SHORTHOPEUNFILTERED

2011-06-17T12:38:00.003Z

Reading the good old Almanack. Thinking a little about Benjamin Franklin's proverb “He’s a fool that makes his doctor his heir.” Why trust your health to a person who would profit by your death? This quote floats up every time I hear a conservative expatiate upon their plan to save Medicare. Why would we trust the health of the Medicare system to the group that has endlessly clamored for its destruction? Ronaldus Magnus said that if Medicare passed, it would inevitably lead to a socialist dictatorship, where we would "tell our children what it used to be like, when men were free.":

Conservatives hate Medicare, they see it as a permanent issue favoring democrats, and a drain on a public fisc they desperately want to dedicate to other things, like a massive new tax cut for the wealthy.

Ah, well. I'm sure that fox will do a fine job guarding that henhouse. He has such excellent references.

2010-04-16T15:00:00.004Z

US Grant has the tea partiers' number:

After the second night at Goliad, Benjamin and I started to make the remainder of the journey alone. We reached Corpus Christi just in time to avoid "absence without leave." We met no one not even an Indian--during the remainder of our journey, except at San Patricio. A new settlement had been started there in our absence of three weeks, induced possibly by the fact that there were houses already built, while the proximity of troops gave protection against the Indians. On the evening of the first day out from Goliad we heard the most unearthly howling of wolves, directly in our front.

The prairie grass was tall and we could not see the beasts, but the sound indicated that they were near. To my ear it appeared that there must have been enough of them to devour our party, horses and all, at a single meal. The part of Ohio that I hailed from was not thickly settled, but wolves had been driven out long before I left. Benjamin was from Indiana, still less populated, where the wolf yet roamed over the prairies. He understood the nature of the animal and the capacity of a few to make believe there was an unlimited number of them.

He kept on towards the noise, unmoved. I followed in his trail, lacking moral courage to turn back and join our sick companion. I have no doubt that if Benjamin had proposed returning to Goliad, I would not only have "seconded the motion" but have suggested that it was very hard-hearted in us to leave Augur sick there in the first place; but Benjamin did not propose turning back. When he did speak it was to ask: "Grant, how many wolves do you think there are in that pack?" Knowing where he was from, and suspecting that he thought I would over-estimate the number, I determined to show my acquaintance with the animal by putting the estimate below what possibly could be correct, and answered: "Oh, about twenty," very indifferently.

He smiled and rode on. In a minute we were close upon them, and before they saw us. There were just TWO of them. Seated upon their haunches, with their mouths close together, they had made all the noise we had been hearing for the past ten minutes. I have often thought of this incident since when I have heard the noise of a few disappointed politicians who had deserted their associates. There are always more of them before they are counted.

From Grant’s Memoirs, via Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is the best blogger going right now.

2009-12-04T15:07:00.005Z

Out here in the perimeter there are no stars. Out here we is stoned, immaculate. Please see this absolutely crazy video dispatch from a British news program regarding the in-combat drug habits of the Afghan Army. I was speaking with a friend about Afghanistan yesterday, and I said that there is really no end state, just a variation between two options; we stay and keep al Qaeda and the Taliban at a handsbreadth bay, or we leave, and al Qaeda reestablishes bases out in the trackless wastes between population centers, that we can perhaps keep an eye on by keyhole satellite and occasionally bomb. My friend, who voted Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Kerry, Obama, said “well, why can’t we just start the second option now, because the first will turn into the second eventually anyway, in the long run. We can’t and won’t stay there forever. Why don’t we just start the future now, and stop the active war? Every close action we fight, every bomb we drop in a populated area, we just lose track of the narrative and let the worst people in the world characterize us as murderers. We bomb a base, and all they have to do is put up a sign that says 'hospital,' shoot a picture, and post it on the web.”

To which I replied that he was right, but the problem was, of course, that the worst people in the world had already been given so, so many images that anything they get now is just a bonus. When you’ve given the world this, what else is needed? I don’t disagree with his point, but the whole thing is just such a desperately sad, fucked-up disaster (witness the video linked above, with the teenage soldier, blind high, chuckling and wandering unsteadily out on the veranda to empty his clip at the sky, while the professional Brit soldiers crouch behind the covering stone wall) that it’s hard for me to really be “for” or “against” any option.

I know that's a cop-out, but in a lot of ways, so is sending in another 30,000 troops and crossing your fingers. Not that I don't hope it works, because I do, I really, really do. Just as I felt about the surge in Iraq - I thought that was going to be an abject failure, but hoped for the best. I was wrong about that - while the Iraq escalation may not have been the legendary success some say, it certainly was not an abject failure. So here's hopng I'm wrong about this one, too.

2009-04-22T00:23:00.005Z

Money is money. Kevin Drum discusses the article-du-jour about Wall Street traders aghast at the notion that they are perceived as greedy or overpaid. The article is full of a lot of guff from the Masters of the Universe about how this is unfair because "we're in a hypercapitalistic society" and nobody minds if A-Rod makes $300 million. And my point isn't necessarily to dispute either of those points. The reason these guys are overpaid, and will never get that, is their entire attitude about their profession.

These folks believe, and have always believed, that they are involved in an independently significant industry, like cars or computers or agribusiness or something. They aggrandize themselves as a "sector" and equate their profits to the profits made by successful companies that retail actual products and services to the public.

However, they are not like these entities at all. They claim to provide "financial services," but what does this really mean? For many, it doesn't mean insurance, or business lending, or any of the other essential risk industries, but rather it means trading, seeking to make money with other peoples money in order to make money for oneself. And these people see this as the highest form of capitalism and further see their own wealth as patriotic, or objectively laudable, as if they have accomplished something, built something permanent besides a large number in their checking account.

Sez Drum:

Sherman quotes another Wall Streeter who's livid over Obama's plan to raise tax rates slightly on the rich. "He doesn’t want to have any wealth creation," the guy wails, and that really seems to get to the heart of all this. Financial industry players sincerely seem to view all "wealth" as equal. If the market pays you a lot, it's because you're responsible for creating a lot of wealth, and that's that. The fact that the wealth you created was largely divorced from even a notional real-world benefit to the larger economy doesn't matter. Money is money.

This is exactly right. I have had infuriating conversations about exactly this with Republican friends and relations who simply view every tax bill as a crime scene, and believe that any money that is somehow pried free of the market into a form that can be pocketed is "wealth creation," and therefore pocketing it is a moral imperative. In other words, since they became wealthy, they were ipso facto engaged in "wealth creation," and "wealth creation" is good, so they must be good (or, at least, above criticism).

But this ignores the nature of the business, and what they made these fortunes doing. OF COURSE they were able to divert large quantities of money into their own pockets. There is nothing surprising about this - they work at the intersection of all the money in the world. There are not many thirsty people living next to (or standing in) rivers.

But on a deeper level, that metaphor is all wrong. These traders don't seem to realize that this money is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. Nor is this money in its roaring billions something they themselves have made, like a car or a pizza or a clean carpet. Rather, this great tide of money is something to which they have attached themselves, in order to profit. Each and every dollar in the flow comes from somewhere. Each of these dollars belongs to someone until these guys extend their arms and catch a hatful. And the hats are scooping whether the stream grows larger or smaller.

This idea is kind of ripped off from Matt Taibbi's absolutely spectacular takedown of the moronic letter from AIG trader Jake DeSantis published in the NYT whining about how he had been victimized by the change in the political winds. Taibbi just crushes him with a mallet:

He acts like he's a victim because he didn't get to keep his after-tax bonus of $742,006.40 in the middle of a global depression. And he really loses his fucking mind when he writes:

"None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house."

First of all, Jake, you asshole, no plumber in the world gets paid a $740,000 bonus, over and above his salary, just to keep plumbing. Second, try living on a plumber's salary before you even think about comparing yourself to one; you're inviting a pitchfork in the gut by even thinking along those lines. Third, Jake, if you were a plumber, and the electrician burned the house down -- well, guess what? If you and that electrician worked for the same company, you actually wouldn't get paid for that job.

Out in the real world, when your company burns a house down, you're not getting paid by that client. It's only on Wall Street, where the every-man-for-himself ethos is built into an insanely selfish and greed-addled compensation system, that people like you expect to get paid in a bubble -- only there do people expect their performance bonuses no matter how much money the shareholders lose overall, no matter how many people get laid off after the hostile takeover, no matter how ill-considered the mortgages lent out by your division were.

You expect that money because you think it's owed to you. But what money? The money is gone. Your boss, if not you, set it all afire. You want the money, but where exactly do you think it's coming from?

Do you just not understand that that money now would have to come out of someone else's pocket? That it would have to come from middle-class taxpayers, real plumbers, people who didn't make millions over the years in equity and commodity trading?

Here's the real problem with people like Jake DeSantis. Throughout this whole period, they never were able to connect the dots -- to grasp the fact that when they skimmed a million here or a million there off the great rivers of capital that flowed through their offices, that that money came from somewhere, from someone. To them, it wasn't someone else's money, it was just money, and why shouldn't they have it?

It's remarkable that when DeSantis, in his letter, touts the reason he deserves his high compensation, all he can talk about is how much money he made: "The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation."

For a guy like this, his worth as a human being is wrapped up in buying a bag of beans for $10 and selling it for $11. He states this like it's a law of nature: he was a good equities-and-commodities trader, therefore he should make a lot of money.

Only a person with a habitually overinflated sense of self-worth could think he deserves a $700,000 retention bonus, even if it has to be paid by taxpayers, when in reality no one "deserves" that much money. It may be that some people do get paid that much, but most people who make that much money have enough sense to realize their cushy lifestyles are an accident of fate, of birth, of class, not something that is "supported" by some unwritten natural law of compensation.

Hey Jake, it's not like you were curing cancer. You were a fucking commodities trader.

Amen.

Johnny Cash image stolen from Matt Bors - I didn't come up with it, I take no credit for it. If you like it, go buy the shirt.

2009-01-16T15:48:00.008Z

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Paul Krugman's column today argues forcefully against Obama's recent signals that he would not seek an investigation into criminal actions by the Bush administration. Krugman makes a number of strong points, but in the end, I have to admit that I am completely exhausted with and viscerally sick of Bush, and I just want that smirking fratboy pinhead to get the fuck out of here and go back to real Merka.

I of course realize that such a reaction is exactly what every scandal-ridden administration hopes for, what every miscreant hopes for, that cataloguing and punishing their bad behavior will eventually seem like just too big a pain in the ass. The sad fact is that it is easier to smear shit on the walls than it is to clean it up. Sometimes, you just want to move out of the goddamn shit-smeared house and start over somewhere else. I just can't get my head around the idea of spending the next four years rummaging around in the fetid trash heap of the Bush administration's executive record.

That's my reason, and it's a bad one. Equally bad is the oft-cited argument that such a measure would worsen partisan divisions. I don't buy this because I don't really give a shit what pisses off Republicans at this point. Fuck 'em.

But that's just an emotional reaction. Krugman's takedown of the same argument is much sharper, and kind of unassailable:

One answer you hear [in defense of letting it go] is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible, shouldn’t there be some penalty for the Bush administration’s politicization of every aspect of government?

He's right, of course, but still...investigations, subpoenas, grinding minutia of dozens of aging scandals competing for attention with each other and sucking the juice out of the Obama agenda, and, as Kevin Drum said on a similar topic, what if they get off? I know, I know, my position is in many ways cowardly, but I can't deny that, like Tom Tomorrow said in 2003...2003!...outrage fatigue has set in, and I just want to turn the goddamn page already. And I don't think I'm the only one.

2008-11-04T19:40:00.004Z

Recycled. From this very blog, 11/5/2002:

IT'S ELECTION TIME IN AMERICA, AND EVERYTHING IS DARK. The conventional wisdom streams in its majestic flooding channels far above our heads, emanating from the tops of towers thousands of feet high, from satellites like near-space quasars, billowing power and information indiscriminately, everywhere, blasting radioscopic cones of force into the ether, into the collective unconscious, into us, Very Long Array telescopes in reverse, not relatively tiny instruments seeking outward into a vastness to find objects of unimaginable power, but overwhelmingly powerful global technological networks looking downward, inward, hunting within the smallness of our prejudices, our instincts and reflexes to find small, powerless phenomena, seeking the elusive interstitial phantom of our attention, our loyalty, our purchases, our vote.

So, go vote.

You heard the man! Get out there!

2008-10-21T20:23:00.006Z

My pick for Obama's Treasury secretary: Andrew Lahde, the Manager of the Lahde Capital Management hedge fund, who volubly predicted, bet his investors' money on, and reaped a shitload of money from, the subprime collapse. Lahde recently posted an open letter to the Financial Times announcing the wind-down of his fund. I paraphrase his primary points below:

1) I got rich because all you Ivy-League-legacy, Wall Street masters of the universe are a bunch of pampered arrogant dumbshits.

2) Having cashed in on your blind greed and stupidity, I'm going to go live my life now. Don't call me.

3) George Soros is a genius, and should fund a summit on the state of American government, which is irrevocably fucked; and

4) Pot is awesome, and should be legal.

So, maybe a bit of a maverick pick, but what the hell. Via Kevin Drum, in his new digs.

2008-03-22T18:04:00.003Z

Good times in the 512
SXSW trip report, for anyone interested, may be found here.

2007-11-12T20:48:00.000Z

Moderation...to the extreme! Time for a quick object lesson on why Atrios matters and is awesome. Okay, read this post on TPM Cafe by legal scholar Cass Sunstein. Now read this post by Atrios. Never mind, don't bother, I will quote it in full: "Extremism: I do not think that word means what Cass Sunstein thinks it means." In single sentence Atrios has put his finger directly upon why the Sunstein post is so wrong-headed, and why that matters. I will now try to accomplish the same thing in fifteen sentences or so:

Sunstein writes about an experiment wherein small groups of politically like-minded people are polled about political issues both before and after a group discussion. The results indicate that these discussions tend to reinforce the strength of common opinion among the group. For example, a group of liberals who polled as mildly in favor of affirmative action, or the U.S. signing and abiding by the Kyoto protocols, etc., prior to a group discussion with like-minded peers will poll as strongly in favor of these things after the discussion. Conservatives who are mildly against, say, civil unions for gays are strongly against them in the wake of a group discussion with other conservatives. The lesson that Sunstein draws is that "self-sorting into groups of like-minded types will often produce greater extremism."

But this is, of course, completely wrong. "Self-sorting into groups of like-minded types" may produce greater agreement regarding a given position, but that does not render the position agreed upon any more or less extreme. "Affirmative action is a good idea" is not an extreme position, and neither (sadly) is "gays should not have legally protected partnership rights." Nor are those people who hold such positions "extremists." The fact that talking with people who agree with you tends to reinforce your opinion does not really strike me as surprising, nor does it say anything valuable about either political extremism or the role of "self-selected groups" in the spread thereof.

People like Sunstein operate from a core belief that there exists some blessed state of "moderateness" that means, I guess, that you can be talked out of any position or principle you happen to have. Under Sunstein's argument, the more strongly you believe in something, the more "extreme" (and by definition farther out of the mainstream) you are. The less confident you are in your beliefs, the more subject to the prevailing winds, the more mainstream you must be. Surely, Sunstein would characterize this pliable state of grace as open-mindedness, and praise those who are willing to take a clear look at new proposals on their own merits, rather than interpreting them through the lockstep dogma of one "extreme" wing or another of the dominant ideologies. And that would sound very nice.

But it's bullshit. No amount of talking is going to convince me that gays shouldn't be able to get married. Why? Because I believe that the law shouldn’t discriminate against inherent traits, regardless of whether a bunch of bible-thumpers think those traits are sinful. I'm a Democrat because I believe that the Democratic positions on these issues are, in fact, correct, and the Republican/conservative positions are, in fact, wrong. 55% of the country thinks civil unions (at a minimum) should be provided for in the law. Obviously, then, a full 45% of Americans think they shouldn't be. These are just not extreme positions, no matter how vehemently they are held.

So, in the end, I believe in some stuff. That doesn’t make me an extremist - in fact, lots and lots of people agree with me on some of that stuff. Sometimes we even get together, and when we talk politics, we (gasp!) agree with each other. If we have had a few drinks, sometimes we even say "goddamn right!" or some such expression of our emphatic agreement. Stop the fucking presses! It's a veritable beer hall putsch of extremism!

Whatever. Atrios is right to continually point out that too many mainstream commentators seem to believe that the defining characteristic of a healthy body politic is a reflexive willingness to concede core principles in order to achieve harmony and "centrism," as if there is just something . . . unseemly about conviction.

2007-11-09T15:32:00.000Z

In the Short Hope Unfiltered tradition of passing along incredible beer ads (remember this?) we hope you enjoy this (click the image to watch the video).

Plus, in a related vein, this, which is just awesome.

And this, which is longer, and on a smaller scale, and also very awesome.

via BoingBoing.

Okay!

2007-11-09T14:11:00.000Z

When the devil met the devil. Ah, cynicism. It exudes a reek like a breath of sweet acrid brimstone wafting over our national discourse. And here we have a 72-day dry aged prime cut of the stuff from whence a mighty stench is emanatin'.

In the background, the sigil of Regent University (formerly Christian Broadcasting Network University), spawning creche of a new generation of noxious right-wing political operatives.

On the left, the aspirant, the blessee, his face tugged into a slight grimace, with the typical Giuliani exasperation with being forced to do anything..."Oh, god, let this be over with and let me get out of this dirtwater burg so I can finally get the fucking jesus freaks in my corner..."

On the right, the aging batshit gladhander, the blessor, managing to keep the babbling crazies from pouring out of his mouth for the few minutes he has to spend in the sanitized national spotlight before he can go back to his oddly unexamined private mediasphere where he can burble undisturbed about how he can leg-press 2000 pounds through the power of prayer and a patented energy shake, and how fags and commies caused god to "lift his protection" from America and allow the planes to crash into the WTC..."Oh, this horrible little New York jew...he's a jew right? Oh, no, wait, he's a Catholic, they're just as bad...but gotta keep those satanist Clintons out of the White House...they performed human sacrifices in the basements there, don't you know..."

Made for each other.

2007-10-04T17:21:00.000Z

Walter Kirn recently described the human mind as "a small ethereal colosseum where angels smite demons and demons play dead." I thought of that quote when I saw this picture by Alex Brown (via BoingBoing). I have no idea why, but I did.

This poor little fucker, drowning in technology and media, he never had a chance. That's the problem with children and media. It provides these elaborately constructed fantasies that never live up to the promise, a promise that kids have a grand capacity to believe, over and over again. The kid got the mask and probably thought it would be the coolest thing ever. But it's not. He's not Darth Vader. He's just a little kid sitting by himself in a sterile corner of a shitty fast food restaurant with a plastic bucket on his head. When the media feed is removed, we all feel a little self conscious in that moment - a little foolish for letting ourselves forget that it's all bullshit.

But, hold on, that's just cheap pathos - there's no such person as Bobby Shaftoe, but I sure think everyone ought to read Cryptonomicon. The little fantasies of childhood are just training for the bigger and better ones of adulthood, in a sense, including that disappointment when the lights come on and you are just some 8-year-old jerkwad in an ewok costume. One of many things you have to learn, some fun, some not so fun.

Still, look at him.

Poor little guy.

Plus, diving helmets!

Also, I like to see this kind of rapid, effective response politics being done by any democratic campaign:

Supporters of Rudolph W. Giuliani and of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton are embroiled in their first major affray of the political season over a ballot initiative on presidential electoral votes some 2,500 miles from the pancake houses of Skaneateles, N.Y., and the fire stations of Queens.

The fight could be a telling prelude to the 2008 presidential contest, with the political instincts and strategies long employed by Mr. Giuliani, a Republican, and Mrs. Clinton, a Democrat, cast in sharp relief. The battle has reflected their political set-to in 2000, when they squared off briefly over a United States Senate seat in New York, and could foreshadow how the game will be played should they become their parties’ nominees.

The proposed measure here would ask voters to apportion electoral votes by Congressional district, potentially giving the Republican nominee in 2008 some 20 of the state’s 55 votes — the rough equivalent of winning Illinois or Pennsylvania — in this otherwise reliably Democratic state.

Such a change could amount to a seismic shift in the nation’s electoral dynamics, potentially springboarding a Republican into the White House, and the possibility has animated hopeful Republicans and fearful Democrats.

Started by a Republican lawyer in California, the measure has been driven almost entirely by people who are associated with or have given money to Mr. Giuliani’s presidential campaign.

The effort to kill the initiative — executed with a swift fierceness almost unheard of against an initiative in such an early stage — has been led by a bevy of Clinton supporters, including a former Clinton White House official, prominent elected Democratic supporters and one of Mrs. Clinton’s most prolific fund-raisers.

“Clinton’s people have taken the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive military strikes against hostile nations and applied it to domestic campaigns,” said Bruce E. Cain, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “As for Giuliani, he was trying to fight under the radar, and it must be clear to him now that that will not work with Hillary.”

[ . . . ] Mr. Lehane, whose thumbs are no doubt sore from constant BlackBerry messages to reporters, has raised endless questions about the source of financing on the other side. The group initiated a complaint with the Federal Election Commission questioning the ties of the measure’s supporters to Mr. Giuliani, largely because Mr. Singer did not immediately reveal himself to be the donor behind the effort. The Democratic group even dug up a charges from a 17-year-old lawsuit against one official backing the initiative, a charge involving the biting of a woman’s bottom, and disseminated that as well.

Amid the accusations and pitfalls, Thomas Hiltachk, the lawyer who drafted the initiative, walked away from the effort, citing ethical concerns about the way the money was raised. His resignation has left the initiative’s future in serious jeopardy, and many Republican consultants around the state are advising their clients and friends to steer clear of the effort, suggesting it will be challenged on constitutional grounds if it passes.

Still, some Republicans are seeing a missed opportunity, worried that the Giuliani loyalists are being outmaneuvered by the Clinton loyalists.

“Lehane did a good job of rallying the entire Democratic establishment to be vocal and aggressively against this,” said Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist who ran Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. “And the gang that couldn’t shoot straight proved their worth.”

Via Kevin Drum. I love to see stuff like this. Turning aggressive moves by GOP fixers into stumbling blocks, leaving them in the media to look stupid for a few minutes, then deep-sixing them. This could all turn around, I suppose, but in the short term, this is the kind of campaign that's going to be necessary for a Democrat. Think about it. In an election year where the GOP are clearly the underdogs and have almost nothing positive to run on, do you think their tactics this time around are going to be more or less sleazy, duplicitous, aggressive and conscience-free than those employed during 2004, The Year of the Swift Boat? Yeah, that's what I think too. I have mixed feelings about HRC, but I know for sure that a Giuliani presidency would represent the starting gun for the Apocalypse, and we're going to need counterpunchers.

Okay!

2007-09-27T17:55:00.000Z

The Country Is With Us! It has long been conventional wisdom among liberals (and among me, when I talk to myself) that the only real problem the Democratic party has is GOTV efficiency; that in an era of low turnouts, Republicans' ability to get the faithful out to the polls makes elections much closer than they would otherwise be if everyone in the country voted. This is why Democrats push things like national voting holidays and motor voter, while Republicans try to scare people with specters of "illegal immigrant voting" to push "voter registration" laws the real purpose of which is to make voting more of a hassle and ensure that fewer people do it. Undergirding this belief is an assumption that the majority of Americans are sympathetic with liberal policy goals (and an assumption that liberals really don't like to vote).

Kevin Drum has a useful post on this subject, not exactly refuting this pleasantly back-patting belief ("deep down, the country is with us!"), but offering some much needed perspective. The short version is that in isolation, in a context free environment (such as, say, answering a phone poll question asking "Do you think women should have access to legal abortion?"), these tendencies do exist. But, when these questions are asked in the context of the worst, most inflammatory arguments against them ("Do you think a woman should have access to legal abortion including the right for a woman and her doctor to partially deliver a viable foetus before tearing it to pieces and throwing it away?") these numbers shift unpredictably. And the modern political environment is one in which the absolute worst possible reading of anyone's opinion is immediately presented by their opponent as fact. So the voting decision is much more like the second question than the first.

Okay!

2007-07-26T16:45:00.000Z

Via Kevin Drum, a seriously, terribly horribly bad idea from M.J. Rosenberg:

The Constitutional remedy of impeachment is no longer what it once was. For better or worse, the Republicans changed it, for all time, when they impeached Clinton over, essentially, nothing.

And Clinton changed it as well. Impeachment not only did not end his Presidency; it did not hurt his standing with the public. His numbers stayed high, even improved some, and he left office on schedule, a very popular President.

In other words, impeachment is no longer the political nuclear bomb it once was, especially if one knows in advance that conviction and removal from office is unlikely to occur.

Accordingly, impeachment proceedings are essentially the best means of getting information to the public which is otherwise unavailable.

What the fuck? With the possible exception of the swift boat debacle, nothing in the last decade of politics has been as cynical, ugly, opportunistic, cheap, debilitating or indefensible as Clinton's impeachment. The sanctimony on parade, the wild inflationary rhetoric, the complete and intentional paralytic lockdown of the media and the government - all of it occurred because of EXACTLY THE KIND OF THINKING DISPLAYED IN THE QUOTE ABOVE. This metaphor is bound to offend many of my remaining 4 readers (hi, mom), but: it's like hitting on a rape victim because you know she's not a virgin. Just because the GOP debased something that was literally supposed to be the absolute last option, does not mean that such debasement enters the arsenal as an accepted or acceptable tactic.

Note also that he indulges in a lazy and self-serving shortcut to declare the cheapening of impeachment as a fixed reality "for all time" because of the single example of the Clinton impeachment. "For all time?" Really? By that argument we should stop vilifying Guantanamo, because Roosevelt interned the Japanese, thus compromising 4th and 5th amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure and conviction without due process "for all time." It's facile bullshit.

Yes, I know, you get big cheers from the lefty backbenches when you deploy that idea, and hell, you could probably convince me there have been some real impeachable offenses during the last 6 years, but if that's so, make the case. Don't just think abstractly about how useful a tactic it is. But this - "especially if one knows in advance that conviction and removal from office is unlikely to occur" is unforgiveable. Impeachment is the last line of defense. Rosenberg's coy 'especially' would permanently reduce it to theater.

As Drum said: "This might be the worst argument in favor of impeachment of all time."

A-men.

...grumble grumble grumble fucking swift boat bullshit....grumble....

2007-05-22T00:54:00.000Z

Enough with the Al Franken already! Yes, I haven't posted in forever. No, I'm not really starting again, as I'm still in the throes of job transition and haven't located that chink in the day's armor that allows me to do so. But! Al Franken must stop leering out of the screen whenever my two remaining readers stop by on their way to the sites linked to the left. So! Here is the cover of Head Hunters by Herbie Hancock because..well, because Head Hunters is a fucking awesome record is because.

Seriously, it is. Go buy it.

This is also great.

As is this.

This hasn't grown on me yet.

2007-02-15T15:17:00.000Z

Al Franken is running for Senate in Minnesota against Norm Coleman. His interesting and avuncular announcement is here. His campaign site is here. Also worth checking out is this essay (with photos) about his latest USO trip (Franken has become a fixture on the USO circuit, visiting Iraq four times and Afghanistan twice). Best clip from the essay is Franken's discussion with a dog handler who guarded Saddam's cell:

He told me Saddam is very charismatic and kind of liked him, although he knows Hussein is a monster. Saddam, he told me, claimed to be puzzled by Bush. "I don't know why Bush is doing this to me. I was a good president. Reagan, him I liked. He gave me helicopters."

So, good for Franken. I still miss Paul Wellstone, though.

2007-01-31T22:55:00.000Z

On another note, how has nobody noticed that the Blair government is embroiled in a major, and possibly fatal, fundraising scandal?

2007-01-31T21:47:00.000Z

Don't ask why I was reading this, but I found the following fascinating passage in Congressional Decree 1441 of the Guatemalan Labor Code. It is as clear a statement justifying labor law as I have ever seen, and it is written directly into the law:

Ideological characteristics of labor law [include] the following: Labor law is a necessary and imperative right. The minimum benefits granted by law are mandatory and limit the principle of "will autonomy." which wrongly assumes that the parties have full discretion to improve a contract, and their will is not affected by economic/social factors and disparities.

I love it. This gets at the nugget of what galls me about the whole conservatarian "right to work" argument (and, frankly, so many of the Free Market Jesus arguments such people so frequently employ). The "right to work" argument posits a world of free contract that does not exist, and simply ignores the fact that employment transactions are not conducted in a vacuum, with each employee given independent standing to negotiate his or her worth. At the lower-skilled, lower-paid positions, the jobs are take-it-or-leave-it propositions, with no negotiations whatsoever regarding salary or working conditions, in fact no leverage at all on the part of the prospective employee. A fundamental goal of labor law is to recognize that, given the interchangeability of low- or non-skilled employees, unregulated employers will lower the terms of that take-it-or-leave-it offer as much as possible. Labor laws force the terms of such deals to be set above minimally acceptable standards of living in a free and just society.

In an unregulated economy, economic desperation will force some people to take the deal, regardless of whether the salary won't cover expenses or the job is highly unsafe. Generations of coal miners toiled and died young choking on dust in clapboard shacks before the unions and then the government forced these conditions to change. In the laissez-faire world envisioned by the conservatarians, the vaunted "freedom" to walk away and choose not to contract is simply the freedom to be unemployed and dependent on shrinking government assistance. In fact, as unemployment insurance and welfare programs have been reformed to require recipients to pursue and accept any possible means of employment, the laborer may not even have this option, and may be forced to enter whatever contract the employer offers. This "freedom," then, is utterly one-sided, and waving the flag of liberty to justify removal of minimum wage/safety/etc. standards is simply rhetoric of the most empty, cynical kind.

The truth is that "freedom" is not the libertarian principle most at work in such arguments. Rather, the real principle being vindicated is that libertarians (and conservatives of a libertarian bent) simply believe that there is no such thing as a minimally acceptable standard of living. It is an article of faith for them that the weak and unskilled will be ground beneath the wheel, and there isn't anything the government should do about it. Distortion of natural market forces is to them a greater crime than permanent reduction of some sectors of the labor market to abject penury.

This Guatemalan code provision identifies and rejects this false front (which it refers to as "will autonomy") as the paper-thin rationalization that it is. And its right there in the law, so no one can play games parsing the statute's meaning later on.

This code provision isn't new, and this isn't news, I know. I should also say that I have no real idea whether, on the whole, Guatemalan workers are treated well and fairly. Maybe (independent labor monitoring success story), maybe not ("Virtual slave conditions prevail on the majority of Guatemala's coffee plantations").

2006-12-26T15:10:00.000Z

There are seven acknowledged wonders of the world. You are about to witness the eighth. James Brown, 73, died on Christmas day.

Yes, he was a troubled man, and lord knows he was a sinner. But you can't watch, say, "When We Were Kings," or this awesome clip posted by Atrios, and see him driving that band on stage, pouring everything into that crowd, all his passion, all his heart, all his love, all his power, out into the world, without seeing something beautiful. So c'mon, St. Peter. Let a man come in and do the popcorn.

2006-11-27T20:54:00.000Z

Semantics. NBC News is now calling it a civil war. CNN's Michael Ware, speaking from Baghdad, states bluntly that anyone who persists in calling it anything else is indulging in "the luxury of distance." CNN's John Roberts, upon his return from Baghdad, describes the situation in the capital as "an absolute mess . . . nothing but a state of chaos." (video at link; transcript here):

KURTZ: If you're sitting at home watching it on TV, you see mass kidnappings, suicide bombings, mosque bombings, death squads. When you're there as a journalist, does the situation seem as chaotic to you as it does to a viewer?

ROBERTS: You know, Howie, I had a perception of Iraq going in, and it was the first time I'd been there in three-and-a-half years. I got out a couple of days after the Saddam statue fell, after the initial invasion. So it was quite a shock to go back and see the chaotic state that the country was in. And as -- I guess you could say as realistic as my perceptions were about going in there, the reality on the ground far exceeded that.

The place is a mess. It's an absolute mess. There is nowhere you can go in the Baghdad area as a Western journalist without an escort, where you could feel safe from being kidnapped, shot at, whatever. The amount of death that's on the streets of Baghdad for U.S. forces and for the Iraqi people is at an astronomical level.

I was out riding with a Stryker unit a couple of days after the election. They got the 911 call, an IED attack against an American convoy. This convoy of Humvees had just been driving up the on-ramp on to a highway when one of those formed projectiles hit it.

It literally disintegrated the guy in the passenger seat, who was right there where the projectile came through, killed the driver. I watched him die on the roadside.

And when you look at that from such a personal level, it does affect your perceptions of what's going on on the ground. And I know that that's not everywhere, all the time, but it does suggest that death lurks at every step in Iraq, and any place where death lurks at every step can be in nothing but a state of chaos.

KURTZ: So in a nutshell, you're saying that the coverage -- that the situation in Iraq on the ground, as you saw close up, is worse -- is worse than it appears from the television and newspaper coverage. Why is that? Why are we not capturing the full anarchy there?

ROBERTS: Because television can't -- and even print -- can't fully capture the scope of what's going on in Iraq.

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has many germane observations, but its all just more words to go on the pile (a pile which includes this post as well). The truth is staring us in the face - this war is a pitilessly devolving clusterfucked nightmare that is tearing the guts out of Iraq.

If nothing else, you should watch the Michael Ware clip. The "are you fucking kidding me" look on his face when Kyra Phillips primly asks him whether or not Iraq is in a civil war speaks volumes.

2006-11-22T16:23:00.000Z

Frivolous. Over at Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy tears apart this column by Richard Cohen, in which Cohen recounts his personal experience with supporting idiotic wars when it was safe and easy to do so, and then condemning them when it became more difficult. Of course, he casts this history as a personal journey of discovery through Vietnam and now Iraq, and his hand never stops moving as he...er...pats himself on the back for his own profound humanism. Hilzoy, skilled eviscerator that she is, makes short work of this nonsense, but she also hits on something behind Cohen's smug, supremely onanistic ruminations:

[H]is article contains one of those sentences that, all by itself, shows that the person who wrote it should never be taken seriously again, at least about policy -- a sentence that should take its place in the Pundit Hall of Shame alongside Jonah Goldberg's "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business" [paraphrasing the equally execrable Michael Ledeen], or Tom Friedman's "We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind". Here it is, in all its glory:

"In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic."

Richard Cohen: resign. Resign right now.

I won't belabor the point, but there really is something disgusting about an argument for war that resorts to such glibness. Cohen could, of course, simply say what he means - that an intervention in the Middle East could have had positive political consequences for both the U.S. and the nations of that region - and then set out the reasons he believes this to be true. He would be wrong, of course, but he at least would have stated a position. By adopting an arch clinician's posture and winking at his readers through the diphthong of "therapeutic," Cohen reduces a call for extreme violence to a sophisticate's cocktail chatter. And I don't care how "prudent" it is, war is extreme violence. Modern armies kill many people and destroy homes, businesses, and civil infrastructure with high-powered explosives. This is not, in itself, an argument against war, but an accurate description of it. This whole stupid disaster in Iraq was conceived and caused by people who think about these issues in the same inexcusably frivolous manner as Cohen clearly does.

Sigh. Well, Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! Make a donation to the USO if you are of a mind to - no matter where you stand on the war, its just got to suck being in Iraq or Afghanistan for the holidays.

2006-11-21T16:24:00.000Z

Did you know that Africa is larger than the United States, China, Western Europe, India and Argentina combined? Well, I didn't, and it is.

2006-11-09T18:44:00.000Z

Ahhh. THAT's more like it. As I noted yesterday, I was somewhat surprised by Wednesday's mild RedState post in response to the GOP collapse in the Congress. But you cant keep a good vat-grown conservapod down, as evidenced by Mike Streiff today:

November 8, 2006. A decade or so from now when a rational post mortem on the Iraq War is written, rather than the noxious and counterfactual hit pieces churned out by the Washington Post’s allegedly unbiased reporters, this is the day that will be pegged as the day we lost the war. It’s amazing how easy it is to do this in hindsight. I think most historians would agree that June 22, 1941 was the day that Nazi Germany lost the war. Some might quibble and contend it was February 2, 1943. But you can’t get to Stalingrad without Operation BARBAROSSA. You can’t get to Midway or the atom bomb without passing through Pearl Harbor.

The sacking of Don Rumsfeld yesterday will become obvious in the days and weeks to come as the day on which President Bush decided that winning in Iraq was just too much work and the sacrifices made in blood and treasure in Iraq, when stacked up against the forlorn possibility of appeasing the new majorities in the House and Senate, simply do not matter. [ . . . ]

There is no doubt that dissatisfaction with the War in Iraq contributed to the electoral defeat on Tuesday, however that dissatisfaction is rooted an much in the feeling that we are not prosecuting the war vigorously enough as it is in the feeling that we should not be there at all.

Mmmm. That's good wingnut. I knew I could count on you guys.

2006-11-08T20:32:00.000Z

Gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. Took a schadenfreude-laden stroll through the right-wing blogs this morning, and was unsurprised to find all of the upright, manful usual suspects dealing with the setback uprightly and manfully. See (if you care): Hugh Hewitt (it's all McCain's fault, and the terrorists intentionally killed a bunch of soldiers last week in order to give the Dems a boost); RedState (actually not bad; it's the common "we lost it, they didn't win it" line, but they do call for Allen to accept the outcome without litigation), Powerline (it's not the Dems, it was us; we have lost the one true conservative path, plus this gem: "Yesterday's biggest winners: illegal immigrants."), Jonah Goldberg (stating inexplicably that Bush is only "technically" a lame duck...what the fuck are you talking about?), Little Green Footballs* ("our job of saving the world just got a little harder"), and so forth. Glenn Reynolds, of course, twitchy little weed that he is, is claiming to have known it all along, and gosh that Jim Webb sure is an impressive fellow, isn't he.

On a lighter note, however, Hugh Hewitt is fucking insane:

President Bush will not flag in the pursuit of the war, and Senator Santorum is now available for a seat on the SCOTUS should one become available.

Can't move...head exploding...denial field...too massive...creating black hole singularity...may...destroy...universe...

*no link, b/c lgf redirects incoming links from liberal blogs to p0rn sites. If you really want to read it, cut and paste this link into your browser: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=23261_The_Morning_After&only.

On second thought, don't bother. It's just not worth it.

2006-11-07T20:20:00.000Z

So we're both right.
From Studio 60 last night:

Conservative: "I don't even understand what the culture wars are about anymore."
Liberal: "Your side hates my side because you think we think you're stupid. My side hates your side because we think you're stupid."

Sure hope they don't cancel that show. As for today's events, I am intentionally ignoring all media until tonight, when they will have, y'know, actual election results. I do, however, think that TBogg is in the ballpark with these predictions:

- No matter how many seats the Democrats take in the House it won't be enough to keep the Republican echo chamber from pointing out that it most certainly is not a mandate, while all the time whining about the loss of control of the commitees.

- Joe Lieberman is going to win and it will somehow translate as support for the war and civility and common sense...and nobody in the media will point out what a sleazy campaign he ran.

- There will be at least one upset that the polls didn't predict and that will be held up as evidence that all polls are always wrong...except when they side with your candidate.

[ . . . ]

- Win or lose, George Allen's national aspirations are finished. Fertig! Verfallen! Verlumpt! Verblunget! Verkackt!

- Lots of recounts.

More at the link.

2006-11-06T19:16:00.000Z

This account of a summer internship spent working for a misinformation contractor in Baghdad is fascinating. The author was paid to place stories written by U.S. military intelligence in the Iraqi press. It presents a now-familiar cocktail of the arrogance, sleaziness, incompetence, and naked greed that has characterized so much of the Iraq adventure and its motley cast of military and private players. Not only were the stories falsely bylined with Iraqi names, but the contractor charged the Army a huge markup over the rates it was actually paying the Iraqi papers.

Because I had just two short months in Iraq, I emailed Bailey and Craig back in Washington after several days of inaction. What projects could I begin working on? I wanted to know. Who was in charge here? What could I do to contribute? A day later I received a rather brusque response from Paige Craig. They didn’t have time to deal with my little problems. I needed only to take my lead from Jim Sutton, the country manager, whom I had seen just once during my first week.

But my badgering did seem to pay off. I was soon contacted by a Lincoln Group employee named Jon, who formerly had run political campaigns in Chicago and now worked on the company’s I.O., or Information Operations. Over lunch at the recently bombed and rebuilt Green Zone Café—an air-conditioned tent with plastic chairs and a TV airing Lebanese music videos—Jon explained that he was returning home for several weeks of R & R and that Jim Sutton had chosen me to be his replacement. Jon quickly sketched out my new I.O. responsibilities. An Army team inside the Al Faw palace, another of Saddam’s former residences, would send me news articles they had cobbled together from wire stories and their own reports from the field. It was my job to select the ones that seemed most like Iraqis had written them. I was then to pass these articles along to our Iraqi employees, who would translate the pieces into Arabic and place them in local newspapers. Jon told me that the U.S. Army could hardly carry out this work in their military uniforms, so they hired Lincoln Group, which could operate with far fewer restrictions. It was a bread-and-butter contract, he said, that paid the company about $5 million annually. I asked if the newspapers knew that Lincoln Group or the U.S. military were behind these articles. They did and they didn’t, Jon said. The Iraqis working for us posed as freelance journalists, but they also paid editors at the papers to publish the stories—part of the cost Lincoln Group billed back to the military. “Look,” Jon assured me, “it’s very straightforward. You just have to keep the military happy.”

The author begins with high hopes that the internship working with the Iraqi press will jumpstart his nascent journalism career, and winds up barrelling through Baghdad's Red Zone in the back of a battered sedan, clutching a loaded submachine gun and sitting on 3 million dollars in cash. Read the rest, as they say.

Oh, yeah, plus the election. Go Jim Webb!

2006-10-06T14:04:00.000Z

The Plug and the Avocado. No, it's not the name of Thomas Friedman's latest book. Just go watch. Via Atrios.

2006-09-13T17:28:00.000Z

Playing offense. Greg Sargent posts this anti-George Allen ad from the anti-war veterans group Vote Vets, harshly criticizing Allen's vote against supplemental appropriations for troops in Iraq (including funds for body armor). It's one of the most aggressive political ads I have ever seen, but it is extremely effective, and does not come off as dirty. And it appears to be accurate; the roll call is here. Don't be misled by the "Yea" next to Allen's name; the vote was for a motion to table (i.e. kill) a supplemental appropriations bill proposed by Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana for "an additional amount for National Guard and Reserve Equipment, $1,047,000,000." The brief text of Landrieu's amendment is here (scroll to the bottom).

Ironically, the very next amendment (SA 453) is one proposed by Senator Allen, which would make it easier for victims of "a foreign state's act of torture, extrajudicial killing, aircraft sabotage, or hostage taking" (or their families) to sue the foreign state for money damages. Barn doors and horses. Way to keep your eye on the ball, Senator.

2006-09-03T18:33:00.000Z

Everything that is wrong with the hard-war right, distilled into a single person. Suppose you hear a story about a terrible thing that happened in the Middle East. Two journalists for a major American network are kidnapped by Islamic terrorists, and are eventually forced at gunpoint to participate in a ceremony wherein they purport to convert to Islam. This ceremony is videotaped, and the tape makes its way into the Arab media. The two are eventually released.

Pop quiz! Your reaction to this is:

(a) It's meaningless. Anyone observing the tape would have to be an idiot to think that the conversion was anything other than utterly coerced.

(b) It's an unfortunate media image of Western weakness, but understandable. These men have families.

(c) I am a useless fucking douchebag.

UPDATE - Make that distilled into two people.

2006-08-19T21:51:00.000Z

IT SUGG! EAT MY SHORT YOU KILL KENNY!
Long live Alicublog.

2006-08-18T17:33:00.000Z

Polls breed questions. For example, review of PollingReport's Iraq page yields some interesting numbers. Withdrawal from Iraq beats staying the course 52%-45% in last week's USA today poll, and 63% of respondents to the CBS/NYT poll say the war was not worth fighting. On August 9th, CNN's poll showed 60% against the Iraq war. At the same time, however, this Harris poll from 7/21/06 finds that 64% of Americans believe that Saddam had "strong ties" to Al Qaeda, and 50% believe that Iraq had WMDs when the US invaded.

Several of these percentages overlap (i.e. are at or over 50%, and so must be held in common to some degree). Therefore, it seems that there is a sizeable subcategory of people in this country who believe all of the following (a) Saddam had WMD's, (b) Saddam was linked to 9/11, and that the Iraq war is such a fucking debacle that it wasn't even worth fighting.*

Think about how disgusted with the war you have to be to believe that Saddam was in on 9/11 and stocked with WMD's, but that looking back, it wasn't worth the cost to topple his government.

* Yes, I know, this point tends to discount the basic unreliability of polls and the dangers of assuming that different polls measure the same population. But the overlaps are well above the MOE for any of the cited polls, so I think the point is basically fair. If the polls are to be believed, at least 10% of the American public believes all of those things.

2006-07-28T16:10:00.000Z

Anthony Bourdain was in Beirut when the bombs started to fall and was trapped there for over a week, and wrote about the experience for Salon - Watching Beirut Die:

Everything had begun so beautifully. Our fixer, Lena, was bursting with enthusiasm when she met us at the airport. After months of preproduction, finally we were here! Finally, the American television crew had arrived -- to show the world how beautiful her country was, how lovingly restored, how hip and forward thinking in the years since the bloody civil war. On the first day of filming, we'd had a sensational early lunch of hummus, kibbe, stewed lamb and yogurt at Le Chef, a local, family-style joint in a charming neighborhood. The customers at the tables around us in the tiny, worn-looking dining area chattered away in Arabic, French and English. Stomachs full, my crew and I headed over to Martyr's Square and the Rafik Hariri memorial; a few blocks away, our fixer and friends pointing out old scars and new construction, trying to explain how much Beirut and Lebanon had changed since the man's death in 2005. They spoke effusively of the calm, the peace, the relative tolerance that had followed the galvanizing effects of Hariri's assassination. Each smiled and pointed at the giant photographic mural of the million-person demonstration that had led to Syria's withdrawal from their country; Ali, our unofficial tough-guy escort, pointed at a tiny dot among the hundreds of thousands in the photo and joked, "That's me!"

They were so proud of how far they'd come, how much they'd survived, how different and sophisticated Beirut was now. They spoke of all the things they had to show us, the people we had to meet. Significantly, the word "Syria" was still spoken in slightly hushed tones. Speaking too long, too loud or too harshly of their former occupier, it was suggested, could still get you killed. (An outcome not without precedent.) We walked along the road leading to a cordoned-off area by the St. George Hotel, where Bardot, Monroe and Kim Philby had once played -- back when Beirut was called the "Paris of the Orient" without a hint of irony. The buildings in the area were still in ruins, a roof torn off, the old hotel -- under construction when the targeted blast that killed Hariri occurred -- still empty. The Phoenician, across the street, which had also been destroyed, had recently been completely rebuilt. A modern hotel like any other, but they were proud of that too. Because, like Beirut, it was still there. It was back.

Then, in the blink of an eye, everything went sideways: Relaxed smiles froze and disappeared. Suddenly, there was the sound of automatic weapons firing randomly in the air from a nearby neighborhood. And fireworks. Then cars -- a few of them -- teenage kids, women and adults, some leaning out the windows and waving Hezbollah flags and flashing the "V" for victory sign, celebrating what we were told, after a few quick cellphone calls, was the grabbing of two Israeli soldiers. Our fixer, a Sunni; Ali, a Shiite; and "Marwan," a Christian, who'd just minutes ago been pointing proudly at the mural -- all three looked down in embarrassment, a look of sorrow, shame and then resignation on their faces. Someone muttered "assholes" bitterly. They knew -- right away -- what was going to happen next.

Read the rest.

2006-07-19T02:21:00.000Z

I always hated Adam Carolla, but this is funny. Via Bob Mould.

2006-07-18T17:28:00.000Z

Matt Yglesias makes an excellent point about a popular narrative framework into which the Arab-Israel struggles are continually shoved:

The "real problem," according to our liberal Reform teachers, was the leaders of the various Arab states. These autocrats presided over fairly crappy polities that did poorly by their own citizens (true). One strategy they adopted to maintain power was to cast attention away from themselves and onto the Israelis and their treatment of the Palestinians (true). The lack of good-faith concern for the fate of Palestinians could be seen by these governments' shamefully bad treatment of Palestinian refugees (true). Ergo, the "real problem" in Israel/Palestine was the leaders of the Arab states stirring up trouble (false).

As I say, that was the generic version of the story. Then we got the Iraq version of the story. Now we're hearing the Syria/Iran version. It all amounts, however, to a failure to admit the obvious -- that Palestinian rage is, whether or not you think it's justified in any or all of its particulars, perfectly authentic. The "real problem" is exactly what it superficially appears to be -- Palestinians by and large want things that Israel won't give them and won't be made happy by concessions of the sort offered at Camp David or by "unilateral disengagement."

That is the real problem. Peace would require either concessions Israel doesn't want to make, or a major change in Palestinian public opinion. Outside actors -- others states in particular -- most certainly do inject themselves in the situation for more-or-less cynical reasons, but they don't create the situation. Rather, they inject themselves into it because the situation exists and doing so serves their ends.

This is true, and pretty important - even if Hezbollah and the Assad government and Iran did not involve themselves in the "Palestinian question" (which they do, and which Saddam Hussein used to do with great zeal and bad effect), there would still be a "Palestinian question." There is no peaceful groundstate that would prevail if those damned Arab autocrats would just stop their infernal meddling.

This matters even more, because it tends to get piled up behind the arguments for war on all fronts against these autocrats, in an orgy of what Gregory Djerejian has aptly labelled "faith-based adventurism." This position has of course caused the stupidest man in the world to label the conservative Djerejian an "appeaser." It is stunning (or not really so stunning) to hear such a 20th Century construction - that (1) everything can be explained by the actions of a few powerful men, (2) deposing these men will change the character of their nations, and (3) that popular movements are essentially irrelevant, or only relevant as stalking horses for established political interests - coming from the same people who shrilly insist that the world has been entirely remade since 9/11.

2006-07-18T17:23:00.000Z

Overheard in the hall. "That's just stupid. If they can ban peanut butter, why can't they ban matches? Matches are much more dangerous."

2006-07-07T12:55:00.000Z

Hamdan's thin reed. Like many others, I was very pleased with the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan for many reasons, chief among which was the fact that the Court ruled that the AUMF did not grant the Bush Administration the right or authority (explicit, inherent, or otherwise) to ignore the strictures of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in providing adequate due process to Guantanamo detainees. That ruling is a good thing in and of itself, but the resonating implication of this holding is clear - if Bush's C-in-C hat didn't allow him to traduce the UCMJ, then it doesn't allow him to ignore DISA either, and AG Gonzalez's defense of the NSA spying program has been revealed as the self-serving authoritarian bullshit that it is.

The decision is not perfect, however, and stands in part on thin ice. Over at Obsidian Wings, Katherine is posting a series of arguments about the applicability and scope of the Geneva Conventions, largely responding to a number of scatterbrained arguments from the right that we have just given al Qaeda a "Right to Jihad," or some such overheated nonsense. One of the posts contains an excerpt from the Red Cross's construction of the meaning and purpose of Article 3. As Katherine points out, the ICRC has a unique right to opine about the meaning of the Conventions:

The Geneva Conventions would not exist without the ICRC. The Red Cross is specifically named in the 1949 Conventions, and specifically given the legal right to visit prisoners and offer assistance to victims of war. There is no organization in the world better qualified to say what the letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions require.

Here are some excerpts from the ICRC's official commentary on Common Article 3:

This Article, which is common to all four Geneva Conventions, marks a new step forward in the unceasing development of the idea on which the Red Cross is based, and in the embodiment of that idea in international obligations....

Up to 1949, the Geneva Conventions were designed to assist only the victims of wars between States. The principle of respect for human personality, the basis on which all the Conventions rest, had found expression in them only in its application to military personnel. Actually, however, it was concerned with people as human beings, without regard to their uniform, their allegiance, their race or their beliefs, without regard even to any obligations which the authority on which they depended might have assumed in their name or in their behalf....

To borrow the phrase of one of the delegates, Article 3 is like a "Convention in miniature"...It is very different from the original draft produced by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which provided for the application of the Conventions in their entirety. But the wording finally adopted was certainly the best amongst the various drafts prepared during the Conference. It has the merit of being simple and clear. It at least ensures the application of the rules of humanity which are recognized as essential by civilized nations and provides a legal basis for interventions by the International Committee of the Red Cross or any other impartial humanitarian organization -- interventions which in the past were all too often refused on the ground that they represented intolerable interference in the internal affairs of a State. This text has the additional advantage of being applicable automatically, without any condition in regard to reciprocity. Its observance does not depend upon preliminary discussions on the nature of the conflict or the particular clauses to be respected. It is true that it merely provides for the application of the principles of the Convention, but it defines those principles and in addition lays down certain rules for their application. Finally, it has the advantage of expressing, in each of the four Conventions, the common principle which governs them....

the scope of application of the Article must be as wide as possible. There can be no drawbacks in this, since the Article in its reduced form, contrary to what might be thought, does not in any way limit the right of a State to put down rebellion, nor does it increase in the slightest the authority of the rebel party. It merely demands respect for certain rules, which were already recognized as essential in all civilized countries, and embodied in the national legislation of the States in question, long before the Convention was signed. What Government would dare to claim before the world, in a case of civil disturbances which could justly be described as mere acts of banditry, that, Article 3 not being applicable, it was entitled to leave the wounded uncared for, to torture and mutilate prisoners and take hostages? No Government can object to observing, in its dealings with enemies, whatever the nature of the conflict between it and them, a few essential rules which it in fact observes daily, under its own laws, when dealing with common criminals....no Government can possibly claim that it is ' entitled ' to make use of torture and other inhuman acts prohibited by the Convention, as a means of combating its enemies.

This excerpt is powerful, but there is something else about it I find troubling for the longevity of the Hamdan decision. One of the preliminary issues confronted by the Court was whether Article 3 could be said to apply to the global struggle with al Quaeda in which Hamdan was swept up. Common Article 3, by its own terms, applies only to conflicts "not of an international character."

The majority in Hamdan construed Article 3's limitation to "conflicts not of an international character" as being "in contradistinction to a conflict between nations," i.e. Article 3 only excluded wars declared between established states (where Article 2 would apply). This definition clearly would apply to the US war against al Qaeda in which Hamdan was taken.

The dissent averred that "conflicts not of an international character" meant internal conflicts, civil wars, etc. The U.S. intervention in Afghanistan could not be described as an internal conflict. The Red Cross excerpt (with its references to "the internal affairs of a state," "rebels," and "civil disturbances") seems to support the dissent's reading.

If the ICRC is indeed the best qualified entity to construe Article 3, this construction tends to cut against the Hamdan majority.*

I'm not crazy about this aspect of Hamdan, because it tends to concede the Government's position that Hamdan was captured in the "struggle against al Qaeda" and not the "struggle against the Taliban," rendering Article 2 inapplicable. Allowing the Government to play semantic games with facts that only it controls gives the Government a green light to determine from precedent what facts will give them a pass, and then simply represent those facts as being true. No one will contradict them, because who can? Who outside of the US Government has any idea what is happening inside Bagram prison right now? Nobody, that's who.

More later, I hope, but right now I gotta go. Go read the rest of Katherine's posts, they are great.

* there could be some arguments about how we were participating in a civil war between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, but if we were fighting the Taliban, Article 2 would apply, and the Court has given up on that argument, as discussed below.

2006-06-29T03:42:00.000Z

Overheard on I Street: "You know, nothing ever changes in my life. It's all the same. They are all up there now, all gone. My chickens, my kitties, that little bird on the roof, my sweetheart. And now my septic system is fucking busted."

Not meant to express my mood, just the mood of a guy sitting down the wall from me earlier today talking too loud on his cell phone. How's everybody doing out there?

2006-05-26T15:20:00.000Z

Dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail... Desmond Dekker, dead at 64. I read through the last couple of posts here - angry, angry, angry. And I'm not a particularly angry person, even, I just play one on the internet, I guess. Don't get me wrong, some of this nonsense pisses me off amazingly, and I am left spluttering and breathing funny. But what can you do? De policeman get taller, de soldier get longer, and de rudeboys a weep an a wail. So, why not mention the following: Temperance Hall is a great new bar that has opened up near my house, so that is always great news. This is really funny (or at least, I think it is. "I'm a website!" Ha.) This is a really good record, as is this. This is going to be fucking amazing, and I can't wait to see this. So there you go; Desmond Dekker is eating rotten green chicken in heaven, and this triggers a new birth of optimism. Go figure. The rudeboy's out on probation, and the rudeboy bomb up de town.

2006-05-22T12:58:00.000Z

Coward. From Matt Yglesias, guest-posting at Talking Points Memo, this takedown of Senator Pat Roberts, (R-Kansas):

"I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties," Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) remarked at yesterday's Hayden confirmation hearings, "but you have no civil liberties if you are dead." This comes via Dave Weigel and nicely encapsulates at least three different pieces of horribly misguided rightingery.

First off is the sheer cowardice of it. Sure, liberal democracy is nice, but not if someone might get hurt. One might think that strong supporters of civil liberties would be willing to countenance the idea that it might be worth bearing some level of risk in order to preserve them.

Second is just this dogmatic post-9/11 insistence on acting as if human history began suddenly in 1997 or something. The United States was able to face down such threats as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany without indefinite detentions, widespread use of torture as an interrogative technique, or all-pervasive surveillance. But a smallish group of terrorists who can't even surface publicly abroad for fear they'll be swiftly killed by the mightiest military on earth? Time to break out the document shredder and do away with that pesky constitution.

Last, there's the unargued assumption that civil rights and the rule of law are some kind of near-intolerable impediment to national security. But if you look around the world over the past hundred years or so, I think you'll see that the record of democracy is pretty strong. You don't see authoritarian regimes using their superior ability to operate in secret and conduct surveillance to run roughshod over more fastidious countries. You see liberalism prospering -- both in the sense that the core liberal countries have grown richer-and-richer and in the sense that liberal democracy has consistently spread out from its original homeland since people like it better. You see governments that can operate in total secrecy falling prey to crippling corruption. You see powers of surveillance used not to defend countries from external threats, but to defend rulers from domestic political opponents.

The U.S.S.R., after all, lost the Cold War, not because we beat them in a race to the bottom to improve national security by gutting the principles of our system, but because the principles underlying our system were actually better than the alternative. If you don't have some faith the American way of life is capable of coping with actual challenges, then what's the point in defending it?

Late Update: Reader S.L. reminds me that Patrick Henry had some thoughts on a related subject.

"This dogmatic post-9/11 insistence on acting as if human history began suddenly in 1997." A-fucking-men. All these steely-eyed, flagwaving rationalists running around in circles and calling everyone with a dry crotch "unserious."

This position, that civil liberties must take a backseat at the first sign of danger, is just ahistorical and stupid. And don't give me any of that "Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus" crap. First of all, that's not all he did. He also used the military to shut down (and in some cases destroy the presses of) opposition newspapers, and had political opponents arrested. Moreover, the Emancipation Proclamation was a military edict effective only in occupied territory precisely because the 13th Amendment hadn't passed yet, and enforcing the proclamation in loyal slave states like Maryland would have been unconstitutional. So, fine. But Lincoln was confronted with 11 million people in open rebellion and a loss of 2/5 of the country's land area. So, a somewhat bigger problem. Second of all, why go leaping backward to an example from a lost era, when the Cold War goes ignored? The stakes were higher, and the nation more recognizeable as our own, but all the wingers want to talk about is Lincoln. Why? Oh, we all know why, goddammit.

Also, I hadn't read the Patrick Henry speech in a while. It's pretty amazing. "They are meant for us: they can be meant for no other."

2006-04-28T14:53:00.000Z

I have a lot of scattered opinions regarding the particular place the new United 93 movie holds in the snapshot weltanschauung of 2006, but the current crop of anguished cries of "it's too soon," and "I can't bear to watch" are driving me fucking nuts. Sullivan in particular teeters on the edge of, and then falls abjectly into, the religiosity that has infected the public remembrance of 9/11:

I regard the acts of those men and women to be an almost sacred moment in the history of America and of freedom. And sometimes, the sacred is best respected through silence. Sometimes, the greatest deeds, like the most monstrous acts, are best left unrepresented. They stand alone. They demand to be left alone. One day, commemmorate. But do not so swiftly represent.

This genuflection would be as affecting as Sullivan intended if it weren't so entirely self-serving. Sullivan obviously treasures, and has treasured, his self-image as one of the brave few who really understands the new world, when in fact he is the epitome of the cowardly millions who have completely misunderstood it. 9/11 didn't change the world. Terrorism's been around for a while, and people much smarter than Sullivan have been thinking about it and fighting against it for a long time, too.

What changed the world was not 9/11, but our hysterical reaction to it. Having been punched directly in the face, we have lashed out in every direction but the right one, indiscriminately slapped our friends, kicked strangers, until finally we found some likely target who kind of looked like the guy who punched us (and was somewhere we could get at him), and beat the ever-loving shit out of him.

By abstracting 9/11, by turning it from something specific that happened into a force and symbol of change, we create a ready excuse for almost any compromise. I won't (and don't have nearly enough time to) enumerate all of the ways that our posture toward the world, and our definitions of government power have changed. Support these changes or hate them, there is no denying that we have undergone a far-reaching revolution in a very short time. I said something like this back in 2002, but here goes again - We didn't lose any freedom on 9/11, and the criminals who carried out the attack didn't hate freedom. They hated America, as America had been explained to them. The only freedom we lost was what we gave away because we didn't know what else to do.

Listen, I don't know if I would have been strong enough to charge up the aisle and try to end flight 93 in a burning field rather than in the subcellar of the White House. I hope so, but I don't know. It was an extraordinary act of clear thinking and sacrifice, and truly heroic, if that word is to have any meaning. What stupidity, then, to avert our eyes and bathe these real people in a penumbra of saccharine holiness that is just another name for our own confusion.

That idiocy aside, obviously not everyone looks away; some stare with feverish intensity. The author of the Slate article linked above wonders why United 93 has been the subject of three movies, while the extravagant heroism of the NYC firefighters and cops running into the burning WTC has not been celebrated, or at least dramatized, nearly so much. He waffles and gropes for an answer, but the answer is simple. Because in a movie about flight 93, we get to see an American attack an actual Al Qaeda member and beat him to death with a fire extingusher, or something. And this is not surprising. There they are. No ghosts of Tora Bora, no grinning phantom Zarqawi and his regenerating leg, there they are, right there, standing by the cockpit door, the ones that did it, that made me this afraid, that made me this sick, this confused, this displaced from my former understanding. Kill that motherfucker! Kill him!

2006-04-12T14:01:00.000Z

The timeline:

1. Spring, 2003: In the wake of the US invasion, flatbed trailers carrying complex mechanical equipment are found in the desert. These trailers jibe with descriptions of mobile bioweapons labs described by Iraqi expat "Curveball" and referred to by Colin Powell in his speech to the UN.

2. April, 2003: Military experts look at photos of the trailers. They state that they believe the trailers are bioweapons factories. Other experts in government disagree.

3. Early May, 2003: The Defense Intelligence Agency convenes a team of nongovernmental subject matter experts to go to Iraq, study the trailers, and resolve the controversy.

4. Early May, 2003: These experts go, and within 4 hours they all are completely convinced that the trailers have nothing to do with bioweapons, nor could they be converted to such use. "It would be easier to start all over with just a bucket." says one member of the team.

5. May 27, 2003: The team's report expressing these conclusions is forwarded to the White House.

6. May 29, 2003: Bush proclaims that the trailers had been found to be mobile "biological laboratories." "We have found the weapons of mass destruction, " he declares.

7. 2003-2004: For the next year, despite the DIA's report, the President, Cheney, and multiple other White House personnel continue to claim that the trailers were found to be bioweapons factories.

8. April 12, 2006: I read the article narrating these events and am in no way surprised.

UPDATE - point 3 corrected (all of the experts were non-governmental civilians).

2006-04-04T21:24:00.000Z

Delay gone. I don't have much to say except "good." I won't get into the current nonsense about how he quit because the race was getting too "nas ssty," But one thing really caught my eye in all the hue and cry. Today, Digby posted without comment a year-old "Open Letter to Conservatives" from lifelong Republican fixer Morton C. Blackwell, a board member of the American Conservative Union. The letter is from March of '05, at the height of DeLay's righteous self-defense. The letter is both a shameless paean to Delay, and a headlong attack on the traditional wingnut bugaboos, "the leftist organizations and liberal media."

Blackwell said that DeLay is "upright and innocent," and all of the allegations against him are lies, spread by "vicious" and "unscrupulous" leftists and their media puppets, who are just "re-hashing the same foggy complaints," motivated only by their "burning hatred of a good man." The letter is a call for conservatives to rise up against the leftists, in a massive protest campaign supporting DeLay.

But this is all par for the course, and not at all surprising.

What is really classic about this is the final paragraph, which I quote here:

Please don't get bogged down answering all the absurd, groundless attacks. The left can and will raise phony new issues faster than you can respond to the old ones. Congressman DeLay has fully and publicly dealt with these false or nit-picky issues.

In other words, don't bother learning enough about the allegations to rebut them, loyal soldiers. If the allegations seem credible, it's just more lies, and the left are too slick for you to keep up with their forked tongues. Just trust me that everything has been taken care of, the Congressman has fully responded to all the allegations (but you don't need to know what he said). Just call your congressman and tell them you want them to support Tom DeLay.

Blackwell is a lifelong party man, from Goldwater on, and has spent his life in politics; he is neither a grassroots zealot or a wide-eyed hagiographer. He is a fixer, whose job it has always been to keep the troops dumb and angry. And this is just perfect, as Tom Delay has made his life exploiting the dumb and angry. They are two Elmer Gantrys, Blackwell puffing up DeLay, DeLay filling the coffers of the party Blackwell is paid to run. All the while, preaching, preaching, preaching, preeaching, never losing that moralistic whine.

These dead-eyed hypocrites are rotting our country away from the inside, and I am delighted to see one of the main tumors respond to the fucking chemo.

2006-03-10T23:20:00.000Z

Roy! Haynes! From the NY Times, a casual interview and listening session with the most musically hip drummer in jazz history. Via Doug.

2006-02-23T13:14:00.000Z

Real quick. Via Drum, an NYT article about a new compendium of current and historical statistics about the United States, in which it can be discovered that right now, in America:

Fewer than 1 in 10 black children under 5 live with both parents; workers with the highest hourly wages now work the longest hours; there are more religious workers (also bartenders, gardeners and authors) than ever recorded, and more shoemakers than at any other time since the Civil War; only half of Americans have access to fluoridated water; a growing share of poor people live in the suburbs; philanthropy compared with the gross domestic product has been declining since 1960; more Protestants and Jews say they attended religious services within the last week than at any time in the last 50 years; the nation is producing record amounts of broccoli; it took four days on average to travel between New York and Boston in 1800; attendance at horse-racing tracks peaked in 1976, but rodeo attendance is at an all-time high; and the proportion of people who have no opinion in presidential approval polls is the lowest in a half century.

Well, it is a statistical compendium, so "right now" probably actually means "a couple of years ago," but the importance of the collection is that it allows you not only to observe that, say, church attendance is at such-and-such a level, but compare that level over long stretches of time. Pretty neat. I'm not going to shell out the $825, however.

Also, from a couple of days ago, this from hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, which lays out something about the current defenses being offered for Bush's warrantless spying program that I think is critical, and that I'm surprised has not been more widely noted:

I was eating lunch, turned on CSPAN, and as luck would have it, a speech by President Bush was on. I usually find the President's speeches unwatchable, since they consist of sentences like "You know, what some people don't understand is, our enemies are really bad people." But on this occasion, for whatever reason, I watched it. And what struck me was that if I had no knowledge whatsoever of current events -- if, for instance, I had just beamed in from another galaxy -- he might sound persuasive. As it was, though, it was so completely detached from reality that it was downright surreal. And so I kept listening, in wonderment, as this speech appropriate to another world entirely moved from one bizarre claim to another, leaving me wondering whether it was me or the President who had gone through the looking glass. And what started me wondering was this statement:
"You know, a lot of us grew up thinking that oceans would protect us; that if there was a threat overseas, it really didn't concern us because we were safe. That's what history had basically told us -- yes, there was an attack on Pearl Harbor, obviously, but it was a kind of hit-and-run and then we pursued the enemy. A lot of folks -- at least, my age, when I was going to college, I never dreamed that the United States of America could be attacked. And in that we got attacked, I vowed then, like I'm vowing to you today, that I understand my most important priority. My most important job is to protect the security of the American people."

Just savor this bit: "when I was going to college, I never dreamed that the United States of America could be attacked."

That just can't be true.

George W. Bush graduated from Yale in 1968. For several decades before and after 1968, the Soviet Union had an enormous number of missiles trained on American cities. Whether or not Bush had to do "duck and cover" drills in school, he would have been the right age. Did he somehow overlook the Cold War? Did he fail to notice that an awful lot of people were extremely worried about the possibility that large chunks of our country might be turned into a pile of radioactive wreckage? I know he was apolitical, and that he drank his way through his 'young and irresponsible' years, but still, I can't imagine any state of apolitical intoxication so deep that the existence of the Cold War would have failed to penetrate it, especially since his father was involved in foreign policy.

Since I assume that he could no more have been unaware of the Cold War than he could have been unaware of the existence of the Solar System, I have to read this passage as reflecting exactly the sort of historical revisionism that Greenwald talks about, in which the fact that less than two decades ago that we faced threats far more serious than any al Qaeda presents us with has simply been made to vanish.

If we simply wave our magic wands and make the Cold War disappear, then the idea that we have to sacrifice our civil liberties and our system of government in the face of "a completely new kind of threat" might seem to be at least worth discussing. But in fact it's just laughable. Al Qaeda is new, all right. But it is not a worse threat than a nuclear-armed USSR. I do not in any way want to minimize 9/11, but: however bad you think 9/11 was, it would surely be worse for someone to destroy the twin towers along with the rest of New York, as well as a lot of other parts of our country.

The USSR was a genuine existential threat to this country. It had it in its power to destroy us. Al Qaeda, by contrast, does not. It can hijack planes and fly them into things, and in so doing it can cause spectacular and horrifying damage. Moreover, every life lost to terrorists is a tragedy. But al Qaeda does not have the power to destroy the country. There just aren't that many planes (or whatever), or that many people willing and able to fly them.
[. . .]
The existential threat posed by the USSR really was a new kind of threat. Until it arose, we had been protected by oceans, and for over a century no country had had the power to conquer or destroy us. Suddenly, we were faced with the very real prospect of nuclear annihilation. As a result, we were tempted to give up our liberties. We allowed McCarthy, a drunken bully, to intimidate our people, hijack the Senate, and ruin people's lives. But we regretted that, and we did so while the threat that led us into McCarthyism remained in place.

Moreover, we did not try to give Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower the power to ignore laws at will, or to do whatever they felt like without congressional oversight or judicial interference. Nixon tried to defy the law, but we reined him in, and we did so despite the fact that the USSR was still threatening us. At no point during this period, when we faced a threat much more formidable than al Qaeda will ever be, did people start muttering that "the Constitution is not a suicide pact", or wondering whether we could afford to preserve the Bill of Rights.

Hilzoy was riffing on this excellent post by Glenn Greenwald, rebutting the bogus right wing argument that FISA was only intended to govern surveillance during time of peace. In fact, as Greenwald points out, the law contains an entire section explicitly detailed to obtaining warrants during wartime, but goes on to observe:

But beyond these self-evident factual errors in Captain Ed’s argument is a more fundamental and pervasive falsehood which is being peddled with increasing frequency to justify the Administration’s law-breaking. It is the notion that restraints on the Executive Branch generally, such as those mandated by FISA or ones prohibiting the incarceration of Americans without due process, are now obsolete because they were the by-product of some sort of peaceful, enemy-less, utopian era which no longer exists.

This world-view is staggering in its revisionism. FISA was enacted in 1978. I did not think there were many people, if there were any at all, who actually believe that 1978 was a time of "peace." Most people -- and I would have thought this was true particularly for "conservatives" -- tend to see that period as the height of a war which we call the "Cold War," where we faced an "Evil Empire" trying to achieve world domination in order to impose its tyrannical ideology. In fact, we spent the entire decade after the enactment of FISA engaged in a massive build-up of our military forces, and we even tried to find a way to build a space-based shield around our country in order to repel incoming missiles. Accordingly, how can it possibly be argued that Americans banned our Government from eavesdropping on us in secret only during times of peace?

So, there. Amen. Gotta go.

2006-02-22T19:05:00.000Z

It's been 19 posts since I copped out by just clipping a Fafblog post, and that's 18 too many. Today, we are presented with multiple iterations of a single dialogue; a cycling, almost Ravellian modulation upon an eternal question:

Q. Why are we in Iraq?
A. Terror! By occupying Iraq we get Iraqis to fight us there so they won’t fight us at home.
Q. We’ve cleverly lured them to where they already were, only in terrorist form!
A. Now you’re catching on!
Q. What if we can’t kill all the terrorists in Iraq?
A. Then we’ll invade somewhere else and trick ‘em into attacking us there – only this time it’ll be someplace really far away where they’ll get stuck, like the ocean or the moon!
Q. I would totally watch Operation: Lunar Justice live on CNN!
A. Wolf Blitzer in a space helmet… it writes itself!
Q. There are more terrorists now than before the war. Is the occupation causing more terror?
A. Well, nobody can say for sure if that’s a man-made terror increase. It may just be a periodic shift in the natural terror cycle.
Q. Tell me more about this “not our fault” theory – I find it oddly compelling.
A. Like weather, terror is affected by seasonal fluctuations. The jet stream carries hijackers from continent to continent; El Niño causes suicide bombers to condense in the upper atmosphere. Is this affected by human activity or just part of a natural warming trend for terror? We just don’t know!
Q. Your ideas are boldly nonconformist, yet conveniently reaffirm my desire to do nothing. I like it!

The last answer is, I think, the greatest thing ever written by anyone anywhere, including the Bible and the Stand. And this is but one of five refrains in this brilliant song cycle, so go! Go! GO!!!!!

2006-02-21T13:51:00.000Z

Right-wing historian David Irving is jailed for three years in Austria under an Austrian law passed in 1945 making it a crime to deny the occurrence of the Holocaust.

A couple of interesting things about this incident:

1) Iran is using the conviction to pimp its own World Series of Holocaust Denial (or whatever they are calling it) planned for this spring. During the press conference, Iran's Foreign Minister said "we do not understand why the West so desperately insists on having committed this crime and killed exactly six million Jews.” As if the real problem is that western governments simply haven't yet realized the political advantages of Holocaust denial.

2) Irving's defense at the trial included an emphatic rejection of his documented Holocaust denial:

"Naturally I apologise," he said, addressing the court in fluent German. "I'm not a Holocaust denier. Obviously, I've changed my views. I spoke then about Auschwitz and gas chambers based on my knowledge at the time, but by 1991 when I came across the Eichmann papers, I wasn't saying that any more and I wouldn't say that now. The Nazis did murder millions of Jews."

The prosecutor rebutted this with examples of denial speeches Irving made after 1991, but it is interesting to note that the threat of jail works like a charm sometimes.

3) It may be worth considering that the law was passed in 1945, at a time when Holocaust denial was the blanket defense of the defeated German government, after an extensive program of covering up mass graves and destroying evidence in the waning days of the war. This blanket denial was only truly broken by the Nuremburg trials in the years after 1945, which included Austrian officials. So at the time the law was passed, it was arguably closer to a law against obstruction of justice, as the denial of the holocaust, especially by public figures, was in a sense abetting a conspiracy of silence and suborning perjury from the thousands of government functionaries that were being rounded up and questioned across the Anschluss.

So . . . is the law (and Irving's conviction under it) a good idea now? Probably not. Maybe the law was defensible in the short term, in the immediate aftermath of the war, but this battle is long since won. The historical record was preserved and rescued from the deniers and the defendants and anyone who seriously indulges in Holocaust denial today is simply ignoring vast libraries of documentary evidence, or explaining it all away as forgery, or whatever tortured arguments of necessity can be summoned in contravention of truth. As currently exercised, this law creates martyrs to one of the stupidest causes imaginable, and gives opponents of Western democracy an opportunity to label us hypocrites.

2006-02-17T14:54:00.000Z

Sometimes, only sarcasm will do. In his speech on health care yesterday, regarding his vision for healthcare savings accounts, Bush said, among other things:

The traditional insurance today will cover your health care costs -- most of your health care costs -- in exchange for a high premium payment up front. The costs are generally shared by you and your employer. You may also pay a small deductible and co-payment at the time of treatment. What's interesting about this system is that those payments cover only a fraction of the actual costs of health care, the rest of which are picked up by a third party, basically your insurance company.

It means most Americans have no idea what their actual cost of treatment is. You show up, you got a traditional plan, you got your down payment, you pay a little co-pay, but you have no idea what the cost is. Somebody else pays it for you. And so there's no reason at all to kind of worry about price. If somebody else is paying the bill, you just kind of -- hey, it seems like a pretty good deal. There's no pressure for an industry to lower price. And so what you're seeing is price going up. If you don't care what you're paying, and the provider doesn't have any incentive to lower, the natural inclination is for the cost to go up and the insurance companies, sure enough, pass on the costs -- the increase in cost to you and your employer. That's what's happening. (...)

For many routine medical needs, HSAs mean you can shop around until you get the best treatment for the best price. In other words, it's your money; you're responsible for routine medical expenses; the insurance pays for the catastrophic care. You're responsible for paying for the portion of your health care costs up to your deductible. And so you -- you talk to your doctor, you say, can't we find this drug at a little cheaper cost? Or you go to a specialist, maybe we can do this a little better -- old Joe does it for X, I'm going -- why don't you try it for Y? It allows you to choose treatment or tests that meet your needs in a way that you're comfortable with when it comes to paying the bills. In other words, decisions about routine medical treatments are made by you and the doc, not by third-party people that you never know. And all of a sudden, when you inject this type of thinking in the system, price starts to matter. You're aware of price. You begin to say, "well, maybe there's a better way to do this, and more cost-effective way."

Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, bubbling over with excitement, responds to Bush's call to greatness:

My sentiments exactly. Just the other day I was beset by a hollow, empty feeling, and I said to myself: Self, there's a void in my life -- a void that could only be filled by spending hours calling around, comparing prices for doctors' visits and pharmaceuticals, preferably while sick. Oh, if only I could say to my doctor: Maybe we can do this a little better -- old Joe does it for X, I'm going -- why don't you try it for Y?

You see, shopping for medical services isn't like ordinary shopping. When you go to the grocery store, for instance, they make it easy for you. There are the boxes of cereal all lined up, awaiting your inspection, and all you need to do is compare the price, the percentage of your daily vitamin needs provided by one carefully measured serving, and so on, and then make your selection. Where's the fun in that? Shopping for medical services is different: hours spent finding and tracking down the relevant physicians and getting through their daunting office staff; price discussions with hospital administrators who don't want to tell you exactly how much anaesthesia you'll need without an exam, and so forth. The thrill of the chase! The call of the wild! By comparison, ordinary shopping is a tame and pitiful facsimile, like shooting cage-raised quail when you could be hunting grizzlies.

You might be thinking: silly hilzoy! You can do this already! But that just shows how little you know about the thrills of shopping for medical services. It's just no fun without a little skin in the game: the sort of skin that you only have if your medical insurance won't cover your bills. And that's what Bush is offering us: the chance to have the shopping experience of a lifetime, and to have it under the most deliciously grueling conditions: with our own dollars on the line, when we're desperately ill. It's a vision as bold and rugged as America herself; and that's why we love our President.

Mmmm. Now that's some gooooood sarcasm. Not irony, not dry wit, but good old battery-acid sarcasm. Yeah. Similarly satisfying is this from commenter cleek:

Now imagine doing all this while being pulled from your car with the Jaws Of Life ! "Hold on! Don't start the ambulance yet, I'm trying to find cheaper radiologist!"

Finally, as noted in this comment, it takes a certain kind of genius to make the current trainwreck of a boondoggle of a health care system sound pretty awesome, while purportedly ennumerating its flaws:

You show up, you got a traditional plan, you got your down payment, you pay a little co-pay, but you have no idea what the cost is. Somebody else pays it for you. And so there's no reason at all to kind of worry about price. If somebody else is paying the bill, you just kind of -- hey, it seems like a pretty good deal.

Huh! Not bad! But snark aside, this really is hideously bad policy at every level. As Josh Marshall explains:

Are you over-insured in health insurance terms? Do you feel like you should be spending more out of pocket? If you say yes to both questions, then you and President Bush agree about what's wrong with the nation's health care system.

"When you go buy a car you're able to shop and compare," says President Bush. "And yet in health care that's just not happening in America today."

Is figuring out which cancer test to take like buying a car? Figuring out whether to get that headache checked?

What planet does President Bush live on exactly?

Functioning markets are a wonderful thing. Our whole economic system is based on them. But any serious student of markets understands that to function they require at least a threshold level of informed and rational actors. Neither is really the case on the consumer end of the health care market.

That sets aside the question of the moral equities involved in placing more price pressures on individuals as they choose the quality of health care they get for their families. And it entirely ignores the really straightforward point that isolating health care purchasing to individuals pretty much guarantees that the cost to the individual is much higher.

This is bad policy and bad politics. The president's opposition would do well by their country to attack him on every point.

Amen. Capitalism is very wonderful in many ways, but it is not, IS NOT, IS NOT an environment that caters to or grants advantages to individuals, no matter how rugged and Randian they may be. In fact, the individual is almost by definition the weakest player in a market system (patients are especially so, as each individual has unique health care needs). Market power is expressed and wielded by groups, the bigger the better. These groups may be led by, or created by, individuals, but it is market power that wins in a capitalist system.* This pretty little empowerment myth is just smoke to hide a lie.

The fact is, with no aggregated purchasing power on the patient's side -- whether that aggregate is an insurance company or a single-payer gov't health program -- to force lower prices, the capitalist equilibrium will be, can be, struck at only one point - the absolute maximum amount that the majority of Americans can pay for health care without collapsing into bankruptcy.

* it is impossible to imagine any individual creating an effective market grouping of patients that could bring anything approximating an effective counterweight (and I think we know what the right wing's reaction to a "patient's union" would be). Besides, how would such a union ever strike? "I'm going to let my cancer kill me to protest high oncologist prices!"

2006-02-15T14:32:00.000Z

So....Cheney shot a guy.

In the face.

With a shotgun.

Huh.

What's to say? I'm not a hunter, so I can't comment on the White House strategy of immediately blaming the recipient of the birdshot. Maybe it was Whittington's fault. I don't know. Others are covering the media soft-pedaling, which is manifest. A pellet gun? Really? A pellet gun? I'm cribbing this from Atrios, but just for clarity, this is a pellet gun:

This, on the other hand, is a 28-gauge Perazzi game shotgun:

The best line I've heard about this was from this comment by Paul at Obsidian Wings: "The accident is the CIA's fault, actually. On the basis of bad intelligence, Cheney believed Whittington was a quail."

On a far more serious note, a new batch of Abu Ghraib photos has been released, and they are awful. I don't even know what to say - I just keep remembering that these photos were taken, and these acts were committed, during a period in which the International Red Cross found that 70%-90% of Iraqis detained by the US forces were "arrested by mistake."

Elmer Fudd cartoon cropped from this cartoon by Tony Auth of the Philadelphia Inquirer, found via Atrios.

2006-02-09T18:30:00.000Z

Two quick things, then I gotta go.

Thing the First: I am hereby predicting the Most Annoying Republican Talking Point of 2008. Keep your ears peeled and vomit-bags handy:

"Now that President Bush and his crack legal team have discovered how much power the Constitution really grants the President, we have an obligation to make sure those pantywaist Democrats never get ahold of it again."

Remember you heard it here first. There's some good discussion of nascent dictatorshippery to be found here.

Thing the Second: According to Luke 23:34, after the Romans nailed Jesus to the cross and hauled him up, Jesus looked at them and said "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." Doesn't this mean that Jesus generally approved of political torture and brutal murder? Or, at least, did not believe it was a sin? I mean, the thing that the Romans "knew not" was that he was the son of god. Presumably they were aware that they were crucifying a human being (and political agitator). So Jesus was saying that they should not be blamed for what they did not know, and "forgiven." But they still were nailing people to crosses and leaving them to die horribly of exposure and dehydration. Pretty harsh, if you ask me. It's like christian anti-alcohol activists. If Jesus was such a tee-totaller, why did he bother to change the water into wine at Cana (John 2:7)? What was wrong with the water? Eh? EH???

UPDATE: spelling correction made above. "Ears pealed"? Yeesh.

2006-02-08T13:09:00.000Z

George Washington, Super-Genius. Hearken to the wisdom of Alberto Gonzales:

President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale.

The Attorney General of the United States, ladies and gentlemen! I mean, seriously. How dumb are these people? How dumb are we?

Yes, I know, that's not what he meant. But even if we dig past his surface idiocy to his underlying point, we still strike a gusher of pure bullshit. The relevant allegation is that the NSA spying program violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA was passed in 1978, and imposed the warrant requirement ignored by the Bush administration. Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt were President prior to 1978. Therefore, what they did is completely fucking irrelevant to whether the NSA program was illegal under FISA. OK? Got it?

2006-02-07T16:51:00.000Z

Three things:
1) The search for meaning in the world beyond "mere being" can be viewed as an attribute or aspect of certain human experiences. Humans can sense, I think, the degree to which an activity, an experience, or even a train of thought partakes in that search, and those activities and experiences can be placed together in a set based upon the presence of this unique and unmistakeable attribute. Most people who make this kind of experience the center of their lives do so through religion. Some make a religion of their politics. For myself, I cobble together an ad-hoc agnosticism, unable to ignore the depth of emotional experience, so far beyond what I can rationally ascribe to surging chemical reaction, but unable to surrender an essentially cynical, analytical view of the world.

It's tough to surrender such a perspective, as it works in the world, and comes up with the right answer again and again and again. The dam bursts, and the man prays that his house standing directly in the path will escape the rushing water. Will it be spared? Ask me, and I'll tell you - of course not. That man's going to lose his house. And I'm right. And when the waters crush his house but spare his life, he'll thank god. Is he wrong to do so? I want to say yes . . . but look at him, sitting in a dirty, crowded gymnasium, hungry, with a broken arm, weeping tears of joy and thanking god. What is it like in there, in that suffering head? I know what it is like in here, in my own mind, sometimes firmly rooted, sometimes displaced by emotion. Does he feel alone, or does he feel god in there with him? Is his religious experience a visceral or intellectual one? Is faith an emotion or a knowledge? Do you feel it like love or know it like the alphabet?

The above rambling is all by way of suggesting that you take a few minutes to look through meaningoflife.tv, a collection of interviews by Robin Wright with a dozen or so public intellectuals (Freeman Dyson, Edward O. Wilson, Francis Fukuyama, John Maynard Smith, and many others) on such topics as being good without god, the nature of free will, the mystery of the universe's friendliness to life, why god lets bad things happen, and my personal favorite, the nature of subjective consciousness. The linked excerpts are but a small sampling; the whole site is really, really interesting, and worth an hour of your time, as people who have thought about these issues in intensely technical ways paraphrase their fundamental beliefs in layman's terms, and seek to place them in context with the history of such ideas, in the course of short (2-10 minute) segments in informal settings. It seems that Wright simply walked into their offices some Tuesday, engaged them in conversation, and filmed it. The project is hosted (and possibly funded) by Slate.

2. Someone needs to explain to me how the leak of the NSA warrantless spying program was a breach of national security. I just don't get it. The administration is pushing for investigation of how the report got to the NY Times, and presumably, the GOP will act on it and hold these hearings. But I seriously haven't heard a single rational rebuttal to the following point: If FISA permitted the wiretapping of national security targets with a warrant, then any putative targets already knew that they were potential targets of surveillance. The FISA court where these warrants were to be obtained was itself confidential and no public record existed of its proceedings. Whether or not a warrant was sought is simply not information helpful to (or even of any concern to) the enemies of this country. To the degree the NYT's coverage (and the leaker's action) is criticized because the resulting outcry over the illegality of the program publicized a little-known, but unclassified law, that is just stupid, and not a standard the press should be expected to self-enforce.

3. I was tweaking a bit after re-reading my too-confident comments about Roe v. Wade a couple of posts ago, based as my comments were upon a reading of those cases 8 years ago in my 1L year. While I stand by my comments about the danger of the "trimester" model set forth in Roe, and I do think the "undue burden" standard a somewhat better one than a straight calculation of "non-viable=woman's interest is stronger/viable=state's interest is stronger," Casey did represent a retreat from Roe's defense of a constitutional right to privacy to be inferred from the explicit terms of the Bill of Rights. That's a dangerous issue, and in ignoring it, my characterization of Casey as "much stronger" was flawed (and kind of dumb).

So, there.

2006-01-25T16:30:00.000Z

For your delectation and viewing pleasure, we refer you to The Beast magazine's 2005 edition of "The 50 Most Loathsome People in America." Contains, among hundreds of other tiny delicious razor-filled bon-bons, this gem: "[Bush] interprets the Constitution like a Unitarian interprets the bible; for maximum convenience and with no regard to the actual text." Go read it, then feel queasy at the thought that these people are very real, and have their grotesque dishonesty, greed and grasping ambition to thank for their very real weath and power. It's just that kind of a world, I guess.

Via Pandagon. Picture stolen from The Beast without permission, but with maximum respect.

2006-01-11T21:38:00.000Z

It would be funny if it didn't make you want to chuck yourself headfirst off a bridge: This Modern World's Year in Review, parts one and two.

2006-01-11T16:36:00.000Z

Chris Bertram is right - the new Google video search is amazing.

Also, The Alito hearing is lurching forward, and Kevin Drum asks a fair question:

I listened to a few minutes of the Alito hearing this morning and I heard Alito say that he thought Griswold v. Connecticut, the landmark privacy case, was correctly decided. But of course he won't tell us whether he thinks Roe v. Wade was correctly decided. Why not? Why is it OK to take a firm stand on some decisions but not on others?

This confirmation kabuki is always instructive less for what it says about the nominee than for the data that can be gleaned from watching how hard each party fights. The objective can't be to determine what kind of judge Alito is. Guess what - he's an anti-abortion conservative. Anyone who thinks that there is any uncertainty about that and that these hearings are going to "get to the bottom of it" is an idiot. As I said before - Bush gets to nominate an anti-abortion conservative because that's how he ran, and that's how the country voted. And don't think that Roe v. Wade is so firmly based in unavoidable principles of the Constitution that it can never be flipped, because it isn't.

A side note - People often confuse the historic significance of Roe v. Wade with its legal significance. Anyone who would choose the reasoning in Roe as the bulwark of abortion rights has simply never read it. It's a horrible decision, that basically leaves the door open for scientific advances to eliminate abortion rights. Casey is much stronger.

Anyway, my point is that the nominee's shuck and jive has nothing to do with strongly held beliefs about the propriety of prejudging controversies, but rather reflects the fact that the judge is already politicized, already sensitive to, and altering his behavior to adapt to, political sensibilities and third-rails. Does this affect his rulings? Who knows. All I know is that the more nominees pretend to be above the political firefights, the more they demonstrate that they are anything but.

Arg, I'm out of time. More later.

Hmm. I see that She Who Must Not Be Linked has sent her teeming minions in my direction, so welcome!

2005-12-20T18:18:00.000Z

Bush in April 2004:

Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

Bush yesterday:

QUESTION: Why did you skip the basic safeguards of asking courts for permission for the intercepts?

ANSWER: First of all, right after September the 11th, I knew we were fighting a different kind of war. And so I asked people in my administration to analyze how best for me and our government to do the job people expect us to do, which is to detect and prevent a possible attack. That's what the American people want. We looked at the possible scenarios. And the people responsible for helping us protect and defend came forth with the current program, because it enables us to move faster and quicker. And that's important. We've got to be fast on our feet, quick to detect and prevent.

We use FISA still -- you're referring to the FISA court in your question -- of course, we use FISAs. But FISA is for long-term monitoring. What is needed in order to protect the American people is the ability to move quickly to detect.

Now, having suggested this idea, I then, obviously, went to the question, is it legal to do so? I am -- I swore to uphold the laws. Do I have the legal authority to do this? And the answer is, absolutely. As I mentioned in my remarks, the legal authority is derived from the Constitution, as well as the authorization of force by the United States Congress.

Get it?

April quote via Dana.

2005-12-16T15:00:00.000Z

So much going on, Iraqi elections, multiplying washington money scandals, Bush endorses the McCain act, and the normal lunacy of life in the end times goes on. But I just had to take time out to say: This is the best music video I have ever seen, and this is the best beer commercial I have ever seen. Irrelevant? Obsession with minutia? Fiddling while Rome burns? Well, scrape scrape scrape.

Video via Slate; beer ad via Kate, to whom I'd link but she don't cotton to trespassers.

2005-12-05T15:22:00.000Z

Item.

John Gorenfeld at Alternet reports that the president's kid brother Neil has been traveling through Asia in the company of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, self-proclaimed messiah and sole proprietor of the loyal Republican Washington Times, promoting (ready for this?) a $200 billion "Peace King Tunnel"--51 underwater miles joining Alaska to Russia.

Forwarded without comment. Because, really, what is there to say?

Update You've probably seen this, but just in case and just for context, here's a link to one of the strangest stories of 2004 (or any other year): Reverend Moon was crowned Messiah last March in the Dirksen Senate Office building, attended by a bipartisan retinue of U.S. Congressmen, asserting that the ghosts of Hitler and Stalin had ordained him as "none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."

2005-12-01T15:14:00.000Z

A la carte cable. Zachary Roth at Washington Monthly posts about the FCC's statement in support of a la carte cable:

PRO-CHOICE AT THE FCC....That was quick. Just weeks after the publication of this piece in support of an a la carte cable system (which would require cable companies to let customers select individual channels, instead of being forced to pay for entire packages), FCC chair Kevin Martin has officially come out in favor of a la carte.

Actually, Martin has been inching this way for a while — thanks largely to pressure from social conservatives, who, understandably, don't see why they have to pay for MTV to get the Disney Channel — but it's still significant that he's made it official, since it adds to the pressure on Congress to act. Looks like more and more people are recognizing that the best way to give parents control over what their kids see — not to mention giving everyone a break from skyrocketing cable bills — is to actually give consumers the power of choice.

And yes, I think I can survive without the Oxygen Network.

I have long wished for cable companies (and satellite carriers - the linked articles make it clear that this recommendation applies to them as well) to cut it out with the so-called "total choice" packages that require you to get five shopping channels in order to get ESPN, or a half-dozen video game and extreme sports networks in order to get BBCAmerica. I disagree, however, that this is likely to affect "skyrocketing cable bills." The industry opposes the measure, so clearly they think that it will affect their revenue, but they will figure out a lobbying hook to protect themselves.

For example, the cable industry will argue, successfully I'll wager, that offering such a choice without a minimum bill would force the cable companies to maintain subscriptions to channels without the ability to spread the cost of those subscriptions across a wide consumer base. The result will likely be the extirpation of many marginally popular networks that have been developing by the grace of the mandatory channel packages, as the carriers will only subscribe to the networks that a large percentage of their customers are going to want. This will arguably have the unfortunate effect of limiting consumer choice rather than increasing it. Admittedly, some of the loss will be deadwood (do we really need The Discovery Times Network, which seems to be dedicated to 24-7 coverage of the Battle of Leyte Gulf?), but I don't know if the The Travel Channel will survive, in which case I'll lose both the World Poker Tour and Anthony Bourdain's new show. That would suck.

However, the essential points raised by Roth still stand - Cable companies do force people to buy what they don't want, while at the same time disclaiming any responsibility for the content that they provide. When the cable companies argue that parents can block certain channels from the set-top box, that's a little disingenuous, as the cable company keeps on charging for the blocked channel as part of the package.

The endgame will likely be prosaic; the cable giants will probably get permission to require customers to choose a minimum number of channels, so that they can continue to charge $50-$75/month. I will say this - the first system to make this switch gets my business. I subscribe to satellite now, but if cable rolls this out for the same or less money, I will switch in a heartbeat.

A decent rundown of how the cable industry works is here. A list of all U.S. cable networks is here.

2005-11-29T16:47:00.000Z

A disturbing story in the LA Times today about the apparent suicide in Iraq of Col. Ted Westhusing, a professor of philosophy at West Point and military ethicist who volunteered to go to Iraq and found himself unable to reconcile his own sense of the meaning of military honor and the reality of the war-for-profit perspective of the private contractors he supervised.

A Journey That Ended in Anguish

By T. Christian Miller, Times Staff Writer

"War is the hardest place to make moral judgments."

Col. Ted Westhusing, Journal of Military Ethics

WASHINGTON — One hot, dusty day in June, Col. Ted Westhusing was found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport, a single gunshot wound to the head.

The Army would conclude that he committed suicide with his service pistol. At the time, he was the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.

The Army closed its case. But the questions surrounding Westhusing's death continue.

Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.

So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.

In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.

His death stunned all who knew him. Colleagues and commanders wondered whether they had missed signs of depression. He had been losing weight and not sleeping well. But only a day before his death, Westhusing won praise from a senior officer for his progress in training Iraqi police.

His friends and family struggle with the idea that Westhusing could have killed himself. He was a loving father and husband and a devout Catholic. He was an extraordinary intellect and had mastered ancient Greek and Italian. He had less than a month before his return home. It seemed impossible that anything could crush the spirit of a man with such a powerful sense of right and wrong.

On the Internet and in conversations with one another, Westhusing's family and friends have questioned the military investigation.

A note found in his trailer seemed to offer clues. Written in what the Army determined was his handwriting, the colonel appeared to be struggling with a final question.

How is honor possible in a war like the one in Iraq?

[ . . . ]

After a three-month inquiry, investigators declared Westhusing's death a suicide. A test showed gunpowder residue on his hands. A shell casing in the room bore markings indicating it had been fired from his service revolver.

Then there was the note.

Investigators found it lying on Westhusing's bed. The handwriting matched his.

The first part of the four-page letter lashes out at Petraeus and Fil. Both men later told investigators that they had not criticized Westhusing or heard negative comments from him. An Army review undertaken after Westhusing's death was complimentary of the command climate under the two men, a U.S. military official said.

Most of the letter is a wrenching account of a struggle for honor in a strange land.

"I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.

"Death before being dishonored any more."

A psychologist reviewed Westhusing's e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the "most difficult and probably most painful stressor."

She said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.

"Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited," wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. "He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses."

One military officer said he felt Westhusing had trouble reconciling his ideals with Iraq's reality. Iraq "isn't a black-and-white place," the officer said. "There's a lot of gray."

Fil and Petraeus, Westhusing's commanding officers, declined to comment on the investigation, but they praised him. He was "an extremely bright, highly competent, completely professional and exceedingly hard-working officer. His death was truly tragic and was a tremendous blow," Petraeus said.

Westhusing's family and friends are troubled that he died at Camp Dublin, where he was without a bodyguard, surrounded by the same contractors he suspected of wrongdoing. They wonder why the manager who discovered Westhusing's body and picked up his weapon was not tested for gunpowder residue.

Mostly, they wonder how Col. Ted Westhusing — father, husband, son and expert on doing right — could have found himself in a place so dark that he saw no light.

"He's the last person who would commit suicide," said Fichtelberg, his graduate school colleague. "He couldn't have done it. He's just too damn stubborn."

Westhusing's body was flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Waiting to receive it were his family and a close friend from West Point, a lieutenant colonel.

In the military report, the unidentified colonel told investigators that he had turned to Michelle, Westhusing's wife, and asked what happened.

She answered:

"Iraq."

Read the whole thing, though don't expect it to get much clearer.

2005-11-29T15:12:00.000Z

In his house in R'lyeh dead Jeffy lies dreaming

Who tore open the soul of the world to feast upon its essence? NOT ME.

Via BoingBoing.

2005-11-24T09:00:00.000Z

2005-11-22T20:15:00.000Z

Follow the bouncing ball.

1. On November 17th, Democratic Congressman Jack Murtha calls unequivocally for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

2. In subsequent days, among other ugly incidents, a Bush administration ally calls Murtha a coward on the floor of the House, and V.P. Cheney says Murtha is "losing [his] memory and [his] backbone."

3. Today, at an Arab League "preparatory reconciliation conference," representatives of the newly-elected Iraqi government propose a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, and go on to say that Iraqi insurgents have a "legitimate right of resistance" that justifies targeting U.S. troops.

4. Here's the punchline - the withdrawal plan advanced by Iraqi leaders was apparently proposed to the Iraqi government by . . . wait for it . . . the U.S. government.

There are differences between Murtha's craven surrenderism and the Bush administration's brilliant strategic redeployment - for one, Murtha wants out at the earliest "practicable date;" which he says could be as soon as 6 months, and the plan floated today in Cairo calls for withdrawal by November '07, a year before the '08 presidential election. I guess the difference between bold, steady leadership and gutless cutting-and-running is 18 months and an "R" in front of the name.

Bleah.

Late addendum: I should make clear - point four is based on Juan Cole's translation of a story in Al-Hayat, a newspaper I know nothing about. Cole is a professor of Middle Eastern Studies and someone with a lot of experience, to be sure, but it is still hearsay, and I have not seen the story confirmed elsewhere. This doesn't mean it's not true, but I think it's worth a caveat emptor.

2005-11-21T17:38:00.000Z

Well, it is the holiday season, and things have settled down a great deal here in the sausage mines, but as we begin this curtailed holiday week, I am experiencing a zenlike detachment from politics and the external world. In my mind, I am already snoozing gently in front of the television, 4:00 Thursday afternoon, ice cubes melting quietly into my disregarded Macallan, shoes off, listening to the football game. Not so good for the productivity, thinking this way, but not bad for the soul.

As to current events, who can say. I haven't had much time to read the papers or the blogs, so all I know is what fifteen minutes of CNN can tell me. Apparently we have either killed or not killed Zarqawi in a raid in Mosul. My money is on not, just because we have been through this so many times before, but who knows. I surely hope so - Iraq needs signposts of progress, something to toss onto the other side of the scale with the daily drumbeat of explosions and disruption. I was certainly encouraged that the Iraqis found a political solution to the 11th-hour crisis over the Constitution; flawed as it is, it remains as a proof that the three sides can, if necessary, forge a political compromise, and bring along enough people to make it law.

Will it hang together? Who knows. All I'm saying is that before, they didn't have that signpost, that certainty that it could be done. Now they do. Killing the nominal head of "Al Qaeda in Iraq" would be another such signpost. Whether Zarqawi really is the central figure he is made out to be is almost irrelevant; he is perceived by many to be a prime mover of the insurgency, and every day he eludes capture reinforces a feeling of lawlessness, a sense that the situation is not under the control of either the new Iraqi government or of the U.S. forces standing behind it.

Killing him would be another step on the way, would provide support for the argument that the smart move for a citizen of Iraq now is to buy in, to get involved now in supporting a democratic Iraqi nation, rather than waiting, scared, in your apartment and waiting for the Americans to leave so life can get back to normal. In such a dangerous environment, it is perfectly reasonable to need a reason to believe in a better future. Otherwise, why would anyone join the police, or the army? Sure, to get a paycheck, but if you believed that there was no way that the new government was going to last, you wouldn't join even for that, as you would expect your new employer to implode, and you would be marked for death as a collaborator.

In other words, in order to even consider joining the Iraqi police, you must believe that there is at least some chance that the government will not fall. Considering how essential police and army recruiting is to (a) a stable Iraq, and (b) the US ever getting the fuck out of there, I sincerely home that he(Zarqawi) is dead.

As for the political side here, I don't have much to say. No surprise that Bush and Cheney used Veteran's Day to lie about their records and vilify their political opponents; not even really worth commenting on. The fact is, it will probably work; the passage of time is the most powerful political force in this or any country, carrying us downstream with an inexorable finality, and these signal charges against the president are even now receding from us, fading back into the political wallpaper. Only fresh revelations or charges will suffice to keep the facts of this presidency in the front of the public's brain.

There is a consonance between this point and the point about Iraq above - time moves us along, and signposts must occur with some regularity in order to create momentum towards any overarching social outcome. Otherwise, potentially galvanizing events just become memories, irrelevant to what is in front of us right now. To hopelessly mix and abuse metaphors, history may grind slowly, sometimes so slowly that it seems that everything is caught in an extended, hideous present. But the future coalesces back into view, and time reasserts its control over imagination, when people can hear the clicking of the mill.

Warning label generator via Amygdala.

2005-11-06T13:24:00.000Z

Ummm... The post below has already generated three emails from people asking if I can really review their internet histories just because they visit this site. So, just for the record, it was a joke. I can't do that. Yet.

2005-11-05T18:48:00.000Z

I know that it may seem that I too often rely upon the device of cutting entire Fafblog posts and pasting them up here in lieu of actual content. This is, however, not the act of lazy plagiarism that it at first appears. You see, sophisticated tracking software that comes free with the Blogger application allows me to monitor the internet habits of every visitor to my site, and upon reviewing your traffic histories, I have come to several important conclusions:

(1) For grown adults, you people are spending entirely too much time at SpongeBobWorld.

(2) At least half of you are from India or Pakistan, and I really don't get that. Seriously, I look at a list of your visited sites and they are all in phonetic Punjabi except for Short Hope Unfiltered (Taaja taaja khabarnaama! Daler Mehndi! He's the Badshah of Banghra!). I dunno what's up with that.

(3) You folks are not reading nearly enough Fafblog. I simply don't understand this. It's linked over there to the left and everything. What's so hard? Shape up, or I will convert this site to a Fafblog mirror site and solve the problem that way.

With that said, we bring you....We Are All Torturers Now

Recently the Vice President has come under fire for attempting to legalize torture for the CIA. While this would certainly make things more convenient for the CIA, who happen to be Definitely Not-torturing prisoners already in a secret network of Definitely Not-gulags, one is inclined to wonder at the moral implications of making torture available to this select clique of the intelligence elite, of essentially setting the Central Intelligence Agency above American, international, and moral law. Upon considering it, we must reject this notion: torture, after all, should be the legal right of everyone.

As an instrument used only on the evil people who utterly deserve it, torture has proved an invaluable and ethical tool in fighting terrorists and witches alike. If anything, America could use more torture: with an overstretched military weary and embattled in the long slog of Iraq, it's clear that the War on Terror needs more torturers on the ground. America's torturers can be lost in the line of duty, too - carpal tunnel from lengthy waterboarding sessions, head injuries from tripping over human pyramids - and if the United States doesn't keep a steady supply of trained torturers to replace these weary heroes, how can it expect to maintain the best and brightest organized rape squads in the world?

It is deeply disappointing then, that Mr. Cheney is willing to allow only the CIA to utilize this vital anti-terror tool. Indeed, given the recent explosion in global terrorist activity, America needs as many torturers as it can get to track down this mysterious new wave of Islamist recruits. Torture shouldn't just be the tool of the CIA or even the armed forces. It should be the legal right - no, the duty - of every American citizen.

It's time to combine the good old-fashioned tradition of American volunteerism with the brand new traditions of forced sleep deprivation and genital electrocution. Fund non-profit torture charities, both secular and faith-based. Support neighborhood watch groups with an eye toward torturing local terrorists. Offer scholarships to college students who pledge to spend four years torturing abroad with the Peace Corps. Parents should get their children involved: bring them to work at the Soviet-era prison camp for a day; teach mandatory waterboarding classes at school. Even more critical than building the torture corps itself is the simple feeling of solidarity that participating in torture generates: an involved America is a strong America.

To some this idea will seem quaint, but defending one's homeland is no idle matter, and America needs every helping hand it can get - as long as that hand is turning a thumbscrew.

Hmm. This post is pretty random, but I'll just leave it as it is - I gotta get back to work. Aaaaaaaaand scene.

2005-11-04T14:58:00.000Z

A hasty drop-in post to refer you to this interesting post by Kevin Drum. The basic point is to raise the possibility that unions, in the end, provide greater workplace stability:

Arbitration over employment disputes may have been frustrating for everyone involved, but the goal of the union was always to get someone's job back, and both sides knew they had to keep working together regardless of the outcome. This prevented routine disputes from descending into all-out war. Today, with unions in decline, arbitration is no longer available to most workers and has been largely replaced by scorched earth style litigation, in which the goal is compensation, not a job, and both sides are motivated to fight to the death on the most explosive possible grounds.

Now, certainly those on the right may respond that the relative predictability and "routine-ness" of union arbitrations is the same iron quiet that prevails in any authoritarian regime, but that feels to me like yet another of these right-wing arguments aimed at some noumenal, platonic target that has nothing to do with anything, and serves only as a fig leaf to provide intellectual and moral cover for what they really want, which is to bust unions because they cost business a lot more than low-wage, minimal-benefit employees.

Drum quotes a post by Timothy Burke, who quotes his father, a long-time, management-side negotiator:

Even my dad thought some strikes were legitimate, and that unions were an important institution. Near the end of his life, he was sometimes bothered, in fact, by the waning of the union movement: my sense was that he preferred arbitration with many union leaders to some of the kinds of workplace litigation he was increasingly involved in. I once saw a videotape he did for non-union workplaces about how to handle drives to unionize, and he went well beyond explaining what their legal obligations were: the first and last thing he said, I recall, was that any employer who thought that a lack of a union was a license to squeeze his employees was going to get a union and he was going to deserve every consequence that followed from that.

Management may have largely won the great union wars, but it's important to remember that once the initial violent stages of the struggle were over, it transitioned into a long, cold war, in which detente had largely been reached. As increasing global competition changed the rules, that detente could no longer function across the economy, in every unionized industry. Strong and effective unions winning big wage packages and generous pensions may well be functionally impossible in industries such as airlines and the automotive industry. But the above suggests (but, as it is anecdotal, does not prove) that where the union model can still be very relevant is in the managing of workplace disputes and the guarantee of working conditions. Without the union process, it's the wild west, and there are costs as well as benefits to management in that kind of landscape. I (and Democrats in general, I think) need to think a bit more about this stuff.

2005-10-27T14:59:00.000Z

Miers is gone. No big surprise there. Miers and the president publicly claim it's because overintrusive questioning from Congress may damage executive privilege. They are lying. Josh Marshall thinks it's because she never had any real defenders. He's wrong. You want to know what happened? Here's what happened.

Washington Post, Wednesday, October 26:

Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers said in a speech more than a decade ago that "self-determination" should guide decisions about abortion and school prayer and that in cases where scientific facts are disputed and religious beliefs vary, "government should not act."

In a 1993 speech to a Dallas women's group, Miers talked about abortion, the separation of church and state, and how the issues play out in the legal system. "The underlying theme in most of these cases is the insistence of more self-determination," she said. "And the more I think about these issues, the more self-determination makes sense."

Washington Post, Thursday, October 27:

Harriet Miers withdrew this morning as a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.

See? Simple.

2005-10-26T20:36:00.000Z

Fafblog gets the scoop:

ITEM! A super-secret source tells us that Patrick Fitzgerald will indict people today - in fact he will indict between none and fifty-seven suspects on charges which could range from Standing With Intent To Loiter to Genocide With a Loaded Meteor.

UPDATE! An even more super-secret source tells us that Dick Cheney will resign and be replaced, most likely by McCheese! Mayor McCheese is widely respected in Republican circles for his strong fiscal conservatism and his tough-on-hamburgling record. But how will this affect the Mayor's 2008 presidential prospects? Will this be seen as a concession to the powerful Fat Lobby? Stay with us, there is more to come!

UPDATE! Sources from the future have just emailed us with the news that President Bush will also resign and immediately appoint a more popular replacement in a cunning ploy to salvage his approval ratings! The new president: a newly-grown genetic hybrid of Santa Claus and Jesus. Your Fafblog insta-nalaysis!: Santa-Jesus has very high positives with a broad segment of Americans. But will his clone status hurt him with the Christian right?

UPDATE! Super-duper-ultra-secret sources from the inner brain of God have told us that the Santa-Jesus hybrid will devour Vice President McCheese in a televised feeding frenzy! This will spark a new federal investigation to determine whether a crime has been committed, and if so whether it was committed by the Santa half attempting to satiate his uncontrollable gluttonous urges, or the Jesus half in an attempt to atone for the sins of all McDonaldland. QUESTION: how does this fit into Karl Rove's master plan!

UPDATE! We have just been informed that Mayor McCheese is not an actual mayor but in fact a corporate mascot, and that Santa-Jesus is ineligible for the presidency on accounta bein grown in Korea. Other than that everything else oughtta check out just fine.

So, that settles that!

2005-10-25T16:33:00.000Z

So I looked at the traffic log today, and it seems like around mid-month we got a big influx of new visitors here at Short Hope Unfiltered World Headquarters. Which is great! Welcome to all the new folks, I hope you keep checking back, and don't mind the occasionally, um, desultory pace of posting around here. I always get back around to it. Check the archives! Since '02, baby!

But my question really is, from whence come you, new folks? Did I catch a link from somewhere, or are you all just automated spambots trying to sell me unguent? If anyone knows, please drop me an email.

Oh, and since this is sort of a process post, I figure I'll try out the blogger image insertion feature, just to see if it works. Not that I generally feel the need to illustrate my posts, but it occasionally would have been useful. Like on the Borf post, for example.

So anyway, welcome, spambot army, whoever you are.

2005-10-24T17:47:00.000Z

Visions of Sugar Plums. There's a great deal of anticipation regarding what will come of Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald's investigation into the Plame leaks, as the rumors swirl daily that "really, for real, the indictments are coming out TODAY oh wait they didn't but DEFINITELY tomorrow, yeah, tomorrow for sure..." This pleasant anticipation is heightened here on the sinister side by the still-fresh joy of seeing the headline "Arrest Warrant Issued for Delay." Certainly I think, or, at least, am content to believe, that every elected Republican is an abject thief, liar, traitor and all-around criminal, but I will take note of one interesting side effect all of this. Some on the left side of the aisle have unabashedly embraced Fitzgerald and Delay prosecutor Ronnie Earle as upright straight shooters standing up for decency and justice in a dirty, compromised world. Okay, fine; maybe. But the fact is that neither I nor anyone I have spoken with have any real idea who these guys are. They are shooting at the right people, so we praise them.

I guess my point is that the left seems really good at counting prenatal chickens. The fact that Fitzgerald has a website does not change the fact that I have no real reason to believe that anything will be posted there besides the text of Fitzgerald's strongly worded comments to the Senate, after he announces that his investigation is closing without issuing indictments. The criticism will be ignored, the GOP will screech exoneration, and the world will keep on turning.

That said, this statement on Meet the Press by GOP Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson is pretty hilarious:

I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn’t indict on the crime so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation were not a waste of time and dollars.

Yes, it would sure be a pity to waste time and tax dollars on an investigation that couldn't make the main charge stick and end up prosecuting some minor perjury committed in the course of the investigation. That would sure be a great, great pity.

2005-10-05T20:37:00.000Z

The Quiet Army. They are out there, in America. They are your neighbors, your friends, your co-workers. They understand the stakes, and they are fighting for freedom in small ways, in quiet ways, this quiet army. They don't believe the America-haters, the naysayers, the liberals and the limp-wristed, the traitorous big-city democRAT party apparatchiks in Congress, and the longhaired fags at the anti-war marches. They know that what the country needs is not appeasement or understanding, but VIGILANCE!! VIGILANCE is not just for the brave, square-jawed soldier on his lonely watch - no! It is also for those of us on the home front, those of us who know that even a great nation can be defeated . . . from within.

Exhibit A, the tale of a nameless, but oh so brave and VIGILANT! Wal-Mart employee, a captain at least in the Quiet Army, set forth below so that freedom-loving citizens may know this heroic tale and sigh meaningfully as they look at the flag decals on their Hyundai Elantras:

Wal-Mart Turns in Student’s Anti-Bush Photo, Secret Service Investigates Him

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.

But that’s what happened on September 20.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.

But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service.

On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.“At 1:35, the student came to me and told me that the Secret Service had taken his poster,” Jarvis says. “I didn’t believe him at first. But they had come into my room when I wasn’t there and had taken his poster, which was in a stack with all the others.”

She says the student was upset.

“He was nervous, he was scared, and his parents were out of town on business,” says Jarvis.

She, too, had to talk to the Secret Service.

“Halfway through my afternoon class, the assistant principal got me out of class and took me to the office conference room,” she says. “Two men from the Secret Service were there. They asked me what I knew about the student. I told them he was a great kid, that he was in the homecoming court, and that he’d never been in any trouble.”

Then they got down to his poster.

“They asked me, didn’t I think that it was suspicious,” she recalls. “I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!”

At the end of the meeting, they told her the incident “would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted,” she says.

The student was not indicted, and the Secret Service did not pursue the case further.

“I blame Wal-Mart more than anybody,” she says. “I was really disgusted with them. But everyone was using poor judgment, from Wal-Mart up to the Secret Service.”

A person in the photo department at the Wal-Mart in Kitty Hawk said, “You have to call either the home office or the authorities to get any information about that.”

Jacquie Young, a spokesperson for Wal-Mart at company headquarters, did not provide comment within a 24-hour period.

Sharon Davenport of the Kitty Hawk Police Department said, “We just handed it over” to the Secret Service. “No investigative report was filed.”

Jonathan Scherry, spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, D.C., said, “We ertainly respect artistic freedom, but we also have the responsibility to look into incidents when necessary. In this case, it was brought to our attention from a private citizen, a photo lab employee.”

Jarvis uses one word to describe the whole incident: “ridiculous.”

Via Kos. So, are we sure they killed that there T.I.P.S. program? Well, I suppose the Quiet Army didn't need some gubmint program to tell them how to fight their quiet war.

And don't even get me started on this stupidity.

2005-09-30T22:46:00.000Z

This essay on Daily Kos from Senator Barack Obama is really quite extraordinary. Go read it.

2005-09-28T12:51:00.000Z

Elbow-deep in the worst week yet, but I wanted to pass along this infuriating Brad Delong post discussing the odd tendency of the modern press to congratulate themselves on their own ignorance and obsession with trivia:

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (New Republic Edition)

Kevin Drum's jaw drops as he contemplates The New Republic's Michael Crowley. Bill Clinton, you see, likes public policy and likes to talk about it. Michael Crowley doesn't like public policy--which makes one wonder why he doesn't go and write about things that do interest him. Crowley is, I think, one example of a larger trend:

The New Republic Online: Second Coming: Bill Clinton was briefing Elvis Costello on the future of New Orleans.... Clinton was really enjoying himself.... Clinton talked on.... Costello had looked starstruck himself. But now, his enthusiasm seemed to be waning.... [T]he Bill Clinton show--a chance for the ex-president to talk an endless number of hapless (though often rich and famous) souls like Costello blue in the face.

Clinton's pathological need for adulation is well-documented. (When a friend of mine--who is not famous and had never spoken with Clinton before--ran into the ex-president at a hotel gym recently, he had to fabricate an excuse to escape his long-winded ruminations.).... The conference's specific topics were suitably grandiose: poverty, climate change, religious strife, and Third World governance.... Poverty, of course, was an unfamiliar condition to those present, many of whom had paid a $15,000 registration fee to attend. At one point, one attendee whispered to an associate, "She has her own helicopter."

A little cognitive dissonance didn't preclude some genuinely noble results.... The pledges, written documents that Clinton required donors literally to sign "on the dotted line," ranged from $1 million (to improve the justice systems of Bolivia and Peru) to a promise by Michael Jordan's mother (for a hospital in Nairobi) to $1.5 million for "cheap sustainable mobility"--translation: free bicycles--for Sri Lankan tsunami survivors....

[O]ne reporter to call her editor in a mild panic. "It's just, like, so incredibly boring...."

And--as seems to be typical among our elite media--Crowley sneers most at Clinton's concern for the developing world:

For Clinton, it was just the opposite. Partly, it was a chance to show off his astounding grasp of global affairs, whether it was the 15,000 job losses in "the little mountain kingdom of Lesotho" due to an expired trade pact; or grain production in Argentina and Brazil ("because they have topsoil, in some places as deep as 22 feet"); or the promise of solar energy ("There are a million homes in Latin America today where the light and cooking heat come from solar generators ... at a cost of about a month's worth of candles"). This, in sum, was a man who wanted to demonstrate total understanding of the planet Earth....

We've seen this before, last year. People who wanted to trash Clinton's book did so by complaining that it talked about details of policy.

The second example is the Weston Kosova and Michael Isikoff review of Bill Clinton's My Life. Kosova and Isikoff lament how Clinton "forces [them] on a joyless march through... arid policy debate[s]" that they must slog through before finding a "raw, confessional moment that almost makes the book seem worth the $35 price of admission." But to politicians like Clinton (and to those who have ever worked for one, whether full-time, part-time, or volunteering just out of citizenship) the "arid policy debates" are of the essence: one runs for office--one works for or supports people who run for office--because one has strong beliefs about what policies will make America a better place. It is only to a reporter like Isikoff that debates about policies are "arid". To ask Isikoff to review Clinton is like asking someone tone-deaf to review a performance of Beethoven's "Eroica". The element of self-parody--unintentional self-parody--is there, especially as Isikoff and his editors repeatedly fail to grasp that they are tone-deaf, and are thus not hearing and incompetent to review the symphony. Where others see the real business of government--real policies with complicated and uncertain effects on millions of real people's lives--they see only the Gedrosian Desert.

The third example is another review of Clinton's My Life: Michiko Kakutani's. She sneers at Clinton's "messy pastiche of everything that [he] ever remembered and wanted to set down in print; he even describes the time he got up at 4 a.m. to watch the inaugural ceremonies for Nigeria's new president on TV." That, to her, is the low point: Clinton actually interested in a place like Nigeria! And--Kakutani is clearly thinking--could there be anything more a total boring and uninteresting waste of time than getting up at 4 A.M. to watch a broadcast from Lagos?

Well, here's the sum total of what Clinton has to say about Nigeria (that I could find, at least) in his book. It's two paragraphs:

p. 856: I got up at four in the morning to watch the inaugural ceremonies for Nigeria's new president, former general Olusegun Obasanjo, on TV. Ever since gaining independence, Nigeria had been riddled by corruption, regional and religious strife, and deteriorating social conditions. Despite its large oil production, the country suffered periodic power outages and fuel shortages. Obasanjo had taken power briefly in a military coup in the 1970s, then had kept his promise to step aside as soon as new elections could be held. Later, he had been imprisoned for his political views and, while incarcerated, had become a devout Christian and had written books about his faith. It was hard to imagine a bright future for sub-Saharan Africa wihtout a more successful Nigeria, by far its most populous nation. After listening to his compelling inaugural address, I hoped Obasanjo would be able to succeed where others had failed.

pp. 920-921: I flew to Nigeria to see President Olusegun Obasanjo. I wanted to support his efforts to curb AIDS before Nigeria's infection rate reached the levels of southern African nations, and to highlight the recent passage of the African trade bill, which I hoped would help Africa's struggling economy. Obasanjo and I attended a gathering on AIDS at which a young girl spoke of her efforts to educate her schoolmates about the disease, and a man named John Ibekwe told the gripping story of his marriage to a woman who was HIV-positive, his becoming infected, and his frantic search to get the medicine for his wife that would enable their child to be born without the virus. Eventually John succeeded, and little Maria was born HIV-free. President Obasanjo asked Mrs. Ibekwe to come up onstage, where he embraced her. It was a touching gesture and sent a clear signal that Nigeria would not fall into the trap of denial that had contributed so much to the spread of AIDS in other countries.

Plague, coups, famine, revolution, and--we hope--steps toward development and democracy. For Nigerians, the stuff of life and death. For President Clinton, the potentially most important country in Africa that he needs to know about as he tries to use his policy levers to make a better world. For an elite journalist like Michiko Kakutani, it's boring--and it is a gross violation of etiquette for Clinton to use two paragraphs in his book to try to teach Americans a little about Nigeria and give them a President's eye view of this piece of Africa.

Kakutani, Kosova and Isikoff, and Crowley. Their complaints that an ex-president is interested in governance and issues--and is actually curious about places like Lesotho and Nigeria--are self-parody. "How dare an ex-president bore me!" they say. "I know nothing about global development or foreign affairs. How dare he find them interesting!"

I have not yet figured out why so much of our elite press--the Crowleys, the Kakutanis, the Isikoffs, and the Kosovas--is so... what should I call it? Feckless. Corrupt (in the sense of well-rotted). Decadent. Why does William Saletan find it funny that Kerry tries hard to give nuanced, reasonably-complete answers to questions about issues with nuances? Why do Weston Kosova and Michael Isikoff cover the government--rather than, say, cover something like advances in bartending--if they find debates over policy the equivalent of crossing the Gedrosian Desert? Why does Michiko Kakutani think it pointless and boring to wake up early to watch the inauguration of the first democratically-elected president in sixteen years in a country of 130 million people?

It is a mystery to me.

It is, however, one reason that we are saddled with an incompetent president like George W. Bush. As David Frum writes, it has long been clear to insiders that Bush is not a "diligent manager of the office of the presidency, [or] a close student of public policy, [or] a careful balancer of risks and benefits"--that, in short, George W. Bush is totally unqualified to be president, totally unprepared to make the decisions a president has to make. But by and large the elite press has simply not cared about the necessary qualifications to be a good president, and fears a president who is qualified to be president. For, after all, strikes them as bizarre and weird for somebody to actually know where Lesotho is.

2005-09-20T18:42:00.000Z

Fascinating blog entry from WWOZ manager David Freedman, describing his journey into New Orleans last week to check on the WWOZ transmitter facilities, and his efforts to get the station up and running.

2005-09-20T18:18:00.000Z

Taking a cue from Norbizness, I present the musical self-audit, wherein I set the ipod to shuffle, and rate the first twenty songs that come out of it, skipping nothing. Let the gaze be unflinching.

1. Tin Roof/Back O'Town Blues - Rebirth Brass Band, Rebirth Kickin' It Live
Nice start! Slow swing dirge with a sweet vocal by Kermit Ruffins. Short of the massive skullcrackin' horn fireworks that come along with the faster songs, but nice off-beat drums and percussion, and a fat trombone solo. 8/10.

2. Satellite of Love - The Velvet Underground, Loaded (bonus track)
Yeah, I didn't really like this song as a Lou Reed solo track. This version is a bit better, a little more loping and less stilted, but even at 3 minutes, it seems to go on a bit. Ehhhh….5/10.

3. Life Worth Living - Uncle Tupelo, No Depression
A pretty song, but one of the ones that forces me to admit that Jay Farrar's lyrics can be a bit too world-weary for their own good, if clever: "a beer in each hand, and a smile in between . . . Everyone has they're ups and downs, its been mostly down around here . . . we're all lookin' for life worth livin - that's why we drink ourselves to sleep…one man's broken will to care…" et cetera. The brief outro with the mandolin is nice, and there is drama, but it's just…maybe one lonely desperate whiskey in the company of the working men in Farrar's head too many. 5.5/10.

4. Ages of You - R.E.M., Dead Letter Office
I do like the early REM stuff - cheerful, droning, incomprehensible. This is a representative sample, if not a big standout. Dead Letter Office has it's charms - I like the Aerosmith cover, anyway. 6/10.

5. Step Right Up - Tom Waits, Step Right Up
"Removes embarrassing stains from contour sheets / that's right / And it entertains visiting relatives / it turns a sandwich into a banquet / Tired of being the life of the party? / Change your shorts / change your life / change your life / Change into a nine-year-old Hindu boy / get rid of your wife." 10/10.

6. The Viceroys - Yaho, Respect To Studio One [compilation]
This is nice. A reggae sea chantey, with the requisite late sixties three part harmonies floating behind, and that quickly pulsing organ. 7/10

7. Bold As Love - Jimi Hendrix, Axis Bold As Love
I have been in six or so bands that cover this song, and I've heard it about a thousand times, but man - that 6/4 strumming on the chorus, and Mitch Mitchell dropping the off-time back beats, that unexpected outro. Minus .5 points because I have heard it so many times I can actually sing along to the the bass comping behind the guitar solo. 9.5/10.

8. Appearance of the Three Enchanted Princesses - Stravinsky, Symphony of Psalms
Incidental music for a ballet, nothing too interesting, just flute and clarinet curlicues leading in some desultory string swells, which don't really go anywhere. No doubt more interesting with actual dancers, but I don't like watching ballet, so… 3/10.

9. The Lantern - Rolling Stones, Singles Collection, The London Years
Kind of a rolling, starting-stopping, semi-hymn, with tons of piano, nice slide work, and some echoing spacy chords. Never really builds any momentum, though. Interesting but ultimately disappointing. Originally from "Satanic Majesties," of course. 5.5/10

10. Skylark - Art Blakey & Jazz Messengers, Caravan
A nice, if a bit conventional, reading of this ballad. Freddie Hubbard has a nice tone, but...well, I'll just admit it, I'm the last guy who should rate jazz ballads. As a drummer, the *pshhh, chick! pshh, chick!* just wears on me. I tend to be easily bored even by the undeniable classics in the genre, and this...probably can't be considered one of those. 5/10.

11. The Well - Salem 66, Homestead Records Wailing Ultimate [compilation]
Ahhh, the early 90's! Where girl groups wearing 1930's party dresses roamed the earth, pounding out thudding dirges in basements across this great land. Riding on the floor tom! Relentless 4/4 chugging! Babes in Toyland, L7, and Salem 66! Excellent background singing, and a shade of R.E.M. jangle add some flavor. Not bad. 5.5/10.

12. Bang Bang - Nancy Sinatra, Kill Bill Vol. 1 Soundtrack
If you saw the movie, you know this song. 7/10.

13. Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era - Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted
I was wondering when these guys would show up. Probably the fullest sounding song on that record, including pianos, echoplexed drums, odd, scratchy background vocal howls, and the repeated (and only) lyric: "I've got one holy life to live, I've got one holy life to give." What does it mean? No idea. How does it sound? Fucking awesome. 9.5/10.

14. Something's Got To Give - Beastie Boys, Check Your Head
Jeez, the college years have arrived with a vengeance. Who am I kidding, I do love this record. In the right mood, this song is a great head-nodder, a strong, slow groove, and the processed vocals hovering dramatically back in the mix. I am not in the right mood right now, however, and the whole thing just feels a little forced. "This one's called 'rectify'!!!" Please. 6/10.

15. Plumbline - Archers of Loaf, Icky Mettle
Bears no real description - it's indie rock, man, played well, with a good singer. As Pitchfork said about a later album: "You like the Loaf? You buy the Loaf! You don't like the Loaf? No soup for you!" 6.5/10.

16. Blues by Five - Miles Davis Quintet, Cookin'
One of many "classic" Miles Davis groups (Davis, Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones), this session is really early; Coltrane takes a solo that stays mostly earthbound, there is a smooth piano run by Garland, some nice clattering fours by Jones. It's all very straight ahead. Definitely swings, though. 7/10.

17. The Travel Jam - Brand Nubian, In God We Trust
Nice loop, but the real payoff is the call and response outro - "New york!" "BANG!" Rock the house! "POW!" "Come on, and help me turn it out!" "D.C." "BANG!" Rock the house! "POW!" "Come on and help me turn it out!" Sheboygan! 8/10.

18. Liberation Frequency - Refused, The Shape of Punk to Come
Goddamn this is a loud song. Starts quiet, with an insistent rimclick driving a choppy undistorted guitar strumming, then all hell breaks loose. Min gud så att bullrig. 7.5/10.

19. The Cheat Is Not Dead - Strong Bad, Strong Bad Sings And Other Type Hits
Ahhh, ahem. Well. A bit jarring after the Brand Nubian and the Refused, but it works. The full gospel choir outro (not present in the original) is inspiring. 7/10.

20. Real Cool Time - The Stooges, The Stooges
Ahhhhh. I feel stupider just listening to this. In a good way. 8.5/10.

So, a solid average of 6.75. Not too bad. Shuffle happily shied away from the hundreds of Captain & Tennile B-Sides I have stowed away in there. Just the claps! Just the claps.

2005-09-15T22:07:00.000Z

Jazzfest 2006 is on. Or, at least, so says Randy Phillips, whoever that might be:

New Orleans' premiere music event, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (Jazz Fest), will return next year, according to Randy Phillips of AEG Live, co-producers of Jazz Fest with Festival Productions Inc. (FPI).

"We are going to do a Jazz Fest in '06," Phillips tells Billboard.com. "Where, how, with what infrastructure, will all be worked out." Phillips says the event may take place in New Orleans, depending on the progress of recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, or in a nearby market such as Baton Rouge.

Or perhaps Lafayette, if long-time Fest competitor Festival Internationale Louisiane would agree to a huge combined superfestival to bring all the tribes together. Whatever, wherever. We're going.

As for all the FEMA/Blanco/Nagin stuff, I don't know. There seems to be so much blame to go around that apportioning it on one side of the seesaw or the other is just pointless. It is undeniable that catastrophic incompetence occurred at every level of our country's disaster response system, and that should fucking terrify everyone who does not believe that there will be no further catastrophic events, ever.

But oh, lord, the lying. Must we always have the lying?

2005-09-02T13:20:00.000Z

St. James Infirmary

I went down to St. James Infirmary
To see my baby there,
She was laid out on a long white table,
She was so sweet, she was so cool, she was so fair.

Went up to see the doctor,
"She's very low," he said;
Went back to see my baby
Oh God! I knew that she was dead.

I went down to old Joe's barroom,
On the corner by the square
They were serving the drinks as usual,
And the usual crowd was there.

On my left stood old Joe McKennedy,
And his eyes were bloodshot red;
He turned to the crowd around him,
These are the words he said:

Let her go, let her go, God bless her;
Wherever she may be
She may search the wide world over
And never find a better man than me

Oh, when I die, please bury me
In my ten dollar Stetson hat;
Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain
So my friends'll know I died standin' pat.

Get six gamblers to carry my coffin
Six chorus girls to sing me a song
Put a twenty-piece jazz band on my tail gate
To raise Hell as we go along

Now that's the end of my story
Let's have another round of booze
And if anyone should ask you just tell them
I've got the St. James Infirmary blues.

2005-08-26T14:43:00.000Z

Thank you, Jesus. I am bone-sick of arguing about Iraq. I am so tired of hearing that it was never about WMDs, that if you read the 2003 state of the union address that there were a whole bunch of other reasons in there, and that it was always about democracy and freedom and democracy, and then they start babbling about painted schools and biased media. This argument, in addition to being the sheerest bullshit, is just not necessary for war supporters to make. Every time I hear this nonsense, I am struck by the fact that but for the utter unwillingness of Bush defenders to admit any mistake whatsoever by their guy, they have a perfectly legitimate argument to make: that the invasion was about WMDs, and Bush acted in good faith on admittedly partial information, but partial is maybe as good as you need in the post 9/11 era. Unfortunately, Bush and his intelligence were wrong, but now we are there, so lets stop whining about the why and start talking about how to stanch the bleeding. I don't agree with the premises of this argument (Bush's good faith, preemption as acceptable), but I recognize it to be a consistent argument that does not intentionally ignore or lie about history. So imagine my great joy in encountering this at Greg Djerejian's right-leaning Belgravia Dispatch:

Look, we don't need to make up fake arguments about why we are in Iraq. We went in because Saddam was an uniquely dangerous individual whom was commonly believed to be in possession of WMD. In a post 9/11 world, caution demanded that the burden of proof that he had disarmed be on him. He never convincingly met this burden, by showing the world beyond a reasonable doubt that his regime didn't possess WMD, and Bush acted pursuant to various UN resolutions to bring him to task. But we were wrong, and he didn't have WMD, yet History had marched on by then. In turn, of course, the goal was not to disarm the regime, in the main, but now to go about the hard work of creating a democratic Iraq. But we are flailing, currently, in achieving this goal. And, if we fail, the ramifications will be immense.

Like I said, I have real problems with some of these premises, but they have the virtue of being honest assessments, rather than assemblages of spin designed to protect a politician. Read it all, it's really a great piece. The broader point of the piece is the offensive stupidity of the so-called "flypaper theory," whispers of which you hear every time you hear the president say, as he does over and over and over again, "We will stay on the offense, fighting the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them at home."

But as Djerejian argues, such a strategy is not only poorly conceived, it is already a catastrophic failure, given the avalanche of terrorist attacks that have swept the globe in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq invasion. Moreover, such an approach, even if it were effective, is completely immoral. Djerjerian quotes this post by the Cunning Realist to render this point:

has anyone thought about why we're justified in using another nation as flypaper in the first place, even if it was a viable, effective strategy? What gives us the right to use a sovereign nation as a catch basin for carnage so we can go on blissfully consuming and merrily flipping real estate here? Instead of flypaper, this should be called the "Night of the Living Dead Nation" strategy---using the undead, zombie-like carcass of a failed state for our own benefit. Beyond the sheer selfish immorality of it, has anyone thought about the potential for blowback? How would you feel if we were invaded by the Chinese on a false pretense, and they stated openly that their strategy was to attract and fight the scum of the earth in the streets of New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Chicago so they did not have to fight in Beijing?

The post excerpted by Djerejian (and the whole blog, really) is worth a read; it's written by a sort of lapsed conservative who blogs from inside some megabank in NYC.

Okay!

Belgravia Dispatch link via Obsidian Wings.

2005-08-24T13:18:00.000Z

Can't...breathe...too...funny....

We join Doctor Fafnir and Doctor Giblets as they race to save a stroke victim through the miracle of pluralistic medicine.

"The brain is irreducibly complex and intelligently designed," says me, "most likely by brain fairies. The only way to save this brain is to lure the stroke fairies outta the brain with delicious fairy snacks."

"You speak madness!" says Giblets. "Your fairy appeasement plan will only encourage these stroke fairies to cause MORE strokes in the future! Only a hardline anti-fairy stance will deter future fairy-designed brain maladies!"

"We won't get anywhere with your dangerous fairy brinksmanship," says me. "I've got a patient to save and the fairies-for-brain trade is the only way to do it!"

"That's just a theory, not a fact," says Giblets. "Giblets knows strokes are really caused by an excess of blood, the only cure for which is an increase in phlegm levels! Get me 50 cc's of phlegm, stat!"

"Oh no we're losin him!" says me. "Get me God on the phone, we need him to create thrombolysis!"

"No time for that, he'll take at least six days and that's not counting the time to tempt it into eternal damnation!" says Giblets.

"He has only one hope now: the artificial replacement brain!" says me.

"Giblets has it right here!" says Giblets scoopin out the brain an stickin in a bag a Stop-U-Mart ice.

"Doctor Giblets I must protest," says me. "How's the patient gonna think with a bag a Stop-U-Mart ice."

"He won't," says Giblets. "He'll think with his heart and use his new artificial ice brain to cool his blood and prevent heated disruptions of the humours like everybody else!"

Seriously....just go read it...

You know what else is funny? The Aristocrats, that's what. But no kidding with the NC-17. This movie could scorch impressionable minds from 200 yards, and through walls. Oh, jeebus. "The Spacedock. It's where you [INCREDIBLY OFFENSIVE CONTENT DELETED]. I don't think anyone has ever actually done that one, though."

2005-08-23T19:00:00.000Z

Some fuss has arisen over the results of this Harris poll showing that a large majority of Americans would prefer both evolution and ID to be taught in schools (see Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias). While that was indeed a surprising statistic, I think that the rest of the poll could only be described as terrifying:

"Do you think human beings developed from earlier species or not?"
2005: Did: 38% Did Not: 54% Unsure: 8%
1994: Did: 44% Did Not: 46% Unsure: 10%

"Which of the following do you believe about how human beings came to be? Human beings evolved from earlier species. Human beings were created directly by God. Human beings are so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them."
Evolved From Earlier Species: 22%
Created Directly By God: 64%
Powerful Force/Intelligent Being: 10%
Unsure: 4%

So, it isn't just that Americans wish to see pseudo-science in the classroom, and it's not just that most Americans have been taken in by some ID disinformation campaign. No such campaign was necessary. The real problem is that most Americans are ID sympathizers because they are, in fact, creationists who do not believe in evolution. One wonders, having accepted the basic Adam-n'-Eve premise, what other talismanic certainties they are dubious about. The big bang? The immutability of the speed of light? The sun-centered solar system?

I often dance around it out of politeness, but it must be said - I do not live on the same planet as those people who believe that humanity was created in the garden of eden directly by god a matter of millenia ago. We do not walk on the same earth. Mine is a speck of rock in the middle of an incomprehensibly vast, incomprehensibly empty clockwork spanning great reaches of space and time. Their earth lies safely nestled in the palm of god's hand, under his ever-attentive eye, tucked into a jewelers box with a tuft of pure white watchcotton. If humans were created, why not everything else? The scientific view of the universe brings the earth to immense, buzzing life, detail and change impregnating everything, the universe alive with self-creation and constant destruction, even this tabletop hiding great reaches of space and dancing energy masked by the seeming solidity of a firm knock. But the creationist walks through a stage set, mere scenery. His world is a papier-mache construct built to contain him and only him, such a beautiful, perfect culmination of the work of god himself. He lifts a rock, and sees insects teeming because they were put there for him to see. To me, such a world is static, muffled, and dead, like a hand clapped over a jar.

Oh, and by the way, I don't know anything much about Paul Hackett, except that (a) he is a democrat, (b) he is an Iraq war veteran, (c) that he ran in a special congressional election earlier this month in a heavily republican Ohio district, and lost by barely 4% of the vote (for context, the republican margin of victory in 2004 was 44%), and (d) he has been floated as a possible challenger to Ohio senator Mike DeWine in 2006. So, that's all very nice. But what I like is this exchange, on the Ed Schultz Show, after Rush Limbaugh accused Hackett of going to Iraq to "pad his political resume."

SCHULTZ: In fact, the No. 1 conservative talker in this country, Rush Limbaugh, said you went to Iraq to pad your resumé. How do you take that kind of conversation?

HACKETT: That's typical for that fat-ass drug addict to come up with something like that. There's a guy -- I didn't hear this, but actually when I was on drill this weekend, I've got to tell you, he lost a lot of Republican supporters with his comments. Because they were coming up to me, telling me, "I can't believe he said that! And besides that, he called you a soldier. He doesn't know the difference between a soldier and a Marine!

As I said, I don't know anything about Hackett, but hearing someone punch back at a whinging shitbag like Limbaugh just makes me wonder why more people don't. The right wing pundits have had it their way for a long, long time. I tried to come up with some brilliant conclusion to this bit, but I couldn't. Rush Limbaugh is an ass. Ho-hum. Oh, well, I guess once again outrage will have to substitute for eloquence, as we go out with a bang: Did you see this fucking crazy-ass bullshit?

2005-08-18T21:40:00.000Z

I am no expert on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I don't even have a coherent position on the matter. Both sides seem able to draw on great reservoirs of righteousness and victimhood to justify...well, almost anything, from suicide attacks by children to indiscriminate rocket attacks on residential neighborhoods. Everything, every single act by both sides is cited as a reprisal, as justice.

Which is just a mealy-mouthed way of saying I have no idea what to do there, or whether the ongoing Gaza pullout is a good idea, or a prelude to another, if different, chapter of darkness. The settlements, to be sure, are an agressive irritant in the peace process, and their expansion is justly pointed to as evidence of Israeli bad faith - the Israelis swear at the bargaining table that the settlements will stop, and no sooner do they return to the capital than more settlements are approved. The Palestinians swear again and again to seek to curb the violence,* but their leaders live in a constant nod-wink relationship with the intifadah, unwilling to risk their political lives by excessively criticizing the prevailing ideology of their citizens.

But what is happening here is a new thing -- I can't think of anything like it in my memory:

Israeli Riot Police Storm Gaza Synagogue

KFAR DAROM, Gaza Strip (AP) - Riot troops stormed synagogues in two hardline Jewish settlements Thursday to evict hundreds of militant holdouts who locked arms in a human chain and pelted soldiers with acid, oil and sand, the most violent clashes in Israel's historic Gaza pullout.

By the close of the day, Israel's 14,000 unarmed forces had cleared all but four of Gaza's 21 settlements - including Kfar Darom and Neve Dekalim, pillars of resistance to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to cede Gaza to Palestinians and alter the course of Mideast peacemaking.

Holy fuck, pelted soldiers with acid? That is nuts. I don't have much beyond the link, just an observation, and a question. First, on its surface, this looks like a significant gesture by Israel. This is undeniably a genuine rollback of settlement activity, and a major political sacrifice by Sharon. There are of course wheels within wheels here, but considering that this is one of the very things that Israel's critics have insisted on as a critical first step to a meaningful two-state solution, Israel must be given credit for acting. Some Palestinian militants see Israel's exit as simply an opportunity to declare victory and consolidate power, and some see it as a prelude to expanded settlements in the West bank. Who knows.

And my question is, what happens to all the houses? Are they knocked down? Sold? Simply abandonded in return for a government payment? I don't know.

So, until next time, ain't no one dope as me!

* Yes, I know no government can stop violence with a wave of its hand, but I haven't seen any Palestinian government even try to break the power of Hamas and its ilk over the public mind.

2005-08-09T17:13:00.000Z

Discovery lands without incident. Well, that's a relief. I remember in winter of 2003, waking up and watching CNN and thinking wow, why are they replaying the Challenger footage? That's kind of a grim way to welcome back the shuttle. Then I saw the live shot, and I figured it out. So, welcome back, Discovery. What this means for the future of the shuttle program, I can't say.

In other science news, the biggest explosion in the universe has been discovered by the Chandra orbiting x-ray telescope. The explosion (well, technically, eruption) is centered on a black hole the size of the solar system which formed the center of a distant galaxy. Apparently, the acceleration and movement of the vast clouds of heated gas traveling towards the inhaling maw of the black hole created "intense electromagnetic fields" that tipped past some balancing point and ejected two vast fountains of highly energized gas that, essentially, ripped apart the galaxy playing host to the supermassive black hole and flung huge arms of dispersed gas and ejecta out into a formation about 600 times the size of the Milky Way. Click the links for x-ray images of the blast.

Lest you think I have lost focus on politics to pursue my long-standing fascinations with astrophysics and graffiti, I bring you this wonderful news - the appointment of a Deputy Commissioner of Bowdlerization by the FCC:
FCC Hires Conservative Indecency Critic
The Federal Communications Commission has hired as an advisor an anti-pornography activist and former lobbyist for groups that push for Christian precepts in public policy. The move may herald a reinvigorated campaign against broadcast indecency and bring renewed pressure on cable to reconsider its racy offerings.

Penny Nance, until recently a board member of Concerned Women for America, is working as a special advisor in the FCC’s Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis, said aides to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

The strategic planning office helps develop agency policy. Concerned Women for America describes its mission as “helping…to bring Biblical principles into all levels of public policy.” In recent weeks Nance, a longtime supporter, stepped down from the organization’s board, said an official with the Washington, D.C.-based group.

Oh, joy. Betty Bowers, policymaker. I can't wait.

Now, I know that some bloggers, when the silences get longer and longer, tend to make it official and drop off the page altogether, hanging up the blogging shoes and going about their lives, unfettered by the nagging feeling of leaving something undone every day they don't post. Well, fuck that, says I. Though the silences be long, they be not eternal, except unto the great silence of the grave.* Thanks for checking back.

* Or perhaps even the grave will not stop me.

2005-07-15T14:09:00.000Z

Good night, sweet Borf! (or, "Borf is no longer winning"). The elusive phenomenon named Borf has been brought to heel:

The mysterious, ubiquitous and eminently destructive graffiti artist known as Borf was arrested yesterday after waging a months-long campaign that may have been intended to enlighten Washington, but mostly just confused us.

The man primarily responsible for Borf is, it turns out, an 18-year-old art student from Great Falls named John Tsombikos, according to D.C. police inspector Diane Groomes. He was arrested along with two other young men in the wee hours of yesterday morning after officers received a tip that graffiti artists were spray-painting at Seventh and V streets NW.

Approached by a reporter at D.C. Superior Court yesterday, Tsombikos refused to comment. One of the other men arrested, Richard Lee, 18, said, "Borf is dead."

Well, yes and no. According to Tsombikos's mother, Kathleen Murphy of Great Falls, Borf was the nickname for a close friend of her son's who committed suicide about two years ago. The Borf face featured in his graffiti -- which many who've walked through Dupont Circle would recognize, and which looks somewhat like TV actor Jerry O'Connell -- belongs to that young man. Murphy suggests that for her son, the Borf face and moniker came to stand for all that he felt was wrong with the world.

Click here for more and more Borf. Borf will rise again! He will rise, slowly, from the bottom of a huge sign over the Roosevelt Bridge!

2005-07-13T18:21:00.000Z

I know, I know, no posts for a while. Why? I don't know, outrage fatigue, I suppose. Stuff like this, man, it just makes it just makes me want to eat light bulbs and puke broken glass into the face of the first Bush/Cheney voter I see. And that's just not healthy, and it makes for uninteresting, screedy blogging.

London. God, what a nightmare, the narratives of those trapped in the trains, smelling the creeping smoke, seeing the brightening light of the fire from the far end of the train. It seems like a miracle that more people weren't killed, but it always seems that way to me. It's strange; I always expect the numbers to be greater. But, then, there were so many wounded - 700 at last count. It reflects, I suppose, how good modern emergency services are, how effective our modern trauma medicine really is. The same thing happens in Iraq, apparently.

Supreme Court. What's to say here? Of course I join in the hope that Bush will nominate a moderate, consensus candidate, but I have less than no faith that he will do so. Why should he? I was listening to a DNC public conference call with Harry Reid yesterday, and he said "the nuclear option is dead," and claimed there was "no way" the Republicans would rewrite the Senate rules to ram through a Dem filibuster of a Bush Supreme Court choice. (click here to listen to a streaming MP3 of the call.) Oh, yeah? That comes as a surprise to me; reading the text of the filibuster deal, it seems the Republicans reserved themselves the right to take the nuclear option out again if they disagree with the Democrats' definition of "extraordinary circumstances."* Such a disagreement would be, shall we say, unsurprising. But I hope Reid is right.

Roe v. Wade. While I can't disagree with the outrage over the danger it's in, it is surely no surprise. The country elected a right-wing, pro-life president in 2004. The entire political strategy of the pro-life movement since 1973 has led up to this moment, this exact moment right now, where a President has the opportunity and likely Congressional votes to install a pro-life justice on the Supreme Court in place of one of the supporters of abortion rights, and repeal Roe. O'Connor was the only thing between Roe and repeal twice, in 1989 and 1992. The country voted for this president, these senators. It gets what it asked for.

On to trivia. War of the Worlds? Abrupt, idiotic ending (yes, I know, it's a remake, but it could have been handled so much better). Not worth sitting through (but nice to get out and spend time with my wife).

This is a nice reminiscence about the Golden Era of the Mixtape by Pitchfork's Mark Richardson.

This is an interesting series of articles about playing in the World Series of Poker by Paul Phillips. Go Greg Raymer! I do love that pudgy little patent attorney.

* This observation does not make me change my favorable opinion of the deal, as expressed here. The fact remains that if they had been unified, the GOP could have shoved every one of the nominees down our throats. The deal was valuable not because of what it did directly, but rather what it did indirectly - enhanced McCain's stature, revealed party divisions, embarrassed Frist and Bush.

2005-06-28T20:54:00.000Z

R.I.P. Shelby Foote, dead in Memphis at age 88.

2005-06-27T13:40:00.000Z

Worse than you think. This is an infinitely depressing way to start a week. Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings collectes a number of links to present a current snapshot of the war in Iraq that is frankly nauseating. Her long post moves through many facts of the conflict, and concludes with a telling quote:

I opposed this war. But since we went in, I have felt that we needed to stay in until we had set Iraq on its feet. The one thing that has always given me pause, however, is the thought that we have botched the war so thoroughly that we are not capable of doing that: that our presence is counterproductive, but our absence would be worse. I have never figured out whether I think we are there yet. I suspect we are. For this reason, I honestly do not know what we should do.

I do know, however, that it is time for this administration to stop pretending that we are winning the war, or turning the corner, or that "the insurgency is in its last throes." (Editor and Publisher: "Is Dick Cheney the New 'Baghdad Bob'?") The American people are not stupid. They know that the insurgency is not in its last throes. They need leadership, not lies. I also think it is imperative that this administration set aside its usual modus operandi and actually consult with congressional leaders of both parties. They have had their chance to act as they see fit, and they have used it disastrously. It is time for them to stop. I agree with Zbigniew Brzezinski in yesterday's radio address (mp3, my transcript):

"Patriotism and love of country does not demand endless sacrifice on the part of our troops in a war justified by slogans. To ensure a safe and secure America, we have a responsibility to ask how we got to this point and where we are going from here. For the first time in our history, America is conducting a war without any effort whatsoever at bipartisan consultation on our tactics, on our strategy, and on our goals. The President can't change the circumstances in which we went to war. He can't make up for the mistakes that have been made. But surely he can move forward in a more responsible way.

The President should provide the American people with a plan describing the key elements of a successful strategy in Iraq. He should explain clearly and credibly what must be achieved before our troops can come home. And then he should lay out what he needs in order to achieve that goal. Our soldiers don't need fancy slogans to do their duty. But to accomplish their mission they need honesty and real leadership based on genuine national unity."

For my part, I did not oppose the war, at least in principle. I believed (and believe) that the UN or something like it is essential to deal with transnational problems like terrorism, environmental degradation, famine, AIDS and other pandemics, refugees, and a host other problems that will never be solved by nations hiding behind their borders and their sovereignty. As I said in January of '03:

"What the evidence of recent history clearly shows is that left to its own devices, Iraq will completely ignore the clear commands of the UN, and the credibility of the UN as a forum for effective global co-operation and enforcement will seek ever-lower nadirs. But that's as far as I'll go. As for the rest of it, I can't swallow that much bile - the cynical, manipulative way that Bush & friends foisted this issue onto the nation, the reverses and inconsistencies in our statements to our allies and our enemies, the repellant demagoguery of the deaths of 3,000 people to justify his shitty little oil venture. Don't get me wrong, I think that Bush is an evil chimp, and any coincidence of his motives with a concern for global justice is but coincidence. But, whether he really cares about the UN or not, when he says that the UN becomes less relevant every day it lets Saddam spit in its face without doing anything, he's right.

But, in the event, that was just wishful thinking. A war to strengthen the UN was never in the cards; the UN sent the inspectors back in, and when their preliminary reports indicated that nothing was there, we kicked them out* and let slip the dogs. Bush did nothing to strengthen the UN, and the war itself was spun and has been used to further disempower and humiliate that body. There is no hope of a multinational force playing any role in Iraq, ever. There will be no blue helmets. Iraq is ours, and ours alone.

What characterizes so much about this shitty little war is the vast tracery of public relations papier-mache that has enclosed every facet of it, and how repeatedly that millimeter-thin veneer has been punched through to reveal incompetence, carelessness, or real dishonesty. From the carefully-spun and cherrypicked WMD intelligence and the UN puppet show by Colin Powell, to Cheney's public assurances to the American people that we would be greeted as liberators, to the supposedly ironclad links to al Quaeda, to the rise and fall and rise and fall of Mr. Chalabi, to the claims that the Iraqi oil fields would pay for the reconstruction, to the catastrophically abrupt "de-Baathification" of the military casting hundreds of thousands of people out of jobs and into bitter poverty, to the bogus "mobile chemical weapons factories," to the Abu Ghraib "bad apples," to the missing billions in reconstruction funds, to the STILL-unarmored vehicles that carry our troops, to the hundreds of tons of high-grade explosive left unguarded which are now being used to blow so many of them into prosthetics, wheelchairs, and early graves. And a hundred more examples, including the general lesson that this war has taught the world: America is far, far weaker than you thought. Before Iraq, the world was pretty sure that we could take on any six countries and whip them while yawning. They don't think that anymore. Its almost unbelievable, really. Almost as unbelievable as the fact that all of this was known on November 2, 2004.

* We kicked them out. Despite the fact that the president chooses to repeatedly lie about this fact, Saddam did not refuse to allow the inspectors in. He let them in, and we told them to leave or risk getting caught in the invasion (no doubt he had his own reasons for doing so, and no doubt those reasons included the large American army massing on his doorstep, but he did let them in, and it would be nice for the President not to lie so much about it). We rejected the inspectors' claims that they were finding no evidence of WMD's; in fact, we took their empty-handed preliminary reports as evidence that Saddam was up to his old tricks of concealment. Given what we know now, this irony is particularly sickening.

2005-06-22T14:53:00.000Z

Dagnabbit. The solar sail vehicle never even had a chance - the crappy Russian missile that was supposed to get it into orbit crashed 83 seconds after takeoff. Oh, well.

UPDATE: But wait! The initial reports may have been wrong! Signals from the craft may have been heard over the Marshall Islands! Stay tuned! More exclamation points surely to come!

UPDATE 2: !

2005-06-20T15:57:00.000Z

Do you know what a turtle is? Free weekly newspapers are a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes, they offer straight news reporting, and sometimes they indulge in snarky outsiderism that can be a bit grating. Sometimes, though, they come up with a perfect blend of the two, and give you something you are just not going to see anywhere else. DC City Paper's "Seller's Market" is one; another is this article in the Bay Area Wave, wherein Eric Gutoski contacted each of the many candidates for mayor of San Francisco, and administered the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner to them. As Gutoski puts it, "Rather than confuse you with endorsements, position papers and other outmoded means of political influence, we’ve decided to get to the bottom of the only question that matters: Is a particular candidate human or an insidious replicant, possessed of physical strength and computational abilities far exceeding our own, but lacking empathy and possibly even bent on our destruction as a species?" An important question, to be sure. Only one of the candidates recognized the reference, and the rest were priceless. My favorite was Angela Alioto:
SUBJECT 1: ANGELA ALIOTO
----------------------------------------

The Wave: Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. Now, answer as quickly as you can. It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
Angela Alioto: I’d accept it.

TW: You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?
AA: I’d look at it. What do you mean what would I do? As opposed to saying “how horrible?” I would tell him how beautiful it is.

TW: You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.
AA: I’d knock it off. It’s something I’m used to doing in politics [Laughs].

TW: You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, Angela, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back, Angela. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that, Angela?
AA: That would never happen. I wouldn’t turn it over in the first place, and the thing with it being in pain is out of the question. Let me ask you, John, how does this fit in to the bigger picture when you ask me about the dying tortoise and the dead butterflies?

TW: They’re just questions, Angela. In answer to your query, they’re written down for me. It’s a test, designed to provoke an emotional response. Shall we continue? Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind. About your mother.
AA: My mother? She’s beautiful. She’s an artist. She’s a renaissance artist.

CONCLUSION: Her defensiveness over her lack of empathy for the butterfly is telling, as is the comparison of a political rival to a wasp that should be knocked off. I think we can safely say that Angela Alioto is indeed a replicant, albeit one that “loves” the implanted memory of her mother. Keep an eye on her.

Read them all. Via Jonas Cord in the comments to this post.

2005-06-20T14:50:00.000Z

Just got back from traveling, so I have no idea what's happening in the world. This, however, is extremely cool:

Sunshine-Propelled Craft Is Set to Sail in Space

The idea occurred to German astronomer Johannes Kepler in the 17th century when he detected a comet flying across the night sky trailing what looked like a plume of fire. If space had so much wind, why not build ships to sail the heavens?

Indeed. Tomorrow, barring delay or mishap, a U.S. filmmaker, an international association of space buffs and Russian aerospace organizations will use a leftover Soviet ballistic missile to put the first "solar sail" into orbit.

This unusual device, which looks like a 6,500-square-foot flower with eight triangular, mirrorlike petals, does not use wind, as Kepler predicted. Instead, it hopes to show that sunlight's gentle push might one day enable a spacecraft to reach speeds far greater than anything achieved by a mere rocket. Deployed, the petals are about 1 1/2 times the size of a basketball court.

"The design life for this mission is only a month," said Louis Friedman, project director for the venture known as Cosmos 1. "It could go longer, but not much. What we want to do is prove that it works -- that we can increase orbit energy and make it fly higher."

Solar sails work on a relatively simple principle -- that beams of light bouncing off a reflective surface will transmit a push to the surface, driving it forward. Although the force is tiny, it is also constant and cumulative. And in the vacuum of space, there is no atmospheric friction to slow it down.

Speed rises, and eventually will build well beyond the 25,000 mph needed to free an object from Earth's gravity. If they handle it properly, ground-based engineers can steer a solar sail back and forth in space, Friedman said, "tacking it, like a sailboat -- although the physics are different."

"The basic trick is to get a large enough sail surface and a spacecraft that's light enough so you can move," said NASA In-Space Propulsion Technology Manager Les Johnson, who is overseeing two NASA solar-sail projects expected to be ready sometime after 2010. "In the 1970s, we didn't have either the materials or the structures, and we've only gotten them in the last five or 10 years."

Traditionally, when I think of a "solar powered vehicle," I think of something like this, clad in silicon panels, where photons knock electrons free in a two-layered cell, converting light to electricity through a chemical process, which electricity then powers some traditional motor to produce mechanical thrust.

But this is a more rudimentary, more primitive form of solar power, derived from the basic f=ma force created by a light source like the sun, rather than a sophisticated manipulation of light's chemical properties. Here, the photons are not absorbed or transformed by a cunningly wrought material, but rather they simply rain against the "petals" like a hundred trillion tiny ball bearings, each imparting the tiniest push against the craft, quite literally like a wind billowing away from the sun, but a wind with no horse latitudes between here and Pluto, no calms until the Big Sargasso between the stars, where the sun's light goes out.

2005-06-09T16:43:00.000Z

Missed recruitment goals are indeed a problem, but as John Cole says, this is not the solution (edited):

When Marine recruiters go way beyond the call

For mom Marcia Cobb and her teenage son Axel, the white letters USMC on their caller ID soon spelled, "Don't answer the phone!" Marine recruiters began a relentless barrage of calls to Axel as soon as the mellow, compliant Sedro-Woolley High School grad had cut his 17th birthday cake. And soon it was nearly impossible to get the seekers of a few good men off the line.

"I've been trained to be pretty friendly. I guess you might even say I'm kind of passive," Axel told me last week, just after his mother and older sister had tracked him to a Seattle testing center and sprung him on a ruse.

A single mom with a meager income, Marcia raised her kids on the farm where, until recently, she grew salad greens for restaurants. Axel's father, a Marine Corps vet who served in Vietnam, died when Axel was 4. Clearly the recruiters knew all that and more.

"You don't want to be a burden to your mom," they told him. "Be a man." "Make your father proud." Never mind that, because of his own experience in the service, Marcia says enlistment for his son is the last thing Axel's dad would have wanted.

The next weekend, when Marcia went to Seattle for the Folklife Festival and Axel was home alone, two recruiters showed up at the door. Axel repeated the family mantra, but he was feeling frazzled and worn down by then. The sergeant was friendly but, at the same time, aggressively insistent. This time, when Axel said, "Not interested," the sarge turned surly, snapping, "You're making a big (bleeping) mistake!"

Next thing Axel knew, the same sergeant and another recruiter showed up at the LaConner Brewing Co., the restaurant where Axel works. And before Axel, an older cousin and other co-workers knew or understood what was happening, Axel was whisked away in a car.

"They said we were going somewhere but I didn't know we were going all the way to Seattle," Axel said.

Just a few tests. And so many free opportunities, the recruiters told him.

He could pursue his love of chemistry. He could serve anywhere he chose and leave any time he wanted on an "apathy discharge" if he didn't like it. And he wouldn't have to go to Iraq if he didn't want to.

At about 3:30 in the morning, Alex was awakened in the motel and fed a little something. Twelve hours later, without further sleep or food, he had taken a battery of tests and signed a lot of papers he hadn't gotten a chance to read. "Just formalities," he was told. "Sign here. And here. Nothing to worry about."

By then Marcia had "freaked out."

She went to the Burlington recruiting center where the door was open but no one was home. So she grabbed all the cards and numbers she could find, including the address of the Seattle-area testing center.

Then, with her grown daughter in tow, she high-tailed it south, frantically phoning Axel whose cell phone had been confiscated "so he wouldn't be distracted during tests."

Axel's grandfather was in the hospital dying, she told the people at the desk. He needed to come home right away. She would have said just about anything.

But, even after being told her son would be brought right out, her daughter spied him being taken down a separate hall and into another room. So she dashed down the hall and grabbed him by the arm.

"They were telling me I needed to 'be a man' and stand up to my family," Axel said.

What he needed, it turned out, was a lawyer.

Five minutes and $250 after an attorney called the recruiters, Axel's signed papers and his cell phone were in the mail.

Now, to be sure, this is just one account of the story, but still, what the fuck, huh? And now, in what is becoming a characteristic response, the Bush administration has decided to deal with the sagging numbers by...changing the disclosure procedure to obscure the problem! Yay!

2005-06-08T22:22:00.000Z

Long Non-Political Post. I don't want to say anything about gulags, or medical marijuana, or Mark Felt, or any of it. What I want to talk about is drums.

Over Memorial Day weekend, I attended the Modern Drummer Festival. A jazz drummer friend of mine and I met up in Manhattan on May 27th, and spent the entire weekend eating great food and geeking out over some of the most overpowering drumming I have ever seen. The festival was amazing, consisting of two days of showcases featuring fifteen or so performances in a wide range of drum styles, from double bass metal speed-freaks like Jason Bittner (click here for a quick video clip, if you want to see someone play double bass really fast), to Drum 'n Bass guru Jojo Mayer and his band Nerve, topped off by a set from jazz legend Roy Haynes. Haynes was particularly inspiring, as he always is – he is 80, and still hits a ton. I don't mean he hits a ton for an 80-year old. I mean he hits a ton, period. Powerful, creative, clean, funky, on-point. That is Roy Haynes, then and now.

Watching Mayer was an eye-opener, as he played beats designed to replicate the superfast metronomic drive of drum-machine based techno music. His clinic was an object lesson in what machines can never capture. Mayer's imitative technique was clean as a whistle, and I imagine if you put a metronome to him, his time is damn-near perfect. But. There still emerged in his playing an identifiable pulse, a whispering artifact of dynamic tension and release that drove the band (a live bass and keyboard player) into the most interesting music I heard all weekend. The bass player had a big part of this, as he was clearly dialed into whatever Mayer was up to just behind the beat. I normally hate techno music, or at least am profoundly bored by it, but this was riveting.

Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers did a dual clinic with Ian Paice of Deep Purple, an avuncular, war-story-swapping affair. The best moment, and one of the high points of the festival, came when Ian Paice invited Smith to take a solo. Paice (a really likeable guy) had just finished an impressive technical solo, with lots of cascading triplets and thunder and cymbals, in the Moby Dick mold. Smith sat down, and just started to stomp out a brutally funky syncopated groove, simple, but driving. Bump, BAP. Bump-babump-BAP. Bump, BAP. Bump-babump-BAP. Everyone was waiting for the explosion, because, although he doesn't use them much on the RHCP records, Smith has huge chops, and can perform amazing, pyrotechnic solo moves when he is of a mind. But he wasn't of a mind. He just sat on that groove, playing steady, hard and loud, for three full minutes. Bump, BAP. Bump-babump-BAP. Bump, BAP. Bump-babump-BAP. It was a thing of beauty.

In the evenings, we went to see some club shows. Nick Payton at Birdland was a mixed bag – Payton was burning, but his band just wasn't up for it, especially a very lackluster drummer, who refused to challenge Payton dynamically, and just seemed inclined to hang back and impress himself with the cool broken-time comping he learned at Berklee. Sunday night, however, was a whole 'nother story. We went to see Wycliffe Gordon play at one of the new small jazz venues that Lincoln Center has set up at Columbus Circle – Dizzy's Club Coca Cola. Despite the cheesy corporate name, and the even cheesier names on the menu (the Manteca Sundae? The Cubano-Bop Steak? Cheese Fries in Tunisia? Okay, I made up that last one, but still), this was the most beautiful jazz room I have ever been in, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the park and the skyline. The band was entirely smoking, with Herlin Riley and Reginald Veal (fellow alumni with Gordon from the classic Wynton Marsalis Septet), and later, Wynton himself, showing up to wish Gordon a happy birthday and take a few solos. A great night, and a venue I hope very much to return to.

So, there. Some other non-political topics: Revenge of the Sith? Good, but not great. Not a good enough reason to turn to the dark side, and a real waste of the potentially devastating Darth Vader Moment ("Noooooooooooooooo!"....feh.) New Spoon record? Good, but I liked Kill the Moonlight better (except for "The Infinite Pet," that's a great fucking song). New M. Doughty record? I was really enjoying it, until I realized that none of the songs would be out of place on a Dave Matthews Band record. Then I noticed that, in fact, Dave Matthews was guest vocalist on the song I was listening to. Then I realized I had better things to do than listen to a Dave Matthews Band record.

All right, that's a bit harsh. I have been walking around singing "Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well" and "I Can Hear The Bells" for like a week now. They are insistent and catchy as hell. But don't you see? That's how they get you! That's what they wanted all along!!!

2005-05-24T13:54:00.000Z

I love the internet. Only out here in the trackless wastes could you find something like this, via the BBC: "Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight" Go on. Read it.

Yeah, I know, it's a fake, apparently "created to settle a dispute" between the creator and a friend who "claimed that 40 weaponless midgets could defeat 1 lion in a hypothetical fight." But that's what's so great about it. Where else but out here would you find people who are not only strange enough to have such an argument, but who have the time, skills and inclination to attempt to win it by cheating?

. . .

As for the filibuster deal, what can I say? From a certain perspective, it's a loss for the Democrats, as nutjobs like JR Brown and Priscilla Owens will apparently get on the bench.* But what must be remembered is that we are in the minority. The only way we can affect the course of the majority's will is to crack off moderate Republicans into reasonable-sounding compromises. The story here isn't that some of the judges will get confirmed. The fact is, if the GOP had maintained party discipline, they would have accomplished that anyway, and more. What matters is that Frist failed, failed completely, to hold his party together. He didn't just lose usual suspects like Chaffee and Snowe, he lost six of 'em. And the defection (because, make no mistake, that's what it was) was led by McCain, who carries with him an gravitational field independent from the party power center that Frist represents. Every independent act that McCain takes to compromise is a direct slap in Frist's face, to say nothing of the profound fuck-off this is to the White House.

So, on the whole, nothing wrong with the deal that wasn't wrong before by virtue of our minority status, and all kinds of upside as faultlines appear in the GOP facade. I have never been one who believes that it is better for the country to bottom out in order to demonstrate the folly of the current administration - such a position is rich in arrogance and borrowed blood, considering what that folly has entailed. I want the responsible members of the GOP to seize control now, even if this sets up McCain 2008.

As I think I've made clear here, I don't have any personal, visceral dislike for conservatism per se. Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings posted about this recently:

According to Merriam-Webster, 'conservatism' means:

1 capitalized a : the principles and policies of a Conservative party b : the Conservative party
2 a : disposition in politics to preserve what is established b : a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change
3 : the tendency to prefer an existing or traditional situation to change

This is a view I can respect, even when I disagree with it. Changing institutions can often have large unintended consequences, and a generally cautious attitude towards changing them often makes sense to me. To quote a passage from Chesterton that Sebastian cited recently:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

I especially like the Chesterton quote, as it captures something utterly absent from the mobthink of the current GOP crowd as they wantonly destroy any institutions that they themselves did not create: a complete lack of real circumspection. From the filibuster, to Social Security, to the prohibition against domestic operations by the CIA, to the due process requirements to obtain search or wiretapping warrants, to the immemorial prohibition against wars of choice, it as if the historic status of an institution or established practice is of no value. The only thing considered is whether there is an obstacle in the path of the immediate impulse of the leadership. In each case, the rush to sweep aside the past has been headlong and utterly unconsidered, justified with only the flimsiest and most contingent of excuses, and the nay-sayers be damned as obstructionists or traitors. Everything is justified by the rhetoric of immediate crisis: "smoking gun is a mushroom cloud!" "bankrupt in 7 years!" "Panic! Panic! Panic!!!!"

These policies, now seen as relics of the past easily chucked away to serve today's expediency, were themselves the product of long practice, of extensive debate, and have, or should have, gathered some weight and substance by the simple fact of their long existence. This, in my view, is the very essence of conservatism - a respect for the weight of past experience and labor. To be sure, this respect can, and too often does, slide into fetishization, and conservatism can become hidebound, reflexive and ignorant; in W. Buckley's telling construction, "Standing athwart history, yelling "Stop!" Paleozoic mugwumps like Buckley and Pat Buchanan have no solutions to the problems of the modern world, and their advice consists only of digging farther and farther into the ground while shrieking "NO!" over and over.

But you can't just turn it all over to the visionaries, either, and this has been the conservative critique of liberal government for years - "How are you going to pay for this? What will this program look like in twenty years? How do you know this will even do what you say it will?" Asking these questions is an essential part of the push-pull of democratic societies. But the current hyperreligious nutbags in charge have just thrown this out the window - what do they want? I don't know. Where are they going? Who knows. They are just ripping out the wiring installed over a half-century and more of Democratic/liberal dominance in the Congress, and I don't think they have a plan for what's to replace it. They are governing like Visigoths, like rampaging Mongols.

Maybe the legacy of FDR really is that bad - maybe the "nanny state" and the "activist judges" are such a threat that we must plunge headlong into this brave new ownership world. Maybe we are about to go crunching onto the rocks if we don't haul the wheel over NOW! NOW! NOW! But I don't really think so, and I don't think most Americans think so either; they have just been startled and are running with the crowd, asking the person running next to them "What's up? What's happening? I heard an explosion!" And their neighbor shrugs, uncomprehending and keeps on running. But eventually, everyone's going to get a little tired, and start looking around, and they will notice that the explosion was a long time ago, and the only noise now, in fact the only noise for a while, has been the noise of their leaders, lined up along the stampede route, shouting into megaphones and firing off pistols into the air.**

So what's my point - that 9/11 can never happen again? That the Democrats would by definition have done better? No, I can't say that, such certainty is just not available in situations like this. But I look at our fractured, angry, bankrupt country and I think that there must be, must have been another way. Even if I have to accept that this country is more conservative than I am, and probably would demand moderate conservative government even without the stimulus of crisis, it would be better than what we have now: real radicals, hiding behind conservative rhetoric. And that's why I like the deal.

So, okay.

*Kevin Drum suggests that a deal may even be in place to knock down one of the more noxious nominations.
**Yes, I know the metaphor is flawed. Yes I know the Republicans didn't start the stampede. Work with me, willya?

2005-05-12T23:18:00.000Z

Real Republicans Part II. Too good to pass up. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dwight David Eisenhower, a real republican and no fool, speaking in 1954:

Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental functions. I oppose this--in some instances the fight is a rather desperate one. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything--even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon "moderation" in government.

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are [a] few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

And in this era of Haliburton executives in the white house, and the ever-increasing pressure to privatize the military, who can forget this classic piece of American conservative wisdom from 1961:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military/industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

It used to be so different. But then again, "real republicans" used to spin crazy-ass conspiracy theories comparing the Yalta conference to the Stalin-von Ribbentrop pact, implying that FDR had stabbed the Eastern Europeans in the back because he was a secret Communist sympathizer. I guess I should be happy that the world has changed. I mean, nobody would say crazy shit like that these days, would they?

Ike quotes via Obsidian Wings.

2005-05-11T01:02:00.000Z

Saw Dave Grohl walking through Adams Morgan this morning as I rode by on my bike at like 7:00 AM. Gave him the four-finger handlebar wave (with nod), got the three-finger coffee-cup wave (with nod) back. "Well, what do you know?" I thought. "I guess he really does live here."

Yeah, I know, this isn't generally that kind of slice-of-life blog - I mean, what's next, pithy little vignettes about my dogs?

2005-05-05T17:58:00.000Z

Hmmm. Well, the new year has brought neither the new burst of blogging activity, nor the promised site redesign, but what the hell. I do what I can, and I heartily appreciate those who keep checking back. If nothing else, the picture of HST has been replaced, along with the quote, and that's something, by god. It was starting to smell positively musty in here...

As for the world in general, it seems to be lurching along, and it seems that the Democrats are doing a bit better digging their heels in, what with making the Republicans look like whiners over the "nuclear option" (and Harry Reid's tactically excellent threatened pushback), the derailment of the Social Security phase-out, the continuing hounding of Tom Delay, and the unfolding fiasco of the Bolton nomination.

So, amid all these classic examples of political theater, it's a good time to be a political junkie. The Bolton nomination in particular raises interesting questions for me. Specifically, I am surprised that Bolton's arm hasn't been given a quick twist, and he hasn't yet humbly withdrawn from consideration to spare Bush more embarassment. But no, Bush has kept this slack-armed meatball artist on the mound well into the 7th inning.

Bush is not congenitally incapable of backing away from poisonous nominees (coughKERIKcough), but perhaps once they have actually been put before the Senate, Bush feels that he can't back off without handing the Democrats a real PR victory. I mean, this is pretty much Mandate 101, when you have control of the entire government, you are supposed to get your fucking nominees through, no matter how noxious or incompetent. So maybe Bush is leaving Bolton in the game as a none-too-subtle message to the senate GOP - "Do your job. Get this guy through. I'm not sending you someone who will make your lives easier." It's a theory.

Anyway, these folks and this guy have been covering all of this stuff in greater and better detail, and from more angles, than I could ever attempt. With that said, however, I'll try to do better with posting next week.

2005-04-15T15:50:00.000Z

Fafblog weighs in on the debate over national healthcare:
Fafblog Without Borders

So a lotta people been talkin about universal health care lately. "Oh, why don't we have universal health care." "Oh, American health care is so bad." "Oh, please I need medicine." No, I am sorry, stay away! If we gave you universal health care you would just spend it all on booze and prescription drugs.

Well other countries might have better health care, but at what cost? At the cost of freedom, that's what - the freedom squeezed from their lives by their all-powerful government healthbots. And freedom is the best medicine, right next to laughter and actual medicine! That's why me an Giblets founded Fafblog Without Borders to go bring urgent medical-grade freedom to the poor an uninsured around the world.

Today we're treatin a patient with a tumor - a malignant communist tumor tryin to nationalize his freedom cells! Giblets bombards it into submission with a stunning kazoo rendition of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" while I attack it with laissez faire economics. Success! In no time at all he's up on his feet an eatin a healthy broth of boiled flags. I give him a prescription for eagles an tell him to take two a day.

Across the street the french Médecins Sans Frontières show up. "Socialized medicine!" says Giblets. "Vive la révolution!" says the french. They grab a guy with heart disease an start operatin on him: redistributin his wealth, controllin the means a production. He's just gettin worse! We try to resuscitate him by stickin a couple SUPPORT OUR TROOPS stickers on his forehead but the french shoo us away. The patient goes into cardiac arrent! One of em shoots a passin czar but it doesn't seem to help an the patient dies on accounta Socialism Doesn't Work. When will society learn!

Tomorrow we will end malaria in Africa with a buncha tax cuts an Fourth of July sparklers.

I would tell you to read the whole thing, but I have just quoted the whole thing. So, I will tell you to go read this, which is also very funny. And this, which is absolutely brilliant (but then, I've always been a HUGE Smasher of Things fan, so I'm biased).

2005-04-07T05:19:00.000Z

What is Iraq? There is no way that this is not a good thing. Kurds dancing in the streets to celebrate their prominent role in the new Iraqi government is a powerful indicator of a popular perception of legitimacy. Kurdish secession has been considered a great danger by many, given the fact that the Kurds are only "Iraqis" by dint of a well-known, if bibulous, Englishman. If the Iraqi Kurds are buying into the central government, a whole host of bad outcomes may be averted. I am not talking only about appeasing Turkey (though that is a valuable gain indeed); something more significant is in play - given the history, this is at least a gesture towards a stamp of legitimacy on the notion of Iraq as a nation outside of the colonial whim of the English, the viciously imposed national identity of the Baathists, and the clumsy, violent liberation theology of the Americans. Such a nationalism has good and bad outcomes, but all of the possibilities stemming from full Kurdish participation in the national government are better than the possibilities implied by their refusal.

I notice also that the vagaries of Blogger have caused my 3/30 post, which I previously believed to be lost forever, to reappear. It's not much of a post, really, and events have clearly overtaken it, but completists may wish to read it, directly below this one.

2005-03-30T16:31:00.001Z

Nader press release begs: "Let Terri Live!" Via Digby, consider this joint press release from Ralph Nader and the creationist Discovery Institute:

Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith call upon the Florida Courts and Governor Jeb Bush to take any legal action available to let Terri Schiavo live.

[ . . . ]

The federal and state governments are spending billions on what we are told will become miracle medical cures for people with all sorts of degenerative conditions, including brain damage. If this is so, why not permit Terri’s parents to care for her in the hope that such cures are derived.

Benefits of doubts should be given to life, not hastened death. This case is rife with doubt. Justice demands that Terri be permitted to live.

I won't rehash all of the reasons this link between Nader, the conservative Christian Discovery Institute, and the Schiavo distortion machine in the service of this cruel circus is repellant and unsurprising. Is there anyone left who will stand up and speak for this disgusting fossil? Anyone?

2005-03-30T16:31:00.000Z

Nader press release begs: "Let Terri Live!" Via Digby, we find this joint press release from Ralph Nader and the creationist Discovery Institute:

Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith call upon the Florida Courts and Governor Jeb Bush to take any legal action available to let Terri Schiavo live.

[ . . . ]

The federal and state governments are spending billions on what we are told will become miracle medical cures for people with all sorts of degenerative conditions, including brain damage. If this is so, why not permit Terri’s parents to care for her in the hope that such cures are derived.

Benefits of doubts should be given to life, not hastened death. This case is rife with doubt. Justice demands that Terri be permitted to live.

I won't rehash all of the reasons this link between Nader and the right wing distortion machine in the service of this cruel circus is repellant and unsurprising. Is there anyone left who will stand up and speak for this disgusting fossil? Anyone?

2005-03-24T19:32:00.000Z

Kung Fu Monkey misses real Republicans:

[ . . . ] I love how in these articles, the [hugely expensive, constantly malfunctioning missile defense] system is always quoted as designed to protect us " ... from rogue states such as North Korea ...". No. No, there are no rogue states "such as" North Korea. It's North Korea, guys. That's it. The only fighter in this weight class. China? They're our biggest foreign asset holder, please. Iran? Jerusalem should worry. The US, not so much . Russian loose nukes? More likely to be broken down for parts for a Van-Based Delivery System (TM) than not -- and year's worth of what we spend on missile defense would be a %2000 increase on what we spend on locking down loose nuclear materials now.

What, are the Phillipines suddenly gonna get all cranked up on non-drowsy cough medicine and decide to go postal on us with their shoddily-made fusion-bomb dancing dashboard figurines? No, when we say " ... rogue states such as North Korea", we mean North Korea. And that means Kim Jong-il. One guy. Simple, fifth-grade logic inexorably draws us to the conclusion that we are spending $200 billion dollars to protect ourselves from one guy.

I'll even SPOT you the argument that we should spend $200 billion on protecting ourselves from one guy. He is, after all, nuts. Probably not so nuts that he'd tip off his super-secret invasion of the southern half of his peninsula by nuking and therefore SUPREMELY pissing off the world's only remaining superpower before he got the tanks rolling, but fine. Nuts. Are you telling me there's no better way to spend $200 billion to stop one guy? What'd it cost the mob to whack Kennedy? $50,000 plus hotel? Even with cost-of-living increase, we can get a better deal here.

If there were a rash of break-ins ... no scratch that. Say there's a violent murder in your neighborhood. A really brutal slayfest. Blood on the walls, body parts on the lawn.

Your neigbor decides to take precautions. He leaves his doors and windows unlocked. He sits on the roof, armed with a SpongeBob SquarePants air-rifle, just in case the killers return and attack the house by hang-glider this time. And the air rifle doesn't work. And he spent EVERY DIME HE HAD on the air rifle.

You would of course, say your neighbor was insane. Or supremely stupid.

You do the rest.

My original point was -- Republicans used to be the guys who put the brakes on this shit. A sad chuckle, a little head shake. "Who's going to pay for this?" they'd say, frowning over national budgets. "Where are the facts? The research?" They'd take out their little red pens and buzzkill our little dreams of nationalized health care or solar-powered windmills or maglev trains, and then go back to banning pornography while secretly screwing around on their wives. But you know what? A lot of times, they were right.

We needed those guys. They were a dull but crucial part of the national dialogue. (And they knew their scotches. ) Now ... a void. Simply put, if you are voting for these guys who call themselves Republicans, then you are voting for crazy air-rifle guy. You just walked up, nodded, and said: "Wow, I gotta get me a ladder."

Please. Please. Bring back the real Republicans. Bring back the science guys. I miss you.

Me, too.

Read it all, it's effing hilarious. Via Crooked Timber.