Attorney General John Ashcroft's statement Saturday confirming the arrest in North Carolina of Eric Rudolph, the longtime fugitive charged in the 1996 Olympic Park bombing and in attacks at an abortion clinic and a gay nightclub.
Today, Eric Robert Rudolph, the most notorious American fugitive on the FBI's most wanted list has been captured and will face American justice. American law enforcement's unyielding efforts to capture Eric Robert Rudolph have been rewarded. Working with law enforcement nationwide the FBI always gets their man.
This sends a clear message that we will never cease in our efforts to hunt down all terrorists, foreign or domestic, and stop them from harming the innocent.
I want to especially congratulate the local authorities in Murphy, N.C., who with the FBI and other local and state law enforcement throughout the country were able to apprehend this suspect.
While it has been a long struggle, they never stopped never yielded and never gave up. The American people, mostly importantly the victims of these terrorist attacks, can rest easier knowing that another alleged killer is no longer a threat.
See, he said "alleged". You don't hear that word much from him. 18:23 BST
The counties will be desperate, the cities not much better. Every area of social service has been cut, not because we have a $9 billion shortfall but because House Republicans do not believe government should help people.
We are watching government morph into something very strange. Benito Mussolini said, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." The real driving force behind this session is something I bet most of you have never heard of -- ALEC.
ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded, extremely right-wing group that sponsors conferences for state legislators and draws up model bills that are introduced all over the country.
ALEC is particularly interested in privatizing government services and deregulating everything, and it is anti-environment to an extent that's almost loopy.
Let's be very clear about this: People who want to privatize prisons and schools and social services are in it for the money. The real questions of government are always: Who benefits, and who pays? And the answer given this session with jaw-dropping regularity is private corporations profit, while people pay the price in worse services. [...] It used to be a joke that when a legislator was contemplating some scurvy piece of special-interest legislation, he would go to ridiculous lengths to make the spurious claim, "And so you see, members, we must do this for the sake of the cheeldrun of Texas."
Man, you stand up in the Texas House today with a bill that really will help the children of Texas, and you will not get a single Republican vote.
Chris at Interesting Times has a look at the canard that Democrats are "too liberal" to be electable:
Joe Trippi, campaign manager for Howard Dean, lays it on the line in response to a "Can Dean Win?" post over on the unofficial Dean 2004 blog. I'm reproducing it in full here because it says so much about why I like the Dean campaign:
I will take a shot at this. For the better part of 22 years (since at least 1980) turnout has consistently gone down in Presidential elections. At the same time the electorate (those that vote) has become increasingly conservative. The conventional wisdom increasingly has become that Democrats must move rightward in order to win. Well the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. In those 22 years we (Democrats) have lost the House and the Senate. And only one man (Bill Clinton) has won the Presidency. Now here Bill Clinton offers a quandry -- was Bill Clinton successful because of this theory that has taken over the minds of some of our party's best and brightest? Or was Bill Clinton successful because he simply was one of the most gifted politicians and communicators of our times? I subscribe to one of the most gifted along with Reagan.
I'm not going to duplicate the post in full, but I think Chris is right when he says:
The Democratic leadership has, over the last two decades, completely misread where the electorate in this country is going. I think Joe has it right that the Republicans, under Karl Rove, have not made the same mistake.
Here is one clear fact that demonstrates precisely what I mean: for the last several decades, Republicans have consistently outspent Democrats when it comes to running political campaigns. The ratio of expenditures is often 3-4 to 1 (sometimes even higher). Yet, despite this huge disparity in money, Democrats as often as not still defeat their Republican opponents.
Why?
Because the electorate (meaning the pool of eligible voters) naturally leans Democratic. The Republicans have to spend all that money in order to fool the muddled middle into voting against their best interests. They also spend that money trying to cheapen the political process so as to discourage more and more people from voting. They do this because, as Joe points out, what is left when they leave is a larger core of dedicated Republican voters who will work to put their people into office.
When most political analysts look at this they miss the deeper meaning and only focus on the shallow surface. The numbers seem to suggest that the electorate is swinging, ideologically, to the right. Nothing could be further from the truth. This country is as liberal as it ever was. It's just that the core liberal interests have become increasingly disillusioned. They are either fooled into thinking that this or that Republican can represent their interests or, even worse, they just throw up their hands and don't even bother to vote.
Or they vote Green, which is pretty much the same thing.
It's nice to know someone is running for office who gets it, and that his team does, too. It's one of those simple things you'd think they'd have noticed: Since most Americans hold what are essentially liberal views, the question isn't why "people" aren't turning out to the polls, but why liberals aren't. And the answer, obviously, is that no one's really offered them anyone liberal enough to vote for. Of course, the media will tell us Dean (and just about anyone else who is "tainted" with liberalism) is "unelectable". The trick isn't to hide the liberalism, it's to get past the spin machine and let Americans know what liberals actually stand for. 17:49 BST
The endless clash between state power and popular will has always assumed its most vivid contours in the matters of sex, booze and drugs.
Particularly in the last case, the struggle concerns not merely pleasure but the suppression of pain. The state protects pharmaceutical companies that enjoy the highest profits in American business. The state persecutes marijuana cultivators and suppliers and, at the federal level, is trying to crush a nationwide rebellion by those who not only see marijuana as delightful and benign but as of proven efficacy as a medicine for those in chronic pain.
This is the argument the conservatives have had trouble beating. In theory, everyone other than Christian Scientists thinks it's perfectly okay to take drugs if you're actually taking them to relieve pain. So they try to make an end-run around it by pretending that cannabis does not actually have any proven efficacy as a medical treatment. Obviously, this isn't true, since plenty of people find the pain easier to cope with when they use the stuff. Yeah, it might just be distracting from pain (by getting you high) rather than simply eliminating pain, but so what? Plenty of legal drugs get you high at normal doses. And, as anyone who has had problems with pain knows, you really don't need the hassle of arguing with the medical establishment about getting the drugs you need instead of the ones they want to give you because they are busy doing contortions over withholding drugs they are prone to moralize about. (When I was a teenager I used to get killer cramps, easily treatable with one tiny codeine pill - but my doctor was killing himself to avoid giving a teenager codeine. Codeine in that dosage doesn't get me high; everything else he tried to give me did. Since I prefer to be alert, I had to keep going back and telling him to stop trying to dope me up and just give me something that worked. Thankfully, I'm not having that same problem over here.)
I don't think it's an accident that politicians who owe so much to pharmaceutical houses are so enthusiastic about going after drugs that Monsanto and Lilly aren't making any money out of. Few people have received more money from the drug companies than John Ashcroft, and no one owes them more than George W. Bush. Add that to the fact that cannabis is a drug that has long associations with funny-colored people and lefties, and you can see that the War on Some Drugs has nothing to do with protecting the public health; it's about politics, and it's conservative politics. (I should point out, however, that liberals have been known to fall for politicized "medical facts", too, such as when they harp on "passive-smoking", a theory that still isn't backed up by empirical data and was openly promoted by people who wanted to both guilt-trip smokers into quitting and enlist non-smokers in harassing smokers to quit because primary smoking is demonstrably bad for you; the idea was to neutralize arguments to the effect of, "If I want to take the risk, I'm only hurting myself." Messing around with science for political reasons can be a bipartisan effort. But the conservatives are worse because they don't really think science matters, they just think things should be the way they want them to be whether it hurts people or not. The medical professionals who invented the "passive-smoking" myth were at least operating in a misguided effort to protect people from the effects of primary smoking, a proven threat. That's not what conservatives are doing when they ruin the lives of millions of people by jailing them for smoking pot.)
The rebellion has many thousands of martyrs, rotting in state and federal prisons. Its most conspicuous victim right now is Ed Rosenthal.
Come June 4, Rosenthal will be back in U.S. District Court in San Francisco to hear what sentence Judge Charles Breyer has decided to impose. Earlier this year, a California jury found him guilty of cultivating marijuana, of maintaining a place to cultivate marijuana and of conspiring with others to cultivate marijuana. He's in his early 50s now and looking at the possibility of being hauled off to prison for the rest of his life. Let's hope that Breyer will stay his sentence, pending appeals that may end up in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The feds went after Rosenthal because he's a high-profile advocate of legalized marijuana, famous for his books and articles. The charges seemed surreal because, in fact, Rosenthal was acting in accordance with the law. He had been asked by local government to supply marijuana to people in chronic pain under the terms of California's Compassionate Use Act of 1996. That law allows the cultivation and use of medical marijuana, and the city of Oakland had designated him the legal supplier. But the feds say U.S. anti-marijuana laws trump state law, and they portray Rosenthal as a major drug supplier.
On the eve of the trial, Rosenthal told me: "This is a tipping-point case. If they put me behind bars, they are going to start closing these clubs [that distribute marijuana to patients] Everyone will have to plead out. It's really important that I win this case."
He has rematches ahead of him, in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then perhaps the U.S. Supreme Court, but Rosenthal lost that round in U.S. District Court.
His trial was a grim farce. Breyer (the brother of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer) overruled every effort by Rosenthal's lawyers to introduce the fact that the man in the dock had been working under the aegis of the city of Oakland and abiding by a law approved by the voters of California.
Thus kept in the dark, and with the ground cut from under Rosenthal's defense, the jury found him guilty. After the trial, the jury learned the actual background of the charges. Within days, six of them mustered in front of the U.S. courthouse to apologize publicly to Rosenthal and to proclaim their shame and indignation that they had been dragooned into this parody of justice. And a San Francisco official invoked the concept of jury nullification, whereby the jury could have set aside Breyer's instructions and found Rosenthal innocent.
The next round in the case concerned precisely this issue of whether a juror can discount a judge's instruction. In the wake of the verdict, two jurors, Marney Craig and Pamela Klarkowsky, disclosed to Rosenthal's lawyers that during the trial, outside the jury room, at least twice they had discussed the issue of disobeying Breyer's instruction. Craig said she had phoned an attorney friend, who told her forcefully that she had to follow Breyer's instructions and would get into big trouble if she used her own judgment. Craig then discussed this call with Klarkowsky.
Rosenthal's lawyers went before Breyer again, arguing for a mistrial on the grounds of malfeasance by the two jurors. But Breyer brusquely dismissed the motion. He doesn't want to order a new trial — one in which the chances of having a jury aware of the background of the case and also of the possibility of jury nullification would be far higher.
Just as Rosenthal predicted to me, the feds took the guilty verdict as a green light. Across California people acting within the terms of the 1996 state statute have every reason to fear that Drug Enforcement Administration agents will come crashing through the door and that federal judges like Breyer will back up their right to do so.
The only silver lining, aside from the edifying stance of principle taken by Rosenthal, is that the issue of jury discretion is on the front burner again.
And, yes, this is a Republican administration rhetorically committed to states' rights.
And, as we have seen, that alleged commitment is also a lie. The "intellectual" basis for conservatism is just constructed as an excuse to prevent social progress. (Via Mark Evanier.) 12:06 BST
Eyewitness news
Early yesterday I noticed that the bubble was just a little black dot rolling around at the bottom of my visual field (because you see what's inside your eye upside-down). Then late last night I realized I wasn't seeing it at all. They'd told me it takes "about six weeks" to dissipate. I make that closer to two months, but it don't worry me none. I'd gotten kinda used to playing with it, moving my eye around and chasing it, or trying to look through it, and stuff. I sorta miss it. On the other hand, it did make me a little crazy sometimes, so I don't think I'll miss it much. 10:48 BST
The Honorable John Ashcroft Attorney General Department Of Justice 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20530
Dear Mr. Attorney General,
Respecting as we do the roles assigned to the Legislative and Executive Branches by the Constitution, we do not usually comment on pending individual prosecutions. But where important national policy issues are directly implicated in decisions to prosecute, we believe it is our responsibility to express our views. And we feel very strongly that the decision by your department to charge Brett Bursey under Section 1752 (a)(1)(ii) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code is greatly mistaken, and is in fact a threat to the freedom of expression we should all be defending.
Of course it is a primary duty of the Secret Service to protect the President, but there is no plausible argument that can be made that Mr. Bursey was threatening the President by holding a sign which the President found politically offensive. Mr. Bursey reports that he was told that he had to either put down his sign or leave the area – in other words, it was not his presence in the area but his presence holding a sign that was expressing a political viewpoint critical of the President that caused his arrest. The fact that Mr. Bursey was told to go to the "free speech zone" demonstrates how mistaken the Justice Department’s position is in this regard.
As we read the First Amendment to the Constitution, the United States is a "free speech zone". In the United States, free speech is the rule, not the exception, and citizens’ rights to express it do not depend on their doing it in a way that the President finds politically amenable. It is extremely relevant that the State dropped the trespassing charges, and that the U.S. Attorney, Mr. Thurmond, then brought this serious charge. Perhaps the problem was trying to convict Mr. Bursey of trespassing when he was standing on public property and doing nothing unlawful. But the State’s decision to drop the charge should have been a model for the federal government, rather than an occasion for the federal government instituting a serious criminal prosecution of an individual whose "crime" was engaging in free speech outside of what law enforcement officials decided was the appropriate "zone". We ask that you make it clear that we have no interest as a government in "zoning" Constitutional freedoms, and that being politically annoying to the President of the United States is not a criminal offense. This prosecution smacks of the use of the Sedition Acts two hundred years ago to protect the President from political discomfort. It was wrong then and it is wrong now. We urge you to drop this prosecution based so clearly on the political views being expressed by the individual who is being prosecuted.
Barney Frank Ron Paul John Conyers James R. Langevin Loretta Sanchez Zoe Lofgren Edward J. Markey Howard L. Berman Jerrold Nadler Melvin L. Watt William D. Delahunt
I'm sure that if the righties happen to notice this story, they will be soon telling us how this isn't a violation of the 1st Amendment, either. (Via The Daily Kos.) 03:04 BST
Jim Henley reports that Fantagraphics is facing bankruptcy. Go out and buy some Hernandez Bros. stuff right now! And back issues of The Comics Journal, while you're at it.
Conservatives wrong again, as usual: The study published yesterday backs earlier research on the programs developed in the 1990s to stem the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and reduce teen pregnancy. It says that students in high schools with condom programs were more likely to use condoms, while students in other high schools were more likely to use other forms of birth control. (Via Amygdala.)
The tax bill that President Bush triumphantly signed into law on Wednesday is not just unfair, dishonest and economically unsound. It is also cruel to low-income families. In a last-minute revision, Senate and House negotiators dropped a provision that would have extended child tax credits to millions of these families. The stated reason was that the total cost of the bill had to be kept to an agreed-upon limit of $350 billion. This excuse is typical of the shifty argumentation that has accompanied this legislation from the start.
Under the new law, which raises the child tax credit to $1,000 from $600, most families with children will receive a $400-per-child check this summer. It was never intended that the wealthiest families — or the very poorest families, making less than the minimum wage — would get the credit. As it turns out, however, millions of families with incomes between $10,500 and $26,625 will not get it either. Blanche Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat, had insisted that the Senate version of the bill extend the enlarged credit to this particular group of working families, who have nearly 12 million children. The provision would have cost $3.5 billion, or exactly 1 percent of the advertised price of the bill. But because it would have helped push the tab above $350 billion, out it went.
Set aside for the moment the fact that the official $350 billion figure is a phony. The real cost of the bill over 10 years will more nearly approximate $800 billion if all the provisions that are scheduled to "sunset" in the next few years are eventually made a permanent part of the tax code, as they almost certainly will be. But even if the cost of the bill were actually $350 billion, there were fairer ways to reach that target than by depriving low-income families of the tiny crumbs the bill gives them.
For example, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the same result could have been achieved with a modest 2.3 percent adjustment in the bill's generous cuts on capital gains and dividends. It could also have been achieved by a tiny adjustment in the new top income tax rate, setting it at 35.3 percent over the next three years rather than 35 percent.
An administration hypes the threat posed by a foreign power. It talks of links to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism; it warns about a nuclear weapons program. The news media play along, and the country is swept up in war fever. The war drives everything else — including scandals involving administration officials — from the public's consciousness.
The 1997 movie "Wag the Dog" had quite a plot.
Although the movie's title has entered the language, I don't know how many people have watched it lately. Read the screenplay. If you don't think it bears a resemblance to recent events, you're in denial. [...] A final note: Showtime is filming a docudrama about Sept. 11. The producer is a White House insider, working in close consultation with Karl Rove. The script shows Mr. Bush as decisive and eloquent. "In this movie," The Globe and Mail reports, "Mr. Bush delivers long, stirring speeches that immediately become policy." And we can be sure that the script doesn't mention the bogus story about a threat to Air Force One that the White House floated to explain Mr. Bush's movements on the day of the attack. Hey, it's show business.
You know, I bet there are a lot of people who'd like to sit next to Bush on a plane. Long enough to let him know just what they think of him. 20:17 BST
On Monday the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is expected to adopt dramatic rule changes that will extend the market dominance of the five media corporations that control most of what Americans read, see and hear. I am a major shareholder in the largest of those five corporations, yet -- speaking only for myself, and not for AOL Time Warner -- I oppose these rules. They will stifle debate, inhibit new ideas and shut out smaller businesses trying to compete. If these rules had been in place in 1970, it would have been virtually impossible for me to start Turner Broadcasting or, 10 years later, to launch CNN.
The FCC will vote on several proposals, including raising the cap on how many TV stations can be owned by one corporation and allowing single corporations to own TV stations and newspapers in the same market. [...] Naturally, corporations say they would never suppress speech. That may be true. But it's not their intentions that matter. It's their capabilities. The new FCC rules would give them more power to cut important ideas out of the public debate, and it's precisely that power that the rules should prevent. Some news organizations have tried to marginalize opponents of the war in Iraq, dismissing them as a fringe element. Pope John Paul II also opposed the war in Iraq. How narrow-minded have we made our public discussion if the opinion of the pope is considered outside the bounds of legitimate debate?
Our democracy needs a broader dialogue. As Justice Hugo Black wrote in a 1945 opinion: "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." Safeguarding the welfare of the public cannot be the first concern of large publicly traded media companies. Their job is to seek profits. But if the government writes the rules in a certain way, companies will seek profits in a way that serves the public interest.
If, on Monday, the FCC decides to go the other way, that should not be the end of it. Powerful public groups across the political spectrum oppose these new rules and are angry about their lack of input in the process. People who can't make their voices heard in one arena often find ways to make them heard in others. Congress has the power to amend the rule changes. Members from both parties oppose the new rules. This isn't over.
ACTIVE U.S. HATE GROUPS IN 2002 The Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project counted 708 active hate groups in the United States in 2002. Really interesting map of the US gives an overview of where hate groups are located. Click on any state, say Indiana, to see where the hate groups are. And boy, check out South Carolina.
It has been two months since the United States and Britain went to war against Saddam Hussein, and coalition forces have yet to discover convincing evidence of the weapons programs that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair said were its primary cause.
Some of those who supported the war beforehand did so solely on the basis of ending tyranny. The mass graves found throughout Iraq, and widespread stories of torture and atrocity, come as no surprise to those who had studied or endured the Baathist dictator's regime. Those who opposed the war for any reason ought to be doing some soul-searching about the kind of horrors they were prepared to leave in place.
Not really. It's always been obvious that the entire operation had to be handled carefully for it to be worth doing, and Bush was making it clear that he wasn't prepared to go that route. Bush has neither saved nor protected the Iraqi people - hell, he couldn't even be bothered to protect the hospitals. If we'd had a real president, someone with some sense and some integrity, many of us might have trusted that president to handle the Iraq situation honorably and intelligently, but Bush never cared, and never intended to follow through. He just wanted to invade Iraq. That's not the kind of person you give the keys to the armed services to.
But it is true that Hussein represented only one of many thuggish regimes, and that the United States is not about to go to war against them all. I supported this war because I believed Bush and Blair when they said Iraq was manufacturing and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons in the hands of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations that shared Hussein's hostile designs made such a threat a defense priority - or so the argument went. [...] Events have moved so swiftly, and Hussein's toppling has posed so many new pressing problems, that it would be easy to lose sight of this issue, but it is critically important. I can imagine no greater breach of public trust than to mislead a country into war. A strong case might have been made to go after Hussein just because he posed a potential threat to us and the region, because of his support for suicide bombers, and because of his ruthless oppression of his own people. But this is not the case our President chose to make.
Truth in public life has always been a slippery commodity. We expect campaigning politicians or debating journalists to pitch and spin. Facts are marshaled to support arguments and causes; convenient ones are trumpeted and inconvenient ones played down or ignored. This is the political game.
But when the President of the United States addresses the nation and the world, I expect the spinning to stop. He represents not just a party or a cause, but the American people. When President Bush argued that Hussein possessed stockpiles of illicit and deadly poisons, he was presumably doing so on the basis of intelligence briefings and evidence that the public could not see. He was asking us to trust him, to trust his office, to trust that he was acting legitimately in our self-defense. That's something very different from engaging in a bold policy of attempting to remake the Middle East, or undertaking a humanitarian mission to end oppression. Neither of these two justifications would have been likely to garner widespread public support. But national defense? That's an argument the President can always win. [...] When a president lies or exaggerates in making an argument for war, when he spins the facts to sell his case, he betrays his public trust, and he diminishes the credibility of his office and our country. We are at war. What we lost in this may yet end up being far more important than what we gained.
Ah, he hedges it so carefully. C'mon, guys, you already know he lied, they all lied. They lied about their reasons for going in, and they lied about what they would do when they got there. It's time to stop saying "if" and start saying "impeach". 15:40 BST
Nearly two-thirds of Americans would have preferred the Bush administration had extended health care to 41 million uninsured people than cut taxes, according to a poll published on Thursday.
Stony Brook University said a nationwide poll taken in May while President Bush (news - web sites) and Congress worked out a $350 billion tax cut bill concluded that more than one-third were willing to pay higher taxes to raise money for a universal health care plan.
The survey's director said the poll found that in the slow economy, Americans were concerned about rising medical costs and having health insurance coverage.
"These concerns translate into support for broad government action on behalf of the uninsured even if it means having to forego a tax cut," said Leonie Huddy, director of the university's Center for Survey Research.
Nearly three out of four respondents also want the government to require employers to provide health insurance to all employees, said Stony Brook, which has 22,000 students and is a leading U.S. public research university on Long Island.
Health care promises to be a major issue in the 2004 presidential election campaign. Most of the nine Democrats seeking their party's nomination to run against Republican Bush have unveiled plans to help cover uninsured Americans.
The survey said 63 percent of Americans favored universal health care to tax cuts. In addition, 36 percent said they were willing to pay higher taxes to deal with the problem of America's estimated 41 million uninsured.
The poll indicated a preference for action on health insurance instead of a tax cut among 72 percent of Democrats, 53 percent of Republicans and 65 percent of independents.
There's nothing new about this poll result, but a lot of people need to be reminded. 15:18 BST
Nearly two-thirds of Americans would have preferred the Bush administration had extended health care to 41 million uninsured people than cut taxes, according to a poll published on Thursday.
Stony Brook University said a nationwide poll taken in May while President Bush (news - web sites) and Congress worked out a $350 billion tax cut bill concluded that more than one-third were willing to pay higher taxes to raise money for a universal health care plan.
The survey's director said the poll found that in the slow economy, Americans were concerned about rising medical costs and having health insurance coverage.
"These concerns translate into support for broad government action on behalf of the uninsured even if it means having to forego a tax cut," said Leonie Huddy, director of the university's Center for Survey Research.
Nearly three out of four respondents also want the government to require employers to provide health insurance to all employees, said Stony Brook, which has 22,000 students and is a leading U.S. public research university on Long Island.
Health care promises to be a major issue in the 2004 presidential election campaign. Most of the nine Democrats seeking their party's nomination to run against Republican Bush have unveiled plans to help cover uninsured Americans.
The survey said 63 percent of Americans favored universal health care to tax cuts. In addition, 36 percent said they were willing to pay higher taxes to deal with the problem of America's estimated 41 million uninsured.
The poll indicated a preference for action on health insurance instead of a tax cut among 72 percent of Democrats, 53 percent of Republicans and 65 percent of independents.
There's nothing new about this poll result, but a lot of people need to be reminded. 15:18 BST
"Of course, they didn't it like. Most of it's a scathing indictment of them." [...] Blumenthal's book is a harsh and incisive critique of Washington's insider culture and its prestige press corps which is -- as a group, if not individually -- corrupt, rudderless and often insipid. (I'd say nasty, brutish and short, but many of them tower over me.) The coverage of the Clinton presidency is the ultimate example, with its whole swirl of babyboomer self-loathing, historical ignorance and nonsense, the willingness to be led around by black-minded reactionaries, politics as Society page, the whole lot of it. (Much of what I'm talking about here I discussed more clearly and crisply in a column on Maureen Dowd's Pulitzer Prize in the now-defunct online magazine Feed in April 1999.) This is difficult for me to say -- not least because I live and work and know many of these people, and consider many to be friends -- and even more because I'm not nearly established as most and must rely on these folks for my livelihood. But there's no getting around the truth of it. Blumenthal is disliked by many in DC because he is a critic -- and to my mind, a devastating one -- of their vapidity, ignorance and willingness to be used.
I keep getting distracted when I mean to blog something. Like this item from Charles Dodgson that caught my interest a week ago before something pulled my attention away:
As a delegate to the 1999 WTO conference in Seattle, Stephen Byers looked sadly on as misguided protesters demonstrated against the trade liberalization which was, he thought, the best chance for improving the lives of the poor.
A few years on now, he now thinks they were more or less right to say that unmanaged trade liberalization works against the interests of the poor.
It's been fashionable to assume that the anti-WTO activists are just incoherently opposed to globalized trade, but that's just not true. The critique of globalization isn't that it exists at all, it's how it's done. The critique of the IMF and the World Bank isn't that they support globalization, but that their "help" actually impoverishes and destabilizes countries. That wasn't always the case, but since 1980 they have done roughly the opposite of what they are supposed to be doing. The "anti-globalization" protesters really are on to something. 02:21 BST
It always makes me happy when a good weblog moves off of Blogspot for sunnier climes. Welcome to the world, Greg Greene. 01:55 BST
Thursday, 29 May 2003
All day yesterday I thought it was Tuesday. Not sure how I did that. Oh, well.
To the Barricades! fails to find anti-semitism in an article in the NYT, even though James Taranto says in the WSJ that it's there.
Paul Krugman is delighted to know that it is now okay to state the obvious. But The Daily Howler says it's only acceptable in some other country.
Rittenhouse Review has the story of names being added to the Vietnam memorial; one in particular, of a man who was laid to rest 22 years after he was originally wounded.
THE US has floated plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a death camp, with its own death row and execution chamber.
Prisoners would be tried, convicted and executed without leaving its boundaries, without a jury and without right of appeal, The Mail on Sunday newspaper reported yesterday.
The plans were revealed by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, who is in charge of 680 suspects from 43 countries, including two Australians.
The suspects have been held at Camp Delta on Cuba without charge for 18 months.
General Miller said building a death row was one plan. Another was to have a permanent jail, with possibly an execution chamber.
The Mail on Sunday reported the move is seen as logical by the US, which has been attacked worldwide for breaching the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war since it established the camp at a naval base to hold alleged terrorists from Afghanistan. [...] British activist Stephen Jakobi, of Fair Trials Abroad, said: "The US is kicking and screaming against any pressure to conform with British or any other kind of international justice."
American law professor Jonathan Turley, who has led US civil rights group protests against the military tribunals planned to hear cases at Guantanamo Bay, said: "It is not surprising the authorities are building a death row because they have said they plan to try capital cases before these tribunals.
"This camp was created to execute people. The administration has no interest in long-term prison sentences for people it regards as hard-core terrorists."
Britain admitted it had been kept in the dark about the plans.
A Downing St spokesman said: "The US Government is well aware of the British Government's position on the death penalty."
No link for this, but it's from this week's issue of the broadcast-listings magazine Radio Times - Susan Sarandon on how TV programs depict her as a ranting, radical loony:
On one they showed me speaking at meetings, and had a close-up of me waving my fists and screaming. I wondered where the hell I was until I realized it was at a hockey game. That's the kind of misreporting we're dealing with.
I'm glad to see someone else point this out:
Every film is political, but you only notice those which challenge stereotypes rather than the ones which reinforce them - like the mixture of sex and violence towards women in an erotic fashion, or those macho films where you're only a man after you've killed at point-blank range. The language of the Bush administration is straight from football crossed with war-film jargon.
But what that first sentence recalled for me wasn't the sex & violence axis, it was the way certain assumptions are made about the day-to-day stuff in our lives - even assumptions Sarandon takes for granted in the article, about a girl's reputation being "ruined" and so on. And do most people ever notice the way it's "non-controversial" to bring god up in every TV show as deserving credit for everything that goes right, or providing solace for everything that goes wrong?
But back to her brilliant career as an activist:
She has turned stardom into a socially useful tool, and scoffs at the criticism that "you're only an actor". "They elected a president who wasn't even a good actor, so that line must be blurred. What really balls me is when I'm asked to talk on television, I often ask for an expert to be with me, and they refuse. They just want celebrities - and then they condemn us for opening our mouths. I'd be so happy to stay at home if someone else would ask the questions for those who are voiceless.
I guess my job is to put a little flashlight on the information people aren't getting. I love America and I'm not leaving until they kick me out. I don't know if they will. But if we go on with our empire building, I might refuse to pay my taxes, and we'll see what happens.
It's all pretty obvious that celebrities are the people who are allowed to go on television and talk, so they are, for the most part, the only ones who are allowed to represent the myriad views of the rest of us. Which is why it's just stupid when conservatives deride (liberal) celebrities for speaking up. Leaving aside the fact that they don't say the same when the celebrities are conservative, let's not forget that conservatives are much more likely to elect celebrities - like Sonny Bono and Ronald Reagan. Which seems strange, when you think about the way they reacted to the suggestion of a presidential run by the one guy who'd demonstrated that he actually knew something about the Soviet Union - Warren Beatty. 11:57 BST
Rick's Rants has a rant about media concentration, and mentions an NPR show on the subject, with a pointer to the audio.
LiberalOasis interviewed Sid Blumenthal, who talked about President Bill's learning curve, political errors, and other stuff.
And Louis Freeh was a completely dysfunctional FBI Director, who was actually waging his own private war against the Clinton Administration. ... If there were any clear investigation of 9/11, they wouldn't let Louie Freeh off the hook."
And it's good to hear someone from government actually say this:
What I describe in my book, is completely relevant to how the Republicans act, [about] their relentless will to power.
They attempted coup d'etats, all through the Clinton Presidency. That’s what Ken Starr was doing. He was trying to drive the President from office.
And they finally succeeded, in my view, stealing the presidency through the Supreme Court after Gore won.
They will be ruthless in their exercise of power. And when I say they will use any means necessary, you think that couldn't be possible.
But then you have to think about the use of mob violence in shutting down the vote count in Miami-Dade County.
And the fact that the majority of that mob were paid Republican congressional staffers, from the staffs of Trent Lott and Tom DeLay, flown down with Bush campaign money, to Florida to shut down the vote count.
And whose votes weren't counted? This is another major element in my book.
The votes that weren't counted for the most part were African-American votes.
It was the biggest suppression of voting rights in our country’s history since Jim Crow. And the thread of race runs from the beginning to the end of my book.
The initial opposition to Bill Clinton took place in great part because of race.
Because he was a white, progressive New South figure, who was a liberal on race.
It’s absolutely crucial for the Democrats to have a sense of their history, of who they are, in order to be able to project their values and stand up for them.
And, by the way, I'm not ashamed to be a member of the party that actually cares about that stuff. 10:27 BST
RSS
Well, the button is down there on the lower right, claiming that this is the URL for my RSS feed. In theory, it should be working by some time tonight. Y'all can let me know if that happens, or doesn't. 09:55 BST
Tuesday, 27 May 2003
When I learned about Dave's death earlier today, my first thought was to post the art he did for me back in the days when we were still publishing PULP. So my little tribute to Dave can be found here.
With Patrick complaining about lack of RSS at The Sideshow (and other places), I began investigating and was getting the feeling that because this page doesn't use a template (or any standardized blogging software), it couldn't be done. But I wrote to Blogmatrix and they say they think they can do it if I change my formatting around a bit. I'd been making my link-code alphanumeric so it would be more comprehensible, but I'm told I need it to just be numeric. And I need to move the link to the bottom of the entry. So I'll be messing around with my formatting a bit for the next day or three. I'm trying to make this as unconfusing as possible while minimizing the amount of labour that's involved. Your comments and suggestions are, of course, welcome, as is your continued patience.
13:53 BST
Though Estrada has been described by promoters as an immigrant who at 17 arrived in the United States without speaking a word of English, he was hardly the abject refugee that description suggests. In fact, he was the son of a high Honduran diplomat and therefore was a member of Honduras' very small and privileged elite. And his political views reflect the comfortable narrowness of that elite.
He and I once had a fiery argument about democracy in Latin America. Two of the issues we discussed remain in my memory. One was his warm approval of Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile, who had led the coup that overthrew leftist President Salvador Allende and murdered thousands. Part of Miguel's argument was that Allende had won only a plurality of the popular vote and therefore was not legitimate in the first place; he dismissed the Chilean legislature's vote to ratify Allende's victory in a process that accorded fully with Chilean law (Allende's own party was a minority in the legislature).
The second issue had to do with his own native Honduras. I recall challenging the legitimacy of the Honduran government, which was and still is known for its corruption, its exclusion and repression of the lower classes, and at the time had been implicated in numerous human rights abuses (including assassinations), some tied to the U.S.-supported Contra war against Nicaragua. His counterfactual answer stuck with me: "Honduras is a pure democracy, just like the United States."
The court to which Estrada has been nominated is considered widely to be a steppingstone to the U.S. Supreme Court, so the fact that he could be "possibly the first Hispanic American to sit on the highest bench in the land" actually increases concern. There are many top-flight Latino lawyers in the United States, even from our class of '86. If a seat should be set up for an American of Latin American descent, Hispanics and moderate Republicans would do well to support someone more likely to bring a broader, and more inclusive, definition of society and politics to important decisions.
I was just over at Newsarama looking at a bizarre and scary article called The AFA Attacks!
When the American Family Association went after the Western Pennsylvania office of the Make a Wish foundation because they collected monies form the Pittsburgh Comic-Con which, (according to the AFA) was a haven for pornography, it seemed like an isolated event. Then the group went after the Motor City Convention. Dangerous times for comics? Maybe.
Now dig this: Wildmon's bunch of sex-haters found out that comic cons are making donations to charities, so they harass the charities into refusing money from these "havens of pornography".
The moves by the AFA in both Pittsburgh and Detroit, while indicative of the AFA's agenda against what they consider pornography (the group recently declared a victory when Wal-Mart announced that were pulling Maxim, Stuff and FHM from their shelves due to customer complaints – an earlier target of the group), they market the first time in recent memory that the group has taken direct action against the comic industry.
Newsarama found AFA's rant against sexy images and discussions of The Wrong Religions and is wondering if this is time for worry. They further note increasing attacks on sexual materials of other kinds, as well as taking another look at the Protect law. You remember that one, the one that tries to return to making fake child porn illegal? As Newsarama says, if one "virtual crime" can be illegal, why not another?
"The reason I bring all of this up is that what I've been noticing over the last two months is that there are a lot more incidents pertaining to the prosecution of pornography," Brownstein said. "It strikes me as something to be concerned about that these attacks on the comics field are coming in that climate. These are something that are on the rise, and I'm not at all shocked to see the AFA, who, honestly, do something like this every couple years, coming after the comic shows. I think it's important to bear in mind that it's all part of a bigger picture."
While I was there, I noticed a story about revival of the shelved Frank Miller Robocop, but by someone else. I loved Robocop. I still don't know how the corporate weasels allowed the TV show to exist at all.
Take Back the Media links to a FAIR report on how serial-prevaricator John Stossel has been punished by ABC for his lack of credibility, by awarding him a better job. Affirmative action in action.
Truth Is Better compares what they say with what they do - that is, the myths Republicans have about themselves, versus reality.
Over at Blogcritics, I learn that Elvis Costello said this:
"We all live in fairly dangerous times in terms of freedom of speech and freedom of expression. A lot of the songwriters that I've admired and learned from ... are people who spoke in matters of conscience as well as matters of the heart. I think that it's essential that we defend that right."
But Al Barger regards this statement as "stupid", apparently believing that because no one has (yet) been arrested for speaking out against the government, there is no danger to free speech.
Conservatives like to pretend that preventing free speech isn't really preventing free speech as long as it's not officially performed by the government itself. But in this case the corporates and the government are so much in each other's pockets that there's hardly any distinction between them. When the vast majority of media outlets work to silence those who disagree with the government, it's just childish to pretend it isn't "really" censorship. Only an idiot thinks you have to put someone in jail to shut them up.
That's leaving aside those little details like people who find themselves on the "no fly" list because they were involved with such terrorist activities as Ralph Nader's campaign or peace activism.
In Britain, the threat already hung overhead long before 9/11, when the BBC pretty much blackmailed Noel Gallagher into repudiating his own words if he wanted Oasis to stay on the playlist. Gallagher is a noted jerk, but his rambling babble about how Ecstasy wasn't any worse than a cup of tea was not particularly inconsistent with the truth and would have been entirely unremarkable not that long ago. However, it didn't mesh with the government's "E kills" message and, since Gallagher is also no John Lennon, an embarrassing statement was issued over his name that sounded like it must have been written by the Home Secretary. Obviously, his manager must have explained the facts of life to him; pity he didn't have the backbone to stand up.
Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security's crack gumshoes at Los Angeles' airport jailed six French TV journalists for more than a day; interrogated, body-searched and fingerprinted them; then forcibly repatriated them to Paris.
Meanwhile, things are bad enough that Neil Young has come back over from the dark side and now worries that it might get him deported. Not a paranoid impression, given that far worse things have been happening to other resident aliens. (Or, for that matter, even to American citizens. Just read Talk Left any day of the week for more of both.)
Things are getting weird in America, and it's really not wise to be complacent.
There are a whole bunch of posts up at CalPundit that I want to quote in full, but That Would Be Wrong. There's a nice one echoing Matt Yglesias' question about when the Bush administration is going to get serious about terrorism, for example. And here's one on the FCC's evil plot. And this one that I'll quote just a little of: "It's just astounding. They get richer and richer, tax rates get lower and lower, and still they feel persecuted. 100 million households in America are earning $7,000 per year less than they should, because the rich have swallowed it up. And we're supposed to feel sorry for them." Read them all.
While the usual anti-diversity crowd was charging the Times with a double standard on race last week, the paper's attorneys were at a federal libel trial in Cleveland, vigorously -- and expensively -- defending a reporting mistake in a 2000 article by Fox Butterfield. That's the same Fox Butterfield, national correspondent and white male, who embarrassed the Times in 1991 when it emerged that he had lifted material from a story in The Boston Globe while reporting, ironically, on plagiarism by a Boston University dean. On journalistic merit, Butterfield does not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the fabulist Blair -- and we do so only to emphasize that race does not necessarily determine who gets second chances at the Times.
The real lesson from the Blair affair is that the Times' system for dealing with accuracy in its newspaper and discipline in its newsroom is badly broken -- if, indeed, any system exists. It's all very well to "trust" reporters, as Times executives insistently declared, but the dull credulity top editors evinced throughout this episode suggests they have not learned the first thing the old hardscrabble City News Bureau in Chicago told its greenest recruits: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
How is it, for instance, that The New York Times could be gulled into publishing on its front page a story accusing a teenager of being the triggerman in the Washington-area sniper attacks -- without any editor apparently ever asking the tyro reporter to identify these unnamed "law-enforcement officials" he is quoting?
One inescapable conclusion from this scandal is that the Times has developed an addictive tolerance for anonymous sources, the crack cocaine of journalism. The Times could not go cold turkey even in its extraordinary Mother's Day cataloging of Blair's journalistic sins, an occasion that cried out for 100% on-the-record reporting. For no apparent reason other than habit, an entirely innocuous e-mail message was attributed to "one fellow reporter."
Still, a more telling indication of the Blair matter's impact was a memo Rocky Mountain News editor/publisher/president John Temple sent to editorial types at the paper on May 12, the day after the Times ran a four-page, 7,200-word investigation into the actions of the discredited scribe. Temple alluded to the e-mail in "Journalism Takes Its Lumps This Week," a May 17 column in which he faulted the Times in notably direct terms for refusing to adequately examine management's culpability with respect to Blair's wrongdoing. "By not acknowledging that they did anything wrong," he wrote, "the paper's leaders are leaving Americans with the impression that newsrooms are cozy clubs where reporters can invent sources that tilt major stories without being carefully questioned by editors." But Temple left out a portion of the missive that hinted at how severely his confidence in the Times has been shaken. [...] More intriguing was Temple's newly declared policy in regard to the publishing of Times reports in the News. He announced that "New York Times stories that use anonymous sources must be approved in advance" by the same editor or editors noted above -- an astonishing development, because it suggests that in a few short weeks, the Times has gone from being among the most trusted news purveyors on the planet to a publication viewed with suspicion by its peers.
But the NYT isn't the only one, as Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler heard from readers after he examined what he'd treated as someone else's problem a week earlier:
The recent problems at the New York Times involving a reporter with a long record of plagiarizing and fabricating stories have touched a nerve with readers of other newspapers, including The Post. Readers who have been writing or calling me say they don't suspect the same kind of brazen, large-scale deception by a troubled individual. But their concerns add up to a real and growing credibility problem for news organizations, especially in today's environment.
That environment includes what seems to me, and a fair number of readers, to be a steady increase in the number of major stories attributed to anonymous sources and a sense that intelligence information is being politicized and that reporters aren't probing hard enough against the defenses of an administration with an effective, disciplined and restrictive attitude toward information control.
I wrote about this a while back. We have a "no fly" list; people who aren't allowed on airplanes for any reason. We also have a much longer list of people who are allowed to fly only after an absurd amount of hassle. Supposedly, this is "for security reasons", but nobody will say who's on the list or why. There's no way to get off of it. It's an observational fact, however, that some people get hassled beyond any point of sense.
David Nelson, for example. Which "David Nelson"? After all, "David" and "Nelson" are both common names. Why, all of them, of course. If your name is David Nelson, you must be a Bad Guy. What kind of Bad Guy? Can't tell you, but we sure can't let you on an airplane without harassing you.
Natasha at The Watchexplains why needing a gun in every home is not a sign of utopia.
Soundbitten on Scarborough's campaign to coerce MCI into dropping Danny Glover as a spokesperson because he said something politically incorrect.
Yellow Doggerel Democrat is now even more blog-like than ever, and found a fine response from Texas Dem Garnet F. Coleman to Republican lies about the Killer Ds.
Wampum has moved off of Blgospot to much more comfortable digs, and lookin' good. I enjoyed the little flashback to aWol's first meeting with The Queen.
What makes neocons interesting is not their religion or ethnicity but their rejection of relativism, the view that ethical truths depend on circumstances.
For years, I've been trying to come up with a concise definition of what conservatives call "moral relativism". Looking at the record, it appears that conservatives generally oppose any evidence of enjoying life if it is done by liberals, and can forgive every kind of immoral, unethical, or criminal act if it is performed by conservatives (unless they are conservative Democrats). It was okay for Newt Gingrich to orchestrate an impeachment of Clinton over adultery because Gingrich's on-going series of adulterous relationships were Republican adultery, whereas Clinton, being a Democrat, was being immoral. The dead woman in Scarborough's office was not suspicious, because he was a Republican; the missing girlfriend of Condit was suspicious, because he was a Democrat. Liberals should honor their (conservative) parents, but conservatives don't have to honor their (liberal) parents. Clinton was evil because he was caught in one little untruth, but Bush's consistent pattern of dissembling over even life and death issues is a virtue.
Thus we see that the "moral relativism" that conservatives condemn is the appalling tendency of liberals to presume that sins committed by Democrats are no worse than sins committed by Republicans. Democrats can think that embezzlers with ties to Republicans should do just as much jail time as embezzlers with ties to Democrats (or no party ties at all) should do. Liberals think that wealthy conservative thieves are just as criminal as any other thieves. Liberals insist that when a liberal or Democrat falls to adulterous temptation, it is only human, or that someone who steals a small amount in order to eat can at least be understood, while someone who possesses extremes of wealth but still steals from those who have less in order to be even more immorally wealthy has a great deal to answer for. We think that if Clinton can be impeached for one little "misleading" statement, Bush is actually worse and deserves to be removed from office immediately for his enormous catalogue of significant lies.
So "moral relativism" appears to be the belief that Democrats and Republicans, or liberals and conservatives, ought to be judged by the same standards, while "moral clarity" is the belief that Republican conservatives get to judge everyone else according to Republican conservative interests, but no one else (probably not even God) gets to judge Republican conservatives.
Neocons are political fundamentalists. They believe in the absolute supremacy of the natural rights and power of liberal democracy over tyranny. That boils down to being willing to use force to eradicate tyrannies and, if necessary, imposing liberal democracy at gunpoint.
The central theory of neocons is that democratic societies are better than all others because they protect minorities, and therefore cannot safely coexist with threatening tyrannical regimes.
When did that happen? Conservatives, be they "neocon" or any other kind, have always laughed at "bleeding-heart liberals" for our condemnation of tyrannical regimes and of the US government's frequent tendency to turn a blind eye to the abuses of "friendly" dictators, such as Saddam Hussein. Liberals were "unrealistic" for our criticisms of administration policies that cozied-up to the Saddams and Pinochets and Sauds and so on. Brutal dictatorships were always absolutely peachy with conservatives as long as they didn't show any "socialist" tendencies - "socialism" being defined as any means of redistributing wealth downward rather than upward. (Castro was bad because he threw the Mafia and the tobacco barons out of Cuba and appropriated their holdings for the country; George W. Bush is good because he took land from ordinary people in order to build a baseball stadium and make himself and his friends extraordinarily rich.) Conservatives have never objected to tyranny per se. What they objected to was privileging anything other than wealth.
The business about "democratic societies" is just a joke. Leaving aside the kind of "support" conservative administrations have shown for democratically elected governments in other countries (e.g., Reagan's obvious love for democracy in Nicaragua), we have a shining model of conservative support for democracy right at home, in our glorious 2000 election. Let's see how conservatives support democracy:
Despite its simple message, the Bush team's task was a great deal more complicated than it appeared. The law was almost entirely on the side of Gore and the recounts.[*] Florida not only explicitly permitted manual recounts, they had been used frequently for a variety of elections, including the one that preceded the current term of its Republican senator, Connie Mack. Indeed, a majority of states either mandated or permitted manual recounting when the difference between two candidates was small enough. By coincidence, one of these states, Texas, had a governor named Governor George W. Bush who only recently had put his signature on the bill. The Texas standard was exactly the same "intent of the voter" standard under use in Florida. It was this standard that the Bush team needed to prevent were it to have any hope of winning the vote.
So Jim Baker had a problem. He needed to control the media's narrative in Florida in such a way that the law on the books and virtually every legal precedent would be ignored and the incomplete vote certified, while in the process, his candidate's presidency could be legitimized. There was another option open to Bush, winning the hard way - by political fiat in the Florida legislature, the U.S. Congress, or the U.S. Supreme Court - but such a naked political ploy might damage the legitimacy of a Bush Restoration beyond repair.
Baker addressed this problem by remaining on the attack and sticking like glue to his disciplined message. "The American people voted on November 7. Governor George W. Bush won thirty-one states with a total of 271 electoral votes. The vote here in Florida was very close, but when it was counted, Governor Bush was the winner. Now, three days later, the vote in Florida has been recounted. Governor Bush is still the winner." With no recounts yet under way, the Gore team was already guilty, according to Baker, of "efforts to keep recounting, over and over, until it happens to like the result." [Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media?, p179; my emphasis.]
[*I don't know what the word "almost" is doing in there; the first run of recounts, including hand recounts of the overvotes, were mandated by law, and they were never completed. The recounts Gore was calling for were supposed to be in addition to those recounts. The Florida Supreme Court had previously ruled in favor of the Republican on a similar challenge in a previous election and so their decision on behalf of Gore was a foregone conclusion on the basis of law and simple precedent.]
A great deal more evidence has come out since 7 November 2000 showing that, both before and after the election, a tremendous effort was made in the state of Florida (and elsewhere, including Tennessee) to keep likely Democratic voters from being able to vote, in addition to ensuring that their votes were less likely to be counted. Katherine Harris deliberately arranged to have the names of legitimate voters removed from the voting rolls by using an out-of-state commercial enterprise to add names to a felon-purge list in direct contempt of a court order not to do so. Absentee ballot applications were tampered with, ballots were mysteriously re-designed to make them more confusing for people voting for any but the first name on the ballot (Bush's), motor-voter registrations were never recorded, black people going to vote were harassed, misleading instructions were provided for first-time voters on how to mark their ballots, and so on. Polling places in Democratic-leaning communities were closed without notice on the day, with no direction for alternative voting venues. Thousands of Gore votes that had already been tallied in the first machine count simply disappeared. Boxes of ballots were lost and some reappeared later.
But perhaps no interference with democracy was more overt or outrageous than the concerted efforts, both legalistic and extra-legal, to prevent - in front of god and everyone! - the ballots from being counted.
Where were neoconservatives during all this? Were they expressing outrage that the election was being "fixed", that democracy was being betrayed? No, they were not. They were instead joining Bush and his cronies in repeating Baker's talking-points, claiming that speed was more important than accuracy, in one case even joining a Republican-sponsored riot to interfere with the ballot-counters' work. They went to court to prevent the counts from continuing even while they attacked Gore for using the courts (before Gore had even done so, in fact). They battered law, logic, and tradition to bloody pulp in order to effect their one and only goal - to put one of their own in the White House over and above the will of the American people and the law.
Before and since then, the neocons have shown contempt for democracy in myriad ways, going even so far as to help impeach a president despite the fact that fully two-thirds of Americans polled said they did not think that president deserved impeachment. They have knowingly pushed the destruction of programs (such as Social Security and public schooling) that they know Americans support and wish to keep. They happily lie - and even write articles in support of lying - to hoodwink the public into letting them get away with undermining the democratically mandated will of the people. They claim to support the Constitution while fervently defending the destroyers of its protections.
Anyone who believed that these same people intended to bring a free democracy to Iraq was out of their mind. These people don't want to see a free democracy anywhere. The people who do are not called "neoconservatives", they are called "liberals".
Now I don't believe anyone has ever thought for one second that Tom Delay was anything other than a slimy, fork-tongued toady who gladly sell his mother to a white slavery ring if it meant one more filthy corporate donation in the NRCC's luxurious coffers. But here he is, a dirty man admitting a dirty, dirty crime -- misappropriation of government resources for petty personal gains, at the very least -- and there is no outrage. There is nothing. Let's move on.
Next on the Friday roundup, readers will be urged to skip a great deal of the pap served up in the Washington Post save the few articles profiled here, beginning with Dana Milbank's brave analysis, with Jim VandeHei, of exactly how much of a compromise President "Mr. Popularity" Bush had to make to get his own party to support his loathesome tax cut. Thankfully, Milbank and VandeHei point out exactly what a sh*t-eating liar pretty much anybody who calls this tax cut for the rich a victory for the president. Let's read together:
In brokering and celebrating a $350 billion tax-and-spending package he derided less than a month earlier, President Bush and top aides this week made the calculation that it was more important to have a tax cut than to stand on principle over its size and content.
President Bush announced Thursday that Josh Bolten would become the next director of the Office of Management and Budget, taking over from the outgoing Mitch Daniels. (Link)
He is one of the closed-lips defendants named in the Dick Cheney secret energy task force lawsuit, filed by Judicial Watch (http://www.judicialwatch.org/cases/67/ac2final.htm). The Bush administration refused to hand over documents that relate specifically to Cheney and Bolten, among others. (Link)
Not everyone is comfortable with him. An aide to Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-GA), who, under tremendous pressure from Bush, sold out the patients' bill of rights, claims that Bolten "screwed us over." According to the New Republic, the man who muscled Norwood into bashing patient's rights was none other than the hush-hush Joshua Bolten.
The 31-year-old Atkins diet, long disparaged by the medical establishment and just as fervently touted by its adherents, has gained a measure of credibility with the publication of two studies indicating that some measures of heart health improved in people who followed low-carbohydrate diets for six months or a year.
The two studies are among the first controlled clinical trials to compare, for longer than 90 days, the kind of low-carbohydrate diets made popular by the late Dr. Robert Atkins with the kind of low-fat diets that doctors have traditionally touted as beneficial for cardiovascular health.
The studies, published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, showed that although the low-carbohydrate diets were, at best, only marginally more effective for weight loss, they were associated with lowered triglycerides, blood fats that can contribute to plaque buildup in the arteries. [...] One of the studies, which looked specifically at the Atkins diet, well known for allowing dieters to indulge in steak and eggs and other high-fat foods, showed that people who followed the low-carbohydrate eating plan for a year also raised their levels of HDL cholesterol, which helps prevent plaque buildup.
There are a couple of things I neglected to say in my response to Jim Henley below. The first is that it's Nineteen Eighty-four, not 1984. And the other is that there is, as far as I can tell, one big distinction between Labour's civil libertarians and America's. It's here:
People who once ran important civil society organizations supporting civil liberties and the welfare of immigrants are now ministers backing draconian infringements on liberties and harsh policies toward asylum seekers.
This is not just a reflection on individuals. It raises the question of whether such organizations are being run by people dedicated to principles or by opportunists using them as stepladders to political office.
I happen to know a lot about the leaders of the two principal civil liberties organizations in both England and the US. I have had close association with Nadine Strossen, head of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and her office. I know her personally because I used to be on the executive committee of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL or "Liberty") and because she contacted me again when she and other feminists in America founded Feminists for Free Expression, and she always contacts me whenever she is in the UK to speak. My knowledge of ACLU operations is not very good, but when I talk to people who work for ACLU, while I may hear complaints about personalities, I don't hear the sort of things I hear from people at "Liberty". Nadine and those like her aren't in ACLU to become members of government; Nadine is a law professor with, as far as I can tell, no designs on such a position. She's been there a long time and shows no signs of wanting to cross to the Hill. She does what she does because she is a civil libertarian, and I've never seen her pull back on her principles to benefit some political leader.
The people who have terrific civil libertarian credentials as former leaders of "Liberty" are another story entirely.
With my colleague from Feminists Against Censorship, Roz Kaveney, I began serving on the organization's executive committee, and I was baffled by the utter lack of civil libertarianism of most of its members. I soon heard gossip from the staff of some interesting aspects of recent history, including a consistent pattern in at least the last three general secretaries of what used to be called NCCL, of being obvious climbers who had taken the job solely as a stepping-stone to office in the Labour Party. They were already party hacks, and they had never been civil libertarians; their positions, even when they directly contradicted the protection of people's liberties and NCCL policies, were the positions that were popular within the upper echelons of Labour. Two of them had become leading lights of Labour as a result.
As time went by, I was confused by the fact that someone who appeared out of nowhere was almost instantly elected by the committee as its chair, and re-elected even after he persisted in flagrant abuses of his position. I eventually learned that this man was the husband of a woman who worked in Tony Blair's office. One member of the executive privately told Roz that his own votes on the committee did not reflect his own views, but that he had hopes for a career in Labour and knew that if he went against the chair his career would be ruined. The new general secretary (a member of paid staff, unlike members of the executive) changed his title to "Director" and proceeded to have regular lunches with, of all people, the Home Secretary, Jack Straw. Weirdly, Straw was actually chosen as the guest speaker to the organization's annual general meeting. (This is the only person who speaks to the organization as a whole all year.)
There is no question about this: the party leadership influenced NCCL policy, and not the other way around. Imagine, if you will, an ACLU that is in bed (literally!) with the political leadership of the government, dines with the Attorney General, and has him as its honored guest speaker instead of a dedicated civil libertarian at its one major event of the year, even as he is deep into the project of trying to eliminate the country's remaining civil liberties.
You can see why Feminists Against Censorship severed all ties with "Liberty" at this point. We are civil libertarians; they are not, and haven't been for quite some time. It's not that these individuals have been co-opted into government, it's that they were always headed there.
There was a period of about a year when a number of civil liberties-oriented organizations in London, including gay rights organizations and free speech organizations, suddenly started behaving very strangely. There had been a period of about six months when funding suddenly dried up for all of these organizations - funding that had come, for the most part, from Labour-related wallets. Then they started purging older, more dedicated (and highly-respected) staff members and with them their civil libertarian positions. Then they started getting funding again. Then Tony Blair was elected, and they all became virtually silent. The leader of one of these organizations, by the way, a former "mad bomber" back in the '60s (no, really), was suddenly named on the Queen's Honours list. A number of people like that, who should never have expected a medal from the Queen, suddenly started acting strangely, supporting Blair's government, and got medals. I believe that those people were bought by the Blair campaign. But the others had never needed to be bought; they already belonged to the surface politics of The Party.
You don't have to buy your way into the Democratic Party that way, so you see a lot less of that in America. That doesn't mean that no one cynically manipulates such positions, but it just doesn't work as well. Being in the ACLU or a gay rights organization doesn't buy you the backing of the DLC, anyway, so it's not worth the bother. And Nadine Strossen is not paid by the ACLU; she has another job. The "Director" of "Liberty" depends on the Labour Party's donors to collect his salary.
Brad DeLong reports that the Financial Times has finally lost faith in Bush:
Wow. The Financial Times is really grumpy. It's not clear whether the immediate cause is the "dollar policy," the tax cut, or simply a long train of abuses and usurpations that has caused them to lose all patience. What is clear is that the Financial Times is now an advocate of its three-part plan for dealing with the Bush administration:
Open toilet.
Insert Bush administration.
Flush.
And here's a little quote from that FT piece:
But even where new brooms have been found, it is clear that changing the economic team has had no impact on the outcome of policy discussions. Fiscal policy is still irresponsible, international economic policy is still chaotic. Trade policy is still an adjunct. We know why. Economic policy comes a distant third in the Bush administration's priorities - behind national security and re-election politics.
In case anyone still doubted this, it was reported earlier this month that the White House Council of Economic Advisers, now under the amiable leadership of Harvard's Gregory Mankiw, is moving out of the - er - White House. Its new home will be a nice suite of offices somewhere near the Starbucks and the mobile phone shop on G Street, a comfortable 400 yards from anyone in a position of political power.
From there Mr Bush will not be able to hear the howls of economic anguish when he proposes his next tax cut or import tariff or agricultural subsidy. One day, as the dollar slides further and the fiscal deficit expands, Mr Bush will need some serious economic thinkers around him. But by then, there will be none left.
There is only one answer. It is time to put Donald Rumsfeld in charge of economics. It would not necessarily do much for economic policy. But it would work wonders for foreign policy.
The FT has apparently failed to realize that national security isn't much of a priority for Bush, either. Rewarding his campaign contributors is certainly a priority, as is physical exercise, and secrecy seems to be very important to him, but I'm not sure what else is. Throwing meat to his "base", I guess. But I've yet to see Bush do a single thing on behalf of our country.
Blumenthal was absolutely right, of course, back in 1995 to keep insisting -- almost alone, and in the face of the frenzy of the press pack and my own anxiety about missing the bus -- that the allegations of Clinton corruption in the Whitewater affair were a big load of nothing. On the other hand, he was absolutely wrong to maintain -- as he put it with maddening loftiness -- that "It's not a story." Not a scandal, perhaps, but not a story? A cabal of right-wing fanatics manipulates the press, the judiciary, and the FBI to the point of nearly destroying a president and it's not a story? It was a helluva story -- as Sidney's book amply shows. And the story isn't over yet, as the Clinton wars continue to be fought in the reviews.
This woman ran the most famously literate publication in America, and she can't parse a sentence? "The Clintons did something bad in Whitewater" was not a story. The malignant skein of the Clintons' implicit "fecklessness" and "immorality" the press wove around it, the actions of Scaife and Starr and their carniverous ilk, yes, that was a story. Sid thought so. He wrote an 800-page book about it.
Tina Brown was one of a number of people who couldn't figure out that the Whitewater "story" wasn't about the Clintons, it was about everyone else - a Congress that knowingly wasted taxpayer's time and money with an investigation of the victims of an embezzlement; a press that refused to print the facts and just heaped more lies and innuendo on a president, his wife, and his staff; a prosecutor who had convicted his victims in his mind and refused to change stride long after in-depth investigation had proven them innocent, even going so far as to threaten the freedom of innocent bystanders when they failed to play ball. Susan MacDougal spent months in jail because she wouldn't perjure herself. Every time Kathleen Willey changed her story - a story the prosecution knew was false - Starr brought charges against Julie Hyatt Steel because her own story never changed.
The real criminals in Whitewater were George H.W. Bush and his little friends who deliberately interfered with the investigation in order to fast-track it into the public eye - originally in hopes that it would taint Clinton enough to lose the '92 election for him - and Starr, who victimized anyone who would not help him "prove" that the Clinton's were criminals. The press, even while acknowledging that the "Clinton murdered Foster" meme was pure conspiracy theory, nevertheless failed to note the sheer irresponsibility of Ken Starr, who investigated the Clintons for the Foster murder repeatedly. To this very day, the press refuses to come clean about Whitewater, still preferring to enhance the myth that it was the Clintons who "committed crimes", in the words of The Washington Post.
So Blumenthal writes a book about that story and every member of the press who refused to acknowledge reality is suddenly full of phony reasons why it is he, not they, who fell down on the job. Please.
The News from 1984 - Via Avedon Carol, this handy, eloquent jeremiad against Tony Blair's New Labour and what they've made - and unmade - of Britain. Author Philip Bowring writes, among other things:
People who once ran important civil society organizations supporting civil liberties and the welfare of immigrants are now ministers backing draconian infringements on liberties and harsh policies toward asylum seekers.
This is not just a reflection on individuals. It raises the question of whether such organizations are being run by people dedicated to principles or by opportunists using them as stepladders to political office.
which is a criticism that goes way beyond Tony Blair, and way beyond Britain. I have to wonder if Avedon realizes just how far it goes. It's an indictment of the class that forms the backbone of both the Labour Party and America's Democrats - not the voters, but the cadres and candidates.
Actually, yes, I do, and far more intimately than you might imagine. I've had some very personal confrontations with the climbing, grasping, back-stabbing scumbags of the Labour ladder. The people who actually run the politics in the Labour Party are careerists who will sacrifice almost anything for their position, and you can be sure that the basic ideals their party is supposed to stand for are no more protected than anything else. The Democrats are similar, of course, but it's worse here because it's a whole lot harder to get kicked out of the Democratic Party than it is to get kicked out of Labour (and thus deprived of your perch) by the leadership. This makes Labour a bit more like the Republican Party these days.
I don't see why that should make any difference to me, though. All four parties are fairly right wing, and I'm not in love with any of them. Labour is a bunch of not-very-convincing socialists and some civil libertarians led by a clever but repulsive guy who wants to be part of the International Rich People's Conspiracy and still pretend he's a good Christian. The Democratic Party is led mostly by some people who are really Republicans; "the cadres" are a bit harder to call, since they are all over the place. The voters just want to be left alone and otherwise get something back for their taxes, and they aren't getting it because it is now fashionable to be penny-wise and pound-foolish and pretend it makes sense.
It's all about what kind of legislation will be passed and how it will affect us, of course. Both Parties overtly claim to want to do some things and not do some others; each party can be pressured to the extent that they live up to those claims. (I said can be, not will be.) The Republicans say (and usually do) things I don't like, and the Democrats kind of drag their feet in most directions. Neither side can actually be trusted to pass the right legislation (or refrain from passing the wrong legislation), which is why accountability matters. The party that is most likely to be secretive at this time is the Republicans, who are also the party most likely to rob you blind. In other times, the Democrats were no better. None of these things are graven in stone, but this is today, and today it's the Democrats who push Freedom of Information and the Republicans who neutralize it. It is unquestionably the Republicans who are doing their best to destroy any ability of a free press to inform the public. If for no other reason than this, they would still have to be stopped. The only tool we have to stop them, sorry as it may be, is the Democratic Party. Alas.
I don't know a lot of Democrats who are Democrats because they are in love with the Democratic Party; most of them are Democrats because the Republicans are worse, and that's about all. Many are actually livid with rage over how poorly the Democratic leadership represents us. None of this is news. It's a question of choosing between the right-wing party and the far-right-wing party, and we all know it. We just don't know why Republicans haven't figured it out yet.
What was the question?
[But read Jim's whole page, which has lots of much cooler stuff on it, on gun control, Iraq, and other things. Hm. I wonder if rises in crime rates could have anything to do with the fact that the police now have more guns?]
Patrick is back at Electrolite, with lots of hot items, such as this romantic interlude in British politics, and the news that Glenn Reynolds has noticed that the excuse for Michael Powell's evil plot seems to be disappearing - the Super DMCA bill could even take your Internet away. But Glenn still makes excuses for media concentration, alas.
Lots of good stuff from Max, like: "Second- (third?) tier Fox blabbermouth Neal Cavuto erupts at Krugman for suggesting that NC mingles news reportage with partisan commentary. I disagree with PK; I see no news reportage going on." Also, do keep up with the Galloway watch. (While I don't really consider the Mirror a great news source, the whole thing still smells of another stupid ploy by the security services. Really, you wouldn't believe some of the moronic ways they come up with to discredit lefties.)
Sam Heldman: I find that I am not much of a blogger these days. Here's what made me realize this fact, with the most clarity. When I read the article in Slate a couple of days ago, proposing that jurors be fined for reaching the "wrong" verdict and financially rewarded for reaching the "right" verdict, the fullest extent of my thinking about the article was, "that's the stupidest damn thing I've ever read in my life." I was right, of course, and I make no apologies for reaching that conclusion, in my own mind, with so little internal deliberation or fancy exposition. But it doesn't make me much of a blogger, does it? Surely the least I could have done, would be to write a hundred words or so about it. Please accept my apologies for my failure to have done so. Sam continues to keep an eye on Bill Pryor, nominee scumbag, too. (And hey, did you know there was a SCOTUSblog?)
CalPundit:The ignorance of Americans about the real world never ceases to amaze me. Ask them what percent of the population is black and they guess it's about a third. Ask them how much they pay in income taxes, and they figure about 50%. Ask them how big the foreign aid budget is and they're off by a factor of 24. This was preceded by another post that covers similar ground. It's not just Americans, you understand; everyone has strong opinions on subjects they know nothing about, and few people see any reason to find out the facts before holding forth on these things. Also see this fine post on how little rich folk really pay for the public welfare and how sad it is that they begrudge even that. (I would add: Yes, that money does benefit them - what we spend on the public welfare increases the safety and stability of our society, whether libertarians want to admit it or not. It ain't charity, it's enlightened self-interest.)
At Rittenhouse Review, Jim marvels at David Frum's theory that we need to privatize fish in order to save them. ("We have to figure out a way to make wild species somebody's property....") Hm, I can see where this is going: "Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish for your privatized species, and he will have to pay you for his catch."
Check out the LiberalOasis interview with Dr. Dean, and also the item asking, "Is Dubya The Next Jimmy Carter?". (Bill also has a link up to an old article from The Sideshow, but you might get more traction using this link.)
This entry over at Silver Rights boggled my mind, if only because of an experience I had on Thursday.
People who are racist may suffer a temporary lapse in mental capacity after interacting with people who are members of a racial minority.
Researchers from Princeton University and Dartmouth College found that white people with a high degree of racial basis (sic) experienced a decrease in "executive function" after spending time talking with black people. Their research appears in the May issue of Psychological Science.
Last Thursday I was at a store in Delaware, buying "spirits", shall we say. I had two bottles in my hand - one Skyy, one Grey Goose. A clerk comes up to me, as I'm picking between fairly expensive vodkas, and asks me if I'd like to know where the malt liquor is. The first thing that came to mind was Dave Chappelle's joke from "Killing Me Softly": Have you ever had something so racist happen to you that you just can't say anything? I couldn't, and stutteringly waved him off as my friend came up with the cart.
This study has just given me license to call anyone even remotely racist an idiot without it being an ad hominem. Well, more license, at least.
I think I would have fallen over laughing if I'd seen this happen. But, gosh, I read somewhere that racism was, like, over, y'know? Could that have been wrong?
The administration's antiterror campaign makes me think of the way television studios really look. The fancy set usually sits in the middle of a shabby room, full of cardboard and duct tape. Networks take great care with what viewers see on their TV screens; they spend as little as possible on anything off camera.
And so it has been with the campaign against terrorism. Mr. Bush strikes heroic poses on TV, but his administration neglects anything that isn't photogenic.
I've written before about the Bush administration's amazing refusal to pay for even minimal measures to protect the nation against future attacks — measures that would secure ports, chemical plants, nuclear facilities and so on. (But the Department of Homeland Security isn't completely ineffectual: this week it helped Texas Republicans track down their Democratic colleagues, who had staged a walkout.)
The neglect of homeland security is mirrored by the Bush administration's failure to follow through on overseas efforts once the TV-friendly part of the operation has come to an end. The overthrow of the Taliban was a real victory — arguably our only important victory against terrorism. But as soon as Kabul fell, the administration lost interest. Now most of Afghanistan is under the control of warlords, the Karzai government is barely hanging on, and the Taliban are making a comeback.
Senator Bob Graham has made an even stronger charge: that Al Qaeda was "on the ropes" a year ago, but was able to recover because the administration diverted military and intelligence resources to Iraq. As former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he's in a position to know. And before you dismiss him as a partisan Democrat, bear in mind that when he began raising this alarm last fall his Republican colleagues supported him: "He's absolutely right to be concerned," said Senator Richard Shelby, who has seen the same information.
Senator Graham also claims that a classified Congressional report reveals that "the lessons of Sept. 11 are not being applied today," and accuses the administration of a cover-up.
Still, we defeated Saddam. Doesn't that make us safer? Well, no.
Of course, everyone knows this now, and no one has any excuse anymore for defending this administration's performance unless they have been hiding in a cave somewhere. Nevertheless, therighties persist in talking as if our refusal to support the shambles that calls itself an administration is some sort of pathological partisanship on our part. When the right raged against Clinton's supposed dictatorial and criminal actions without any evidence that he had any such past or intentions, that was perfectly rational, but when Bush is actually, publicly doing those things and worse, we're crazy to criticize him. It never crosses their minds for a minute to think that perhaps their continued inability to acknowledge the facts, their persistent need to come up with rationalizations for Bush's activities, is what is truly irrational.
Ted Barlow is kinder than I would be; it's no longer simply a matter of conservatives having different beliefs about effective forms of government, but the manifest indifference they show for the very things they said were important only a few short weeks ago. If they ever thought those things were important, what is their reason now for their lack of interest in them? These people gloated over the fact that the United States was able to beat Iraq in a war as if liberals had ever claimed we couldn't, but at no time have they acknowledged that we were right about our real qualms about the invasion, which have proven to be much closer to the case. The simple fact is that if the Bush administration really believed Saddam had the kind of weapons they said he had, and posed the kind of threat they said he did, it was insane to attack him and thus provoke him to use them or - worse - allow them to fall into even more dangerous hands. If they didn't believe it, they had no excuse for going after him based on his alleged (but unproven) possession of WMD, and should have allowed the inspections to continue unhindered. When Bush stood on that aircraft carrier and announced that he'd won the war on terrorism, only an idiot could fail to notice that this was a bit premature. And hey, look, it didn't work! Terrorists are still attacking Americans.
Tell me, what is preventing conservatives (and other pro-invasion types) from admitting that liberals who said, over and over, that Bush cannot be trusted to handle this situation were right? I figure these guys are either drinking toxic amounts of alcohol or someone is paying them an awful lot to make this stuff up - or maybe both. But maybe they are just so superstitious that they cannot help themselves. Still, the only thing that is really consistent about them is their certainty that liberals are bad and wrong, and this usually borders on monomania (when it doesn't entirely cross that line, which it frequently does). In the circumstances, that really fits categorization as insanity.
Jeff Cooper is merely amused at this stuff, but he takes it apart nicely. Still, he, too, is kinder to them than they deserve. Aside from the aristos and theofascists, there is no one who is actually benefiting from the way Bush is running the country, and most of us are endangered by it. If you belong to the first two categories, you are utterly anti-American and worthy of no intellectual defense; if you belong to the latter category and still think there is any defense of Bush, you're deluded. It's pretty simple, really. There are certain things that sensible people do not do. We do not set our houses on fire, we do not seek out winos in the park for sex, and we don't support the Bush administration.
Gen. JC Christian, Patriot, says: "The sad thing is that feminism has taken such a strong hold in this country that many people want to now blame rape on the men who commit it. Can you imagine that?"
Thank you to all the nice people who wrote and said they like to read The Sideshow even though I don't cover as much ground as Atrios does, either because knowing me adds an extra dimension or just because they think it's good. Your remarks have been "noted in the building".
Ari the liar resigns ("He had a long list of fallback lines: "I'm not going to engage in hypotheticals." "I'm not at liberty, unfortunately, to say right now." "I'm not in a position to give you that information."); and so does Blair's press secretary. Spooky.
I sometimes feel like there's hardly any point in quoting Atrios, since everyone reads him anyway. I often feel like I needn't cover issues he's covering, for much the same reason. Only then someone will send me e-mail saying they read The Sideshow because it loads a whole lot faster than all those things on Blogspot, or someone will walk up to me at the pub and say, "I have to read your page to find out what's really going on," and then I feel deeply remiss that I haven't cited damn near everything Atrios has linked, 'cause that boy really does have a knack for finding stuff. But he's not just a heavy linker, and when he writes, that's when we see what he's really about. A lot of people mistake his sometimes gadfly-clown tone for radicalism - you get the feeling he'd have gotten along fine with Abbie Hoffman. But he's actually a fairly clear-eyed centrist (in the real sense of the word) - he's probably a little bit to the right of me - and we could really use a whole lot more commentators with his eye for the heart of the debate. The Republicans survive by muddying the discourse with a lot of bumper-sticker distortions, and there's a great deal to be said for someone who can point out the obvious and bring things down to earth, as he did last night:
Isolation vs. Intervention
Arthur Silber wants to know why conservatives are, in theory, isolationists when it comes to domestic economic policy (or non-interventionists) but interventionists on foreign policy and why liberals are the opposite.
First of all, even ignoring the problems of over-generalization that I know Arthur is well aware of, in this century liberals have been, for the most part, interventionists in foreign policy, with conservatives in the Pat Buchanan mold being the isolationists.
But, aside from that I think it's just a faulty comparison. Minor interventions in the functionings of markets in order to (in theory) make them more competitive and deal with externalities, contracting problems, and assorted rigidities (I rarely hear many calls for the dismantling of the SEC) is something entirely different from thinking one can spread democracy by the sword.
Liberals aren't the statists we're painted as, aside from some minor appropriate interventions, most of us just think that contrary to the rhetoric from the other side the rules of the game have been rigged for the wealthy and powerful, and they have all the refs in their pockets. Or, another way to put it - government intervenes all the time, but from steel tariffs and agricultural subsidies feeding the pockets of large corporations down to corrupt town planners and zoning officials, it just tends to intervene in favor of the winning team. Plenty of industries - from oil to pharmaceuticals to aerospace to advanced electronics, etc... etc... - have lots of "special rights" and cozy relationships with the federal government. And, at the more local level plenty of wealthy developers have cozy relationship with state and local officials.
It's wrong to think that liberals are somehow enamored of government while conservatives aren't. It is true that conservatives and Republicans have adopted libertarian rhetoric, but aside from cutting taxes on capital and bringing down top marginal rates, there's very little follow-through elsewhere.
This is, of course, as plain as the nose on my face, which is why it's so annoying that no one else is saying it.
I used to explain to people that I have no imagination. If I had imagination, I would write science fiction novels.* Since I don't have imagination, I am perpetually astonished at some of the bizarre "explanations" people come up with for why we should all walk around behaving in ways that are completely contraindicated by the facts. I mean, I've still never gotten over the stupid idea, forced on me in grade school, that little girls should walk around bare-legged in freezing weather, even when there is snow on the ground at least as high as their knees. I didn't have the imagination to figure out why my elders, who put unwieldy mittens on my hands because it was not good for me to get cold, would nevertheless insist (over my objections) on sending me out h
I was just over at Newsarama looking at a bizarre and scary article called The AFA Attacks!