IsThatLegal?

"Though he be a gentleman, remember, Eric Muller is also a lawyer."
-- Sparkey of "Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing"

Next week's headline over at CrimProf: "Virginia Inmates Teach Habeas Corpus Seminar to William and Mary Law Students."

Some have suggested that my calling attention to Michelle Malkin's retention of her maiden name for legal use is racist, apparently because her maiden name is Filipino.

Au contraire, mes amis.

Malkin says that her maiden name is "a beautiful, melodic, Filipino family name," and I agree.

What I was pointing out was the hypocrisy of her attacking Teresa Heinz Kerry for selectively using the married name "Kerry" while selectively using her own married name.

As Malkin put it back in July, in a post called "Strange Love" commenting on the Kerry marriage, "[t]he adoring wives I know do not have huge conniption fits over adopting their husbands' names."

The inference, of course, is that adoring wives just adopt their husbands' names.

Malkin didn't.

Simple as that.

Lest you thought things were getting all warm and fuzzy here at IsThatLegal, my Reason Magazine review of Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror" is now posted at reason.com.

It begins thusly:

Since 9/11, some civil libertarians have denounced every antiterrorism policy that singles out Arab men as a repetition of the terrible mistake the government made after Pearl Harbor, when it evicted tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry from their West Coast homes and banished them to barren camps in the interior. Supporters of profiling have a reasonable response to this comparison with what we’ve come to call the Japanese-American internment: There is a big difference between asking Arab male airline passengers some extra security questions and forcing American citizens behind barbed wire in the high desert for three years.

As obvious as that answer might seem, it is not the answer that conservative columnist Michelle Malkin gives in her book In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror. She argues instead that the desert imprisonment of virtually all of the West Coast’s Japanese-American men, women, and children for three years was the right thing to do: It was a sound military judgment that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his top war advisers made on the basis of solid intelligence that Japan had organized untold numbers of Japanese resident aliens (the “Issei”) and their American-citizen children (the “Nisei”) into a vast network of spies and subversives.

Over the last several decades, historians have shown that the chief causes of the Japanese American internment were ingrained anti-Asian racism, nativist and economic pressures from groups in California that had long wanted the Japanese gone, and the panic of wartime hysteria. As the Presidential Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians said in its 1981 report to Congress, “The broad historical causes which shaped [the decisions to relocate and detain Japanese Americans] were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Malkin contends that this history is a big lie—a “politically correct myth” that “has become enshrined as incontrovertible wisdom in the gullible press, postmodern academia, the cash-hungry grievance industry, and liberal Hollywood.”

That passage alone should tell the reader this book is not a trustworthy work of history but a polemic—The O’Reilly Factor masquerading as the History Channel.

UPDATE: Comments by Dave Friedman here.

Michelle Malkin has a good post up (really ... I'm not being sarcastic) calling attention to the efforts of some German Americans to raise public awareness of the story of German aliens and their U.S.-citizen children who were interned in the USA during WWII.

Often these advocates seem to subvert their own cause by directing a great deal of anger at those who write about the Japanese American experience in World War II. It is refreshing not to see that in either Malkin's post or the letter to which she links.

When people so cavalierly say that Chapel Hill is a great place to live, they forget that the nearest Dairy Queen is over 18 miles away.

Who would have thought it? Two works of fiction about Japanese Americans in the same year!

(Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the pointer.)

The end-of-year snark-list over at Michelle, uh, Malkin's blog yesterday included this:

END-OF-THE-YEAR LISTMANIA II: THE TEH RAY ZAH EDITION

The quotable Mrs. Heinz Kerry (or is she back to Mrs. Heinz?) deserves a 2004 best soundbite list all her own:
. . .
"My legal name is still Teresa Heinz. Teresa Heinz Kerry is my name . . . for politics."

Here's the copyright statement from the first page of Michelle, uh, Malkin's "In Defense of Internment":



I guess Michelle Malkin is her name . . . for being a Fox News commentator.

(Hat tip to an astute IsThatLegal reader for catching this.)

This was an awesome video game.

UPDATE: Whoa. Look what I found. And I'm supposed to be writing an exam. (Couldja tell?)

Have you ever noticed how, in the grocery line, people often sound sort of, I don't know, ascetic when they opt for the plastic? It's always, "oh, plastic's just fine," as if to say, "Oh, don't go to the trouble of paper for me; I wouldn't think of wasting a paper bag on my little items here. I can get by just fine with plastic."

You never hear somebody say, "oh, paper's just fine."

What's up with that?

The comments continue to pile up about my earlier post trashing one of the often-heard objections to penalty enhancements for a criminal's motive of bias. Now the other often-heard objection appears: "Enhancing the criminal sentence because of the offender's prejudiced motivation," it is claimed, "is essentially punishing the offender for his beliefs and opinions."

This is true only in the way that an apple is "essentially" an orange.

Consider four situations:

(a) a person is convicted of and punished for the crime of hating Jews.

(b) a person is charged with the crime of burglary. A search of his car incident to the arrest uncovers viciously anti-semitic literature. The sentencing judge says, "The law allows a sentence of 3 to 7 years for this offense. I was going to give you 3 years because this is your first offense, but I've decided to give you 7 years because you're an anti-semite."

(c) a person burns down a synagogue because he hates Jews. He is prosecuted for arson, and his sentence is enhanced because of the anti-semitic motive for the attack.

(d) a person burns down a synagogue because he wants to collect on an insurance policy. He is prosecuted for arson, and his sentence is enhanced because of the motive of greed.

Is it not terribly obvious that (a) and (b) are nothing like (c) and (d)? And that each of (a) and (b) are essentially alike and each of (c) and (d) are essentially alike?

When this, one of the most conservative U.S. Supreme Courts in the history of the institution had this question before it in 1993, it rejected the argument that penalty enhancements for bias motive are impermissible punishment of belief and opinion unanimously. In an opinion by the notoriously politically correct William Rehnquist.

So enough of this chatter about how sentence enhancements for bias motive are illegal thought control. It's just silly.