Cuba

Obama wants to open up Cuba and he is working towards that goal: White House Announces Easing of Cuba Restrictions - NYTimes.com

The announcement, which is in line with Mr. Obama’s campaign pledge, is timed to coincide with his trip this week to Trinidad and Tobago for a gathering of Latin American and Caribbean leaders, where he may face calls to ease restrictions even further. Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill are also urging the administration to do more, and are pursuing legislation that would allow all Americans, not just those with family ties to Cuba, to travel freely there.

Mr. Obama is not lifting the longstanding trade embargo with Cuba. But according to a senior administration official, who spoke anonymously in advance of Mr. Gibbs’s briefing, the president will use his executive authority to shift policy toward Cuba in three specific areas.

This was not such a big surprise: Obama will use spring summit to bring Cuba in from the cold | The Observer:

"President Barack Obama is poised to offer an olive branch to Cuba in an effort to repair the US's tattered reputation in Latin America.

The White House has moved to ease some travel and trade restrictions as a cautious first step towards better ties with Havana, raising hopes of an eventual lifting of the four-decade-old economic embargo. Several Bush-era controls are expected to be relaxed in the run-up to next month's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago to gild the president's regional debut and signal a new era of 'Yankee' cooperation"

But not without the usual right wing fantasists doing their usual tap dancing for the Florida vote:

Marc A. Thiessen - The Embargo After the Castros - washingtonpost.com:

"The dumbest thing we could do today would be to enact legislation unilaterally lifting the embargo. Set aside questions about the embargo's efficacy. Like it or not, it is our only leverage, aside from our military, to affect the transition in Cuba. Why would we fritter away that leverage just as time prepares to do what the embargo could not -- bring about the end of the Castro regime? Fidel was never going to negotiate a loosening of repression in Cuba in exchange for a lifting of the travel ban and other trade restrictions. But those who succeed him will, and the Castro brothers will soon be gone. The question is: When that happens, what power will the United States have to encourage a democratic transition on the island? Instead of strengthening Raúl by lifting the embargo now, we should keep our powder dry and use it to strengthen democracy and influence his successor. The embargo has been in place for 47 years -- at this point, it would be foolish not to wait a little longer."

The Cuban Embargo has only hurt cigar smokers and professional baseball teams, but it stays because of Florida's electoral votes.

Scotland's Sunday Herald has some pictures showing what Cuban life is like now here. Castor would not have lasted this long if he had to contend with open and free trade with us.

The National Security State

is it too big for Obama to overcome? Doug Masson over at Masson's Blog writes a bit about this in his Not Completely Transparent. After reading his post, I ran across the following from H-Net Reviews

Douglas T. Stuart. Creating the National Security State: A History of the Law That Transformed America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 358 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-13371-3; $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-13371-3.

Reviewed by Diane Putney (Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense)
Published on H-War (March, 2009)
Commissioned by Janet G. Valentine

The National Security Bureaucracy: An Introduction

With Creating the National Security State, Douglas T. Stuart, professor of political science and international studies at Dickinson College, has written a provocative book focusing on the history of the National Security Act of 1947, that he believes is the most important piece of legislation in modern U.S. history after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. After explaining the disagreements and compromises leading to congressional approval of the act and President Harry Truman's signature on July 26, 1947, Stuart traces the evolution or devolution of some of the entities the law authorized: the National Military Establishment, with its Office of the Secretary of Defense, Munitions Board, and Research and Development Board; the National Security Council; the Central Intelligence Agency; and the National Security Resources Board. The general scope of the volume ranges from 1937, the start of President Franklin Roosevelt's war preparedness campaign, to 1960, the final year of President Dwight Eisenhower's administration.

In his introduction, Stuart presents bibliographic analysis citing other books dealing with the post-World War II national security state, and compares and contrasts his volume to previous works. He singles out Michael Hogan's A Cross of Iron (1998) for showing the basis of early Cold War debates as disagreement between those with a new national security ideology and those who embraced a traditional ideology opposed to statism and militarism. Stuart disagrees with Hogan and presents his own thesis called the "Pearl Harbor system" to explain the nature of the postwar debates. Although he does not fully establish his thesis, he asserts that the Pearl Harbor attack was a "turning point in modern American history," sweeping away traditional concepts of national security that included suspicions about the dangers the nation faced from a large, peacetime army (p. 2). According to Stuart, "Pearl Harbor convinced the American people that preparing for the next sneak attack was everybody's business, all the time, at home and abroad. In the jargon of contemporary constructivist scholarship, America has been 'securitized' ever since" (p. 3).

I buy into this Pearl Harbor argument. Think back to the Bush and Cheney reaction to 9/11. Listen closely to what Cheney has been saying of late. What we have learned is that democracy suffers at the hand of national security concerns.

I would also point out that whenever anyone talks about taxes and their burden always omit any mention that we were on a war footing from 1947 to 1989. Reagan kept us on a war footing but cut taxes and created a huge deficit. That is worth thinking about, too.

Is There Soemthing Wrong with Gun-Owners or Our Educational System?

Heard a bit about the wingnuts on MSNBC last night and rolled my eyes about the talk of Obama taking guns. Then I get to read Ammo and gun shortage driven by fear of legislation in today's Herald Bulletin:

"The election of President Barack Obama, he said, startled gun owners, who quickly loaded up on ammunition and guns, fearful that the Democratic majority would strip them of gun rights. “The federal government is introducing so many bills concerning ammunition, people are scared and instead of buying one box when they come in, people are buying 10.”

Michael Stephenson of Middletown is the secretary and treasurer of the Alexandria Conservation and Gun Club and said today’s leaders in Washington don’t sympathize with gun owners.

“Everybody’s so afraid that after the election, they’ll try to confiscate the guns and ammunition. Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Obama — they all hate guns.”

Although Congress has not yet passed any gun laws, Clevenger said state legislators are well on their way toward driving up ammunition prices."

I always figured the gun control thing was more about geography than party politics. My first year in law school, I heard a fellow raving about the pick-ups with gun racks. He was from Connecticut and a Republican. Those of us native to Indiana had a good laugh at him.

About as good a laugh as I am having thinking that Obama is going to take everyone's guns. He has never said a word close to this. The Dems have never said anything about taking guns. Go where those Dems who favor gun control are from and you will see that it makes sense to them. Then count up the votes where it does not - from Western Pennsylvania to Nevada.

And for all the concern for Second Amendment rights, it would be heartening to see a similar interest in our other constitutional rights.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

But the Republicans have not been so good about respecting constitutional rights they do not like. Maybe it is a collective bad conscience on the part of Republicans.

The Financial Industry Task Force blog

Ok, probably way too legal for this blog but considering how political the financial industry has become I think it has a place. While not published too frequently, take a look at Financial Industry Task Force blog.

Liberal Bias on Network TV? Nope

I always thought of the complaint of liberal bias as the whining of spoiled brats. Seems I was right and the Right was wrong.

'Liberal bias?' IU professors find network TV election coverage favors Republicans: IU News Room: Indiana University:

"Grabe and Bucy found the volume of news coverage focusing exclusively on each party -- one measure of media bias -- favored Republicans. Their research found there were more single-party stories about Republicans overall and in each election year except 1992. When they studied the time duration of these stories, no pattern of favoritism was evident.

But they did spot differences when they studied visual coverage, that is, with the volume turned down.

'Reporters do exercise control over production decisions,' they write in their book. 'The internal structure of news stories -- their placement in the newscast, editing techniques and manipulations related to camera angles, shot lengths, eyewitness perspectives and zoom movements -- is at the volition of news workers, free of the influence of image handlers.'"

Government and the Economy - A History Lesson

Something from The New York Review of Books that is well worth repeating. Too much has been made that America was made without government intervention. That the federal government increased its investment in the country during the last century is true but that the Nineteenth Century saw no government intervention or subsidy in support of economic development. Indiana saw its share and the failure of one big venture brought the state to bankruptcy. Take a run down to Metamora and see the remnants. Now, about that New York Review of Books essay.

Government Beyond Obama?:

"'Market-based solutions,' in this new conventional wisdom, have become—for every Republican and Democratic administration since Jimmy Carter deregulated the airlines—the mantra for solving the big public policy issues of our times. Ronald Reagan, guided by such economists as Milton Friedman and Arthur Laffer, declared government 'the problem, not the solution,' but it was Bill Clinton a decade later who, prodded by Robert Rubin and the Democratic Leadership Council, proudly announced that 'the era of big government is over' before going on to back legislation for a balanced budget, welfare reform, and an ever-declining public workforce.

Leaders who have endorsed this bipartisan consensus running from the right to the center left don't always agree fully on particulars, but tend to share a uniform enthusiasm for 'market-based solutions,' whether the deregulation of transportation, utilities, telecommunications, and finance; the privatization of services from trash collection at home to security services in Iraq, as well as retirement savings and investment; the provision of vouchers for education and health care; or so-called cap-and-trade solutions to issues of the environment such as global warming."

***

The book's opening historical essay reminds us that from the American Revolution to the Great Depression, government's share of GDP—that is, federal, state, and local public spending as a proportion of the nation's total income—was quite small. It was probably about 1 or 2 percent in 1800, and 7 to 8 percent a century later. Yet its influence was disproportionately large for several reasons. First, upon organization of the Northwest Territory in 1789, the federal government became the nation's largest landowner—a fact not reflected in conventional GDP calculations. And over the next century and a half the federal government was able to shape economic growth through its land distribution policies: for example, it used sales and leases of its land to foster small-scale farming, promote free primary (and later higher) education, encourage forestry and mining, and finance the nation's vast transportation network.^[1] Second, state and local governments from the beginning of the Republic actively promoted large-scale investments in infrastructure, notably in roads and canals, and subsidized America's primary education system, which made the young nation the most literate in the world—an enormous advantage in utilizing the new technologies on which mass production was founded.

Between the Civil War and World War I, moreover, governments at the federal—but especially the state and local—level all steadily expanded their regulatory powers to meet the challenges posed by the surging immigration, urbanization, and industrialization that made the United States the world's largest economy by the 1890s. Although primarily at state and local levels initially, government intervened actively and repeatedly in matters of business organization, consumer rights, working conditions, new technology, utilities, public health, agriculture, urban design, and private and public finance.^[2] Particularly impressive, for example, was the construction of large-scale sanitation systems in cities throughout the nation.

What is Liberalism?

I think E.J.Dionne makes a crucial distinction in his A Wave of Populism, a Test for Obama:

"Conservatives have argued for decades that the sins most dangerous to our society were rooted in lust when in fact they were rooted in greed."

Then I found these paragraphs in a New York Times book review, Just Another Word

The closest Wolfe comes to a core liberal principle is this: “As many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take” (somewhat a definition of democracy itself). Further, liberalism’s purpose is “helping people to achieve control over their lives.” Empowerment is the contemporary version of this principle, which originated with John Locke, not Franklin Roosevelt.

This is not a vision of the state telling people what they can and cannot do. This is government helping people to maximize their potential. Consequences, whether involving gender, race, ethnic derivation or economic condition, flow from this principle. Barriers have to be removed, and ladders of opportunity must be built. If markets remove barriers and build ladders, so much the better. If they do not, a principled liberal state has no choice but to act.

I agree with both Dionne and Gary Hart. For all the anti-statism voiced by Rush Limbaugh and even smarter conservatives, I always noted they were happier with more police doing more to invade the liberty of my privacy. In fact, the only thing where they seemed not like to government to go was into the economic field to regulate companies like AIG and Bear Stearns.

Reviewing Obama's Treasury

I have a Republican friend working in the financial services field who detests Geithner. I am non-committal. First, I think Obama wants and needs a technician and I think Geithner fits that bill. Second, taking the team of rivals analogy to it logical conclusion: not all of Lincoln's cabinet stayed with him though both terms, and I expect changes.

So I have been noticing some reporting on Obama's economic team and here some of the interesting points.

The United Front of Geithner and Summers - washingtonpost.com:

"Geithner and Summers are also taking the lead in shaping the Obama administration policies for creating millions of jobs through the economic stimulus plan, rescuing the banking system, revitalizing the housing market, restructuring the auto industry and overhauling financial regulation.

Obama's decision to make Summers and Geithner the key players in such a wide-ranging agenda has left some within the government concerned that they will be unable to handle so many complex issues at once. Geithner already was widely criticized on Wall Street for being too vague when he announced the financial rescue package last month.

Geithner said the crisis has left the administration little choice but to tackle every problem head-on. Last week alone, Geithner ran from meeting to meeting to craft a new rescue deal for Citigroup, talk with governors on the economic stimulus package, co-host a summit on the nation's fiscal issues, work with lawmakers on regulatory reform, refine a plan to help homeowners, discuss a major upcoming summit with his foreign counterparts and roll out the details of a 'stress test' for banks."

***

Former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., who hailed from the Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs, ran his agency more like a corporation. He often sought quick decisions, the officials said, and was faulted for lurching from one plan to the next. Paulson also operated fairly independently, with little White House interference.

Geithner and Summers prefer a more academic environment, where lengthy debates are fostered within the Treasury and between the agency and other key administration officials.

Some government officials expressed worries about the approach of Geithner and Summers to the financial rescue, saying it has left investors unsettled because they do not understand the administration's intentions. But the decision to withhold details was made consciously by the two men, who believed it was more important to come up with the right plan than to respond to every move of the markets, administration officials said.

Financial Gurus Geithner, Summers Get Another Chance - washingtonpost.com:

"Rubin pinpointed all the right issues. And yet when pressed in interviews about a new financial architecture to reduce these systemic risks, he would shy away. Famously, he balked at the recommendation from Brooksley Born to regulate derivatives at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Summers and Geithner had similar worries about systemic risk, and the same phobia about frightening the markets. Their skill was in crisis management -- the Mexican peso crisis in 1994, the Asian financial crisis in 1997, the Russian default and Long-Term Capital Management collapse in 1998. They were deft in nudging the markets away from meltdown, and that reinforced their confidence that ad hoc policies, negotiated privately with Wall Street leaders, were better than clunky regulatory regimes."

I think the point of Staffing Shortage Hinders Treasury's Progress has been made over and over the past week:

A shortage of staff at the Treasury Department is taking a toll on its ability to deal with a financial crisis that continues to deepen in scope and complexity, government and industry officials said.

Every key position within the Treasury, with the exception of Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, remains vacant or awaits confirmation

Who Runs Our Government?

Want to know? Take a look at this:

Who Runs Gov - Government directory: "WhoRunsGov.com offers a unique look at the world of Washington through its key players and personalities. It’s your window into how deals get made and policy is shaped in the new Obama administration that is remaking the nation’s capital…… Learn more at our site blog

Want to Know About the Government's Health Care Proposals?

Take a look at ResourceShelf's RAND Launches Unique Tool to Evaluate Health Reform Proposals:

"Like our health-care system itself, the subject of health-care reform is complex. Every policy prescription to solve one problem will ripple through the system in ways not easily seen or understood. RAND Health created COMPARE in recognition of these complexities and the need for an unbiased source to aid policymakers with the reform efforts ahead.

Direct to COMPARE"

Endorsement: Barry Welch

It was my great disappointment this year not to do more to tout Reverend Welsh. He has debated Representative Pence twice and done well both times.

Anyone who confuses a Baghdad market with an Indiana farmer's market sorely lacks good sense. Anyone who supports George W. Bush as much as did Pence needs removing from the public sphere for someone who can think for themselves. Consider this from The Muncie Star Press:

Republican Congressman Mike Pence has voted with the American Conservative Union's position 99 percent of the time, and he supported President George Bush 92 percent of the time during 2007.

Are voters in Pence's sixth Congressional district that conservative?

"That's a great question," says Pence's Democratic challenger, Barry Welsh, a Methodist minister. "We'll find that out Tuesday."

Welsh, who is the same age as Pence -- 49 -- says he is not a "fire-breathing liberal."

"I think the district has swung a little bit and he might be a little too conservative for the district," Welsh says. "I'm a fiscal conservative but a social moderate. That's a big difference. He's a fiscal conservative and a social conservative as well."

The problem with ideologues is that they attempt to make the world fit their ideas instead of fitting their idea to the world. Such characters belong in academia or a think tank, not where they can do damage to the rest of us.

For an example, NAFTA remains beloved by the conservatives like Pence. I agree that theory makes free trade a good thing but the facts have shown us here in Madison County the wrongness of free but unfair trade. Mr. Perot's giant sucking sound was more of a continuous drain. Representative Pence does seem to see the difference between free but fair trade and free trade that is also unfair.

Update on New Jersey Voting Machine Case

See my earlier post here.

This comes from Forbes:

Judge to release report on NJ voting machines

A Superior Court judge ordered stepped up security of 10,000 electronic voting machines in New Jersey Friday and agreed to release a Princeton University professor's report that questions the reliability of the machines.

Princeton's Coalition for Peace Action and others who have sued to force the state to return to paper balloting sought the release of the report, which they say bolsters their claim that touch-screen voting machines are vulnerable to hacking and can miscount votes.

"The landmark is that for the first time a 100 percent independent review of the technology took place," said Irene Goldman, chairwoman of the coalition and one of the plaintiffs. "Everybody should be very happy there is a report that tells the truth about these machines."

Judge Linda Feinberg agreed with electronic voting critics that the public has the right to view the report, but redacted four sections to keep from possibly revealing manufacturer Sequoia Voting Systems' trade secrets.

Revolving Door...The Money Trail?

Revolving Door | OpenSecrets:

"Although the influence powerhouses that line Washington's K Street are just a few miles from the U.S. Capitol building, the most direct path between the two doesn't necessarily involve public transportation. Instead, it's through a door—a revolving door that shuffles former federal employees into jobs as lobbyists, consultants and strategists just as the door pulls former hired guns into government careers. While members of the executive branch, Congress and senior congressional staffers spin in and out of the private and public sectors, so too does privilege, power, access and, of course, money."

New Jersey Voting Machine Case

Things like this post from the Daily Dissidence Blog only stoke my innate distrust of electronic voting machines :

Report on Voting Machine Security Suppressed:

"A judge of the New Jersey Superior Court has prohibited the scheduled release of a report on the security and accuracy of the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. Last June, Judge Linda Feinberg ordered Sequoia Voting Systems to turn over its source code to me (serving as an expert witness, assisted by a team of computer scientists) for a thorough examination. At that time she also ordered that we could publish our report 30 days after delivering it to the Court--which should have been today."

More on Race and Indiana (and we're not talking the 500)

This from the IBJ's NewsTalk Blog:

"Long-time IUPUI political scientist Brian Vargus reminds that in the May primary election Obama failed to capture so much as a single county in a gigantic “U”-shaped swath around the Indianapolis area. That “U” begins near Fort Wayne and extends south to cover virtually all of southern Indiana and up the western side of the state to Lafayette.

Are people in that “U” racist? It would be naïve to think that some aren’t, Vargus says. Most of the apparent discomfort with Obama probably comes from the largely rural areas having little contact with minorities, he suspects.

Hardly anyone admits to pollsters that race influences their vote. Yet, Vargus notes that polls in other states have shown 5 to 15 percent of respondents say their neighbor wouldn’t vote for a person of color."

And this from TPM's, Indiana Republicans Making Voting Harder for Blacks:

To win Indiana, Obama would likely need a big turnout from three low-income, heavily African-American cities, in the northern part of Lake County, near Chicago. Those three cities -- Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago -- together comprise more than 40 percent of the county's population. But under Indiana law, early voting can take place only in the county clerk's main office, which for Lake County is in Crown Point, more than an hour's drive from those cities.

As a result, on September 23, the county board of elections, on a 3-2 party-line vote, approved the opening of satellite early-voting centers in the the three cities. (State law specifically gives elections boards the authority to approve satellite voting centers, and early voting occurred at the centers in advance of the Democratic primary in May.)

But Republicans argue that the decision is unfair to voters in other parts of the state, many of whom would still need to travel to their county seat to vote early. Last week, the county GOP challenged the move, arguing that the centers can only be approved through a unanimous vote of the election board, and asking for a restraining order on early voting. Superior Court Judge Calvin Hawkins -- a recent appointee of the state's GOP governor, Mitch Daniels -- issued the order Friday.

Within hours, a federal judge had vacated that decision, and announced a hearing this Thursday to resolve the issue.

Democrats had hoped to open the satellite voting stations today, but have agreed to hold off until the issue is resolved. They have said that if the restraining order is not upheld on Thursday, they plan to open the centers the following day. But whatever happens, almost a week of easier access to the polls for many of the county's low-income residents has been lost.

Also see Voter Suppression Battle Brewing In Northwest Indiana.

A minor observation, a question really, about annoying Lake County: it seems all this could backfire on the Governor who seems to want to make nice with the toll road country.

Upcoming Elections: Appellate Court Retention

Along with everything else, Hoosiers get to decide whether the appellate court judges should be kept or sent back to civilian life. Three Supreme Court Justices, one Court of Appeals judge, and the Tax Court judge are up for retention.

This year we have a web page Judicial Retention in Indiana on the subject. You get a thumbnail biography and links to their cases.

All I am going to say here is that no appellate court judge has lost their job on a retention vote.

Somber, Serious Morning with a Reminder of Reality

Three days of wheezing lungs have pretty much done in any amusement for me. I mention because it may affect my judgment here. As I was leaving for work, I ran across Cohen: Kiplin' vs. Palin. I like Kipling's poetry. Read the article which ends this way:

Palin, Mainstreeter that she is, loves to drop her g's, so she'd no doubt call the poet Kiplin'. She might have asked, with that wink, to call him "Rud."

That's cutesy politics. But pigs still don't have wings. It's time for copybook realists in the White House.

Cohen hits a certain dire note that resonates with me today. I see Obama as the realist we need and McCain as not. But that is not the real worry. The worry is if we, the people, are ready to be realists or need to supplicated with fantasy. Time for all of us to take the bitter with the good.

For the whole poem, go here.

Who Benefited from the Vietnam War?

I still have not made up my mind about Harold Meyerson's Why Were We in Vietnam?.

"Or we could argue that our onetime opposition to communism was noble and all that but that, unburdened by the illusions of the past, American business, backed by the American government, has realized that the problem with communism wasn't that it was undemocratic but that it was anti-capitalist. And that once communism was integrated into a world capitalist system, its antipathy toward democracy not only wouldn't be a bad thing but would actually be good. That is clearly the political logic that underpins our involvement with China. It's a little dicier to say this about our growing involvement with Vietnam, since all those Americans whose names are on that wall on the Mall probably didn't realize how compatible with global American enterprise Vietnamese communism would turn out to be or how the cause of democracy would turn out to have been of no real importance at all."

Except to ask who benefited from whipping us up into a froth of anti-Communism. Yes, I belong to that generation of the 70's who thought Communism/Marxism was a pretty silly sham of a secular religion without any legitimate claim to protecting the proletariat (since they were not doing a very good job of protecting their own workers and certainly not as good as helping our local prols as the UAW). So I never grew up thinking there was anything specially dangerous to us from the Commies (unless they got the idea we were going to nuke them first). So who did benefit from the anti-Communism of Buckley and McCarthy?

Or put this another way, why is it that we still have a Cuban embargo? Other than all those Cuban-American voters in Florida?

Reflections on our politics

Robert J. Samuelson's The Candor Gap hit on a subject that is dear to me - that whatever we have in our politics reflects us.

"People complain about governmental gridlock. But what often obstructs constructive change is public opinion. The stalemates on immigration and retirement spending are typical. We avoid messy problems; we embrace inconsistent and unrealistic ambitions. We want more health care and lower health costs; cheap energy and less dependence on foreign energy; more government spending and lower taxes. The more unattainable our goals, the more we blame 'special interests,' 'lobbyists' and other easy scapegoats."

Ouch - British Judges Criticize Our Criminal Sentencing Law

So what does the London Times write when British judges decide not to implement sentencing rules like ours'? Judges scorn American-style sentencing to control prison overcrowding. Scorn: "an object of extreme disdain, contempt, or derision : something contemptible."

"Plans for an American-style sentencing “grid” to control prison numbers appear doomed because of overwhelming opposition from the judiciary.

Judges at all levels, as well as the Magistrates' Association, have dealt a devastating blow to the scheme which would have required them to deliver set punishments for specific crimes.

The Magistrates' Association says that restriction of that discretion would be a retrograde step: “People are individuals. We would regret any change which moved us towards a formulaic or mechanistic approach to sentencing.”"

***

The Council of Circuit Judges says: “The American dream would result in a nightmare in England and Wales.” It adds that it would be impossible to devise an American-style sentencing grid that would not be a “blunt instrument resulting in unfairness and injustice”.

The magistrates suggest that some of the proposals “could be seen as an attempt to engineer a reduction in the prison population, rather than to deliver just sentences that fit individual crimes”.

They said: “Consistency of approach to sentencing is needed, not uniformity of sentence.” Consistency is already promoted through the existing sentencing guidelines, they say.

So British judges hold higher the idea that we are all individuals and justice is an individual thing than we do?