rice has contented herself with working in the background on the Russian-Georgian crisis. George W. Bush, meanwhile, has been strangely mealy-mouthed in public statements about the crisis.

Khalilzad told the Security Council on Sunday that the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had told Sec. of State Rice in a phone conversation that Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, must go. He then turned to ambassador Churkin and, dramatically, asked:

“Is the goal of the Russian Federation to change the leadership of Georgia?”

Churkin waved away the question inside the council but told journalists outside the chamber that some leaders, meaning Saakashvili, should contemplate how useful they’ve become to their people.

“Regime change is purely an american invention, purely an American invention,” Churkin, nevertheless, insisted. “We never apply this terminology in our political thinking.”

Khalilzad persisted that Russia’s overreach in Georgia could undermine the relationship of the two powers

“We want to make sure our Russian counterparts to understand that the days of overthrowing leaders by military means in europe, those days are gone,” he said.

Churkin, sly and charming, told reporters the truth:

“I don’t think we’re in danger of somehow jeopardizing our relationship with the United States.”

He is right.

No one, not the U.S., not the Europeans, will do a damn thing to help Georgia. Georgia is dead and gone, hors d’oeuvre, to Russia’s insatiable appetite for territory. In a time not too far in the future, all that will remain of the nation we now know as Georgia will be comprised of a desert, a couple of gas pumps, and oil pipelines leading out to the Black Sea.

Who will stop Russia?

Study: Poor Ballot Designs Still Affect U.S. Elections

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Study: Poor ballot designs still affect U.S. elections By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Poorly designed ballots continue to plague U.S. elections, even after Congress set aside $3 billion to overhaul voting systems to prevent a recurrence of the flawed Florida ballots that deadlocked the 2000 presidential race, a study out today concludes.

Problems with confusing paper ballots in 2002, absentee ballots in 2004 and touch-screen ballots in 2006 led thousands of voters to skip over key races or make mistakes that invalidated their votes, according to the study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

“In the big election meltdowns … where thousands of votes were lost, ballot design was the primary cause,” says Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center.

Ballot designs could play a big role in mistakes made at the polls this fall because of an infusion of new voters who registered for this year’s presidential race and the introduction of new voting machines in parts of 11 states with 15 million potential voters. Since passage of the Help America Vote Act in 2002, states have spent more than $2 billion in mostly federal funds to overhaul their voting systems.

Congress approved spending of up to $3 billion because of problems in the 2000 presidential race in Florida. A deciding factor in that race was the confusion caused in Palm Beach County by the “butterfly ballot,” which required voters to punch a hole beside their candidate’s name in a strip between two facing pages that listed the presidential contenders.

Despite all the spending since then, mostly on new electronic voting systems, not enough attention has been paid to ballot design, the new study warns. “There has not been a documented instance where a computer has fouled up the vote by itself,” agrees Kimball Brace of the consulting firm Election Data Services.

The study’s conclusion, endorsed by many federal and state election overseers, is leading counties and election system manufacturers to improve ballot designs by the November election.

Starting this week in Ohio, ballot design experts will show officials how to avoid the kind of voter confusion in Florida’s 13th Congressional District in 2006. More than 18,000 Sarasota County voters skipped that race, which appeared above a more prominently displayed race for governor on the same screen. Republican Vern Buchanan won the congressional race by 369 votes.

BETTER BALLOT: Varied ballot designs are ‘literacy test for voters’ By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY
Since 2000, when conservative Pat Buchanan did mysteriously well in Florida’s Palm Beach County at Democrat Al Gore’s expense, the way ballots are designed and explained has never stopped vexing voters.

About 12,000 presidential primary votes went uncounted in Los Angeles County this year because voters didn’t realize they had to fill in two ovals — one for party affiliation and one for candidate — on what came to be called a “double-bubble” ballot.

More than 18,000 voters in Sarasota County, Fla., didn’t choose either congressional candidate in 2006, in part because a more prominent race for governor was displayed on the same page on the touch-screen machines.

In the 2004 presidential race, nearly 3,000 absentee voters in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County mistakenly tried to line up arrows in a booklet with numbers on a ballot, negating their votes. Voters from Illinois to Iowa to Wisconsin met similar fates in 2002 because of poorly designed ballots.

Heading into the 2008 presidential election, officials who have spent billions on new technology are turning to designers for advice on such basic tenets as large type, clear language and simple layouts.

“Maybe we just should have designed a better ballot way back then,” says Oregon’s John Lindback, president of the National Association of State Election Directors. “It might have avoided the rush to touch-screen voting machines.”

A report scheduled for release today by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law shows that poor ballot design and instructions have caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of votes. Because there are no federal regulations, ballots vary significantly between and within states. “It’s kind of a literacy test for voters,” says Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center.

Studies have shown that those most likely to be confused are elderly, low-income and newly registered voters — factors that could influence this year’s race for the White House. “You tend to find the biggest problem in precincts with large numbers” of those voters, says David Kimball, associate professor of political science at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, a co-author of the report.

Election directors from counties that experienced recent ballot design problems say more attention should have been paid to the issue since 2000 than to the headlong rush to replace entire voting systems. Some counties in California, Florida, Ohio and elsewhere are dealing with their third systems in eight years:

•Los Angeles County Clerk Dean Logan says ballot designs and instructions are “the element of the elections process where we have the most opportunity between now and November to try and prevent inadvertent errors that voters might make.”

•Sarasota County elections director Kathy Dent says the changes from paper ballots to electronic machines and back to paper ballots has forced officials to spend more time on ballot preparation than ever. “We could have continued to use the punch cards in Sarasota,” she says.

•Cuyahoga County elections director Jane Platten says a clear, concise ballot isn’t easy to produce in Ohio, where state law demands ballot issues be printed in full. Every page costs 45 cents per voter — and the county has 1.2 million registered voters.

Tim Kaine of Virginia

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Va. governor could help fill gap for Obama: Centrist seen as dark horse among VP possibilities By Lisa Wangsness, Globe Staff, June 12, 2008

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – He is the popular governor of a critical swing state. He has working-class roots and a Harvard degree, and strong support from both business and labor. He is a devout Catholic and speaks fluent Spanish, and was the first governor outside Illinois to endorse Barack Obama for president.

Governor Tim Kaine is probably the least well known of the trio of rising Democratic stars from Virginia. The others – US Senator Jim Webb, the flame-throwing author and former Navy secretary, and former governor Mark Warner, the wealthy venture capitalist who briefly flirted with a presidential run – are regularly listed as vice presidential possibilities.

But Kaine’s biography and political resume fill many of the perceived gaps in Obama’s profile, making him for some analysts a dark horse in veepstakes 2008.

“The case for him is Virginia is a competitive state this time around, and he is kind of a centrist,” said Dan Palazzolo, a political scientist at the University of Richmond. “He’s prolife, basically, and he’s got this probusiness background. He’s also a big supporter of Obama.”

But, as Palazzolo notes, Kaine has no military or foreign policy experience, credentials Obama also lacks and that could prove a detriment for Republican John McCain, a Navy veteran and former prisoner of war who has traveled extensively around the world during his 22 years in the US Senate. “I think they’re substantial downsides,” Palazzolo said.

Obama, though, clearly has warm feelings for Kaine, who befriended the Illinois senator when he came to Virginia to stump for Kaine in 2005. (They discovered that their mothers came from the same small town in Kansas.) Campaigning in Virginia last week, Obama appeared with all three of Virginia’s Democratic notables, but he reserved special affection for Kaine.

“When you’re in the political business, there are a lot of people who are your allies, there are a lot of people who you’ve got to do business with, but you don’t always have a lot of friends,” Obama said at a rally, according to the Washington Post’s Virginia Politics blog. “The governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia is my friend.”

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U.S. Serbs Saddened and Angry By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

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Sunday, April 04, 1999

Lana Todorovich was on the phone to Belgrade with an urgent message for her parents: “Get out. Now.”

In the early hours of March 24, U.S. NATO warplanes bearing bombs were on their way to Yugoslavia.

Milan and Yela Simic, 62 and 57 years old, heeded their daughter’s warning. They made the hair-raising journey through the city of Novi Sad, northwest of Belgrade, as the first bombs began to fall.

“They saw bombs and rockets fall on Novi Sad, everywhere just fire and destruction and fear and disbelief,” said Todorovich, a fashion executive from Westchester.

They traveled first to Budapest under cover of darkness, then took a flight on CFA Czech Airlines to The Hague, Netherlands. The paradox of this war and their flight from it: The United States was their ultimate haven from the fighting.

“So the very country that was bombing them,” Todorovich said, “was also their way out of this terrible situation.”

That ambiguous dynamic in which the pain of U.S. attacks was felt along with the comfort of sanctuary in America has played out with many Serb immigrants in the last two weeks.

They love America, they say, but they hate what American-led NATO forces are doing to them.

More than 2 million Serb immigrants live in the U.S., predominantly in Midwestern cities, such as Chicago and Cleveland. In the greater New York area, some 50,000 Serbs live in Paterson and Elizabeth, N.J., and in Astoria, Queens.

Many express disbelief at what they see as the unfairness and injustice of the NATO attack on their homeland. Todorovich, 33 and the mother of a 6-year-old girl, arrived in the U.S. about 10 years ago and is an American citizen. She said the bombing campaign left her disillusioned, frustrated and angry.

“I just believed that we would do the right thing, and we didn’t.” she said. “It is a violation of my American sense of morality, to go ahead and commit aggression, provoke death and atrocities in the name of protecting people from the very same thing,”

Todorovich is not alone in feeling betrayed by U.S. actions in the Balkans. Serbs interviewed in the city said they blame President Clinton, not the American people, who they do not believe support the assault on their nation.

They scoff, however, at the notion that the U.S. quarrel is with Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, not with the Serb people. In protests across the city and all over the world, Serbs have taken to wearing bull’s-eyes on their shirt fronts and backs, suggesting they are also targets of the bombs.

George Bogdanich, 50, of the upper East Side, decried what he sees as President Clinton’s bungling of the conflict.

“These obnoxious references to Hitler and Nazis and so on Clinton ought to be aware that Serbs provided the first resistance to Hitler on the mainland of Europe during World War II,” Bogdanich said.

Americans just don’t understand what is at stake in Kosovo, he said. For Serbs to give in to the Kosovo Liberation Army, many said, is tantamount to a violent separatist movement wanting to secede from Texas and Russia or China saying, “Give them what they want or we’ll bomb you.”

“It’s just a sad situation,” Bogdanich said. “But Clinton does nothing but create ill will and bad policies by demonizing Serbs.”

By bombing and threatening Serb sovereignty, he said, Clinton and NATO did for Milosevic what the Serb strongman had not been able to do for himself: wipe out opposition to him in his own country.

Bogdanich bristled at reports of fresh Serb atrocities against Kosovo Albanians since the NATO bombing began. He insisted there is no evidence of such incidents.

Like many other Serbs, he blamed the reports on a biased Western media that have taken complex issues and created a simplified picture of good and evil.

“As a result of the selective press coverage, Serbs have been demonized,” Bogdanich said.

The media, Serbian-Americans argued, tagged the Serb people as genocidal for the killing of 200,000 Bosnian Muslims. But they fail to report that many Serbs have suffered ethnic cleansing at the hands of other warring Balkan ethnic groups, they said. They cited, correctly, the 190,000 Croatian Serbs routed from their homes in 1995 by Croat soldiers being advised by retired U.S. generals under the cover of NATO air strikes.

Mark Milich, 46, a third-generation Serbian-American who lives in Port Washington, L.I., said Clinton’s arrogance was responsible for a debacle.

“Our action is not the way to free people from oppression. America, the land of the free, is now responsible for driving these people deeper into their oppression,” Milich said.

“These are the days of infamy,” said Tatjana, 32, of Bernardsville, N.J., an economist for a telecommunications company who did not want her full name used. “I just don’t believe Tomahawks [cruise missiles] can bring peace.”

Todorovich’s parents are happy to be alive. But their worldly possessions have been reduced to the two suitcases they hurriedly packed when they left Belgrade.

“My parents are just recuperating now,” she said, “trying to get over the fear, the treacherous ride through bombs, through the furnace.”

GRAPHIC: CLARENCE DAVIS DAILY NEWS RALLY: Pro-Serb protesters sporting bull’s-eye look popular in Yugoslavia march outside Grand Central Terminal last week.

Plungers Waved In Angry March

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Sunday, August 17, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, CAROLINA GONZALEZ and PAUL SCHWARTZMAN, Daily News Staff Writers

Brandishing toilet plungers and chanting “KKK must go!” thousands of angry protesters yesterday descended on Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct, where two cops have been charged with torturing a Haitian immigrant.

Pressed tightly against a line of cops standing behind police barricades, the mostly Haitian crowd jammed the street outside the Flatbush stationhouse where two cops, Justin Volpe and Charles Schwarz, allegedly beat Abner Louima before shoving a toilet plunger into his rectum last week.

Louima watched the demonstration from the intensive care unit at Brooklyn Hospital Center, where he is recovering.

Louima “felt very good that people are upset about what happened and that they were making their voices heard,” his lawyer Carl Thomas said.

As temperatures steamed into the mid-90s, the raucous crowd swelled to 4,000, with many pounding drums, dancing, and hoisting Haitian flags and plungers in the air in a racially charged, sometimes carnival-like scene.

Despite scattered skirmishes, no one was arrested in the tense stand-off as police brass took pains to adopt a conciliatory tone, even as many in the crowd chanted, “Pig,” “Shame on you,” and, “Seven-O, KKK.”

Someone from the crowd lobbed an empty water bottle, hitting a police officer in the eye. The officer was not hurt, but as a precaution, six officers were stationed on the rooftop of a one-story building across the street from the stationhouse.

The bottle throwing occurred around 7 p.m. after a late afternoon storm reduced the crowd to about 75.

During the height of the protest, marchers also shouted racial epithets and taunted the officers by waving the plungers in their faces.

“It’s Giuliani Time,” read one demonstrator’s sign, a reference to Louima’s claim that the cops told him, “This is Giuliani time, not Dinkins time” as they beat him.

Another sign displayed a photograph of Volpe with horns protruding from his head, accompanied by a caption that read, “Devil in a Blue Suit.”

Assistant Police Chief Patrick Brennan said the demonstrators “are mad as hell, and they have the right to be.”

“They want to get the most out of their demonstration, and who can blame them?” he asked.

Deputy Police Chief Wilbur Chapman conceded that the torture incident has “fractured” the community’s fragile relationship with the police. But he said the precinct’s new commander, Inspector Raymond Diaz, would “work hard to restore the faith.”

“One particularly horrific incident doesn’t negate all the terrific work that has been done,” Chapman said.

But that was not a sentiment held by many in the crowd, which began gathering in the morning outside Club Rendez-Vous, the Flatbush nightclub where Louima’s fracas with cops began early Aug. 9.

“In Haiti we went through all these things,” said Marie Toussaint, 36. “It’s a shock to find the same thing going on in the United States.”

Roy Sargent, 55, a former Flatbush resident, said he drove to the march from his home in Piscataway, N.J., because he wanted to be counted among the voices expressing outrage.

“We put the Police Department in uniform to serve and protect us, and this is what they’re going to do us?” he asked incredulously. “This has to stop.”

Others vowed to protest in front of the stationhouse every day.

The Rev. Al Sharpton spoke to the smaller crowd assembled at the precinct stationhouse.

“We’re not against the police; we’re against police brutality,” Sharpton told the demonstrators.

Standing nearby, Jonas Louima, 25, Abner Louima’s brother, said he hoped that the restless crowds would remain peaceful.

“I don’t want fights,” he said. “I want people to express what they feel without violence.”

Louima’s friend, Ian Joseph, said the steps taken by Police Commissioner Howard Safir to punish cops in the precinct did not send a strong enough message that brutality is unacceptable.

“They shift one and the other, but before they start firing people it won’t change,” he said. “If the cops had to live among us, they might fear that we might see them the next day, and it would be very different.”

Original Story Date: 08/17/97