As seen from Just Above Sunset

Tuesday, 13 July 2004

Topic: Election Notes

Paranoia - Take two...

Previously, in Let us not be paranoid... there was a bit of discussion on reports, verified reports, that officials in the Bush administration have been discussing the idea of postponing Election Day in the event of a terrorist attack on or about that day - and this was announced by a Homeland Security Department spokesman on Sunday.

Lots of sound and fury followed, but may signify nothing.

Over at the Washington Monthly Kevin Drum points out that it is unlikely this could happen -

... consider the mechanics of the whole thing:

- The only body that can change the date of federal elections is Congress.
- Assuming the Supreme Court agreed, Congress could delegate this power to a federal commission if it so desired.
- However, in a couple of weeks everyone goes home for the summer. They come back on September 3rd.
- The current target for adjournment of the current congressional session is October 1st.

In other words, supposing that the Justice Department actually decided (suicidally, in my opinion) to propose legislation to create an election commission with the power to reschedule elections, Congress would have a grand total of four weeks to debate and pass it.

This is impossible, of course, unless the bill had essentially unanimous bipartisan support. Which it wouldn't.

Bottom line: short of a nuclear attack on Washington DC nothing is going to happen and elections will proceed as scheduled. Convinced?

Yep. That's pretty convincing.

But Bob Harris here is NOT convinced -

Yes, I do believe that Team Chimpy is likely to exploit any possibility of postponing our elections in one way or another.

My opinion only, but it seems delusional to imagine they wouldn't, given the laundry list of the unimaginable we already know they're perfectly happy to do: muscle into power, steal multiple entire Congressional districts by redistricting, expose our own intelligence people for political gain, start an entire war based on obvious lies, endanger our safety by subordinating the fight against Al-Qaeda, treat our own wounded troops as pariahs, claim the right to imprison indefinitely at the president's whim, rationalize torture, try to time the arrest of Bin Laden to sabotage the Democrats, and build their entire freakin' convention around the shameless exploitation of a mass murder.

I can't think of a single damned thing that these people won't try to spin and twist and distort into a political advantage. Right this very minute, it's an uphill fight to make sure the voting machines themselves aren't simply hijacked. And you know perfectly well which side Chimpy is on.

If you truly imagine there's a line they won't cross if they can, you're not paying attention. This is not about democracy for them. It never has been. As Molly Ivins put it so well: They wish not to govern, but to rule.

I mean, what more would we need to see the utterly obvious here? Dick Cheney simply biting large bits out of people every time they disagree with him? "Go fuck yourself" replacing "E pluribus unum" as our national slogan? Karl Rove strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue drinking Tom Daschle's brain marrow through a crazy straw?

(And really, at this point, would you be all that surprised...?)

Bob Harris of Los Angeles, a "Jeopardy!" five-time champion by the way, is not a trusting sort, is he?

And he seems kind of angry - perhaps appropriately so, but angry. Perhaps that clouds his judgment.

The first argument seems more sensible to me. Getting congress to approve granting DeForest B. Soaries Jr. - chair of the newly formed Election Assistance Commission and former New Jersey secretary of state, and senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, New Jersey - the power to postpone the coming presidential election, for as long a he thinks appropriate, would be difficult. It's hard to imagine the Bush team could rustle up the votes to grant the senior pastor that right, the man they appointed to a commission they invented. Establishing a new, neutral body would be more difficult yet. Time is running short.

Harris does mention the administration seeking "any possibility of postponing our elections in one way or another." One way or another?

Are there other ways? An executive decree in time of national emergency might work. We are not officially at war. Congress has not issued a declaration of war, as such. But do we need a formal, official, fully-declared war - or just a national emergency?

Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War - and of course there are still many who say that war was not at all a "civil war" in any sense of the term, and refer to it as the War Between the States. (Yes, I lived in South for a few years.) But Lincoln suspended habeas corpus nevertheless, and the world did not fall apart. The nation came out of that "late unpleasantness between the states," as some in the South used to call it - and in 1867 habeas corpus was reborn. Truman, as the Korea War spun up - an undeclared war, but a war nonetheless, even if it was officially a UN police action - attempted to nationalize the steel industry here. He got slapped down. The Supreme Court said he didn't have that power. Are there other examples of the chief executive assuming certain parts of the constitution could and should be suspended given events at the moment? Don't know. Not my field.

Can the chief executive suspend parts of the constitution as needed? All you can do is try it out. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't.

As a practical matter, what would actually happen of the president declared we had a national emergency and he was suspending, carefully, selected parts the constitution - the presidential election and perhaps the freedom of the press to investigate and report on particular events - because... but I'm not sure here what his reason would be. Because if we held the national election in November al-Qaeda would, without doubt, set off massive explosions and unleash chemical and biological attacks all over America, and hundred of thousands of citizens would die? I guess that would be the reason, the official justification - public safety. That makes the whole business a simple if-then proposition - if we vote, then we get attacked. If we don't vote - well, then no one has to die.

Well, you'd have to trust them on this if-then logic, and assume they had the hard intelligence to be certain that this was exactly what would happen if the election went forward. But then again, the administration hasn't exactly been batting a thousand on obtaining good intelligence. But we'd have to trust them. We'd be told we just couldn't afford to take the chance that this might not be so. Many would, I suspect, buy into that. Many would not.

Each president takes an oath to protect and defend the constitution, and this one did too, just as did all the presidents before him. But the right is always trotting out the well-worn line - "The constitution is not a suicide pact." No, it isn't - but I don't see how holding the federal elections on schedule would be certain suicide. Then again, I don't have the resources of the CIA, NSA, NRO, the Defense Department spooks, the State Department analysts, the independent Cheney-Feith investigative teams and all the rest. Would we all have to assume they know things we do not know, things they cannot reveal without compromising their sources, and we thus must simply trust them? ("Simply" has multiple meanings in this context, of course.) Trusting them has become a problem for many, given recent events.

As a practical matter then the "you just have to trust us" approach would not work very well. Too many people feel they have been jerked around a bit too much by these guys - and some of them have lost sons or daughters, husbands or wives. You can only go to that well so many times. It done gone dry, at least for half of us.

The Madrid Scenario

But Tom Ridge is really suggesting something else. He is suggesting that IF there is an attack BEFORE the scheduled election, THEN perhaps we should postpone voting to avoid people making hasty decisions about who should lead the country for another fours years. Well, he's not exactly saying that. That is certainly implied in what he's saying, but not explicit. "Disruptions to the process" is his tune here. He's implying that voting in such a circumstance could not really be fair - as some precincts and polling places would be, well, wiped out. And everyone else would be all upset - at least far more upset than they are now. I think his idea is that it would just make sense not to hold an election when events are so dire. But some people see events now as dire.

This second argument is far weaker. In this Madrid Scenario the authority of the president to suspend laws - to suspend certain constitution rights - seems less clear than the first case, stopping the elections to save lives. In the Madrid Scenario many people are already dead. Efforts to assure public safety, in this case, have already failed. So why not hold the election and do the best you can? You might have to step over a few smoldering bodies to get to the voting booth, but in that case you probably would really WANT to vote.

In this Madrid Scenario I suspect that is what really worries the Bush Administration. After all, these guys keep saying, hey, really, we made things safer for you all, we really did - trust us, we really did.

No.

Posted by Alan at 18:01 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Tuesday, 13 July 2004 18:11 PDT home

Monday, 12 July 2004

Topic: Election Notes

The NAACP and George Bush - Political Theater

Caveat -

This writer has been a dues-paying card-carrying member of the NAACP for almost two decades now. What follows may be colored by that (sorry about the pun).

The basic story broke over the weekend -

Bush Criticizes NAACP's Leadership
Relationship With Rights Group 'Basically Nonexistent,' President Says
Mike Allen, The Washington Post, Saturday, July 10, 2004; Page A05

YORK, Pa., July 9 -- President Bush said Friday that he has a "basically nonexistent" relationship with the NAACP's leadership and he refused for the consecutive fourth year to speak to the group's national convention.

Bush's assessment of his relationship with the nation's largest civil rights organization was a sharp reversal from his rhetoric during his last campaign. Then he spoke to the group's convention as part of an effort to show he was a different kind of Republican and said that "there is much we can do together to advance racial harmony and economic opportunity."

Bush will not be speaking before the 2004 convention, which will open Saturday in Philadelphia.
Bush, during a day-long bus tour through Pennsylvania, said in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer and two other state newspapers that he "admired some" NAACP leaders and said he would seek members' support "in other ways."

But he castigated the group's officers, who include President Kweisi Mfume and Chairman Julian Bond. "I would describe my relationship with the current leadership as basically nonexistent," Bush said, as reported by Knight Ridder Newspapers. "You've heard the rhetoric and the names they've called me."

They hurt his feelings?

No, they didn't show him the proper respect. They disagreed with him.

Some perspective -

Let's first be clear that the Bush campaign isn't simply not going to the NAACP convention, they're deliberately and publicly snubbing the NAACP, and this snub was planned well in advance. The White House and the Bush campaign would have known probably a year ago that the NAACP would be in Philadelphia this weekend, and they would have planned the Pennsylvania bus trip months ago. Not only did they decide not to go to the convention, they deliberately planned on being in Pennsylvania at almost the exact time of the convention to draw more attention to the fact that Bush would not appear before the NAACP.

The bigger issue here is that George Bush is effectively saying "screw you" to one of the most prominent and esteemed organizations in America, an organization that is the most important representative of African-Americans and which still leads the fight for civil rights in America. This isn't a failure to send a message to supporters of civil rights, this is a deliberate decision to send a message that, forty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, there are still two sides to the debate on civil rights, and Bush is on the side of those opposed to "special" rights for people who aren't white, Christian, and heterosexual. By deliberately blowing off the NAACP four straight years, Bush has signaled that he doesn't view himself as President of all Americans. He's the President of just those Americans who look like him and agree with him.

It is, thus, a message to his base.

Also from the Post -

Earlier this week, the White House said the invitation had been declined because of scheduling commitments, and officials said that was the reason cited in the letter to the group. But when asked about the matter by reporters on Air Force One on Friday, White House press secretary Scott McClellan made it clear that a lot more was involved. "The current leadership of the NAACP has certainly made some rather hostile political comments about the president over the past few years," he said.

The NAACP said Bush is the first president since Warren G. Harding not to meet with the group while in office.

Bond has accused Republicans of "playing the race card in election after election." He said they have "appealed to that dark underside of American culture, to that minority of Americans who reject democracy and equality," and "preach racial neutrality and they practice racial division."

Oh heck, Bond and Mfume are still grumpy about Ted Olson and that University of Michigan case. And Bush and Ashcroft speaking at Bob Jones University in South Carolina, where interracial dating is strictly forbidden. And Ashcroft saying his political hero is Robert E. Lee. They seem to take this stuff seriously.

But there is a larger question. Bush can win easily without the black vote, and without the gay vote- he doesn't need them.

Bush is, really, depending on voters who know what it is like to be insulted, to be disrespected, and see Bush as they guy who just won't put up with that. Bush is making himself into a kind of hero to the common man here - the person people wish they had the courage themselves to be, but cannot. Bush can smirk "Like I need YOU?" to the NAACP. And Cheney can tell the senior senator from Vermont, on the floor of the Senate, to go fuck himself. And people cheer, or that's the theory on how to win in November.

Is this approach to the election planned? Is it instinctual? That's hard to say, and frankly it doesn't matter much. It simply works.

Much has been said about how odd it is that Bush is seen as "the common man" while John Kerry is seen as a rich, removed, elite patrician sort. Bush's antecedents are a president (formerly the VP and head of the CIA and an ambassador) and a senator (Prescott Bush) and a long line of bankers and financiers (the Harriman and Walker families). And we're talking major money here. Kerry is the son of diplomat, schooled in Switzerland as a kid, who speaks a number of foreign languages fluently and who is married to one of the richest women in America, who herself is sophisticated and brilliant in her own way. Both went to Yale. Both were in the famous, and socially elite, Skull and Bones. Neither guy is exactly Joe Six-Pack.

So how does Bush pull it off?

Bush laughs at how he did so badly in school. He barely slid by. Folks can relate to that.

Bush doesn't hide that he was drinking heavily and not doing much of anything before he turned forty. And look at him now. Folks like that - he pulled himself up from all that.

And Bush does the visuals - he bought that Crawford ranch in Texas just before the 2000 election and hangs around down there in jeans and a work shirt, clearing brush. The press is kind enough to not mention how recent an addition that is to the Bush family holdings, and how unlike the rest of the Bush residences. Folks relate to working around the yard.

But most importantly, think of the present times. The world now seems, at least over the last almost three years, a far more dangerous place and complex place than we ever imagined. Any number of peoples hate us, or our policies, or both - and murderously so. And it is not getting any better. Much of the rest of the world distrusts us - questioning our motives, and our actions, and often, even our intelligence (in both the military and general sense). Our list of allies grows thin, as they say.

What to do with this complexity? Simplify it. Good and evil. With us or with the terrorists. Enough has been said on that. Is this way of thinking cynically planned to win the next election? Is it instinctual? That's hard to say, and frankly it doesn't matter much. It also simply works.

Kerry offers complexity of thought and consideration of various options. For "the common man" this is far too dangerous. And he resents it.

And the key to all this is playing on resentment. What's this NAACP snub about? Imagine you're a regular guy crossing the street in the city on your lunch hour, worried about your mortgage and your kids and the bills and your taxes and all that stuff. You see next to you a tall black man in a three thousand dollar tailored suit, with his fancy attach? case, talking on his cell phone to someone about a bank merger or such stuff. You seethe with resentment. Because of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and Affirmative Actions and the 1964 Civil Rights Act and all the rest of what the Democrats said was the right thing to do, there he is, and you cannot remember where you parked your ten-year-old tinny Civic. That's what the NAACP snub is about. Saying fuck you to the whole business.

What's happening in Bangkok, over in Thailand, this week? The international AIDS (SIDA) conference. And that too is another political stage for the same drama. The politics of resentment.

What has been staged for the American voter? First, we sent only on quarter of our usual array of doctors. Many papers will not be read or discussed. The folks excluded were, you see, going to present studies that were just plain wrong. What would those be? Papers suggesting anything about the use of condoms in preventing disease, and papers with any direct or indirect data or sponsorship from family planning groups that might have, at some time, offered abortion counseling. But we will participate vigorous on the panels discussing drug therapies for AIDS, to protect the patents on the drugs developed here, to make sure our pharmaceutical industry isn't undermined by cheaper versions of these drugs. Business is business. You see, folks are uncomfortable with all these people dying, and with many of them being those odd and awful gay folks. And all this costs so much! Our meager participation in the Bangkok conference? A message to the uncomfortable, resentful American voter - our guys, and Bush, are saying in-your-face, you losers! There are a whole lot of votes in that message.

Why vote for this guy? Because he doesn't shit for anybody - and lives our fantasy life. It's a Walter Mitty thing. Kerry has no clue how to counter that.

The leader now is the guy who doesn't have to explain anything. He just does what you wish you could do, if you had the balls and weren't such a damned coward. He knows you'll lap it up. You love it, secretly or not.

See September 14, 2003 Opinion: Leadership, Management Theory and Saying You're Sorry or That You Need Help for a bit on that.

When Bob Woodward was interviewed by Mike Wallace on Sixty Minutes regarding Woodward's research on the book he wrote about George W. Bush, Woodward made some interesting comments.

Woodward said Bush told him that when Bush chairs a meeting he often tries to be provocative. When Woodward asked him if he tells his staff that he is purposely being provocative, Bush answered: "Of course not. I am the commander, see? I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

... The issue is one of temperament. On one end of the scale you have the "I'm the boss and you're not" school of leadership. On the other end you have the "We're all in this together so let's figure out how to make this work" school of leadership. One assumes unquestioning obedience while the other assumes the leader draws on all the available resources and shapes some sort of plan everyone can pretty much agree to.

The next national election may be a matter choosing between two leadership/management approaches. "We're all in this together so tell me what you think and what your ideas are..." - not words that come naturally to the current leadership. And I wonder if those who will vote in the next national election think those are words any leader should speak.

I still wonder.

Posted by Alan at 22:06 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Monday, 12 July 2004 22:07 PDT home

Topic: Election Notes

Let us not be paranoid...

Clear Channel Communications, fair and square, purchased the rights to billboard space in Times Square in Manhattan. It is not public space. It is commercial space. They own it.

Note this -
Antiwar Group Says Its Ad Is Rejected
Raymond Hernandez and Andrea Elliott, The New York Times, July 12, 2004

A group of antiwar advocates is accusing Clear Channel Communications, one of the nation's largest media companies, with close ties to national Republicans, of preventing the group from displaying a Times Square billboard critical of the war in Iraq.

The billboard - an image of a red, white and blue bomb with the words "Democracy Is Best Taught by Example, Not by War" - was supposed to go up next month, the antiwar group said, and it was to be in place when Republicans from across the country gathered in New York City to nominate President Bush for a second term.

... Last night, the president and chief executive of Clear Channel, Paul Meyer, said the company had objected to the group's use of "the bomb imagery" in the proposed billboard. Mr. Meyer said Clear Channel had accepted a billboard that would replace the bomb with a dove.

... Told of Mr. Meyer's comments, [Project Billboard spokesman Howard] Wolfson said that earlier, Clear Channel had rejected the ad with the dove as well as the one with the bomb, demanding that the words be changed, too. "It's news to us, and not reflected in any prior communications between Clear Channel and Project Billboard," Mr. Wolfson said last night. "This contradicts Clear Channel's demand that the copy be changed."

So the dove won't do either? It's confusing.

But this is America. The marketplace decides. You buy what space you want, to show what you want. If the protestors want to put up a billboard embarrassing the President Bush, they should buy their own media company. There's no free lunch. It seems the left doesn't believe in capitalism.

Another example? The end of the weekend here in Los Angeles.

Adelphia Glitch Cuts Out Kerry Interview in Los Angeles
Los Angeles Times, July 12, 2004

A technical glitch at Adelphia Communications Corp.'s Santa Monica facility left 70,000 subscribers without service for about 2 1/2 hours, blacking out CBS' "60 Minutes" interview with Sen. John F. Kerry, a company spokeswoman said.

The lack of programming left some subscribers wondering if the socially conservative company had pulled access to a program featuring the Democratic presidential candidate. The Adelphia official said the glitch had nothing to do with politics.

Just an accident.

But if the folks who hate America so much they want Bush out of office want their guys to appear on national television, on CBS of all things, well perhaps they should buy their own cable company. There's no free lunch. It seems the left doesn't believe in capitalism.

You have no right to what you don't pay for. You have a problem with that? Get off your fat ass and get a job. Accept personal responsibility. There is no clearer definition of America than that, or so my conservative friends say.

My friends on the left? Some advice - the "public airwaves" will be increasingly closed to you, and the "public spaces" too. Guess what? They never were public. All "open forums" in the real world have owners. And they book the halls and divvy up the airtime. They purchased that right. They have control, and copyright, and a cut of the popcorn concession. Get over it.

You want a forum? Buy your own.

Are you poor lefties feeling paranoid? You saw this on CNN?

U.S. officials have discussed the idea of postponing Election Day in the event of a terrorist attack on or about that day, a Homeland Security Department spokesman said Sunday.

... The department wants to know about the possibility of granting emergency power to the newly created U.S. Election Assistance Commission, authority that [DoJ spokesman Brian] Roehrkasse said was requested by DeForest B. Soaries Jr., the commission's chairman.

Soaries, who was appointed by President Bush, is a former New Jersey secretary of state and senior pastor of the 7,000-member First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, New Jersey.

Well, I just saw Soaries on television, an MSNBC interview.

He seems a pleasant fellow.

But you don't want a Baptist minister with emergency authority over your elections?

Well, according to Newsweek, Tom Ridge also wants John Ashcroft to look into the possibility of postponing the election in case of a terrorist attack.

Would Ashcroft find this a problem - like it might be, say, unconstitutional? Don't think so.

An interesting comment over at Hullabaloo -

But constitutionality aside, why would there be any need to do this? We lived under the threat of nuclear war for decades - real weapons of mass destruction pointed at all of our major cities - and nobody ever contemplated suspending elections and devised no plans to do so. We have held elections during every war, including the civil war, and didn't contemplate suspending them in case of an attack.

This is absurd. Unless the terrorists are somehow able to prevent large numbers of people from exercising their right to vote by bombing individual polling places there can be absolutely no reason to postpone this election.

Besides, if I recall correctly, the Bush administration made quite a case a few years back that there should be no changing of the rules, even when certain rules are contradictory, in election procedures. I remember that deadlines, particularly, were sacrosanct. Indeed, the dates surrounding election laws were seen as written in stone.

Somehow, I have to believe that if terrorists attack us around the election, Americans will crawl out of the rubble on their hands and knees to vote. But then, that's obviously what they're really afraid of, isn't it?

Well, yes. Such an attack might make some folks, a few, maybe many, think that Bush and his foolish war brought this down on us all. They might blame him. And get really angry. And not vote for him.

This now makes sense. There's a big attack in early November. This could be the final straw that turns the solidly Bush folks against him. Canceling the election then makes perfect sense.

But marshal law would be easier. And no one would have to die.

The idea is this - just after Labor Day the administration declares marshal law and just cancels the elections indefinitely, and heck, Bush can declare himself president for life, supported by the army. His wife, Laura, can even change her name to Eva if she wants. And al-Qaeda thus has no reason to attack. We can go on as usual. The stock market soars. Osama bin Laden gets all grumpy.

This could work.

Posted by Alan at 18:41 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: Photos

On the road...

Palm trees and all - could be Florida, or could be somewhere out here in Southern California. But the Freeway Blogger found this.

Examine carefully.

Posted by Alan at 14:32 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Sunday, 11 July 2004

Topic: Photos

New stuff...

Volume 2, Number 27 (Sunday, July 11, 2004) of Just Above Sunset is now on line. Entries here will resume tomorrow, or late this evening.

This week's issue of Just Above Sunset- brings you news of Michael Moore Week in Paris, from our correspondent there, with a few photographs. But there is a column this week on Ohio, if Paris isn't your kind of place. In the Kafka column there's a lot of insider press stuff and a friend tells tales trying to shoot an American television documentary in the old Soviet Union (not easy) - and it seems we're not much better these days than the old soviet guys. What else? More than you ever wanted to know about Djibouti, of course. Bob Patterson is back as "The World's Laziest Journalist" and as "The Book Wrangler." There is an automotive column for a change - on the virtuous Prius and where such things are leading us. Photos? Here and there in the articles. And in Photography, Hollywood's new museum and some strange news about palm trees. Enjoy.

Some of this you saw here, but each item has been expanded. Much is new.

The "teaser" photograph? Are you a singer? Is your voice giving out from running up and down and all around the Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute (Die Zauberfl?te) too many times? These folks will fix you up. Right in the middle of Hollywood.

Posted by Alan at 20:12 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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