The Sideshow
Archive for July 2002
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The SideshowArchive for July 2002 |
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14:41 BST: Permalink
Wednesday, 31 July 200220:51 BST: Permalink
London monthly sf meeting notice: The meeting will not be held at the Jubilee, but at the Silver Cross in Whitehall. Here's the map.20:40 BST: Permalink
Tim Wilson notes that a bunch of Confederates are getting together for a meeting, and says:20:00 BST: Permalink
I know it's likely that these "Confederate" folks are going to talk up how they're all about "Southern heritage". They'll try to play their "states' rights" cards. But the fact remains that the right the states who seceeded from The Union were concerned about at the time was the right for their white citizens to own slaves.Actually, it's worse than that, you know. Those southern states wanted to impose their laws on other states. Like the runaway slave thing: If a slave runs away from a slave-holder to an anti-slavery state, whose laws apply? In the slave state, the slave is property that must be returned, but in the northern state, this person is a human being who can not be property. So if your slave ran away from Tennessee to Wisconsin, and you wanted to go to Wisconsin and claim your "property", you had to violate Wisconsin law to do it. "But," you might say, "in Tennessee this is my property." And Wisconsin could rightly say, "This isn't Tennessee." So the southern slave-holders really hate it when the north welcomes runaways and refuses the return of this "property", and they want the Federal government to intervene to force the north to accept the imposition of the laws of other states. Got it, now? The whole "states' rights" thing is pure scam, and always was.
Atrios has an excerpt from this convocation speech by Keith Olbermann, delivered in 1998 when he was the host of the top-rated show on MSNBC cable. It's really worth reading.19:09 BST: Permalink
There are days now when my line of work makes me ashamed, makes me depessed, makes me cry. And it occurs to me that this moral sensor has been fine-tuned within the walls of this campus. Forty years ago the great news broadcaster Edward R. Murrow got up in front of the convention of the radio and television news directors and announced that without moral direction all this great medium would become was "wires and lights in a box," and there are days when I wish it would still be even that idealistic.
If Krugman's stuff was impassioned speeches at the end of movies, it would be gratifying, but since it's real life, it's just plain scary. Like yesterday's article, Our Banana Republics:00:06 BST: Permalink
The other — further revelations about the way dishonest budgeting by former Gov. Christie Whitman crippled the state's finances — has dire implications for all of the state's eight million people, who face the prospect of higher taxes on their houses, more potholes in their roads, fewer teachers in their children's classrooms and worse medical care for their parents. This story received no national coverage at all.See how bad it is? It's not that long ago that Krugman would have done anything to avoid crediting "the Clinton administration" for the health of the economy - he would have made sure to say it was Greenspan. But that option is gone now that Greenspan has proven to be only as good as the administration he serves.Experts already knew that the Whitman administration had used creative accounting to justify a series of tax cuts. Last year New Jersey Policy Perspective, a local think tank, released a study of fiscal policies in the 1990's titled "Take the Money and Run." Among other things, the state stopped contributing to its pension funds. This made the budget look a lot better, but created a financial hole. In an attempt to fill that hole Governor Whitman violated the basic principles of pension funds by having them engage in stock arbitrage, borrowing money to speculate on the market.
Now the state's taxpayers must make up for an investment loss of $22 billion, most of a year's tax receipts. But don't cry for New Jersey; Mrs. Whitman wasn't alone in her misbehavior.
For one thing, many corporations with pension plans used a similar trick to inflate their bottom lines. As the current issue of Business Week explains, the pension time bomb involves large numbers; I'd say it's the equivalent of at least 50 WorldComs.
Furthermore, Mrs. Whitman's policies were by no means the worst among the states. That honor may fall to Tennessee, though Alabama, where a cash crunch stopped all jury trials for awhile, may run a close second.
The fact is that in recent years many states have been run like banana republics. Responsibility gave way to political opportunism, and in some cases to mob rule. When Tennessee considered a tax increase last year, legislators were intimidated by a riot stirred up by radio talk-show hosts. Only when lack of cash forced the governor to lay off half the work force did the state, which has the second-lowest per capita taxes in the country, face up to reality.
The only reason Tennessee doesn't look like Argentina right now is that it isn't a sovereign nation; since the federal budget was in good shape until recently, there's a safety net. And the federal budget was in pretty good shape because the Clinton administration, unlike state governments, behaved responsibly. Budget projections were honest — if anything, too cautious — and boom-year surpluses were used to reduce debt.
But the responsibility era is over. Even as state governments face up to the consequences of cooked books in the 1990's, the Bush administration is following in their footsteps.
Bartcop links to a Jimmy Breslin story about how conservatives defend your free speech:
Dr. Susan Block's Los Angeles sex therapy show, "Sex for Wisdom," has been censored week after week on a TV station owned by the Rigas family's Adelphia Communications. The Rigases say they are good and she is bad. Yesterday, Susan Block watched the glorious sight on television of the whole Rigas family walking around in handcuffs."Why, we had a show on handcuffs two weeks ago, and they wouldn't run it," Susan Block said. She said to her assistant, David Brando, "Do you think they understand bondage now?"
[...]
The stock market people are so dizzy that they said all day yesterday that the prices were going up, up, up because of the pictures of the Rigases in irons.Susan Block thinks that the Rigases belong in prison for something far more important than massive theft: censorship. She has a half-hour show that has been on community-access cable stations in Los Angeles since 1992. She has discussions, then visuals. "I like wild sex in an interesting historical context," she says. She likes Professor Mark Gordon, who lectures on the erotic world of sex before the Nazis took over Berlin.
A year and a half ago, Susan Block says, she had porn star Teri Weigel and her husband on for their 14th wedding anniversary. "They had wild sex."
This was before the Rigases took over. The general manager of the stations was Bill Rosendahl. He was a Los Angeles liberal. He looked at cassettes of the 22-minute Dr. Susan Block shows when they were turned in and always said, "Fine." When they turned in the show with porn star Cumisha, who walked on the set and immediately took off all clothes, Rosendahl said, "great."
Then the Rigases bought all available Los Angeles cable. Rosendahl immediately sent the cassettes to the new owners in Coudersport, Pa. The Rigas family viewed the shows and sent them back to Rosendahl with notes.
"We can't run a show like this," Rosendahl, liberal no more, told Susan Block.
"What's the matter with them?"
"The Rigases said these shouldn't be seen by American families. I agree."
Susan Block wrote on the Internet, "The cable company is based in a tiny backwater town called Coudersport, which, according to a New York paper, is the next possible home of the Aryan nation. John Rigas and Sons rule the town like a Greek mafia, surrounded by lawyers. They tried to force their morals on every place that had their stations. The only morals they did not try to force on us was their quaint notion of what to do with other peoples' money. Steal it."
The Rigases then had a rule for Dr. Block shows. She could say anything but could not show images. When she talked about the body and started to show images, the screen went black.
Susan Block began to write in big white letters on the black, "This is what censorship looks like."
It is against all law for some small-town bum like Rigas to censor anything, but he went ahead and did it and Susan Block had no fortune to fight him with.
Tuesday, 30 July 200223:08 BST: Permalink
Music News20:09 BST: PermalinkI can't help myself: *snicker*
"The Rising" is loaded with melodic, high-octane arena-ready songs: hard rockers, evangelical anthems and tender ballads that ought to sound right at home among his classic material, which is the best news of all.
Rittenhouse Review has found a truly offensive article by Michael Novak and taken it apart. I guess, unlike us wild, unvirtuous libbies, Novak didn't grow up learning songs about the roads that never saw sun nor sky:17:45 BST: Permalink
Rumble of rock and the walls closed round
Living and the dead men two miles down.Eight days passed and some were rescued
Leaving the dead to lie alone
All their lives they dug their graves
Two miles of earth for a markin' stone.In the town of Springhill you don't sleep easy
Often the earth will tremble and roll
When the earth is restless miners die
Bone and blood is the price of coal.
Once upon a time, the Democratic Party right wing actually wore sheets. Most of them have since bolted to the Republican Party, and good riddance, but ever since the GOP lured them away with their Southern Strategy we've been handicapped by a group of people who insist that the way to win elections is to abandon the rest of the Democratic program as well. The Nation has a good article by Robert L. Borosage up about this bunch, The DLC Comes to Manhattan. Here are some greatly abridged highlights:02:41 BST: Permalink
1. At a time when the public thinks big business has too much influence in Washington, the DLC's mission is to increase the influence of business in the Democratic Party.Never mind their policies, what is most loathsome about the DLC is their contribution to Republican spin. These are the nominal Democrats who provide the "bipartisanship" for far right Republican programs that repels the Democratic rank and file. They are the ones who insist that Gore "lost" because he was "too left wing" - notice that even Lieberman uses phrases (not just once) that suggest Gore actually lost the election, and did so because of his policy prescriptions. They do everything they can to blur the distinction between the two parties, and they have disproportionate sway over the direction that the Democratic Party takes in both its rhetoric and its mistreatment of liberals.2. New Democrats joined with conservative Republicans in contributing to the current mess. DLC icon Senator Joe Lieberman and other New Dems joined with Gingrich and Republicans to pass securities "reform," a centerpiece of Gingrich's Contract With America, over President Clinton's veto. The measure, which the DLC touts to this day, made it harder for shareholders to hold executives and accountants liable for misleading reports. Clinton is surely right to now point to this measure as contributing directly to the current scandals.
New Democrats in the House and Senate, led by the ethically challenged former New Dem co-chair Representative Jim Moran, worked with Republicans to frustrate Arthur Levitt, Clinton's chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, in Levitt's attempt to ban auditors from doing consulting for the companies they audit. As Clinton notes, this led directly to the Enron scandals, in which auditors had every incentive to ignore shady off-the-books maneuvers.
And Lieberman, the DLC's favored candidate for President, made the fight against honest accounting of executive stock options his personal mission. Honest accounting, urged by such "radicals" like Alan Greenspan and Warren Buffett, would have tempered the abuse of stock options; as things stood, executives had a multimillion-dollar incentive to cook the books in the short term so they could cash out. Lieberman continues to block efforts for this reform to this day, but now claims, in his best Claude Raines imitation, to be shocked that stock options have been abused, and haven't been used to redistribute wealth, as he thought.
3. New Dems joined with Republicans in diluting efforts to clean up the current mess. New Dems in the House offered bipartisan support for the Republican accounting reform bill that was certified as harmless by the accountants' lobby.
4. Led by Senator John Breaux, New Democrats have helped to block a real prescription-drug benefit for seniors.
5. The DLC champions privatization of Social Security as a centerpiece of its program for the new century.
6. The DLC trumpets the corporate trade agenda, scorning efforts to build environmental and worker rights protections into trade accords.
Since the DLC is infamous for taking credit for every victory and blaming others for every defeat, its leaders are not likely to admit that they've been wrong.
Since Nixon's victory in 1968, the conventional party wisdom has been that the Democrats lost because they were "liberal" and had to repudiate pretty much all of liberalism if we wanted to win elections. The result has been a pull to the right that has alienated many of the party's core supporters. Jimmy Carter's victory was taken as proof of this: the first presidential candidate to declare himself a born-again Christian, Carter nevertheless was able to win support from Democrats solely because everyone was so sick of the Republicans and wanted to punish Ford for pardoning Nixon. But Democrats disliked Carter's conservatism and their fire dimmed long before the rabbit jokes started and the Iranian hostage crisis began to drag on; he couldn't bring Democrats back to the polls, and in 1980 Reagan was able to win the presidency.
This has, obviously, been a disaster for Democrats, especially where the White House is concerned. Dems were not helped when our candidates showed up weak on the personality scale - Dukakis' wimpy response to the death penalty question in the debates is probably what killed him; not his position, but his lack of fire. But there were signs that reality was peeking through when Clinton, despite his visible social liberalism, was allowed to win the party's nomination. I think it's pretty obvious that the social liberalism Clinton displayed had a great deal to do with what made Democrats willing to support him in spite of his conservatism - he looked a lot more like "one of us", and he wasted no words on trying to prove he was more virtuous than the rest of us. He was, unlike his Republican opponents, a normal guy from humble roots who did ordinary things like sharing a home with his family. This was in stark contrast to people like Reagan and Dole, who preached "family values" but cheated on their wives and eventually dumped them and their children.
But the party left was never entirely comfortable with Clinton's DLC credentials and by his second campaign was more than a little unhappy with his illiberal caving-in to the Republicans on civil liberties issues. He had charisma, and he had Carville, but he, too, had a tendency to give the DLC wisdom far too much credence. It was DLC types in both the party and the press who seem to have convinced him, after all, to make what must have been the biggest political mistake of his presidency: to dignify questions about Monica Lewinsky with a response.
Joe Lieberman, one of the more self-deluding characters in the party, was also its greatest weakness over the last few years. Aside from being a major shill for the worst corporatists, he was doing everything he could to prove that he was no free-loving, rock'n'rolling '60s liberal. Lieberman can share the credit for all those Democratic votes that went to Nader. His attack on Clinton during the Lewinsky mess disgusted liberals, as did his constant harping on the evils of Hollywood and his blatant religious bigotry. Republican attacks on Clinton's morals clearly energized many Democrats to come out for their party, but those were the very people Lieberman was sneering at. Every time he opened his mouth he alienated more young voters - voters who happen to enjoy popular culture and many of whom actually do believe in free expression. His greatest moment of triumph was stupidly buying RNC spin about counting the ballots in Florida - on national television - thus setting the scene for illegal absentee ballots to be counted in Republican counties only. You don't often hear it said in public, but it's true: The worst mistake Gore made in the 2000 campaign wasn't his "swing to the left", it was Joe Lieberman, who still apparently believes that it's social conservatism and corporate sucking-up that brings out the Democratic vote. He probably thinks the conservative elements of Clinton's program were the only reason anyone voted for him, and that Gore won all those votes not because he was to the left of Bush, but because he didn't get caught sleeping with the wrong woman.
What really saved Clinton's electoral bacon, as we all know, was Ross Perot, who drew the attentions - and the votes - of people who really did want to see America's checkbook balance. Ironically, Clinton delivered this in a way Republicans have clearly been uninterested in doing, but many Republicans nevertheless see Clinton's victories at the polls as "illegitimate" because they believe that the combined Perot-Bush and Perot-Dole votes really represent Republican majorities. This would make sense if the Republicans were still the party of fiscal responsibility, but as long as they claim Reagan as a hero president, this won't wash - it was precisely Reagan's fiscal irresponsibility that made Perot seem so attractive to his Republican supporters. Bush2, who promised even more thriftlessness, could hardly be their standard-bearer.
But Democrats, by and large, were voting for the up-beat, blue-jeaned liberal who used a Fleetwood Mac tune as his theme song; while the Republicans desperately clawed for a return to a dead and hated past, Clinton's campaign said, "Don't stop thinkin' about the future." Even Gore was stronger in this respect than Bush - he loves the Grateful Dead and the Beatles, and his wife plays on Zappa records. But with Lieberman egging him on, Gore let that aspect of his background be down-played.
Back in the present, the DLC hates Al Gore because he took a "swing to the left" at the Democratic convention. (Of course, Lieberman and the rest also hate the fact that if Gore stands again, he is likely to get the nomination they all want so bad.) They refuse to acknowledge that he also jumped in the polls and was headed for a landslide as a result of that swing - that he, in fact, won the election with more votes than any Democrat has ever received, and did so despite the pull from the left from Nader and the libels against him in the press. They are the source of much of the anti-Gore spin that has permeated the air since 2000. They are not going to give a break to someone who is more liberal than Gore. If they are giving nice spin to someone who right now seems more liberal, you can be sure they either aren't so liberal or that they are being groomed for the (harmless) VP place on the ticket - they aren't going to allow anyone to be the nominee unless they believe he is one of them.
I followed a link from Atrios to this article on the Left Behind series and was irritated to see that they are such record-breaking best sellers. It's not that they're best sellers that I mind, but that they are outselling all other novels.Something must be done. I've been wracking my brains for an appropriate series that could and should replace it, and I think I have it: Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. They're well-written, they've got heart and humor, and there are lots of them. If you're short of time, I liked the first two a lot but The Last Continent is the one to skip, and don't miss Small Gods, The Truth, and Thief of Time.
Monday, 29 July 200219:35 BST: Permalink
I didn't send it, Guv.16:35 BST: PermalinkI've just had a couple of e-mails from nice people - one of whom I have never corresponded with and whose address isn't in my address book - warning me that I allegedly have a virus. A couple of error messages of the "your mail has been rejected because it has a virus" type have also come in showing headers allegedly from me - and clearly not from anywhere near my machine. (They're from ".kr" - is that Korea?) These infected e-mails were mostly addressed to other bloggers, most of whom I do recognize (and the ones I recognize are mostly liberal/Dem types), and unsurprisingly contain these terrifying characters in the header:
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook ExpressI wouldn't be caught dead using Outlook Express, or any other mail client that automatically encodes/decodes mail. I'm all ascii, all the time. I normally assume that anything that tells me it's a MIME message is spam. Ditto HTML mail. Real people don't use that stuff in e-mail, do they?Clarification (01:53 Tuesday): I wasn't asking a question; I know that some viruses are designed to exploit OE's default settings and send mail out from a victim's address book - but OE has never been installed on my machine and my mail reader doesn't have those weaknesses. (That's why I am so snide about Outlook Express.) I also know that some people are nasty enough to send viruses to people deliberately, using someone else's address. Stay with me now: The headers in the bounced versions of this mail supposedly from me actually show an envelope from iticorp.co.kr and were sent with Outlook Express - in other words, it could not have come from me.
An article in yesterday's Washington Post points out once again that abstinence-only sex education leaves much to be desired:14:28 BST: Permalink
While helping young people delay sexual intercourse is a laudable goal, this ideologically driven grant is based on unproven public health interventions. It stipulates that programs it funds must teach young people that sexual activity outside of marriage can have "harmful psychological and physical effects" and that "a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity."That "more than 90 percent" is a bit of an understatement. Programs that provide good information and positive encouragement to trust condoms usually have effectiveness statistics as good or better than the textbook stats for the effectiveness of The Pill in preventing conception. Of course, The Pill itself does better still in that kind of program, but the point is that condoms are pretty damned reliable if used properly and consistently. (Use them every time - and I do mean every time - and never, ever use an oil-based lubricant, and they pretty much always work.)Less than one quarter of D.C. households consist of married heterosexuals; less than 20 percent have children. Yet the federal government apparently thinks that the remaining majority of people in the District ought to be celibate, and the city apparently has agreed in its grab at the carrot of federal funding.
The most egregious thing about the grant is that the programs it funds are not permitted to discuss contraception -- including condoms -- other than to point out their failure rate. A score of the most popular abstinence-grants programs nationwide even undermine condom use by claiming that condoms fail one out of six times -- despite mountains of studies showing that, when used consistently and correctly, condoms are more than 90 percent effective in protecting against pregnancy and HIV infection.
Hey, this is a drum I will beat every chance I get: Good, comprehensive sex education works to reduce STDs and unwanted pregnancies. It's really not an accident that the US has higher rates than Europe does - and, despite what you may have heard, European young people do not start having sex as early as American teenagers. Abstinence-only programs are not sex education, they are anti-sex education, and they are a very bad idea.
Paul Krassner has details on his site about the "suppressed" Homer Simpson intro to his album, complete with streaming audio.12:18 BST: Permalink
Buzzflash interviewed Joe Conason, and asked about what I still regard as what should have been the biggest scandal of the Whitewater investigation:10:00 BST: Permalink
BuzzFlash: We've talked with Gene Lyons and David Brock, and want to talk with you, about one of the little details that gets lost in the memory of the average person. There are probably only a few hundred people in the U.S. that can recall this, but it's in your book and David Brock's book. We're talking about the moment when former Senator Faircloth of North Carolina and Jesse Helms met with David Sentelle.As one of the few hundred people who have never forgotten it, let me heartily recommend you read this interview.
My thanks to Chris Bertram for the tip-off to the URL for my letter in response to the porn article he cited last month.And also thanks to Lenny Bailes, who provided an uncomfortable but effective solution to the offline browsing problem. What I don't understand is why I needed one in the first place - I hadn't changed any settings to make it stop doing what it was doing before. But hey, that's Windows.
Sunday, 28 July 200219:24 BST: Permalink
Blogstuff17:05 BST: PermalinkNathan Newman notes that I praised ACLU but omitted to mention National Lawyers Guild, and he's right, I should have. I also should have mentioned Feminists for Free Expression, who were instrumental in killing the federal version of the Dworkin-MacKinnon anti-porn legislation.
Nathan is also discussing an article in The Economist about the failure of the telecoms, thanks to competition.
From Ray Davis at Bellona Times:
Twenty years ago I encountered Academia and ran away squealing like a libertarian.Rittenhouse Review has been culling links again (but I'm still there!) on the grounds that some of the crackpots listed were just making the page take too long to load. This is a position with which I thoroughly sympathize. However, I was a bit concerned by this paragraph:But now I return.
What brought me back? One goal. One goal I have in mind. One monochromatic battle of darkness against light. I hate that stupid fight.
For I will never rest until an end's been put to high-resolution bitmaps and our cultural heritage has been saved by eight-color grayscale GIFs (or until I reach early retirement, whichever comes first). For every effin' U. teaches its baggy-jeaned tots and cane-wielding toddlers that strict two-color black-&-white is how digital archiving must be done, thus destroying all they digitally archive, and the U.s do more digital archiving than anyone, for they have much to destroy.
And yet, the links continue to include numerous conservative publications and columnists, the latter group including, among others, Pat Buchanan, Linda Chavez, Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, Michelle Malkin, William Safire (though hanging by a thread), and George Will.I realize that the man who is known to the Media Horse as "William Safliar" can be a crackpot, too, but frankly I can't see why he alone is "hanging on by a thread" when George F. Will isn't. There have been plenty of times when Safire was the sole dissenter from right-wing spin-of-the-week, and Will really doesn't measure up.Ethel the Blog is less than flattering toward a couple of well-known names:
That we even have to test for the moribundity of "Wired" each month is due to their endless techno-stock hyper-hyping, their large monthly "toys for boys" sections that come off as not much more than Maxim without the tits, and their apparent contractual obligation to write at least one worshipful profile of George Gilder per year, with this year's model also appearing in this issue. Gilder is perhaps known best among those who aren't techno-droids as the author of Wealth and Poverty, a paean to Reagan-era trickle-down economics that still inspires tumescent approbation amongst a certain crowd. The most entertaining, and perhaps unwittingly correct, quotation from Gilder in the article is one he uttered about Global Crossing a few years ago, "It will change the world economy."Diane E. has posted an old Andrew Sullivan article that, if he had any integrity, would embarrass him, but then if he had any integrity this stuff wouldn't happen in the first place. And she says:
Sullivan doesn't care about principle, it's just sucking up to power that he cares about. It's a Daddy Complex thing. Or maybe the Cinderella Complex thing.Diane also reminds me that it's time to post my monthly reminder that I'm not British (I only live here), I'm not male, and yes, Avedon is my first name.Or...maybe we should put a new entry in the DSM for a whole new psychological complex: The Sullivan Complex, which characterizes guys with PMS (paralyzed masculinity syndrome) that need a Big Strong Man to suck up to.
I love these: "Knickers in a twist." "Panties in a bunch." And now this one from T.C. Mits:
It seems that the Family Policy Network has it's undies all up in a bundle over the Summer Reading Program for incomming freshmen and transfers at the University of North Carolina.This is, of course, about the controversy over the presence of a book about Islam on the UNC summer reading list. I'm rather amused by the idea that it's offensive to "force" students to read about things they may not like. When I was in school, I had to learn about Nazis, and no one asked me if I liked them. As a matter of fact, I didn't like Nazis at all. (Quick quiz: The school I went to was run by (a) Nazis (b) Jews. Don't think too hard, it's not a trick question.) In college I had to read about the Women's Christian Temperance Union, Harry Anslinger, and union busting, and I didn't like them, either. It would have been pretty stupid to be offended that my teachers were trying to educate me.TCM also finds a neat little quote from last Monday's Crossfire:
BEGALA: Just goes to show you, the Republicans were right: They all said if I voted for Gore, we'd have an idiot in the White House, the deficit would return, the stock market would collapse and the economy would tank. Well, I did vote for Gore and we did -- well, you get it.Feoreg went to see the Farnborough Air Show, and Charlie stayed home:
The afternoon continued much like any other summer weekend afternoon, until I turned on the TV at about 5pm to check the news headlines. I was half hoping to see some footage of the air show. What I saw instead was horrific: a Sukhoi-27 fighter ploughing into a mass of spectators and exploding in a fireball! The news presenter intoned portentiously: "seventy-eight die and over a hundred are injured in one of the worst ever disasters at an air show, when a Sukhoi fighter jet crashes into the crowd." (At this point I was hyperventillating and feeling faint.) She continued: "the air show, in the Ukraine --"
Vicki Rosenzweig prevented me from missing this piece by Molly Ivins about one of my favorite hobby-horses:01:45 BST: Permalink
Bob McChesney, the media critic and professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sums it up nicely: "The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was one of the most important of the last 50 years. It was also the most corrupt and undemocratic bill of the time: It was of, by and for special interests. Most of the congresspeople who voted for it didn't even know what they were voting on."Same thing with the phone companies. Whenever big companies start talking about how something will provide better products and services because it will increase competition, it's always time to worry, because competition is the last thing they want.He understates. The bill actually was written by industry lobbyists, each of the several components of telecom snarling at one another like wolves over a piece of meat as they ripped up 70 years' worth of regulatory experience. The wolves united once the bill hit the floor to push it through. We few, we happy few, who raised Cain about it at the time had it condescendingly explained to us that the magic of the marketplace would take care of all our doubts.
Here's what the magic has done in just one area:
Before President Reagan, a radio company could own 12 stations nationally and no more than two in any one market. After the first round of de-reg in the '80s, that was changed to no more than 28 nationally and no more than four in one market. The '96 law changed that to as many as you could acquire nationally and eight in one market. The result, we were told, would be increased competition. Sure.
Since then, almost two-thirds of American radio stations have been bought, always by ever-larger entities. Clear Channel owns 1,200 stations nationally, and two or three companies own almost all of them. In all the major cities, we are down to a duopoly or triopoly in radio.
Now connect the dag-nabbit, bobberty-doggin' dots here. This is not a business scandal. WorldCom is not just a corporate failure. This is about government. The government of this country has been bought by campaign contributions from corporate special interests. This is about the nexus between big corporations and government, the American keiretsu, the Establishment.From Washington we hear nothing but petty, provincial yapping over whether this hurts the R's or the D's. The R's blame it all on Bill Clinton; the D's blame it all on the greedhead Republican Congress. But this is about much more than the next election, or the one after that.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. Because if we don't, it's going to get worse. The FCC is now chaired by the anti-regulation Michael Powell, who is determined to do for newspapers and television what has already been done to radio and cable.
Housekeeping & tech junk1. Yes, yes, I somehow typed "Senate" when I meant to say "Congress" in the headline below (now fixed). How embarrassing. Thanks to all the nice people who wrote to
tell me that I'm a dimwitwake me up.2. Over the last several years I've become pretty dependant on our household's really ace sysadmin/tech support guy, but last week he disappeared forever in a puff of smoke and the next day I came in and found my whole back-up system had exploded and I don't know what to do with it. What do you know about Retrospect and the HP SureStore 5000?
3. And IE is still driving me crazy. I don't know why it suddenly stopped letting me browse offline, but it did, a few months ago, and it's a real inconvenience. The really annoying thing is that when I try to explain to other people what's wrong, they think I mean something else that I could only mean if I were completely unfamiliar with using IE. They say things like, "Did you try setting it to Work Offline from the File menu?" Well, of course, I don't have to "try" it since I've been doing it for years - in fact, if I don't set it to Work Offline before I go offline, IE will keep trying to dial out again even if I'm not touching the keyboard. I'm not trying to get it to do something new I creatively thought up, I'm just trying to get it to do what it always did before. The point is, IE behaves as if my cache is empty, even though I only closed the page I'm looking for mere minutes ago and it's still in the History. I think it's automatically deleting stuff, but I don't know why. As near as I can tell, this is an undocumented bug, and maybe re-installing Windows would fix it, but I'm just not ready to jump into that right now without a net. (Yes, I've reinstalled Windows before with no problem, but I always knew there was someone to hold my hand immediately if something went wrong, and I'm nervous that way. Right now I feel like an orphan.)
4. And I just broke one of my favorite coffee mugs. It's been a bad week.
Saturday, 27 July 200217:55 BST: Permalink
It is hard to pick the stupidest part of this Charles Krauthammer article about how liberals are stupid...05:34 BST: Permalink
To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil....but this is surely a contender:For the first side of this equation, I need no sources. As a conservative, I can confidently attest that whatever else my colleagues might disagree about -- Bosnia, John McCain, precisely how many orphans we're prepared to throw into the snow so the rich can have their tax cuts -- we all agree that liberals are stupid.
We mean this, of course, in the nicest way. Liberals tend to be nice, and they believe -- here is where they go stupid -- that most everybody else is nice too. Deep down, that is. Sure, you've got your multiple felon and your occasional war criminal, but they're undoubtedly depraved 'cause they're deprived. If only we could get social conditions right -- eliminate poverty, teach anger management, restore the ozone, arrest John Ashcroft -- everyone would be holding hands smiley-faced, rocking back and forth to "We Shall Overcome."
Liberals believe that human nature is fundamentally good. The fact that this is contradicted by, oh, 4,000 years of human history simply tells them how urgent is the need for their next seven-point program for the social reform of everything.
Liberals suffer incurably from naivete, the stupidity of the good heart. Who else but that oracle of American liberalism, the New York Times, could run the puzzled headline: "Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling." But? How about this wild theory: If you lock up the criminals, crime declines.
Accordingly, the conservative attitude toward liberals is one of compassionate condescension. Liberals are not quite as reciprocally charitable. It is natural. They think conservatives are mean. How can conservatives believe in the things they do -- self-reliance, self-discipline, competition, military power -- without being soulless? How to understand the conservative desire to actually abolish welfare, if it is not to punish the poor? The argument that it would increase self-reliance and thus ultimately reduce poverty is dismissed as meanness rationalized -- or as Rep. Major Owens (D-N.Y.) put it more colorfully in a recent House debate on welfare reform, "a cold-blooded grab for another pound of flesh from the demonized welfare mothers."
Liberals, who have no head (see above), believe that conservatives have no heart. When Republicans unexpectedly took control of the House of Representatives in 1994, conventional wisdom immediately attributed this disturbance in the balance of the cosmos to the vote of the "angry white male" (an invention unsupported by the three polls that actually asked about anger and found three-quarters of white males not angry.)Huh. Even if we accept Krauthammer's suggestion that "liberals" invented the idea of the "angry white male", is 25% of men a small fraction of the population? Certainly not for voting purposes. It is probably a larger group than the much-valued "swing-voters" who are alleged to decide elections.
The "angry white male" was thus a legend, but a necessary one. It was unimaginable that conservatives could be given power by any sentiment less base than anger, the selfish fury of the former top dog -- the white male -- forced to accommodate the aspirations of women, minorities and sundry upstarts.Notice how Krauthammer confuses "the conventional wisdom" with "liberals". The alleged "wisdom" was coming from some members of the media - that would be the same media, by the way, that never permitted the Clinton administration the traditional "honeymoon" period and almost instantly started writing about the failed Clinton presidency and how deeply hated this particular president was. After a lifetime in which the deep antipathy liberals felt toward the likes of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush - presidents who had committed real crimes - had not been considered worthy of mention in The Newspapers of Record, liberals were stunned that this kind of thing was being written about a new president. We were being told with remarkable frequency what a useless, irrelevant, degenerate, cynical and dishonest man Clinton was. There were even articles helpfully pointing to Internet gathering places for Clinton-haters; this subject alone probably received more ink in the first years of Clinton's presidency than the entirety of left-wing publications had garnered from the mainstream media in the previous two decades. Yet Krauthammer thinks that journalists who went out of their way to talk about the hate movement against "Slick Willie" and his conniving lawyer of a wife can be confused with "liberals".Can it be that Krauthammer is stupid enough to have missed this? Plenty of conservatives overtly (and sometimes violently) express their belief that liberals are evil rather than stupid. The idea that the Clintons and their liberal minions were smart, sneaky, cleaver bastards and bitches who were intentionally doing evil was closer to the surface than any left-liberal criticism of Republicans had ever been without a few hundred thousand people at least having to march on Washington to manage to get a headline out of it. The Clintons didn't even have to do anything to generate stories about how evil and hated they were.
What is not discussed in Krauthammer's article is the fact that liberals distinguish between some conservatives and others - people who really thought Bush would live up to his campaign promises to give raises to military personnel, or not to drive us into deficits, or not to hurt Social Security, are miles away from the Republican leaders who pretended to believe those things but who intended all along to turn their back on those promises the moment Bush was in office. Just as people who sang "God Bless America" last year with tears welling in their eyes and sincere grief and love in their hearts are miles away from White House spin-masters who try to pretend that cuts in the capital gains tax are necessary to America's national defense against terrorism. And libertarians who thought liberals were the biggest threat to civil liberties are very different indeed from the Republican leaders who exploited that belief while doing everything they could to promote the War on Some Drugs, the seizure laws, the attack on habeas corpus, censorship, and so on.
Yes, conservatives like Krauthammer no doubt think liberals are stupid because we believe that human beings are capable of being more than thugs, pirates, and murderers. But that doesn't blind us to the fact that plenty of conservatives are lazy, greedy, nasty, and stupid. We realize that some are smart enough to get rich and powerful but not decent enough to do so with even a modicum of integrity, and we also realize that many decent conservatives are, well, self-deluding and/or just plain dupes. Frankly, I can think of no other explanation for the fact that some people can still say with a straight face that Al Gore was trying to "steal the election" by trying to get all the ballots counted. What kind of mind could create such spin, and how much of a dupe do you have to be to believe it?
Liberalism seen in Congress!03:00 BST: PermalinkIt just shows you how preoccupied I have been all week that I missed this amazing news from Elton Beard:
Rep. Barney Frank, defender of states rights. No, really. Representative Barney Franks (D - MA) has introduced H. R. 1344 (PDF), the well-named States' Rights to Medical Marijuana Act.And then he provides an update:
No rush. The States' Rights bill noted below was actually introduced last year, and has since been superceded by H. R. 2592 to boot (oops). As of this writing, that legislation has 37 cosponsors (with the most recent sponsor having been added 06/05/2002) of which 33 are Democrats, 1 is an Independent and 3 are Republicans.Well, it was news to me, too. And, you know, I bet I'm not the only one. Gee, I wonder why the Republican leadership forgot to attack all those wild, drug-fiend liberals this time? (Okay, I'm lying; I don't wonder at all.)Elton also notes that the CNN quick poll shows 90% support for the bill.
Ted Barlow has reposted a fine analysis of some of the reasons to oppose the GOP's Social Security privatization plan. Good stuff.02:30 BST: Permalink
A couple from Gene Lyons:One lonely dissenter was New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. "Mr. Bush has made an important political discovery," he wrote. "Really big misstatements, it turns out, cannot be effectively challenged, because voters can't believe that a man who seems so likable would do that sort of thing." Indeed, happy throngs of Bush supporters echoed his imbecile taunt of "fuzzy math."Orwell's Example
A more subtle controversialist than Kelly (although who isn't?), Appleyard even goes so far as to concede that America and Americans have been known to make mistakes before demanding to know "whose side are you really on?" Put that way, of course, there's only one conceivable answer: not Osama bin Laden's. But that's not the end of the discussion. It's the beginning. The real message of Orwell's work, as well as of his heroic personal example, is that intellectual integrity is more far crucial to an embattled democracy than orthodoxy. Without vigorous dissent, there's no creative thinking. Honest people can change their minds; demagogic bullies, alas, almost never do.(That second one is via Tapped, and it's worth reading their entry, too.)
Friday, 26 July 200215:10 BST: Permalink
Robert Scheer is sloppy, but so is Spinsanity's Ben Fritz:14:11 BST: Permalink
The lead, for instance, implies that the time Cheney has spent at secure locations following September 11 has actually been an attempt to avoid political scrutiny. "Vice President Dick Cheney," Scheer writes, "has spent most of the past year in hiding, ostensibly from terrorists, but increasingly it seems obvious that it is Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the media and the public he fears." The accusation that Cheney was hiding from the SEC before its investigation of Halliburton was revealed is, of course, ludicrous. And, more generally, Scheer is using an irrelevant fact to set up Cheney as defensive and vulnerable.Does the quoted sentence say he was hiding only from the SEC for the last year? What about all the other questions Cheney has been refusing to answer since the early days of this administration? This, after all, is the guy who has even refused to answer questions from the GAO about his secret energy policy meetings, not to mention the questions from media and the public. You remember way back in February when John Dean was wondering why Cheney was so busy looking like he had something to hide? And that was only in the latest round of a game that had been going on since well before 9/11. Cheney has in fact been hiding things for a very long time, even before Haliburton became flavor of the month.
Online MediaMoose & Squirrel tipped me off to this Brian Wilson concert (free registration).
And here's a patriotic Flash animation.
Thursday, 25 July 200216:30 BST: Permalink
The American Prospect has posted an article by Richard Just about both the death penalty and the importance of taking your case to the grass roots before you go to court, Natural Causes:15:40 BST: Permalink
Atkins v. Virginia and Ring v. Arizona -- the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decisions restricting who can receive the death penalty and who can impose it -- are important for all sorts of reasons, but none quite as central as the fact that the rulings themselves aren't so important at all. At least not in the sense of importance that most Americans generally attach to Supreme Court rulings: These were not daring thunderbolts of judicial intervention aimed from on high, but rather decisions dictated, in many ways, from below. To be sure, for members of the anti-death-penalty movement, Atkins and Ring are confirmation from the top of the legal system that things are moving slowly in their direction. But evidence of such progress has been playing out in the court of public opinion for quite some time. Atkins and Ring -- which, respectively, ban the execution of the mentally retarded and stipulate that only juries, not judges, can impose the death penalty -- were merely symptoms that something in the politics of capital punishment has been changing in America. And perhaps still is.I can remember the days when something like half of all Americans opposed the death penalty. In those days, people believed in rehabilitation, so it didn't seem as crazy. It was also understood that a justice system based largely on revenge didn't really meet our requirements.Understand this: people can be rehabilitated, and are all the time - even the most vicious, violent people can be helped. Whenever someone sets up a small, experimental program to rehabilitate violent people - kids or adults - the results are astonishingly good. And then buried. Because there seem to be a lot of people who have a stake in making people think that rehabilitation can't work, that virtually every single person in prison is genuinely a hopeless case.
Prison rehabilitation programs, while far from perfect, used to at least hold out some hope. Most of them weren't very good, but at least we didn't assume that someone was lost forever as soon as they went inside. And plenty of people have recovered their lives, or built new and better ones, after time in prison.
Somewhere along the way complaints about the haphazard and sometimes half-hearted implementation of rehab programs turned into a meme that "rehabilitation doesn't work". I've heard this even from people who seem like they should know better. Yes, a lot of people, including me, have pointed out that many rehabilitation programs are virtually useless, but that doesn't mean all rehab programs are useless. Good faith implementation of well-designed rehabilitation programs still works. The problem is that, increasingly, the programs were poorly designed or undertaken in bad faith. Some programs seemed designed to fail, others looked to have been sabotaged. (And what on Earth did they think they were doing at Vacaville with that weird program that turned out "Colonel Cinque" and his big plan to create the Symbionese Liberation Army?)
Over the last 20 or 30 years, we've created a world that is bereft of forgiveness. We write people off the first chance we get, and we do our best to make sure they never recover from a mistake for which they are caught. It's not simply that we don't believe they can recover, but we don't want them to - we resent the idea that someone can do something horrible but then go on to repent and become a productive member of society. We want them to suffer forever.
It's not that I don't have any sympathy with this view - truthfully, I have a lot of trouble finding any forgiveness in my heart for murderers. Certainly, when I was raped, I wanted to kill the guy the most violent way I could think of (none of this due process stuff), possibly involving the use of my teeth. I think that kind of anger is normal. But, the thing is, I don't think you can have a civilized society if you let that kind of thinking drive your laws. Those emotions are raw, crazy - natural, but wholly destructive.
If we choose those emotions as our driving force, we choose barbarism. We have to be better than that.
Two items worth looking at over at Consortium News:05:10 BST: Permalink
An Agnew-Nixon Solution?And:
It is growing obvious to many Americans – from Wall Street to Main Street – that George W. Bush is not up to the awesome job of the presidency of the United States. Though his united-we-stand poll numbers remain high, there can be little dispute that his 18 months in office have been among the most disastrous in U.S. history.From Bush’s swearing-in despite losing the national popular vote, through the first act of war on the U.S. mainland in modern times, to the shattered confidence in U.S. securities markets and the resurgence of the national debt, the slide has been steep and seemingly unstoppable. In particular, Bush appears clue-less what to do about the economy.
Still, no one seems willing to ask two relevant questions: What further damage can the nation expect over the next 30 months of Bush’s term? And is there a constitutional way to spare the country that experience by easing Bush out of office, especially given that a plurality of American voters wanted Al Gore in the White House, not Bush?
Just asking the questions might help focus the thinking of Bush's economic advisers and give them a fresh incentive to review some of their faltering policies.
Twice as Bad as Hoover
George W. Bush is shattering records for the worst first 18 months in office for a U.S. president as measured by the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500. In his first year-and-a-half in the White House, Bush presided over a 36.9 percent decline, almost twice the percentage drop of Herbert Hoover, the president who led the nation into the Depression.
I should have gone to Jim Henley's site first before posting about the Steve Earle thing, and he's since added more on the subject.Now he's talking about liberal weblogs and wondering when we are going to field our version of Instapundit - someone who posts frequently the way Glenn Reynolds does. (It's not going to be me, I'm telling you right now.)
I suppose the combination of Blogspot's recent problems and the fact that Jim, who is also not on Blogspot, mentioned me favorably Monday has something to do with my having reached a new high in hits for the last couple-few days. (Still not the kind of numbers you write home about, folks.) Jim was referring to my having made a defense of civil liberties against Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett's current round of attacks, even though I'm not a Tory, thus proving that liberals can, indeed, do such things. (Don't kid yourself that Tories do it all that often, Jim.)
Well, I'm not a Labour supporter either, I must point out. And though on some days I'm a sort of welfare anarchist, on most days I'm just basically a member of that group of people who understands that the criticisms of libertarianism and the criticisms of socialism are both right; that is, I'm a liberal. And the thing about us dyed-in-the-wool liberals, see, is that we just hate having big, powerful institutions breathing down our necks.
Now, Jim alludes to why a lot of people in the libertarian camp don't think of this as a liberal thing:
It's worth noting that at the last DC blogfest, a genuinely nice fellow who consults for the Republican Liberty Caucus told me that there is simply no commitment to liberty by liberals any more at all. Avedon Carol is an entirely sufficient refutation of his claim.Many people make the mistake of thinking that because civil liberties were encroached during the Clinton administration, it was Clinton, and Democrats, who were the party of attacking civil liberties. I kept running into this meme on Usenet - principally in alt.censorship - and wondering where people got that idea, since the Republicans had been attacking civil liberties all along and in fact a lot of this rubbish really took off during Republican administrations. This was most notable on the subject of censorship - I have previously referred to the way the Republicans managed to support the Computer Decency Act while giving the impression that it was purely a Democratic bill (even though, in the end, more Democrats than Republicans actually voted against it. Not a lot of Democrats, mind you, but not one single House Republican voted against it, and only one Republican Senator did - and then he co-sponsored CDA II). It did take me a while to twig that there were actually a whole lot of people out there who were all in favor of civil liberties and apparently unaware that some of the same "liberals" they hated had been the most ardent defenders of civil liberties for the last 40 years - usually in opposition to programs that had far more support from Republicans.This is why libertarians make a mistake if they put all their eggs in the Republican basket. It is true that Bill Clinton's administration was a disaster for civil liberties and property rights. Republicans opposed Clinton on some of this because they were out of the White House. It made sense for libertarians to support them in those efforts. (Even though they fucked up the Waco hearings bigtime and the Ruby Ridge hearings were saved by the intervention of much-despised Patrick Leahy, a Democrat.)
A lot of these young "conservatives" seem to have come to political awareness during the Clinton administration and not noticed all that history. Or that, for example, the commission that was put together specifically to try to find an excuse to ban pornography was the Meese Commission, under Ronald Reagan, and it was pretty overwhelmingly stocked with Republican social conservatives. Nor had they noticed that the attempt to impose the so-called "feminist" Dworkin-Mackinnon anti-porn ordinance in Indianapolis was organized entirely by Republicans, including Phyllis Schlafley - it passed on a party-line vote, with Democrats uniformly opposed, and it was liberals, including local feminist activists (who hadn't been notified about the hearings in the first place), who finally got the thing overturned. Similarly, the federal version of the bill died when several NOW chapters raised public objections to it. But libertarians seemed convinced that Republicans were the party of free speech.
And then there's the American Civil Liberties Union, a hot-bed of liberals (yes, really) who are regularly trashed by the Republicans for having liberal ideas like defending your Constitutional rights in court. Michael Dukakis was attacked and derided for being a "card-carrying member" of the ACLU (which did not, in those days, have cards, but as a result of this they had to start issuing them because people kept asking for them) - part of that whole liberal, permissive, rights-loving, trouble-making clique on the left, you know. Yes, my friends, as recently as 1988, the Republicans were openly saying, as a major part of a presidential campaign, that there was something wrong with caring about your civil liberties.
Then along came Clinton, and suddenly civil liberties were important! Yet, at the same time, the ACLU was still bad, because they didn't seem to defend the 2nd Amendment as hard as they did other rights. Buncha liberals, you see.
Say what you will about their position on gun-control, it's interesting that the ACLU was attacked so vociferously by Republicans - and not just for their weak support of the right to bear arms. We were and are still being told that the ACLU is bad because they "want to remove God from schools", or because they want to "coddle criminals" by defending your Miranda rights, or because they defend (*gasp!*) pornography. They protect your rights because they are liberals.
Real, fiery liberals, alas, make the Democratic leadership nervous, so we don't much hear from them through the party these days. We make the Democratic leadership nervous because the Republicans always attack us for our card-carrying liberal views, so they want us to shut up. The Democratic leadership is pretty conservative, anyway, so this isn't terribly surprising. Aside from that, if we criticize the government's abuse of our Constitutional rights these days, we are "anti-American". (Jim, why do you hate America?)
But the notoriously liberal ACLU was and still is the organization that does the most to defend your civil liberties, and the Republicans have smeared them eight ways from Tuesday and continue to do so. The libertarians point to their 2nd Amendment stand and think that's reason enough to dislike them, but I can't agree (and anyway, I think the gun control movement will sink once we get rid of the War on Some Drugs, against which the ACLU has been campaigning all along).
Just remember: The Republican leadership and their flea pack didn't attack Clinton for harming civil liberties, they attacked him for stupid things like having possibly inhaled, for getting blow-jobs, and for having a wife named Rodham. Everything else, they pretty much made up, but they never really went after him on civil liberties - that subject barely made a dent in the public discourse. This was perhaps the most infuriating thing about the way the Republicans went after Clinton: They forced liberals to defend him, because they were attacking him for being a liberal.
Well, damn, I wrote all that and was about to post it when I noticed that Brad DeLong said it all much better and shorter already. But then he kinda took it all back and said:
But the truth is, Maguire's right. The civil liberties-loving political left is being cowardly. So if the TIPS program does not become part of our daily life, I and the rest of the country will owe a profound debt of gratitude to... I can't say it... it's just too much... it won't come out... to... to... Dick Armey and company.Actually, I bet if journalists bothered to phone up the ACLU and other civil liberties-loving lefties, the papers would suddenly be full of the words of outraged liberals in defense of your Constitutional rights. What does it mean that they can only be bothered to quote Dick Armey, hm?
Wednesday, 24 July 200218:33 BST: Permalink
Tapped finds another example of the hereditary disease of Bushitis, previously seen in such frightening examples as his father's infamous, "Message: I care." Well, at least Bush2 added an object to his sentence:Tapped made another good point Monday in response to Andrew Sullivan's claim that Howell Raines is "hyper-liberal" because he doesn't like Bush. Well, sure, if it's particularly conservative to like a stupid, ignorant, lazy, incompetent manager, and even want one to be president.
SHADES OF POPPY, AGAIN. Ignore all the other things Bush said yesterday in his speech about the accounting bill. Focus on the things he's saying that people will remember, to his detriment.That's the best he can do? "I worry that people will lose work"? Way to go, buddy.Bush has been quick to express sympathy for people who are suffering financially in what his aides say is an effort to avoid one of the mistakes of his father, President George H.W. Bush. For instance, President Bush said his biggest concern about Sunday's record bankruptcy filing by WorldCom Inc. is the effect on the employees. "I worry that people will lose work," he said.It's a funny thing: Most of the people I associate with who call themselves "conservatives" would almost certainly despise Bush if they had to be around him. Of course, my conservative associates are pretty smart people who feel a certain responsibility to honor their commitments, so I don't think they'd appreciate having to put up with a towel-snapping ignoramus in their midst who delivers noogies and sneers at people who like to read; even less would they enjoy having to work for such a man while he alternates being on vacation with giving contradictory orders and changing policies every five minutes so that no one can ever do their own work with any confidence that they'll get anywhere with it. And I'm sure if their CEO produced the kind of crocodile tears exemplified by the quote above, there'd be a lot of bitter laughter around the water-cooler over it.
I used to know a guy who was a little bit like Bush when I was in college. He wasn't a towel-snapper and he wasn't as mean, but he obviously didn't much like to read. He skated on his good looks rather than his father's wealth, and yes, he was a cheerleader (who once complained that people just didn't appreciate the hard work he put into holding those girls up). At least he wasn't a politician, so he was free to be sincere, and I can't really say that Bush reminds me of him - Bush is neither pretty enough nor nice enough to remind me of this guy. But when he was losing an argument, he would resort to personal insults and be unaware that all he'd really accomplished was to lose the respect of people in his audience who might otherwise have sympathized with him. He was one of those people who had real trouble understanding when he was being asked a hypothetical question, and who also thought it was very important to show that he was too good. So, in an argument in class, when a woman was trying to explain why it's hard to know how to respond to men who hit on you in public places, and she said, "Suppose you see me sitting in there and you walk up and make a pass at me -" he instantly had to interject, "I wouldn't make a pass at you." That kind of thing (which is almost as bad as what Bush does with reporters who are just doing their jobs). And yet, he was obviously trying to understand things, obviously being genuine, so we all cut him a little slack. He was, after all, pretty harmless. But as far as I can tell, not one person in that class, regardless of their politics, their looks, or their intellectual interests, had any real respect for that guy. I'm sure none of them would have voted for him for president.
During the 2000 campaign one of the weird conversations that turned up in the media was the "Who would you rather sit next to on an airplane?" question. The answer was supposed to be that you'd sure rather be sitting next to Bush than Gore, 'cause he'd be more fun to talk to. But is that really true? Would you want a seat-mate who delivers noogies and gives you a stupid nickname? I know I wouldn't, and I bet most of my conservative friends and associates would feel the same way. I think I would rather have been talking to Al Gore, maybe about things he's supported that I don't agree with - because, at least, he might understand what I was saying - and no noogies.
Now, here's the thing: To most overt liberals, Al Gore isn't really liberal; he's what used to be known as a conservative, but without the racism. So there's nothing at all liberal about liking Al Gore; you might like him personally and disagree with his politics, or you might support him for partisan rather than policy reasons, but it's not about liberalism per se, since none of the two major parties' candidates in the 2000 race were liberals. Meanwhile, a conservative might very much like Gore precisely because he's, well, conservative, and dislike Bush because his policies are fiscally irresponsible and his actions and statements often blatantly embrace unconstitutionality. Disliking Bush because he is a lying, incompetent embarrassment is obviously non-partisan and has nothing to do with one's political philosophy. The only reason to like Bush is if you really, really think that bankrupting the government and removing even the most prudent restrictions from both the criminal justice system and the business sector are really cool ideas.
Ah, but those are conservative positions, I hear some of you say. And, indeed, they are exactly the things liberals have long opposed conservatives for. On the other hand, they are also the things that Clinton was criticized for - even by conservatives.
So we have this question: If conservatives hated Clinton for his violations of civil liberties, shouldn't they hate Bush even more? If conservatives didn't trust the Clintons because they didn't produce a file instantly, shouldn't they distrust Bush-Cheney, who simply refuse to produce any information at all, even more? If conservatives advocate fiscal responsibility, shouldn't Bush horrify them?
See, as a liberal, I disliked Clinton's violations of civil liberties, so as a liberal, I dislike Bush even more. But when it comes to bankrupting the treasury, my conservatism kicks in, so now I actually have conservative reasons to dislike Bush. Libertarians, of course, have been known to indulge fantasies of how emptying the treasury stops the government from spending on stupid programs like the War on Some Drugs (yeah, right), so I guess they don't need to hate him for that, but they could at least have the decency to really hate his administration's continued commitment to the War on Some Drugs - and stop pretending that the Attorney General serves at the pleasure of someone other than his president.
Neil A. Lewis in The New York Times says Ashcroft's Terrorism Policies Dismay Some Conservatives:
WASHINGTON, July 23 - Many religious conservatives who were most instrumental in pressing President Bush to appoint John Ashcroft as attorney general now say they have become deeply troubled by his actions as the leading public figure in the law enforcement drive against terrorism.Well, it's nice to know that conservatives have noticed there's something wrong with Ashcroft, but the oddest thing about this article is the number of people who seem so surprised that a man whose Senate career was full of examples of his contempt for Constitutional rights and even common sense has somehow, mysteriously evolved into an Attorney General who shows contempt for Constitutional rights and even common sense. Like this well-known gentleman:Their dismay comes as several Bush advisers have begun complaining that Mr. Ashcroft, with his lifelong politician's fondness for attention, has projected himself too often and too forcefully. More significantly, they say privately that he seems to be overstating the evidence of terrorist threats.
Most striking, however, is how some conservatives who were Mr. Ashcroft's biggest promoters for his cabinet appointment after he lost his re-election to the Senate in 2000 have lost enthusiasm. They cite his anti-terrorist positions as enhancing the kind of government power that they instinctively oppose.
"His religious base is now quite troubled by what he's done," said Grover Norquist, a conservative strategist and president of Americans for Tax Reform.
Mr. Norquist, who holds regular lunches with a cross-section of conservative leaders and is influential with White House and Congressional Republicans, said, "If there hadn't been this big-government problem, Ashcroft would have been talked about as the Bush successor. Instead, the talk is that `too bad we pushed for him.'"
Ken Connor, the president of the Family Research Council, said that while he still applauded Mr. Ashcroft's stands on abortion and child pornography, he and many other religious leaders were dismayed by the changes instituted at the Justice Department.
"It's important that we conservatives maintain a high degree of vigilance," Mr. Connor said. "We need to ask ourselves the question, How would our groups fare under these new rules?"
Senator Arlen Specter, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania and a former Judiciary Committee colleague, put it this way: "There are several positions that Attorney General Ashcroft has taken that Senator Ashcroft would vehemently oppose."Oh, really? Which ones? Did Senator Specter ever look at any of the legislation Ashcroft proposed while he was in Congress? He holds the record for introducing awful new Constitutional amendments, he writes laws that explicitly forbid speech that is incontestably protected, he is hostile to almost every individual right save gun ownership.Some people entertain the fantasy that Ashcroft's current program of destroying our rights and protections is a reaction to 9/11, but of course there's little in his post-9/11 campaign that he hadn't proposed before. 9/11 was just his opportunity to do what was unacceptable before.
Tuesday, 23 July 200206:20 BST: Permalink
Max has a guest poster sitting in who is doing some interesting stuff. Here's a taste:06:10 BST: Permalink
Let me restate the above as a question: does the perennial poverty debate and its restricted scope serve to foreclose political contestation of the uncontestable core value of work? Rather than strengthening the so-called work ethic, such political pornography offers a surrogate -- an ersatz work ethic, a smugly accusatory they-don't-want-to-work ethic.
Creeps06:00 BST: PermalinkIn a series of little-noticed executive orders intended to ease the tax burden on corporate America, the Bush administration has implemented a number of new policies that will provide corporations with billions of dollars in tax relief without the consent of Congress.
Alex Frantz's prediction comes true:03:00 BST: Permalink
[Andrew Sullivan's] abstention from frantic attacks on the New York Times lasted for exactly 36 hours, 26 minutes, and 14 seconds - and for exactly 0 full length posts, as I predicted. At 2:00 am today, Andrew's first full length post since his pledge to abstain from swingin' at the Raines was released to an eager world, containing 6 items: 3 attacks on the Times, 2 criticisms of conservative critics of homosexuality, and a quick mention of Osama Bin Laden.Personally, I blame Andrew's early relapse on Bill Clinton. Ever since he lied about that blow job, the helpless Beltway media has been unable to refrain from lies, half-truths, and generally asinine conduct. Granted, this started 20-odd years ago before most of them had ever heard of Bill Clinton, but he may very well have been getting blow jobs back then too, so it's still his fault.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has some interesting thoughts on conservative Christopher Caldwell's new insight into how good our corporate "presidency" is looking:02:50 BST: Permalink
It's painful watching a conservative inching toward that realization. Spare a kind thought for conservatives and their ideals: Not because they hold them, but because they believe their leadership holds them too. They get seduced and abandoned oftener than a babe who has nowhere to go when the bar shuts down.She sure has a way with 'em, don't she? And there's more!
It's as though the guys who are running things are reading the Wall Street Journal, but what they're feeding the voters is the Weekly World News . They get us all exercised about fluoridated drinking water or politically correct nomenclature or whatever the flavor of the month is, and there's a lot of sound, fury, and general fizzing about it; but when it's over, nothing has changed. Meanwhile, while we we're distracted by this nonsense, the people who're supposed to be our public servants are selling us out to the special interests for bribes, campaign contributions, and other considerations. The officials who do the selling make a good thing of it. The outfits that do the buying then turn around and gouge almost unimaginable sums out of the economic life of the republic.Up at that end of the business, nominal party affiliation doesn't matter. They talk about free enterprise, or at any rate some of them do; and they all talk about democracy. But they don't believe in it for a minute. They belong to a club. You're not a member of it and you never will be.
Music NewsGeorge Harrison was inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame. Eric Idle made the speech:
When they told me they were going to induct my friend George Harrison into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame posthumously: my first thought was - I bet he won't show up.(Thanks, Patrick.)On the more stupid side of the road, Steve Earle (who Patrick also turned me on to a while back) is now being attacked by the right-wingers for a song on Jerusalem written from the viewpoint of John Walker Lindh. Glenn Reynolds actually thinks this is not nuts. Matt Welch disagrees. And Atrios has never heard of Steve Earle, but thinks the argument is silly on its face:
As for this statement "If Anyone Still Thinks that no one on the Left identifies with every enemy of America..." Well, I'm sure there are people who identify themselves as Left, Right, Center, and Martian who have just about every opinion imaginable. But, we all knew that.Meanwhile, the smart person might go to Earle's site and read what he has to say about Jerusalem rather than taking other people's word for it.
Monday, 22 July 200223:29 BST: Permalink
I suppose it is inevitable that I'm sitting here with my eyes tearing up while listening to Beach Boys music - mostly stuff from Pet Sounds, which contains some of the most beautiful love songs ever. This is at least partly inspired by having watched a special on Brian Wilson and his little band the other night on BBC2. Which, eventually, made me think about something. A couple-few weeks ago I read this interview in The Guardian in which for the thousandth time someone talked about how poor old Brian obviously did too many drugs:22:35 BST: Permalink
The next 45 minutes are the most excruciating I have experienced in 20 years of interviewing. The mystery is that I'd read of numerous encounters with him before my own, yet nothing had adequately prepared me for the extent to which he has been so clearly damaged by his nervous breakdowns and years of mental illness, exacerbated by his use of hallucinogenic drugs and the subsequent doses of prescribed medication he must rely on merely to function.At least that paragraph implies that he wasn't just an addled ex-acid head, but it wasn't until I watched the TV special that I realized how often I've heard how Brian Wilson was just a casualty of '60s drug culture. That was it - it was the drugs, folks, the damn pot and LSD and all that. And it wasn't until the other night that I understood that the big freak-out, when he suddenly started living in bed for three years, didn't just follow a lot of drug use, but came on the heels of one very significant betrayal: His father had sold all of Brian's songs, without even telling him.Man, that'd sure knock the wind out of my sails.
I missed this letter in the NYT but Bartcop quoted it from a correspondent over the weekend:
To the Editor:So much for the 9th Circuit having the record for reversals.Re "Court That Ruled on Pledge Often Runs Afoul of Justices" (front page, June 30), about the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit:
In the calendar year 2001, the Ninth Circuit terminated 10,372 cases, and was reversed in 14, with a correction rate of 1.35 per thousand. The Fourth Circuit, reputedly the most conservative circuit and the circuit with the second-largest number of cases reviewed by the Supreme Court, terminated 5,078 cases and was reversed in 7, making a correction rate of 1.38 per thousand.
JOHN T. NOONAN JR.
U.S. Circuit Judge, 9th Circuit
San Francisco, July 1, 2002
Sunday, 21 July 200223:45 BST: Permalink
What is happening on his head?20:20 BST: PermalinkOooh, I wish I knew, I wish I knew.
(Thanks, Max).
Not much like justice13:00 BST: PermalinkThis kind of thing worries me.
Under plans unveiled last week in the Criminal Justice White Paper, courts will for the first time be allowed to study evidence in serious crimes not only of previous convictions but behaviour patterns shown up by acquittals. For example, a man who has been repeatedly accused and acquitted of date rape may see former witnesses recalled in a later case.You can see the problem. On the one hand, there are guys walking around with 15 or more acquittals for rape - you just know they're guilty, but justice demands that each case be tried on its own merits, so you can't bring those prior indictments up in court.But the trouble with being able to mention them in court is more than just that they prejudice the jury, although they do that as well. The big trouble with this, as with suspension of the double-jeopardy rule, is that it encourages the criminal justice system to do sloppy and corrupt work. If the cops and prosecutors don't have to prove their cases, it encourages them to bring up charges without evidence because they know that if they keep doing it, the fact of their own repeated (potentially false) accusations becomes "evidence".
The cops and courts already use sleazy tactics to punish people who they know have done nothing wrong. They make big splashy raids on people that generate headlines about, say, the bust-up of a major child porn ring, with the names and pictures of the accused (and pictures of their homes, and their addresses, and the names of their employers), on evidence so flimsy that most anyone in the country could be found to have the same "evidence" around the house - but they're really after the victim because he's gay, or is an activist who has annoyed someone powerful. Exoneration never gets the same kind of headlines. A single sex crime charge can itself completely disrupt your home and career, and that's bad enough, but imagine - after all that damage has been done - finally winning an acquittal only to learn that as far as your record is concerned, it's not much different from having been found guilty. And they can keep doing it over and over until some jury thinks they've seen a preponderance of evidence of a "pattern" of illegal behavior.
It all seems so obvious that it should go without saying, but that's the problem - when we go without saying these things, people forget them. It's not good enough to use vague phrases like "civil liberties" when addressing problems like this; it's got to be spelled out, over and over again, so that each generation learns it anew and has no opportunity to forget or believe it's been superceded by "modern" ideas.
StuffHere's an old picture of me.
Here's an interesting article about Carol Gilligan and "difference feminism".
Here's a new blog called In Arguendo.
Which leads me to the blogroll issue. I'm stingy about links because I know the more I add, the fewer hits go to what's already there. I've added enough now that I had to find some way to break them up, but I couldn't really decide who should and shouldn't be counted as VLWC. If you think you should be elevated, do let me know. Please don't write and ask me to trade links - I don't do trades, I have a special magic formula that no one but me knows.
And this one won't go on the list at right, but it's being added to the FAC links and I thought you might like to have a look: the Free Expression Policy Project site, which has, among other things, a letter from my pal Marjorie Heins to the AMA in response to their announcement about how research proves that violent media causes violence. (Research does no such thing.)
Friday, 19 July 200215:12 BST: Permalink
In their latest entry fact-checking Ann Coulter, Tapped quotes this astonishing paragraph from her book:14:30 BST: Permalink
[T]he press maintained radio silence on stories embarrassing to Gore. For example, … Al Gore couldn't pick George Washington out of a lineup. In a highly publicized stop at Monticello during Clinton's 1993 inaugural festivities, Gore pointed to carvings of Washington and Benjamin Franklin and asked the curator: 'Who are these guys?' He was surrounded by reporters and TV cameras when he said it. Only one newspaper, USA Today, reported the incident.Tapped points out that in fact dozens of papers carried the story (and that Ann misquotes Gore). What Tapped failed to point out was what really underscores just how wrong Annie is on how well the press treated Gore: As usual, the story itself is not true. But it was never corrected and Coulter still believes it. Gore did say, "Who are these people?" However, he wasn't referring to the images of Franklin and Washington, but to some actual walking, talking strangers who had entered the room.
The news from the eye hospital is that it's not macular degeneration and there's a chance I'll recover the central vision in my right eye. Or not. But I don't need either one to see that John Ashcroft still needs to be removed from office. Hell, even Richard Cohen can see what's wrong with the man he calls Spotlight John:
I couldn't care less that John Walker Lindh, agreeing to a plea bargain, is going to get 20 years in jail for fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan. He's just a screwed-up young man, that's for sure, but the jails are full of such types and, mostly, I feel no sympathy for them. I have only one regret in this case. Lindh's attorneys should have bargained for John Ashcroft's resignation as attorney general.A trial also might have revealed that Lindh was mistreated by Americans after his capture. He was turned over to U.S. troops Dec. 1. He had been shot in the thigh. On Dec. 7, Lindh was transferred to a Marine base outside Kandahar, where he was questioned by the FBI, and on Dec. 14, he was moved to the Peleliu, a U.S. ship in the Arabian Sea. It was only there, two weeks after his capture, that the bullet was removed.
In all likelihood, Lindh would have lost a jury trial and been sentenced to life in prison. He was, after all, an armed enemy soldier. But much of the rest of what Ashcroft said about him -- not to mention the fact that Spotlight John chose to make almost every significant announcement about the case himself -- amounted to an exaggeration. Just about the only time Ashcroft chose to keep his mouth shut was when the plea bargain was announced. For once, the AG was not in makeup.
For Ashcroft, this is beginning to look like a pattern. First comes the hype and then comes the disappearing act. It was Ashcroft who announced from Moscow that someone named Jose Padilla had been arrested on the suspicion that he was involved in a plot to explode a dirty bomb. The attorney general said the United States had "disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot" that could have caused "mass death and injury."
[...]
Ashcroft is a hype artist who, when it suits him, plays fast and loose with the truth. It's impossible to scan his schedule of public appearances and not wonder whether he is angling to return to the Senate from where he was ousted by Mel Carnahan, who died shortly before the election and whose wife, Jean, was named his successor. Just for the record, Ashcroft handled what had to be a tough loss with grace.As is often the case with conservatives who decry big government and Washington interference, Ashcroft makes an exception for himself. Not only does he drop in like Batman whenever his PR people tell him evil is lurking, but he has reached down from his perch at the Justice Department to overrule local prosecutors in death penalty cases. The Supreme Court and various state governors may be having qualms about capital punishment, but not the AG. Twelve times he has ordered sappy U.S. attorneys to seek the max even though they, the vaunted local officials most familiar with the cases, decided otherwise.
Thursday, 18 July 200214:30 BST: Permalink
Chris Bertram is more restrained than I am on the subject of David Blunkett's latest bombshell. If anyone wonders why British writers are so scathing whenever the US government lowers the bar on civil liberties, this is why: It is almost guaranteed to lower the bar worldwide, and especially here. You just wouldn't believe how often I hear, "Even the Americans are doing it," as a dismissal of civil libertarian complaints. Hey, if they can do it in The Land Of The Free, they can do it anywhere.01:12 BST: PermalinkChris enumerates the rights Blunkett is violating further and notes that some of it has been done before:
1. Right to trial by jury. Arguably very important. But if the principle is not breached for summary trials involving penalties of up to six months it is hard to see how extending the period to a year does constitute such a breach. Not so "fundamental" that Conservative governments have supported it all circumstances: the "Diplock Courts" in Northern Ireland are the obvious exception.I've been saying for years that David Blunkett is a creep. For a long time I was the only one saying it, because most people are too wimpy to come right out and call a blind man on these things, but every time he turned up in the news it was for saying something reprehensible. Well, now do you believe me? (And I'm not just saying that because I'm waiting for my ride to the eye hospital.)2. Innocence until proven guilty. This is not only a long-standing principle of English law but is also guaranteed by Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. But it does admit of exceptions, notably where an act is generally prohibited but permissible to certain authorised persons (such as permit holders). There it is permissible to make the defendant prove that they were in fact authorised to act as they did. I don't know whether the matters Lilley refers to fall under this description, if not they are liable to fall foul of the Convention.
3. Habeas corpus. Important, but abandoned by British governments in time of war and civil emergency. Instances of abandonment include the recent detention of foreign Al-Quaida suspects and internment in Northern Ireland (arguably the British government's biggest single mistake in N. Ireland policy).
4. Double jeopardy. I can't think of any actual or theoretically justifiable exceptions here.
I love Brad DeLong's reaction to Mickey Kaus' latest fantasy about welfare reform:01:00 BST: Permalink
Yes, People Should Make Sure Someone Edits Their WeblogDoes Mickey Kaus really think that Wanda Dunn, 37 year-old African-American Stone Mountain web designer, would be on AFDC if not for the mid-1990s welfare reform?
Miscegenation, By Mickey Kaus...the increase in black women dating white men.... Why the shift?... [I]sn't there another possible factor, something that happened in, say, the mid-90s, something like ...(the suspense must be killing you) ... welfare reform?... when you're working the virtues of pooling your income with a male earner are now far more obvious than in the days when that could cost you your AFDC check. If there aren't enough "marriageable" black men around... then women expand their "options," as one African-American Web designer puts it: "I'm not going to sit on a porch in a rocking chair, all alone at 80 years old because of color," says Wanda Dunn, a 37-year-old Stone Mountain Web designer...
It's funny, the author of this piece in The Economist seems to have bought a lot of the Campaign 2000 spin - the whole "reinvention" thing, the idea that his make-up turned voters off, etc. - but there's one that didn't sell: the idea that Gore "lost" because of his swing to the left:00:50 BST: Permalink
AL GORE won dismal reviews for his decision to reinvent himself, in the middle of the last presidential campaign, as a people-versus-the-powerful populist. Didn't Mr Gore realise, his critics argued, that he was squandering his greatest asset, the fact that he had been vice-president during the longest boom in American history? Didn't he realise that a man who inherited his father's Senate seat wasn't a very convincing champion of the oppressed? And didn't he understand that all he needed to do to win was to present himself as Clinton without the sleaze?I still think Gore is the best and most electable candidate the Democratic party has at the moment. Since I know they're never going to nominate anyone I really love, I don't have a problem with that. The only thing Gore's done lately that really worried me is that he talked about strategy. Talking about strategy is a dumb idea, and one that seems to have infected the whole damn party leadership. I want all the Democrats to stop talking about their own strategies right now.Some of these charges may still ring true, but the statistics have never confirmed the theory that Mr Gore's populism was suicidal. After all, he won more votes than Bill Clinton ever managed (51m compared with 47m). And remember that his speech at the Democratic National Convention, in which he first revealed his new religion to the public at large, put him ahead of Mr Bush in the opinion polls for at least a month. Whatever the merits of running as a populist during a boom, Mr Gore's campaign is now looking more far-sighted by the day. Even the briefest reading of the press cuttings produces some choice quotations. Mr Gore gave warning that his rival was being bankrolled by "a new generation of special-interest power-brokers who would like nothing better than a pliant president who would bend public policy to suit their purposes and profits"; that these special interests were determined to "pry open more loopholes in the tax code"; and that "when powerful interests try to take advantage of the American people, it's often other businesses that are hurt in the process." The people who would benefit from Mr Gore reining in the corrupt moguls would be "the small- and medium-sized companies that are playing by the rules and earning profits the old-fashioned way."
[...]
Why are Democrats so reluctant to praise their former champion? Many are still nervous about populism. They worry about reviving their party's reputation for business-bashing, a reputation that Mr Clinton spent a decade expunging. And they think that Mr Gore's brand of populism is exactly the sort that the party needs to avoid: a populism of the heart rather than the head, of grand rhetoric rather than concrete proposals, of sabre rattling rather than scalpel precision. You can search his campaign speeches in vain for ideas about accounting reform and outside directors—and that is certainly not because of any aversion on Mr Gore's part to tedious detail.The other reason for the silence is an intense power struggle within the Democratic Party. Many of the party's biggest names are quietly positioning themselves for a run for the White House in 2004. People who see themselves as potential presidents, such as Tom Daschle, the leader of the Senate, and Dick Gephardt, the minority leader of the House, can hardly be expected to trumpet Mr Gore's achievements as a fortune-teller. John Edwards, a photogenic senator from North Carolina, and Russ Feingold, an inveterate campaign-finance reformer, are both busy developing their own brands of populism.
Now here's a guy who really knows how to take lemons and make lemonade out of 'em:00:37 BST: Permalink
BERLIN (Reuters) - Forget palm-reading. A blind German psychic claims he can read people's futures by feeling their naked buttocks.It's too bad he's not American - he's got all the makings of a Republican presidential candidate.Clairvoyant Ulf Buck, 39, claims that people's backsides have lines like those on the palm of the hand, which can be read to reveal much about their character and destiny.
"The bottom is much more intense -- it has a much stronger power of expression than the hand in my experience," Buck told Reuters on Tuesday. "It goes on developing throughout your life."
By running his fingers along a number of lines on the surface of a client's posterior, he says he can tell them about their future monetary success, family life, health and happiness.
A question I've always liked is, Where are those Americans who supposedly back Bush?
A recent column in The Washington Post by prime pundit David Broder suggests, perhaps for the first time in the mainstream media, that Americans may be developing some serious doubts about the Bush administration’s "War on Terrorism."At first I thought, "Sure, you're a lefty activist in Oregon, who else do you talk to?" but then I got to that third paragraph and thought, "Really? KC?"The response I generally hear is, "Well, duh!" For quite a while, folks have been complaining that they don't understand the high poll ratings for Bush’s policies because no one they know supports them.
An associate reports from Kansas City that he made a sign saying, "Bush is lying about 9-11!!" and stood in the city center displaying it to passing traffic. He says, "In three hours, I was only flipped off once; 90 percent of the those who acknowledged me were cheering and honking and saying, 'I knew it all along.'"
Is it a scam the press is pulling? Like that game the Daily Mail plays where they pretend to speak for everyone, and then everyone thinks they're the only one who disagrees? Maybe it's true.
Wednesday, 17 July 200218:35 BST: Permalink
It probably wasn't fair of me to quote the first part of Bruce Baugh's ruminations on regulatory capture and just leave the impression he's treating the situation as hopeless. In fact, he's written further on the subject:
The real question for those who accept that any enterprise might ever need legal constraints on its behavior - that is, for everyone except pure anarchists - is, can we compensate for the systemic temptations toward regulatory capture? The answer is, not easily.There are a couple of obvious cases where things didn't quite happen that way - at least, not at the start. The SEC regulations weren't designed by someone who didn't know what he was doing, they were designed by a man who had gotten rich off of exploiting the lack of regulations and once said words to the effect of, "This shouldn't be legal, but I'm going to take advantage of it while it is" - Joe Kennedy. And his regulations seem to have worked pretty well for quite a while, until we suddenly found ourselves with a generation of wise-guy businessmen who apparently believed that the standard responsibilities, requirements, obligations and risks were for suckers - and who nourished their own cadre of journalists and politicians to put their philosophy into practice.We can have laws and regulations made by people who don't know what they're talking about. This is more likely to happen with legislation passed in response to some particularly visible tragedy, but even there the laws are more likely to reflect the agendas of staffers and people they deal with than to reflect just plain rectocranially inverted ignorance. Regulation is an ongoing affair for someone, who will be putting years and years into interpreting and applying the principles established in the laws. The lawmakers go on to other things; the regulators settle in, and they're going to end up learning something about the field.
But Bruce goes on later to say that the situation is not as grim as it might seem:
So let us say that the problems summed up under the heading "regulatory capture" are essentially not solvable, that any effort at regulation is vulnerable to them and that in the long run every effort goes sour in one or more of these ways. Is this a counsel of despair?I know some libertarians who seem to believe that you should never try to do anything good because there are always unintended consequences that you don't like. Thank goodness Bruce isn't one of them.I don't think it is. I think it's really a counsel against unjustifiable optimism. There is no ideal configuration of people and policies which lets us say "we'll get all of what we want out of this and none of what we don't want". But then that's honestly not a deeply surprising conclusion. Most things in life are that way, and the problem is that we're the heirs of a bunch of screwed-up ideas about what's politically possible.
Most of you, I expect, are accustomed to the notion of imperfection in your own lives. You aren't precisely as fit as you'd like to be. If you have someone you love and share your life with, you probably know things about the people you love that make them seem like a bit less than fresh arrivals of Heaven untainted by this world of woes. You know that your friends make mistakes. You have to make apologies yourself. Your business doesn't go perfectly. And knowing all this, if you're like most people, you nonetheless make an effort to live your life reasonably well, with due attention to your obligations and due effort to protect your rights. There's not much in daily life that many of us dismiss as not worth doing at all just because we can't do it perfectly. Well, politics isn't immune to any of that. So you should go ahead and pursue your vision of a just and moral polity, while keeping in mind that imperfection happens - and, here's the key part, designing with failure in mind.
(Bruce's site has moved, by the way, to www.tkau.org/weblog.)
Tuesday, 16 July 200215:12 BST: Permalink
Jeff Cooper joins the speculation about Vermont's governor as the next Democratic presidential nominee:15:00 BST: Permalink
Matthew Yglesias takes issue with a Washington Post article stating that Vermont governor and likely presidential candidate Howard Dean is following Jimmy Carter's 1976 campaign model. Matthew believes that Dean's real role model is Jed Bartlett. An interesting suggestion. Although I haven't yet chosen a favorite candidate (anyone but Gore is my current preference), I must admit that I'm intrigued by Dean, about whom I've been hearing for a few years from my mother, a Vermont resident. There are some definite parallels between Dean and Bartlett, even beyond their New England governorships. But much as I love The West Wing, I've never been able to believe that the American voters would elect Bartlett president. And I have to think that Dean knows better than to model his campaign on a fictional character.I disagree. I think a horny version of Jed Bartlett was pretty much who Americans thought they were electing in 1992, as a matter of fact. And in 2000, the plurality of Americans thought they were electing a less folksy version of Bartlett. Actually, Gore is in many respects just as folksy as Bartlett, but the press did their best to hide that fact from the public.But, Jeff, you're making the same mistake Gore made in 2000 - you're letting the conventional wisdom sway you. No one in their right mind should be buying the "anyone but Gore" line unless they want to see Bush stay in the White House. "Anyone" would include the intolerable Joe Lieberman, for example. It would also include all those Democratic Senators who let Ashcroft slide into the AG seat, who sang those awful renditions of "God Bless America," and who put their hands on their hearts to show their opposition to your Constitutional rights. Gore is still the cleanest and smartest guy in the running, and anyway, he won last time, no matter what anyone tells you.
Me, too.02:50 BST: Permalink
Camilla Parker Bowles remained unruffled when Sharon Osbourne used the f-word in front of her, it emerged today."Oh, it's quite all right. We curse quite a lot around here," the Prince of Wales's companion said during last month's Jubilee concert at Buckingham Palace.
Charles Dodgson has returned this week, I'm pleased to say, and has further thoughts on Scalia's remarkable mouthings. Asking that you imagine yourself back in the Clinton administration, he says:02:00 BST: Permalink
In the middle of this, imagine that a well-known, stridently liberal Supreme Court justice gives a speech saying that democratic values --- most clearly represented in America at the federal level by Congress --- are actually a corrupting influence on society. (You'll have to imagine a well-known, stridently liberal Supreme Court justice, but work with me here).I'd like you to think about what, say, Newt Gingrich would have had to say about that. William Kristol. Bill O'Reilly. Rush Limbaugh. Imagine the recriminations. The furor.
It's all of a pieceDavid Broder says:
The confidence crisis that has overtaken the Bush administration has many dimensions, but at bottom, it comes down to a single question: Can you take this president's words seriously?I suppose that's the best we can hope for from The Washington Post. But things are looking up."It is utterly fabulous," said Patrick, "to see even neocon Marty Peretz digging this deep into the muck of Bushness." Indeed:
Nonetheless, what makes this kind of selling legally acceptable (if not exactly morally correct) is the obligation to report in a timely fashion the sale (or purchase) so outsiders know what insiders are doing. But Bush didn't do that. As the SEC has found, he failed to notify the authorities (and, through that notification, other stockholders and the public) on a timely basis that he had, in fact, sold stock. The SEC nevertheless declined to press charges, a decision that becomes more interesting when you realize, as The Baltimore Sun has noted, that the Commission's then-general counsel, James R. Doty--the man who supervised the legal inquiry into Bush's behavior--was also the lawyer who had facilitated the sale of the Texas Rangers baseball team to George W.'s partnership.