I don’t know if I am a liberal or a conservative. A colleague at work said that “I’m pretty conservative”, but I’m willing to bet that if we engaged in detailed policy discussions that he and I are not that far apart. I don’t think that he has a lot in common with the cretins like David Horowitz who populate the Right these days. And when I read some of the stuff that represents the Left, I get cranky.
Take Talk Left, for example, please. Talk Left is run by Jeralyn, a defense attorney. In this post, she talks about the extradition of Roman Polanski from Switzerland. She takes the position that since Roman Polanski ‘served’ part of his sentence while undergoing mandatory psychiatric testing, the original planned sentence of 90 days is somehow in force. WTF?
Instead, after the Judge had imposed and Polanski had served the diagnostic sentence, the Judge scheduled another sentencing hearing. And days before the hearing, he told the prosecutor and Roman’s lawyer he had changed his mind, he was going to ignore the evaluation and probation report and not allow the lawyers to argue at sentencing. The requirement of the psych evaluation was a mandatory component of sentencing for offenders where the victim was under 14. So the judge at least partially imposed the sentence, and Roman had served it.
The way I see it, or at least the argument I’d make, is that since the sentence had partially been served, the legal question to be decided by the Swiss is not what could he have been sentenced to, but how much time remained to be served. Since everyone, including the current Judge, agrees the original Judge intended to and promised to impose no more than 90 days, and Roman served 42 of them, there is less than four or six months remaining on his sentence and the request doesn’t comply with the U.S.- Swiss treaty or Swiss law.
Logic like this is why some liberals get a bad name.
On the Talk Left blogroll is a link to Amygdala, a purported liberal blog. But the poster there spends most of his time complaining about a variety of ailments and asking for money. Amygdala appears on many liberal blogrolls. I think that if I had as many problems as that guy has, I would not spend my time on line.
I know that part of the liberal mantra is to not be judgmental, but I think I can do without these two blogs representing liberalism.