The
NYT report says she's
"credited with injecting new energy into the administration’s efforts to
improve America’s image around the world, more actively spreading good
news about the United States while more aggressively addressing bad
news." Lord amercy that is the "work of generations" after the damage
done by the administration she worked for, and her BFF, President George
W. Bush.
She was good for the State Department's
public diplomacy budget, boosting it to almost a $billion a year.
But it wasn't just the Arab and Muslim worlds which are not quite won
over after her tenure:
"Just in the past week, many Canadians were annoyed that a new
welcome-to-America video, proudly posted on Ms. Hughes’s blog on the
State Department web site, used images of the Horseshoe portion of
Niagara Falls, which is entirely within Canada."
We do have one astounding insight to carry forward as a result of her
labors, however: "She said she advised President Bush and Secretary Rice
that resolving (the Israeli-Palestinian) conflict would do more than
anything to improve American standing among Muslims." Who knew?
Who could have guessed?!
Thank God for the Service of the Jury
Turns out his attorney brood isn't so scary after all;
not a Hallowe'en story, just coincidental timing, for news of the
jury verdict against Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist "Church."
$2.9 million for invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional
distress with its despicable demonstration at a Marine's funeral,
and $8 million more for punitive damages. Seems about right to me, but
some wonder whether the First Amendment, which "protects a lot that's
reprehensible," should permit the Phelps klan to do their thing. Is it
enough to observe that Phelps is "highly offensive to a reasonable
person"?
29.Oct.07
Puts the FA in FA-NOMENAL
The sign with that punchline got featured in the post-game runout
tonight... whoops, am I disseminating an account of the NFL's game and
violating their copyright? Come and get me, guys, I don't care 'cause
I'm over the moon about that EIGHTY-THREE YARD TOUCHDOWN PASS To beat
the Denver Bongoes like a drum in the first play from scrimmage in
their 19-13 OT win on Monday Night Football.
That's FA as in BRETT FAVRE, of course. So glad he didn't retire after
last season! Fa-Sol-La-Ti-Do; Go Packers!
28.Oct.07
The Other T-word
As with "evil," everybody says he's against "torture" (excepting of
course the producers of 24; they know how well it sells to a
fearful audience). Even George Bush's nominee for his 3rd Attorney
General knows he's supposed to say "it's absolutely right out" if
Congress asks him about it.
But behind the scenes... the government's own documents tell a
different story, which the ACLU has assembled into a book,
Administration of Torture.
"The documents show that abuse of prisoners was not limited to Abu Ghraib
but was pervasive in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan
and at Guantánamo Bay. Even more disturbing, the documents reveal
that senior officials endorsed the abuse of prisoners as a matter of
policy-sometimes by tolerating it, sometimes by encouraging it, and
sometimes by expressly authorizing it."
Life Imitates Art, Episode III
Ok, so I'm late getting around to finishing the "final" of
the 6 episodes,
but that means I don't have to worry about putting up a spoiler alert,
right? Rather amazing to carry a story around for 30 years before
connecting the last stitches...
"This is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause." –Padmé Amidala
"I have brought peace, justice, freedom, and security to my new
Empire!" "If you're not with me, you're my enemy." –Darth Vader
"You were the Chosen One! ...You were to bring balance to the force, not
leave it in darkness." –Obi-Wan Kenobi
To defend the nation from its enemies, Jacobins expanded the
government’s police powers at the expense of civil liberties, endowing
the state with the power to detain, interrogate and imprison suspects
without due process. Policies like the mass warrantless searches
undertaken in 1792—"domicilary visits," they were
called—were justified, according to Georges Danton, the Jacobin
leader, "when the homeland is in danger."
"We're in the middle of a disastrous war in Iraq, the military and
political situation in Afghanistan is steadily worsening, and the
administration's interrogation and detention tactics have inflamed
anti-Americanism and fueled extremist movements around the globe. Sane
people, confronting such a situation, do their best to tamp down
tensions, rebuild shattered alliances, find common ground with hostile
parties and give our military a little breathing space. But crazy
people? They look around and decide it's a great time to start
another war."
But you might get caught: "No actual reporter attended the news
conference in person, FEMA spokesman Aaron Walker said," according to the
news-about-the-non-news. The Reuters story didn't mention whether
Walker used "air quotes" around "news" when talking about the staged
event, apparently designed to reassure and communicate such important
information to the general public as whether or not the deputy
administrator was "happy with FEMA's response so far?" (Yes, he was.
Very.)
Blame it on ""good leadership."
Doom and Gloom and Gossamer Wings
Paul MacCready has done some amazing stuff in human-powered and
solar-powered flight, by his own account for rather mundane reasons:
there was money in it, for a while. A really difficult engineering
challenge is incentive for some people, too. The Helios
flew to 96,863 feet, "above 98% of the earth's atmosphere," pulled
by solar-powered propellors.
His talk at this year's TED turns decidedly less light and airy when
he adds up the world's weight in vertebrates and notices that humans,
their pets, and their livestock are now running 98% of the
total.
That's up from "not even one-tenth of 1%" 10,000 years ago.
He asks the high school students he works with from time to time to come
up with an estimate of the equilibrium, sustainable human population of
the earth, and says that they usually arrive at a consensus figure of
about two billion. With no idea how to get there from here. (MacCready
says he has no idea, either.)
"Over billions of years, on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin
covering of life—complex, improbably, wonderful and fragile.
"Suddenly we humans (a recently arrived species no longer subject to the
checks and balances inherent in nature), have grown in population,
technology, and intelligence to a position of terrible power: we now
wield the paintbrush.
"We're in charge. It's... uh... frightening."
Of his black-edged painting of the earth and the history of life, he says
"I have no idea what comes next, so I just used robotic and natural
cockroaches as the future, as sort of a warning."
[Detail of the graph: it runs from 1850 to 2000, with lines projected
another half century. The weight of all land and air vertebrates in
"wild nature" has gone from 250 million tons to less than 50? in the
past century and a half, on a line declining to zero in a few decades.
After "Dominating Nature," "Your choices" include Devasting
Nature; Bio-engineered Humans win?; Computers win?;
Cockroaches Win? and of course Other.]
Please Vote For Me
That's the title of
a
remarkable film that was shown on Independent Lens this week,
about the election for Class Monitor in a third-grade class in China:
"Eight-year-old children compete for the position of class monitor in the
first school election of its kind held in China. Aided and abetted by
parents and teachers, the young candidates reveal the nature of
democracy in a rapidly changing country."
I'm usually not positively impressed by artists talking about their work
(I guess because I think art should speak for itself), but
the statement from filmmaker Weijun Chen is well worth reading.
And the film is well worth seeing, if you have the chance!
One provocative "reminder" from an anonymous poster in the Talkback
section: "The original children's dialogues are way funnier than the
often rigid, vague, and sometimes inaccurate subtitle translation."
Another poster suggests that "Class Monitor" isn't the best translation,
and "Class Leader or Manager" or "Classroom President" woudl be more
accurate. That made me reflect on the informal position I held in my
early grade school classes as "Teacher's Pet." The film didn't provide
that much insight to the teacher, but she didn't seem like the type to
have a favorite, really. The film showed her as a fascinated facilitator
of the interactions, not as protective of her students as I would have
expected, as I wanted to keep one from hurting another. She came across
to me more like "let's see what happens next!"
'bots at the Book Sale
The speculative fiction genre is replete with tales of robot-run
dystopias which cause some of us to worry, a little. Of course that
future's not here yet. Or is it? You've already run into a
Captcha, whether you
knew who Alan Turing was or not, and had to prove (to a computer, no
less) that you were human, before proceeding with a comment post, or
perhaps a commercial transaction.
Earlier this month, that was my last step in the process for attempting
to buy a ticket to the Davis Cup final in Portland. I passed the test,
but was then informed that there were no tickets left—seventeen
minutes after they'd gone on sale for a venue with more 12,000 seats.
Purchasers were limited to 12 at a time, so you can do the math; there
were a lot of machines ahead of me in the queue.
Jeanette and I are
Friends of the Boise Public Library, and in addition to a very
modest annual contribution to the cause, she works regularly sorting
donated books, preparing for their semiannual
book sales to the public. Yesterday was the "Friends" preview, and
as usual, the place was swamped with dealers willing to make a
"donation" to get the first cut.
They almost all carry little computers these days, with barcode
scanners. Who needs a head full of knowledge about what's valuable when
you have a database connection to look up the latest bid and asked
prices? These people swarm the volunteers like a cloud of Idaho
mosquitoes, pouncing on each load of books that's brought out and spread
onto the tables, pushing the hapless retail Friends out to the
margin as they try to suck out the residual value of the used books.
Jeanette did her best to mix it up with them, bringing out armloads
rather than a box at a time, and then distributing them unpredictably
among the tables. And she engaged them in conversation, using the same
tactic that works so well with teaching children: the element of
surprise. I know what you're up to, she said. They caught on to know
that she knew what they were up to, probably. And when she knew they
knew she knew what they were up to, she would up the ante with a new
strategy they weren't anticipating.
It's a best a partial victory, and the retail customers will have to
content themselves to having more vendors to buy from (such as a
bargain
bookstore that never closes)
as the machines and their support staff push them out of the way.
25.Oct.07
Still Looking for an Attorney General of the United States
Jed Rubenfeld renders an opinion on Michael Mukasey's performance at his
confirmation hearing, concerning that statement about the
Lawbreaker in Chief. Asked whether the President is required to obey
federal statutes, he Mukasey replied
"That would have to depend on whether what goes outside the statute
nonetheless lies within the authority of the president to defend the
country."
This is some kind of crazy notion leaking out of
Number
One Observatory Circle. "It is a dangerous confusion and distortion
of the single most fundamental principle of the Constitution—that
everyone, including the president, is subject to the rule of law,"
Rubenfeld writes.
We do not live under a system where our leaders
are the sun of the nation
and mankind (and neither do the North Koreans). The threat of
terrorism, real or imagined, does not somehow trump the political system
and allow our Fearless Leader to become a dictator.
"Under the American Constitution, federal statutes, not executive
decisions in the name of national security, are "the supreme law of the
land." It's that simple. So long as a statute is constitutional, it is
binding on everyone, including the president....
"As a minimum prerequisite for confirmation as attorney general, a
nominee should be required to state plainly whether the executive branch
or a federal statute is supreme when the president and the Congress,
both acting within their constitutional powers, clash. This is
especially imperative today, when the executive branch has been making
unprecedented claims about the scope of presidential authority. A Senate
that did not demand a clear statement on this point would not be
doing its job."
23.Oct.07
Southern California Burning
Trouble in paradise, a half million people forced from their homes by
wildfire in the dry hills. The Witch Cr. Fire (1% contained at last
report) evacuation zone comes right up next door to some of my
family in San Diego County, so the
Google Map being maintained by KPBS, showing fires, evacuation
zones, and refuges is much appreciated.
8pm update: The wind has shifted to on-shore; blessed relief
from over the ocean.
Hello, Big Brother!
Imagine this:
a
story about GPS-enabled cellphones and the comm channel for you and
your buddies to track where everyone is, and no mention of the
N.S.A.!
...Consumers can turn off their service, making them invisible to
people in their social-mapping network. Still, the G.P.S. service
embedded in the phone means that your whereabouts are not a complete
mystery.
"There is a Big Brother component," said Charles S. Golvin, a wireless
analyst at Forrester Research. "The thinking goes that if my friends can
find me, the telephone company knows my location all the time, too."
And if the telephone company knows your location, so does the National
Security Agency. No joke.
(Among Jindal's bona fides is his apparent "willingness to
consider the teaching of intelligent design." I guess you don't graduate
magna cum laude from Brown and get selected as a Rhodes Scholar without
knowing how to calculate carefully.)
Is That All You Got?
The RNC "not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee" is
running a "Scariest Democrat" contest for Hallowe'en, and as you might
guess, Hillary Clinton is leading the voting. (91% last I checked,
leaving only single digits for 5 other contenders.) I followed the link
to see
what
they have for a big bad boo on the candidates for President.
Hillary's frightening attribute? She consistently votes liberal, with a
"Party Unity Score" (their caps) of 95.2%.
So, party unity and thinking alike is bad. Hmmm.
But wait. Where's the rest of the attack on Clinton? Nothing?
Nada?!
Man, those Republicans scare easily. Maybe that's why we rushed in to
Iraq against some imagined threat to our domestic tranquility, and
started shooting ourselves in the feet in a orgy of collateral damage.
Gosh, that worked so well,
let's do
Iran, too.
Good god, get these people out of office.
22.Oct.07
Especially If You Have Dim-bulb Leaders
Tom Friedman:
Save
the Planet: Vote Smart. "It is so much more important to change
your leaders than change your light bulbs."
I've been (relatively) green since it had a certain fashionability the
first time around (as in, the 70s), but as he notes, such personal
rivulets in the middle of the mighty stream of consumption don't make a
whole lot of difference in the big picture. If we'd had a President who
thought this issue was important in the year 2000 instead of one who
thought "government" as a whole could be derided, taken advantage of,
and used to enrich one's pals, it would have made a world of
difference.
So, time to redirect, better late than never.
21.Oct.07
A New, (even) Dryer Chapter in the West
Joe Gertner, in today's NYT Magazine:
"Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies
nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical
models indicate that it will never be full again."
Another illustration of how
the
future of the West is drying up is that it would take 20 years of
average flow in the Colorado River to fill Lake Powell again, now at
half its capacity. What isn't clear is how soon any of the
boomers west of the 100th meridian will be changing their plans on
the basis of a weather forecast. Colorado expects to be home to
3 million more people by midcentury, California, 24 million
more.
Record outbreaks of pine beetles and the dead trees in their wake are
just one signal of the crisis; whether or not we have a catastrophe such
as the one that forced the Anasazi out of the region a millennium
earlier remains to be seen. Shortly.
20.Oct.07
Another Bush-league Attorney General
"...in his two days of testimony this week, it became clear that Mr. Mukasey
believes presidential power to be robust, expansive and sometimes beyond
the power of Congress to control...."
This is not
a
Senate confirmation hearing question, it's a High School Civics
class question. Does the President have to follow laws passed by
Congress? Why yes, yes he does.
What if the President says the law is unconstitutional? It's up to the
Supreme Court to make that determination, not the President.
If the President breaks the law, what's the remedy?
Impeachment. (But please; do Cheney first.)
19.Oct.07
Outsourcing Security to Mercenaries
Bill
Moyers' interview of Jeremy Scahill, investigative journalist and
author of
BLACKWATER: the rise of the world's most powerful mercenary army was
chilling enough when they were talking about the contractors and
mercenaries on our payroll that outnumber our military in Iraq, but
where it really gets creepy is the story of Blackwater showing up in New
Orleans after hurricane Katrina, ahead of FEMA, and ahead of the
contract that would get signed and delivered soon enough. (They'd
eventually bill $950 per man-day to Blackwater; $350 and per diem went
to the men themselves.)
Think of it as a rehearsal for the next time the President needs to
declare martial law somewhere in the U.S.
Our President was willing to commit hundreds of billions of dollars of
yours and my money for a war of adventure, but $30 billion over 5 years
to enhance and extend health insurance for those not fortunate enough to
have been born on 3rd base?
No, that was a bridge too far.
Our junior Representative
helped sustain Bush's
rejection of the bill using specious or at least ignorant arguments,
in spite of more than 40 Republican members, including our other
Congressman, Mike Simpson, voting in favor.
The President wants a little high-visibility negotiation with Congress,
driving his party further into the ditch, with an issue that the American
public supports by a 3 or 4-to-1 margin; fixing healthcare, starting
with uninsured children who need it the most.
(T)he Dalai Lama said that he felt "a sense of regret" over the sharp
tensions with China unleashed by his visit and the honors conferred upon
him. In gentle language and conciliatory tones, he congratulated China
on its dynamic economic growth, recognized its rising role on the world
stage, but he also gently urged it to embrace "transparency, the rule of
law and freedom of information."
This from the man who was driven into exile 48 years ago by the Chinese
Army.
The Chinese government's director general of its "State Administration
for Religious Affairs" called our Congress' honoring Tenzin Gyatso "a
farce," but the report doesn't go into particulars.
Is it the idea that any government (let alone the Chinese government)
could be "transparent" that made it a farce? Or that the Chinese could
stand up for the rule of law, and freedom of information?
Ye Xiaowen might do well to consider the English-language version of
Confucian wisdom: "better to keep quiet and let people think
you're an idiot than to speak up and remove all doubt."
(And yes, I could learn a lot about compassion and being gracious from
the Dalai Lama.)
Overexposure
Larry Craig's media team need to take another look at that study of
the persistence of myths. Our brains are wired to discount
anti-tautologies such as "I did nothing wrong" and to cling to the more
sensational facts the way those escaped squares of toilet paper like
to cling to one's heels.
Two hours of Larry and Suzanne on their loveseat are not going to wash
away the scene of wide-stance toe-tapping and hand-waving that is being
engraved ever-deeper on the American psyche. There are still the 5% of
right-wingnuts who will babble about this whole circus being
"orchestrated bi-coastally to take down one of the most powerful
senators in the nation"
[sic] and are glad Craig is staying in office to bring home Idaho's
pork barrel for the resource extraction industries. And then there is
the vast majority who think he should quit out of the shame and
embarrassment for one or more of the behaviors that got him arrested, his
response to being arrested, his guilty plea, and his cynical
manipulation of public opinion while he dithered between quitting and
staying.
The GOP did their best to get rid of him, threatening the very same
Ethics Committee that brought Larry Craig to tears for his friend Bob
Packwood, and he called their bluff. Don't expect that Ethics Committee
to move this up on their calendar. They'll find whatever reason they
need to let it slide until his Idaho replacement can be slid into place.
His party will just have to hope and pray that Craig can catch a clue
and stop blathering in public (as
his
BFF in the Senate finally suggested he do after that OMG moment,
reading snippets of the interview). Larry Craig's attorneys have
informed him that he can sit tight for the rest of his term, and that's
what he plans to do, come hell or high water.
The one other thing we know for sure, is that everybody has an
opinion (and at least three jokes) about Larry Craig now. They want to
share it with you, and the progressive, socialist, left-wing idealogues
of the mainstream media and blogosphere want to help them do it.
16.Oct.07
A Matter of National Security
With Scooter Libby gone from commuter to Commuted, and Karl Rove retired
to some dank burrow in lower Texas, the treasonous outing of Valerie Plame
is old news, right? Maybe it is just a topic for history, now augmented
with her new book,
Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House,
but it's worth noting,
as one of the people who started the disclosure of the affair,
David
Corn, does, that the focus of her job was to prevent the
proliferation of nuclear weapons. You know, those so-called Weapons
of Mass Destruction.
Corn writes: "Ironic? Ask Dick Cheney."
But our Vice President is not an interactive medium, he's
broadcast-only, and only appears when it's time for him to check to see
if his shadow is still there, and then only before carefully selected
audiences.
The bottom line: this episode demonstrated that the Bush White House was
not honest (the vice president's chief of staff was even convicted of
lying to law enforcement officials), that top Bush officials had risked
national security for partisan gain, and that White House champions
outside the government would eagerly hurl false accusations to defend
the administration.
"(T)he United States stands alone in the world in convicting young
adolescents as adults and sentencing them to live out their lives in
prison. According to a new report, there are 73 Americans serving such
sentences for crimes they committed at 13 or 14."
No Justice or Good People in the World
I've seen the Dalai Lama, and I've seen some Chinese bureaucrats
(ok, both on TV, but Jeanette saw H.H.D.L. in person when he came to
Idaho), and I'd choose the former for pretty much any occasion, whether
social or political.
Reading about Tibet's Communist Party boss, Zhang Qingli,
complaining to reporters about the forthcoming Congressional
accolade for the Dalai Lama from the U.S. Congress seems a bit
laughable:
"We are furious. If the Dalai Lama can receive such an award, there must
be no justice or good people in the world."
Our White House spokesman wants everyone to know that we don't want to
make China feel we're "poking a stick in their eye," even though they so
richly deserve being so poked for their history in Tibet.
To preserve the dignity of our huge trading partner and creditor, they
omitted the photo op of Bush and the Dalai Lama.
That'll... not show them.
I can't wait to hear what Dana Perino has to say about Chinese police
using
electric prods on 15-year-old boys and holding them for ransom for
the crime of scribbling slogans on walls calling for the Dalai Lama’s
return. Perhaps the Chinese ambassador could assure us that they don't
torture.
RIAA Sues Usenet
I thought the headline was a spoof, suitable for The Onion, but the
news on Wired appears to be the real deal. Most web denizens have no
idea what "Usenet" is, I imagine, much less how it could be a
"brazen outlaw that actively shirks its legal obligations."
Usenet used to be "the" place for online interactivity for geeks,
with "newsgroups" of threaded conversations, covering every imaginable
topic, and some unimaginable ones to boot. Threads were typically
rambling, unfocused, useless, and so on. It's where some of us first
experienced
flamage, blather, and spew, before there were blogs and email lists
to collect pointless (and ever so occasionally pointful) commentary.
The story describes it as "a global, distributed message-board network
that was created in the pre-internet days, when it relied on dialup
modems for distribution. Now it's carried over the internet." (That's
"now" as in, for more than
2 decades).
The Larry Craig Shows
It's the horrific car crash on a crowded freeway that you can't look
away from, and neither can anyone else, as everyone's rubbernecking
slows traffic to a crawl. Here comes two hours of more Larry Craig than
you ever thought you wanted to see, on our local NBC
affiliate, ktvb.com.
"I'm not an attorney, I'm a farmer and a rancher," Craig says. Never
been arrested, so this was a new experience for him. Maybe he was a
farmer and a rancher 27 years ago, but he's been in Washington for
almost three decades. He's a professional legislator, who almost
miraculously remains naïve about the law.
"I did nothing wrong," he keeps saying. Pleading guilty just seemed like
the best way to make it quietly go away. "I didn't seek counsel," as if
it was just an attorney he lacked? He needs counseling more than
he needs an attorney. Stick a fork in that Minnesota case, it's
done. His attorneys keep saying that, too, but they're happy to
keep taking Larry's campaign contributors' money until it runs out.
"I've read all of the emails," he says. "I've got to understand what
Idahoans are thinking." Funny, he never showed a lick of interest in
what I was thinking before this happened.
It really is all about Larry Craig in his mind. You think maybe
you were "set up"? You mean to tell me Senator that you're still trying
to claim that you weren't trolling for anonymous sex in that restroom?
That you just accidentally stumbled upon exactly those
signals that the anonymous gay sex in restroom community knows so
well?
Good lord.
All you had to do was keep your tappin' toes in your own stall,
Senator, just like everyone who goes in there to use the facilities.
"Wide stance," my ass.
And then he trots out his self-serving rationalization that he's
fulfilling a "responsibility to Idaho." It's not his seniority
he's protecting, it's Idaho's. We're just fortunate that all
those folks who contributed to his campaign can fund his legal team.
"Idaho's taken a heck of a beating," Larry says. "Gladiator politics,"
a blood sport at the expense of those poor, honest, dilligent
politicians (working at a job that pays most of $200,000 a year, plus
benefits).
Have we learned our lesson? He doesn't think so: "Idaho is going to
elect a Republican to United States Senate," Craig says without a hint
of doubt in his mind.
Dave Frazier handicaps the media magic at his Boise Guardian
blog: "Craig dictated the terms of the interview if not the questions.
No intimidating New York or Washington TV studio. Nope. He did it in the
secure comfort of his Idaho home—put the eastern newsy off
balance. Then he piggy backed the local interview into the same
session—sort of a dress rehearsal for whichever went
second."
"By controlling the interviewer, the venue, access, and time, Craig was
about as close to being in command as he will ever be."
They did select a good question from their emails, though; from "Mark in
Boise" (if not the Mark in Boise that's doing the soft-porn interview
for KTVB): would you actually work to protect the police from entrapping
people for soliciting sex in public places in restroom? Craig is "going
to take a look at it," for sure.
And the big, fat softball: do you really think this is in Idaho's best
interests? Oh yes, yes I do, says Craig. Hard decision,
but yeah. And what a happy coincidence that it serves my
self-interest!
Was it also a coincidence that the ad stuffed between the local
and national interviewer was for The Singing Bee with a group
imitating The Village People singing "YMCA"? Or somebody at the network
slipping in a sly commentary on
the Larry Craig song and
dance?
"I almost quit listening," Larry told Matt Lauer, after he'd told Mark
Johnson that he listens to and reads it all. I guess he had to say
something to keep the second interview from just being a
rerun...
And there's Larry Craig "standing on the wall" for us, protecting us
from the evils of Government. Hmm, or is it bringing home the millions
and billions of pork barrel appropriations that are so important for our
state? He's bringing home the bacon, but he hates himself for doing
it.
At least the national interview sampled some less Craig-controlled
counter opinion, like Craig's calling out Bill Clinton as a
"Nasty bad, naughty boy" in between the replays of Larry's
rehearsed position statements. Jiminy.
15.Oct.07
What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?
That's
Paul Krugman's question, but I wonder, too. "The desire to expunge
the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration"? Or perhaps
to expunge the stink of failure?
The anti-terror initiative turns out to be promote the recruitment of
terrorists. Lowering taxes for the highest payers turns out to be
running our economy and balance of trade so far in arrears, it may never
recover. And the denial of the environmental consequences of our
high-energy lifestyle may push us over the brink.
Last Century Was Good; Do We Have to Leave?
We early adopter bloggers used to have to explain to others just what
the heck a "blog" is. A sampling shows that too specific an answer would
be wrong. What's a "magazine," after all? It's a publishing medium,
which doesn't tell you what it's a medium for. Blogs are a
compound category as well. They can be a personal publishing
medium, such as this one, a sort of celebrity gaggle
as TomPaine's Common Sense
and The Huffington Post are,
or an interactive, group medium such as
DailyKos.
They're online, we know that much for sure.
They're new, evolving faster than descriptions of them, interesting,
powerful in some ways, noisy, fascinating to watch.
At least for those of us who've taken a look inside, and started
participating they are.
To those left behind
(such
as our Lieutenant Governor and now annointed Republican candidate
for the U.S. Senate from Idaho, Jim Risch), contemplating that fear of
confronting something complicated that we don't understand, they are an
irrelevant distraction that can be dismissed out of hand.
"I understand there's a lot of chatter about them among politicos like
us. But the guy walking down the street who's gonna vote, who's neither
a Republican or a Democrat, how many political blogs does that guy visit
between now and the day he punches that ballot?"
Risch supposes "it's a generational thing," with his three year
headstart on his 61-year-old Democratic challenger. The good old boy
network has never needed blogs, why should he?
"Risch's mindset is to see voters as consumers, not as participants in
making their community better. With enough money, he just hires the
consultants and pollsters to tell him what to put in his ads and
speeches that will push the buttons to get people to act. His comment
about the guy walking down the street reveals that he does not see him
as a full participant in power, but merely as a consumer that he needs
push with the right messages."
How Long Can We Plead Innocent?
Frank
Rich thinks the free pass for the public's implicit acceptance of
the crimes of the Bush administration may be running out. Not to put
too fine a point on it.
"It was always the White House's plan to coax us into a blissful
ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual
Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of
photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our
passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that
knows there's no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded
there could be a free war....
"Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in
our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we
resemble those "good Germans" who professed ignorance of their own
Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge
administration policy every day. Let the war's last supporters
filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose
except whatever remains of our country's good name."
Might Makes Right
Yet another international lesson in nuclear technology,
provided by Israel this time. Signing the Nuclear Nonproliferaton
Treaty, and following the letter of its terms is not protection from a
pre-emptive first strike by the world's enforcer countries. Just about
every country is mum about the Israeli sortie that dropped bombs on some
sort of military facility in Syria.
"Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M.
Gates were particularly concerned about the ramifications of a
pre-emptive strike in the absence of an urgent threat,"
David Sanger and Mark Mazzetti tell us. Presumably their concern admits
more irony than Dick Cheney will ever recognize, still annoyed as he is
about the idea that we'll actually engage North Korea instead of
starving them back to the stone age.
12.Oct.07
God is Flying Again
The
Architect of the Capitol says that it's been policy since 1970, but
not so much in writing all that time. "Religious and/or political
expressions" were disallowed on the flag certificates for flags flown
over the (side of the) U.S. Capitol. One wouldn't want a political
expression on one's flag certificate, eh?
Apparently some constituents were unhappy that God was not allowed in the
restricted airspace, and Members of Congress raised a beef with the help
of the right wing
echo
chamber. The Architect found that "in fact, these rules have been
inconsistently applied and that it is inappropriate and beyond the scope
of this Agency’s responsibilities to censor messages from Members. The
Architect's role is to certify that flags are appropriately flown over
the U.S. Capitol, and any messages on the flag certificates are personal
and between a Member of Congress and his or her constituents."
Are you itching to get one of those flags ("flown briefly on auxiliary
flagpoles erected near the base of the dome, on the west side of the
Capitol's roof," currently going for $17.05 from Idaho's Members,
shipping included!) and your very own certificate? Join the 100,000+
others who are making requests of their Congresscritters annually.
The Larry Craig flag should be a hot item here in Idaho. Limited Edition!
And now you don't have to worry about avoiding mention of God or Mammon,
just the 300 character limit. And the filter of your Member, through
whom your request to the Architect must be relayed.
Just one more question: are these flags made in China?
Corporate Gravy Train Toots in Boise
It's just "local" news, and the amounts are not nearly as obscene as
some corporate fathers are getting, but still. After
reporting losses of $225 million for its 3rd quarter, and $158
million for the 4th, Micron's sweet $7 million gift to its CEO
gets on the front page.
$15 million worth of dilution to the rest of the shareholders is
business as usual, and a job well done for the top ten best situated and
least laid-off of Micron's workforce. They're generous in trickling
some down to the community, of course, which we're all happy to see.
We're assured that the awards were based on the individual and company
performance, but basic arithmetic tells us this is an inverse
relationship, or maybe a perverse relationship, from
the
point of view of the more than 1,000 workers recently laid off.
This summer, a member of Micron's Board of Directors, Gordon Smith,
made
news by being–horrors!–critical of the CEO's
performance. Appleton and the rest of his supine Board quickly closed
ranks, silenced him, and then
pushed Smith off the train. That's what we call "corporate
accountability."
11.Oct.07
Fact Checking Myself
In my quick quip after the Republicans' debate,
I complained that Fred Thompson seemed underinformed about Social
Security benefits' indexing, but
here comes those FactCheck.org folks again to tell me he did just
fine. (Better than Guiliani, even.) Changing the index from
wages to inflation would reduce benefits, thereby helping
our government make the ends of the baby boom generation meet its
means.
A low-key, avuncular, late-arriving candidate who gets his facts
straight, huh. If he'll abjure wars of adventure, maybe I could learn to
like him.
More Bush Lies
We're not supposed to say it that directly, and
FactCheck.Org uses the conventional euphemisms for the President's
prevarication about the SCHIP bill he vetoed. "False claims" isn't too
subtle, but "mischaracterizes" sounds rather like an accident.
"Gave a false description," "repeated a false charge," "misstated the
intent of the SCHIP program" (the intent being Congress' prerogative
after all, not the Executive's), those are all lying. Unless it was an
accident again. Bush seems to have a lot of those.
Just Say No
WaPo's story about
Oklahoma's Tom Coburn holding up a new firearms law includes this
interesting tidbit: "Coburn has holds on about 100 pieces of legislation
he opposes," as in one Senator just saying no to any bill s/he
doesn't like. Never mind the merits of this particular bill, which we're
told is the first new firearms law in more than a decade, and which
the NRA actually supports.
One Senator, just saying no to a hundred bills?!
Economics of Mayhem, part 2
The Iraqis are upping the ante from
the previous report. A couple thousand bucks is
no longer going to be considered sufficient justification for a
wrongfully taken life. Blackwater's now long-ago initial notion of a
quarter million dollars seems low too. The current bid is
$9 million.
10.10.07
Maybe Mitt Romney is Presidential
We know he's practical at figuring out what people want to hear, and
also at figuring out what works. Military action needed to deal with a
(possibly imagined) threat?
"You sit down with your attorneys and tell you what you have to do,"
the transcript from yesterday's debate
reads. Good on Ron Paul for expressing indignation at a candidate's
stunning ignorance of the Constitution, but with the performance of
George W. Bush and the 107th through 110th Congresses fresh in mind,
it's no wonder Romney needs a brush-up.
George W. Bush has sat down with his attorneys and "tell you what you
have to do" on many occasions. Mirabile dictu, they always seems
to say what he wants to hear. "Looks legal to me, sir!"
All Merged Into One, Bland Pilsner
But with dozens of different labels, I'm sure. New
MolsonCoorsMillerLite! Tastes like nothing at all! I used to be a
sucker for "imported" beer, whether it was from Canada, or from the
glorious Rocky Mountains. Now it really does have to taste great, or
I'm not interested. That makes for more domestic tastes, with the happy
resurgence of micro-breweries
to augment the mass-produced swill that provides steady doses of
anesthesia for the mob.
I don't see the point in Anheuser and Busch being standoffish; why not
merge them into the big vat, too? Less filling!
U.S. Currency Gone Sub-Loony
I can't remember the last time the U.S. Dollar was worth less than the
Canadian Dollar.... November, 1976, according to
oanda.com; malaise
days are here again? But even stranger is the news that those
Chinese Communists are propping up our currency, even as they're
riding down with us, as compared to the Euro, et al.
We're pouring our cheap money into China's foreign reserves even faster
than we're pouring it into Iraq: $40 billion a month lately, now at
$1.2 TRILLION,
and climbing. (But hey, that's only about $4,000 for every man, woman
and child in this country.)
Choosing a New Senator for Idaho
Letters are still flooding in to the Statesman
on the Larry Craig affair, and if
today's selection was representative, they're running 14:0
"against." Catch of the day for name calling is "Liar Craig" (which
would have been funnier if coupled with "pants on fire" somewhere,
instead of just repeated seven times), and "Stall of Shame." (As opposed
to the Idaho Hall of Fame,
which has found itself a new domain name; "today's announcement," dated
Sept. 21, says "Beta test is going well"; slogan: "Idahoans on loan to
the world.")
Lt. Governor Jim Risch is delicately avoiding any public statements
having to do with our sitting Senator, as his party rallies to annoint
him the next Senator from Idaho. No word—needed, thanks to Craig's
decision to tough out his last term—on whether or not the Governor
was prepared to have appointed Risch.
Let's let bygones by bygones; Otter's possible choice is moot, and now
he and every other statewide office-holder can
rally
behind the chosen Republican. Except oops, Larry Wasden was out of
town for the announcement... guess he won't be running, will
he?
Popkey lauds Risch's expression of bi-partisanship, something that
yes, we could use some of to help "extricate" ourselves from Iraq.
If only D.C. were as well-oiled as the Idaho Legislature, where
Republicans have their way without the messy problems of a two-party
system.
9.Oct.07
Leading from Behind
"Supporters consider the former senator's slow metabolism to be part of
his appeal,"
writes Peter Canellos of The Boston Globe, and also, he isn't
Rudy Guiliani. Or Mitt Romney. Or McCain, Huckabee, or Paul. Maybe the
strategy really is what it looks like: start slow, stay low, and wait
for everyone else to self-destruct.
George W. Bush's lack of command of relevant facts has never seemed to
hurt him very much, so maybe it doesn't matter that Thompson isn't aware
that Social Security benefits are indexed to inflation. (Canellos
doesn't seem to be aware of it either, so go figure.)
The low expectations never hurt Bush either. Maybe Fred Thompson is the
front runner!
The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed the district
judge's ruling that the risk of exposing "state secrets" was more
important than justice in the case, and our Supremes implicitly concur.
Without comment.
Of course, the C.I.A. isn't talking about the case either. Kidnapping?
Rendition? Torture? No comment.
Really?!?
I don't get around to Saturday Night Live very often, and as you all
know, the comedy has been pretty well squeezed out of our senior
Senator's adventures in an airport bathroom... but
Seth and Amy's segment could offer the last question
(if not the last word) on Larry Craig's stance that he'll stay in office
through the rest of his term. (Get it quick before NBC decides it's not
OK with that? Hmm, or get it
from
them and don't you skip that ad, you hear?)
8.Oct.07
Double Dip of Irony
It's just
a short news item, but imagine this: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad getting
student protesters on his home turf, Tehran University. And just like
our President, "only the most ardent supporters of the president were
allowed to be present for the speech."
Fly Me to the Moons...
of Saturn. The
TED talk from Carolyn Porco, my favorite planetary scientist, is now
available to us non-illuminati, thanks to Tim Copeland's Blue Washington
TV. We saw her in person at the UUA's General Assembly this year,
giving a similar presentation, and were inspired by her enthusiasm, her
energy, and of course, the stunning pictures from our solar system, and
beyond.
If He Keeps Talking So Much, The Magic Will Be Gone
The other Daily Show interview worth checking out is
with Alan Greenpsan, which is what I went looking for, after
starting the John Schwartz NYT piece,
Suddenly, It's All Greenspan, All the Time, with his parenthetical
recommendation that Stewart's interview was "the most interesting of the
bunch.")
(Watch the video first; the column is funnier, and better for "dessert.")
I'm a lot more likely to read Goldsmith's book than
The Age of Turbulence, though. Greenspan's book tour, "working
through the local weeklies and auto traders and penny papers"
by this point, has satisfied my curiosity about him.
"...You worked with Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, and John Yoo, and
these lawyers we've all heard about, and demonized for so long, to see
them as people though, it's somewhat illuminating, and I think changes
your mind a little bit."
"Thank you, I tried to paint as fair a picture as I could of the
pressures everyone was under, and, they're not evil people, they're
people who were trying to do their best, we all made mistakes of
judgement, and, um, they were trying their best, even though they
made mistakes."
Same As It Ever Was
Krugman dismisses the idea that our Unitary Executive has fallen
off the agenda of "true conservatism" in this country. Cutting taxes and
waging war? Using debt, outsourcing, and secret ops to monkey-wrench
government competency? Holding the line against voting rights by
"attacking fraud"? Intimidating the press with accusations of
treason?
This is not a new program.
Meanwhile, Back East
The Caucus blog's account of
Romney at the Grass Drags is a hoot, exposing the more treacherous
world of campaigning across the full spectrum of Americana. But he's a
gamer, for sure.
"Mr. Romney, who was more casually dressed than usual today in khakis and
a blue-checkered button-down shirt, pushed gamely ahead, making his way
inside what was essentially a cross between a state fair and a
motorcycle rally, with lots of beer, for snowmobilers...."
Get the Wool Out
Larry LaRocco's working for the Senate, taking jobs around the state as
he campaigns and reconnects with the people he'd be representing.
His day on John and Diane Peavey's sheep ranch is captured in a very
nicely produced video, available on YouTube:
7.Oct.7
Why Should We Have to Pay for the War?
The Bush team has done a hell of a job associating "patriotism"
with supporting the war and occupation in Iraq, and they've done a hell
of a job manipulating Congress into continuing the funding, with both
branches of the government working to keep the appropriations
miraculously off-budget. "Emergency" appropriations for 4 years and
counting now.
Now comes Sen. David Obey (D-Wis.) and Sen. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.),
proposing to actually pay for some of those appropriations, as
opposed to just running up the national debt as we've done so far.
The intermittent outrage by a Congressman or Senator here and there
would be more convincing if Congress did not keep rolling over and
passing laws to further enable this administration's attack on our
fundamental values.
A
program for prisons and torture modeled on the techniques from
Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union?!
To hell with outrage, these are high crimes and misdemeanors, and the
Constitution has a well-defined process for responding to them.
Oh, One More Thing Larry Craig Could Do
Thanks to
Mason
Jones' letter to the editor today to remind me of the starting
point to undo the assault on civil liberties that the Bush
administration has made in their "war on terror." The restoration of
habeas corpus tops the to-do list to correct the egregious
actions of the neo-con "unitary executive" team.
The bad news is that Craig went out of his way to get his tail back to
D.C. to cast
a vote against restoring this basic right last month.
6.Oct.07
The Main Stream Goes Mainstream
As a reader of this blog, you've heard of blogs, right? And maybe
talked about them? And maybe had to answer the question, "what's a
blog?" The answers to that question could be used to generate a
new "blind men describing an elephant" fable; the blogosphere is too
vast to actually experience in its entirety, and each person's
experience is only a variegated sampling.
As the power (and money) of the netroots becomes too significant for
even the latest adopters to ignore, Bara Vaida adds another contribution
to the meta-blog genre,
"Blogging On", about politicians applying blogs to their jobs.
(Their cover story doesn't show a permalink; but K. Daniel "Danny"
Glover got permission to "reprint" it on his Beltway Blogroll... on the
same site?!)
Nine paragraphs in, Vaida defines "blogs" as "a handle describing Web
sites that feature entries from individuals or groups of writers, and
the back-and-forth discussion among folks responding to one another’s
musings." (Apparently the N.J. audience is coming from the world of
Citizen's Band radio, where names are "handles.") Well, Betsy Russell's
Eye on Boise
now has back-and-forth, and the S-R's
Huckleberries
Online seems to be nothing but back-and-forth (with "Wild Cards"
providing the means to comment on anything, as opposed to commenting
on something), but my fortboise still does not.
Alas, my blog is not built on mass-produced software that has it built
in, or configurable with a mouse click or three. It would take me
some trouble to enable any yahoo to walk in and post a generous graffito
or rippin' riposte... so it's not getting done. Send me an email if
you've got a comment, and if it's good, I'll post it, just like the
letters to the editor you all love.
Or, join the tens of millions of people with something to say who are
saying it on their own blogs, and get the buzz yourself.
In the meantime, enjoy the spice of life in the variety of what's
online, from Dick Durbin crafting legislation with citizens rather than
lobbyists, to the scrolling entries of
Technorati's Top
Topics, from the amplifiers, the blatherers, the provocateurs,
the shills, to the confidence men of the Internet Age.
As Long As You're Staying...
The bathroom humor has pretty much run its course, and for good or ill,
Larry Craig is going to try to tough it out for the rest of his term.
Chances are pretty good he's hit bottom with nowhere to go but up.
With that in mind, let's consider some priorities for the coming year
that will do him and the people of Idaho proud, erase the stain of
his personal indiscretion, and create a legacy beyond the best friend
resource exploitation ever had in Idaho. Just a few suggestions:
Work for passage of the
Employment Non-Discrimination
Act to prohibit employment discrimination against sexual
orientation and gender identity.
Close Guantánamo.
Stop Torture. (And no, the President's "proof" by repeated assertion
is not sufficient assurance.)
Support our troops and our standing in the world by working to end
the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
It's too late for FY 2007, but work to finish next year's appropriation
bills on time, before the start of the fiscal year on October
1.
Stop obstructing and start helping the Wilderness initiatives that have
been advanced by the other members of the Idaho Congressional
delegation,
for the
Owyhees
and
the Boulder-White Clouds.
Work toward
universal health care (starting with
a veto override for the SCHIP bill).
Help this country take a leadership role in
taking action to mitigate global warming.
I watched the video to see if she was being funny, and no, she wasn't,
but in the context, it was clear she meant that he doesn't have second
thoughts about his veto of the SCHIP bill.)
Was that Helen Thomas, trying to bully the photogenic, young
Secretary from the front row? "What did God tell him, from prayers?"
(Ms. Perino did not take the bait on that one.)
5.Oct.07
Fame is Fleeting
The Idaho Hall of Fame has, from my point of view at least, kept a low
profile, right up until it splashed into the news today with the report
that none other than our former singing and toe-tappin' Senator,
Larry Craig, is slated for induction in a little over a week.
He was picked back in March, when the rumors were only rumored, and the
company of Governor C.L. "Butch" Otter, Lt. Gov. Jim Risch, and—of
course!—BSU football coach Chris Peterson seemed like a great
class of 2007.
Needless to say, some of the Hall Monitors are wishing they hadn't made
that choice, and are checking the fine print of their by-laws to see if
the nomination might be as revocable as Craig's "intent to resign"
proved to be.
But what of this little-heralded Hall of Fame? To my astonishment, I
find that its advisory board, at least, is
statutory. Maybe I'll have to show up for the ceremony here in
Boise on October 13 and see what's what.
As if Craig's nomination wasn't embarassing enough, I see that the
Hall's web domain, idhf.org, expired last month
and is now parked, selling unrelated ad views for dynonames.com.
4.Oct.07
The Shame of Alberto Gonzales
Was early retirement for Alberto Gonzales really enough? It's not as if
the assault on civil liberties by the Bush administration is all his
doing, but for
his part in it, criminal prosecution would seem more appropriate
than a pension. I agree with
Barack Obama:
"It's time to tell the world that America rejects torture without
exception or equivocation. It's time to stop telling the American people
one thing in public while doing something else in the shadows. No more
secret authorization of methods like simulated drowning."
WITHOUT EXCEPTION OR EQUIVOCATION. What in the HELL is so hard to
understand about this? The end does not justify the means. (Let
alone the fact that the means that Cheney, Addington, Yoo, Rumsfeld,
Gonzales and their ilk have been willing to authorize others to employ
are beyond ineffective.)
"Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them. Torture is
how you get bad information, not good intelligence. Torture is how you
set back America's standing in the world, not how you strengthen it."
Guilty As Pled
You don't have to read my account, there are
9,000 others all over the internet about the rejection of Sen. Larry
Craig's failed attempt to withdraw his guilty plea. After 25 pages of
preambulatory memorandum,
here comes the Judge:
Because the Defendant's plea was accurate, voluntary, and intelligent,
and because the conviction is supported by the evidence, the Defendant's
conviction for disorderly conduct... is valid. Accordingly, the
Defendant's motion to withdraw his guilty plea is DENIED.
The ACLU's Amicus Curiae brief was "appreciated," but dismissed as
"inapplicable and potentially misleading." Their citation related to
"fighting words," not the conduct of "Defendant's entry into an
occupied stall with his eyes, hand, and foot." Never mind that one might
have a reasonable expectation of privacy for sex in a restroom
stall.
Ask yourself, "why would she lie?" And then ask yourself why
would he lie. Which is more likely? More in character?
Sixteen years after the Senate gave Clarence Thomas the ultimate
affirmative action, with a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court,
he's still trying to win the argument, now as he flogs his
newly-published memoir.
Thomas still has a huge chip on his shoulder, as
his 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft shows, ready to
assume that people are thinking the worst about him. When his
grandfather rejected him, he had good reason to be "angry at everyone,"
and maybe he's had good reason to be angry at everyone since then.
That doesn't provide an excuse for lying about someone else, though.
In that last Senate confirmation hearing, he found a winning strategy:
"uncategorical" denial, and attacking his accusers, and he's still
working that angle.
That Seldom-Used Veto Stamp
George Bush's administration has managed to manipulate (or ignore)
the Congress pretty well, but when it comes to actually vetoing
legislation (as opposed to tacking on "just kidding" signing
statements), he's been
right next to
silent. His 4th one in 6 years has just been delivered,
rejecting the reauthorization of the SCHIP children's health
insurance that had strong bipartisan support in Congress. The
two-thirds support needed to override is a tall obstacle though, and in
the House, at least, the bill may not have it.
The lastest polling said 86% of the American people supported
reauthorizing SCHIP, with 7 in 10 saying they supported the plan to
scpand SCHIP by $35 billion over five years.
Bush has forced us to find hundreds of billions of dollars
to pursue his war and occupation in Iraq, but $30 or $35 billion for
children's health care? That's too much for him to contemplate.
"He's Our Kind of Guy"
The Larry Craig story is getting kind of long in the tooth, with most of
the humor pretty well tapped out by the late night crowd. After the
Sept. 30 date, when he "intended" to resign, but then didn't, the
Boise Weekly went looking for his supporters
willing to say something on record. They found Chuck Cushman at the
American Land Rights Association happy to speak up.
"My job is to protect land owners, private property rights, access to
federal land," he said, "people who are the foundation of this
country–ranchers, miners, forestry interests. Larry Craig has been
a real stand-up guy when it comes to the U.S. Senate as far as
continuing to fight for those kinds of things and gun rights."
"And gun rights," I like that. The juxtaposition of "private property
rights" and "access to federal land" always gets me. The nut of it is,
there are a lot of people near our federal lands who feel that they have
a private property interest in that land and what's on (or under) it,
and they pursue that agenda without apology (or any sense of irony).
Advancing the cause of resource exploitation was the primary cause that
Larry Craig fought for in the Congress.
The ALRA says it's boycotting the Minneapolis-St.Paul airport and
Northwest Airlines to get back at the nasty police sting that caught
Craig in the stall. And they're trying to decide whether to go after
The Idaho Statesman for good measure, responding to Craig's
"the newspaper frightened me into pleading guilty" complaint.
Living in the (Corporate) Past
Once upon a time when the web was new, I set up a web server on HP's
intranet. In early 1995, our hp-ux workstations had been well-connected
for many years, although getting beyond the corporate firewall was still
a bit of a challenge in some respects. I'd been "browsing" what was
available from other sites for a while, but it had a read-only feel to
it.
My immediate motivation to have my own server, was for distributing
a lengthy research paper I was writing, having to do with finite element
analysis of the vibration performance of two hard disk drives that we
were manufacturing. This new-fangled World Wide Web seemed like a better
way than Microsoft Word and a photocopy machine to distribute it. I
wouldn't have to worry about the distribution list quite as much, for
one thing; and I could include lovely color pictures to my heart's
content, which interested readers could enjoy on their high-resolution
CRTs.
So I learned the rudiments of HTML, and, lacking a competent whizzy
editor, proceeded to work from within the vi text editor, customizing it
with convenient macros as I went along. That January, 1995 report marked
a turning point in my document production: I resolved to do everything
in email and/or HTML from there on out, and my networked workstation was
the publishing means for almost all of the the professional work I did
at HP. It also became a modest little soapbox for semi-work-related
essays, more on the realm of "g-jobs"; technically interesting, but not
really relevant to what I was being paid to do. Some of them were
technical, some coporate commentary, some wandered further afield.
One of the managers got a charge out of Eliyahu Goldratt's "business
novels" and was passing out copies of them to his peers and engineers.
I thought he had some good ideas, but that they could be communicated
more directly, so I wrote a review of one of the books, and publicized
it as a quicker read. That engendered some wider discussion, and
networking between sites, as these things sometimes did. Bill Harris,
who wrote more extensively on the subject than I did, and who is still
going at it, encouraged me to revive what I'd done in 1998, and so
I have: now posted in my "useful" section,
Critical Chain - book review.
The "further reading" section includes the link back to
Bill's re-published paper on the same topic.
2.Oct.07
The Juggernaut
Everybody's talking about how unstoppable Hillary is.
Bush, Guiliani, the RNC. Hmmm. The chairman of the RNC, Mike Duncan's
latest fundraising letter has it in the subject: Stop the Hillary
Juggernaut! Send money, eh? We already knew that Republicans never
feel they have enough money, but the more interesting part of the letter
is the recitation of the talking points, outlining how the RNC will
attack.
She's raising too much money! (They say that like it's a bad
thing, ironically.) Big Labor, Hollywood elites, trial lawyers and
liberal groups like MoveOn.org are coming to get us! Hillary-Care 2.0!
Refusing to denounce despicable free speech! Proposing more than $615
billion in new goverment spending to pay for her liberal schemes!
(As opposed to the how many hundreds of billions we've dumped in Iraq?
And all the new government debt to pay for conservative anti-tax
schemes?)
Here's the really scary tactic:
"If Republicans don't close the fundraising gap with the Democrats by the
end of this year, we will not be able to defend our candidates from
their vicious attacks and outright distortions."
And fund our own vicious attacks and outright distortions!
(Maybe the
GOP money
funk demonstrates that Republicans are careful with their money, not
wanting to throw away their sometimes hard-won (and othertimes pretty
easily won) dollars at a losing cause?)
Guiliani's camp
tells its supporters that he's the man to beat Hillary: "there is no
candidate that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats fear more in the
general election than Rudy Giuliani." And apparently, there is no
candidate that the Republicans fear more in the general election than
Hillary Clinton.
Except that the base Christians that Karl Rove used to get his man into
office seem to be
rather fearful of a Guiliani candidacy, too. Third party
candidate?! Bring him on! Let's see just how marginalized you people
really can be.
Pat Robertson! Gary Bauer! Alan Keyes! Doctor Dobson! Take your pick.
Whew, I've got exclamation fatigue.
1.Oct.07
Alma Pater
It seems a small eon ago that Doug Wilson and I sat through Nick Gier's
college course in Existentialism together. I went on to bicycle
mechanics, and engineering, while he went on to create an unexpected
revival in part of Moscow, Idaho's downtown. His 15 minutes of fame has
ripened with an article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine,
Onward Christian Scholars. Molly Worthen describes Wilson's New St.
Andrews College in mostly friendly terms, with most of what criticism
she does cite coming from one of Wilson's younger brothers. Another
brother teaches at the college. He didn't get a speaking part in the
article, and neither did Wilson's son or son-in-law who are also
"fellows." Nepotism? Wilson waves it away: "Part of modernity’s negative
legacy is the pretense of objectivity. All institutions thrive on
interconnectedness, affection and loyalty." The affection runs strong:
"the school is a capable matchmaker, and during May and June student
weddings occupy nearly every weekend."
Unlike Liberty University and Patrick Henry College, N.S.A. is not
taking a political approach to changing the world. Its goal is
"classical Christian education," producing a more "medieval"
Protestantism, with "a much longer view." (Not just backwards?)
Taxonomy and creationist science are to be favored over Darwin's
idea, merely "a curious event in the history of modern secularism."
But the part I liked in the Magazine piece was learning about Cornelius
Van Til's theology called presuppositionalism.
"He argued that no assumptions are neutral and that the human mind can
comprehend reality only if proceeding from the truth of biblical
revelation. In other words, it is impossible for Christians to reason
with non-Christians. presuppositionalism is a strangely postmodern
theory that denies the possibility of objectivity—though it does
not deny the existence of truth, which belongs to Christians alone."
That explains quite a lot.
The Economics of Mayhem
Probably just a coincidence that so many Friends-of-George and
Friends-of-Dick are running companies profiting from the war in Iraq.
But we do have to wonder if anyone looking out for the public
interest could suppose that it's better to be paying about half a
million bucks a year per mercenary, versus the salary, benefits and
support costs of a soldier, well under $100,000. The House Committee on
Oversight and Government Reform is going to be talking about all this
tomorrow, looking for the answers to three questions:
Is Blackwater's presence advancing or undermining U.S. efforts in
Iraq?
Has the State Department responded appropriately to shooting incidents
involving Blackwater forces? and
What are the costs for U.S. taxpayers of the reliance on Blackwater and
other private military contractors?
The
majority staff report includes some background reading with salient
facts. In spite of Blackwater's "protective" job description, they
fired the first shots (from a moving vehicle "in the vast majority of
instances") in 80% of the almost 200 "escalation of force" incidents
since 2005.
The report includes some interesting calculation of the cost of an Iraqi
life, from a reparation standpoint. $250,000 was way too high, and
might cause Iraqis to "try to get killed." $15,000 was more like it,
but even that price has been sliding. Later, $5,000 was deemed enough to
square things up.
This comes off the Blackwater top line (or were those no-bid contracts
all "cost plus"?), but they've probably got some slack in the
$593,601,952 they collected from the U.S. last year, part of
their $1 billion in contracts in the last 5 years. Things really
took off in August, 2003, when Jerry Bremer awarded the company a no-bid
contract to provide "security."
Earlier this month, that was my last step in the process for attempting
to buy a ticket to the Davis Cup final in Portland. I passed the test,
but was then informed that there were no tickets left—seventeen
minutes after they'd gone on sale for a venue with more 12,000 seats.
Purchasers were limited to 12 at a time, so you can do the math; there
were a lot of machines ahead of me in the queue.
)
as the machines and their support staff push them out of the way.
Bill Scher didn't use that term in
Joe Gertner, in today's NYT Magazine:
"Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies
nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical
models indicate that it will never be full again."
"I did nothing wrong," he keeps saying. Pleading guilty just seemed like
the best way to make it quietly go away. "I didn't seek counsel," as if
it was just an attorney he lacked? He needs counseling more than
he needs an attorney. Stick a fork in that Minnesota case, it's
done. His attorneys keep saying that, too, but they're happy to
keep taking Larry's campaign contributors' money until it runs out.
We early adopter bloggers used to have to explain to others just what
the heck a "blog" is. A sampling shows that too specific an answer would
be wrong. What's a "magazine," after all? It's a publishing medium,
which doesn't tell you what it's a medium for. Blogs are a
compound category as well. They can be a personal publishing
medium, such as this one, a sort of celebrity gaggle
as TomPaine's 
It's just "local" news, and the amounts are not nearly as obscene as
some corporate fathers are getting, but still. After
But with dozens of different labels, I'm sure. New
The bathroom humor has pretty much run its course, and for good or ill,
Larry Craig is going to try to tough it out for the rest of his term.
Chances are pretty good he's hit bottom with nowhere to go but up.
With that in mind, let's consider some priorities for the coming year
that will do him and the people of Idaho proud, erase the stain of
his personal indiscretion, and create a legacy beyond the best friend
resource exploitation ever had in Idaho. Just a few suggestions: