The Sideshow

Archive for August 2002

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Saturday, 31 August 2002
20:40 BST: Permalink

From the Banned Book Project, a review:

When I learned that the novel I most enjoyed teaching in high school was number 41 on the most challenged book list, I was nearly floored. I could not imagine why anyone would ever challenge Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
(Via wood zilla lot. Er....)

19:45 BST: Permalink

Daniel Cainer wrote a song to commemorate the opening of the London Eye a couple years back, and if you haven't yet heard this beautiful song about the city where I live, do give a listen to London Cries. (RealPlayer)

19:30 BST: Permalink

This isn't a criticism of the sex industry.

17:19 BST: Permalink

An editorial in The Washington Post
Fundraiser-in-Chief II
WHEN WHITE HOUSE officials announced that President Bush was going to spend most of August in Crawford, Tex., they also warned reporters not to describe the sojourn as a vacation. Now we know why. Mr. Bush has indeed been working hard -- at raising money for Republican congressional, senatorial and gubernatorial candidates. On Thursday he attended his 49th and 50th fundraisers of 2002, pushing his total take for the year past $110 million. Just this month, while based in Crawford, he has raised money in 11 states. Mr. Bush is making President Clinton, who raised something like $50 million for his first midterm election, look like a model of restraint.
Gee, what a surprise. For the whole first year of his campaign (which, you may recall, started about a year earlier than anyone else's), the headline about Bush was that he was breaking all records in fundraising. In fact, aside from the occasional reference to his "experience" as governor of Texas (an experience that we were often told - when news leaked out about how rotten Texas governance had been - involved no power and few activities), his fundraising abilities were apparently his only recommendation. By the end of the campaign, it was well-known that he had not only continued to break all records but had pulled in twice what his Democratic opponant had. Nevertheless, the same newsmedia that had breathlessly reported on this fantastic ability to rake in the bucks didn't bat an eye when Bush said, during the first presidential debate, that Gore had pulled down twice as much as Bush in contributions.

Like Mr. Clinton and presidents before him, Mr. Bush has every right to campaign for his party and to try to win a Congress more to his liking. There's nothing illegal about bending your schedule and travel itinerary to the electoral map. But, just as some Republicans pointed out in Mr. Clinton's case, there are reasons to worry when speaking for money seems to be a president's chief pursuit. It doesn't enhance the prestige of the office when most people can meet or hear you only if they pay up front. When the vice president is articulating foreign policy while the president is concentrating on pulling in the bucks, it's bound to raise questions about governing priorities.
Except that, in Clinton's case, people could see and hear him all the time without paying up front, and there were no "First Amendment Zones" to prevent the serfs from showing up and maybe even heckling.

There's a particular reason for disquiet when the nation is at war and, as Mr. Bush has stated many times, in peril. In Washington, he appeals for bipartisan support; in fighting the war against terrorism, he has mostly received it. Yet when appealing for donations, he suggests that only Republicans really can be counted on. It's important to have members of Congress "who understand the need for this nation to be steady and resolved and determined and honest about the difference between good and evil," Mr. Bush said at a fundraiser Thursday. To suggest on the hustings that Democrats don't understand that distinction can't much help Mr. Bush's justifiable desire for bipartisan support on the war when he returns after his unvacation in Crawford.
Right, he's "a uniter, not a divider."

04:19 BST: Permalink

MWO has the red light flashing:

FLORIDA 2000 FRAUD BOMBSHELL
JEB CONCEDES G.O.P. STOLE 2000 ELECTION
President Gore Manfully Quiet
And Where Are The Whores?
In developments virtually ignored by the American press, the state of Florida and two remaining Florida counties have quietly settled, out of court, a suit by the NAACP which charged systematic vote fraud and turning away of eligible black voters during the 2000 election.
The decision by the Jeb Bush Administration to settle rather than face trial casts more doubt than ever upon the 537-vote margin that the Scalia Five on the United States Supreme Court seized upon, as grounds for halting the recounting of presidential ballots and declaring Dubya Bush the only legitimate winner in Florida.
Had the NAACP suits gone to trial, the G.O.P. 2000 coup would, almost certainly, been exposed in open court -- just as Governor Jeb, one of the alleged plotters, is in the thick of a hotly contested re-election campaign.
If the State of Florida were innocent, having a trial would have played out in Jeb's favor.
Halting a trial and settling with the NAACP carries the presumption that the State of Florida was far from innocent, and that the evidence to that effect is deeply embarrassing to Bush and the Florida G.O.P.
At last report, President Al Gore maintained a dignified silence about the bombshell settlement.
But where, apart from the Boston Globe, are the Media Whores? They don't report, so you can't decide.
Full Story

Friday, 30 August 2002
14:50 BST: Permalink

Elton Beard detects the Mickey Kaus trap:

Here's my take. I think that Mickey Kaus is the journalistic equivalent of a Trojan horse, with a shtick designed to penetrate enemy defenses by masquerading as a liberal while spreading conservative memes (in this case the fear of a moral hazard). He's been doing this for years. And I don't know whether Kaus is a hustler, a true believer or both, but there is one thing I know for sure: Mickey Kaus is an imposter. At once an artifact and an agent of the dominant conservative media, he may sport a boomer-cool facade - but that man is no liberal. Reader beware.

14:00 BST: Permalink

Jim Henley thinks I was being catty about Coulter, but it's really just honest pity. I suppose I should be jealous of her - after all, she makes money being over the top while I am poor but honest, most of the time trying to restrain my more irresponsible impulses. But I just can't help thinking that someone is deliberately getting her drunk before she goes out in public and says all those outrageous things. Then they get to look reasonable simply by not being Ann Coulter.
And Avram Grumer is right that Jim is falling for a line on public libraries.
On the other hand, Jim is so, so right about Bloomberg's smoking ban. People who at this late date don't know that smoking is bad for them aren't going to be out there accidentally frequenting smoking establishments, because they are too stupid to get dressed. The rest of us can make our choice. Non-smokers don't have to feel comfortable everywhere, and god knows they can find plenty of places where smoking is banned. Anti-smokers can congregate comfortably in the majority of spaces at this point; but smokers are entitled to go out and have a good time, too.
Oh, yeah, and the argument that a smoking environment is an imposition on those who work there neatly omits the probability that a high percentage of those people are smokers themselves and probably want to work someplace that won't oppress them for being smokers. These are low-end jobs, and that's where most of the smokers are. Something the anti-smokers don't get is that adults who are still smoking in the current climate are by and large people for whom quitting is especially difficult. Making it harder for them to get jobs only exacerbates that problem for them.

04:31 BST: Permalink

Much good stuff at Bertramonline, such as A healthy society for all, and also he knows which Dead Russian Composer he is. (I'm Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.)

04:10 BST: Permalink

Frog Liberation Front?
Could George Bush pass this test?

04:00 BST: Permalink

The top search string leading to this site for the last two days has been:
"Name President Herbert Hoover's pet dog while in office."
You dorks, the answer is "Fala". Jeez.
UPDATE: [smacks forehead] No, no, I was thinking of FDR. Why would anyone remember Hoover's dog, for that matter? Unless it was a good crossword word, of course.

01:15 BST: Permalink
Largest Religious Groups in the United States of America

Religion Adherents, 2001 % of population Christianity 159,030,000 76.5% Nonreligious/Secular 27,539,000 13.2% Judaism 2,831,000 1.3% Islam 1,104,000 0.5% Buddhism 1,082,000 0.5% Agnostic 991,000 0.5% Atheist 902,000 0.4%
Thursday, 29 August 2002
11:50 BST: Permalink

Salman Rushdie on the US/Europe divide.
And Carville knows the score:

Republicans have learned that they can say anything they want to. When you answer it, a lot of Democrats are horrified. They say you can't do that, that it's negativism. No, it's not. It's deciding that you aren't going to let thuggery work.

Wednesday, 28 August 2002
23:08 BST: Permalink

Bush is ripping off DC again:

THE FEDERAL government is trying to have it both ways on the coming World Bank-International Monetary Fund meetings, all at the District of Columbia's expense. City leaders should not let the feds get away with it. In the past, the D.C. police have provided security for the fall events, in support of the U.S. Treasury Department, which hosts the international gatherings. This year, as in recent years, security will be a tall and expensive order. Thousands of demonstrators are expected to descend on Washington, some with announced plans for five days of marches, rallies, teach-ins and traffic disruptions, beginning Sept. 25. In addition to street protests, the federal government, eager to make a good impression on the world visitors, expects District police to escort cars carrying delegates and to beef up security at their hotels. But here's the rub: District police already incurred heavy expenses providing security for IMF-World Bank meetings last April -- expenses for which the city has not been properly reimbursed. Now the Bush administration wants to provide $15 million to cover the cost of events such as the IMF-World Bank meetings, but only for costs incurred in fiscal 2003. The feds want to turn a blind eye to costs incurred during fiscal 2002. The District is rightly balking at that unfair proposal.

18:11 BST: Permalink

I meant to refer to this when Patrick originally posted it last month, but I was distracted. But just in case you didn't see it the first time, or failed to mark its importance, here it is again:

Look, a clue
Artemis Records has a wild and crazy marketing idea: how about getting their artists played on thousands of Internet radio stations? Duh.
Courtesy of Erik V. Olson, here's their announcement.
Artemis Records has agreed to issue licenses to internet radio for one year for the master use of songs by all Artemis recording artists. This announcement was made today by Danny Goldberg, Chairman and CEO, Artemis Records and Daniel Glass, President, Artemis Records. During this period, beginning August 1, 2002, Artemis will waive the royalty payments that would otherwise be due them.
Artemis artists include Warren Zevon, Rickie Lee Jones, Boston, the Reverend Horton Heat, and (blogger red-meat alert) Steve Earle.

17:59 BST: Permalink

This might be a useful news site.

15:09 BST: Permalink

I've broken down and added more links over there at the right, and broken them up a bit so it's not just one mind-numbing list. There are a couple I'm still trying to make up my mind about but the discovery last night of Jack Cluth (via Charles Kuffner) seems to have pushed me over the edge. He's got way too much of his autobiographical information on his front page (mercifully, down at the bottom), but I like it.
14:45 BST: Permalink

There was some good news yesterday, if it lasts:

The federal appeals court in Cincinnati declared yesterday that the Bush administration acted unlawfully in holding hundreds of deportation hearings in secret based only on the government's assertion that the people involved may have links to terrorism.
The decision, which was laced with stinging language questioning the administration's commitment to an open democracy, is the first major appellate ruling on the government's legal tactics concerning Sept. 11.
"Democracies die behind closed doors," wrote Judge Damon J. Keith for the unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. The Bush administration has sought, the panel said, to place its actions "beyond public scrutiny."
"When the government begins closing doors," the panel continued, "it selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people. Selective information is misinformation."
[...]
"The task of designating a case special interest is performed in secret, without any established standards or procedures, and the process is, thus, not subject to any sort of review," Judge Keith wrote. "A government operating in the shadow of secrecy stands in complete opposition to the society envisioned by the framers of our Constitution."

03:42 BST: Permalink

Jim Henley is recommending Spiders, a web comic that projects a whole different sort of war in Afghanistan. It is, as he says, "pretty damn cool".
The relationships between money and water and government and privatization are explained at Through the Looking Glass.
Liberal Oasis has some good stuff on the Sharpton problem and on why Cheney's position on weapons inspections in Iraq doesn't work.

02:50 BST: Permalink

Some great links from MWO:
Clinton gives 'em the spirit in home state:

"The Republicans campaign on ideology and resentment," he told about 400 people at the West Memphis Civic Auditorium. "They're good and the rest of us are bad. They spent $70 million of your money to prove I was a sinner, and you could have told 'em that for free."
Inarticulate, and proud of it:

"I'M A PATIENT man," President Bush said the other day. He was dressed in cowboy clothes. "And when I say I'm a patient man," he added, somewhat impatiently, "I mean I'm a patient man." The president was responding to reporters' attempts to make sense of the administration's scorching but confusing rhetoric about Iraq. His declaration of patience amended his declarations of war, seeking to douse expectations of imminent attack while promising that hostile action will come eventually.

02:27 BST: Permalink

The Washington Post says Bush Seeks Secrecy For Pardon Discussions:

President Bush's lawyers are trying to keep secret the inside stories of President Bill Clinton's last-day pardons by invoking a claim of executive privilege that extends far beyond the White House.
In pleadings filed in U.S. District Court here this month, including affidavits from White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson, the Bush administration contends that the privilege covers not only advice given to a president about individual pardons, but also government papers he has never seen and officials he has never talked to, such as the sentencing judge in a particular case.
The stance, taken in opposition to a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit group Judicial Watch for access to Clinton pardon records, represents a hard line that the government has never taken. In the past, executive privilege has been recognized for advisers who operate within the White House. Bush's lawyers say it covers officials in any part of the government who are asked for input about pardon requests.
This is just too rich. (So to speak.) Gee, I wonder what they're trying to hide this time - and is it just to avoid exonerating Clinton, or have they got covering-up their own sleazy dealings in mind? Oh, yeah, they want to cover up Scooter Libby's part in the deal!
Oh, but there's more (as Atrios also notes):

Clinton repeatedly short-circuited the pardon process, which requires applications to the U.S. pardon attorney at the Justice Department; investigation by the FBI; consultation with interested parties, from the sentencing judge to the victim; and a report and recommendation by the pardon attorney to the president, after a review by the deputy attorney general.
No, it doesn't, actually. The Constitution places almost no restrictions on a President's power to pardon. (You don't think Ford and Bush1 bothered with all that process when they pardoned Nixon, Cap, & friends, do ya?) Haven't we been through all this before? Do these people have the collective attention span of a gnat? Even I can remember January of 2001 well enough to recall that lots and lots of people were repeatedly pointing this out; why can't the damn Post remember this stuff?

02:10 BST: Permalink

Rittenhouse Review has looked at that curious quote from Katherine Harris' book:

A sample of Harris’s insightful review and analysis of the post-election controversy: "Regardless of what course of action we chose, we knew we had landed in a no-win situation. Before I made my first public statement, we all knew that my office would come under fire."
"When the Gore campaign began to unleash the dogs of war upon me during the difficult recount controversy, I was not inordinately surprised," Harris writes, adding that Gore’s "aggressive tactics" may have spoiled an opportunity for a full recount.
As best we can tell, the "dogs of war" include "the media," particularly unnamed editors who pressured unnamed reporters to slant their stories against Harris, President George W. Bush, and Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.); David Letterman; Jay Leno; the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, particularly Chairwoman Mary Frances Berry; Democratic Party activists; and editorial cartoonists.
Harris dresses up her argument with a tortured legal analysis but it really seems to boil down to one word: Spite.
Yes, that's right: Apparently, Harris had every intention of doing her duty, but when she, uh, didn't, and that evil Al Gore tried to make her, she got so mad that she decided not to do it after all.
Funnily enough, I rather enjoy this new piece of spin in which Al Gore was too aggressive in Florida, which rather conflicts with the previous spin that he wasn't aggressive enough and therefore dropped the ball.

01:35 BST: Permalink

I guess Maureen Dowd really does hate everyone, or else writing something like this might mean she was rethinking some of her other positions:

"Usually I run six days a week," the magazine's leggy cover boy expounds. "When I don't run, I use an elliptical trainer, lift weights and stretch. But when I run, I run hard. On Sundays, if I'm at Camp David, I'll go for a hard morning run — these days about 20:30 to 20:45 for three miles on a tough course. . . . I try to go for longer runs, but it's tough around here at the White House on the outdoor track. . . . It's sad that I can't run longer. It's one of the saddest things about the presidency."
Another one of the saddest things about this presidency is that it has no voice. The greatest president of the last century could not even walk, but he recognized that he had to talk — that if the people did not understand the reasons for his actions, they could not become his partners in history.
About the grave crises facing us today, there is a deafening silence at the top. Mr. Bush's policies on the economy, the Middle East, North Korea and Iraq are obscure and even opaque, but his policy on physical fitness policy is crystal clear: "I expect the White House staff to be on time and sharp and to exercise." (Ask not what your abs can do for you. . . .)

00:52 BST: Permalink

Max recommends this Salon article with this Merle Haggard quote:

MERLE HAGGARD ON JOHN ASHCROFT, August 25, 2002, Kansas City: "I think we should give John Ashcroft a big hand...(pause)...right in the mouth! . . . The way things are going I'll probably be thrown in jail tomorrow for saying that, so I hope ya'll will bail me out."

Tuesday, 27 August 2002
23:00 BST: Permalink

I apologize for posting earlier without enough coffee. We now return to our regularly scheduled hobbyhorse, in this case an interesting letter to MWO from Mark Weber:

Michael Powell is worried about shock jocks. I suppose he feels that they coarsen our culture.
Funny, because Powell and other like-minded Republicans are directly responsible for the sad state of radio today.
The Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is currently directing an investigation into a radio stunt pulled by WNEW's Opie and Anthony.
The two Howard Stern wannabes were recently fired after they aired a live broadcast of a couple allegedly having sex in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral.
It looks as if the FCC is out for blood this time.
[...]
But the press, as usual, has missed the bigger story.
Before we start, let's state the obvious: Opie and Andy are a couple of chuckleheads. Their St. Pat's stunt was offensive, idiotic and spectacularly unfunny.
But why is Powell pressing for an investigation? The morons have been fired. The station's general manager and the program director have been suspended. The couple who allegedly had sex, and the producer who described it, are under arrest.
Even William Donohue, head of the Catholic League, seems satisfied by the outcome, and has backed off on his call to pull WNEW's broadcast license. Powell, who wants to keep the government out of corporate media, should be thrilled - the market has removed offensive speech all by itself. So why investigate?
A quick look at the history of Republicans and the FCC might clue us in:
From 1949 to 1987, the FCC enforced a policy known as the Fairness Doctrine. The doctrine ensured that at least some diversity of opinion was offered on the nation's airwaves. It called on broadcasters to offer balancing views about political issues as a way of serving the public interest.
But when Congress tried to write the doctrine into law (in a bill supported by both Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms), Ronald Reagan vetoed it.
All through the first Bush administration, the Fairness Doctrine enjoyed wide support - except in the White House. The constant threat of a veto kept the doctrine from being passed into law.
Around this time, Rush Limbaugh and other right wing radio squawkers began their syndicated ascendancy. Rush was praised as the "Majority Maker" by Republicans in 1994; from then on, Gingrich's House would ensure that the Fairness Doctrine could never become law.
It was then that the Republicans ran their first Statue of Liberty play. By adding the Communications Decency Act to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Republicans turned the focus of the debate toward shock radio and away from the increasingly bellicose and one-sided commentary being offered by Limbaugh and others.
The younger Powell is now in charge of keeping that Republican tradition of media distraction alive. Powell has already levied fines against several radio stations for indecency, even as he clears a path for larger media conglomerates to dominate the airwaves - conglomerates that are happy to cut costs by broadcasting more and more syndicated programming.
And, as long as they keep it "clean," these mega-media corporations have fewer and fewer content restrictions to worry about. Take the Personal Attack and Political Editorial Rules. As the FCC's Web site explains:
"The political editorial rule provides generally that if a licensee airs an editorial supporting a political candidate, it must notify other candidates for that office of the editorial and provide them an opportunity to respond on-the-air. Similarly, the personal attack rule provides generally that when, during a program on a controversial issue of public importance, an attack is made on someone's integrity, the licensee must inform the subject of the attack and provide an opportunity to respond on-the-air."
[...]
On the one hand, Powell demands that shock jocks clean up their act, because the public owns the airwaves and insists that the radio spectrum be used in the public interest.
On the other hand, Powell frets that providing for a real political dialogue on radio is an unnecessary infringement on broadcasters' First Amendment rights.
In other words, if you talk about sex, you're outta here. But if you talk about Bill Clinton having sex, your rights are secure.
There's more there, including some sources. (Anyone remember my earlier rants about how "the public interest" used to mean something more than suppressing sex and dirty words?)
One of the projects I keep never getting around to is compiling a single list of links for all the stories on how the Bad Guys have been crippling free speech on the public airwaves and on the 'net. This is scary stuff, it really is.

14:21 BST: Permalink

Collage
I'm sorry, but this is not what a President of the United States should sound like.
Here's some cartoons:
Patrick alerted me to this one.
Maia Cowan sent me this one. (A couple of months ago, actually, but I kept forgetting.)
I'm still on my first cup of coffee, and I'm perusing stuff I downloaded last night that has more on the unsavory subject of Ann Coulter, and I keep remembering this collage someone gave me back in the early '70s that had a quote clipped from Rolling Stone running across it: "Sullen sexuality doesn't make you a great singer anymore than bad manners makes you a great ball." - Paul Williams
(I never did find out which Paul Williams said it.)
I've never seen Ann Coulter except in still photographs, but the tone of her words in transcripts is often sullen. Yet she doesn't convey sullen sexuality. What she conveys is a sort of drunken desperation, as if she'd go home with just about anyone. She certainly has bad manners. I hope to god she doesn't speak in her higher register much, she's bad enough already. Maybe if she gets drunk enough she's fun, but she comes across as such a harridan that it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to wake up to her.
Oh, god, I need more coffee.

Monday, 26 August 2002
18:39 BST: Permalink

The New Republic remembers when Trent Lott said, "I think, as Jesse Jackson would say, give peace a chance here."

18:15 BST: Permalink

Lisa English knows what's important:

In this war of tit for tat which focuses on the value of incendiary semi-journalism (Drudge, Rush, MWO, et al), it sure looks like we've lost our bearing and the drive for solution. We The People are being royally screwed by a campaign of media deregulation which threatens the foundation of our democracy and what is our response? To play Gotcha or invariably, to sit back in silence and ignorance while Colin's kid, FCC Chairman Michael Powell systematically whittles away at what's left of communications anti-trust. Is tit for tat really that more fulfilling an avenue to travel?
Regardless of which party we've registered as our personal political savior, our voice, the voice of the people, is being slowly snuffed out. That's right...the voices of Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Greens, etc. ... the whole lot of us - the public citizen's voice is being legislatively silenced by a corporate media elite which bears no relationship to the so called and mythological "liberal media" and which couldn't care less about the people's voice. But dig this: these are our airwaves, folks.. and those who lease our airwaves should be required to GIVE BACK in the form of election debate and public airtime as well as with programming that provides alternative to the corporate view, etc. Without that alternative and regulations which prohibit the monopolizing of newspapers in a given market (so that the only voice you get is GE's or AOL/Time Warner, etc), millions of Americans will continue to walk around like zombies...ignorant of the reality that our corporate media is keeping information out of our newspapers, radio and tv because it's not in line with their business agenda. Think about it...in this day and age, media conglomerates own pieces of power companies, pharmaceutical concerns, newspapers, theme parks, online services. There are inherent conflicts of interest here. I'm not speaking of conspiracy...I'm talking about your basic biz school profit-minded decisionmaking - they're not about to screw the profit pooch and if left to further deregulate, they'll just screw us.

Sunday, 25 August 2002
19:10 BST: Permalink

Patrick just messaged me on AoL Instant Messenger to correct me:

Patrick: No, feudalism does not grow out of libertarianism. What you mean to say is that authoritarian and inequitable systems grow out of the Hobbesian state of nature. In that you're probably correct. Feudalism grows out the collapse of the Roman system, and was revolutionary in its way: in the feudal great chain of being, everyone is a full-fledged human being with value, and even the most powerful have obligations to the powerless.
Classical antiquity was built on slavery. Feudalism is post-slavery. Serfs aren't slaves. One has obligations to one's serfs.
Avedon: Yes, you're right. I forgot. *chagrin*
Patrick: I do think you're generalizing a bit about libertarians. Many libertarians are well engaged with the question of how do you have a freer society without reverting to a war of all against all, in which society would wind up run by the strongest thugs. What you say is true, but it's kind of like arguing with democratic socialists by exclaiming over the moral and practical deficiencies of Bolshevism.
Avedon: Well, yes and no. Because I think the answer to that "libertarian" question has always been, clearly, liberalism.
Patrick: Well, I do too, but I think libertarians raise a lot of the issues that liberals need to address in more detail. I also think many liberals get altogether too darn comfortable exercising power for its own sake. Which is why I describe my own politics as "liberalism boiled in libertarianism."
Avedon: I agree, but what I think this is is an argument between liberalism and liberalism.
Patrick: Well, modern liberals and libertarians are both descendants of 19th-century liberalism, if that's what you mean. Both are critiques of the kind of aristocratic and entrenched power that just sits there and says Fuck You.
Avedon: But part of the argument here is whether power that comes from entrenched Great Wealth can be trusted to run unchecked by government. Adam Smith said no; modern libertarians have made a habit of ignoring that.
Patrick: Ayup.
Avedon: The pro-corporate argument is not liberal, but aristocratic.
Patrick: Many (not all) libertarians have a hard time grasping that big business is, by and large, an arm of big government.
Avedon: Or vice versa.
Patrick: Not many corporations grew up as the unfettered creations of single brilliant Randian heroes.
Corporations are inherently creations of the government's monopoly on force.
BY DEFINITION the "limited liability corporation" can't exist if government power isn't deployed to protect it.
Avedon: Yes.
Patrick: Some libertarians do grasp this.
Avedon: Yes. But they vote Democratic. :)

18:15 BST: Permalink

From Chris Nelson:

From Counterspin, here's a link to audio (RealAudion format) from the Portland protests. As suggested on Counterspin, fast-forward to the 6 minute mark and listen to the comments from a female participant.

18:12 BST: Permalink

Atrios has posted a thoughtful comment from one of his readers on the subject of the way Bush uses hubris as a substitute for "patient planning, consultation with Congressional leaders as well as allies, substantive debate and careful building of support among the American people."

18:05 BST: Permalink

Blimey! Moose & Squirrel has started a blog! No permalinks, but go cruise around and enjoy the pictures. But oh, Moosie, please, a larger font size!

18:00 BST: Permalink

Patriotism

NEW YORK--The United States is a nation of laws. The police arrest suspects they reasonably believe to have broken the law, not citizens who happen to disagree with the government's politics. Cops don't go after people preemptively because they might commit a crime someday. In America, people are considered innocent until they're proven guilty in a court of law. They enjoy the right to a fair trial by a jury of their peers as quickly as possible. And of course they're entitled to the counsel of an attorney.
These fundamental rights, taught in every civics class, define what it means to be American. When other countries fill their prisons with political dissidents, we wonder aloud what it must be like to live in such lawless places. When we watch films like "Midnight Express," in which an American drug smuggler rots in a Turkish prison, we shake our heads not at the sentence--after all, he's guilty--but at the lead character's railroading through the court system and the abuse he suffers at the hands of his guards.
Before September 11, no patriotic American would have disputed the last two paragraphs. Sadly, legal guarantees that every American considered a sacred birthright have been shredded virtually overnight, and many people don't seem to care. Just as a World Trade Center built over the course of five years was destroyed in under two hours, a presidential impostor has used a phony "war on terror" to systematically unraveled two centuries of basic jurisprudence in less than a year.
George W. Bush may not have read Gibbon but he possesses the morals and cunning of a gangster; in a country still stunned by last fall's attacks, that seems to be enough.
[...]
There are few more sickening sights than George W. Bush wearing a lapel pin bearing an image of the American flag. Bush and his creepy henchmen can wrap themselves in nationalistic symbolism all they want, but these right-wing thugs aren't patriots. They may pledge allegiance to the flag, but they despise the republic for which it stands.

16:47 BST: Permalink

Brad DeLong's got a nice little discussion going on the topic of the shameless Bush treatment of veterans and Mickey Kaus' indefensible defense of it:

First, some background. Joshua Micah Marshall posted a memo in which the Veterans Affairs Department brass directed that outreach activities to veterans be severely restricted, in the hope that it would allow them to save money: if you treat a smaller proportion of eligible veterans, after all, you save dollars. Paul Krugman picked up the story. It seemed pretty sleazy, yes? To try to save money by keeping veterans unaware that there exist hospitals where they have a right to have their diseases treated is just one half step above trying to balance your budget by stealing from the blind.
But then comes Mickey Kaus to argue before the bar that eliminating veterans hospitals is a good-government cause, and so keeping as many veterans as possible ignorant of them and their rights is a good-government cause too. This is what leads Jason McCullough to assign Kaus to the Dark Side.
And this is where I disagree. I agree that welshing on the government's promise to provide medical care for veterans is reprehensible. I agree that Kaus's attempt to claim that the budgetary savings come from reduced "marketing activities" rather than from more untreated sick veterans is mendacious. But Mickey Kaus can't join the Dark Side. After all, the Dark Side does believe in free medical care for veterans. On this John Derbyshire, Chancellor Palpatine, and Ming the Merciless agree.
While people in the comment section speculate on what causes Mickey to behave the way he does, I'm more interested in where Brad draws the line on "the Dark Side" on this issue. From where I'm sitting, the Dark Side has a number of different types of members and levels of troops, such as:

the reigning aristocracy (who actually don't care about anyone but themselves, and just use whatever rhetoric they think will sell in order to try to, um, manufacture consent for their plundering of our resources for their own gain)

the genuine theofascists (who would happily use the government to provide any means necessary to suppress any other lifestyle, any dissent, any deviation from a strict adherence to their own belief system - yes, complete with gulags and extermination, given the option)

true-believer libertarian free-marketeers (who sincerely think that removing all regulations from the marketplace will make it a better, more efficient system for rewarding creativity and hard work and for providing products and services to society)

hustlers (who know it's all rubbish but, like the aristos, are out for themselves, and want to attach themselves to the power-brokers)

dupes (who actually believe all the hype about Social Security being a shambles, Bush being more honorable and dignified than Clinton, Gore having slandered Bradley during his primary campaign, Democrats trying to queer the ballot-counts in Florida, etc.).

I had to force myself to separate the libertarians from the "dupe" category, because I think in large part libertarians are fairly deluded. Many of them have confused arguments against violations of individual civil liberties with arguments against regulation of corporate bodies. Many of them still seem to think that because some high-profile members of "the left" have demonstrated streaks of authoritarianism (e.g., anti-porn feminists) or corporate toadying (Fritz Hollings, for example), they are the exemplars of what "liberalism" really means. That conservatives have actually been even more prone to such behaviors seems to have escaped their notice. They think libertarianism is a smart new idea that's never been tried, but have somehow overlooked that it is in fact the natural state, the starting point from which aristocracies, dictatorships, feudal systems grow. We've seen libertarianism over and over; it makes people long for democracy.
I think Kaus is a hustler with aristo ambitions, myself, but that puts him well into the Dark Side, from my perspective. The true-believer libertarians and the out-and-out dupes are at least hoping for a system that works better and is fairer to all, but Kaus is not an honest broker. He is a "liberal" only to the extent that he likes essentially conservative ideas when they are signed into law by purportedly "liberal" leaders (Clinton and welfare reform), but he's basically a shill for power. His personal instincts are probably in line with his generation's social behavior, but politically - well, let's just say that he probably applauded Michael Douglas rather than Martin Sheen when he saw Wall Street.

16:00 BST: Permalink

From The Grauniad:
A creep and a great man: The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate
And a story I regret to say I missed when it was still hot, Free bus pass for Nibbles the hamster:

A hamster at the centre of a cash-for-travel row has been awarded a free travel pass, it was announced yesterday. The 10-year-old owner of Nibbles, Jordan Underwood, was stunned when a bus driver demanded that he pay an additional 10p on top of his own 55p fare to take his pet on a bus ride into Northampton town centre.
The bus company First Northampton apologised to the pair for the top-up charge yesterday, awarding Jordan free bus travel for a month and giving Nibbles his own lifetime travel pass.
The pair were then given a trip around the town on one of the company's buses, which carried a sign reading "The Hamster Special".
Austin Birks, a spokesman for the company, apologised to the pair and thanked them for drawing attention to a gap in the firm's travel policy.
He said: "We realised we had no policy for hamster travel so we have released the first ever guidelines for hamsters using our buses.
"First, hamsters are encouraged to travel free of charge on any of our services, preferably accompanied by a fee-paying human.
"Second, young hamsters will be asked to give up their seat to an elderly or infirm hamster.
"Thirdly, we request that hamsters do not use mobile telephones or Walkmans while travelling on our buses for the comfort and convenience of other hamsters."

Saturday, 24 August 2002
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Looking for some gorgeous wallpaper images? (Via Bartcop.)

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Jacob Sullum is not jubilant:

The Libertarian Party is celebrating the defeat of U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, whom it calls the "worst Drug Warrior in Congress." Although I spend much of my time criticizing the war on drugs, I do not share the L.P.'s enthusiasm.
There's no question that Barr, who recently lost his bid for the Republican nomination to represent Georgia's newly redrawn 7th District, is an enthusiastic prohibitionist. The four-term congressman has bucked public opinion by doggedly opposing the medical use of marijuana. He even supports a ban on hemp products because they sometimes contain trace amounts of THC--too little to get anyone high, but enough to offend Barr's sensibilities.
Yet Barr is also, paradoxically, a vocal champion of privacy and civil liberties. The tragedy of his career is that he does not recognize how the war on drugs undermines those values.

03:10 BST: Permalink

Ha ha ha
Patrick announces the return of The Poor Man citing this post reacting to the awful appearance of Horowitz on Nightline, and also commenting on Andrew's template, generating many comments at Electrolite and finally this post from Andrew. Hey, I can always use a good laugh.

03:00 BST: Permalink

The New Republic on The Sheriff-of-Nottingham Party:

At last the results of the Republican revolution are in. When the GOP took control of Congress in 1995, it promised to scale back government across the board--"shared sacrifice," as then-Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich put it at the time. Well, this week the Associated Press studied the changes in federal spending that have taken place under Republican control, and the outcome turns out to have been neither shared nor, from the point of view of Republican constituents, sacrifice. Rather, Congress mainly shifted programs away from Democratic districts and toward Republican ones. In the 1995 budget--the last one written by a Democratic majority--the average Democratic district received $35 million more than the average Republican district. By 2001 the average Republican district received a whopping $612 million more than the average Democratic one. This turnabout might seem like fair play but for one fact: Democratic districts tend to be poorer and thus in greater need of help from the federal government. These days they're not getting it. For six years Republicans have cut programs that help the struggling--such as child care food programs and public housing--and raised spending on programs that help the relatively well-off, such as farm subsidies and business loans. House Majority Leader Dick Armey offered this gloating explanation for his party's efforts at upward redistribution: "To the victor go the spoils." Now there's a moral basis for government.

02:30 BST: Permalink

I dont want to put any .jpgs on my site (it downloads slow enough already), but this is kinda cool. They've also got some useful HTML stuff like this really neat color map. And, most importantly, this.

Friday, 23 August 2002
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Contrast and Compare
Bob Somerby is unhappy with how the Wise Men of the press - and here he's talking about some of its more restrained members - simply ignore outrageous statements by the RNC and the likes of Ann Coulter.
But take a good look at some of those outrageous statements by those people, the lies and even the longing for the murder of liberals and Democrats. And then remember that Spinsanity accused Media Whores Online of using the worst tactics of their opposition.
Go ahead, Spinsanity, show me anything from MWO that compares with this kind of crap. This is what's on talk radio for hours every day, this is what's on television - even on Crossfire (and even when Coulter isn't on the show, Tucker Carlson does his own version of truth-killing). A moral equivalence between MWO and "the worst tactics of its opponents"? You won't find it; it isn't there.

13:46 BST: Permalink

At last!

"Good evening, I'm Congressman Bernie Sanders and I want to welcome you to what I believe is the first Congressional Town Meeting ever organized to address the issue of corporate control of the media."
Thus began the first of two public town meetings in late April 2002, where U.S. Rep. Bernie Sanders (Vt.-Ind.) did what perhaps no member of Congress has done before--suggested that media can be a political issue in America. By focusing on corporate control of the media, the severe problems it creates for self-government and what can be done about it, the six-term congressmember opened a new chapter in the struggle for media reform.

Thursday, 22 August 2002
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Max on a popular subject:

Which brings us to the conservative narrative of moral equivalence. Often a radical's response to the allegation of a crime by someone deemed unsavory is to respond with some parallel deed for which the U.S. government bears responsibility. Conservatives say this is an error of moral equivalence because the USG are the good guys and the other guys are not. It is wrong to evaluate actors in light of actions because the actors are fundamentally different.
The logic here is precisely backwards, albeit ingenious. Ordinarily we would infer morality from actions. If two parties each commit murder, they are equally wrong. The moral equivalence narrative says we must begin with the implicit assumption that the USG represents the greater good, hence one may not evaluate our enemies by the same standards by which we evaluate ourselves. If we each commit murder, the USG murder deserves at least the benefit of the doubt, if not automatic approval. If the U.S. indulges the use of WMD by Saddam Hussein, our motives are honorable while his are despicable.
Everyone is a good guy in their own movie. Some of the most horrible evils are carried out by people who are awash with a sense of righteousness, moral outrage, justified anger, confrontation with intolerable evil. They are unquestionably capable of being wrong, whether their enemy is truly evil or not. But they think it's okay, because they are Good.
The idea that the world can be so simply divided up into "good guys" (who sometimes make mistakes - but that's forgivable, because they are basically good people) and "bad guys" (who act only out of evil purpose) is something we expect from children but also expect them to outgrow. The conservative narrative to which Max refers is, to me, a sign of arrested development.

16:50 BST: Permalink

The Nielsen Haydens have re-posted 110 Stories by John M. Ford on their site. It has 110 lines. Go read it if you haven't seen it yet.

Wednesday, 21 August 2002
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Uggabugga thinks Spinsanity is spinning.

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Joe Conason knows where to get the dirt:

Cartoon characters clash
Bob Barr's accidental discharge of an antique handgun has provided considerable mirth to supporters of John Linder, his opponent in the increasingly bitter Republican primary in Georgia's Seventh District. One of them recently showed up at a Barr rally dressed as Yosemite Sam (the outraged Warner Bros.'s cartoon dude who always shot himself in the foot), billing himself as the wacky winger's "official gun safety instructor." Unfortunately, Barr's blazer-wearing goons, including his son, didn't get the joke, as this video of the event indicates. It's a bit reminiscent of certain events in Florida in November 2000. The same Republican underground Website, Political Vine, offers acid commentary on divisions within the Georgia GOP, now chaired by former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed. On Political Vine, members of the ultra-right faction in the Peach State party led by Barr and Reed are known as "Neo-Nasties."

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I worked on the The Memphis Blues Festival in 1969 and saw these guys play.

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Max has some very good things to say about Democrats and populism, and also links to a useful article in The American Prospect. Both of these are very much worth clicking on, folks, please do it.

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An interview with Frank Zappa, in which he talks about, among other things, the myth of the liberal media. (Via Bartcop.) We miss you, Uncle Frank.

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I've got to agree with Josh Marshall: Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate is an insane idea, for all of the reasons he outlines.
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I'm so slow, I just noticed this at Uncertain Principles:

In my office, I'm pretty much stuck with the radio, thanks to my lemon of a desktop computer, which doesn't deal well with streaming audio. In the lab, though, I've found a better solution, or, rather, the student who's working with me for the summer has found a solution. It's one of the handful of Web radio stations that hasn't been driven out of business by the ridiculous royalty policy ~~bought~~ lobbied for by the record industry, operating out of Seattle.
He's right, KEXP does have that old WHFS feel. Brings back a lot of good memories of sitting up there late at night when I wasn't supposed to be there....

Tuesday, 20 August 2002
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Mind-blowing:

Mystified by the new wonder drug LSD, the psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West and his colleague at the University of Oklahoma, Chester M Pierce, were looking for a new way to investigate the drug in 1962. They came up with an idea so outlandish it could only happen in the world of experimental psychology.
Male elephants are prone to bouts of madness; LSD seems to cause a temporary form of madness; perhaps if we combine the two, they reasoned, we could make an elephant go mad. Their research paper about this venture is a tragicomedy of high hopes and lessons not learnt. For only mindless optimism and blind faith can account for the events that unfolded on a hot summer day in Oklahoma City's Lincoln Park Zoo 40 years ago.
Having established that "one of the strangest things about elephants is the phenomenon of going 'on musth'," a form of madness that sees the animal "run berserk for a period of about two weeks, during which time he may attack or attempt to attack anything in his path," West and Pierce enrolled the assistance of Warren D Thomas of the local zoo.
Thomas volunteered the services of Tusko, a 3,200kg, 14-year-old male elephant. They were all set to establish what an elephant on acid would get up to. One crucial point had to be decided - how much LSD would it take to make him run amok? Research had established that lower animals are less susceptible to the mind-altering effects of LSD than humans. It would be a waste to have an elephant ready to go and then miss out on the unique opportunity by giving it an insufficient dose.
West and Pierce decided to go for it. While 297mg might not sound a lot, it is enough LSD to make nearly 3,000 people experience hours of "marked mental disturbance," to use the researchers' phrase. This was the record-breaking quantity of the most potent psychoactive substance in existence fired into one of Tusko's rumps with a rifle-powered dart at 8am on August 3. What happened next is captured with an oddly moving economy of expression in the clinical voice of the research paper:
I'll let you read it. Bear in mind that where pure LSD is concerned, 100 micrograms is a potent dose for a full-grown man.

19:00 BST: Permalink

From Body & Soul:

Talk about a change of heart. A year ago, David Corn wrote a piece in The Nation headlined Al, Don't Run, arguing that Gore was a horrible campaigner and an unbelievable populist, and that Democrats ought to do everything they could to discourage him from running. His latest piece is called All For Gore in '04. The reason for the change is not a re-evaluation of Gore's populist credentials, but a sense that only Gore can stop Joe Lieberman from running.
At this point, I'll take any Democrat, including Lieberman, over Bush. But I think David Corn's change of heart is interesting and may reflect an increasing willingness of people on the left to accept the good and not hold out for the perfect.
I hope so.
Me, too.

18:30 BST: Permalink

I am wrong, according to Alas, a blog.

Avedon claims that after sex a man "becomes an innocent bystander," and therefore he has no responsibility for what happens. This is "hot potato" morality; instead of splitting responsibility between all decision-makers, the last person to make a decision gets 100% of the responsibility.
To see why hot potato morality doesn't work, consider the meat industry. Bob's meat plant sells Jane's meat shop unsafe meat - even though Bob knows it's unsafe. Jane's meat shop then sells the meat, even though Jane also knows it's unsafe. Then, several consumers eat the meat and go blind. According to Avedon's hot potato morality, only Jane is responsible for that outcome, and those blinded folks may sue Jane but not Bob. After all, the decision to sell the meat to consumers was "made solely by Jane"; once the meat had passed out of Bob's hands, Bob "becomes an innocent bystander."
Er, um, I suppose this works out okay if we equate sex with poisoned meat, but, gosh, I just can't. Bob and Jane may both know that they're selling poisoned meat, but Suzie and Pete just thought they were having sex - which, in fact, they were.
Look, sex is this great way we have of making contact with each other, developing relationships, cementing bonds. Granted, we've messed it up a bit and we all know it doesn't always work out, but life is a great deal more bleak if you delete sex from the formula. Treating sex like it's a bad thing - poisoned meat - is part of the problem.
Bob and Jane are each knowingly choosing to sell poisoned meat. But we're talking about a situation where two people want to make opposite choices. One of them, at least, is wrong. I think the woman who expects a man to take responsibility for an agreement he did not make is the one who is poisoning the meat. She bought perfectly good meat from Pete in an honest and open deal, and then added the poison herself - and tried to feed it to Pete. Remember, Pete only agreed to sex, not fatherhood; Suzie wants to change the rules after the fact. It's not responsibility, it's fraud.

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This is a new one going on the list at right: Talk Left, who have the subheader, "the politics of crime".

15:42 BST: Permalink

From MWO:

Bush has taken not a single action since beginning his White House occupation that demonstrates he is more concerned about the American people than his own interests. He has advanced no policy that was not the result of a political calculation that his action would either "appease the base" or satisfy the cronies and the contributors.
[...]
Election 2000 matters. Election 2000 provided the answer to the single most important question one would ask in evaluating whether Bush's judgment on the economy, Iraq and other world affairs, and all other critical issues should be trusted: "Is George W. Bush's priority the American people, or his own interests and agenda?"
Election 2000 matters, because Bush provided us irrefutable evidence throughout that controversy that he does not consider the people's interests or American principles to be paramount, but instead his own political ends.
Bush -- whose most obvious character trait is entitlement -- knowingly, deliberately, and without apology mounted a brutal and vicious battle against American citizens and principles throughout November and December 2000. He knew then that Al Gore was elected by the people. He knows it now. Mr. Gore knows it, and every journalist in America knows it.
But Bush's mission at that time was to do anything and everything in his and his Poppy's appointees' power to prevent the outcome he knew the American people had chosen for themselves. (No one can forget that creepy scene election night, with the Bush Crime Family sequestered together in a small room, insisting the Florida call was incorrect. And no one to this day can quite explain it either.)
Once he had stolen the election as a result of requesting an abuse of power by the Supreme Court that was ultimately granted, Bush proceeded to knowingly abuse his own ill-gotten power by ramming a rejected agenda down the throats of the American people.
Is there any justification for Bush's actions in Election 2000? None. That's why the topic is taboo in the Whore-American community. No one can defend those actions, or their own complicity in the theft of an election from the American voters. And no one dares contemplate what they mean in the current context of domestic and global crises.

Monday, 19 August 2002
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To me she will always be the woman who protected Michael Rennie and helped save his life when she uttered the immortal words, "Gort, Klaatu barada nictu," but there are many reasons to admire Patricia Neal.

15:34 BST Permalink

Rebecca Knight is still angry and has the citations to back it up:

WOW! You really have to hand it to Al Gore. Apparently when he speaks everybody listens. At least all the mainstream media pundits listen. Then they run like scalded dogs to write their tirades and set Mr. Gore straight. What is this anti-Gore illness with the media all about? It is really hard to get a handle on exactly what causes it, but the symptoms definitely exist. One would think that just a glance at what the Bush administration has done to this nation would be enough to give any critical thinking pundit reason to self-examine his or her previously held beliefs about Al Gore. Oh, but no! Wouldn't be prudent, as Poppy Bush likes to say.
And it's not just the media that goes negative on Gore. Joe Lieberman, of all people, had the nerve to criticize the populist theme of Gore's campaign 2000. Oh, Joe, we gotta know how you came up with that one! Did you express those thoughts during the campaign in your strategy sessions with Al? Were you thinking those thoughts when you sat like a wuss and got out-debated by Cheney? Were you thinking those thoughts when you appeared on national television and inserted foot in mouth about the military votes in Florida? Uh, Joe, clear the cobwebs dear. Gore got more. Simply put, the populist theme worked then and it will work again because it is a very relevant issue, even more so now. So, Joe, cut the crap and stop with your pathetic shenanigans. We all know you are trying to position yourself for a presidential run in 2004. Not gonna happen dear boy.
What's wrong with this picture? The candidate who tells the truth to the people is branded as a habitual liar and the candidate who lies as easily as he breathes gets a free pass. Not only that, the liar candidate sneaks around in Florida with his brother Jebbie and Katherine (Cruella) Harris manipulating the voting process, the recounts, and the judicial system so that he becomes the leader of the free world. Something is fundamentally wrong in America. Something is so wrong that, as stated in a previous column, this writer will get over it when pigs fly!

15:03 BST: Permalink

There are some things you never expect:

A Crisis Of Conscience By Roger Wilkins
When I was writing editorials on Watergate for The Washington Post, I would have bet that not in a million years would I side with Charles Colson [op-ed, July 30] against a Post editorial [July 10]. And yet here it is, only 30 years later and I agree wholeheartedly with his belief that conscience is essential for healthy capitalism -- and, I would add, for a healthy civic life as well.
Slavery was about as conscienceless a capitalistic endeavor as can be imagined. Its morality was debated at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Assessing the international slave trade, Luther Martin of Maryland asserted, among other things, that slavery was dishonorable. John Rutledge of South Carolina lashed back coldly: "Religion and humanity have nothing to do with this question. Interest alone is the governing principle with nations. . . . If the Northern states consult their interest, they will not oppose the increase of slaves which will increase the commodities of which they will become the carriers."
The profound Virginian, George Mason, himself a slave owner, delivered a stirring rebuttal to Rutledge topped by this thunderous conclusion: "Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. [Slaves] bring the judgment of heaven on a country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, providence punishes national sins, by national calamities." Mason and Martin lost, and the calamities, begun when the first African was enslaved here, continued rumbling down the decades toward the Civil War.
Mason wasn't the only delegate who understood the role of conscience in the life of the new nation. As the secret constitutional conclave was ending, a woman stopped Benjamin Franklin on the street. "What have you made for us in there?" she asked. "A republic, Madam, if you can keep it." Franklin replied.
If you can keep it! Franklin was instructing us that in order to survive, the republic needed a polity with a democratic conscience. The Founders had given us a vivid lesson in what that meant in the period from the Stamp Act Crisis in 1765 to the shots fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775 -- the time that John Adams called the "real American Revolution," because in that period much of the population in the colonies changed its self-conception from that of subject to King George to that of self-governing American.
These people had spent that decade carefully following public affairs, reading, reflecting and then discussing issues with their colleagues. They organized their resistance, framed petitions and wrote learned treatises, undertook arduous travel to meet with each other as they created new institutions and, finally, created a government and an army and prosecuted a revolution. So it is no wonder they thought that taking care of public affairs was the first concern of the democratic citizen. At the Constitutional Convention they created institutions in their own likeness that needed tending by people who had a passion for democracy and freedom.
But over time, this lush, vast continent and the riches it promised turned human minds toward notions of freedom without restraint and of wealth without democratic responsibility. The force of this culture increased immeasurably as the nation accumulated enormous wealth and power, all wrapped in the idealistic generalities we inherited from the founding. In such an environment it appears that the most admirable virtues are demonstrated by the acquisition of wealth and fame without very much regard to how they have been acquired. As Colson points out, the law alone cannot protect us from our worst cultural impulses. The law is necessary, but not sufficient. There is moral ambiguity in the life of every nation just as there is in the lives of all human beings (as the conflicted life of George Mason surely indicates). Without the ethical constraints and imperatives of conscience that give potency to the aspiration toward decency and toward robust self-government, the law will always be engaged in a losing race with the avaricious and the corrupt.

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Ginger reckons I'm wrong:

Once the woman has declined to exercise her right to terminate a pregnancy--and the fact that it terminates parental responsibility in the future is a byproduct of that right--the question stops being about the rights of the parents, and becomes about their responsibilities, and the rights of the child they're (both) bringing into the world. The child's rights include the right to care from both its parents, male and female. Avedon's comments, and the comments of the people she's quoting, miss that part of the equation.
No, unfortunately, they don't. Responsibility has to start before that, either way. If responsibility doesn't include taking the father's willingness to parent into account, it's a meaningless concept. A child neither has nor needs the "right" to a father who has no desire to be part of that child's life, who may be seething with so much resentment (even hatred) of the mother that their every encounter is poisonous, and who may project that resentment onto the child and even demonstrate it in very visible and very hurtful ways.
And that "(both)" up there is just plain wrong: she is bringing the child into the world; he is not. He can do his damnedest to influence her decision, he can facilitate as much as he wants or can do, but he cannot bring the child into the world by himself, and she can. The ultimate responsibility - or blame - for making that decision is hers and hers alone.
I speak from pretty intimate knowledge, having seen in counselling sessions how women make these decisions. (I am, of course, a woman myself, and these questions have crossed my mind on an even more intimate level, too.) Most women, thank goodness, do ask themselves, "Can he cope with this?" And most women, when the answer is "no", choose to terminate or, if they have that option, raise the child independently.
Can he cope with it? Sometimes the answer really is "no". And why reserve all our protective instincts only for small children and pregnant women? I promise you that a grown man trapped in a horrible situation that makes him feel helpless and betrayed is just someone's child in trouble.
Having a sex partner get pregnant doesn't suddenly make you economically stable, it doesn't suddenly make you emotionally strong, it doesn't magically turn you into a great provider and terrific emotional support for your child. We need to internalize that fact before this debate can proceed.

Sunday, 18 August 2002
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Jim Henley has been listening to Steve Earle's new album (Flash player) and thinks it's just "pretty good".

22:50 BST: Permalink

Solomon's Refuge says we may be Slouching Toward Fascism.

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If you haven't seen it yet, don't miss Frank Rich laying it all out nice and neat in The Waco Road to Baghdad:

George W. Bush tossed the nation's press a softball and they hit it out of the park. There was not a single good review, not even from his minions at The Wall Street Journal editorial page, for the White House's feel-good-about-your-401(k) jamboree at Waco. It was a "forum," the critics suggested, in the sense that the Politburo was a "legislature." Only Mr. Bush, who is on record as having loved "Cats," pronounced the event a "great show."
But it's Mr. Bush who was right. What his critics miss is that by this administration's standards of governance, Waco was a triumph. It was expressly designed to be content-free (rather like "Cats," in fact). The goal was never to produce policy but solely to serve up a video bite of Mr. Bush looking engaged by the woes of what his chief of staff, Andrew Card, referred to on CNN as "so-called real Americans." If the White House wanted anyone to listen, it would not have staged eight separate panels simultaneously on a Tuesday morning in the dog days of August, assuring that complete coverage would be available only on C-Span.
Imagine. Finally, a show of contempt so blatant that even the Stepford Press seemed to wake up for a moment and see the scam for what it is. Can it last? Will the Dana Milbanks, at least, begin to realize that they are dealing not with statesmen but with con artists?

What makes the morning-after outrage of the nation's commentariat seem a bit over the top is that the preordained hollowness of the Waco show is not news. This is how this administration always governs. Mr. Bush has two inviolate, one-size-fits-all policies (if obsessions can be called policies): the tax cut (for domestic affairs) and "regime change" in Iraq (foreign affairs). Everything else is a great show designed to provide the illusion of administration activity when it has no plan.
The show takes the form not only of the Orwellian slogans emblazoned on the backdrops ("Small Investors/Retirement Security" loomed above the president and Chuck in Waco) but also of bogus announcements of muscular action. At the forum's final curtain, the president declared that he would teach Congress a tough lesson about fiscal responsibility by holding back $5.1 billion it had appropriated for such low-priority items as equipment for firefighters and health monitoring at ground zero. But what about the $190 billion in wasteful farm subsidies he has already thrown to the winds? Besides, he would have to cut spending by $5 billion five days a week for more than a year to compensate for the red ink of his $1.35 trillion tax cut.
Though the president's harshest critics think he's stupid, I've always maintained that the real problem is that he thinks we are stupid. He never doubts that his show will distract us from bad news. Waco was supposed to make us forget the latest round of economic headlines: stagnant wages, slowed growth, new all-time records in personal bankruptcies and consumer borrowing. All this is on top of a falloff in the Dow that The Economist measures as identical in percentage to that of Herbert Hoover's first 18 months, which included the crash of '29.
Well, the economy is only money. It's when the same governance technique is applied to life-and-death matters like war and domestic security that the farce curdles. Here, too, there are new headlines the administration wants us to forget. At the F.B.I., a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed, the prehistoric computer system remains in disarray even as the agency's top executives are either pushed out or flee for private employment (as the counterterrorism chief abruptly did on Thursday). The Wall Street Journal discovered that when the federal government issued a terrorist warning to shopping centers four months ago, the Mall of America learned about it only by watching CNN. Not only are our airlines collapsing but, according to Thursday's USA Today, so is the undercover air marshal program that was supposed to be strengthened after Sept. 11. One marshal called it "a laughingstock."
And what does the administration propose as a solution? Last week John Ashcroft went on TV to announce what he calls the "first ever White House conference on missing and exploited children." It takes an exploiter to know one. F.B.I. figures show a decline in the kidnapping of children — except on cable TV. But if you can't crack the anthrax case, why not create some distracting hysteria by glomming onto a local law enforcement issue that is the biggest showbiz phenomenon since shark attacks? The administration loves the bait-and-switch. It hyped the cases of "the American Taliban," John Walker Lindh, and the "dirty bomber," Jose Padilla, to cover for its failure to snare the actual Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and the actual bomber, Osama bin Laden, much as it has hyped the perp walks of second-rung executives from WorldCom to make us forget about Halliburton, Harken and Ken Lay.
Next stop: Iraq. Just as a tax cut is billed as the miracle antidote to every possible economic ill — "We've got the best tax policy in the world!" Mr. Bush said at Waco — so we're asked to believe that taking out Saddam Hussein will bring democracy to Iraq and the rest of the Arab world, miraculously repair the chaos wrought by our disengagement from the Middle East and win the war on terrorism all at once. The silver bullet that gets Saddam, it appears, will cure all international ills with the possible exception of the arrogance of the French.
By the way, does it bother anyone but me that while we're supposed to be at war with a virulent strain of religious extremists, Bush wants to pretend there's nothing more important than going after one of the few countries in the area that is not theocratically dominated?
Randolph Fritz wrote to me recently and suggested this scary thought: "Has it ever crossed your mind that US policy towards the Saudis and Salafi Islam for at least the past decade and probably longer looks very much like appeasement?" Well, yes. I'm sure the Saudis were very much in (the elder) Miles Copeland's mind a few years ago when he said, "You cannot win a war against the Muslim world."
But we have been told for decades that the reason we play patty-cake with awful governments is that there is nothing to replace them with that isn't worse - get rid of Pakistan's military junta, for example, and you'll end up with more crazy Muslim extremists, just like what happened in Iran during the '70s. Horribly, its probably all true.

While Saddam is an authentic genocidal monster, there are more plausible links between Al Qaeda and our dear friend Saudi Arabia than between Al Qaeda and Saddam; it could be argued that toppling him would strengthen Al Qaeda. But what the administration is mainly hoping is that a march on Baghdad will make us forget about Al Qaeda, wherever it may be lying in wait. It's not good P.R. for our war on terrorism that Islamic terrorists have been linked to eight attacks abroad since Daniel Pearl's murder in January, including the assassination of the Afghan vice president in Kabul and the slaughter of an American diplomat, among others, at a church in Islamabad.
The White House keeps saying that no decision has been made about Iraq, but of course a decision has been made. Richard Perle, an administration Iraq hawk, gave away the game in yesterday's Times: "The failure to take on Saddam after what the president said" would lead to "a collapse of confidence." Translation: If Mr. Bush doesn't get rid of Saddam after all this saber rattling, he will look like the biggest wimp since — well, his father. Democrats, as timid in challenging Mr. Bush on Iraq as they were in letting his tax cut through Congress, keep calling for a "debate." What world are they living in? Mr. Bush is no sooner going to abandon his pursuit of Saddam than his crusade to eliminate the estate tax. These are his only core beliefs.
They are, too. Not the economic stability of our nation, and not protecting our shores and our citizens from attack, but tax cuts and killing Saddam.

What's been most remarkable about the Iraq project so far is how an administration as effectively secretive as this one could spring so many leaks of invasion scenarios to the press. It strains credulity to assert that this is all an ingenious conspiracy to fake out Saddam. The leaks fake us out instead, inuring us to the new war to come.
The only mystery is when D-Day will be. Given the administration's history, I'd guess that it will put on the big show as soon as its political self-preservation is at stake. Certainly the White House's priorities are clear enough. It has guarded the records of Dick Cheney's energy task force and the S.E.C. investigation of Harken far more zealously than war plans that might endanger the lives of the so-called real Americans who will have to fight Saddam.

16:00 BST: Permalink

Time travel:

Is time travel possible?
Could evidence for it be found in the story of a man who appeared suddenly on the streets of New York City in 1950, bearing the property and identity of a man who had vanished in 1876?
Chris Aubeck loves a good mystery, so the Londoner who lives in Madrid, Spain, decided to get to the root of a tale that has received a lot of press in Europe.
This month, the Spanish magazine Enigmas will publish the yearlong odyssey of Aubeck, who doggedly traced a piece of paranormal folklore through six countries and back six decades to its source -- in Akron.
Aubeck, 31, who researches modern and ancient mysteries as a hobby, said fellow researchers in Europe often use the case of Rudolph Fentz as proof of time travel.
"They had been using the story for years in articles and books... and many of them accepted the Fentz story at face value," Aubeck said in an e-mail interview. "When I asked them if it had been solved, I was told it had been tried but never successfully."
To Aubeck, that sounded like a challenge he couldn't pass up.
I won't spoil the punchline for you, go read it.

15:30 BST: Permalink

Charles Kuffner contributes to the MWO discussion:

These words struck a chord with me. I don't want all political discourse to be like what's on MWO, but without MWO or something like it I don't believe that liberal and progressive ideas would be as widely heard. There's a lot of shouting out there, and for better or worse you're going to have a hard time being heard unless you do a little shouting yourself. Asking others to hush so you don't have to raise your voice accomplishes little.
I believe, therefore, that it's silly to ask MWO to be more like Jack Germond or EJ Dionne, and it's silly to denigrate MWO for not being like that. It's like asking Shaquille O'Neill to play point guard - their talents are best used on other things. But just as five Shaqs would make a lousy basketball team, a lineup of all MWOs or all EJ Dionnes would be a poor way of making the case for liberalism.
Does this mean that I therefore approve of Rush Limbaugh? Well, no, I firmly believe the world would be a better place without him. My reason for that belief isn't just because I think Limbaugh is an overheated blowhard. It's because I know damn well how much effect Limbaugh has on the public debate. Whether or not you agree with his methods and veracity, he gets the word out to a lot of people. I'd much rather people saw things my way because of appeals to logic and reason, but on Election Day it doesn't matter why they're punching a chad for a particular candidate. If a little MWO frothing helps to elect the people who will implement policies I approve of, I say bring it on.
I keep coming back to the idea that we aren't all going to express ourselves the same way, or have the same priorities, and that's okay. I think it's good to have a lot of different voices with our own different styles, and I think it's destructive to pit the quiet, thoughtful, measured voices against the over-exuberant ones. I don't want to divide us all up into opposed categories of those of us who are fine writers, thoughtful, and never call people names, and those who get a bit carried away. MWO never gets carried away enough to lie, but they have the energy to write more than the occasional article. That's a good thing. Maybe they'll hone their craft so that they're even better, but I'm happy to give them some time and support, just like I was given all those years ago.

Saturday, 17 August 2002
20:45 BST: Permalink

"Who are the girly boys?"
How right-wing smears work
Fascism defined
Gene Lyons channels me
Nixon didn't like them, either.
Christine Quiñones weighs in on MWO
20:15 BST: Permalink

Bob Somerby finds Chris Matthews' original opinion of Gore's debate performance:

MATTHEWS (10/4/00): I couldn’t believe the number of people who chickened out last night. It was clear to me—and I’m no fan of either of these guys entirely, and I can certainly say that about the one who I thought won last night, that’s Al Gore—I thought he cleaned the other guy’s clock, and I said so last night. All four national polls agreed with that…I don’t understand why people are afraid to say so.
That’s what Matthews said in real time. But in his book, he says that Gore’s best performance was in Debate III, and that he lost all three outings. Remember: Given the rank dysfunction of our modern press corps, intelligent citizens will be very careful when offered the corps’ Treasured Tales.

20:00 BST: Permalink

Back to an earlier topic, Matthew Yglesias says:

I know everyone disagrees, but Noah Snyder is still right about this.
But I wasn't previously aware of "this", so:

The argument is not that men have exactly as much of a right to annul paternity as women do to an abortion. The argument is that every argument for abortion has a analogue (albeit sometimes weeker) which argues for paternalt annulment. I'm not claiming that a right to control your bank account is equivalent to a right to control your own body, but that doesn't mean we don't have some right to control our bank accounts.
The question at hand here is why is it reasonable to force a man to pay for the rest of his life for a child which he did not want to have. If you argue that by choosing to have sex he has agreed to live with the consequences, then you are on slippery ground because you could make the same argument that a woman agrees to part with certain rights to control her own body when she chooses to have sex. Perhaps the argument for men is weeker, but that doesn't make it incorrect.
I'm about as strong a pro-choice advocate as you're likely to find when it comes to abortion, and I will say that this guy is absolutely wrong about not proof-reading his entries or using a spell-checker, but as for substance, I think he's spot on. Women should certainly have a unilateral right to decide whether to carry to term, but I can see no good argument for also allowing us the unilateral right to impose a decision made solely by the woman on a man who, at that point, becomes an innocent bystander. You can't claim that his responsibility for having sex is any greater than hers unless it's either rape or you really think women are too stupid to live (and never initiate sex). They both did it, and if you argue that the resulting pregnancy is his responsibility for the next 18 years just because he happened to have sex with her, you're going to have to work pretty hard to explain why she didn't take on the same responsibility when she chose to engage in the same sex act.
Now, there's an argument that supposedly trumps this that goes something like this: Whether she chooses to abort or carry to term, she always has to deal with some consequences, either in arranging and enduring an abortion or in actually carrying to term.
To which I say, "Yes. So?" Look, that's just a fact of biology: it's happening in the woman's body; that's why she has the right to choose what to do about what's going on in her body. But if she chooses to continue the pregnancy and has a baby, that part of the argument is over, null and void, dead. (Okay, you can, uh, milk the game for the next four years by nursing if you want to, but that isn't what people are talking about, and some people would argue that nursing is a benefit rather than a hardship.)
It seems to me that the real basis of this argument is a desire for some kind of tit-for-tat: Goddamn it, I had to carry this damn thing for nine months and push it out this tiny little opening, and if I hadn't I still would have had to have some kind of icky medical thing happen to me even though my belly wouldn't have gotten all distorted, and now by god you're going to endure some lousy crap too just to make things even.
In fairness, women aren't the only people who present this argument, but it still amounts to: If women suffer, even a little (and most abortions, physically speaking, are not all that horrible for women to endure), then we have to do something to make men share the suffering, even if it is grossly disproportionate to what women go through. (And let's not pretend that men don't go through any emotional crap when a partner gets pregnant, please.) When it gets down to the cheese, you're weighing about ten minutes of discomfort against 18 years of servitude. People think it's fair to try to balance things out by making men suffer economically. Well, it balances out fine to me if the guy pays the full cost of the abortion, or at least as much as he can contribute. It does not balance out fine to me if the guy is forced to pay (sometimes usurious) child support for a child he never chose to have because someone else unilaterally decided to impose it on him.
Some people argue that the simple way to end this problem is marriage. That, after all, is pretty much what it's for - to decide the technical issues of who gets the rights and responsibilities in reproduction. If the guy marries the mother, he agrees to share the burden of any children she has (and, under present law, that includes children who are not biologically his own). But marriage, in its current incarnation, doesn't really protect men from having their parental rights ultimately denied to them. There's a lot more to be sorted out on this score, but I don't think we should settle for what we have now.

15:00 BST: Permalink

Long ago, the Whitechapel Bell Foundry cast a bell that is one of the most famous in the world (well, they've cast most of 'em, I think), housed in Philadelphia. And now...

September will see the dedication of not one but two very special Whitechapel bells in the USA. The first of these, a full size replica of the Liberty Bell, was cast here at the Foundry some months ago within yards of where its predecessor was cast a quarter-millennium earlier and commemorates the landing on American soil of the original Liberty Bell 250 years ago in September 1752. The other commemorates much more recent and tragic events and will be dedicated at Trinity Church on Wall Street on 11th September 2002, the first anniversary of the terrorist attack on New York City. This bell is 31" (785mm) in diameter and weighing approximately 650 pounds, bears the inscription:

TO THE GREATER GLORY OF GOD
AND IN RECOGNITION OF
THE ENDURING LINKS BETWEEN
THE CITY OF LONDON
AND
THE CITY OF NEW YORK
FORGED IN ADVERSITY - 11 SEPTEMBER 2001

A gift from London to New York. With pictures.

14:25 BST: Permalink

Hmm, this looks new: Nick Kessler. Only a few posts so far but he has the intestinal fortitude to read townhall.com, which is more than I can usually do.

14:10 BST: Permalink

Origami (via Bartcop).
Also: Invention & Technology has a feature on the space art of Chesley Bonestell - with pictures!

Friday, 16 August 2002
15:02 BST: Permalink

The term "Teflon president" actually means the press just doesn't bother to take criticisms of that president seriously. The man can be deteriorating before your eyes, but they don't say so. The man's policies can range from hugely unpopular to manifestly criminal to terrifyingly insane, and the press acts like it's all perfectly normal and acceptable. By an astonishing coincidence, Teflon only seems to adhere to Republican presidents, no matter how criminal, no matter how incompetent, no matter how negligent, no matter how demented.
I'm not saying it's 100%. Even during the impeachment, the mighty New York Times, whose own malpractice helped cause the whole mess in the first place, was publishing excellent articles telling the real story behind Starr, Whitewater, the Arkansas Project, and so on. But those pieces were not given the prominence of the mendacious stories about Clinton's alleged criminality, nor were their authors given Pulitzer Prizes. Maureen Dowd got a Pulitzer Prize.
Who wrote those thorough investigative reports that actually told the truth about the campaign against Clinton? Do you know their names? Are they media stars today? Is their opinion given the same weight in Washington circles and the rest of Big Media as that of the right-wing pundits who continue to pretend that Clinton was the most dishonest president we've ever had, and who still treat Bush as if he were a better man than Clinton was?
In a parallel universe, The Washington Post and The New York Times never once gave their support to special investigations of Whitewater, and demanded that the case remain in the normal channels it had begun in. They insisted in their editorials that under no circumstances should the presidency be subject to every obviously politically-motivated nuisance suit that Scaife's minions could drum up. They published clear and prominent articles detailing just how little substance the Whitewater, Travelgate, and Filegate stories were made of. They made abundantly clear to their readers just who was behind the attempts to slander Bill Clinton, and why. On the front page, above the fold.
In that Universe, a thoughtful press grabbed hold of lies propagated by Rush Limbaugh and the RNC about Clinton and Gore and instantly headlined deconstructions of them, exposing each lie for what it was. (In that world, Rush Limbaugh is not a mouthpiece who is given hours every day to fulminate in a near-monopoly radio market controlled by Clear Channel, with virtually no competition permitted.)
In that world, Matt Drudge is a partisan hack barely acknowledged by the mainstream press, Maureen Dowd is a minor novelist, and Gene Lyons won the Pulitzer Prize for his thoughtful and informative coverage of the background behind the campaign against the President.
In that world, the media responded to suggestions that Al Gore is a liar by pointing out that none of his so-called lies were actually untruths at all, and that in fact he has a long-standing and well-deserved reputation for integrity. In that world, the idea that George W. Bush should be allowed to run our country was treated as an insult to the people and to the office of the presidency. And in that world, despite numerous criminal actions by partisan officials to steal the election for Bush, Al Gore won by a historic landslide.
In that world, there is no need for Media Whores Online.
In this world, however, Spinsanity is just plain wrong - dishonest, in fact - when they say this:

MWO's tactics simply pollute the public discourse. While many intelligent people read the site and are not seduced by its methods, the overall effect is to build a self-reinforcing community of aggrieved partisans and to help break down taboos among liberals against the rhetorical viciousness promoted. The editors' claim that their actions are a justified response to the tactics used by others is both insufficient and, ultimately, circular: anyone who listens to Limbaugh, for example, knows that he often uses the same rationale. The reality is that, with liberals increasingly agitated, both sides will continue to escalate their rhetoric to the point of hysteria, all the while pointing wildly at each other to rationalize their actions. In the end, these tactics are unacceptable no matter who uses them.
They are wrong because MWO cannot pollute the discourse - it is already fatally polluted. The damage has already been done by the likes of Coulter, Dowd, Limbaugh, Olsen & Olsen, et alia. Worse, the thoughtful, measured websites and articles that in a sane world should serve to disinfect the disease propagated by the right-wing media have had virtually no impact in trying to bring the discourse back to sanity, despite the admirably optimistic values Brendan Nyhan and Patrick Nielsen Hayden express in their criticisms of MWO.
How can anyone miss this point? Being "reasonable", well-spoken, and truthful has been tried for a very long time - and it was completely trampled by the right wing's willingness to not just name-call, but to lie and to demand extreme measures for the most petty of offenses. The right wing succeeded by doing this. But MWO has not stooped to their level; while they may be partisan and may have let their positions influence their interpretations of events, the fact of the matter is they try very hard to stick to the truth. Even so, by raising the volume, they have done what more serious, thoughtful and restrained commentators had failed to do - they and their arguments have received attention from the media. So much so that now it's time to attack them for daring to be interesting enough to be noticed.
Because that's what it's all about. For years we have heard that the popularity of right-wing radio over moderate or left-wing commentators is because the right-wingers are the only ones who are interesting. Lefties are boring, we're told. Centrists are boring. "Objective" commentators are boring. Of course, this is false; the "popularity" of right-wing media owes a great deal to the fact that no alternative is permitted to hold such sway, no wealthy and powerful benefactors give genuine liberals or lefties whole hours a day on their cable networks, no alternative to Clear Channel brings liberal commentary to audiences in every market. It has nothing to do with what's popular; it's about what they want to broadcast.
We have also been told that the reason the press ran with all that RNC propaganda is that the left just didn't send them all those angry faxes and e-mails and letters like the right did. Of course, this, too, leaves out the fact that the media actually preferred to spread RNC propaganda, but certainly getting blast-faxed from the left makes you aware that someone sees through the bull.
So MWO have made themselves interesting and more difficult to ignore. They've managed to actually bestir their readers to actually write those letters rather than just hoping someone else will. I suggest to my readers that they write letters, too, but I bet the percentage who respond to those calls from MWO is a lot higher, because they get the adrenalin going. And good for them. The media has actually been forced to notice them.
Gene Lyons, by the way, was writing those more restrained articles all along, but no one noticed until MWO kept bringing him to our attention. They made him a bit of a celebrity in their own little circle and now, at long last, it looks like he is finally getting a bit of syndication. Pity they didn't do it sooner.
No, MWO has not polluted the discourse; on the contrary, they have injected a dose of equivalent outrage laced with some badly needed BS-detecting. It's exactly what the media needs.
Spinsanity has tried to equate MWO with Limbaugh and Coulter. This is a bad joke; there is simply no equivalence at all. MWO attacks media sources for delivering "fair and balanced news" that is manifestly slanted and false. Rush and Ann are propagators of such falsehoods. MWO is a single page a day on a website with no Big Media connection; Limbaugh has massive exposure on AM radio throughout the country, and Coulter appears on television and has a book at the top of the NYT best seller list. Perhaps most importantly, MWO makes no pretense of being "balanced" or "non-partisan" - and why should they? In a world where a Bush-supporter knowingly called a national election for the loser on national television, it's a lot better to know where your partisans stand. How can they possibly be equivalent?
There is a difference between being ardent and being rabid. There is a difference between being passionate and being grossly dishonest. There is a difference between being partisan and being out-and-out wrong. In a world controlled by those who are rabid, grossly dishonest, out-and-out wrong and partisan, MWO is a welcome relief. Dispassion is all very well, but what MWO does actually works. And they're right.
Some folks keep advising our Green friends that we shouldn't demand perfection - that we shouldn't sacrifice the good in the name of an unachievable perfection. Well, the quiet, thoughtful, measured perfection we all hope for has failed and failed again, and in this world, MWO looks pretty damn good.

03:32 BST: Permalink

She's a breath of fresh air.

"My friends and I are collecting prom dresses to give to girls who can't afford them for their proms." -Lauren Bush, on the importance of charity

01:04 BST: Permalink

Tapped says:

WHAT LIBERTARIANS? The blogosphere is said to be full of libertarians. Why, then, do they spend so much time moaning about Norman Mineta when John Ashcroft has revealed himself to be a far greater menace to liberty (not to mention open government, the quaint notion of checks and balances, and the prerogatives of Congress)? Here's the latest. You have to go down to the last third to get a sense of why what this article discusses is so unprecedented.
The story they cite, Justice Dept. Balks at Effort to Study Antiterror Powers by Adam Clymer, makes this administration look even scarier than they already are. Which takes some doing.

Thursday, 15 August 2002
17:10 BST: Permalink

For what it's worth
From The Los Angeles Times (via Buzzflash), Camps for Citizens: Ashcroft's Hellish Vision:

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft's announced desire for camps for U.S. citizens he deems to be "enemy combatants" has moved him from merely being a political embarrassment to being a constitutional menace.
Ashcroft's plan, disclosed last week but little publicized, would allow him to order the indefinite incarceration of U.S. citizens and summarily strip them of their constitutional rights and access to the courts by declaring them enemy combatants.
The proposed camp plan should trigger immediate congressional hearings and reconsideration of Ashcroft's fitness for this important office. Whereas Al Qaeda is a threat to the lives of our citizens, Ashcroft has become a clear and present threat to our liberties.
The camp plan was forged at an optimistic time for Ashcroft's small inner circle, which has been carefully watching two test cases to see whether this vision could become a reality. The cases of Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi will determine whether U.S. citizens can be held without charges and subject to the arbitrary and unchecked authority of the government.
Hamdi has been held without charge even though the facts of his case are virtually identical to those in the case of John Walker Lindh. Both Hamdi and Lindh were captured in Afghanistan as foot soldiers in Taliban units. Yet Lindh was given a lawyer and a trial, while Hamdi rots in a floating Navy brig in Norfolk, Va.
This week, the government refused to comply with a federal judge who ordered that he be given the underlying evidence justifying Hamdi's treatment. The Justice Department has insisted that the judge must simply accept its declaration and cannot interfere with the president's absolute authority in "a time of war."
In Padilla's case, Ashcroft initially claimed that the arrest stopped a plan to detonate a radioactive bomb in New York or Washington, D.C. The administration later issued an embarrassing correction that there was no evidence Padilla was on such a mission. What is clear is that Padilla is an American citizen and was arrested in the United States--two facts that should trigger the full application of constitutional rights.
Ashcroft hopes to use his self-made "enemy combatant" stamp for any citizen whom he deems to be part of a wider terrorist conspiracy