Click image for full Mike Luckovich cartoon.
May we all have a healthy and prosperous new year. A few things I'm hoping for in 2008:
Let's move political news to the Style section, how 'bout it? That's what we're getting, anyway. I guess the New York Times feels it has to keep up with Robin Givhan's vacuous pieces in the Washington Post. It's a race to the bottom all right, but who's bottom?
I suppose it's possible that Mark Leibovich has a pitch-perfect ear for politics and that everything he writes about the atmospheres of the Democrats' rallies provides us with deep insight into their meaning. I suppose it's possible that the Beltway conventional wisdom reflected by his story is 100% spot on.
Possible, but not likely. Here's the last paragraph, in regard to a conversation with Pervez Musharraf:
“We also talked about the importance of the upcoming elections,” Mr. Edwards said, meaning, presumably, in Pakistan, not Iowa.Why would anyone presume that? Wouldn't it make more sense to think that Edwards was talking about both elections, that he was talking about change coming and telling Musharraf that he had better be on the democratic side of that change?
Seriously, Iowa and its unrepresentative process should not settle anything. But the national press corps loves to get it over with so they can go home.
What is it about their motorized, climate-controlled 4WD sofas that makes people want to run over everything? I'm not opposed to fun, even fun whose appeal I don't understand, but why do we allow them to destroy what we hold in common for our descendants?
Do news reporters ego-surf? Do they Google themselves like the rest of us? Or are they jaded to having their names in print? Nope, nothing like that - they just couldn't possibly find a low-volume blog.
I make a habit of keywording their names, but they get far too many hits to come here. The question is how they get feedback from their readers. Occasionally, there's a controversy, and their defensiveness as a rule seems complete. Their outlets' ombudsmen, if they have them, exist mainly to defend them - or, now and then, to softly critique them.
I've seen a reporter or two show up on Editor and Publisher to defend themselves. But mainly, they seem almost as insulated from public dissatisfaction as Duhbya himself.
There is no real controversy about whether waterboarding is torture. It is now when Americans do it, and it was when the Nazis, the communist Chinese, the Viet Cong, and the Soviets did it. It even was during the Inquisition, but the New York Times still says:
To the already fierce controversy over whether the Bush administration authorized torture has been added the specter of a cover-up.Duhbya and Rummy (with Darth Cheney in the dark shadows) authorized waterboarding, among other tortures. There's no doubt about it. They had everyone ask mother-may-I from Rummy. They even had Gonzo and John Yoo write down their transparently bullshit rationales that add up to two giggle-provoking assertions newer before imagined to be plausible in American law:
O.k., as everyone knows, newspapers have no future, not in their present form (nor in their present numbers, but that's another topic). Young people don't read them, despite decades of editorial attempts to pander to them.
Even the middle-aged don't read them as much as we once did. I still do, but I don't represent any group large enough to base a business model on.
Though I've been reading a daily paper for forty years - yeah, I started at age eight - see how weird I am - lately I prefer reading on line. Gray type on gray newsprint not only gets all over my fingers, it's also much harder to read than an LCD display. For the increasingly weak-eyed, middle-aged demographic that newspapers still serve, that matters.
The one thing I still like about reading a dead tree edition is that I know when I'm done. I start at the back, dispose of the soft news sections, usually including sports after I read Tank McNamara. I find the jumps that interest me, flip to their beginnings, and wind up back at the jump, where I continue with back-to-front reading. Yeah, sure, weird, but it's an algorithm that works for me.
I can't do that on line. On line, reading is never done. When I start the weekly recycling, though, and browse the unopened papers, I almost always find stories I missed on line. If I represented a large demographic, they would be looking for a way to help me, but alas, when newsprint is no more, I'll miss the ability to finish reading the day's news.
Update: Last sentence clarified.
The FBI's getting into biometrics in a big way. Using technology tested in Iraq, they'll be creating dossiers on us, storing and comparing. DNA from birth is only a matter of time.
And, get this, if your employer - or maybe even just a prospective employer - wants a background check on you, it can ask the FBI to hang onto your fingerprints, your palm print, your facial geometry, and your iris scan so that the FBI can notify your boss if you ever run into a little trouble.
The only privacy left is inside your head, and maybe that's enough. Yeah, sure.
Catching up on the dead tree edition of the Boston Globe...
This story on sex selection abortion gladdens my heart. Fingers crossed, it's a start on avoiding the military diaspora of Asian males that a lack of prospects for marriage and family that might otherwise be caused by the foolishly chosen scarcity of females.
One line half-way down the column buried the lead:
[M]others would often apologize for giving birth to a girl.I think of the day my daughter was born, and I wonder how anyone could possibly apologize or expect an apology about such an event.
The EEOC is permitting corporations to put their retirees into two classes - never mind the equal in their very name. The two classes are the people the companies will continue to insure and the ones in Medicare. They're doing this because the companies really, really need it, or they'll have to dump health care for all their retirees. Or, even worse, they might join the lobbying war for national health care.
Single payer makes all this nonsense go away.
Newtie Gingrich has written a book, and in it - get this - he's claiming to be an ardent environmentalist. What's next? A syndicated column giving marital advice?
Juliet Eilperin gives Newt's book a "balanced" review, rather than a fair one or an objective one. Maybe derisive laughter wouldn't translate well into print in the Washington Post. But I suspect journamalism at work. Bending over backward to conservatives is so expected by the handmaidens to power. Here, some bon mots, starting with the headline (not Eilperin's responsibility):
Green RepublicansThere's this cherry-picked statistic:
Newt Gingrich gets tough on the U.S. role in the environment
[T]hey question the wisdom of imposing a mandatory, nationwide cap on carbon emissions on the grounds that Europe's carbon dioxide emissions rose faster than America's between 2000 and 2004.Here's a graph that can put that captious crap into context. Surely even the WaPo has access to Google so that they could find a source not printed by the competition.
Gingrich and Maple contend that the private sector, not government, holds the answers to the globe's biggest problems.This is the most patent bullshit, but Eilperin's comment is the vacuous:
The question is whether people in places such as Bangladesh can afford to wait and see if they're right.If the private sector could have solved environmental problems, why haven't we seen any progress so far? The private sector is built to exploit externalities. It's like trying to solve peonage with Ebenezer Scrooge.
Just now opened the Boston Globe dead tree edition from Sunday, and since this is in my core subject area, it has to go up, even late. Hey, would putting the word bullshit in a mission statement render it buzzword non-compliant? Omitting it would be insincere, so no mission statement for me...
Click image for complete strip.
When a Republican says, "I don't recall," he's almost always hiding something.
(Click the cel to visit Salon for the whole strip. Hat tip Crooks & Liars.)
How many Americans know this? I didn't.
In the United States, where almost all crops are now genetically modified, the debate is largely closed.For that matter, what does this sentence actually mean? Are nearly all harvested individual plants GMO? Or merely some individual plants in each commercial species?
Every story has two sides. But there's so much to say about this story that makes me sick that I have to say that sometimes those sides are good and evil.
Here in the Christmas season, I'm supposed to be finishing up the regular work of disappointing my family, near and far, and myself and trying to finish my "joyful" shopping. Instead, I'm morose that anyone can defend keeping people in penury this close to bondage.
I'm outraged that anyone like Reggie Brown of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange can utter so much bullshit in support of craven desire to exploit the poor:
If we weren’t paying a very competitive wage and giving these workers enough money to send to their families in Mexico and Central America, we wouldn’t be able to attract a labor force...He wants to pay third-world wages. It's his business model.
The Florida Tomato Growers Exchange is an agricultural cooperative of Florida tomato growers who operate as socially accountable farm employers by participating in comprehensive programs that certify employment, health, housing and safety practices. The industry is strongly committed to supporting long-term solutions that improve the lives of their employees.I love tomatoes. Now I know what they're fertilizing them with.
CIA: You didn't ask for the tapes.
Commission: We asked for everything. You didn't tell us the tapes existed.
CIA: We were very cooperative with your requests. We preserved the tapes in case you guessed they existed.
Commission: John McLaughlin said you gave us everything responsive. You don't think a videotape is a document?
CIA: A videotape might be documentation, but only something on paper is a document. Or maybe email. At least for now.
Commission: So no one in the agency ever wrote a memo on the existence of the tapes?
CIA: See, that's one of those times when when the tapeness of a memo turns it from a document into something tapey, and since you didn't ask specifically for documentation related to videotapes, there's no way you could expect us to hand it over. But we were very cooperative. You couldn't have written your narrative without our information.
Commission: Which is why we needed all of it.
CIA: We gave you everything you asked for.
Commission: Is there anything else you have that we supposedly didn't ask for?
CIA: We always cooperate with commissions while they are active.
So now Giuliani's hospitalization was due to a "massive headache" instead of flu-like symptoms. If he really had "every test imaginable," he must have had an MRI to eliminate or confirm several of the possible diagnoses that I'm aware of for massive headache:
The problem with trying to handicap the Republican field is that they're all so handicapped already. For example, before Fred Thompson dithered away his buzz, I thought he would be the perfect empty vessel into which Republicans could pour their shake 'n' bake cult of personality. He could play another vacuous character on the national stage and quench the silly wingnut thirst for another Ronald Reagan.
But, no, he couldn't even remember his best line from The Hunt for Red October, "Your average Russkie, son, don't take a dump without a plan." Turned out even Jeri didn't have much of a plan to prop up her man without his unmistakable lassitude showing through.
So, the national press corps is back to searching for the dark horse who has the legs to pass Romney and Giuliani. This week it's Huckabee, which really shows how far the lunacy has spread.
Who can unite the plutocrats, the authoritarians, and the theocons? Draft Dick Cheney!
Wouldn't John McCain and Joe Lieberman really like to spend more time with their families?
(Click the image to see the full comic.)
There is only one thing you need to remember about Mitt Romney: His every public act is about brand positioning, not anything that would imply real commitment.
Politics is just another form of business for him, and that requires the ability to discard his past like the cheap suit he has never had.
From where I sit at the tail end of the post-war baby boom, things look pretty good. Every time I have to spend some more precious and increasingly expensive gasoline, there are a dozen classic hits stations to choose from on the radio. Let's do the time warp again!
The last time I was in Tennessee, I learned something that should have been obvious. There are actually classic country stations, playing the music I grew up avoiding like the plague.
Why is this? Why should a bunch of middle-aged fossils like me dominate the dial? No, it's not the fact that we're still so uncool that we actually buy music instead of finding it on some file-sharing server in what we still quaintly think of as the Warsaw Pact. It's for the same reason Social Security needed to be (and was) rescued in 1983 - we're the biggest demographic ... ever. That's why every business sector in the economy has always catered to our every whim.
Or, anyway, we have been the biggest demo. But our days are numbered. For one thing, we've started to die off. For another, we don't spend money the way people who don't have much stuff do. The kids upgrade cell phones every year or so; I, for example, still have a five- or six-year-old, scratched up cell phone. I don't need to watch low-res concert video just because Verizon wants me to.
Soon - way too soon for me - Gen Y is going to slam our music into a wheelchair (where, thankfully, our clothing fashions long ago disappeared) and try to force it into a home. The "classic" radio will play rap, giving us all headaches, and cars won't even come with CD players any more. If we have MP3 players, if, they won't integrate with anything, since MP8 players will be the latest thing, and we won't be able to make the retinal scan interface play anything but Barry Manilow - and how the hell did that crap get TiVoed on there?
The jig is going to be up, and we're really going to miss it. We're finally going to understand how the WWII generation felt when we cavalierly abandoned their nightclub torch song Sinatra-ville.
It isn't going to sit well with us. There are far too many narcissists among us who won't be able to deal with the world not telling them every five minutes that they are the most important people on earth. Or at least the most important wallets.
At least we'll still dominate the nursing home market.
Originally a comment at Philosoraptor.
If you don't get children thinking as they learn from as early an age as possible, they'll never shake off the rote regurgitation of factoids or, at best, the ability to solve exactly the class of problem that you've taught them. They'll never grasp the meaning in the equation.
Teachers matter, but for the most part parents are decisive. If they permit their children to follow the truth, their children may try to understand how things work instead of how their parents and teachers want them to work. The academically free approach is perfectly encapsulated in Richard Feynman's title, What Do You Care What Other People Think?. I was blessed with a mom who introduced me to Darwin at age eleven (me, not her!). (She was a public school educator and also an exceptional mentor.)
None of my teachers were going to do this. They were too conservative (in the South a long time ago), too unable themselves to question their social conditioning.
I went to college with a botanist who told me that in no case could a blackberry be considered a berry because botany classified blackberries as drupes (actually, an aggregate of drupelets, but nevermind). No amount of lexicography could move her off that dogma to a more open-minded view that words have different and still legitimate senses. She teaches high school science now, hopefully with a little more perspective.
Since I knew this botanist at Harvard, for chrissake, my result matches jimbales's for elite institutions. Critical thinking appears to be as damn rare in them as everywhere else.
Keeping the Senate in pro forma session to block Duhbya's typically invidious recess appointments is the one thing Harry Reid is doing right, and I have to give him credit for it a second time.
Now, why can't he generalize the anger he feels about this to the whole goddamn Bushist apparatus?
The sun is still low in the sky, and there's a lot of darkness yet to come this winter. A metaphor for American politics...
Image from Wikimedia used under Creative Commons, rights owned by Jailbird.
Is there anything the Bushists could do that would piss Congress off enough to get them to start saying NO? I'm no fan of earmarks, but Duhbya's firm and unvarying willingness to screw all of the gentleman's agreements that previously made the government work ought to have dawned over the marbleheads in Congress. Maybe, just maybe, Duhbya hitting the gravy train will awaken them from their craven, self-interested slumbers.
Update: Thought we needed some variation from all the spousal abuse metaphors...
I love stories of survival. They've moved me for more than 40 years. There are not many books I recall from elementary school, but I remember a compendium of survival stories published by Reader's Digest that I read in second grade.
That the Dominguez family survived in the snow is conventionally a miracle, but everyone in the CNN story is apportioning credit and blame bassackwards. The snow was an act of God; the rescue was human.
The definition of miracle seems to be something good that one had given up expecting.
Two Republican candidates have cancer. The spouse of one Democratic candidate has cancer. Which has gotten the most pundit and press attention?
Elizabeth Edwards's recurrence of cancer was conventionally supposed to spell the end of her husband's candidacy, but the Edwardses decided to live the rest of her life to the fullest and hopefully for years, rather than settling down to wait for her to die.
Fred Thompson has non-Hodgkins lymphoma, but the press has basically said ho-hum. I happened to channel-surf past "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" last night, and the contrast between his appearance there - playing himself only with better lines - and his skeletal appearance now was a hell of a lot more than better make-up.
Rudy spent the night in the hospital with those ubiquitous "flu-like symptoms". His spokeswoman said afterward (my emphasis):
After precautionary tests the doctors found nothing of concern at this time...Will the press herd question this? My bet: nope.
Can creationists really teach science that they actively disbelieve despite the evidence? Of course not, but they fervently want to get their fundie soldiers into position to poison the minds of children against reality.
For cryin' out loud, the ICR is a young earth creationist outfit. They've been purveying captious lies for more than thirty years in my own experience. They not only disbelieve biology, paleontology, and geology but also physics, cosmology, and astronomy. Maybe they believe chemistry. Maybe. They are lunatics.
(Not all Texans, mind you, just the ones in charge. Y'know, Duhbya's successors.)
Can anyone still believe that the White House was not involved in destruction of recordings of torture? No one who isn't in the middle of a do-it-yourself colonscopy.
Basically, this story describes Bandini, Lambert, & Locke negotiating with the CIA. Addington, Gonzales, and Miers were all involved. You know which direction the orders were travelling, even if they might have been in the form of nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Update: Really from the New York Times, which finally lays out the prisoners' legal rationale for including these non-Guantánamo interrogation tapes in the order about Gitmo prisoners: al Zubaydah may have implicated them during torture.
The Boston Globe's twin endorsements on Sunday are probably more influential than my own by dint of vastly more readers, but they're still not very important in the modern political world.
Endorsing Obama is a slight departure from the conventional. Hillary of course is the safe candidate. The problem I have with Obama is his very lack of a confrontational approach to our completely broken political culture. It's not his fault that he can't risk visibly acting on his true outsider status to speak to that; maybe if he gets elected he will prove to have more steel than I've seen so far.
Hill has plenty of steel, but she's thoroughly compromised and utterly pro-establishment. Her collegial cozying up to Lindsey Graham after the impeachment fiasco is akin to John McCain's willingness to kiss Duhbya's exceedingly hairy ass after what Rove did to McCain in South Carolina in 2000.
The Globe's endorsement of McCain is of course completely soft-headed and conventional. They don't agree with him about anything, but he has a reputation - ill-deserved - as a straight talker. Oh, and he's mythically bipartisan, not toxic.
Please, what we need is not to transcend partisanship, but to severely punish the party that screwed us. A real stand from the Globe for something other than the conventional narrative would have gone like this:
We're willing to endorse the lesser of evils. That's the way politics is. But we're not willing to endorse anyone from the Republican Party, even in a primary. The GOP has seriously damaged this country, and no one bearing its standard deserves election to any nationally significant position.Yeah, never happen. Too partisan.
Transparency is a core value of open societies, but it isn't to the sort of Ayn Rand price-on-everything universe that the Bushists (and Alan Greenspan) profess to love as long as it doesn't hurt their cronies.
Corporations, of course, may use Rand-like laissez-faire rhetoric, but they really just want the playing field tilted in their favor. That's why all copyright law for the past at least twenty years has been destructive of public rights and fair use. Digital rights management, enabled by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, gives them everything and the rest of us, whatever's left.
Commenting here, I finally realized the truth of Fox News's slogan. It's really:
We report (a biased view of the controversy). You decide (based on your prejudices).See, they even trim their own quotes to match their ideology.
To start with, the U.S. blew the U.K.'s investigation of a 2006 terrorist plot by pushing Pakistan to arrest Rashid Rauf immediately.
This left the Pakistanis claiming they didn't have enough evidence against him in the plot.
Also, the Pakistani interrogation was untrustworthy because it may have included torture.
But the British still wanted Rauf in connection with a 2002 murder.
Then, the Pakistanis let Rauf slip through their fingers, and we're supposed to believe that (a) this was an accident and (b) they really, really want to recapture him.
Did I leave anything out? The Keystone Kops, maybe.
Of course, the hot skin cells reprogrammed as stem cells are different from fetal stem cells. How will that affect research results? We can't tell yet.
... and Americans don't need to know. That's the Bushist rationale. There's nothing they won't cover up.
I'm sure they'll appeal the decision to classify White House visitor logs as public records. The records won't be available before Jan. 2009, I would bet.
Yet when Bill Clinton was President, the Republicans argued that everything the Secret Service did should be public, the better to find stains related to Monica Lewinsky. Sure, the public really, really needed to know about the oral sex. But policy? No way.
As I told the office of one of the good guys, John Kerry, "The Congress needs new leadership."
I once offended a local Democrat by deriding Joe Lieberman, and I haven't seen her at a meeting since. I wonder how she feels about Lieberman's endorsement of John McCain. I feel completely vindicated, much as when I pushed a racist voter away from my Congressional candidate in 1974.
My fervent hope is that the Senate Majority Leader who defeats Harry Reid in January of 2009 will drum Lieberman out of the Democratic Party caucus. Could it be more clear that he's not a Democrat? You have to wonder about Connecticut Democrats who voted for him.
Another quaint Constitutional right that the Bushists are shitting on:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.Let me get this straight: Telecom amnesty is required because one or two phone companies declined an illegal Bushist surveillance program at some point? Telecom amnesty furthers the government's goal of spying on all of us in violation of the Fourth Amendment? And that's the reason I should support telecom amnesty?
The very nature of our country and our government fundamentally transforms step by step, with little opposition. We all were inculcated with the notion that what distinguished our free country from those horrendous authoritarian tyrannies, both right and left, of the Soviet bloc, Latin America and the Middle East were things like executive detentions, torture, secret prisons, spying on their own citizens, unprovoked invasions of sovereign countries, and exemptions from the law for the most powerful -- precisely the abuses which increasingly characterize our government and shape our political values.
Your hooded masses yearning to breathe free...
(Click on the image.)
Love the extended pinky, too.
The world may think the Bushists just gave in on global warming and emissions targets. Huh-uh.
Those targets remain in the agreement — including a possible cut in emissions of up to 40 percent below 1990 levels by rich countries by 2020, and a 50 percent cut in emissions globally by 2050 — but they are now a footnote to the nonbinding preamble, not a main feature of the plan."Put Hans back on, Ellis. You have no idea what kind of man you're dealing with, but I do."
Based on a week's longevity on CNN's front page, this is the most important story facing America today:
This alone is enough to prove that the media prefers inconsequential froth. If it bleeds, it leads, but to really last someone's gotta get nekkid. It's just too bad it was men, not a bevy of Hollywood Barbies.
Update: December 18th and this is still on CNN's front page.
Update 2: December 20th and finally CNN has found some naked women. This story will probably be up until the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition comes out sometime after the Super Bowl.
Republicans don't care as long as the answer's "right". They're more likely to say, "HEY, look over there."
The Bushists will go to any length to accrete power to themselves. Wherever dissent occurs in the executive branch, they will move to crush it. It's the kind of people they are.
Of course, they will dress it up in legalese and apply the wrong legal principle to cover their power grab. Here, they claim they are pursuing civilian control of the military, which is clearly not at issue, when in fact they seek to destroy two things that vex them politically:
Not sure this guy is as "qualified" as Duhbya, but he's on the gravy train.
For those who still believe the sainted market corrects executive compensation to its actual value, bullshit!
Maybe I've missed it, but I haven't seen much written about stress positions. If the New York Times won't call waterboarding torture, you know they probably would liken stress positions to having a hangnail. (I just found Slate.)
So, how do you think our interrogators get their victims into those stress positions? You think they use sweet reason?
What she said. Be sure to read this source of hers.
As a youth, I had heard all about the banality of evil, but I persisted in denial. There must have been something particular and defective in the German character, for instance, that permitted Hitler to coarsen ordinary morality out of his people. First, jealousy and fear, then petty cruelty and thuggery, then aggressive war and torture, and then holocaust.
By now, I know that the moral and judgemental defects that lead from fear to mass murder infect the entire human race. Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, Hutu, Turks, Arabs, Israelis, and of course Americans. I should have known this earlier; what we did to Africans that caused the Civil War should have been enough. Before that, we committed genocide on native Americans. Even before that, my people in the British Isles brutalized and killed each other for the slimmest mindfuck reasons like divine right of kings or "Christian" sectarianism.
The yawning abyss between humane and human might be more obvious, I guess, though only in the way that a runaway train is more obvious when you're standing on the tracks than when you're momentarily safe on the platform. Atrocities come naturally to us. They are our cultural and genetic heritage, and we live in a period when the Bushists have largely rendered law impotent to restrain them.
The Bushist excuses for torture committed by Americans continue their - and our - lapse from the hope that liberty and democracy could ameliorate our brutal human nature. Now, having abandoned our higher principles for base and bloody violence, we Americans are simply another senescent empire on the verge of self-destruction.
The same goes for the redemptive hope that Christianity sometimes gives. Those in power call themselves Christians, but they have rationalized the same expedience as Pontius Pilate. Their excuses for torture would permit crucifixion so long as we cut down and revived Jesus before he died from blood loss and exposure.
As for me, I have to work hard to restrain myself from advocating the gallows and instead to suggest that we may need a new Spandau - perhaps Guantánamo - not for terrorists but for our own home-grown war criminals.
The hardcore Bushists will view this acquittal and mistrial as proof that they were right to say that law cannot handle domestic terror. They will argue that only suspension of habeas corpus can work with "those people". Who needs evidence when they have their overwhelming suspicion?
The Bushists are anti-American; they don't believe in our founding principle of due process.
House Republicans are still carrying water for the Bushists, in this case carrying it over to the waterboard. The New York Times and the AP still can't bear to call it torture, but anyone whose head is not up his (or her!) ass knows it is.
At least half of Washington has gone drooling, gibbering, Freddy Krueger insane. When will the media notice?
I'd like to see a microbe make natural gas out of the air. Fuel and a solution to global warming. Then maybe oxygen would become a pollutant!
Turns out James Watson is an octoroon! And if you know that old word with the bigoted one-drop heritage, you're either reading too much Faulkner or what? Bigots themselves aren't literate enough to remember it. Unless maybe they're James Watson.
(Hat-tip to onegoodmove.)
If you read deep in the Boston Globe today, you'll find this:
Yesterday, Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that a delegation from China, one of the biggest producers of the gases linked to global warming, told him at the international climate-change conference that it was ready to cut greenhouse gas emissions if the United States first set mandatory reductions of its own - a plan the Bush administration has consistently rejected.Duhbya will be gone in 13 months and 8 days. China will still be there spewing out carbon dioxide, while Duhbya out to pasture will release only relatively small amounts of methane spiced with sulfur compounds.
The morally bankrupt Washington Post has Robin Givhan assigned to snark the clothing of every Presidential candidate. They'll claim they're balanced, but Givhan is carefully inserting the Beltway consensus narrative into every piece of crap she writes. Here's the latest installment.
Of course, the person who most deserves to be fired is the editor who decided that Givhan could make a useful contribution to American political discourse.
Harry Reid has not been as big a disappointment as Nancy Pelosi, simply because I didn't expect much from him. I had great hopes that she would bring some liberal sanity to Washington and, more important, that she would have the guts to make some things stick. Reid, I hoped, would at least tame the Bushist penchant for appointing extremists to Federal offices. Even with those low expectations, he has been underwhelming, though I was thrilled at his pro forma sessions.
Now, Mitch McConnell is dictating budget terms to the Senate Democratic majority! McConnell says:
I think we are being consistent here against higher taxes, consistently against greater regulation, consistently against creating new causes of action in bill after bill after bill...Consistently against democracy, I'd say. Doesn't he remember who lost in 2006? Doesn't he remember his own anti-filibuster rhetoric in the previous years. Of course he does. His principle is winning, not consistency. He's playing hardball, while the Democrats play blind man's bluff.
Whenever someone claims I was just as blind to Bill Clinton's faults as they want to be to Duhbya's lack of virtues, I can answer with one word, "Rwanda." He was a President who refused to call obvious genocide by its name, lest he then be obligated to do something about it, obligated morally and by the UN Charter, to which the U.S. is a signatory confirmed by the Senate. Now, we have a President who refuses to call obvious torture what it is.
There is a small difference in favor of each: Clinton did not order the genocide, where Duhbya ordered the torture. But the genocide did kill half a million people, while torture has killed at most a few dozen.
I wonder, will Duhbya repent after he has pardoned all those who executed his unlawful orders?
Dan Froomkin labors away at the benighted Washington Post trying to shed a little light into all their smug Beltway denial. A vital challenge for anything that backs up the Bushist propaganda - even if it comes from a refreshing exponent of reality - is, "Prove it."
Update: Looking at the ABC videos of Kiriakou (hmm, the feminine form of a Greek name), I'm a bit skeptical of him. He's such a boy scout, and he's confirming so much without demurring from any question, that he seems more like an actor than a spy.
The Washington Post despises John Edwards, and that's a good enough recommendation for me!
Mitt Romney's speech, which I didn't bother to watch, has opened the floodgates for the journalistic deconstruction of Mormonism. Everyone who had an article in development is trying to get it published before Mitt vanishes after Iowa and New Hampshire choose Huckabee and who-the-hell-knows-who.
This piece makes the LDS (say "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" and you'll know why the abbreviation is popular) sound similar to Scientology when someone crosses over the line into saying what really happened with Joseph Smith/L. Ron Hubbard. Sure, LDS is not as imperialistic with nonbelievers, nor as likely to sue, but both want to keep the curtain closed on the Wizard.
I would really like to read a secular explanation of how a cult grows large enough to graduate to mainstream religion. Paul had something really powerful going on inside him. What was it? How did he pull in other people as fervent believers? The official line of the Catholic Church and indeed of its Protestant sects is that Christianity is the one true religion. That's explanatory for a believer but loses its probative power in light of all the other cases from other religions. What did Muhammad have that Mitt Romney would love to have a little of?
What gives a person the charisma to attract disciples, not just fellows? Sure, most people have a desire to believe, and many of them want to retreat to childhood's refuge in a dominating parent, but this is not just a few quirky personalities. This is practically everyone, leaving unbelievers like me to be the quirky ones.
I'd really like for some astute psycho-socio-histo-genius to explain it to me because I haven't met an explanation that satisfies me. Of course, I'm not going to become the genius's disciple; I just don't have the personality for that.
What struck me most about the article was way down in p. 3:
But these books and articles also worried conservatives within the church. In 1981, Mormon apostle Boyd K. Packer, a leading conservative, famously cautioned: "Some things that are true are not very useful." Mormon historians who do their work "regardless of how they may injure the Church or destroy the faith of those not ready for 'advanced history,' " he said, may find themselves in "great spiritual jeopardy."There's a critical conflict inherent in this that I've noticed for a long time, though I'm just recently beginning to appreciate its central importance.
Now it's Mitt Romney's hair the Washington Post wants us to hear about. Would someone please send Robin Givhan back to middle school.
Hey, if it's good enough for Ted Williams, it's good enough for the likes of you.
Scooter Libby helped out Valerie Plame to aid a craven political smear in a way that damaged American national security. She did after all work on WMDs. For this "service", Scooter got:
"No recollection," when uttered by a Bushist of any stripe, means "if I told you I wasn't involved, that would be perjury."
There is actually some policy coverage in this story:
[Giuliani] focused on economic issues, particularly his plans to cut the federal corporate tax rate, ease regulatory restraints, and provide generous tax incentives for individuals to buy their own health insurance. More than four months after sketching the outlines of a healthcare plan, Giuliani has provided no details on its impact on the US Treasury.It's not the topic of the story, which starts out as another poll-driven, horse race story, but at least it's in there in paragraph 9. And the rest of the story after the jump covers Giuliani's stump speech with actual context and a critique founded in reality. Bravo!
Is there anything the Washington Democrats won't allow the Bushists to do?
Nancy: You're not tough if you cave every time someone questions your toughness.
It is possible that the Bushists are claiming consent by silence when in fact there was none. That's a completely consistent pattern, too.
As in we've got ours. When the studios claim they want "reasonable compromises that are in the best interests of our entire industry," keep your hand on your wallet.
The quotes from the press releases show exactly who is interested in negotiating. The studios just want to steal.
So, if racist Chicago cops do it, it's torture, but if the CIA does it, it's enhanced interrogation. At least, that's what the New York Times tells me.
The Bushists will do whatever they want to do. They will accept no legal or practical restraint from democracy. The Congress has three powers that matter:
Someone might identify a torturer, and we can't have that! What would that do for the torturers' morale?
How is it that the Republicans can oppose a responsible, revenue-neutral fix for AMT and expect the voters not to punish them for it? It's been working for years.
When push comes to not even shove but excuse-me, the GOP puts the richest of the rich - a few hedge fund managers and their even better-heeled clients - ahead of millions of middle class wage earners, not to mention fiscal sanity. They know the press won't call them on it.
Really, is there anything that comes out of Mitch McConnell's mouth that's not flavored with bullshit? When he says "a lot of other Americans", he means a very small number of overpaid financial manipulators - many of the same people who gave us the credit crisis.
The Democrats, if they had a lick of sense, would make the Republicans filibuster this openly and visibly and for a long time. Have the Democratic Senators who are running for President come back to D.C. every few days for another cloture vote and issue a zillion press releases about what's at stake.
Update: Of course, the Democrats have already caved again (and the Times has changed the story under my original link).
I've been thinking about some wild speculation on the future of journalism, but meanwhile I just noticed something about the future of journalists. I had previously noticed that Mac Daniel, once of the Globe, is now spokesman for the Turnpike Authority. Today, I was reading along about the sheer brazen gall of a man who put his 4-year-old son on the Massport payroll. When the story got to the testimonials to the guilty man's character, my attention was flagging, but I skimmed down to the bottom and found a familiar name, Matthew Brelis, speaking for Massport.
Brelis used to report for the Globe, too. I knew him when he worked in the western suburbs. My memory is that he worked for a different paper, but I could be wrong. While I wasn't a fan at the time, he moved up, and eventually started reporting on aviation, including the 9/11 attacks.
Who knows, this may be one reason reporters are no longer eager to dig. Their industry is shrinking, and they never know when they'll need a job.
Everybody hates 'em.
The Eagles showed the three things you have to do to compete with the Pats, and the Ravens did them even better:
The deputy commander of Guantánamo tells us that "four to six" prisoners harmed themselves in the past month or two. He doesn't have a precise number? No, he just won't give it.
He also tells us that the suicide attempts are about public relations, despite the fact that they happen in secret and the inmates have no access to any information confirming for them that anyone knows about it.
And he tell us that, despite substantial blood loss from a self-inflicted wound to the throat, the prisoner was never in danger of dying. Riiight.
Well, isn't that just ... bullshit from start to finish.
It's pretty hard to cast any sympathetic light on those prisoners at Guantánamo who really are terrorists, but the Bushists have managed even that with their attempt to carve out a lawless enclave.
Anyone older than about six should be able to see through Samuel Bodman's lame "It is wrong to single out an industry, the oil industry or any industry" for new taxes. So, it's perfectly fine to single out the oil industry for sweetheart tax breaks but immoral to repeal them?
The Bushists still count on Americans to be idiots. For a long time, they got away with it.
I'm not a fan of ethanol, however...
Will Peter Canellos use the death of every old Republican hypocrite (redundant?) to "raise questions" about the Clintons? (You'll notice there's no mention of Hyde's own "youthful" indiscretion - when he was 41.) Well, Whitewater nostalgia is easy crap to write when you're on deadline, so unless the Globe rips him outside the Beltway, I'd guess yes. Then, he'd just audition for Fox.
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
Seriously, how do I get a job like the sinecure Canellos has?
I have no problem with vigilance, nor with continuing international pressure. But, seriously, it's a warning sign that Iran suspended its nuclear program? You'd think Duhbya was the first one ever to recognize that proliferation is a bad thing. I suppose I should stop complaining and just be glad he has finally come to understand that.
So, Iran has/has no nuclear weapons program, and "nothing's changed". Yep, that's about right. No facts could ever make a dent. Of course, Condi still justifies going into Iraq because of decades-old behavior. Any day now, I'm expecting Duhbya to rescue the Tutsis in Rwanda.
Of course, Iran, like Iraq before it, wanted its adversaries (including us) to think it has WMD, especially nukes. They're trying to take on protective coloration so the price of attacking appears too high. Then again, even without their having WMD, attacking Iraq proved too expensive in blood and treasure. Hey, how about Sudan! Ha.
I can't believe we're still not clean on phosphorus. Of course, I'm guilty, too. I only recently switched to a green dishwasher detergent, which I supplement with a small amount of Cascade if I need a little phosphorus and chlorine to get the dishes clean. But nearly 40 years ago, eutrophication was a known problem due to phosphorus run-off. Those radicals at National Geographic reported on it.
The Globe story is not very good. First, there's the nonsensical mention that phosphorus is a "natural element". True, but it's the artificial phosphorus that matters. The reporter at least mentions that later, but he never gives any sense of the relative magnitudes of the human sources.
Then, the story meanders back and forth. Its narrative is so confused that it's hard to imagine any remedy other than starting over from scratch.
Duhbya's trying to have a legacy in the Middle East that's not about the sandy quagmire in Iraq. He certainly doesn't have anything to burnish. Of course, it was just a photo op. That's what these guys do.
Of course, Bill Clinton tried pretty much the same thing, the difference being that he actually had paid attention to peace before the last year.
... against strongman rule - by a hair. Chávez says, "For now, we could not do it." (emphasis added)
My guess: He'll be back with another proposal that includes provisions intended to mollify just enough of the opposition coalition. All he needs is 50% plus 1, after all.
The Boston Globe has a Google mash-up of homicide data for Boston. With a month to go in 2007, there have been 63 homicides in Boston, which is arithmetically convenient for a city of about 630,000 (metro Boston is much bigger). That's a risk of 1 in 10,0000.
More than 40,000 Americans will die in car accidents this year. Thus the risk to all 300 million of us in America of dying in a car accident is substantially greater than 1 in 10,000, more like 1 in 7,000.
No one I know avoids car travel because of this, but the last time I went to Dorchester people who were supposed to go decided it was too risky to spend one day working on a Habitat for Humanity project.
We as a society can't tolerate murder. But unreasoning fear is not going to help us eliminate it.
MIT's curriculum is on line. There are big changes coming for higher education. They won't all be good, but they're coming.
Education is labor intensive. American colleges and universities deliver it via very highly trained and hence very expensive professors. They have already responded to this expense by adding an exploited middle tier of Ph.D. instructors who have no chance at tenure, no job security, and low pay for arduous hours - pretty much the condition of the rest of the American labor market in these days when every worker is expected to tolerate a much greater degree of risk than was true in the four decades after WWII.
Information delivery is a critical part of education. Those nostalgic for the allegedly golden age of McGuffey's Reader may think that's all there is to it, but there's also the more important aspect of learning how to use that information. Even in the humanities, it's not enough to memorize what the dead white guys said and wrote. It's also important to reason about that, to assess other voices, to compare and contrast, and then to generate the next set of questions and proposed answers.
Both these rough categories are communication, and telepresence technology more and more permits them to be done without sharing physical space. Most large corporations use telepresence every day, even if they do try to accomplish it on the cheap with commodity facilities such as phone conferences, video conferences, and desktop sharing.
Here are some possibilities:
Under Darth Cheney's one percent doctrine, America should invade any country that has a 1% chance of conveying nuclear weapons to terrorists. So why aren't we in Pakistan? Good question.
A sane one percent doctrine would prepare for 1% chances, war game them, create mitigation plans and scenarios, build infrastructure, keep some resources ready for rapid deployment, etc. The war gaming at least appears to be what the Pentagon is doing without any White House sponsorship (though it is possible the White House just couldn't acknowledge it), and I say good for the Pentagon.
One of the bonuses of being in Afghanistan is that we're right next door to the single most likely source of nuclear weapons for Islamic terrorists. I hope that we have a go team standing by at all times for possible interdiction or rescue. That would be a hell of a thing to try to put together on the fly. I'd rotate the duty, too. No team can stay sharp if it's sitting around the base yawning about alerts that always stand down.
Further, if we're not directing all the best of our satellite and electronic intel into Pakistan, we're idiots. Which is yet another reason to fear the results of having such incompetent morons in the White House.
What's wrong with Democrats? Even after what the Bushists and especially Karl Rove did to him, Tom Daschle still says:
Rove either has "a very faulty memory, or he's not telling the truth"When the hell would Daschle ever bluntly state the obvious truth, "Karl Rove is a liar, has always been a liar, and will always be a liar. There's no point in anyone listening to a single word he says."
So, the AP has a White House document that indicates Duhbya's last budget (hallelujah!) will/might/plans to slash the parts of the homeland security appropriation that actually protects the homeland. Why?
Well, port security mainly helps blue states. That couldn't be it, could it?
Congressional Republicans do have a huge need to separate themselves from Duhbya. Could this be a gift to them, a painless way for them to distance themselves from an unpopular president?
Of course, the Republican reflex is to cut any budget, no matter how useful the expenditure, so long as it can't be directed to a crony. Probably, the reason this appropriation is in the Bushists' sights is that the funding is directed by other people.
Wouldn't a new attack help the Republicans at all levels? Surely that's too farfetched even for this bunch of criminals. Even our lazy press would notice if al Qaeda exploited the elimination of port security funding.
More on how we got here...
We Americans, like any people, have a history of believing in falsehoods. Every people has its founding myths, for one thing. We want to believe the stories we learned in childhood about George Washington - the cherry tree and the silver dollar (before dollars existed). We're not so keen to hear that Washington brewed small beer or adopted military tactics he learned from Indians.
Similarly, we cherish Thomas Jefferson's lovely, high-flown words in the Declaration about the natural rights of all men. But we're not so interested in Sally Hemings and her descendants, who are now known to be related to TJ and possibly to be his direct descendants. Most of us white people had already chosen to ignore Jefferson's ignoble failure to observe his own principles and free his slaves from unconscionable bondage.
Further, at least when I was in school in the South, we glossed over the devil's bargain of the "Great Compromise". My teachers framed it in terms of federal representation in the Senate and the Electoral College, not also in the House of Representatives, where slaves were "represented" at a discounted, subhuman rate by the same white landowners who enslaved them.
Americans in the late twentieth century, however, started having trouble distinguishing truth from fiction about subjects that were less abstract and historical. The media abdicated any attempt to referee any fact that either side deemed "controversial".
I recall throwing out Time magazine for the last time in the early 1980s. Every story was balanced in the way of too-young Ivy League grads who thought themselves worldly for their experience putting the Harvard Crimson or the Yale Daily News to bed. The writers wrote he-said-she-said stories with a little verbal shrug at the end as if news were all just an in joke and we the readers could only be cool if we agreed to find it as funny as they so knowingly did.
As a young Ivy grad myself, I preferred the hard facts of some old, fat, bald guy in a polyester suit who chewed on cheap cigars and drank too much young whiskey, but who couldn't be fooled by a large vocabulary or common club membership. That old reporter might not even have gone to college, but he could write strong subject-verb sentences, and he was loyal to his readers' desire to know what actually had happened.
Other readers must not have noticed. They were probably busy watching TV news, and they didn't notice that the factual, responsible old school journalists epitomized by CBS were being replaced. Roger Mudd had a face for radio, and the culture was turning to superficial values that would reign supreme when Connie Chung did her turn as Dan Rather's co-anchor. (Rather himself pretended to be old school, but he was really a blow-dried blowhard, even if his desire was to report legitimate news.)
In any case, Americans lost their frontier skepticism in the face of the boggling beauty of TV productions and personalities. Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism that "the medium is the message" may not have been true in the infancy of television, but it had certainly become true.
In the face of anchors like Brian Williams and Katie Couric and celebrity, helicopter journalism even outside the studio, viewers lost track of facts among all the flash. And at every turn, Brent Bozell and his pressure groups were there to flay anyone who got off script into distinguishing lies from truth. Most Americans didn't notice, apparently, since most came to believe that the media was in fact biased in favor of liberals. The truth of course was that TV was biased in favor of good pictures.
But we were learning to enjoy being spoon fed. It was so much easier than getting up from the comfy chair.
Once our bullshit detectors were the best in the world. No longer. The world changed, and most of us didn't keep up.
