Kim Jong Il doesn't trust his son

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/09/29/kim_jong_il_doesnt_trust_his_son

Posted By Blake Hounshell Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Reacting to the news that Kim Jong-un, North Korea's heir apparent, has assumed high positions in the military and the ruling Workers' Party, NightWatch's John McCreary comments:

Today's appointments complete the bridge that links military and party authority. The young Kim has both, but in both domains he is shadowed and shepherded by his aunt, his father's protégés and by his uncle Chang Song-taek and his protégés. This young man has no independent authority. He is in training. A regent troika lurks behind the scenes that is composed of the Chang family leaders and the newest Vice Marshal in the army.

Kim Chong-il, meanwhile, has given up none of his positions of authority , such as Chairman of the National Defense Commission, head of the party and head of all the party organizations of importance. Kim Chong-il does not trust his youngest son to govern anything, which explains the regency troika.

The various appointments and elevation of an untested youth in this fashion has no precedent in recent North Korean history. the process looks poorly and hastily thought out in terms of competence and ability, but crafted to try to keep the Kim family in charge.

It suggests that Kim Chong-il is sick and could die with little warning. Appointing neophytes and civilians to four-star military ranks looks ill-conceived and prone to incite resistance from professional military ranks. The leadership is becoming much less stable and durable.

Nevertheless, the announcements leave no room for doubt that the heir-apparent is the third son, Kim Chong-un. That does not mean he will ever govern.

외로우면 결혼하지 마라?

http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/culture/culture_general/440778.html

스님의 주례사, 외로우면 결혼하지 마라?

‘전쟁터에 나갈 때는 한 번을, 바다에 나갈 때는 두 번을, 결혼식장에 갈 때는 세 번을 기도하라’는 격언이 있다.

월드컵 심판의 레드카드가 축구를 하지 말자는 게 아니고 제대로 해보자는 것이듯이 법륜 스님의 말도 결혼을 하지 말자는 것이 아니라 하려면 불행해지지 말고, 행복해져보자는 것이다

외로워서 결혼하면 한이불 속에 있어도 더 큰 외로움을 느낄 날이 오기 때문이라는 것이다.

결혼한다고 행복해지는 것이 아니라 스스로 행복한 상태에서 결혼해야 결혼도 행복해질 수 있다는 게 현자의 답이다.

상대방이 언제나 일방적으로 다 주기를 바라고, 자기 마음 내키는 대로 살려고 한다면 결혼은 필경 불행한 결론으로 이어질 수밖에 없단다. 스스로 마음의 중심이 단단히 잡히고 행복해야 혼자 살아도 외로워하지 않고 같이 살아도 귀찮아하지 않아서, 혼자 살아도, 같이 살아도 행복하다는 것이다.

Supreme Court Justices Hire Likeminded Clerks. Is This a Problem?

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/09/22/supreme-court-justices-hire-likeminded-clerks-is-this-a-problem/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wsj/law/feed+(WSJ.com:+Law+Blog)

• SEPTEMBER 22, 2010, 4:21 PM ET

By Ashby Jones

An editorial in the NYT on Tuesday asks whether something should be done about the fact that Supreme Court justices generally hire law clerks who share their political views.

The piece was prompted by a recent story by the NYT’s Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak on the phenomenon.

Wrote Liptak:

Th[e] unbroken ideological commitment is just the most extreme example of a recent and seldom examined form of political polarization on the Supreme Court. These days the more conservative justices are much more likely than were their predecessors to hire clerks who worked for judges appointed by Republicans. And the more liberal justices are more likely than in the past to hire from judges appointed by Democrats.

The editorial writer in Tuesday’s piece expresses surprise at the fact that “the practice isn’t sparking many objections in Washington.”

One possibility, according to the editorial: requiring Senate confirmation of the clerks, a suggestion the piece dismisses as “unlikely to solve the problem.”

But there are other ideas worth considering, like having “the justices as a group hire all clerks into a pool; the clerks would then be assigned randomly to justices, case by case. Another approach would have a nonpartisan committee of former clerks, law professors and lawyers who appear before the court choose clerks and assign them.

. . .

In addition to finding promising clerks who are smart, honorable, well trained in the law and adept in researching and writing about it, each of these approaches would underscore what’s at stake. Whatever a clerk’s political allegiance, it must be secondary to his or her legal commitment. That is essential for the court’s work and for its credibility.

Who knows? Maybe this is a good idea. Maybe Supreme Court justices are driven to the ideological poles by their liberal or conservative clerks.

But we wonder about the degree to which this is true. We’re reminded of this story, by the NYT’s Charlie Savage, from earlier this year about Elena Kagan’s clerkship with Justice Thurgood Marshall. When Marshall disagreed with a draft of a dissent that Kagan had written, he didn’t just shrug and let his 27-year-old clerk rule the day. To the contrary. Savage quotes Kagan as writing:

He “returned to me successive drafts of the dissenting opinion for failing to express — or for failing to express in a properly pungent tone — his understanding of the case.”

So again, we wonder whether a proposed solution, taking the sole authority of clerk-hiring away from the justices, for instance, and into the hands of Congress, is a larger correction than needed. Thoughts?

=================================

Politically Charged Clerks The New York Times September 22, 2010 Wednesday

As Adam Liptak recently reported in The Times, Supreme Court justices are increasingly choosing clerks who reflect and reinforce their political leanings, the more conservative justices especially but also the more liberal. Just as striking, perhaps, is that this practice isn't sparking many objections in Washington.

A half-century ago, the threat that politically minded clerks might exercise undue influence on justices was the focus of considerable alarm -- at least by conservatives. In a 1957 essay in U.S. News & World Report, William Rehnquist (then a recent clerk, later the chief justice) wrote that ''a majority of the clerks I knew'' showed ''extreme solicitude for the claims of Communists and other criminal defendants.'' He suggested that clerks' biases were skewing which cases the court decided to hear.

A few months later, Senator John Stennis, a conservative Democrat from Mississippi, quoted extensively from the Rehnquist article in a speech on the floor and exhorted Congress to consider imposing hiring standards for clerks to ensure their competence and lack of bias. He urged his colleagues to ''determine whether or not Senate confirmation should be required for these positions of ever-increasing importance and influence.''

That declaration stemmed from a charge by a single clerk. The evidence today about political polarization in the hiring of clerks and about its impact on the outcome of cases is a lot more extensive and worrisome.

Senate confirmation is unlikely to solve the problem. But there are other ideas worth considering.

One option raised by scholars would be to have the justices as a group hire all clerks into a pool; the clerks would then be assigned randomly to justices, case by case. Another approach would have a nonpartisan committee of former clerks, law professors and lawyers who appear before the court choose clerks and assign them.

Or the justices -- notoriously resistant to change or any loss of prerogatives -- could behave more judiciously and more like former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. In her 25 years on the court, she hired half of her almost 100 clerks from judges appointed by Republicans, half from judges appointed by Democrats.

In addition to finding promising clerks who are smart, honorable, well trained in the law and adept in researching and writing about it, each of these approaches would underscore what's at stake. Whatever a clerk's political allegiance, it must be secondary to his or her legal commitment. That is essential for the court's work and for its credibility

=======================

A Sign of Court's Polarization: Choice of Clerks The New York Times September 7, 2010 Tuesday

By ADAM LIPTAK; Amanda Cox contributed reporting..

THE ROBERTS COURT: Articles in this series explore the workings of this Supreme Court and the little-understood forces that influence it.

BODY:


WASHINGTON -- Each year, 36 young lawyers obtain the most coveted credential in American law: a Supreme Court clerkship. Clerking for a justice is a glittering capstone on a resume that almost always includes outstanding grades at a top law school, service on a law review and a prestigious clerkship with a federal appeals court judge.

Justice Clarence Thomas apparently has one additional requirement. Without exception, the 84 clerks he has chosen over his two decades on the court all first trained with an appeals court judge appointed by a Republican president.

That unbroken ideological commitment is just the most extreme example of a recent and seldom examined form of political polarization on the Supreme Court. These days the more conservative justices are much more likely than were their predecessors to hire clerks who worked for judges appointed by Republicans. And the more liberal justices are more likely than in the past to hire from judges appointed by Democrats.

Each justice typically hires four clerks a year. Since Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court in 2005, Justice Antonin Scalia has not hired any clerks who had worked for a judge appointed by a Democratic president, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has hired only two. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, only four of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's clerks on the Roberts court came from judges appointed by Republicans. The early data on President Obama's two appointees, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, show a similar pattern.

By contrast, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, a conservative appointed by President Richard M. Nixon who led the court from 1969 to 1986, hired roughly even numbers of clerks who had worked for judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans. Judge Richard A. Posner, a generally conservative judge appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, clerked for Justice William J. Brennan Jr., a liberal.

The recent divide in the selection of clerks amplifies the ideological rifts on a polarized court, one political scientists say is the most conservative in recent memory. And it echoes as clerks go on to prominent careers in government, the legal academy and major law firms.

David J. Garrow, a University of Cambridge historian, said the court had in this way started to mimic the political branches of government.

''We are getting a composition of the clerk work force that is getting to be like the House of Representatives,'' Professor Garrow said. ''Each side is putting forward only ideological purists.''

Supreme Court law clerks share the justices' chambers, do much of their work and influence their thinking. They make recommendations about which cases the court should hear, help prepare the justices for oral arguments, discuss the cases with them and draft major portions of the opinions and dissents.

''You can't possibly delegate as much as the justices do without turning over a degree of responsibility,'' said Lawrence Baum, a political scientist at Ohio State who has published empirical studies of Supreme Court clerks.

Influencing the Law

Indeed, the polarization among law clerks has had consequences for the development of the law, a 2008 study published in the DePaul Law Review found. The presence of clerks who identified themselves as Democrats made liberal votes from the justices for whom they worked more likely, the study found. The opposite was true, too.

A handful of federal appeals court judges known as feeder judges are gatekeepers. J. Michael Luttig, for instance, produced more than 40 Supreme Court clerks in his 15 years on the federal bench, with 33 of them going to work for Justices Thomas or Scalia. Mr. Luttig, now general counsel of the Boeing Company, said the justices' overall hiring practices reflected a fundamental shift.

''As law has moved closer to mere politics, political affiliations have naturally and predictably become proxies for the different political agendas that have been pressed in and through the courts,'' Mr. Luttig said. ''Given this politicization, it should come as no surprise to learn that the more liberal judges tend both to hire clerks who would self-describe themselves as Democrats and to hire clerks from other judges who would likewise self-describe themselves as Democrats, and vice versa for the more conservative judges.''

But ideological orthodoxy can dampen the robust discussions in chambers that clarify issues and shape rulings. Justice Scalia for instance used to seek out candidates from the opposite ideological camp when he served on a federal appeals court in Washington and in his early years on the Supreme Court.

''He made it a point of telling me that I was his token liberal,'' said E. Joshua Rosenkranz, who clerked for Justice Scalia in 1986, his last year on the appeals court. ''To his credit, I'm sure it was largely because he wanted to be sure he always heard the arguments against the positions he was taking.''

The politics do not stop when clerks leave the court. Though a clerkship is a ticket to a law firm job that can include a $250,000 signing bonus, many former clerks take positions consistent with their former bosses' ideological leanings in the legal academy, the government and elsewhere.

Laura Ingraham, the conservative political commentator, served as a law clerk to Justice Thomas, for instance. So did John C. Yoo, the Bush administration official who provided legal advice about interrogation practices.

The clerks who do join law firms often form ideological clusters. According to a study published last year in the Vanderbilt Law Review, several of the leading firms -- Kirkland & Ellis, Sidley Austin and Jones Day -- have largely hired clerks from the more conservative justices. Others -- including Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr and Jenner & Block -- have tended to hire from the more liberal justices.

The rise of ''politically oriented practice groups,'' the study said, reinforces the impression that the court is ''a superlegislature responding to ideological arguments rather than a legal institution responding to concerns grounded in the rule of law.''

For his part, Justice Thomas has said that choosing clerks is like ''selecting mates in a foxhole.''

''I won't hire clerks who have profound disagreements with me,'' he said at a luncheon in Dallas a decade ago. ''It's like trying to train a pig. It wastes your time, and it aggravates the pig.''

Three members of the current court -- Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kagan and Stephen G. Breyer -- are themselves former Supreme Court clerks. So were Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired in June, and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who died in 2005.

Sometimes it seems that a Supreme Court clerkship has become a prerequisite to a seat on the court. The three candidates on President Obama's short list to replace Justice Stevens -- Justice Kagan, who joined the court in August, and Judges Merrick B. Garland and Diane P. Wood -- had all served as Supreme Court clerks (and all to liberal justices).

Indeed, if Justice Kagan's recent hiring is any guide, a Supreme Court clerkship may even be a prerequisite for a Supreme Court clerkship. Three of her four clerks have completed clerkships with other members of the court, Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Anthony M. Kennedy.

Justice Kagan's hiring is telling and savvy. It immediately aligns her with the two more senior justices on the court's liberal wing -- Justices Ginsburg and Breyer. And her hiring of a clerk who worked for Justice Kennedy will provide insights into the methods and thinking of the court's swing justice.

Delegated Duties

''The reason why the public thinks so much of the justices,'' said Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who served from 1916 to 1939, ''is that they are almost the only people in Washington who do their own work.''

These days, respect for the court must be grounded on other factors. Opinion writing is largely delegated to clerks, and Chief Justice Rehnquist candidly acknowledged that the justices' chambers were ''a collection of nine autonomous opinion-writing bureaus.''

With the departure of Justice Stevens, it appears that none of the justices routinely write first drafts of their opinions. Instead, they typically supervise and revise drafts produced by their clerks.

A few decades ago, the court decided 150 cases a term. That number has dropped by about half, meaning each justice must write about eight majority opinions a term. Yet the practice of entrusting much of the drafting to clerks remains entrenched.

''We have created an institutional situation where 26-year-olds are being given humongous legal authority in the actual wording of decisions, the actual compositional choices,'' Professor Garrow said.

The justices forbid their current clerks to talk to the press, and most former clerks refuse to discuss the work they performed for living justices in any detail. But Artemus Ward and David L. Weiden received responses from 122 former clerks to a question concerning the drafting of opinions for their 2006 book ''Sorcerers' Apprentices.'' Thirty percent of the clerks said their drafts had been issued without modification at least some of the time.

Reviewing the book in The New Republic, Judge Posner, a close student of the court, wrote that ''probably more than half the written output of the court is clerk-authored.''

Justice Ginsburg, a famously hard-working justice, described her own habits in an interview with Todd C. Peppers, who teaches public affairs at Roanoke College, for ''Behind the Bench: Portraits of United States Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices,'' a book to be published next year by the University of Virginia Press. Justice Ginsburg said she was an energetic supervisor and editor who made sure the final product faithfully reflected her views. But the initial draft, she said, is prepared by a clerk.

''I write the opening,'' Justice Ginsburg said. ''It will be anywhere from one to three paragraphs. It's kind of a press release, and it will tell you what the issue was and how it was resolved.''

Then she said she provided a law clerk with a detailed outline. ''Sometimes, to my delight, they will give me a draft that I can make my own version through heavy editing, but I don't have to redo it,'' Justice Ginsburg went on. ''I'd say it's a good year if I have two law clerks that have that skill.''

Polarized 'Feeder Judges'

There are about 160 active federal appeals court judges and more than 100 more semiretired ones, yet more than half of the clerks who have served on the Roberts court came from the chambers of just 10 judges. Three judges accounted for a fifth of all Supreme Court clerks.

There is ideological polarization among the feeder judges just as there is in the larger population. Judge Garland of the District of Columbia Circuit, appointed by President Bill Clinton, has sent 21 clerks to nine justices in the Roberts court years, but 17 of them went to members of its liberal wing.

On the other hand, Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, sent 13 clerks to the court in those years, but only one to the court's liberal wing.

In a 1998 interview published in The Green Bag, a law journal, Judge Kozinski, a generally conservative judge on a court with a reputation for liberal decisions, said he took account of ideology in hiring clerks, giving ''an extra measure of consideration to conservative and libertarian law students'' in considering whom to hire.

''There are a lot of liberal judges out there,'' he added.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, appointed to the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., by President Reagan, has sent clerks to justices across the ideological spectrum.

''I've tried in my own hiring on the circuit court level not to put an ideological litmus test on anyone I've hired,'' Judge Wilkinson said in an interview. ''Law is a craft and profession that in many ways transcends philosophy.''

Some 1,000 people apply for Supreme Court clerkships each year, and the usual practice is to apply to all of the justices. Put another way, justices cannot tell anything about applicants' ideological leanings from the fact that they applied.

Lacking other information on that score, the justices seem to look to the ideology of the feeder judge, Professors Baum and Corey Ditslear wrote in a study published this year in The Justice System Journal.

''The identity of the judge with whom a clerk works has become more valuable as a source of information about the clerk's proclivities,'' they wrote.

Nonpartisan Past

The stark political divide among the clerks is recent.

''The Supreme Court clerkship appeared to be a nonpartisan institution from the 1940s into the 1980s,'' according to detailed data in the Vanderbilt study.

Over the Roberts court years, by contrast, none of the five more conservative justices -- Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Scalia, Alito and Kennedy -- hired more than 20 percent of their clerks from judges appointed by Democrats. Three of the more liberal justices -- Justices Stevens, Ginsburg and Sotomayor -- hired 12 percent to 35 percent of their clerks from judges appointed by Republicans.

Only Justice Breyer hired roughly half of his clerks from judges appointed by presidents of each party.

The Justice System Journal study, which considered the 10 years ending in 2005, found ''a growing polarization in the system.'' In particular, those data ''suggest a high level of bipartisanship for Breyer and a lack of bipartisanship for the relatively moderate Kennedy.''

The ideological divisions continue after clerks leave the court, another recent development.

Clerks from conservative chambers are now less likely to teach, according to the Vanderbilt study, which looked at data through 2006. If they do, they are more likely to join the faculties of conservative and religious law schools. Republican administrations are now much more likely to hire clerks from conservative chambers, and Democratic administrations from liberal ones. Even law firm hiring splits along ideological lines.

Political polarization among Supreme Court clerks may be curious, but is it consequential?

According to the DePaul study, by Professor Peppers and Christopher Zorn, the political leanings of law clerks influence the votes of Supreme Court justices. The study used information about political party affiliations collected from more than 500 former clerks and standard measures of judicial ideology.

''Over and above the influence of the justices' own policy preferences,'' the study concluded, ''their clerks' policy preferences have an independent effect on their votes.''

Everything else being equal -- the justice, the year, the case -- the presence of additional liberal clerks in a given justice's chambers makes a liberal vote more likely, the study said, while the presence of additional conservative clerks pushes justices in the opposite direction.

Judge Guido Calabresi, who sits on the federal appeals court in New York and has placed some 30 clerks with the justices, overwhelmingly with the more liberal ones, said he ''has no litmus test'' and hires ''clerks who are conservatives and clerks who are liberals.''

At the Supreme Court, Judge Calabresi continued, the ideological leanings of clerks may sometimes have an impact.

''To the extent that justices are really strong, it doesn't matter,'' he said. ''To the extent that justices are uncertain or weak, it can make a difference.''

=================================

The Court, The Cases And The Conflicts

September 14, 2010 Tuesday

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

It's not often that you get to ask a Supreme Court justice about how he arrives at his opinions. So I'm very pleased to have as my guest, Justice Stephen Breyer. He's written a new book called "Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View."

He says he wrote the book to increase the public's understanding of what the Supreme Court does. He explains how the court first decided it had the power to hold federal law unconstitutional; how the court managed to gain and hold the public's trust, even when its decisions have been highly unpopular; and how, in Justice Breyer's view, the court should help make the Constitution work well for contemporary America.

Justice Breyer was appointed by President Clinton in 1994. He's a former Harvard Law School professor.

Justice Breyer, welcome back to FRESH AIR. It's great to read about the court from the point of view of a Supreme Court justice. So thank you for writing the book.

And let's start with your constitutional philosophy, that the Constitution should be a living Constitution, that it needs to work for contemporary Americans; whereas Justice Scalia, in the court, thinks that the Constitution should be read more literally, and justices should keep in mind basically what the framers had in mind and only that. Would you describe what you see as the fundamental difference between the two points of view?

Justice STEPHEN BREYER (United States Supreme Court; Author, "Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View"): I can say what I think. I think that we're following an intention by people who wrote this document: Madison, Adams, Washington.

I mean, the framers - Hamilton - they had an idea that they were writing a Constitution. In that Constitution, they would create certain institutions. The institutions were designed to create, basically, democratic systems of government of a certain sort; protecting basic liberty, as it turns out; ensuring a degree of equality; separating powers, so state, federal and three branches so that no one has too much power; and assuring adherence to a rule of law.

Now, those are very general statements, and much in the Constitution is written in a very general way. Words like freedom of speech do not define themselves, nor does the word liberty. And what they intended, I believe, with these very basic values, in a document, would last for hundreds of years.

So they had values that changed, but little, while the application of those values changes as circumstances change. They didn't foresee the Internet. They didn't foresee automobiles, or television or radio. And yet they wrote words that can apply to those changing circumstances.

GROSS: If we interpreted the Constitution only literally in the way that the framers had in mind, would we still have slavery?

Justice BREYER: No, not necessarily. We fought a war against that, and the Constitution didn't say you had to keep slavery. Rather, the framers tried to postpone the issue. They thought it would go away. They were wrong. It certainly didn't go away. It didn't go away...

GROSS: What do you mean they thought it would go away?

Justice BREYER: They thought eventually, or many of them thought, that eventually, perhaps in 50, 60, 70 years, the South would come to the realization that slavery didn't work and was an evil institution and would abolish it.

And instead of that coming about, it seems, from what I read, that things got worse, and we ended up in a civil war. And there is a lesson in this for the court.

GROSS: Which is?

Justice BREYER: The worst case ever decided, the Dred Scott case; where the Supreme Court said the descendant of a slave was not a citizen or a person who could sue in the United States, even if he became free. That was a terrible decision.

And the only justification I've ever heard for it, was that Roger Taney, the chief justice, and the majority thought that by deciding that, they would avoid the Civil War. It happened the opposite way. They fed the flames of the Civil War. .

Abraham Lincoln said he couldn't believe that decision. He called it an astonisher, a legal astonisher. And the lesson, in part, is that judges are not very good politicians. And if you want people to decide politically, you better let Congress decide, not the judges.

We're in an institution that is not really to decide, politically, and is to be there in order to protect people who might be very unpopular.

GROSS: Let's look at an example where you tried to interpret the Constitution as a living Constitution, trying to figure out the values of the framers, as opposed to a literal interpretation. And you ended up being in the minority decision on this one.

And I'm thinking of the Second Amendment case in Washington, D.C., about a law, a local law prohibiting handgun possession and whether that violated the Second Amendment or not.

So what was your thinking in deciding that this law prohibiting handgun possession did not violate the Second Amendment? And let me just read the phrase here, that we're considering. That a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Justice BREYER: Yes, that's what it says. And parts of that - I use this as an illustration how, I would say, I very often and some others do approach difficult constitutional questions.

And the first thing I think we want to know, is what are the values, what's the basic objective of the Second Amendment? And their history is relevant.

And some people thought, the majority thought, that a well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, that that isn't the heart of the thing.

The heart of the thing is the right of the people to keep and bear arms, and that means to protect themselves from attack, even by burglars. The minority, of which I was one, looked back over the same history, and they say: No. This was put here for a particular reason.

What happened was that Madison and the others who wanted the Constitution faced opposition from states, and the states were afraid that Congress would call up state militias as part of the federal army and then disband them, and the states would not be protected.

Don't worry, says Madison and Hamilton - we will write these words into the Constitution, and they will protect the states' right to have a militia.

Now the minority thought that was the basic value underlying these words. So there was a disagreement. If, in fact, you accept the minority view - look back at the words, look back at the language, look back with the history - this does not have much to do with keeping a pistol on a table to protect yourself from a burglar.

Now the second half is assume the majority is right, which I did not assume they were right, I don't believe they were right, but I'll assume it for arguments sake.

Still, on the assumption that they're right, and this has something to do with keeping pistols next to your bedside, the question is, what does it have to do with it?

The District of Columbia had passed a law which said that you cannot have pistols in the District of Columbia. And the question would be: Is that law prohibited by the Second Amendment as the majority interprets it?

And I thought, and the others in dissent thought, the answer is the District of Columbia can pass such a law, because it serves a very important objective: saving lives from burglars, from accidents, from suicide.

And it is overwhelmingly important. But you see, what we're trying to do there, is to work out: Is this kind of prohibition that the District of Columbia has proportionate? Is it fair? Is it reasonable in light of the ends, the objectives, the values in the Constitution?

GROSS: When you were having - when the justices were having a spirited debate about this handgun decision, did you ever think that you would actually change anybody's mind except perhaps a swing voter like Justice Kennedy? Did you ever think there was any chance, on the face of the Earth, that you would change Justice Scalia's mind on this?

Justice BREYER: I might. What you're doing, you see what you're - I see how you're thinking. And this is probably because this is your job, and the press's job is to take those decisions that are, that usually have very great visibility because they're political. So they're in the newspaper.

But you should remember, first of all, that probably 40 - 30 to 40 percent of our decisions are unanimous; that the five-fours account for maybe 20, 25 percent; and it isn't always the same five and the same four. And so we discuss, and it isn't always a sure thing.

GROSS: In terms of your ability to change other justices' minds, particularly the mind of Justice Scalia when it comes to a decision like handguns, I think a lot of Americans, a lot of court watchers, court reporters, see this court as a court with a bloc of activist conservative judges who are very strongly conservative and are very consciously trying to move the court and the country in a more conservative direction.

And I'm wondering, from your seat on the bench, if you would agree with that perception?

Justice BREYER: I'd say this about the perception. Put it in context. Put the perception in a context where you're probably talking about a very small number of cases, maybe 10 cases out of 80 or 90 during a year.

Then put it in a context where people, in trying to change other people's minds, all know that the other people want to change their minds. And the way to change somebody's mind is to make certain your own mind is open and that you have a genuine discussion.

Not in every case can you possibly have such a conversation, because there might be - you're too distant. There might not be a point.

And then remember to put in context when you use the word political. Of course it's understandable that the press, in writing about the court and the political scientists in describing the court, want to describe this in ordinary political terms.

But one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is I wanted people to put that phrase in context. In the sense of pure politics, I don't - politics, I worked in the staff of the Senate, I've been - I know some pretty good politicians, and that isn't what a judge is. And that isn't what we do.

Now, you say well, what about ideology? I'll say ideology, pure ideology, are you an Adam Smith free enterpriser? A Mao-Marxist troublemaker or something? That kind of thing doesn't influence it much.

But a person's basic values, over time, of course people develop approaches as to how legal questions could be solved better.

GROSS: I think that the...

Justice BREYER: Yeah...

GROSS: I think the perception is that presidents, particularly some presidents, appoint judges because of their politics, because they're conservative or because they're liberal.

Justice BREYER: Teddy Roosevelt appointed Oliver Wendell Holmes, and within three months, I think, Oliver Wendell Holmes had decided away a very important case, antitrust case, contrary to the way Roosevelt thought. He was in dissent in the Northern Securities case.

And Teddy Roosevelt said: I could carve a judge with more backbone out of a banana. He was pretty annoyed. So if presidents think they're going to get the decisions that favor them out of judges, sometimes they're right, and sometimes they're wrong.

But if what the president is trying to do, is trying to appoint someone who, in law, has a general view of the country and how law relates to people and what it's about that is closer to his own, a president will be more successful, perhaps, not completely successful always.

Now, that means that judges over time will, there will be a diversity of ideas on those very basic jurisprudential or philosophical points on the court.

This country is a country of 300 million people or more. And people think very different things, and it isn't a bad thing that quite different, basic approaches are represented on that court. And I keep that in mind in those instances where I'm so certainly certain I'm right.

GROSS: My guest is Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. His new book is called "Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View." More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Stephen Breyer, Justice Stephen Breyer, and he's written a new book called "Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View."

One of the things you write about in the book is the question of when the Supreme Court was established, would people follow the court's decisions?

And, you know, you write about a decision with Andrew Jackson as president, where he didn't follow the court's decision; and then you write about President Eisenhower, who sent in troops to uphold the court's decision in Brown versus Board of Education, when the South wasn't desegregating schools as they were told to by the Supreme Court.

In the Bush v. Gore decision, which you write about, and you were in the minority on that, you thought that the court shouldn't have heard the case, and if they did hear the case, they should have decided differently. You point out that Al Gore went along with the decision.

Did you ever think, after Bush v. Gore, that Al Gore wouldn't go along with the decision or that the decision would be so unpopular that there would be massive demonstrations or rioting in the streets?

Justice BREYER: No, I didn't think that, and I don't think many people did. And what I show in this first part, that that is not just a given, but it reflects a lot of history, and it's a positive direction.

That wasn't true, as you pointed out, in the Cherokee Indian case. It required the 101st Airborne in the case involving segregation in Little Rock. And it was more or less taken for granted.

I've heard people say, including Senator Reid - one of the most remarkable things about the case is something that isn't often remarked, and it's just what you said. It's that people did not turn to guns or battles in the street. They more or less accepted decisions they thought were wrong, and I agree with them, it was wrong. But I think it's a treasure that we do accept the decisions of the institution.

GROSS: When you accept a decision like that, that you really think is wrong and that, you know, had a profound effect on the country, can you just kind of like let it go and move on to the next decision, or does it eat at you and upset you?

Justice BREYER: It upsets me. It upsets me, but I know that tomorrow is another day, and we'll have other decisions.

GROSS: So, let me ask you about another decision. One of the things you write about in your book is how the court tries to uphold previous courts' decision, but sometimes a court decision really needs to be overturned - an example being Plessy versus Ferguson, which said separate but equal is okay. And then it took Brown versus Board of Education to say no, separate but equal isn't okay, and schools had to be desegregated.

So you were recently weighing in on a Supreme Court decision that kind of overturned previous court decisions, and I'm thinking about the Citizens United case, which gave corporations the right to give unlimited funding to candidates, because to restrict the funding would violate the corporations' right to free speech.

And a lot of critics of this decision said, well, you're basically giving a corporation the right of a human being to free speech, and a corporation isn't a human being. So what decisions do you think that decision overturned?

Justice BREYER: Well, there were number. They're listed. John Stevens wrote a long dissent, and the four dissenters agreed with that dissent. And he found instances going back many decades, where he thought that the power of the state to regulate the contribution of a corporation or a labor union was pretty well- established.

GROSS: So what was the argument within the court, if you could give it, between overturning these decisions and not? Because one of the paradoxes that I think a lot of court-watchers saw in this decision, was that judges who oppose, quote, "judicial activism" ended up overturning precedence.

Justice BREYER: The people who were for it, thought that the deviation from prior precedent was not great and that the Constitution, the heart of it, did permit the corporations to give the money to further speech, political speech.

The persons against it, thought the contrary. I can't easily summarize the opinion, and I'm reluctant to, because what's written is what's there, and what is - it's best to let other people do the summaries, and it's best to encourage people to read what they want to read there.

The power of the opinion is important. That's where we put down our reasons. That's where we support our reasons. That's where we can be criticized. I think most judges will go into a job like mine, and they'll think some decisions should be overruled.

As you said, Plessy versus Ferguson had produced a country that was divided and segregated by race, contrary to what the 14th Amendment assures. And that had become apparent by the time of Brown, that it was contrary - it did not produce an equal protection of the law.

So the decision was overruled, and I think most of us would say, correctly so. But that doesn't mean you can overrule every decision with great ease, because that way lies chaos.

So one of the more difficult things for judges to decide is when you overrule decisions, and there are helps in the standards that have been laid down for that. But ultimately, you have a need for stability and not overruling that must be respected, and sometimes you think it's necessary in order to get to a truer meaning of the Constitution, to overrule the past.

GROSS: Have you ever decided to overrule a decision?

Justice BREYER: I'm sure that I have, and...

GROSS: If you could think of an example.

Justice BREYER: Yes, I can.

GROSS: Great, because I'd love to hear how you weighed it, yeah.

Justice BREYER: The one that I was on the decide - the side, was the Bowers v. Hardwick, which talked about the right of the state to forbid homosexual conduct. And that was later overruled by the court, and I joined the decision, overruling that earlier decision.

And there were a set of reasons there, which included the fact that this law was rarely enforced, that it allowed the police to enter the bedroom, that there was no specific harm being done and that the court, the first time, deciding the case, decided not too much previously, had made in the majority's view a number of serious errors that meant less protection for a group of people who were going to have this law enforced, perhaps arbitrarily, against them.

GROSS: My guest, Justice Stephen Breyer, will be back in the second half of the show. His new book is called "Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. He's written a new book called "Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View." He served on the court since 1994, when he was appointed by President Clinton.

The Florida preacher who threatened to burn the Quran, some people said well, that's his free speech right and then, but what about the rights of Muslims who would be offended to the core, outraged by that act? As a Supreme Court justice, I wonder how you looked at - if you're willing to talk about it - how you looked at that event and if there's the possibility that burning a sacred text of any religion would be considered a hate crime. Like, how do you balance all of the rights and positions involved in a situation like that?

Justice BREYER: Well, I don't look at those things that - issues and so forth - that might come up in the future, because if they do come up in the future, I'll have the issue in front of me and it will be very, very well briefed. They'll be lots written about it and I'll be able to form a more intelligent opinion. I would say that where you're talking about the freedom of speech and something like this preacher or anything like that, I would keep two cases in mind.

One is years ago, Justice Holmes said you cannot shout fire in a crowded theater because that could kill people. Very well. That sets limits to the freedom of speech. But the court also said where an American flag is being burned in protest, that the Constitution protects that because it is a purely symbolic action which is being done, despite how much people hate it, to express a point of view. So, we probably, were we to have such a case, we'd have to have a law in front of us, see what it says, see what the actions are. But I've given you an outline, which sort of sets boundaries.

GROSS: You've been in the Supreme Court since 1994. What are some of the ways you've seen the court change since then?

Justice BREYER: Well, it's gotten a little harder for me in some respects. First few years I - pretty nervous about whether I could do this job. Then you adjust to it. And I think that over time, I work pretty well with some of the members there and I was...

(Soundbite of clearing throat)

Justice BREYER: ...quite often in the majority and then Justice White said years ago, that with every new member it's a new court and we've had a number of new members and the court's changed and people learn to work with each other again and there we are. I'm more in the dissent now, if you want a more precise statement, that's it.

GROSS: And what's the difference between being in the dissent and being in the majority when you come to work every day? Like...

Justice BREYER: I prefer to be in the majority.

GROSS: Mm-hmm. Okay.

Justice BREYER: It's not quite as nice to be in the dissent. For one thing, people pay less attention and you have the law going the way that you think is wrong.

GROSS: How would you compare the Roberts court versus the Rehnquist court?

Justice BREYER: Well, from the personal point of view you said it. The Roberts court is one where so far I've found myself more in dissent. You want a characterization in terms of conservative and liberal, but that's not my job. That's your job. That's the job of the press and the public to characterize. My job is to decide the cases, write the decisions as best I can.

GROSS: I guess I was wondering if you think Chief Justice Roberts is different as a chief justice than Chief Justice Rehnquist was.

Justice BREYER: Every new appointment is different. Every new person who comes on makes it a different court. So the difference is not just the individual, it's the reactions of the others to that person. White said that some time ago and I have found truer words were never spoken.

GROSS: But do they run the court differently to the extent that the chief justice runs the court?

Justice BREYER: No. No. The chief justice in charge of administration. But each of us has a vote and each of us votes on everything. And the one power that the more senior members have, and the senior justice is the most senior, the chief justice, is that in those cases where there is a - if the chief justice is in the majority, he will say who writes the opinion in the case. But there are constraints. We all write the same number, approximately, of cases over the year. And quite often, the assigning, who is going to assign the case, it sort of answers itself, that question. It's fairly obvious from what people say in the conference. So there is some additional authority there but not additional voting authority.

GROSS: You know, when I interviewed Jeffrey Toobin, the legal correspondent for CNN and The New Yorker, and this interview was not too long ago, shortly before Justice Stevens retired, Toobin said something that really just astonished me, which is that sometimes in courting a swing voter, they will be told that they can write the opinion if they're in the majority and that's a kind of a little carrot that can be presented to the swing voter as incentive to vote with the team that wants to be the majority.

Justice BREYER: I wouldn't - that's true but I don't put it in that way. Look, put yourself in the courtroom in our conference. There is an issue. It's either A or B. The first four people say A. The second four people say B. And there I am, the most junior member. I say I don't know. Who will you assign that opinion to? You have to assign it to me.

GROSS: Why?

Justice BREYER: Because your job as chief, if you're the - your job is to get a majority for a position. The job of the court is to decide. You have to assign it to me because I'm uncertain. And however I go, so will go the court. So I'm the only one that will produce a majority. Since the others are certain and I am not certain and it's four to four, the canics(ph) of the court require it to be assigned to me.

GROSS: But is that political?

Justice BREYER: You tell me how...

GROSS: Is that political, getting you to do it as an incentive?

Justice BREYER: No it's not - no. No.

GROSS: No?

Justice BREYER: No. It's nothing to do with an incentive. It is to do with what the court is supposed to do, which is the court is supposed to decide cases. That's our job and we decide one case after another. Now, how can you get a decision of a court in that circumstance without assigning the case to me? Because I will be the one who determines whether it's A or whether it's B. Now that circumstance does not arise often but sometimes it does.

GROSS: Were...

Justice BREYER: And so I learned from that that if I don't want to write the decision in such a case, I better say I'm pretty sure.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: Were you in that position of being uncertain...

Justice BREYER: Sure. I have been.

GROSS: ...and then you (unintelligible) to write the opinion?

Justice BREYER: I have been. That has been the situation in some instances. Occasionally that's happened. That happens with everyone. And that's why I say sometimes the assignment decision, it decides itself.

GROSS: So how, I don't know if you could give us an example of this, but in a situation where you were uncertain, how did you make up your mind?

Justice BREYER: I've been uncertain in that sense fairly - it's not totally rare. I mean, I just had a case where I really thought that I was going to join this particular person's opinion. I really thought that was the better opinion. But I thought before I make my mind up definitely - and it wasn't one I was writing in - before I make up my mind definitely, I want to sit down and review them.

And I went down, sat down, reviewed the opinions and then thought about it for a while and said I can't join that other one. Not that it's wrong, but it's more consistent with what I've generally been thinking and really have thought generally to join the other opinion. So I joined the other opinion, having thought that first I wouldn't.

And that's what Sandra O'Connor means when she says that when you're there for a while you create footsteps. That is, you take approaches and there's a need to be consistent with what you've said before. You don't want judges who feel they're jumping from one thing to another in terms of their general philosophy or outlook. So what you do is sit down, think about it, and then you reach a decision.

I'll tell you something interesting about that too, if you want - human nature.

GROSS: Sure. Yeah.

Justice BREYER: I've found it interesting. I bet it's true whether you're in business, whether you're in law, whatever field of life you're in, you have a tough decision to make, really tough, and you think, my goodness, this is evenly balanced. Oh my goodness, what will I do? But I'm sorry, time is passing. You better make up your mind. And so you do and you think this side has a slight edge. Now time passes. Do you think you think I might have been wrong? No. As time passes you begin to think, I think I was probably right. More time. Yeah, I was right. More time. I sure was right. More time. How did I think the opposite? That is called the self-protective psychology of human nature.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: That's been your experience on the court?

Justice BREYER: By and large.

GROSS: No regrets?

Justice BREYER: Well...

GROSS: But have there been decisions where you really lost sleep in trying to figure out which side you were on?

Justice BREYER: Yes, I would say. It's an uncomfortable feeling. It's a kind of void before you begin to make up your mind and before you were - and it happens a lot. You read - it's not that you don't have a point of view. You know, you read the first brief and there is the question, say I bet I know how that comes out. But then you read the next brief and you think, oh my God, no, it comes out the other way. And then you go back to some of the reply briefs and say, oh. And then in the oral argument you can go back and forth. That doesn't mean you don't have a point of view. And it doesn't mean that you're not open- minded.

Open-minded is you may well have a point of view but you're open to changing it. And I've discovered that - that quite a lot. It isn't really a void. It's that you are not quite easy so far with your decision. It's like that old joke about the judge. The judge says to the, he hears the well, the plaintiff and says, you're right. You're absolutely right. The defendant says judge, you haven't heard me. Says okay, what do you have to say? Listens, says, you're right. You're absolutely right. And the plaintiff says hey, judge, I mean you said I was right, now you say he was right. We can't both be right. And the judge says you're right. You're absolutely right.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Justice BREYER: More like that than you think.

GROSS: So, the outsider perspective is that all arguments now in the court are pitched to Justice Kennedy because he's perceived as the swing vote.

Justice BREYER: You're probably thinking of some cases, which is going to be a minority out of the 80. And you're probably thinking that you can read what he's thinking. I've learned over time I can't necessarily read what the others are thinking. I find out best when I'm talking to them in the conference, then I'll know.

GROSS: You were the junior member of the Supreme Court for many years and now there are - you are not.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Justice BREYER: That's true.

GROSS: And there's two very new members now, Elena Kagan and Justice Sotomayor. So does that change your experience a lot, not being the junior member?

Justice BREYER: No. The junior member opens the door in the conference when somebody knocks and they usually have some papers that somebody forgot. So the junior member hands them the papers. Sometimes you might hand somebody a cup of coffee. I handed Justice Scalia a cup of coffee. He said you've been doing this for a long time. I did. I did it for 11 years. I said yes, and I've gotten very good at it. And he said. No you haven't.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Justice BREYER: (Unintelligible) and there we are. That's - the junior member is not a significant matter.

GROSS: And in terms of how...

Justice BREYER: (Unintelligible).

GROSS: ...of how you think and your position as a leader in arguments?

Justice BREYER: The argument isn't just simply the argument and discussion. It may be sometimes an advantage to go first, earlier in the discussion, because then people listen to you and their minds are less made up. But it also can be an advantage to go last because then you've heard what other people say and what you say can be affected by what they said. So sometimes it works out one way, sometimes it works out the other.

GROSS: Well, Justice Breyer, thank you so much for talking with us. I really appreciate it.

Justice BREYER: Thank you.

GROSS: Justice Stephen Breyer has written a new book called "Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View." You can read an excerpt on our website, freshair.npr.org.

Coming up, Ken Tucker reviews Ricky Skaggs' new album of pop, gospel...

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: ...pop, gospel, bluegrass music. This is FRESH AIR

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" I can say what I think." == I see what he did not say as well as what he did say. he is aware of (vigilant of) his jurisdiction.

North Korea wants to make a deal

The International Herald Tribune September 17, 2010 Friday BY JIMMY CARTER

During my recent travels to North Korea and China, I received clear, strong signals that Pyongyang wants to restart negotiations on a comprehensive peace treaty with the United States and South Korea and on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

The components of such an agreement have been fairly constant over the past 16 years, first confirmed in 1994 by the United States and Kim Il-sung, then the North Korean leader, and repeated by a multilateral agreement negotiated in September 2005.

The basic provisions hold that North Korea's old graphite-moderated nuclear energy reactor, which can easily produce weapons-grade plutonium, and all related facilities and products should be disabled under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency; that while the reactor is shut down, the United States should provide fuel oil or electric power to North Korea until new power plants are built; that the United States should provide assurances against the threat of nuclear attack or other military actions against North Korea; that the United States and North Korea should move toward the normalization of political and economic relations and a peace treaty covering the peninsula; that better relations should be pursued by North Korea, South Korea and Japan; and that all parties should strengthen their economic cooperation on energy, trade and investment.

The comprehensive agreement reached by the Clinton administration was disavowed in 2002 by President George W. Bush. Nevertheless, although North Korea reprocessed fuel rods into plutonium and tested nuclear explosives in 2006, good progress was made in its talks with the United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia.

But conditions have since deteriorated: the talks stopped in 2009, and that same year the United Nations imposed sanctions on Pyongyang after it conducted a second nuclear test and launched a long-range missile. North Korea also prohibited reunions between North and South Korean families.

Tensions grew still higher this year when North Korea detained an American, Aijalon Gomes, whom it accused of crossing into its territory, in January and a South Korean fishing crew in August.

However, there are now clear signals of eagerness from Pyongyang to resume negotiations and accept the basic provisions of the denuclearization and peace efforts.

In July, North Korean officials invited me to come to Pyongyang to meet with Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, and other officials to secure the release of Mr. Gomes. Those who invited me said that no one else's request for the prisoner's release would be honored. They wanted me to come in the hope that I might help resurrect the agreements on denuclearization and peace that were the last official acts of Kim Il-sung before his death in 1994.

I notified the White House of this invitation, and approval for my visit was given in mid-August, after North Korea announced that Mr. Gomes would soon be transferred from his hospital back to prison and that Kim Jong-il was no longer available to meet with me. (I later learned that he would be in China.)

In Pyongyang I requested Mr. Gomes's freedom, then had to wait 36 hours for his retrial, pardon and release. During this time I met with Kim Yong-nam, president of the presidium of the North's Parliament, and Kim Kye-gwan, the vice foreign minister and chief negotiator for North Korea in the six-party nuclear talks. Both of them had participated in my previous negotiations with Kim Il-sung.

They understood that I had no official status and could not speak for the American government, so I listened to their proposals, asked questions and, when I returned to the United States, delivered their message to Washington.

They told me they wanted to expand on the good relationships that had developed earlier in the decade with South Korea's president at the time, Kim Dae-jung, and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan.

They expressed concern about several recent American actions, including unwarranted sanctions, ostentatious inclusion of North Korea among nations subject to nuclear attack and provocative military maneuvers with South Korea.

Still, they said, they were ready to demonstrate their desire for peace and denuclearization. They referred to the six-party talks as being ''sentenced to death but not yet executed.''

The following week I traveled to Beijing, where Chinese leaders informed me that Mr. Kim had delivered the same points to them while I was in Pyongyang, and that he later released the South Korean fishing crew and suggested the resumption of family reunions. Seeing this as a clear sign of North Korean interest, the Chinese are actively promoting the resumption of the six-party talks.

A settlement on the Korean Peninsula is crucial to peace and stability in Asia, and it is long overdue. These positive messages from North Korea should be pursued aggressively and without delay, with each step in the process carefully and thoroughly confirmed.

===========

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/09/16/ive_got_a_nuclear_reactor_in_yongbyon_to_sell_jimmy_carter

I've got a nuclear reactor in Yongbyon to sell Jimmy Carter

Posted By Joshua Keating Thursday, September 16, 2010 - 6:25 PM

Granted, I've never spent time with any senior North Korean officials or participated in high-level nuclear negotiations, but former President Jimmy Carter's New York Times op-ed today, "North Korea wants to make a deal," seems so bizarrely credulous that one hopes he had an ulterior motive in writing it.

Carter says that during his recent visit to Pyongyang in order to secure the release of U.S. prisoner Aijalong Gomes, he received assurances "clear, strong signals that Pyongyang wants to restart negotiations on a comprehensive peace treaty with the United States and South Korea and on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."

Here's how it went:

In Pyongyang I requested Mr. Gomes’s freedom, then had to wait 36 hours for his retrial, pardon and release. During this time I met with Kim Yong-nam, president of the presidium of the North’s Parliament, and Kim Kye-gwan, the vice foreign minister and chief negotiator for North Korea in the six-party nuclear talks. Both of them had participated in my previous negotiations with Kim Il-sung.

They understood that I had no official status and could not speak for the American government, so I listened to their proposals, asked questions and, when I returned to the United States, delivered their message to Washington.

They told me they wanted to expand on the good relationships that had developed earlier in the decade with South Korea’s president at the time, Kim Dae-jung, and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan.

They expressed concern about several recent American actions, including unwarranted sanctions, ostentatious inclusion of North Korea among nations subject to nuclear attack and provocative military maneuvers with South Korea.

Still, they said, they were ready to demonstrate their desire for peace and denuclearization. They referred to the six-party talks as being “sentenced to death but not yet executed.”

Yes, nothing like a good North Korean death sentence joke to set everyone at ease.

Carter acknowledges that North Korea continued to process plutonium during previous rounds of talks and that the most recent round of negotiations stopped in 2009, the same year that North Korea "conducted a second nuclear test and launched a long-range missile." Indeed, over the last two decades, Kim Jong Il has perfected a game of periodically promising a return to negotiations -- in return for aid or a loosening of sanctions of course -- while continuing to build a nuclear weapons program. Why is this time different? Carter doesn't really explain.

It's all the more bizarre that the former president would choose to carry Pyongyang's water, since he wasn't even treated particularly well during his visit. In contrast to the high-profile meeting between Kim Jong Il and Bill Clinton, Dear Leader hightailed off to China when Carter showed up, leaving him to meet with lower-ranking officials.

And as both Senator Joe Lieberman and Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell have pointed out today, the fact that Carter doesn't even mention the recent sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan raises serious questions about his analysis of the situation.

It's also not quite clear what Carter's intentions are in putting in a good word for North Korea. If he's urging the Obama administration to resume negotiations with North Korea, that's already official policy. As Campbell says, North Korea's recent appeals for talks are already "well known to us."

There's not really any news here and in the end the piece reads like a defense of Carter's international relevance after a high-profile snub in Pyongyang.