COMMENT

...That isn't good news...

...Unlike members of racial or ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians are viewed by straight white teen-agers "as legitimate targets which can be openly attacked," the report states...

...And North's many admirers will no doubt demonstrate their gratitude for the reversal of his convictions by searching out other instances when defendants have been wrongfully punished in violation of constitutional guarantees...

...They tend to be fumbling and inept, insensitive and corruptible...

...North appealed, and a Federal appellate court recently overturned one conviction and vacated the others that stuck against him for his role in the Iran-contra imbroglio...

...But we're not holding our breath...

...It's comforting to know that just when Romania and Albania are getting out of the business of persecuting people on the basis of information from faceless tipsters, America is ready to take up the slack...

...These are not the ideal attributes of a Supreme Court Justice who will be called on to help decide questions bearing on our civic, economic, social, and cultural lives...

...When Iraq overran Kuwait in early August, the United States was left with egg on its face...

...Mail-Order Stoolpigeons At first, it was funny...

...Now the mail-order stoolpigeon gimmick seems to be the hottest trend in U.S...

...On the Wrong Side The United States has an uncanny ability to back the wrong teams in the Third World...

...The deregulation mania that began even before the Reagan Administration entered office, and that was fervently embraced by all but a few Congressional Democrats, was the ultimate excess in the "privatization" of America...

...About the only thing that can be said for them is that they are preferable by a long shot to the alternative—a system regulated only by the greed of its dominant interests...

...Those who clamor for a U.S...

...That's why Bush appointed him—and why Bush is likely to appoint more like him as the opportunities present themselves...

...When President Eisenhower named William J. Brennan to the Court in 1956, a commentator in The Progressive dismissed Brennan as "a technical Democrat of...

...The first is the hoary myth that the Supreme Court, in its Olympian majesty, is somehow "above politics," and that candidates for appointment to the Court must, therefore, not be subjected to a "litmus test" that probes their views on specific constitutional issues...

...the marketplace") formulate the rules by which we all must play...

...Typically, when the United 'I think it would be wrong to underestimate the ultimate aims of Saddam Hussein...

...What needs to be said about the great S&L fiasco—and what has hardly been said so far—is that it provides a great (if monstrously costly) indictment of deregulation...

...Now, at the eleventh hour, the United States has switched gears...

...policy that has bolstered Pol Pot's followers...

...What stuns and staggers is not the prevalence but the virulence of the prejudice...

...conservative stripe," and added: "He may have the seed of statesmanship in him, and that seed may blossom on the Court...

...It's wrong to do anything legislatively to promote sexual perversion...

...States intervenes abroad, it does so for its own material and ideological purposes—and at great cost to human life...

...The nominee's slate may not be clean, but the few scratches on it are unlikely to stir much debate in the Senate, which is eager to avoid a head-on conflict with this "popular" President...

...At times, self-determination means taking up arms against an aggressor...

...That homophobia persists in America is hardly news...

...According to the AP, law-enforcement officials in Illinois and eight other states have expressed interest in the West Virginia program...

...Peoples have the right to self-determination...

...And the same is true for free-speech rights and all the other freedoms that seem to be in acute jeopardy right now...

...For years, Washington supported a rebel Cambodian force that has come close to reinstalling the brutal Khmer Rouge in Pnom Penh...

...Legitimate Targets' Reports from the front: H In July, a male hair stylist was harassed and attacked at a bar by three Wisconsin police officers...

...In Souter, Bush found his man...

...The North Reversal For thumbing his nose at the Constitution, the legal process, and the American people, former National Security Council aide Oliver North was found guilty of a few minor crimes, fined $150,000, and ordered to perform community service...

...It had as its founding principle the fatuous notion that the public interest is best served when private interests (a.k.a...

...On the abortion issue—probably the most urgent to come before the court in the next few years—he is associated with the position that public funds should not be used to help those who could not otherwise afford to terminate an unwanted pregnancy...

...The information can be called to a toll-free phone number or mailed to state-police headquarters...

...There was, apparently, only one important criterion that Bush applied in making his selection: He wanted a staunch conservative who had successfully kept his judicial ideology under wraps, so that a minimum of controversy would arise on such touchy questions as the preservation or reversal of Roe v. Wade, the Court's landmark decision affirming a woman's right to choose abortion...

...The odds are that Souter's presence on the Court won't help the causes of justice, due process, free speech, civil rights, and civil liberties...

...H "The most severe hostilities are directed at lesbians and gay men," reports a study by the New York Governor's Task Force on Bias-Related Violence...

...Though Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh (who vigorously protested the grant of immunity) took unusual measures to avoid use of that testimony in preparing his case, the appeals court concluded that North's conviction rested on disclosures made before Congress...

...11 Also in July, but this time in Greenwich Village, three men were attacked by a gang that shouted anti-homosexual slurs...

...Now that they have discovered the lofty principles of due process in the case of Oliver North, they will presumably hasten to apply comparably strict standards to all of the instances of police misconduct and prosecutorial malfeasance that come their way...

...The officers, two of whom were attending an academy graduation party, called the man a "faggot," and at least one officer started to beat the man because he was thought to be gay, witnesses said...

...I feel in my heart and in my gut that to pass this bill is wrong," said Representative Howard Fargo, a Republican...

...We believe the United States has no divine right, no high moral claim, to act as world policeman...

...The stern, no-nonsense bank examiner was a familiar figure in Depression-era movies—and in real life...

...For gays and lesbians, equal rights are a long way off—and so, too, are safety and acceptance...

...For decades, bank (or S&L) failures were all but unheard of within the Federally insured system...

...Members of the Clamshell Alliance and other demonstrators against the nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire, remember Souter as a state attorney general who displayed harsh indifference to their free-speech rights...

...It's going to be a close one, folks...

...We can search out these examples, and a few more, in a melancholy quest for evidence that President Bush's nomination of David Souter to succeed Justice Brennan may yet turn out for the best...

...It is deplorable that Iraq invaded Kuwait, but it is for the Kuwaitis to resist, if they choose, as others have resisted foreign occupation and tyrannical rule before them...

...But Frankfurter turned out to be one of the Supreme Court's dour reactionaries, playing an utterly destructive role in the critical era of Cold War witch hunts...

...But it's a terrible thing for the taxpayers who will shell out hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation for the victims of the criminal greed and incompetence that ran rampant once the restraints of regulation were removed...

...At The Progressive, we proudly uphold the tradition of nonintervention...

...The abortion decision was handed down by a conservative Supreme Court—Richard Nixon's Supreme Court— because the women's movement had made it plain in the early 1970s that the right to choose abortion could no longer be denied...

...The seed of statesmanship did, indeed, blossom in Brennan, and he left the Supreme Court this summer with an extraordinary record of unblemished devotion to highly principled and humane application of the law...

...But how bad it is will depend on us...

...The second foolish notion is a special problem for the Left, which grew accustomed during the New Deal years, and again in the 1950s and 1960s, to thinking of the Court as the ultimate bulwark of our freedoms...

...In such an instance, the human costs may simply be too great to adhere to the standard of nonintervention...

...That's what we've got...

...Our last fling with unregulated financial institutions occurred in the early years of the Great Depression, when millions of Americans lost their life savings in "failed" banks...

...He really hopes in the long run to put Iraq on a par with the kind of power he sees the Western powers as having.' —Senator David Boren, Oklahoma Democrat 'Anti-gay violence is still acceptable because, while leaders decry racial and religious bigotry, they ignore violence against gays and lesbians.' —Matt Foreman, executive director, New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project...

...Roe v. Wade illustrates the point...

...So it was with the late Justice Hugo Black, who came to the Court tainted with sometime membership in the Ku Klux Klan and emerged as its pre-eminent champion of First Amendment freedoms...

...In personal terms—and personal terms can be important in an office of this sort—Souter seems to be a man of limited contact and experience, who has deliberately chosen to shield himself from exposure to the rough-and-tumble of urban life and ethnic diversity...

...We are...

...The assumption that a body whose members are chosen by the President of the United States with the advice and consent of the Senate—a body endowed with sweeping powers over matters of life and death (and money)—will function on a nonpolitical basis is patently absurd...

...It was an extraordinary display of concern for the rights of an accused by Ronald Reagan-appointed law-'n'-order judges...

...Comment 'The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems.' —Justice William J. Brennan Supreme Folly Once in a rare while, an early judgment about a candidate for appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States can turn out to be dramatically misguided...

...But it isn't likely...

...The Case for Reregulation The great race is on: Will the number of taxpayer dollars expended on the savings-and-loan bailout exceed the number of inane words about the bailout issued by politicians and faithfully played back by the mass media...

...The House and Senate committees that "investigated" Iran-contra granted North immunity from any prosecution based on his highly publicized, nationally televised testimony before Congress in 1987...

...And it is equally absurd to maintain that the people have no right to know in advance where judicial nominees stand on fundamental principles of law and public policy...

...It isn't...

...What little we do know about Souter's legal philosophy provides no basis at all for complacency...

...Government agencies are extremely imperfect instruments of regulation...

...Hitler's Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodia are two of the most obvious examples...

...According to the AP account, "Tipsters, who get no compensation, can fill out the name and address of drug users, the address of suspicious activity, or the license plates of cars in the vicinity...

...But the chances are strong against it...

...That's a good thing for the depositors in the many institutions that have now gone belly-up...

...What we had before wasn't great, but it was better...

...Judge Souter's qualifications (or lack of them) for high judicial office aside, two pernicious notions that dominate the public discussion of his nomination deserve close scrutiny...

...The strongest argument that can be made for intervention is that it may be unavoidable to prevent genocide or a holocaust...

...How strange it is, then, that those who now urge intervention against Iraq were for so long defenders of the U.S...

...must throw its weight around...

...law enforcement...

...military response against Baghdad seem to care little about the tens of thousands of lives that would surely perish in such an adventure...

...Another clue to his attitude toward women's rights is a decision in which he held that a defendant in a rape case can submit evidence on "the sexual activities of a complainant immediately prior to an alleged rape...

...The man was treated for bruised ribs and internal injuries...

...The deposit-insurance system remains in place and has, in fact, been substantially expanded...

...The confounding of preconceptions can cut both ways: There were high expectations when Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Felix Frankfurter, who had been outspoken on the progressive side in such great controversies as the Sacco-Vanzetti case...

...The question that rises from the S&L scandals, then, is not whether President Bush's son was one of the avaricious speculators who enriched themselves in sundry shady deals (apparently he was), or whether various fat cats grew even fatter at the public's expense (they surely did), or how many politicians were enriched by the magnanimity of the S&L hustlers (quite a few were...

...As the record of all but a few of the 104 men and one woman who have served on the Court in this nation's history attests, what you see is usually what you get...

...And what we see in Souter is a nonentity ill-suited to hold so significant an office...

...A reactionary Supreme Court is almost certain to preside over the nation's judicial system well into the next century...

...It's wrong to do anything legislatively that would lead to the further deterioration of the traditional family and its values...

...To prevent a recurrence, the Federal Government established a system of deposit insurance—and a reasonably effective regulatory system...

...For years, Washington supported Iraq in its war against Iran in the mistaken judgment that the Teheran government was the most destabilizing force in the region...

...it has happened occasionally before...

...Then the file started bulging...

...Gang members cut two of the men and threatened to throw the third into the Hudson river...

...Whether that right is preserved in the years ahead will depend much less on David Souter and the rest of the Supreme Court than on the kind of political pressure that is mobilized in this country...

...When newspaper clippings began arriving about cut-out-and-mail coupons citizens could use to turn in suspected drug users and dealers to their local authorities, we stuffed them into our No Comment file...

...11 In late June, the Pennsylvania House rejected legislation to protect homosexuals from harassment by a vote of 118-80...

...The question is how long we will tolerate a pervasive get-rich-quick ideology and a system that assumes turning a buck to be the highest goal humans can aspire to...

...These two recent events raise once again the question of when—if ever—it is right for the United States to intervene abroad...

...And with the late Chief Justice Earl Warren, a gregarious California politician complicit in the unlawful persecution of Japanese-Americans during World War II, who presided over the Court during its great period of expanding civil rights and civil liberties...

...Already, for instance, Saddam Hussein's aggression has elicited cries from the George Wills of this world that the U.S...

...Latest to come to our notice is an Associated Press story datelined Charleston, West Virginia, which reports that state troopers are distributing coupons for return by anonymous informants...