BiteSoundBite

Voki

2008-05-12T21:07:00.000-05:00

TPMCafe || The Same Intelligence

2005-11-12T01:40:00.000-06:00

Yglesias put together some useful info on the prewar WMD claims

Why I Love Pops

2005-09-27T00:06:00.000-05:00

Pops' Bucket:

Monday Lite: I Didn't Really Want To Officer, But You See, My Outerwear Has An Insatiable Thirst For Human Blood
I'm later than usual today because the school called and I had to go pick up my son, whom I've agreed to pretend is sick. I do this for him in exchange for not having to take him to soccer practice today. I scratch his back, he scratches mine."

Outsourcing the Nigerian Email Scam

2005-08-31T20:39:00.000-05:00

So I'm trying to sell my boat. I put the boat on craigslist under the listing "Fugly but useful fishing boat" (so I'm not exactly a marketing guru or even a semi-competent salesman. I'm just a guy that wants to sell his boat, ok) and waited for a reply. This is the very first reply (via email) I received:

Hello
i saw your advert on the web,i am interested in
buying your(Fugly but useful fishing boat)am based in west africa.
My shipping broker will be coming for the pickup
after payment as been made.
i am willing to pay $600
Get back to me if my offer is ok by you.
Have a nice day.
regards

I was somewhat annoyed that the first reply I received was just a version of the old Nigerian email scam. I was much more annoyed with what a shoddy job they did of it. I mean, come on! You guys have been at this for years. Is it really that hard to write a script that doesn't include "()" around the title of the post you are replying to? It's a dead give-away and it is just sloppy. Did the Nigerian Email Scam Project Manager just not include in the the project specs or did the programmer screw up? Either way, really lame, dudes.

I had a couple of minutes to kill so I did the old write-back-just-to-fuck-with-the-scammer thing. I know, it's been done before but the sloppiness made me angry and, like I said, I had a few minutes to kill.

Fantastic!

I'm very delighted to hear of your interest in purchasing my (Fugly but uselful
fishing boat). I feel guilty, however, to note that I did not mention in my
initial advertisement that this particular boat is plagued with the Ebola Virus.
I've tried to treat it with antibiotics and even some herbal remedies that I
picked up off the internets, but nothing seems to work. I hope that this is not
a deal-breaker for you.

Would you be willing to forward me a cashiers check for the boat? Because that
would be swell.

Also, if it is not too much trouble, I would appreciate it if you wouldn't mind
tattooing a crawfish to your buttocks and make it dance very crawfish like (for
verification purposes, you need to be extra careful when dealing with people on
these internets you understand). Be tasteful about it though, I only need it
for verification purposes and I'm not into smut.

I look forward to doing business with you.

James K. Polk

I received the following message within a day:

Hello,
Thanks for getting back to me.i also want to buy it asap.
Like i said earlier i am based in the Western africa
.there won't be any probs about the shipment,after payment ,the pick
up will be made at your
place. i have made arrangements with the prepaid
shipping company.
As regards payment,this is what i am going to do.I
have a client in the US
who is owing me $3,000 i would instruct him to
makeout a certified check to you in that amount and as soon as it
clears your bank. you can now
deduct your money from it and send me my balance,i
will be using part of the money to pay for the shipping and other
expenses.you will then send my
balance by via western union money
transfer.Although the value of the check
is more than the asking price but i think i should
be able to trust you
with my balance even as a man of law enforcement.
So i would like you to deduct the western union
charges from my balance.So if my terms are
acceptable to you,i would like you to give me your
full name,address and phone number so that i can
instruct my client to make out the check to you.
Pls get back to me as soon as you get this mail so
that we can round things up in a timely fashion..i
will be trusting in this business transaction. get
back to me.
Thanks in this regards

So now I'm pissed. I take the time to write them and all I get back is a form letter? Something else is wrong here, though. Something is off. The English is actually pretty good. There is just something very perfunctory about it. It lacks style. It lacks art. The customer service is lousy and there is obviously communication problems between the Program Manager and staff. It just seems so famili...OH MY FUCKING GOD! I've got it! The Nigerians have outsourced their email scam to India!

I'm so angry at this point that I can't think about anything but kicking that talentless douchebag Thomas Friedman in the nuts. I send a quick reply.

Wow, that is a great offer and you can totally, totally trust me to send
you the balance of your $3000! If you need a reference as to my good character
I can give you my mothers phone number. She will totally vouch for me.

I have yet to receive the buttocks crawfish picture, though. As soon as I
receive that, we can begin the transaction.

You're so totally cool!

Sincerely,

James "Dead Prez" Polk

Shortly afterwards I receive this:

I want you to get back to me with your contact name and address you want the check to be payable to so that i can quickly forward it to my client to issue the check to you without any delay. get back to me as soon as possible.

Thank you.

I am absolutely exasperated. Is it really too much to ask that I get a real-live Indian pretending to be an African to write to me? How did it come to this? Was Nigerian labor really that expensive? I remember being very supportive when the Nigerian Email Scammers finally formed a union (NESU). I had never been that fond of the Nigerian Email Scammers management and I figured that through the union the workers would at least get a better cut and would get better training to hone their art. What went wrong? Crooked or incompetent union bosses? It's depressing. Ok, one more but I'm going to give up soon.

My friend,

You are a business man. I understand that. I am/was also a business man. I
ran my own lemonade stand this summer, so I know where you are coming from.
Speaking of my lemonade stand, did you know that if you sell a glass of lemonade
for $.01 each you can actually lose money? This was ok with me at first (like
you, I understand that sometimes you have to lose money to make money), but when
my secret ingredient was discovered and the police got involved it just became
too much of a hassle. So, again, I know where you are coming from.

If I had received your generous offer exactly four years ago, I would have given
you my address right away, but then on 9/11/2001 Saddam blew up the Oklahoma
City Towers and everything changed. Security is important and I have to watch
what I say so that I don't have to fight with you over here.

Now that I think of it, I think maybe I am being really rude and unusual. You
probably don't have crawfish where you are and that is why you have not sent the
security picture. If that is the case I am very, very sorry and embarrased. I
am not actually the cultural elite that my good writing would suggest. Because
of my stupid mistake, I will accept a tattoo of any crustacean of your choice on
your buttocks.

I hope to hear from you soon. The more I think of our business the more excited
I get!

Love,

James "mostly worms" Polk

I'll try and keep you good people updated on this, but right now I'm going through my "People I Hate" rolodex to figure out which address to send him. In case you are wondering, everybody in that rolodex receives just a cheap Christmas card that I bought in bulk with a quick note. My real friend gets a genuine Hallmark card with a letter attached.

Maybe I will take up this, how you say, "blooging"?

2005-08-16T23:00:00.000-05:00

So SJ is chiding me for leaving the Alabama post on the top of my blog for too long. This is understandable, as I can understand how a liberal from Alabama could be touchy about people making fun of their hillbilly, backwater state. On the other hand, telling me that I have to post again is like pointing a camcorder at someone and saying, "ok, now be funny". It's cruel.

I've put off blogging because the next time I came to this site I was going to add to my much neglected links (pops, sj, mph and now, petercorolla), but that is just so much darn work. I know my blog sucks. I'm cool with that. I feel that it is actually an advantage when I go to other blogs that suck and tell them how much they suck because then I am speaking from a position of authority (I'm looking at you http://nc.startribune.com/blogs/vikings/). See how bad this sucks? I can't even be bothered anymore with hyperlinks.

So...um...well...oh, oh here's something. I'll try mentioning something from my actual life instead of a long political rant or just linking to some other long political rant. Pops has been talking childrens soccer, so I'll jump on that wagon and update everyone (hi SJ! Hi Pops! Hi wife!) on tonights soccer experience. My youngest boy (just turned 5) had his best game tonight. Scored somewhere in the area of 5 goals. Oldest boy (6 1/2) played some decent defense and then, after the game, lectured the opposing coach on one of her players lack of sportsmanship during the game. I'm so proud of both of them.

Why We Should Make Fun of Alabama

2005-07-08T22:14:00.000-05:00

This is good. Michelle Pilecki of Huffington Post pointed out an article the Canadians are snickering about (and rightly so) about why Toyota decided to build a plant in Canada instead of Alabama or Mississippi despite the fact that Alabama was offering much better subsidies:

The Huffington Post | The Blog: "But [Gerry] Fedchun [president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association] said much of that extra money would have been eaten away by higher training costs than are necessary for the Woodstock project. He said Nissan and Honda have encountered difficulties getting new plants up to full production in recent years in Mississippi and Alabama due to an untrained - and often illiterate - workforce. In Alabama, trainers had to use 'pictorials' to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech plant equipment.

'The educational level and the skill level of the people down there is so much lower than it is in Ontario,' Fedchun said"

Almost as funny, an Alabama newspaper wrote this article defending the massive brainpower of our southern neighbors entitled Are Alabama workers dumber than Canadians? To dispute this claim, does the paper compare graduation rates? Aptitude tests? Teeth-per-mouth ratios? Nope. They ask a Toyota executive at the company's Huntsville engine plant, the Alabama Development Office Director and the director of Alabama Industrial Development Training. Oddly enough, none of these people agree with the article.

When our local school district was having a tough time (still is) getting a levy passed for an increase in support, I wrote a letter to the editor of our local newspaper. I wanted to get across the idea that public investment mattered. At the end of the letter I needed an example of a state where public investment was not a high priority and low taxes trumped every other concern. The first state name that jumped out at me was Alabama.

I'd apologize for this post to SJ, but I'm guessing that she probably enjoyed this post more than any non-Alabamians (or whatever the hell you call yourselves).

Whiskey Bar: Send in the Clowns

2005-07-06T20:07:00.000-05:00

Whiskey Bar: Send in the Clowns: "Send in the Clowns

It looks like the Cheney administration is finally getting serious about losing the war in Iraq -- it's sending in the radio talk show hosts:

A contingent of conservatives talk radio hosts is headed to Iraq this month on a mission to report 'the truth' about the war: American troops are winning, despite headlines to the contrary.

The 'Truth Tour' has been pulled together by the conservative Web cast radio group Rightalk.com and Move America Forward, a non-profit conservative group backed by a Republican-linked public relations firm in California.

If the Iraqi insurgents are smart -- and most of them are fucking geniuses compared to your average right-wing talk show host -- they'll spread the word: Leave these particular dumb ass infidels alone. (Not that any of them are likely to poke their porcine snouts outside the green zone without a brigade-strength escort. But you never know where the odd mortar round is going to land.)

Why? Because collectively, these guys are an enormously valuable asset to America's enemies -- both because of their utterly brainless support for Al Qaeda's strategy of turning the war against terrorism into a crusade against Islam, and because they've done such a splendid job of setting up the American people to be demoralized and disillusioned by the truth.

Anthony Cordesman, the conservative but reality-based Iraq analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provides a good thumbnail description of Al Qaeda's war strategy in his most recent report, Iraq's Evolving Insurgency:

The goal of Bin Laden and those like him is not to persuade the US or the West, it is rather to so alienate them from the Islamic and Arab world that the forces of secularism in the region will be sharply undermined, and Western secular influence can be controlled or eliminated. The goal of most Iraqi insurgents is narrower -- drive the US and its allies out of Iraq -- but involve many of the same methods.

As it happens, the paid propagandists of wing nut radio have the same objective -- to promote a clash of civilizations. They do it by playing up every atrocity committed by the insurgents while ignoring every display of massive overkill (like the flattening of Fallujah) committed by the U.S. military, by glorifying torture and degradation (I Heart Gitmo), by demonizing Islam as a "gutter" religion and the Arabs as a subhuman species, and in general by being the loudest, most obnoxious assholes on the face of the earth. Walking billboards for anti-Americanism, in fact.

And they do these things for much the same reason Bin Ladin rants about Zionists and crusaders: because it gets good ratings. Spewing hatred over the airwaves 24/7 keeps the true believers in a permanent froth, drowning out any doubts about the party line and the party elite. This, in turn, makes it easer to paint dissent as treason and criticism of the Cheney administration as support for terrorism. It's all fairly conventional totalitarian stuff -- which is why I tend to think of wing nut radio as the living embodiment of Ingsoc's slogan: Ignorance is Strength."

You should probably just be reading Billmon everyday

2005-07-06T19:49:00.000-05:00

Billmon: "I'm not a big fan of patriotism, at least not as most Americans understand the word. Patriotism is just another word for nationalism, and nationalism in my book is the modern equivalent of the black plague -- an incubator of xenophobia at its least, a killer of millions at its absolute worst. And we've seen enough of the absolute worst over the past century to understand where nationalism could ultimately lead: the extinction of the entire human race.

Still, there are emotional attachments to home -- to the familiar, the dear, the remembered -- that go deeper than the intellect and pull harder than reason. Tribal loyalty is a powerful thing. On the morning of 9/11, I was as much a patriot as any man or woman alive, and would have greedily torn Bin Ladin to pieces with my own hands to avenge 'our' dead.

But hatred and revenge are patriotism's curse, not its justification. When Lincoln spoke of 'mystic chords of memory' and urged his countrymen to put their common heritage ahead of their political divisions, he wasn't appealing to their tribal loyalties, but their loyalty to an ideal: democratic government under the law. If American patriotism has any claim to be an exception to the general run of blind national chauvinism, it has to be found in that idea. If America is to be an exceptional nation, one worth glorifying above all others, it has to be because of the quality of her justice and the strength of her democracy -- not because of the language she speaks, or the God she worships or the color of her skin. And not because of her material wealth or military power or imperial ambitions. Least of all those."

The Poorman found a nice list of quotes

2005-06-29T15:43:00.000-05:00

thepoorman.net
“You can support the troops but not the president”
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

“[The] President…is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation’s armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy.”
-Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)

“If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy.”
-Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W. Bush

“I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning…I didn’t think we had done enough in the diplomatic area.”
-Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

“I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our overextended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today”
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

“Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?”
-Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

“Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.”
-Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

“Bombing a sovereign nation for ill-defined reasons with vague objectives undermines the American stature in the world. The international respect and trust for America has diminished every time we casually let the bombs fly.”
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

I remembered the tone, but none of these specific quotes about Kosovo when "Support the troops by supporting the war or you're a damn commie traitor" campaign began. Why weren't these quotes brought up every time one of these assholes were on Meet the Press flogging flogging everyone that didn't have a boner for Iraq?

How to Make Wine In Prison

2005-06-14T14:18:00.000-05:00

via The Apostropher
The Sneeze - Half zine. Half blog. Half not good with fractions.
You know, just in case.

My New Favorite Sentance

2005-06-11T16:15:00.000-05:00

James Wolcott: "With a terrible, swift sword, Alexander Cockburn makes Pundit McNuggets out of the groovemaster of globalization, a man who has never met a cab driver he couldn't quote to his prove his own point, yes, the inimitable Thomas Friedman."

Related to The Most Important Subject

2005-06-06T16:05:00.000-05:00

with handy graph
The Washington Monthly

The Most Important Subject

2005-06-06T16:03:00.000-05:00

Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind - New York Times
When F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced that the very rich "are different from you and me," Ernest Hemingway's famously dismissive response was: "Yes, they have more money." Today he might well add: much, much, much more money.

The people at the top of America's money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population, an analysis of tax records and other government data by The New York Times shows. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Call them the hyper-rich.

They are not just a few Croesus-like rarities. Draw a line under the top 0.1 percent of income earners - the top one-thousandth. Above that line are about 145,000 taxpayers, each with at least $1.6 million in income and often much more.

The average income for the top 0.1 percent was $3 million in 2002, the latest year for which averages are available. That number is two and a half times the $1.2 million, adjusted for inflation, that group reported in 1980. No other income group rose nearly as fast.

The share of the nation's income earned by those in this uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980, to 7.4 percent in 2002. The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 percent rose far less, and the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell.

Next, examine the net worth of American households. The group with homes, investments and other assets worth more than $10 million comprised 338,400 households in 2001, the last year for which data are available. The number has grown more than 400 percent since 1980, after adjusting for inflation, while the total number of households has grown only 27 percent.

The Bush administration tax cuts stand to widen the gap between the hyper-rich and the rest of America. The merely rich, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, will shoulder a disproportionate share of the tax burden.

President Bush said during the third election debate last October that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans. In fact, most - 53 percent - will go to people with incomes in the top 10 percent over the first 15 years of the cuts, which began in 2001 and would have to be reauthorized in 2010. And more than 15 percent will go just to the top 0.1 percent, those 145,000 taxpayers.
continue

Comments to David Neiwert

2005-05-20T15:04:00.000-05:00

David,
OT, but I couldn't find your email address. I also wanted to ask you about the Sanatorum "nazi" quote, specifically the reaction.

It seems to me to be counter-productive and even dangerous for so many us on the left to condemn the quote BECAUSE of a comparison to the nazis.

Allow me to explain. This seems to be part of a larger pattern that I have noticed that the Republicans are able to pre-empt criticism of what they are doing by accusing the other side of precisely what the Republicans are doing.

Bush promoted a series of highly partisan hacks into important national security positions and, when any opposition came up warned the Democrats not to "play politics with national security".

In the runup to Bush nominating crazy right wing activists judges we see an enormous, well organized campaign against activists judges.

Now, with the Republican making an extrodinary power grab where they are willing to ignore all rules, precedents and tradition in order to achieve unchecked power we have Sanatorum in what I'm sure was a deliberate and rehearsed statement comparing the Democrats to nazis for trying to stand in their way.

His remarks are hypocritical, for sure, and pointing that out is fair game, but I've seen a lot of commentators on the left say things like comparing your opposition to nazis is out of bounds. It is not. I've read your excellent Pseudo Fascism essay and while you took great care to make sure it is clear how the movement conservatives differ from fascists in very big important ways, you also seem to understand that there is nothing to prevent it from happening again. When these similar tactics are used to gain power at all costs it should be pointed out (much like Robert Byrd did and took a lot of heat for it).

Well, that's all I've got. I've just been waiting to see some commentary on this paticular issue from you since you seem uniquely suited for it.
HaloScan.com - Comments

update:
I could add that Bush attacking Kerry for his military service and the smear meme of Kerry = bin Laden also fit this MO.

Me materialist (again, not shocking)

2005-05-19T15:20:00.000-05:00

You scored as Materialist. Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements.

Materialist

100%

Postmodernist

75%

Modernist

69%

Existentialist

63%

Cultural Creative

38%

Romanticist

25%

Fundamentalist

25%

Idealist

13%

What is Your World View? (corrected...again)
created with QuizFarm.com

You! Yeah you! Read this!

2005-05-19T11:17:00.000-05:00

Includes clip from Harpers and a prediction 25 years ago of the rise of the Christian Right Fascists
This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow: May 15, 2005 - May 21, 2005 Archives

Daily Kos

2005-05-18T09:33:00.000-05:00

Daily Kos: "Bill Maher appeared to be channeling Kos Friday night...

New Rule: The people in America who are most in favor of the Iraq war must now go there and fight it. The Army missed its recruiting goal by 42% last month. More people joined the Michael Jackson Fan Club. 'We've done picked all the low-lying Lynndie England fruit.' And now we need warm bodies. We need warm bodies like Paula Abdul needs...warm bodies.

... Now, I know you're thinking, `But Bill, I already do my part with the 'Support Our Troops' magnet I have on my Chevy Tahoe. How much more can one man give?' Well, here's an intriguing economic indicator. It's been over a year since they graduated, but neither of the Bush twins has been able to find work. Why don't they sign up? Do they hate America or just freedom in general?

And that goes for everybody who helped sell this war. You've got to go first. ... Ann Coulter, darling, trust me, you will love the Army. You think you make up shit... But mostly, we have to send Mr. And Mrs. Britney Spears. Because Britney once said, 'We should trust our president in every decision that he makes, and we should just support that and be faithful in what happens.' Okay, somebody has to die for that. Or at least go. ... And think of the spiritual lift it will provide to troops and civilians alike when actual combat smacks the smirk off of Kevin Federline's face and fills his low-hanging trousers with dootie."

Veronica Mars

2005-05-11T16:15:00.000-05:00

My prediction was wrong. So now I'm like 0-500 in the prognostication business. Super bowls, elections, whodunnit tv series - doesn't matter. One would do very well if they were to pay attention to my predictions and then put all their money on the opposite.

My wife, however, correctly predicted the killer. I'd like to think that my mind is too pure to have possibly guessed the perverted truth, but the smart money says that that just isn't true.

Title not needed

2005-05-09T13:16:00.000-05:00

Empire Notes: "SENTRY: We spotted an Arab female about 100 meters below our emplacement, near the light armored vehicle gate.

HEADQUARTERS: Observation post 'Spain,' do you see it?

OBSERVATION POST: Affirmative, it's a young girl. She's now running east.

HQ: What is her position?

OP: She's currently north of the authorized zone.

SENTRY: Very inappropriate location. [Gunfire] OP: She's now behind an embankment, 250 meters from the barracks. She keeps running east. The hits are right on her.

HQ: Are you talking about a girl under ten?

OP: Approximately a ten-year-old girl.

HQ: Roger.

OP: OP to HQ.

HQ: Receiving, over.

OP: She's behind the embankment, dying of fear, the hits are right on her, a centimeter from her.

SENTRY: Our troops are storming toward her now. They are around 70 meters from her.

HQ: I understand that the company commander and his squad are out?

SENTRY: Affirmative, with a few more soldiers.

OP: Receive. Looks like one of the positions dropped her.

HQ: What, did you see the hit? Is she down?

OP: She's down. Right now she isn't moving.

COMPANY COMMANDER [to HQ]: Me and another soldier are going in. [To the squad] Forward, to confirm the kill! CC [to HQ]: We fired and killed her. She has...wearing pants...jeans and a vest, shirt. Also she had a kaffiyeh on her head. I also confirmed the kill. Over.

HQ: Roger.

CC [on general communications band]: Any motion, anyone who moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, should be killed. Over."

The Washington Monthly

2005-05-09T13:09:00.000-05:00

The Washington Monthly: "WHITE CHICKS....Former Bob Dole press secretary Douglas MacKinnon writes a column in the Chicago Tribune about a subject that came up in conversation just last night here at chez Drum:

Note to the news media — with an emphasis on the cable networks: Enough is enough.

Your continual focus on, and reporting of, missing, young, attractive white women not only demeans your profession but is a televised slap in the face to minority mothers and parents the nation over who search for their own missing children with little or no assistance or notice from anyone.

....I have a number of friends at the cable networks (or at least I did), and I have spoken to some about this very subject. While all professed disgust with the underreporting of missing minority women and young adults, most were very uneasy with the thought of shining a spotlight on their own management to ascertain an answer. 'Besides,' one of them told me, 'you've already figured it out. We showcase missing, young, white, attractive women because our research shows we get more viewers. It's about beating the competition and ad dollars.'"

found via The Poorman.net

2005-05-09T10:40:00.000-05:00

The Harvard Crimson Online :: Opinion: "Thirty years ago, President Bush was my student at Harvard Business School. In my class, he called former president Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904, a “socialist” and spoke against Social Security, unemployment insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other New Deal innovations. He refused to understand that capitalism becomes corrupt without democratic civic values and ethical restraints.

In those days, Bush belonged to a minority of MBA students who were seriously disconnected from taking the moral and social responsibility for their actions. Today, he would fit in comfortably with an overwhelming majority of business students and teachers whose role models are celebrated captains of piracy. Since the 1980s, as neo-conservatives have captured the Republican Party, America’s business education has also increasingly become contaminated by the robber baron culture of the pre-Great Depression era.

Bush is the first president of the United States with a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA). Yet, he epitomizes the worst aspects of America’s business education. To privatize Social Security, he is peddling a colossal lie about its solvency. Furthermore, Bush, along with today’s business aristocrats, shows no compassion for working Americans, robbing them to benefit big business and the very rich. Last year, due to Bush’s tax cuts, over 80 of America’s most profitable 200 corporations did not pay even a penny of their federal and state income taxes. Meanwhile, to pay for his additional tax cuts for the very rich, Bush is drastically cutting back several social services, such as federal lunch programs for poor children."

Ivans on Energy

2005-05-09T10:36:00.000-05:00

Welcome to WorkingForChange: "So stupid, it's painful

Molly Ivins - Creators Syndicate

05.05.05 - AUSTIN, Texas -- When the history of this administration is written, I suspect the largest black mark against it will be wasting time. The energy bill just passed by the House is a classic example of frittering away precious time and resources by doing exactly nothing that needs to be done about energy. The bill gives $8.1 billion in new tax breaks to the oil companies, which are already swimming in cash.

ExxonMobil's profits are up 44 percent, Royal Dutch/Shell up 42 percent, etc. According to the business pages, the biggest problem oil executives face is what to do with all their cash. So why give more tax breaks to the oil companies? Makes as much sense as anything else in this energy bill. Nothing about conservation, higher fuel efficiency standards or putting money into renewable energy sources. It's so stupid, it's painful.

And their genius answer to 'energy independence'? Drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Look, the total oil under ANWR is 1 billion barrels less than this country uses in a year, according to Robert Bryce, the Texas journalist who specializes in energy reporting. The bill is just riddled with perversity: We continue to subsidize people who buy Hummers, but no longer grant tax rebates to those who buy hybrid cars that are more than six times as fuel efficient. This is not how you get to 'energy independence.' The United States hit its oil peak back in 1970 -- domestic production has been declining ever since."

Sick yet Familiar

2005-05-09T10:12:00.000-05:00

Hiroshima Cover-up: How the War Department's Timesman Won a Pulitzer

Unions

2005-05-09T09:15:00.000-05:00

The Washington Monthly: "It's because unions are the only truly effective check on the sine qua non of modern conservatism: corporate power. For all their faults — and they have plenty, just as corporations do — unions are the only organizations that have the power to bargain effectively for the interests of the middle class. Union power in the private sector began to wane in the 1970s, and it's not a coincidence that this was exactly the same time that middle class wages began to stagnate, CEO pay began to skyrocket, and income inequality began increasing inexorably.

Many liberals seem to believe that these grim trends can be fought with tax and regulatory policy, but those are blunt instruments with plenty of drawbacks and unforeseen consequences. Collective bargaining, which is essentially a market based approach in which the government's job is simply to make sure that unions have enough authority to ensure serious bargaining and then get out of the way, is far more reliable, effective, and flexible. It actually works, which is why conservatives have always hated unions so bitterly.

Despite this, there are plenty of cocktail party 'new' Democrats who blithely think of unions as just another dinosaur special interest unsuited to politics in the 21st century. They should think again. Republicans understand the stakes a lot better — and so should we."

MyDD :: Proof of the Ideological Coalition Shift

2005-05-06T16:30:00.000-05:00

MyDD :: Proof of the Ideological Coalition Shift

Not Shocking

2005-05-06T13:54:00.000-05:00

I am:
8%
Republican.

"You're a complete liberal, utterly without a trace of Republicanism. Your strength is as the strength of ten because your heart is pure. (You hope.)"

Are You A Republican?

Daily Kos :: It Begins: Dems "Excommunicated" From Church? [updated w/ VIDEO]

2005-05-06T11:04:00.000-05:00

Daily Kos :: It Begins: Dems "Excommunicated" From Church? [updated w/ VIDEO]

Holy shit.

The Mighty Hackworth vs. Puny Johan

2005-05-06T11:01:00.000-05:00

The Poor Man: "I’m not very comfortable about making this connection, but reading this horseshit the day I find out about the death of David Hackworth really burns my ass. And it’s not just a fatuous Little Lord Fauntleroy keyboard kommando saying that people who said Vietnam was a bad war were the real reason we lost, although that’s not a very happy juxtaposition, either. I never even met Hackworth, I don’t know much about him personally, or what his political views were, and - not to put too fine a point on it - I don’t see much of a reflection of myself in him. (Much more of myself in Goldberg, I am sad to report.) But we live in a very cynical age, where when people use words like “honor” and “sacrifice” and “patriotism” and “commitment” you can comfortably assume they are bullshitting you. Politicians don’t just lie, they lie absurdly, they steal and threaten, they debase themselves and debase our country, and are applauded for it. Maybe all ages are like this, I don’t know. The point is, it is very important to keep in mind that there is a lot of decency in people, too, and that there are some people - not many, nowhere near enough, but a few - who can talk about “honor” and these other hollowed-out meaningless words and have them mean something again, because these are things they really understand and live. Which is not to say that they don’t fall short of perfection or do wrong and/or stupid things with the same frequency as the rest of us - of course they do, they’re human, and that’s the point. It’s so tempting and easy to just be horribly cynical about your country and/or people generally, and just say “fuck it, who cares, the world will get what it deserves”; but people like Hackworth who don’t throw up their hands and make some weary wise-crack but just keep fighting no matter how hard or futile the fight, because it is right, their example is our hope.

I have no claim on Hackworth, but he was a person who stood for something to me. And he was a man who was poisoned by the country he loved in a war he knew should never have been started, and that’s why he’s not around anymore. He was a generation or two before me. My generation, by contrast, offers Jonah Goldberg, copying out the same mimeographed war fanboy talking points from 35 years ago which kept us fighting that war for so many needless years, and making it that much harder to come to grips with and learn from that bloody mistake. This is not progress."

NerdTests.com Fun Tests - Nerd Quiz

2005-05-05T16:51:00.000-05:00

NerdTests.com Fun Tests - Nerd Quiz: "
"

Good Social Security Strategy for Dems on Liberal Oasis

2005-05-05T14:15:00.000-05:00

LiberalOasis: Archives For The Week Of May 1, 2005

Veronica Mars

2005-05-05T11:27:00.000-05:00

I just want to go on record predicting that Logan killed Lilly.

They Had a PhD in Stating the Obvious

2005-05-05T09:47:00.000-05:00

USATODAY.com - 2 in GOP to skip DeLay ethics probe: "WASHINGTON — Two of the five Republicans on the House ethics committee will not participate in any investigation of potentially improper travel by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the panel's chairman said Wednesday.

Lamar Smith of Texas and Tom Cole of Oklahoma contributed to DeLay's legal defense fund last year, creating what outside ethics experts regarded as a conflict of interest."

The Appalling Elitism behind the Pharmacists' 'Right of Conscience' Campaign

2005-04-27T10:27:00.000-05:00

The Emerging Democratic Majority WebLog - DonkeyRising: "The Appalling Elitism behind the Pharmacists' 'Right of Conscience' Campaign

The current debate regarding whether individual pharmacists should have a 'right of conscience' to refuse to sell birth control medications has been almost entirely composed of either straightforward arguments in support or opposition to the proposed 'right' or the discussion of some compromise position that attempts to bridge the gap between customers' rights to buy legally prescribed medication and pharmacists' personal ethical views.

Yet, when one steps back for a moment to look beyond these limited terms of debate, an extraordinary fact quickly becomes apparent -- the proposed extensions of earlier 'conscience' laws to cover pharmacists are profoundly and, in fact, grotesquely elitist. They actually propose nothing less then endowing a small group of Americans with a special class of new legal rights and privileges regarding moral/religious issues -- based essentially on their education -- while denying those same rights to everyone else. As a result, the proposed laws are not only basically unconstitutional in intent but also un-American in spirit and contrary to the egalitarian tenets of sincere Christian faith.

To see why this is so, it is only necessary to compare the proposed extension of the 'right of conscience' to pharmacists with the purpose of the original 'conscience' laws which were designed with doctors and operating room nurses in mind. It was not because doctors or nurses had advanced medical education or knowledge that special provisions were enacted for them, but because the nature of their work might obligate them to personally perform medical procedures they considered immoral, such as abortions or sterilizations, or to personally prescribe and administer abortion-inducing drugs. Granting a doctor or nurse with moral objections to these procedures the legal right to refuse t"

Daily Kos :: US protecting -- Osama's privacy?

2005-04-22T09:55:00.000-05:00

Daily Kos :: US protecting -- Osama's privacy?: "Judicial Watch, the public interest group that fights government corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act ('FOIA') in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation ('FBI') has invoked privacy right protections on behalf of al Qaeda terror leader Osama bin Laden. In a September 24, 2003 declassified 'Secret' FBI report obtained by Judicial Watch, the FBI invoked Exemption 6 under FOIA law on behalf of bin Laden, which permits the government to withhold all information about U.S. persons in 'personnel and medical files and similar files' when the disclosure of such information 'would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.' (5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(6) (2000)) [...]

'It is dumbfounding that the United States government has placed a higher priority on the supposed privacy rights of Osama bin Laden than the public's right to know what happened in the days following the September 11 terrorist attacks,' said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. 'It is difficult for me to imagine a greater insult to the American people, especially those whose loved ones were murdered by bin Laden on that day.'"

WSJ.com - How Companies Pay TV Experts For On-Air Product Mentions

2005-04-22T08:55:00.000-05:00

WSJ.com - How Companies Pay TV Experts For On-Air Product Mentions: "In November, Child magazine's Technology Editor James Oppenheim appeared on a local television show in Austin, Texas, and reviewed educational gadgets and toys. He praised 'My ABC's Picture Book,' a personalized photo album from Eastman Kodak Co.

'Considering what you showed me, kids' games really don't have to be violent,' said the anchor for KVUE, an ABC affiliate and the No. 1-rated television station in its market.

'If...you're not careful, they will be,' Mr. Oppenheim replied. 'That's why I've shown you some of the best.'

There was one detail the audience didn't know: Kodak paid Mr. Oppenheim to mention the photo album, according to the company and Mr. Oppenheim. Neither Mr. Oppenheim nor KVUE disclosed the relationship to viewers. During the segment, Mr. Oppenheim praised products from other companies, including: Atari Inc., Microsoft Corp., Mattel Inc., Leapfrog Enterprises Inc. and RadioShack Corp. All paid for the privilege, Mr. Oppenheim says.

One month later, Mr. Oppenheim went on NBC's 'Today' show, the U.S.'s biggest national morning news program, which is part of NBC's news division. 'Kodak came out with a great idea,' he said to host Ann Curry, before proceeding to talk about the same product he'd been paid to discuss on KVUE. Ms. Curry called it a 'nice gift for a little child.' Kodak says it didn't pay for the 'Today' show mention. But neither Mr. Oppenheim nor NBC disclosed the prior arrangement to tout the product on local TV.

In the 'Today' segment, Mr. Oppenheim talked about products made or sold by 15 companies. Nine were former clients and eight of those had paid him for product placement on local TV during the preceding year.

KVUE says it didn't know about Mr. Oppenheim's business deal. An NBC spokeswoman says the network is looking into what it knew about Mr. Oppenheim's relationship with Kodak and th"

Founding Fathers

2005-04-21T13:58:00.000-05:00

The Light Of Reason » Blog Archive » IT’S NOT THEIR AMERICA ANY LONGER

Digby on Coulter

2005-04-20T09:03:00.000-05:00

Hullabaloo: "Ann Coulter is not, as Howie Kurtz asserts today, the equivalent of Michael Moore. Michael Moore is is not advocating the murder of conservatives. He just isn't. For instance, he doesn't say that Eric Rudolph should be killed so that other conservatives will learn that they can be killed too. He doesn't say that he wishes that Tim McVeigh had blown up the Washington Times Bldg. He doesn't say that conservatives routinely commit the capital offense of treason. He certainly doesn't put up pictures of the fucking snoopy dance because one of his political opponents was killed. He doesn't, in other words, issue calls for violence and repression against his political enemies. That is what Ann Coulter does, in the most coarse, vulgar, reprehensible way possible.

Moore says conservatives are liars and they are corrupt and they are wrong. But he is not saying that they should die. There is a distinction. And it's a distinction that Time magazine and Howard Kurtz apparently cannot see.

I have long felt that it was important not to minimize the impact of this sick shit. For years my friends and others in the online communities would say that it was a waste of time to worry about Rush because there are real issues to worry about. Likewise Coulter. Everytime I write something about her there is always someone chastizing me for wasting their time. Yet, here she is, being given the impramatur of a mainstream publication of record in a whitwash of epic proportions."

Guardian Unlimited | Columnists | Allure of the blank slate

2005-04-18T15:42:00.000-05:00

READ THIS!!!!

Guardian Unlimited | Columnists | Allure of the blank slate
Three months after the tsunami hit Aceh, the New York Times reported that "almost nothing seems to have been done to begin repairs and rebuilding". The dispatch could have come from Iraq, where, as the Los Angeles Times has reported, all Bechtel's allegedly rebuilt water plants have started to break down, one more in a litany of reconstruction screw-ups. It could have come from Afghanistan, where President Karzai blasted "corrupt, wasteful and unaccountable" foreign contractors for "squandering the precious resources that Afghanistan received in aid".

But if the reconstruction industry is stunningly inept at rebuilding, that may be because rebuilding is not its purpose. According to Guttal: "It's not reconstruction at all - it's about reshaping everything." The stories of corruption and incompetence mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. On this front, the reconstruction industry works so efficiently that the privatisations and land grabs are usually locked in before local people know what hit them. Herman Kumara, of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in Negombo, Sri Lanka, sent an email to colleagues around the world warning that Sri Lanka is facing "a second tsunami of corporate globalisation and militarisation ... We see this as a plan... to hand over the sea and the coast to foreign corporations ... with military assistance from the US marines."

Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, oversaw a similar project in Iraq: the fires were still burning when US officials announced that the country's state-owned companies would be privatised. Some argue that Wolfowitz is unfit to lead the World Bank; in fact, nothing could have prepared him better.

'Post-conflict" countries now receive 20-25 % of the World Bank's lending, up from 16% in 1998. Rapid response to disaster has traditionally been the domain of UN agencies. But today, with reconstruction revealed as tremendously lucrative, the World Bank leads the charge. There are massive engineering and supplies contracts ($10bn to Halliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan alone); "democracy building" has exploded into a $2bn industry; and times have never been better for the private firms that advise governments on selling off their assets. (Bearing Point, the favoured of these firms in the US, reported that revenues for its "public services" division "had quadrupled in five years".)

But shattered countries are attractive to the World Bank for another reason: They take orders well and will usually do whatever it takes to get aid dollars - even if it means racking up huge debts and agreeing to sweeping policy reforms. Even better, many war-ravaged countries are in states of "limited sovereignty" and considered too unstable to manage aid money, which is often put in a trust fund managed by the World Bank - in East Timor, the bank doles out money to the government as long as it shows it is spending responsibly. Apparently, this means slashing public-sector jobs (the government is half the size it was under Indonesian occupation) but lavishing aid money on foreign consultants. In Afghanistan, the World Bank mandated "an increased role for the private sector" in water, telecommunications, oil, gas and mining and directed the government to leave electricity to foreign investors. Few outside the bank knew of these changes, as they were buried in a "technical annex" attached to an emergency-aid grant.

It has been the same story in Haiti. In exchange for a $61m loan, the bank requires that private companies run schools and hospitals - extremely controversial given Haiti's socialist base. The bank admits that, with Haiti under what approaches military rule, there is "a window of opportunity for reforms that may be hard for a future government to undo".

Now the bank is using the December 26 tsunami to push through its favoured policies. The most devastated countries have seen almost no debt relief, and most of the bank's aid has come in the form of loans, not grants. The bank is pushing for expansion of tourism and industrial fish farms, rather than rebuilding small-boat fisheries. As for roads and schools, bank documents recognise that rebuilding "may strain public finances" and suggest that governments consider privatisation (yes, they have only one idea).

In January Condoleezza Rice horrified many by describing the tsunami as "a wonderful opportunity" that "has paid great dividends for us". If anything, she was understating the case. A group calling itself Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters says that for "businessmen-politicians, the tsunami was the answer to their prayers, since it wiped these coastal areas clean of the communities that had stood in the way of resorts, hotels, casinos and shrimp farms". Disaster, it seems, is the new terra nullius.

via Orcinus

2005-04-18T14:36:00.000-05:00

Orcinus: " Wages in the factories average about $3 per hour -- more than $2 less than the U.S. minimum wage of $5.15. No overtime is paid for a 70-hour work week. But that's hardly the worst of it. Far away from the swank beachside hotels, luxurious golf courses and the thousands of Japanese tourists snorkling around sunken U.S. Navy landing craft in the clear waters, some 31,000 textile workers live penned up like cattle by armed soldiers and barbed wire, and squeezed head to toe into filthy sleeping barracks, all of which was documented on film by U.S. investigators last year.

The unhappy workers cannot just walk away, either: Like Appalachian coal miners a generation ago, they owe their souls to the company store, starting with factory recruiters, who charge Chinese peasants as much as $4,000 to get them out of China and into a 'good job' in 'America.' Their low salaries make it nearly impossible to buy back their freedom. And so they stay. The small print in their contracts forbids sex, drinking -- and dissent

The Clinton administration was moving to change these conditions when DeLay and Abramoff sprang into action:

Enter Tom DeLay and his Texas Republican sidekick, Dick Armey. When the Clinton administration sought to yank Saipan's factories into the 20th century in 1994, requiring the workers be paid a minimum wage, overtime and their living conditions improved, the island government hired a platoon of well-connected Washington lobbyists, headed by former DeLay aide Jack Abramoff, to block the plan. Abramoff, in turn, personally or through his family, contributed $18,000 to DeLay's campaign coffers. So far, the island government has paid the firm of Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds $4 million for their efforts, records show. They also treated DeLay and Armey to trips to the island, where they played golf, snorkled and made whirlwind visits to factories especially spiffed up for the occasion, according to several accounts.
"

Sirotablog: Bush: Bad Data Means Stop Publishing

2005-04-18T11:07:00.000-05:00

Sirotablog: Bush: Bad Data Means Stop Publishing: "Bush: Bad Data Means Stop Publishing

President Bush has said that 'in a society that is a free society, there will be transparency.' That means that in America, we have a government where the public gets to see as much information as possible about its government.

But as the record shows, Bush is anything but pro-transparency. A careful look shows the Bush White House has systematically tried to stop publishing government information that it finds embarrassing or disagrees with - the opposite of 'transparent.' See the record for yourself:

- Knight-Ridder reports today that the Bush administration announced yesterday that it has 'decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.'

- When unemployment was peaking in Bush's first term, the White House tried to stop publishing the Labor Department's regular report on mass layoffs.

- In 2003, when the nation's governors came to Washington to complain about inadequate federal funding for the states, the Bush administration decided to stop publishing the budget report that states use to see what money they are, or aren't, getting.

- In 2003, the National Council for Research on Women found that information about discrimination against women has gone missing from government Web sites, including 25 reports from the U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau.

- In 2002, Democrats uncovered evidence that the Bush administration was removing health information from government websites. Specifically, the administration deleted data showing that abortion does not increase the risk of breast cancer. That scientific data was seen by the White House as a direct affront to the pro-life movement."

Slobbering classes

2005-04-15T16:41:00.000-05:00

"I stopped into Larry's Gas 'n Grubs for my regular morning commuter coffee mug refill and lo and be damned! There was my hirsute 300-pound friend Poot working at the counter. I said, 'What the hell are you doing ringing up my coffee at this crap stand? You're supposed to be a welder, fat boy!''

It turns out that Poot, who'd lost his job with a metal fabricator, took on a little private contracting work. However, he couldn't afford to get his contractor's license and was busted for working without one. And got thrown in jail for it, too. Somehow I would have thought it was a lesser offense than that.

Now he is on jail work release to work at Larry's Gas 'n Grubs, an area 6-location chain of convenience stores that regularly hires work release labor at super cheap rates. By court order Poot must work there at least until August and pay the great state of Virginia a big chunk of his wages for the privilege.

This represents nothing less than chattel slavery under the local judicial system, impressments of the same sort as have always practiced on blacks and poor whites here in the slave states. Throw them in jail, and then farm them out on work release to local industry and businesses in cahoots politically with local law officials and courts. In fact, in a new twist on the game, the masters of our little Virginia banana republic brought in a huge regional jail. It is now a provider of cheap local work release labor, even as the taxpayers foot the bill for housing and feeding the jailbirds, and the jailbirds seldom return to their hometowns up nawth, choosing instead to shack up with the fetching local wenches. You Yankees have no idea what Bush's election has kicked off in the American South. Our congenital penchant for punishment and press gang labor has ushered in a new era of prison building unseen since the days of Uncle Joe Stalin. Down here we know what to do with uncooperative folks like the hapless Po"...
The Smirking Chimp:

Fanatical Apathy: Over and Dun

2005-04-15T14:52:00.000-05:00

Fanatical Apathy: Over and Dun

Digby finds a great letter to Horowitz

2005-04-13T12:53:00.000-05:00

Hullabaloo

Pandagon: Speaking ill of the dead (aka fuck the pope)

2005-04-11T15:22:00.000-05:00

Pandagon: Speaking ill of the dead

Pandagon: Thanks for the help and sorry about that knife wound in your back

2005-04-11T15:17:00.000-05:00

I liked this line:
Pandagon: Thanks for the help and sorry about that knife wound in your back: "Finkelstein characterizes himself as 'libertarian'--a label that lately only means 'conservative who has personal peccadillos he doesn't wish to see outlawed'. Most 'libertarians' I know of are straight men who like to fuck without making babies and therefore oppose the wingnut push to legislate the bedroom. But they don't oppose it in any meaningful way, such as supporting politicians who, you know, agree with their beliefs about personal freedom. Instead, they keep supporting wingnuts and relying on liberals to do their fighting for their civil rights for them."

The Religious Right

2005-04-08T14:36:00.000-05:00

One thing that has been talked about in the past is how religious conservatives help Republicans win elections and those same Republicans conveniently ignore them once they are in office (in which case, they are much like any constituency). They don't want to actually outlaw abortion or do anything that would actually make the fundamentalists happy because it would be political suicide.

Recently, though, some of the more powerful Republicans ARE the crazy religious right. They also have a common interest in the issue of pushing through bat-shit crazy judges.
Eschaton

Christian conservatives and a core group of congressional supporters are launching a significant new push to restructure the federal judicial system to reflect a more explicitly biblical world view, in the hopes that these changes will pave the way for broader social and political changes, leaders of the movement said.
Some of the most prominent conservative leaders in the country -- including Vision America's Rick Scarborough, Coral Ridge Ministry's James Kennedy and the Free Congress Foundation's Paul Weyrich -- launched the effort Thursday in Washington.
Members of the new coalition said they would immediately focus on bringing an end to Democratic filibusters of President Bush's judicial nominees before pushing Senate Majority Leader Frist to enact sweeping changes in the judiciary.
They also warned that Frist and other politicians who have thus far been reluctant to force a confrontation with Senate Minority Leader Reid over the nominations would be held accountable if Democrats continue to block conservative judges.
Participants at this week's Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration meeting said the group also will focus on forcing Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against any judge who does not conform with their biblically based interpretation of the Constitution, as well as permanently curb judicial authority over matters of church and state, marriage and governmental acknowledgement of a Christian deity.
"What it is time to do is impeach justices," Texas Justice Foundation President Allan Parker extolled a crowd of a hundred or so conservative lobbyists, attorneys and activists. "The standard should be any judge who believes in the 'living constitution' should be impeached."

I'd tell you how I think this is going to play out, but I haven't picked an election or a Superbowl right for probably the last decade, so I'll resist.

The Pope Didn't End Communism - He may have accomplished a lot, but not that. By Marc Fisher

2005-04-08T09:52:00.000-05:00

The Pope Didn't End Communism - He may have accomplished a lot, but not that. By Marc Fisher

Television Coverage of the Pope

2005-04-07T10:58:00.000-05:00

Whiskey Bar: TV Guide

taxes

2005-04-07T09:16:00.000-05:00

The Washington Monthly

Hell Yeah!!!!

2005-04-06T11:02:00.000-05:00

The People Rise Up Against the Governator

Terrorists

2005-04-01T13:14:00.000-06:00

Animal Rights Groups and Ecology Militants Make DHS Terrorist List, Right-Wing Vigilantes Omitted

Reading that reminded me of this case which nobody noticed.

Amazon.com: About Henry Raddick: Reviews

2005-03-31T15:33:00.000-06:00

Funny:
Amazon.com: About Henry Raddick: Reviews

A couple of quick favorites:

McDonald Happy Meal Toys from the Nineties: With Price Guide (Schiffer Book for Collectors) by Joyce Losonsky, Terry Losonsky
Edition: Paperback
Price: $24.95
Availability: Special Order

13 used from $13.30

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
First rate, June 21, 2002
An essential guide for the fast food promotional toy collector, this fine book lists each and every one of the toys given away with Happy meals in the 90s. If you choked on it, it's in here. It even had listings and recent auction prices for some of that weird "McCrying Game" merchandising. A must.

God, Why Did Dad Lose His Job? by Katherine Marko, Kathy Counts (Illustrator)
Edition: Paperback
Price: $3.50
Availability: This item is currently unavailable.

6 used from $6.45

46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
Tremendous, June 20, 2002
A truly wonderful guide which has enabled me to explain my recent sacking for vandalising company property to my children in terms of a minor act of redemption. First rate.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00005V4NR.01._SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg
Sm 14in Pose/stick
Availability: This item is currently unavailable.

54 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
= Durability = Fun = Educational = Overall
Excellent, July 5, 2002
A superb action figure that sticks to windows and walls. Flexible yet sturdy, you can bend him into any shape, including the your-dad-at-a-rave pose (pictured).

God weighs in on the Gannon/Guckert/mediawhoreisarealwhore affair

2005-03-29T16:51:00.000-06:00

The Poor Man - I have a vewy gweat fwiend in Wome named Bigus Dickus

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: March 27, 2005 - April 02, 2005 Archives

2005-03-29T14:30:00.000-06:00

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: March 27, 2005 - April 02, 2005 Archives

Matthew Yglesias: Super-Inequality

2005-03-29T13:52:00.000-06:00

Matthew Yglesias: Super-Inequality

THE BRAD BLOG: "High-Level Republicans from the New 'Non-Partisan' 'American Center for Voting Rights' Explain Themselves..."

2005-03-24T14:03:00.000-06:00

THE BRAD BLOG: "High-Level Republicans from the New 'Non-Partisan' 'American Center for Voting Rights' Explain Themselves..."

Bush Admin War on Openness

2005-03-17T16:00:00.000-06:00

Anybody that follows the news knows (or should know) of this administrations open distain for freedom and openness. Slate has a nice little article on some of the things I didn't know, though.

The Age of Missing Information - The Bush administration's campaign against openness. By Steven Aftergood

Irony

2005-03-16T14:11:00.000-06:00

From Yahoo via Fark
Yahoo! News - Top Cardinal Blasts 'Da Vinci Code' as 'Cheap Lies':

"You can find that book everywhere and the risk is that many people who read it believe that those fairy tales are real,'"

The above quote is truly perfect as is and I should probably leave it alone, but I'm going to sully it with some follow up questions.

"Mr. Bishop sir, the book you refer to has given enjoyment to and believed by millions of people and has a good moral message overall. So really, what is the harm?"

"Also, if you don't mind, what objective criteria do you suggest we use in order to determine what is historically accurate and what is merely, how did you put it, oh yeah, just a 'fairy tale'?"

Mykeru.com March 6 to 12, 2005

2005-03-11T13:29:00.000-06:00

Interesting little piece somewhat related to the shooting of the Italian journalist. I'm much less interested in that particular story than the observations about the right-wing columnists that wrote their conclusions about it immediately and then worked the facts over afterwards to fit their conclusion. A common practice that seems to be getting more attention lately.
Mykeru.com March 6 to 12, 2005: "ds -- canards about them being more hu"

Daily Kos :: Confessions of a Former Dittohead: The Right-Wing Reasoning Chip

2005-03-10T15:05:00.000-06:00

Daily Kos :: Confessions of a Former Dittohead: The Right-Wing Reasoning Chip

Ok, I can see this being very satisfying

2005-03-08T14:52:00.000-06:00

Flash game that you can play John Kerry beating up Bush (or vice versa).
ArcadePod.Com

The Framing Project and The GOP Playbook (Frank Luntz)

2005-03-08T13:08:00.000-06:00

Political Strategy - Politics, Strategies, Tactics, News and Opinion

Pawlenty Exposed: Flip-Flopper Tim Pawlenty

2005-03-08T10:53:00.000-06:00

Pawlenty Exposed: Flip-Flopper Tim Pawlenty

Next time the governer is on MPR, it would be a good idea for all left-leaning Minnesota bloggers to call in and ask him about this.

Penalties and late fees make up half of credit card company profits

2005-03-07T10:46:00.000-06:00

The Washington Monthly

This is the reason for the bankruptcy bill.

Labor Blog

2005-03-07T09:52:00.000-06:00

Nathan Newman has a good breakdown of Sanatorum's anti-labor measures from the GOP's minimum wage bill:
Labor Blog
found via Atrios

Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving by Deborah E. Lipstadt, reviewed by Salon.com

2005-03-04T11:08:00.000-06:00

Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving by Deborah E. Lipstadt, reviewed by Salon.com:

New book on the libel trial holocaust denier David Irving brought against his critics. Also, Christopher Hitchens is a dick.

Good listing of what is wrong with "bankruptcy reform"

2005-03-02T14:04:00.000-06:00

Angry Bear

Yglesias on Patriotism v Nationalism

2005-02-08T09:14:00.000-06:00

Patriotism and Nationalism

What not to do for the poor

2005-01-31T09:58:00.000-06:00

The De Soto Delusion

VP Debate: Missed Opportunities (big time!)

2004-10-05T22:01:00.000-05:00

One of the first things that was brought up with the nomination of Edwards was the strength he would bring to the VP debate against Cheney. Who the hell decided that the best thing to do would be for Edwards to come out and simply parrot what Kerry said only five days earlier? It would be one thing for this ticket to "stay on message", it is another for Edwards to come out and repeat verbatim the phrases that Kerry used, "more casualties in August than July, more in July than...". For one thing, it makes Edwards look simply like Kerry's adoring yes-man. More importantly, he had to know that the Republicans have had armies of true believers go over the lines that worked for Kerry looking for the snappiest responses to them.

The reason I was looking forward to this debate is that it was the last time that the American people will EVER see Cheney have to respond to questions from anyone less friendly to him than Rush Limbaugh. How is it possible that the Kerry/Edwards campaign could allow Cheney to walk off the stage without having to explain (or in this case refuse to address, since they weren't allowed to ask questions to each other) loyalty oaths, free speech zones and a level of secrecy never before seen in the American presidency. Whenever Cheney puked out high-minded phrases about "freedom" or "democracy", loyalty oaths should have been mentioned. When he bloviated about "accountability", his hiding behind Rush to respond to criticism should have been brought up. His amazing work with every brutal dictator and enemy of the US in order to line his pockets at Halliburton could have been mentioned every time he started to pretend that he ever gave a shit about democracy.

Edwards did, at least, bring up some of his most unforgivable votes in congress, but he did so in laundry list fashion that will be quickly forgotton. Why not tie it in to the questions at hand? "I don't think a man that voted against the Civil Rights Act is going to be the one that brings this nation back together". "I don't think the man that voted against the release of Nelson Mandela because he considered him a terrorist is someone that can effectively lead our war against real terrorists." Why no mention of Cheneys terrorist task force that never met? What about his Energy task force whose members were secret? Protecting Kennyboy?

I realize that the point of the debate was not to please me, but harsh criticism of a man that so richly deserves the scrutiny that he will now never receive in any important format would have been a service to the people. I can't imagine that he did this ticket that much good with the approach taken tonight.

Update:
It looks that I was at least somewhat wrong regarding last night (thankfully). I've heard some of the rebroadcast of the debate and reading articles since then and it seems that I missed all of Edwards strongest portions of the debate (putting kids to bed, etc.). Still not as good as what I expected, but much better than what I thought. Admittedly, I would have never been completely satisfied with anything short than Edwards ripping Cheney's Grinch-like heart out of his chest and stuffing it through his scowling mouth.

Goss Fucking Dammit pt II

2004-09-29T16:22:00.000-05:00

The trouble is not necessarily that Bush would nominate a partisan hack or incompetent boob for an important job (this was a false dilemma anyway, Goss is both). I would be shocked if he had done anything else. The shocking thing is that the Dems went along with it.

Only eighteen Dems in the Senate voted against his nomination, fearing retribution in the upcoming election if they had "politicized" the nomination. Set aside the fact, for a moment, that the Cons chose politics over national security (again) for a moment. Set aside the fact that the Senate is now holding sessions on what went wrong with our intelligence and how to fix this in the future (shaking their little fists and thumping their hearts, vowing to never let it happen again) at the same time that they have nominated an incompetent hack for the most important position in the CIA. Set aside the fact that this story only merited a brief mention on the news and only for about one day (with little to no context, of course).

My father was a long time Republican who is now completely disenchanted...actually, let's call it what it is...completely fucking pissed and thoroughly disgusted with the Republican party. He will be voting for Nader this year because the Dems are "just as bad". When things like this come up, I wouldn't even bother arguing with him. "Gee dad, it is true that both parties are completely fucking us here. Hey, but the Cons are taking an active role in the buggery! At least the Dems are only being complicit in this in a passive way. Vote Democrat! Yeah!"

The Cons never backed down from thing like Clinton's health care plan, despite the fact that most polls showed that most people wanted health care reform. They didn't huddle in the corner begging the Dems not to hurt them or meekly asking them if they would be allowed to participate in the victory celebration afterwards.

The Dems need to give the people a clear alternative. Otherwise, what is the fucking point?

Goss Fucking Dammit

2004-09-23T21:06:00.000-05:00

Is our new CIA director Peter Goss an incompetent boob or partison hack? Check out Sam Rosenfeld's article that explores this interesting question.

More on this later.

Fluff

2004-08-10T14:34:00.000-05:00

Haven't had a chance to post in a while. Hopefully will be able to soon. After such a long absence, I feel obligated to come up with something spectacular upon my return. I feel obligated, but I'm not going to. Instead I give you a quote that I heard on public radio last week (taken out of context):

"When the US women's soccer team won the title and Brandi Chastain took off her shirt, I thought of Richard Nixon".

Before Sunset

2004-07-31T12:25:00.000-05:00

Nine years ago I rented a little movie called Before Sunrise because it was directed by Richard Linklater and I liked his other films. Oddly, it was of the few times in my adult life where the characters in the film where exactly my age and expressed many of the ideas and fears and feelings that I expressed to whomever would listen. They were better looking than me, of course. And I couldn't afford to go to Europe. So, there were differences, but they were minor, really. It is not often that one sees a film about people you could know living lives that you might need a little more luck to lead, but not that much luck. These characters were living in a world that is exactly like this one. The film was a realistic romantic fantasy about two people and one night. I liked the film enough to watch it several times. I had my friends watch it, and girls I dated had to watch it. I had my parents watch it at a time when my parents really didn't understand me at all. I don't remember thinking that this film represented me in any specific way, I honestly never thought about it. Now I see that it did. It was a film that I showed to people because I felt it said something about me and what it said was: I believe in ideas, I am a romantic, and at heart I am as excited about life as these two characters are and if you feel the same way then maybe the world's a little brighter than I fear.

The first film followed two 23 year olds who, after meeting on a train, spend a night walking around Vienna. As they walk and talk and talk and talk, they fall in love. The reality is that one is an American due to fly back to America, the other is French with her own obligations. As sunrise approaches, they are faced with the likelihood that they will never see each other again. The film ends with the two agreeing to meet back in Vienna in six months. Fearing that a long distance phone relationship would wipe the shine from their perfect night, they do not exchange personal information. They seem to reason that if they still love each other in six months, they'll will take the chance to return to Vienna. It will require no small amount of faith for either party and the audience is left to decide for themselves if this reunion ever actually occurs. I always assumed that that it did not. I felt it was more romantic that way. If they met again, their relationship would certainly get messier, more complicated, the luster would be lost. Perhaps, perfect relationships cannot last more than one night.

The sequel Before Sunset takes place in real time nine years later. Real life complications made their attempt at reunion impossible, but now they meet again. The setting has changed, one is married with a son, the other in a relationship. Neither is really happy. Both look back on that night as an opportunity lost. The questions of the second film are these: Is this second meeting a blessing or a curse. Is it a chance to put right what went wrong, or is their coupling an impossibility? Will they destroy even their memory of the original night if they try at romance now? And most importantly, would a relationship at this stage in their lives be an exercise in romanticism or cynicism? Is it a risk worth taking or trangsression to be avoided?

The characters are nine years older, I am nine years older. They are more successful than I am, they are living rather different lives than I am (they always were) but watching this film, watching these characters discuss the last nine years I found myself recalling the events of my life over that span. I thought about who I was nine years ago, who I am today, what's changed? what's been gained, lost?

Some of the people who watched the first film with me are no longer with us. They will never see this new chapter. One thing I know that's lost is the opportunity for me to discuss with them this new film, to discuss with them anything. LIke the first, the second film ends abruptly and openly--that is almost to say that it doesn't end. The characters are still alive and still living and the film settles nothing and answers nothing. We don't know what will happen in the next few minutes of the film, much less the next nine years.

Richard Linklater loves life and talking about life and making films that talk about life and people who talk and talk and talk about everything. Some people hold that against him. When the action in a film is conversation there are many who will say that nothing is happening. When the film doesn't tell you its meaning there are many who will say that it is meaningless. I haven't really gone five minutes without thinking about this film, and the first one, and my own life since the opening scene began to flicker some twenty hours ago. By way of contrast, I haven't thought about The Lord of the Rings since the last image on screen cut to the credits. I don't know that Before Sunset is a great film, I don't even know if I like the characters--that is I think that I might find them annoying and certainly self involved and probably too much like me without being enough like me. Or I might really just want to talk to them, or talk to somebody who talks about the things they talk about, and forget about difference and indulge their indulgences. I don't know.

Perhaps what's brought me so close to this film is that these characters have lived in the same world as I have since 1994. They look older, more sad. They've seen the same news. They've tried to grow up. They go from thinking that they're now better equipped to deal with life's difficulties to thinking they can't deal with anything. Their encounter is equal parts serendipitous and the last thing either of them needed. They walk the streets of Paris as both their 32 year old self and their 23 year old self. They might be about to make a terrible mistake but it might not be a mistake--or maybe the mistake was that at 23 they were too young and too hopeful and if they had been 32 then everything would have worked out, they would have planned it, been realistic. The 32 year olds see the failure of the earlier romance as being the product of two people who were too romantic. At the same time, it is the 32 year olds who are willing to be romantic again, and this time the romance is irresponsible, possibly self-destructive, and maybe despite all of that worth it. I don't know.

If the film is great, it is great because I don't know what these two people should do and they don't know and the film doesn't know. What's more I don't even know what I want them to do. I don't know that at 32, I can see the world through 23 year old eyes. But I don't know that, that if I were in the same situation as these two characters, I wouldn't try. I don't know what I'd do. I don't know what is optimistic, romantic, pessimistic or cynical. If I remember correctly, when I was 23 I think I did know. And when when I was 23, I kind of always thought that at 32, I would know better. Unfortunately, at 32 I know more and less--whereas the open ending of the first film offered promise in the possibilities it left open, the ending of Sunset haunts.

The BSB Interview. Mick Arran

2004-07-15T15:37:00.000-05:00

BSB: You started your first blog Omnium in September 2003. What motivated you to start blogging and what do you hope to accomplish?

Mick: I cut my teeth on BBS', like a lot of others, but the bulletin boards were being taken over by trolls, especially right-wing trolls, and 'discussions' had turned into endless rounds of repetitive posturing; every time you tried to move the discussion in a different direction or deepen it beyond the level of propaganda, the trolls would move in and shove it back into partisan bickering. It became limited, circular, stuck in the same revolving door like an old silent comic. I was looking for another way to have my say when I stumbled across Eschaton and discovered blogs. That was just before the Second Gulf War.

Cut to the chase: the SGW motivated me. I had been frustrated by the right wing's success in neutralizing discussion about the war on BBS'; here was a format that I could control, a way, or so I thought, that the discussion could be raised once again to the more helpful and inclusive level where it had been before Iraq was used to polarize it. That's what I hoped to accomplish, in some small way, when I started. But I misread the limitations of blogs, or just didn't understand them. Blogging--like the rest of the internet, in a way--is only partially about discussion. Mostly it's about building a community of one sort or another where like-minded people can support each other and exchange ideas and tactics. Blogs have been extremely successful, despite their relatively tiny numbers of readers, in influencing the discussion in the mainstream. They have also been instrumental in pushing mainstream journalists into acting more like a press and less like sycophantic bootlickers.

In that sense, they remind me of IF Stone and his Weekly. At his height, Stone only had a few thousand readers but what he wrote influenced the course of mainstream reporting and forced issues to the front that had been successfully buried before he dug them out of their holes. That's why Stone is Omnium's chief icon: it's my little addition to the attempt to spread important information that would otherwise be ignored.

We're often accused by the right of 'preaching to the choir'. I think Phaedrus' tagline speaks for me as well: 'Aiming to Arm the Choir'. That's what we're doing.

If you mean personally? Ego, old son. Pure ego. I have a big mouth and I like to shoot it off, and on my blog, nobody can tell me to shut up.

I don't know if you want this, but a technical reason was getting DSL finally. Posting on a bbs or a blog could be a time-consuming proposition on dial-up. When I got DSL in Sept, I noticed right away how much quicker and easier it was to do: I could source quotes, find additional information, and download it all in minutes or even seconds rather than hours. For a working stiff, that was a big Green Light

BSB: I'm glad you brought up the BBS'. I suspect that many of the bloggers started out on message boards before blogs were available. Do you ever go back to visit your old stomping grounds?

Mick: For a long time I did, but they were always having the same arguments, talking about the same things. Somebody would try to bring something up about Iraq or Halliburton or the PATRIOT Act and inside of three posts they'd be back to what a terrible man Clinton was. After awhile it just seemed like a waste of time. There was one I visited regularly because it wasn't like that bvut it wasn't like that because there were only a dozen or so people posting on it and we all knew each other. Then they started to drop away and it was 8, 6, 5.... I quit even checking-in a month or so ago.

BSB: At their best, they can have the advantage of having bright, thoughtful representatives from both sides of the aisle (before they are overrun with trolls and descend into flame wars).

Mick: Yeah, I really miss that about them. The one important thing you don't get with a blog--at least I don't--is feedback, the give-and-take where you have to let your perspective and your belief be challenged, maybe changed. Hard to believe now, but that really used to happen before the polarization set in.

BSB: What about the right-wing bloggers? Do you spend much time reading their blogs?

Mick: Not any more. I did for a while, but then it gets to the point where they're making the same arguments day after day after day no matter what the subject is. I gave up on Sully and GR and Kaus because I could have written their opinions for them; it would have been easy: same buzzwords, same phrases, same talking points. When I knew what they were going to say before they wrote it, why bother to read it? I suppose there are probably people who feel the same way about me. I'm very sensitive to repetition, tho, and I try not to say too much I've said before. The problem with the Bushies is that they pull the same tricks the same way using the same people. To talk about it at all is to feel like you're repeating yourself endlessly. How often can you expose the same bait-and-switch routine? It must get old to read; it certainly gets old to write. I was going to quit a couple of months ago because I thought I was turning into a broken record. I was boring myself, altho challenging as a writer: I had to find entirely new and entertaining ways to say 'bait-and-switch' and fresh angles to come at it from. But it's getting harder. FTT was good for me that way; it got my juices flowing again by focusing on the concrete results of the bait-and-switch games.

I read The Volokh Conspiracy from time to time, Intel Dump (which I like a lot) and Sgt Hook, but they're more center-right than right. At least they're not still bitching about Clinton and they have their own takes on things, they're not just parroting the standard GOP talking points. There's an awful lot of that on the right. Just flipping thru it gets tiresome. How many times can you read the same rant in slightly different words on how John Edwards is a trial lawyer?

BSB: I notice that you run sitetracker on your blogs. How closely do you monitor your traffic and has this changed since you first started blogging?

Mick: Hmmm. More closely lately. Blogger doesn't have Trackback unless you pay for it. I was curious about how badly I was wasting my time. In the beginning it didn't matter much--I had a dozen or so people I brought over from the bbs' where I'd been posting, and that was good enough. Now that it looks like Bush is going down, though, and I have a number of other avenues I want to explore (FTT and LitBlogs are more like where I think blogging is going as it matures), I don't want to keep Omnium afloat if it's time has passed and it's losing it's audience. As long as it continues to grow, I'll probably do it. I still have lots to say about politics and current events and will probably always want an outlet for them. But more of my focus is going toward FTT type issues. I guess it's a matter of emphasis and prioritizing time. Tracking numbers, even in such a crude way, helps me figure what my readers like and how to divide what time I have.

Tracking is a relatively recent development for me, btw. I only added the meters a couple of months ago, so I don't have much to say about how it's changed except numbers-wise: when I put them I had 15-20 hits a day; that has more than doubled since then to 35-40. Not a big readership exactly, but more than I ever expected--and more than had ever read anything I'd written before.

BSB: Do you have many unfinished drafts that just sit on blogger unpublished, or do you pretty much hit the “send” button for everything you write?

Mick: I'm old-fashioned. I work til it's done and then I publish it. If I can't finish it before I have to go to work or do something else, I dump it. Blogs are like newspapers: Right now it's fresh; tomorrow it's on the bottom of the canary's cage or wrapping fish. The only pieces I ever put in the word processor and worked on over days were the series I did: 'The Myth of Corporate-Style Government' and 'Bush and the Cult of Personality'. I treated those more like essays than posts. I rewrote them a number of times, edited them, wrote them again. If I did that with every post, I'd do one a month.

I've read that other bloggers do drafts and I guess it's a good thing but I don't see the point. By the time you get back to it somebody else has already said it, probably better than you did, and everybody else has moved on. Blogging moves as fast as the news, for better or worse--and, like marriage, it's both. As David Neiwert said, one of the great strengths of blogs is their ability to jump on an issue, spread it around, correct mis-statements or lies almost as soon as they're told, and track the tale as it makes the rounds. They're less successful at long, thoughtful, magazine-style essays. Neiwert and Tim Dunlop at The Road to Surfdom are the only two I can think of off the top of my head who do that kind of writing every day and are consistently good at it. We all do it sometimes--Max Sawicky has moments, Tristero, Jeff at NOTA--but it's hard work and very time-consuming. 'Bush and the Cult of Personality' took over a month of doing practically nothing else. That's why I haven't written one since 'Myth' and the series on 'Intelligence: Who Collects It and How Does It Get Processed?' has been sitting in my home WP for 6 weeks and I have yet to finish the first installment.

The only value I can see to drafts is timing: you can do a piece and hold onto it until something happens that it fits right into. Other than that.....

BSB: A wise man once said...(ok, actually it was Tony Pierce Tony Pierce):
"dont tell your mom, your work, your friends, the people you want to date, or the people you want to work for about your blog. if they find out and you'd rather they didnt read it, ask them nicely to grant you your privacy"

Do you tell your friends and family about your blog?

Mick: Not at first, no. But then when I started FTT, I started to talk about it to, not friends exactly, but people I know who are online and who it might interest or even represent. I don't write a journal or a chit-chat blog, so there's not much point to letting friends know about it; they already know what I think politically, and with them I talk. You know, face-to-face.

OK, now the truth--my friends tend not to be as politically radical as I am. This is a conservative part of MA. I didn't used to worry about spouting off now and then and neither did they, but Bush's quasi-election polarized people here just like it did everywhere else and politics got to be a dangerous subject. (See David Neiwert's 'Politics and the Personal' for the best desription of this phenomenon I've read.) In the interest of keeping them as friends, I agreed to keep politics out of the discussion. Actually, given everything that's happened, I may need to test them again; their attitudes may be changing.

As for family, no, at least, I haven't yet. We're most of us not real close. As a matter of odd timing, tho, before I got this email my brother--who I haven't heard from in at least 3 years--called last night out of the blue and I ended up telling him. He said, "What's a blog?" The standard response, I might add. He's a carpenter in New Hampshire, and barely online, meaning he is but he hardly ever uses it. He got all excited to think he'll actually be able to read something I wrote after all these years of hearing how I'm a writer but never seeing anything published that he could read. He's having trouble with his ISP, too, which is another reason he dcoesn't use it much, and he's switching providers. When he gets his new email address, I'm going to send him all the links. It should be...interesting to see his reaction. From there, the rest of the family will know inside a week because he'll tell them. That should be interesting, too.

BSB: You have dedicated a lot of time to calling attention to other bloggers that you enjoy. You are the only one that I have seen that includes some reviews of other blogs on your blogroll and I have particularly enjoyed your “Women Blog, Too” running item. Is this because you just want to share the blogs that you enjoy with your readers or is there a larger purpose to this?

Mick: Both. It started out as a sharing thing--blogs are new, still, and there are a lot of questions about them, a lot people don't know about them. I always discovered blogs either through the recommendation of another blogger or--far more often--by randomly clicking links on other people's blogrolls. Most of the time I didn't have any idea what I was going to find, and most of the time what I found I didn't like all that much. Occasionally, tho, I came across a real gem and thought, it's too bad people don't know about this, so I started writing about them (if you go back in the archives, you'll find reviews of a lot of the blogs on the Honor Roll; one of these days I'll put links up to them, too). As I said in the first WTB, the inspiration was Jeff's Daily Link at NOTA--he was doing a blog review a day for awhile there (at one a week, I'm a lightweight compared to that) and I discovered that having a description helped me figure out if it was something I was interested in. I found a bunch of good ones through Jeff that I still read. So when an 'online friend' got interested and asked, 'Where are all the women?', it seemed like a natural extension of what I was already doing.

What I don't think I understood when I did it, though, is that it also opened up a 'larger purpose'. Women's blogs are different; they don't have different concerns, but they express them differently. They also tend to play with the form more than men. Reading them by the barrel to prepare each WBT, I began to realize that, while it was still in its infancy, what women were doing was a lot more flexible, a lot richer, and a lot more promising than what I was used to from reading male blogs. I think you have to see them in isolation to know that, tho. What they do is quieter, less strident, as a rule, and they don't stand out. Another rule: you have to read them for awhile (at least I did) before what they're doing really starts to sink in. Male blogs are much more obvious about their attitudes and intentions; read 2 or 3 posts and you know what you're going to get. Female blogs are full of surprises, twists, unexpected jumps, unsuspected connections. They don't say 'This is politics, this isn't', like we do. It's all part of the Big Picture for them. And their interests tend to be wider and less compartmentalized than ours.

I'm not saying that makes them better, I'm saying it makes them different and the difference is intriguing.

What was the question? (This is your own fault, you know, you have nobody to blame but yourself. You would pick the longest-winded blowhard in the blogosphere to interview first. Good luck editing this mess.)

Ah yes, the 'larger purpose'. So what I began to get from the female bloggers I was reading were hints of strengths and potentialities in blogs that I hadn't seen before. I decided--I was at the 'Why am I doing this?' phase I mentioned before--that I wanted to explore some of those potentialities and examine some of those strengths. LitBlogs is the first small, focused attempt to do that, but I'd like to do more. And will if I get the chance. See, I'm not really sure yet what that 'larger purpose' is. I just know there is one and I'm in the process of figuring it out and maybe helping to map it.

BSB: You normally do not resort to name calling on your site. The effect of this is that it has a stronger effect on the rare occasions that you do. You’ve called Tom DeLay a cockroach and Grover Norquist a toad. Why these two in particular and not, say Bush, Ashcroft, Wolfawitz or a host of others?

Mick: Bush, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice, Libby, Perle, et al are greedy, ignorant, stupid (which is not the same as ignorant), arrogant, wrong, or pig-headed stubborn, sometimes--often--all of them at once, but--and I've said this many times--I'm convinced they believe in what they're doing. Ashcroft is a genuine fundamentalist, Bush truly believes he talks to god--and worse, that god answers--Wolfowitz, Libby and Perle are committed neocon followers of Strauss, Rice is loyal to her boss, and Rumsfeld still believes his radical approach to defense will turn out in the end to be the right one. Their motives are confused when they're not contradictory, they lie as a matter of policy, and they are incapable of admitting mistakes. They suffer from a severe form of tunnel vision, an inability to recognize their own hypocrisies, 16 kinds of mental and emotional blindness, and an almost pathological identification with corporations as the ideal expressions of Western civilization as they define it. But underneath all those flaws, they are TB's--True Believers--who think what they're doing really is best for the future of the society they want to protect and encourage. If it isn't a society either of us would care to live in and that we fight to our last breaths, that doesn't alter the fact that they are fighting for a world they believe is humanity's best hope for security and progress. I give them that much respect--if no more.

DeLay and Norquist are fakes. They believe in nothing but their own advancement and they're willing to destroy the social contract and steamroller anybody who gets in their way. They are without beliefs or conscience. They're power-mongers, plain and simple. Norquist has called (I think this was in one of the posts I did on him; if not, it will be in the next one) the people who support him with their membership money 'idiots' for believing he can do what he tells them he will do--repeal the income tax. DeLay has never betrayed the slightest bit of belief in anything other than power and greed. He is contemptuous toward his own colleagues, willing to use anybody and anything to get his way, even a children's charity, without respect for so much as the pretense of law ('I AM the Federal Government!') with regard to himself, and utterly lacking in the most basic of human values. They are both pompous, arrogant, primordially self-centered, elitist ambulance-chasers who have shamelessly crow-barred their way to power using nothing but extortion, bribery, threats, and blackmail. They don't have a single redeeming quality or selfless act between them, and either of them would call down a nuclear holocaust if they thought it would advance them one small step personally. They recognize no limitations or restrictions on either their monumental greed or their slimy, inhuman, criminal tactics. 'Might Makes Right' is their Golden Rule. They're miniature Hitlers--and I mean that literally, not figuratively: at root, they are autocratic, dictatorial types who would 'cleanse' the earth of their enemies, real and imagined, by whatever means necessary, given half a chance. Delay would have run a crematorium without a qualm; Norquist would have planted himself in the central warehouse to weigh and count the gold teeth shipped from the ovens and been proud of his work even as he stole half of everything that came in and put it in a numbered Swiss bank account.

In short, they are calculating, selfish, mean little men without redeeming features of any kind. Maybe DeLay is nice to his family, but I doubt it. Maybe Norquist gave a homeless man on the street a quarter once, but I'd want to see the vidoetape. Men like that who browbeat their subordinates and toady their superiors, who respect no one but themselves, deserve none. Not from me, and not from anybody as far as I'm concerned.
Does that answer your question? I could go on....

BSB: Would you consider yourself a reformer or a revolutionary? I think I know the answer, but maybe not and I wanted to hear your answer as to why.

Mick: Huh. To tell you the truth, I don't think of myself as either one. I think of myself as a writer and a radical progressive with strong opinions and a need to shoot my mouth off about them; blogging is where they merge and feed off each other in a parasitic duel like a Bob Fosse set-piece.

But if pressed, I'd say a reformer with revolutionary tendencies. I'd rather see the system corrected than scrapped, but if correction isn't feasible, I suppose I'd be willing to go back to the Constitution as a starting point and try again. Is that revolutionary? The Constitution, for all its flaws, is the best and most hopeful set of governing rules ever written. I would never scrap that. I would, however, be willing to tear down a government that was ignoring that Constitution and replace with one that didn't. Is that what you meant? Or have I misunderstood your question?

BSB: FTT focuses the growing gap between the very powerful and the very helpless and the real world consequences this has on the latter. Omnium often chronicles the almost daily news we receive of our government being happily manipulated, funded and controlled by large corporations and their idealogical enablers, especially (but not exclusively) from the Republican party.

How much do you think can achieved through incremental change and how much needs to come from a fundamental overhaul? Is the system broken or does it just need some tweaking?

Mick: Ah. Gotcha.
The eternal questions. No, the system isn't broken. The system works fine as long as people believe in it. It's the people who've been broken. We've had our belief in the system undermined consistently for 30 years. We've bought a cheap, simple fantasy: you can have it all and you don't have to pay for it. We've allowed a small group of determined con artists to pull the wool over our eyes in order to rob us blind, and then we pulled the blankets over our heads so we wouldn't have to see them do it. We have given in to fundamental human weaknesses like fear, greed, and denial without a fight. We haven't challenged ourselves to rise above the LCD since Reagan sold us the idea that we'd been too generous, that we would all be a lot richer and a lot better off if we started thinking about Number 1 and the hell with the other guy, let him take care of himself.

To be fair, we have had the most unrelenting, sophisticated, and pervasive propaganda machine ever devised aimed at us for 30 years, controlled by the people at the top who had the most to gain. We stood up against it for longer than they imagined possible, and they had to turn up the heat to almost unbearable levels, but they got what they wanted--and didn't know what to do with it once they had it. Their vision is almost claustrophobically tiny: faced with the first terrorist attack on US soil by foreign agents, our leader--the smallest of small minds--said, 'We're gonna go to war against the whole world.' We said, 'What's our part? What do we do?' and he said, 'You guys go shopping.' That's about as deep as he gets.

None of this is new.The system was under attack the day it was proposed by the Hamiltonian contingent, the plutocrats of the day who thought of the common people as 'rabble' and were horrified at the prospect of putting a government into the hands of the 'ignorant herd', as Samuel Chase put it. They have been trying to bring it down and take it over ever since. But you could go back to the Roman Empire and watch the same kind of people destroy that for the same reasons: greed and a contempt for ordinary people. Despite everything the American cousins of the Roman oligarchs could do, the system survived for over 200 years, sometimes under enormous strain, because we believed in it, because we elected leaders who believed in it. When we started to elect leaders who said openly that it was a crock and that the government wasn't us but some kind of amorphous 'other' that was our enemy, the system was doomed--no system can stand up to being run by people who want to destroy it.

The system will work even now if it's allowed to work. The problem is that the thieves have gotten so bold (or so desperate) that they've begun stealing the democratic mechanism itself--the election process. No system can work when it's being dismantled and replaced. But we're waking up. They've gone so far off the deep end in their greed that we've finally been forced to notice what they're doing rather than listen to what they're saying, and we're appalled. If the system is allowed to work, then the worst excesses of the oligarchs who controlled the system will be modified very shortly and people who believe in the Constitution--the system--will be in charge again.

But if we are to stop this from happening a second time, the system's going to need more than 'tweaking'. The way we finance campaigns has to be overhauled from the ground up and we're going to have to face the hard fact that we're going to have to pay for elections ouirselves to keep the Monsters from using the Money Machine to roll over top of us. Clean Elections works in Maine, it can work nationally, and we're just going to have to bite the bullet.

Likewise, this absurd winner-take-all election process has to be overhauled. We need a system that eliminates its weaknesses--Money Rules by controlling the two parties--and puts the real power back into the hands of the people. Proportional representation will only create an entirely new and different set of problems--and opportunities for the oligarchs. Run-off voting is cumbersome and a tweak that will work for a short time and then collapse under the weight of its own confusion. We need YNMS voting to energize people agaoin and prove to them that their vote counts.

I suppose you could consider those 'reforms' but they're fundamental reforms and their effect, taken together, would revolutionize the way the system works.

So what does that make me? A Reform Revolutionary? A Revolutionary Reformer? Crazy as a bedbug? [Select One]

BSB: You are involved in three separate blogs and a website ( Omnium, From the Trenches, litblogs and The Omnium Annex). You are one of the more prolific political bloggers. You post frequently, especially on Omnium. How do you find the time?

Mick: I don't have a life. Or if I do, this is it.

When I was down in the creative doldrums and discovered Maine Line, I briefly considered writing a journal like Emmett's. But then I thought about what it would look like:
Monday--

Got up at noon. Wrote a post on Bush's idiocy, a post on Cheney's greed, and a post on a new reality TV show called ''Beach Party Disease' for Omnium. Went to work at 3pm. Came home at 11.30pm. Posted a news report on Ashcroft's proposal to sell the homeless to Protor&Gamble to make soap out of and a long Commentary on Bush's belief that the poor really have Mercedes-Benz's hidden away in secret palatial mansions near Santa Monica. Spent a half-hour on the new Snake story. Spent remaining hour on screenplay, 'Not So Lethal Weapon 16'. Have to figure a way to get Mel Gibson out of the walker long enough to waste the 3 baddies with his cane. MUST BE BELIEVABLE.Went to bed at 7am.

Tuesday,

Repeat.

Wednesday,

Once more.

Thursday,

And the same again.

It was too depressing.

BSB: If nothing else, that will at least make me feel better for not posting more often. Thank you, Mick. It has been a pleasure.

Mick: yeah, i enjoyed it. you made me think about stuff i haven't thought of in a while. and i got to write about myself, which is always a kick for an ego as large as mine. thanks for asking.

Did GWB Flip these Kids the Bird?

2004-07-14T10:27:00.000-05:00

From jiveturky

...Sean had to go back to work (he snuck out to join in the fun), so we drove him back to my place where his car was, then me, Adam, and Brendan went to another spot along the highway that we had spied earlier. A friendly Kerry supporter named Mr. Shenk let us use his front yard to display our banners. Now comes the good part. After waiting around for about 45 minutes, the motorcade passed by us again. A few police cars, followed by a van or two, drove by. Then, a Bush/Cheney bus passed, followed by a second one going slower. At the front of this second bus was The W himself, waving cheerily at his supporters on the other side of the highway. Adam, Brendan, and I rose our banner (the More Trees, Less Bush one) and he turned to wave to our side of the road. His smile faded, and he raised his left arm in our direction. And then, George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States of America, extended his middle finger.

Read that last sentence again.
I got flipped off by George W. Bush.

A ponytailed man standing next to us confirmed the event, saying, "I do believe the President of the U.S. just gave you boys the finger."

There is no way to confirm this one way or the other, but it made me chuckle.

The BiteSoundBite Interview

2004-07-12T15:11:00.000-05:00

Ever since I first started wandering around the internet (approximately 1994) I've wondered about the people that supplied all of the free content. Why would a person take the time to build a site to help others fix arcade games or to pay tribute to They Might Be Giants? These same questions have occured to me about bloggers. I'm a blogger and I'm not even certain why I do it sometimes.

Every Thursday I will be posting an interview with a different blogger. I want to know what makes them tick and what makes them talk. I will probably focus mainly on the left-leaning political types because those are the people I am most interested in. This will be an experiment. I may add my own opinions to my questions and comment about what I thought of the interview or critique the questions that I have asked afterwards. Hopefully I will get better at it and find a style that is interesting and lends itself well to the medium as I go along.

I will be posting the first interview tommorow, 7/14/04, with Mick from Omnium, From the Trenches and Snake Tales.

Brave Old World

2004-07-08T22:11:00.000-05:00

One narrative device that just about everyone uses is the "Post 9/11" world paradigm. You know, everything's changed "post 9/11", Edwards might have been viable as veep once, but "post 9/11"... The presumption is that the world is a more dangerous place today than it was before the first WTC tower was struck. Of course, a more thoughtful analysis might conclude that the less dangerous world of "pre 9/11" was an illusion, and the extraordinary perilous nature of today is an exaggeration--the emphasis now placed on possibilities we once dismissed as remote or wrongly thought impossible. We were not safer on 9/10, the attack could have come then, but it was planned for 9/11. It could have come on 8/11, or on 12/31/2000 or on some other date prior to or post "9/11." Of course,some attacks had come before, but they occurred in Africa-- we expect Africa to be a dangerous place to live. An attack killing hundreds somewhere in Africa doesn't affect an American's sense of security, and nary an American thinks the world less safe because Nairobi is burning. The truth is that the 9/11 attack did not make us less safe, it only made us realize that we never lived in the totally secure world we had assumed was our birthright. Alas, these points generally fail to resonate in the USA and this analysis has few adherents.

The immediate reaction after 9/11 was (appropriately) outrage, and often merely RAGE. Americans were scared. The tendency thereafter was to believe that the entire world had changed. Nothing on Earth was as it should be. America had new responsibilities. It was time to go to places far more dangerous than here and rain down missiles and bombs upon those who dwelled in these shadowy regions. It was time to round up conspicuous looking people (whose names bore a superficial resemblance [meaning they looked Arabic] to the names of those who'd made us recognize that America is of this violent world, and whose conspicuous look fit the racial profile). This was a new age. A dark time. Special methods were needed. Old ideals of rights and liberties were romance and fantasy. We had to shoot first and ask only appropriate questions at appropriate times. Questions like "How will we get these terrorists out of their holes, will we smoke them?" Yes, yes, we will. We have to. It is a new era. It is midnight in America.

According this perverse paradigm, America needed a different President on 9/11 than it needed on 9/10. So what kind of President did we have on 9/10? It's an old story, but so is all history:

T H E Q U I Z
by Glen Johnson, Associated Press Writer
Thursday, Nov. 4, 1999
WASHINGTON-Texas Gov. George. W. Bush was hit with a surprise quiz on foreign affairs and scored only 25 percent.
The Republican presidential front-runner sat down Wednesday with WHDH-TV, the NBC affiliate in Boston, and was asked to name the leaders of four current world hot spots: Chechnya, Taiwan, India and Pakistan.
He was able to give a partial response to just one: Taiwan.
That drew immediate criticism from the camp of Democrat Al Gore, which said the vice president could have answered all four correctly.
“I guess we know that ‘C’ at Yale was a gentleman’s ‘C,’” said Gore spokesman Chris Lehane, referring to the way Bush has described his academic record.
The Bush campaign brushed off the incident. “The person who is running for president is seeking to be the leader of the free world, not a Jeopardy contestant,” said Karen Hughes, Bush communications director.
“I would venture to guess that 99.9 percent of most Americans and probably most candidates could not answer who is the president of Chechnya,” Hughes added.
The questions were put to Bush by political reporter Andy Hiller during a break in Bush’s campaigning in New Hampshire. Hiller is known locally for asking sassy questions of political leaders.
Hiller asked: “Can you name the president of Chechnya?”
“No, can you?” Bush replied.
“Can you name the president of Taiwan?” Hiller asked.
“Yeah, Lee,” responded Bush, referring to Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui.
"Can you name the general who is in charge of Pakistan?” asked Hiller, inquiring about Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf, who took over last month in a military coup.
“Wait, wait, is this 50 questions?” replied Bush.
Hiller replied: “No, it’s four questions of four leaders in four hot spots.”
Bush said: “The new Pakistani general, he’s just been elected-not elected, this guy took over office. It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country and I think that’s good news for the sub-continent.”
Hiller persisted, saying, “Can you name him?”
Bush said: “General. I can name the general. General.”
“And the prime minister of India?” asked Hiller, inquiring about a man who was recently re-elected and who last year tested a nuclear bomb.
Bush said: “The new prime minister of India is-no.”
At that point, Bush responded in kind to Hiller.
“Can you name the foreign minister of Mexico?” asked the governor, whose home state borders the Central American nation.
The reporter replied, “No sir, but I would say to that, I’m not running for president.”
Bush said: “What I’m suggesting to you is, if you can’t name the foreign minister of Mexico, therefore, you know, you’re not capable about what you do. But the truth of the matter is, you are, whether you can or not.”
For the record, the president in Chechnya, the Russian breakaway republic and scene of recent fighting, is Aslan Maskhadov.
The prime minister of India is Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
-Copyright 1999 The Associated Press. Reprinted with permission

Andy Hiller’70 reports for WHDH-TV (Channel 7) in Boston. He has covered many presidential campaigns and virtually every major campaign in Massachusetts since 1977. His identification on WHDH-TV’s web site is “The Hiller Instinct.” At Beloit, he was editor of the Round Table. Hiller earned a master’s degree in Public Administration from Harvard.

Whatever the PR people at the White House would have you believe, Bush did not magically transform overnight. Consider that he was running for President, that his father had been both President and director of the CIA. Consider that his life had been spent surrounded by politicians who must have spoken about world affairs from time to time. Consider again that he WANTED to be President. He had his entire life to ready himself, to develop a disciplined curiosity in the goings on of the world. He decided he'd rather not. His lack of experience in making foreign policy may have been a weakness, his lack of interest in foreign affairs was a fatal flaw. It didn't take 9/11 to make the Bush Presidency dangerous, it only took the 2000 election.

In order to reconcile the GOP's seemingly hypocritical rationale that Edwards is not ready for the Presidency at a time when foreign policy expertise is at such a premium, one has to accept the flimsy premise that Bush was not the novice he appeared to be in 2000, or has somehow, in four years time, developed into a leader with an astute understanding of geopolitics after devoting a lifetime of feckless indifference toward such matters. This requires a running leap of faith, and it seems to me the country has followed GW off one too many cliffs already. No, if we are to accept that Edwards is unqualified to be on a national ticket b/c of his lack of foreign policy making experience, then even the laziest student of American presidential politics (I'm talking to you, Wolf Blitzer), would have to assume that it was a mistake to nominate, campaign for, and vote for GW Bush in 2000, that we have been living with an unqualified President ever since, and that it is dire that we get a qualified man to take over post haste. Of course in 2000, we were living in a dream land, lulled into a false sense of security by the veil of darkness kept carefully undisturbed by the market driven media, and confused by a din of babbling noise lucid only when explaining only which consumer goods will make us whole. Had we known better, we would never have accepted this child of extreme privilege who lacked even the decency to take advantage of the legacy that provided him with opportunities of which few could ever dream. He was not fit for the trials that were soon to come his way, even if 9/11 had never come at all. His critiques of the Clinton administration's nation building have proven to be simply campaign fodder and not practicable policies (though the press lets this slide), his proposition that America act with humility was, in retrospect, unintentionally ironic, and it is no stretch to say that the President's own foreign policy decisions have not yielded a single, unqualified, significant success. It is equally uncontroversial to say that these same decisions have in many ways yielded many, many complicated and possibly unredeemable and incalculably destructive failures.

So what about Edwards? I say we give him a quiz. Better yet, let's quiz Bush again, every week, until he's finally gone.

RNC Talking Points Make the Rounds Re: John Edwards

2004-07-07T14:34:00.000-05:00

You’ve heard them on CNN; you’ve seen them in your local paper. “He’s rich! He’s a trial lawyer (said with obligatory sneer). He’s a rich trial lawyer!” Even correspondents and pundits on NPR seem to be in a contest to see who can fit “rich” and “trial lawyer” the most times into each paragraph. Just this morning I heard a calm, all-knowing voice on NPR telling me that the same skills that made Edwards “rich” as a “trial lawyer” had benefited him in the Senate.

If you are a businessman going into politics, you are always touted for your skills that made you “successful”. I don’t recall one similar newscast in the run-up to the 2000 election reminding us that George Bush’s ability to capitalize off of his family connections not only made him very rich, but the same “skills” would also benefit him in Washington (although, boy did they ever!). What about Dick Cheney’s ability to exploit his contacts in the government in order to secure huge government contracts for his company? They certainly made him rich…er…I mean…successful!

It is assumed, of course that “trial lawyer” is the most despicable thing one can possibly be. Provided that it is said with enough of a sneer there is no reason to elaborate on why this is. It is just assumed that the title will conjure up images of Johnny Cochran and not Clarence Darrow or John Adams.

By yesterday afternoon, the smears that had rocketed out of the RNC moments after Kerry’s announcement had gained enough speed and force through the Republican echo chamber that it even reached the little company that I work for in Nowheresville, MN. The office dittoheads were gathered into a corner reading loudly and proudly the words of John Kerry during the primaries about Edwards’s inexperience. Never mind that the friends of our dear leader had said the exact same thing during his primary in 2000. My hope is that the technology will soon be available so that they can have Fox News channeled through their voice boxes (maybe Wi-Fi?) and save them the trouble of having to actually remember and repeat phrases such as “John Kerry speaks French!” themselves.

This is all, of course, great news. I voted for Edwards in the primaries and am thrilled to hear the panic and desperation in the voices of those that know what a great ticket this is. In November I shall shake their hands and drink their tears.

Update:
slacktivist adds Atticus Finch, Fiorello LaGuardia, Ralph Nader, Thurgood Marshall and Abraham Lincoln to the trial lawyer list. Trial lawyers: don't you just hate 'em?

New Article on Chavez

2004-07-02T13:17:00.000-05:00

I've done some research on the internet from time to time looking at Hugo Chavez. Other than that, I know very little about the region and its history. I have yet to find any convincing articles by his critics. There are, however, many articles from the pro-Chavez side that are convincing. Here is the latest from counterpunch

Update: Right after posting the above article, I checked out their other article of the day. Read it here if care to. Here is a sample:

This won't harm Nader much. Indeed, it may liberate him. Free of the Green Party's encyclopedic platform, Nader can now distill the themes of his campaign to the most potent elements (war, jobs, corruption and the environment) and, unburdened by the concern of party building, Nader can, if he chooses (and he should), focus his efforts only on the battleground states, where Kerry must either confront Nader's issues or lose the election. It's as simple as that.

The fatal damage in Milwaukee was done to the Green Party itself, where Cobb and his cohort sabotaged the aspirations of thousands of Greens who had labored for more than a decade to build their party into a national political force, capable of winning a few seats here and there and, even more importantly, defeating Democrats who behave like Republicans (cf: Al Gore). The fruits of all that intense grassroots organizing were destroyed in an instant.

But behold: the rebuffed Nader continues to poll nearly 6 percent without the Green Party behind him. Yet, you can't discern Cobb's numbers with an electron microscope. Of course, the pungent irony is that's precisely the way Cobb and his backers want it.

So, the Greens have succeeded in doing what seemed impossible only months ago: they've made the quixotic campaign of Dennis Kucinich, which still chugs along claiming micro-victory after micro-victory long after the close of the primaries (indeed there have been more victories after the polls closed than before), seem like a credible political endeavor. Of course, Cobb and Kucinich share the same objective function: to lure progressives away from Nader and back into the plantation house of the Democratic Party.

I picked up a book by the editors of counterpunch recently. These two back to back articles are a pretty good representation of my frustration with them. One chapter will be a well researched, thoughtful article on a subject that deserves much more attention than it gets. The next moment they will launch into an insane, self-destructive damn-anyone-that-disagrees-with-me diatribe filled with unsubstantiated charges and no consideration or counter-arguments to the well know arguments against their position.

As with your daily newspaper, read it with a critical eye.

The Corporation

2004-07-02T09:36:00.001-05:00

I'd like to pass this along in hopes that we can get the word out and make this a must-see documentary.

From Salon:

Jennifer Abbott, co-director of "The Corporation," an ambitious new Canadian film that seeks to demystify the dominant institution of our age, sees a mini-rebellion in progress among information consumers.

"People are craving substance," she says. "A lot of people feel alienated from mainstream media and fiction films, Hollywood films. They're craving something deeper, something that gives them answers to some of the questions they're asking. At least, I hope that's why it's happening."

Mark Achbar, her co-director (and previously the co-director of campus cult hit "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media"), chimes in: "The longer you try to hold down this kind of critical perspective, or push it out of the mainstream -- it's like trying to squeeze Jell-O; it's going to ooze out between your fingers no matter what. The theatrical releases of these films prove that people are willing to pay money to see their values reflected in a legitimizing package."

Abbott and Achbar, along with Joel Bakan, a professor of law at the University of British Columbia (who wrote both the film script and the accompanying book just published by the Free Press), stopped by Salon's New York office this week to chat about "The Corporation." Their film is long and dense, and may lack the balls-out entertainment value of "Fahrenheit 9/11," but it's an ingenious and startling work that explores a subject few of us understand well. In an election year when the balance between corporate power and democracy seems near a tipping point, it's every bit as crucial as Moore's movie. (Now playing in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, Calif., Sacramento, Calif., and several other West Coast cities, "The Corporation" will reach much of the heartland by September.)

In a sometimes vertiginous collage of file footage, voice-over narration and interviews with critics (such as Chomsky and Moore) and corporate insiders alike, "The Corporation" tries to untangle the ideology behind a social institution that is often believed to possess no ideology at all. There's no question this is a radical and didactic work, and its premise at first may seem outlandish: The modern corporation, which has been legally endowed with many of the rights and conditions of personhood, is in fact a psychopathic personality, constitutionally incapable of doing good or caring about others. But the longer you sit and watch the movie, the more irresistible the conclusion becomes.

As "The Corporation" demonstrates, although the concept of legal personhood for corporate entities stretches back to the dawn of the Industrial Age (and in fact, says Bakan, to the Roman Empire), the dominant social role assumed by the 20th century corporation came about largely by accident. When the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed after the Civil War, it was intended to guarantee the civil rights of newly freed slaves. But sharp-eyed lawyers began to wonder whether it also guaranteed rights (such as freedom of speech and due process) to the artificial person known as the corporation.

The courts ultimately agreed, setting the stage for a day when corporations would become so powerful that they virtually dominate the society around them, controlling public philosophy and discourse to a significant degree. That day, Bakan and company argue, is today.

By far the most convincing aspect of "The Corporation" is that much of its critique comes from current and former corporate insiders, not merely from sideline commentators or anti-corporate activists. Former Goodyear Tire CEO Sam Gibara explains how frustrating it was to run a major corporation and discover that his urge to change the way Goodyear did business was at odds with his mandate to serve shareholder interests above all else. Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the avuncular head of Royal Dutch Shell, meets a party of Earth First! protesters at his English country house with tea and lunch. Even Milton Friedman, the Reagan-era guru of free-market economics, agrees that corporations cannot be relied upon to be socially responsible without government regulation.

"It was very important to portray corporate insiders in their complexity and diversity," says Abbott. "That was the strategy we used so that corporate insiders wouldn't say, 'No, I'm not engaging with these issues, I'm not seeing this film.' So many corporate insiders have seen the film and really loved the film. Not all, but those that have this thing inside them where they know something is wrong."

Most striking is Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface, the world's largest manufacturer of commercial carpeting. A buttoned-down Southerner with a velvet-toned Jimmy Carter accent and the manner of a small-town Presbyterian minister, Anderson has become one of the corporate world's leading apostates. He dares to suggest that if people like him cannot make their businesses environmentally sustainable, they ought not to be in business. He becomes the movie's implausible, almost Christ-like hero, addressing a convention of North Carolina business leaders as "my fellow plunderers" and gently suggesting that at some point in the future executives who have created as much pollution as he has will be sent to prison.

Anderson proves to be an irresistible centerpiece for the film, but Bakan remains privately skeptical about the long-term viability of his vision. "Ray Anderson has made money by being sustainable," Bakan says. "He's a very smart man, a very driven man, a very committed man. He's using recycling now. Rather than selling carpet and saying, 'That's it,' he effectively leases the product and then recycles it. He saves a lot of money on raw materials -- he doesn't have to buy them anymore -- and on waste disposal. He's actually become more profitable by becoming more sustainable. Now the question of how far he can go with that, or how far that can be a model in general, is a real question."

When Bakan asked Goodyear's Gibara if he could imagine a similar model in the tire business -- taking responsibility for a potentially toxic product from manufacture to disposal -- the former exec just laughed at him.

"I take my hat off to the Ray Andersons of the world," Bakan goes on, "people who are embedded within the corporate structure and trying to push the envelope. But it's important to remember that there's always an envelope. Mark Moody-Stuart [of Shell] can't get up at an annual meeting and say, 'You know, I'm an environmentalist. So we're going to stop drilling in Nigeria even though we're reaping huge profits. And I'm going to take money out of the shareholders' pockets in order to serve my environmental vision.' It would be illegal. He'd get his ass sued. That's what the best-interests principle of the corporation is all about. He does not have authority to act in a way that does not benefit the shareholders. Personally, he could be a member of Earth First!, you know? It doesn't matter."

As preposterous as Bakan's psychopath diagnosis may sound, the central point of "The Corporation" is difficult to argue with. Corporations have been designed to be avaricious and self-serving; why should we be surprised if, when we leave them in charge of the world, they loot the place? "The fundamental diagnostic idea of a psychopath," Bakan says, "is a person who's incapable of being concerned about others. In the corporation, we have created an institution that is deliberately programmed, legally, to be incapable of being concerned about others. That's a fact. Any corporate attorney will tell you that: Yes, of course, corporations have to serve their own self-interest even if it means exploiting or harming others. I challenge anybody to tell me why the metaphor is inaccurate."

Prison Agrees With Him

2004-07-02T09:36:00.000-05:00

Whatever abusive regiment Saddam's been undergoing the past several months, my adive is: don't stop. This new, trim Hussein is positively dashing! Sure, he could shave the moustache, but not without appearing to be a slightly older, slightly more distinguished Pete Sampras! The man looks fit and fit is IN! They may convict him of mass murder, but might I suggest that he is now every bit the Ladykiller of his own works of fiction. And who doesn't thrill at the sight of a bad boy? So, count this as just good ol' charlie giving the gentleman Hussein his propers. He looks good, America, that makes him a STAR!

Tougher Restrictions on Cuba

2004-07-01T16:17:00.000-05:00

You've probably heard about this already, but I wanted to take this opportunity to link to a good post at The All Spin Zone about it. Good links in there and good comments. I've been a little slow to come around on the Cuba issue. The thing that finally made it sink in how absurd it was was when charlie compared our policy towards Cuba with Saudi Arabia (I don't know why the China comparison never took with me, I'm slow).

Besides, it is great sport to bring up Cuba to charlie and watch his head explode in 3...2...1...

What is America's role in the world

2004-07-01T11:54:00.000-05:00

The Left was right to oppose this war in Iraq. I opposed it from the get-go. But now I wonder, what should America's role in the world be? An editorial in this weeks New Yorker by George Packer suggests that this is War of Ideas that has also managed to be a war on ideas. The idea that America should act in the world to promote democracy appears now to be another of this war's victims. I never believed that this was a war to promote actual democracy. But what if this war were a democrat's war? What if it was Gore's war done with a multilateral force that included France and Russia and Mexico? Would I have supported that war? Would you have supported that war? I don't know that I would have trusted them either. But I post this to facilitate discussion. Tell me, what should America's role be in the world?

"Let Freedom Reign"

2004-07-01T11:08:00.000-05:00

New article from Juan Cole highlights some of the potential problems the new "soveriegn" Iraqi goverment may face and why.

Guardian Unlimited special report from yesterday gives us an example of a very real problem with handing over "soveriegnty" to terrorist thugs. Let freedom reign indeed! (thanks to Digby)

American military police yesterday raided a building belonging to the Iraqi ministry of the interior where prisoners were allegedly being physically abused by Iraqi interrogators.
The raid appeared to be a violation of the country's new sovereignty, leading to angry scenes inside the ministry between Iraqi policemen and US soldiers.
...
Iraqi ministry of interior officials admitted that around 150 prisoners taken during a raid four days before in the Betawain district of Baghdad had been physically abused during their arrest and subsequent questioning.
...
One of the prisoners bared his back after his initial arrest to reveal open welts allegedly caused by baton and rubber hoses.

A bodyguard for the head of criminal intelligence, Hussein Kamal, admitted that the beatings had taken place.

Nashwan Ali - who said his nickname was Big Man - said: "A US MP asked me this morning what police division I was in. I said I was in criminal intelligence.

"The American asked me why we had beaten the prisoners. I said we beat the prisoners because they are all bad people. But I told him we didn't strip them naked, photograph them or fuck them like you did."

The clear evidence of human rights abuses in the ministry building, which western advisers said they were not aware was being used for interrogations, raises serious questions over what authority the US and other multinational forces have to intervene if they suspect human rights abuses.

Liberal Caution re: F911

2004-06-29T16:05:00.000-05:00

Soon after charlie and I sat down to view the movie, a particularly gregarious woman and her boyfriend sat next to us and struck up a conversation. Being the gruff, antisocial, pale hermit that I am I would normally have pointed out some shiny light to them and ran in the other direction to find a seat next to fellow angry loners. This time, however, I was happy to engage them (it was just that kind of atmosphere):

Really Friendly Lady That Laughed Too Much: Are you guys excited?

Me: Actually, I really am. If someone had told me one year ago that I would not only be going to a Michael Moore flick, but going on opening night and excited about it I would have told them they were nuts.

RFLTLTM: Really, why is that?

Me: Moore has a tendency to play loose with the facts. I think it is important for people on the left to not resort to the tactics that people on the right have used because then we lose credibility. More importantly, we don't need to stretch the facts because the case against...

At this point charlie boxed my ears and told me to go get him more licorice. My point is that I like to think I have always valued truth over pure partisinship. I realize that I am certainly not immune to it and that my opinions can't help but be colored by the media I chose to pay attention to and the company I keep, but I try.

What impressed my about the reviews of the flick before I had seen it was that the hawks were not really disputing the factual content. "Partisan!" "not really a documentary!" "contradicts other things he has said!" Surely, I thought, if this is the best they can do then Moore really has something here.

I will spare you the long review, I'll just say that I was impressed and that I cried (very quietly and manly-like, of course).

What has struck me afterwards is the way that some liberals have bent over backwards trying to find ways to criticize the movie in order to maintain some "liberal, but not like that Michael Moore!" street cred.

Take, for example, some criticisms by Kevin Drum:

What to say? The argument over the film mostly seems to revolve around whether it's factually accurate and presents a logical case, a conversation so pointless as to be laughable. I mean, it's a polemical film from Michael Moore, not a Brookings Institution white paper. It's like complaining that editorial cartoons are unfair because they don't portray the nuance of serious policy discussions.

Now, as it happens, I thought Fahrenheit 9/11 was a bit mediocre even as polemic, but the thing that really struck me about the film was the almost poetic parallellism between its own slanders and cheap shots and the slanders and cheap shots of pro-war supporters themselves over the past couple of years. If Moore had done this deliberately, it would have been worthy of Henry James.

Take the first half hour of the film, in which Moore exposes the close relationship between the Bush family and the House of Saud. Sure, it relies mostly on innuendo and imagery, but then again, he never really makes the case anyway. He never flat out says that the Bush family is on the Saudi payroll. Rather, he simply includes "9/11," "Bush," and "Saudi Arabia" in as many sentences as possible, thus leaving the distinct impression that George Bush is a bought and paid for subsidiary of the Saudi royal family.

Which is all remarkably similar to the tactic Bush himself used to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11. He never flat out blamed Saddam, but rather made sure to include the words "9/11," "Saddam Hussein," and "al-Qaeda" in as many sentences as possible, thus leaving the distinct impression that Saddam had something to do with it.

Or take Afghanistan. In a lengthy and nearly unreadable screed in Slate, Christopher Hitchens takes Moore to task for arguing in 2002 that the war in Afghanistan was unjust but then arguing in the film that Iraq was a distraction from the real war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

But surely I'm not the only one who's reminded by this of the ever shifting rationales for war from the Bush administration itself? In 2002 it was mostly about WMD. But there was no WMD. So then it became al-Qaeda. But there were no serious al-Qaeda ties. How about liberation? Maybe, except the Iraqis don't seem especially happy with their liberators. Democracy? Stay tuned.

Finally, the last half hour of the film includes a piece of street theater in which Moore accosts congressmen on Capitol Hill and asks if they'll try to get their sons and daughters to enlist in the military. It's a brutally unfair question, but one that echoes a standard debating point of Hitchens and others: "Would you prefer that Saddam Hussein was still in power?" It's a question that's unanswerable in 10 words or less, and about as meaningful as Moore's ambush interviews with congressmen.

So is Fahrenheit 9/11 unfair, full of innuendo and cheap shots, and guilty of specious arguments? Sure. But that just makes it the perfect complement to the arguments of many in the pro-war crowd itself. Perhaps the reason they're so mad is that they see more than a little of themselves in it.

Kevin seems to go out of his way to paint Moore as being just as bad and misrepresentative and the Bush administration. These days, that is about as strong of a condemnation as you can get. He doesn't seem to back it up with much, though.

He criticizes Moore for linking Saudi money with influence. Who in their right mind really doubts that money buys influence in Washington? When Company X donates millions of dollars in campaign contributions to congress and then Company X receives unusually favorable legislation that benefits them, how many really cry "foul" at this fact is being brought up (besides Cheney) or demands that they "connect the dots"? Moore points out that the Bush family has received 1.4 billion dollars from the Saudi family over the past thirty years (A figure that I have not as of yet heard disputed) and points out that the Saudi's received some extraordinary favors from the White House immediately after 9/11 (favors that were, by the way, denied by the White House until they were proven). I seriously doubt that the money came with a signed contract titled "Payment for Access, Influence and in Case Some of Our People Really, Really Fuck Up".

Why does Kevin consider Moore's questioning of congressmen that are so quick to send others off to die about their own children's military service? To me, this is a question that should be asked more often. Why is this "brutally unfair"?

Now to be fair, this is not a completely negative review by Kevin Drum. I posted it in its entirety so that I would not give the impression that it was, but in addition to the points above, why is the entire thing peppered with things like like "mediocre, slanders, cheap shots, innuendo, unfair, specious arguments" to describe it unless it is a deliberate effort to distance himself from it? If it is a deliberate effort and he genuinely didn't like it, fair enough, but I would hope to see more substantive criticism of it for him to come out firing that strongly against it.

The review in Salon by Stephanie Zacharek is even more bizarre. Read it for yourself, but most of the criticism amounts to "I would have criticized this about Bush instead" or on his tactics or that it is too simplistic. Most of this misses the point. The movie is so powerful because Moore understands the nature of his medium. Human being are pattern-seeking, story-telling creatures. We understand, are effected by and retain more when something is related to us as a narrative. Yes, you could fill entire books with the information that Moore didn't use to criticize Bush. In fact, you could a years worth of NY Times bestsellers with it. He could have filled the screen with more statistics, used less of his humor and gone into much more detail on just about any one of his subjects. If he had, though, it would not be Moore and it would not be filling theatres the way it is right now.

She does make one good point that I had missed before:

Moore is a very specific and slippery kind of bully: He glides along on his underdog status as if it were a parade float. He professes to feel great compassion for the common man. Yet over and over again, in movie after movie, he invites the audience to chuckle over ordinary people. Why? In "Fahrenheit 9/11" he lists the countries that stepped forward as members of Bush's Coalition of the Willing (Palau, Costa Rica, Iceland, Romania, Morocco, and the Netherlands among them), accompanied by funny stock footage of people in costumes of many lands. If Moore is the left's great spokesman by default, shouldn't he be using his influence (not to mention his money) to raise the level of political discourse in this country instead of lowering it? Instead we have a filmmaker who manages the feat of getting liberal audiences to laugh at how funny those foreigners are.

The most honest and worthy criticism I have read about the show was by
Juan Cole. The review is mostly positive and his criticism seems to me the most honest attempt in the pursuit of truth. See here for an equally persuasive counter-argument by Mick. The differences were mostly of opinion and not on hard facts, so at the very least I would say it is a wash.

My hope is that liberals will avoid criticizing this movie just for effect or just to show that they are not "too liberal". I remember similar cultural pressure during the Clinton blow job "scandal". Don't fall for it. Most importantly, if you have not seen it yet, go check it out for yourself (and bring your Republican friends)!

What I was talking about when I was talking about democracy

2004-06-29T12:08:00.000-05:00

My previous post(besides ending in a regrettable grammatical error in which subject and verb conjugation disagreed, a typing error actually--sorry)may have been a tad too indirect. Allow me to clarify.

I believe that a true democracy is one wherein power is evenly distributed among its citizenry...One person, one vote. Influence over the political processes has to take seriously the concerns of any coalition of voters and when enough votes are accumulated, the government must put into action the will of the people. Alas, in reality, this is just about never the way things work. Poor countries are given their domestic agendas from the World Bank and IMF with complete disregard for the harm such policies will wreak on the poorest of that country even when the poorest make up 70 to 80 percent of the population. The political leaders of these small democracies are either corrupt or bullied into neo-liberal policies that place the concerns of multinational ahead of the poor. The rights of the people are denied or stripped away. Denying them education, health care, and even the right to form unions (essentially the right of the poor to participate in politics). When a government cannot act on the behalf of its citizenry, it is not a democratic government regardless of whether or not it was elected. When a government cannot ensure that the basic human rights of its citizens are protected, it is not democratic.

At home, here in the US, we are being continually instructed that the economic concerns of corporations trump the concerns of the people (a fact that has been true in the developing world since the West began to colonize them). The debate is limited to how best to cut taxes on the wealthy-how best to unburden the rich so that they will hire us to make them richer. We cannot discuss doing what is necessary to improve schools in poor neighborhoods because that would mean higher taxes. We cannot discuss a meaningful and fair health care system because that would require higher taxes. When the state budget is in crisis, the answer is to eliminate programs designed to help least wealthy and therefore the least powerful. In short, the poor are told that they have no recourse. They can take the job at $8 an hour without meaningful benefits or not. They cannot organize. They cannot get sick. They can vote, but no candidate who cares about their concerns enough to suggest that they are the most important concerns in a real democracy can win. Not surprisingly, most don't vote.

What are we talking about when we talk about democracy? Probably we are defining it by what it is not. It is not a dictatorship. It is not a kingdom. We tend to conflate the concept with that of a free society--there are no secret police, people have rights. Of course, there are secret police, and people can have rights in other forms of government. The real glory of democracy is the notion that every person in a democratic society has the same power in governing that society as everyone else. Where this fails to be true, democracy fails.

Whether Iraq becomes a democracy in the sense that its governments come to power via elections is one question (and we don't even know for certain that that will happen), but another question is whether the democracy will mean anything. One has to doubt that the will of the Iraqi people will be reflected in its eventual government. The administration has certainly planned to prevent an anti-American government from coming to power in Iraq. If they have not, they may have just undertaken the most foolish foreign policy maneuver in world history. Imagine spending over hundred billion dollars and an enormous of clout in the world (not to mention domestic political capital)just to see one anti-American government replaced by another (and one likely to cozy up to Iran). This is one possible outcome of democracy in Iraq, and one I'm sure the US will do everything possible to prevent. So what are we talking about when talk about democracy? You tell me.

What we talk about when we talk about democracy

2004-06-29T10:13:00.000-05:00

When Bush says that the newly democratic Iraq should serve as a model for all other nations in the region, I have no doubt that he means it. But what is a democracy? What are democratic values? Is democracy defined as merely a political system wherein those who lead a given country are elected to govern? By whom are they elected? Who is deemed competent to take part in the process? Does democracy imply an equality of political power among each member of a given society through its credo one person, one vote? Are distinct ethnic groups (e.g. the Kurds) or specific regions (e.g. the American states) given special powers to protect their interests against the interests of the majority? Does that really square with the idea of a democracy? Are these mutations necessary to protect minority rights, or are they really just the result of genuine poliitical negotiations in which those with power compromise in small ways with each other to retain their power in the face of necessary changes? In short, do elites make deals in the name of the people when they are, in fact, just doing what is necessary to hold on their position of privilige? Is that democratic?

When the government of Spain joined the Coalition of the Willing against the will of the majority of their people, why did the democracy loving Bush administration praise the decision? When the Spanish people voted in a new government to replace the one that had ignored them, why did the administration (and just about everyone in mainstream American media)criticize their decision by reducing their rationale to a simplistic and cowardly strawman? The implication from these two episodes is that the Bush administration doesn't deem the Spanish capable of making decisions that are in their own interests. Perhaps they should be unburdened of this weighty vote? In fact, when record crowds protested the American war in Iraq, Bush dismissed their voice and compared them to a focus group to whom he didn't have to listen. The voice of the majority of the world was deemed irrelevant. Was that in keeping with a love of democratic values? It seems that in those cases, the Bush administration was more interested in what the elite thought than the people. The same should be true in Iraq.

To predict what Bush is hoping for in Iraq, perhaps we should look to the numerous democracies fostered and nurtured in the area where the US has dominated the longest--South America. From the NYTIMES:
Latin America is Growing Impatient With Democracy

The people of Iraq has much to look forward to.

A Skeptical Look at Downsizing

2004-06-28T15:14:00.000-05:00

From John McKay:

Corporate HR fads
Alert reader and fellow Don Marquis fan, Dum Luks sent me this op-ed piece from the English edition of the Japanese paperAsahi Shimbun:

`There is no clear evidence that downsizing actually does any good, at least not in the United States.'

In recent years, Japan's kinder and gentler managers borrowed a critical lesson from their more ruthless American counterparts: They learned to downsize. They got serious about trimming their work forces, that in turn boosted profits, and that finally brought the fragile recovery Japan is now experiencing.

It's a nice story, but there is a big problem with it: There is no clear evidence that downsizing actually does any good, at least not in the United States. What? How could that be? Everyone knows that downsizing reduces costs, and cutting costs raises profits. But that is precisely the point.
Everyone is so convinced that downsizing enhances corporate performance that no one bothers to check the evidence, ...

I have been doing some research on the topic recently, and I discovered to my astonishment that the evidence from the United States suggests that downsizing has not improved corporate performance-whether defined in terms of profits, productivity, or stock price-and many studies indicate that it impairs performance.

After all, downsizing may save a company on labor costs, but it also entails substantial costs: The immediate cost of paying off downsized workers, for example, plus the longer-term cost of losing valuable personnel and undermining employee morale.

In one of the most authoritative studies, prominent economists William Baumol, Alan Blinder and Edward Wolff [in the book Downsizing in America] find that downsizing does not improve productivity, lowers stock performance and raises profits-but only by depressing wages. Other studies contend that downsizing does not even increase profits, and one study suggests that layoffs actually decrease profits in subsequent periods.

So if downsizing doesn't help, then why have so many American companies rushed to do it? Several scholars have taken up this puzzle, and they conclude that American managers are so beholden to the myth that downsizing is effective that they do not even bother to check whether it happens to be true. They also contend that managers view downsizing as a social norm, so they do it to preserve or enhance their firm's reputation.

Fahrenheit 32

2004-06-28T08:18:00.000-05:00

I walked out of the Michael Moore film last friday evening having been deeply moved. The personal testimonials of people who have been directly affected by this war, the images of innocents maimed by modern war technology, the senselessness of this foreign policy--all of this shook me--and I was not as critical as I should have been. Read Juan Cole's comments. Cole doesn't damn the film, but his remarks regarding Moore's connecting the Saudi's to the Bush family to the plot on 9/11 show that Moore's logic and understanding of the issues are, at times, wanting. It is one thing to have a point of view, and another to be blatantly unfair.

There are a number of reasons why I missed this as I watched Friday night. One, I went wanting to believe the film would be an entirely flawless indictment of the Bush administration (as opposed to a flawed but still powerful editorial). Two, I went wanting to believe this and heard nothing but very positive assessments of the film going in (now I realize that they were all from film reviewers not experts on foreign affairs and the affairs of the Middle East like Juan Cole). Three, when Moore connected the Bushes to the Saudis and the Saudis to 9/11 I read his point the way I wanted to and not as it was. That is to say that I conflated Moore's statements with my own past arguments which pointed to the Saudi connection to 9/11 not as being a strong connection but as being a "connection" in the way that Iraq was connected to 9/11. My argument is that the Iraq connection to 9/11 is specious and that connections of the same type can be made between al Quaeda and governments of the region whom we call friends and do not invade. I thought that Moore was doing the same thing, but now I don't think he was. I still enjoyed the movie, and would reccomend it. But read Juan Cole's remarks first, go in with a cool head.

Also, me gotta go, but the Washington Post reports that "sovereignty" has done been handed over already. And it dutifully notes why the term deserves quotes:

Although a U.N. Security Council resolution passed earlier this month deems the interim government "fully sovereign," it will lack many hallmarks of a sovereign nation.

More than 130,000 U.S. troops will remain in the country with wide latitude to mount operations to combat an increasingly violent insurgency. A temporary constitution also limits the interim government's power to basic civil administration and preparations for national elections.

While ordinary Iraqis regard the handover as symbolically important, it will not result in many immediate changes for them. U.S. forces will continue to conduct raids and house searches. Iraqi government ministries will operate in much the same way they did while under occupation.

Despite the restrictions on his government, Allawi has promised to use his new authority to take more aggressive actions against insurgents. He said he would announce new security measures later on Monday.

The surprise ceremony was deemed necessary to ensure security. They're off to a flying start, I'd say.

NY Times looks up "gullible" in the dictionary...

2004-06-25T16:31:00.000-05:00

The NY Times is running a story spoon-fed by the neocons lovable little scamp, Ahmad Chalibi. Fortunately for me, Mick is already covering this with the indignant scorn it deserves so I don't have to.

Al Gore's 6/24/04 Speech

2004-06-24T21:18:00.000-05:00

Very impressive speech from the man that would be president:
Read and pass along!

Sharing the Love

2004-06-24T19:54:00.000-05:00

I originally thought that I would keep the blog roll limited to some of my favorites that I read everyday. I now realized what a stupid idea that was and will be updating accordingly.

One of the first that I need to add is Big Picnic.

THE OFFICIAL BIG PICNIC TERROR PLATFORM
or: ten points that should come as a huge relief to our conservative peers

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. I do not support terrorism.

2. Running an organization whose sole purpose is murdering innocent people in an attempt to bring about global Islamic theocracy is worse, by several orders of magnitude, than the worse thing Bush has ever done.

Apparently, some people are of the opinion that Big Picnic does not make this point frequently enough. Rest assured, the above paragraph is an unqualified expression of my thoughts on the subject, and it was never my intention to suggest otherwise. If it's somehow comforting to you to be reminded that Bush is better than a terrorist, then consider yourself so comforted.

3. Criticism of the way someone fights something should not be construed as support for the thing being fought. (ie. If I suggest that someone should not try to put out a grease fire by throwing water on it, such advice should not be interpreted as being pro-fire.)

4. I only possess a single vote, so my influence on American democracy is limited. Likewise, very few voters (or people, for that matter) read this site. Of those, even fewer are actually influenced, in any way, by the things I write.

Be that as it may, I possess no votes in the terrorist elections, and have even fewer readers who boast membership in Al Qaeda. As such, my very, very, limited influence on the American electorate is still greater than my influence on the actions of terrorists. This is one reason that condemnation of figures in American politics is more frequent than condemnation of foreign terrorists; having pro-terror sympathies is not one such reason, as I do not have pro-terror sympathies.

Cheney

2004-06-24T16:10:00.000-05:00

SCOTUS has decided that they aren't going to make Cheney release his secret meetings for the energy task force. The Duck Hunt Pays Off

In other news, Cheney tells Leahy to "Go Fuck Yourself" on the Senate floor.

Update: Just wanted to note that this is the same Senate floor where, just yesterday, Senators voted 99-1 to Increase fines for naughty words:

WASHINGTON - Disgusted by racy language, explicit scenes and skin-baring outfits, the Senate overwhelmingly agreed on Tuesday to fine radio and TV broadcasters and personalities as much as $3 million a day for airing indecent entertainment.

Faced with public uproar stoked by Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake's "wardrobe malfunction" at this year's Super Bowl, the Senate rushed the bill through on a 99-1 vote without floor debate.

GOP Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas said the issue has been debated enough. Lawmakers have continually criticized broadcasters for airing what they say is increasingly coarse programming that can be seen or heard by children.

"People are tired of this indecent material on over-the-air public broadcast, particularly during prime time when people's families are watching," said Brownback, the bill's sponsor. "We're going to have to take action because the broadcasters won't police themselves."

Under the measure, the maximum fine for broadcasters and entertainers would increase to up to $275,000 per indecent incident, up from $27,500 for license holders and $11,000 for personalities. The fines would keep increasing for each incident until a maximum fine of $3 million a day is reached.

Good Article in Salon Re: Brown and Root and Texas Power

2004-06-24T15:17:00.000-05:00

Check it out here. Well worth the read.

What will it take for the media to stop calling it "sovereignty"?

2004-06-24T14:41:00.000-05:00

Lifted from billmon who lifted it from The Financial Times:

The US-led occupation authority in Baghdad has warned Iraq's interim government not to carry out its threat of declaring martial law, insisting that only the US-led coalition has the right to adopt emergency powers after the June 30 handover of sovereignty.

Senior American officials say Iraq's authorities are bound by human rights clauses in the interim constitution, known as the Transitional Administrative Law, prohibiting administrative detention.

But they say the recent United Nations Security Council resolution 1546 sanctions the use by foreign forces in Iraq of "all necessary measures" to provide security.

A senior coalition official in Baghdad said: "Under the UN resolution, the multinational force will have the power to take all actions traditionally associated with martial law."

To curb Iraq's access to heavy weapons, observers say the occupation authorities have signed a $259m contract with US company Anham Joint Venture to be sole supplier of arms to Iraq's armed forces for the next two years.

William Krar, Orcinus, Krugman, Stewart and Scantily-clad Babes

2004-06-24T10:58:00.000-05:00

From Krugman's op-ed column:
Noonday in the Shade

n April 2003, John Ashcroft's Justice Department disrupted what appears to have been a horrifying terrorist plot. In the small town of Noonday, Tex., F.B.I. agents discovered a weapons cache containing fully automatic machine guns, remote-controlled explosive devices disguised as briefcases, 60 pipe bombs and a chemical weapon — a cyanide bomb — big enough to kill everyone in a 30,000-square-foot building.

Strangely, though, the attorney general didn't call a press conference to announce the discovery of the weapons cache, or the arrest of William Krar, its owner. He didn't even issue a press release. This was, to say the least, out of character. Jose Padilla, the accused "dirty bomber," didn't have any bomb-making material or even a plausible way to acquire such material, yet Mr. Ashcroft put him on front pages around the world. Mr. Krar was caught with an actual chemical bomb, yet Mr. Ashcroft acted as if nothing had happened.

Incidentally, if Mr. Ashcroft's intention was to keep the case low-profile, the media have been highly cooperative. To this day, the Noonday conspiracy has received little national coverage.

I've often wondered what happened to the coverage that the right-wing militias and terrorists were getting back in the 90's when Clinton was president and they were all barricading themselves in and waiting for the gubmint to come and try and take away their guns. Did they just give up? Nope. They're out there, they are still determined and fully capable of killing on a large scale, but they aren't Arab so Ashcroft and the media don't really care. Ashcroft has, however, identified eco-terrorists as our most important domestic terrorism threat (Perhaps he can employ the help of Laurie Mylroie and she can link the enviro's with Saddam in the Oklahoma City bombing and clear McViegh and the other lunatics altogether!).

This is the first I had heard about the Krar case and, apparantly, this is for good reason. The State Department did apparantly issue a press release about this in Novemeber 2003, but was careful not to use the phrase "domestic terrorism" therefor assuring that our lazy, spineless, I-only-repeat-what-I-read-in-the-NYTimes press would never pick it up (and they haven't disappointed them yet).

Fortunately for us, Ornicus has been following the case for a long time. Check the link out. He has been following this story from the beggining and has more info can be found in the comments of his post.

When you are done there, check out the following (in case you missed it). John Stewart of the Daily Show interviewed Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard on his shitty little new book "exploring" the ties between Al Q & Saddam. His information is not from the CIA, the 9/11 commission or any other reputable source, but from Douglas Feith and the Office of Special Planning that was invented with the express purpose of shifting through poorly sourced and completely fabricated information that the CIA had already determined as bogus to try and make a case for invading Iraq:
John Stewart interviewing Stephan Hayes

HAYES: No, I think that's a good point. On the other hand, I think that Iraq, in this case, presented a unique threat. Because...

STEWART: Why?

HAYES: Precisely because of its weapons of mass destruction, because of its demonstrated use of weapons of mass destruction...

STEWART: Iran has done the same.

HAYES: They've used weapons of mass destruction?

STEWART: Yes.

HAYES: When have they used weapons of mass destruction?

STEWART: In the Iran/Iraq war. They both were mustard gassing back and forth.

HAYES: Well, that's one theory. I don't think that that's been shown.

STEWART: Well, you're no one to talk about what's been shown!

So John Stewart does a better job of asking the right questions and shows the rest of the media how to ask follow up questions and point out obvious contradictions and hypocricy.

In the mean time, no major newspaper or television news show has covered the arrest of a right-wing terrorist that could have potentially killed thousands of Americans. However, there is an article about it in this months Maxim magazine (I'm serious).

What do you think?

2004-06-24T08:06:00.000-05:00

From Reuters news services:

The Iraqi Health Ministry said at least 66 Iraqis were killed and more than 268 wounded in the attacks. In addition, three U.S. soldiers were reported killed and at least 10 wounded in fighting and bomb blasts in Baqubah and Mosul.

I wonder how the President will summarize these events. Will he say they hate freedom and we love freedom? Will he say that these are the acts of barbarians? Will he say that they are trying to "shake our will", but we won't be intimidated? Will he say that these acts demonstrate how desperate the insurgency has become, and so actually indicate progress in Iraq? Will he say nothing, or all of these things? Or will he, GASP!, be allowed to use entirely new language? What do you think?

Realpolitick

2004-06-22T13:07:00.000-05:00

Obtained from Lewis Lapham's essay Chasing the Pot in the July issue of Harper's, this passage was from a memo circulated in the United State's State Department in 1948 and was written by George Kennan:

We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population...In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positve detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming.

Who was George Kennan? In short, he was a major figure in developing US foreign policy in the Truman administration, and the Truman administration's positions vis a vis the Cold War were essentially followed by every president until that conflict's end. Here's a bit from a site devoted to his biography:

Kennan articulated the strategy of patient, long-term "containment" of the Soviet Union, and in particular, the re-establishing of a stable balance of power by rebuilding Western Europe and Japan. As first director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff from 1947 to 1950, under Marshall and Acheson, Kennan was responsible for long-term planning. He played a major role in both the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japan, as well as overall US strategy towards the Soviet Union.

Hence, he knew a little bit about foreign policy and was a respected voice in the US government of his time. He was simply saying what State ministries have said throughout history about the cold hard facts that outline their decisions--the cost/benifit analysis that governs history. But Americans like a more romantic story. So they ignore the cold, hard facts.

That material ends drive our foreign policy should not be a surprise. But why are they are seldom acknowledged as even being a factor in our leaders' decisions? At times, in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, people intimated that I must be a conspiracy theorist or just plain misinformed to insist that this was, in its essence, a war about oil. For most people, still, this was a war about security, and for some it was a combination of concerns for security and concerns for the long oppressed peoples of Iraq. If we take these two sentiments seriously, and they are the only two sentiments that the mainstream American press seems to take seriously, then we have to build an argument that on the one hand, demonstrates why a pre-emptive war needed to be conducted without a broad coalition, UN sanction, or an imminent threat to the security of the nation, and on the other hand explains why Iraqis were chosen for liberation over other victims of political oppression.

Regarding the argument concerning security: When do security concerns justify a pre-emptive war? I would suggest only when one is fairly certain that harm is on its way. Of course, the Bush administration has argued that they cannot wait for "threats to become imminent", but they certainly must have to have some sense of "imminence" in mind, or their logic would justify a pre-emptive invasion of just about anybody--and they can't possibly mean that. At any rate, the threat posed by Iraq was not imminent, nor even much of a threat as it turns out. Still, assuming in good faith that the US believed Iraq to be in possession of WMD, what made Iraq a greater threat than North Korea? Or for that matter, why reduce the number of troops in Aghanistan where we already fighting a war of sorts whose purpose was clearly related to security in order to move them to Iraq who the administration has acknowledged did not pose an "imminent threat"? And what makes the Hottentots so hot? There must be another factor.

Regarding the argument that the war was to liberate: this strikes me as the sort of "daydreaming and senitmentality" warned against by George Kennan. Anyway, anyone with even a cursory awareness of American history in the past twenty years would know that the US has chosen not to liberate a great many people. Why did we rush to liberate the Kuwaitis in 1991 and ignore the people of East Timor as they were slaughtered by the Indonesian military (supplied with US arms)?Why liberate Iraqis and not Liberians, or the Sudanese, or the North Koreans, or the Palestinians? For mainstream America, it seems to me, that the liberation argument was always lumped together with the security argument and just about never offered alone. Its pervers ethos can be summed up as "America is force that seeks to spread freedom in the world, but only to the people of nations who pose some vague threat to our security." Implicit in the phrase "National Security" is the understanding that "security" refers to the safety of not only American lives, but also the safety of American interests--which are material, and necessitate American hegemony. That is a fact that Americans simply ignore, despite its supreme significance. Every nation in every war stresses that their cause is just and that the battle is to protect their loved ones. No one ever says "this a land grab! We are going to roll them under and take for ourselves what is justifiably theirs!" Yet how often has it been a land grab or at least, a move that would likely increase the material well being of the already better off in a society?

Of course, naked ambition has always been too ugly to admit to or acknowledge in those we love. Narratives are designed to paint its face and round out the sharp edges. There is pretense abundant in Iraq. Their oil is, to date, nationalized. But if we care to look (that is, if all goes as planned), we will find that multinational corporations will make a little money off all of this, and the US dependence on foreign oil will be eased eventually (it may take twenty years, but Iraq has huge amounts of untapped oil). In place of a dictator who 13 years ago stopped being a US stooge to stooge independently, will be an Iraqi goverment chosen under US supervision and reliant on US investment and techinicians. The oil will be in the people's name (until they decide to privatise in the interest of their countrymen, I'm sure), and it will flow westward. Westward, ho!

The Year of the Documentary

2004-06-21T22:43:00.000-05:00

Orcinus has a nice post highlighting some of the documentaries that will be coming out this year. The mysterious "charlie" and I will going to see Fahrenheit 9/11 on Friday and will perhaps be one of the 40,000 bloggers to comment on it (and by that I mean that charlie will be posting thoughtfull, witty commentary on it and I will be quoting other clever people that happen to agree with me about it- it's kind of our schtick). Ornicus summed up my feelings about Micheal Moore fairly well (although he is more forgiving):

Actually, I find Moore's films to be guilty pleasures. I'm well aware that sprinkled throughout most of them are various factual errors, mostly minor ones, but enough to bring out the censurious editor in me. At the same time, Moore is not only an imaginative filmmaker with astonishing narrative skills, he's also a very clever political provocateur who concocts really hilarious stunts that have the virtue of making his point incisively. I expect 9/11, which hits theaters Friday, will be more of the same.

I was encouraged by Christopher Hitchens' review of it today in Slate. Most of his criticisms boiled down to what he saw as inconsistencies in the films narratives with Moore's previous statements about his own idealogy. He also notes that Micheal Moore is fat. No real criticisms of any factual errors. If that is all you've got, Hitch, you and your war mongering buddies are in trouble.

Ornicus also brings up The Hunting of The President and a couple that I had not heard of before: The Letter and Gunner Palace.

One that Ornicus did not mention that I am looking forward to seeing is Control Room. I tend to read the "reader comments" at IMBD (a nasty habit) and couldn't help but chuckle when I ran across this:

The Al Jazeera reporters may vow to be neutral, indeed many claim to have inherited the mantle of the best aspects of Western journalism, but they have a daily reality that the other news services wholly lack: each reporter and on-screen commentator is a Moslem and many are Arabs As one young reporter responds to the gentle urging of a senior colleague that he must be neutral, he replies with obvious distress that it is very difficult when his ethnic and national ties can't be shed, a problem U.S. and European reporters often don't have.

Get back to me when you start to notice that most of the reporters on CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC/MSNBC/CNBC are white Judeo-Christian westerners. You may even notice that most of the reporters on Fox News happen to be conservatives.