Steve Morse

Other Opinions Steve Morse High School Drug-Sweeps: Legal?
By Steve Morse
Recently, I was approached by a parent of a student at Traverse City
Central High School who asked if I had heard about the drug sweep that
had taken place at the school the day before. I had not. The man
said that although his daughter had not been busted, he wondered
whether such a sweep, conducted with drug-sniffing dogs, was legal.
Reading about it in the paper the following morning, I guessed that
this question might be one on the mind of many other parents,
students, and members of the community. Here is the answer.
Searches of students by school officials are governed, like all
searches, by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That
amendment does not prohibit all searches, only those that are
“unreasonable.” An illegal search occurs “when an expectation of
privacy that society is prepared to consider reasonable is infringed.”
The starting point, of course, is that there must be what the courts
consider to be an actual “search.”

Other Opinions Steve Morse Why we must investigate torture
In 1947 the United States convicted a number of Japanese war criminals to life in prison for waterboarding U.S. soldiers.
In one case, a Japanese officer named Chinsaku Yuki made his victim strip off all his clothes, after which he was tied naked to a bench. Then Yuki poured water over a cloth wrapped around the victim’s face until he drowned and passed out. When the man was revived, he’d find Yuki sitting on his belly and the process would start all over again.
One U.S. soldier testified that he was drowned four or five times, losing consciousness, then revived for more punishment.
We gave the Japanese and Nazi war criminals the harshest penalties that a military tribunal could mete out for their hideous acts. But now, our nation finds itself gazing in a mirror, faced with the same question: Should the Bush administration be investigated for condoning and encouraging torture?
The short answer is that they already are being investigated -- by the press.

Other Opinions Steve Morse On the day following the historic election of Barack Obama, it was clear, as reported by the Record-Eagle, that “not everyone is excited about the nation’s first black president” and, in fact, “some are downright hostile.”
The reference was to Rod Nyland, the managing employee of Hampel’s Key and Gun Shop in Traverse City. Nyland authorized the flying of an American flag upside down. As he explained, the purpose of doing this was to utilize “an international signal” to convey that “we feel our country is in distress because the n___ got in.” An hour later, Nyland apologized: “I regret my choice of words. That was a poor choice and I apologize. It’s probably not appropriate.”
At this point, Jack Fellows, a salesman for Hampel’s, said he, not Nyland, was a spokesman for the gun shop. Fellows stood by the decision to display the upside-down flag as “a distress signal warning for the country” as “basically a display of alarm.” “The winning presidential candidate,” said Fellows, “was not our choice and has the worst anti-gun record in Congress, let alone the Senate. He’s not fit to be president of the country.”
While the NRA has opposed Obama, it is not true that he has the “worst anti-gun record in Congress.” For one thing, Obama supported the landmark decision upholding Second Amendment rights handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in June, 2008.

Other Opinions Steve Morse The Michigan Supreme Court ruled on May 7 that a voter-approved constitutional ban against single-sex marriage also prohibits state, county, and municipal governments and agencies, as well as state universities, from recognizing domestic partnerships to provide health insurance to the partners and families of gay workers. It was a deplorable decision.
One of the main objectives of the Michigan courts when construing provisions of the State Constitution is to determine as closely as possible what the people intended by passing the provision in the first place. This objective is reduced to the following principle of statutory construction: “When interpreting the Michigan Constitution, [the Supreme] Court’s duty is to enforce the law which the people have made, and not some other law which the words of the constitution may possibly be made to express.” -- Simple, reasonable, and to the point, you might say.

Other Opinions Steve Morse As we approach the end of the fifth summer we’ve been at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s evident that virtually no progress has been made toward effecting a cease-fire, not to mention a lasting peace. And, what is worse, there is no end in sight — notwithstanding that the American people voted to replace the Republican-held Congress with Democrats who, we thought, looked favorably upon ending the conflict.
It’s now clear that following the 2006 mid-term elections, after having been repeatedly lied to for six years by the Republican administration, the American Left was ignored and then peremptorily dumped by the Democratic leadership in the Congress. That “leadership,” which has been in office since the start of the year, is supposed to be in charge of Congress - a Congress, however, that now has a “confidence” rating of 14%, the lowest since Gallup started asking the question in 1973 and five points lower than the Republicans scored last year.