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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, October 29, 2003
Top Ten Top Ten lists are as fun as they are meaningless, so I can't help responding to this Volokh Conspiracy post by Tyler Cowen, a list of the recent (1950 - 2000) works that will still be significant in 200 years. The titles selected are from David Frum; the comments are from Cowen. 1. A. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. A wonderful book, but too narrowly political, not in my top ten by any stretch.
I'll go with Cowen on items 1, 2, and 10. For 3, I would drop Pollock and go instead with the paintings of Chagall. But he may not qualify, since most of his greatest and truly original work was done before 1950. On the Godfather films, I too prefer I to II; I've always thought that the sections of II where De Niro plays the young Don Corleone, struggling to imitate the voice and bearing of Brando's great portrayal in I, are an unacknowledged weakness. But I would rate Chinatown as the greatest of American crime movies, and my own favorite movie of all time. It lacks the epic sweep of the Godfather series, but this story of interlinked personal and financial corruptions is just perfect on its own small scale.
Cowen's comments on 5 are an embarassing blunder. "The Captive Mind" is a great book; maybe not great enough to be on this list, but a masterpiece. It is, however, an essay, not a bit of a novel. The books listed at 7 & 9 I have never read and won't comment on.
Camille Paglia, often an interesting observer of culture although vapid on politics, has pointed out that we live in a poor age for the traditional high culture forms. It is quite possible that no paintings or sculpture from our era will matter in 200 years. It is all but certain that this is true of our operas, symphonies, and compositions in other traditional classical music forms. Hey, none of them matter today; what's the chance they will in 200 years?
The modern highbrow literary novel is harder to rate, but I have my doubts. The most acclaimed novel of my life, "Gravity's Rainbow", is well on its way to becoming a classic in the mold of "Ulysses", admired by all and read by almost nobody.
But where these traditional forms have lost their resonance, new forms and styles have emerged. Recent operas are feeble, but our musicals are likely to hold their interest for centuries to come, with "West Side Story" and "Les Miserables" topping the list. Most conspicuously missing from Frum's list is the even less prestigious form of the pop song. The single modern work that I feel genuinely confident will still matter in 200 years is the Beatles catalog. It's hard to say what other pop music will last, but the legitimate contenders, led by Dylan, Springsteen, and the classic Motown recordings, are numerous.
Fiction is trickier, but again I think that the work most likely to survive is from what is now dismissed as generic fiction, particularly SF, rather than the mainstream. SF is potent in today's worl and will be moreso in the future because the themes central to the genre, the paths of technological change the impact of technology on society and individuals, are now part of everybody's life, and that certainly won't change in the future. Indeed, as we move towards a future that, in the next 25 - 50 years, is likely to feature fully Turing Test capable software, routine genetic engineering of embryos, and possibly even alien contact, science fiction's questions about the boundaries and meaning of humanness will surely become more compelling than ever. By contrast, far too much mainstream fiction seems to be more about pure style than about compelling stories, characters, or problems. Borges, for his short fiction, is the only 'highbrow' writer who would make my top ten list. Heinlein and Dick are possible survivors; both did most of their best work before 1970, but are as widely read today as ever. "The Lord of the Rings", published in 1954 and after but largely written in the 40s, is another likely survivor, if counted as eligible. Among living authors, Wolfe, Crowley, Sterling, Le Guin, Brin, and Bujold are some I would regard as strong candidates.
This is not particularly a new development. Genre author Conan Doyle and borderline genre author Jane Austen matter far more today than almost any of their contemporaries.
Television has had a vast impact on society and culture, but predicting what, if anything, will survive from that vast wasteland is deeply problematic. "Seinfeld" seems wildly overrated to me, as is most of "I Love Lucy". The best of Lucy was brilliant, but the majority not especially memorable. In this it is similar to "Monte Python's Flying Circus": the best pieces are as funny as ever, but the series as a whole shows its age. In general, the best British shows improve on anything done in Hollywood, probably because the larger number of shows required for an American season makes high quality difficult to sustain. "The Prisoner", at once a strong action adventure and a playful yet profound psychological drama, is probably the strongest candidate. Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Some Web Notes On the text side, Consortium News has an interesting article with background on the Neocon politicization in intelligence going back to the 70s. On the graphics side, Interestinmg Times has a wonderful photo illustrating the divisions in the administration. The body English in this one is worth at least a thousand words. Saint Ronald William Bennett recently spoke as follows on Hardball: MATTHEWS: Let me put you in a position of being a script reader. Early scripts of a new CBS miniseries on the Ronald Reagan family, Nancy and Ronald Reagan, obtained by “The New York Times.”
Jerry Falwell is equally shocked by the AIDS quote:
Anyone who ever knew President Reagan knows that such language would never emanate from this heroic man. While Reagan detractors enjoy portraying him as a bumbling and unfeeling man, the truth is he was a compassionate and respectful leader who would be taken aback by such language. (In fact, not even a wild-eyed religious radical like me has ever made such a blatantly horrific statement.) In fact, religious radical and former Reagan Communications Director Pat Buchanan has said far worse, but that's another subject. At the moment, it might be appropriate to remind Messrs Falwell and Bennett, who may have been busy playing slots and fleecing believers at the time, of this memorable incident from Mr Reagan's career:
The [Patty Hearst] abduction occurred in February 1974. One of the SLA's demands was a free food program. Patty's father, Randolph Hearst, publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, arranged for such a project in Oakland. Governor Ronald Reagan responded to the long line of people waiting for free food: "I hope they all get botulism." And let us not forget Ronald Reagan'splan, so wise and compassionate, for dealing with dissent:
If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement.
"Why would Reagan be portrayed as a death-wisher? " cries an anguished Brent Bozell. Perhaps because that's what he was. Monday, October 27, 2003
Blue Meanies Calpundit posted on the changing rules for blue slips, the traditional Senate practice which essentially gives Senators from the home state of a judicial nominee the right to block that nominee from being considered by the Senate. Kevin has noted the dishonesty of the crocodile tears of Bill Frist and his fellow RNC spokespuppets at Fox News at the 'unprecedented' acts of Democrats against Bush judicial nominees. Although strictly speaking there are few (not none) precedents for filibustering of judicial nominees, the GOP has repeatedly changed the blue slip rules, to make approval harder under Clinton, then changed again to make it easier under Bush. However, the facts are even stronger than Kevin mentioned. Judiciary chairman Hatch has not only gone from allowing a single Senator from a nominee's home state to block an appointment to requiring both Senators, he is now talking about going ahead without the support of either Senator for a group of Bush nominees from Michigan. Hatch is troubled by the fact that Michigan's Senators, both Democrats, have used the blue slip 'irresponsibly' by not approving Bush nominees he supports.
Also, Kevin appears to be wrong in saying that Democrats changed existing blue slip rules when Jeffords switched the control in 2001. Although Hatch planned on easing the rules during early 2001, when Republicans had a narrow Senate majority, he seems not to have actually done so. There wasn't enough time, since the period was dominated by Cabinet and other Executive appointments along with the first tax cut. So the Democrats didn't actually change anything when they took over post-Jeffords, they kept the existing rules. The rules were changed this year, however. According to Senator Leahy, "Today is the first time that this Chairman will ever have convened a hearing for a judicial nominee who did not have two positive blue slips returned to the Committee. The first time, ever. Despite protestations that this has been the Chairman’s consistent policy over time, the facts show exactly the opposite."
Friday, October 24, 2003
Off the Trail Rick Perlstein has taken some shots at the Lieberman semi-campaign. When I first set out in early September to profile Lieberman, I began the conventional way: I rang up the press office and asked when a good time might be to witness the candidate in action on the campaign trail. For weeks press secretary Jano Cabrera promised to get back to me and never did. It was then that I finally logged on to the official Lieberman website.... I took a look at the schedule of events the campaign seemed so disinclined to have me know about.... On the 14th, Joe scheduled an aberration, the only campaign event open to the general, non-paying public all the way through to the end of the month, a town hall meeting in Manchester (he preceded it with what the campaign advertised as an "all-out campaign blitz": The candidate knocked on six doors in downtown Concord). Then it was back to the grind—a reception, the next night, at the Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel in Boston. "Event Hosts: $2000 contribution per person. Guests: $500 contribution per person." This is what Jano Cabrera had been hiding from me. Save for these fundraisers, his candidate wasn't campaigning at all. September wasn't a fluke: Lieberman continues to hit the hustings with all the energetic entusiasm of Homer Simpson. Kerry's schedule is packed with events Thursday through Saturday leading up to the Sunday debate. Edwards will address a union meeting and hold two town halls today in Florida. Gephardt has six events today and tomorrow in - surprise - Iowa. He hits five Detroit churches on Sunday before the debate, then back to Iowa. Clark has public events today and tomorrow in New Hampshire, then is off for the debate. Dean has been resting up yesterday and today. He'll need it, because starting Sunday he has rallies, speeches, and a debate scheduled for seven states in five days. Even Moseley-Braun, who spoke yesterday in Texas, has a speech and appearances tomorrow in Wisconsin and Illinois.
Excluding Sunday's debate, Lieberman has no public events scheduled from the 14th through the end of the month. Thursday, October 23, 2003
Secrets of Software It's well known among those familiar with the industry that few commercial products are less reliable than complex software packages, or complex products using both hardware and software components. Almost all are shipped defective, with bugs, known or unknown, included - the first day they are installed, they fail in some way to work properly. There are a lot of reasons for this. The packages contain numerous components which interact in complex ways. In a typical installation with large numbers of stations connected over a local network, the interactions are even more complex. Fixing problems is difficult and expensive, and companies are constantly under pressure to add new features rather than go back and repair problems in old ones. Finding problems is also quite difficult; and it is costly. It requires adding numerous testers who make no direct contribution to revenue; in fact, they can easily be seen as hurting it, since it is generally true that the better testing and quality control are, the harder it is to get new products out the door. And those whose job it is to test products have little or no direct contact with end users, so don't know what is actually being done with the product in the field. It is axiomatic and true that no matter how hard you work to make a product idiot proof, there will always be bigger and better idiots to defeat your efforts. I have worked in four companies, and can say that none had really good testing procedures. It's often quite hard to even say whether your company is responsible for a problem. If a problem seems unfixable, it can be easier, and sometimes even true, to say that your product is fine, but there is a bug in the network, or the database back end, or the desktop PC. This is especially true if you're using Windows, as most systems do; Microsoft is a de facto monopoly and the quality problems inherent to the software industry combined with those inherent to monopolies makes for an ugly combination. (This can lead to nightmares for the end users, who when calling for technical support on a bug can simply find themselves shuttled between the support departments of various vendors, with each saying their product is just fine and the bug is some other vendor's fault.)
While coders try to fix problems with the old systems, marketing and sales are looking for new releases with new features. Salesmen and often managers have a poor understanding of what is feasible, and can make unwise promises to clients that programmers are then expected to live up to. Over years, all sorts of features never envisioned in the original design are added on. The resulting code can be astoundingly ugly; often a single program will incorporate over 200 changes large and small made at various times by dozens of programmers of varying levels of ability, some of them certainly very poor. Strange hacks are slipped in for some reason that somebody once understood, but today nobody knows why they are there. Ancient comments are left floating about, perhaps referring to code that was deleted years ago, but some programmers know no better than to make decisions based on them. Work on these baroque and obscure programs is, in the vast majority of companies, dumped on the most junior employees, while the comparably much easier task of writing new programs goes to the most senior.
All this was especially true during the years when programming jobs were easy to find and talent was scarce. Huge numbers of people who had no real gift for the subject took college courses because they heard it was a lucrative field. Due to the labor market, most found jobs and often kept them, good or no. Even if this is less true today, the bad code they wrote lives on. And of course, companies will always be tempted to hire the cheapest programmers and testers rather than the best.
When users finally start running the product, it gets worse. They usually need to learn how to use it from the manual, and manuals have their own set of problems. For a detailed explanation of why user manuals are almost always bad, along with many other things, see the famous and brilliant novel, 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', by Robert Pirsig, who wrote those manuals for a living while he was working on his book.
If you have any doubts as to the quality problems of the industry, just read closely the disclaimer on almost any software product you purchase. They generally require you to accept that the product is not guaranteed to work properly for any purpose, at any time, under any conditions; furthermore, in addition to malfunctioning itself, it may also damage your computer and cause other programs to malfunction. Users are normally required to waive damages or compensation of any kind, even if they use the product exactly as recommended.
So as a veteran of the software industry, reading the following didn't especially startle me. I've seen it all before, if not quite this bad.
For the past three years I have worked for Spectrum then Global. Over that time I have become increasingly concerned about the apparent lack of concern over the practice of writing contracts to provide products and services which do not exist and then attempting to build these items on an unreasonable timetable with no written plan, little to no time for testing, and minimal resources. It also seems to be an accepted practice to exaggerate our progress and functionality to our customers and ourselves then make excuses at delivery time when these products and services do not meet expectations. The pressure to meet these deadlines and deal with repeated calls from sales staff and customers trying to ascertain actual progress versus exaggerated reports has become intolerable. The resulting stress has had a very negative effect on me both mentally and physically.
As internal politics and mismanagement continue to divert attention and resources away from these issues, the problems become further and further entrenched. ...
-B. Clubb
It does not matter whether we get anything certified or not, if we can't even get the foundation of Global stable. This company is a mess! We should stop development on all new, and old products and concentrate on making them stable instead of showing vaporware. Selling a new account will only load more crap on an already over burdened entity....
Every time I look at the support list there is another sales person or manager screaming we can't go forward without having to fix this or to fix that. You are taxing the development team beyond what they can handle. This is not there problem, it is yours....
I have never been at any other company that has been so miss managed. I see blame being put on anything that moves. Communication does not exist! All I here from upper management is “That’s fine, he or she will be removed”. Upper management seems to think they know what is going on. They are to caught up in to much politics, and to much self importance, to even realize that there are employees watching them, waiting for some direction... We have allot of bright people in Global, why is it so hard to get things right....
I just received a call from Ingrid, she says she is tired of getting calls from clients asking for help. No one at Global is giving them the time of day. Ingrid is the only name I will use in this conversation. I have had calls from other ex-employees stating the same thing.
We have a management team that is so redundant, it is pathetic, and yet we don't have enough employees to get the work done. Wake up! We keep loosing good people, and yet management does not see this...
My views are my views only. If you wish to fire me for speaking the truth, bring it on... or fix this crap. The employees of this company are watching, waiting to see if you are the leaders that will keep them going, or the pathetic fools that will drive this company into the ground. ...
-M. Brown The above comes from the famous cache of internal e-mails concerning touch voting systems that Diebold is attempting to suppress. (They think they can successfully suppress something that has already appeared on the WWW? Right there you know these guys don't understand their business.)
I don't necessarily believe that Diebold is playing dirty with the vote counting, although that is a legitimate concern. The point is, it doesn't matter, not even a little. The problem is that these systems leave no evidence whatsoever external to the machine of how many votes have been cast or for which candidate. Errors that occur are uncatchable and often undetectable. One Florida county in 2000 showed -16000 votes for Gore. That was obviously preposterous and at least led to the number being questioned, although it seems unclear whether the correct count was ever determined or properly awarded to Gore. But a more subtle error, although it might wipe out thousands of votes, could simply be invisible, even in a recount. Systems like these just aren't robust and reliable enough to use for something as critical to society as counting votes, not unless there is a paper trail to show what really happened. Forget intentional sabotage; even if you knew organized cheating wasn't going on, just plain screw ups are more than sufficient reason to demand that systems like this be banned. Monday, October 20, 2003
Time has a new article purporting to give new information on the career and cover of Valerie Plame. Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who put in 24 years as a spymaster and was Plame's boss for a few years, says Plame worked under official cover in Europe in the early 1990s — say, as a U.S. embassy attache — before switching to nonofficial cover a few years later. Mostly Plame posed as a business analyst or a student in what Rustmann describes as a "nice European city."... Though Plame's cover is now blown, it probably began to unravel years ago when Wilson first asked her out. Rustmann describes Plame as an "exceptional officer" but says her ability to remain under cover was jeopardized by her marriage in 1998 to the higher-profile American diplomat. The odd thing about this is that it seems to contradict the story which came out earlier that Plame wasn't used in a cover capacity since 1994, due to fears that her cover had been blown by Aldrich Ames. It's just barely possible to make that story fit with Plame switching from official to NOC status at some point in the 1990s, but it takes some squeezing. And the story that her cover "began to unravel" when she started dating Wilson flatly contradicts the account that it had been ruined years earlier.
Maybe I'm just getting paranoid, but I find this pattern highly suspicious. Originally, we had one, now wholly discredited, account that she was never a true spy to begin with. Once it was clear that wouldn't stand, two further accounts of Plame's cover history, with conflicting details but with the same bottom line - that by 2003 her cover was no big deal - were leaked to major news outlets. Are we still getting more spin than truth? Kevin thinks that a proposal to repeal the recent law allowing illegal immigrants to obtains driver's licenses is bad because it's too trivial an issue to place in the state Constitution. Not that he's really wrong, but this is a battle that has long since been lost for most state constitutions, including California's. Here are a few excerpts from the current state constitution: [Article 10A] SEC. 6. (a) The venue of any of the following actions or
[Article 10B]SEC. 4. (a) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, gill nets
[Article 20]SEC. 2. Except for tax exemptions provided in Article XIII, the
Friday, October 17, 2003
Failing the Test It's no real shocker that the state program to test academic proficiency of New York High Scholl students is a mess. What is fairly scary is this: People who should have known better were fooled. New York's testing program was one of the first approved by the federal government under No Child Left Behind. In the spring, a survey of testing programs by Princeton Review ranked New York first of the 50 states. "Mills was hard core" about testing, said Steven Hodas of Princeton Review. "He had a take-no-prisoners attitude," he said. So this wasn't just one more state program. It was a program in one of the largest and wealthiest states, selected by alleged experts as the best in the nation. And yet, the tests were inadequately tested, the scoring was arbitrary and inconsistent, some questions were incomprehensible, and the contents of the tests failed to match the state guidelines of what students were expected to learn.
Similar tests are now being imposed across the country, due primarily to the No Child Left Behind act, as well as state-level initiatives. No real funding from Washington is being provided to ensure well-designed tests, or to help schools prepare students. Millions of students will spend weeks or months of class time preparing for these tests at immense expense and with huge disruption of other educational objectives. And yet there is little evidence that the millions of test scores that will be collected and analyzed will even provide meaningful information, much less a real approach to fixing the real problems of schools. It would be a considerable overstatement to claim that infamous NY Times 'reporter' Kat Seelye has gone back to her old tricks. This article on Clark is generally quite positive, enough so to be cited without complaint by the Clark blog. This earlier piece, no longer free content, is favorable enough to have drawn at least one complaint of pro-Clark bias from the conservative blogosphere. But both contain a questionable criticism: "In one incident in 1994, General Clark posed with Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian-Serb general accused of slaughtering hundreds of civilians. General Clark had been advised by the State Department not to meet with him, but he did anyway, swapping caps and posing for pictures."
I have discussed this charge at some length here. Clark flatly denies that his meeting with Mladic was contrary to instructions by the State Department. The incident doesn't seem to have troubled Richard Holbrooke, who was then Assistant Secretary of State for Europe. Holbrooke subsequently brought Clark onto his team for the Bosnia peace negotiations.
If Seelye has some evidence for doubting Clark's denial, she should say so. If she has none, she should at least mention Clark's version of events when repeating the claim. Wednesday, October 15, 2003
I learned from Donald Sensing that another retired general, Dennis Reimer, has been critical of Wes Clark. Retired Gen. Dennis Reimer, a former Army chief of staff, describes Clark as an intelligent, ``hardworking, ambitious individual who really applies himself hard.'' But, Reimer said, ``Some of us were concerned about the fact that he was focused too much upward and not down on the soldiers. I've always believed you ought to be looking down toward your soldiers and not up at how to please your boss. ... I just didn't see enough of that in Wes.'' A differing viewpoint can be found at Veterans for Clark:
T. Ryan
By the end of his career, Wes Clark had a very large number of people under his command and a very small group above him. If he was indeed unconcerned with the welfare of those he commanded, why aren't we hearing it from them? If Clark was obsessed, as some claim, with buttering up those above him in rank, why is it that criticisms seem to come precisely from those officers - officers who are known to have opposed the policy, that Clark supported successfully, of increased US involvement to end the disaster in the former Yugoslavia? Catastrophe Narrowly Averted Some who call themselves baseball fans have been rooting for the Cubs to actually win the NLCS. These are people, clearly, who don't understand the nature of baseball. The most conservative of sports, baseball is nothing without its traditions. There are no liberals in dugouts, and very few in the stands. Why else would the DH rule, a rather minor change and in many ways a positive one, still be spoken of decades after it was established, sometimes by fans who are younger than the rule, as an atrocity comparable to the Thirty Years War? One celebrated tradition of baseball is that the Chicago Cubs are never to play in, much less win, the World Series. Those who lack faith in the power of the Almighty to preserve and uphold the game were prepared to think last night that the tradition was about to end. After Mike Mordechai flew out, Prior had retired 8 straight and the Cubs were 5 outs away with a fairly comfortable 3 run lead.
Fortunately one heroic fan stepped up to save the day, ably assisted by Alex Gonzalez, an excellent infielder who committed only 10 errors in the regular season. By their efforts baseball, the American way, and quite possibly the unity of the time-space continuum were preserved against all odds. After the Cubs lose tonight, all will be safe for another year.
This will have the unfortunate side effect of the Florida Marlins playing in the World Series. And since the odds are now against Boston, the cursed crew of the AL, making it, there will probably be nobody worth rooting for in the Fall Classic.
Monday, October 13, 2003
The Washington Post on Sunday promoted (without attribution) an idea first proposed in the blogosphere by Mark Kleiman. Kleiman's idea is essentially to smoke out the Plame leaker by requiring all senior White House aides to verify, under oath, that they did not leak the story and don't know who did. The leaker's defense, if found, is likely to be that he didn't realize the covert nature of Plame's position. Someone planning to fall back on that defense, and optimistic about its effectiveness, might well stop at signing such a statement - perjury would in some ways be much easier to convict on than a violation of the Intelligence Identities Act.. So there is a real chance that this strategy could identify the culprit immediately. Bush will avoid this if he can, of course. But if the idea leaks out from the blogosphere into the general public, it will be hard to justify not taking this step. I'd Like to Announce That I'm Writing a Blog Kucinich is the latest Democrat to 'announce' his candidacy after a year or so of hard campaigning. I really would like to see these bogus announcements go the way of the 300 baud modem. Dispelling rumors that he is insane, Kucinich is also running for re-election to his current House seat. Calpundit is rather too kind to this Times editorial on the Plame scandal. Kristof is harsh on attempts to spin the crime, noting that, "Republicans have inexcusably tried to whitewash it". But he tries to balance that with a criticism of Democrats for, "engaging in hyperbole when they describe the White House as having put Mrs. Wilson's life in danger and destroyed her career". But the truth is that the exposure does cause some personal danger to Ms Wilson and her family, and any such added risk, although small, is inexcusable. The very public nature of the exposure makes them a potential target not just for foreign intelligence organizations, but also, probably a greater concern, for generalized nut jobs, such as the man who broke into the home of Clinton associate Cody Shearer, vandalizing property and threatening visitors with a gun, after Shearer was falsely accused on talk radio of having threatened Kathleen Willey. Democrats have consistently emphasized the national security aspects of this story from the beginning. Here is the first statement by any prominent Democrat I know of, Shumer's call for an FBI investigation:"Leaking the name of a CIA agent is tantamount to putting a gun to that agent’s head. It compromises her safety and the safety of her loved ones, not to mention those in her network and other operatives she may have dealt with. On top of that, the officials who have done it may have also seriously jeopardized the national security of this nation." This early treatment by Josh Marshall similarly is more concerned about security implications, although it does suggest, perhaps incorrectly, that ongoing activities of Plame personally were damaged.
Kristof also states:
Moreover, the Democrats cheapen the debate with calls, at the very beginning of the process, for a special counsel to investigate the White House. Hillary Rodham Clinton knows better than anyone how destructive and distracting a special counsel investigation can be, interfering with the basic task of governing, and it's sad to see her display the same pusillanimous partisanship that Republicans showed just a few years ago. First, Hillary Clinton has no particular knowledge of special counsels. Ken Starr and his cohorts were special prosecutors, appointed under a law that no longer exists, and with a diffenent status than special counsels. Special counsels go back a long way. The first President to hire one - and to fire one - was Ulysses S Grant. Special counsel investigations, not conducted under the Special Prosecutor Act of 1978, have an extensive history, and have generally been more successful than otherwise. It's true that this is a subtle distinction missed by most people, but that's no excuse for a writer in the NY Times making such a mistake.
Kristof also entirely ignores some facts which weaken his case considerably. Karl Rove, a major potential target of this investigation, has close ties not only to Ashcroft's boss, but to Ashcroft himself. Worse, Ashcroft has not merely kept the investigation within normal DoJ channels, he has so far not taken the obvious step of recusing himself. There are legitimate arguments against a special counsel, but recusal is a routine action which should have been immediate and uncontroversial.
One point which nobody seems to have made: one new piece of information in the editorial is that over the past several years, some of Plame's primary duties have been in "liaison roles with other intelligence agencies". Such work would almost certainly have involved foreign travel, which would mean that Plame is covered under the "5 year" provision of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
In general, Kristof spins the story a standard partisan food fight, with both parties failing to live up to the magisterial ethical standards of the Times. Kristof succeeds in leaving the impression that the malfeasance on each side is about equal, although in one case it involves a premeditated crime involving grave damage to national security and a lack of interest bordering on coverup in prosecuting that crime, on the other is a slightly excessive emphasis exaggerating one aspect of the harm done by this act and a call, which Kristof doubtfully labels as premature, for an independent counsel. Along with some journalistic self-gratification, this closely corresponds to the current Republican approach. David Corn gives an illuminating example of that spin in action.
Thursday, October 09, 2003
Is Clark in Crisis? There has been some disorder and musical chairs recently in the Clark campaign, most visibly the resignation of Donnie Fowler and most recently an open attack on the campaign by an anonymous insider from the original draft campaign. Certain bloggers, mostly the pro-Dean faction, have been jumping on this as a sign that the Clark campaign is collapsing. At Tapped, Garance Frankie-Ruta, who had been setting up shop as the house Clark basher, stepped back to do an interesting discussion of the problem. How seriious is it? "The bell [is] tolling for the Clark campaign" according to the attack linked above. Another piece I saw somewhere in the blogosphere says Clark has two weeks to salvage the situation. Such announcements strike me as needlessly, even absurdly, apocalyptic.
Clark continues to lead in the latest poll released today. Money is coming in. There are 3 months until the first primary. And the grass roots continue to thrive. This is not a campaign on the verge of catastrophe. Most of these difficulties look like just the expected false steps and personal incompatabilities that occur when a new organization is being formed. They happen in most campaigns, but we are under greater pressure to fix them quickly since we came into the race relatively late.
The critiques suggest that the grass roots are angry at the campaign's direction. As I have mentioned before, I am involved as a grass roots activist for the campaign in my area. We aren't being micro-managed, or even really managed at all, out of Little Rock. The instructions we have gotten have been simply to continue our current activities. Hardly anything has been changed - I believe that local groups were told to stop having campaign materials printed at non-union shops, but that's almost the only order sent down I know of, and I don't think it affected our local group. If anything, the problem for local activists is that we aren't getting enough from Arkansas; particularly we would like to have Arkansas sending us campaign flyers, signs, and so forth, so we could focus only on getting them out, without having to expend energy creating and printing them. This hasn't happened yet; supposedly it is on the way very soon.
The anger that I read on the web is simmering in the Clark grass roots is completely invisible to me. The people in my local group are excited and optimistic. We believe in the candidate and are waiting to see with the campaign.
What seems to be ignored in all the commentary on the Clark campaign is that we are doing something that is really unprecedented. Clark had about 20,000 volunteers in place nationally on the day he declared; many more have come in since. This was done over the web, mostly through Meetup and a lot of Yahoo groups. We also had tables in street fairs and other locations, which added more names to our lists. There was very minimal structure - major areas had local coordinators who were in touch with each other through email and phones, and there were the people who ran the draft web sites. Other people had organized themselves into various groups for particular projects. We had the pledges to raise money, but the money actually donated to the draft couldn't go to the campaign for legal reasons. We had volunteers in every state and almost every major city, but nobody really knew how to put this into a serious campaign. No campaign has had anything like this already in place from day one; previous campaigns have worked for months to develop similar networks. Most never succeeded; Clark's Meetup list now is larger than those of the other eight candidates (excluding Dean) combined.
Since nobody has ever done it before, nobody really knows how to fold that kind of grass roots internet movement into a developing campaign. Dean has run a brilliant grass roots operation, but his support grew gradually in an existing campaign, and he's had over a year to put his operation together. And even in the Dean camp, the bugs aren't entirely worked out.
Once we really have it right, the Clark campaign can potentially offer the best elements of an insider and outsider campaign - backing from the party establishment and an excited, effective volunteer base. I think we'll get there; but we clearly aren't there now. Mistakes have doubtless been made, and more probably will be. Working this out is a tricky problem. But figuring out what to do with 40,000 enthusiastic volunteers spread across the country is a 'problem' that the Kerry and Gephardt campaigns wish they had. (The volunteer list is large and growing; Clark is now consistently getting more Meetup signups than Dean.)
And while I'm on the topic of the party establishment, I find it quite astonishing that certain Democratic bloggers - Kos being the worst and most consistent offender - have completely swallowed the RNC line that the Clintons and Al Gore are the quintessence of evil. To Kos, Clinton and Gore are so suffused with corruption that it inevitably rubs off on anybody who associates with anybody who associates with them. No self-respecting volunteer will stay in a campaign that allows these awful people to play key roles. A little reminder: the Clinton/Gore insiders won three consecutive presidential elections and gave this country eight years of the best government it has had for half a century. I'm not planning to leave the campaign because they're joining it, and I can't see why any Democrat would.
Lastly, I want to point out that these 'grass roots' complaints against the campaign aren't really coming from the local volunteers, the true grass roots, at all. They seem to be coming from the 'outside insiders', the folks who ran the draft web sites - look at all the hints and nudge nudge insider gossip in the screed I linked to at the beginning of this post. Some of them have been given positions in the campaign that are not equal to what they consider they deserve. I think those people have made terrific contributions and can continue to help the campaign succeed, and I hope that good roles are found for them. But I didn't join up to get a job with the campaign or to guarantee that John Hlinko gets a nice office in Little Rock. I joined to help replace a terrible President with a man who could become a great one, and that's still what I care about. There are no problems, as we are regularly informed by certain bloggers, with the rebuilding of Iraq. Move right along, nothing to see here except liberal bias. And, seeing as that is such a roaring success, there are naturally no problems with the morale of our troops. All those soldiers asking for advice on the penalties of "doing a Dubya" are just expressing their esteem for their beloved Commander in Chief. (Link from Maru.) And the Loser Is While others focus on the guy with the most votes, the Nuisance takes a moment to remember all those other candidates in California's 135 person field. For all the talk about the huge field, the two top candidates ulitmately split just over 80% of the vote. Add in McClintock, and you have 93.8%.
Peter Camejo got about 45% of the remainder, with 2.8% of the vote. Considering that this was an election where voters were eager to toss out the in crowd and look to alternatives, and that Camejo got huge exposure from several broadcast debates, that can't be seen as an impressive showing.
Next were in order Huffington, Ueberroth, Flynt, and Coleman. Mary Cook finished 10th. Comedian Gallagher finished last among the actual celebrities, with 4,864 votes for 16th place, still beating out the 2,262 votes (28th place, if I counted correctly) of self-declared celebrity Angelyn.
Web favorite Georgina Russell earned 1,947 votes. I guess there just aren't enough voters who read German profiles, even when they have racy titles like "Sex, Drugs, und Open Source". A disappointing finish, but sexy liberal Georgy did beat out her right wing counterpart, sexy conservative Brooke Adams (1,833).
Edward Kennedy led the my-name-is-famous-even-if-I'm-not crowd with 2,583, coming in just behind it's-sorta-like-a-famous-name-if-you-don't-look-too-close Dan Feinstein. Trailing in this category were Richard Simmons, and Michael Jackson. Proving that we're not in Kansas any more, Robert Dole brought up the rear in 132nd place.
Let history note that the unique honor of finishing 135th out of 135 went to Todd Richard "Bumhunter" Lewis. With 172 votes, Mr Lewis gained the support of 0.002% of California voters. So much for the theory that having a web site is a sure campaign gimmick. Earlier in the campaign, when he still held dreams of finishing 134th, Mr Lewis had said, "People are going to know the Bum Hunter is doing this, and hopefully it will get the young demographic to go out there, support me, register to vote, and be involved in future elections. And it will draw attention to the homeless people; no one realizes how many people are out there." How many voters were drawn to the polls by Mr Lewis's candidacy remains uncertain. Wednesday, October 08, 2003
Win One for the Groper Various people have tried to make comparisons between the conduct of Bill "I feel your pain" Clinton and Arnold "I feel your breasts" Schwarzenegger. Both are pretty obviously not models of conduct in their personal lives, but their faults seem to be actually quite sharply different. Clinton is known to have had several extramarital affairs; the ones we know about are most likely the tip of a pretty sizable iceberg. But his affairs were consensual; his most famous paramour, Monica Lewinsky, clearly was chasing after him before he was more than vaguely aware of her. Three women have accused Clinton of nonconsensual conduct. But all are questionable witnesses. The most serious accusation, that he raped Juanita Broadrick, was made only 19 years after the alleged act, and after she had stated, under oath and in several conversations, that she had received no unwanted sexual attention from him. Kathleen Willey is known to be a dubious character who has lied about Clinton and her own affairs, as well as using questionable means to avoid returning money her late husband stole from clients. Paula Jones originally filed suit over the claim that her name was tarnished by a single sentence in an article which mentioned only her first name; she wound up using her celebrity to attach her full name to nude photos in "Penthouse". It's not unreasonable to believe that Clinton has never engaged in nonconsensual sexual conduct beyond making unwelcome passes. Even if his accusers are believed, his actions were private and seem to reflect excessive libido.
Schwarzenegger's alleged harassments, in almost every case, took place before an audience, most of the time an audience of Schwarzenegger's own Hollywood posse of sycophants and hangers-on. Only two women describe instances when they were alone with Arnold, and in both cases they were in public spaces: a hotel elavator and a break room in a movie editing facility. Schwarzenegger seems to have little interest in sex in most of these stories; instead his pleasure comes from the public humiliation and degradation of his victims. It's hardly a trait that gives one confidence in the man's character. And these stories are most likely also instances of a much broader pattern; where it took years of investigation and the combined efforts of Jones's attorneys, Starr's investigators, and dozens of right-wing muckrakers to bring forward 2 women who gave rather weak support to the allegations of Paula Jones, the LA Times was able to find 6 women and corroborate that they had previously told friends of Arnold's behavior in less than two months - and 10 more women volunteered similar stories within days of the L.A. Times publishing.
This trait, rather than political ideology, is how Schwarzenegger's admiration for Hitler should be viewed. He says he is not a Nazi, and I entirely believe him. But he has a fascination with power and narcissism that is deeply disturbing. Rather than an improbable obsession with Mein Kampf, this is the far more likely explanation of Arnold's fantasy of being "like Hitler in the Nuremberg stadium. And have all those people scream at you and just being total agreement whatever you say." As a young man, he sought the most obvious, superficial kind of power, becoming the most famous bodybuilder in the world, and indulging his narcissism by posing nude. He went on to gain another kind of power, in celebrity, wealth, and social status. Now he has successfully sought the real thing. Will he be a success at governing? I'm skeptical, although it would be foolish to dismiss out of hand a man who has been so successful through almost his entire life. But he is facing sizable problems that he can't charm his way out of, and his promise to spend several billion to reduce the car fees makes them even larger. Being a movie star is a superlative career preparation for running, but a very poor one for governing. He boasts of being a businessman, a somewhat more apt introduction to governance, but his main actual business venture, Planet Hollywood, was a major failure. He was conspicuous in the campaign for his refusal to address California's real problems or offer serious solutions. The fact that he has slid through the campaign and won the election with our knowing almost nothing of what he will do to address the state's urgent fiscal problems speaks poorly of both the media and the electorate. He certainly could surprise me - I did publicly predict he would lose - but I suspect his administration will be less successful than his campaign. Thursday, October 02, 2003
Matthew Goes Free TAPped has yielded to the unstoppable power of the Free Matthew Yglesias movement and is now putting authors' bylines on posts. Plame Excuses Bob Novak says that Valerie Plame Wilson's role as an undercover agent was just casually mentioned to him by two senior White House officials, while he was writing up a negative column about Joe Wilson. But it wasn't "a planned leak", oh no. It was merely "an offhand revelation" during "a long conversation with a senior administration official", and was promptly confirmed when he called another senior official. Mr Novak is an honorable man who is just shocked, shocked, that anybody would believe "that somebody in the White House failed to plant this story with six reporters and finally found me as a willing pawn". Clifford May says that a few days earlier, a third person, "someone who formerly worked in the government", mentioned the same fact to him, in "an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of". As is quite clear if you read May closely, this just happened to occur while he was researching an article that would make him, as he proudly claims, "the first to publicly question the credibility of Mr. Wilson".
These officials just happened, within a few days of each other, and shortly after Wilson's article on the Niger uranium hoax was published, to blow the the cover of of Wilson's wife to two "journalists", both of whom were right wing activists looking for goods to smear Wilson with. This leads to one of two conclusions:
If I were them, I'd drop the cover story and just cop to the conspiracy. As bad as it is, it's probably less damning. Blogger Counterrevolutionary has some interesting speculations on the Plame affair. But he (she?) has shown a touch of carelessness with the facts. In this post, CR asks about Wilson's relationship with the CIA. CR makes the rather odd statment, "Wilson claims that he was tasked by the Vice-President himself, a charge that Cheney denies." There seems to be no basis for this claim at all. During a long interview (first part, second part) Wilson said to Josh Marshall: During the course of briefing them, talking to them about them, they'd brief me on the nature of the report, they also said that it was the office of the vice president that had raised the question. And, at the end of the briefing, they said would you be prepared to go out there to update our information based on this. So I said yes, and then we subsequently discussed--and again, the people I was talking to, there were about a dozen people that I was talking to who represented, I think, the intelligence communities, the cadre, sort of, who followed this... TPM: And you're going on your understanding of basically how the U.S. government and the nexus of the intelligence community and the executive branch works, and that tells you that since Cheney was the one who asked for the report, the report would have come back to him in some fashion or another.
The Vice President's office request was really, "Can you look into this to see if you have any more on it?" It was not, "Send Joe Wilson to Africa." Koppel: I understand that. The CIA was tasked to find out what happened, and they in turn came to you. Wilson: That's correct. So there is no actual contradiction between Cheney's and Wilson's accounts. Even CR seems to notice this because he contradicts himself in saying, "[Wilson] claims that he was asked by a group at the CIA to go on this mission. "
The question of how Wilson was chosen should be looked at because various commentators have suggested his choice is somehow suspicious. The allegation that Wilson was an odd choice was at the heart of Novak's column and the attempt to discredit him by alleging that Plame talked the CIA into the choice. CR says, "But it still does not make sense why he was chosen. Doesn't the CIA have officers in Niger or any other countries of Franco-phone Africa? Why not the Ambassador to Niger? Why was he chosen instead? Why a former State guy instead of CIA? "
The reason for a State veteran rather than CIA should be apparent. CIA officers are either spooks operating under cover or analysts mostly working out of Washington who spend little time on the ground in the area they're analyzing. Wilson had been posted to Niger as a diplomat, he had been posted to other countries in West Africa, including three of the four African countries that export uranium. As Clinton's NSC aide on Africa, he had worked extensively with the key leaders of the Nigerien government at the time the sales were alleged to have taken place. From that work and his earlier work in Niger, he had built personal relationships that few other possible investigators matched. And of the tiny number of candidaates who had Wilson's knowledge of Niger and fluency in French, Wilson was perhaps the only one who had been stationed in Iraq.
Why not the Ambassador? The Ambassador in Niger already had looked into the reports and reached the same conclusions. This has been clear from Wilson's original editorial: "The next morning, I met with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick at the embassy. The embassy staff has always kept a close eye on Niger's uranium business, so I was not surprised when the ambassador told me that she knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq, and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington." Nor was Wilson the only person who went to Naimey to investigate the story. It's been known since July that Carlton W. Fulford, a Marine Corps General, made a similar trip around the same time and reached similar conclusions. And while there has been much speculation about why a retired official was sent, the advantages of sending an expert now in private life, versus an active employee of comparable seniority who would be away from his normal duties for at least a week, are obvious.
CR also has a theory that Plame worked in the CIA as what is called a Collection Management Officer, or CMO. A CMO is a sort of liaison who works with covert agents and analyzes their results, but does not actually go into the field or run spies. It's a good try, but it falls apart on an obvious point that CR even states: "The cover assumed by both Ops Officers [covert agents] and CMOs when abroad is typically that of State Department employees. This allows them to maintain diplomatic immunity. The CIA runs very few “illegals” (officers without official cover) and they are never CMOs." There is not the slightest reason to believe that Plame ever worked under official cover - that is, as an employee of the State Department, which would leave a substantial trail of public documents that would by now have been uncovered by enterprising reporters if it were true. There is convincing evidence she was a covert agent. Again in July, Josh Marshall wrote, "My sources tell me that Plame formerly worked abroad under nonofficial cover and has more recently worked stateside." Retired CIA official Vince Cannistrano, as noted on this blog, has gone even further in describing Plame's duties: "She was under corporate cover and a non-governmental affiliation, and she was stationed abroad. [That] meant that she was a clandestine case officer, she was controlling agents."
Plame was a spy - the real thing. She worked on probably the greatest threat to this country's safety, nuclear weapons proliferation. (That's the logical connection between her cover as an 'energy analyst' and her real work in WMD.) The claim that she was an analyst or her work wasn't really secret is nothing but a smoke screen thrown up to hide the damage that was done by blowing her cover.
Update: More evidence, this from the Times, that Plame was a seriously secret operative, using nonofficial cover. This story is the first that has some biographical details about her, but adds no new information on her work, the leak, or the investigation. Wednesday, October 01, 2003
From Colin Powell's interview Sunday on This Week: MR. STEPHANOPOLOUS: But, as you know, Ambassador Bremer ran into a buzz saw up on Capitol Hill this week from Democrats and Republicans. And a lot of Republican members of Congress including, say, Senator Susan Collins from Maine, have said that this $20 billion should -- at least a portion of it -- should be loans not grants.
Wow, Powell seems to feel very strongly about the destructive consequences to a nation of saddling it with excessive debt. Has he discussed this subject lately with anybody at, say, OMB?
Karl Rove with a Telephone? In last nigt's Nightline interview, referenced in my last post, Ambassador Wilson backed off some from his earlier suggestions that Rove was the one who leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's status as a CIA operative. But one remark he made does seem to provide added evidence, certainly not conclusive, that Rove was a leaker or at least central to the conspiracy. Wilson:
What I do know, or what I have confidence in based upon what respectable press people in this town have told me, is that a week after the Novak article came out, Karl Rove was still calling around, talking to press people, saying Wilson's wife is fair game....[I was told] By reporters who talked to Karl Rove, the gist of the message, this was reported back to me right after the phone call, was, "I just got off the phone with Karl Rove. He tells me your wife is fair game." Compare and contrast this passage from the major Post story of this weekend that broke the Plame affair into prime time:
A source said reporters quoted a leaker as describing Wilson's wife as "fair game." Add this to the recent Guardian report that reporters are confirming, off the record, that they were called by Karl Rove, and the circumstantial trail leading to Rove's office gets pretty strong.
Yet McClellan was unambiguous in denying Rove's involvement on Monday, and he expressed the President's confidence in Rove.
QUESTION: Ambassador Wilson has said that he has information that Karl Rove condoned this leaking, and I've seen your comment that that's absolutely false -- McCLELLAN: It is ridiculous. It's ridiculous. QUESTION: What do you -- McCLELLAN: And keep in mind, I imagine that only a limited number of people would even have access to classified information of this nature. QUESTION: So he doesn't have information? QUESTION: Can I follow up? McCLELLAN: Yes, go ahead. And, Helen, you may always follow up. Go ahead. QUESTION: What, then, do you think the -- given that you say Rove condoning this is ridiculous, what do you think Ambassador Wilson's motivation is for leveling such a scurrilous charge? McCLELLAN: I can't speculate about why he would say such a thing. I mean, I saw some comments this morning, where he said he had no knowledge to that effect. But I can't speculate why he would say that. QUESTION: Did Rove say, "ridiculous"? McCLELLAN: I did, for him. QUESTION: Did you speak with him about it? McCLELLAN: Yes, I've spoken to him. ...
McCLELLAN: I've already provided those assurances to you publicly. QUESTION: Yes, but I'm just wondering if there was a conversation between Karl Rove and the President, or if he just talked to you, and you're here at this -- McCLELLAN: He wasn't involved. The President knows he wasn't involved. QUESTION: How does he know that? McCLELLAN: The President knows. QUESTION: What, is he clairvoyant? How does he know? If McClellan knows that Rove was the leaker, he would probably not make such a strong denial, and certainly not link Bush so directly to his denial. After all, he could have just chatted about 'pending investigations' and issued an effective 'no comment'. Yet it seems that there is at least a belief in the Washington press that Rove is implicated. And since the act in question is leaking information to numerous members of the Washington press, a tight and gossipy clique, it's hard to see how they could be mistaken about this.
What is going on behind the scenes remains to be seen. But one definite possibilty is a straight cover-up. Remember, this is one case in which the old Washington cliche that 'the cover-up is always worse than the act' doesn't apply. The original act is certainly enough to destroy a career, and the guilty paty is likely to need good luck (and good attorneys) to stay out of jail. By contrast, simply telling a few lies to reporters or subordinates is relatively trivial. Night Valerie Tonight's Nightline was entirely about the Valerie Plame story. I counted at least 3 fairly interesting new developments.
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