The Sideshow
Archive for April 2002
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The SideshowArchive for April 2002 |
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Tuesday, 30 April 200220:28 BST: Permalink
I decided I can't go on living a lie, so I've changed all the spurious GMTs to BSTs, since it's been British Summer Time all month. I considered changing the time stamps to actual Greenwich Mean Time instead, but then I thought, "Nah...."I've had a hell of a time trying to get this stuff posted today. There's been an interruption of great duration at every stage, every time I thought I was going to have time to finish up and go online. Some of this stuff is more than 24 hours old.
* * * * * Well, this just bites: Dave Weingart says he saw this on fr.rec.arts.sf:
On apprend le décès de John Middleton Murry Jr, beaucoup plus connu sous le nom de Richard Cowper ("Les gardiens", la trilogie de Corlay, _Le crépuscule de Briareus_ et bien d'autres belles choses). Il était né en 1926.I haven't been able to find this confirmed anywhere yet, but damn. Cowper is one of very few authors I re-read - why, just the other month, I suddenly found I had to read "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and of course ended up reading the whole of The Road to Corlay again. Probably read the other two books again shortly. Yes, it has been a bloody awful month for SF, as elsewhere.C'est décidément l'horreur, dans la SF et ailleurs, ce mois-ci. :-(
* * * * * Nancy Kuhn at Buzzflash on The Latest Crime of the Stolen Election:
The latest crime of the stolen 2000 Presidential election is blaming the victim of the stolen election - Al Gore - for the numerous illegal acts committed by the Bush campaign and its surrogates in their broad daylight theft of the Presidency. Both the evidence that Democrats.com has collected in its extensive investigation of the stolen election, and the election laws and procedures of the state of Florida, prove this "blame the victim" attack to be totally wrong.I haven't previously seen that item about Bush threatening Florida lawyers. I'd like to get some documentation on it, 'cause if it's for real, it's dynamite. All of the other points in the article are pretty well documented, though, so I'm definitely keeping this one at the top of my Indictment File.As someone who lived in Florida for 16 years and volunteered on numerous Democratic campaigns while I lived there, I know both the disputed territory and Florida election law extremely well. It pains me greatly that two of the people involved in this unjust attack are none other than two of my favorite Democrats in the entire world, James Carville and Paul Begala. Also involved in this false attack is my favorite journalist Greg Palast, and two authors whose books do an outstanding job of documenting many of the illegal acts that the Bush campaign used to steal the election - Jeffrey Toobin and Jake Tapper.
These false attacks range from accusing Al Gore of not fighting hard enough to win in Florida to blaming Al Gore for the pro Bush media's unprecedented campaign against him. They include allegations that Gore abandoned African American voters who were illegally purged off of the Florida voting rolls, that he vetoed public demonstrations, that he did nothing to promote voting reform and counting all of the votes. The truth is that there was nothing short of starting a civil war that Al Gore could have done to have gotten the uncounted, legal votes in Florida counted.
The Gore campaign followed Florida election law to the letter. In contrast, the Bush campaign broke numerous Florida and federal laws to steal the election in a broad daylight coup d'etat. Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris grossly abused their offices to aid in the theft of the election.
[...]
It was Jeb Bush who sent out a letter to registered Republicans with an older version of the Florida state seal urging them to vote in the comfort of their home by absentee ballot. Florida election law very specifically states that only voters who will be more than 100 miles from home on election day, in the hospital or a nursing home or an election day worker can request an absentee ballot. Florida is not a vote-by-mail state. In addition, Florida election law states that the state seal cannot be used for political purposes.It was Jeb Bush who threatened Florida law firms that they would never get any more business from the state government if they represented the Gore campaign in this dispute. It was Jeb Bush who continued to work behind the scenes to help steal the election as evidenced by his phone records and his also allowing numerous state employees to do the same. These are all clear violations of Florida law, which clearly prohibits elected officials from abusing their public offices for personal purposes.
* * * * * I didn't get around to reading parts 1 & 2, so I'm not sure what it's the case for, but your paranoia report for today is part 3, September 11: The circumstantial case:
April 24, 2002—The terrorists could not have picked a better time to attack America for the Bush administration. George W. Bush's conservative agenda was bogged down in a newly Democratic Senate. The week of the attacks, Newsweek ran a cover story detailing the Bush campaign's skullduggery in the Florida election debacle. The George W.'s overall approval ratings were slipping into the 40 percent range.This just shows you how shiftless and lazy I am, I don't even know if it's really paranoid without reading whatever comes before it. If it's an indictment of the Bush administration for exploiting 9/11 in order to push through a whole bunch of polices that would normally be unacceptable to a lot of people who have been in a state of paralysis or even paranoid dementia since the attacks, it works pretty well. Let's see, they've suspended a load of Constitutional rights, they've set up a shadow government composed of their friends, and they've installed a bunch of conspiracy specialists - that is, specialists in creating criminal conspiracies - into the current administration.All that changed on September 11. Once the butt of late-night stand-up comedians, Bush became a national hero literally overnight. His approval ratings rose to never-before-seen levels. The man who lost the election to Al Gore by almost half a million votes was now ranked among the greatest presidents of all time in opinion polls.
Plans were pushed through Congress for conservative policies which had nothing to do with the war. Opposition, even to items such as corporate tax cuts, was now labeled unpatriotic.
I guess that last bit sets off a couple of bells, but I suppose it's not completely deranged to ask why you would hire those people if you didn't have some use for them in mind. On the other hand, I reckon it could just as easily be more of that famous Bush Family loyalty thing, and anyway the Republicans are still angry over the fact that Democrats mercilessly investigated, indicted, and frequently convicted them merely because they had committed high crimes, so maybe it's all just a way to spit in our eye by letting us know that even catching 'em red-handed won't keep them from running the government they believe is theirs by divine right. Nevertheless, the fact that they have made a point of hiring known criminals strikes me as reason enough to throw the bums out.
* * * * * Farber points out this article in New Scientist introducing vibrating phones. Not just vibrating when they ring, but vibrating while you talk, in response to deliberate squeezing to punctuate your conversation. Biggest laugh I had all day.Gary also discusses the lame legal struggle in this story:
School officials in upstate New York will go to federal court today to battle a lawsuit that blocks them from silencing a 5-year-old girl who says grace before her kindergarten snack of cupcakes and milk.My standard free speech rant would be redundant here, but what I can't help but wonder is whether the kid was actually taught to say the prayer that way or if it was some idiot reporter who missed the rhyme scheme and reversed the first two phrases. (Are you old enough to remember being taught in school to say that prayer over your milk and Graham Crackers? I am. Being force-fed Bible stories, praying in school, and pledging allegiance to the flag are what made me the raving godless left-wing loonie I am today!)The controversy began Jan. 15 when teacher Lori Maragno hushed Kayla Broadus for saying, "God is good. God is great. Thank you, God, for my food."
Board officials later declared in a letter and press release that the child was prohibited from praying aloud in school. Kayla's mother, Cheryl Broadus, responded by filing a lawsuit Feb. 1 with help from civil rights lawyer Thomas J. Marcelle.
But the whole case still irritates me. Jesus was against public displays of piety, and not without good reason. I bet that, like me, that kid was taught that God could hear her thoughts, too, so why does she have to pray aloud? It's free speech, sure - but as guerilla theater, not religious worship.
Gary is also defending the NYT's lack of bias. There is some good, objective reporting in the paper, it's true, but c'mon, Gary, this is the same paper that published those spurious "Bush still wins" stories after the NORC count showed that Gore won, the same paper that seemed to think the coup in Venezuela was democracy but counting the ballots in Florida was not, and the same paper that thought President Clinton's love life was a more important crime than the combined illegalities of President Bush and his two sons, Governor Bush and Governor Bush. Granted, they do take the occasional "liberal" position (although, in truth, most of them are more mainstream than the right-wing would have you believe), but they spend remarkably little ink defending those positions. They are to the left of Fox News, but that doesn't make them unbiased; 80% of America is to the left of Fox News.
An objective news organ would have insisted on factual reporting of the real Whitewater case (a business partner of Clinton had embezzled), sans the dissembling about how it was all just too complicated to figure out. Their reporter would not have identified the false-witnessing and hatred of Clinton by old-line Arkansas segregationists and criminals as merely "murky" local politics without even an explanation. They would have fired journalists who repeatedly invented nasty stories about Al Gore and would have pulled Frank Bruni off the Bush campaign as soon as they noticed he'd fallen in love with Bush and wasn't covering issues. They would have corrected the record about the debates, demanded that ballots be counted in Florida, and checked the claims of RNC propaganda before publishing them as fact. Rather than leading the pack to try to get Clinton impeached, they would have identified the persecution of the President as what it was: libel and slander. Ditto the smears against Gore.
You can say that "Monica" was an interesting news story, but you can't say that about the orignal Whitewater charges, without which there would have been no "Monica" in the first place, but they kept it fuelled instead of throwing cold water on it early like they should have done. Meanwhile, the current administration is composed almost entirely of well-known perjurers and other criminals, some of whom were arguably guilty of treason, and hey, where's the outrage? Smells like bias to me.
Okay, it isn't as bad as The Washington Post, but, still.
I realize it's the conventional wisdom - that is, the "reasonable, sensible" view - that we should scoff at claims from right and left that the Newspapers of Record are biased, but since it's the same papers that are telling us that, well, they would say that, wouldn't they? And, you know, I'm not really interested in being perceived as "responsible" and "sensible" if it requires me to agree with things I know are not true. I have worked in and written for big city newspapers and I have always known what stories you're allowed to cover and how you're supposed to cover them, and I promise you that even before most of them were owned by huge corporate conglomerates, they always had a conservative bias and it's very definitely gotten worse. It was noticible in the '60s and '70s, worse still in the '80s, but with the advent of very noisy and influential right-wing media (Fox, The Washington Times, etc.) who are taken seriously far out of proportion to their relevence to mainstream American concerns and certainly unjustified by their willingness to properly source their stories, these papers have swung even further to the right, now treating seriously views that were once way too far out in right field to dignify with such treatment, without any corresponding coverage of the progressive left (let alone the correspondingly far left).
Again, consider: A huge majority of Americans (including Republicans) tell pollsters that they would be willing to pay higher taxes for an NHS-style healthcare system, but it gets nary a word of consideration from the mainstream papers, nor does single-payer. More than 60% of those polled during the Florida recount (including Republicans - and including many Bush voters) said that it was important to take the time to count the ballots correctly, but the media instead insisted that speed was of the essence and that Gore, the probable winner, should concede. Most Americans want to preserve Social Security, but the press has for the last several years given far more play to the right-wing canard that the system is about to fail than to the truth. Most Americans want their kids to go to public schools, but the ink goes to Republican talking points about the failure of public schools and the virtue of phony vouchers to send everyone to private schools (yeah, right).
A bit of ineffective lip-service to ending the death penalty because it is "barbaric" or unfair, while spending virtually no ink at all discussing alternatives and why they can work, does not balance out this visible conservative bias. Apparent even-handedness on reproductive choice while adopting right-wing terms like "partial-birth abortion" for late therapeutic terminations isn't really so even-handed. Even editorials condemning censorship don't balance out news stories that explain the Computer Decency Act as a measure to protect children from "smut".
The New York Times is a whole lot better than most newspapers, but your standards have fallen pretty far if you regard it as unbiased.
* * * * * Here's a good picture Declan McCullagh took of Whit Diffie.* * * * * Kip Williams told me about this. I can't see much of anything in it but it's called Deep ASCII and it's supposed to be a version of that famous porn film.
Monday, 29 April 200218:18 BST: Permalink
No, I can't work out why that black banner below looks wrong in IE (even though it looks fine in Mozilla). If anyone knows what's wrong with my HTML, please don't keep it from me. (Update: I've found something that centers properly but I still preferred the long banner.)
* * * * * Even at The Houston Chronicle they know that Tom DeLay is a fanatic:
DeLay proves he's far outside conservative mainstreamRep. Tom DeLay is entitled by law to his views. However, his advice to parents not to send their children to Baylor or Texas A&M University is conclusive evidence that the House majority whip's views are unfounded and lie far outside the mainstream of conservative thought in America.
At Pearland's First Baptist Church last Friday, DeLay urged about 300 people to pressure state legislators to "bring God in" to Texas' public universities. His implication that religion is banished or discouraged on state campuses is false, as the Sugar Land Republican well knows. State campuses are amply furnished with chapels, chaplains, comparative religion studies and student denominational associations.
DeLay disparaged Baylor apparently because professors of that well-regarded Baptist liberal arts school do not reject evolution and embrace creationism to his satisfaction. His comments, amplified by his press aide, Jonathan Grella, show complete ignorance of Baylor's mission and desire to inculcate Christian ideals. Before spouting off again, DeLay, who was kicked out of Baylor in 1967, should accept the school's invitation to visit, so he might acquaint himself with reality.
DeLay said his daughter attended A&M and was shocked by male and female students who spent weekends together in coed dormitories. His daughter was not so dispirited by her A&M experience that she could not stay on for the full course, graduating in 1995.
Particularly egregious is the view of DeLay and his staff that the powerful congressman should be exempt from public scrutiny. Does DeLay think he can give speeches to hundreds of constituents in quasi-public settings in secret?
DeLay's distaste for Baylor and Texas A&M is part and parcel of his rejection of distinguished scholarship and scientific inquiry and his fanatical desire to transform American government into a theocracy. House Republicans who value reason should reconsider their bizarre commitment to have DeLay replace retiring Rep. Dick Armey as Republican leader in the House.
* * * * * This interview of Robert Young Pelton by Mark Scheffler in Salon isn't new but it does give you an insight into why the news we're getting is, um, uninformative:
That's the thing. You hear a lot about the press talking about how they have such limited access, but the military actually says that they can go wherever they want to go.Well you'll hear this from the military. Every time you ask the military, "OK, I want to be put on a plane and I want to go to the front lines and I need to be back by 5 o'clock," they just laugh, because it's not their responsibility to chauffeur people around and to entertain them and feed them and protect them. But it's also a different country -- it's Afghanistan -- so if you want to go to the front lines in Afghanistan you have to talk to Afghans, and nobody seemed to talk to Afghans. I talked to Afghans. If I want to go into a country, whether it's Algeria or the Philippines or whatever, I don't ask the government's permission.
* * * * * Feorag at Pagan Prattle found this one at Ananova:
Sex shop 'haunted by messy prostitutes' ghosts'Alas, as the ghosts are so untidy, they are thinking of bringing in a psychic to try to clean the place up permanently.The owners of a sex shop in Kent claim their store is haunted by ghosts which throw bras and knickers on the floor.
Staff at Pillow Talk in Margate arrive most mornings to find it in a mess.
Boss Alan Butler thinks the shop is haunted by the employees of a brothel which once stood on the site.
* * * * * Mac Thomason at WarLiberal.com says:
Ethanol is stupid; it takes more energy to grow, harvest, and refine than it produces. Maybe someday we'll find a better way, and we should experiment, but right now it's nothing but a farm subsidy.But me, I don't know about this. I can remember that when they did a study to see what it would cost to use alcohol as fuel, they based it entirely on corn. Well, yeah, but you can make alcohol from garbage, so maybe another study is in order first.
* * * * * Nicholas Confessore on Leiberman's true colors:
But the best example is Enron. One major reason Democrats have failed to get traction on the issue is that Lieberman has, so far, been unwilling to play hardball as chairman of the Senate's Governmental Affairs Committee. (It's not the only committee investigating Enron, but it has primary jurisdiction over fraud and corruption within the executive branch.) Three months after Lieberman said he would launch an investigation of Enron's collapse, the committee has held only a handful of hearings and has yet to subpoena a single Bush administration official. Instead, Lieberman recently sent "requests" for information to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and others -- the congressional equivalent of "pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top." (They ignored the deadline for responding.)* * * * * An editorial in The Arkansas Times advises that we Pray Hard:
A mass will be held May 1 at St. Andrew's Cathedral in Little Rock to pray for the judicial system. The judicial system has never needed it more.The Arkansas lawyers and judges who attend should aim some of their prayers at a special guest, Justice Clarence Thomas of the United States Supreme Court, who will speak at a luncheon following the mass. The blood of democracy is on Thomas' hands. He was one of five justices who rushed past judicial activism all the way to judicial assault, forcing an unelected president on the American people.
District of Columbia Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman needs tons of prayer. He may need impeachment too. In his book, "Blinded by the Right," David Brock, once an intimate of Silberman, says the judge reveled in guerilla politics, conniving with Clinton-haters and conservative crackpots. Silberman is lying low.
A colleague of Silberman's at the D.C. court, Judge David Sentelle, has much to answer for. Sentelle was chiefly responsible for assigning Kenneth Starr to investigate President Bill Clinton, even though he knew Starr was a savage partisan with a personal grudge against Clinton. Exactly the sort of person who should never be appointed "independent counsel," in other words.
The judges of the 8th Circuit Court in St. Louis could use some high-intensity praying, particularly the trio of Pasco Bowman, James Loken and Clarence Beam, who accommodated Starr by removing Judge Henry Woods of Little Rock from one of Starr's Whitewater cases. The judges evidently feared, and with good reason, that Woods would preside impartially. Judicial impartiality was poison to Starr's causes. Like Roy Cohn, he was always more interested in having the right judge than in having the right law.
It'll take long, hard prayer to save Judge John F. Nangle. Nangle not only dismissed ethical complaints brought against Starr by a public-spirited Connecticut lawyer, he ridiculed and threatened the lawyer. When the federal district judges in Arkansas raised similar questions about Starr and asked for an investigation, Nangle denied their request too, and he ordered both request and denial kept secret. Robert Ray, who succeeded Starr, spilled the beans about the judges' petition when he filed his final report on the Whitewater affair. Despite a clear public interest in full disclosure, Nangle keeps the file sealed, for no apparent reason except to shield Starr.
More judicial sinners are the judges who dallied with the Federalist Society, an elitist group funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, the dotty right-wing millionaire who also financed much of the anti-Clinton movement and was a patron of Starr's. Some of the complaints against Starr were about conflicts of interest stemming from the Scaife connection.
The federal court system began to degenerate when Ronald Reagan made conservative ideology and party loyalty the principal qualifications for judicial appointment. It was that kind of judge who appointed George W. Bush president, and now President Bush is appointing that kind of judge. A vicious circle, indeed. One mass will not be nearly enough.
* * * * * One day my sister said to me on A.I.M. that she had met Ralph Nader that day and shook his hand and said, "Thank you for giving me someone to vote for." I bit my tongue.
Sunday, 28 April 200220:36 BST: Permalink
George Alec Effinger
1947-2002
Remembered with love
Yes, I was one of the many; I adored him. I laughed when he would phone out of nowhere and greet me with, "Do you hate me?" (It was a stitch at restaurants watching waitresses kill themselves to provide attentive service after he'd ask them plaintively, "Why do you hate me?" even though they'd done nothing that should have earned that. He just knew how to get to women, the bastard.) He used to leave open bottles of Coke all over the place (even the edge of the tub) so there'd always be one handy. But he wrote Felicia and When Gravity Fails and a lot of other things, and offered to write another Planet of the Apes Book to pay for it when he knew I had something medical worrying me (I said no; he needed the money for his much more pressing medical problems far more than I did), and he provided a frank and very useful answer when asked about a tricky subject, and for all of those things I owe him a debt of gratitude.
I know we're lucky to have had him as long as we did. Surgeons had carved a tree and branches up and down the front of his torso, removing tumors that would always be replaced by new ones. At one point he ran out of money and a hospital tied up his rights for non-payment, which is why we never had a fourth Marid Audran book, I guess.
I've missed him since moving to England, but you know how it is: you just assume you will see them again because they're an important part of your life, your history. And then they're gone.
Good-bye, Piglet, and thank you for it all.
* * * * * Reading the papers:UK: The big story in Britain is the acquittal of teenagers accused of murdering 10-year-old Damilola Taylor. Big public hue and cry about the outrage of these villains getting off, "failure of justice" blah blah blah. The Telegraph disagrees:
THE acquittal of the four children accused of murdering Damilola Taylor is not necessarily the "failure of British justice" which it has been called. When a jury reaches a "Not guilty" verdict, it is not necessarily the consequence of "something profoundly wrong" with the police or with the judicial system.Mary Riddell at the Observer agrees:On the contrary, one of the strengths of the adversarial system of justice is that the prosecution's evidence is tested in as strong a way possible. If the jury is not convinced that the evidence passes those tests beyond reasonable doubt, then it is their duty to acquit.
British justice was registered dead in the moment an Old Bailey jury cleared two brothers, aged 16, of the murder of Damilola Taylor. The trial, with its candyfloss prosecution case, had seemed a travesty. The Taylor family had been betrayed and so had a society illogical enough to think that pity and revulsion could force a popular outcome. But the case fell apart, and the 'untouchables' walked free. There is, some papers mourned, no justice.Worryingly, though, the Telegraph reports that the Boys cleared of Damilola killing could be tried again:The opposite is true. If the fiasco of the Taylor trial proves anything, it is that justice works. Its component parts, from shoddy police work to Crown incompetence, may be damaged. The judge's decision to allow a troubled 14-year-old liar to be torn apart by the defence seemed unwise. But the jury's delivery of the correct and only possible verdict was not a catastrophe for British justice. It was its triumph and its vindication.
THE Metropolitan Police hope to find new evidence with which to bring fresh charges against the teenagers who were acquitted last week of the murder of Damilola Taylor.This is, of course, outrageous. Prosecutors should bring people to trial only after they have compiled a case, and not before. Justice is not served by this kind of thing.The Torygraph also reports that Mo Mowlam wants to make drugs legal:
FORMER Cabinet minister Mo Mowlam is calling for the legalisation of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine.I like Mo Mowlem. We once sent out letters to MPs, protesting censorship, and the only positive response we got was a call from Mo who invited me to tea at the Houses of Parliament. "I don't like censorship," she said, and we eagerly explained to her that the things she'd heard about the dangers of pornography had no basis in fact. Not that she was in much of a position to do anything about it with the entire Labour Party doing its best to show it could be just as reactionary as the Tories, but I'm grateful for that one chance to enjoy the unique view of the river and County Hall from that lovely little tea room. It was wonderful.Ms Mowlam - who as Cabinet Office minister was responsible for the Government's anti-drugs policy - says legalising and taxing drugs is the only way to deal with the problem.
"I think that is the most effective way because in the end I don't think you could ever stop it," she said. "Why not regulate it, take the tax from it and seriously deal with addiction which has been around since the 1900s?"
I didn't see that story in the Observer, but I did find a Simon Garfield article about Linda Lovelace that strikes many of the same notes I did in mine yesterday, only at greater length, titling it Blow for freedom .
Also in the Observer, former Labour leader Neil Kinnock tells Andrew Osborn Why the Left is failing us.
US: In The New York Times, Garry Wills (at last!) addresses the issue of child-molesting priests in his usual thoughtful way with Lies of the Cardinals:
In the year 425, a scandal rocked the African diocese of Bishop Augustine — now known as St. Augustine. A priest in the community attached to the cathedral died and left his personal property to Augustine. A grieving Augustine went before his congregation to say why he felt that he could not accept the bequest. That priest, like others who had entered that community (and like Augustine himself), had sworn to divest himself of all personal property. To take the property would make the community dedicated to the truth of the Gospel a partner in a deceitful transaction.While I was at the NYT I also thought I'd have a look at the obit pages to see what I missed from last year, and found the one for Rush's role model.Augustine said that he would set up a special board, including "loyal and respected brothers from your number, from you, the community," to decide on a division of the property among members of the priest's family. But that was not enough. If one man had broken his vow, why should people not suspect that others might also be doing so? The reputation of the priesthood was at stake: "Neglecting reputation is a way of being cruel to others," Augustine wrote, "especially in a church position such as ours, about which the Apostle Paul wrote to his followers: `Present to everyone a pattern for doing good works.'"
[...]
Lying for God is the worst kind of lie. Rather than lie even for a good cause, even for the church, Augustine asked himself what Jesus would do (a question some of our politicians say they use). His answer is stunning: "When I summon up, before what might be called my heart's eyes, the intelligible beauty of Christ, whose mouth never framed the slightest thing false — then, though truth glows with intensity beyond intensity, unstringing my trembling nerves, yet love of that splendor flames through me, making me wish to renounce all human ties that pull me away from such truth."At The Washington Past Mary McGrory takes a look at how democracy has flourished during the Bush administration, in Democracy Takes a Hit:
But the coup didn't work in Venezuela. Democracy prevailed. The man the White House sees as a pluperfect pain in the neck, Chavez, got his job back in 48 hours. The coup collapsed after the two-day president, Carmona, declared he would cancel Congress and fire the Supreme Court. The most conspicuous casualty? America's reputation for promoting democracy, one of the stated goals of our currently confused foreign policy.The Bush White House insists it had nothing to do with the whole affair, which some considered almost inevitable in view of the recent appointment of Otto Reich to be the State Department's leader on Latin America. Reich is an anti-Castro zealot, and this intrigue on the anniversary of the Bay of Pigs offered a peerless opportunity to get even. The presence of Elliott Abrams on the Bush national security team was considered a factor -- he used to lecture on patriotism to legislators protesting death squads.
[...]
Democracy is taking a hit on another continent, too. The president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, is going forward with plans for a referendum on his record -- not exactly a substitute for the election he promised his people.We are entirely beholden to Pakistan's military dictator, who seized power in a coup 2 1/2 years ago. His cooperation in the war against terrorism is indispensable. As Afghanistan's closest neighbor, he has played a key role in our successes in those inhospitable mountains. His program to crack down on domestic terrorists and Muslim extremists was much appreciated, and it was easy to close our eyes to Pakistan's terrorist activity in Kashmir. In any case, we have had no comment on his plan to hold the referendum, which would prolong his term in office by three years.
* * * * * Here's a question from the latest Zogby poll:
On a scale from 1 to 5, where one is least important and five is most important, please rate how important you feel each issue is.Wow, that leaves a lot of room for nuance, doesn't it? I think it's really important to rescind the Bush tax cut, but does saying you think taxes are important give someone an excuse to say that you think it's important to cut taxes even more? I wanna know.Taxes
1. Least important
2
3. Medium importance
4
5. Most important
Not sure
* * * * * From memory lane: Bush brother declares martial law in Florida
"I hereby declare that a state of emergency exists in the state of Florida...The Authority to suspend the effect of any statute or rule governing the conduct of state business, and further authority to suspend the effect of any order or rule of any government entity...The authority to seize and utilize any and all real or personal property as needed to meet this emergency...The authority to order the evacuation of any or all persons from any location in the State...The authority to regulate the return of the evacuees to their home communities...I hereby order the Adjutant General to activate the Florida National Guard for the duration of this emergency."There was a brief flurry of astonishment when Jeb Bush signed Executive Order 01-261 four days earlier, but something else came up, and we forgot.
~Florida Governor Jeb Bush,
September 11, 2001 [Idaho Observer]
Saturday, 27 April 200214:35 BST: Permalink
I'm actually writing this at what for me is "Friday night" but is really 2:00 AM Saturday morning (BST), but I've just noticed that Free-Online is having scheduled down time so I guess I'll be posting it after I get up in the morning (or afternoon, as is sometimes the case). Hey, at least it's not blogspot, eh?
* * * * * Vaara has pointers to some Salman Rushdie stuff and reminds me that I want to start a religious movement for Political Atheism. I call it a religious movement because I figure it's the best way to protect the spiritual from all the nasty grubbers who mercilessly exploit our spiritual feelings in the service of their own power and greed. Being a Political Atheist has nothing to do with whether you believe in god/gods/whatever but rather a public rejection of their attempts to manipulate us into playing their game, whatever our beliefs.Charles Kuffner is looking at a good example of their games over at his site, in case anyone wondered.
Meanwhile: Imagine.
* * * * * I shouldn't let the death of Linda Boreman, formerly known as Linda Marchiano but most famously known as Linda Lovelace, pass without comment.The public met her as the star of the first porn feature film to have that marvellous innovation, a plot. Granted it wasn't much of a plot, but in a world where porn flicks were rarely more than a bunch of sex acts (and sometimes just fragments of sex acts), the idea that a woman was systematically pursuing sex with a specific goal in mind was something new. Deep Throat made a particular type of sex act a household - well, bedroom, anyway - word, and gave us many other things, not least among them a nickname for a famous government snitch. Not to mention some unfortunate ideas about the best technique for fellatio.
Linda escaped from her authoritarian parents naive and ignorant and all those other good Christian things, and thus totally vulnerable to getting into a really bad relationship with the wrong man. (This doesn't mean he was the wrong man for Marilyn Chambers, a smart woman who does not have the same complaints about him, but he was clearly the wrong man for Linda.) Her first real autobiography, Ordeal, depicted a brutal cohabitation with a man who beat her and forced her to rent her body out for uses she didn't really want any part of. Luckily for her, one of them was starring in that now notorious movie where, she said, she experienced camaraderie with the other professionals on set and, finally, her fame gave her an escape route.
But anti-porn activists saw Linda as a victim and encouraged her to blame not her ubringing or her insensitive partner for the misery she experienced in her relationships, but pornography. No doubt feeling she was being championed (rather than merely exploited again) made her sympathetic to their cause, and she soon became pretty much the poster child for the anti-porn movement.
Yet, a few years ago, she seems to have turned her back on all that, and even gave interviews saying she would be happy to appear in porn again. Genre aficionados and professionals were thunderstruck by the statement, but Susie Bright, like me, understood and wished her luck.
She is survived by an ex-husband who still called her his best friend, two children, and the memory of that brief window in time that many still regard as the golden age of pornographic film, before the anti-porn movement messed things up and, eventually, video changed everything. She'll be hard to forget.
* * * * * A lot of blogs are talking about books, so perhaps it's time to mention that I recently read Stinger by Nancy Kress. I might not have mentioned it here but for the fact that it's a perfect little story about paranoia and/or conspiracy theories, one of my favorite topics these days. You can find it at Amazon but I recommend against reading the reviews that give too much away.But as long as I'm talking about books I've been reading, the thing that's really winding me up lately is George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. I rarely recommend books with kings and queens or dragons in them (unless someone's actually asking for fantasy recommendations), but I find these so thoroughly absorbing that months after reading one I still find myself obsessing on it. It's a richly plotted story with great characterizations and twists and turns and loads of interesting places and mysterious things and the suspense is killing me.
* * * * * On 2002-04-25 04:18:02, on rec.arts.sf.fandom, Susana Serras Pereira (susanaserraspereira@hotmail.com) wrote:
Subject: I come bearing flowers
Virtual flowers, unfortunately.Twenty eight years and some hours ago, just a few blocks from here, tanks were rolling, the sun was coming up, and some young men were pointing guns at each other. They were all very nervous, many were very, very young, and many were crying. They were soldiers, and many of them were about to disobey orders. About to decide they would not, could not, shoot each other.
It was all so quick, and yet it seems like forever when you watch the films and read the reports. It was just one bright day for freedom to be born, but it was precarious forever. People filled the streets so quickly, so spontaneously, so completely, and when you see them now, hanging from trees, kissing each other, embracing strangers, standing on walls and tanks and yelling god knows what, yelling anything, laughing, when you see that now, it seems it was inevitable, and swift.
And yet, there were the all hours that Salgueiro Maia stood outside the Carmo, megaphone in hand, all the endless back and forth of conflicting information, all of the nervous shots, every dreadfull minute until the end of the regime was agreed to, facetiously, by a regime that thought it would probably turn it all around the next day, every stinking minute of the parley with a minister who had shit his pants, every pathetic incident, taking headquarters and finding holes dug in walls, and the rats escaped, making the final awful concession of getting a general to hold provisional power so the power "would not fall on the street", never the street, which was so frighteningly alive with the people. It was forever that day. It was precarious, fraught and slow.
And beautiful.
And twenty eight years ago. Twenty eight years we have been free, twenty eight years we have been precarious and every negotiation has been fraught and slow.
In those old films, everyone looks young -- everything was, young, and new, and scary. Twenty eight years, and the commemorations are official, stodgy, reluctant, and forgotten.
Except. Except there will be people marching today, and there are going to be carnations in the hands of people who want to remember, and to keep it all young, new, and, yes, a little scary. Being free should be frightening, it should keep you awake.
That dawn, the flower sellers, who might have been taken with the euphoria of change, or taken with the handsome soldiers, or just plain realized they wouldn't be making money that day, started giving their flowers away. The soldiers, just boys, dazed, were waving carnations in the air, sticking them in their rifles, giving them away.
Bright and red, and unplanned, I bring them, to mark that first day.
Happy 25th of April!
Happy freedom to you all! And may you guard it well, and be awake.
(I'm back, I think, but not till later today: I have to go and yell, and hug some people, and wave carnations.)
Friday, 26 April 200216:16 BST: Permalink
Things have gone a little weird at The Mighty Organ, so Val Stevenson has started a new website at nthposition.com. Not much up there yet, but Tanya Reinhart does have a piece about Jenin and how the government's propaganda war is playing in Israel:
It may take a while before we (Israelis) start to digest what we did in Jenin. I don't have the words yet to speak about my shame, my horrible pain for the Palestinian people. Therefore I speak about what we did to ourselves. A dear friend of mine was murdered three days ago in a trip in Sinai - a painter and computer expert, in the draft resistance circle. By informal reports, his murderer was an Egyptian who sought revenge for the murder of the Palestinians. He could not distinguish between my friend and the nice reserve fellows from Jenin that we saw and heard so much about the last few days. In fact, they do look similar, and many of these guys are also in computer business. Itai Angel, the young journalist who interviewed reservists on channel 2 TV news last Friday night, has possibly managed to convince many in our little bubble that such nice guys, by their very nature, cannot possibly, commit a massacre. Therefore, there was no massacre - there was a fierce battle and we are OK. But outside our bubble, nobody watches Itai Angel. They watch the ruins of Jenin. We are turning the whole Muslim world against us.* * * * * At Online Journal, another look at George W. Bush's distinguished military career:
November 4, 2000 | Here comes the other shoe to the denials and cries of "desperation" from the George W. Bush camp: A former officer in the Texas National Guard says an aide to George W. Bush scrubbed Bush's military records to get rid of the disparities between those files and an account of Bush's military service in his official biography.Bill Burkett, a former lieutenant colonel in the Guard, said, "As the State Plans Officer for the Texas National Guard, I was on full-time duty at Camp Mabry when [Bush aide] Dan Bartlett was cleansing the George W Bush file prior to G.W.'s presidential announcement. For most soldiers at Camp Mabry, this was a generally known event. The archives were closely scrutinized to make sure that the Bush autobiography plans and the record did not directly contradict each other. In essence it was the script of the autobiography which Dan Bartlett and his small team used to scrub a file to be released. This effort was further involved by General Daniel James and Chief of Staff William W. Goodwin at Camp Mabry."
Burkett stated, "I knew one person who worked within the records scrub who commented to me, while at the smoke area, that the Bush files really showed some problems with his 'blue-blood service record.'"
* * * * * Before you get too complacent, it's always helpful to read George F. Will:
Judging by his nominees so far, Bush will splendidly staff the federal judiciary (half of it, if he serves two terms), but not until Republicans control the Senate. They will be more apt to do that if he campaigns on the issue of judicial activism. His tax cuts will do more than Republican congressional majorities would do to limit government activism. His education bill deeply disappointed only those conservatives who mistakenly want education reform driven by Washington. And concerning the most momentous policy problem, conservatives cannot fault either the substance of Bush's decisions on biomedical matters (cloning, stem cells) or the seriousness with which he has arrived at that substance.Which is why conservatives in the capital should be more like conservatives across the country: on balance, quite pleased.
* * * * * Terry Jones (yes, that Terry Jones) comments in The Observer on the Venezuelan coup:
After last weekend's shocking events in Venezuela, in which President Chavez was ousted in a free and fair democratic coup, only to be returned to office two days later on what seems to have been little more than the whim of the people, the leaders of the Free World have clearly been forced to reconsider the nature of democracy.When asked whether the Bush administration now recognised President Chavez as Venezuela's legitimate President, a spokesman for President Bush conceded that although Mr Chavez 'was democratically elected' one had to bear in mind that 'legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however' [sic].
Clearly, this involves a fundamental re-evaluation of what we understand by democracy, and I offer here some thoughts on the principles - other than counting votes - which might confer legitimacy.
Since its ground-breaking experiments in vote-counting in Florida two years ago, the United States has been universally recognised as the chief innovator in the field of democratic principles. Therefore, one of the factors that must surely confer legitimacy on any democracy would be approval by the United States.
* * * * * Some people got upset at Paul Krugman for his piece in The New York Times Tuesday about The Angry People. Krugman begins like this:
A slightly left-of-center candidate runs for president. In a rational world he would win easily. After all, his party has been running the country, with great success: unemployment is down, economic growth has accelerated, the sense of malaise that prevailed under the previous administration has evaporated.What appears to have upset people is Krugman drawing a parallel between the likes of Tom DeLay and John Ashcroft and France's Le Pen - and suggestion that things are worse in the US than in France, because:But everything goes wrong. His moderation becomes a liability; denouncing the candidate's pro-market stance, left-wing candidates — who have no chance of winning, but are engaged in politics as theater — draw off crucial support. The candidate, though by every indication a very good human being, is not a natural campaigner; he has, say critics, "a professorial style" that seems "condescending and humorless" to many voters. Above all, there is apathy and complacency among moderates; they take it for granted that he will win, or that in any case the election will make little difference.
The result is a stunning victory for the hard right. It's by and large a tolerant, open-minded country; but there is a hard core, maybe 20 percent of the electorate, that is deeply angry even in good times. And owing to the peculiarities of the electoral system, this right-wing minority prevails even though more people actually cast their votes for the moderate left.
If all this sounds like a post-mortem on the Gore campaign in 2000, that's intentional. But I'm actually describing Sunday's shocking election in France, in which the current prime minister, Lionel Jospin, placed third, behind the rabid rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Until very recently, Mr. Le Pen was regarded as a spent force. Now he has scored an astonishing triumph.
Now for the important difference. Mr. Le Pen is a political outsider; his showing in Sunday's election puts him into the second-round runoff, but he won't actually become France's president. So his hard-right ideas won't be put into practice anytime soon.As I remarked in a comment at Oliver Willis' site, all the evidence you need that these people wish to impose their unconstitutional and unpopular views on America is right there in that quote. After all, he believed it appropriate to impeach a president merely because he disagreed with him. Meanwhile, a correspondent wrote to Atrios pointing out that Le Pen is not a million miles away from the Republican leadership in policy matters, proposing to:In the United States, by contrast, the hard right has essentially been co-opted by the Republican Party — or maybe it's the other way around. In this country people with views that are, in their way, as extreme as Mr. Le Pen's are in a position to put those views into practice.
Consider, for example, the case of Representative Tom DeLay. Last week Mr. DeLay told a group that he was on a mission from God to promote a "biblical worldview," and that he had pursued the impeachment of Bill Clinton in part because Mr. Clinton held "the wrong worldview." Well, there are strange politicians everywhere. But Mr. DeLay is the House majority whip — and, in the view of most observers, the real power behind Speaker Dennis Hastert.
-Eliminate the income taxAnd it wouldn't matter what else he believed or intended, because if the Republican party nominated someone with Le Pen's beliefs as their presidential candidate, the press would ignore his anti-semitism and treat him seriously, and the American public would simply find it too implausible that such a person could have received a major party nomination and thus when it was pointed out by "Democratic partisans" (as all who opposed him would be defined) they simply wouldn't believe it. This is precisely what happened with George Bush, isn't it? Too many people just couldn't accept that he was really that incompetent, mean-spirited, dishonest, and completely unsympathetic with the principal concerns of most Americans. And the only reason there hasn't been open revolt against Bush's policies, and particularly his tax cuts, is because most people simply do not believe they are what they are. (And why should they? Even most Congressional Democrats don't have the guts to come out and say that they should never have been passed and must be rescinded.)
-Eliminate the inheritance tax
-Withdraw from international environmental treaties
-Recognize that human life begins at conception
-Outlaw abortion
-Eliminate civil unions for same-sex couples
-Reinstitute the death penalty
-Partially privatize the state pension systemCall Le Pen what you want, but don't try to tell us he wouldn't, if he were in the U.S., be right in the mainstream of the GOP.
* * * * * Eric Alterman has a look at Frank Bruni's book about candidate Bush:
New York Times reporter Frank Bruni has written an instructive, important book about the state of modern American political campaigns and American democracy. Unfortunately, he appears to have done so by accident. Bruni's Ambling into History purports to be a laser-like examination of President Bush's character through the eyes of his most prestigious and perhaps most intimate campaign chronicler -- a Teddy White for our time. And while it's not without insight into Bush the person, it's more valuable as an exhibit -- rather than a study -- of the dangerously degraded state of our political debate.Bruni's field of study is an inch wide and an inch deep. As difficult as it may be to imagine, this Times reporter has written an account of the 2000 presidential campaign that contains nary a word about health care, Social Security, tax cuts, the Middle East conflict, missile defense or, God forbid, global warming. Genuine issues are apparently better left to the wonks at the Brookings Institution. We learn precisely how many seconds the Bushes danced at each of the inaugural balls but precious little that would prepare us to understand what the president might be doing the next day when he went to work. We get an awful lot about Bush advisers' secret smiles, nods, and winks laden with deep meanings, and a near-semiotic reading of the syllables uttered by the book's subject in the presence of the author.
Thursday, 25 April 200212:55 BST: Permalink
Lewis Lapham is not happy with the media:
Lapham is most dismayed that he has been accused of being unpatriotic, when he isn't. "In a democracy, the most valuable quality is candor," he said. "Democracy works best when people try to tell each other the truth. That's not what we've got. We've got a lot of cant."* * * * * Let's face it, the minute you heard about Bush nominating Otto Reich to his cabinet, you had to wonder what sort of messes he'd be creating in South America. And when you heard about the coup in Venezuela, didn't you have that sneaking suspicion that Reich had to have his hand in it somewhere? Bush had to give him the job without Senate confirmation because everyone knows what kind of trouble-maker he is. The San Antonio Express-News insists he's the wrong man for the job:
After President Bush nominated him to be assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, Otto Reich did not receive Senate confirmation — for good reason.Reich, a Cuban-born American who despises Fidel Castro, was a figure in the Iran-Contra scandal that rocked the Reagan administration in the mid-1980s.
In early January, taking advantage of a loophole that allows a president to push through nominations of non-Cabinet members when the Senate is in recess, Bush appointed Reich to a one-year term.
Now he is paying dearly. Reich was a central figure in the failed April 11 military coup in Venezuela. Long before and during the brief ousting of President Hugo Chávez, Reich was in touch with leading Chávez opponents. This nation then fumbled its response to the coup.
The United States can't afford further fiascoes in Latin America. In nations such as Mexico and Argentina, even though they are not friends of Chávez, Washington appeared hypocritical in supporting a coup against a democratically elected president.
Bush, who wants to negotiate a free-trade agreement with the Western Hemisphere nations, should reconsider his support for Reich. The White House needs someone who can mend fences in the region, not someone who is widely distrusted.
* * * * * Ethel the Blog finds an interview with the Lebanese ambassador to the US and thinks someone might be biased:
Fox Interviewer: Mr. Ambassador, do you consider Hizbollah a terrorist organization?Abboud: Yes, Sharon is a terrorist!
FI: Mr. Ambassador, this was not my question. I asked you about the operations of Hizbollah in the targeting and killing of innocent civilians. How do you view Hizbollah?
A: Yes, Sharon the terrorist has killed thousands upon thousands of civilians. He is the biggest terrorist out there!
* * * * * Some links I found on rec.arts.sf.fandom:1) More for my file on the virtues of so-called "intellectual property theft" on the 'net as a promotional tool, this time on books. The verdict from Eric Flint is that free unencrypted books make money:
Jim Baen and I set up the Free Library about a year and half ago. Leaving aside the various political and philosophical issues, which I've addressed elsewhere, the premise behind the Library had a practical component as well. In brief, that in relative terms an author will gain, not lose, by having titles in the Library.2) Bruce Schneier on How to Think About SecurityWhat I mean by "relative" is simply this: overall, an author is far more likely to increase sales than to lose them. Or, to put it more accurately, exposure in the Library will generate more sales than it will lose.
As a practical proposition, the theory behind the Free Library is that, certainly in the long run, it benefits an author to have a certain number of free or cheap titles of theirs readily available to the public. By far the main enemy any author faces, except a handful of ones who are famous to the public at large, is simply obscurity. Even well-known SF authors are only read by a small percentage of the potential SF audience. Most readers, even ones who have heard of the author, simply pass them up. Why? In most cases, simply because they don't really know anything about the writer and aren't willing to spend $7 to $28 just to experiment. So, they keep buying those authors they are familiar with.
What the Free Library provides - as do traditional libraries, or simply the old familiar phenomenon of friends lending each other books - is a way for people to investigate a new author for free, before they plunk down any money.
[...]
The first title to go up into the Library was my own novel, Mother of Demons. That was my first published novel, which came out in print in September of 1997. At the time it went into the Free Library, in the fall of 2000, that novel had sold 9,694 copies, with a sell-through of 54%. As of today, according to Baen Books - a year and a half after being available for free online to anyone who wants it, no restrictions and no questions asked - Mother of Demons has sold about 18,500 copies and now has a sell-through of 65%.
If security has a silly season, we're in it. After September 11, every two-bit peddler of security technology crawled out of the woodwork with new claims about how his product can make us all safe again. Every misguided and defeated government security initiative was dragged out of the closet, dusted off, and presented as the savior of our way of life. More and more, the general public is being asked to make security decisions, weigh security tradeoffs, and accept more intrusive security.Well, he'd be the first guy you'd ask.Unfortunately, the general public has no idea how to do this.
But we in computer security do. We've been doing it for years; we do it all the time. And I think we can teach everyone else to do it, too. What follows is my foolproof, five-step, security analysis. Use it to judge any security measure.
3) The Secret message of Coca Cola
Wednesday, 24 April 200217:45 BST: Permalink
I've been seeing a number of articles recently remarking on how DNA evidence has freed yet another victim from Death Row, and how this proves we really ought to have DNA testing so that we can be assured that we don't murder any more innocent people. And, of course, I do agree that we should be using every means at our disposal to assure that we don't convict the innocent. But I find it alarming that there seem to be so many people who believe that DNA evidence alone is all we need to have that assurance, as if there always is DNA evidence available in every crime. But criminals, believe it or not, may somehow manage to inconvenience us by failing to be so obliging as to leave us enough evidence. Finally, Richard Cohen looks at the issue:
Ray Krone owes his freedom to the simple fact that whoever killed Kim Ancona drooled on her. The killer also sexually assaulted her, but no semen was ever recovered, and he also bit her, leaving tooth marks that one expert in such matters said matched Krone's. As sometimes happens, another expert held another view -- but the jury was never told this. Krone was sentenced to die.Of course, when innocent people are finally freed in cases like this, or other cases where, say, college students in Illinois give closer scrutiny to the rest of the evidence than the defense lawyers ever did, death penalty advocates insist that this proves that the system works. It works! Innocent men spent years in prison and would have lost their lives if they hadn't had the good luck to be someone's class project, and the system works. Bloody hell, murderers will grasp at any excuse, won't they?Earlier this month, he became the 100th person freed from prison after having been on death row. He had already served 10 years before a DNA test proved that the saliva found on Ancona could not have been Krone's. He was free to go on his merry way -- and sorry about those 10 years, Ray.
What would have happened, you might wonder, had the actual killer just kept his mouth shut? In that case, you would have had your run-of-the-mill murder, a stabbing in which DNA played no role whatever -- nothing to prove, nothing to disprove. This is usually the case with murder. Shoot someone from the customary 10 paces, and you get no exchange of bodily fluids. If the wrong man is convicted, tough. The wrong man is executed.
* * * * * Last month I cited a letter in The Washington Post that confused the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee with "the hard left". I suppose the right-wingers who complain about the "liberal media" might be making mistakes like that because the mass media seldom tells them what real liberals let alone the "hard left" actually think. But I don't think we'll be hearing anything like this from the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee:
In these dangerous times, when our hearts and our wills are tested by powers and ideologies that seek to destroy the great vision this country was founded on, it is necessary to speak clearly and plainly what it is we believe in and why we fight. We must plant our flag in the sand, we must claim and do battle for what is ours, we must strike at our enemies fearlessly and righteously with every power at our command, for our sake, and for the sake of the future.It is necessary for us to have a goal above and beyond just confronting the opposition either personally or because of what we feel their policies are doing to damage the country and destabilize the world. It is important for people to have something to vote for. The enemies of freedom, that is, the political leadership of the Republican Party and the corporate oligarchy that supports them, are experts at pointing out in no uncertain terms the many things they are against, but they have no vision apart from that. They will say any lie, kill any person, ridicule any idea, support any evil, oppose any kindness, and ruin any government to assure their continued domination of our lives for their profit.
This entire administration is based on fraud. They have lied to the American public about their goals from the beginning, they have used the power of government to enable them to amass more money than any small group of people could possibly earn honestly, and have in turn used that money to keep and hold political power. And they will not stop until they have destroyed the freedoms they lie about believing in. They want to establish a new aristocracy; a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy. And those not fortunate enough to have been born into this wealth, or those who refuse to sell their souls to the Almighty Dollar, will spend their entire lives being wage slaves to this new aristocracy. They get away with these lies because the same people who are corrupting the government are corrupting the media, their interests are the same.
To some of you, this is hardly a new message. You work hard for a living, harder than you should, earning just enough money to cover your debts. You read in the news, or see on TV, on those rare occasions where such things are even publicized, about an incompetent CEO who got fired, only to get a severance package worth more money than you will ever see in your entire lifetime. You find yourself paying more and more taxes so that the new aristocracy can pay less. And all you see on the television and all hear (especially) on the radio is how these people have somehow earned their money, and how, by implication, you are a lower form of life, born into servitude and destined to remain there.
* * * * * Patrick provides this astonishing quote from Microsoft:
It is a legal requirement that pre-installed operating systems remain with a machine for the life of the machine. If a company or individual donates a machine to your school, it must be donated with the operating system that was installed on the PC.Pick your jaw up off the floor, please.Patrick also finds another example of stupid Republican tricks.
* * * * * In Salon, a Carol Lay cartoon explains the administration's energy policy.Also from Salon, a look at Brock's book and wimpy Democrats offers this observation:
No news organization sullied itself more during the Clinton years than the Wall Street Journal. The tabloidization of the Journal's editorial pages in the service of the get-Clinton propaganda campaign is one of the great scandals of American journalism. It was one thing for publisher Peter Kann, long before Clinton, to encourage editorial czar Robert Bartley to turn his pages into a forum for aggressive conservatism. It was quite another to allow Bartley and his fellow zealots to publish every crackpot defamation of the Clintons that excreted its way into the right's imagination. They loudly and repeatedly suggested that White House counsel Vincent Foster had been murdered (perhaps, Brock surmises, to deflect attention from their own role in his death; Foster, clearly ill equipped for Washington's increasingly savage climate, pointed to "WSJ editors [who] lie without consequence" in his suicide note). They brooded obsessively about "mysterious Mena," the Arkansas airport where Clinton and his cronies allegedly trafficked in drugs and where "Clinton death squads" murdered two teenagers to cover up their nefarious business. It is unclear whether Bartley, who emerges as one of the strangest fishes in Brock's weird aquarium, really believed any of this Clinton frothing or whether he had simply sold his journalistic soul to the far right. But the more important question is why the top editors and executives of the Journal allowed him to get away with it. Bartley no longer runs the Journal's opinion section; he's been kicked up the corporate stairs. But in his golden years he has been awarded his very own column, where recently he took a typically wild swipe at Brock as "the John Walker Lindh of contemporary conservatism." Like his fellow right-wing propagandists, Bartley could offer nothing of substance to rebut Brock.And also says this:
There's a chance, of course, that Al Gore has learned to become a winner during his long, dark night of the soul following Florida and what Toobin calls "the crime against democracy." But he has to prove it, and it won't -- nor should it be -- easy. The Democratic Party should treat him as just one more candidate for its 2004 nomination, putting him through the type of crucible he was largely able to avoid in the 2000 primary contest. During the upcoming primary season, the winning Democratic candidate must show that he or she can not only weather the most withering assaults, but punch back, cleanly and devastatingly. The Democrats will need a Kennedy or Clinton-style battler to face the Bush reelection machine in 2004, because the Bush dynasty has amply demonstrated it will do whatever it takes to win. And the Republican candidate will be surrounded by a movement of true believers that, as David Brock has revealed in gory detail, will do even more than that.* * * * * At Junius, Chris Bertram examines questions about the NHS.
* * * * * Play miniature golf.
Tuesday, 23 April 2002
18:46 BST: Permalink
The news that MSNBC is hiring Phil Donahue has been met largely with smirks - after all, he's so old (hell, he's older than I am - this guy had grey hair back when I was still skinny), but Jeremy Lott suggests that maybe it's not such a dumb idea:
Could going the atheist-Nader route create a new television audience? Well, 2.8 million people in this country did vote for Nader, and when polled perhaps as many as 14 percent of the U.S. population describes itself as non-religious. That's not exactly a small swath of the American population. Maybe MSNBC is on to something after all.Gee, what an idea - one genuinely left-wing voice to counter, um, a whole raft of raving loony right-wingers on cable (and in Congress). I guess it's a start.MSNBC's brass has, at different points, whispered that it isn't interested in siphoning off viewers from O'Reilly. Normally that could be dismissed as advance spin to lower expectations -- what cable channel wouldn't give its right arm for a shot at even a third of O'Reilly's viewers? -- but MSNBC President Erik Sorenson has been saying some interesting things about the hire and about his company that force us to consider the possibility that they may be true.
In Sorenson's estimation, his hiring of the explicitly Naderite Donahue represents "counter-programming" to O'Reilly. Indeed, this appears to be the view that he is taking of the channel as a whole. A memo released to MSNBC staff on April 11 and leaked to The Associated Press said that the channel's image should be "fiercely independent." It also took a shot at Fox News's claims of being "fair and balanced" by saying that MSNBC would showcase "real fairness." Some news channels, Sorenson complained, "stack the deck with partisans from one side and offset them with patsies from the other. But our channel is not partisan and has no agenda, other than to serve the American people, serve our viewers, give them in-depth coverage and thorough analysis."
At first glance, Sorenson's notion that one highlights one's fairness or nonpartisanship by hiring Phil Donahue, a screaming leftist and atheist, seems curious. But perhaps it's not the extreme nature of Donahue's views that count so much as the fact that they're remarkably underrepresented in cable news. MSNBC may be attempting a true rarity in this media age: letting a thousand flowers bloom.
* * * * * Salon interviews Todd Gitlin:
Is there an oversaturation point in place with the news, so that we no longer care about the real issues at hand?Definitely. Most Americans still think violent crime is increasing, when it isn't. The local news and the cop shows cultivate this fancy. Some of these binges have more staying power than others, but they suck all of the oxygen out of the mental room. So they contribute to a national attention deficit disorder. While we're doing OJ, OJ is the biggest character in the national news, and then we're onto, briefly, Marv Albert, or Kathy Lee and Frank Gifford. Other stories have more legs. I've been realizing that during the year 1998, when bin Laden walked into national life by organizing the massacre at the two embassies in Africa, obviously that was a news story, but it pretty much came and went, while of course, the big story was Monica and Bill.
And Clinton's retaliation for the bombings was dismissed as "wagging the dog."
But that was also because of the political game the Republicans were playing, namely suggesting that there's a domestic motive for fighting against terrorists. There's a political corruption here, too. Of course, if the Democrats tried that this year, they'd be creamed for it.
* * * * * In The Washington Post, David Bromwich looks at More Than One Evil:
If you commit acts of terror or subsidize such acts, or if you harbor terrorists, you are our enemy, and we will treat you as an enemy. That is the Bush doctrine. Israel was plainly acting in conformity with the doctrine when it began its military campaign to "uproot" terrorists from the West Bank. Yet one cannot have followed the news of this campaign without a growing conviction that something went terribly wrong.The makers of the Bush doctrine invented a simple test, but one that does not lend itself to ready application. How do you gauge the true loyalties of people who live in the neighborhood of terrorists? The doctrine says that only evil people could fail to resist the agents of evil. It neglects the possibility that some may fail to resist because they are afraid, or because they are confused by the presence of more than one evil.
15:50 BST: Permalink
Last Wednesday J. Bradford DeLong presented:2002-04-17: The Morrison Plan for Peace in the Middle EastA crack group of political scientists, social psychologists, techno-libertarians, socialist-technoids, and others, meeting at a secret base under the Antarctic have come up with a plan for peace in the Middle East: the Morrison Plan.
It has six simple parts:
(1) U.S. sealift command to move all Israelis to Utah immediately.
(2) U.S. airlift command to move all Palestinians to Afghanistan (alternatively, western Australia: the only desert even further from the Utah high desert than Afghanistan) immediately.
(3) No right of return for any of them, ever, to any spot in former cis-Jordan British Mandate Palestine. Any who violate this provision to be shot on sight immediately.
(4) Former cis-Jordan British Mandate Palestine to be rented out by the U.N. to the Walt Disney Corporation to establish religious-historical theme park: "Holy Land."
(5) Walt Disney Corporation to have all rights of high and low justice in "Holy Land," without appeal.
(6) Rent paid by Walt Disney Corporation to finance all other U.N. activities.
* * * * * Let's look at Ted Rall:
You didn't have to blink to miss it. Let the record show that George W. Bush, reconstituted Cold Warrior and ardent defender of democracy, has suffered his first Bay of Pigs. Whether this experience will chasten him as much as it did JFK remains to be seen.Hm. I think I detect a historical error, here. (And who does Rall think he's fooling with that "remains to be seen"?)
"According to the best information we have, the government suppressed what was a peaceful demonstration of the people," said Fleischer, in reference to an April 11th incident in which armed men wearing clothes indicating loyalty to Chávez shot 13 anti-government strikers to death and wounded more than 100.I bet he was embarrassed when he found out they weren't even Chevez loyalists.
Was Fleischer suggesting that the Kent State shootings in 1970 should have precipitated a coup to remove President Richard Nixon?Heh. Okay, I'll give him that one.Speaking of that, August J. Pollak cited Rall for something earlier on and has posted a response to people who mailed him about it and about his complaints of a plot-change in the administration's war story.
And he also points to this article from William F. Buckley:
My vote is that Ariel Sharon's offensive is the stupidest campaign in recent memory. Defined here as a campaign that has solved nothing, increased Israel's problems, intensified Palestinian hatred of Israel, estranged many Europeans and Americans, and fanned Islamic hostility. What is General Sharon up to?* * * * * American Politics Journal has many juicy items, including Tamara Baker on Louis Freeh:
Here's the deal: Freeh, who had been appointed to a judgeship by Poppy Bush in 1991, was picked by Clinton to head the FBI as a way of showing evenhandedness towards his political foes. Mr. Freeh, in typical GOP fashion, did not return Bill Clinton's graciousness.Tamara points to stories in Business Week and The Palm Beach Post on how Freeh ignored a presidential order that required him to take note of employees who were spending beyond their means. He bungled a lot of other things, too - including Waco - but got away with it because all his Clinton-hating pals think helping them try to bring down a Democratic President was more important than protecting America and Americans.Louis Freeh, in fact, hated Bill Clinton so much that he actively worked with Clinton's enemies to undermine his presidency -- and in the meantime, enabled Robert Hanssen to operate undetected for decades.
* * * * * Having looked at single-payer and NHS style health care, I can hardly ignore this Krugman article:
The Bush administration really, really dislikes sharing information with Congress. Dick Cheney refuses to release the records of his energy task force; Tom Ridge won't testify on homeland security; and last week Thomas Scully defied a subpoena from the Small Business Committee.Who? What? If you are an American over 65, or are considering becoming one, you should pay more attention. Mr. Scully, you see, is the director of Medicare and Medicaid. The specific issue on which he refused to testify — payments to providers of portable X-ray machines — sounds arcane. But the real story here is the collision between tax-cut myths and fiscal reality, with Medicare caught in the middle.
The background is the recent surge in health-care expenses. During the 1990's the rise of H.M.O.'s put a squeeze on medical bills; now there is nothing left to squeeze. So H.M.O.'s are sharply increasing their payments to health-care providers, and the federal programs overseen by Mr. Scully are under pressure to follow suit. Since these programs cost more than national defense, we're talking about a lot of money here.
Still, if medical care is a priority, which it surely is for the voters, why doesn't the government simply provide the necessary resources? You already know the answer: it's hard to reconcile realistic spending increases with plans for more tax cuts.
Last year the administration claimed that it could easily cut taxes without tapping the Social Security surplus. Those claims were false, but Sept. 11 provided cover: who cares about lockboxes when we're in pursuit of evildoers?
True, skeptics have raised a few questions. Given that we face a major new demand on the budget, shouldn't we reconsider a tax cut proposed in more peaceful times? (Instead, the administration wants to make the tax cut permanent.) Don't taxes normally go up in wartime, as a matter of shared sacrifice? And isn't it a little strange, given all the martial rhetoric, that the administration's recent 10-year budget proposal allocated more money to a second round of tax cuts ($665 billion) than it did to new defense spending ($625 billion)?
But as the cartoonist Tom Tomorrow has explained, the answer to all such questions is, "Why do you hate America?" A patriotic public is in no mood to question its leader's policies.
The really amazing thing is that raiding the lockbox wasn't enough. In the name of fighting terrorism the administration has in effect diverted $2 trillion of Social Security surpluses, previously pledged to debt reduction, to cover the revenue losses from tax cuts. But realistic projections now show permanent deficits in the federal budget as a whole. This threatens the administration's story line, which says that now is the time for even more tax cuts.
[...]
And that brings us back to Mr. Scully's defiance. Any health-care professional will tell you that Medicare's payment rates are increasingly inadequate. Many physicians now turn away Medicare patients; and service providers, like the companies that do X-rays at nursing homes, are going out of business. When Mr. Scully discovered that he would have to face some of those service providers, he walked out. You can't blame him (except that he was breaking the law). After all, he's under orders to keep those numbers down.
Saturday, 20 April 200220:47 BST: Permalink
"Charles Dodgson" considers the commentary on the administration's performance in foreign policy, expressing something less than admiration for the rationalizers of the Middle-east muddle (yeah, yeah, it's all a clever ploy, you bet) and those who accept the Washington line on the Venezuelan coup ("With 'anti-Idiotarians' like these, who needs idiots?"):
As to putting the grownups in charge, Bush at points last week was notoriously clueless about the policy and statements of his own administration. And then there's the Venezuela business, which seems more and more like the Mad Magazine version of a novel by John le Carré.And in related matters, Dodgson is also useful on another subject:So far, this is all just embarrassing. But a war with Iraq could make things worse in a hurry. Are we sure they know what they're doing?
In the wake of September 11th, one of the first concrete responses from Congress was the passage of a bill which rescinded certain CIA regulations concerning dealings with thugs, imposed in 1995.Administration war hawks claimed these rules prevented the CIA from making deals with bad actors which were necessary for it to do its job. In fact, the regulations in question did nothing of the sort. They still allowed the CIA to deal with anyone it liked. They just required that before initiating dealings with death squad leaders, drug dealers, and assorted murderous thugs, field agents should check with headquarters. Explaining why that was a bad idea is left as an exercise for Dick Cheney.
* * * * * The Washington Post has printed responses to the article on affirmative action I referred to last Tuesday:
Goodwin Liu's brilliant, comprehensive and meticulously documented arguments against Allen Bakke's case for admission to medical school were compelling, to say the least. He's even convinced me that Bakke would not have gained admission absent a quota. But as an implicit defense of quota systems, Liu's article was a red herring from start to finish. Quota systems are inappropriate, not because they disadvantage non-minorities but because they introduce standards of selection for schools and jobs that are irrelevant to success at those schools and jobs.This is an argument that looks good on the surface and which I'm sure I'd fall for if I didn't know better. The quality of a doctor can't be determined by how well they do in med school, but by how well their patients thrive in their care.I agree with Liu that measures other than the SAT and grade-point average should be considered. But improving the validity of selection methods should have nothing to do with ancestry. Whatever additional measures and standards are used should be applied equally, without regard to ethnic identity. Diversity is a reasonable social policy but only if achieved through outreach and then applied to a pool of otherwise qualified candidates capable of evolving into competent practitioners. [Angelo Mirabella]
You can't judge by their performance as your doctor. The same practitioner who provides excellent care to the white residents of Chevy Chase can turn out to be an abysmal doctor to poor black kids. A lot of it has to do with how well people relate across race and class barriers, and many doctors who do a fine job within their own race and class might just as well be trying to breathe in water if you take them out of their neighborhood. Some of it is about racism on the part of doctors, or about cultural ignorance on their part. Some of it is just a bit more specific to biological concerns, and you may find that a doctor who is not from your ethnic group simply doesn't recognize what is normal within it. Some of it has to do with how fully the patients trust the doctor; unhelpful prejudices can work in both directions. There are a number of factors but the bottom line is that minorities need access to minority doctors.
Again: your class full of high-quality, all-white graduates will provide no better care - and possibly even worse care - to minorities than the lower-performing minority graduates who were admitted under affirmative action programs. What this means is that no matter how good your graduating docs are, if they are all white, the standard of care for minority patients will decline. In a perfect, color-blind world this would not be an issue, but we don't live in that world. For the present, there must be minority doctors, and if affirmative action is the only way to get them, then we really do need affirmative action.
* * * * * Atrios is defending my position in regard to Cynthia McKinney's statement after Charles Kuffner disagreed with me. I think the points Atrios makes are good ones, but where I take issue with Kuffner is where he says:
I agree with Carol that McKinney asks some good questions, but I don't think a government investigation is needed to answer them. I'm quite sure there are plenty of reporters and writers who are looking into all of these questions and more, and should any of them find something damning to the Bush presidency, I've no doubt it will the top story for weeks. If there's one thing we did learn from the Enron investigation, it's that Congressional committees are more about facetime for the panel chairs than getting to the bottom of things. Our press corps is frequently and justly maligned here in blogland, but there are a lot of pros working out there, and an actual smoking gun would be a hell of a coup for one of them.I'm afraid I can't accept that point at all. Kuffner is placing an entirely unearned faith in a corps of reporters who work for organizations that have demonstrated a dwindling willingness to provide good news budgets, especially for projects that question the performance and integrity of this administration and those close to it. Our press has already shown how much vigor they are prepared to devote to those "good questions" - by mercilessly attacking the person who asked them. Lip service to the goodness of those questions is no substitute for the demands they should already be making for an investigation into what went wrong on 9/11. I'd like to believe Kuffner is right, but I can't help the feeling that if he were, the press would have been asking those questions first, and with even more energy than they devoted to their attacks on McKinney. And:
Beyond that, it's the way McKinney framed her charges. It's not that she's blaming "us", it's that she's charging deliberate negligence on the part of the administration for the purpose of enriching their cronies in the oil and defense industries.This may or may not be what she meant, but it is certain that the Bush family has close ties to the bin Laden family and it's also certain that when they took over the White House the administration stepped back from investigating the bin Ladens. They may have done that because the bin Ladens are their friends, or because they are their business associates, and they wanted to protect them, or because they just can't believe that the people they associate themselves with could be involved in anything bad.Whatever the case, the fact remains that the administration is now resisting the investigation that I believe most of us simply assumed last September would be taking place ASAP. That no moves were made immediately could be written off as shock and preparation and a lot of other things, but it's getting kind of late now and it not only hasn't happened, but the administration and the Republican leadership are openly engaged in obstructing such an investigation. It should be obvious that they would be demanding that investigation themselves if 9/11 had happened on a Clinton or Gore watch. Which answers another of Kuffner's questions:
And I said that McKinney's charge was disingenuous. I say that because I'm also willing to bet that Al Gore, who is no stranger to oil money himself , has friends and cronies in the same businesses that are profiting right now from the war and related buildup in defense spending. Politics is full of rich people, and many of them have a few questionable income sources in their pasts and presents. We here on the left-hand side of the equation frequently point out that the GOP loves to score points off Democratic misdeeds while overlooking the same peccadilloes when a fellow Republican is involved, so I have to ask: Would McKinney be saying the same thing if 9/11 had gone down as it did with Al Gore in the White House? I kinda doubt it.Right, because she wouldn't have to. Let's face it, Clinton was not coming from way out in left field when he said that if Gore had done things the way Bush has been doing them, the Republicans would have tried to impeach him after 9/11.But of course, it's very unlikely Gore would have done things the same way. As even The Washington Post admitted, the Clinton administration had been obsessed with terrorism and bin Laden and it's very likely much of that would have carried over into a Gore administration. (This is, after all, the same Al Gore who authored the report on airport security.) It is certainly doubtful that Gore would have restrained the FBI from investigating the bin Ladens. And I cannot imagine that he would have been coming up with excuses to stave off an investigation of the 9/11 tragedy.
And it is that last point that makes it not quite so disingenuous after all to raise the issue of the Bush family relationship to the Carlyle group and the bin Laden family. The rest you might just shrug off as coincidence, but why are they so hostile to an investigation? You don't have to be some sort of lefty kook to wonder what they're trying to hide.
In related news, Atrios also points to this article in which David Corn wonders why McKinney received more opprobrium for her remarks than James Inhofe (R-OK) got for his speech on the Senate floor asserting that Israel is entitled to the West Bank, and, "One of the reason I believe the spiritual door was opened for an attack against the United States of America is that the policy of our government has been to ask the Israelis, and demand it with pressure, not to retaliate in a significant way against the terrorist strikes that have been launched against them." Or, as Corn interprets it:
In other words, on Sept. 11, God allowed airliners to be piloted into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon because U.S. actions related to Israel were not to His/Her liking. How else to interpret Inhofe's words? A "spiritual door opened" for the attack? Well, who's in charge of spiritual doors -- and opening and closing them?Corn seems to see an equivalence between McKinney's statements and Inhofe's, but, no, I can't agree; this one is from fruitbat territory.In other news Kuffner offers a short memorial to those who died seven years ago at the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma, along with some more amusing items on Stupid Texas Tricks.
* * * * * I hate the stupid signs in the London Underground warning people not to give money to buskers. I hate the fact that the Underground authorities forbid busking. I really used to enjoy walking by the string quartet that illegally performed in Charing Cross station back when I used to work in the neighborhood. I was appalled when a number of stations in central London decided to drive the musicians out by playing their own approved canned music over the stations' loudspeakers. The Washington Post is on the same page with me on this one:
This being Washington, there will be those who prefer silence in which to read the briefs in their laps, and other assorted naysayers -- the ones who like it dull and dark. T. Dana Kauffman, who represents Fairfax on the Metro board, says the only music he wants to hear is the ding-dong of the door closing as he takes a seat. The staunchest resistance may come from transit police, who have, we acknowledge, a lot to worry about in these security-conscious times. But New York City offers a good model: There, musicians are licensed by a program called MUNY (Musicians Under New York), which schedules gigs for them, while casual buskers also compete for unofficial spots. The musicians may accept, but not solicit, tips. We see no reason such a system can't work here. The more music and the less regulation the better. Youth choruses. Harmonica players. Bring 'em on. Heck, if we were greeted, going home, by an off-key chanteuse singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," we'd gladly, even then, throw change.
Friday, 19 April 200215:20 BST: Permalink
Tons of interesting stuff around the web, but I don't have much to say about 'em. There's the Crossfire transcript with Kerry's appearance, for those who are looking for a Democratic candidate for 2004. Personally, I'm not impressed with his failure to admit that Bush's tax cut should be rescinded.Meanwhile, Atrios finally has a webblog (about bloody time!) and he's pointing to J. Bradford DeLong on the question: Does it matter that George W. Bush is dumb and lazy?
Defenders of Bush say that the fact that he is a slow study with a weak general knowledge base who doesn't crack the books too hard and doesn't think too fast doesn't matter. Why not? Because Bush has smart people to do his thinking for him: Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, et cetera. In Bush's own words, "My job isn't to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think. And when I think there's an axis of evil, I say it. I think moral clarity is important..." Once the President has given his people clear moral clarity as to what the important things are, they will have their marching orders, and good policies will emerge.In The Washington Post, Richard Cohen looks at a similar question:The first problem with this is that the President's words are actions, and should be considered actions. If you have a potential adversary that you are trying to isolate--Iraq--and if its largest neighbor Iran hates Iraq more than it hates you, you should not pop up and in your State of the Union address say that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea are an "axis of evil." That instantly gives the country you are trying to isolate two new allies. There would be substantial benefits to having a President smart enough to know, while his State of the Union address was being written, that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea were not an "axis"--an alliance--of any sort. And there would be substantial benefits to having a President who would think far enough ahead to consider whether his State-of-the-Union rhetoric might make his diplomats' task of isolating Iraq needlessly harder.
Today's multiple choice quiz: George Bush is president because (1) some chads hung in Florida, (2) Al Gore stopped wearing earth tones or (3) Andy Hiller asked the wrong questions. The answer, I now feel certain, is (3). Hiller was the journalist who asked Bush during the campaign to name the leaders of Pakistan, Chechnya, Taiwan and India. Bush flunked and, on account of that, went on to win the presidency.Of course, there may be other reasons why Bush dropped the ball on Venezuela. Patrick is pointing to questions both by Josh Marshall and by Greg Palast, who also wants to set the record straight:Why, you ask? Because the leaders in question were obscure and it was somewhat understandable that Bush could not name them. Had Hiller asked, instead, about France, Germany, Canada and China, Bush might have whiffed on them, too, and that would have been a different matter. Hiller not only held Bush to an unrealistically high standard, he inoculated him against further suggestions of intellectual insufficiency. The presidency was his.
Now we are beginning to see that Hiller was on to something. More and more the administration appears inept at foreign policy. Recently, for instance, it failed to instantly condemn the Venezuelan coup, somehow forgetting that the United States favors democratically elected governments, especially in this hemisphere. Someone should have looked it up.
Here's what we read this week: On Friday, Hugo Chavez, the unpopular, dictatorial potentate of Venezuela, resigned. When confronted over his ordering the shooting of antigovernment protestors, he turned over the presidency to progressive, democratic forces, namely, the military and the chief of Venezuela's business council.(Another cool thing at Patrick's site is a RealAudio link to his interview on NPR about Damon Knight. It's short, Rob, you can spend the time listening to it without going broke.)Two things about the story caught my eye: First, every one of these factoids is dead wrong. And second, newspapers throughout the ruling hemisphere, from the New York Times to the Independent to (wince) the Guardian, used almost identical words - "dictatorial", "unpopular", "resignation" - in their reports.
[...]
The resignation myth was the capstone of a year-long disinformation campaign against the populist former paratrooper who took office with 60% of the vote. The Bush White House is quoted as stating that Chavez's being elected by "a majority of voters" did not confer "legitimacy" on the Venezuelan government. The assertion was not unexpected from a US administration selected over the opposition of the majority of American voters.
[...]
There remains the charge that, in the words of the New York Times, "Chavez ordered soldiers to fire on a crowd [of protesters]." This bloody smear, sans evidence, stained every Western paper, including Britain's newest lefty, the Mirror. Yet I could easily reach eyewitnesses without ties to any faction who said the shooting began from a roadway overpass controlled by the anti-Chavez Metropolitan Police, and the first to fall were pro-Chavez demonstrators.And The Alternet is looking at why Palast himself is working in Britain rather than the US.
Also in media news, Eric Boehlert says the preferential treatment Bush is getting from the media is worse than you think. Clinton was always getting hammered for supposed spotlight-hogging, but when you saw him on TV it was always in connection with matters of state; with Bush, every campaign speech seems to be getting free on-air advertising.
Atrios also has a pointer to a Boston Phoenix article that says Judith Levine's new book calls for honest debate about children and sexuality. She’s hit the right’s gag reflex.
Patrick gave me a heads-up on a Slate article called My Sharon that basically says Sharon has thrown Hamas right into that briar patch:
Sharon refused to hold talks with the Palestinians until they abstained from violence for 10 straight days. Under pressure from the United States, Sharon cut the demand to seven days, then dropped it entirely, but only for discussions about a cease-fire. Discussions about the shape of a Palestinian state would have to wait, he said. "Peace negotiations can commence and move forward only after terrorism has ceased," Sharon reaffirmed on April 8."If the terrorists wanted those negotiations to move forward, Sharon's policy would make sense. But they don't. Don't take my word for it. Take Israel's. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs catalogs the worst suicide bombings perpetrated since December, when the current wave of terrorism began. Of the six attacks documented during that period, the ministry attributes five to Hamas. "The teachings of HAMAS utterly reject the peace process, which involves the surrender of 'Islamic land' and the recognition of Israel's right to exist on this land," says the ministry's most recent background paper on Hamas, dated September 1998. "HAMAS has recently become the moving spirit among those opposed to the peace process."
* * * * * And Hal O'Brien mailed me that paragraph from Dahlia Lithwick's article, also in Slate, about Justice Kennedy's bizarre idea that you are only entitled to your rights if you assert them. Which is great if you're a well-dressed white person (preferably female), but I promise you that while I want my nephew, who is black, to know what his legal rights are, I will not be telling him to assert his rights and refuse to submit to an illegal search in the face of cops who are looking for an excuse to beat the hell out of someone. But, by all means, know your rights, and spread it around:
What, specifically, am I talking about? Ladies and gentlemen, if a police officer boards the bus/train/plane/subway car upon which you are riding, and without having any suspicion of wrongdoing on your part asks to search your bags or your person, you have the absolute right to tell them no. Once more, and you should teach this to your babies (or have your nannies do so): The Fourth Amendment protects you from causeless, suspicionless searches by the government. You can just say no. I agree with Justice Kennedy on this one point, which he makes four or five times this morning: This democracy will be a much healthier one when Americans know their rights and assert them loudly and forcefully toward the police. I can't bring myself to agree with Kennedy's policy prescription, however, which seems to be that we should incarcerate anyone who doesn't know or assert their rights, until we are left with a citizenry consisting of those 400 citizens who are well-informed. So please cut and paste this paragraph into an e-mail and send it to 10 people, along with the threat that something terrible will happen to them if they don't forward it to 10 more. This isn't one of those woo-woo something-special-will-happen-to-you chain letters. ... Something really terrible will happen to you if you don't spread the word. Just ask Christopher Drayton and Layton Brown.* * * * * How kids fare in new welfare eraBruce Fuller, a study director from the University of California, Berkeley, calls the report a "sobering warning that simply requiring single mothers to work more in very low-wage jobs is not likely to boost the well-being of young children. We can't put all our eggs into forcing women to work more hours in low-wage jobs, if the policy goal is to improve young kids' environments."I like it when people have a firm grasp of the obvious.President Bush's answer to that challenge is to fund new efforts to promote higher marriage rates – since poverty rates are highest for single-parent families.
Aside from the political controversy over that proposal, such a result may be difficult to achieve. As Connecticut women in the study began working more, their newfound financial self-reliance apparently had a wider impact: They married less often than those who faced less pressure to work, researchers noted.
Fuller also challenges Bush's proposal to double the work requirements for mothers with very young children. "He doesn't want to spend any more money on child care. Our findings suggest that an investment in quality child-care centers would help accomplish the goal of improving child well-being."
* * * * * The Congress Moves to Block A New King George, and Richard Reeves testifies:
The official subject of the hearings was "The Presidential Records Act of 2002" introduced by Rep. Stephen Horn, a California Republican, who said: "The 1978 act was a landmark law. It declared for the first time that the official records of a former president belong to the American people. ... It allowed former presidents to restrict disclosure of certain confidential records for up to 12 years after they leave office. The authors ... considered this sufficient to prevent a 'chilling effect' on a president's ability to get confidential advice."Bush wanted to give former presidents -- and current ones, too -- control over such papers for their lifetimes and the lifetimes of their descendants and their descendants' lawyers. In other words, forever. (It should be noted here that records concerning "national security" can be kept secret by the government itself. One of the points made by professor Kutler was that the most important archives of World War I are still classified and kept from historians.)
The Horn bill would simply roll the clock back to last Oct. 31, the day before the White House made its power grab. The last line of his opening statement was: "Finally, the bill provides that Executive Order 13233 shall have no force and effect."
This is a great and important fight -- and it has been going on for more than 200 years. My contribution was to try to make the point that presidents have often tried to use executive power -- control the levers of process and procedure in the executive branch -- to diminish, even eliminate, the powers and influence of Congress.
The best example, I argued, was President Richard Nixon's ability to hide his diplomatic initiative to China and his economic initiative taking the U.S. dollar off the gold standard and leaving a stunned world to floating currencies and the beginnings of globalization. For better or worse, those startling initiatives were never debated nor considered by Congress or the American people. Nixon simply went on television and announced them.
That is probably how most presidents would like to govern, more like ol' King George did it. Certainly it would be quicker and easier. But quick, easy and secret are not what makes American democracy great. I had the impression that the members of Congress we saw last Thursday agreed with that -- and America will be better off if the Horn bill becomes law.
Wednesday, 17 April 200213:56 BST: Permalink
J. Bradford DeLong does his taxes:
At this point, here on the world wide web, I am supposed to rant about how this--heavy--tax burden is an unsustainable burden, an oppressive violation of my natural rights, crushing the spirit out of America's creative and entrepreneurial minorities, reducing us to a nation of ingenious tax cheats on the one hand and those desperate for a suck on the government teat on the other.I say, "Bull****!"
From my perspective, my taxes are well-spent--a way of buying a lot of very important things I could never get any other way.
* * * * * Michelle Cottle looks at a recent study and suggests parental guidance:
For starters, the standards used in the study seem suspect. Researchers found that kids (average age of 14) who watch between one and three hours of television a day are much more likely to later exhibit aggressive behavior than those who watch less than one hour a day.No kidding. Plenty of other researchers have noted that the strongest indicators for violence are found in peer groups and parents.Less than one hour a day? I'm sorry, but these days, kids who watch less than one hour of television a day--be it "Sesame Street," "Barney," or "Wrestlemania"--are simply not normal. I mean that in the best way possible. Maybe their parents are deeply religious. Or hyper-intellectual. (Most of us know an idealistic academic who at some point threw out her TV set.) Or simply super-concerned with their child's upbringing. But any household in which youngsters are not watching even one hour of television per day almost certainly has some other socializing influence far more important than the presence--or absence--of "Power Rangers" on the tube.
But wait - what about those studies that found that kids who commit crimes actually watched less television than others did? What are we missing, here?
* * * * * Joshua Green wants McCain to run for the Democratic presidential nomination. I dunno, an anti-gun conservative - is that a good idea? (The oddest thing about this article is that it identifies Zogby as "the independent pollster". I think it's more accurate to call him conservative, too.)
* * * * * Stupidity as a bipartisan effort: Bush Pledges Support for Constitutional Amendment on Victims' Rights
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush endorsed a constitutional amendment Tuesday that would guarantee rights to crime victims that include possible payments by criminals, calling it "one of those rare instances where amending the Constitution is the right thing to do."A Bartcop Forum poster wondered what happened to:The proposed amendment is sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and John Kyl of Arizona - "one a Democrat, one a Republican, both great Americans," Bush said.
the manly virtue of taking what the world throws at you, of not whining about your fate, of standing up to the wimpy whingeing victim culture of Oprah and Donohue. Or so we've been told. But if you are a wimpy woman Democrat you can come along with a constitutional amendment valorizing the victim culture as long as it gives the ruling caste of judges and magistrates an opportunity to exact yet more vengeance and punishment. Sure thing, shweetheart.* * * * * Supreme Court Strikes Down Ban on Thoughtcrime:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government went too far in trying to ban computer simulations and other fool-the-eye depictions of teen-agers or children having sex, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.And now I find that Gary Farber has a good take on Ashcroft's predictably unhappy response.Youthful sexuality is an old theme in art, from Shakespeare to Academy Award-winning movies, the court found in striking down a 1996 child pornography law on free speech grounds.
The law would call into question legitimate educational, scientific or artistic depictions of youthful sex, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for a 6-3 majority.
"The statute proscribes the visual depiction of an idea -- that of teen-agers engaging in sexual activity -- that is a fact of modern society and has been a theme in art and literature throughout the ages," Kennedy wrote in a decision joined by four other justices. Clarence Thomas, one of the court's most conservative justices, wrote a separate opinion agreeing with the outcome.
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Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer signed Kennedy's opinion. Thomas, in a separate concurring opinion, said the court's ruling appropriately strikes down a ban that was too sweeping but leaves a window for future regulation of some kinds of virtual child pornography.Justice Sandra Day O'Connor partially agreed with the majority and partially disagreed. The law is indeed too broad, but a portion of it could be salvaged, O'Connor wrote.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Antonin Scalia dissented, arguing that the law need not be read to ban the kind of artistic material that concerned Kennedy.
* * * * * Media Whores Online finds Bob Woodward with a case of amnesia:
A quick look at the record of President Clinton's TV interviews alone -- not accounting for many times that amount for print outlets, including several with the Washington Post, and, of course, a lengthy interview with Mr. "Woody" Amnesia himself -- shows that Bob Woodward's claim that Clinton never gave lengthy interviews is absurd. Woodward told an audience in Providence, Rhode Island, fawning about George Bush's giving him an interview: "Certainly Richard Nixon would not have allowed reporters to question him like that. Bush's father [former President George Bush] wouldn't allow it. Clinton wouldn't allow it. As a journalist I like somebody who is straight and direct." Who doesn't? Even in journalists.* * * * * Is this piece by Elisabeth Bumiller in the NYT an admission that Clinton was right, or just another excuse for Bush's bumbling?
Not surprisingly, many former members of the Clinton administration think so. They argue that the president's delay in getting actively involved in the Middle East was part of an ABC policy — Anything But Clinton — that began with minor things, like wearing coats and ties in the Oval Office and being on time. Mr. Bush would also deliver shorter State of the Union addresses, never read political polls and stay away from Hollywood swells.But soon the ABC policy, Clinton advisers assert, moved on to the serious business of foreign policy. Mr. Bush, they say, was so convin