Paul Krugman notes that the high-end stores saw better Christmas sales than the low-end stores did, and says: Based on these reports, you may be tempted to speculate that the economic recovery is an exclusive party, and most people weren't invited. You'd be right. [...] Calculations by the Economic Policy Institute show real wages for most workers flat or falling even as the economy expands.
Kevin Drum likes Dean's proposal to raise the minimum wage, noting that it did no harm back in the 1950s when it was the equivalent of $8.00 an hour in 2003 dollars. And should we index the minimum wage to inflation? Of course. But I'll renew an even better idea I proposed a year ago: index it to congressional salaries. Assuming a normal 2000-hour work year, congressmen make about $75/hour right now. How about simply making the minimum wage equal to 10% of that? Congress can then increase their own salaries anytime they want, but only if they're willing to help out the working poor at the same time. Seems fair to me. (And does anybody remember this?)
E.J. Dionne: Conservative critics of "Bush hatred" like to argue that opposition to the president is a weird psychological affliction. It is nothing of the sort. It is a rational response to getting burned. They are, as a friend once put it, biting the hand that slapped them in the face.
Garance Franke-Ruta at Tapped: Indeed, everything I've seen from the DLC in the past eight months suggests to me that its leaders are more interested in whining than in winning. I have never been so certain that the Democratic nominee will lose the 2004 general election than I was after attending the DLC's highly depressing annual conference in Philadelphia last summer, where it became clear to me that the DLC is more interested in seeing Dean lose than in seeing Bush do so. (And even then it was clear that Dean would become the Democratic frontrunner.)
A Level Gaze has a word for George Bush: There isn't a lot of sophistication in Bush's public statements. He talks in front of curtains(?) emblazoned with repeating two- or three-word slogans that are merely cosmetic, and which claim results yet to be achieved. Simplistic.
And a question about those paperless voting machines:
While he's at it, I'd also like to know why Diebold and the other electronic voting machine manufacturers so stubbornly refuse to admit that auditability is a desirable attribute of electronic voting systems. If they were concerned with the bottom line, like, say, businesses, they could turn this controversy into whole new contracts to retrofit their machines to generate paper. If, as Cringely posits, the companies adapted voting machines from existing systems, every one of which already leaves a trail, it should be a very lucrative piece of cake. Why aren't they chasing this easy money?
The terrorist attack on the United States could have been treated as a crime against humanity rather than an act of war. Treating it as a crime would have been more appropriate. Crimes require police work, not military action. Protection against terrorism requires precautionary measures, awareness, and intelligence gathering—all of which ultimately depend on the support of the populations among which the terrorists operate.
Declaring war on terrorism better suited the purposes of the Bush Administration, because it invoked military might; but this is the wrong way to deal with the problem. Military action requires an identifiable target, preferably a state. As a result the war on terrorism has been directed primarily against states harboring terrorists. Yet terrorists are by definition non-state actors, even if they are often sponsored by states.
The war on terrorism as pursued by the Bush Administration cannot be won. On the contrary, it may bring about a permanent state of war. Terrorists will never disappear. They will continue to provide a pretext for the pursuit of American supremacy.
We've said it before, and we'll say it again: al Qaeda is not a state power. In fact, taking the adminstration at its word, the most recent alert was triggered by the concern that al Qaeda would hijack an airliner (or two). What more proof do you need that these guys don't have any weaponry? Sure, they are a menace with truck bombs, but the Bush adminstation has been treating al Qaeda as if they had submarines and jet fighters and laser guided bombs. They don't. The core is about 2,000 guys, mostly in Afghanistan. They were not captured when there was the opportunity (immediately after September 11), and now, two years later, it will be much harder to get them - partly because of the Iraq invastion, partly because the global (and expecially Islamic) community is less likely to go along.
As we have seen, the "War on Terrorism" isn't about fighting terrorism at all, it's about making war on pre-chosen targets that may have nothing to do with terrorism. In the meantime, the world has become a more dangerous place than it was before, and a breeding ground for terrorists. 19:58 GMT
Harvey Milk School
The American Federation of Teachers asks: Are schools for gay students a good idea? Gay activist Bill Dobbs doesn't think so, but Alan Ettman (of the AFT’s Gay and Lesbian Caucus) says, "Yes." 19:39 GMT
A la blog
First National Bank of the Living Dead: What we needed to resist was rebranding the estate tax as a "death tax," instead of a "lazy parasite tax" or a "crazy-assed worthless motherfucker tax." [...] But the various forces of the Republican right are well-practiced muddiers of mortality. We're supposed to feel helpless sentimentality toward the poor defenseless "dead person" as we do toward the poor defenseless "unborn person," in both cases overlooking life as an essential attribute of personality. (Live people, presumably, are able to defend themselves. Live non-rich people, anyway.)
Xymphora does a little reading: Wow! This is, I remind you, the freaking Washington Post! This editorial is one of the most insane things I've ever read in an American newspaper, and that's really saying something.
Demosthenes finds a really totally supawhacky right-wing crackpot plan for China.
Atrios says, "Steve Gilliard's right. It's time to take the gloves off," calling for an "adopt a journalist" program - you choose your scribe (a reporter, not a mere pundit), and document their abuses. Atrios suggests two particularly dangerous creatures, Kit Seelye and Ceci Connolly, who you remember I regard as being among The Spite Girls. Check out those Somerby links for a good look at these beings; they were instrumental in chipping away at Gore's lead, and reputation, in 2000 by spreading a load of smoke.
MaxSpeak has made the changeover to Movable Type, thank goodness, and I am so relieved. Change your blogroll link for him if you haven't already, and check out the Deathburger Party post.
Patrick must have run out of Buffy DVDs, and been forced to return to blogging. 02:13 GMT
Whedon declined to say which of the series' many loose threads he would tie up in the movie. Some of those include the secret behind the Blue Sun Corp. and its interest in River (Summer Glau); the secret behind Shepherd Book's (Ron Glass) past; the unresolved romantic tension between Capt. Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and Inara (Morena Baccarin); and the unresolved romantic tension between Simon (Sean Maher) and Kaylee (Jewel Stait).
Even for some heterosexuals, the Episcopal Church's stance on homosexuality was the main reason for switching. Mr. El-Naggar, a retired C.I.A. officer and college instructor, said that when he read the news about the church's decision to back Bishop Robinson, he got out the Yellow Pages and phoned the closest Episcopal church.
He said he was pleased to discover that the rector at Calvary Episcopal Church was a woman, because he had always questioned the Catholic Church's opposition to ordaining women. He now attends Calvary Episcopal and said he had been stunned at the open theological debate there over homosexuality and other issues.
"I am trying to be a good Christian, and I have never felt that spiritual freedom I feel now in the Episcopal Church," Mr. El-Naggar said.
Those actually sound like better - more Christian, more spiritual - reasons to change churches than the ones given by those who left for the Catholic Church. (Via Atrios.) 23:50 GMT
Yarns
Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Jim Capozzola are talking about a school in New Jersey where half the kids are knitting. It doesn't appear to be sex-typed.
In the small boarding school I went to in the sixth grade, it was. For the first time in known history, a sex-typed event was taking place at Green Chimneys: the older girls (fifth and sixth grade) were informed that we were to come to evening teas to be held by the school nurse, because we were supposed to learn to be young ladies or something. And mostly, we knitted.
As soon as the boys found out we were learning to knit they insisted that we teach them. The hell of it was, they were better than us at it. That was the thing I always remembered about it, which I guess is why it took me years to realize that it was also at these "teas" that they gave us "the talk", and that of course that had probably been the real purpose of the exercise. And it's taken me until just this moment to realize why they were doing this for the first time in history: because girls hadn't previously hit puberty by the sixth grade, but that was changing by the '60s, and suddenly they had one sixth-grader whose shirts weren't lying flat over her chest anymore. (Have I mentioned that I was the only girl in the sixth grade? I guess I should be damned grateful that they found this wonderfully casual way to impart the information to us - to me. And it was timely, too, and saved me from having a Carrie event a few months later.) (I originally wrote "bloody grateful" up there but decided that would be going too far.)
This one is worth clicking through the ads for the free Salon day pass:
In the heart of the Bluegrass, a Bible Belt preacher is rallying people to political action around what he calls "basic religious values." Think you can describe his politics? Think again. This man of the cloth wants "regime change" in Washington.
The Rev. Albert Pennybacker, a Lexington, Ky.-based pastor, is head of the Clergy Leadership Network, a new, cross-denominational group of liberal and moderate religious leaders seeking to counter the influence of the religious right and to mobilize voters to change leadership in Washington. Pennybacker, affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and a pastor of 35 years, is tired of the conventional wisdom that equates religiosity with conservatism. Nationwide, he says, the religious right often squeezes out the left in public debate.
Now is the moment for liberal religious voices to make themselves heard, Pennybacker says. He believes the Bush administration's record runs contrary to the core values of America's religious communities, and, as examples, he points to what he says are deceptions about war in Iraq, economic programs that favor the wealthy and destructive environmental policies. [...] Would you talk about some of the specific issues you're focusing on?
One of the things we're very concerned about is the economic impact of policies in this administration. When people lose jobs, we see it as pastors and religious leaders. It means that families are shortchanged. It means that domestic violence increases. It means that alcoholism increases. And then we're very concerned about the international policies. This administration has set us against the world. From 9/11 to now, we've done a 180-degree turn with our relations with the world. In a very profound way our democracy is at stake. [...] Most religious leaders are moderate to progressive. [William Sloane] Coffin has written this wonderful book where he quotes an archbishop in South America who says, "God's given us two eyes, two ears and two arms and two hands, but only one heart. And it's in the center and a little bit to the left."
Before we can restore the upbeat 1990s business climate, two things need to happen:
We need to oust the Bush regime, and replace it with a
government that encourages innovation, entrepreneurialism and small
business, instead of corporatism, oligopoly, and more rights for
corporations than for consumers.
We need a citizen-consumer rebellion against corporatism, and against businesses who lie to customers, sue customers, sell poor quality, uninnovative products, mistreat employees, offshore jobs, and are socially and environmentally irresponsible. That rebellion will produce both changes in spending habits and new laws.
But in the meantime, those of us that advise businesses need to (at least for now) set aside the 'nice to do' business improvement ideas of the 1990s, and develop some hard-nosed new ideas that address the 20 stay-awake issues above in more creative and positive ways than the 'Usual Solutions' that prevail today. Because these issues are real, and until we come up with better answers, the 'race to the bottom' will continue.
And let me join her in recommending this outstanding post from Whisky Bar in which Billmon recaps the history of the neocon emergence as the failed criminals who gained another shot at wrecking the world after having already screwed it up before.
I love watching the slow evolution of Josh Marshall as he begins to see the things that were obvious to me all along:
I finally finished this empire essay which I've several times mentioned I'd been working on. I found it much more taxing and draining than I'd imagined. And it’s made me question and rethink a number of my assumptions about America’s place in the world today, her relative power, and the underlying domestic changes that are shaping the way she acts today on the world stage.
Is it really reasonable to expect that the values which undergird liberal democracy in America will be effectively spread abroad by the most illiberal people in America? It's a good question. Think about it.
Years ago, when concern was being expressed about the shipment of factory jobs to places with slave wages, hideous working conditions and even prison labor, proponents said there was nothing to worry about. Exporting labor-intensive jobs would make U.S. companies more competitive, leading to increased growth and employment, and higher living standards. They advised U.S. workers to adjust, to become better educated and skillful enough to thrive in a new world of employment, where technology and the ability to process information were crucial components.
Well, the workers whose jobs are now threatened at I.B.M. and similar companies across the U.S. are well educated and absolute whizzes at processing information. But they are nevertheless in danger of following the well-trodden path of their factory brethren to lower-wage work, or the unemployment line.
This "Ownership Society" gambit is another of those slick sell jobs that Americans love to buy into since it gives them an illusion of guaranteed upward mobility by dint of their own special talent and superior moral values. Most people would rather hear that, I'm afraid, than hear that they are a bunch of rubes who've been sold down the river by a rich, elitist snake oil salesman. It will take a serious economic catastrophe to get people to admit that their belief in the "low-taxes-will-make-you-rich" American Dream was a scam.
People of unsullied reputation will still be able to fight over good jobs as maids, butlers, and gardeners. 17:05 GMT
About a week ago I got a telephone call from a former student of mine at Santa Clara, and he was very concerned and left a couple of voicemail messages. I called him back, and it turned out that he had been contacted by the FBI here in Oakland. And all that they would tell him was that they wanted to talk to him, that he shouldn't worry. The agent said, "You don't need to flee the country or anything. You are not suspected of anything, but we just want to ask you a couple of questions. We're doing an investigation." So needless to say, he was very concerned.
He is a United States citizen of Iranian descent. He was on the eve of studying to take the Professional Responsibility Exam, which is part of the examination process that law school graduates go through before they can be sworn into the bar, the California bar among others. And he just repeated over and over how concerned he was, despite the fact that he could think of nothing that he had done that was wrong. He could think of nothing that anyone he knew had done that was wrong. But he remembered from having taken my constitutional law class that there might be a problem here, and so he called to ask for some advice about how he should answer these requests.
This guy nearly ran for governor of California, and would have made a great one. (It has been said that he is "why Playboy was so liberal for all those years." And he is still liberal.) Hey, it's not too late for him to run.
At Skimble, there's a bit of anger over the fact that Ashcroft hasn't really been investigated, and a good nutshell quote on the updated War on Some Drugs: All roads lead back to 9-11. See TalkLeft on the administration's support for the proposed Victory Act and its war on bogus narcoterrorism. Equating routine drug offenses with the activity of Al Qaeda serves as another false, preemptive linkage to further a preordained agenda that has nothing at all to do with 9-11-01. Oh, yeah, and some publishing news.
Paul Krugman lays out New Year's Resolutions for journalists. The Daily Howler will be there to give us the blow-by-blow as they break every single one of them.
Anne Zook: Atrios says the DLC seems to want Dean to lose more than they want to beat Bush. I always like it when someone points that out. We need to add "DLC" to the places/organizations requiring a little regime change. I certainly agree about those first two sentences, but "regime change" for the DLC doesn't actually make any sense, since the DLC is those people. Their purpose is to drag the Democratic Party to the right. We can't stop them from associating with each other and making stupid pronouncements. What we need to do is make sure no one in the party takes them very seriously.
Sorry, got distracted. Santa brought me the DVD of the second X-Men movie because I couldn't go see it when it was out in the theaters due to having my eye gouged out that business after the surgery. Also, we ate a lot of food. Santa was very fannish this year, brought some Buffy stuff and also the DVD set of Fellowship of the Ring. Oh, and the Led Zep concert DVD.
All week I have been trying to figure out why this quote is supposed to demonstrate that Dean is anti-religious: "We are not cogs in a corporate machine," he preached last month in Iowa. "We are human, spiritual beings who deserve better consideration as human beings than we're getting from this administration." That sounds downright Christian, to me.
I saw Sir Cliff doing his new Christmas song the other night. It's called "Santa's List", and it's a peace song.
Tom Spencer (formerly of Thinking it Through) has lately been posting over at Dave Johnson's Seeing the Forest, which was already good with just Dave. Tom made a Christmas Eve visit to his relatives, former humans who are now apparently among the Cloud Minders of Stratos. Maybe he should send this to them as a New Year's greeting.
Teresa takes us back to Christmas past, Season 5. (Why do you think there's so little blogging at Electrolite, lately? Yes, they are late to the party, but now they've got the whole damn series on DVD and are watching it all for the first time.)
All images of gay gatherings at national sites, including the Millennium March on the Washington Mall have been ordered removed from videotapes that have been shown at the Lincoln Memorial since 1995 according to a civil service group.
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) says that the directive came from National Parks Service Deputy Director Donald Murphy. Murphy is said to have been concerned about pictures in the video that showed same-sex couples kissing and holding hands after conservative groups complained.
The Millennium March held in 2000 to bring attention to LGBT civil rights issues drew tens of thousands of gays and their supporters to the mall for one of the biggest demonstrations since the civil rights and anti-war marches of the 1960s.
Also ordered cut from the tape were scenes of abortion rights demonstrations at the memorial, and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations "because it implies that Lincoln would have supported homosexual and abortion rights as well as feminism."
In their place, the Park Service is inserting scenes of the Christian group Promise Keepers and pro-Gulf War demonstrators though these events did not take place at the Memorial in what Murphy calls a "more balanced" version.
"The Park Service leadership now caters exclusively to conservative Christian fundamentalist groups," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. "The Bush Administration appears to be sponsoring a program of Faith-Based Parks."
So important events that actually took place there have been deleted from the record, replaced by what we are now expected to perceive as the much more significant flexing of religiously-inspired masculine muscles. 12:35 GMT
Some holiday blogging
Mr. Sideshow has run off to the comic shops, but that'll be the last excursion into the outside world for the next couple of days. We're spending the holiday at home, where we expect to catch up with some movies we'd videoed off the TV and never got around to watching, and of course play with our computers. The Sideshow will not be running off on holiday, therefore.
We've already started the movie thing, with Bowling for Columbine, which is much better than we'd been led to believe. Although Moore does focus on guns, he by no means emphasizes them as the cause of violence in America, and looks to other likely suspects, like America's bizarre resistance to the sensible social policies that can be found elsewhere in the First World, along with the continuous media promotion of fear. America is the advanced country where it is most terrifying to be short of money; any decent criminologist can tell you what that means.
But what even Moore doesn't mention is something that's really unique in the First World: the breadth and influence of reactionary religious doctrine. That's the big open secret of crime in America, and anyone who has studied sex crime and serial violence knows that homes where restrictive, anti-sexual religion is taught are the ones most likely to produce rapists and compulsive serial killers. (In Third World countries you don't have to be a criminal, you just join the police.)
Anyway, a few things I saw before I went to bed last night:
[Link] go there its a website u might have heard of it facist
Well, how could I resist? I actually did check out the site, and it was full of the predictable rubbish about how feminists should shave their legs and wear bras. So I wrote a reply:
We don't shave our legs, we wax them.
I rather like this site, although it is a bit pricey:[Link]
However, you'll never get to see it, because a guy who can't be bothered to type all three letters of the word "you" is damn sure too lazy to be any fun in bed.
Eat your heart out.
This is actually fairly typical of about a quarter of the mail we get from the website. And not entirely atypical of the way I usually respond. Once, believe it or not, I ended up in a fairly civil exchange with one such correspondent, who in the end said, wistfully, "I guess I've ruined my chances with you, huh?" 22:54 GMT
A couple things
Garance Franke-Ruta at Tapped recommends an article by Paul Glastris outlining a genuine family values agenda for the Democrats.
Katharine Seelye and Robin Toner wrote another offensive Dem-bashing article last week, with the fashionable stuff in it about how "some" Democrats are "uneasy" about Dean's candidacy. The Agora responds:
Jesus, this pisses me off.
I have been uneasy about every Democratic presidential candidate in the last 15 because they ran screaming away from real liberal positions, and never bothered to articulate a vision of a government that used the vast wealth of modern society to make life less precarious. Damn New York Times never interviewed me about that
Yes, and it's all the DLC's fault. Back in June, Norman Solomon talked about that:
In a 1992 book, "Who Will Tell the People," political analyst William Greider noted that the Democratic Leadership Council's main objective was "an attack on the Democratic Party's core constituencies -- labor, schoolteachers, women's rights groups, peace and disarmament activists, the racial minorities and supporters of affirmative action."
And they were doing pretty well at it, too. And in so doing, they've let us come to this place where the debate is between a "left-wing extremism" characterized by a Rockefeller Republican (Howard Dean) and a "conservatism" that is led by raving far-right loonies who differ only marginally from the KKK and who appear to be trying very hard to follow in Hitler's footsteps. (Ooooh, she said "Hitler"! Well, c'mon, they're asking for it.)
Who are the people who are "uneasy" about Dean and want someone more respectable on the ticket? Let's see:
One of the key "New Democrats" is DLC favorite John Breaux, a senator from Louisiana who distinguished himself by trying to protect deregulation measures approved in early June by the Federal Communications Commission. Breaux unsuccessfully proposed amendments to help TV networks to further consolidate media ownership. His efforts were even too flagrantly corporate for many Republicans on the Senate Commerce Committee.
I suspect that even Breaux knows that Dean is really a conservative, although he doesn't let that stop him.
Unfortunately, what I worry about is the same thing Douglas Anders was talking about there at the top: I'd like to see real liberals on the ticket. Dean is liberal on a few social issues, but the truth is that he, too, is not really behind a liberal economic agenda. Edwards has a good approach toward some of the more outrageous attitudes toward working people that inhere in the "conservative" agenda, but he's a liberal only in the sense that he's not a theofascist or raving neoroyalist. Clark actually calls himself a liberal, but he did pander a bit on the flag-burning amendment (even though he believes such an amendment will never be passed). Kerry lost all of my remaining respect once he started attacking Dean for being honest about how little good Saddam's capture does American security.
The truth is, I was already seeing the candidate I really wanted to vote for last year, when he made all those great speeches about Iraq, the media, and so on. But he's not in the race.
But you gotta love Dean's campaign, and I wish a real liberal had done it first. Meanwhile, getting back to that NYT article, I know I'm not listening to Breaux's counsel:
Senator John B. Breaux of Louisiana, who has long sought to push the Democratic Party to the center, said Dr. Dean's remark about Mr. Hussein's capture was "not the smartest thing to say." Mr. Breaux added, "Most people in my part of the country think the world is indeed safer without a ruthless dictator."
Gee, he makes it sound like Saddam, who was apparently the only dangerous person in the world, was still in power right up until he was back in US hands. What a jerk.
And Kit makes it sound like Breaux is a centrist. She's an even bigger jerk. 20:19 GMT
There is a real irony in using "naturalness" as the basis for arguing a
single true reason for sex, since if one is going to go that route,
examining evolutionary mechanisms is only sound direction to seek in. In
which case, the obvious conclusion is that if there is a "purpose" to
sex, it is to promote genetic diversity. Asexual reproduction generally
produces no genetic diversity, and so the evolution of sex seems to have
been "for" gene-swapping. Sex being "for" gene-swapping in the sense
that the original sport generated a means of reproduction that was wildly
successful in permitting future adaptability, especially in larger
animals. So much so that it's the predominant means of reproduction in
both animal and plant kingdoms.
Absent a deity, looking at evolutionary success in the bearers of a trait or mechanism is about as sensible a way as is available for assessing what any biological mechanism is "for," i.e. what does it do that aids evolutionary success? What is it that allowed the trait to be propagated in subsequent generations to the exclusion of competing traits? From there, if there is some sort of virtue in using an evolved mechanism only for the "purpose" it evolved, it's a short hop to say that the only virtuous sex is promiscuous, procreative sex, i.e. that sex which produces the greatest genetic diversity. In other words, unwed mothers with lots of children by maximally multiple fathers are among the most sexually virtuous people possible. Needless to say, I don't think this is the conclusion that is wanted.
In the end, I think arguing "natural" virtue is just a mistake, especially in the sense of arguing virtue in using evolved mechanisms only for what they are evolved "for". It presupposes a sort of teleology that really works (and then, only sort-of) if you have a deity that sets the purpose of things. I think these nature teleology arguments are mostly a way of theists trying to sneak in god without too much idea of how "nature" actually is conceived, in the absence of god. If this sort of argument were sound, it would be equally wrong or selfish to use your eyes for close work (e.g. reading) when after all, what they're "for" is tracking moving objects at a distance, and evil and selfish to use your arms to move a wheelchair since what they're "for" is brachiation. And so on.
A bit of potentially good news from Gene Lyons:
It's with mixed feelings that I let you know I won't be sending my column around by e-mail after this week. The reason is that I've agreed to a syndication deal with United Media (NEA), which gives newspapers from sea to shining sea an opportunity to turn my immortal words into birdcage lining.
Those of you who have come to rely upon me to provide your weekly quota of spleen, sarcasm, bile and invective have three options. One, you can persuade your local newspaper to carry the column. Two, you can google up a paper that does carry it and (unlike the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) doesn't charge online readers. Here's hoping there will be a lot of them. Three, you can wait a few days and read it on the United Media website.
As we've all known for some time, Gene's column is too good and too important to languish in the wasteland of The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, so syndication has been breathlessly-awaited. Y'all be sure to write those letters to your local papers - and especially to the Newspapers of Record - and tell them that their pages sorely need Gene Lyons. (In the meantime, go to Moose & Squirrel for links to current pages for Gene and a lot of other good columnists.) 16:15 GMT
In the wake of Saddam's capture, a Christian expressed actual Christian sentiments, and a CHINO just couldn't hack it. Mark Kleiman meditates on the nature of Christianity and the problem of Christianists: Now for all I know Bainbridge is right about Martino, and Martino wouldn't feel, or express, compassion for someone whose behavior Martino really disapproved of. But Bainbridge does seem to be saying that, although Jesus of Nazareth was and is God, doing what Jesus said everyone should do makes Martino a bad person. He has further thoughts here in response to some e-mail he received. (Mark also looked at 20 of the entries for Bush in 30 Seconds, and listed as the best of those Baby Johnny's Stolen Future, Thank you, Rebuilding Iraq, and What Has He Done for You.)
At Tapped, absolutely do read Matt Yglesias' report on Tom DeLay's performance on Meet the Press, which is a truly astonishing compendium of outright lies, not to mention the disgusting liberal-bashing and, let's face it, dyed-in-the-wool America-hating. Matt generously credits Tim Russert with simply being overwhelmed in the face of such non-stop dishonesty, but this is really just Russert being, as always, willing to let the Republicans get away with murder.
On a somewhat related topic, Confessore, again at Tapped, on Sam Donaldson's ridiculous explanation for why it is Dean and his staff, rather than everyone else, who should be taken to task for Dean's utterly true statement that the capture of Saddam does not make us safer. We have gone past the point where Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh pretends that a Democrat is stating falsehoods when he or she is not; we now have Sam Donaldson telling us that telling the truth is "a gaffe".
Confined Space looks at New York Times articles about workplace-related death: The first article is a story of a young man, Patrick Walters, killed in an unprotected 10-foot deep trench, only a couple of weeks after OSHA had cited the same company for sending workers into unprotected 15-foot deep trench. It's the story of OSHA refusing to issue a willful citation despite proof that the hazards were well known to the company, and finally the story of a federal workplace safety agency that wouldn't even refer this case to the Justice Department for possible criminal investigation.
Remember last month when I was saying Bush's so-called tax cut is really a tax hike? Well, I'm pleased to see it's catching on. Nico Pitney at Not Geniuses has taken a look at Howard Dean's domestic policy speech and finds that Dean is referring to it as "the Bush Tax". Pitney says: This is potential genius, but it's only going to work if we all work together to spread and develop the meme... So spread that meme!
From Consortium News, Do Democrats Need the South? and, more recently, Bush & Democracy Hypocrisy: George W. Bush is now presenting the War in Iraq as a noble plan to bestow democracy on the Iraqi people. But there are troubling indications that Bush's pro-democracy rhetoric may be just a new sales pitch to justify the war to the American people, after the collapse of other rationales, such as trigger-ready weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda. 01:10 GMT
Monday, 22 December 2003
Happy Solstice
You know when your friends have a kid, and you haven't seen the kid for a while, and then one day her father says, "She's a model now, just google on her name"? Well, I just did that, and I am boggled.
Just a Bump in the Beltway completely grossed me out with some quotes from a David Brooks column in which he reveals that, "he has completely gone over to the Dark Side." And things are so bad that people actually say this stuff in public, in the so-called liberal New York Times.
At Talk Left, the Disappeared - in Britain. Two years ago the security services broke into his family home at 5:30 in the morning, and he hasn't been seen since. But now he has smuggled a letter out to The Guardian (here). And I guess this stuff shouldn't surprise me: Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) have teamed up to sponsor a terrible bill--one that panders to irrational fear but resonates politically. It is the "Gang Prevention and Effective Deterrence Act."
If you're tired of hearing me harp on e-voting, go read J.B. Holston on the subject instead.
The two big questions of the year - "Why do they hate us?" and "Why did we really invade Iraq?" - have the same answer. Lisa English is back, thank goodness, and she has caught that maniac Michael Ledeen answering them in a moment of honesty.
Josh Marshall has a nice little example of a deranged neoconservative, with a short but telling quote from Richard Perle. And here's Michelle Goldberg with the extended version. These people really have some astonishing mental short-circuits in place.
If there was one thing we could be sure of, it was that the decision of the Massachusetts court would be the occasion for some stupid arguments against gay marriage. And these arguments, of course, are never any better than the arguments against masturbation, and sometimes even worse. Or sometimes they're just the same ones taken out for another ride. Like Jennifer Roback Morse at National Review Online saying:
So, what is the meaning of human sexuality anyhow? Sexual activity has two natural, organic purposes: procreation and spousal unity. Babies are the most basic and natural consequences of sexual activity. "Spousal unity" means simply that sex builds attachments between husband and wife.
I really wish people wouldn't say "sexual activity" when they really mean penis-in-vagina activity. I was having the former long before I'd even heard of the latter and I can promise you that babies would not be a natural consequence of this extremely frequent form of sexual activity.
Many people celebrate the uncoupling of sexual activity from both of its natural functions, procreation and spousal unity. But by doing so, we have capsized the whole natural order of sexuality. Instead of being an engine of sociability and community building, sex has become a consumer good. Instead of being something that draws us out of ourselves and into relationship with others, our sexual activity focuses us inward, on ourselves and our own desires. A sexual partner is not a person to whom I am irrevocably connected by bonds of love. Rather, the sexual partner has become an object that satisfies me more or less well.
Another thing I wish is that complete strangers would not try to tell us how our motivations differ from what they believe their own are. This is a kind of expertise from ignorance: I assume that my reasons are better than your reasons, even though I don't even know you, and I therefore make up the reasons you do the things I think you do, from what I imagine to be bad reasons, and therefore I am morally superior to you. I have sex for reasons of "sociability and community building", but you are just using a consumer good. I am connected by bonds of love to my sexual partner(s), but you look at your partners as "an object that satisfies [you] more or less well."
And when people throw these constructions at me, I can't help the feeling that they are trying to reassure themselves that they really are unselfish in their motivations rather than just users. Either that, or they are trying to console themselves that they have virtuous reasons for their choice of putting up with some pretty crappy sex.
This difference in worldview is at the heart of the culture wars. One side believes the meaning of human sexuality is primarily individual. Sex is a private activity whose purpose is individual pleasure and satisfaction. The alternative view is that sex is primarily a social activity. Sex builds up community, starting with the spousal relationship and adding on from there.
I actually don't know anyone who claims that sex is not a social activity, but we'll let that slide for the moment. The author appears to be suggesting that sex should be for people other than the sexual actors themselves - that somehow we are to be engaging in sex for the benefit of others who don't even know whether we are actually doing it. And that somehow it is these private, often invisible, sexual acts that build "community". (It's unclear whether we have to enjoy the sex, or be "above" such petty concerns, for this to work.)
The law of marriage is not the only social structure that creates the context for socially acceptable sexual behavior. But the law does play a key part. This is why it is utterly reasonable for the law of marriage to take into account the natural purposes of human sexuality. And it is utterly unreasonable for the law to treat all sexual unions as though they were equivalent.
So whatever is not compulsory should be prohibited, I guess.
Will Baud has a neat response to this view that sex is anything in particular:
This is, of course, ridiculous. Yes, sex can definitely make babies. And sex can certainly build attachments between married people, but it can just as easily serve as a wedge to drive them apart. And sex can also build attachments between unmarried people (one does not forget one's first lover). Morse herself says that "Science can now tell us how the hormones released during sex help to create emotional bonds between the partners."
Hormones do not recognize marriage contracts.
Indeed. Because sex is, like verbal communication, an activity that can be fun, infuriating, frustrating, bonding, exciting, alienating, boring, and so on. Sex is a form of communication, and what it communicates can vary enormously between any two individuals; there is no reason to assume that it will be a positive communication just because the two people are married, or of two different sexes, or the parents of the same children, or living in the same house, or even in love. Hell, even the two people (or three, or more, but let's keep it simple) can be having entirely different experiences of the same sex act. And the same person can experience two similar sexual occasions with the same partner differently on each occasion. It's bloody hard to define what sex is to any one person at any particular moment, let alone what sex is altogether. All we know is that it can be an awful lot of things, and some of them are things we do sex for, and some are happy or unhappy byproducts. But of the former, there are so many that it seems silly for Morse to declare only a tiny number of them to be "the" purpose of sex. And, as Baud says:
But even if we agree that sex does have a purpose, and that some of the things humans use sex for are somehow inorganic or unnatural, Morse's "spousal unity" declaration comes out of nowhere. Why should the organic and natural purpose of sex not be pleasure just as much as procreation? How else to explain the immense quantities of non-procreative non-marital sex that people have (and often enjoy!)?
Things can have more than one purpose in differing contexts, and, as Matt Yglesias points out, "the" purpose for which something was originally designed isn't always the best use of a thing. Not that - as Matt also points out - "design" is an issue we can easily parse. Thomas Aquinas tried this trick and made rather a mess of things, too. He was arguing against masturbation, partly on the laudable grounds that having sex with other people was a good way to promote socializing, although he seemed to have been ignoring the fact that this option isn't always open to everyone (and that sometimes sex is how people avoid having to talk to each other). So Aquinas got tangled up in the stupid trap of defining the "purpose" of, of all things, the penis itself, and said that since it was made for reproductive sex, it shouldn't be used for anything else.
There is an obvious mechanical flaw in this reasoning that, for me, underlines why people shouldn't get carried away with trying to invent "the" reason for anything in aid of supporting their prejudices. I mean, it should be obvious to anyone that Aquinas did not survive to adulthood without using his penis for anything other than penis-in-vagina activity. (I suppose that with enough use of modern technology it could be achieved, and the Gents would be a lot tidier as a result, but it seems an awful lot of bother to no good purpose.) And yet, here was a grown man who used his penis for something other than sex every single day, probably several times a day, and it doesn't appear to have occurred to him that there is a far more crucial use of the penis than for sexual activity of any kind.
(It's a bit of a puzzle, really. It might have made sense if it was a woman saying this - a woman who was unaware of the existence of the clitoris, that is - because our reproductive organs are separate from our organs of elimination. And you could perhaps forgive Aquinas for not wondering what the clitoris was for, since even in 2003 people still seem largely unaware that, for women, there's little biological connection at all between sexual response and reproduction. But even Thomas Aquinas must have been familiar with the phenomenon of a piss-hard.)
All of which is just a long-winded way of saying that the anti-sexual agenda produces a lot of cocked-up reasoning.
For more sex, Will has a follow-up post in which he revisits his statement in the earlier one cited above that: "Some people (like, presumably, Ms. Morse) are against premarital sex. Other people (like myself) are against presexual marriage." I heartily concur with his sentiments.
[Update: Further thoughts from Ulrika O'Brien above.] 12:36 GMT
Saturday, 20 December 2003
Look what we found
Check out this post at Altercation for, among other things, a very fine take-down of yet another dopey Friedman piece and other evidence that The New York Times has some bloody sorry stuff in its pages. Thank goodness for that glaringly shrilliant exception, Paul Krugman. And there's another lie quoted from lying liar Bill O'Reilly, along with the soon-to-be classic O'Reilly quote, "There is no other cure than to kill Matt Drudge." (In a later post, Eric briefly links to this piece on the Hardball "Battle for the White House" series that you really ought to read.)
Steve Gilliard says Dean will have to address religion at some point, and considers the approach. (And if that link doesn't work for you, just search on "Dean and religion".)
William Burton on Dean: Not the Lefty They Think He Is: What does all this add up to? Dean is a pragmatic centrist, but one who has been adopted by the left for his willingness to rail against George Bush. There's a very good chance that if more prominent Democrats hadn't spent the last two years sucking up to Bush, Dean would, in fact, be the Bruce Babbitt of this election.
Tapped, as usual, has some great stuff from Nick Confessore and Big Media Matt Yglesias. Confessore observes another unfair and unbalanced article appearing right smack dab in the mainstream media:
"LAWSUIT HELL?" NOT QUITE. I was pretty surprised two Mondays ago when Newsweek came out with a cover package on lawsuits. It struck me as one-sided and, worse, prone to the same sorts of exaggerations and overdependence on anecdotal evidence that plagues much journalism on the subject. Co-written by Stuart Taylor, Jr., a legal pundit of demonstrable conservative persuasion and a longtime proponent of tort reform, the article was presented as a piece of straight reporting instead of the opinion journalism that it actually was. Taylor's no hack, but I don't think he tried to present both sides. So in that light, I'd recommend the following reading. Both reports are from activist groups, but I've looked through them and they appear well-annotated (unlike the Newsweek article). One is this report from the New York State Trial Lawyers Association. The other is this long rebuttal by Public Citizen. Here's a good example of what I'm talking about, from the latter report:
[Confessore quotes from it here, but no link is provided, alas.]
Those who've been paying attention to this issue know it is fuelled by a deluge of anecdotes that purport to show "frivolous" lawsuits that should never have been filed, and judgments that should never have been awarded. The only trouble is that when you look into the cases, you usually discover that they are not quite what they seemed. Even in the famous McDonald's hot coffee case, it turns out that McDonald's was really asking for it.
"Conservatives" do a great deal to promote those specious stories, in an effort to eliminate the means by which ordinary citizens can find redress against wealthy bodies that are negligent toward, or defraud, the public. What they want is not justice, but a license to evade all liability - and responsibility. The real problem is not that it's too easy for ordinary citizens to file lawsuits against wealthier entities, but that it's still too difficult.
THE END OF MOBILITY? Paul Krugman has a piece in The Nation titled "The Death of Horatio Alger." It's quite good, and between Krugman's piece and BusinessWeek's recent article "Waking Up From the American Dream," you have a pretty good debunking of conservative efforts to deny that class mobility is on the wane.
When your basic liberal (i.e., me) or, at the other end of the spectrum, your basic Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, Sr., talks about how successful people owe big tax money to the general pool as payment back into the system that allowed them to become successful, this is what we're talking about. Bill Junior had the resources to become as wealthy as he is today because his father was able to generate wealth in a system that offered him that shot, the same way my own parents were able to rise from immigrant poverty and Depression-era deprivation to comfortable middle-class status.
That kind of opportunity is becoming a whole lot more rare as wealth accumulates at the top and fails to move through the system; even the brightest and hardest-working middle-class kids are finding it's all the running they can do to stay in the same place - and some of them still can't stay in the race. You can't really measure the losses to society from this because you simply don't know how many smart kids with bright ideas just don't ever have the resources to develop them. In the meantime, the positions they should occupy are inhabited instead by the mediocre offspring of those who were able to become wealthy in earlier generations - people like George W. Bush, who is where he is today despite his utter lack of quality only because his forebears had the smarts he lacks.
Confessore also recommends a Prospect article by Chris Mooney on sunsets - the built-in provisions of (potentially bad) legislation that allows bills to expire, or at least require review prior to renewal, when the people who pass them aren't so sure they're a good idea. "Turns out it's yet another area in which George Bush has rewritten the rules of Washington politics," says Nick.
Matt Yglesias thinks Kean's declaration that 9/11 was avoidable may finally be what's necessary to break through the illusion that Bush is any good on national security and counterterrorism:
Even more so than the Iraq intelligence inquiry and the Valerie Plame leak investigation, which the administration has also been trying to stonewall, I think this one has the potential to do some very serious damage. The president continues to receive very high marks for his handling of counterterrorism -- significantly more people approve of his policies in this regard than of his conduct in Iraq or economic policy -- making his record on this score the linchpin of his re-election hopes.
The main problem here, from the president's perspective, is that this approval is largely unwarranted. As has been pointed out in the Prospect and elsewhere on any number of occassions the administration has seriously shortchanged homeland security and programs like Nunn-Lugar aimed at WMD counterproliferation as well as pulling intelligence assets that could have been used to capture Osama bin Laden out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and into Iraq. It's a pretty sorry record when looked at objectively, but so far the American people don't seem receptive to the message.
So there you go:
Tort reform - a scam to solve the wrong end of a problem.
American mobility - defunct.
Sunset clauses - will be deleted before bad legislation has a chance to lapse.
Bush's strength on security - the opposite of the truth.
Now all we have to do is work like hell to try to get people to notice. 14:44: GMT
Friday, 19 December 2003
It's all about Dean
In The Washington Post, Dean Assails 'Washington Democrats' on Iraq - his response to the slams he's been getting from the likes of Lieberman and Kerry for acknowledging that the capture of a man who was hiding in a hole in the ground doesn't actually make Americans safer.
E.J. Dionne, in The Politics of Positive Thinking, observes that some candidates - especially Clark - have been staying above the fray, letting others do the damage (and hurt themselves as well). But he also has a few good words for John Edwards and his policies, and thinks he's positioning the policies, rather than himself, to be part of the Democratic campaign, whoever wins the nomination.
And Howard Kurtz says he can't seem to get Wesley Clark's campaign to mention Dean at all. 18:18 GMT
A few hits
So Digby wrote a satirical piece the other day about how, hey, with Gore's endorsement of Dean, we should cancel the primaries. And now Ted Rall has written a serious piece about how we should cancel the primaries. Digby's response.
From The Independent: "The National Theatre is being accused of blasphemy for producing an adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy at Christmas time." (Via Arthur Hlavaty.)
The British Board of Film Classification is taking a poll on their guidelines. If you go to the site it gives you a pop-up window to participate. Have fun.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden on Why we hate America. "We don't, of course, but dweeblings from the far right keep saying we do. It's a bizarre but persistent habit of theirs." But then, we know how the Republicans project.
Buzzflash interviews Arlie Hochschild: "Why are 50% of Blue Collar White Males Planning to Vote for Bush in 2004, Even When He is Picking Their Pockets and Stealing the Futures of Their Children?" 12:29 GMT
Liberal Oasis is on that Diane Sawyer interview of Bush:
A fair amount of it was the typical softball questions we have come to expect.
But for about five minutes, Sawyer pressed Dubya on the question of the Phantom WMD harder than anyone has, perhaps harder than anyone has pressed him on anything since 9/11.
And in response, Dubya was defensive and evasive, clinging tightly to his talking points.
Judging from the wire reports of the interview, it doesn't look like anyone in the mainstream media is going to pick up on the fact that when faced with such questions, Bush has no good direct response.
Bill has presented his own transcription since ABC took their sweet time getting theirs up (and edited them when they did). And it's all there - the arrogance, the willingness to conflate things that are not alike as if there is no difference between them, the whole arsenal of specious "fact" and sophomoric argument, and of course the persistent non-answers:
SAWYER: What would it take to convince you he didn't have weapons of mass destruction?
BUSH: Saddam Hussein was a threat. And the fact that he is gone means America is a safer country.
(Pause, as both smile.)
SAWYER: And if he doesn't have weapons of mass destruction --
BUSH: You can keep asking the question. I'm telling ya, I made the right decision for America.
Because Saddam Hussein used weapons of mass destruction, invaded Kuwait.
But the fact that he is not there, is uh, means America is a more secure country.
Of course, Bush can't tell you why America is supposedly more secure (because it isn't), but it doesn't even appear to occur to him that such an explanation is called for. Bush clearly expects "Because I say so" to be explanation enough. As Bill notes, Bush actually signaled during the interview that he doesn't feel any obligation to answer press questions. If I'd been in Sawyer's shoes, I would have taken that as a sign that if I didn't ask those questions now, the press might never get another shot at it. Sawyer was harder on Bush than anyone else has bothered to be in face-to-face, but not hard enough. Still, the truth about Bush was there for anyone who wanted to see it, and Bill reckons that if the Democratic nominee starts to push him, the public may finally get a chance to see what sort of creature really occupies the White House. And maybe he'll say more things like this:
SAWYER: But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction, as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons still --
BUSH: So what’s the difference?
(Smile's gone.)
Bill also notes that the "bounce" in the polls for Bush after Saddam's capture was negligible and in fact within the margin of error.
Meanwhile, Gary Farber takes David Brooks apart for his stupid attempts to imply that Howard Dean is more of an upper-crust city boy than George W. Bush. I disagree with Gary's apparent belief that the quote he offers in this post is suggesting that anti-semitic activity in Europe is "no problem"; on the contrary, I think it says something much scarier than that. (However, I've only read the quote, not the originating article.) But do read this post in which Gary asks, "What goddamn, wimpy, Euro-loving, soft-on-the-UN, Donk cheese-eating surrender-monkey liberals wrote this trash?" if you didn't already know that William Kristol and Robert Kagan have lately been making the same criticisms of Bush that liberals have been making all along. And, of course, Gary reports on more dildos arrested in Texas.
New York - In a weird and unexpected repetition of Fox News versus Al Franken, ex-Governor Mario Cuomo this week filed suit against Franken's publisher, Penguin, over the ex-politico's mention in the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Mario also sued the author, journalist Greg Palast for $15 million. Palast, whose award-winning stories appear on BBC television and in Harpers Magazine, is known in Britain as, "the most important investigative reporter of our time" (Tribune Magazine).
In an ironic twist, Al Franken, subject of the last lawsuit against Penguin, is one of the celebrities who have recorded the audio version of Palast's book.
Palast said, "This is Fox and Franken Part II. It's goofy. Katherine Harris called me, 'twisted and maniacally partisan.' Well, now it's Mario gunning for me - all for reporting the news."
Obviously, Cuomo doesn't think Palast's excellent book has received enough publicity, and is hoping that he can do for Greg what O'Reilly did for Franken. Thanks, Mario! Hope it works.... 17:26 GMT
Verifying the vote
The NYT's piece from Monday on the Gaithersburg conference on "Building Trust and Confidence in Voting Systems" didn't appear until today in The International Herald Tribune, on the Business/Technology page. In The New York Times, it was in Technology.
HIGH-TECH voting is getting a low-tech backstop: paper. Most new voting machines are basically computers with touch screens instead of keyboards. Their makers promise that the new machines will simplify voting and forever end the prospect of pregnant and hanging chads. But as the market for computerized voting equipment has intensified, a band of critics has emerged, ranging from the analytical to the apoplectic.
I don't think I can approve of this use of the term "apoplectic" until I can see someone who actually is. The implication is that anyone who doesn't see this issue as a mere technical problem is overwrought; they're not. This isn't just a serious problem, it can mean the difference between whether we have a democracy or a dressed-up dictatorship. And the idea that we should relinquish democracy calmly should make people furious. I have no patience with anyone who doesn't View With Alarm the potential for the complete corruption of the democratic process.
Now a growing number of election officials and politicians seem to be agreeing with the skeptics. Last week, Nevada said it was buying voting machines for the entire state, and it demanded paper receipts for all voters. Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller said he received an overwhelming message from voters that they did not trust electronic voting. "Frankly, they think the process is working against them, rather than working for them," Mr. Heller, a Republican, said. Last month, the California secretary of state, Kevin Shelley[,] said that his state would require all touch-screen voting machines to provide a "voter-verified paper audit trail."
Nevada, no less - land of casinos. I'd take Nevada standards seriously. (I take the absence of that comma in the NYT seriously, too, by the way. I hate the fact that the low standard of punctuation that annoys me daily in the British press has crept into The Newspaper of Record. So there.)
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, has introduced a bill that would require a paper trail and security standards for voting machines. Her bill is similar to an earlier entry sponsored by a fellow Democrat, Representative Rush D. Holt of New Jersey. "What's required for money machines should be required for voting machines," Senator Clinton said in introducing the bill. "We must restore trust in our voting, and we must do it now."
Rebecca Mercuri, an expert on voting technology who is affiliated with Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and attended the symposium, said the tone of the discussion had changed from acrimony and accusation to the beginnings of civil conversation. The old corporate view, she said, was that "we have the safest, most secure voting machine - and by the way, it's a secret," Ms. Mercuri said. But that "is not going to provide the trust and confidence that we need," she said.
Yeah, well, congratulations to these women for going this far, but I don't want a mere audit trail, either. I want printed ballots. I want people to be able to confirm with their own eyes that the thing that is actually going to be counted initially says what they meant it to say, and receipts are not the same as input. It's the input to these computers that is actually being counted, not the piece of paper. There's no reason to think that someone who wants to fix an election won't just jimmy the input totals enough that there's no "close" election to require a recount.
The industry insists that its systems are secure and trustworthy, with or without paper. Harris Miller, who leads a new trade association for the industry, said that the group had no position in favor or against paper trails, but dismissed the issue as a "theological debate within the academic community." Mr. Miller, who is also president of the Information Technology Association of America, called some opponents of electronic voting "black helicopter theorists" and Luddites who "want to go back to the bad old days" of stuffed ballot boxes and chad wars.
Now there's a deflection of focus, for you. The "chad wars" were an issue in 2000, not so long ago, and the real issue was the same issue that is being addressed here: an active program by Republicans and their supporters to fix the vote. That the people who own and program the machines largely fall into that camp is reasonable cause for worry. It's not "black helicopter" stuff.
And don't you love that "Luddite" thing? I've been in love with this technology since I used my first mag-card typewriter, and started saving up for my very own PC before most people knew such a thing existed. The people who have been criticizing touch-screens aren't people who fear technology - they are the techies and power-users themselves.
But some of the critics know a lot about computing, security and elections - like Prof. Aviel D. Rubin at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team that analyzed purloined code from Diebold and found flaws that he said even basic training in secure coding would prevent. His work was cited in Nevada's decision to choose Sequoia's machines over Diebold's. "The only way that vendors are going to produce auditable machines is if they are forced to," Professor Rubin said. "So the recent moves of California and Nevada to require voter verifiable paper are huge steps in the right direction."
See what I mean? (I bet I had my own PC while people like Harris Miller still thought the only person who would ever touch a keyboard was a secretary.)
A spokesman for Diebold, David Bear, said that the company did not oppose the idea of voter receipts, and was happy to sell whatever kind of voting machine election officials wanted to buy. "We're in the business of providing products that our customers need," he said. In fact, the company's machines already have thermal printers that are used to produce end-of-day reports, so providing individual receipts would not necessarily require an enormous change.
With a wink and a smirk, I bet. I imagine these folks at Diebold relaxed quite a bit when they realized they were only going to be asked to print receipts and not actual ballots.
I was interested in seeing a line I hadn't seen before quoted from the now-famous e-mail:
Not all of Diebold's employees are so supportive of change, as Web sites that have sprung up in opposition to the machines have shown. Among the thousands of internal e-mail messages from the company that have made their way to anti-Diebold Web sites is a Jan. 3 message to colleagues by an employee identified only as Ken. Referring to criticisms of the Diebold, he wrote that news articles about a paper trail missed an important point, which he italicized: "they already bought the system."
"At this point they are just closing the barn door," Ken wrote. "Let's just hope that as a company we are smart enough to charge out the yin if they try to change the rules now and legislate voter receipts." In a later note he explained that he meant, "Any after-sale changes should be prohibitively expensive."
"At this point they are just closing the barn door." The suggestion here is that if they are using the machines at all, the fight is already lost. I suspect that "Ken" fully understands that receipts aren't what's needed to protect voting accountability.
Pay attention: You want the machines to print out the actual ballots. And you want to count them by hand. 15:06 GMT
The reason that backers of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill are likely to be disappointed in its results can be found right at the start of the majority opinion last week upholding the law. Quoting the 1896 words of that icon of the Progressive era, Elihu Root, Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O'Connor, the authors of the 5-4 majority opinion, said the new law is designed "to purge national politics of what was conceived to be the pernicious influence of 'big money' campaign contributions." [...] Far more troubling are the law's restrictions on broadcast advertising about federal candidates in the period leading up to a primary or general election. Such ads -- "Tell Senator Jones he's wrong on this issue" -- are indistinguishable in effect or intent from ads saying, "Vote against Senator Jones," the court ruled. So it upheld the new restrictions, saying that groups of any sort that buy them must adhere to the same limits on contributions and disclosure requirements as parties and candidates.
Such independent ads are a pain to the candidates -- a wild card in their election campaigns. But I must agree with Scalia that the restrictions Congress has placed on them are a boon to incumbents and a limitation on core First Amendment rights of speech and association. If I join the National Rifle Association or the Friends of the Earth and find that they cannot use my annual dues to say in a TV spot that Representative Smith has been voting against our interests, but first must solicit me for a PAC contribution, my rights have been restricted.
While the court acknowledged that "money, like water, will always find an outlet," the justices punted that problem "for another day."
Yet, without the national parties channeling campaign expenditures, unaccountable, shadowy "Section 527" groups will fill the void. What we probably will see is an explosion of sham organizations such as Republicans for Clean Air, which distorted Sen. John McCain's environmental record in a 2000 Republican primary.
Mr. McCain's experience should have taught him not to sponsor such bad legislation, and as the only member of the court having elective office experience, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor should have known better than to offer the deciding vote endorsing it.
I know I've seen and forgotten better articles than this that I ought to have linked to, but these were in Wednesday's paper. Those better links will, of course, be welcomed. 00:55 GMT
Wednesday, 17 December 2003
Bits and pieces
John Nichols: Lieberman doesn't deserve pity party. Holy Joe's break with Al started way back during the 2000 campaign, so why should anyone feel sympathy for the man who sabotaged his own ticket and now is doing the same to the Democratic field?
A lot of people have been citing this Ruy Teixeira piece entitled "Can Dean Move to the Center?" which says:
But that means it’s more vital than ever to think through the question of whether and how Dean will be able to move to the center in the general election. And make no mistake about it: he will need to do so. In the Gallup poll linked to above, Dean does way better among liberal Democrats than any of the other candidates, receiving 40 percent of their support, compared to just 11 percent for Clark and 9 percent for Gephardt.
But when you look at moderate and conservative Democrats, it’s a different story. Dean receives only 17 percent of moderates’ support, running slightly behind Clark at 19 percent. And with conservatives, he does rather poorly, receiving 11 percent of their support, running behind Gephardt (25 percent), Clark (17 percent) and Lieberman (13 percent).
Okay, one of the issues where Dean is weak with voters is security - but that, of course, has more to do with the press than with Dean's position. Pretty much all of the Democrats are appalled by how poorly Bush has addressed national security - Al Qaeda, first-responders, and any other matter that would help address the threat of terrorism has gone by the boards while Bush has been busy destabilizing the Middle East. Worse, he has clearly weakened our armed forces, which can hardly be helpful. The idea that Dean - or any other Democratic hopeful - could do worse on national security is just plain silly.
Unfortunately, rather than underscoring that point, other Democrats have instead exploited the "Dean is weak on security" meme to attack him, preferring a weapon for the circular firing-squad to an arsenal for beating Bush. The result is that the public sees not just Dean but all of the Democrats as weaker than Bush on this issue. But the crux isn't becoming better on security, it's getting the word out that we already are.
Next we get:
The Pew poll also finds that just 36 percent of these likely Democratic primary voters favor repealing all of the Bush tax cuts, as Dean does. This is actually less than the number (42 percent) who would prefer to repeal the tax cuts for the wealthy, while keeping the rest of the cuts in place. And this is among Democrats. It’s a very fair assumption that Dean’s position will be an even harder sell among the general election electorate–particularly the moderates and conservatives mentioned above.
The trouble with the analysis here is that there's an implication that Dean's position is too liberal. Obviously, a return to taxing the wealthy is a more centrist (and more liberal) position than what we have now, but there's nothing particularly leftward per se about removing the "cuts" for the middle class. What would be leftish would be if Dean wanted to restore the same amount of income to the Fed without bringing middle-class taxes up - which would mean further raising taxes on the wealthy. But Dean, so far at least, is more conservative than that.
And his liberal supporters know this - that Dean isn't a liberal in any substantive sense. Oh, he is "like us" in that he appears to regard anti-gay bigotry and other aspects of the anti-sex agenda as a waste of resources, but that's about as far as it goes. Sensible people realize that invading Iraq made no sense, and what really matters right now is putting people in the White House who are capable of making sense. Dean made sense on that issue and a number of others, and the White House did not. Overturning the Bush tax program makes more sense than leaving it in place. Fighting real, known terrorists makes more sense than fighting with France.
Could Dean be better? Sure. But so could they all. That doesn't change the fact that Bush is worse than any of them - and that all of them are closer to the center than Bush is.
This doesn't mean that I'm convinced Dean will beat Bush in the general election, but it does mean that this kind of "Dean is too liberal" talk sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy that hurts all Democrats. We really do have to keep our eyes on the prize. Alex Frantz says something very serious, and very true, about this at Public Nuisance:
It's tempting to look at Bush's evident lack of curiosity and failed record in office and assume he'll be equally incompetent in the campaign. But Bush and his circle are bad at governing for the same reason that Tiger Woods is probably lousy at chess - it isn't their interest. They care about power, they know politics is a necessary skill to gain that power, and they are very good at it. They use it to reward their friends and punish their enemies, something this administration has probably done more effectively than any in history. By the standards of those of us who see government as a tool to solve societal problems they look much more like failures than they really are. This is particularly so since, for political reasons, they pay lip service to those standards themselves. But they don't believe a word of it. The Bush administration hasn't failed at improving the economy, they simply never tried. To this day, Bush has never even proposed a serious policy for job creation, or energy, or health care. He's only collected proposals to reward his campaign contributors out of public funds and labeled the results as an 'Energy Bill' or 'Growth Policy' or 'Medicare Drug Benefit'.
Bush hasn't failed at solving the country's problems because he hasn't tried. He has tried to be seen as somebody who has proposed solutions for the problems that don't interest him, and he has succeeded. What he cares about, he does well, much better than we are generally willing to admit. And he cares very much about winning the election.
Now that's something that everybody had better keep in mind. 14:38 GMT
Tuesday, 16 December 2003
Real liberal media
Send the One True Josh a get well card, and if you can (I couldn't), you might want to have a look at his panel discussion on the future of neoconservatism on C-Span, here.
What about the liberal dream of an Arab democracy that entranced many Democratic opinion-makers to support the Iraq war? Elections, in Baker’s experience, are not about fairly casting and counting votes; they are about who gets to rule. If a fair election was an indulgence not appropriate in Florida 2000, certainly Iraqis are not going to be allowed to vote for a freely chosen self-government in 2004. For that matter, we cannot be sure that the United States will have a fair vote count in 2004. You never know what exigencies may arise in a close election.
Eric Alterman's Target: George Soros looks at the attacks on Soros now that he has promised to throw some money into democracy in America. My favorite laugh-line: A writer in Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times complains jingoistically that "the Hungarian native anointed himself a major player in American politics." Definitely worth reading.
And speaking of Eric, some of you may not have noticed that his page has been moved to Slate's pages (and loading a whole lot faster here, I've noticed - faster than Slate's pages have ever loaded before, too). I can still find it because I've never used the numerical address to begin with, and use this one, which always forwards to Altercation, wherever it is. Apparently, a lot of other people can't get to the page because they only have the other URL. 23:24 GMT
I'm shocked that I can find no online confirmation of this, but I'm certain that I've seen this tabloid headline before -- I've been chuckling over it and quoting it to people for years. As I recall, it first appeared after the capture of Manuel Noriega.
Which is interesting because back then, under a president named Bush, we worried about the scourge of drugs almost the way we now, under a president named Bush, worry about the scourge of terrorism. And it may not have been said in so many words, but we were led to believe that the capture of Noriega was a huge victory in the war on drugs.
Remember how, after Noriega was captured, no one in this country used illegal drugs ever again?
No, I don't remember it either.
What? Are people still taking illegal drugs? I am shocked.
U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood held his thumb and forefinger slightly apart and said, "We're this close" to catching Saddam Hussein.
Once that's accomplished, Iraqi resistance will fall apart, said the five-term Republican congressman from Peoria who serves on the House Intelligence Committee.
A member of The Pantagraph editorial board -- not really expecting an answer -- asked LaHood for more details, saying, "Do you know something we don't?"
From Florida Today, Senators were told Iraqi weapons could hit U.S.U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities.
And check out TomPaine.com if you haven't had enough of this subject, yet - they're all over it, too.
Update: I forgot to check to see whether Roz has posted her promised comment about Saddam at her Live Journal, and she has, and it's worth reading. 21:20 GMT
Peace on Earth
When Atrios celebrates "Write Like Nedra Pickler" day, he neglects to mention that she is a wholesale invention of a Freshman Comp. professor as an example of rhetorical inanity and other features of right-wing reportage.
says "Mr. Upright" in a comment to this post at Eschaton. Here is Atrios' more straightforward introduction to Ms. Pickler's work.
But here's something else I found in the comments, from someone called "Cynical":
Has anyone noticed how few xmas cards in the stores say "Peace" or "Noel" this year? Guess it's too political to send to the whole list. Plenty of "Joy" and stuff about xmas presents and eating. Couldn't find a single plain "Peace" or "Peace on Earth".
If I look on the bright side (which I never do, come on... get real...) maybe there was so much demand they all sold out before I could get my act together.
I haven't really noticed, myself, but I'm now wondering if others have been seeing seasonal "Peace" cards.
Atrios is on another little holiday at the moment, and has enlisted frequent commenter Thumb to pick up the slack. 20:38 GMT
Rehnquist v. tr. To purge voter rolls of blocs designated as likely to vote Democratic, whether by excluding anyone with the same last name as someone who might be a felon, or directly intimidating minority voters at the polls. Usage: "Katherine Harris really rehnquisted Florida in 2000."
Of course, we already had another usage of "rehnquist", but this'll do. 12:43 GMT
Liberal media
Bartcop was none too kind to Walter Shapiro Friday about some excuses he made for his performance covering the 2000 presidential campaign. He's right about that, but reading the transcripts of that 7 December appearance on Reliable Sources, I notice Michael Isikoff isn't too adorable, either. For example, he's very concerned about Howard Dean's sealed gubernatorial records, although for some reason he felt no such concern over George W. Bush's sealed records.
KURTZ: You have any reason to believe that there's anything embarrassing in these Dean Vermont records?
ISIKOFF: Well, who knows? I mean, that's -- it's always the case in records that you can't see. But look, Dean has only recently emerged in the last few months as the clear frontrunner in this campaign.
Isikoff, you will recall, made a big deal about something called Whitewater, which he never stopped finding sinister, although $70m later it still turned out there was nothing there.
Then Howard Kurtz brought up Dean's successful avoidance of the draft over a bad back (after which he went skiing in Aspen):
KURTZ: Walter Shapiro, is this another media-driven scandal? Something happened 30 years ago during the Vietnam era.
SHAPIRO: I think to some extent it is. I come out of a personal point-of-view that we should just have a general statute of limitations on dredging up "what did you do in the war, candidate?" Because Vietnam was a terribly wrenching period.
And in the same way I don't think George W. Bush's interesting attendance record with the Texas Air National Guard is relevant. And in the same way, I don't think that -- Howard Dean did something totally legal. He didn't play fast and loose. There were no self-serving letters...
Catch that? What Dean did was legal, we won't even mention that what Bush did was not only illegal but desertion, and the only thing that's truly bad, apparently, is that Bill Clinton wrote a "self-serving" letter. (Let's see, wasn't that the letter in which Clinton spelled out the fact that he didn't support the war? Not all that self-serving, if you ask me.)
Back to Spikey:
KURTZ: Doesn't the public resent the press when it seems to be prosecutorial, digging into everybody's background, dredging up issues from 30 years ago?
ISIKOFF: Right. But that's not the way these stories were written. They were just sort of -- look, here is one facet of his life we've written about, you know, facets of every other candidate's life. Dick Cheney doesn't fare too well when you put this kind of lens under where -- what did you do during the war?
That -- also, I don't think it's going to be a big political issue, but that doesn't mean you can't write about it or say what happened.
But you don't do that when it's Dick Cheney or for that matter George W. Bush - who is also a candidate in the race for '04.
Here's the bit that set Bart off:
KURTZ: You write that you felt snookered by George Bush in 2000.
SHAPIRO: Yes.
KURTZ: How so?
SHAPIRO: Because I really took that campaign on the surface. I did not do the homework. I was not -- I mean not I didn't do the homework. I mean, I did not camp myself in Austin, Texas in 1999. And to a large extent I accepted too much of the compassionate conservatism packaging of the campaign. And there's a level at which we all make mistakes. I'm not saying my coverage was factually wrong of Bush, but it was -- I didn't pick out the nuances.
Bart isn't satisfied with that. Me, I find it incomprehensible. Nuances? Bush was lying through his teeth. The evidence wasn't that hard to find, either - it was in his record in Texas, and it was in The New York Times. I was thousands of miles away and I noticed it, so why couldn't Walter Shapiro? 02:30 GMT
Monday, 15 December 2003
Good stuff
I just got back from a pretty good party and I'm still getting settled.
I could just not write anything and simply post links to Liberal Oasis and save us all a lot of time - and save myself a lot of angst, too. Here's his take on the Dem debate, and though we are in concert on a number of points, it seems to feel better the way he says it.
But as Karl Rove likes to say, "good policy is good politics."
Personally, I'd like to think that good policy is our politics. But I don't think it's true for Rove. 23:49 GMT
Yawning at the headline
I think I haven't wanted to write write much because the arrest of Saddam seemed to me like one of those black hole things that people would make too much of. I mean, it makes no difference to the war on terrorism since:
Saddam had nothing to do with 9/ll, and
it seemed unlikely that Saddam was directing the resistance (that guy had too many enemies - he couldn't trust anyone once he lost control).
What did seem likely was that a lot of people would make this out to be a big deal, and a considerable number of them would be the very same people who would like to treat all liberals and Democrats pretty much the same way that Saddam treated "his own people" when he gassed them or tortured them or arrested them for being dissenters. (David Neiwert has the latest outbreaks of this covered here and here - along with the usual life-style advocates he usually talks about, of course. [And he also took a cool photo of Keiko the killer whale.])
And, as usual, it just happened to occur at a point in the news cycle when AWOL(TM) was about to get hammered.
And for anyone who's asking, yes, I do think it is a bad thing if inconsequential things like the capture of Saddam deflect
At Skimble, there's a bit of anger over the fact that Ashcroft hasn't really been investigated, and a good nutshell quote on the updated War on Some Drugs: All roads lead back to 9-11. See TalkLeft on the administration's support for the proposed Victory Act and its war on bogus narcoterrorism. Equating routine drug offenses with the activity of Al Qaeda serves as another false, preemptive linkage to further a preordained agenda that has nothing at all to do with 9-11-01. Oh, yeah, and some publishing news.
You know when your friends have a kid, and you haven't seen the kid for a while, and then one day her father says, "She's a model now, just google on her name"? Well, I just did that, and I am boggled.
