SHARPES, Fla., Aug. 26 — After seeing more than 130 prisoners freed by DNA testing in the last 15 years, prosecutors in Florida and across the country have mounted a vigorous challenge to similar new cases.
Prosecutors acknowledge that DNA testing is reliable, but they have grown increasingly skeptical of its power to prove innocence in cases where there was other evidence of guilt. Defense lawyers say these prosecutors, who often relied on the same biological evidence to convict the defendants before DNA testing was available, are more committed to winning than to justice.
The fight has become particularly heated in Florida, where prisoners will soon be barred from seeking DNA testing for old cases under a 2001 law that set an Oct. 1 deadline for such requests.
In this state, the cases of two prisoners illustrate both the power and limits of DNA testing.
In one case, Wilton Dedge was convicted of rape based in part on two light-brown hairs found in the victim's sheets here in 1981. It was the only physical evidence against him. The hairs were, the prosecutor said at his trial, "microscopically identical" to those of Mr. Dedge.
In a 1983 trial of another man, Richard McKinley, for the rape of an 11-year-old girl in Homestead, the prosecutors told the jury that semen recovered from the girl matched his blood type.
DNA testing, which was not available at the time of either trial and which was performed recently only after fierce resistance from two sets of Florida prosecutors, showed that the hairs and the semen could not have come from the defendants.
Yet both men remain in prison serving life terms, and the prosecutors who relied on the biological evidence to convict them now say the DNA testing is not proof of their innocence.
Other Florida prisoners may never have the chance to argue about whether DNA evidence exonerates them. In 2001, the state Legislature opened a two-year window for DNA retesting in older cases. The window will close on Oct. 1, after which courts cannot hear the cases of hundreds of inmates who say that testing could free them, and lawyers across the state are in a race against time to file motions on behalf of such clients.
While prosecutors concede that DNA can prove whether someone is associated with a given piece of biological evidence, they insist that is not the same thing as proving whether a defendant committed a crime.
But in Dedge's case, it was the only piece of evidence that might have meant anything; everything else was at best highly debatable.
The tests were performed in 2000. Though the victim said that only she, her sister and the rapist could have left the hairs in her sheets, the tests excluded the sisters and Mr. Dedge.
But prosecutors say that Mr. Dedge has not proved his innocence or his entitlement to a new trial. They rely on three other pieces of evidence against him.
But if only the rapist, the victim or the sister could have left the hairs, and it matches none of these three people, then how could Dedge be the rapist? Looks pretty solid to me.
The victim, who was 17 at the time, identified him. But she first said that her assailant was 6 feet tall, weighed 200 pounds and had a hairline receding to the point of baldness. Mr. Dedge is more than six inches shorter than that and weighs about 145 pounds; at the time of the crime, according to court records, he was about 125 pounds. He still sports a full head of hair.
So he didn't fit the original description given by the victim.
After-the-fact eye-witness identification is actually pretty dodgy. People will pick a face that looks familiar even if it had nothing to do with the crime; in one study, another bystander to a staged crime was placed in the line-up and identified as the perpetrator by many subjects. This is because they remember seeing them at all. Additionally, the police have little tricks they use to make their chosen suspect easier to "identify" by a witness, such as allowing the witness to see the suspect already cuffed and in custody before holding the line-up. Such identifications can't be relied upon.
A prison informant testified that Mr. Dedge had confessed to him in a passing conversation. The informant received a 120-year reduction in his sentence in exchange for his testimony. A truck confiscated by the state was also released to the informant's wife as part of the same deal.
Whew, 120 years off and a truck for the wife. Did 120 years make the difference between staying in jail forever and getting out in this lifetime? A lot of people might consider that well worth lying for. Again, this kind of jailhouse "witness" is extremely difficult to trust.
And an expert witness was allowed to testify that his dog had compared the victim's sheets three months after the rape to a selection of sheets from the local jail and had picked out Mr. Dedge's sheets. Such "scent line-ups" have since been questioned by the Florida courts.
I don't know much about "scent line-ups" but, again, I wouldn't want to have to pin a man's freedom on something like this.
In June, a trial judge, J. Preston Silvernail of Brevard Circuit Court in Viera, ruled that Mr. Dedge could pursue his motion for exoneration.
"There is," he wrote, "a reasonable probability that the defendant would have been acquitted if the DNA evidence excluding the defendant as the contributor of the pubic hair had been introduced at trial." Prosecutors appealed that decision.
Robert Wayne Holmes, the prosecutor in the case, did not return repeated calls for comment. In court papers, he emphasized the justice system's interest in finality, the hardship that a retrial would inflict on the victim and the strength of the remaining evidence. "The fact that it can now be said that the defendant was not the source of the hair has little significance," he wrote.
Mr. Dedge, a steely man who wore a bright-red prison jump suit, handcuffs and leg shackles during an interview at the detention center in Cocoa, Fla., disputed that.
"They used it against me," he said of the hair evidence, "and now they say it doesn't matter."
Mr. Dedge, now 41, presented six witnesses at his trial who said he was working as an auto mechanic and was on the job at the time of the rape.
Oh? Gosh, do you think they are less reliable than a jail-house snitch?
The thing that worries me the most is this idea prosecutors seem to have lately that "finality" is a more important value than the guilt or innocence of the accused. To what kind of mind is that a meaningful argument? Justice is irrelevant; they just want to be able to say, "We won, tough."
Again, we see members of the legal system who seem to believe that this "justice" thing is just a game, like it's a football match or something. Yeah, maybe the refs made a bad call, or your manager didn't do all that well by the players, but hey, too bad! It doesn't matter if the real rapist is running around free, it doesn't matter if an innocent man goes to jail, it just matters that, "Our team won!" As if the accused - and society - doesn't have a somewhat more significant interest in the outcome.
(I originally saw this story in the paper version of IHT, as "Prosecutors fight back as DNA appeals rise and prisoners go free," although I note that in the online version it's DNA trial reversals under challenge. Then I noticed the link at Tapped to the longer NYT version.) 23:48 BST
Words & Pictures
To celebrate Labor Day, I'm officially hating the Bushistas all weekend because of all the nasty things they are doing to people who actually have to go to work every day. LiberalOasis has more on that story. And you can hate all their friends, too, for things like this.
Anyway, it just so happens that if the U.N. Security Counsel had actually sanctioned our invasion of Iraq, all of those Gas Oil and Pipeline reps at the VP's Energy Summit would have been forced to competitively bid for their "rebuilding" contracts against France, Germany, and the rest of "Old Europe's" businesses. So invading Iraq without the UN security counsel's approval has cost us dearly in soldier's lives as well as billions of dollars. And the cost will continue unless we're willing to do something about it.
In celebration of the working person's holiday, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao has announced the Bush Administration's plan to end the 60-year-old law which requires employers to pay time-and-a-half for overtime.
I'm sure you already knew that -- if you happened to have run across page 15,576 of the Federal Register.
According to the Register, where the Bush Administration likes to place it's little gifts to major campaign donors, 2.7 million workers will lose their overtime pay -- for a "benefit" of $1.53 billion. I put "benefit" in quotes because, in the official cost-benefit analysis issued by Bush's Labor Department, the amount employers will now be able to slice out of workers' pockets is tallied on the plus side of the rules change.
Nevertheless, workers getting their pay snipped shouldn't complain, because they will all be receiving promotions. These employees will be re-classified as managers exempt from the law. The change is promoted by the National Council of Chain Restaurants. You've met these 'managers' - they're the ones in the beanies and aprons whose management decisions are, "Hold the lettuce on that."
The proximate cause of my recent departure from Discovery Institute, Seattle’s main conservative think tank, was my opposition to President Bush’s Iraq war. But I also left because I could no longer abide the purposes of the movement. Over the last several years, I’ve become sadly convinced that American conservatism has grown, for lack of a better word, malign. Not exactly a congenial conclusion for someone who started out with Goldwater in ’64 and ended up writing defense memos for Steve Forbes in 2000. [...] After 30 years, I realized why. Deep down, these people — these people who can be so gracious and so decent in their personal lives — believe that they’ve been deprived of their proper place at the center of the universe. Deep down, they know that, were the world right, everyone would be like them, or at least aspire, or pretend to aspire, to be like them.
At TomPaine.com, Jobs Without Power: For at least half their waking hours, the American people live in a dictatorship. At home or in public places, Americans enjoy a measure of freedom and liberty envied by most people around the world: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of association (true, John Ashcroft is trying to change all that but that's another story). But, the moment Americans walk through the doors of their workplace, they enter into a world that strips away all their basic rights. Within the walls of the workplace, the whim of the corporation is more powerful than the U.S. Constitution.
At Black Box Voting, "Conflict of interest: It's worse than we thought." [Diebold CEO Wally] O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. [...] In a recent fund-raising letter O'Dell wrote that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." There's more below, after a short piece explaining the crippling restrictions that will be placed on the hack challenge mentioned below.
Digby says: I honestly think that one of the keys to the Bushies' "success" is the sheer volume and magnitude of outrages they perpetrate. It's exhausting keeping up with them and the resultant static makes even a hard core news junkie like me want to pick up a cheap novel or mindlessly watch TVLand just to keep my head from exploding. But go read him on slickness and "the death of reputation and credibility by a thousand small smears."
In the IHT, William Pfaff reminds us just how clueless these neocons really are: They resemble Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, who in 1997 expressed astonishment at the gangster capitalism that had emerged in the former Soviet Union, and which still exists. He said he had assumed that dismantling communism would "automatically establish a free-market entrepreneurial system."
Direct from The Smirking Chimp: Randolph T. Holhut: 'The Bush administration's shabby treatment of our soldiers', which, among other things, answers my question about whether Bush has bothered to visit our wounded GIs: The soldiers there have been treated well and have gotten visits from all sorts of celebrities from Michael Jordan and Hulk Hogan to Sheryl Crow and Jennifer Love Hewitt. But one group of people have been conspicuously absent from Ward 57 - President Bush and the members of his administration. Not one of them have shown up to see the human cost of their misguided war. Also, Heather Wokusch: 'Lawsuit for Gulf War veterans targets WMD businesses' - now that they know who exposed them to WMD in the previous Gulf War, some people aren't very happy.
And Alun has posted a short report on the funeral at PNN. 14:52 BST
DLC disarray
In The American Prospect, Garance Franke-Ruta looks at the split between the Democratic Leadership Council's founder, Al From, and, well, everyone else in the party:
Al From is quivering with rage. It's the end of a long day in late July at the Wyndham Philadelphia, and with a sheen of sweat coating his face, he gleams with emotion as he launches into the closing speech of the day at the DLC's annual conference. It's a grim speech, delivered in rousing, impassioned tones more vehement than any other speech that day. "We cannot allow our party to be hijacked!" thunders From, railing against the leftists who have been his bête noire since he founded the DLC in 1985. "The future of our party and more importantly the future of our country is at stake."
Surrounded by supportive state senators and fresh-faced New Democratic governors, From, CEO of the DLC, is in his element. His anger has been foreshadowed by other discouraging conference speakers, whom The New York Times found "glum," "combative" and tending toward "pessimism" and The Washington Post dubbed "defensive" and "gloomy." "What we're fighting for is the definition of the party," From later told The Philadelphia Inquirer. "And this is probably the most bitter fighting -- or maybe intense is a better word -- in nearly 20 years. But it's because the left wants to go back to the way things used to be."
Well, yeah, if you mean the way things used to be when the media and Congress were both a little more mainstream/status quo instead of right-wing crackpot. From and the DLC ceded even the center of the discourse and handed it over to the far-right. Gee, thanks! Of course we want to go back to "the way things used to be" - who in their right mind doesn't?
Whether the left is truly trying to drag the party back in time is a matter of heated dispute in Washington. What's clear is that after two decades at the pinnacle of the Washington power hierarchy, From's ideas have triumphed beyond his wildest dreams, and the central role he's played as a policy entrepreneur in the 1990s is unquestioned. But by publicly involving the DLC in an increasingly nasty battle with Howard Dean, From is causing some of his erstwhile allies to wonder if he's finally lost his touch.
Someone really ought to ask the question of whether, politically speaking, From ever had "touch". What he actually did was put together an organization that briefly captured the attention of a (conservative-leaning) mainstream media and, ultimately, helped to elect a president. They did so largely by creating momentum and staying behind him, helping to unify the party long enough to get him into the White House. Frankly, though, they went kind of watery during the orchestrated attacks by the far-right on the man they elected. (And anyone who thinks Clinton owes more to From than to Perot is out of their minds anyway.)
But where the hell were they in 2000? Gore was the party nominee and the DLC, rather than backing him up, was sniping from the sidelines. Even as his numbers were surging, they where whining about how he was throwing away the election by swinging "to the left". The DLC's version of "the left" seemed to be, basically, emphasizing the needs of ordinary Americans who, you know, have to show up for work in the morning. Wow, what a whacked out, far-left constituency that is!
When Gore was obviously winning the election and the Republicans were spinning it as a loss, where was the DLC then? They were sitting on their hands. They did not get behind their nominee - a DLC nominee! They weren't "saving" the party, they were handing the country over to anti-democratic thieves.
So what is From doing now? Well, of course, he's trying to make Howard Dean sound like some kind of far-left loony-tune who is "hijacking" the party. And what is the loony, far-left position Dean is taking? Why, he opposed completely betraying America's ideals and haring off on an insane program of costly and wasteful empire-building. Does From actually believe that mainstream America ordinarily endorses making war for its own sake? That we just prefer to be at war? Defending the country is one thing, but just randomly attacking other countries isn't really the sort of thing we tend to go for - especially when it's coming out of our pockets, closing our schools, eliminating our economic stability. What kind of a jackass thinks it helps the Democratic Party to label such mainstream views as some kind of fringe-left whackiness?
Chatter among presidential campaign staffers in the weeks since the DLC conference suggests that From's grip on the younger generation of his ideological compatriots is weakening. "I don't think anyone thinks of From as a leader," says one senior aide to a presidential candidate regularly praised by DLC heavyweights. "People don't like Al From," remarks a campaign operative with a different DLC-backed presidential candidate. "People like [DLC President] Bruce [Reed]." Adds an aide to a third DLC-supported candidate, "I think they've gone out of their way to pick a fight with Dean to satisfy their need to stay relevant."
Those are surprising words from people whose candidates' might be expected to benefit from From's harsh talk and the DLC's now 4-month-old "Stop Dean" campaign. But an increasing number of Democratic elected officials, consultants and campaign operatives are beginning to suggest that the DLC's campaign against Dean involves a fundamental misreading of today's political environment. In Newsweek, James Carville advised Democrats to "give [Dean] a chance" and challenged the DLC take that an anti-war candidate is unelectable. "It's not if you're against the war that matters," he said. "It's how and why you're against the war." At the DLC forum, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell cautioned against "name calling." Washington state Rep. Laura Ruderman, a John Kerry supporter, rose with dismay at the conference to decry the "rat hole" into which the DLC-Dean conflict was dragging the party. "Quite frankly, it's the kind of eating each other alive that drove Jim Jeffords out of the Republican Party," she said.
More importantly, it's the kind of attack on mainstream values that drives most young people and other natural Democratic voters away from the Democratic Party - and away from the voting booth altogether.
Perhaps the most unexpected salvo came in early August during Al Gore's speech to the online activist group MoveOn.org. Simply speaking to the anti-Iraq War group was an affront to the DLC, and in his remarks, Gore called for Democrats to respect dissent and questioning of the war, a position From and Reed have decried as "weakness abroad."
It's "weakness abroad" to not want to alienate all of our allies, break treaties and invade countries for no apparent reason, terrorize the planet. It is "strength", I guess, to endorse a program of war at any price.
Al From thinks that Bill Clinton won the elections in '92 and '96 solely because he was a DLC-style candidate, a so-called "centrist" who was in fact to the right of the mainstream economically. But the truth is that Perot's candidacy played a crucial role in electing Clinton, who did nowhere near as well as Al Gore did in 2000 after his alleged "swing to the left". And much of Clinton's early momentum with the press had to do with his apparent social liberalism, something the DLC is allergic to on most days of the week. In reality, Al From has never gotten a president elected. And by allowing the liberal discourse to be suppressed, he handed the right-wing culture warriors everything they needed to lead the Democratic Party and the country "into the wilderness". 10:41 BST
You won't read about it in the N&O, but John Edwards has been under attack for the last week by a New Hampshire group that advocates for the legalization of medical marijuana. Members of Granite Staters for Medical Marijuana have challenged Edwards with questions and signs at least three times in the past week - enough to fluster the candidate's handlers, apparently, and raise questions about his commitment to free speech in public settings:
...on Sunday, for the third time in less than a week, Edwards' campaign staff tried to block GSMM members from peacefully expressing their views in a public space. At a town hall meeting in Keene Central Square Park in Keene, New Hampshire, five GSMM members tried to enter the public park with signs protesting Edwards' position favoring the Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA's) raids on medical marijuana patients in states that protect patients from arrest. Several campaign staff members stopped them.
When a campaign worker said, "We'll not allow you in with the signs ... this is our park," GSMM Campaign Coordinator Aaron Houston replied, "We have the right to be here," and entered with GSMM volunteers and signs. Edwards' campaign staffers then held their own signs in front of the protesters to prevent voters and journalists from seeing the GSMM placards.
This angered some audience members. An unidentified woman approached an Edwards campaign worker -- who was blocking a sign that read "Stop Arresting Patients" -- and asked, "What are you afraid of?" Under audience pressure, Edwards' staffers eventually withdrew and stopped blocking the signs.
Not, it turns out, that any of the Democratic contenders are all that good on the marijuana issue - the best Dean could come up with was a promise to, "require the FDA to evaluate marijuana with a double blind study with the same kinds of scientific protocols that every other drug goes through." But Edwards won't even go that far, and refusing to even let people hold up signs at a rally in support of a position that a majority of Americans are behind is cowardice of an unusual scale. 11:40 BST
40th Anniversary
Billmon reminds us of the ugly past we are trying to climb out of, and watches a dream come true.
In the end, Friday's two-hour discussion of whether computers should be the sole tabulators of Georgia voters' ballots came down to a challenge.
Roxanne Jekot, a 51-year-old computer program developer from Cumming, said she and a few expert friends could crack Georgia's $54 million touch-screen voting system in a matter of minutes.
The weather was grey, as I suppose is fitting for a funeral. Had a good cry. Hugged a lot. And then we drove for a long time and when we got home I looked at the web.
I see Alan has said just the sort of thing I've been thinking all along about Diane Feinstein, now that she has jumped right in to support the other side. Great going, Diane! But we already wanted to get rid of her.
Jeff Cooper, taking up slack for Bashman while he's holidaying, says: Yes, it's that Dean: In American Booksellers Foundation v. Dean (pdf link), the Second Circuit considered a challenge to a Vermont statute barring the distribution to minors of sexually explicit material "harmful to minors" over the internet. In an opinion by Chief Judge John Walker (yes, it's that W), the court concluded that, as applied to the plaintiffs' internet speech, the statute violated both the First Amendment and the dormant Commerce Clause.
Harley Sorensen is good on what a brave boy George Bush is: Can you imagine Mr. Bring-'em-On in a street fight? Try to picture him lipping off in a bar: "Hey, buddy, keep it up, and my bodyguards will pound the snot out of you." He's the personification of the "let's you and him fight" syndrome.
Here is Nathan Newman's most recent post on the advantages of a higher minimum wage. Then just keep reading down....
What's required is a willingness to chip away at Kim's post-Iraq paranoia by responding seriously to his shrill and unbending demand for a "non-aggression pact." No U.S. president would sign such an agreement, and Congress would never ratify it. But the U.S. delegation could break the ice by making an unambiguous statement that America does not intend to strike militarily at North Korea.
The statement would carry more weight than past assurances because it would be witnessed in a formal context by North Korea's sympathetic former benefactors, China and Russia, who are party to the talks along with U.S. allies South Korea and Japan.
A "shrill and unbending demand" for a "non-aggression pact"? What a downright dastardly, bellicose thing to ask for! It speaks volumes that North Korea is asking for such an elementary thing, and that the author thinks that "No U.S. president would sign such as agreement and Congress would never ratify it." And then, almost laughably, he procedes on to claim that we could solve this problem not with a "non-aggression pact" but with a "statement from Congress" that was "witnessed in a formal context." This just has to be the funniest thing I've read in quite a while. The U.S. tears up treaties (e.g., the ABM treaty) it decides are no longer in its best interests, it has its president sign treaties which it then renegs on (e.g., the international criminal court). And Schoenberger thinks that a "statement from Congress" would be worth anything more than the paper it's printed on?
Readers can make up their own minds about the nature of the North Korean state, I won't address that here. But whatever your opinion on that front, you should be aware that the ground is being prepared, and your minds are being prepared, to make North Korea the next "enemy" "threatening our national security" and "putting us at great risk" who we "must" invade or take other military action against immediately. It is up to those of us who can see through these lies to make sure this doesn't happen.
I have a feeling that, at this point, even a number of Republicans are starting to see through the lies; certainly Democrats would be less likely to fall for them this time around. But hey, maybe it's a completely different dodge; maybe all this bellicose talk about North Korea is actually a chance for Bush to pretend to demonstrate some last-minute prudence just before the election by not committing our over-committed troops to another stupid war. Wouldn't that be something? 07:42 BST
Talk Left reports Udall seems to be already presenting a serious challenge to incumbent Ben Nighthorse Campbell (who is only five points ahead of him), and he hasn't even declared yet. Also from TL, a worthy cause to send those dollars that are burning a hole in your pocket to, the Life After Exoneration Program. (Note to self: Follow her link to the new blog about autopsies.) (You should read the whole page, you know - it's full of fascinating stuff every damn day.)
Over at Pandagon, it seems that some parts of the right have noticed, finally, that Ashcroft is out of line. But only once. However, here's something from my old employer back home: Try as he might, Mr. Ashcroft can no longer dismiss opponents of the USA Patriot Act as a small but whiny band of liberals. Some of the nation's top conservative groups as well as a huge majority of the Republican-led House of Representatives -- in other words, the Bush base -- are now leading the drive to eliminate portions of the law that allow secret spying on anyone.
Rantavation has a series of posts that you gotta read - starting with the one about the racist misunderstanding people have of welfare and continuing down, it's a nifty look at the difference between perception and truth in economics, both nationally and in California. Whew!
The broader point, however, is that this should have been friggin' obvious from the start. In those earlier debates you can almost imagine (and frankly I've heard) grizzled CIA operators saying, "Wow, and all this time we were tossing Mossadeq, keeping Mubarak in power, and making nice with the Saudis, we could have just built western democracies instead. Why didn't we think of that?"
Of course, everybody thought of it, but most people realized it would be damned hard to do. Not that I'm all that thrilled with what was done instead, but could the people who are running this show really have been so dumb, so naive, so bloody out of it, that they thought they could just run right in and invade a country and it would just fall into place? (Did you?)
Now, given that one of the Iraqis' big suspicions is that we're after their oil, you might think that rerouting almost half of the country's oil through Israel, and using a pipeline last used when Palestine was ruled by the British, might at least create some perception problems.
But that doesn't seem to be all of it. That oil from the Kirkuk oil fields is now transhipped through Turkey. And folks in government circles in Jerusalem seem to think that these American hints about the Kirkuk to Haifa pipeline are, as Ha'aretz says, part of an "attempt to apply pressure on Turkey."
This deserves more attention. Why are we even remotely considering this scheme to send half of Iraq's oil through Israel? And why do we seem to be trying to sow discord between two of our most important allies in the region?
Now there's a question. I guess you never really know who your friends are. 17:42 BST
Punishing New York
They even lied about whether the air was safe breathe. Krugman:
All in all, the people running Washington, while eager to invoke 9/11 on behalf of whatever they feel like doing, have treated the city that bore the brunt of the actual attack very shabbily. In September 2004 the Republicans will hold their nominating convention in New York. Will New Yorkers take the occasion to remind them about how the city was lied to and shortchanged?
Patrick quotes Teresa from a comment thread at her weblog, on a subject I think of often:
My problem with "creative destruction" is that when I hear the phrase, I think of what happened when Ron Perelman got hold of a large segment of the comics industry. He very nearly destroyed both Marvel Comics and the existing comics distribution system.
Comics is full of guys who've put years and years of hard work into learning demanding and highly specialized skills. Ron Perelman never studied under Joe Kubert. I doubt he knew more than one-point-five nanosquats about the Marvel or DC continuities. But he leveraged his leverage into enough leverage to grab hold of Marvel, and proceeded to wreck the hopes and livelihoods of half the people in the industry. Maybe more than half. […]
The more I watch how people build their lives, the less I like large upheavals. All of us are forever trying to spin out some modest little web of opportunity and possibility in the gaps and angles formed by the much larger economic entities around us. And when the lords of this earth bring their creative destruction down upon us, we weep for the wreck of our small schemes.
This is pretty much the kind of thing I think of when folks start talking about how the Invisible Hand is going to sort things out for us in the latest upheaval. I think of ordinary people with plans and hopes for their lives and their families, suddenly tossed into the meat-grinder of "competition". I think of dreams lost, jobs and products disappearing from the landscape, shops closing, whole communities turned into ghost towns. I look at this and wonder who can possibly be so abstracted, so divorced from human society, that they can talk about "market adjustments" as if they have some meaning above and beyond those splintered lives, as if they are not agents of wholesale tragedy. What is an economy for, I wonder, if not to preserve the chances of ordinary people like us to secure our futures, to practice our crafts, to reach for our dreams? 12:42 BST
How to lose your cherry
Via Arthur Hlavaty, a memoir by Realist editor/publisher Paul Krassner:
My second columnist was Robert Anton Wilson. I had already published his first article, "The Semantics of God," in which he wrote, "The Believer had better face himself and ask squarely: Do I literally believe 'God’ has a penis? If the answer is no, then it seems only logical to drop the ridiculous practice of referring to 'God’ as 'He.’" Wilson’s column was titled "Negative Thinking." [...] In New York, the son of the owner of a newsstand in front of Carnegie Hall became my distributor. In Chicago, the Realist was distributed by the manager of an ice cream company. Steve Allen became the first subscriber, and he gave several gift subscriptions, including one to Lenny Bruce, who in turn gave gift subs to several others, as well as becoming an occasional contributor. I was publishing what was considered to be the hippest magazine in America, but I was still living with my parents, and I was still a virgin. [...] At this point, attorney Gerald Lefcourt filed a suit on my behalf, challenging the constitutionality of the abortion law. He pointed out that the D.A. had no power to investigate the violation of an unconstitutional law, and therefore he could not force me to testify. In 1970, I became the only plaintiff in the first lawsuit to declare the abortion laws unconstitutional in New York State. Later, various women’s groups joined the suit, and ultimately the New York legislature repealed the criminal sanctions against abortion, prior to the Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade. [...] In 1964, I assigned Robert Anton Wilson to write a feature article, which he called "Timothy Leary and His Psychological H-Bomb." A few months later, Leary invited me to his research headquarters in Millbrook, where I took my first acid trip. When I told my mother about LSD, she was quite concerned. "It could lead to marijuana," she said. Mom was right.
You'll love the part about how he lost his virginity on Bill Gaines' office couch.
(I met Krassner once, shortly after I'd lost my own virginity. It was the day Abbie and Jerry were chasing that Pig around on the Ellipse, and Abbie got arrested for wearing that shirt. But I was trying to pretend to be sophisticated, so we didn't talk about anything interesting.)
(Yes! Skippy invented that phrase! But he's on holiday.)
Off the Kuff has some polling results on the popularity of the Texas Republicans' attempt to redistrict and the Dems' walkout.
Excellent news: Cursor has posted the final version of David Neiwert's Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An exegesis in nice, clean HTML without the drag of Blogspot, on its very own pages. Cool.
Estimated Prophet also has a look at the subject of Fascism while discussing a George Will column. Figures. (Via Pacific Views.)
LiberalOasis found this quote from Howard Dean: We're not going to let them take our flag anymore. That flag belongs to everybody in the country; it doesn't belong to Tom DeLay.
Go over to MWO and search on "Mickster", 'cause they are all over him about this moronic idea that Clinton-haters are just the same as Bush-haters. I liked this bit, quoting Kaus:
Rich Lowry thinks today's Bush-hating on the left is the equivalent of the Clinton-hating on the right. ABC's estimable The Note (which, I think, means Mark Halperin in this case) has called the comparison "insane" and "uncalibrated." Lowry answers back in today's N.Y. Post [not online, as far as I can tell]. ... I've hung out with Bush-haters, and I've hung out with Clinton-haters, and I would side with Lowry in the uncalibrated, rough-equivalence camp. Maybe marginally fewer Bush-haters accuse Bush personally of ordering Mafia-style murders--but the night is young.
It's ridiculous hyperbole to accuse Bush of ordering Mafia-style murders when there is no evidence any of them have been carried out "Mafia-style."
Indeed, as the Mafia doesn't usually murder people in broad daylight in front of God and everyone and even in front of news cameras. But when George Bush invaded Iraq on the back of a string of flimsy lies, that was mass murder. It's not an unproven rumor about suspicious goings-on at some Arkansas airport, it's established, documented fact.
Meanwhile, at The Globalist, The Washington 'PR'ess Corps: That's when you begin to wonder whether the political reporters of major U.S. papers really see it as their job to provide truly independent news and analysis — or are all eager to act as undercover government spokesmen. 19:00 BST
And TNH got push-polled by her power company, who asked a lot of questions designed to make the end-user feel responsible for over-burdening the power grid by using all these here new-fangled devices, thus fattening them up for the rate-hike. But, remember, it's not your fault.
Even Jimmy Breslin keeps being surprised by how much the administration lies: I sit here in New York and I don't believe one single solitary word of what the government says. Can you believe anything Bush says? Only if you're a rank sucker. Then you put that Rumsfeld on and he grimaces and tells you the first thing he thinks of, and here is Powell, who I thought would be our first black national candidate and he's as bad as the rest of them. But it started a long time ago, with one little tiny lie....
The Daily Kos has found more evidence that Iraq is starting to look like Afghanistan. Saddam was, whatever else you can say about him, a bullwark against Islamic fundamentalism. The US is increasingly unable to push back against the rising tide of fundamentalist in that nation. And in the long run, that may prove deadlier than an impotent Saddam. This, of course, is exactly what I was afraid of. Aside from all the killing and maiming, I mean.
Anyone remember the comical moment of seeing an actor lip-sync Gerry Adams on the Beeb because we weren't allowed to hear him speak? Well, the current amusement isn't quite as funny, but since they can't televise the hearings over whether Tory Blair is a liar, they're having actors portray the events in question. Jerome Doolittle thinks this is such a good idea that he is now holding a Casting Call for the US version. (Also: Who is Michael Terence Meiring, and is he now having beers with Osama, Saddam, and Dick Cheney in the Undisclosed Location?)
I was really hoping to read more last night, but connecting was a real hassle and eventually I just gave up and went to bed. OK, I was pretty tired after racing around the length and breadth of the country and London for the last week-and-a-half, not to mention the emotional roller-coaster, but still. Yeah, I looked at a lot of beautiful scenery and had some great food and all that, but I looked at an awful lot of that scenery while sitting in a variety of moving vehicles for hours on end, and my body doesn't like it. (It doesn't like sleeping vertically, either, which is one reason it doesn't like those extra-early mornings and late nights in quick combination.)
Anyway, I was trying to catch up with The Nation, which I haven't looked at lately. I did manage to pull down the following:
Victory at McDonald's, by William Greider, in which Micky D's has come over to our side on the issue of pumping meat full of antibiotics and is now actively working to change this industry practice.
Al Gore Moves On, Ibrahim Ahmad, Ari Berman & Sasha F. Chavkin's report from early this month on Al Gore's NYU speech. Nothing new here but at least it was more straightforward and honest than The Washington Post version.
Patriotic Gore by Eric Alterman, about how the So-Called Liberal Media (SCLM) ignored its own news pages to editorially trash Al Gore's speech at NYU in their persistent psychopathological need to disagree with anything Al Gore says while pretending that George Bush is above reproach. Yes, I did mention it earlier, but now I've actually read it.
Selling Dean Short, in which Katha Pollitt decides she likes him for the nomination no matter what the DLC and the Republicans (and SCLM) say. One reason is the Big Mo, but what it really boils down to is that he's campaigning like it matters.
California Chaos, Peter Schrag's analysis of the multi-ring circus in the recall.
Never did get past the contents page of The New Republic, but it looks like they have some interesting items, like: Compound Interest by Peter Beinart, "Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi v. campaign finance reform"; two items about Dr. Dean - Department Of "Not Technically A Flip-Flop" and Dean's Strategy: Flip-Flop-Proof; some stuff on the recall; and Founding Fakers - "During the cold war, conservatives romanticized rebel leaders who claimed to be anti-communist, preferring their own mythmaking to the realities on the ground. Now, in the battle against militant Islam, they're making the same mistake all over again."
I opened a bunch of pages at The Washington Past but then my machine crashed and the only page that would reopen afterwards was the Free For All letters page from Saturday. They seemed to be trying to give the right-wing nuts more space this weekend, with silly stuff like this:
What's Left?
I was surprised by the obvious bias of staff writer Evelyn Nieves in her "For Right, a Wrong Direction" [news story, Aug. 18]. First, Nieves notes that Arnold Schwarzenegger "supports abortion rights, gay rights and gun control" and that "he may even be against tax cuts." But then she says Rush Limbaugh has been "sounding the alarm" about Schwarzenegger's "moderate views."
If these are moderate views, what does it take to be a liberal? [Christopher McFadden]
Well, if the definition of "liberal" is the one the right has been using, which is: "so far outside the mainstream that they are practically soviet-style communists," I think you'd have to be further left than that, since those are pretty mainstream views. You'd have to support free abortion on demand (which means it is included in Medicaid), and you'd have to support not just gay rights but gay marriage.
As to tax cuts, most mainstream Americans support a certain degree of tax cuts for themselves - but only because they don't think their taxes are buying what they are supposed to be paying for; they say they would actually support tax raises for some added services, such as universal health care. Moreover, what a lot of people are hurting from are payroll taxes, and the Republicans, strangely, have shown no support at all for cutting those taxes.
But, most importantly, mainstream America only supports tax cuts to the extent that those cuts help them, and the more they understand who the last several rounds of tax cuts and further planned tax cuts are going to, the more they oppose them wholeheartedly; very few people believe that rich people and corporations should be immune from paying their dues to the country while the rest of us should have to shoulder the burdens they heap on us. Old-fashioned mainstream-style conservatives never used to support tax cuts only for the wealthy. They used to talk about targeting tax cuts at a virtue called "job-creation", not just tax cuts for their own sake. Aside from the fruitcakes who claim that people who actually work for a living contribute nothing to society, most people want to see the rich ante up, and indeed it is not even a particularly liberal view that the rich should pay more than the rest of us.
The country is currently in serious economic trouble and it's getting worse. It is not conservative at this point to support more tax cuts, it's simply insane. In fact, it's pretty insane at this point not to want to rescind all of the Bush tax cuts. A more liberal position would be to support tax hikes, but only on the upper brackets; however, these would be significant tax hikes over and above those of the Clinton era and perhaps going as high as they were during the Kennedy era. Placed in historical context, wanting to go back to the prosperity of that period could even be seen as conservative. 15:29 BST
Sunday, 24 August 2003
I'm back
I was in Cardiff. The diet went completely to pieces the minute I got there and was confronted with lots of pies. Meat pies, fruit pies, cheesecake, and homemade apple pie. Oh, god, they found my weakness.
Anyway, here's some stuff I found when I turned on my computer again:
Seeing the Forest knows you've never actually heard or read Jimmy Carter's famous "malaise" speech. Reading it now, its prescience is startling: We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure..
Matt Singer catches another: The odds seem to be when Glenn Reynolds advises the Dems to do something, they're already doing it. He just posted a rant about how Dems should be more like the Democratic Governor in his state who balanced the budget by tightening up on spending and built a reputation for keeping his word. Awesome, dude. That's almost our platform now. Yep. But, Matt, the adjective form for party members is "Democratic", okay?
Matt Yglesias kinda likes the idea of "smart card" drivers' licenses. Modulator has a couple of qualms. Me, I don't think they will stop determined terrorists, and anyway I don't want this government to be too efficient at tracking the rest of us. (Also: Slavery in the US.)
MWO provides this audio link to a radio interview of Joe Conason by a host who is - surprise! - not a liberal.
In case you were wondering how to sing "Fair and Balanced" when it comes around on the guitar, MadKane has the answer. 18:20 BST
A right to defraud
Our favorite libertarian blogger, Jim Henley, on the Castillo case:
Jesus Castillo was swindled. The State of Texas defrauded him by sending a representative under false pretences. The State of Texas came in bad faith, like a jay. Among the safeguards Keith's Comics put on their "adult" material - separate racking, warnings, prohibition on access by minors - the most important was this: if you didn't want Demon Beast Invasion more than you wanted the money in your pocket, you wouldn't buy it. A sure, deliberate barrier, albeit one requiring a certain responsibility on the part of the purchaser. His pocket full of someone else's money (the taxpayers of Texas), the undercover officer trespassed against that barrier.
Cheater. And for what? Pictures, word balloons and captions which no one needed to see who did not wish to see.
It's long been a commonplace that the state, by nature, claims a monopoly on force. Increasingly, it arrogates to itself the right to commit fraud too - for the best of reasons or the best reason it happens to have today. It's one more creeper on the bush of government that needs to be kept pruned.
[BTW, Jim, I hadn't had a chance to read 1602 until yesterday, but although I wasn't actually bored (because I trust Neil enough to assume he's just a bit slow setting it up this time), I did have a lot of the same reaction you did.] 15:42 BST
It's Clinton's fault
Atrios provides a (very) short slide-show and this little quote:
Congressman Dana Rohrbacher with Afghan rebels, 1988. Since Sept. 11, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher has angrily—and with no small dose of irony—blasted the Clinton administration for failing to topple the Osama bin Laden-connected Taliban in Afghanistan. What the Huntington Beach Republican never mentions is a fact the Weekly reported last September: Rohrabacher himself was cozy with the Taliban. In late 1996, he assured the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs that the Muslim group did not have terrorist ties, was no threat to the U.S. and would bring "stability" to the region.
This comes, by the way, as interaction with The Poor Man, who was somewhat taken aback at the jump-for-joy response to the bombing of the UN HQ in Iraq that came from a certain hatriot. Andrew and his readers (check out the comments!) are appropriately aghast, and provide a few other examples of moral clarity from the compassionate conservatives, including some startling interpretations of the Gospels. 14:09 BST
The Healthcare Thing
From The Financial Times, Tax-funded healthcare 'could save US $200bn': Switching to a government- funded health system like Canada's would save the US $200bn a year by cutting administrative costs, enough to pay for all 41m uninsured Americans, according to two new studies. 02:51 BST
I have to remind myself that, in fact, there are several weird things going on every day and it's just a matter of catching up with them, but it nevertheless always feels as if there has been a major Insanity Dump whenever I go away for a few days.
Something that's aggravated me for a while is the fact that when BushCo got into the White House they started deleting things from the WH website that referred to the previous administration, which was outrageous enough, but now they are actually changing their own official record to keep up with their current spin. It's just way too Winston Smith. The Likely Story has details, complete with screen shots, of how the word "major" has been inserted at the beginning of the phrase "combat operations have ceased." If I were ambitious, I'd set up an entire White House mirror site showing the original pages and noting where each one has been deleted or "updated".
Fresno residents and community leaders, outraged by an e-mail message in which City Council Member Jerry Duncan wished he had a "dirty bomb" to kill every liberal in Fresno, called Thursday for his resignation, recall or reprimand.
A crowd that gathered in City Hall also chastised City Council Member Brian Calhoun and his chief assistant, Ann Kloose, who wrote in an e-mail that police should "Cap" members of the Human Relations Commission.
I thought it was just supposed to be drug-addled, tie-dyed, unkempt teenagers who talked like this. But, no, I think this goes a bit beyond "Off the pig!"
Also at Eschaton, Lambert finds the Texas Republicans digging deeper into their bag of dirty tricks to try to force the Democrats to cave in to their power-grab:
The Republicans on Friday voted to enforce the fines by taking away certain senatorial privileges until the missing members return and pay the fines.
...
If the Democrats do not return and pay the fines, they and their staffs will lose parking on the Capitol grounds, state cell phone use, all purchasing for their offices, staff passes to the Senate floor, travel, use of conference rooms and subscriptions. Their postage will be limited to $200 a month.
As Lambert observes, this would cripple their ability to serve their constituents. Of course, they could just cancel the election instead....
As you will appreciate, things are still a bit fraught, but here are some highlights of last-night's web-crawl:
Check out BadAttitudes Journal for a theory on why conservatives really fear gay marriage that goes right back to original causes.
Julian Sanchez has an interesting little piece on why it's not a good idea to ban stuff (religion, art, whatever), and he quite rightly says that it's not merely the worry that they will someday ban your religion if it stops being popular. And much as I love Ampersand, I have to agree with Julian on this one.
Tapped found what "may be one of the most intellectually shallow articles Tapped has ever read" - an attempt by Peter Berkowitz to claim that George Bush is not a radical. Tapped takes some of it apart, but there's plenty left to go after, and I wish I was in form to do it.
Dwight Meredith is good (as usual) on frivolous lawsuits. (Remember the Republican rules: Lawsuits against big corporations that screw you are always "frivolous"; nuisance suits by wealthy and powerful people who just want to shut you up are not.) Also: You've already paid for that new BMW.
Via MWO, a good review in the Chicago Sun-Times by William O'Rourke of Joe Conason's Big Lies, Thunder from the Left, and Salon is posting excerpts from the book. They also provide a link to an Alterman article in The Nation that I haven't read yet - but will - about the way The Washington Post reacted to Gore's speech about Bush's, uh, "mistaken impressions". I also haven't been to Orcinus yet, but MWO already has, and offers this quote with reference to the California recall:
Democratic institutions are the heart of our stable society; and by consistently disrupting and overthrowing these institutions in the blind pursuit of power, Republicans betray their own basic untrustworthiness when it comes to holding the reins of American governance. And when they consistently demonstrate that they are not willing to abide by the rules, nor respect traditions and institutions, we also have to ask: Just how conservative is this movement anyway?
Josh Marshall catches Tom DeLay in another example of up-is-downism. And speaking of DeLay, Josh has Wesley Clark's response to more of the idiot's lame attacks: "Well, first of all, I'd be happy to compare my hair with Tom DeLay's. We'll see who's got the blow-dried hair."
Note to self: Follow links from this post at Body and Soul on Christians vs. Christianism. Also: Yikes, is this kinky or what? He said it in public, so I'm going with "what".
The Fox News Network is suing Al Franken, the political satirist, for using the phrase "fair and balanced" in the title of his new book. In claiming trademark violation, Fox sets a noble example for standing firm against whatever.
Unreliable sources report that the Fox suit has inspired Paul Newman, the actor, to file a similar suit in federal court against the Department of Housing and Urban Development, commonly called HUD. Mr. Newman claims piracy of personality and copycat infringement.
In the 1963 film "HUD," for which Mr. Newman was nominated for an Academy Award, the ad campaign was based on the slogan, "Paul Newman is HUD." Mr. Newman claims that the Department of Housing and Urban Development, called HUD, is a fair and balanced institution and that some of its decency and respectability has unfairly rubbed off on his movie character, diluting the rotten, self-important, free-trade, corrupt conservative image that Mr. Newman worked so hard to project in the film. His suit claims that this "innocence by association" has hurt his feelings plus residuals.
A coalition of the willing — i.e., the Bratwurst Asphalt Company and the Ypsilanti Hot Dog and Bean Shop — has been pushed forward and is prepared to label its products "fair and balanced," knowing that Fox News will sue and that its newscasters will be so tied up with subpoenas they will only be able to broadcast from the courtroom, where they will be seen tearing their hair and whining, looking anything but fair and balanced, which would certainly be jolly good sport all around.
Paul Newman, an actor, is chief executive of Salad King.
As always, LiberalOasis was there to decode the Sunday talk shows:
Fox News Sunday's Brit Hume drew out the most important point yesterday, while interviewing Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham:
HUME: …you're saying with certainty here, sir, and others are as well, that we need to upgrade the transmission facilities, and you've been trying to do that.
ABRAHAM: Right.
HUME: But you're not yet sure that there was a failure in the transmission facilities, are you?
ABRAHAM: Well, here's the bottom line.
Regardless of whether the problem was related to the transmission operations, we need more transmission capability.
The real bottom line is everyone in the electricity game is trying to exploit the blackout for their own ends.
Even though we don't know yet what exactly caused the blackout, and hence, cannot possibly know what the solution should be.
But investing in infrastructure sounds nice enough.
As long as environmental standards are in place, it's good ol', job-creating, public investment. Right?
Although, we do have that nasty deficit. Who's gonna pay?
On that, here's Abraham, being interviewed on CBS' Face The Nation by Bob Schieffer:
ABRAHAM: Ratepayers, obviously, will pay the bill because they're the ones who benefit.
And that's where most of the responsibility ultimately will be assigned.
[...] SCHIEFFER: So you're saying the customers are going to have to pay for this?
ABRAHAM: …that's the kind of long-term investment that will be needed, to keep the transmission system in a situation where we have the ability to both avoid blackouts on the one hand, and deliver power to people at an affordable level.
You heard right. Your rates need to be jacked up, in order to keep your rates affordable.
And why is it that this falls on you?
Because, as almost every pol will tell you, you're the reason the grid is strained.
As Bill shows, what they're claiming is that you mere end-users have doubled demand on the system - and it's not true. Guess who's straining the system:
Basically, power that used to just go from point A to point B -- from the plant to you -- is now shuttling back and forth between wholesalers, straining the system.
Thanks to deregulation.
That's a deregulation that pretty much no regular citizen ratepayer ever asked for.
Dereg came about because of upstart power companies wanting to score big, led by Enron, and large corporate power users wanting cut costs.
Yet, as Abraham said plainly yesterday, you, Joe Ratepayer, will foot the bill for their deal.
Unsurprisingly, deregulation's role in weakening the grid didn't come up much on Sunday.
And as Bill also points out, this is not an issue where the Democrats look good - they look just like the Republicans. 16:45 BST
Sort of a holiday
The thing I love about going away is being completely disconnected from all the responsibilities I normally deal with every day. I took my cell phone with me in case of emergency but I didn't expect to be using it so I didn't even bother taking the charger with me, just turned it off. I'd expected to just spend a few days basking in the gorgeous scenery and relaxing.
Then it occurred to me that I needed to send a text message to my boss reminding her that I wouldn't be there (I was right - she forgot), so I turned the phone on and found two voice messages waiting, one from Martin Smith's mother asking me to call her, and the other from Cedric, saying he had gone over to Martin's flat and tried to rouse him but didn't get an answer. Margaret Smith's line was busy when I rang back, so I called Cedric and told him to speak directly with her. I was hoping the news was that she'd dragged Martin off to a dry-out hospital or something. It wasn't. After I'd talked to her on the Tuesday she'd tried to reach him and started to worry by Thursday when she still was getting the BT message service. She had the police break in and they found him in front of the television. The coroner says he probably just fell asleep and slipped away, and that's what we all choose to believe.
There's no getting around it: he drank himself to death. Presumably the destruction of his liver was what brought on the startling onset, at the age of 40, of Type I diabetes that hospitalized him only a couple of months ago. We'd thought at the time that it was a wake-up call for him, and he'd seemed sobered by the experience and resolute about taking care of himself, but once he was back in his flat alone he sank into his stupor again. I already knew he was an alcoholic, I'd wanted him hospitalized even before that, but now everyone else saw the urgency of it and they were all trying to help him. It was already too late. I can't help suspecting that they'd known that at the hospital when they treated him but decided it wouldn't be a kindness to tell him.
The thing is, Martin had for as long as we'd known him managed to get to work every day, turn up where he was expected, organize various events, and be charming and sweet and friendly wherever he went. He was never mean, never started fights, never did most of the obnoxious things you associate with out of control alcoholism. To me it was obvious that he was a drunk, but to everyone else he just seemed like a guy who liked to have a bit too much when he was in a partying environment, and I didn't realize that the problem wasn't as visible to others as it was to me. But even I thought we had a couple more years to help him pull himself together.
Well, we have to put up a memorial page to Martin, and we're working on that now, although the whole business has been exhausting. I enjoyed the Isle of Mull (and even bought some postcards), but through the whole thing I kept being brought up short by the realization that there'd be no joking around with Martin at the weekly pub meet anymore, no new stories (all amazingly true) about the latest porn star or hooker or lesbian who had decided Martin was adorable and let him charm the pants off of her, no new episodes in The Martin Chronicles. No more hugs. This well and truly bites.
Martin will be cremated next week; friends are invited to send messages and to contact us if they'd like to attend. 09:37 BST
Thursday, 14 August 2003
Connection, I just can't get no...
Don't know what was going on with Demon last night and this morning but I couldn't get the surftime connection. Which means I missed my last chance to web-crawl for the next few days in all probability, since I am off to a little Scottish island where I won't have access to all my toys and don't even know whether I can get a modular jack-in. Won't be able to post here but if I have a chance to find anything it will be at Avedon's Other Weblog. Meanwhile, here's a few things I managed to pull down before Demon fell apart on me:
Crazy Soph (of Woolgathering) sent me the link for another cursor toy.
09:59 BST
Wednesday, 13 August 2003
You heard it here last
You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him.
And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.
And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in
singin a bar of "Fair and Balanced" and walking out. They may think it's an organization.
And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said
fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of "Fair and Balanced" and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement.
And that's what it is , the Fair and Balanced Anti-Pravda Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come's around on the guitar.
Like Susan at An Age Like This says, this must have been just a tiny selection of the dissenting mail The Washington Post received in response to its idiotic editorial on Al Gore's speech.
Space Waitress had some vandalism at her home recently, and then:
But in talking this incident over with my roommate, I found out about something far worse. She has spotted bumper stickers around town (including at the State Capital) in Wellstone's signature green saying "He's dead, get over it."
She also has a pointer to yet another story of someone who was investigated on a tip. You Remember Marc Schultz, the guy who was reading while bearded in a coffee shop? Well....
Marc Schultz was one of the fortunate suspects. He's middle-class, educated and articulate, connected through his father, a lawyer, to people with influence. Not so fortunate was a middle-aged man identified only as M., profiled by Elizabeth Amon in the current Harper's. Arrested by the FBI on no charge (a co-worker said he wore a surgical mask "more than necessary"), denied bail, M. spent five months in a New Jersey jail with rats, roaches, and rapists, by his description. He was released still uncharged, $30,000 in debt from the experience, guilty only of being a resident alien and a Pakistani.
Under the abominable Patriot Act, Franz Kafka's "The Trial" is coming true in America, in comic and tragic versions, just under the mass media radar, just off the front page.
Sometimes you just have to wonder whether the goal of all this isn't to just find the thing they can do that is so shocking, so outrageous, so far beyond the pale, that it finally leaves us speechless. 11:57 BST
"If America's largest and most conservative corporations can own and influence big chunks of the American media," some have asked, "then why not our most established and respected unions?"
It turns out that unions can get into the media business - and one already has, creating what has recently become America's only operational commercial liberal talk radio network, officially introduced to the industry this month with a prominent ad in Talkers Magazine.
KKBJ-AM Talk Radio 1360 discovered the union-owned network's liberal programming on a stormy night back in June when one of the Minnesota talk station's satellite receivers died. To avoid dead air, the station flipped to the program stream coming down on a second satellite receiver, tuned in to i.e. America Radio Network's 9 pm-midnight host, Mike Malloy. Malloy was in fine form, ranting about the "Bush crime family."
The next day, KKBJ's Chuck Sebastian got some feedback from listeners who had just heard their first bit of liberal programming on a station that otherwise carries mostly right-wingers. "One guy said that it was a breath of fresh air to finally get somebody who knows what he's talking about," Sebastian said. He added, "Another said it was 'nice to hear somebody with an opinion the opposite of Michael Savage's ranting and raving.'"
This revolution in talk radio has come about because four years ago the United Auto Workers union (UAW) acquired a struggling talk radio network from its owner in Florida. In the intervening years, they renamed it the "i.e. America Radio Network," moved it to Detroit, and invested in state-of-the-art studios, satellite uplinks, and internet stream servers.
The network brought in top-notch radio industry management, technical, and programming talent, and built an entire business week of high-quality left-leaning programming and an assortment of non-political weekend shows. The i.e. America Radio Network now feeds the ABC Starguide III satellite, which beams down a broadcast-quality signal that can be carried by virtually any radio station in North America - for free on a barter basis (of the 14 minutes in a broadcast hour, the local station can sell nine minutes and the network keeps five).
Over 115 stations across the nation have now taken them up on the offer. The i.e. America Radio Network has also joined with the Sirius Satellite Radio system (standard option on Ford/Chrysler/Mercedes/Jeep and many other cars) to providing live programming for "Sirius Left," stream 145.
Openly liberal/progressive in their programming, the i.e. America Radio Network is shaking up the world of talk radio, causing many in the industry (including an outspoken VP at Clear Channel) to openly question the conservative conventional wisdom that AM listeners only want to hear rants of the right-wing variety.
This is not, of course, news that right-wing radio talk show hosts want you to know.
In the August 1, 2003 issue of the radio industry's "R&R" magazine, Rush Limbaugh said, "Liberal Talk radio isn't going to work. Who wants to listen to a bunch of people run down the country and run down the institutions and traditions that made this country great?"
Apparently Limbaugh has forgotten his own performances during the eight years of Clinton's presidency, and hasn't bothered to learn about the many forward-thinking and positive visions of America being put forth by the Democratic presidential candidates.
The reality is that liberal talk radio is the conservatives' worst nightmare, and - as Clear Channel's Randi Rhodes has proven for years in Florida - in those markets where it's well established it regularly draws huge market shares. As Limbaugh knows - and fears - Liberal Talk radio could lead one of the most important political trends in modern American media by balancing the dialogue to which Americans have access.
Malloy currently airs in the 9:00 PM to midnight slot, and Thom Hartmann from noon to 3:00 PM, eastern time. 11:08 BST
Trying to keep the internet open
Been over to Peacefire lately? I don't go there that often (because Bennett doesn't update that often), but there's always something interesting there, like maybe this:
Report on double standards for anti-gay "hate speech" Peacefire created four pages, on free servers such as GeoCities, which consisted of anti-gay quotes copied from four different conservative Web sites: Dr. Laura, Concerned Women for America, Family Research Council and Focus on the Family. Using anonymous HotMail accounts, we then sent the URLs of the newly created pages to six blocking software companies, recommending that they block the newly created pages as "hate speech". After the companies had agreed to block the sites we created, we told them that all the quotes on those pages had been taken from the four conservative Web sites, and recommended that they block those Web sites as well. The blocking companies did not block those Web sites and did not respond to our inquiries.
They've also developed more software for circumventing blocking schemes. 10:16 BST
I managed to look at The Washington Post Outlook section. Jim Hoagland is disgusted to know that the administration is preparing to accept help from the man whose name is spelled differently every time I see it, in this case "Moammar Gaddafi". ("Morally, that price is too high.") In these times of moral clarity, however, it must be okay to deal with mass-murderers because Democrats don't like them.
Rich Lowry still hallucinates that George Bush is compassionate. Do these people really believe this stuff?
Saletan sees something suspicious in the way supporters of the Pryor nomination are the only people bringing up the fact that Pryor is a Catholic, just like they were the people who brought up the fact that other judges (who were believed to be pro-choice) were Jewish. Of course, real Catholics know that being Catholic - even being a good Catholic - doesn't mean you are anti-abortion or want to make your religious feelings about homosexuality into law. In fact, many Catholics were taught in Catholic schools that making your faith into the law of the land is wrong.
I read George Will's most recent stupid article and rolled my eyes at the usual right-winger refusal to recognize that Bork was rejected because he was an anti-constitutional nutbar, and the same is true of quite a few of George Bush's nominees. Then I went over to Geekpol and found this: Shorter George Will: The GOP has trampled tradition in their series of power grabs. This is the Democrats' fault for rejecting Bob Bork.
Well, I tried to read The Washington Post over the last few days, but it was just too boring. Fortunately, Elton Beard takes care of that sort of thing (so you don't have to). My god, what a rightbunch of crackpots. This is the intellectual cream of conservatism, folks, an absolute abyss in the fabric of reason. The Post would be vastly improved if they hired Beard and were forced to read his Shorter versions of their articles before they went to print.
Not that the NYT is without sin. Just how long can Tom Friedman go on pretending that invading Iraq was the road to democracy in the Middle East? He's been writing the same thing over and over for about a year or more now and it never made sense but becomes more ridiculous as every day goes by and reality overtakes his continuing delusion. For a long time people put up with it because he had a reputation for "understanding" the region, but it's become increasingly clear that all he understood was that he didn't like it much and he understood even less about how human beings work. Don't believe me? Charles Dodgson had a little look at Friedman (and others) on the subject and couldn't help but notice that these people cannot tell the difference between democracy and Roman emperors. And our businessmen are people who think an admirable leader of a "successful government" is Adolf Hitler (and that it's okay to say so in public). And that this version of "democracy" is being led by people who set up situations like this:
Intel engineer Mike Hawash has plead guilty to assisting the Taliban. The slashdot comments on the story include this one, which brings up the case of the Lackawanna six -- who were advised by their lawyers to plead guilty, because, in their words, "We had to worry about the defendants being whisked out of the courtroom and declared enemy combatants if the case started going well for us." There's also this comment, pointing out that the confessions in Stalinist show trials were at least as convincing. But the most depressing comments are the ones like this, which argue that since he agreed to a plea bargain, he must be guilty, because the Feds would never, ever deploy the big guns against an innocent man.
God only knows what these people mean when they talk about "democracy" if this is it.
"Freedom" is an interesting word, too, and it's not just the Ashcrofts who have a problem with it. Dodgson also has a look at what it appears to mean for some libertarians:
A homeowner puts a UN flag on his front lawn. Some local bureaucrats tell him to take it off; having that flag is against the rules. He's refused, and will probably wind up in court. If the local bureaucrats were government officials, libertarians would be all over this as an example of the silly excesses of the nanny state. But the bureaucrats are members of a private homeowner's association, and some libertarians seem quite pleased: [quote elided]
What's interesting here is that if the homeowner's association were a formally constituted government body -- say, a zoning board -- the homeowner would face pretty much the same set of choices that he does against a private body: fight in court, petition the board to change its policies, or run for a seat on the board and start to work from the inside. And the argument that "he know about the association when he chose to buy his house" applies just as well to a zoning board. The main difference is that, as our libertarian commentators are quick to point out, there are restraints on government, like the first amendment, which do not apply to private bodies and cannot be used to defend against them.
Which all might give some people the feeling that there's something ever so slightly wrong with libertarianism. (At least if you think it's supposed be about empowering people and not corporations; if the latter, there's no problem at all).
Indeed, the whole idea was supposed to be that if big corporate entities try to put their boots on my neck, I have something bigger than myself - the government - fighting on my side; otherwise, it's my money against their money, and their money is always going to win. Can the government get big and scary, too? Sure, but as long as they are operating in opposition to big private interests rather than in concert with them, they create checks on each other; if they are working together against me, I haven't got a chance, and neither do you, so quit dreamin'. You can't be too smart if you can believe that corporations, if given the option, won't be every bit as terrifying as governments; historically, they already have. (Yeah, governments have cops and armies - but when they can, so do corporations. Don't kid yourself that they won't go back to using brute force against us if we give them the chance. We've just had a temporary lull in our part of the world, but it's a relatively new - and local - phenomenon.)
Meanwhile, in the scrappy bits of the media that can honestly be called liberal, Ted Rall on 9/11 is painfully on the money. If you can stand to use RealPlayer, Mike Malloy interviewed Dennis Kucinich on his radio show, with questions for the candidate sent in by listeners. And Jerome Doolittle found something good in the press, too, but read his own intro to it, which is pretty fine in itself. Oh, and lest I forget, Krugman responds to more lies about the tax cuts. 14:26 BST
News, views, and chews
Have you written that letter to The Washington Post yet? I'm not kidding, you know.
Eucalyptus has a good laugh at the new weekly tabloid version of The Washington Post.
Nathan Newman has the news that: Illinois's governor just signed a law waiving the "sovereign immunity" under the 11th Amendment that the rightwing Court had said protected states from those lawsuits.
Roger Ailes (the good one) finds Katherine Harris abusing her office again. Well, no surprises there. They can say what they want about corrupt Democrats, but Harris was actually elected for being corrupt.
John David Rose asks, Arrogance, or something darker?But perhaps the Bushies had a reason for ignoring the warnings. Something brushed over in the Congressional 9/11 report suggests the possibility of one of the worst conspiracies of American history. [...] Here's the chilling kicker: To convince the American people to spend extra billions for defense instead of on Social Security, Medicare, etc., PNAC suggested it would take a "catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." (PNAC's exact words.) 00:38 BST
Monday, 11 August 2003
Are you partisan?
Mark Evanier is asking a question about whether your position on supporting Arnie in the California Governor's recall election would be the same if he were a Democrat rather than a Republican. Or, more specifically, whether Republicans who support him would feel the same way if he were a Democrat. But I suppose you could apply it either way.
Obviously, support for Arnie presupposes support for the recall, which is itself an essentially anti-democratic measure, and part and parcel of what has clearly become the Republican strategy and ideology. Most of Republican rhetoric these days is that opposing or criticizing them or their projects in any way, or supporting a Democrat or "liberal", is by definition partisanship (at the very least - if not actual treason), or else about some sort of pathological hatred of George Bush as a person, and has nothing to do with how you stand on issues and what you believe is best for the country.
This is, obviously, typical Republican projection; as we have already seen, you can bet that if the Republicans are accusing Democrats or liberals of something, it's something the Republicans are either already doing or are about to embark on.
The GOP has spent most of their modern existence attacking liberalism, and particularly the social liberalism of racial equality, cultural diversity (up to and including different haircuts), women's liberation, sexual openness, and weakening of the drug laws. Arnold Schwarzenegger has both talked the talk and walked the walk of social liberalism as long as anyone can remember, having even gone so far as to toke de reefer on camera. He has even stated that he is socially liberal. He has said he was ashamed of his party when they impeached Clinton. And unlike aWol*, he has never hidden or repudiated his dissolute past. He is exactly the sort of person who, the Republicans have been telling us for years, is too degenerate to be allowed in elective office. If he hadn't told people early on about his recurring dream of being king of the world, it would be hard to understand why he was a Republican at all.
So if you are part of the corporatist elite that doesn't actually care about "lifestyle issues" as long as you support their criminal takeover, it's easy to understand why you'd support someone like Arnold. But for those who oppose him, the question isn't partisan, it's likely to be either precisely because he is a liberal, or one of the following:
1. The recall is part of an anti-democratic effort by the Republican Party to invalidate any election that does not result in a Republican victory.
The GOP has made it clear that taking over governorships is part of a larger plan to redistrict and otherwise shift the vote away from the majority in large population centers, further skewing elections to the unrepresentative right. There are too many reasons to believe that his party is supporting Schwarzenegger's candidacy for precisely this reason. No one who wishes power to reside with the people can support such an effort. Allowing any Republican to win is to reward the Republicans for these tactics. One therefore votes against the Republican not because one is a Democrat, but because one is a democrat.
2. A candidate for governor of California needs to show the ability to offer California and the nation something more than quotes from movies. So far, quotes from his movies are exactly what the Terminator has offered in response to questions about how he will ameliorate California's problems. Leaving aside the refusal to engage the issues, there is something very worrying about a guy who thinks such quotes are appropriate to the occasion, given that he originally uttered them in a mission to destroy the human race.
3. The Republican Party as a whole has been consistently backing numerous efforts to loot, disenfranchise and impoverish the people of the United States. They are only barely trying to hide this fact, and now casually dismiss questions about their corruption and dishonesty, making clear that they don't accept the right of the people to question them at all. No one with any integrity can support a party that behaves this way. If Schwarzenegger still wants to be associated with these people, we have no choice but to question his integrity and his intentions in standing for office.
4. Issues matter. Since Schwarzenegger is running as a Republican, we can't assume he doesn't really mean it. Republicans have made clear that they have no further interest in fiscal responsibility, keeping government intrusion into the private sphere limited, creating jobs, national security, or social responsibility. They may occasionally produce phony science (such as The Bell Curve) to rationalize their activities, but it's clear they don't care much about science or the truth, either. Republicans claim that programs that work for the public don't work, and that programs that are proven failures do work. They have spent decades trying to overturn nearly all of the Bill of Rights. Those of us who believe in Constitutional democracy and who want government to perform efficiently without interfering with our private life will simply have to oppose the Republican Party as long as it is operating so clearly in opposition to the rest of us. 14:10 BST
Who owns this dream?
William Rivers Pitt gave a speech to Veterans for Peace, called We Stand Our Ground:
This is America. At bottom, America is a dream, an idea. You can take away all our roads, our crops, our people, our cities, our armies - you can take all of that away, and the idea will still be there as pure and great as anything conceived by the human mind. I do very much believe that the idea that is America stands as the last, best hope for this world. When used properly, it can work wonders.
That idea, that dream, is in mortal peril. You can still have all our roads, our crops, our people, our cities, our armies - you can have all of that, but if you murder the idea that is America, you have murdered America itself in a way that ten thousand September 11ths could never do. The men and women within this current administration are murdering the idea that is America with their Patriot Acts, their destruction of civil liberties, their lies, their daily undermining of even the most basic tenets of decency and freedom and justice that we have tried to live up to for 227 years.
Elaine Riggs has a pointer to A Picture's Worth, which doesn't seem to have an extensive gallery yet but I liked this little thumbnail:
Happily, there is a larger version of this one:
(That reminds me: Would someone please tell me the code for the equivalent of an "alt" tag on a text link as opposed to on an image as above? I can't remember where I saw it to copy the source code.) (Update: Got it.)
I'm not someone who is normally much affected by the heat, but it's 97.9 degrees in here and my brain is cooked. There's a rumor that it might actually hit 100 in Britain this week for the first time ever. Oh, joy. At least in America you can go stand in the frozen food section of the supermarket to cool down for a bit, but it makes no difference here. Anyway, here's some stuff to read:
I've been wondering when Soros was going to get in the fight. It's about time: In a statement describing his reasons for giving $10 million, Soros said, "I believe deeply in the values of an open society. For the past 15 years I have focused my energies on fighting for these values abroad. Now I am doing it in the United States. The fate of the world depends on the United States and President Bush is leading us in the wrong direction."
Mark says A. Whitney Brown is smart and funny. I think I missed his era on SNL but he does get in a few. We can all use some of that right now.
And Now, the Queer Eye for Straight Marriage by Frank Rich: And with friends like Rick Santorum, the family-values Republican senator from Pennsylvania, does marriage need any enemies?
At Orcinus, David Neiwert has now begun to post as HTML the updated version of his excellent series, with the new material, starting with Part 1: Projecting Fascism. 15:22 BST
Who's no fun?
No More Mister Nice Blog read the in-flight magazine and found an article about the Coney Island roller-coaster, the Cyclone:
Here's what one rider says about the Cyclone:
"It is a roaring, churning, dropping, body-freezing, politically incorrect, this-can't-be-happening horror."
What is the point of "politically correct" in that sentence?
Look, I know the answer. To this guy, and to a lot of other people, lefties are anti-fun. We're buzzkill. We're thou-shalt-not. To this guy, that notion has detached itself from politics and has taken on a life of its own -- on some level, this guy thinks anything that restrains you is political correctness.
And meanwhile, we're the ones who say, "You want to marry someone of your own gender? Go for it! Put elephant dung on a painting of the Virgin Mary and hang it in a museum? Hey, I'm there!" But we still have the spoilsport rep, not Rick Santorum. It sucks.
It's the smoking thing - remember, they burned Hillary in effigy over it. 14:15BST
Saturday, 09 August 2003
Things
We do stupid things is a blog newly inspired by the man responsible for the quote, Paul Wolfowitz.
It is perhaps a small thing in the great scheme of things, but this would make me happy.
But then, so would one of these:
or this, or this, or this, or maybe this, or a very useful-looking (but way too expensive) this. (Come to think of it, they are all too expensive.) 21:23 BST
Now this is news
I thought War Under False Pretense was just an ordinary article about how Bush lied and blew it and all that until I realized it was from the Bircher mag.
Update: Steven Cohen e-mailed to say:
Actually, the Birchers have been anti-war and anti-Bush for some time now. Last winter I attended a public forum where public affairs were being debated. I made some sort of anti-Bush rant and as I was leaving, I was accosted by a dweeby guy who said, "I guess you don't like Bush, we don't either" and proceeded to hand me some John Birch Society literature. I was as surprised as you are, and I
