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Random commentary and senseless acts of blogging.
The first Republican president once said, "While the people retain their virtue and their vigilance, no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years." If Mr. Lincoln could see what's happened in these last three-and-a-half years, he might hedge a little on that statement. Blog critics Gryffindor House Slytherin House Ravenclaw House House Elves Beth Jacob Prisoners of Azkaban Muggles
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Tuesday, December 31, 2002
CalPundit has listed all of Heinlein's fiction, in order of preference. I can't comment on his whole list - about half the works in question I've never read. But I certainly wouldn't agree with his choice of the rambling, overlong Time Enough For Love as #1. My own unoriginal pick for the top would be Stranger in a Strange Land. I would also probably raise his low rankings of The Puppet Masters and Podkayne of Mars, while knocking down several spaces the short story collection The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag. Heinlein's late work has a God-awful reputation among fans. The only late Heinlein I've read was Job, which I thought was actually quite good, and led me to wonder at times if the other late books were underrated. But Kevin singles Job out for a rather high rating while trashing all of the other late novels.
But in an otherwise fine post, I do have to take exception with the offhand and completely gratuitous swipe at the terrific writer Lois McMasters Bujold.
In other SF blogging, Electrolite suspects that the entire world is now starting to act like fans.
Avedon Carol has a fascinating discussion of the political implications of Tolkien that offers so many interesting points, from the moral qualities of orcs to the nature of fantasy, to write about that it's hard to pick one out. So I'll just head back to the starting point, whether LotR is 'pro-war' in a way that can be meaningfully compared to current policy disputes. In a crude sense, Tolkien is pretty clearly pro-war. Tolkien drew on the heroic literature of pagan and early Christian northern European cultures. One way that he imitated this literature was in making his villain absolutely, unconditionally evil. There isn't much point to trying to deal with Sauron by negotiating with him - the only alternative is to fight him. And characters in the book seem to say pretty clearly at several points that he has been growing stronger while the forces of good looked away and avoided all out war. This is one of the major reasons that LotR has often been read as a parable about WWII.
Tolkien is obviously not a pacifist. But the suggestion that he's trigger happy doesn't seem consistent with the story. The war against Sauron and Saruman is fought by soldiers to a considerable degree, but look at who actually wins it. Saruman is overthrown by the ents, and Sauron defeated by hobbits. Each culture is pacific and non-military. Both keep to their own corners of Middle Earth so thoroughly that the ents are believed to be legends and hobbits are hardly known to those who don't live in or near the Shire. There seems to be no such thing as an army, a militia, or a professional soldier in either culture.
Tolkien also suggests the dangerous temptation of power. The ring is the most obvious symbol; not only is Boromir tempted by it, but even Sam has to struggle with the temptation. Saruman himself was once good, but seduced to evil in the course of his own struggle against it. Saruman uses jealousy and suspicion to trick some humans into becoming allies against Rohan, although it is clear that if he succeeds he intends ultimately to destroy his allies. Sauron has human allies coming up from the south; although just why they have allied themselves with Sauron is never made clear, they aren't portrayed as being inherently evil. Even Theoden becomes in some sense a tool of evil when he is under the influence of Wormtongue. It is obvious Tolkien understands that those who are not 'objectively pro-evil' can be made into tools of evil if they are not extremely careful. The ideal of heroism and military glory is one way they can be seduced, as is a dislike for what is foreign or strange to them.
In real world situations, the problems are not so simple. Even the struggle against Hitler, as close to a war against absolute evil as you are likely to get in real life, required an alliance with another tyranny only marginally less evil. Orcs may well be completely irredeemable things without human qualities (I am inclined to think so, although Patrick Nielsen Hayden doubts it); Moslems quite certainly are not.
It has been a trope among hawks for the past 50 years to see every war or peace question as another Munich, and every enemy as another Hitler. Bringing Sauron into the equation is the same thing in a more contemporary reference. As a culture, we remember Munich 1938 but have largely forgotten Sarajevo 1914, where unwillingness of key leaders to be perceived as backing down led to a war that nobody wanted, that could have been prevented, and cost millions of lives without really settling anything. Monday, December 30, 2002
Tapped has recently declared something of a Jihad against Bob Somerby, devoting a series of four posts to criticism of the Daily Howler. Tapped does score a few points in this debate, more against a private e-mail from Somerby that was accidentally cc'ed to Tapped than against the Howler itself. But on the merits, their essential case is weak. It started with an off-hand suggestion in Tapped that the Lott story was originally ignored in major media due to a reluctance to criticize Washington insiders. Somerby fired back strongly, suggesting that this account deliberately ignored a media tendency to go soft on Republicans. The theory that Washington insiders or useful sources get soft treatment from the media contains some truth, but doesn't explain nearly enough unless you also include a conservative bias. The Clintons first came into Washington as outsiders, as did Jimmy Carter earlier, and that status was used by some to explain the harsh media treatment they got. But Al Gore is very much a Washington insider, indeed, it was one of the things he was criticized for in 2000. (At the same time, the media uncritically pushed the theory that the key to the personality of George W. Bush, whose family lived in Washington and vacationed in Maine, was his deep Texas roots.) More to the point, he was an insider who had received generally favorable press treatment for 20 years until the run-up to the 2000 campaign began and the right wing spin machine stopped focusing on Clinton and made him their primary target. A man who for years had been seen as squeaky clean became overnight a pathological liar who was likely to be indicted at any moment, and stories which were known falsehoods were printed repeatedly and never retracted. In spite of the eagerness of Tapped and some others to do so, I don't think that the sociology of the chattering classes alone can explain that strange event. Only the willingness of the establishment media to bend to the conservative agenda, and the fact that most of the key members of the press and all the senior executives of the corporations that control them are part of the 1% financial elite who receive real benefits from Republican economic policies, explains it.
In the Lott case, many people have noted the early silence of the mainstream media. Fewer have commented on the fact that the real media piling on only began after Bush himself criticized Lott. Until Bush gave permission, which assured that criticism wouldn't be regarded as 'liberal bias' and made it clear that the most powerful conservatives were quite willing to throw Lott overboard, there wasn't nearly enough momentum to force Lott out. So even in the only incident of recent years which seems to run against the pattern, an underlying fear to offend right wing power can be seen.
Tapped provides no explanation of why a press corps so friendly to Washington insiders and valuable news sources turned on Daschle after he criticized Limbaugh, why they disemboweled Gore, or why they embraced every scandal story that came down the chute during the Clinton years, even though one story after another proved fake. Tapped also refuses to make an attempt to refute Somerby's explanation, instead dismissing it as "such a mush of twisted logic and impenetrable non sequiturs that we're not sure where to begin". They also bizarrely claimed not to understand what Somerby might mean by "bow[ing] to conservative power", and labelled him as "consumed by his obsessive-paranoid worldview" . It isn't hard to figure whether it is Somerby or Tapped who is "attack[ing] people who basically agree with him".
At the same time, Tapped has an article up on its web site discussing the media attacks on Gore. The article contains little, perhaps nothing, that hasn't already been discussed more thoroughly in the Howler, much of it years ago, but fails to mention Somerby's prior work. Thursday, December 26, 2002
Gandalf the Gay This is a sick, sick mind at work. The funniest thing I've seen this month. Link from Judith at Kesher. Wednesday, December 25, 2002
Merry Christmas and happy Channukah (you do know it ended about 3 weeks ago) to all. And in the spirit of the season, a little bad will towards you-know-who. Tuesday, December 24, 2002
The Two Towers The second movie in Jackson's adaptation of Tolkien's famous trilogy is better than the first. There are two big problems in adapting The Two Towers. The first, that it doesn't really come to a payoff until the final installment, is insoluble, although Jackson has used the battle of Helms Deep as something of a finale. The worse one is Gollum. Unless you throw away Tolkien's story and start from a blank page, you can't tell the last two volumes of Lord of the Rings without Gollum as a major character, and that begs for disaster. He's mostly an irritating presence in the books, sniveling and lisping, and handled poorly on screem could easily make you long for Jar Jar Binks. But just as Phantom Menace is a lesson for filmmakers on how not to integrate an animated character into a live film, The Two Towers is a lesson in how it can be done right. Jackson's Gollum, voiced well by Andy Serkis, is remarkably lively and expressive, both in facial movement and body language. He is alternately disgusting, pathetic, nasty, comic, decent, and always compelling. What could easily have been the weakness of the film becomes its greatest strength.
With a strong Gollum, and a solid cast still led by Elijah Wood as Frodo amd Ian McKellen as Gandalf, the rest of the movie flows gracefully. The visualization of the ents was a bit less impressive than I had hoped for, but the panoramic sweep and visual splendor of the action in scenes like the battle of Helms Deep, the battle of Isengard, and Frodo and Sam traveling through the Dead Marshes easily made up for it.
There are significant changes in the story. Without going into spoilers, the main one is that Frodo and Sam take a side trip they didn't take in the book, and at the end of the movie they have not yet reached Cirith Ungol, which is where Tolkien left them (in a cliffhanger) at the end of the book. That episode will presumably be entirely in the final chapter, which is fitting since it is the shortest of the three volumes - very short indeed if Jackson chooses to omit the final anti-climactic episode in the Shire. There is also an added romantic subplot, with the elf Arwen (Liv Tyler) and the Rohannan princess Eowyn (Miranda Otto) both falling in love with Aragorn (Viggo Mortenson).
Overall, the film is not to be missed for anyone who enjoyed the first installment and even those, including myself, who thought it mildly disappointing.
Monday, December 23, 2002
Jeanne d'Arc has a wonderful post remembering the emptiness of some Christmas 'charity' from her own childhood. H. D. Miller notes an original, although apparently ineffective, means of fighting a traffic citation. Sunday, December 22, 2002
Tilting at Windbags Mark Kleiman did a fine post a few days ago showing how phony claims of 'liberal bias' are drummed up out of nowhere, referencing an article on Bill Frist. Today, Instapundit and the liberal bias whiners are at it again. Glenn accuses the Times of 'recycling lies' about Frist, citing a post by Tennessee blogger and journalist Bill Hobbs.
The Times article referred to does say, in the 14th paragraph of an overwhelmingly positive profile, that Frist 'is certain to face new scrutiny over racial issues'. The next paragraph refers to the Marion Barry quote that Josh Marshall has recently mentioned. Paragraphs 16 - 19 say:
Also in that campaign, Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., Democrat from Memphis, demanded that Mr. Frist apologize to African-Americans for remarks that he and a supporter made. Mr. Frist, going to a largely black march against crime, had asked a worker to obtain imprinted pencils to distribute, requesting unsharpened pencils. "I don't want to get stuck," he told the aide. A supporter also said the bus was getting "deeper into the jungle" as it approached a black neighborhood. Mr. Frist said at the time that his remark was not racial and that he could not be held responsible for his supporter's remark. But some blacks said he had been racially insensitive.
Hobbs and Instapundit both call this a 'lie' without giving any explanation of what they mean. No claim is made that Frist never made the remark about 'get[ting] stuck', so they appear to be referring to the claim that this remark had racial connotations - something that the Times never says, but attributes to 'some blacks', the only named critic being plainly identified as a Democratic elected official. At most the Times is making a mountain from a mole hill - or, more accurately, with an offhand reference 16 paragraphs deep into the story, making a slightly larger mole hill out of a miniscule mole hill.
Hobbs, however, isn't finished. He has another post 'exposing' liberal bias which surely sets some kind of record. Check out the opening paragraphs of the sloppy kiss that Hobbs labels 'the liberal media's biased attack on Sen. Bill Frist':
WASHINGTON -- Lawmaker by day, Good Samaritan by night, Sen. Bill First, R-Tenn., is a wealthy doctor-turned-politician who occasionally attends art openings at his family-endowed museum -- but prefers to spend his vacations visiting remote African villages to dispense lifesaving care. It goes without saying that he pilots his own plane. So Frist fits neatly into the melodramatic script of Trent Lott's fall from power, cast as the new majority leader called on to rescue the party in a moment of peril. "He really shows the true compassionate conservatism," in the words of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas. But this plot twist raises a thorny question that only time will answer: Can those delicate surgeon's fingers manage the backslapping, arm-twisting, hand-holding and pocket-picking that comprise the sometimes grubby backroom reality of a Senate leader's life?
Some of the phrases applied to Frist later in the article include: "notoriously independent...superstar surgeon... expertise... idealism...a Dr. Kildare idealism...the son of a Tennessee legend... a daredevil lad...cosmopolitan...personified the Bush administration dream of conservatism with a friendly face...Party leaders get dreamy-eyed when they picture the new majority leader saving a life on the Capitol grounds-as Frist has done a couple of times in the past eight years. (Once, he resuscitated a collapsed tourist; another time, he tended to the grievously wounded gunman who killed two Capitol police officers. )...toured AIDS-ravaged countries with rock star Bono... an astute and willing negotiator...Tarplin said he was struck by Frist's `ability to synthesize very, very complex subject matter`... worked to provide greater access to health care in impoverished communities... a Boy Scout in all the positive ways... smooth demeanor..."
It's just shocking that the liberal media can use such vicious language about a public figure and get away with it. I hope Sen. Frist has a good libel lawyer.
Here's how the nasty liberal media handles the most dodgy part of Frist's background:
In the late 1980s, the Frist family company was swallowed in a hostile takeover, and Frist's father and brother ceded management control to the owners of what became Columbia/HCA. In 1997, FBI raids on company hospitals turned up widespread Medicare fraud. According to attorneys for the whistleblowers who revealed the massive overbilling, HCA engaged in illegal practices even before the takeover. But Thomas Frist Jr. returned to the helm of the company as unpaid chairman and chief executive, and worked to restore trust in the company.
The account is sloppy on the facts. The merger took place in 1994, not the 1980s, and no other report I found described it as hostile. According to this acount, written during Columbia founder Rick Scott's glory days, HCA initiated the deal. Business Week mentions that after the merger Thomas Frist, Jr remained vice-chairman. The article attributes the claim that illegal practices existed before the merger to "attorneys for the whistleblowers", but briefs filed by DoJ also allege illegal acts preceding the merger by over 5 years. Note that the merger is again described as a takeover. And Forbes stated that HCA's guilty plea on criminal fraud in December, 2000 followed "a seven year investigation" - i.e. an investigation started before the merger. And the article doesn't mention at all the NLRB ruling that Columbia/HCA illegally refused to recognize a nurses union in Kentucky - in this case also some of the illegal acts preceded the merger, although most took place afterwards. These inaccuracies give a false impression maximizing the distance between the Frist family and the illegal activities at HCA. The article also mentions that Thomas Frist returned as CEO without pay in 1997 after the company fell into legal trouble, but neglects to mention that in 1992, his income of $125 million from stock options made him the highest paid executive in the country.
With all this, why does Hobbs find the article to be a "biased attack"? Exactly one word, 'wealthy', which the freeper Hobbs cites favorably complains is applied to Frist but not to Hillary Clinton (who is in fact far less wealthy than Frist). Never mind that the article is glowing enough to have been written by an unusually devoted mother, and soft-pedals or even falsifies some facts to make Frist look better. The presence of one word, neither negative nor inaccurate, alters everything. That one word is enough to prove 'liberal bias'. Wednesday, December 18, 2002
Flogging a Dying Horse Some passages in Trent Lott's bizarre apology from BET deserve notice. I am for affirmative action. And I practice it. I have had African-Americans on my staff, and other minorities, but particularly African-Americans, since the mid-1970s.
In other words, the fact that he actually hires black people demonstrates that he practices affirmative action. These are, in Lott's mind, the same thing. Apparently Mr Lott thinks that if he hired by merit, his staff would be entirely white. Lott is not far from admitting that the charge Democrats have been making for years, that the blacks prominent in conservative circles are tokens, is true. So it's appropriate that at this moment J C Watts, the only black Republican in Congress and recently largely invisible should be reappearing in Lott's defense. Watts is leaving Congress largely because his inability to move up in the leadership after Armey retired suggested that criticisms he had been put in the leadership as a gesture were accurate.
Look, I have a lot of good friends, young African-Americans, business men and women, people in my state that I have reached out to and helped and going to continue to help, and a number of them are speaking up about it.
No, really, some of my best friends...
Well, yes, that's what I'm saying, my actions, I think, don't reflect my voting record.
I am not what I am. - Iago
Really, it's gotten bad when even I'm feeling sorry for the guy. Somebody should get a sharp knife and put this poor jackass out of its misery. Watching it writhe around is just painful.
Punditry note: My feeling is that Nickles wouldn't have made a potential challenge unless he knew he had support - either from within the Senate or, quite likely, a commitment from the White House to back his challenge behind closed doors. Lott will agree to stay on until the next election, in return for a cushy sinecure after his retirement. Nickles will be the new Majority Leader and will push an aggressive right wing agenda.
Saturday, December 14, 2002
The Gwielo Diarist, both a Mississippian and a conservative, has a strong post condemning Lott. Permalinks seem broken, look at Friday under headline "Trent Lott is a Racist". If you still need more reasons to despise Lott (why would you?) try looking here. Tomorrow's News Today Once again, you can find it in the blogosphere. On Thursday, I was sure, along with many others, that Lott was out as majority Leader. But that day Daily Kos wrote: Say Lott is pushed out. In the past, disgraced leaders (like Livingston) have resigned their seats. Really, the humiliation of getting the heave-ho is better swallowed back home, than sitting amongst those who gave you the boot. BUT, if Lott resigns his seat, Mississippi's Democratic governor will (theorertically) appoint a Democrat to replace him. Normally, this wouldn't be the worst thing possible. It's not as if MS wouldn't return a Republican to the Senate in a 2004 special election. But these are not ordinary times. If Lott is replaced by a Democrat (a Zel Miller Democrat, no doubt, but one that would vote for Daschle), that would make the Senate 50-50 once again. And THEN, a Chaffee switch is not inconceivable. The beauty of this scenario is that Republicans couldn't cry that Democrats "stole" the Senate. Lott's resignation would be his fault alone, while Chaffee's switch would be seen by moderates as a repudiation of the GOP's dominant Southern wing. Partisan Republicans couldn't seize on this the way they did with the Jefford's switch. So, it's clear that for Republicans to assure themselves the majority, they could not afford to have Lott resign his seat. But if he was pushed out, could he really go from the number two Republican to essentially a back-bencher? (Indeed, who would even work with him? He'd be radioactive!) The pressure for him to quit the Senate would be intense (from pundits, his own pride, and, perhaps, even feelings of betrayal and spite). Today, Atrios reports from the Weekly Standard that Lott may indeed be unwilling to stay on as a back bencher, leaving Republicans with a nasty choice between keeping on a damaged Majority Leader and risking an outright loss of their majority. Meanwhile, more news of Lott's past is surfacing. From today's New York Times: In 1969, when Trent Lott was a young legislative aide to a staunch segregationist congressman from Mississippi, one of his jobs was responding to angry letters from constituents outraged by the progress of integration. "Mississippi is no more," one woman, Justeen Strange, wrote to her representative, William L. Colmer, a longtime Democrat from Pascagoula, that July. "Thanks to our politicians, we are slaves to the gorilla race, our proud white race is now in servitude to the NAACP jews and negroes." Mr. Lott, writing above Mr. Colmer's signature, politely replied that he was "not insulted" by Ms. Strange's letter, adding, "I was just disappointed that you were not more appreciative of my efforts in behalf of sound government and against the things you complained of."
Howard Fineman is a typical example of the Washington media, and his column on the Lott meltdown is a good example of the lengths they'll go to to find excuses for Republicans - and themselves. Lott comes from a time and place—Mississippi in the ’50s and early ’60s—when segregation was a way of life and defending it was still a route to power. He was a cheerleader at Ole Miss and has been cheerleading for the old days ever since. As a young congressman, he filed a friend of the court brief in favor of preserving the right of Bob Jones University to bar blacks from admission. Lott, by the way, was eventually joined by the Reagan administration itself. A year before that he said what he repeated the other week: that the country would have been better off had Strom won election in 1948. I’ve covered Lott for quite some time and find him to be a courteous, gentlemanly fellow in person. But I think he just is incapable of understanding how offensive it is even to joke—even at Strom’s birthday—about a segregationist campaign. How exactly did Fineman determine Lott was joking? Lott didn't deliver it as a joke, nobody laughed, and none of his numerous semi-apologies has cliamed he was joking. Lott's history, which Fineman knows and at least does mention, hardly suggests he was joking. The only plausible reason to say it was a joke is to spare Lott the embarassment of having said it seriously, even though he plainly did.
As usual in Washington, the statement itself isn’t as damaging as his reaction to having made it. Indeed, when he first made his comments at Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, none of the reporters watching the event gave the remarks a second thought. It was only two days later, when The Washington Post explained the history that Lott had invoked, that the brushfire began. To which I can only say, What the F***?! What history did the Post explain that reporters weren't already familiar with? I can match anybody in the room in my contempt and loathing for the Washington punditocracy, and even I can't accept that none of them already knew that Thurmond ran as a segregationist, or that blacks had a hard time in the South before Civil Rights. Even I don't buy that they're that stupid. Is there any meaning here at all beyond an utterly lame excuse for the media's failure to lead on this story? Thursday, December 12, 2002
Selective Outrage The [Lott] incident did come up on "Meet the Press," where Robert Novak said: "I think it was a mistake. I don't think he was at all serious, and I don't even think we should dwell on it."... Novak wouldn't budge: "I mean, this is the kind of thing that makes people infuriated with the media, is they pick up something that's said at a birthday party and turn it into a case of whether he should be impeached." Republican Sen. Pete Domenici, who canceled his own re-election campaigning in New Mexico because of Sen. Paul Wellstone's death, was appalled that Tuesday night's memorial service in Minneapolis turned into a Democratic political rally. Domenici had worked closely with Wellstone on mental health issues and was crushed by the news of the Oct. 25 plane crash. He hurried to Washington and then went to Minneapolis for the Wellstone service. Friends described him as disappointed by the tone there, especially when Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott was booed. Trent Lott, who is now clearly getting desperate, has followed up his non-apology apology with a non-explanation explanation. According to the Times via Jim Henley: "It was certainly not intended to endorse his segregationist policies that he might have been advocating, or was advocating, 54 years ago." Rather, Mr. Lott said, he meant to hail Mr. Thurmond's record on issues like national defense, balancing the budget and economic development rather than the views on race Mr. Thurmond held when he ran for president on a Dixiecrat platform opposing "social intermingling of the races."
In explaining the similar statement he made at a 1980 rally,
A spokesman for Mr. Lott, Ron Bonjean, said the remarks at the 1980 rally did not pertain to race but were made after Mr. Thurmond, then a top draw on the Republican circuit, had complained mightily about President Jimmy Carter, the national debt and federal meddling in state matters. "We want that federal government to keep their filthy hands off the rights of the states," Mr. Thurmond was quoted as saying. Mr. Bonjean, when shown the article, said, "Clearly, Senator Lott was praising the policies of Thurmond and Reagan, of smaller government and reducing the federal deficit."
The balanced budget defense is even weaker. According to the US Treasury, the debt at the end of FY 1945 was $260.1 bn. When Truman left office after FY 1952, it was almost exactly the same, $259.1 bn. (The debt went down from 45 - 48, so it did rise, about 6%, in Truman's elected term. Still, Truman was probably the only President in history to fight a major war without increasing the national debt.) By contrast, Ronald Reagan almost tripled the debt, from FY 1980 $909.0 bn to FY 1988 $2,601.3 bn.
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
The Twelve Mitzvot of Christmas All you need to know about the halakhic rules for celebrating Xmas, via Teresa Hayden. Tuesday, December 10, 2002
Like a lot of leftists, I was hardly surprised by Trent lott's recent absurdities. I have always assumed that most of the old guard southern white Republican leadership privately thought that way, and this really isn't the first time Lott has slipped up and let his racism show, just the first time he's been so blatant about it. I was pleased, but also not surprised, when conservative bloggers jumped on the story; most conservatives of the baby boom generation and after support racial equality in reality and not as a pretense. It would be too much to ask for bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, who has been all over this, and Andrew Sullivan to shut up about the 'liberal media', now that they have demonstrated that their own liberal credentials are in better shape than much of the mainstream media they complain about. But they might try a bit of reflection.
I was honestly shocked that Lott failed to make a quick apology. Especially since the remarks were made on the verge of a very close election in a southern state with a large black population. The reluctance to apologize really shows that the far right of the Republican Party is feeling profoundly confident after the last election. The suggestions in some circles that they are going to press a modest agenda are likely to be far off base.
Another strange thing is that the national media seems to be picking up on the story only now, after an apology of sorts has been issued. It's as if, no matter how outrageous a statementy made by a leading Republican is, the media is afraid to criticize or mention it unless an retraction is made that concedes the excess. So maybe Lott's delay in apologizing showed more media savvy than I thought. Friday, December 06, 2002
Josh Marshall has been describing in Talking Points how the latest right wing bullet point, mocking John Kerry's hair cut, has been picked up by NRO, CNN, and the Washington Times. In addition, it has been covered by Limbaugh and was discussed on Tonight by Dennis Miller. This is all a big coincidence, obviously. Why shouldn't all these commentators suddenly start talking about John Kerry's hair? I mean, it would be one thing if we were on the verge of war, or the economy was falling apart, or al-Qaeda was still going strong, or crime was going up. But with none of these things happening, it's apparent that there just isn't anything else to talk about more compelling than John Kerry's hairdo.
In spite of the obvious logic of this, some people continue to see shadowy media conspiracies, as John Fund points out:
Although most of the media gave Mr. Daschle a pass, some commentators questioned his mental stability. Morton Kondracke, executive editor of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, diagnosed the departing majority leader as suffering from "post-election stress disorder." He criticized Mr. Daschle's office for claiming it was "not permitted to discuss what threats had been leveled at Daschle or his family or even whether the number has increased." Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist as well as a pundit, joked on Fox News Channel that while he doesn't "usually practice on camera," he thought Mr. Daschle's comments were "the edge of looniness."
It seems that some liberals believe that these people, who largely live and work in the same city and attend the same parties, know each other. Some give voice to a bizarre claim that they keep sophisticated electronic devices in their homes and offices which allow them to communicate among themselves instantly, and often use them. A few conspiracy freaks go so far as to claim that they often carry such devices around in their pockets. Fortunately, the legitimate media ignores these lunatics and continues to print reliable infomation on important topics, like liberal media bias, the color of Al Gore's suits, and John Kerry's harcut.
Thursday, November 28, 2002
Maybe Avedon Carol didn't like being classified by Den Beste as a good liberal (see below). This marvelous slam on Kissinger being named to the 9/11 investigation is a little sharper than her usual writing: Even I can't believe some of the stuff that comes out of this administration. The only reason they haven't got all of their convicted criminals and unindicted co-conspirators in this administration is because some are too busy doing talk radio or, in Nixon's case, in Hell, to join them.
Wednesday, November 27, 2002
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
Cocoons Instaman, Clueless, and various others are discussing Jim Cappazolla's decision not to link to any bloggers that link to Charles Johnson's controversial LGF blog. Glenn's original item raised the issue in terms of internet 'cocoons', using the web to seek out only those opinions you agree with and filter out those you dislike. He thinks this doesn't happen generally in blogs, although by citing two examples of liberals engaging in it, he clearly implies that it is a leftist tendency. Actually, I think that cocooning happens all the time in the blogosphere. To my knowledge, only 4 generally conservative sites blogroll me. Of those, one is defunct and one blogs almost exclusively about the Middle East, where there isn't much conflict between their strong pro-Zionist positions and my own. That leaves only two blogs, one of them more oriented to humor than to political writing, that write about US politics from a relatively conservative viewpoint and blogroll this site. Maybe the others just have better taste, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for liberal political blogs. At least 30 have blogrolled me. This isn't universal, but it comes pretty close. Almost all left sites, mine included, blogroll quite a few liberals and fewer or no conservatives. Almost all right sites tilt their blogroll in the opposite direction. Without looking very hard, you can find popular sites on both left and right without a single contrarian position in their blogrolls. There's nothing wrong with this, really. A blogroll is part of the blogger's content, and a blogger is no more obligated to put up a balanced list than to put up unopinionated commentary. But it is cocooning, it is very widespread, and it is pretty much equal on left and right. It really just reflects a natural tendency - reading opinions that confirm the rightness of our views tends to be more enjoyable than reading things which attack them, regardless of what those views are. One of the important ways that the tendency to cocoon in blogs is counteracted is by linking. I sometimes read conservative blogs specifically to look for interesting articles that I can criticize or react to. I always link to bloggers and posts or articles that I'm criticizing. You don't have to take my word for what somebody says, you can check out the site yourself and see if I'm characterizing their positions fairly. That's a central part of blog debates, so I'm much more bothered by this post, which implicitly criticizes several bloggers without linking to them, than by Jim's boycott of LGF. Den Beste says:
When I took a look at what sites were actually listed there, most of the ones I recognized are best described as "the usual suspects", and there was a clear ideological similarity to them. Any site which links approvingly to Warblogger Watch, This Modern World, Ted Barlow, Tapped, Sullywatch, Shadow of the Hegemon, Smirking Chimp, Media Whores, Eschaton, and Counterspin Central is applying a distinct filter to the choices. (Which is RR's privilege, of course.) I also found links to Brian Linse, Patrick Nielsen Hayden (and Teresa), and Avedon Carol, none of which do I consider extremist voices. Den Beste's phrasing implies, without quite saying, that the earlier group of blogs and sites he lists, are 'extremist voices'. Some of those sites are unabashed take-no-prisoners lefties, but that's a pretty strange characterization of Ted Barlow or Tapped. If Den Beste is going to make it or suggest it, he should provide the links so his readers (many of whom probably don't read a lot of liberal sites) can judge on their own. Incidentally, with all this commentary on Rittenhouse Review's boycott, one site that may not be taking it seriously is RR. It took about two minutes going through links to find a blog still linked by RR which links over to LGF. Monday, November 25, 2002
The East Bay Express has published a strong expose over the past two weeks of the cultish local Black Muslim organization. Led by Yusuf Bey, the group has had a substantial presence and public respectability in Oakland for decades, in spite of overt racism and a series of crimes that led the stepmother of a girl molested by Bey to call the group and its influence 'Oakland`s dirty little secret'. The first part focuses on violence and sexual abuse; the second examines their close links to local political power and access to public money. Although Bey is now being held to account for these allegations of rape and child abuse, his legal untouchability may once have extended far beyond such alleged sexual atrocities. In the late '90s, Allen Tucker was a resident of an apartment complex at 530 24th Street; in 1997, Bey family associate and apartment manager Basheer Muhammad allegedly led a crew of men in beating him unconscious. According to Tucker, associates of the Bey family did much more than this one alleged beating. In fact, he says, the Bey family terrorized the tenants with military drills in the parking lot and violent confrontations. And the cops, Tucker claims, did nothing to stop it. "Everybody was under threat at that apartment building, even the neighbors," he says. "Every Sunday, they would come over and do these military marches. Every time they came around, you could feel the tension in the air. You knew when they came somebody was gonna get beat up." Tucker claims that during the numerous confrontations he witnessed, neighbors called 911 but the police never bothered to show up. "The cops would never come," he says. "It was like they were given the okay, like the police wanted to let them do their thing. But their thing is criminal. One police officer, I remember he wanted to get them so bad. But his hands were tied. ... I guess Yusuf Bey's hooked in with the police or the mayor's office. I couldn't understand that." Tucker's not the only one with stories like this. Two senior Oakland police officers claim that their department allowed Bey family associates to exact vigilante justice in certain neighborhoods in the mid-1990s. According to one officer, there was an unspoken rule among police patrolling the North Oakland beat: In certain neighborhoods, Yusuf Bey's men were going to clean up drugs and crime however they could, and the cops should just get out of the way. "The methods they employed, we're not allowed to do that in a democratic society," this officer says. "The police aren't allowed to go around and beat up young black men. But during this time, if you were a Black Muslim, you had the permission to do that, and the police were told to look the other way." ... Regardless of how it happened, just one year after Nedir Bey got off with nothing more than home detention, he received a magnificent gift from the city: $1.1 million in taxpayer money. Bey was the founder and chief executive officer of EM Health Services, which in 1996 asked for a $1.1 million city loan to build a business training nurses' aides and home health care providers to care for AIDS patients and other desperately ill people in low-income neighborhoods. The city just happened to have an ample fund ready to spend on such ventures: $50 million in cash from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, $22 million of which was to be disbursed by the city's One Stop Capital Shop to needy inner-city businesses rejected by traditional banks. The fund was specifically designed to revitalize struggling neighborhoods. Moreover, EM Health Services promised to make its money by giving comfort to the terminally ill -- an ancillary benefit that seemed to make the company an ideal candidate. At first, some members of the city council had reservations. Councilmen Dick Spees and Ignacio De La Fuente worried aloud that Bey did not have enough collateral to secure the loan, noting that the family's bakery also owed $60,000 in back taxes. Although Your Black Muslim Bakery offered equipment allegedly worth $200,000 as collateral, city officials would later conclude that it was either worthless or already encumbered by prior liens. But in the course of evaluating this loan, not one person in city government apparently asked why the city should lend $1.1 million to a man who just one year earlier had been convicted of a felony in which he allegedly tortured a man. The issue just never came up, according to Elihu Harris, who as mayor joined Spees, De La Fuente, and the rest of his council colleagues in approving the loan. "I don't know anything about it," Harris says. "I don't have any recollection of that. I'm not saying it didn't happen. But it was not a public issue, it was not raised by anyone I know." According to Mary Joseph, an employee of the city's Community and Economic Development Agency, the city's due diligence simply does not include checking for felonies. "It was not city policy at the time, nor is it currently city policy, to conduct criminal background checks on city loan applicants and their principals," Joseph wrote in response to a question by this paper. "Staff was not aware that Mr. Bey had pleaded no contest to a felony count of false imprisonment in 1995." Joseph's department moved ahead with the loan in June 1996 -- and has regretted the decision ever since. Within months, city officials were complaining about how Bey was spending their money. By January 1997, agency employees and federal officials were questioning the following expenses: a $96,000 salary for Nedir Bey, $2,000 in cellular phone bills, $43,800 in consulting services, $12,600 for "security," $8,000 in "architectural fees," and $6,800 to lease a Cadillac Sedan DeVille for Bey's personal use -- although Bey later insisted that no city money was used to lease the car. Officials ultimately concluded that EM Health Services had spent $226,000 in excessive salaries and consultant fees in the second half of 1996 alone. Meanwhile, Bey complained that the city wasn't disbursing the money fast enough. Although the city had agreed to pay the money in quarterly installments, officials soon realized that they had acquiesced before getting federal officials to sign off on the deal. After federal officials noted that Bey and the city had failed to complete all the necessary paperwork, Oakland chose to float Bey cash out of its own pocket -- albeit not as quickly as he wanted. As the city's cash flow slowed down, Bey started firing off angry letters to "the powers that be in Oakland." ... Of course, Nedir Bey is not the only bitter party. On July 18, 2001, the city received a judgment against him for all $1.1 million. City officials are still trying to determine who, in addition to Bey, may be liable for the loan. To this day, not a penny has been repaid. It should be noted that Bey and his followers are linked to Nation of Islam; which means that they teach the racial fantasies developed by Farrad Mohammad rather than the more mainstream Islam that most Black Muslim groups now employ. Sunday, November 24, 2002
James Taranto is upset (no permalinks - 11/22) at Paul Krugman (now there's a surprise) for noticing the remarkable number of nepotism appointments in the Bush administration. He returns a rather weak shot citing Democrats who also had parents who were prominent in politics, although most of those Taranto lists are elected, not appointed. Apparently Taranto has forgotten that his own publication has seized the position, generally unsought in American politics, of being the defender of aristocratic privilege against the unwashed masses. Saturday, November 23, 2002
NRO has some suggestions from Randy Barnett on how Republicans can appeal more to libertarians. The suggestions aren't bad, but it's safe to say that they will be ignored. For instance, Barnett suggests that Republicans should try actually taking Federalism seriously. It's pretty safe to predict that the next two years will be long ones for those people who actually believe in state and local authority as a political rule instead of a convenient argument. Since rightists now control the federal government, they have no grounds for wanting to move either political or legal disputes from federal to state jurisdiction. So since it isn't expedient in current political circumstances, you can bet this 'fundamental principal' is going to be forgotten. Republicans have already shown eagerness to override local and state governments on everything from securities regulation to treatment of the Boy Scouts when it suited their purposes. Already there are plans to grab federal jursidiction over class actions, the better to kill them off.
As for privacy and the security of such basic rights as the right to be charged with an actual crime and be represented by an attorney, the Bush administration has already shown plainly where it stands. Just this week, they won the right to place wiretaps and bugs to build criminal cases without probable cause. 'Libertarians' who supported the Republicans have no grounds to complain when they see these rights undermined.
The problem with Barnett's whole presentation is that it's based on the belief that the GOP is, from a freedom standpoint, a basically good girl who may fall off the straight and narrow from time to time, but is pure at heart deep down. Regretably, there is no real basis other than wishful thinking for this assumption. When the Christian Coalition agenda reduces freedom, the GOP backs it. When corporate donors want government subsidies and a rigged market instead of a true free market, the GOP always has a sympathetic ear - for a price. Unfortunately, some folks just aren't able (or willing) to notice the difference between a lady with a past and a career whore. Monday, November 18, 2002
Here's another US - Sweden economic comparison that, for some reason, Glenn neglected to blog: (link from Brad Delong) It seems increasingly apparent that the secret to success is to have a successful parent. Consider some prominent examples: George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush; Bobby Bonds and Barry Bonds; Henry Fonda and Jane Fonda; Estée Lauder and Ronald Lauder; Julio Iglesias and Enrique Iglesias; Sam Walton and Jim, John, S. Robson and Alice Walton. As more recent and better data have become available, economists have marked up their estimate of the impact of parents' socioeconomic status on their children's likelihood of economic success. It turns out that the famous line attributed to Andrew Carnegie — "from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves in three generations" — is an understatement. Five or six generations are probably required, on average, to erase the advantages or disadvantages of one's economic origins. This represents a marked departure from past thinking. In the 1980's, when Gary S. Becker of the University of Chicago pioneered the economic theory of intergenerational transmission of economic status, it was believed that the correlation between a father's and son's income was only around 0.15 — less than half the correlation between fathers' and sons' heights. The early studies suggested that if a father's income was twice the average, his son's expected income would be 15 percent above average, and his grandson's just 2 percent above average. This is fast "regression to the mean," a concept Sir Francis Galton used to describe the progression of offspring toward the average height. Landmark studies published by Gary Solon of the University of Michigan and David J. Zimmerman of Williams College in The American Economic Review a decade ago, however, led economists to revise substantially upward the estimate of the similarity of fathers' and sons' incomes. They noted that income fluctuated for idiosyncratic reasons from year to year — an employee could lose a job, for example — so estimates that depended on a single year were based on "noisy" data. Also, the samples previously analyzed represented only a narrow slice of the population at different points in individual careers. These factors caused the correlation in annual incomes to understate the correlation in "lifetime" incomes. Averaging earnings over five years produced a correlation of around 0.40 for fathers' and sons' earnings — the same as the correlation between their heights. If people's incomes were represented by their heights, the similarity in income between generations would resemble the similarity observed in the heights of fathers and sons.... Perhaps the only legitimate use of the intergenerational correlation in income is to characterize economic mobility. The data challenge the notion that the United States is an exceptionally mobile society. If the United States stands out in comparison with other countries, it is in having a more static distribution of income across generations with fewer opportunities for advancement. Anders Björklund of Stockholm University and Markus Jäntti of the University of Tampere in Finland, for example, find more economic mobility in Sweden than in the United States. Only South Africa and Britain have as little mobility across generations as the United States.
This scientific test has determined, with 80% probability, that I'm a male. Better yet, it proves beyond doubt that I am mas macho than comparatively sissy bloggers Sam Heldman and Ampersand. I'm so proud, I think I'll go out and buy my penis some porn videos. Harry Potter and the Cash Machine The Harry Potter sequel is pretty enjoyable. All the cast from the original is back, along with Kenneth Branagh as Gilderoy Lockhart, a self-promoting twit who serves at the annual Defense Against Dark Arts replacement. Branagh hams it up shamelessly, which is perfectly in character. Another strong addition is Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy, a character who, unlike Lockhart, will be returning in future installments. The returning cast members all turn in good performances. I especially liked Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley - his reaction when his mother sends him a nasty letter is priceless. Towards the end of the first movie, I found myself nodding off and checking my watch. There was less of that this time - the story is stronger and builds dramatic tension more effectively, mostly a result of the source novel being better than the original. Like 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer`s Stone', this film sticks closely to its source material, although some gratuitous action sequences that I don't remember from the book are thrown in. Also tending towards the gratuitous and intrusive is the musical score by John Williams.
This will be the last of the Harry Potter movies directed by Chris Columbus, whose work is more striking for technical proficiency and showy sequences than marrative skill. The next installment, not due until 2004, will be directed by Alfonso Cuaron, a much more exciting choice. Cuaron is the director of one of the better recent children's movies, 'A Little Princess' (1995), as well as the emphatically adult-themed 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' (2001), a marvelous film. The delay in releasing the next film may be due to Cuaron's commitments to his current project, an adaptation of P. D. James's 'The Children of Men'. It will be worth the wait to see what Cuaron does with the increasingly complex material of the next two novels. Sunday, November 17, 2002
Offward, Christian Soldiers One of the major local news stories for the past few weeks has been the murder of Eddie 'Gwen' Araujo, a pre-op transsexual teenager. Whether because of media self-censorship or prosecutors withholding information, the details of Gwen's murder are unclear, but it seems that she was tortured, strangled, and killed by three men, now under arrest, after having sex with one or more of them who later discovered she was a physical male. The murder has caused unusual attention for a local High School's production of 'The Laramie Project', a play about the murder of Matthew Shepard. And the publicity brought out the followers of prominent nut job and publicity hound Fred Phelps.
In a world of spin and PR there's something almost refreshing about the unabashed nuttiness of the Phelps clan. There were 8 hate picketers at the play, and their slogans pretty clearly weren't market tested on focus groups, unless the testing consisted of checking to see what made people angriest. Along with the classic 'God hates fags", there were such winners as 'God hates America', 'God sent the sniper', 'No tears for queers', and the crowd pleasing 'Thank God for 9/11'.
The openness does have certain consequences. The local newspaper described the picketers as 'Phelps' son, daughter, daughter-in-law and five grandchildren'. In other words, after years of publicity and millions of web page views, Phelps turned out a grand total of 0 non-family supporters in an urban region of several million.
Phelps was planning to continue with pickets at several 'queer-friendly pseudo churches'. Saturday, November 16, 2002
The letter delivered to the UN by Iraq reads like the work of a passionate but semi-literate High School student. It has to stand as one of the most incompetent pieces of propaganda I've ever encountered. Part of this is undoubtedly poor translation: the English version is sprinkled with simple grammatical errors such as, "The aggressionism of the United States of America and its single-handed infliction of injustice and destruction on those subjected to its inequity, in the forefront of whom are the Muslims and Arab believers, is the basic reason why America has withdrawn its ambassadors and other staff, close its embassies, and restrict its interests in many parts of the world, while reaping the hatred of the peoples of the world due to its policies and aggressive objectives." But the original text must bear part of the blame. Even with corrected grammar, the sentence above is clumsy and redundant. At best, the whole thing reads like an impromptu speech by a mediocre orator. There is no logical argument or narrative flowing from sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph:
In the meantime, the gang of evil returned to talking about adopting a new resolution, or new resolutions, in order to create something for the world to talk about, other than following the work of the inspectors and then seeing the fact already stated by Iraq, which was that Iraq neither had produced or was in possession of any weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical or biological, throughout the time of the inspectors' absence from Iraq. However, representatives at the United Nations and its agencies, especially those from permanent member-states, instead of fellowship up on this and, hence, expose those responsible for the dissemination of lies and fabrications, were busy discussing the type and wording of the new resolution. They were indulged in what word or letter to add here or omit there, until they adopted a text under the pretext that is would be better to take the kicks of a raging bull in a small circle than to face its horns in an open space. The text was adopted under the American Administration's pressure and threat that is would leave UN, if it did not agree to what America wanted, which is, to say the least, extremely evil and shameful to every honest member of the United Nations who recalls the provisions of its Charter, and sees that some people feel ashamed on behalf of those who are shameless. Mr. Secretary-General, We have said to the member of the Security Council whom we have contacted, or who have contacted us, when they told us about the pretexts of the Americans and their threat to perpetrate aggression against our country, whether unilaterally or with participated from others, if the Council were not to allow them to have their way, that we preferred, if it ever became necessary to see America carry out its aggressions against us unilaterally, when we would have to confront it relying on Allah, instead of seeing the American government obtaining an international cover with which to camouflage its falsehood, partially or completely, bringing it closer to the truth, so that it may stab the truth with the dagger of evil and confronted the United States before when it looked as it does now, and this was one of the factors of its isolation in the human environment on the globe at large.
If the author is Saddam himself, which seems probable, it would seem to indicate that he is losing it. That's good news - you don't want the enemy to be at the top his game. But an irrational Saddam is also more likely to attempt some suicidal grand gesture. Andrew Sullivan is out of the box as the first right wing pundit to attack Al Gore's 'support' of a single payer health care system, first reported on ABC's Note. Matthew Yglesias correctly notes that the single payer system used in Canada is not actually the British system that Sullivan condemns, but shows no skepticism on the underlying story. One could also note that the British system Sullivan so roundly attacks is clearly valued by the British, however much they may complain about it. After all, Maggie Thatcher, famous both for her love of privatization and her willingness to openly embrace controversial proposals, never tried to change it in any serious way. But I'm more curious about whether this whole story isn't yet another fabrication. The ABC story claims the statement was made "in front of (as best The Note can tell) only two members of the media". The media member who presumably gave them the story isn't identified. And there is no actual quote of either what Gore was asked or what his answer was - not that Gore 'quotes' as reported in the media can be trusted anyway. The media has been making up Gore stories and Gore quotations for years now. This story fits into a traditional anti-Gore meme (ABC in the first story was already labelling it a flip-flop, which it is, if Gore really is now supporting single payer) and an emerging anti-Gore theme that matches the emerging anti-Democrat theme (moving to the extreme left). So it is suspiciously convenient and ought to be treated with skepticism until it is supported by some type of credible information.
Of course, if it is true, it also goes against some of the traditional anti-Gore characterizations - single payer is notoriously unpopular in this country, so it certainly isn't the position of someone who will 'do anything to get elected', nor is it the position of someone who is driven only by polls. But notice you didn't see those being mentioned in these stories, and you won't see much about them in the future. The pundits know better than to emphasize truths which inconveniently undermine favored cliches.
Update: Another article at the ABC site does have an actual quote. Via Liberal Oasis. Thursday, November 14, 2002
Now that Nancy Pelosi has been named Minority Leader, the smear campaign can't be far behind. In fact, it is already going strong. The key theme to this campaign so far seems to be labeling Pelosi as a socialist. This is the political language or the attack machine: Democrats who aren't liberal are called liberals or ultra-liberals; Democrats who really are liberal are called socialists with the explicit or implicit association of being Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist.
The attack on Pelosi is based largely on her membership in the Progressive Caucus; Nathan Newman has shown how silly that is. It is also worth noting that the world's only remaining Marxist/Stalinist government of any real consequence is the People's Republic of China, and Pelosi is known for her defense of human rights in China. In the most important recent China vote, Pelosi opposed permanent MFN status for China, as did the Progressive Caucus. Among the Stalinists, commie sympathizers, and fellow travelers who voted to support the Chinese Communists were Trent Lott, John Ashcroft, Strom Thurmond, and Phil Gramm.
Congratulations to Brian Linse and Avedon Carol on the first anniversaries of their excellent blogs. Wednesday, November 13, 2002
Attention Mac Thomason: Now that the snakehead threat is believed to be eradicated, the next piscean invader is the dreaded bighead carp. It can't walk, but apparently it can jump extremely well. Best line in last night's Buffy: "I'm here to kill you, not to judge you." Biggest mystery (spoiler): When and why did Spike apparently drop off the wagon? Eve Tushnet beat me to commenting on Matthew Yglesias's odd assertion, "there is actually only one big question in political theory: Is there a God?". in his erudite discussion of various recent writings in political philosophy. A new post modefies this to the clearer but quite wrong, "if you think there is no God, then there are no more big questions in political philosophy". If you think there is no god, then there still remain the problems of how people are to live together as individuals (ethics) and as a society (political philosophy). I don't see that the existence of God solves these problems at all. Basic problems of political philosophy such as balancing the goals of liberty and equality can be addressed entirely outside theology, and indeed it's unlikely that theology can have anything to say of them. The only question that is clearly impacted by the existence of God is the question of the origins of legitimate authority. Our political institutions are based largely on the belief that Locke's solutions to the basic questions of political philosophy are superior to those reached before him, and atheists, agnostics, and believers are all able to accept those institutions with that implicit belief.
If you do believe in God, that doesn't in any apparent way solve the problems of political philosophy or ethics. All it does is move them into a different category, making them (potentially) theological problems. But unless you also have a divine revelation available to give you the answers to these questions, they still have to be solved in any society.
Stating essentially human problems as theological ones is just likely to lead you to poor solutions. A famous, possibly apocryphal, saying of Dostoevsky is, "If there is no God, then anything is possible." That has always seemed to me the exact opposite of the truth. If you create an ethical or political philosophy without presuming the existence of God, then individuals have claims that are not easily brushed aside. If an ideology is built from the assumption that God created everything, those parts of creation which aren't obeying God's will become very dispensable indeed. No-one does violence more easily or enthusiastically than those who believe themselves to be instruments of God, working towards a new Eden which will appear as soon as those who refuse to see the light have been neutralized.
Sunday, November 10, 2002
For years now, the Japanese economy has been mired in an unending slump because, among other things, major banks have many billions of dollars in bad loans that they decline to write off and the government is afraid to force a write off, fearing that it would expose some major banks as actually insolvent. American media and economists have tut-tutted at geat length on this state of affairs, explaining that treatment of some companies as too big to fail shows the weakness of Japanese business and the superiority of American business practices. With the recent Microsoft settlement, it is plain that American megacompanies are not only too big to fail, they're also too big to be expected to obey the law. The trial found that Microsoft violated the law; the settlement agrees. It's just that the Justice Department feels Microsoft shouldn't actually be punished for illegal activities, what with all those fat checks to the RNC.
Aside from harmful effects for consumers, the probable harmful effects for the economy as a whole are substantial. IT and particularly IT entrepreneurialism drove a great deal of the economic growth of the 90's boom both by generating new jobs directly and increasing productivity in other sectors of the economy. The harmful effects of the bubble in overpriced stocks of companies that had no viable plan for becoming profitable shouldn't make us forget that. Microsoft now has an unprecedented ability to block IT innovation, and no real inducement not to. Indeed, it now quite effectively blocks innovation without doing a thing. A venture financer who agrees to fund a new software application, however valuable, would have to be regarded as defective in either competence or sanity. Either the market will embrace the new app and Microsoft will copy it, or the market will ignore the new product. Either way, there's no money in bringing it to market, so nobody is going to invest in doing so.
There are still numerous niches for enterprise systems, mostly designed around the needs of specific industries. But Microsoft has largely closed off any new applications niche, and has been successful in blocking or slowing innovative new computing devices that don't require a desktop running Windows. Other companies will also be encouraged to violate antitrust and probably other laws, since they now know that all they have to do even if caught in illegal activity is draw out litigation until a friendly administration takes office and drops enforcement actions. But Microsoft's ability to dominate its industry and squash innovative products is based not only on its effective monopoly but also the structure and economics of the software industry, and is probably unique. Wednesday, November 06, 2002
Meryl Yourish lists a few of the web pages blocked in Saudi Arabia. Oddly enough, this one isn't, and Monday I had my first visitor from a Saudi domain. I'm anticipating a special award from the Elders of Zion for this breakthrough in our global propaganda control. California Results Forget all this nonsense about control of the House, Senate, and Governorships. In truly important news, it remains legal by a landslide vote to sell coffee in Berkeley that is not organically grown. Plus Winona Ryder was convicted, which serves her right for drinking environmentally harmful coffee. The final margin of victory for Davis was 5%, closer than I expected but not real close. Local pundits last night were discussing Simon's future. I think it looks a lot like 'go back to spending my inheritance'.
The sweep of all statewide positions by Democrats seems to have happened. McClintock lost by only 0.5% and gets a recount, but there's no reason to think it will help him. He did have the best commercials I saw this cycle, using an actor in a kilt to say he was the thrifty choice for Controller.
Democrats won both the open House seat (Condit's) and the new seat. No incumbent was defeated and, where no incumbent ran, no seats changed parties. Democrats still control both houses of the state legislature by safe margins, although they lost a few seats in the State Assembly. Tuesday, November 05, 2002
Thune has a narrow lead in South Dakota, but the lead seems to be growing with most of the votes counted. A Republican Senate takeover isn't quite certain at this point, but it would require a near-miracle, and probably Chafee as well, to prevent it. The Davis/Simon race is a virtual tie right now, and the newscasters are calling it a potential upset. Don't believe it. With 40% of statewide votes in, many rural pro-Republican counties such as Fresno, Kern, Kings, Amador, and others have reported 70 to 100% of their precincts. Strong Democratic counties San Francisco and Alameda are running slightly below 40%. Most importantly, only 7% of Los Angeles has been counted, meaning over 1/3 of the uncounted vote is coming from there. Simon would need a huge lead at this point to stand a chance; in fact he's trailing slightly. This is going to end up a runaway. Get your latest results here. Dole wins in North Carolina to hold that seat; the Republicans gain their first Governor's pickup behind Benson in New Hampshire. In the really important contest, so far every race has gone in accord with the Nuisance's final predictions. In early results, I've done some quick calculations and comparing tonight's county returns with presidential returns from 2000, I've found Cleland generally running 9 - 10 points ahead of where Gore ran in 2000. Unfortunately, if that pattern continues, it's a close loss because Gore lost Georgia by 11.7%. Still way too close to call. As anticipated, Democratic gubernatorial pickups have started - Rendell in Pennsylvania and Blagojevich in Illinois are being projected as winners. Lautenberg In THe first result in a race that had been considered a possible key race has been called, with Lautenberg winning in New Jersey. I have just heard another one announced, Jeb Bush picked as the winner in Florida. Although these races had been considered close at one point, neither is a surprise based on recent developments. The Pain, The Pain Blithering bloggers and ridiculous readers alike will join me in mourning the death of Jonathan Harris, who died from a blood clot only a few days shy of his 88th birthday. Harris played many roles in a long career, but will forever be the notorious Dr Zachary Smith, saboteur, sniveler, coward, and all around bad guy who stranded the Robinson family in space and pestered them through all their travels.
I never missed Lost In Space as a child. Lost In Space is not a pleasure that ages well. An adult may enjoy it for the utterly 60s atmosphere of the supposedly futuristic adventures and the occasional campy smile, but can't help noticing that it isn't really very good. But part of the sad sweetness of childhood pleasures is that they can't be re-experienced as an adult. I'll never again sit on pins and needles struggling to will into the TV set a warning to my childhood hero Will Robinson that Dr Smith can't be trusted, but I can still remember, at least a little, how passionately I once did. And the passion came in large part because Harris created Dr Smith as a wonderful villain, a man you could truly love to hate, yet one who would never understand why you didn't love him as much as he loved himself. Final Predictions I'm going with pretty much the calls I made in earlier posts. Senate: Democratic pickups in New Hampshire, Arkansas, and Colorado. Republican pickup in Missouri. South Dakota stays Democratic. Democrats win one from my list of possible upsets: Tennessee, Texas, N Carolina, S Carolina, Maine - most likely Texas. No other seats switch.
House: Democrats pick up 2 seats, leaving the House at 221-213-1. I pretty much pulled that number out of thin air, but if it turns out to be right, I reserve the right to assert that it was based on detailed study of individual races matched with my profound understanding of political trends.
Governor: Democrats take away or pick up Arizona, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. Republicans pick up New Hampshire, Alabama, and Vermont. Net result, D - 29 R -21. This is a little less optimistic than I had projected earlier, but it looks like Republicans will hold on in Texas, Florida, and Arkansas. If the night goes badly, there are other possible losses in South Carolina, Alaska, and Hawaii, but I'm calling those seats to stay Democratic.
In my home state, I predicted months ago that Davis would equal his landslide margin (about 16%) of 1998. That prediction now looks bad, but I stand by a Davis victory and don't think it will be especially close. I called a Democratic sweep of the statewide offices last month and I stand by that one, although as I mentioned Republican Controller candidate Tom McClintock has a shot at breaking the shutout. Democrats will also easily control both houses of the state legislature. The only real question is whether Republicans will hold enough seats to sustain a veto, and I think they will. Democrats will take the open Congresssional seat in the 18th District, Gary Condit's old seat, and will win the new redistricting seat. Not one incumbent from either party is going to lose, or even have to stay up late. The protection of incumbents in the state redistricting plan is a disgrace. Monday, November 04, 2002
The Broward Numbers There are 5265 available machiles according to this. 5765, which appeared in Pandagon's election blog and on Eschaton is a typo that overcounts it by 10% - maybe Atrios is lobbying for a job counting Republican votes in Florida! The estimates I've seen for how long voting takes are 13 minutes or 15 minutes (first article linked). Averaging to 14 and figuring constant use for the 12 hour election period, 51 votes per machine can be cast, or 268,515 for the county. And that is including unrealistic optimistic assumptions: that every machine is in use the minute polls open, and every machine runs for the whole day with 0% breakdown. It's estimated that 80,000 ballots have already been cast in early voting or by absentee votes. Total possible ballots 350,000 out of 978,000 registered, which is just under 36% turnout.
In 2000, 575,000 votes were cast in Broward. Dropping the vote by 225,000 while keeping the same percentages would have given Bush an extra margin of 81,000.
A more optimistic assessment of Broward's preparedness is here, but that article doesn't address the ratio of voter to machine or how many voters the county is ready to handle.
California Scheming Scott Koenig has a mixed slate of endorsements for California statewide races, picking both Democrats and Republicans. Amazingly enough, I'll be going more Democratic; in fact, I'll vote the full slate - although I would probably have gone for Riordan if he had been on the ballot. Scott does make specific arguments for the Republicans he backs that are worth addresing. He criticizes Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, running for re-election, as "a loyal soldier to Governor Davis". Actually, the tensions between Davis and Bustamante are considerable, and will likely grow in a second term, when Davis will be a lame duck and Bustamante will be campaigning for his job. Bustamante's rival, Bruce McPherson is a nice enough guy and a political moderate. I won't be heartbroken if he wins, but he isn't going to.
Tom McClintock, running for Controller, is the only Republican candidate who might break through and actually win, although it would be a mild upset. He's a far right Republican with ties to the Christian Coalition. His opponent, Steve Westly, is that rare creature, a dot com zillionaire who is still rich - he made his money in Ebay, whose stock price never fell badly. Westly has sought to make hay of his opponents right wing positions in the campaign, but in fact it's hard to see how a controller could do much mischief in these areas. McClintock is a fiscal conservative with expert knowledge of the state budget, so if he sticks to the Controller's job, assuming he gets elected, he might actually do quite well. Westly has far less background in state government, but his business skills and general smarts should be an adequate substitute.
My strongest disagreement with Scott is for Secretary of State, which flows from his position on Proposition 52. Prop 52 would allow election day voter registration, while increasing penalties for election fraud. Democrat Kevin Shelley supports it; Republican Keith Olberg is opposed. Scott claims that elcetion day registration would lead to massive fraud, but there seems to be little evidence backing that assertion. Six states currently allow same-day voting, and there is no evidence that fraud has increased in any of them. What it has done is open up the process to less conventional candidates - same-day voters are credited with providing the margin of victory for Jesse Ventura.
Meanwhile, it was recently noted that the thousands of voters, primarily black, who were illegally purged from registration lists in Florida before the 2000 election have still not been reregistered. Mark Kleiman points out that Jeb Bush has essentailly guaranteed his re-election by installing an inadequate number of voting machines in heavily Democratic Broward County. The machines are being used for the first time, and early voting has shown that it takes on average 13 - 15 minutes for a voter to cast a ballot. Only 5,265 have been installed, meaning only about 23,000 votes per hour can be cast in a county with over 950,000 registered voters. Given that some machines will surely fail, and some will be empty during slow periods, the actual numbers figure to be even lower. Paper ballots to supplement the machines have been barred by the Secretary of State. So the biggest threat to a Bush victory, heavy voter turnout in Broward, has been rendered physically impossible. Florida continues to prove that state of the art election theft doesn't require election day registration.
Friday, November 01, 2002
Another one bites the dust: Joe Katzman is temporarily (we hope) shuttering his Winds of Change blog. There are quite a few benfits to being a tenured professor. For instance, doing your job is optional. (Link via CalPundit.) Thursday, October 31, 2002
That Had Best Be Dixie You're Whistling Sam Heldman notes that Alabama will appeal the recent court decision legalizing vibrators in the Yellowhammer State. Mark Kleiman has good explanations of some common errors made in interpreting poll data and margin of error. William Burton takes on the myth that Reagan won the Cold War. Junius points to this alarming report on the French underclass, interesting because, unlike many recent reports widely cited in the blogosphere, it discusses the appalling reality of immigrants in France without much attention to Islam as a dominant factor. Wednesday, October 30, 2002
Mid Term Corrections With less than a week to go, I stand by the prediction made here previously that the Democrats will hold the Senate, and very probably gain 2 seats or more. The forecast: Democrats are likely to pick up seats in Colorado, New Hampshire, and Arkansas. Republicans have only one probable pickup, in Missouri, and that one is looking less probable now, due perhaps to a rebound sympathy vote for Carnahan after the death of Paul Wellstone. Another potential Republican gain is South Dakota, where the race is pretty much a toss up. Democrats have a shot at gaining seats in Tennessee, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, and possibly Maine, but none of these is worth betting on. Along with their two good shots, Republicans have outside chances at Democratic seats in Georgia, Louisianna, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Iowa. However, Ganske in Iowa and Lautenberg in New Jersey are looking safer all the time. Mondale should be able to hold Minnesota, and I think Wellstone, had he lived, would have won there. Only Cleland of Georgia from that list is in real danger, and I think he will pull through. In the Governors' races, Tuesday will be a disaster for the GOP. Democrats might, if things really break their way, pick up as many as 10 states. Democrats will pick up Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Kansas(!) and Maine (currently independent). Already an impressive list, but voters may add Florida, Texas, Arizona, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Minnesota. Few states are likely to go in the other direction, and the candidates are mostly smaller states: Alabama, Maryland, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Hawaii are the most likely. On Wednesday morning, it's possible that among the 10 largest states, only Ohio will have a Republican governor who fits into the national party. (Pataki is very much a RINO, well to the left of many Democrats, including, on some issues, his opponent.)
New Democratic governors in swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and New Mexico could make the difference in ousting Bush if 2004 turns out to be close. Obviously Bush could not have 'won' in 2000 if Florida had been in Democratic hands.
As for the House, it's hard to call, but Republicans probably have the advantage. Republicans were able to use Governorships in several states that added seats to rig several new districts in their favor. However, numbers for the last few weeks show Bush's popularity dropping and, worse for Republicans, consumer confidence sinking to a 10 year low. It's very hard to figure out - there is little polling for most races, but I think control of the House is very much in play.
Note: Daily Kos agrees with me in looking for a gain of 10 - 11 seats in governorships, and explains why it matters. He corrects me on Arizona, which I had listed as a possible Republican gain, but is yet another swing state that is a probable Democratic gain. The Armed Liberal looks at the California ballot and has some persuasive posts arguing for a No vote on Prop 50 (Water Bonds) and Prop 51 (Transportation Improvements). Prop 51 is particularly egregious and richly deserves to lose; however, relatively few California voters will have studied the ballot closely enough to be aware of the dirty dealing in which various interests contributed to the Yes on 51 campaign in return for large projects that would benifit them being written into the proposal. AL hasn't addressed so far another interesting point. There are 3 bond issues (46, 47, 50) on the current CA ballot. Proponents of each insist that their bonds have nothing at all to do with raising taxes.
Q: Where will the money come from? A: Proposition 46 is a $2.1 billion general obligation bond that will be paid through existing funds in the state general fund. Funding for Proposition 46 will not require a new tax. Proposition 50 is a fiscally sound opportunity to make necessary investments in our infrastructure. The bond will be paid back through existing resources in the state general fund, NOT through new taxes.
What these proposals all do is to require new expenditures without specifying where the money will come from. So in that sense they 'don`t raise taxes'. But the money to pay for the bonds won`t fall out of the sky. The bonds will have to be paid off and that means (duh) taxes. Of course when and if voters pass these proposals, the Legislature will have to scrape up money to pay about $35 bn in new obligations (assuming all pass) over the next few decades. And voters will wonder why those damned politicians are raising their taxes again.
Two other initiatives simply require the state to pay for certain proposals out of existing funds. According to Yes on 51: Proposition 51 accomplishes all these goals by establishing a new transportation trust fund, using money from the existing sales tax on motor vehicles. Proposition 51 does not raise taxes.[Emphasis in original.]
However, if 51 does pass, important projects not mentioned in the initiative will go unfunded, or else taxes will have to be raised. It's the same thing as the bonds, except that the bonds require you to pay twice - pay for the actual project and pay for interest on money borrowed to finance it.
Prop 49 works in much the same way as 51, but it deserves a posting of its own. It's the most interesting initiative on the state ballot, primarily because it is also the opening shot of a probable Schwarzenegger 2006 gubernatorial campaign. Friday, October 25, 2002
 Paul Wellstone with Sheila Ison, Marcia Wellstone, and other family membersOf whom shall we speak? For every day they dieamong us, those who were doing us some good, who knew it was never enough but hoped to improve a little by living. W. H. Auden On the Verge The Giants have been playing in San Francisco for 44 years. To say there have been great stars would be an understatement; arguably the two greatest players in the history of the game were San Francisco Giants, both playing in San Francisco in the peak years of their careers. But in those years there has never been a World Series title. For only the second time that title is one game away, and for the first time the Giants have two shots at that one game. It will be tough; the Angels feature amazing hitting, excellent defense, and strong pitchers. When a team takes a 6 - 0 lead in baseball, I normally fell the game is essentially over. I never felt that in last night's game; not until the lead was stretched late to 12 - 4 did I really feel the game was a done deal.
Getting the last win I think may come down to the pitching; another 16 run explosion seems unlikely. How to stop the Angels isn't so mysterious - the Giants recorded 23 strikeouts and yielded 10 runs in their 3 victories. In the 2 defeats, there were only 5 strikeouts, and 21 runs given up. Ortiz and Hernandez, who were hit hard as starters in games 2 and 3, seem to be the planned starters. With the Giants bullpen working heavily in recent games, one of them probably has to come through with a strong start.
A more counter-intuitive formula for a Giants victory is proposed by Byzantium's Shores, which notes that the Giants are 7 - 0, now 8 - 0, in postseason games in which Barry Bonds doesn't go deep, but only 2 - 5 when he does. Daily Dis Some notes on the latest wit and wisdom of Sully: There's yet another post, actually a pretty good one, on Orwell. It's fine that Sully is noting that Orwell was not, in truth, a neocon - but the very fact that this transcendently obvious point has to be explained shows how bizarre our politics has grown. Anyone with the most casual familiarity with Orwell knows how deeply anti-imperialist and anticapitalist he was, but these points tend to be missed in many recent Orwell discussions. I suppose once you can cite Christ without noticing that he wasn't exactly a huge fan of wealth and privilege, making Orwell into an enthusiast for the free market becomes easy.
Andrew also has an explanation for why the Maryland sniper was difficult to catch. His 'explanation' is racial profiling. His evidence is a story that the sniper may have been stopped by police on October 8, but let go because "`Everyone was looking for a white car with white people,` said one high-ranking police source."
How did Sullivan conclude that the reason the snipers weren't caught was racial profiling? He offers only that one quote to support his claim that police were particularly looking for white suspects. A number of other accounts seem to contradict that, such as this one:
No descriptions of possible suspects have been released....
The only descriptions "we have are those of the white vehicles, and we're not even sure how solid those descriptions are," says Sgt. Kim Chinn, a Prince William County, Va., police spokeswoman. Chinn, who attended an internal police briefing Sunday morning, said investigators did not mention any video or suspect description. "We're all sharing information, but I'm not aware of any videotape with a suspect," she said.
What we do know is that police were looking for a white van. And the car the alleged snipers were actually using was neither white, nor a van, nor stopped near a crime scene. "And yet the cops let a man go because of his race", says Sullivan. Apparently the fact that there was no evidence or even real cause for suspicion had nothing to do with it.
It's a genuine mystery to me why Sully would have so little interest in his credibility as to blog such nonsense. His readers know the police were looking for a white van. With the publicity this case got, headhunters in the Amazon know the police were looking for a white van, and that that was the main clue repeated in the media for weeks. And yet Sullivan blithely writes as if this fact doesn't exist or has no importance. Who on earth does he think he's fooling?
Another Sullivan correspondent is eager to attack Dana Milbank for daring to say anything remotely critical of George Bush:
Finally, he closes with a basic error in arithmetic: "Other times, the president's assertions simply outpace the facts. In New Hampshire earlier this month, he said his education legislation made "the biggest increase in education spending in a long, long time." "In fact, the 15.8 percent increase in Department of Education discretionary spending for fiscal year 2002 (the figures the White House supplied when asked about Bush's statement) was below the 18.5 percent increase under Clinton the previous year. . ."
This gentleman is simply wrong in claiming to have proven an inaccuracy in Milbank's numbers. He says the 2002 increase is 1.2% greater than the 2001 increase, but hasn't included the 1.9% inflation in 2001, which wipes that out. He has also ignored the fact that the numbers he's dealing with are approximations, not exact. But if he wants to find a real incidence of playing decpetive tricks with the difference between percentage increases and absolute increases, he can always check out the home page of the Bush Department of Education. |
