super hanc petram

Moved Again

2006-01-02T18:49:00.000-08:00

Another pointer to the new-new blog. levingar.com Doing the wordpress thing at the moment. Check out the archives page. Plugin goodness.

To The East Side

2005-02-23T21:18:00.000-08:00

Please update your links.

Remaindered Links/Thoughts

2005-02-23T17:10:00.000-08:00

I'm still working through why it is that the president (and two of his press secretaries) knowingly and eagerly (and repeatedly in the case or Ari and Scotty) calling on a prostitute for a life-line during a press conference is not a story in these times.

'The family is looking into whether Thompson's cremated remains can be blasted out of a cannon, a wish the gun-loving writer often expressed, Brinkley said. "The optimal, best-case scenario is the ashes will be shot out of a cannon," he said.' Bravo. This story, read in conjunction with the story in last month's Harpers about the right to die in America provides some great food for thought.

Saw Sideways last weekend. Enjoyed it, but the fact that it was nominated for Best Picture means that 2004 was a very bad year for movies indeed. The Aviator is there simply to give Scorcese his Oscar so Weinstein will shut the hell up. Until next year.

Disclosure: I have not seen The Aviator.

Playing Crusader Kings of late has sparked my interest in the medieval migrations of the various tribes of Europe. Wikipedia has been invaluable in sorting out the facts from my recollections of 9th grade Western Civilization. (In this instance, how exactly William came to believe he had a claim to the throne.)

Make sure to check out both folklore.org and the book Revolution in the Valley that grew out of the site. Some fascinating reads in there. "Dozo, quick, hide in this closet. Please! Now!"

tag: musings

Subvert the Dominant Internet Link Hierarchy!

2005-02-23T12:36:00.000-08:00

Update: I feel it's important to note that the one blog that got me into blogging in the first place was megnut. Meg certainly doesn't need any links to boost her page rank, but it should be noted that she is but one example of how women were instrumental in creating both the software and the phenomenon of blogging. Mena Trott is obviously another great example.

Today's issue: women bloggers. Kevin Drum kicked it off. Backpedaled. I found out about it through Ezra. On his site I threw out two comments that reference Brad DeLong's brief Subvert the Dominant Internet Link Hierarchy! series, and making that a broader trend in blogging. Specifically on the issue of women bloggers, though, I feel the need to examine my own house first. The blogroll lists Jess, Meg Hourihan, Laura Rozen, and Halley Suitt. Fafnir may be a woman, but I doubt it. To get my own house in order, therefore, the men will be (briefly) relegated to the level of comment in the source of the page, while I will bulk up the links to women bloggers on the roll. Avedon Carol is correct; the best reponse is here. Also, copied below is Kevin's list of responses from women bloggers. My favorite response on this list is from Brutal Women.

Meryl Yourish: "A (female) blogger sent me this link to Kevin Drum being an idiot (yes, I know, he is often an idiot, but this time, it's personal—he mentioned women bloggers)." And this one, where she doesn't call me an idiot: "The scholarship behind Drum's thesis simply boggles the mind. Why, it's as if he took all of five minutes to think about the issue before he wrote his post."
Trish Wilson: "I get so tired of this same stupid question coming up every three months. The guys don't read or link to political women who blog, and then have the audacity to feign innocence every two months (from three, previously). They wonder where we are. As we have said the last three or four times this discussion has come up, we're out there. You just have to take the time and energy you take to link to and read the primarily middle- and upper-class, white, male bloggers and find us. Guys, you have no excuse."
Random Thoughts: "I'm tired of this discussion. I'm tired of the comments that say women aren't as analytical, competitive, interested, bloviating, or motivated. I'm tired of reading about the boys network at the top, even though it does exist."
Pinko Feminist Hellcat: "Having the gall to point out that yes, we exist, is apparently unforgivable. The attacks women go for this--women who stated this quite civilly were called hysterical and accused of attacking people. They were also called dykes, ugly, manhaters, moonbats, and had their looks derided and their appeal to the opposite sex questioned. Because, you know, that's civil."
Brutal Women: "In other news, the fucktards are back."
Avedon Carol: "On the other hand, I'm staring you right in the face, Kevin, and even though you've said you read me every day you don't have me on your blogroll. It's things like this that make me tear out my hair when people wonder why women are underrepresented in the top-rated weblogs, or journalists, are whatever."
Media Girl: "[Some poor schmoe named Aaron is] nothing like the horses asses and raging bulls that litter the landscape, like the goombas and ninnies who pop up periodically to wonder why women bloggers aren't more popular, or the fuckwits who wield misogyny like a phallic sword."
Ilyka Damen: "Having proposed the most supportable theory, that 'there are plenty of women who blog about politics but they don't get a lot of traffic or links from high-traffic male bloggers,' a theory supported by a quick review of his own blogroll, Drum concludes instead that the delicate flowers of blogdom are averse to the medium's 'fundamental viciousness.' What can you say to that beyond, 'Bitch, please' . . . ?"
What She Said!: "The saddest part of this all, Kevin, is that there are some really excellent writers out here. There are women writing extraordinary commentary, with sharp analysis and flawless arguments and you'd rather waste time in another gender-jerkoff than reading it."
Echidne of the Snakes: "There is one theory about all this that has some merit, I believe, and that is that some men don't want to read what women write (unless it is on sex), so if a blogger can be identified as a woman she will lose those readers whose print looks too feminine...."
Ayn Clouter: "As noted below, Kevin Drum has stirred up the usual hornet’s nest about under-representation of femmes pixelle on the web. This tempest in a herbal tea pot is missing the really big picture far above the heads of all these busybloggers."
Sisu: "We can say right up front that the shallowness of Kevin Drum's argument turns off this woman. Maybe we're in a Pauline Kael bubble of our own, but most of the women we know -- fellow bloggers, readers, friends and relatives -- adore fiery political discourse and keep coming back for more."
Conglomerate: "I know from trying to get a group blawg together of female law professors, that most of the participants were pressed for time. Blogging is a second (or third or fourth) job after teaching and writing, and a lot of the women that I know have a few extra jobs anyway with child-rearing."
Ann Althouse: "Sigh. Why is he assuming that promulgating opinions is a mean and domineering sort of behavior? I've certainly noticed that a lot of bloggers that I find unreadable display this tendency, but I think the best blogs are reasonable, good-natured, humorous, and well-rounded."
Long story; short pier: # Note: not a woman. "You want to know what the funny thing is? The ice-edged gut-punching joke of it all? Five minutes spent perusing any feminist comment thread or discussion group would be enough to rapidly disabuse Messr. Drum and his commentariat of the idea that women aren’t 'comfortable with the food fight nature of opinion writing.'"
Loaded Mouth: "In reply to your idiocy, I refer you to What She Said!. Then maybe, just maybe, you could start linking to women bloggers instead of using the old and busted (not to mention repeatedly debunked) 'Where are they?' argument."
Dummocrats: "Drum's hypothesis is that opinion writing on the web is too vitriolic and rough for delicate females. Clearly he's never read one of Lucas' takedowns of Michael Moore. But, all kidding aside, he may have a point. Sometimes the comments on the site do get pretty rough. The language is nasty and personally, I refuse to deal with that."
Elayne Riggs: "I think, if anything, female bloggers should be thanking Kevin Drum rather than piling on his latest version of the every-three-months "where are the women bloggers/why aren't women bloggers more 'famous' or 'popular' (i.e., listed higher up in a self-selecting ranking system)" discussion."
James Joyner: On the food-fight nature of political blogging as a turnoff for women: "It's as good a reason I can come up with."

tag: blogs

Miracle on Ice

2005-02-22T13:02:00.000-08:00

25 years ago today was the Miracle on Ice. I was just over 3 at the time and yet it achieved iconic status for me as I grew up playing the game. In high school a friend of mine had a great poster that a gas station put out in 1980 to commemorate the game. I'm not sure if the bulk of the prose is original, but it really captures just how unbelievable the feat of beating the Soviet team was. Above the writing was the shot of Mike Ramsey (I think) with that look of total elation on his face.

Somewhere along the line we lost it. We stopped believing.

Then the kid next door won a gold medal.

The kid with the runny nose and milk money danced up to the tiger and spit in his eye.

And it's not an upset. Not a long shot, a darkhorse, or a David and Goliath.

It's a miracle.

It's America.

Welcome back.

It's really the only way to describe the magnitude of what those kids accomplished. This was one of the greatest mismatches in the history of sport. That Soviet team was manhandling NHL teams. A few weeks before the game, the Soviets had waxed the US team in an exhibition game at MSG. I've been a part of a lot of incredbile moments playing sports, and I can't imagine what it must have been like to be on the ice for that game.

Some people forget that this wasn't the gold medal game, this was the semi-final. The US still had to beat Finland in the final to win the gold. So how on earth do you motivate a team that's coming off the most impossible victory in the history of sport? Herb Brooks:

You lose this game and you'll take it to your fucking grave.

Your fucking grave.

tag: sports

Hunter Thompson is Dead

2005-02-21T13:22:00.000-08:00

Update: See Steve Gillard (via James Wolcott) for an eloquent discussion of Thompson's legacy in print and online.

Hunter Thompson is gone and I am poorer for it. While his most acclaimed work was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I am more partial (being a political junky) to Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972, and another short work with great relevance to today's (or any) political climate: his eulogy of Richard Nixon:

From Rolling Stone, June 16, 1994

HE WAS A CROOK

by Hunter S. Thompson

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK DATE: MAY 1, 1994 FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER… HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA… BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."

—Revelation 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing — a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive — and he was, all the way to the end — we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style — and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable — some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern — but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man — evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him — except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."

Many were incensed about the howitzers — but they knew there was nothing they could do about it — not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments — most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.

When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise — a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him). It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director — who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says — and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.

Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that — but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives — whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

tag: books, politics

Peggy Noonan Blesses Blogging

2005-02-17T17:15:00.000-08:00

Nooners takes up the issue of blogging today. I join others (Dave, Matt) in generally praising the column. Nooners can't bring herself to actually mention a blogger that doesn't share in her ideology, but what is one to expect from opinion pages of the WSJ? I do find amusing the dogged attempts by Peggy and Hewitt to pretend that the only blogs in existence are the 101st Fighting Keyboarders. Kos, Atrios, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, the list of elephants in the room goes on, but — ever the good WASP — Peggy will ignore them.

Noonan sees blogging through the lens of journalism and thus shapes her discussion around blogging versus traditional media. I don't find the blogging vs. journalism discussion particularly compelling since the media have always had scandals and always will and, as Roger Ailes so eloquently put it

I have no interest in collectively building a culture online where we figure out norms for people who both consult and write online so that readers can have the tools to be skeptical, active participants.

If blogging can have any effect on the media, my hope is that it will prod the press to stop the he-said she-said nonsense that Brad DeLong regularly derides. It takes courage to report the facts because the facts are not balanced, the facts are not evenhanded and the facts can destroy people. Often simply bearing witness to an event is the most devastating action one can take. Bad people like to do things in the shadows. If blogging can force the media to shine a light on those shadows and report what is happening (rather than what the participants say is happening), that will be a public service. This is not to say that blogging cannot ever be journalism. Many in the ranks have already proven to be effective journalists; but blogging is not about journalism. If all blogging can claim, in the end, is that it slapped the media around a bit, blogging will have failed. What is happening now is an attempt by specialists of all stripes to pigeon-hole blogging. To define it and have it stacked in the appropriate place in the hall closet. That way it can be safely ignored on all issues except for those to which blogging has been assigned relevance. This effort must be resisted.

Blogging has the potential to assist in redefining the way we as people relate to our public sphere. Media are a part of that sphere, but so are government and commerce. Blogging will not destroy any of these, but it's greatest contribution would be to cause us to force them open. For to do that it will have become a great tool of connectivity. It will allow me, on my terms, to connect with you, on your terms. It will allow us both to clarify, to expand, to prod and to react. Jason, today, harkens back to 2000 when I started this blogging thing:

How's that for a bit of nostalgia? Back in the early days of weblogs, a lot of folks had webcams...it was part of the package. Posts, a list of links to your friends' sites, a webcam, link to your Amazon wishlist, maybe a link to your Epinions page, an about page, a guestbook or little chat widget in the sidebar, etc. It was a social space to move around in. Now that everyone is reading everything in RSS readers, a lot of that sort of thing has been lost. RSS readers are not that social, even with so-called "next gen" newsreaders that recommend sites based on what you already read. It's mostly just information in, information out...little time or opportunity for play. Thank God for sites like Flickr, LiveJournal, and Fark, where people can still go to hang out and play around with the web and their friends a bit.

Connections. And, if blogging is successful, those connections will bring change for the better. Much to the chagrin of Nooners, Instapundit and all the Little Green Footballs.

tag: blogs, media

Paging Harry Sinden

2005-02-15T17:13:00.000-08:00

Is Harry Sinden now advising the NHL on its negotiating tactics? Old Harry liked to use this strategy with Bruins free agents he didn't want to sign. He'd go back and forth with the agent for a while and then right before the player was eligible to declare free agency, he'd throw down a take-it or leave-it offer that he knew was unacceptable. Once the player had spurned to offer and declared free agency, he'd start a full PR blitz to blame the player for abandoning the fans of Boston. It worked a few times. It will be interesting to see if it works for the NHL here. Dan Duquette also used this tactic in negotiating with Roger Clemons and Mo Vaughn, among others. There's really no way to respond to such bad faith tactics except through the media. Hopefully the NHLPA is prepared to control the message starting tonight because you can bet the NHL is going to pound away that it's the players who've killed the season.

The league bumped its salary-cap proposal from $40 million to $42.5 million Tuesday and gave the players' association until 11 a.m. Wednesday to accept. If they reject it, the season would be canceled two hours later, according to a letter sent by commissioner Gary Bettman to players' association executive director Bob Goodenow.

"This offer is not an invitation to begin negotiations — it's too late for that," Bettman said in the letter obtained by The Associated Press. "This is our last effort to make a deal that's fair to the players and one that the clubs (hopefully) can afford. We have no more flexibility and there is no time for further negotiation."

In the final bargaining session between NHL chief legal officer Bill Daly and players' association senior director Ted Saskin, the league dropped its longstanding demand for a link between revenues and player costs.

In return, the union came off its reluctance to a salary cap — and proposed one.

The cap the players offered was a soft cap of $52 million, a source close to the negotiations told the AP on condition of anonymity. Teams would be allowed to spend up to 10 percent above that three times in six years but would be subject to an escalating luxury tax on anything above $40 million.

The league knows their offer is unacceptable, but they've structured their final offer to provide some simple talking points.

The players rejected the league's offer and forced the cancellation of the season. It's the players' fault.
The league and the players were less than $10m apart when the players forced the cancellation of the season. The players are greedy.
The owners were willing to negotiate until the last minute, but the players spurned those offers. The players lack good faith.

I'm sure there are a couple of others that I've missed here. I had read the NHL's intent wrong before. I had thought they'd cancel the season over Superbowl weekend to take the heat off such an announcement. I had forgotten that it's far better to blame the other side than admit to mutual failure. So the NHL simply built momentum during the NFL playoffs for this announcement, but wanted to wait for the dead time between NFL and MLB seasons to make the announcement in an effort to smear the players when sports writers have nothing else to talk about (except the NBA). It was a shrewd decision, and we'll see if the players are ready to push back. Already they've botched things by allowing so many media outlets to refer to the lockout as a strike, we'll see now if they're ready for some real mud slinging.

tag: sports

Belaboring …

2005-02-11T12:58:00.000-08:00

Apropos my problems with Friedman and our current policy in Iraq, we have Lawrence Lessig talking about writing an early draft of the Georgian consitution.

And second, that it captured beautifully the single most important thing that I learned from my years working on "constitutionalism" in Eastern Europe: That 90% of the challenge is to build a culture that respects the rule of law, and that practices it. A document doesn't build that culture. And no one has a formula — either for building it, or preserving it.
Certainly not a law professor.

I don't watch the West Wing, for which I have been roundly castigated by many friends and acquaintences. But here's hoping more people in power look for a lesson from that West Wing than from today's Tom Friedman.

tag: iraq, democracy, media

A Waste of Great Real Estate

2005-02-11T12:13:00.000-08:00

Via Ezra (again) we have Tom Friedman. The text of this opinion piece tacks from the cogent to the bizarre and back faster than a ship navigating the Straight of Magellan. My education about the Middle East is very much in its infancy and yet I cannot help but feel that Friedman, for all his work in that area, is more clueless than I am.

There will be a lot of trial and error in the months ahead. But this is a hugely important horizontal dialogue because if Iraqis can't forge a social contract, it would suggest that no other Arab country can – since virtually all of them are similar mixtures of tribes, ethnicities and religions. That would mean that they can be ruled only by iron-fisted kings or dictators, with all the negatives that flow from that.

And yet falling towards the heart of this paragraph with alarming speed is the Iranian sword of Damocles. From what I can gather, what is happening in Iran is a genuine horizontal dialogue between and amongst a people who are dissatisfied with their government. Similar, perhaps, to the one that occured behind the Iron Curtain in the 70s and 80s. What we have in Iraq is something else entirely and much more of a Frankenstein. The point is that Friedman's statement that what's happening in Iraq is unique to the region is offensively wrong. What separates the steps taken towards democracy and liberty in Iraq from those elsewhere is that they are being forced by a foreign military. They are not organic, not a true democratic conversation between the governing and the governed. It might still work, but it is not a model to be emulated anywhere else.

Another problem is not that Tom Friedman is a fool, but that fools read him. Fools in power. They read Friedman and Lewis and Raphael Patai and they put these half-cocked ideas into motion, and dire consequences result.

In the specific case of the most recent Iraqi elections, Friedman needs to get his facts down:

If we can help produce a representative government in Iraq – based on free and fair elections and with a Shiite leadership that accepts minority rights and limits on clerical involvement in politics – it will exert great pressure on the ayatollah–dictators running Iran. In Iran's sham "Islamic democracy," only the mullahs decide who can run. Over time, Iranian Shiites will demand to know why they can't have the same freedoms as their Iraqi cousins right next door. That will drive change in Iran. Just be patient.

But the Iraqis didn't decide who ran for this parliament-thingy either. The voters didn't know for whom they were voting. There was no campaign, no exchange of ideas, no dialogue about the future of Iraq. Now it seems Ahmed Chalabi is a front-runner for a cabinet post. Why is it that American sponsored exiles keep popping up in positions of power? Hint, it's not because of the freedom we've created in Iraq.

There is more, much more, but I fear my head will explode. Again, I don't mind that Friedman is a fool, it's that his readers in power actually give his twaddle credence.

tag: iraq, media

Power Disorders

2005-02-09T14:20:00.000-08:00

Via del.icio.us/tag/books I came across this interview with Neal Stephenson at Reason.com. Toward the beginning of the interview, Stephenson is asked about a recent talk he gave during which he cited theologian Walter Wink and Wink's discussion of "domination systems." I've never heard of Wink and must make a note to explore his writings, but I find Stephenson's discussion of the concept of power disorders in response to the question interesting.

Reason: You gave a speech at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference a few years back in which you suggested that the focus on issues like encryption was too narrow, and that we should give more attention to what theologian Walter Wink calls “domination systems.” This surprised some of the attendees, partly because it reached outside the usual privacy/free speech issue set and partly because, hey, you were citing a theologian. What brought you to Walter Wink, and what other light do you think theologians can shed on our approaches to government?

Stephenson: This probably won’t do anything to endear me or Wink to the typical reason reader, but I was made aware of him by a Jesuit priest of leftish tendencies who had been reading his stuff.

It’s almost always a disaster when a novelist decides to become political. So let me just make a few observations here on a human level — which is within my comfort zone as a novelist — and leave it at that.

It’s clear that the body politic is subject to power disorders. By this I mean events where some person or group suddenly concentrates a lot of power and abuses it. Power disorders frequently come as a surprise, and cause a lot of damage. This has been true since the beginning of human history. Exactly how and why power disorders occur is poorly understood.

We are in a position akin to that of early physicians who could see that people were getting sick but couldn’t do anything about it, because they didn’t understand the underlying causes. They knew of a few tricks that seemed to work. For example, nailing up plague houses tended to limit the spread of plague. But even the smart doctors tended to fall under the sway of pet theories that were wrong, such as the idea that diseases were caused by imbalanced humors or bad air. Once that happened, they ignored evidence that contradicted their theory. They became so invested in that theory that they treated any new ideas as threats. But from time to time you’d see someone like John Snow, who would point out, “Look, everyone who draws water from Well X is getting cholera.” Then he went and removed the pump handle from Well X and people stopped getting cholera. They still didn’t understand germ theory, but they were getting closer.

We can make a loose analogy to the way that people have addressed the problem of power disorders. We don’t really understand them. We know that there are a couple of tricks that seem to help, such as the rule of law and separation of powers. Beyond that, people tend to fall under the sway of this or that pet theory. And so you’ll get perfectly intelligent people saying, “All of our problems would be solved if only the workers controlled the means of production,” or what have you. Once they’ve settled on a totalizing political theory, they see everything through that lens and are hostile to other notions.

What I really need after this is a nice discussion of the Federalist and how Hamilton, Madison & Jay thought the Constitution would attempt to solve the problem of power disorders. Power disorders of a kind remain the defining problem of our politics. The problems we face currently with regard to corrupt officials or invasive laws derive from far worse disorders that existed under a monarchy. And yet any back-bencher in Albany, NY or moderate congressman in D.C. will tell you that the system (and by extension the people) is being abused by a small minority that are in power. Party politics recognizes this issue and, rather than attempt to remedy the situation, seeks simply to put its slate of officials on the throne. There are those of us that would like to reform the system and yet we resemble the early physicians in Stephenson's analogy. Reform movements often wind up playing whack-a-mole with power disorders rather than unplugging the machine.

tag: politics, books

Thrice as Nice

2005-02-07T11:53:00.000-08:00

Exhuasted today after the Superbowl. The Pats won their third Superbowl in 4 years and I'm elated. I watch these games a little too closely and when I know I can't replay something (for instance, when we go over to a friend's apartment to watch the game) I watch all the more intensely. As you can imagine, watching a game with me is a real treat.

Due to this rather over-intesnse style of watching a game, I am a great arm chair coach. And, as TMQ says, all my advice is guaranteed or your money back! The big question from the Superbowl is why did the Iggles develop a bad case of vapor lock (not to be confused with Todd Pinkston getting cramps during the game and having to leave) at crunch time, I've developed two theories. My effort is trying to see things from Andy Reid's perspective and it's possible he played it the best way it could have been played. I certainly expected them to go no-huddle (as did the rest of planet earth) but it's entirely possible that Reid felt McNabb would throw an INT instantly if they did. That McNabb was just too shell-shocked to run the thing effectively. The way the Pats D played, I don't blame him. Dealing with that crew must be like steering a ship in a hurricane.

My other theory is that Reid knew his D only had one stand left in them and he needed to give them time to rest. Going hurry-up would have had his offense off the field (scoring or not) too quickly and the D just had nothing left in the tank. When they scored to pull within 3 with so little time left, he knew he could tell his D to get one last punt, and they did. Of course that put the game back in McNabb's hands which wasn't where Reid wanted it, but at that point he'd done all he could. And, naturally, McNabb threw the INT when under pressure. This is the weaker of the two theories as Reid's post-game comments indicate that he was himself a bit shell-shocked.

Anyway, those are my two theories.

Finally, these have been the best years to be a Boston sports fan there ever will be. Starting really with Pedro's incredible year in '99 and rolling right on to the Superbowl-World Series-Superbowl trifecta, there's been nothing like it in Boston history. It won't last (perhaps it ended last night) but I've made the effort to soak in every last minute of it. It has been and continues to be one of the things in life that you just sit back and enjoy while it lasts.

tag: sports

Truly, the NHL is doomed

2005-02-04T10:34:00.000-08:00

Taking a break (or submitting before he went) from his Superbowl festivities, Bill Simmons takes the time to look over the bed the NHL owners made but now refuse to lie in:

Even hockey diehards — a dying breed right up there with Eddie Murphy fans and handlebar-mustache fans — seem to agree this lockout is for the best. And that's a little weird, because we're not talking the WNBA here, where only a tiny segment of people will pay to watch the games. People like hockey. Sure, most of them live in Canada, where Bryan Adams is an icon, but there's still an audience. And we are all victims of a once-likable league that screwed itself up beyond repair, the same way you screw up a relationship by drunk-dialing too many times. The NHL made two unforgivable mistakes: expanding more recklessly than Krispy Kreme and paying their players way, way, way too much money. It was a lethal combination of greed and sheer stupidity.

This was a blue-collar sport for middle-class fans — a quality dive bar with one good TV, a few solid beers on tap and a ballbusting bartender named Fitzy. Then they tried to retool into an upscale joint with $15 beers and bartenders in bow ties. Suddenly, the price of NHL tickets rivaled that of the NFL and the NBA. Does that make sense? … Tragically, the owners lack the resolve and leadership to undo the damage. Basically, they need to bring on a hockey apocalypse and start over. Since that will never happen, hockey is doomed.

My current thoughts on the impending season cancellation is that the league is waiting until after the close of business today to announce anything. Timing this thing to be totally swept under the rug by the Superbowl is crucial for them. Once the sports stations are wall-to-wall Superbowl, they'll have enough cover to slip the announcement in and not have any coverage for almost a week. At that point it will be essentially old news and they'll have had several days to prepare their talking points, etc.

It's not out of the realm of possibilities that, once Bud Selig is firmly ensconced as the new owner of the Washington ~~Lobbyists~~ Nationals, baseball will go through many of these same death throes. It won't be pretty, but baseball is nearly as broken as hockey and neither league understands that the product is the league itself, not any individual team.

tag: sports

ESPN Interview with Malcolm Gladwell

2005-02-03T15:29:00.000-08:00

Page 2 interviews Malcolm Gladwell about Blink today. Two things struck me about this interview. First, Jeff Merron seems to have actually read all or most of the book. Second, Gladwell seems a genuine sports fan. The result is a quality interview where both participants are on the same (or at least similar) page. In my experience this is surprisingly rare in book interviews.

I found most interesting the part where Gladwell talks about Moneyball and the need for balance in evalutating a player based on both stats and impression:

You are right to bring up "Moneyball," because reading Michael Lewis' book was a real inspiration for me. I think about it this way. What people in the classical music world discovered was that when they couldn't see the person auditioning, they made very different and much better hiring decisions than when they could see the auditioner. With a screen up, for instance, they began to hire women for the first time, which suggests that before that their judgment had been impaired by all kinds of biases they were unaware of. What they saw with their eyes had interfered with what they heard with their ears. Billy Beane makes the same argument about scouting prospects: that sometimes what you see — whether a player is short or tall, thin or heavy — corrupts your assessment of what really matters, which is whether a guy can hit. So Beane does, essentially, a version of what orchestras do: he put a screen. He doesn't let what he sees with his eyes corrupt his statistical appreciation of a player's ability.

But this doesn't mean that all instinctive judgments about players are useless, because the question of whether a guy can hit is only one of a number of questions that a scout has to answer. GMs also want to know: is the guy lazy or a hard worker? Is he coachable? Does he have good habits? Will he be a good clubhouse presence? How strong is his competitive desire? What separates Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds from any of the other top players drafted alongside them is not talent, at the end of the day. It's desire and competitiveness — and to predict that you very much need a seasoned scout who can look at a player and have an instinctive sense of what he'll be like years down the road. I always thought that the critics of "Moneyball" misinterpreted what Lewis was saying. He wasn't saying that all instinctive scouting judgments are flawed. He was saying that there are some questions — like predicting hitting ability — that are better answered statistically, and that the task of a successful GM is to understand the difference between what can and can't be answered that way. That's my argument in Blink as well.

Later in the discussion Gladwell mentions that he'd love to put eye-tracking goggles on Peyton Manning. I also think this would be fascinating. More than that, I'd love to put them on several QBs of varying skill and age. Seeing how these guys see the field would be fascinating. On Prime Time and other shows, ESPN uses the highlight box to focus on different players during a replay. Which players QBs highlight instinctually (specifically as opposed to what they might say afterwards) as they read the field would provide a great contrast. If only to compare how the field is seen by the viewer (or the coach's tape) vs. the guy under center.

MG: I'd love to know, on this same level of detail, how Manning "reads" a defense. Does he spend a extra fraction of a second on the linebacker, or the safety? When he's playing the Ravens, does he look to Ray Lewis first, or last, or does he do something completely unexpected like not looking at Lewis at all? Are there certain schemes that he takes longer to understand? If so, what are they? And so on. Manning, for instance, probably picks up blitzes better than anyone else in football. Wouldn't you love to know what he's doing, in the face of a blitz, that — say — Kyle Boller isn't?

Even if you haven't yet read the book, it should be a very interesting interview.

tags: sports, books

Who Needs Reform?

2005-02-03T13:01:00.000-08:00

Reading over the commentary on the SOTU, I confirmed my suspicion that there was no need to actually watch it. Indeed, all Bush's speeches are, as Ezra noted yesterday, worthless by intent. Full to the brim of empty rhetoric that gets the good-intentioned all atwitter, but deliberately avoid any meaningful details. This is a luxury afforded Bush by his fellow traveller Tom DeLay. DeLay has structured the legislature such that all bills are written in their entirety behind closed doors, passed out of committee at absurd hours of the night and presented for an up or down vote on the floor of the House within hours of the bill's particulars being released to members. It then gets tossed over to the Senate where Frist botches the process entirely and the bill either dies or gets modified. From the Bush/DeLaw perspective what actually happens in the Senate is irrelevant since if the bill is modified it goes to conference committee. That committee, meeting behind closed doors, either discards all the Senate's changes in favor of the original House bill or writes a totally new bill that is far more egregious than the original. The result is once again presented and within hours is voted up or down. If it passes, great, if not, blame the Democrats.

You might ask what the point is to all of this since it ensures that, most of the time, nothing gets done or if something does pass it's so egregious that members would be embarassed to admit voting in favor. The point is to pass the most foul laws possible, and only the most foul laws possible. Otherwise, let them die and try again when conditions seem more favorable. No one's watching so who gives a shit? Make pretty speeches and pass whatever your donors want in the middle of the night. Then make a pretty speech about it. Details? What details? It's all he-said, she-said and you can't report the fact that they're lying, that's not objective.

Reform? That's class warfare. You're just too angry. The American people don't like anger. We're not going to win in the heartland by demonizing our opponents, people just tune that out. We need someone who can reach across the aisle and make common cause. Present our side and reach a compromise bill. That's the Third Way. That's centrism.

tag: politics, reform

Wilson Reduction

2005-02-02T11:48:00.000-08:00

Hear him! Matthew Yglesias on Woodrow Wilson:

Fundamentally, though, there are some very real similarities between the two. In my opinion, Wilson, despite the large role he plays in certain versions of Democratic Party automythology was a pretty fantastically terrible president. Like Bush, his policies abroad tended to be animated by worthy ideals, but they were persued in an incoherent and thoughtless manner with seriously bad consequences for the country and the world.

I should note that Wilson's loftiest ideal was Wilson himself. Wilson would be the greatest of peacemakers. Wilson would bring peace with his terrible swift sword and all would be grateful to Wilson. Wilson will get his country into that goddamned War to See Who's Feudal System Will Collapse First even if it takes 3 years and some of the most twisted logic ever uttered. For Wilson is the peacemaker and his 14 points shall end all conflict for all time. Even if he does get schooled at the peace table like a rookie in his first practice with the varisty. Wilson will be remembered, damn it, that's what matters.

tag: politics, history

Dean in at DNC?

2005-02-01T15:51:00.000-08:00

A lot of people wonder what the Republican party would look like if John McCain had a stronger role in shaping its message. Well, if Chris Bowers is correct, the Dems are about to find out what happens when the maverick outsider who fell off his horse on the road to Damascus gets the keys to the party. I'm an outspoken supporter of Dean for the DNC chair and I hope that some of my predictions about the DC bubble being popped come to fruition. With Dean at the helm I think we'll start winning some elections again and stop "taking it," as Al Franken so memorably said, on the party level. The insiders are already lining up to get a seat at the Dean table, and I sincerely hope I'm right that he's able to marginalize them. Dean's got a lot of political capital built up. And political capital is worth nothing if you don't spend it.

tag: democrats

Mac and Safety

2005-02-01T13:45:00.000-08:00

Is the Mac actually safer? SpyWare, AdWare, malware in general, all of it seeking to destroy my WindowsME installation. Will my looming switch to the mac make me safer? Yes. Why? Because OS X is structurally more impervious to these maladies. True? You bet your buster browns say the mac people. Not true say the, er, experts? From yesterday's Salon article:

According to experts, though, it isn't the Mac's better structure that accounts for why so few pieces of malware and spyware are aimed at the operating system — it's the size of its user base. If miscreants really put their heads to it, they could probably come up with many dangerous attacks against the Mac — but who would want to? Faced with the choice of disrupting 95 percent of the computer users in the world or just 3 percent, which would you choose? The choice is especially obvious for the purveyors of spyware, who, remember, depend on high numbers of infected machines to make money. If you want to make a killing in the spyware business, you're not going to get far by attacking the Mac.

Who are these experts? They go unnamed in the article. Normally I'd let this pass since a reporter will interview many, many sources for a story and if the same general comment comes from many of them, it makes sense to aggregate these comments as the opinion of 'experts.' But in this case I think it's a point worth belaboring. I have spent a great deal of time trying to fix and/or fireproof a number of my family's computers from the perils of malware. It would be of significant help to me if I could say definitively that they will be better off just buying a Mac because these problems are all but non-existent (and getting smaller) when running that environment.

After reading Backlash (via TUAW and MacDailyNews), I am convinced that the 'market share' argument is so much nonsense. And yet, I am always open to a lucid counter-argument. So who are these experts and what evidence (if any) do they have to back up their [collective, paraphrased] assertion? I think that the reason for the profusion of malware for Windows raised in the Salon article is strong. "The choice is especially obvious for the purveyors of spyware, who, remember, depend on high numbers of infected machines to make money." Malware writers do not write for glory, but for profit. If enough profit were to exist in the Mac market, they would enter it. And yet, "[m]any orders of magnitude more people look over the source code for OS X and the related BSDs than have access to Windows source code."

I peg the useful like of a computer at roughly 3½ years. I feel I can say with confidence to family members that their next PC purchase should be a Mac machine, not a Windows machine. To the list of superior features of the Mac OS I now add (for at least the next 3½ years) freedom from malware.

tags: mac, windows

Results Cloudy, Ask Again Later

2005-02-01T10:53:00.000-08:00

MSFT search has been launched. Becuase of the way I use search engines (mostly for research), it will be some time before I have my own evaluation of MSFT search. Two bloggers did some searches of their own to evaluate the new service. Their experiences are starkly different and highlight, I think, the difficulty of evaluating any search engine. It depends as much on the results you want as the results you get. First up Kim Krause of Cre8PC:

For the record, I'm freezing my butt off in my office because my wood stove is taking forever to heat up.

Following up on the news of MSN's now official, finally legitimate, no more BETA folks, re-launch of its search engine, I have to admit, I was shocked at my very first pass.

The true test is my UsabilityEffect.com site, which came out in May, and though Google indexed it with zesto, rank is a sad tale I scream about behind closed doors. No matter what rabbits I've pulled from my hat, Google has given me a complex about that site. Meanwhile, Cre8pc.com is treated like a Queen; but of course, it's been around since 1996 and well deserves Google's nod. And (ahem) Google loves this blog.

MSN Search, meanwhile, has me gasping. Typing in web+site+usability+reviews, my UE site is on page one of SERPs. Not only that, MSN scored more points for featuring my services page first, followed up with the home page. How freaking wonderful is this?

So let today, February 1, 2005, be a day you remember where you were. Look for your web site(s). Revel in the love. Sing in the rain. Run around stark naked, screaming with joy. For one historical day, let me pathetically admit, I'm paryting with MSN. Come on. WoodStock, as you know, only happened once too.

Overall very positive. Next Fred Wilson of A VC:

Last November, I did a long blog post about my side by side comparison of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft search. Microsoft had just launched their search in beta at the time. My conclusion was that Google was still the best for plain vanilla search because of the format of the results page, the speed of the search, and the relevance of the results.

Well Microsoft is out of beta now as evidenced by the availability of the service at http://search.msn.com. The word beta is gone from the URL.

So, I went back and redid the comparison tests. Did anything change during the beta? Yes, Microsoft got worse and the others didn't change.

Why did Microsoft get worse? Mostly because the relevance of the results got worse. They did something to their algorithm during the beta period that caused the results on the searches I did to change.

First, I always Google myself. In all three engines last fall, this blog was at the top or in the first three or results that are "above the fold". It's still that way in Google and Yahoo!, but somehow this blog is now buried half way down the second page in Microsoft's resutls.

That's enough for me but in an attempt to be fair and balanced, I tried a few more keywords. So I tried "bit torrent + wilco" on all three. The first result for Microsoft and Yahoo! was the front page of bt.etree.org which is a big bit torrent site. Google had that second. But Google and Yahoo! all had various bit torrent sites above the fold, whereas Microsoft had a bunch of other stuff that was less relevant.

I tried a few more searches and in every case, Microsoft's results page was less relevant to me than Yahoo!'s and Google's.

As I said in November, Microsoft has made a nice effort to develop a competitive product, but it isn't going to change my behavior yet.

Two people using their own search results as a barometer and coming away with polar experiences. For my purposes, I think Fred's experience would more closely match my own, but I'm not entirely sure. Kim is an expert on SEO while Fred is a VC. Kim has been trying to figure out how to push a new site that she launched to the top of search engine results using various 'rabbits.' Google has resisted those tricks while MSFT ate them up with a spoon. One could therefore conclude that Google is better because it resists gaming more effectively. Fred's "bit torrent + wilco" search is interesting. What I noticed was that on MSFT the results were heavily populated by blog posts while Google had some blog and some other information. Certainly if I'm a novice bit torrent user (and I am) I think Google's results are better for me. On the other hand, if I'm searching for what's happening in the bit torrent world, MSFT's results would be superior as the gaggle of posts track the latest bit torrent happenings.

Again, depending on what results I wanted, I would have to use a different engine. Ranking one engine as "better" than another is obviously a holistic and personal endeavor. At the moment my default will still be Google, but if I'm looking for the latest info on something I might give MSFT a try.

tags: microsoft, google, seo

Switching

2005-01-31T14:48:00.000-08:00

Salon looks at the state of the Mac today, and there is a good deal of commentary to be mined. Hitting closest to home for me was this quote on the difference between Windows and Mac users:

Perhaps the answer lies in what Jason Snell, the editor of Macworld magazine, says is the essential difference between Windows people and Mac people: Mac people love their computers on a personal, emotional level. Windows people, on the other hand, prefer to think of their machines as office tools, gadgets no more special than the stapler. Windows users don't expect much in the way of quality, beauty or elegance from their machines; if they did, they'd be Mac people. Instead, they expect their PCs to perform a great many tasks, and they've resigned themselves to having to labor over those tasks.

No sentence fragment could better describe my computing experience since I first switched from Mac to PC than, "resigned [myself] to having to labor over those tasks." And it is indeed labor. Most recently when I bought Crusader Kings. Great game, but I spent two full days trolling message boards trying to get it to work. Now that it does, I'm quite content as I like the game a lot. And yet, I'm just tired of putting up with this kind of thing. I'll never forget helping my dad to set up his, at the time, new computer. Windows 2000 had just been released and he snapped a great new machine and brought it home. Being home for the holidays, he asked if I was game to help get the thing running. Five full days later we finally got it going, though without getting the new printer running also since the drivers for Win2000 hadn't been released yet. Around the middle of the second day of this tribulation, while I was on hold with MSFT support, he said, "you know what I'd really like? Instead of getting 3 years of phone support, I'd pay to have someone from MSFT here so I could beat the shit out of them." Whenever I fight back adware, spyware, or WinRot I think of that.

In the Salon article, one commenter noted that part of the barrier for people switching from Windows to Mac was, "[I]t involves learning a new operating system, transferring files, and buying new, expensive software to replace the software on your Windows machine." But that is mostly the case when I buy a new Windows machine anyway. My personal data has to be hauled over to the new machine and reclassified in whatever manner MSFT feels is newer and better. The software is mostly a non-issue since the latest versions are included in the purchase price of the new machine. So for me anyway, the barrier was never transferring files. As for learning a new operating system, I liken this comparison to driving stick vs. automatic. You're still driving a car, the experience is just a lot easier.

I had ported over to Windows because that's what everyone else was using. And in the mid-90's it mattered a little more that I have the same OS as everyone else. Part of that was a social phenomenon. Games were coming out for Windows a lot faster and I wanted to play them as my friends were playing them. Email and the internet were growing rapidly and it was easier to be using Outlook rather than Eudora since, again, that's what everyone else was using. Now? Now I use gmail for email, furl for documents and I look longingly at ITunes and IPhoto since organizing music and photos on Windows is such a gigantic pain in the ass. In short, I depend on my OS now more as a vehicle for accessing the online community and organizing some of my larger data files. I don't need Windows and its attendant hassles for that. My hope is that the Mac we buy in the next few months will carry us for at least 3 years if not a little further.

At that point maybe some of these issues will be closer to resolution:

The problem with the modern personal computing environment is that, in some fundamental sense, it's a broken business. "There's a poison in the computer industry," Hertzfeld says, "and that is the fact that the common software base is controlled by a predatory software company with a lack of ethics." In case you didn't get the reference, Hertzfeld is talking about Microsoft, which, through Windows, controls the underlying software development base for the PC industry — essentially, it controls the standards, the keys to empire. "Microsoft is not a good steward of the standards," Hertzfeld says, and if Microsoft is to be beaten, and if a company like Apple is to exert more dominance in the PC world, Microsoft has got to first lose control of the standards. Hertzfeld actually believes that this is occurring; Microsoft is in fact slowly losing its grip on the software development standards, he says. "But I don't think Apple is the driver of that dynamic — I think the free software movement is pushing that."

One postscript. As I think back more on why I switched from Mac to PC, at the time (1996) Mac simply wasn't keeping up with the technology I needed and remaining competitively priced, and the support community was difficult to access. It's possible that this could happen again. It certainly seems as though Mac has broken away from some of the habits that made it difficult for users like me to stay with them, but one never knows.

tags: windows, mac

Blessed are the Children

2005-01-31T13:39:00.000-08:00

The graphic tells you all you need to know.

Many teeth will be gnashed and garments rended over this study of high schools students' opinions on the first amendment. I have not yet read the study, and only became aware of it from the most viewed images section on my yahoo. But looking at the graphic I am unsurprised by the finidings of the study.

Let's look at two lines of the graphic. "Newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories. Students: 51% yes; Teachers 80% yes; Principals 80% yes." Much shok and awe about students freely giving away their first amendment rights. And yet, the last line of the graphic, "Students should be allowed to report controversial issues in their student newspapers without the approval of school authorities. Students 58% yes; Teachers 39% yes; Principals 25% yes." Why do students not much care about the first amendment? Perhaps because in their experience it doesn't mean all that much. And, as we see, extending the freedom of the press to student newspapers isn't something the faculty and staff at schools finds particularly important either.

The headline could very easily read, "Teachers and Principals Gleefully Trample Students' Rights." But that headline would be nonsense. Teachers and principals want children to take their rights seriously. They also realize, however, that if students were allowed to publish newspapers free of faculty approval, something quite inappropriate (or worse) would be printed. And perhaps that would be a good lesson for the students, except for the fact that when the shit hits the fan, the kids aren't going to be only ones who face the consequences. Principals and teachers would confront very real threats to their livelihood even though they had no control over the publication in question. For in the eyes of parents, their children are innocent. It's not a new phenomenon.

These students will probably grow into adults whose opinions on the first amendment fall in line with average adults today. It's just that right now they spend their lives (as all children have throughout the ages) being told what they can and cannot do. They lead very structured lives under near constant supervision. To me the lesson is one for adults. If you tell a person they have certain rights and then use your authority to abuse those rights, that person will start to view those rights as either unimportant or non-existent. Children do not need the ability to publish an unsupervised newspaper (that's what blogs are for!), but they would benefit from the example of the adults in their community guarding their liberty carefully. And in this case, as in so many others, responsibility for setting that example should fall on the parents, not the teachers.

tags: politics, schools, kids

Election Evaluation

2005-01-30T16:48:00.000-08:00

Juan Cole posts his thoughts on the election in Iraq:

With all the hoopla, it is easy to forget that this was an extremely troubling and flawed 'election.' Iraq is an armed camp. There were troops and security checkpoints everywhere. Vehicle traffic was banned. The measures were successful in cutting down on car bombings that could have done massive damage. But even these Draconian steps did not prevent widespread attacks, which is not actually good news. There is every reason to think that when the vehicle traffic starts up again, so will the guerrilla insurgency.

The Iraqis did not know the names of the candidates for whom they were supposedly voting. What kind of an election is anonymous! There were even some angry politicians late last week who found out they had been included on lists without their permission. Al-Zaman compared the election process to buying fruit wholesale and sight unseen. (This is the part of the process that I called a 'joke,' and I stand by that.)

This thing was more like a referendum than an election. It was a referendum on which major party list associated with which major leader would lead parliament.

Many of the voters came out to cast their ballots in the belief that it was the only way to regain enough sovereignty to get American troops back out of their country. The new parliament is unlikely to make such a demand immediately, because its members will be afraid of being killed by the Baath military. One fears a certain amount of resentment among the electorate when this reticence becomes clear.

The most difficult aspect of evaluating this election is that something genuinely good did happen in Iraq, but the mendacity, the American and Iraqi body counts, the cost in treasure and legitimacy to our country and Iraq simply doesn't reconcile. Moreover, I think it is extremely important to note that this election was neither unique nor even particularly new for the Middle East. Prof. Cole: "But this process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan." Further complicating the reactions of any American is the hysterical invective thrown by some commenters on the right at anyone who has the audacity to make a measured evaluation of the situation on the ground. Could any of these Bush seraphim admit to the public that their pet project in Iraq has been, thus far, less democratic and less legitimate than the stumbling steps toward freedom that have been taking place in Iran for the past decade and more? The comedy of their ambition to march on Tehran is tragic indeed.

tag: iraq

Books: The Politics of War | Chapter Two

2005-01-30T13:57:00.000-08:00

Note: Reclamation of post to my dKos diary.

Chapter 2 of The Politics of War details how, in response to popular fury against economic and political corruption, President Cleveland tried to take the country to war with England. His ambition would be thwarted, but the issue of rebellious insurgents in Cuba would be waiting in the wings for another president inclined to distract the people from their domestic fantasies.

It was in Februray of 1895 that the revolt that would eventually lead to the Spanish-American War began on the island of Cuba. The headquarters of the revolt were, however, over a thousand miles away in New York City.

The main objective of the rebels' guerilla warfare was to create conditions so atrocious in Cuba that the United States in due course would intervene. Securing that intervention was the second prong in the rebels' twofold assault on Spanish rule. For this purpose the civilian arm of the rebellion, the so-called Cuban Junta, set up its headquarters in New York to raise money, purchase arms, and carry out a campaign of agitation and political lobbying for American intervention, the rebels' only secure hope of success.

To say that this objective was a long-shot would be a profound understatement. Of the two major parties, the now imperialist-leaning Republicans were not going to support the cause of guerilla insurgents whose aim was anti-imperialist (i.e. securing Cuban independence from the Spanish Empire) while the Democrats (the party of White Supremacy) who were, "fulminating against the Populists for threatening the South with 'Negro rule,'" could not be expected to support a rebellion being fought by black ex-slaves.

While the particulars of the Cuban revolt were not attractive to either party, the broader concept of a foreign war very much was. After the 1894 off-year elections, both parties had had just about enough of the independent muscle the electorate had been flexing.

Since the onset of the political crisis [in 1890] Republican leaders had been determined to transform America into an active world power and thereby make foreign affairs the preeminent factor in American politics. Politically speaking, it was to be the permanent functional equivalent of the no-issue politics of the precrisis years. The Republicans' "large policy" … had as yet no support in the country. Aside from unconvincing talk about controlling the "Pacific Trade" — an economic figment of politicians and party scribblers — the "large policy" offered no inducement whatever to the American people. … Even on its own terms it was not a means but an end in itself. Its essential purposelessness was well expressed by [E. L.] Godkin in a May 1895 issue of the Nation. What its advocates really wanted, he wrote, was to bring the United States "into contact with considerable foreign powers at as many points as possible." The object of the large policy was to have a large policy. … To gain popular support for so useless a policy Republicans were unrelenting in their efforts to arouse jingo sentiment in the country.

One might expect that such a dramatic and politically expeident shift, indeed one that went against the anti-imperialist foundations of our own revolution, would have been mocked and derided by the opposition. That such a policy was instead supported by the Democrats and the President (who had been abandoned by the people and his party) was a measure of how desperate all politicians of standing in the counrty had become to stop the people from daring to demand that government act as an agent of the people.

If Democrats, too, wanted to "get up a foreign war, if possible," they did not share the Republicans' far-reaching objectives. … In the aftermath of the 1894 elections the Democratic Party was literally fighting for its life. … Shotguns and fraud had failed to halt the southern Populists' advance, but the Democratic Party, risen like a phoenix from the ashes of civil war, had no intention of being sent to extinction by an upstart party of rural stump-speakers, farm journalists, and untried politicians of no great political acumen.

The only hope of the Democrats was to convince the Populists to fuse with the Democrats and form a single national reformist party. Democratic leaders wanted no part whatsoever of general reform (economic, political or otherwise) but they would prefer a little reform to total extinction. To that end, they glommed on to a single reform that was, in the context of the total Populist package, fairly minor.

The major element[] in the Democratic plan [was] to unleash across the rural South and West an intense and minutely organized propaganda campaign designed to persuade poor farmers that the free and unlimited coinage of silver bullion at the ratio of 16 to 1 to gold (twice the market value) would cure all their ills and remedy all their grievances.

The Dems would then make this issue the central tenet of their 1896 platform and, finally, convince the Populists to nominate the Dem candidate at their own convention and thus "fuse" with the Democratic party. This strategy was a profound and dangerous departure for the Dem leadership.

[I]t would set a perilous precedent for genuine party rebellions in the future; it would attract to the Democratic Party agitators and reformers of every sort and description. Most important, it was forcing the southern Democrats, mainstay of the national party, to reverse the very policy on which their power for a generation had rested, that of keeping the rural populace in a stage of apathy, despair, and inertia. … Crying up free silver sa a revolutionary measure lured angry farmers from the People's Party, but it left them no less angry. … Little wonder, then, that [the southern oligarchs] looked forward to "swapping off the free coinage of silver for the Cuba question."

The final remaining piece needed to set the country on a war footing was President Cleveland himself. Cleveland wanted no part of the Cuba issue, but the prospect of free silver truly terrified him.

To Cleveland, the free coinage of silver was the ultimate economic menace, the final proof, as he had put it in September of 1894, that his party was "returning to wallowing in the mire." He had no direct means of stopping the Democrats. Cleveland's power in the party was now virtually nil.

Old Grover did notice, though, that both parties were agitating for some kind of war to "knock the 'pus' out of this 'anarchistic, socialistic and populistic boil.'" While he wouldn't go to war with Spain over Cuba, Cleveland didn't mind going to war with England over Venezuela.

England and Venezuela had been quibbling for a half century over the precise boundary of British Guiana. In December of 1894, Cleveland notified congress that he intended to take up the cause of Venezuela. Earlier that same year, when asked by the Venezuelans to intervene in the dispute, Cleveland had stoutly refused. Eleven months and one electoral ass-whooping later, Cleveland came around to their point of view.

The lame-duck Democratic Congress, however, took the President's cue with alacrity. … It is doubtful if anyone in Congress knew how far Cleveland intended to go, but the nation's legislators clearly approved the direction he was taking. Trouble with Britain was the one species of international wrangling that was certain at any time to win the electorate's approval.

That the US would avidly inject itself into a boundary dispute bewteen England and Venezuela was astoundingly odd. In order to get the country totally behind him, Cleveland needed to make the issue about America rather than England & Venezuela. To that end, he reached back in time over 70 years to a speech given by President James Monroe. Cleveland's righteous hammer against England would be the Monroe Doctrine.

The Monroe Doctrine, as it came to be known, had long held an honored place among the public sentiments of the American people, although it had been honored but intermittently by American administrations and had never been formally recognized by any act or resolution of Congress. Committed in the past to a restrained foreign policy, Cleveland himself had shown no interest in the Monroe Doctrine. … From Monroe's speech he now saw implications that no previous President had hitehero detected. It had not occured to anyone before Cleveland that a mere boundary dispute between a [South] American republic and an established European colony could possibly violate the Monroe Doctrine.

Logical failings were of no consequence to the country's legislators in 1895, however. The full rot of the American political system had come to fruition in the early months of that year. In January the Supreme Court invalidated most of the Sherman Antitrust Act, with the tacit complicity of the Attorney General. In February Cleveland, "made a private gold-buying deal with J.P. Morgan and August Belmont. Forcing the President to accept harsh terms, the two bankers netted themselves a windfall profit of some $7 million within a matter of hours."

[O]n April 8 the Supreme Court declared a federal income tax on landed property an invalid "assault upon capital" and ultimately decided on May 20, in one of the worst decisions in Court history, that no federal income tax was valid. … Millions of Americans, thrown into yet another spasm of rage, now saw their worst suspicions confirmed — the government, the laws, the Constitution itself, were no longer the people's. The rich and the privileged had appropriated everything, and the Supreme Court had become their shameless tool.

In short, Cleveland & the parties needed a war, and they needed it now. Cleveland put facilitating war with England in the hands of one Richard Olney. Olney's risible letter to England on the Venezuela issue said that if the British refused arbitration, the U.S., "would conclude that the British had committed an 'invasion and conquest of Venezuelan territory.'" For themeselves, the Brits "noted, correctly, that Monroe's Doctrine had undergone a 'strange development' in Olney's hands and that the disputed frontier of Venezuela 'has nothing to do with any questions dealt with by President Monroe.'"

England's defiance of Cleveland's nonsensical claims whipped the country at large into a proper jingo fury. The people may have had problems with the oligarchy, but they would damned before they'd roll over for England.

It was only the movings of Imperial Germany that caused England to turn away from its raving, unhinged former colonies. However, as Karp notes, the damage had been done.

With his Venezuela adventure Cleveland had forced a major breach in America's traditional foreign policy; he had endorsed with the prestige of the presidency the proposition that it was America's duty to right wrongs abroad; he had laid sweeping claim to American hegemony in Latin America. Most important, he had revealed to the nation's political leaders that the American people could indeed be diverted from their domestic concerns if the right sort of foreign crusade was offered.

One thing that has not yet been discussed in this diary, but that Karp makes very clear in his book, is that the media of the time were totally complicit in the designs of the political leadership. The press was totally partisan and with both parties agitating for war, there was no voice of reason in the media. It is sometimes advanced that the media were the driving force behind the Spanish-American War, and the McKinley acted reluctantly, but in response to great popular outcry. As Karp will later show, this is not how it happened at all.

tag: books

Books: The Politics of War | Introduction

2005-01-30T13:46:00.000-08:00

Note: Part of my writings aggregation project. First post on The Politics of War in my dKos diary.

In the August 2003 issue of Harper's Lewis Lapham used a brief discussion of the fiasco in Iraq (and its hoodwinking casus belli) to recommend a book and bring to light some of the facts that led to an even more deplorable foreign boondoggle; the Spanish-American war. The book is The Politics of War by Walter Karp.

As Lapham so ably notes:

The Politics of War brings to bear the clarity of hindsight on the chicanery of the present, and by so doing answers questions never asked by the Wall Street Journal or dreamed of in the philosophy of CNN. Just as Operation Iraqi Freedom was not about the rescue of the Iraqi people, so also the Spanish-American War was not about "the sacred cause of Cuban independence," and our entry into World War I not about making the world "safe for democracy." Presidents Wilson and McKinley sought to punish foreign crimes against humanity (the ones committed by villains in Brussels and Havana) in order to make America safe for the domestic crimes against humanity committed by fine, upstanding, corporate gentlemen in Boston and Chicago. If by 1890 the Industrial Revolution had made America rich, so also it had alerted the electorate to the unequal division of the spoils. People had begun to notice the loaded dice in the hand of the railroad and banking monopolies, the tax burden shifted from capital to labor. A severe depression in the winter of 1893-94 brought with it widespread unemployment, vicious strikes in the Pennsylvania steel mills and West Virginia coal mines, hobo armies on the march in the Ohio Valley and the Appalachian Mountains. The demand for social and political reform prompted the angry stirring of a Populist movement across the prairies of the Middle West, and as a cure for the distemper of an aroused citizenry—"something," in the words of an alarmed U.S. senator, to knock the "pus" out of this "anarchistic, socialistic and populistic boil"—the McKinley Administration came up with war in Cuba, the conquest of the Philippines, the annexation of Puerto Rico, and an imperialist foreign policy deemed "essential to the greatness of every splendid people," necessary "to the strength and dignity of any nation."

I recently picked up the book and I can attest (having read 100-odd pages) that it is a sweeping history and indictment of the politics of the late 19th century. As embroiled as the US now is in the affairs of the world, it is hard to imagine just how antithetical our 19th century forerunners would have found our current international disposition. Indeed, the 'splendid little war' that launched American imperialism was the most stark, contrived and (at the time) un-American reversals of our country's foreign and domestic policy.

My next 14 diary entries will cover the chapters in the book and my thoughts on them as I read through. This book is important for two reasons. First it reminds us of how cynical incumbents are and how desperate they are to hold on to their power. This is not a tendency that is particular to any party. As Kos has pointed out the current minority leader in the senate is running on his ability to funnel federal dollars to his home state more effectively than his rival could. It is a political fact that incumbents and power brokers will do whatever they think gives them the best chance at retaining their seat.

Howard Dean has pointed out that for some time now the Dems in Washington have been engaged in little more than damage control. As a result, they largely hold on to the power they have and propose little inspiring or principled legislation. The chapters of the book decsribe how the Democrats of an earlier age engaged in similar, though far more cynical, behavior.

The second reason this book is important is noted by Karp himself in the preface; for an unknown reason, most historians treat foreign & domestic affairs as entirely separate matters. This is both strange and unfortunate. As Karp puts it:

[N]o substantial connections have ever been made between the turbulent domestic politics of the [Gilded] age and the increasingly ambitious foreign politics of that age. It is as if they were two separate historical sequences, each flowing through its own watertight channel, one labeled "domestic" and the other "foreign."
Such is the was American history — ideological, Marxist history excepted — has come to be written. The diplomatic historian traces the history of foreign affairs as if domestic politics were offstage disturbances; the historian of domestic politics treats the explosions of war as if they were offstage disturbances. The historian who copes with both in the confines of a single book puts them into alternate chapters, as if it were virtually unthinkable that domestic and foreign politics could possibly be elements of a single unified history.
I say "as if" because no one, so far as I know, has ever argued explicitly that foreign affairs and domestic affairs could not possibly be related. Stated baldly, the proposition is absurd. Were it true, we would have to believe, for example, that Presidents who have faced a mounting sea of troubles at home have nonetheless conducted their foreign policy without the slightest regard for those troubles. We would have to believe, in other words, that individual American Presidents were themselves divided into watertight compartments, one labeled "domestic" and the other "foreign." We would have to believe, too, that public men faced with a dangerously divided country could not possibly want to see it united by a patriotic struggle against a foreign foe; that men of power forced to cope with bitter and burning domestic questions would not wish to change the question before the country by pushing foreign affairs forward. Such propositions are not only contrary to common sense, they are falsified by the overwhelming evidence of history, for the political history of mankind records innumerable examples of rulers using foreign affairs for domestic ends.

Walter Karp, The Politics of War (Franklin Square Press, 1973, 2003), xv-xvi.

tag: books

Books: The Politics of War | Chapter One

2005-01-30T13:30:00.000-08:00

Note: In the four years I've been blogging, I've contributed to a number of different sites, both my own and others, but never kept a single storehouse of all my various writings. Some are clearly lost in the ether, but I hope to find and aggregate as many as I can here. Some, like those on PolState I'm content to leave where they are, but others like this one from my Daily Kos diary, I'd like to keep. There are two other posts on this book that I posted to my diary that seem to have disappeared. Not finished digging however. And I need to call Stu to get access to the FE posts. Some good pre-Iraq thinking done there as I recall.

This was originally posted to my dKos diary on January 16, 2004.

Chapter 1 of The Politics of War covers the political turmoil that confronted the two major parties from the 1890 elections through the 1894 elections. 1890 heralded the end of the strong party identity that most voters had held since the Civil War. By 1894 both parties had controlled the presidency and the congress only to be summarily and resoundingly rebuked by the electorate on election day. The turmoil was extended and affected both parties because instead of reacting to the demands for reform voiced by the electorate, the leaders of the parties fought tooth and nail against the people. This combative strategy led to the creation of the People's Party which, by 1894, was in a position to sweep away the Democratic Party almost entirely.

Until 1890 the American electorate had been, for a generation, a predictable and readily managed body of voters. In the off-year election of 1890, however, they delivered a stunning rebuke to the long-dominant Republican Party, reducing its House majority to a mere rump of 88 representatives and sweeping the party out of power in states that had gone Republican since the first election of Abraham Lincoln.

Because the people had for a generation, 'voted as they shot,' in the Civil War, party leaders had become almost totally divorced from the concerns of the voters.

The electorate's fidelity to party enabled the leaders to pursue on the state and local levels corrupt and self-serving policies in the certain knowledge that exceedingly few of their supporters could stomach the prospect of voting for the rival party. It enabled them to overawe independent-minded politicians with crushing assaults on their disloyalty to the party that had chosen to advance them. Most important, it allowed the two national parties, for almost a generation, to keep significant economic issues out of the political arena — issues that might split a party organization and weaken its hold on the voters' elected representatives.

It would be the Republicans that later (under McKinley) got economic issues off the table with Spanish-American War. Until then the leaders of both parties would stop at literally nothing to thwart the collective will for reform coming from the voters. In contrast to the Democracy, the Republican Party was the principled, liberal party that had won the civil war, freed the slaves and extended (to a certain extent) long suppressed freedoms to them, and presided over the huge industrial expansion of the late 19th century. Yet by 1890 that expansion was over and the high tariffs that had for so long protected American industry now served only to enrich the business elites that reaped the excess profits from the protectionist policies.

By dispensing corrupt tariff favors, the [Republican] party leaders expected to enjoy not only the fruits of office but irresponsible oligarchic power, the power to control the dominant party in the country.
With these self-serving considerations in mind, what the Republican-controlled Congress did in 1890 had the quality of sheer, brazen impudence. Knowing full well the political risks they were running … the Republican leaders in Congress raised the tariff rates higher than ever, deliberately bestowing on the privileged manufacturers even greater windfall profits than they had previously enjoyed. That the Senate Republicans killed a House bill to protect Negro voting rights in the South in order to win votes for the 1890 tariff only underscored the waning virtue, to put it mildly, of the erstwhile party of Lincoln.

Voter disgust led to the ouster of the party of Lincoln in late 1890. However, their replacements would prove no better, if for different reasons. Even when handed control of the Congress and the Presidency in the 1894 election, the Democratic Party would do nothing to respond to voter calls for reform. Indeed the nomination of Grover Cleveland (a politician guaranteed not to enact any kind of reform, or almost any legislation at all) led to the creation of the People's Party.

The Democracy was helpless because it was in many ways the inverse of the Republican Party. Where the Republicans were organized into a quasi-national party, the Democrats were simply a party of the opposition. That meant that Democratic politicians from different parts of the country stood in polar opposition to their ostensible co-partisans on the major political issues of the day.

In its essential, stripped-down, irreducible historic core, the Democratic Party was a mere congeries of local parties, principally a number of urban strongholds in the North and several state-ruling "rings," as they were known, in the old Confederacy. Each local party satrapy survived by making appropriate local gestures to its voters, often with scant regard for the contrary gestures made by party colleagues elsewhere.

Therefore, in order to stay a party at all the Democrats, when in power, had to attempt to accomplish as little as humanly possible. In contrast to the Republicans who refused to take action, the Democrats were unable to take action. To defend such an indefensible legislative strategy (and thus attempt to retain legitimacy) the Dems resorted to pure bluster.

Since almost any national legislative program would swiftly sunder so motley a band of political allies, the central national tenet of the Democrats was the principle of doing nothing, which party leaders often described as "True Democracy." Democrats dressed up the principle in a number of wrappings. They preached it as the very essence of constitutional rule: "states' rights … home rule" and "strict construction" of the Constitution ostensibly forbade the general goverment from doing almost anything.

It was at this time that the Republicans first adopted the principles of what would become known as the large policy. With no desire to respond to the calls for reform, party leaders decided that their course of action lay in distracting the populace from their domestic concerns. To find a national cause big enough to sweep the people into a proper jingo fury, they reached back half a century to the concept of manifest destiny and adopted it as a part of the Republican Party platform in 1892.

For their part the Democrats managed to so infuriate the populace that in 1894 they were electorally annihilated in the off-year elections.

[The Republicans] expected to ride the depression to victory anyway, since Cleveland and his party had performed the singular feat of alienating virtually every major category of voter. Even so, the results of the 1894 elections were electrifying. It remains to this day the most sweeping rebuke of any President and his party ever suffered in an off-year election. Punished by a volatile electorate, the Democrats lost a total of 113 seats in Congress. In the Northeast, the Democrats' congressional contingent was reduced from 88 to 9; in twenty-four states the party no longer had congressional representation at all. In the South, despite the Democrats' increased use of terror and corruption, the People's Party now stood on the verge of victory throughout the Old Confederacy. Whatever else lay in store for the country, the post-Civil War party system had been destroyed forever.

I hope to make the chapter reviews a little shorter than this one, but initial chapter does a great job of laying out the political turmoil that led party leaders to attempt to wag the dog. For truly, that is the only way to describe the course of action upon which McKinley would launch the country. Throughout the book, I have been most struck by the total contempt in which the populace was held by the politicians they elected. Rather than as representatives and agents of the collective will, congressmen saw themselves as rulers of the country. The will of the people was to be fought at every turn in order to hold onto the levers of power. The idea that goverment in general was in no way responsible to the people was to be developed further over the ensuing decade. People who demanded that the goverment fulfill its responsibility and be more responsive to collective will would be derided as beggers. At every turn the reforms that would be enacted were made with as little good faith as possible, and the truly principled politicians would lose many more battles than they won.

The poltical corollaries between that age and this make the book endlessly fascinating for me. I'll attempt to draw some of parallels that I see more clearly in the future, but for the moment, I wanted to lay out Karp's presentation of the facts with a minimum of input.

Daily Kos and other sites that are gaining popularity and noteriety could become that modern day muckrakers that forced the issues of reform to the surface in the early years of the 20th century. The book lays out well just how steep the uphill slope is for anyone that wishes to make things better for the majority of the people.

tag: books

Reflections on Michael Powell

2005-01-30T13:12:00.000-08:00

Note: Dredging Google's cache of the FE, I came across this post on an op-ed of Michael Powell's from July 28, 2003.

Michael Powell makes one good point today. "Yet there is a distressing lack of consensus, and even some basic misunderstandings, over exactly what problem Congress is trying to solve." The rest of his opinion is a rambling attempt to refute the opposition to the FCC's recent rule change. He cites some statistics and zooms in and out from micro to macro perspectives of the national media marketplace. In the process he does more to discredit his own ambition to loosen national market ownership rules than to help it. Let's go to the videotape.

If the problem is lack of diversity among the media, then the fact is that the United States has the most diverse media marketplace in the world. There are more media outlets, owners, variety and diversity now than at any point in our nation's history. Moreover, our nation's media landscape will not become significantly more concentrated as a result of changes to the F.C.C. rules.

Powell plays a nice rhetorical game here. Has anyone said that diversity is a problem with media control? Perhaps, but the word "diversity" means many different things in many different situations. In the media realm it could connote the number of different owners, the size of owners, the race or gender of owners or the number of different media outlets controlled by an owner. As we shall see later, the word control is also very slippery in Mr. Powell's hands. In the final sentence of this graf, Powell makes a nice declarative but meaningless statement. "[O]ur nation's media landscape will not become significantly more concentrated as a result of changes to the F.C.C. rules." Says who? According to Powell this is true, but we know that since he's the one promoting the rule change. However, to blunt his critics, Powell throws in the universal qualifier of "significantly." Very serious and like-minded people can disagree about the meaning of that word. Its effect is to render this sentence meaningless.

Some say the problem is media concentration, and point out that only five companies control 80 percent of what we see and hear. In reality, those five companies own only 25 percent of more than 300 broadcast, satellite and cable channels, but because of their popularity, 80 percent of the viewing audience chooses to watch them. Popularity is not synonymous with monopoly. A competitive media marketplace must be our fundamental goal, but do we really want government to regulate what is popular?

Huh? Powell here diverges into a question nobody asked, or is asking. This is a Rumsfeldian quirk that seems to be seeping into other realms of this administration. One of the reasons I oppose the rule change is precisely what Powell states. That five companies control 80% of what the viewing audience chooses to watch. I don't want that number to climb any higher through mergers or cross-ownership. Powell points out that popularity is not synonymous with monopoly. That's true because the government prevents media companies from leveraging their popularity into monopoly by virtue of (among other things) the market cap. The piece now diverges into a truly risible screed.

Much of the pressure to restrict ownership, I fear, is motivated not by worries about concentration, but by a desire to affect content. And some proposals to reduce concentration risk having government promote or suppress particular viewpoints. The solution proposed by some in Congress is to rescind the ownership cap and restore the status quo. These are the same ownership rules that governed during the time of widespread public discontent with television. It is hard to see how the status quo will produce the results some in Congress say they want.

One harbinger of logical doom is when an author starts flinging pronouns with abandon. Who are these insidious "some" that seek to curtail our freedoms with their devious proposals? Powell doesn't tell us. The final sentence of this pronouns section is a masterpiece, "the reults some in Congress say they want." I defy you to explain what the fuck he is talking about.

Powell then drops his ultimate justification for forcing this rule change. Whenever he gets pressed on these issues, he pulls this bad-boy out. "Keeping the national ownership cap on television stations at 35 percent is also a rule previously struck down by the courts." He does not cite a case or the circumstances. Please, Mr. Powell, tell me the case so I can look it up and read just which court threw out the FCC's 35% national ownership restrictions. And if it threw out the 35%, why would that same court allow a 45% restriction?

Powell now throws in a little sleight of hand. "Yet not one of the four major networks (CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox) owns more than 3 percent of the nation's television stations." This is just disingenuous. While "technically true" (a favortie buzzterm in the administration of late) it seeks only to deceive. All four major networks as cited by Powell are themselves owned by gigantic conglomerates that in turn own massive amounts of media outlets. CBS=Viacom; NBC=GE; ABC=Disney; Fox=News Corp. These individual sites tout their media dominance to the investor.

Taking a right turn, Powell now concerns himself with the smaller markets in the country, and identifies an actual problem with FCC ownership rules.

In any case, the national cap does not limit the number of stations one can own; it limits only the number of people one can reach. If a company owns a handful of stations in populous markets like New York or Los Angeles, it will bump into the cap quickly. But if the stations are in smaller markets, it can own many more. This oddity is why so-called local affiliate groups own many more stations nationally than the networks. Fox Network, for example, is over the 35 percent cap with 35 stations, but Sinclair Broadcasting is well under the cap (at 14 percent) with 56 stations. One can see why many local broadcast groups support the national cap — it allows them to own more stations than the networks. It does not prevent a company with headquarters in Atlanta from owning stations in Muncie, Ind., no matter what numerical limit is drawn. Such has been the case for decades.

Does Powell propose to fix what is quite clearly an issue within the smaller markets of the country? Or does he feel that allowing companies to aquire even greater dominance in the rural areas of the country will actually help this problem? I don't know, he doesn't say. Somehow dominance in local markets by single owners is supposed to make us want these companies to get bigger.

"At the same time, the current debate has ignored a disturbing trend the new rules will do much to abate: the movement of high-quality content from free over-the-air broadcast television to cable and satellite." How will allowing the companies that own these large sections of the media to own a greater share of what we see induce them to put it on their free outlets and not their cable outlets? I just don't follow. Finally, Powell ends his descent into madness with this bit of dribble.

Quality prime-time viewing, long the strong suit of free television, has begun to erode, as demonstrated by HBO's 109 Emmy nominations this year. Indeed, for the first time ever, cable surpassed free TV in prime-time viewing share last year. If they can reach more of the market, broadcasters will be able to better compete with cable and satellite.

HBO is owned by AOL/TimeWarner. Have a little fun clicking on those divisions to see just how many companies AOL/TimeWaner owns. My favorite is Time, Inc. Tell me, Mr. Powell, if AOL gets to merge with Viacom, how will that allow CBS to take a bite out of HBO's 109 Emmy nominations?

All of this demonstrates that media ownership is no easy issue. When striving to promote the public interest, we must also honor the values of the First Amendment. That's why, following the 1996 mandate of Congress, the F.C.C. armed itself with the facts and spent an exhaustive amount of time and resources to strike this constitutionally important balance. Let's have a national debate, but let's keep it in focus.

A wonderful end to a litany of disingenuous twaddle.

tag: media

Iraq's Election

2005-01-30T13:08:00.000-08:00

And so Iraq held its first election under the US occupation. I'm eager to see the full results come in for two reasons. First, it will be very interesting to see who voted. According to the CNN story, turnout varied highly by region and by ethinicity. Second, I am curious as to which slate of candidates polled the best because as far as I can tell each had fairly different ideas of how best to move Iraq forward. I will, as always, be depending greatly on Professor Cole for this information. I note that Bush has already deemed the election a "resounding success," which is about the level of detatched, grandiose language one has come to expect from him. The actual act of holding an election is not the barometer here. Recall that before the invasion, Saddam held an election in late 2002 and polled quite well. Of course, that election was a joke because Saddam was a tyrant before the election as he was after it. The Ukraine also held an election late last year. Er, two elections. Shit even Uzbekistan held an election.

Anyone can hold an election, but it is the circumstances that lead up to and follow an election that give it credibility. The pre-election circumstances in Iraq were very much a mixed bag. On the ballot were slates of candidates that represent different ideas about what Iraq is and where it should go. Violence and brinksmanship, though, disrupted the pre-election conditions. Violence against candidates was so bad that they were instructed to keep their names and their candidacies a secret, so it's difficult to call today's polling "free and fair." The withdrawal of nearly all Sunni candidates from the ballot, whether for legitimate concerns or simply in an attempt to cancel the elections, further tainted the pre-election ground.

But still the election went forward. And a parliament that would be thought laughably discredited in any western country will convene to ostensibly do the work of its people. It is during this period that we'll see if this election was credible at all. Expectations are that Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani's party will do quite well indeed today. Al-Sistani has some very strong and very independent-minded ideas about the future of Iraq. Ideas that will not sit well with our own mullahs here in the US. I don't expect that Bush will allow any credibility to take root around this parliament. For were they to be left to their own devices, they might start to act uppity. Nothing pisses off Bush more than lesser people getting uppity. John Negroponte and his death squads will ensure that the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate and that the new Iraqi constitution (which this parliament was elected to write) look eerily similar to the current ruling law.

Those latter two predictions are why I think this election (tainted though it was) was important. Some measure of the Iraqi populace (hopefully a majority) has put its collective faith in a specific group of people (none American) to turn this situation around. How that faith is abused and leads to civil war is the story over the next 6 months to a year. Let us remember, then, that it could have been different. As with pre-war preparation, post-war stability operations and the transfer of sovereignty, this could have been a moment when something genuinely positive occured, but did not.

tag: iraq

Books: Blink

2005-01-29T13:59:00.000-08:00

I'm a huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell's writing. His article The Art of Failure was, at that time, the most thought provoking piece of magazine writing I'd read in years. Since then I've eagerly looked for Gladwell's byline in each issue of the New Yorker. A couple of weeks ago, Gladwell published his second book, Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

Blink is concerned with the very smallest components of our everyday lives — the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that spontaneously arise whenever we meet a new person or confront a complex situation or have to make a decision under conditions of stress.

To me, the most interesting part of his discussion concerns the messages our faces send unconsciously depending on our reaction to a situation. He had previously written about this in a 2002, The Naked Face.

Perhaps the most famous involuntary expression is what Ekman has dubbed the Duchenne smile, in honor of the nineteenth-century French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne, who first attempted to document the workings of the muscles of the face with the camera. If I ask you to smile, you' ll flex your zygomatic major. By contrast, if you smile spontaneously, in the presence of genuine emotion, you' ll not only flex your zygomatic but also tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis, which is the muscle that encircles the eye. It is almost impossible to tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis, on demand, and it is equally difficult to stop it from tightening when we smile at something genuinely pleasurable. This kind of smile "does not obey the will," Duchenne wrote. "Its absence unmasks the false friend." When we experience a basic emotion, a corresponding message is automatically sent to the muscles of the face. That message may linger on the face for just a fraction of a second, or be detectable only if you attached electrical sensors to the face, but It's always there. Silvan Tomkins once began a lecture by bellowing, "The face is like the penis!" and this is what he meant — that the face has, to a large extent, a mind of its own. This doesn't mean we have no control over our faces. We can use our voluntary muscular system to try to suppress those involuntary responses. But, often, some little part of that suppressed emotion — the sense that I'm really unhappy, even though I deny it — leaks out. Our voluntary expressive system is the way we intentionally signal our emotions. But our involuntary expressive system is in many ways even more important: it is the way we have been equipped by evolution to signal our authentic feelings.
"You must have had the experience where somebody comments on your expression and you didn't know you were making it,"Ekman says. "Somebody tells you, "What are you getting upset about?' "Why are you smirking?' You can hear your voice, but you can't see your face. If we knew what was on our face, we would be better at concealing it. But that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. Imagine if there were a switch that all of us had, to turn off the expressions on our face at will. If babies had that switch, we wouldn't know what they were feeling. They'd be in trouble. You could make an argument, if you wanted to, that the system evolved so that parents would be able to take care of kids. Or imagine if you were married to someone with a switch? It would be impossible. I don't think mating and infatuation and friendships and closeness would occur if our faces didn't work that way."
Ekman slipped a tape taken from the O.J. Simpson trial into the VCR. It was of Kato Kaelin, Simpson's shaggy–haired house guest, being examined by Marcia Clark, one of the prosecutors in the case. Kaelin sits in the witness box, with his trademark vacant look. Clark asks a hostile question. Kaelin leans forward and answers softly. "Did you see that?" Ekman asked me. I saw nothing, just Kato being Kato — harmless and passive. Ekman stopped the tape, rewound it, and played it back in slow motion. On the screen, Kaelin moved forward to answer the question, and in that fraction of a second his face was utterly transformed. His nose wrinkled, as he flexed his levator labii superioris, alaeque nasi. His teeth were bared, his brows lowered. "It was almost totally A.U. nine," Ekman said. "It's disgust, with anger there as well, and the clue to that is that when your eyebrows go down, typically your eyes are not as open as they are here. The raised upper eyelid is a component of anger, not disgust. It's very quick." Ekman stopped the tape and played it again, peering at the screen. "You know, he looks like a snarling dog."

As Gladwell discusses in the book, our brains catch and react these fleeting expressions. The overall concept is something he calls "thin–slicing." That is, our brains evaluate people and situations very quickly, and that subconscious evaluation greatly affects our own behavior for that limited time. With training, we can learn to not only recognize these reactions in ourselves and others, but alter our response to them.

Needless to say, I enthusiastically recommend Blink. The overall concept Gladwell discusses in the book is something he calls "thin&$8211slicing." That is, our brains often evaluate people and situations very quickly, and that subconscious evaluation greatly affects our own behavior for a limited time. Like Gladwell's previous book, The Tipping Point, Blink is not a rigorous scientific study of a phenomenon. Both, however, are highly though provoking and great quick reads.

tag: books

Just Let It Go

2005-01-28T16:03:00.000-08:00

I haven't been following the most recent NHL lockout very closely because I think the league should be shut down completely and restarted free of the tragic missteps it has taken over the past 12 years. I grew up playing hockey in Massachusetts. I lived and breathed the sport for close to 20 years and played yearround sometimes on three teams at the same time. My dad and I logged thousands of miles in the car around New England and up to Canada. He did the same with my older brother and younger sister. The pond in our backyard was where we all learned to play the game. I get chills when I think about the Miracle on Ice and furious when the name Ulf Samuelsson is mentioned or written. Do you know where the Pet Brick is in Slap Shot?

The point is that it wasn't easy to turn my back on the NHL, but the league gave me no choice. I wrote about all of this a while ago, but an article on ESPN today has me thinking about it again. The owners are without question at fault in this case. One example, the New York Rangers signed Bobby Holik to a 5 year $45 million contract in July of 2002. Bobby Holik is a lot of things, but in no sense is he worth $9m a year. Owners like this don't need a salary cap, they need a semblance of intelligence. Hockey sense, you might say. Why would you pay Holik $45m when you could have had Iginla for less money? Again, this is just an example, but it illustrates why the game is so terrible and former die-hard fans like myself don't miss it at all. Foolish contracts are only a small part of the problem. The game expanded too quickly and gleefully ditched its small market Canadian franchises for bizarre locations in the southeast. Explain again why the Hartford Whalers moved to Carolina. These combined to dilute the talent pool and alienate fans in all markets. The league has teams in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. It just recently put one back in Minnesota after the disgraceful move to Dallas.

So blow it up, I say. Let the owners and players that are serious about a league put out a new product. All the needed elements are at the ready; bad businessmen are the only ones standing in the way.

tag: sports

My Inner Daffy

2005-01-28T11:49:00.000-08:00

Some great work being done here by Professor Anderson (via Prof. DeLong). An increasing number of people on the right have fallen under Grover Norquist's anti-taxation spell. Some hold their anti-taxation opinions quite genuinely and deeply, most others simply nod in agreement when someone screams "It's your money." When I get my paycheck, I have a very strong reaction to the numbers on the piece of paper. There's the gross income number, and then further down the page, there's my actual takehome pay. It seems to me, when I'm looking at that page, that I'm taking home far too little (though still the majority) of the gross income. I'll call this my Daffy Duck reaction.

However, it isn't all mine. And this simple fact is what sends Norquist and many others into their little paroxysms of rage. When I look at my paycheck I think about the work that I put in to earn my money. And therein lies the rub. I did not labor in a vacuum. A highly structured framework is in place; it is that framework that allows me to earn anything at all. Freaky rightists will hollar that I believe very deeply that the state is entitled to tax all of my income. This is laughably silly, and made even more so by the gritted teeth and sweaty, quivering hand with which it is declared. Lunatics aside, this framework, and the right of the state to tax us for it, is the founding premise of our country. Simply:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Those are some pretty lofty goals. And they don't come cheap. The preamble also enshrines the necessary balance between the state's right (granted to it by those that live under this Constitution) to create a framework through taxation and everyone's inalienable right to the Blessings of Liberty. What is the right apportionment between state and individual? There is no single answer. This concept is as lost on the leftist central planners as it is on the rightist proponents of infanticide. (Mr. NORQUIST: I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.)

The reason we have the political forum is to continually negotiate that balance. Government is a heavy hand, and it is easy for it to overreach. Corruption is everywhere in our society and we must watch for it in both the public and private sector. I think about corruption when I look at my paycheck. How many of my tax dollars are being pissed away? Some, certainly. Some are being directed to projects that I think are fruitless or, worse, counterproductive. But that's why I vote, why I'm politically active. I think our framework is pretty good and I'd like to make it better. The Constitution sets the bar for our society very high, and it's taken us a long time to get it hitting on all 6 of its cylinders. The price of living in the US is the difference between gross and net income. Gross income is the total earnings from both my labor and that of the society I live in. My Daffy Duck side would dearly love that this were not so, but unfortunately for him and those like him, it is.

tag: politics

Fafnir on PrivatizationPrivatePersonalAccounts

2005-01-27T16:31:00.000-08:00

As only Fafnir can snark:

Q: I ended up with crap stocks, and my private account went empty early. What do I do?
A: You run out of money and starve. But you'll starve in freedom, because you OWN your empty personal account, which means you OWN your starvation!
Q: I feel so free and hungry!
A: A wise man once said it is better to live in freedom than to die in slavery … the slavery of a secure retirement.
Q: Give me liberty AND death!
A: That's the spirit!
Q: Wheeee! *hack hack wheeze*

tag: politics

Advice and Consent

2005-01-27T15:38:00.000-08:00

I'd like to use this post by New Donkey to expand on the concept of "advice and consent" a little more generally. ND notes at the beginning of his post, "I generally think presidents, even those I really dislike, should have significant leeway on cabinet appointments." His opinion is the one that is generally held by most politically active people. The post is about why the current case of Alberto Gonzalez is one in which he doesn't support confirmation. Now if I was a senator I would vote against Gonzalez on principle. That is, I am against torture in principle. The specific caveat to this principle is the "terrorist with a nuclear bomb" scenario. But that is a very specific and rare (almost to the point of non-existence) scenario. I would also vote against Gonzalez on the grounds of his relevant experience and overall competence. Gonzalez (and Rice for that matter) are fairly simple cases of being totally unqualified for the positions for which they've been nominated and only the saddest political hacks would vote to confirm.

Those are these specific cases, though, and I think senators should generally take a much tougher stance on cabinet appointments than they do. Presidents should have leeway, yes, but not so much that they can just install any crony or fool (or combination) they choose. As ND puts it:

It's a familiar argument, but worth repeating: the AG is not just the president's top lawyer, and not just head of a cabinet agency; he or she is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, supervising a vast array of prosecutors, investigators, and specialty cops. The AG has enormous power to help or hinder the pursuit of justice in this country, every single day. Sure, every AG reports to the president, but I cannot remember an AG nominee who is simultaneously so ill-equipped to show independence from, and influence in, the White House (Bobby Kennedy was obviously not independent from his brother, but he sure as hell wielded a lot of influence with him).

ND's description of the position of AG is dead on, but it is also true of almost all of the other cabinet and many non-cabinet positions. This is, after all, the reason the Senate as a body is given the power to veto nominations. Since these positions affect the broader nation as a whole, these Secretaries must be acceptable to a majority of the people's representatives. And no, just because the majority votes for a candidate, it does not mean that they by proxy approve of every nomination said candidate puts forward.

Does the Secretary of the Treasury have any less a significant role in the US economy than does the AG in the justice system? I would wager that he has a greater relative influence. Secretary of Defense? Homeland Security? And yet for some reason, these secretaries are allowed to pass through, no matter how embarassingly unqualified, no matter how much ruin they bring upon the nation, in the name of presidential leeway. Unless, of course, they hired an illegal immigrant to do chores around their house.

In the case of the current balance of power in the Senate, we know that all nominations are on the fast track to confirmation anyway, so there's absolutely no reason for a Dem senator to vote in favor of a single nominee about whom they have even the slightest reservation. In the case of both Gonzalez and Rice, filibusters are definitely in order. US Senators have some of the best job security in the nation. Wouldn't it be nice if they acted like it?

tag: politics

WWRW? Not If You Want to Win

2005-01-27T11:34:00.000-08:00

Three issues with this post from Bull Moose. Quoth the Moose:

The Moose has also observed a certain cannibalistic tendency emerging on the left that is attempting to purge fellow Democrats who don't follow the party line. The latest example is the suggestion on some prominent lefty blogs to run a primary opponent against Senator Lieberman to punish him for his support for Rice's nomination and the war.

Is the Moose unaware that this cannibalistic tendency did not begin with the lefty part of the party after the election? It was not a proudly liberal Dem that penned:

When liberals talk about America's new era, the discussion is largely negative -- against the Iraq war, against restrictions on civil liberties, against America's worsening reputation in the world. In sharp contrast to the first years of the cold war, post-September 11 liberalism has produced leaders and institutions -- most notably Michael Moore and MoveOn -- that do not put the struggle against America's new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world. As a result, the Democratic Party boasts a fairly hawkish foreign policy establishment and a cadre of politicians and strategists eager to look tough. But, below this small elite sits a Wallacite grassroots that views America's new struggle as a distraction, if not a mirage. Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11 era, American liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.

Second issue with the Moose's post:

Lefties may have their differences with Senator Lieberman, but he has loyally served the party as its vice presidential nominee and he is a deeply honorable and decent man. Don't succumb to the temptation to become just a mirror image of right wing Freepers. Left-wing cannibalism - an infantile disorder.

There is no question that Holy Joe is a proud Democrat. Unfortunately as (most famously) his performance during the 2000 recount and (most recently) his bashing of Howard Dean on Fox show, Lieberman doesn't understand how to play the current political game. As such, he is unsuited to his current position as a spokesman for the centrist wing of the party. He is not, as the Moose correctly notes, a bad Democrat however. What he is is a pliable politician as well as an unquestioned vote for a Democratic Majority Leader in the Senate. And it is for those two reasons that I wouldn't mind seeing a primary challenge to Holy Joe. Being a pliable politician, Joementum could use a swift kick in the rear from the Democratic base. Joe will cruise to reelection in the mid-terms, but he needs a strong tug from his CT grass roots to reorient him. He needs to be reminded how his constituents really feel and get the bubble of DC politics that surrounds him popped. These two failings a strong primary challenge can correct.

I disagree with Kos that Lieberman must be ousted since I think Joe's lesser political qualities can be corrected, but I also wouldn't shed a tear if Joe were replaced by a Dem who understood the game a little better. That brings me to my third issue with Moose's post:

When Democrats either nominate a Chairman or take a position they should ask themselves "WWRW" - What Would Rove Want. Far more than most D's, the Moose understands the cunning and deviousness of the adversary. Don't make things easier for them.

And yet, Joe Lieberman is precisely what Rove does want. Joe has been rolled by the adversary's cunning deviousness more than any other prominent Dem. Even when the right telegraphs the pass, Joe is unable to see what's happening. Indeed, Joe grounds himself in whatever talking points the RNC produces. He takes those points, softens them a bit and calls himself a centrist. He does this because it ensures that he get invited on the talk shows and fawning comments from the editorial boards. Above all, though, he does it because he thinks it wins him elections in CT. A grassroots challenge in his home state will disabuse him of this notion. Like many DC Dems, Joe needs to reconnect with his constituency.

Dems must absolutely stop this nonsense of trying to decide which position or person will cause Karl Rove to play nice. Rove's game plan is the same regardless of what the opposition says or does. Negotiation is not a part of that plan; not with Democrats or Republicans.

Building a national party does not begin with coopting the talking points of the radical element that is now in power. It begins with opening up our party to the voices of the faithful in each and every state. In essence, it means getting the DC out of our representatives in DC. Asking WWRW means putting more DC in our representatives.

tag: democrats

Al From, Caricature

2004-12-08T15:58:00.000-08:00

In today's WSJ, Al From pens a piece that screams, "follow me, I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about!" From has been beating the exact same drum for a very long time (these are just the most recent examples), and his advice would be very good were it not for one small detail. National Dems have taken his advice for more than a decade and in that time have gone from controlling all three legislative bodies to controlling none and losing more ground with each cycle. From has done great damage to our party with his (now yearlong) trench warfare against Dean, so I'm going to jump in a foxhole here and fire some shots back. One quick note. From lost his way when Clinton actually won the presidency. Since '92 From's sole ambition has been to hold on to his leadership position in the party. Were Dean to approach From and ask him to be his chief advisor, From would immediately become Dean's lapdog. Dean shouldn't do this, my point is only that From's only desire is power. Dean's threat to him is that he, Dean, knows From is full of shit and won't give him the time of day. On to the From op-ed.

The blood-red electoral map Democrats have been staring at since election night makes one thing clear: If we want to be a majority party again, the only road back runs through the heartland. In the blue states, 2004 was a close contest. In the red states, it was a bloodbath. Down the stretch, Democrats didn't even contest 23 of the 31 states Bush won. As a result, he won 202 electoral votes without lifting a finger. Republicans now hold 39 of 46 Senate seats in those uncontested states. [emphasis added]

Leading off From tells us that, shocker, in order to win back the presidency, Democrats need to win the heartland. BRILLIANT! What are those states? Iowa, Ohio, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana. Hey, aren't those the swing states? So From is telling us we need to run our hardest in the swing states. BRILLIANT! Honestly does it get any more idiotic than this. The location where this election was most hotly contested is the location that is crucial to winning back the presidency. Genius.

Let Republicans be the party of Washington. Now that Republicans control the government, we're the outsiders, and we should take up the reform mantle that elected Bill Clinton in the '90s. We need to be the party of change, protecting our principles, not our programs.

Now that Republicans control the government? Now? NOW? This is perhaps the clearest indication that From simply cuts and pastes his little memos, and has done so for a very long time. Does anyone here not know who has controlled both houses of Congress for a decade (let's not kid ourselves about the Jeffords interregnum)? Hands up. And all of government for 4 years? And did Kerry not pick up the 'reform mantle' in exactly the New Democrat way throughout the election? Indeed haven't the last 4 Democratic tickets been staffed by two New Democrats? Clinton, chair DLC. Gore, founding member DLC. Lieberman, chair DLC. Edwards, DLC wunderkind, Senate New Democrat Coalition. Kerry, DLC, Senate New Democrat Coalition. The most amusing aspect of the entire piece is the presumption that New Democrats (and the DLC ideas) are new at all. But, as I said, this is about power, not new ideas.

Put the same muscle into persuasion that we put into turnout. In Ohio, despite the best Democratic ground game in history, exit polls showed Republicans outnumbering Democrats by five points. We simply can't win a turnout war in red states, because the GOP has a bigger base there than we do. We should keep up our turnout efforts, but next time we also have to pour our energy, resources and best thinking into opening up a new front: changing voters' minds.

So we should make sure that our candidate gets out his message in states like Ohio. BRILLIANT! Of course, Kerry went to Ohio 36 times during the general election. Add to that the huge efforts by 527s and it's difficult to say that Dems weren't out there trying to persuade voters.

Some Democrats want to write off the red states, or pretend that the same old formula will make them turn blue. Joe Trippi wrote recently on this page that Democrats' top priority should be to play to our base because only the grass roots can save the Democratic Party. To be a grass-roots national party again, we have to realize that grass won't grow in the desert.

Doesn't that passage remind you of all the framing BushCo. did with Iraq-Al Qaeda in the runup to the invasion. Who wants to write off the red states? Certainly not Joe Trippi.

A party that ignores the needs of state and local parties is doomed. We must begin to invest aggressively in states we continually write off in national elections. If we don't, the decline of the party in these states will continue until we're non-existent. Look at the south.

Indeed, what Trippi gets and From misses is that the grassroots do indeed exist in the desert. And the Democrats in Arizona know a hell of a lot better than Al From on Pennsylvania Ave. does what Arizona voters want. That's the power of grassroots. What it isn't, most definitely, is the power of Al From's consulting job. Back to the caricature:

We believe the heartland is a prime target for Democrats, if we put our heart into it. Let's not forget: For all the talk these past four years of a nation hopelessly divided over guns, gay rights and abortion, Bill Clinton was able to carry a dozen red states in 1992 and 1996, with the same positions as Democrats today. The Democratic Leadership Council is teeming with red-state governors and other rising stars who likewise have figured out how to champion Democratic principles in hostile territory.

Once again Al tells us that we need to focus on swing states in order to win. Then he pulls something right out of his ass that I'd like to rub in his face. According to the DLC website, there are 15 New Dem governors. (To get the list enter 'governor' as position and hit search.) Throw out McGreevey and Musgrove since one has resigned and the other lost to bogeyman Haley Barbour. Of the 13, I'll give Al 6 that are in red states. Easley, NC; Holden, MO; Kernan, IN; Napolitano, AZ; Sebelius, KS; Warner, VA. I'm being curteous by ceding AZ to the red column. Six governors listed on their site does not a teeming bunch make. Indeed, most damning to me is that the list does not include Brian Schweitzer the Dem who just won the governor's mansion in Montana. A Dem that can win in MT? Now that's a new kind of Dem. Dare I say, a grassroots Dem, of the kind that can speak to voters in his state better than Al From. To return to the DLC's teeming horde of governors, I have another question. If these governors can champion democratic values in hostile territory, why couldn't governors Richardson, Holden & Vilsack deliver a victory for New Dems Kerry & Edwards on election day? If only those 3 New Dems had been able to effectively communicate the New Dem message of the New Dem ticket, we might have had a New Dem in the White House. Do people get more preposterous than Al From? As a former card carrying, literally, DLC member I am ashamed that my donations helped support what is now a very stale institution. I understand that Al is in a desperate fight to save his own power-brokering hide but he's going to have to come out with some better ammo than this drivel. Indeed, the DLC's inability to come to grips with the post-1992 world is what makes this fight for the DNC chair so important.

Dean on the DNC

2004-12-08T13:13:00.000-08:00

This is a power struggle. The consultants and insiders that control the DNC currently fear, above all, sharing or losing power over the DNC. They fear it far more than losing any number of national or local elections. That fear is currently manifested in the person of Howard Dean. Dean accomplished something that the insiders and consultants had long ago forsaken. His candidacy was built on regular people engaging in the political debate. Regular people are, in the opinion of both parties' elite, to be instructed for whom they should vote and about which issues they should care. They have a tremendous amount of disdain for the general populace because they think the populace is stupid. They'll take our money and our votes, but never our opinions or ideas. Dean as DNC chair would work to change that. There is a lot to mine in this short speech, but I think a couple of snippets hit on the theme I'm talking about here.

We cannot be a Party that seeks the presidency by running an 18-state campaign. We cannot be a party that cedes a single state, a single District, a single precinct, nor should we cede a single voter. ~~~ There are no red states or blue states, just American states. And if we can compete at all levels and in the most conservative parts of the country, we can win ... at any level and anywhere. People will vote for Democratic candidates in Texas, and Alabama, and Utah if we knock on their door, introduce ourselves, and tell them what we believe. ~~~ The pundits have said that this election was decided on the issue of moral values. I don't believe that. It is a moral value to provide health care. It is a moral value to educate our young people. The sense of community that comes from full participation in our Democracy is a moral value. Honesty is a moral value. ~~~ The second thing she said was, "The other reason we're with you is because evangelical Christians are people of deep conviction, and you're a person of deep conviction. I may not agree with you on everything, but what we want more than anything else from our government is that when something happens to our family or something happens to our country -- it's that the people in office have deep conviction."

There is great fear among the elites that Dean will win the chairmanship and actually open the party up to its faithful. And until January they will unleash all the dogs on Dean to stop his candidacy. There will be many platitudes about 'reason' and 'moderation' and 'partisanship' and 'centrist.' It doesn't matter that this has now lost two straight presidentials and every mid-term election since 1998. It's their playbook and they're sticking to it come hell, high water or ruin. The difficult trick here is that many of the people whose power is on the line vote for the chairman. As far as I can tell this subset is not the majority, or even a plurality, but they are the noisiest and members who consider themselves serious take these fools seriously. It's the cost of never seeking knowledge that's outside the bubble. A postscript. It's possible (perhaps likely) that no candidate will be found who can stand up to Dean. What is essential for the elites, then, is to ensure that the field is so crowded that no candidate can reach a majority. This is an old time convention tactic that anti-front runner factions would use stop a popular candidate. Said front-runner polls well on a first ballot but not well enough to win. Thus begins the chorus of 'he can't win' and a loud movement begins to find a compromise candidate from the rest of the field. It was a standard strategy for presidential conventions in the days before a popular primary.

Braised Chicken Thighs with Figs and Bay Leaves

2004-12-08T12:21:00.000-08:00

A very good and very easy recipe. The only difficulty is not burning your nose when you stick your snout so close to the pan right after the chicken is put in. The combo of the oil, salt, pepper, and bay leaves creates an irresistible aroma.

The Great Indecency Hoax

2004-11-29T22:45:00.000-08:00

The much praised column by Frank Rich about our latest front in the culture war. Get it now before it disappears into the Times's chasm of articles they want no one to read after eight days. I'd like to say it was because they were doing the Lord's work. But then...

The Vineyard Kitchen

2004-11-20T14:49:00.000-08:00

Preparing for Thanksgiving. Jess and I can't eat an entire turkey by ourselves so we've decided to improvise a bit. We're taking two recipes from our new favorite book The Vineyard Kitchen in order to take advantage of the late fall local produce from the two farmer's markets we have access to. For the main course we're having sage-roasted chicken with sweet potatoes and cipollini onions, and for desert we're making our maiden voyage into pies with the heirloom apple pie. To start we're taking something from the new Cooking Light, the spinach-pear salad with mustard vinaigrette. We're also taking the recipe for our stuffing from the same issue. The herbed bread stuffing with mushrooms and sausage. Should be a pretty good meal all around. Oh, and for the rest of today we're going to be making a big batch of Nana's Tomato Sauce, from Vineyard Kitchen, so that we can stop spending money on the jarred stuff.

Storing cheese correctly

2004-11-19T23:25:00.000-08:00

So last night I caught the Frontline about marketers. One of the interviews was with Clotaire Rapaille. Rapaille talked about helping a french cheese company marketing its product in America.

For example, if I know that in America the cheese is dead, which means is pasteurized, which means legally dead and scientifically dead, and we don't want any cheese that is alive, then I have to put that up front. I have to say this cheese is safe, is pasteurized, is wrapped up in plastic. I know that plastic is a body bag. You can put it in the fridge. I know the fridge is the morgue; that's where you put the dead bodies. And so once you know that, this is the way you market cheese in America. I started working with a French company in America, and they were trying to sell French cheese to the Americans. And they didn't understand, because in France the cheese is alive, which means that you can buy it young, mature or old, and that's why you have to read the age of the cheese when you go to buy the cheese. So you smell, you touch, you poke. If you need cheese for today, you want to buy a mature cheese. If you want cheese for next week, you buy a young cheese. And when you buy young cheese for next week, you go home, [but] you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don't put your cat in the refrigerator. It's the same; it's alive. We are very afraid of getting sick with cheese. By the way, more French people die eating cheese than Americans die. But the priority is different; the logic of emotion is different. The French like the taste before safety. Americans want safety before the taste.

So I decided to take a look at some ways to store cheese. It will be interesting to try some of these and see how they turn out. I'm not actually afraid of dying from cheese as I'm not all that into the stinky cheeses. Jess and I are, however, very into taste so this should be a good deal of fun.

Tough Times for a Centrist

2004-11-15T18:40:00.000-08:00

I'm a centrist democrat. However, over the past two years I've seen the Washington "centrists" leave me behind and enter some imaginary world that is "centrist" to them. I left the DLC over their ridiculous anti-Dean crusade and I dropped my TNR subscription over their absurd support of Bush's Iraq adventure. There are two things I find infuriating about these "centrists" that have left Dems like me behind. First, what it means for them to be centrists is to stake out some position half way between sanity and whatever position the conservatives put forward. The substance of the proposal can never be too outrageous for them to actually oppose it or call a spade a spade. Being "centrist" to Holy Joe et al. means taking extremists seriously and, as a consequence, getting rolled by them every time. This leads to the second infuriating habit (rather, delusion) of the "centrists." They take every proposal as if it has merit. This absurd notion reached its height with the Iraq resolution. The scribes at TNR waxed oh so poetic about the dangers of WMD and the shining light that a democratic Iraq would be, all the while setting aside whether the current administration was actually up to the job. There were several problems I had with launching the Iraq war in 2003, but none was bigger than that I knew from watching BushCo. for three years that they were incapable of handling the situation. Any sentient being in Washington should have known the same. But in the name of "centrism" no one spoke up. Now I see that Holy Joe and the "centrists" are out to sink Dean yet again. Howard Dean is the best thing that's happened to our party since the Clinton presidency, but Joe doesn't ground himself in the party. He grounds himself solely in relation to the opposition. I'm not saying Joe should leave or be thrown out of the party. He needs to understand, though, that he is currently not a centrist and that there are no bridges to be built to the current opposition. It is a strategic choice of the majority in congress right now to resist any effort at bridge building. Indeed, reaching out to them is taken as a signal to shift further right. Akin to a car salesman upping the price just a little more since he senses you'll pay it. A while back the Republicans realized that the DLC were using the R's positions as the only way to determine what the "centrist" position was. With the Democrats controlling one branch or house of government, this worked since the party as a whole could engage in dialogue. Now that mooring is gone and the old centrists in Washington have become "centrists" only to themselves. Tom Vilsack is, I'm sure, a fine human being. I'm sure he's also a very capable politician and a man who could forge a coalition with moderate Republicans. But Tom Vilsack is not Howard Dean, and Howard Dean is the only man on the map at this time that can bring us back to the majority. He has been so publicly derided by our own party luminaries that he probably can't get the nomination in 2008, but that's part of what makes him perfect for DNC chairman. Dean is a leader who needs to be able to speak his mind and take the energy of the party faithful and put it into action. Finally, and this is perhaps what is most threatening to Lieberman et al., Dean actually is a centrist. To Holy Joe he may look like some crazy lefty, but that's solely because Joe is stuck in his Washington paradigm of "How to be a Centrist."

Where Lewis Went Wrong

2004-11-13T11:35:00.000-08:00

Much fat to chew within this Washington Monthly article by Michael Hirsh. As a companion piece to William Darymple's look at where Lewis went wrong with medieval Hellenic history, we now have the beginnings of a cogent non-Lewis-slanted history (past and modern) pushing its way into the mainstream. From Hirsh:

"Modern Arab anger and frustration is, in fact, less than a hundred years old. As bin Laden knows very well, this anger is a function not of Islam's humiliation at the Treaty of Carlowitz of 1699—the sort of long-ago defeat that Lewis highlights in his bestselling What Went Wrong—but of much more recent developments. These include the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement by which the British and French agreed to divvy up the Arabic-speaking countries after World War I; the subsequent creation, by the Europeans, of corrupt, kleptocratic tyrannies in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan; the endemic poverty and underdevelopment that resulted for most of the 20th century; the U.N.-imposed creation of Israel in 1948; and finally, in recent decades, American support for the bleak status quo."

This discussion is vitally important because our current foreign policy is controlled entirely by Lewisites. This is why so many of our troops are being killed unnecessarily in Iraq. It is, in fact, a fundamental misunderstanding of the Middle East and the Arab Mind. Most troubling, though, is that as far as I can tell, Lewis et al. don't get everything completely wrong. That is, Lewis doesn't put forward false events in his histories, he's just drawing the wrong conclusions and focusing on the wrong events. However, when such misreadings are literally writ large upon a region and its peoples, the ramifications are dire for years if not decades. Indeed as this article points out and Bin Laden (and others) has been telling us for several years now, al Nakba is far more important than the Battle of the Nile. If we are to make significant headway against both terrorism and the corrupt regimes in the Middle East, we must gain a greater understanding of What Actually Went Wrong.

Election result maps

2004-11-09T15:29:00.000-08:00

As with the last election, the maps of red and blue America are all the rage. In 2000 the map was a novelty and some pundits used it to make broad statements about red and blue America that verged on the inane. This year the mania over "red" and "blue" America is reaching a fever pitch especially as James Dobson and the freaky rightist try to claim some sort of mandate for Bush and his intimidating 51% (286 EV) popular landslide. For those willing to look a little deeper, of course, there is much, much more to be found out about our country in maps similar to the bland red/blue but that make more effective use of the data. Comes now this page, which incorporates a host of different number-crunching takes on the old red/blue map. For my money, this is the most effective.

Prior to the election, this quote from Mark McKinnon in Ron Suskind's piece got a lot of press:

"You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!"

Now inside the bubble that is the power-grabbing right in Washington, I'm sure 51% looks to them like 66%, but as the map above shows, there is no 2:1 margin in favor of any faction. It's important to keep this in mind, espeically if you're in the habit of watching the Sunday talk shows or any of the nightly offerings from the cable stations.

FURL Cooking!

2004-11-07T18:23:00.000-08:00

I'm sure others have already thought of this, but I've now added a 'Cooking' category to my Furl archive. No more flipping between Cooking Light, Epicurious and old fashioned Google cooking, now I've got my own damned cookbook. And with the old wireless connection in the apartment, now I'm cooking with FURL. First recipe goes to my favorite. Broiled Tilapia with Thai Coconut-Curry Sauce. Vary the amount of curry paste according to how spicy you're feeling. Eat with both wine and water handy. It took Jess and I while to figure that last bit out. With just wine, you wind up slugging down a bottle without thinking just to cool your mouth down. Hot stuff.

Thursday Cat Blogging

2004-10-27T22:46:00.000-07:00

1000 of them

2004-10-27T22:12:00.000-07:00

et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam

2004-10-27T22:08:00.000-07:00

Jason Vartiek

Champions

2004-10-27T22:01:00.000-07:00

Signed For One Reason

2004-10-27T21:59:00.000-07:00

25 Men, One Nation, One Dream, Realized

2004-10-27T21:55:00.000-07:00

2004-10-27T21:48:00.000-07:00

The Daddy, The Ironman, Señor Octobre

I Believe in Miracles

2004-10-27T21:44:00.000-07:00

2004-10-27T21:26:00.000-07:00

SOX WIN

There are no words.

Let Me Die in My Footsteps

2004-10-25T18:13:00.000-07:00

As the fear-mongering reaches a fever-pitch, I find myself singing to myself more and more often Dylan's elegant response to our earlier confrontation with the nuclear threat. Back then, of course, it was far more likely that we would be attacked with nuclear weapons.

I will not go down under the ground "Cause somebody tells me that death's comin' 'round An' I will not carry myself down to die When I go to my grave my head will be high, Let me die in my footsteps Before I go down under the ground. There's been rumors of war and wars that have been The meaning of the life has been lost in the wind And some people thinkin' that the end is close by "Stead of learnin' to live they are learning to die. Let me die in my footsteps Before I go down under the ground. I don't know if I'm smart but I think I can see When someone is pullin' the wool over me And if this war comes and death's all around Let me die on this land 'fore I die underground. Let me die in my footsteps Before I go down under the ground. There's always been people that have to cause fear They've been talking of the war now for many long years I have read all their statements and I've not said a word But now Lawd God, let my poor voice be heard. Let me die in my footsteps Before I go down under the ground. If I had rubies and riches and crowns I'd buy the whole world and change things around I'd throw all the guns and the tanks in the sea For they are mistakes of a past history. Let me die in my footsteps Before I go down under the ground. Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood Let me smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood Let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace. Let me die in my footsteps Before I go down under the ground. Go out in your country where the land meets the sun See the craters and the canyons where the waterfalls run Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho Let every state in this union seep in your souls. And you'll die in your footsteps Before you go down under the ground.

There are two messages that I find most important in the song. First, that it is vital that we get out and see our country. It is gigantic, and its size and diversity are a great gift to us as citizens. We have to go out and visit our fellow Americans. To get out and meet people in red, blue and purple states. The second message is that there will always be fear mongers and they will always try to scare us back into our homes. There we are isolated and can be further harangued that the enemy is right outside our door. Circling back to the first message, by getting out and meeting our countrymen we make ourselves immune to the fear mongers. Now I am no peacenick. Our country does have very real enemies that have killed thousands of us and would like to do so again. But it is also true that those enemies are few. Very few when compared to our allies, and those who earnestly desire our help, but have thus far been let down by a scattershot policy. Our challenge as citizens is to recognize the real enemy from the scare campaign. Sadly, our government (and most others of any age) has a rather long history of ginning up foreign controversies that cause the populace to (on cue) rally 'round the flag and forget whatever 'populist boil' may be stirring the old melting pot at the time. It is neither easy nor pleasant to point the finger at elected officials and cry deception but if we allow ourselves to be frightened into submission, we end up with, well, Iraq. Everything is not a conspiracy. And a government official can be earnest is his concern over foreign threats and still be a fear-monger. But it is our own peculiar nationalism that assumes the politician will lie about domestic policies only to be totally virtuous on foreign ones. The current administration embraces the politics of fear and war with truly distressing glee. In many ways I look at next week's election as a referendum on whether we as citizens will be defiant to both the terrorist and the demagogue (yes one can resist both in the cause of defending the nation) and announce, in the face of a relentless fear campaign, that we will not go down under the ground.

On exorcising demons

2004-10-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

If the Sox wanted to beat the Yanks, they had to knock out their best hitters in the 8th and 9th to do it. If they want to win the WS they have to beat the Cards. Everyone remembers 1986 and the Mets, but the team that had actually thwarted the Sox in the series two times prior to that was the Cards (in '46 and '67, both in 7 games). Just as the Pats had to beat the Greatest Show on Turf to win their first Superbowl, the Sox have to go through the Cards to get the big monkey off their back. They can win it, but they've got to earn it.

The Levels of Choking and Panicking

2004-10-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to (temporarily) close the book on the ALCS before the start of the WS, there are but two questions to answer. First, did the Yanks choke or panic? Second, where does the 3 game collapse sit on the 13 levels of losing? Hopefully Simmons will address the latter today, and I e-mailed Gladwell to get his thougts on the former. Let's begin with Simmons since there are so many different instances of each (and it's so sweet to relive them).

Level XII: The Achilles' Heel
Definition: This defeat transcends the actual game, because it revealed something larger about your team, a fatal flaw exposed for everyone to see ... flare guns are fired, red flags are raised, doubt seeps into your team ... usually the beginning of the end (you don't fully comprehend this until you're reflecting back on it).

This, to me, is A-Rod slapping the ball out of Arroyo's glove in game 6. The Yanks were down having been dominated by Schilling all night and Arroyo was about to tag A-Rod and all but kill their chances for a come back. A-Rod, like a Litte Leaguer who doesn't want to lose, slaps the ball out of Arroyo's glove:

Without question this play revealed something larger about both A-Rod and the 2004 Yanks. From Simmons

The Buckner-Armbrister flashback play in Game 6 clearly exposed A-Rod as a liar and cheater of the highest order -- the kind who would turn over an "R" in Scrabble and pretend it's a blank letter. Warrants mentioning.

Additionally, the play showed (as is being discussed to my glee ad infinitum in the City yesterday & today (you know I always liked Mike Lupica ... really), this Yankee team had none of the pride and passion that made their predecessors so dominant. What would Paul O'Neill have done if one of his players had pulled the shit that Rodriguez did?

Level X: The Rabbit's Foot
Definition:Now we're starting to get into "Outright Painful" territory ... this applies to those frustrating games and/or series where every single break seemingly goes against your team ... unbelievably frustrating ... you know that sinking, "Oh, God, I've been here before" feeling when something unfortunate happens, when your guard immediately goes shooting up? ... yeah ... I'm wincing just writing about it.

A slight modification on this one is that every Yankee fan out there could look at the Bellhorn homerun and the A-Rod slap as calls that would have stayed the Yanks' way in seasons past but didn't this year. In past years the opponents would have been stewing that the Umps had screwed up two easy calls and it would have distracted the whole team. The Yanks would then smile inwardly, get that warm glow of knowing the gods are looking out for you, and put together a fierce two-out rally to bury the opponent.

Level VIII: Dead Man Walking
Definition:Applies to any playoff series when your team remains "alive," but they just suffered a loss so catastrophic and so harrowing that there's no possible way they can bounce back ... especially disheartening because you wave the white flag mentally, but there's a tiny part of you still holding out hope for a miraculous momentum change ... so you've given up, but you're still getting hurt, if that makes sense.
Games 6 and 7 of the [1986] ALCS (Red Sox-Angels), following the dramatic Game 5 when the Angels (three outs from the World Series) blew a 5-2 lead in the ninth inning (capped off by Dave Henderson's go-ahead homer with two strikes and two outs in the ninth, as policeman surrounded the field and the Angels bench was ready to run onto the field). If that wasn't bad enough, the Angels tied the game in the bottom of the ninth, had two chances with the bases loaded to score the winning run, then blew the game in the 11th. Then they flew cross-country to Boston to play Games 6 and 7, which they promptly lost by a combined score of 132-2. Talk about Dead Man Walking.

Could it be that game 4 did this to the Yanks? It's certainly possible. Rivera with a 4-3 lead to start the 9th and complete a 4-0 sweep of the Sox after embarassing them in game 3. Easy money, done it 1000 times before. This is why they play Enter Sandman when he comes out of the dugout. And yet he blows it. The next night, when they really needed him to come through, Torre puts him not so much to save the game (there was a man on 3rd with one out) as to prevent an actual loss. That is, keep the Yanks on life support. But here's the thing, Torre knew he couldn't expect Rivera to actually get out of the situation. They were fighting the tide. Later on, Señor Octobre strikes again. Finally there's a combination of two for Game 7. The sweetest thing about all of this is that the backdrop to the whole week was that everyone knew the Yanks would pull it out. Game 7, I feel, is these two together:

Level VI: The Full-Fledged Butt-Kicking
Definition:Sometimes you can tell right away when it isn't your team's day ... and that's the worst part, not just the epiphany but everything that follows -- every botched play, every turnover, every instance where someone on your team quits, every "deer in the headlights" look, every time an announcer says, "They can't get anything going," every shot of the opponents celebrating, every time you look at the score and think to yourself, "Well, if we score here and force a turnover, maybe we'll get some momentum," but you know it's not going to happen, because you're already 30 points down ... you just want it to end, and it won't end ... but you can't look away ... it's the sports fan's equivalent to a three-hour torture session.

Level V: The "This Can't Be Happening" GameThe sibling of the Full-Fledged Butt-Kicking ... you're supposed to win, you expect to win, the game is a mere formality ... suddenly your team falls behind, your opponents are fired up, the clock is ticking and it dawns on you for the first time, "Oh my God, this can't be happening."

The beauty is that since everyone knew the Yanks would come back, the creeping death of Game 7 is all the sweeter. They didn't come back.

2004 Red Sox. Biggest comeback in sports history. So did the Yanks choke or panic? My reading of Gladwell's article is that they did indeed choke. It's hard to believe that a team could choke four straight games, but I think the important quote that elaborates how this could happen is this:

"When you go and interview them, you have the sense that when they are in the stereotype–threat condition they say to themselves, 'Look, I'm going to be careful here. I'm not going to mess things up.' Then, after having decided to take that strategy, they calm down and go through the test. But that's not the way to succeed on a standardized test. The more you do that, the more you will get away from the intuitions that help you, the quick processing. They think they did well, and they are trying to do well. But they are not." This is choking, not panicking. Garcia's athletes and Steele's students are like Novotna, not Kennedy. They failed because they were good at what they did: only those who care about how well they perform ever feel the pressure of stereotype threat. The usual prescription for failure—to work harder and take the test more seriously—would only make their problems worse. That is a hard lesson to grasp, but harder still is the fact that choking requires us to concern ourselves less with the performer and more with the situation in which the performance occurs. Novotna herself could do nothing to prevent her collapse against Graf. The only thing that could have saved her is if—at that critical moment in the third set—the television cameras had been turned off, the Duke and Duchess had gone home, and the spectators had been told to wait outside. In sports, of course, you can't do that. Choking is a central part of the drama of athletic competition, because the spectators have to be there—and the ability to overcome the pressure of the spectators is part of what it means to be a champion.

Suprised Eddie?

2004-10-20T21:40:00.000-07:00

If I wake up tomorrow morning with my head sewn to the carpet I wouldn't be more surprised than I am right now. Not really able to put it all into words, but starting in 2001 with the Patriots, being a Boston fan over the past 3 years has been pretty amazing. Being a Boston fan in New York for all that time has been even more amazing. I might be one of the few Sox fans that will not call in sick tomorrow. Lots and lots and LOTS of people I will flash my pearly whites (okay maybe they're a little off-white at this point) at tomorrow. Wow what a series. Four wins to go.

No, no a thousand times no!

2004-10-20T10:18:00.000-07:00

Via Juan Cole I see that Bush is showing that he does not understand even his own freedom is on the march justification for invading Iraq.

If free and open Iraqi elections lead to the seating of a fundamentalist Islamic government, "I will be disappointed. But democracy is democracy," Bush said. "If that’s what the people choose, that’s what the people choose."

Invade a secular dictatorship, kill the dictator and many civilians, allow civil war, jury-rig elections, populace installs sectarian dictatorship. This is the Greater Middle East Initiative? The logic of Bush's statement is akin to Rumsfeld's "free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," kiss-off of the initial post-war turmoil that began our march toward the chaos that now rules Iraq. The entire purpose of Bush's radical (and to date disastrous) approach to the Middle East was to prevent any further extremist regimes from arising. Indeed, Iraq was to be the beacon of freedom that shook the fundamentalists from their seats of power. $200bn, 1,102 killed, 7,532 wounded, all so SCIRI can replace Saddam. Bang up job George.

The Truth About Muslims

2004-10-20T08:59:00.000-07:00

Prior to 9/11 and due mostly to my interest in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I had begun to research the history of the Middle East, ancient, medieval and modern. Initial Google searches pulled up Bernard Lewis's "Roots of Muslim Rage" article from the Atlantic. Enjoying the article, I read two of his books, The Middle East and The Multiple Identities of the Middle East. I found both informative and enlightening, especially the latter book as it shed some light on why the borders drawn by the British in 1919 are particularly unsteady. Now given that my interest in this topic was born out of an interest in one of the region's most bitter conflicts, I was initially willing to take some of Lewis's more sweeping statements about rage and humiliation at face value. However, after reading Multiple Identities some things began to unravel. Lewis takes great pains in this small book to point out that any Westerner who attempts to treat the Islamic world as a unit that is homogenous in mind and religion does so at great risk. The peoples of the former Ottoman Empire do not necessarily look at the world in the same manner as the peoples of the NATO alliance. Our nation-states have been at war with one another for centuries and we developed the concept of Nationalism in order to more concretely divide ourselves between "us" and "them." And yet, the premise of "Roots of Muslim Rage" is that all the peoples of the Empire are enraged by their standing viz. the modern West. One might call it a historian/sociologist split. And to me, Lewis the historian makes Lewis the sociologist look very amateurish indeed. Now comes an excellent article from the New York Review of Books by William Dalrymple that looks at Lewis against himself and other contemporary historians of Islam. At issue primarily is the interactions of Islam and the West.

The tortuous and complex relationship of Western Christendom and the world of Islam has provoked a wide variety of responses from historians. Some, such as the great medievalist Sir Steven Runciman, take the view (as he wrote at the end of his magisterial three-volume history of the Crusades) that "our civilization has grown" out of "the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident." Runciman believed that the Crusades should be understood less as an attempt to reconquer the Christian heartlands lost to Islam than as the last of the barbarian invasions. The real heirs of Roman civilization were not the chain-mailed knights of the rural West, but the sophisticated Byzantines of Constantinople and the cultivated Arab caliphate of Damascus, both of whom had preserved the Hellenized urban civilization of the antique Mediterranean long after it was destroyed in Europe. Others have seen relations between Islam and Christianity as being basically adversarial, a long-drawn-out conflict between the two rival civilizations of East and West.

Lewis's most recent writing adhere strongly to the latter position. And yet, as the US becomes more embroiled in Iraq and the region generally, I think it is vital that we ascertain a clear understanding of just how what one could broadly call the Ottoman and Latin worlds have actually interacted throughout history. Perhaps the best initial way to reframe our thinking in this regard is to place the two worlds in their proper context, and that is as two major subsets of the Hellenic world. In this frame far greater attetion would be paid to the Great Schism in 1054 than the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Equally important would be to reframe our understanding of Islam itself. It is on this issue that relying on Lewis too strongly is detrimental. From Dalrymple:

Underlying most of [Lewis's essays], however, is the assumption that there are two fixed and opposed forces at work in the history of the Mediterranean world: on one hand Western civilization, which he envisages as a Judeo-Christian block; and on the other hand, quite distinct, an often hostile Islamic world hellbent on the conquest and conversion of the West. As he writes in one essay, "The Roots of Muslim Rage,"
The struggle between these rival systems has now lasted for some fourteen centuries. It began with the advent of Islam, in the seventh century, and has continued virtually to the present day. It has consisted of a long series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests.
It was this essay that contained the phrase "the clash of civilizations," later borrowed by Samuel Huntington for his controversial Foreign Affairs article and book.

Contrast this presentation (or any found in the mainstream media) with the following discussion of a book by Richard Fletcher, The Cross and the Crescent:

[Fletcher] emphasizes how the Prophet Muhammad did not think he was "founding a new religion," so much as bringing "the fullness of divine revelation, partially granted to earlier prophets such as Abraham, Moses or Jesus, to the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula." After all, Islam accepts much of the Old and New Testaments and obeys the Mosaic laws about circumcision and ablutions, while the Koran calls Christians the "nearest in love" to Muslims, whom it instructs in Surah 29 to
dispute not with the People of the Book [that is, Jews and Christians] save in the most courteous manner...and say, "We believe in what has been sent down to us and what has been sent down to you; our God and your God is one, and to him we have surrendered."
Fletcher also stresses the degree to which the Muslim armies were welcomed as liberators by the Syriac and Coptic Christians, who had suffered discrimination under the strictly Orthodox Byzantines:
To the persecuted Monophysite Christians of Syria and Egypt, Muslims could be presented as deliverers. The same could be said of the persecuted Jews.... Released from the bondage of Constantinopolitan persecution they flourished as never before, generating in the process a rich spiritual literature in hymns, prayers, sermons and devotional work.
Recent excavations by the Jerusalem-based archaeologist Michele Piccirillo have dramatically underlined this point.

Life for the minority sects in the Ottoman Empire wasn't wonderful, but it was better than under the boot of either the Eastern or Latin rites.

There was of course no shortage of travelers on both sides who could see no good in the infidels among whom they were obliged to mingle, and deep tensions often existed between Muslim rulers and the diverse religious communities living under their capricious thumb. By modern standards Christians and Jews under Muslim rule—the dhimmi—were treated as second-class citizens. But there was at least a kind of pluralist equilibrium (what Spanish historians have called convivencia, or "living together") which had no parallel in Christendom and which in Spain was lost soon after the completion of the Christian reconquista. On taking Grenada on January 2, 1492, the Catholic kings expelled the Moors and Jews, and let loose the Inquisition on those—the New Christians—who had converted. There was a similar pattern in Sicily. After a fruitful period of tolerant coexistence under the Norman kings, the Muslims were later given a blunt choice of transportation or conversion

What I find strikingly noteworthy and informative in today's climate is the following:

Early Byzantine writers, including the most subtle theologian of the early church, Saint John Damascene, assumed that Islam was merely a heterodox form of Christianity. This perception is particularly fascinating since Saint John had grown up in the Umayyad court of Damascus—the hub of the young Islamic world—where his father was chancellor, and he was an intimate friend of the future Caliph al-Yazid. In his old age, John took the habit at the desert monastery of Mar Saba, where he began work on his great masterpiece, a refutation of heresies entitled The Fount of Knowledge. The book contains a precise critique of Islam, the first written by a Christian, which John regarded as closely related to the heterodox Christian doctrine of Nestorianism. This was a kinship that both the Muslims and the Nestorians were aware of. In 649 a Nestorian bishop wrote: "These Arabs fight not against our Christian religion; nay, rather they defend our faith, they revere our priests and saints, and they make gifts to our churches."

As a beacon of freedom to the world, we in the US do ourselves a disservice if we adopt Lewis's stark view that our interactions with Islamic world are, in fact, confrontations with The Other. It is true that the majority of governments in the region are currently cotrolled by fanatical regimes, and perhaps Lewis is unable to differentiate the people from their government, but the victory of the NATO alliance in the Cold War shows that the best way to oust a fanatical regime is to engage its people on the basis of our similarities above and beyond the necessary confrontations with the regime over our differences. It is not an either/or decision (much to the chagrin of our more hawkish elements). At least, not if we actually want to spread freedom and liberty in the world. Most importantly, we must keep in mind that the current prevalence of fundamentalism in the Middle East is no deeper-rooted than was Communism in Eastern Europe in the last century.

There is a serious point underlying such anecdotes, for they show that throughout history, Muslims and Christians have traded, studied, negotiated, and loved across the porous frontiers of religious differences. Probe relations between the two civilizations at any period of history, and you find that the neat civilizational blocks imagined by writers such as Bernard Lewis or Samuel Huntington soon dissolve. It is true that just as there have been some strands of Christian thinking that have always been deeply hostile to Islam, so within Islam there have been schools of thought that have always harbored a deep hostility toward Christians, Jews, and other non-Islamic religions and civilizations, notably the Wahhabi and Salafi schools dominant in modern Saudi Arabia. Until this century, however, the Wahhabis were a theological movement of only localized significance and were widely regarded by most Muslims as an alien sect bordering on infidelity—kufr. It is the oil wealth of modern Saudi Arabia that has allowed the Wahhabis to spread their narrow-minded and intolerant brand of Islam, notably by the funding of extremist Wahhabi, Salafi, and Deobandi madrasas across the Islamic world since the mid-1970s, with the disastrous results we see today.

See New York City by subway?!?!?

2004-10-05T13:13:00.000-07:00

This CNN story has got to be one of the most ludicrous missives I've read in a long, long time. See NYC by subway? If you like tunnels. Miles and miles of unadorned tunnels. I love the subways here. They are a truly fantastic way to get around the city. That is, you get in, travel to your destination and then you leave. Staying in them is not a way to 'enjoy' the city.

You can have an extraordinary tour of New York -- complete with panoramic views, music, art and even food -- without ever leaving the subway system.

First, panoramic views. There are elevated parts to the subway system but the views from them are fairly fleeting. Moreover, there are no elevated parts to the system left in Manhattan so the panoramic views are all in the outer boroughs and you need to know exactly when and where to crane your neck in order to see them; oh and you'll need to be sitting by a window and on the right side of the train also; the article does not provide the necessary details on these crucial points. "Music, art and even food." Music? There are the occasional worthwhile musicians from the Music Under New York program, but most of the time it's several people using poorly tuned instruments (or trash cans as drums) performing less than melodic by eardrum jarringly loud cacophonies. My favorite are the steel drum players that just sort of bang away tunelessly. Man can that sound carry in a low ceilinged concrete and steel enclosure. Art. Not graffiti, mind you. Art. The article talks about the mosaics. I too like the mosaics. I especially liked the mosaics that were on the wall of the Delancey St. station on the F line (transfer for the J, M, & Z lines) but those were inexplicably removed over the course of a year, replaced by something resembling a Times New Roman font printed on an Imagewriter II. Food. Um, look, if you're going to eat, eat above ground; this is New York City for Chirst's sake. Whatever you do, do not, DO NOT, partake of the fare proferred by the, "unsanctioned entrepreneur peddling something slightly more exotic," unless you have a hankering for an equally exotic intestinal reaction.

For the best views, however, you'll need to leave Manhattan, where the system is largely underground, to access the elevated lines. Start your trip on an early autumn morning, taking the D train across the Manhattan Bridge, where you'll be greeted by the sight of its better-known cousin, the Brooklyn Bridge. A 7 a.m. sunrise shimmers over the East River, and looking south through the train windows, you'll be saluted by the Statue of Liberty, four miles (six kilometers) away. To the north is the familiar Manhattan skyline, anchored by the distinctive shapes of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.

A 7am ride on the D. Where do I sign up? This is not the most absurd suggestion in the article, and that should tell you something. I'm sure all the early morning commuters will love you dashing from one side of the car to the other to take in the North/South views on your 45 second trip across the Manhattan Bridge. When you get off the D at 7:15 in the middle of the massive 4th Avenue, Flatbush Avenue, Atlantic Avenue acre of asphalt have fun finding place that's open where you can get some breakfast. I do not recommend the vacant lot across the street where the new Nets Stadium will allegedly be built.

But a ride over the East River isn't the only spectacular view a subway trip offers.

You mean there's MORE??? The article really goes off the rails here.

Far on the eastern portion of Queens, the A train begins its 31-mile (50-kilometer) run, but not before passing two of the city's most interesting landscapes.

New York is the safest large city in America, but people from Peoria are simply not going to be comfortable on the A. The A is easily the craziest line in the city. Evangelists, panhandlers, musicians (not the sanctioned ones), dancers (professional and otherwise) and the guys with batteries and small electronic toys for $1 all ride the A in alarming numbers. However, after you spend $35 to get out to JFK from your midtown hotel so you can take this little trip, here's what you have to do.

Transferring from the A to the Manhattan-bound L train at the Broadway Junction stop, riders get an aerial view of Brooklyn rooftops as the train winds and twists like a roller coaster on a 50-foot high elevated track ... transfer to the Queens-bound G train at Metropolitan Avenue [this is a local that runs about once every 45 minutes if you're lucky] ... change to the Queens-bound No. 7 ... passing through the ethnically diverse neighborhoods ... you'll find riders speaking everything from Spanish to Pakistani Urdu to Korean ... Glimpses of Manhattan are visible between cars ... emptying out at the last stop. By now, it's afternoon [You've been underground for 95% of this trip and intentionally done this during rush hour. Having fun yet?] ... stay on the No. 7 [this is misleading, you have to get off the one you're on and go up and over to get to a train going back to Manhattan, a 45 minute trip] and double back into Manhattan ... change to the No. 4 train at Grand Central.

Ahh the Lexington line. Dante did not include the Lexington line in one of his deeper circles of hell, but rest assured it is there ferreting the damned about their eternal torture. And they're packed in like sardines at all hours of the day on this, the most overcrowded line in the city. A recent advisory told commuters on the 4 express (i.e. skips a lot of stops on the way downtown) that they would be better off taking the local train to work in the morning because it will get them to Wall St. faster. There are no words to describe the sadistic nature of the bureaucracy that would try to pack yet even more people onto the downtown 6 in the morning.

Farther up, look for mosaic tile works at 96th, 103rd, 110th and 125th streets on the local line.

Construction permitting, the 4 will rip past these stations in about 3 seconds and you'll have no chance to enjoy anything on the station walls. Especially since you'll be standing in the middle of the car with three people between you and a window.

Yankee Stadium at 161st Street and River Avenue. Get off here and wind your way back to Manhattan via a series of transfers that will make you feel like a real New Yorker: Take the D to 145th Street, then head back uptown for just a couple stops, to 168th Street, where you can switch to the downtown Nos. 1 or 9.

This series of transfers will take you until doomsday. By the way, remember when we said it was afternoon back when we were at Shea? It's now about 8:30 at night.

After a dozen hours in the subway, any tourist would be exhausted, even though the day's trip was not even half the system. But some people think riding the train is as much fun as reaching any given destination.

Holy Hosannah. Listen. I use the subway for everything here. I really and truly love it. I take it to work every day, I take it to go out at night and I take it home during "late night" service hours. It is absolutely fantastic. But it is also nothing more than a series of tunnels blasted through the schist on which the city is built. They're not pretty and while they're not filthy, they're not clean either. It's a wonderful utilitarian system but it is also a system on the verge of collapse that needs many billions of taxpayer dollars to get it performing well enough to survive the next 50 years. If you're in town on vacation, splurge and take a cab where you're going. Odds are you want to stay in Manhattan anyway. I live in Brooklyn in a quiet little neighborhood off the F line; I love it, but there isn't too much for a tourist to do there. And that elevated section that goes over the Gowanus Canal, not that pretty.

Dick Cheney. Trial Lawyer.

2004-10-04T11:37:00.000-07:00

It's probably too late for Edwards to be able to work this information into his debate prep for tomorrow night, but one question sure to be raised is about tort reform and trial lawyers. Apropos Max links to this pdf report by Public Citizen. The report opens:

Business lobbyists and their political allies have created a perception that America's legal system has run amok. They point the finger at consumer and patient lawsuits, which they imply are concocted by "greedy trial lawyers." They argue that lawsuits have detrimental effects on society and the economy, and effectively suggest that people should turn the other cheek when their rights are violated. President Bush and Vice President Cheney mimic these erroneous claims and make attacks on the legal system a central part of their campaign stump speeches. "See, everybody is getting sued," says the President, and the lawsuits are "junk and frivolous."

Then in paragraph three of the introduction, the report drops the key nugget viz. tomorrow night:

Oddly enough, Vice President Cheney, who frequently attacks lawyers in his speeches, typifies the hardball litigation stance of corporate America. During Cheney's five-year tenure as its CEO, the Halliburton corporation filed over 150 lawsuits, seeking money from other corporations, individuals, and insurance companies.

So Cheney filed 30 lawsuits a year as CEO of Halliburton. I don't know how many Edwards himself or the average trial lawyer files annually, but I would love to see Cheney confronted with this. The text of the report is about 20 pages with another 20 pages of tables and end notes. Worth a skim. Here's the summary table from the report of lawsuits filed in four counties in 2001:

Jurisdiction	Philadelphia, PA	Arkansas	Cook County, IL	Mississippi
Number of Business Lawsuits	64,698	20,868	137,890	45,891
Number of Individual/Trial Attoney Lawsuits	19,751	4,786	26,938	7,959
Ratio of Business to Individual Lawsuits	3.3 to 1	4.4 to 1	5.3 to 1	5.8 to 1

Bush Wins Second Debate

2004-10-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

I've been ruminating on it this morning and can't think of any circumstances under which Bush will not be declared the winner of Friday's debate. The media will require of itself that the outcome of the debates also be balanced, and since Kerry won the first exchange, Bush must win the second debate. In all likelihood the debate will be a draw since there's no way Bush's team will let him look like such a fool twice in a row. Additionally, we know the press will never deign to actually examine the domestic proposals of each candidate, so Bush will be allowed to stand up straight, throw out "ownership society," "tax cuts," and some new take on "fuzzy math" as a joke, while Kerry will perform in much the same manner as the first exchange. The result is two men who seem reasonably intelligent disagreeing on the best way to balance the budget over the next decade. Since the bar has now been set impossibly low for Bush ("will he actually start to drool this time?"), his performance on Friday will be spun as having been "solid," and as such he will have "bounced back/rebounded" from the initial disaster. I have an image in my head of a Cokie Roberts-style media analyst delivering an assessment. "President Bush needed to rebound from his lackluster perfomance in the first debate and he seems to have done just that. He challenged Kerry early on over the issue of [probably tax cuts] and laid out his message that [again probably tax cuts] were working and Americans were going back to work. He was positive and upbeat and reminded Americans that he had bold new proposals for his second term." I am actually making myself sick as I type this. Anyway, Bush will "rebound" Friday and the final debate will be a draw. Kerry may wind up being the loser overall since he was never able to deliver the "knockout blow" that is suddenly required of him. Needless to say, nothing will prevent the media from reestablishing the "strong leader" meme after Friday night.

New Yorkers & 9/11

2004-09-02T07:22:00.000-07:00

Apropos a comment in this post from Big Media Matt:

"I get the feeling these New Yorker liberals just don't understand how 9-11 changed things. It's like they don't even remember it."

Those voters not so blinded by partisanship (and there are many who claim to be thus) should consider this statement. Rather, they should consider why it is that New York City is very decidedly going for John Kerry. This city is a long-standing Democratic bastion in presidential politics, but one should consider that if anything were to have shaken the Dems' grip on the city, it would have been 9/11. Indeed, there were many who postulated in the aftermath that Bush had been so brilliant in his response to the attacks that New York may very well be a swing state in 2004. We here in the city are on the front lines of the war on terror. It is our homes and our businesses and our infratstructure that are the most prime targets of terrorists seeking to damage the US. There are few of us here that did not have friends or loved ones that died in the WTC and I would wager none of us did not know someone who was in (or should have been in) the towers that morning. And we expect that when another attack comes, it will again take place (in whole or in part) here in the city. It being the case that as individuals we expect we might be a victim of the next strike, our collective vehemence in opposition to Bush should send a message. We who are condemned to die do not think George Bush can keep us safe. This is not partisanship (there are no partisans in foxholes), but rather a careful recognition that 9/11 did change things and Bush has failed to recognize this and react in kind. Far from not remembering it, 9/11 will be foremost in our minds on election day. That Bush doesn't stand a chance of being competitive in the city should tell those who consider security the number one issue this fall a lot about the candidate we, who are most in danger, consider most fit to defend their lives and livelihoods. We on the front lines consider George Bush unfit for that command.

Assessing Foreign Policy

2004-08-31T13:18:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday Brad DeLong took issue with an editorial from the Economist that sized up the current administration. The Deputy Editor of the publication then wrote a letter to Brad. I take particular issue with the Economist's opinion (expressed in both the editorial and in the letter) that, "Bush has got the big things right on foreign policy." I am unable to see how this can plausibly be judged as true. Perhaps it is that Bush has been so uniformly miserable on a wide range of issues that the editors gave him some slack on the one action he took that was seen widely as both correct and admirable. His retaliation for the 9/11 attacks against al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Operation Enduring Freedom, however, was not a Churchillian act of self defense or a Lincolnian war for the present and future of the country. It was, in short, what any president would have done. That Bush wielded the most powerful military force in the history of mankind to oust a fundamentalist regime (perhaps only temporarily at that) from one of the most barren parts of the earth confirmed that he would defend the US when it was attacked. That is comforting, but no great achievement in and of itself. Jefferson is not remembered for heroically sending the navy to put down the Barbary pirates. Ranked properly, Enduring Freedom could be set just below the ouster of Noriega (after all, Bush pere got his man). I will not soon forget 9/11 or the days following here in the city, but I will also not allow my sentinentality to glorify reality. Indeed, it is the desire to prevent another 9/11 that compels me to take issue with the Economist's assertion.

For this newspaper, that verdict looks mostly right for Mr Bush's foreign policy. The charge that he set off in a needlessly unilateralist direction on taking office is vastly overdone; he sought allies throughout; and in many ways his forthright style was a breath of fresh air after the muddle and evasions of the Clinton era. Yes, he dropped out of the Kyoto Protocol in a tactless way; but that was a bad treaty which America was never going to accept in any case (the Senate voted against it by a margin of 95-0). Mr Bush upset many people by ripping apart the outdated anti-ballistic-missile defence treaty with Russia—then baffled his critics by getting both Russia and (more hesitantly) China to go along with him.

This is the pre-9/11 roundup of Bush's foreign policy. There is a noticable lack both here and in the entire editorial of any mention of North Korea. Recall that it was very early on that Bush declared that he would deal with North Korea in a far more effective and confrontational manner than had Clinton. The fact that NK now stands ready to service the outlaws of the world with nuclear weapons seems to concern the Economist not at all. Bush very much treated North Korea in a "needlessly unilateralist" way from the outset of his administration. The second intifada had been raging before Bush was inaugurated, but he chose not to pick up any of Clinton's efforts to bring peace between Israel and Palestine; indeed he very publicly chose to do nothing at all. It was only after 9/11 that Bush decided to engage in the least and it has always been a halting engagement at best. What I find most confounding about the Economist's editorial is that it treats Bush as something other than a politician willing to do and say whatever it takes to get his way. This is a common affliction among the media with Bush and one by which they should be terribly embarassed.

But it was the thunderbolt of September 11th that counted most. Those atrocities set the course for the remainder of his presidency. Since then, we continue to think that Mr Bush has got the big foreign-policy decisions right. He understood the nature of the war that had been declared against America and the western world. He made it clear that it is not a war between civilisations, let alone religions; but he has also served notice to Arab regimes of the need to change. He rightly decided to destroy al-Qaeda's home in Afghanistan—and, yes, on the evidence that presented itself at the time, he rightly decided to invade Iraq.

If one were to read Bush's speeches alone, one would certainly be under the impression that he does indeed understand the nature of the war against al Qaida. One could persist with this opinion only without an honest assessment of his actions or a determined effort to believe the words and not the deeds. When one matches words and deeds, however, the result is that Bush does not understand the nature of the war. Nothing demonstrates this clearer than Bush's Wilsonian drive to invade Iraq in 2002 and early 2003. Only with a blinkered and myopic view of the evidence can one state that Bush had cause to invade Iraq in 2003 or that he sought the assistance of allies. He may have believed he had the cause based on the evidence he selectively examined, but it is the totality of the evidence at that time that is relevant. More importantly, when one compares the latter to the former, the result is that only a politician that had decided to invade ex ante could believe his case was supported by the record. The trips to the UN were nothing more than political theater engineered to protect Tony Blair from immediate ouster by his own party. Bush's belligerence toward both Iraq and the UN as an institution were plain to anyone willing pay attention. His bravado posturing and declaration that either the UN bless his invasion or decamp to the Oxford Union bore no resemblance to a statesman entreating his allies to join the good fight. When the UN insisted on determining what, exactly, was actually happening on the ground in Iraq (by having Hans Blix establish a record), Bush became impatient and petulent. Finally, having done his kabuki dance ("No matter what the whip count is, we're calling for the vote.") he walked away from the international body, cut the inspectors off and launched the invasion. All of this the Economist presumably knows but chose to ignore. Indeed, unless the members of the editorial staff were babes in swaddling clothes a mere 14 years ago, they would recall the massive diplomatic effort Poppy put into assembling a true coalition to attack Saddam. Glossing over the facts of how the Iraq invasion was launched is inexcusable. Need I remind the Economist that Bush even refused allied assistance when it was explicitly offered? Do they forget that the invocation of Article V of the NATO charter after the 9/11 attacks was unceremoniously snubbed by Bush? The assertion that he sought allies throughout is false on its face. The post-war reconstruction of Iraq demonstrates lucidly and painfully that Bush understands very little about the world even after 9/11. Bush's actions have shown that the liberty of the Iraqi people is secondary to their unwilling assistance in his reelection effort. His actions show his belief that their land and its resources are little more than chips to be handed to the winner of no-bid contracts. The butcher's bill of the post-war failure stretches from the morgue to the Oil Ministry to the Iraqi National Museum. The Economist notes some of these failures but bizarrely contends that Bush understands the war on terror. If, after all, it is, "the thunderbolt of September 11th that count[s] most," then Bush has been an abject failure. There is no single issue that is a greater threat to the security of the US than nuclear proliferation. As Bush and his fellow fear-mongers love to remind their audiences, "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Nuclear proliferation remains the single biggest foreign policy issue facing the world. It has been for the past 60 years and yet the Economist mentions nothing of North Korea or Bush's pathetic coddling of Pakistan and Dr. Kahn. There are no real politik or terrorist hunting exuses for allowing Kahn to get off with a slap on the wrist. North Korea and Pakistan have very publicly formed an Axis of Proliferation and yet the actions of both remain studiously ignored by Bush. The Economist praises Bush for doing away with the ABM treaty but sees no reason to elaborate on why it was good to be rid of such an agreement aside from declaring it "outdated." The Economist takes Bush to task for many domestic issues on which it disagrees with him, and I can only assume that its poor analysis of Bush's foreign policy record is an attempt at balance. Either that or the Economist is simply afraid to call a spade a spade. Its offices, like my own, are here in the city and perhaps it is too painful to look at Mr. Bush and say, "you let us down, you did not do enough," but that is plainly what has happened. The Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan, bin Laden remains at large and, thanks to Operation Iraqi Liberation, has become a prophet. These are the big things in foreign policy over the past four years, and Bush has got them wrong.

You Broke It, We Bought It

2004-08-27T12:31:00.000-07:00

Sam Rosenfeld at Tapped is far kinder than I. Alan Greenspan is a very smart man, but he is also a hack. His legacy is the very fiscal junk heap that he now decries as being the work of an overspending congress. I will not take advice from this charlatan as to how our country is to mend the very structural problems he engineered. Very bad things were set in motion in the early 80s and it will take a long time to fix them. Nothing could accelerate that process faster than the distinguished chairman retiring forthwith. This will never happen, of course, and it will take great moral and legislative effort over the next several years to stem the poisonous 'reforms' Uncle Alan now advocates until his term of service mercifully ends. If the General Welfare has survived until then we may yet ensure that every person who helps to make our country great is possessed of a secure and dignified retirement that is their due.

Brave Sir Robin

2004-08-25T13:08:00.000-07:00

Nice to see that Commander Codpiece is afraid of a triple-amputee (mobility notwithstanding). Brave Sir Robin ran away. Bravely ran away, away! When danger reared its ugly head, He bravely turned his tail and fled. Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about And gallantly he chickened out. Bravely taking to his feet He beat a very brave retreat, Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin! He is packing it in and packing it up And sneaking away and buggering up And chickening out and pissing off home, Yes, bravely he is throwing in the sponge...

Perfect Test Run

2004-08-06T09:08:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's because I like in NYC or a too close reading of the texts of Hunter Thompson, but the terror alert on Sunday stunk to high heaven, and whenever my wife called me into the bedroom to replay Ridge's now famous presidential leadership quote (the wonders of Tivo) the bullshit meters were clamouring. There was one particular reason that the b.s. meters were redlining, though. Ridge announced that, "the United States Government is raising the threat level to Code Orange for the financial services sector in New York City, Northern New Jersey and Washington, DC." Now most of the country may not know this, but NYC has been on Orange Alert ever since 9/11. Hence the fatigued guardsmen in Grand Central and Penn Station along with the increased police presence. I was quite confused as to why Ridge had called a press conference to announce that NYC would continue to be at Orange Alert. Later came the details about how this particular orange alert would differ from NYC's normal orange alert. Truck traffic would now be prohibited from entering Manhattan using several of the bridges and tunnels. That's when I thought, "fire drill." The RNC wants to turn this place into a fortress in a couple of weeks, but one doesn't make a city of 8 million dance to a certain tune without some warmup. One could make announcements about closures, etc., but that might cause complaints and even lawsuits from a few whackjobs. Far better, though, would be a terror alert that would allow for a dress rehearsal as well as softening up the population for the real thing in three weeks. Enter Ridge. The city has already been treated to other kinds of drills over the past month, but this week the whole population got good and softened up. To boot, they threw in a campaign stop for the first lady at the freshly locked down Citigroup building. Capping off the rehearsal was the lifting of most of the travel restrictions on Wednesday night. No need to tax everyone too much before the real thing. Yes it was the perfect test run for convention week. Now we're all ready to go and there's no need for a terror alert in late August. The lingering question is whether they'll shut down the Lincoln instead of the Holland tunnel during the convention as that dumps out near MSG.

Same Press Conference, Different Day

2004-08-05T07:34:00.000-07:00

One year ago next week:

Two men with suspected al Qaeda links were arrested in a sting operation ... early on Thursday in a money-laundering scheme to buy a shoulder-fired missile, law enforcement sources said.

Whoops, that's from today, this is from a year ago:

The missile shipped into the New York area last month was not a real missile — just a mockup — also arranged entirely by the government. The government also arranged the meetings at a New Jersey hotel and elsewhere, where Lakhani allegedly told undercover agents posing as al Qaeda terrorists about his support of bin Laden. "One would have to ask yourself, would this have occurred at all without the government?" said Gerald Lefcourt, a criminal defense attorney.

Iraqi Profile

2004-03-18T15:38:00.000-08:00

KnightRidder profiles an Iraqi family one year after invasion. Their income has risen from about $2 a day to about $19 a day. That's the good news. In their opinion, though, there are more negatives to life now than there are positives.

To understand their disillusionment, Mohammed said, consider that in the last month, 20 children have been kidnapped for ransom from the school where she teaches. This isn't a new story: Kidnapping is a growth industry in postwar Iraq. Most victims never report the crime to police - they simply pay anywhere from $3,000 to $50,000, depending on their means. And then there are the explosions. A few months ago, Hameed was cut in the head by flying glass when a police station near his school was bombed. A few days ago, bombers struck a Shiite mosque near their younger children's school, forcing the school to close for a week while the windows are replaced. Polls show most Iraqis believe crime has declined since the chaotic months after the war. But they still cite a lack of security as their top concern. Rapes, robberies, carjackings and murders remain epidemic. So, too, does a widespread feeling of lawlessness that can be almost as corrosive as the quiet terror once sown by Saddam's secret police.

The extra income comes from the family's two government jobs; those pay raises are a result, "of seized assets, oil revenue and U.S. aid." What isn't factored in here are Iraq's debts. Also even though corruption seems to be running high at the moment, the US is still in control of the finances of the country. Does anyone believe that if Chalabi & his ilk get the reins of power they will continue to pour money into government salaries? Of the resistance, if Mohammed's opinion is held by the majority of Iraqis, it's not clear that US troops will ever be welcome in Iraq.

They are ambivalent about the presence of U.S. troops. Mohammed says she thinks U.S. troops are needed to keep the country from slipping further into anarchy and sectarian violence, but Saad says attacks against U.S. troops are justifiable.

Happy that Saddam is gone, believe that the US keeps what little security there is, but still feel that attacking US troops is okay. If that opinion is held by most of the population, that's a tough bind for an occupying power. I don't know that handing power of to another titular entity will change Mohammed's mind. I wonder if his opinion will change at all as long as US troops still patrol parts of the country.

On the Record -- 3/18

2004-03-18T13:12:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Josh Marshall posted a snippet from W's speech on March 17, 2003. That got me wondering how many other statements like that one there are on the record from this administration. Certainly Rumsfeld was publicly embarassed this past Sunday when he asked for "any citations." Could there be one for each calendar day from now until the election?I want to confine the issue to major administration players. To that end, Wolfowitz would count, but not Perle. Today we have a snippet from old George himself. On March 18, 2002, he was in Missouri to talk about economic recovery:

One way to make sure America is strong is to rally the compassion. Another way is to make sure that our economy is strong. I want to tell you right up front that I do not think the role of government is to try to create wealth. That's not the role of government. The role of government is to create an environment in which people are willing to take risk. (Applause.) The role of government is to create an economic climate in which the Rolf's of the world say, gosh, I've got a good idea, I want to take a risk. And, therefore, employ people. That's really what I view my job is. If there's roadblocks, to eliminate them. And if there's ways to make the environment better, do so. I wanted to talk a little bit about that. High taxes is a road block. (Applause.) High tax rates discourage investment. And when you discourage investment, you discourage job creation. And, therefore, working with people in Congress, both the House and the Senate, we worked to reduce the tax burden on working people in America. And it came at exactly the right time. Tax relief was vital. (Applause.) It was vital for our economic future, because when you give people more of their own money to spend, they demand. And when they demand, somebody produces. And when somebody produces, somebody gets to work. (Applause.) But the other thing that was important about tax relief is that it is -- recognizes the importance of small business, because many small businesses are unincorporated. Many small businesses are sole proprietors, or are limited partnerships. And by cutting the personal rates, all personal rates, what we are in effect doing for the small business community was encouraging cash flow. And more cash flow on small business owners means more jobs. And so one of the crucial things we've done to address the economic recession and its slowdown, and the effects it caused on working people, was to say, let's give people their own money back. (Applause.) For a while they were talking about taking away that tax relief -- "they" being some people in Washington, D.C. I couldn't imagine anybody saying in the midst of a recession, we're going to raise taxes. They were reading the wrong textbook, Senator. (Laughter.) Anybody in their right mind knows that if you're interested in making the economy more vital, you let people keep more of their own money. I don't hear much of that talk anymore now that the plan looks like it's working.

This snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute shows W's miserable performance on job creation from March 2001 forward.

The number of payroll jobs reached a low point six months ago, in August 2003. Job growth has averaged only 61,000 a month in the last six months—far less than the 137,000 jobs a month now required to keep the jobs gap from widening. As a result, despite positive job gains, the jobs gap has grown from 6.6 million last August to 7.1 million in February 2004.

Accountability = Appeasement

2004-03-17T12:12:00.000-08:00

Dennis Hastert, the 3rd most powerful man in the US, thinks that a vote for accountability is a vote for appeasement. It's important to highlight why this particular piece of rhetoric is being floated from the right at this point. No one knows if al Qaeda will attack on US soil between now and election day. If they do, though, the men whose responsibility it is to ensure this doesn't happen don't want you to blame them. If you do, they say, you will be handing al Qaeda a victory. That is, if you hold our leaders accountable for their jobs, you are aiding terrorists in their ambition. The goal is to set up a situation whereby if the US is not attacked, the Republican leadership should be rewarded and if the US is attacked, the Republican leadership should be rewarded. They have done the bare minimum to secure our borders and punish our enemies since 9/11 and they are petrified that they will actually be held accountable for this. Thus they want to guilt, shame, or scare you into voting for them.

More on Delusions

2004-03-17T08:58:00.000-08:00

David Kay attempts to smack some sense into Cheney. Cheney's willful disregard for facts is of a piece with Brooks's & Kagan's delusions.

What worries me about the vice president's statement is, I think people who hold out for a Hail-Mary pass—and lo and behold maybe we'll find that stockpile a year or two years out so everyone keeps searching—delay the inevitable looking back at what went wrong. I believe we have enough evidence now to say that the intelligence process, and the policy process that used that information, did not work at the level of effectiveness that we require in the age that we live in. It's a little like the analogy I sometimes use [of NASA's troubled and nearly fatal Apollo 13 mission to the moon]: in Apollo 13, if when the astronauts had said, "Houston, we have a problem," mission control had responded, "Well, you're only a third of the way to the moon. Why don't you keep going and we'll see how serious this problem is? And if and when you get there you don't make it, we'll investigate and we'll fix it for the next one." I mean, it is very hard for institutions to fix problems while they're in denial as to whether the problem really existed. And I am concerned that statements by the vice president and others—principally the vice president and the administration—really raise that issue.

Dangerously Confused

2004-03-17T08:53:00.000-08:00

David Brooks put together another beauty yesterday. The right is all up in arms over the people of Spain appeasing al Qaeda and turning Madrid into Munich. It's 1938 and Osama is Hitler. Spaniards gave into al Qaeda when they elected the man who made fighting terrorism a central piece of his platform. Spaniards gave into al Qaeda's demands when they ousted a liar whom they no longer trusted to protect them or to represent their will to the world. Confused yet? See to Brooks and Kagan, fighting terrorism and Mr. Bush's War are one and the same. Brooks: "The terrorists sought [Aznar's ouster] because they understand, even if many in Europe do not, that Iraq is a crucial battleground in the war on terror." Kagan: "Responsible heads in Europe must understand that anything that smacks of retreat in the aftermath of this latest attack could raise the likelihood of further attacks. Al Qaeda's list of demands doesn't end with Iraq." To me and many, many other people (including the majority of Spaniards) the fisaco in Iraq and destroying al Qaeda are two different fights. They require different personnel, tactics and arms. Mr. Bush's War has made it harder for the US to fight terrrorism. It has also made it harder for us to engage our allies in this fight. Spaniards seem to have felt that Aznar's approach to combating terrorism was tragically ineffective. So they want to give someone else a chance. For many on the right, toppling Saddam was step one in the great dream of reforming the middle east. 9/11 provided a nice way to prod Americans into supporting this dream. It was sold to us that toppling Saddam would be a great blow against al Qaeda. Many people thought this line of thinking was bullshit. The point was not that Saddam should have been allowed a free pass, but that we should have dealt with al Qaeda and its offshoots exclusively first. Brooks, et al. took great pains to obscure the lines between Saddam and terrorism. They twisted language and logic in their writing to such an extent that they no longer know what is al Qaeda and what is Iraq. It is all, the enemy. It is all Hitler, it is always 1938 and we are always in Munich. Can they see reality in their own heads? I don't know; but that they are so detatched from the world in their public musings is a danger to our national security. It is imperative that we vote out this administration that tracks so closely such specious reasoning.

Perhaps That's the Problem

2004-03-16T12:25:00.000-08:00

"Now he is a political candidate and I'm secretary of state, and I don't do politics." Colin Powell doesn't do politics. Perhaps this is why the US is now totally alienated from other like-minded countries around the world. Our own Sec. of State doesn't understand his own job. If Powell doesn't do politics, why is he at State in the first place? This is perhaps Powell's most obtuse statement yet. The entire purpose of his office is political. When he goes abroad he meets foreign leaders; who are politicians. When he meets at the UN with the Security Council, he meets with politicians engaged in political negotiations over how to deal with the world's problems. Why does America's chief liason to the world think he doesn't do politics? Does anyone in this administration know what he's doing?

Disinformation Campaign

2004-03-16T10:11:00.000-08:00

"As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important." Thus spake Chalabi. Knight-Ridder, which is making the rest of the major media outlets look like pikers, has an expose today of the INC's disinformation campaign. While what was said before is not important to Chalabi, it is extremely important that we all examine the various nefarious elements that got us into Iraq. Here is the list of the 100 articles for which the INC provided disinformation. The timeframe is October 2001 to May 2002. I would love to see a list covering June 2002 to March 2003. Note that the first article comes from a WaPo editorial one month after 9/11. Here, then, is a corrupt exile group bragging to the Senate Appropriations Committee that it was feeding information (which we now know to be false) to the major media outlets (including Knight-Ridder) one month after al-Qaeda attacked the U.S.; information that played no small part in convincing the American people that invasion was the best course of action against Saddam. Chalabi continues to be the benefactor of American tax dollars even after his Information Collection Program has been shown to be a total farce. One would think that an administration that had been duped so badly by a man, who is now bragging about it and laughing all the way to the bank with his $4m in US taxpayer money, would seek some retribution or at least restitution; one would think. The gutless sops in the administration aside, it is important that Americans in general follow this story carefully because it is part and parcel with how this administration conducts business. So blinded are they by their own ideology and self-rightousness that they will defy all logic, evidence and even public humiliation to continue their self-appointed mission of world reconfiguration. This is true on the domestic front as well as the foreign one. From the WaPo editorial:

Take Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, a 47-year-old former Iraqi army captain who from 1994 until 1998 was a military instructor in the elite militia known as Saddam's Fighters. He escaped with his family into Iraqi Kurdistan and then to Turkey in 1999 and received U.S. permission to settle as a refugee in Fort Worth last May. Alami, a soft-spoken man with the engaging quiet smile endemic to the Tigris and Euphrates delta, guardedly outlined to me here Wednesday details of the training given for airliner hijacking and assassinations in the Salman Pak area of Baghdad while he was there. The Iraqi National Congress had tracked Alami to Fort Worth and made him available for an interview here while he sought a meeting with the FBI. Discussing Iraq's links to terrorism with an American was a novel experience, Alami said. The Immigration and Naturalization Service official who interviewed him in Turkey for his refugee visa did not probe his military specialties. More surprising: An Iraqi ex-intelligence officer who has told the Iraqi National Congress of specific sightings of "Islamicists" training on a Boeing 707 parked in Salman Pak as recently as September 2000 says he was treated dismissively by CIA officers in Ankara this week. They reportedly showed no interest in pursuing a possible Iraq connection to Sept. 11.

From today's KR piece:

Many of the articles relied on interviews with the same defectors, who appeared to change facts with each telling. For instance, one defector first appeared in several stories as an Iraqi army former captain, but a later story said he was a major. Another defector told one interviewer that the aircraft fuselage on which Islamic extremists received training in hijacking belonged to a Boeing 707 and was quoted in a later story as saying that it came from a Russian-made Tupolev. Intelligence debriefers look for such differences when trying to determine the reliability of defectors, who sometimes exaggerate their importance or try to tell interviewers what they think the interviewers want to hear. The Information Collection Program (ICP) was financed out of the more than $18 million that Congress approved for the Iraqi National Congress, led by Chalabi, now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, between 1999 and 2003. The group remains on the Pentagon's payroll.

In Detroit or in Baghdad

2004-03-12T10:24:00.000-08:00

Wherever BushCo. goes, it hampers prosecutors who are driven by a desire to actually convict criminals rather than get headlines. Is Salem Chalabi a reliable source? I don't know, but his connection to his uncle Ahmad makes him very suspect. However, the facts of Salem Chalabi's complaint don't seem to be in dispute.

"The U.S. military just releases detainees without consulting with us. They are releasing people with valuable information on Saddam. They are undermining the process of putting him on trial," Salem Chalabi told Reuters. "Why should we bother?" Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the U.S. Army in Iraq, said the release of detainees from American custody did not preclude the Iraqi authorities from taking action against them. Chalabi said frustrations over the releases were growing in the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, with some members discussing putting on hold the special tribunal expected to try Saddam and his top aides if they were not consulted. "There is a feeling that it is a pointless exercise. Important figures are being released and we are not even consulted. These people are leaving the country."

While it's technically true that the Governing Council can act against these people, it has no powers of enforcement with which to detain them. The military doesn't dispute that it's releasing people or that they may indeed be criminals that deserve prosecution; it just doesn't want to hold on to them anymore.

"The Americans have released 15 detainees who would have been valuable to us. They are doing this because they arrested too many people and now they are compensating," he said. One important example, he said, was Saadoun Hammadi, a longtime Saddam ally who served as prime minister in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. "At one point he was a senior member of the Baath party. He knows a lot of information," Chalabi said. U.S. officials say they have detained about 8,000 Iraqis suspected of being security risks.

Beyond Parody

2004-03-11T13:19:00.000-08:00

It's just too easy: Kerry Not Sorry for Swipe at GOP Critics

3:10 PM -- As Republican congressional leaders criticized Kerry's proposals and called for him to stop name-calling and negative campaigning, Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., said they see Kerry as "Ted Kennedy on a South Beach diet."

Bush Unveils Negative Ads Vs. Kerry

4 PM -- Bush's toughest ad, titled "100 days," envisions Kerry's first three months in office. "John Kerry's plan: To pay for new government spending, raise taxes by at least $900 billion." "On the war on terror: Weaken the Patriot Act used to arrest terrorists and protect America. And he wanted to delay defending American until the United Nations approved."

As several other people have noted, there are 5 more months of this to go. Part of the law of unintended consequences, though, is that these attempts to label Kerry as a flip-flopper, big spender or other such nonsense has cause the blogosphere to start compiling the very real and very relevant flip-flops of W's that have had an effect on the health of the nation over the past 3 years. The best thus far are from Kos and Josh Marshall has two more here and here. Marshall also gets one for good measure from Senator Man on Dog.

Rallying the Base

2004-03-08T13:42:00.000-08:00

Part of his early effort to preempt any unfavorable comparisons between himself and Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry addressed voting issues in Florida today.

"Remember, George Bush ran as the great uniter, and he's become the great divider," Kerry said. "You'd think that somebody, remembering what happened here in this great state, who was finally put in office by the Supreme Court of the United States, would actually recognize the divisions in this country and try to reach out."

Kerry's currently up in the Florida polls, and it appears that if he has his boot on Bush's neck in one area, he's not going to let up. Long way to go until November, but Kerry's making good on his promise to run non-stop until election day.

Responding to a voter who asked, "What can you do to prevent them from stealing the election again?", Kerry, a lawyer and former Massachusetts prosecutor, said his campaign was assembling a legal team to examine districts which had problems. "We're going to pre-check it, we're going to have the legal team in place. ... We're going to take injunctions where necessary ahead of time. We'll pre-challenge if necessary," the four-term Massachusetts senator said.

This will play well with anyone that was disappointed with how the Gore team handled the recount situation.

Judiciary Dust Up

2004-03-08T13:28:00.000-08:00

Ted Kennedy has taken issue with Bush's recess appointment of William Pryor.

In a letter released Monday, Kennedy, a high-ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that "a serious question exists as to whether Judge Pryor's recess appointment is constitutional." He asked the court to determine the validity of the appointment, so as to not taint any decisions in which Pryor may be involved. Recess appointments can only come "at the end of a Congress or the recess between the annual sessions of Congress," Kennedy wrote. "No other Article III judge in the nation's history has ever received a recess appointment during a brief holiday period in the midst of a session of Congress," Kennedy added in a memo attached to the letter.

The White House feels that Kennedy doesn't understand the history at all.

"The president properly exercised the power granted to him by the U.S. Constitution," White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said. "Judge Pryor's appointment was thoroughly reviewed by the Department of Justice and is fully consistent with long standing practices of both Democrat and Republican administrations."

I guess it depends on what the definition of 'recess' is. This may be an indication that the Dems on the Judiciary intend to ratchet up their opposition to W's appointments during this election year. The Republicans are sweating with the computer theft report (large .pdf -- via Calpundit) out and any further investigations that could grow from its fertile ground. As Bush has decided that he will attempt to reignite the culture war this election year, the judiciary will become a central element in the argutments of both sides. Perhaps the senate Dems feel themselces on solid ground taking on old George this time.

All Dead Not Politically Expedient

2004-03-04T12:31:00.000-08:00

Here's a question, why are the remains of 9/11 victims prominently displayed in W's first campaign ad and not the dead or wounded from Iraq? Why this? and not this? or this? Certainly the latter is a more direct result of W's leadership over these past 4 years than the former. Iraq is his legacy, not 9/11.

Priorities

2004-03-03T10:27:00.000-08:00

Why can W spare 80 minutes to talk with network news reporters about his re-election strategy but only 60 minutes talking to the 9/11 commission? Why are W's priorities so out of whack?

The Oval Office session was designed to show Bush as eager to campaign and fight back against Kerry, and to portray the president as engaged in the issues of the day. The meeting was supposed to run just half an hour, and Bush seemed to enjoy showing that he could handle whatever topics were fired at him, according to the accounts.

One would think he would be eager to show himself as dedicated to determining exactly what went wrong on and before 9/11 in an effort to do everything humanly possible to prevent such an attack from happening again. One would think.

With God on Our Side

2004-03-02T13:46:00.000-08:00

For some reason our baby boomer media hounds have yet to mention the utter comic irony of this question being asked of an American presidential candidate that both fought in Vietnam and later opposed that same war. Is God on America's side? With God on Our Side

Oh my name it is nothin' My age it means less The country I come from Is called the Midwest I's taught and brought up there The laws to abide And that land that I live in Has God on its side. Oh the history books tell it They tell it so well The cavalries charged The Indians fell The cavalries charged The Indians died Oh the country was young With God on its side. Oh the Spanish-American War had its day And the Civil War too Was soon laid away And the names of the heroes I's made to memorize With guns in their hands And God on their side. Oh the First World War, boys It closed out its fate The reason for fighting I never got straight But I learned to accept it Accept it with pride For you don't count the dead When God's on your side. When the Second World War Came to an end We forgave the Germans And we were friends Though they murdered six million In the ovens they fried The Germans now too Have God on their side. I've learned to hate Russians All through my whole life If another war starts It's them we must fight To hate them and fear them To run and to hide And accept it all bravely With God on my side. But now we got weapons Of the chemical dust If fire them we're forced to Then fire them we must One push of the button And a shot the world wide And you never ask questions When God's on your side. In a many dark hour I've been thinkin' about this That Jesus Christ Was betrayed by a kiss But I can't think for you You'll have to decide Whether Judas Iscariot Had God on his side. So now as I'm leavin' I'm weary as Hell The confusion I'm feelin' Ain't no tongue can tell The words fill my head And fall to the floor If God's on our side He'll stop the next war.

Conservative Poverty

2004-03-02T09:51:00.000-08:00

I remember some all night bull sessions in college where some friends and I would chew the fat on one issue or another in an attempt to arrive at a workable theory (if not a solution) on how to cope with one or another of the world's ills. Today's David Brooks column, in a return to the drivel that was fuelling his descent before his prior column, rails against liberals for wanting to assist the poor. In David's world any time a Democrat mentions assisting the poor he means welfare. And all Democrats have the same opinion. Try to follow his logic.

Edwards talks about poverty in economic terms. He vows to bring jobs back to poor areas and restrict trade to protect industries. He suggests that if we could take money from the rich and special interests, there'd be more for the underprivileged. This kind of talk is descended from Marxist theory, which holds that we live in the thrall of economic conditions. What the poor primarily need is more money, the theory goes. The core assumption is that economic forces determine culture and shape behavior. As William Julius Wilson wrote in "The Truly Disadvantaged," "If ghetto underclass minorities have limited aspirations, a hedonistic orientation toward life or lack of plans for the future, such outlooks ultimately are the result of restricted opportunities and feelings of resignation originating from bitter personal experiences and a bleak future."

John Edwards = Karl Marx = William Julius Wilson Does John Edwards agree with Prof. Williams? Who knows? I don't, and Brooks offers no evidence that he knows.

We've now had a 40-year experiment to determine which side is right, and while both arguments have merit, it's clear the conservatives have a more accurate view of poverty. For decades welfare programs funneled money to the disadvantaged, but families dissolved and poverty rates remained stubbornly high. Then the nation switched tack in the mid-1990's, embracing policies that demanded work. Many liberals made a series of horrifying predictions about what welfare reform would do to the poor. These predictions, based on the paleoliberal understanding of poverty, were extravagantly wrong.

Is that true? Did the Great Society programs fail to alleviate the suffering of the poor? Did poverty rates remain stubbornly high? Not according to the National Poverty Center.

In the late 1950s, the poverty rate for the total U.S. population was 22.4 percent, or approximately 39.5 million individuals. These numbers declined steadily throughout the 1960s, reaching a low of 12.1 percent, or 24.1 million individuals, by 1969. For the next decade, the poverty rate fluctuated between 11.1 and 12.6 percent, but began to rise steadily again in 1980. By 1983, the number of poor individuals had risen to 35.3 million individuals, or 15.2 percent of the population. For the next ten years, the poverty rate remained above 12.8 percent, and had climbed to 15.1 percent, or 39.3 million individuals, by 1993. The rate declined dramatically for the remainder of the decade, to 11.3 percent by 2000, before rising slightly in 2001, to 11.7 percent.

So it would seem that from the Great Society (I'll peg the start of that in 1964 with the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964) until 1980 we had pretty good luck getting the poverty rate down and keeping it there. Then with Ronald Reagan ("Welfare Queens") the poverty rate heads north and stays there until the late 1990's. So did the Great Society fail? Do conservatives have a more accurate view of poverty? The statistics don't seem to think so. Brooks then jumps through hoops trying to argue that it is behavior, not opportunity, that keeps all the poor in that state. If they just wanted it bad enough, they wouldn't be poor anymore. Of course, they don't seem to be able to do this. Brooks then back away from the behavior argument.

There are as many kinds of poverty as there are poor people. As David K. Shipler writes in his wonderfully observant new book, "The Working Poor," it takes emotional dexterity to climb out of poverty, as well as job skills. The poor often have "less agility to navigate around the pitfalls of a frenetic world driven by technology and competition."

Sounds to me like this wonderfully observant book is noting that the poor live, "in the thrall of economic conditions." Marxist pig. Brooks finally throws up his hands and says everyone's right.

While conservatives were right about the basic nature of poverty, liberals are right when they point out that simply getting people off welfare and into the world of work is not enough. Welfare reform means more single mothers are working, but they are having a hard time making progress into the middle class. We're going to need support programs to complete the successes of the 1990's.

Support programs? WTF? Brooks's whole argument is that liberals are wrong that the poor need support programs. What they need is a stiff upper lip. That's the way out of poverty! Conservatives have spent two decades poisoning (and draining) the well of support programs. Now Brooks wants them back? How did this guy get a gig writing for the NY Times? Honestly.

You're No Caravaggio

2004-02-26T09:14:00.000-08:00

I will wade into the discussion of Mel Gibson's celebration of violence only so far as to say that he shall not besmirch the name of Caravaggio, in my opinion the greatest pure painter in history, by claiming to have been inspired by him when Gibson set out to make his gore-fest. To wit, this bears no resemblance to this.

Lockbox

2004-02-25T13:37:00.000-08:00

Perhaps Greenspan was sleeping for the entire 2000 Presidential campaign when Al Gore was derided by the media for his pledge that the surplusses be put in a lockbox to ensure the solvency of Social Security & Medicare.

There's something else at stake in this election that's even more important than economic progress. Simply put, it's our values. It's our responsibility to our loved ones, to our families. And to me, family values means honoring our fathers and mothers, teaching our children well, caring for the sick, respecting one another, giving people the power to achieve what they want for their families, putting both Social Security and Medicare in an iron-clad lockbox where the politicians can't touch them. To me, that kind of common sense is a family value. Hands off Medicare and Social Security trust fund money. I'll veto anything that spends it for anything other than Social Security and Medicare.

Why would Greenspan tell such a bold-faced lie as he did today?

Just in Case You Missed It

2004-02-25T13:31:00.000-08:00

I don't know if Uncle Alan was actually in attendance on 27 January 1998, when President Clinton first announced that the budget would swing into surplus (thus beginning the debate about what to do with the surplus), but in case he, or anyone else, is confused about what the debate was about, here's what Clinton said:

Now, if we balance the budget for next year, it is projected that we'll then have a sizeable surplus in the years that immediately follow. What should we do with this projected surplus? I have a simple four-word answer: Save Social Security first. Tonight, I propose that we reserve 100 percent of the surplus -- that's every penny of any surplus -- until we have taken all the necessary measures to strengthen the Social Security system for the 21st century. Let us say -- let us say to all Americans watching tonight, whether you're 70 or 50, or whether you just started paying into the system, Social Security will be there when you need it. Let us make this commitment: Social Security first. Let's do that -- together.

Greenspan was chairman of the Fed then and was surely aware of Clinton's comments. Indeed in his testimony of 4 March 1998, Greenspan endorsed saving Social Security first.

However, we can be more certain that, absent action, the budgetary position will erode after the next decade as the baby boom generation moves into retirement, putting massive strains on the social security and medicare programs. Without question, the task of stemming that erosion will become increasingly difficult the longer it is postponed. Indeed, especially in light of these inexorable demographic trends, I have always emphasized that we should be aiming for budgetary surpluses and using the proceeds to retire outstanding federal debt. In that regard, one measure of how much progress has been made in dealing with the nation's fiscal affairs is that serious discussion of such paydowns has begun to surface. Working down the stock of the federal debt would put further downward pressure on long-term interest rates, which would enhance private capital investment, labor productivity, and economic growth, preparing us better to confront the looming changes in retirement demographics.

And yet for some reason in 2001, Greenspan felt that we needed first and foremost to slash government receipts in order to stem the tide of paying off the federal debt too quickly. What happened to Greenspan between 1998 & 2001? And what has happened since then that he is now advising gutting one of the cornerstones of American life?

Screw the Boomers

2004-02-25T08:39:00.000-08:00

That's Alan Greenspan's message to Congress. The best way to deal with the looming financial issues in the Social Security system? Screw the retirees. Oh and boost the retirement age. This is, in Alan's opinion, far preferrable to raising taxes to cover the financial gap that will open in the system when the boomers begin to retire. I went on a tirade a while back over Greenspan's 25 January 2001 testimony in which he told the Congress that the financial future of the country was dependent on them slashing taxes.

I believe, as I have noted in the past, that the federal government should eschew private asset accumulation because it would be exceptionally difficult to insulate the government's investment decisions from political pressures. Thus, over time, having the federal government hold significant amounts of private assets would risk sub-optimal performance by our capital markets, diminished economic efficiency, and lower overall standards of living than would be achieved otherwise.

Having been given cover by the wise old man, Congress slashed taxes 3 years in a row. Now the budget picture is a mess. But now, 36 months later, the wise old man says that the tax rates from 2000 cannot be enacted again because it would destroy the economy. A brief aside. Greenspan floats this stink bomb in his testimony, "[i]n recent years, budget debates have turned to choices offered by those advocating tax cuts and those advocating increased spending." This is a lie. Perhaps in Greenspan's world these were the decisions, but the actual question in the debates of 1999-2001 was tax cuts vs. saving Social Security. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding, indeed anyone that read the newspaper even on a monthly basis during those years understands this. The current outlook is such that we have a total reversal of the budget picture from 2001 which is now also holding the nation's future hostage.

These scenarios suggest that, under a range of reasonably plausible assumptions about spending and taxes, we could be in a situation in the decades ahead in which rapid increases in the unified budget deficit set in motion a dynamic in which large deficits result in ever-growing interest payments that augment deficits in future years. The resulting rise in the federal debt could drain funds away from private capital formation and thus over time slow the growth of living standards.

As Kevin Drum discussed here and as the Economist discussed here there is a very wide range of budget outlooks. The Economist even provides this handy graphic: The CBO baseline estimates factor in a recovering economy from now until 2013. Indeed, they expect a sharp turnaround in the deficits to begin soon as a result of economic growth. However, after 2006, a yawning light blue section emerges under the baseline. This is the cost of allowing Bush's tax cuts to become permanent. Roughly $400b a year by 2013. The only other section of the graphic that is as large is the one that accounts for increases in discretionary spending (of which Social Security & Medicare are not a part) as a result of the growth of GDP. Greenspan's proposal to deal with this (and future assumingly larger) deficits in the budget picture is to slash spending on Medicare & Social Security as well as halt all increases in discretionary spending (yes that would include defense). But if we are to believe the CBO (and Alan certainly seems to) that would still leave us with a $200+b deficits (and no hope of closing it) solely as a result of the tax cuts. As I remember it, the country was doing pretty well under Clinton's tax rates. Indeed we only barely made it to a surplus then (with the help of a speculative bubble, no less). Rather than screwing old people out of their retirement benefits and health care (for which they have worked to make this country what it is today since the late 60's), shouldn't we first look to restore some sanity to the tax code? Why is it that the marginal income tax rates of people making over $200,000/year are untouchable until we have destroyed the retirement system of this country? Why is the chairman of the Fed's worldview so distorted?

Atta Boy!

2004-02-24T13:06:00.000-08:00

Just when I thought he was headed off the cliff, David Brooks yanks up the e-brake and turns in truly lucid and insightful column.

You'll find that Huntington marshals a body of evidence to support his claims. But the most persuasive evidence is against him. Mexican-American assimilation is a complicated topic because Mexican-Americans are such a diverse group. The educated assimilate readily; those who come from peasant villages take longer. But they are assimilating. It's easy to find evidence that suggests this is so. In their book, 'Remaking the American Mainstream,' Richard Alba of SUNY-Albany and Victor Nee of Cornell point out that though there are some border neighborhoods where immigrants are slow to learn English, Mexicans nationwide know they must learn it to get ahead. By the third generation, 60 percent of Mexican-American children speak only English at home. Nor is it true that Mexican immigrants are scuttling along the bottom of the economic ladder. An analysis of 2000 census data by the USC urban planner Dowell Myers suggests that Latinos are quite adept at climbing out of poverty. Sixty-eight percent of those who have been in this country 30 years own their own homes. Mexican immigrants are in fact dispersing around the nation. When they have children, they tend to lose touch with their Mexican villages and sink roots here. If you look at consumer data, you find that while they may spend more money on children's clothes and less on electronics than native-born Americans, there are no significant differences between Mexican-American lifestyles and other American lifestyles. They serve in the military — and die for this nation — at comparable rates. Frankly, something's a little off in Huntington's use of the term "Anglo-Protestant" to describe American culture. There is no question that we have all been shaped by the legacies of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. But the mentality that binds us is not well described by the words "Anglo" or "Protestant." We are bound together because we Americans share a common conception of the future. History is not cyclical for us. Progress does not come incrementally, but can be achieved in daring leaps. That mentality burbles out of Hispanic neighborhoods, as any visitor can see. Huntington is right that Mexican-Americans lag at school. But that's in part because we've failed them. Our integration machinery is broken. But if we close our borders to new immigration, you can kiss goodbye the new energy, new tastes and new strivers who want to lunge into the future.

Was There Any Doubt?

2004-02-24T07:53:00.000-08:00

More on the rest of W's much anticipated stump speech last night later, but for the moment I'd like to highlight what is the core (indeed perhaps the total) of his re-election message to voters. An attempt to drape himself in the crushed bones and smoldering ash of the people killed on 9/11:

'None of us will ever forget that week when one era ended and another began. On September 14, 2001, I stood in the ruins of the Twin Towers. I remember a lot that day. Workers in hardhats were shouting, "Whatever it takes." One man pointed at me and said, "Don't let me down." As we all did that day, these men and women searching through the rubble took it personally. I took it personally. I've a responsibility that goes on. I will never relent in bringing justice to our enemies. I will defend America, whatever it takes.'

The full remarks are here (for some reason they're not on the White House site yet).

Unserious Hacks

2004-02-23T13:24:00.000-08:00

The Bush administration is staffed almost entirely with deeply unserious political hacks. By unserious I mean that they are committed only to scoring political points against their self-chosen enemies and care not a whit for actual policy. While constantly spouting rhetoric about how the world changed on 9/11, administration insiders don't hesitate to tar any political opponent with what has become one of the most odious epithets in modern American discourse. It is not an accident.

Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation's largest teachers union a 'terrorist organization' during a private White House meeting with governors on Monday. Democratic and Republican governors confirmed Paige's remarks about the 2.7-million-member National Education Association. 'These were the words, 'The NEA is a terrorist organization,'' said Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin. 'He was making a joke, probably not a very good one,' said Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania. 'Of course he immediately divorced the NEA from ordinary teachers, who he said he supports.'

Bad taste doesn't begin to describe a joke that likens teachers to the men who flew planes into the WTC. It would be one thing if this was an off-hand comment by a low-level staffer to some other low-level staffers voicing frustration after extremely difficult negotiations; but this was the Sec. of Education (a career school bureaucrat in Texas) talking to governors (who are responsible for state education budgets as well as conforming to the NCLBA) about the country's largest teacher's union, an organization with which Paige & the governors would be intimately familiar. There is simply no way to justify such a comment; especially coming from a member of an administration that stokes the nation's fears over terrorism at every possible turn. It seems we should assume that even the Sec. of Education sees himself as being in a holy war against evil doers as he promotes the No Child Left Behind Act.

No Enthusiasm

2004-02-23T12:30:00.000-08:00

Following up on this post, we are now sending 50 Marines to protect the US Embassy in Haiti. Adding today's entry to the list from last week we have this chronology: 17 February 2004 3:28PM: "There is frankly no enthusiasm right now for sending in military or police forces to put down the violence that we are seeing," Powell told reporters. 19 February 2004 2:15PM: The Bush administration said Thursday it would send a military team to Haiti to assess the security of the U.S. Embassy there, but stressed that it is still looking for a political solution to the bloody uprising against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. 23 February 2004 2:30PM: Fifty Marines headed Monday to protect the U.S. Embassy and its staff after rebels overran Haiti's second-largest city and threatened to attack the capital, Port-au-Prince. Residents of Cap-Haitien went on a rampage of reprisal and looting for a second day as supporters of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide armed themselves and set up burning barricades outside Port-au-Prince. There were ominous but unconfirmed reports of rebels executing Aristide backers. The Marines were dispatched to the capital to secure the embassy, according to Western diplomats and a Defense Department official. Still no peacekeepers, but can those really be that far behind? As Fred Kaplan discussed last week, Colin Powell is all but irrelevant in forming US foreign policy and has been for a long time.

Honeymoon Over

2004-02-23T09:37:00.000-08:00

It didn't take long for Arnold to run afoul of his fellow state officials. I'll try to find the polling data, but right now a similar fate awaits his bond measure at the polls on March 2:

The Republican governor ordered the state's Democratic attorney general, Bill Lockyer, 'to take immediate steps' to stop the marriages. Lockyer declined. 'The governor can direct the Highway Patrol. He can direct the next Terminator 4 movie if he chooses. But he can't direct the attorney general in the way he's attempted to do,' Lockyer told the San Francisco Chronicle. Lockyer, a likely challenger to a Schwarzenegger re-election bid in 2006, says he'll defend state law that restricts marriage to a man and a woman, but neither he nor the governor has the power to force the city to comply.

Did Arnold's legal people advise him that he could order the State AG around or did he just go off half-cocked? His attempt to order Lockyer came in the form of a letter, though I can't find it on his site.

Cash Cow

2004-02-23T08:35:00.000-08:00

I realize that I'm supposed to have my socks knocked off by the Bush re-election fundraising prowess, and that all Dems should cower in fear before the terrible prospect of the re-election campaign actually starting (apparently the stunt at Daytona was not, in fact, a re-election effort). That being said, how does a campaign that hasn't even started yet burn through $50m? W's campaign will probably pull in at least another $50-60m if not a cool $100m before November. But the ability to raise money does not also indicate the ability to spend it wisely. This campaign has burned $50m even though W has all the trappings of the presidency to reduce his spending. For absolutely no charge to the campaign, Air Force One did a low altitude fly-by at the Daytona 500. For no charge W and his massive entourage did a lap around the track in a fleet of SUVs. W can make speech after speech after speech and his campaign isn't charged a dime. One is left to assume, then, that the $50m was burned almost entirely on overhead and fundraising efforts. Obviously the re-election campaign has been in full swing for a long time (public pronouncements not withstanding), and we know that Bush himself has felt that his re-election campaign should be the biggest political story in the country since last August.

Q Are you going to do anything for Arnold? You say he'll be a good governor. You're spending two days in California. THE PRESIDENT: I'm going to campaign for George W., as you know. Q Will he get a plug in the speech, a mention? THE PRESIDENT: I think I've answered the question, and yes, he would be a good governor, as would others running for governor of California. Like you, I'm most interested in seeing how the process evolves. It's a fascinating bit of political drama evolving in the state -- in the country's largest state. Q It's also the biggest political story in the country. Is it hard to go in there and say nothing about it? THE PRESIDENT: It is the biggest political story in the country? That's interesting. That says a lot. That speaks volumes. Q You don't agree? THE PRESIDENT: It's up to -- I don't get to decide the biggest political story. You decide the biggest political story. But I find it interesting that that is the biggest political story in the country, as you just said. Q You don't think it should be? THE PRESIDENT: Oh, I think there's maybe other political stories. Isn't there, like, a presidential race coming up? (Laughter.) Maybe that says something. It speaks volumes, if you know what I mean. But, yes, it's an interesting story, it really is. And I'm looking forward, like you are, to seeing the outcome of the interesting story. But, no, I'm going to go, I'm going to talk about -- now that you've asked, are you going on the trip?

The point is this, a campaign that has spent 33% of its funds before it competes in a primary or rolls out a national ad campaign is one that is not spending wisely. While they may break all fundraising records, they will spend far more than they raise, and right now the campaign looks undisciplined as it spends like a drunken sailor.

Two Men, Same Feelings

2004-02-21T14:49:00.000-08:00

In my humble opinion, both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ralph Nader can go fuck themselves. Nothing really deeper than that. Just fuck off.

Recess Appointment

2004-02-20T13:29:00.000-08:00

Pulling on several different threads here, but I wonder if this most recent recess appointment has anything to do with quelling the conservative uproar that Josh Marshall talks about here. Hard liners are apparently up in arms over the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee not making waves over the content of stolen Democratic strategy memoes.

The 90-minute session grew heated at times, as the visiting conservative leaders repeatedly interrupted the senators and questioned their handling of the memo controversy. But the senators, who received last week a closed-door briefing on the investigation from Senate Sergeant at Arms Bill Pickle, warned conservatives they might come to regret their position when the results of the probe are fully known. Pickle is expected to finish his investigation by March 5. The senators also asked them to suspend their strong statements in favor of Manuel Miranda, the GOP leadership aide who has admitted to reading the leaked files.

Using a recess appointment on Pryor is a nice sop to the hard liners to let them know that Bush & Co. still care about their agenda. However, it is not often that legislators tell their supporters to shut the hell up. It's especially rare for Republicans on the Judiciary to do it since one must be pretty hard line (or very senior) to get on the committee in the first place. Clearly the Republicans (who were briefed last week about the investigation) expect some pretty bad information to be coming forward on March 5. Info that may (this is pure conjecture) hamper the ability of Republicans to get any nominee out of committee for the rest of the term. Thus, in a last minute pander, Pryor is appointed and the base is told to knock it off until the storm passes. I do wonder what Sgt. at Arms Bill Pickle is preparing in that report of his. Some people are predicting a Special Council on this one. With this and the Plame investigation, it could be long spring on the Hill.

Behind the Green Zone

2004-02-20T09:13:00.000-08:00

Interesting article in Salon today from a reporter living in Baghdad. The reporter doesn't live in the US Green Zone but paints a decidedly bleak picture of the US presence in Baghdad. At the moment I'm trying to work out all the angles of the drop-dead handover date of July 1, and the surety of the US military that our troops will remain in Iraq for a long time after that. For now, here are some clips from the story:

Staff turnover within the CPA is ongoing and enormous, a virtual tsunami of outgoing and incoming personnel. Most CPA employees sign up for the minimum three-month stint and don't renew their contract. ~clip~ But the clock is ticking for this mission. American proconsul Paul Bremer has declared that, come hell or high water, the transfer of power will take place on July 1. There's a sense of both resignation and a mad scramble at the CPA. There's no way that everything can get done on time, but Bush is up for reelection four months after that, and they have to get it done. One CPA staffer told me that Bremer had sent around a memo saying something along the lines of, "I know I told you that the sprint would eventually become a marathon. But we're back to sprinting again." A different anonymous staffer told me, "It's like a ticking bomb. If the ministries don't get their shit together, things could go really bad." ~clip~ In the early days of the Green Zone, before suicide bombers and roadside explosives became the daily diet of risk in Baghdad, Karen used to leave the Zone and get out on the streets of the city. But for a long time now, soldiers, Coalition Provisional Authority employees and contractors have had to adhere to strict orders with regard to their movements. Soldiers leave on planned, heavily armed patrols. CPA employees and contractors occasionally make daylight visits to ministries or power plants. When they go, they travel in small convoys of humvees and military escorts. They are forbidden to go shopping on the streets of Baghdad or eat in a restaurant or visit the homes of their Iraqi co-workers. Some occasionally break the rules and sneak out. My roommates and I have occasionally sent cars to pick up furtive Green Zone escapees and bring them to our house for dinner. I'm sure others find ways to get out as well. But most don't risk it for fear of getting hijacked or bombed or just getting caught. Recently, a contractor I met who lives and works in the Green Zone described standing on the inside of that last line of razor wire and looking out at the city beyond. It was an incredibly sad feeling, he told me. Here he was living in the middle of a city that may as well have been on the other side of the world. The isolated nature of the U.S. occupation has always been an issue. Back in May I met a man working at what was then ORHA. He raved about the stupidity of holing up in the palaces, of not being out on the streets, available to the Iraqi people. Now, with the increasing attacks, it's too late to do anything about it. The Iraqi hearts and minds that the Bush administration talked about winning are focused resolutely on American decampment. Despite the well-intentioned work being done behind closed doors, Americans are, first and foremost, inaccessible occupiers. ~clip~ The July 1 transfer of sovereignty will change that. But it's not going to be easy. No one really knows at this point how it will even work. If the United States leaves outright, the subsequent struggles for power could lead to civil war. If the United States stays in an overbearing regent sort of role, it's bound to perpetuate the violence against those seen as U.S. collaborators. These days, Iraqis seem to feel that the American presence is responsible for pretty much all the ills of the country: the violence, lack of power, lack of jobs. With the U.S. election approaching, the Bush administration has a strong impetus to stick to the deadline and just get away from this debacle.

Great Military Blunders

2004-02-19T14:05:00.000-08:00

After beating John Kerry about the head for 6 straight paragraphs (regarding his actions as a part of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War) with comments, "filled with hyperbolic exaggerations," to use the author's own term, James Webb lets loose on matters relevant to today's fight against terrorism. Many Democrats have criticized Bush in the same manner as Webb, but none has the distinction of having been Sec. of the Navy under Reagan.

Bush arguably has committed the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory. To put it bluntly, he attacked the wrong target. While he boasts of removing Saddam Hussein from power, he did far more than that. He decapitated the government of a country that was not directly threatening the United States and, in so doing, bogged down a huge percentage of our military in a region that never has known peace. Our military is being forced to trade away its maneuverability in the wider war against terrorism while being placed on the defensive in a single country that never will fully accept its presence. There is no historical precedent for taking such action when our country was not being directly threatened. The reckless course that Bush and his advisers have set will affect the economic and military energy of our nation for decades. It is only the tactical competence of our military that, to this point, has protected him from the harsh judgment that he deserves. At the same time, those around Bush, many of whom came of age during Vietnam and almost none of whom served, have attempted to assassinate the character and insult the patriotism of anyone who disagrees with them. Some have impugned the culture, history and integrity of entire nations, particularly in Europe, that have been our country's great friends for generations and, in some cases, for centuries. Bush has yet to fire a single person responsible for this strategy. Nor has he reined in those who have made irresponsible comments while claiming to represent his administration. One only can conclude that he agrees with both their methods and their message. Most seriously, Bush has yet to explain the exact circumstances under which American military forces will be withdrawn from Iraq.

But how do you really feel? As for Webb's venom towards Kerry, more specifically towards this testimony that Kerry gave. Webb describes it this way:

Kerry's own comments were filled with hyperbolic exaggerations that sought to make egregious acts seem commonplace. During a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 1971, he testified that fellow veterans had routinely "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan." With those words, he defamed a generation of honorable men. No matter how he spins it today, at a minimum, he owes them a full and complete apology.

There is no need to spin Kerry's comments since what Kerry testified was that his fellow veterans had themselves confessed to committing such horrible acts.

I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit - the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

Webb can spin Kerry's comments however he likes, but as this series in the Toledo Blade painstakingly details, US soldiers did unspeakable things to the Vietnamese during that war.

The other witness, Mr. Causey, 56, who served as a medic with Tiger Force in 1967, said he’s prepared to talk about the platoon’s attacks on villagers. "What I can clearly say is that we went into that valley and we killed every male over 16 years old - without question," he said. "I only saw one [enemy] gun the whole time. It wasn’t about killing enemy soldiers. This was about killing villagers. It went on and on. By the end, I had just had it. I was just sick of it."

Kerry's testimony has been disparaged since it was delivered by people that want to sweep the uncomfortable truths about Vietnam under the rug and it will become a larger issue as the campaign heats up over the summer and into the fall.

Colin Trouble

2004-02-19T13:10:00.000-08:00

I'm not the only one bashing Colin Powell today. Fred Kaplan has a fantastic rundown of Powell's difficult tenure as Secretary of State. Via Pandagon.

The Empire Strikes Back

2004-02-19T12:29:00.000-08:00

I doubt no one on our end had thought of this during either Reagan or Bush's grandstanding about missile defense, but it tends to make the entire concept of a missile shield (at least one using current technology) pointless. I know Rumsfeld and some others have dreams at night about orbiting laser guns that shoot missiles launched at the US right out of the sky, but we're not there yet. For the moment we're stuck with trying to hit one bullett with another bullett. Now the Ruskies have developed a bullett that will evade our bullett. Does it work? Probably not that well right now, but with some development I'd bet this thing would be more successful at evasion than our defense would be at collision.

In Washington, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by reporters about the Putin statement. "If you're in that business — intercontinental ballistic missiles and warheads — you want them to be survivable, and maneuverability is one way to increase their survivability against any potential defenses," he said. Putin said that Russia had no intention of immediately deploying new weapons based on the experimental vehicle. Baluyevsky concurred. "We have demonstrated our capability, but we have no intention of building this craft tomorrow," he said, adding that Russia had told the United States about its plans to conduct the experiment.

Comically the Baluyevsky also noted that the test craft had "ceased to exist." It's important that the US guard itself against rogue nations and asymmetric threats, but as we do so, we need to outthink our adversaries not pump money into 20-year-old pipe dreams that will be obsolete the moment they're activated.

Flippity-Floppity

2004-02-19T12:09:00.000-08:00

I'm used to the administration making stupid claims and then backing down from them a while later after the total nonsense of the earlier position became clear, but the most recent reversal is something to behold. 17 February 2004 3:28PM: "There is frankly no enthusiasm right now for sending in military or police forces to put down the violence that we are seeing," Powell told reporters. 19 February 2004 2:15PM: The Bush administration said Thursday it would send a military team to Haiti to assess the security of the U.S. Embassy there, but stressed that it is still looking for a political solution to the bloody uprising against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Not even 48 hours. HOO-AHH! This initial team is small, but the very fact that it's going indicates that there is enthusiasm for sending troops to Haiti to put down the violence. A political solution is absolutely preferrable to any foreign military involvement, but we've been down this road before in Haiti so can we please refrain from making blanket statements for the next few weeks?

Skilling Indicted

2004-02-19T08:18:00.000-08:00

One more Enron crony indicted. The second biggest fish of them all, though probably the one that was most responsible for the company's shady accounting, has been bagged. CFO Fastow has already pleaded guilty, but he was simply the moon to the corrupt Skilling's sun. Only Ken Lay remains free thus far and it is questionable if he will ever see the inside of a jail cell. Taking my information from the book Pipe Dreams, old Kenny Boy seems to have been the rotten, though largely clueless head of the fish. Lay is not without blame by any stretch of the imagination, and it was his leadership that allowed Enron to become one of the largest sham companies in corporate history. Such fecklessness is not a crime in this country even if it does bilk thousands of people out of millions of dollars. I can only hope that Skilling's trial is a pitiless sojourn through his arrogant, crooked time at Enron that lays bare the utter lack of regard for laws or ethics with which Lay and Skilling blanketed the company. One post-script to the Enron story bears attention. In 1997, Skilling took over as President of Enron after Lay forced out Rich Kinder. Kinder had led Enron from 1990-96 as an executive focused on cash-flow and assets that yield steady (though perhaps not sexy) returns. Until 1997 Enron had been primarily a pipeline company. As Robert Bryce continually notes in Pipe Dreams, pipelines don't produce blockbuster earnings. What they do produce is hard cash. After leaving Enron, Rich Kinder started the pipeline company Kinder Morgan, and actually bought some of Enron's pipelines before and after the implosion. As one can tell from looking at their asset map, Kinder Morgan has become a very successful energy company.