Public Nuisance |
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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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Wednesday, June 25, 2003
Recall News I speculated below on the possibility that Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante would be a possible strong candidate in the event of a recall election against Gray Davis. Bustamante has now said that he isn't running, although his phrase, "I do not intend to put my name on that ballot", leaves some wiggle room. The current position is that state Democrats are uniting behind Davis, but, if it gets to the point where sufficient signatures are certified and an election called, I still expect some name Democrat will land on the ballot. I have, after a long interval, finally gotten my DSL line operating again, so I am no longer restricted to the crawling speed of dialup. This may mean some increase in the usually glacial pace of recent posting on this blog, but not in the immediate future: I've just started in on the new Harry Potter. Still in the early phases so far - I haven't even gotten to Hogwarts as yet. Although I may be temporarily out of the scrum, Jeff Cooper is back. Judicial Activism The recent affirmative action decisions contained this statement by O'Connor, writing for the majority: The requirement that all race-conscious admissions programs have a termination point “assure[s] all citizens that the deviation from the norm of equal treatment of all racial and ethnic groups is a temporary matter, a measure taken in the service of the goal of equality itself.” We take the Law School at its word that it would “like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula” and will terminate its race-conscious admissions program as soon as practicable. It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education. Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today. This suggestion (also noted by Tapped) that affirmative action should be a temporary pracitice is uncontroversial. But Clarence Thomas made an interesting use of it in his dissent:
I agree with the Court's holding that racial discrimination in higher education admissions will be illegal in 25 years. This statement takes some rather vague remarks by Justice O'Connor and labels them as what the language shows quite plainly they are not - a 'holding' that any form of affirmativbe action in college admissions will become impermissible in 25 years - and that that date is fixed and unchangable without regard to whether any progress towards racial equality in K - 12 education is made or even attempted in the intervening years. This deadline is in some ways reminiscent of the discussion of the first, second, and third trimesters in Roe v Wade, a discussion which conservatives regularly cite in charging that Roe v Wade was judicial overreach, sloppy reaosning, and legislating from the bench. But at least the trimester distinctions in Roe v Wade have some level of support in medical science; the 25 year rule that Thomas is creating here has no basis at all except for the fact that it is a round number, and that about 25 years have passed since the Bakke decision.
Justice Thomas, in order to further his own political agenda, has read language contrary to its plain meaning, has ruled gratuitously on a question not at issue, has endorsed a 'ruling' that was never made and, if made, could have no conceivable basis in any possible reading of the Constitution, has ignored the substantial legislative history indicating that numerous Congresses, including the Reconstruction Congress that originally drafted and passed the constitutional provisions under discussion, have supported some form of affirmative action, and has advocated the federal government managing how an entity of state government conducts its affairs. Conservatives used to have all sorts of nasty things to say about judges who did this, and usually less than this, to serve liberal ends, but don't hold your breath waiting for any criticism of judges who do the same to further conservative ends. So far Thomas has only been criticized, and that rather mildly, by Eugene Volokh, the most famously contrarian conservative/libertarian in blogdom. Monday, June 23, 2003
From time to time, I note in my referral logs persons who have come to this page apparently seeking information on such useful topics as how to find a whore in Karachi or how to torture gay sex partners, only to. presumably, be disappointed in their search. On the other hand, some strings seem to be ideally matched to this blog - I can harly believe that four other pages beat me out for this one. And then there are those who just need to come up with shorter strings. I noticed today what has to be a new record holder in the long-winded category: "debate on the sitution IF TWO PERSONS ARE GOING IN A BOAT FOR THE INTERVIEW OF THE POST OF GENERAL MANAGER AND SUDDENLY THE BOAT STARTS SINKING THEN ONE PERSON HAS TO JUMP IN THE RIVER FULL OF CROCODILES TO SAVE SECOND PERSON'S LIFE AND LET HIM BE THE GM".
Thursday, June 19, 2003
Total Recall It is now widely seen as likely that attempts to recall Gray Davis will succeed in forcing an election. The question of who will be on the ballot is growing increasingly tangled. Under state law, if the recall reaches the ballot, there will be one election, in which voters will vote yes or no on recall and vote at the same time for a new governor, the latter vote taking effect only if a majority back recall. That means there are no primaries - anybody who pays or obtains a certain number of signatures can be on the ballot. The candidate who gets the most votes wins, although, if the vote is split enough ways, the winning candidate might potentially draw 25% or less.
Darrell Issa, an extreme rightie and car alarm multimillionaire, will definitely be on the ballot. Failed and unpopular gubernatorial candidate William Simon will likely be there with him, competing for the same voters. Arnold Schwarzenegger, busy promoting T3, isn't saying what he'll do, but he certainly isn't ruling out a run.
Who will the Democrats put up against this? All Democrats are opposed to the recall, but clearly some prominent figure has to be on the ballot in case it passes. Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, Attorney General Bill Lockyer, Controller Steve Westly, and Treasurer Phil Angelides are all at least thinking about running for Governor in 2006, when Davis is out on term limits. Only Westly has said unequivocally that he won't go on the ballot. Lockyer and Angelides have sort of said they won't, but left a bit of possible wiggle room in their statements.
Clearly, both are eyeing Bustamante, who is known to be on unfriendly terms with Davis. It was Bustamante's refusal to join in a joint statement clearly denying an intent to run that led Lockyer and Angelides instead to issue separate, weaker statements. If Bustamante does get in through a successful recall, other Democrats will presumably have to put off plans to run until 2010.
The other candidate speculation has focussed on is Senator Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein has never, I believe, lost a statewide election - if she steps in, others will be far less likely to take on the person generally considered the state's most popular and successful politician. If she should run and win, she can, as Governor, appoint her own successor in the Senate. One scenario has her appointing Bustamante, in return for his promise not to run for Governor - with Feinstein in and Bustamante out, Lockyer and Angelides would certainly stay out, and Feinstein should win easily with the Republican vote split.
Either way, the recall could potentially backfire on Republicans. Bustamante has a strong position should he run, since he is very strong with the state's large Latino vote, reasonably popular with other Democrats, and running in a largely Democratic state. I believe there are currently no Latino Governors or Senators, and Bustamante, from either position, could be a strong help to Democrats in other states campaigning with Latino voters. Monday, June 16, 2003
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Hillary is now riding at # 2 on the Amazon best-seller list, trailing only the new, unpublished, Harry Potter. Needless to say, this causes much wailing, gnashing of teeth, and even dumber than usual commentary in the obvious circles. Wolf Blitzer: Her critics charge the $8 million advance and her presidential ambition were behind the decision [to write the book].
Omigawd, critics charge that an author wrote a book, in large part, to make money! And, for the first recorded instance, an accusation against the Clintons is actually true. Quick, somebody wake up Ken Starr and get him back in action.
On one of the most important questions raised in the book, her supporters and critics often disagree -- namely, on whether she should have remained married to Bill Clinton after he confessed of his relationship with Lewinsky. Many critics say she should have left him, charging that the only reason she stayed married was out of political necessity.
Odd, I thought conservatives were supposed to be against divorce and in favor of making troubled marriages work.
Brent Bozell, infuriated at Barbara Walters's interview of Hillary, sputters:
Walters only asked questions that would please the Clinton-loving Left. How could Hillary work with icky Tom DeLay and senators who voted to impeach her husband? She lamented that the poor Clintons were so hounded: "I can barely remember a week went by when one of you wasn't being criticized and investigated." Can you imagine ABC or Barbara Walters ever lining up a row of poor-dear questions for Newt Gingrich, who was also investigated routinely throughout his tenure as Speaker of the House? Or Ollie North? Or Clarence Thomas? Or anyone conservative?
For the record, here is some of the hard-hitting dialogue when Walters interviewed Hillary's successor, Laura Bush:
WALTERS As you waited [on 9/11], what were your thoughts?
Where there is are Clintons and spin, you can always find Andrew Sullivan:
And at its center is an obvious, big, glaring fib: that she never had an inkling of her husband's long pattern of sexual abuse and harrassment until the August morning he told her of his latest victim. This stretches credulity beyond even Clintonite limits.
This is such an obviously false charge that even Sullivan himself contradicts it on his own site:
This time, the fuse was the leaked spin that the former First Lady only found out about her husband's adultery with Monica Lewinsky the day before Clinton's civil deposition. Until then, we are asked to believe, she had no idea that her husband would ever have contemplated an illicit sexual liaison with a young intern.
What Hillary said was that she had believed Bill's denial about Monica Lewinsky until he admitted the truth. This is widely claimed, without proof, to be impossible, or at best proof she was delusional. But where is the real difficulty in believing this? There is obviously no doubt that Bill had a history of cheating. Like all philanderers, he tried to hide the truth from his wife, but she certainly found out about at least some of it. But these incidents took place before Clinton became a serious presidential candidate. It seems clear that Clinton changed his habits after, or perhaps well before, the Flowers story came out. Presumably that was discussed between the Clintons. For all the jokes and stories, there is no good reason to believe that Clinton had any dalliances in the White House other than Lewinsky - certainly Starr's and Jones's lawyers were trying hard to find one and came up empty. (Kathleen Willey, the only other alleged case, is an unreliable witness.) So when the Lewinsky allegations first came out, Hillary knew that Bill had a long history of such activity, but had every reason to believe that he had changed. And she also knew that both he and herself had been targeted with an endless stream of false allegations for 6 years. In that context, her believing Bill about Monica was entirely reasonable.
Tony Blankley gives what can be considered the quintessential rightist critique:
Miss Hillary's new book surely will make it on The New York Times' best seller list. The only suspense left is whether it will be placed on the fiction or non-fiction list. This decision will be an early test of the NYT's new commitment to truth. (They could regain all their lost credibility in one bound, if they went with the fiction list.) ...Whether Miss Hillary is a natural born liar or whether she learned it at the foot of the master, may be an interesting topic for a Ph.D. thesis someday. But, clearly, not only do she and her husband not have a reputation for truthfulness, they don't seem to have the capacity for it. I haven't actually read her book yet (I may spend money like water, but I have my limits). However, from various publicly available quotes out of the book it is obvious that she has not veered anywhere near the truth.
Blankley hasn't actually read the book, doesn't know what's in it, but he is certain that it is all lies from beginning to end. That he can't actually offer up any evidence of a single lie is irrelevant. It's Hillary Clinton; that she is lying is less a political claim than a metaphysical/religious axiom. (Over at NRO, Ramesh Ponnuru and David Frum engage in the same exercise of proof by assertion.) Who needs the evidence of times and places when you have the evidence of things unseen? Indeed, after Blankley is finished analyzing a book he has never read, he goes on to give a demonstration of his ability to read the minds of both Bill and Hillary:
For instance, in the Barbara Walters free media publicity event, Miss Hillary seemed to boldly differ with her husband on the matter of amending the Constitution to permit a third presidential term. For 24 hours cable news shows were clucking about her stepping out on her own and breaking with her husband -- the only human on the planet in the last half century who has mentioned changing the 22nd Amendment to provide for a third presidential term. First of all, Mr. Bill didn't say it as a serious matter (he knows it is a political impossibility), but because he needed a publicity fix. And Miss Hillary didn't publicly disagree with him because she disagreed with him -- but because she wanted to be seen to be publicly disagreeing with him. She thinks it's good for her hideous image. And, after all, this is the rare issue that no voters or Democratic party interests care about. It's a freebie.
Clearly, Mr Blankley has rare psychic gifts. Maybe the Pentagon should ask him where Saddam hid all those WMDs.
Friday, June 06, 2003
It Depends on what the Meaning of Trend Is Conservoblogger Jim Miller has been reading the papers and detected, guess what, liberal bias. Not being a regular reader of Mr Miller's site, I know of this supremely unsurprising fact only because Instapundit has been reading Jim Miller and detected a persuasive argument. Looks like the right is 0 for 2. Miller objects to reports like this which report that public opinion around the world is growing more negative towards the US. His principal point, which is correct, is that where data is available both for March (when the war was about to start or underway) and for late April/May, after the war ended, a bounce upward in opinions of the US is detectable. From this, he declares "the trend is in our favor", and criticizes the media for reporting otherwise.
Miller start off his discussion with a few lines that suggest right away number crunching may not be his forte:
This is, at the very best, misleadingly incomplete. Suppose a weatherman was reporting temperatures and had the following four daily highs (in Fahrenheit), 83, 75, 48, and 70. Would you think it a fair summary if the weatherman said that the weather was getting colder?
Rhetorical question or no, Jim, the answer is: Yes, I would, and so would anybody else with basic training in statisics and interpreting graphs. The 48 is way out of line with the other data and would be considered a probable anomaly, either freak conditions or measurement error. (This can sometimes lead scientists to dismiss what is in fact the most interesting number. The ozone hole, which was missed for years because scientists ignored funny numbers instead of asking why they were so funny, is a recent and prominent example, but that's another post.) So you draw a line through the other three numbers, and you get a trend: The weather is getting colder.
Now let's look at the data for the last 2 years. (I'm using this dataset, which contains only 2002 - 2003 results, so, unlike Jim, I'm not really examining 2000. I'm using the latest numers which, varying by country, stretch from late April to mid May. There are two obvious trends:
Here's a table of the 'very unfavorable' stats:
The average increase in very unfavorable is 22.8% for Islamic countries, 9.2% for others.
The poll is incomplete - I'd like some numbers for China, even if they weren't fully reliable, and excluding India seems a huge oversight. But where in the numbers we have the 'trend in our favor' can be found escapes me.
One other interesting point in the poll: Americans are returning the favor. The poll also compares US opinions of France, Britain, Canada, and Germany in 2002 and 2003. The most dramatic increase in negativity is unsurprisingly towards France, but very negative ratings for all four countries are up, while positive ratings for all four are down.
The Raines It Paineth Every Way The resignation of Howell Raines has a certain irony to it - Raines has himself become the latest victim of the smear machine he worked for years to hone and aim at Bill Clinton and Al Gore. The conduct of Jayson Blair was a real scandal, although not obviously worse than that of people like Jeff Gerth, Kat Seelye, Frank Bruni who remain at the paper, spinning half-truths and lies to serve the GOP. They never lie free lance, so they don't have to worry about the fate of Jayson Blair. The subsequent Bragg mini-scandal was a nice touch of the style. Discredit your adversary, then blow up any trivial incident and call it a scandal; people will buy the new story and start to think of your target as chronically dishonest. Bragg was guilty of using unattributed work by a stringer in a story. This was at best a trivial incident. The Times reviews every week books not actually written by the famous person whose name is on the cover; scholarly jourmals are filled with articles which list a professor as lead author although most of the research and writing was done by graduate students listed as co-authors; many politicians haven't given a speech that includes their own words in years; it was well known that the reason Bill Bennett was able to generate such a vast stream of books and articles touting his own moral superiority was that he was signing his own name to work prepared by others. All this is doubtless deplorable, but the reality is that it is common and tolerated - yet suddenly a fairly minor instance of it appears in the Times, and the nation is shocked, shocked, at such goings on.
That Howell Raines is now hoist on his own petard, one he built over years to serve the same rightists who now use it against him, has a rich irony more like a novel than real life. At least this time, the victim is somebody who deserves to have his reputation trashed.
If you have any suspicion that the result will actually be a better newspaper, forget it. Avedon Carol has the scoop on former editor Joe Lelyveld, who will now be taking over.
Search Strings It seems that lately this blog has become rather popular among lonely tourists seeking companionship in distant locales. Unfortunately, they're probably looking in the wrong place. And then there's this guy. I don't even know what he was looking for, and it's probably better that way. Matrix Redux [Warning: Spoilers for Matrix Reloaded.] I might just be the last one to catch on to this, but Neo has Superman powers in the Matrix becuase he knows it isn't real. But at the end of the movie, he starts having the same powers in the 'real world' outside the Matrix. That implies that the real world is just another level, no more real than the Matrix. And the statement of the Source, that the machines have already repeatedly destoyed Zion, seems to clinch the point.
It's reminiscent of a story by Lem, The Futurological Conference, that handled the same material more playfully and very well. In a furture paradise, a researcher discovers that everything around him is a drug-induced illusion, but then the reality under that proves to be just another illusion, hiding a new reality which turns also to be unreal, etc. I don't actually remember how Lem's story ends, but then the ending of a Lem tale is nearly always less interesting than the ideas he plays with while getting there.
When Neo pulls back the next level in M3, as I presume he will, will the film tell us the real story, or imply a more Buddhist perpective, that all realities are as real or as illusory as the viewer accepts them? Given the philosophic implications of the first two (and the movies do possess remarkable philosophic showiness, considering that they are at least 40% fight scenes), I suspect they will try to be ambiguous and have it both ways. |
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