The Sideshow

Archive for June 2002

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Sunday, 30 June 2002
20:20 BST: Permalink

Somebody Gimme a Cheeseburger!
Andrew Marlatt (of SatireWire) graces The Washington Post:

"The phrase 'under God' clearly violates the First Amendment's separation of church and state," said McDonald's CEO Jack Greenberg. "However, there is nothing in the Constitution that separates chicken and state, which is why we're proposing, 'One nation, six chicken McNuggets and a medium Coke, all for $1.99.' "

01:54 BST: Permalink

Junius links to an article on Pornography - or, rather, an article that correctly points out that it's not bad for a politician to take money from a pornographer, but it's bad to take campaign contributions from Richard Desmond because he owns a newspaper and it corrupts the news-gathering and reporting process. Not that I really see a difference between overtly partisan newspapers that don't give money to politicians and those that do, really. I mean, I've seen with my own eyes people in public life who quite seriously say that they can't stand up for principle on some issue because, "You can just imagine what News of the World would say."
However, the author, John Lloyd, is entirely wrong when he claims that the anti-pornography position was held by the entire feminist movement - it never was, not even a little - and he's way behind the times if he thinks it still is. There are only a small number of people appearing in British media in any capacity today who are publicly identified as feminists, and most of them are members of Feminists Against Censorship. (I'm probably on the air at least as often as Germaine Greer, but she gets to do Have I Got News For You while I have to do late-night discussion shows that actually talk about pornography.)
Which reminds me: Last winter I mentioned that FAC did a submission to the British Board of Film Classification disputing their position on female ejaculation. Well, the BBFC responded with some codswallop, and more recently a documentary maker sent us a letter that contradicts the BBFC's claims. The submission page has been updated with this material, so go here and scroll down to see those letters.

Saturday, 29 June 2002
18:11 BST: Permalink

Links to The Washington Post letters pages are sometimes a bit unreliable, but if you're reading on the day you can get them by going to the relevant link on the dynamic editorial page I don't know why a link that works from that page doesn't always work from somewhere else.
Anyway, some Post readers were none too pleased with an article sounding a False Alarm About Undereducated Men:

Michael Fletcher's article is interesting, but the impression that male college attendance is declining is not true. Deep into the second page we read that the "number of male college graduates has increased . . . to 529,000." We never hear what that means in terms of percentage of increase, although the quotations suggest dramatic changes. All this article tells us is that more women are going to college -- not exactly news. Without some knowledge on the trend for men, we can't tell whether the percentage of men who seek higher education has leveled off (perhaps "maxed out") or whether it is, in fact, dropping. And, if the latter is the case, how steadily, for how long and among what groups?
Furthermore, the claim that this represents a "seismic shift in the nation's social norms" is also misleading. Having grown up in Iowa, I can testify to a long Midwestern tradition in which men went from high school to tractors, while their sisters became teachers and nurses. Change occurs and is newsworthy, but let's have the facts along with the commentary. [Roseanne Kane]
One of the advantages of having parents who are old enough to be your grandparents is that you get a longer view of things. When my parents were in school, my father was able to drop out to get a job. This poor kid from an immigrant family - he did not even speak English until he entered school - was making $50 a week during the Depression. My mother, who had no such job opportunities, stayed in school and graduated. But my dad "went to war" (sort of - his version was, "I rode around on a train" - but he did it in uniform!) while the woman he would eventually marry kept working, and for the first years of their marriage, she made more than he did. Of course, he shot ahead of her when she quit for a few years to have three kids. She never caught back up with him.
Another reader says:

Although many of the statistics cited in the article "Degrees of Separation" are accurate, the way in which Michael Fletcher chose to frame his review of college education is misleading. While women do earn more bachelor's degrees than men, according to the National Center for Education Statistics women are still far behind men in engineering (only 17 percent of graduates are women), computer and information sciences (27 percent) and the physical sciences (38 percent).
As for "a dwindling share of men to fill top corporate jobs," in 1997-98 only 38.6 percent of master's degrees in business management and administrative services were earned by women. One must also ask, why focus on finding men for these positions?
Finally, I share Christina Hoff Sommers's curiosity as to what would happen in a country where women are "significantly more literate" and "more educated" than men. Rather than assuming a host of social problems, I anticipate that the pay gap between men and women might decrease (women currently make 76 percent of what men do), more women might hold political office (only 14 percent of members of Congress are women), and fewer women might live in poverty (in 2001, 12.5 percent of women in the United States lived in poverty compared with 9.9 percent of men). [Alesha Durfee]
I guess it depends on how you define "literate" and "educated". If you mean better at reading comprehension, writing, language/communication skills generally, and more likely to do a lot of reading and writing, well, hasn't that always been true of women? Even in grade school, girls tend to do better in these areas. In maths and sciences, males do better, and in those professions men are still ahead of women.
It's worth remembering that degrees don't necessarily translate into better jobs and higher pay for women and minorities. I haven't checked the figures in a while, but last time I looked, men with only highschool degrees generally made more money than women who finished college. This was even true when comparing black male highschool graduates with white female college graduates. The only area where this wasn't true was for black women with Master's degrees, who did better than almost anyone. (My statistics professor was of the opinion that this was because black women represent less of a threat to white men, who feel that powerful black women are black men's problem and not theirs, while black men represent direct competition. It's a believable theory, but I have no useful evidence to either support or question it.)
Three of the four letters the Post printed on this subject today look like they were written by women. Let's see what a letter signed with what looks like a man's name says:

I am not the least bit worried about "the gender gap among college graduates." I know landscapers, carpenters, mechanics, electricians, plumbers and pest-control experts who make a great deal more money than I, a high school English teacher, ever will with my BA, MA and teaching certification on top of that. (You could say I have higher education coming out of my ears.)
Perhaps rather than trying to cajole more men into attending college, we need to figure out a way to make these incredibly important and necessary occupations more attractive and accessible to female candidates, whom I often see go to college without any set goal merely because they "don't know what else to do."
After you send everyone to college, who is going to fix cars, build beautiful decks and ensure that the lights work and the water flows? And who is going to make all that money? [Ken Kraner]

16:05 BST: Permalink

Over at Nth Position, Robert Jensen is talking about moral clarity:

AUSTIN, Texas - A history professor of mine once returned essay exams with the comment that some students' attitude seemed to be, "Don't bother me with the facts - I'm going for the bigger picture."
George W Bush wasn't in that class, but I thought of the professor's sardonic comment as I read the commencement address the president delivered at West Point earlier this month.
In addition to restating the Bush Doctrine (the United States has the right to destroy any society anywhere for whatever reason it chooses regardless of international opinion, law, or basic morality), Bush at West Point used one of the popular contemporary buzz phrases, "moral clarity."
Given that no one really argues for moral unclarity, claiming moral clarity is really just a cheap way to dismiss other points of view without providing a compelling argument or dealing with the messy world of facts. The West Point speech shows just how morally murky the president is.
[...]
The point is simple: Calls for moral clarity, if they are to be more than empty rhetoric, require that we bother ourselves with the facts and pay attention to history.
[...]
What seems to make me a relativist in the eyes of politicians such as Bush and intellectual attack dogs such as William Bennett is that I believe the United States should be as accountable to those standards as other nations. In other words, in this odd political climate, a relativist is someone who argues for moral consistency.
If moral judgments are applied consistently, it's clear that the United States, like other great powers, has much to answer for. Making this simple point these days leads to further accusations that I must hate America, another curious claim. How is it hateful to apply moral standards to one's own nation? If I articulate clear moral standards and try to apply them to myself as an individual, it is usually taken as a sign of maturity. But when done at the level of a nation, it is widely condemned as a sign of insufficient love of country.
Also at Nth Position, Decker; or, The Klan and I - personal social history, from Joe Palmer:

Hooded Klansmen and women, a dozen of them in white, three of them in purple robes, walked silently and slowly in single file up the central aisle of the American Methodist Church in Decker, Indiana, under the awed gaze of the congregation, who stood in respect and fear as the Klansmen took their seats, filling the front pews. As the last one walked up the aisle, the shrill voice of a little girl broke the solemn silence.
"Oh, there's Ellie Pea. I can tell from her new shoes!"

03:28 BST: Permalink

Welcome to Theocracy
A New Slugfest, Under God, Howie Kurtz calls it:

The culture wars, after a brief time-out for such mundane matters as fighting terrorism, are back.
The left and right are once again raging rhetorical war over the star-spangled banner and the subsidizing of private schools.
Even as lawmakers everywhere can't wait to be filmed reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, everyone knows that debate is somewhat bogus. The three-judge appeals court ruling that the "under God" part makes the pledge unconstitutional -- which was stayed yesterday -- is never going to become the law of the land. Federal and state lawmakers would sustain injuries elbowing each other to amend the Constitution if need be.
But politicians won't pass up a chance to wrap themselves in red-white-and-blue religion, no matter how minor the threat.
A Supreme Court decision yesterday upholding Cleveland's school voucher program, on the other hand, is hugely important -- and set off the usual ideological wrangling. The court also upheld random drug testing of students yesterday.
(Pet peeve department: The Supreme Court saves its most important rulings until the end of every term, then dumps them out two or three at a time. This not only screws the press -- which can barely digest what would otherwise be a series of front-page stories -- but the public, which is deprived of a broader debate over the justices' handiwork. You'd think they'd want lawyers, scholars and others to have enough time to pour over the rulings.
No you wouldn't. Lots of fine lawyers took a good look at, for example, Bush v. Gore and the overwhelming majority of them noticed that it doesn't hang together as anything other than a partisan travesty. You don't want scrutiny when you're committing criminal acts. But Howie continues:

(Maybe the robed ones have other things on their minds. Drudge says the White House is preparing for a high court resignation, maybe in the next few days. Eventually, of course, that story will become true. Paging Al Gonzalez!)
Uh oh. And just when (I learn via Atrios) George Bush says:

Yesterday a court in America made a ruling that I want to comment on. America is a nation that is -- a nation that values our relationship with an Almighty. Declaration of God in the Pledge of Allegiance doesn't violate rights. As a matter of fact, it's a confirmation of the fact that we received our rights from God, as proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence.
I -- I believe that it points up the fact that we need common-sense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God. And those are the kind of judges I intend to put on the bench.
US Constitution, Article VI, Clause 3:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
From Atrios' comment section:

If he intends to reject all non-Christian judges on the basis of their lack of faith how is that not a "religious test"? [A. Dershowitz]
Max has declared Cal Thomas to be King Stupid for his remark suggesting that the 9th Circuit decision might be "a greater injury than that caused by the terrorists". In the comments section, "G.O." expresses awe at seeing a statement even dumber than one he saw earlier from Seth Lipsky and Ira Stoll saying that the school voucher decision is, "the greatest civil rights victory since Brown v. Board of Education."

Friday, 28 June 2002
16:37 BST: Permalink

House passes ban on "morphed" erotica:

The 413-to-8 vote aims to circumvent a recent Supreme Court decision that nixed an earlier ban on "morphed" erotica. A similar proposal has been introduced in the Senate. With the enthusiastic backing of both Democrats and Republicans, final passage of a bill this year is all but certain.
"This bill closes the door left open by the recent Supreme Court decision," Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said at a press conference Tuesday. "I urge the Senate to take action immediately."
Only one Republican voted against the bill, libertarian Ron Paul, who said:
Mr. Speaker, as a parent, grandparent and OB-GYN who has had the privilege of delivering over 4,000 babies, I share the revulsion of all decent people at child pornography. Those who would destroy the innocence of children by using them in sexually-explicit material deserve the harshest punishment. However, the Child Obscenity and Pornography Prevention Act (HR 4623) exceeds Congress' constitutional power and does nothing to protect any child from being abused and exploited by pornographers. Instead, HR 4623 redirects law enforcement resources to investigations and prosecutions of "virtual" pornography which, by definition, do not involve the abuse or exploitation of children. Therefore, HR 4623 may reduce law enforcement's ability to investigate and prosecute legitimate cases of child pornography.
* * * * * Patrick approvingly quoted Jim Henley as follows:

Wild-eyed antigovernment extremist Jim Henley holstered his gun, stubbed out his dollar-sign cigarette, and made a rather telling point about the Librarian of Congress's recent ruling that Internet webcasters shall be forced to pay higher royalties than conventional broadcasters. Having cited the concept of "regulatory capture," the phenomenon by which regulatory agencies eventually become the tools of the businesses they're supposed to be reigning in, Henley observes:

Good thing we have an author of books on Russian history deciding what new-technology business structures will be "fair!" (One might wish he knew a little more Russian history.) And a good thing he's making decisions based on which medium supposedly best serves the pecuniary interests of existing conglomerates!
But I don't get it. What does his having been the author of a book on Russian history have to do with it being a stupid decision? Does writing about Russian history disqualify him from being able to make intelligent decisions? Or is this meant to suggest that he must be sympathetic to communism and so could be expected to side with "the people" or "the workers" and, boy, aren't the libertarians disappointed in him for just becoming another corporate lackey?
Okay, Jim explained further later on, but still. Yes, the guy who made the decision worked for the government and wasn't, in theory, just a corporate lackey. But let's be honest, the free market isn't exactly working hard to keep information free, folks, and every effort on the part of this administration has been to reduce the degree to which you and I, ordinary users/content providers, have control over the corporations that would like to take away our authority over our nifty little toys to get our free speech out into the air. What that means is that the government used to at least slow them down, and now it's not doing that job so well.
Does anyone really think that, absent government protections, big corporations won't go back to their old tricks of hiring private armies of thugs to prevent individuals from interfering with their dominance and control of what they regard as "their" turf? (Tell me, do you think your right of free association is (a) a good thing and (b) a guarantee of your right to join a union?) I think it would be good if libertarians read some books on US industrial history, myself.
And I still don't get the Russian history book thing, but then I'm just the author of a book on pornography, so what do I know?

* * * * * Via MWO, this Salon review of Anne Coulter's book, where I found a choice quote:

I could go on, citing claims and quotes, but since I do believe in fact and truth, I don't believe anything Ann Coulter says without seeing it in its original context. The following passage gives a good example of how "Slander" works:
"After Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion contrary to the clearly expressed position of the New York Times editorial page, the Times responded with an editorial on Thomas titled 'The Youngest, Cruelest Justice.' That was actually the headline on a lead editorial in the Newspaper of Record. Thomas is not engaged on the substance of his judicial philosophy. He is called 'a colored lawn jockey for conservative white interests,' 'race traitor,' 'black snake,' 'chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom,' 'house Negro' and 'handkerchief head,' 'Benedict Arnold' and "Judas Iscariot'."
The passage is conveniently phrased to make it look as if the quotes, as well as the headline, appear in the Times editorial. They don't (notes in the back of the book identify the sources as former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elder's interview in Playboy, and Joseph Lowery at a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference quoted in the New Yorker). Coulter sets up the passage to give the impression that the Times called Thomas a "lawn jockey" and a "house Negro" and hopes that we won't notice that she's fudged it.
* * * * * Hm, here's that article on women's buns, but without the accompanying photos, alas. (Thanks to Dominic, who is much better at finding things than I am.)

* * * * * Amnesia
Permalink

Sen. Joseph Lieberman said:

"There may have been a more senseless, ridiculous decision issued by a court at some time, but I don't remember it."
Robert Lichtman wrote to the Chron (don't know if they printed it) to say, "I can," and MWO said, "Think hard, Mr. Vice President," but I reckon the decision they are thinking of was not so much "ridiculous" and "senseless" as, say, calculated, cynical, criminal, and evil. Be that as it may, Lieberman's comment does invite the comparison and he's a twerp for phrasing it in a way that's a smack in the face to those of us who still feel traumatized by the selection.
Though highly critical of Lieberman's comment, MWO is saying that the Democrats in Congress were right to distance themselves from the 9th Circuit's decision as fast as they could, on pragmatic grounds. Of course, responding negatively to queries from the press about the decision is probably all a Democratic politician can do to avoid wearing the Cynthia McKinney mantle, but I wonder: Would Blogospherians, were they in that position, have the integrity to make the truly principled response, instead?
Because, of course, the 9th Circuit had no choice. They could not refuse to hear the case, and the Constitution is pretty clear: the government is forbidden to encourage Americans to make an affirmation of monotheism.
And every single argument I have seen in favor of the 9th Circuit having said otherwise has been, well, ignorant and stupid. These range from the fantasy that the Founding Fathers wanted it this way (which, I suppose, is why they explicitly said we must not do it?) to the rather remarkable proposition that these are just ritual words so it doesn't really mean anything.
Oh, there's a good idea, let's teach kids that it doesn't actually matter what they make oaths to because the words don't "really" matter. So we're now saying that we not only want to teach kids that it's okay to lie, but okay to lie on oath about their belief in a god. And does that mean we don't take their pledge of allegiance to their country seriously, too? And we don't expect them to, either?
A related argument says, "Just leave those words out." Uh huh, so you're supposed to pretend to be taking this oath in front of God and everyone, but you're just faking it - and that's okay.
As to, "You don't have to say the Pledge at all," I can only say that honest proponents of this excuse have far too weak an understanding of childhood to be competent to comment on this discussion. Which leaves us with the dishonest ones: What they really mean is, "Tough on you if you don't believe in God the way you should." In truth, they are well aware of what kind of a challenge refusing to recite the Pledge imposes on schoolchildren, and they want kids to feel ostracized if they dare step out from the herd. They also know quite well that being propagandized with religion from an early age is effective and they do indeed hope that wider dissemination of their religious beliefs in public life will indoctrinate America's children with monotheism. They are deliberately attempting to use the public school system to force their religious beliefs on other people's children.
Last night someone said to me, "I want my daughter to say 'the Pledge' every day." I asked her why she couldn't do that before class. Oh, it's not the same, she said, it's different when it's with the whole class. Ah, she wants her kid to say it in a group, so she wants to force the rest of the kids to do it just for her. "Why not get together with all the other kids who want to before class, then?" "Because it's not gonna happen." Even better: She knows it won't matter enough to them or their families to arrange to do it before class, so she wants to force them to do it in class, on the taxpayer's dime.
Of course, the old libertarian saw has been trotted out that public school isn't mandated by the Constitution so if we just get rid of public schools we won't have these arguments. I'm quite willing to believe that destroying our once-magnificent public school system is precisely why conservatives come up with destructive arguments to turn it into a Christian indoctrination network just so they can trot out "solutions" like this when people balk at the idea of sending their kids to religious schools for beliefs they may not share. However, the Constitution does in fact instruct the government to provide for the public welfare, and if you don't believe an educated populace is necessary to the public welfare, you're going to have to explain that one a whole lot better than you've been doing.
Oh, and: Just stay off the ballot next time, Joe.

Thursday, 27 June 2002
13:57 BST: Permalink

Elton Beard says the 9th Circut was right but they will be overturned. He's right, too:

In Fantasyland, where bold and principled Democratic politicians get elected, those Democrats would probably calmly make the winning logical case -- that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to our beloved Constitution clearly prohibits the government from selecting, or even recommending a religion for its citizens to believe in. That you can believe what you want to believe, but should not force others to profess to your beliefs or to any beliefs. That the state should not be in the business of indoctrinating children in the proper choice of gods.
We can but dream.

* * * * * Alex Frantz has a question:

Why is it that we can put together $15 billion on the double for an airline bailout but find it so hard to come up with 1% of that to keep Amtrak running or maybe 5-6% to allow real improvements to the outdated equipment and better service?
If I didn't know that our devoted public servants are solely concerned with our best interests I'd tend to suspect that maybe the big campaign donations from airline companies had a lot to do with the airline bailout.
I might even be crazy enough to think that maybe those air carriers don't want to compete against a really good inter-city rail service and use their influence in Congress and the Administration to keep Amtrak on the edge of bankruptcy, and Amtrak is unable to fight back since, being government funded, it can't make the big PAC and soft money donations that the airlines do.
Of course the airlines needed that bailout because they were hit by a disaster that they weren't at fault for. And I'm sure that airline lobbyists sinking the Gore Comission's proposals to improve security, as well as any other attempts at better security for years, had nothing to do with 9/11.
Warning: Don't read the post below it if you don't want to see spoilers for Buffy seasons 6&7. Shame on me, I couldn't resist.
Alex also talks about the recent Supreme Court decision on the death penalty as applied to retarded criminals. I have a comment on this myself, but I'm a bit baffled by the idea that applying the death penalty to the retarded is especially "cruel and unusual". I'm not entirely sure that it's any more cruel for them than it is for anyone else, but that isn't where I'm confused. I'm pretty sure that that's never been the real reason that we try to be sure we're dealing with people who know what's going on, and that's because they must understand the trial, and they must understand why they have been sentenced and the meaning of their sentence. Ricky Ray Rector knew what he was doing when he shot that cop, for example, but after his arrest he was so brain-damaged that he thought Kennedy was still president and, at the last, he saved some of his Last Meal "for later". Not much cruelty involved in his execution, given that he didn't seem to be aware what he was losing - which, come to that, wasn't much - but how on earth can anyone claim that he understood what was going on? He could not confront his accusers or defend himself in any meaningful way, nor understand the meaning of the judgment against him.

* * * * * Jim Henley differs with Professor Reynolds on the superiority of a "war" (against a country) over a "war on" a concept, like "terrorism" or "drugs", the latter being open-ended and thus never over:

Well now he tells us, the cynic might say. But believe it or not, UO is not a cynic. And it's nice to see a pro-war libertarian making an argument on the basis of concern for - American liberty. But Unqualified Offerings thinks that, while Reynolds' concerns about an unending "war on" are acute, that the expansive war he favors - against Iraq and the Saudis, with occasional other targets thrown into the mix too - doesn't avoid the "war on" problem. UO thinks that the war has structural requirements that will make it as endless as any "war on." UO furthermore believes that US policy, particularly Bush administration policy, is being made by people for whom the endless part is a feature rather than a bug. Spelling out some of the reasons why will have to wait until tomorrow, though. (It's UO's gaming night.) So all readers, new and old, are invited to return.
* * * * * Blowback is not pleased by the decision to price web radio off the air:

Where do all those smug, self-satisfied techno-libertarian weasels stand on this? This issue illustrates the vacuousness, and the subservience to the whims of Big Capital, of their nonsensical positions. Their triumphalist rhetoric is a masochist moan, delighting in submission...
And he also says Save Internet Radio.

* * * * * Special Cheesecake Section
I wish I could link to ES magazine's feature on the new fashion in women's backsides, but I don't think they have it online (there's no visible link at This is London). It's got pictures. Most of the pictures aren't very helpful - the picture of Britney doesn't really tell you much about her ass, but she seems to have great legs. There's one woman I've never heard of (because I don't notice celebrities much) who is certainly wearing a dress that shows off every curve...except, well, she doesn't have much in the curve department. Then again, Kylie's dress (which is dead sexy) doesn't hide the fact that she doesn't have a lot up front but sure makes her backside look curvacious as all hell. The famous Lopez hiney is covered in fitted satin but blatant as can be.
Anyway, this article babbles about the reason women's bums have become fashionable being that the fashion business relies on changing the focus and it was this body part's turn, but I don't think this one is led by the fashion industry (which has had plenty of opportunities to rediscover the female bottom over the last 40 years and failed to find it). The entire fashionable set in London went into total shock at the discovery that men found the Caboose de Lopez sexy, and fashion is trying to catch up. (Surprise! Heterosexual men prefer women who are shaped like women to women who are shaped like men!) So now even actresses and models who look like a dress on a hanger are posing with their bums pushed out for the camera in an attempt to catch the eyes of the cheek-gazing public.
I find it all very cheering, and I'm happy for all those guys who get to enjoy it all, but I still want to know why this couldn't have happened when I was 15 so I wouldn't have had my classic figure compared with Twiggy's lack of one. Damn.
Oh, yeah, ES also has a flawlessly perfect cover portrait of SMG herself (no hiney shot), and she's interviewed inside in that empty way that British interviews explore complete triviality. Did it say one thing you wouldn't already know if you had any idea who Geller was to begin with? News: She likes her boyfriend and plays Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Anyway, nice cheesecake issue, I thought. Too bad you can't run out and buy a copy.
(Update: Here is the link to the story on women's backsides, but without the accompanying photos.)

Wednesday, 26 June 2002
15:09 BST: Permalink

I guess I should point out before any more people congratulate me that I had nothing to do with the recent victory of sense over paranoia in regard to the UK government's aborted attempt to expand invasions of privacy under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000). While I did some work on trying to stop the bill during it's early phases, I can't take any credit for what happened last week. The real heroes of the day are Stand and most importantly the Foundation for Information Policy Research:

The Home Office is reported to have postponed its proposals to amend the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act to allow a huge increase in the official that can access personal details of phone calls and emails.
Attention was first drawn to the highly technical Regulations encapsulating this change by an FIPR Press Release on 10th June. The story has since become headline news and the Government has now decided not to proceed with these changes.
Ian Brown, Director of FIPR welcomed this news, "these proposals were poorly considered, poorly justified and over the past week have been condemned by almost everyone outside of Whitehall. The Home Office must now tear them up and start again from first principles."
He continued, "we are as keen as anyone else in seeing wrongdoing investigated, but we don't think that handing out such wide-reaching powers to every bureaucrat in the land is compatible with living in a free society. The Government needs to carefully consider whether self-authorisation can ever be appropriate for this type of invasion of privacy and they need to pay a lot more attention to the oversight regime. An Interception Commissioner who doesn't have the resources to open all his mail is no credible way to ensure that abuse is detected."
* * * * * Tuli Kupferberg sent a copy of his book and says the Fugs are still performing and recording and to check out their site at www.thefugs.com.

* * * * * E.J. Dionne has a firm grasp of the obvious:

What was once obvious is becoming painfully obvious again: The doctrine of states' rights, so often invoked as a principle, is almost always a pretext to deny the federal government authority to do things that conservatives dislike. These include expanding claims to individual rights, increasing protections for the environment and regulating business.
How do I know this? Because when states have the temerity to try doing the things I just listed, conservatives are quick to use federal power to stop them from exercising their right to act.
Big government in Washington is bad, in other words, unless it can be used to quash progressive state action. And "judicial activism," long a target of polemicists on the right, is becoming the movement's weapon of choice whenever it can muster five votes on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Seems a few of the most states-rightsy Supreme Court justices opined that the rights of states (and of individuals) should not override, say, the rights given to HMOs by the Fed. And:

What does this argument have to do with the law? Nothing. It's ideology. You might even call it judicial activism. It's a perfectly respectable case for the HMOs and their political supporters to make. But if these four justices want to get into the thicket of policymaking, they should quit the court and run for Congress. In fairness, these justices are not the only conservatives who dislike states' rights when they get in the way of their preferences. As The Post reported last week, major Wall Street firms have drafted amendments to federal law that would block state securities regulators from investigating whether stock analysts misled investors. They're responding to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who forced Merrill Lynch & Co. to pay $100 million to settle charges that its analysts derided stocks privately that they were publicly touting to investors.
Rep. Richard Baker, a Louisiana Republican who chairs the House financial services subcommittee on financial markets, derided Spitzer's effort as "a failed attempt to usurp federal rulemaking and oversight of capital markets."
"If 30 different states come up with 30 different sets of rules regulating financial service firms," Baker said, "that's a calamity."
In other words, states' rights are great until Wall Street firms or HMOs decide they don't like them. Then they're a calamity. So much for states' rights.
* * * * * From Slashdot:

Shocked, Shocked at Payola
[Music] Posted by jamie on Tuesday June 25, @12:00PM
from the chess-piece-face's-patience-wearing-thin dept. "It costs a record company about $250,000 just to launch a single on rock radio today. That doesn't guarantee success; it just gives the single access to the airwaves. If the song catches on and eventually crosses over to the mainstream Top-40 format, indie costs balloon to more than $1 million per song." Salon.com has a pair of articles on payola today: one on the widening scandal and one specifically on a curious Clear Channel case. For context, here's our latest payola story, or if you want the background on why the labels hate the promoters but can't shake the habit, my writeup from a year ago. (If you want some beach reading on this topic, go check out "Hit Men.")
* * * * * Dana Milbank seems to have gone back to normal. Karl Rove, Adding to His To-Do List, he says, noting that Rove is expanding his role even further. And:

President Bush often tells the story these days about the time, during the campaign, when he vowed he would keep the federal budget balanced unless the nation found itself in a war, a national emergency or a recession. "Never did I dream we'd have a trifecta," Bush then says, to audience laughter. Sometimes, he adds that he made this statement to a reporter while campaigning in Chicago.
Problem is, nobody can find evidence that he actually said this during the campaign. (In fact, Bush often said his tax cut could be done without causing a deficit even in a downturn.) The New Republic magazine first pointed out the problem, and NBC's Tim Russert earlier this month told Bush budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. that NBC could find no evidence Bush said such a thing. Daniels replied that he's "not the White House librarian."
A group called Spinsanity did some library research of its own and found that the president, who first mentioned the mysterious Chicago campaign interview last Oct. 3, has used the "trifecta" joke at least 13 times since Feb. 27 -- even after Russert put Daniels on the spot -- and the war, emergency and recession lines another two dozen times. But Spinsanity found no recorded mentions from the campaign.
Asked about this, the White House press office referred your correspondent to a Sept. 6, 2001, Bush appearance at the White House with President Vicente Fox of Mexico. "I have repeatedly said the only time to use Social Security money is in times of war, times of recession or times of severe emergency," Bush said. That was before war and emergency, but already in an economic downturn -- and it was well after the campaign.
The White House also suggested supporting evidence might be found in GOP presidential primary debates on Jan. 7 and Jan. 10, 2000. But a search of the transcripts of those debates finds no exculpatory information.
And if he had been making such statements in January, why was he saying that his tax cut created no such problems during the first presidential debate for the general election, months later? The fact is that during the campaign Bush was responding to suggestions that his tax cut was "risky" by insisting that it would not require raiding Social Security or deficit spending even in the event of economic downturn or emergency needs. It was all taken care of, he insisted, even going so far as to suggest that Al Gore was a liar for saying otherwise.
The claim that Bush made these allowances during the campaign is a nice bit of spin, I suppose, if you are willing to laugh at his creepy jokes, but I think it's really meant to cover up the fact that he made the trifecta joke in the first place. The first time I saw it, back in early December, it was not so carefully phrased:

"Lucky me. I hit the trifecta," Bush told Daniels shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the budget director.
As Brad Carlton noted, the trifecta is something you bet on, a good thing. Every time he repeats this phrase, he seems to be saying that he was banking on having something really awful happen, and boy was he lucky when those planes hit the World Trade Towers. You don't need paranoid theories about how the Bushies planned the 9/11 attacks to find this worrying: There is something seriously wrong with a man who keeps repeating a phrase that has such implications and thinking it's a good joke - and something equally wrong in the fact that his partisan audiences keep laughing at it. This is the same man who said that 2001 was a great year for him, at a time when the rest of us were still reeling in shock and unable to get our bearings over a starkly transformed New York City that was missing a major compass point. "Gee, lucky for me 3,000 people got killed, buildings were destroyed, and god-knows-how-many-others were put out of work! Lucky for me the economy is tanking and New Yorkers are in post-traumatic shock!"
Yeah, I guess it must be pretty funny, if you're him. Thank God George W. Bush has the moral clarity to know that his poll ratings and his ability to raid the treasury and Social Security are more important than the lives of thousands of Americans.
Oh, yes, here's one worrying item from that same Milbank column:

Turnover has been particularly high in speechwriting, where Matthew Scully is following David Frum out the door. In the White House counsel's office, Rachel Brand has gone to work for Kennedy -- Justice Anthony, not Senator Ted; also in the counsel's office, Robert W. "Moose" Cobb has left to be NASA's inspector general. The highest turnover has been in Bush's faith-based office, where deputy director Don Eberly left earlier this year for the U.S. Agency for International Development and Don Willett joined the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy; the office's first director, John DiIulio, departed last year.
There's one popular sf trope in which an evil alien attaches itself to a part of your body and then spreads its filaments deeper and deeper into your central nervous system. This reminds me of that.

Tuesday, 25 June 2002
00:04 BST: Permalink

Mail Call
This is one I didn't see when it came in amidst the spam a few months ago, and I only saw it because I made a new folder and re-sorted some mail. Keith Thompson wrote:

I was just reading a CNN transcript of a town hall meeting held in Florida on December 4, 2001. Bush is talking to a third-grader, so the unsophisticated wording, for once, actually makes sense.
The transcript is at [link]. Search for "Jordan" and scroll down a page or so.
This is the one where he claimed to have seen the first impact on live television, which is clearly impossible -- but we've heard about that one before.
But take a look a couple of paragraphs below that:

And Jordan (ph), I wasn't sure what to think at first. You know, I grew up in a period of time where the idea of America being under attack never entered my mind -- just like your daddy and mother's mind probably.
George W. Bush was born in 1946, and he says the idea of America being under attack never entered his mind. I think I believe him.
I knew he was oblivious to the world around him; I'm not quite sure why I'm so suprised.
He does say some very odd things, doesn't he?
Jim Henley didn't like the sources The Scotsman is using:

I'm temperamentally inclined to believe that the anthrax attacks are domestic and that the FBI is dragging its feet for any number of reasons (including not just the usefulness to the War Party of a live "Iraq did it" thesis, but also and importantly the "greymail" angle).
But the fact that the Scotsman relies on someone from the Federation of American Scientists gives me pause. Bruce Rolston just caught them out on hyping the "dirty bomb" threat to an almost absurd degree (link).
I have to admit, I was wondering what kind of an organization it was and what that meant about their representative's credentials, too.
Philippe Richards thinks Dana Milbank might not have gone over to the dark side:

I dunno, seems to me that paragraph has a rather dubious tone to it. First, he gently contradicts Bridgeland by pointing out how none of the "inspirations" were actually named in the speech. Then there's the weird juxtaposition between the discussion of Niocmachean ethics and the Henry-Madison debates on the one hand, and the fact that Bush was a C student on the other, and never mind the use of the word "actually" by Bridgeland suggests that the flack may believe it, but is surprised. The whole paragraph has a raised eyebrows, staring over the reading glasses kind of feel to it.
And the next one is even better. A flourish reminiscient of JFK? That's got to be some kind of joke, right? Is Milbank serious when compares that clunker with "ask not what your country can do for you..." I, seriously, doubt it.

Monday, 24 June 2002
18:40 BST: Permalink

When I got to the middle section of this article, I couldn't help remembering that Kenny Lay told Dick Cheney who to push out of gorvernment jobs. Nat Parry on Bush's Grim Vision :

Targeting Individuals
Beyond those policy rebuffs to multilateralism, Bush went on the offensive against individual U.N. officials who have not conformed to his administration's desires. These officials, who insisted on holding Bush to standards applied to other leaders around the world, soon found themselves out of jobs.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary C. Robinson, was the first to experience the administration's displeasure. The former Irish president's efforts had won acclaim from human rights groups around the world. But her fierce independence, which surfaced in her criticism of Israel and Bush's war on terror, rubbed Washington the wrong way. The Bush administration lobbied hard against her reappointment. Officially, she was retiring on her own accord. [link]
The Bush administration also forced out Robert Watson, the chairman of the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC]. Under his leadership, the panel had reached a consensus that human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, contributed to global warming. Bush has resisted this science, which also is opposed by oil companies such as ExxonMobil. The oil giant sent a memo to the White House asking the administration, "Can Watson be replaced now at the request of the U.S.?" [link]
The ExxonMobil memo, obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council through the Freedom of Information Act, urged the White House to "restructure U.S. attendance at the IPCC meetings to assure no Clinton/Gore proponents are involved in decisional activities."
On April 19, ExxonMobil got its wish. The administration succeeded in replacing Watson with Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian economist. Commenting on his removal, Watson said, "U.S. support was, of course, an important factor. They [the IPCC] came under a lot of pressure from ExxonMobil who asked the White House to try and remove me." [Independent, April 20, 2002]
The next to go, on April 22, was Jose Mauricio Bustani, the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW]. Bustani ran into trouble when he resisted Bush administration efforts to dictate the nationalities of inspectors assigned to investigate U.S. chemical facilities. He also opposed a U.S. law allowing Bush to block unannounced inspections in the United States.
Bustani came under criticism for "bias" because his organization had sought to inspect American chemical facilities as aggressively as it examined facilities of U.S.-designated "rogue states." In other words, he was called biased because he sought to apply the rules evenhandedly. [link]
The final straw for Bush apparently was Bustani's efforts to persuade Iraq to join the Chemical Weapons Convention, which would allow the OPCW to inspect Iraqi facilities. The Bush administration denounced this move an "ill-considered initiative" and pushed to have Bustani deposed, threatening to withhold dues to the OPCW if Bustani remained.
Critics said Washington's reasoning was that Bush would be stripped of a principal rationale for invading Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein if the Iraqi dictator agreed to join the international body designed to inspect chemical-weapons facilities, including those in Iraq. A senior U.S. official dismissed that interpretation of Bush's motive as "an atrocious red herring."
Accusing Bustani of mismanagement, U.S. officials called an unprecedented special session to vote Bustani out, only a year after he was unanimously reelected to another five-year term. The member states chose to sacrifice Bustani to save the organization from the loss of U.S. funds. [Christian Science Monitor, April 24, 2002]
"By dismissing me," Bustani told the U.N. body, "an international precedent will have been established whereby any duly elected head of any international organization would at any point during his or her tenure remain vulnerable to the whims of one or a few major contributors." He said that if the United States succeeded in removing him, "genuine multilateralism" would succumb to "unilateralism in a multilateral disguise." [link]
Reading the whole of Parry's article, it is hard to escape the feeling that Bush is truly attempting to become not just dictator over America, but of the whole world. Certainly his actions are consistent with such a program. Most importantly, they are not consistent with a desire to protect our cherished American freedoms, or even our physical safety.
So what does it take, folks? How far does this administration reallly have to go before so-called libertarians refuse to excuse them anymore? What will it take to make Greens realize it's time to stop playing around? When will "centrists" acknowledge that what we have is a dangerously illegal, unconstitutional infestation in the White House that must be removed?
12:30 BST: Permalink

Dan Perkins reminds you:

Regular readers will remember that this space has referenced a book by two French intelligence analysts, "Bin Laden: the Forbidden Truth," on numerous occasions. The book alleges that the Bush Administration was negotiating a pipeline deal with the Taliban during the summer of 2001, and that the State Department actually stymied FBI investigations into al Qaeda.
Now, there's a story on the front page of the Times this morning about a different French conspiracy-theory book called "The Horrifying Fraud," in which it is alleged that Sept. 11 was actually masterminded by the U.S. government.
I just want to be clear: that is not the book to which I have been referring. Though, unfortunately, I suspect that the two will become confused in the public mind, defeating any attempt to draw attention to the very plausible allegations of the former.
Of course, there's a conspiracy theory about this, too, that The Horrifying Fraud was released to create confusion with Bin Laden: the Forbidden Truth.

* * * * * John Dean has written a letter to Karl Rove:

It's unimaginable that the Bush Administration would want to risk repeating the mistakes of the Nixon presidency, yet the continuing insistence on secrecy by your White House is startlingly Nixonian. I'm talking about everything from stiffing Congressional requests from information and witnesses, to employing an executive order to demolish the 1978 law providing public access to presidential papers, to forcing the Government Accounting Office to go to Court to obtain information about how the White House is spending tax money when creating a pro-energy industry Vice Presidential task force. The Bush Administration apparently seeks to reverse the post-Watergate trend of open government.
As you are the President's top political adviser, let me draw to your attention the political wisdom of a man who served in the cabinet or sub-cabinet of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford, and then eighteen years as the U.S. senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He's not only an able politician but a student of government secrecy, most recently serving as chairman of a bipartisan Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. You might want to take a look at his recent book, entitled Secrecy. Senator Moynihan sums it up nicely: "secrecy is for losers."

Sunday, 23 June 2002
10:43 BST: Permalink

Remember when I hoped it was just an April Fool's Day story? Well, now The Washington Post is asking, Curtain Call for Webcasts? Only the misleading sub-head suggests someone is listening to too many industry shills:

Some Decry Order to Pay Royalties to Musicians
Thousands of Internet radio stations may find their transmissions financially jammed after the Librarian of Congress yesterday adjusted the royalty fees that the webcasters must pay musicians and record companies for broadcasting their songs online.
Librarian James Billington cut the fees proposed by an arbitration board in half, but many of these fledgling firms say they will go out of business even under the reduced royalty regime.
Billington is charged by Congress with administering copyright laws for the printed word and sound recordings. He ruled yesterday that Web sites that broadcast music over the Internet must pay record companies and musicians 0.07 cents per song per listener. The arbitration panel set a per-song fee of 0.14 cents per listener late last year.
The panel had also proposed a 50 percent discount on that rate for FM stations simulcasting their broadcasts over the Internet, but Billington did away with that distinction.
"This will put us out of business," said Kevin Shively, director of interactive media for Beethoven.com, one of the most successful webcasters. "This is going to destroy Internet radio."
Shively said paying the fee would eat up almost all the gross revenue of his service, which reaches 200,000 listeners each month. After the initial decision by the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel, Shively said he was forced to lay off several staffers; he is now the site's only full-time employee.
Internet radio stations must pay two sets of copyright fees. One royalty, set at 3.5 percent of total revenues, goes to the songwriters and publishers of a piece of music. The other fee �
the one decided yesterday by Billington �
is shared equally by the performers and the record company.
Radio stations pay only the music publishing fee, not the royalties for musicians and record labels.
[...]
Record companies said the new fee isn't enough to compensate them for the value broadcasters derive from their creative work. "The import of this decision is that artists and record labels will subsidize the webcasting businesses of multibillion-dollar companies like Yahoo, AOL, RealNetworks and Viacom," said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America.
There is, of course, a very good reason why broadcast radio doesn't pay a "compensation" fee to the record companies (and make no mistake: it's to the record companies, not the musicians; it's promotion, and musicians are forced to pay the record companies for that out of their royalties, the record companies don't pay musicians for it). Let's go back to that article in the NYT last April:

In a 1998 copyright law, Congress gave Webcasters an automatic license to stream copyrighted music so long as they paid a royalty fee to be agreed on later. Like broadcast radio stations, Webcasters already pay about 4 percent of their revenue to compensate composers and music publishers. But American broadcasters have never paid a royalty for using sound recordings, which are typically owned by a record label, successfully arguing that record labels are already compensated by the promotional benefits of having their music played over the air.
Webcasters argue that the recording industry should recognize that it derives a similar benefit from music that is streamed over the Internet. In an arbitration panel proceeding supervised by the copyright office, the Webcasters proposed a royalty rate about equal to those paid to composers and publishers, 5 percent of revenue. The recording industry asked for 15 percent of revenue, or a comparable per-performance fee.
A considerable proportion of the material in question is music that would never be broadcast at all in this Clear Channel world, and therefore has negligible promotional opportunity. Many of these webcasters are offering online sales of the music they play and therefore moving thousands of dollars worth of CDs that would otherwise not be sold. In other words, it's free publicity, and the record companies are actually asking to be paid for it!
The musicians themselves can only benefit from the wider profile the webcasters offer them. Radio play is what sells their CDs and makes people buy tickets to their concerts. But the tiny number of companies that own radio stations these days play a very limited range of music, leaving most musicians - and audiences - out in the cold.
Since the record industry presumably knows this (that's why they hustle so extravagantly for air-time), one wonders what agenda they are really pursuing when they go to court to foreclose on free promotion for their performers.
There is, of course, a way around all this. Independent performers could band together to create their own web radio stations where they air music by themselves and other artists who are not bound to record companies. By producing, packaging, and promoting their own music via the web, they can retain control and never have to give the bulk of their profits to industry middle-men. Although web radio will never have the kind of access to large audiences that broadcast radio does, it can ultimately provide even more money to musicians while reaching an audience that is not satisfied by modern Top 40 radio.
I believe that the best way to break the industry's lock on stealing both careers and money from musicians is for performers to acquire independent bandwidth for this purpose now, before the record companies figure out a way to make that illegal. I also think there is real money to be made by a serious effort to by-pass the industry altogether via the web. In fact, I like this idea so much that I'd even be prepared to advertise them. Wouldn't you?

Saturday, 22 June 2002
18:17 BST: Permalink

Web access is intermittent at best, with attempts to reach any blogspot site timing out frequently. Not just on Demon, either. So I've created a page for something interesting I found on rec.arts.sf.fandom. It started in a thread called "now the CIA", in a post from Lucy Kemnitzer, who wrote:

I'm frightened: I think of my country's actions and positions in the world, and I wonder how long the rest of the world will put up with it. I do not want to be Carthage.
Ken MacLeod followed with a poem of his, which inspired Lucy and then a couple of others to add their own bits. It was rather wonderful, and I say this as a person who most often cringes at the sight of poetry springing up in public. Click here for the whole thing.

* * * * * Ah! Okay, I've managed to get through to the blogosphere, and I just found Barry's priceless response to this question from Atrios:

Could one of you Randroid zombies please explain to me how a retail (residential) spot market for electricity would work, precisely?
Thank you.
It begins:

It's simple, if you would only pull your letist islamofascist head out of your marxist books of lies, and actually bother to take Econ 101 (and pass it). If you'd stop reading Krugman, all of whose columns are lies, and who is considered laughable by every anonymous Chicwhore whom I won't quote by name, you'd realize how:
Go read and enjoy.

* * * * * Nathan Newman answers a question:

Auditors Selling Tax Fraud Advice- What's the difference between corporate America and the mafia? Mob leaders are held accountable for failing to pay taxes. The Times reports that auditors are selling tax avoidance schemes that help corporations massively conceal income.

Friday, 21 June 2002
16:22 BST: Permalink

Sex & Violence
Glenn Reynolds points to what he says is the "bottom-line reason why you may soon see less of both on TV" - an article in The Washington Post:

Watching a movie or TV program with strong sexual references interferes with people's ability to remember the commercials in such programs, according to research announced yesterday.
In the first study to empirically measure whether sexually explicit programming helps or detracts from marketers' messages, researchers found that people watching shows packed with sexual innuendo, performers with revealing clothes or sexual scenes were much less likely to remember the ads both immediately after the show and a day later.
The steep declines in memory after the explicit shows were seen among adults of all ages, among men and women, and among those who liked the programs and those who did not.
I don't care. I can't remember a single advertisement I saw all week. It doesn't matter whether I'm watching Buffy (which is full of innuendo and violence, with occasional sightings of skin &etc.) or a cooking show (although some might argue that that's sex, too), I don't remember the ads. Sometimes I may remember seeing an ad, but I don't remember what show I was watching at the time. Mostly, I remember ads when I am standing in front of the shampoo rack at SuperDrug and I see all these highly-promoted shampoos and remember that that's the one with the phony "scientific" spiel that goes along with the animation, and that's the one where the model's hair seems to be sort of metallic-looking. I remember some memorable ads independently - like all those cool Budweiser ads in black & white with nifty blues tunes in the background, which does Budweiser no good with me since I can't stand lager. And, of course, you can still get a laugh out of me with a couple of those late-night ads, like the one for Ginsu knives: "You can break a board in half with your hand! [crack!] But NOT a TOMATO! [splat]" - great knives by the way, but I only found that out because they came as a "free gift" with something my mom mail-ordered; or my all-time favorite, THE AMAZING EGG SCRAMBLER! ("Thwipthwipthwipthwipthwip!") But I have no idea what show I was watching when I saw them.
But what the advertiser wants from me, and gets, is this:

I'm standing in the drug store trying to find something to deal with adolescent acne that is extending it's reach well into adulthood, and my eyes light upon that familiar blue jar I've seen in all those ads. Yes! It's gotta be worth a try! (It works.) I never would have bought it if I hadn't recognized it from seeing the ads.

I'm watching TV with my father, and am astonished to notice that this 75%-deaf man is singing along with a Nat King Cole tune from an album that's being advertised in the break - one of those Xmas collections. "I didn't know you were a Nat King Cole fan," I say. "It's a good song," he replies, almost defensively. I go out the next day and pick it up. (When he unwraps it on Xmas morning, he immediately takes it to my room, puts it on my turntable and plays "Nature Boy", looking really misty-eyed. ("That's so true," he chokes out, as the song finishes.) (I have other stories on the gift-idea theme from advertising.)

I'm watching TV with my sweetie when we see an ad for a movie. "Wow, we gotta see that!" one of us says.

I've been getting tired of eating the same old Shreddies when I'm in the mood for cold cereal, and I see a silly add for Sugar Puffs. "God, I'd forgotten all about those! I want some!" "You like them? Good, I noticed they have some sort of Buffy trinket enclosed but I don't eat them so I didn't get them." "Oh, yes, get them, I like Sugar Puffs!" (The Buffy thing was definitely not something worth buying a cereal you don't want for, BTW.)

If you'd asked me the day after seeing any of those ads what advertisements I could recall from the previous 24 hours, I might have remembered the Nat King Cole ad, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have remembered the others, or any other ad that, ultimately, might influence my future buying. And studies like this one tell you nothing about how people's purchases will actually be affected by the ads they see or what shows they saw them in.
Max has been going after Instapundit all week for not being as good as his rep, and I can't help but agree after seeing some of Glenn's mischaracterizations of what he appears to think of as "the left" (including that crazy bomb-throwing hippie Dan Rather).
One does often get the feeling that "thoughtful conservatives" think that anyone on the left who criticizes the way the administration is prosecuting the war is against going after Al Qaeda at all. The other day Patrick quoted Glen as saying this:

But while I believe in prosecuting the current war against Islamist terrorists to the utmost, I feel absolutely sure that if the U.S. government is given power to act in ways for which it is unaccountable, it will act badly. Our entire Constitution is based on the notion that unaccountable power cannot be trusted. That's more than a notion, really: it's a certainty, on a par with the law of gravity.
And, you know, that's precisely how most of the liberals/lefties I know feel about it, the only distinction being that we think this administration came into office with the goal of taking precisely that kind of power, and that they have already demonstrated that they cannot be trusted. Rumsfield and Cheney, as Bruce Shapiro reminds us, have been trying to do that throughout their careers:

Recently I found myself contemplating this photo, taken shortly after the Watergate scandal forced President Nixon from office. The two would-be hipsters -- Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney -- were aides to the new president, Gerald Ford. At that time Rumsfeld and Cheney were persuading Ford to veto one of the most important Watergate-inspired reforms, an enhanced Freedom of Information Act, designed to guarantee public and media scrutiny of the FBI and other agencies. FOIA, the two aides warned, would take too much power from the executive branch. Ford indeed vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode the veto and the FOIA became the law of the land -- at least until last October, when Attorney General John Ashcroft fulfilled Cheney and Rumsfeld's three-decade-old wish by pledging to fight any FOIA request that comes over the transom.
With the political aftershocks of Sept. 11 only now beginning to be felt in Washington, it's especially important to recall the real lessons of Watergate. Thirty years on, it is easy to forget that "Watergate" was really misleading shorthand: It was shorthand not only for the 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters and Nixon's subsequent coverup of campaign shenanigans, but also for a vast array of domestic spying and other executive-branch abuses, which the Nixon crew perfected but did not invent.
It is fashionable now to blame Watergate on Nixon's paranoia and rogue personality. But the crimes of Watergate grew directly from the kind of unchecked presidential powers now sought by the Bush administration both at home and abroad. FBI spying on political rallies and religious communities? The White House plumbers practiced their tradecraft breaking into the psychiatric records of dissident Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The "enemies list" grew from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's decades of spying on religious, civil rights and peace groups.
Expanded paramilitary covert operations abroad? The Watergate break-in team was conscripted from the CIA squad for covert Cuban operations. Restrictions on the flow of information to Congress and the public? The direct complicity of Nixon and other high officials in Watergate was proved only because senators who had subpoenaed White House records refused to knuckle under to claims of executive privilege -- a drama being replayed this month with Sen. Joseph Lieberman's subpoenas regarding the involvement of Cheney and other White House officials in Enron.
One particular lesson of Watergate deserves close attention these days, and that's the lesson we learned about the power of the attorney general. Actually, we learned two contrasting lessons.
Start with Nixon attorney general John Mitchell. From the moment of Nixon's inauguration Mitchell was obsessed with partisan secrecy, with a crabbed and narrow vision of law enforcement, and with the intimidation of critics. His Justice Department fought the New York Times' publication of the Pentagon Papers, the internal secret history of the war in Vietnam; concocted fraudulent charges to jail antiwar dissidents like Jesuits Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, absurdly accused of plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger; wiretapped aides suspected of disloyalty; launched a doomed war on drugs; and tried to pack the Supreme Court with conservative ideologues. Up to his eyeballs in Watergate sewage, Mitchell claimed it was all in the interests of law and order, and to the bitter end of his tenure used his office to intimidate opponents and keep information from Congress.
The lesson: Without the active collaboration of an attorney general, Watergate would never have happened. Mitchell gave law-and-order cover to a lawless administration.
[...]
It is really only in the light of Watergate that the Bush administration's actions since Sept. 11 make sense. Just as the Reagan administration saw its job as undoing New Deal-descended corporate regulation, so has Bush & Co. systematically exploited the terror attacks to undo Watergate-era reforms reining in the executive branch. Each day's tit-for-tat, blame-the-other-guy leaks from the FBI and CIA make it more and more clear that prior to Sept. 11 neither agency suffered from an inability to spy, wiretap or otherwise collect information. Instead, the administration has shrewdly manipulated public opinion to accomplish something sought by Watergate-era Republicans like Cheney and Rumsfeld ever since: a restoration of the imperial presidency.
There's more, go read the rest.

Thursday, 20 June 2002
12:48 BST: Permalink

Kathy Kinsley notes that Jose Padilla was originally hoping to build the bomb from The Journal of Irreproducible Results.

* * * * * Avram Grumer has posted some pointers to his drawings strewn variously around the web. Even if you don't look at any of the others, go to this page and search on "Avram".

* * * * * Buzzflash has nabbed a new columnist:

Let me introduce myself. I am a partisan Democrat who has something to say. And as a senior staffer on Capitol Hill, I have a perspective that may be different than the one provided by the mainstream media. But, due to my position, I run the risk of my views being attributed to my employer. So, I offer this anonymously-written weekly column and speak only for myself.
* * * * * The Christian Science Monitor weighs in on The politics of fear:

In playing to our fears, Ashcroft does not let consistency, any more than the law, interfere with his actions. He prefers to appeal subliminally to racism as well as xenophobia.
[...]
Ashcroft says the fight against terrorism is a fight for human rights, but he is not the only administration official whose pronouncements would make George Orwell blush.
[...]
But if this is war, ask yourself what you have done to help. Have you paid more in taxes, bought war bonds, planted a victory garden, been drafted or called up (or even know someone who has)? Or have you simply remained silent while Ashcroft decides whose rights have to be sacrificed in the name of protecting us all?
If so, you are not in the minority. A new Gallup poll shows that 4 out of 5 Americans are ready to give up some of their freedoms in return for more security; nearly half worry about becoming victims of a terrorist attack. Ashcroft has done his work well.
* * * * * Permalink
You'd think even conservatives would understand why, at this time, coalitions with Islamic fundamentalists might have the stink of, well, giving aid and comfort to the enemy. For the two of you who missed that story, here's The Washington Post version:

UNITED NATIONS -- Conservative U.S. Christian organizations have joined forces with Islamic governments to halt the expansion of sexual and political protections and rights for gays, women and children at United Nations conferences.
The new alliance, which coalesced during the past year, has received a major boost from the Bush administration, which appointed antiabortion activists to key positions on U.S. delegations to U.N. conferences on global economic and social policy.
But it has been largely galvanized by conservative Christians who have set aside their doctrinal differences, cemented ties with the Vatican and cultivated fresh links with a powerful bloc of more than 50 moderate and hard-line Islamic governments, including Sudan, Libya, Iraq and Iran.
And yet, when Charles Kuffner wrote about this on his page, he got comments from people explaining that it's all perfectly okay to join forces with enemy nations in order to promote anti-American values. Not like those nasty lefties who actually criticize foreign policy, f'rinstance.
See, even the Axis of Evil is okay when they're trying to suppress the freedoms of gays, women and children. (Hey, it's not just about oil and/or drugs, it's about repression, too!)
Even the Bull Moose can see what's wrong with this:

The Moose sympathizes with much of the agenda of the religious right, but this new alliance undermines their moral authority. Just as liberals weakened their case when they joined hands with the Communists, the religious right's moral standing is severely weakened by working with states that enslave women, promote extreme anti-Semitism and support terror against America and the West.
What's next? A strategic alliance with Satan? A religious right conference on Hezbollah family values?
Apparently, the Bush Administration is promoting this coalition. According to the Post, "U.S. and Iranian officials even huddled during coffee breaks at the U.N. summit on children in New York last month." So much for the Bush Administration's PR gambit to protest the radical Islamic treatment of women!
These have not the best of times for the religious right. Falwell and Robertson both embarrassed the movement with their absurd comments after 9/11. The Christian Coalition is only a shell of its former self. This new alliance with the axis of evil cannot help its standing among the American people.
The Moose wonders whether there is anyone in their ranks who will speak truth to power?
The Moose has things to say about the GOP's political strategy, too:

The Moose suggests that the President should also tell his top political adviser to be a bit more careful about employing the rhetoric of war on behalf of the trivial. Real soldiers are in harm's way defending our real lives and liberty. The Moose realizes that defending the rich has become a theological cause for the modern GOP. But it is not the crusade that concerns the American people.
* * * * * Excellent entry by Gary Farber, who is spot on:

And that's why the US made a deal with the devil, Syria, because the purer Germans respected their own laws.
This is truly dark territory, and I fear it.
And more: It isn't the best way to get good intelligence, either.

* * * * * From The Guardian, Long spin, gentle press:

The Bushies, however, are now accompanying their quasi-legal behaviour with news manipulation of a particularly shameless type. Indeed, we can perhaps see why the president has been so anxious to consult Tony Blair so often.
It is mildly gratifying for a small nation, otherwise pathetic enough to regard football matches as the major benchmark of national self-esteem, to be a world leader at anything at all, especially in an American-invented sport like spin-doctoring (the term is believed to date back to the Reagan-Mondale debates of 1984). But though Britain has achieved excellence in this field, the Americans are quietly fighting back. Fleischer is a world-beater.
Actually, it seems even easier to dupe the American press than our lot. The daily inquisitions of Fleischer, which look so grand on CNN, actually take place in a tiny subterranean annexe resembling a converted potting shed. Those attending are the White House correspondents, their average age surprisingly young, whose job - though involving some exotic travel and hobnobbing - tends toward a form of stenography. The stern and formulaic rules of American news reporting make scepticism difficult to express. And those who do prove awkward can be punished by the removal of access and favour. The nation's most skilled interrogators are not there, anyway. And European correspondents are effectively barred, partly by the effect of the time difference on deadlines, partly (under Bush) by maladministration of the pass system. No sane person would go twice anyway, since it is far harder for a journalist, denied the luxury of a little light torture, to extract information from Fleischer than for the CIA to get the facts from an al-Qaida hard case.

Wednesday, 19 June 2002
13:05 BST: Permalink

Sports News
Istanblog tells me that the US made it to the quarter-finals of the World Cup. So now you know where to look for that. I'm not a good person to ask, I've always hated football games of all sorts. I like to watch Jimmy White play snooker, but the game has become a bit less interesting now that all the mechanics have moved in. (Also: Go, Mets!)

* * * * * I love it when Richard Cohen gets a visit from his grandpa's ghost.

* * * * * Even I have trouble believing what amazing scam artists the Republicans are. Krugman talks about Politicians on Drugs:

Why should we have prescription drug insurance in the first place? One answer is that the voters want it. A better answer is that it is needed to preserve Medicare's original mission: to ensure that all retired Americans have access to necessary health care.
The omission of prescription drug coverage from Medicare was less a policy decision than an oversight; when the program was created, prescription drugs were not a major expense. But since then there has been a pharmacological revolution in medicine, especially for the elderly. And with sustained use of expensive drugs so essential to millions of people, what was a small omission has become a gaping hole.
Patching that hole would be expensive, but not prohibitively so. The Senate Democratic plan would cost about $500 billion over the next decade; if we could afford that $1.35 trillion tax cut, we can afford prescription drug coverage � and if we can't afford both, why not reconsider some of the tax cut? Just by canceling future cuts for the top income tax bracket, and retaining current taxes on estates over $3 million, Congress could save enough revenue to pay for the Senate Democrats' plan � and adversely affect only a handful of very affluent families.
Of course, the House Republican plan, with a price tag of $350 billion, looks even more affordable. What's wrong with it?
One answer is that in order to save that $150 billion, the Republican plan leaves many truly needy retirees behind. The Senate Democratic plan imposes fairly hefty co-payments, but then covers all subsequent expenses. The House Republican plan provides pretty good coverage for the first $1,000 in expenses, much less coverage for the next $1,000, and nothing at all after that until you reach a $4,500 annual limit. So a retiree with, say, $6,000 in drug expenses would find himself paying the full $4,500 � a crippling expense for many families.
Anyway, all that is hypothetical, because according to early reports the House Republican plan has an even bigger flaw: instead of providing insurance directly, it will subsidize insurance companies to provide the coverage.
What? Even on its face, a measure like that can only be one of two things: either it's a flat-out poison pill, or it's there to make a space at the trough for middle-men who can scoop off lots of money before delivering (not even minimal) services.

The theory, apparently, is that competition among private insurance providers would somehow lead to lower costs. In fact, the almost certain result would be an embarrassing fiasco, because the subsidy would have few if any takers. The trouble with drug insurance, from a private insurer's point of view, is that some people have much higher drug expenses than the average, while others have expenses that are much lower � and both sets of people know who they are. This means that any company that tries to offer drug insurance will find that if it tries to offer a plan whose premiums reflect average drug costs, the only takers will be those who have above-average drug costs.
A similar problem of "adverse selection" affects all insurance, but in the case of ordinary health insurance the differences in predictable expenses among individuals are narrow enough that companies can still design policies that both protect individuals and pay their way. In the case of prescription drug coverage for the elderly, insurance companies have decided that there is no viable business model � and there is no reason to believe that the House Republicans have found a way to change their minds.
Grrrrrrr.

* * * * * I found this Political Quiz at Curmudgeonry.

Tuesday, 18 June 2002
22:47 BST: Permalink

The story in The Washington Post says:
Lieberman Positions Himself Out Front
Presidential Ambitions Not Hidden
And I say:

Dear Democratic Party,
Want to increase that Nader vote? Go right ahead and nominate Joe Lieberman, why don't ya?
Your friend,
Avedon

* * * * * Christine Qui�ones is hot again. Here's a sample :

Ever since 9/11, potential critics of the administration -- those with mainstream press coverage, anyway -- have bent over backwards to say how good a job they think the president has been doing, that whatever offense to the Constitution the administration has in store in any given week must be a shortsighted act but certainly not a purposeful attack on our democracy, that the misfeasance or malfeasance in intelligence that led to the attacks is on the part of subordinates with never a hint of real accusation against the men at the top. Admittedly, whenever there's been a real threat to Cabinet-level officials or higher, a new terror alert or other distraction has arisen, and now people are beginning to see how convenient this is. But could there be more to the walking on eggshells?
Richard J. Ochs has posted a chronology that shows how the anthrax attacks on Capitol Hill coincided with the debates on the USA PATRIOT Act. So apparently Congressmen passed the bill without reading it too closely because they were too scared of possibly getting killed by their mail to pay adequate attention to the legislation they were reviewing. Once USA PATRIOT passed, the anthrax attacks stopped as suddenly as they started.
So is it possible that Congress, and the major news organizations who also received anthrax letters at that time, are pulling their punches because they're aware that someone, who the FBI knows works inside the government, may try to off them with some other less conspicuous biological agent if they get too far out of line? Given the administration's obsession with secrecy, I can imagine that even talking about a threat of this sort might constitute cause for arrest and indefinite military custody. Recall the constraints on librarians even saying they've been served with a USA PATRIOT search warrant.
* * * * * In the Amygdala comment section, Charlie Stross offers a defense of Chomsky :

The second point, however, is more important: whatever you might think of his conclusions or ideology, he brings some very useful analytical tools to the political debate. Tools which anyone can use, for any ideology -- you don't have to agree with him to use them.
What tools are these?
Well, the first insight he came up with is that repressive regimes that want to look free need to employ much more subtle tools of censorship than old-fashioned monarchies or dictatorships. (Heads up: this also goes for corporations that want to look accountable and friendly to the public interest while behaving badly -- like Enron.) Just because the propaganda doesn't come under a masthead labelled Volkisch Beobachter and isn't delivered by a guy in a brown shirt and jackboots, it does not follow that the propaganda isn't there.
The second insight he came up with is that most of us fall, at one time or another, for the "eat shit -- a trillion flies can't be wrong" fallacy; and indeed, this is the key mechanism used for propaganda in democratic societies or by corporate spin doctors. "Use Microsoft Office -- everybody else does", is one particularly unsubtle variant. More subtly, by excluding the hostile fringe from one end of a polarized debate, the impression can be generated that the centre of a debate lies elsewhere than it does in reality. (Right wing talk show host introduces barking-mad neo-nazi as "Mr right-wing", and middle-of-road Republican as "Mr left-wing". Where is the centre of this debate? And where does a socialist fit on this scale?) If you can convince people that the centre lies somewhere else, if they're hostile to your position they'll scratch their head and assume they're an extremist, so far off the map that they're marginal.
The final trick is to manufacture consent -- that is, to generate the appearance that a majority of the public favour as policy whatever unnatural perversion you're trying to run past them. Companies do this with "astroturf" campaigns, fake grass-roots write-ins to convince legislators that actually, the public _don't_ mind having a toxic waste dump on their school playing fields.
Having invented these analytical tools, Chomsky then expended about six billion words tediously applying them at length to his particular political hobby-horse. Here's a clue: you don't have to! You can make them your own. They're tools, dammit, not an ideological stance, and refusing to use them is like refusing to shop at the co-op where the food prices are cheaper because they're run by evil communists, dammit.
* * * * * FBI �guilty of cover-up� over anthrax suspect says The Scotsman:

AMERICAN investigators know the identity of the killer who paralysed the US by sending anthrax in the post but will not arrest the culprit, according to leading US scientists.
[...]
At a time when the Bush administration is beefing up America�s Homeland Security defences any indication of progress by the FBI should be good news, but one prominent and well-respected biowarfare expert believes the FBI has not only known the identity of the terrorist for months but has conspired with other branches of the US government to keep it secret.
Dr Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the biological warfare division at the Federation of American Scientists, first accused the FBI of foot-dragging in February with a scathing investigation that included a portrait of the possible perpetrator so detailed that it could only match one person.
Rosenberg said she knows who that person is and so do a top-level clique of US government scientists, the CIA, the FBI and the White House.
"Early in the investigation," Rosenberg told Scotland on Sunday, "a number of inside experts, at least five that I know about, gave the FBI the name of one specific person as the most likely suspect. That person fits the FBI profile in most respects. He has the right skills, experience with anthrax, up-to-date anthrax vaccination, forensic training, and access to the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (AMRIID) and its biological agents through 2001."
[...]
Most crucially, she believes the suspect has in the past actually conducted experiments for the government to test the response of the police and civil agencies to a bioterror attack.
"It has been part of the suspect�s job to devise bioterror scenarios," Rosenberg said. "Some of these are on record. He is known to have acted out at least one of them, in hoax form, perhaps as part of an assignment to test responses. Some hoax events that have never been solved, including several hoax-anthrax events, also correspond to his scenarios and are consistent with his whereabouts."
The question she wants the FBI and the Bush administration to answer is, why it has taken so long to arrest this man? In the unlikely event that the government divulges all it knows about what she now believes to be a full blown cover-up, Rosenberg said responsibility can be expected to fall on a number of government agencies, all with a vested interest in shielding the truth.
"Either the FBI is under pressure from the Pentagon or CIA not to proceed because the suspect knows too much and must be controlled forever from the moment of arrest," she said, "or the FBI is sympathetic to the views of the biodefence clique or the FBI really is as incompetent as it seems."
Rosenberg�s analysis suggests a combination of all three. The American defence establishment guards its secrets well and given the suspect�s covert work on their behalf their reluctance to see him publicly exposed appears natural.
Equally there is evidence that some of the suspect�s colleagues are not unhappy with the fallout from his terror attacks. Rosenberg cites David Franz, a former commander of USAMRIID who earlier this year said of the anthrax campaign: "I think a lot of good has come from it. From a biological or a medical standpoint, we�ve now five people who have died, but we�ve put about $6bn in our budget into defending against bioterrorism."

12:50 BST: Permalink

Tim Francis-Wright was kind enough to send me the Washington Post debate link I was looking for, and the link for their index page for all of the presidential (and vice presidential) debates. It's really worth reading them to see how often Bush either implies or states outright that Gore is lying whenever Bush is challenged to defend (or, in some cases, identify) his own policies.

* * * * * Jeff Hauser on what it means to have the promised war without end:

So, the conclusion is that if we are sufficiently frightened NOW to undermine the Constitution, we need to recognize that logically, those Constitutional protections are never going to return. Never. We will never be comfortably, knowably safer than now, because enemies of the US will always exist. That's the problem with defining war so broadly -- the tradeoffs we might make for anomalously threatened circumstances during a legitimate state of war invoke far greater threats to liberty when that status WILL NEVER BE REVOKED.
* * * * * Gloria R. Lalumia watched the FOX interview with Bill Clinton, and you can see the transcription and her analysis here, but what interested me was this from her recollection of a later discussion on the show:

And frankly, I was fed up, too. There was no way I was going to stick around for Cosby and the Catholic bishops! The only good thing about this program was that I got to see and hear Bill Clinton and then got to hear a preview of the GOP smear campaign that we will be seeing when the time is right. It was also good to see Eleanor Holmes Norton stick to her guns and go after Ashcroft, or as Dreier called him, "The General."
When did this "General" thing get started? The first time I noticed it, a Repubican partisan assured me that it's a "traditional" term, but I lived in Washington for 33 years, I even worked on newspapers, and I can't remember ever hearing the AG referred to that way. "Attorney General Ramsey Clark", "Attorney General John Mitchell", "Attorney General Edwin Meese III" (or "3d", in that strange construction the NYT came up with) - and I'm sure I never heard anyone refer to Janet Reno as "the General". It seems to me that the Republicans keep discovering a lot of "traditions" that no one ever noticed before - and which the Republicans themselves certainly do not apply on behalf of Democrats.

* * * * * Here's the Finder's guide to Deep Throat, detailing the sifting the students did to determine that Deep Throat might very well be Pat Buchanan, and here's Josh Marshall saying Oh, Man, is Deep Throat ever Pat Buchanan!!!. It all looks pretty believable to me.

* * * * * Dominic has the most totally sci-fi movie-looking computer photo on his June 16th entry at Epicycle.

Monday, 17 June 2002
22:48 BST: Permalink

Brad Carlton in The Baltimore Chronical says that while it might be unthinkable, we have to think it, in How Bush Hit the 'Trifecta' on 9/11--and the Public Lost Big-Time:

Whenever someone is suspected of a crime, investigators look for a motive in addition to actual proof of guilt to determine, a posteriori, whether there was malice aforethought. In cases of criminal negligence, motive must also be deduced, a priori, to answer the question: were preventive failures due to craftiness or mere cluelessness?
The serial apologists of the Bush Is Not Stupid crowd are rather incongruously opting for the latter, this in the wake of the scandal about pre-9/11 failures to issue precisely the kinds of public warnings and security directives that accompanied the also "non-specific" Y2K threats. For now, it is difficult to say who knew what when because the administration is not exactly being forthcoming, preferring instead to use the scandal as an excuse to broaden the FBI's snoop powers. However: there was a potential motive for the administration to sit on perceived terrorist threats.
Think back to the days before 9/11. The topic on everyone's lips (Condit aside) was: what will happen when budget realities force Bush to raid Social Security? He had explicitly promised during his campaign to establish a contingency fund for severe emergencies that would keep Social Security untouched. But the economy was tanking and the costs of the tax cut made the raid inevitable. Even Daniels acknowledged that the government would be forced to tap Social Security to the tune of $14 billion to fund pending legislation. Strangely, Bush kept insisting, "We can work together to avoid dipping into Social Security." But, beginning August 24, he gave himself an escape clause: "I've said that the only reason we should use Social Security funds is in case of an economic recession or war." (Three days earlier he had said that there should be "special consideration" in the budget for these contingencies. Otherwise, this was completely new rhetoric.)
September 4: businessman and commentator Ben Cohen ran a mock "help wanted" ad reading, "Serious enemy needed to justify Pentagon budget increase. Defense contractors desperate." Same day: a CBS poll found that 66 percent of Americans did not think a recession (extant, but not yet confirmed) was reason enough to tap Social Security. September 6: Bush invented another exception. "The only time to use Social Security money is in times of war, times of recession, or times of severe emergency." September 11: he had all three. Lucky Bush.
Then, on the morning of September 12, Bush announced his very first post-9/11 policy move. Because the attacks were "more than acts of terror; they were acts of war, this morning I am sending to Congress a request for emergency funding authority." On cue, pundits like Tim Russert chirped, "Suddenly the Social Security lockbox seems so trivial." Since then the trust fund has been strip-mined to subsidize pork barrel and deficit spending with no political fallout for the president.
These extraordinary coincidences have gone unremarked in the media, who have entirely missed that the terms of the "trifecta"--note that the word connotes something you bet on--was never mentioned until two-and-a-half weeks after Bush's August 6 briefing and days before 9/11. (He has since claimed the 'trifecta' was a campaign promise. This is a lie.) It is sickening to contemplate an administration intentionally looking the other way while terrorists scheme so that whatever havoc they wreak can provide cover for the president to raid Social Security. But we journalists are paid to have strong stomachs, and we should be hardy enough to admit that the scenario is conceivable, for three reasons.
[...]
Third, and by far most importantly, Bush needed to save his presidency, which by August was already in serious danger of sinking into fiscal chaos and one-term ignominy. This is a viable motive. Whether or not Bush or someone in his administration acted on it by winking at hijacking threats remains to be seen.
But it was unsettling, though still inconclusive, to read in the May 17 Washington Post , "Members of congressional committees investigating the pre-Sept. 11 warnings said yesterday that there is far more damaging information that has not yet been disclosed about the government's knowledge of and inaction over events leading up to Sept. 11."
* * * * * Eric Alterman says it's conservatives, not liberals, who advance their least admirable members by affirmative action. Well, anyone who tried to figure out how Clarence Thomas got nominated knew that. Alterman's favorite nominee is Ann Coulter:

By the time she finally got herself fired from MSNBC, Coulter was a star. (No man, or ugly woman for that matter, would have lasted remotely as long.) She found herself celebrated by the likes of John Kennedy Jr., who gave her a column in George, as well as bookers for talk shows with hosts like Wolf Blitzer, Larry King, Geraldo and Bill Maher, and quoted by ABC's George Will with the same deference usually reserved for Edmund Burke or James Madison.
Lately Coulter has gotten herself in the news again by calling for the wholesale slaughter of Arabs, the murder of Norm Mineta and the use of mob violence against liberals and Muslims. Perhaps she's kidding, but it's hard to know. We have, too, another book-length screed, Slander, this one bearing the imprimatur of Crown Publishers. As with her entire career in the punditocracy, it is a black mark on the soul of everyone associated with it. Here is Coulter's characterization of a New York Times editorial criticizing John Ashcroft: "Ew yuck, he's icky." She worries about "liberals rounding up right-wingers and putting them on trial." One could go on, and on, and on.

13:12 BST: Permalink

The truly remarkable thing about Along Via Ferlinghetti, the Beat Goes On is that it is by George F. Will:

SAN FRANCISCO -- America's gauzy popular culture has the power to envelop even its perfervid critics in a tolerant, domesticating embrace. If they live long enough, these critics run the risk of winding up full not only of years but of honors. They can, like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 83, become tourist attractions.
These tourists, he notes, are intellectually upscale. They come in a small but steady trickle, from across the country and around the world, to his City Lights Bookstore, next door to a street named after the most famous of the writers who have hung out there -- Jack Kerouac. The store, which is a short walk from the street -- actually, an alleyway, which seems right -- named Via Ferlinghetti, has been designated by this city a protected landmark. This is not because the wedge-shaped structure built in 1907 is a gem (it is not) but because of its cultural significance, which is primarily its association with Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and other designated voices of the Beat Generation.
* * * * * I really like the new look and feel of Jim Henley's site, and he's being very linkable at the moment, too. Here he's discoursing on the discourse about civilian casualty figures and how they are discussed, and here he says:

Of course, Unqualified Offerings has played some fairly frank numbers games itself, and been willing to rely on utilitarian arguments. It has taken pains to deflate the portentous term "weapons of mass destruction" because it thinks that inflated danger estimates are being used to stampede the American people over the cliff of endless war. In taking these pains, it is responding to enthusiasts for empire and intervention making a "pragmatic" case - "We'll all die!" - for the United States abandoning a prudent reluctance to engage in major wars.
Utilitarianism is dangerous, but it has a role to play.
* * * * * Alex Frantz addresses a critique of Rachel Carson:

Of course, these aren't those squishy, soft-headed, statistics that relativistic, Luddite, anti-Enlightenment liberal environmentalists love to terrify the innocent with. A good conservative/libertarian writer would never resort to such tricks, especially after just attacking an environmentalist for them. These are firm, trustworthy, conservative statistics with rock-hard pecs and abs, ready to stand up to the toughest challenge.
* * * * * Ethel the Blog looks at peer-to-peer news:

Such a refreshing example has been provided by Stan Liebowitz (via Slashdot), usually one of the house hacks at the Cato Institue who can be counted on to churn out report after report affirming the house ideology. It seems that Stan, who wrote a report back in May assuring his paymasters in the recording industry that peer-to-peer file sharing would eventually leave the industry in ruins (and the poor executives unable to afford a coca leaf much less a mountain of snow), is losing his religion. Here's Stan on why he's no longer certain that what the record industry paid him to say will happen will indeed happen.
The interview with Stan Liebowitz is not behind the Premium wall at Salon and is well worth having a look at.

* * * * * Atrios recalls some real White House vandalism, quoting from a 1993 WP article:

WASHINGTON -- When President Clinton's top aides moved into the White House in January, many of them had trouble getting their computers to work.
That's because during the night of Jan. 19 and into the next morning -- President Bush's last hours in office -- officials wiped out the computerized memory of the White House machines.
* * * * * Rebecca Knight discusses The Media's Violation of Public Trust:

In our society, large corporations are a more common source of censorship than governments: Media outlets killing stories because they undermine corporate interests; advertisers using their financial clout to squelch negative reports; powerful businesses using the threat of expensive lawsuits to discourage legitimate investigations. The most frequent form of censorship is self-censorship: Journalists deciding not to pursue certain stories that they know will be unpopular with the boss. Those reporters who have the courage to buck the pressure from the top run the risk of losing their jobs as corporate media conglomerates are getting rid of the few remaining aggressive television investigative reporters.(5)
One of the best reports I have read about behind the scenes manipulation of the media is an account put together by makethemaccountable.com that details the interference of Jack Welch, then head of GE, on the reporting of all the media outlets under the GE umbrella.(6) Welch was contacted by Karl Rove in 1999 and was convinced by Rove that it would be financially beneficial for GE to have Bush in the White House. Welch had long believed that it was ludicrous for news organizations to work in conflict with the best interests of the corporations that own them. Welch proceeded to influence the news from GE sources to promote GE's financial well being.
Imagine that the only reporting you read or saw about the two candidates for president in 2000 came from your local newspaper or the big three networks. If you did not have the Internet with which to explore the facts, would your opinion have been skewered by the news media reports that Al Gore was an accomplished liar and George W. Bush was a "compassionate conservative?" See the difference?
Of course, if you actually believe that Gore is a pathological liar and Bush is "compassionate", you probably don't see the difference.
[Editorial kvetch: This is the third time in a single week I have seen someone haplessly reach for the word "skewed" and miss. Is our children learning?]

* * * * * Send a Voodoo Curse. Or do some Very Virtual Voodoo.

Sunday, 16 June 2002
17:42 BST: Permalink

Public Service Announcement
I used to be a singer - a good one. I haven't done it much lately. And here I am with the sort of thing someone like me dreams of - the new Buffalo Springfield boxed 4-CD set with demo versions of some of their stuff without back-up vocals. What that means is that I can harmonize bare with Neil on "Out of My Mind", right? Ah, glorious! Except...it's not, because I'm so out of practice that I'm missing the notes, losing the flow. And it hurts. I thought it was hard-wired, y'know? I could never not be able to do it. And yet.... Well. Any ex-musician in the world probably has encountered something like this and knows what I mean, but: Don't let this happen to you.

* * * * * Airport profiling:

Private citizen Al Gore learned that last week - not once but twice. Traveling to Wisconsin, the former vice president was pulled aside for random security screening at Reagan National Airport before boarding the 7:15 p.m. flight to Milwaukee on Friday. Passengers sharing Flight 406 were startled to hear Gore being told, "Sorry, sir, you have to go through extra screening," and to witness security personnel rifling through his briefcase and suitcase, a witness said.
[...]
On Saturday afternoon, when Gore was leaving Milwaukee's Mitchell International Airport, he was taken aside for some extra scrutiny at a Midwest Express gate before boarding a flight to New York, said Gore spokesman Jano Cabrera, who accompanied him during both checks.
[...]
"Despite the fact that he won more votes than anyone else in the history of America, except for Ronald Reagan, he is more than happy to do his part for airport security.
"As I recall, he shook the hands of all the airport screeners afterward and thanked them for doing the jobs that they're doing and asked them to keep up the good work."
* * * * * Mark Morford gets fan mail:

I am an utter moron. I am a total imbecile. I am the enemy.
[...]
I am apparently many, many very unpleasant things that can't be printed here, but simply recall all the absolute crudest, most juvenile curse words you ever heard from the thickest jock in junior high (don't forget the gross bodily functions) and rearrange them at will � la magnetic refrigerator poetry, and you'll have some idea of the feedback I often get.
But more than anything else, the absolute worst thing that can apparently be said about me among the spurts of hate mail I invariably receive whenever one of my more politically charged columns pokes at the oozing sores of rage over at some right-wing Web site, is this: I must be gay. Really, really gay.
No, not gay. A fag. A world-class spineless AIDS-ridden dope-smoking rainbow-flagged liberal whiner super-fag, one who lives in a city and in fact an entire state that apparently a very large contingent of "real" Americans genuinely wishes would "get bombed by the terrorists and fall off into the ocean after you all get f--king AIDS and die you liberal pussy faggot traitors." That is pretty much a direct quote.
I bet Aaron Brown is glad he doesn't get his mail.

* * * * * Reading The Washington Post
What has happened to Dana Milbank? I'd been getting the impression that he was the designated "guy who doesn't just write PR for the Bush White House" for The Washington Post, but he seems to have been demoted:

The president who spoke here today was not the same president who spoke in New Haven a year ago. Bush aide John Bridgeland told reporters this morning that the president's speech, serious and grave, was inspired by the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Pope John Paul II, Aristotle, Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, Georg