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Photos and text, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003,2004,2005,2006 - Alan M. Pavlik
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Consider:

"It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape."

- I. Compton-Burnett, letter to Francis King (1969)

"Cynical realism – it is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation."

- Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop"







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Tuesday, 13 April 2004

Topic: For policy wonks...

Just Another Day in Paradise (Jefferson's Birthday)

Note, on this day in 1743 Thomas Jefferson was born in Shadwell, Virginia.

But our president now is not Thomas Jefferson.

Bush just wrapped up one of his rare news conferences. Not much news. Same old stuff. Things are getting better, and we must continue with whatever it is we're doing. Fine.

And no one's mind was changed tonight -

Opinions Vary on Bush News Conference
Mitch Stacy, Associated Press, Tuesday, April 13, 2004

On the right:
Dennis Nelson paused from eating a slice of pizza at a Tampa American Legion Hall Tuesday night to listen to President Bush, who said just what he wanted to hear: The United States will not be deterred in Iraq.

Nelson, a 51-year-old Vietnam veteran and post commander, said he was pleased Bush stood firm on Iraq in his prime time news conference, despite increasing instability there and polls showing that fewer Americans approve of the way he's handling the war.

"He's given us a plan, what we're going to do, and we're not going to let anything stop us," said Nelson, a Republican. "I was proud of the president that he would not let anything deter us from making this happen."
And on the left:
On Chicago's South Side, viewers included about 20 members of the Task Force for Black Political Empowerment, a political activist group that has come out against the Iraq war.

"I feel sorry for him," said A.L. Reynolds, 68, a retired businessman from Chicago who described himself as an independent. "He has not answered one reporter's question, he has not apologized, he has an arrogant attitude and he's not going to change anyone's opinion with this speech. ... I feel very sorry for him and I'm scared for us."
And further left, Hesiod over at CounterSpin offers this:
But tonight was the first time I have truly been afraid. Yes...afraid for our country.

I've joked about how "incompetent" I thought George W. Bush was. But I've always dosed it with a healthy bit of respect for him as a political opponent. Namely, I thought he was shrewd, dishonest, conniving, etc.

Tonight, though...I'm not so sure.

He looked absolutely clueless. He looked like he had no way out of the problems we are facing in Iraq, and is just trying to play out the string until the election.

I was not comforted by that, at all. A chill literally ran up and down my spine when I thought that this man was in charge of protecting us, and making day to day life and death decisions on national security. It scared the hell out of me.

In any event, I am firmly convinced the public and the media will continue the Kabuki dance of pretending that the emperor has clothes on. The focus groups and people interviewed for post press conference polls will all say they thought the press was "picking on" poor George.

Frankly, I weep for this country if we do not change leaders in November.
Yeah, yeah.

Over at The Daily Kos you get this too:
Some of the press conference was a rerun of typical Bush behaviors. He suggested that criticizing him or our actions in Iraq sends a bad message to our troops and our enemies--i.e., dissent is treason.
Yep, we all caught that. That's understood.

But this was a bonus observation:
.... Bush approaches the world as if the good things that happen to him are the result of virtue and the bad things the result of environment, but with other people it's the exact opposite. We're all susceptible to that mistake. But with Bush it's reached a truly bizarre level, and makes listening to him an unsettling experience.

When he's not questioned or challenged, or things are going swimmingly, he comes across as confident and resolute. But when the environment changes--like tonight, when even NYT correspondent Elizabeth Bumiller (!) asked a slightly pointed question, and the White House press corps showed signs that they're embarrassed about their performance over the last three years, Bush resumes smirking and becomes that smug jerk we all hated in high school.
Ouch!

Oh, in case you missed the reference, Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times has been taking a lot of crap in the last few months for her answer to why she didn't ask hard questions of Bush in the few previous press conferences, and she answer that she was too awed by the occasion and hard questions seemed inappropriate. Only press junkies followed that item.

Ah, but for a little humor over at Patriot Boy General JC Christian, Patriot, adds THIS:
Don't listen to the doomsayers. The current situation in Iraq is the best thing that's happened to America since 9-11. Remember that day? Remember how it united America? We're going to see a lot more of that kind of unification very soon.

Our Leader deserves the credit for that. After all, it was his policies that prompted Viceroy Bremmer to shut down a dissident Shi'i newspaper, thus sparking what has become the Iraqi Intifada. It was his policies that fueled the resulting disorder when a murder warrant was issued against Muqtada al-Sadr. It was his policies that drove the al-Mahdi Army recruitment efforts by introducing neutral Iraqis to the concept of collective punishment.

Our ally, Arial Sharon, the Shade of Shatilla, deserves to be credited with an assist. His ongoing campaign to make Hamas the preeminent power in Palestinian politics is on the brink of success. The secular-minded Fatah politicians will soon step aside as the Islamists of Hamas become the voice and the sword of the Palestinian people.

And it's not your father's Hamas. It is a radicalized organization, an extremist organization pushed even furter to the extreme, an organization seething with hatred for those who executed its most revered cleric as he was wheeled out of his mosque in a wheelchair, an organization that has become an international force, exerting influence into Faluja, Kut, and Baghdad.

That is where we are today.

Tomorrow, we will have unity. We will be a single people again, united in tragedy. Because tomorrow, we turn Muqtada al-Sadr into a martyr. Tomorrow, we back Sharon's plan to seize large portions of the West Bank. Tomorrow, we turn The War in Terrorism into The War on Islam. Tomorrow, we become jihadis.
Yes, another reference if you haven't been following the news. Arial Sharon will visit Bush at the ranch late this week and the big announcement will be that we support Arial Sharon's new peace initiative - Israel abandons everything in the Gaza Strip (let the Palestinians have it all) and keeps and expands all the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Everyone now bursts into a chorus of the theme song from the movie Exodus - This land is mine... God gave this land to me...

Hey, paraplegics in wheelchairs ARE dangerous. You have to blow them away.

Oh yeah, the 9-11 Commission continues its work. Last week Condoleezza Rice explained that the Bush administration would have done something about all the terrorist threats back in the summer of 2001 but no one TOLD them exactly WHAT they should do, no one gave them INSTRUCTIONS, after all. To quote her, "If someone had told us what to do...." So criticism is unfair. Yeah, yeah. How can you lead without specific instructions? Hey, what good is having subordinates if they don't tell you what you should do? And that presidential briefing from August 6th of that year wasn't full of warnings, even if the title said it was full of warnings. Who you gonna believe, Condi or your own eyes? Be a patriot - ya gotta believe Condi!

And the hearings today.... The former head of the FBI said Attorney General John Ashcroft, at a specific meeting he noted with date and time back in 2001, told him he didn't want to hear anything more about terrorist threats. Ashcroft warned him that the topic was irrelevant, and upbraided him for always harping on it. And that year on September 10th Ashcroft vetoed a big block of funds for more money and agents to work on terrorism issues - a matter of record. The Commission was too polite to ask about that. And then Ashcroft also testified at the end of the day to something else. Said he never made those "I Don't Want To Heat It" comments to the head of the FBI - never said it. Well, someone's lying. Doesn't matter. Ashcroft said the whole problem was with Bill Clinton - Bill and his folks screwed up the FBI and the supervising Justice Department with all kinds of stupid rules to protect privacy and free speech and crap like that (I paraphrase of course but check it out - and you decide) so he really couldn't get any anti-terrorism stuff done much at all. Slick Willie strikes again. That man ruined the country. Yeah, yeah.

So that was Thomas Jefferson's birthday.

___

Note: typos corrected 14 April...

Posted by Alan at 21:50 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 14 April 2004 09:51 PDT home

Monday, 12 April 2004

Topic: The Economy

Misery Loves Company: Economic data for most of us in the middle...

Today in CNN Money
Not so bad, not so good
Household income is little changed since 2000 -- not the message sent by either Kerry or Bush.
April 12, 2004: 2:39 PM EDT

I read it. It confused me.

But I liked this summary from Kevin Drum -
Kerry says middle class families are worse off and the rich are better off under George Bush.

- George Bush says that's not so: average income has gone up 5.9% in the past three years. Not bad!

- Oops, wait a second. That's "average" income. The right measure is "median" income, since the average is skewed upward by.....the rich being better off.

- Median household income has decreased 3.3% since 2000.

- But wait! If you take into account tax cuts and increased entitlement income, median household income has.....declined 0.6%.

Even flat income for three straight years is disastrous, of course, something the writer of the article seems not to understand. So no matter how you measure it, middle class families are worse off and the rich are better off under George Bush. Just like Kerry said.

It's worth noting that the article is non-bylined. I can understand why.
Well, today the Kerry campaign came out with its "Misery Index" - some sort of thing that's supposed to let folks know why things seem so bad, and how they got to be so bad, and then allow them to rag on Bush's methods for improving life here, at least economically. I would have preferred the thing be called the "Hard Times Index" as that sounds much more Woody Guthrie populist and much more appealing.

On the other hand, when I lived in the far upper left corner of New York, almost where it meets Canada at Niagara Falls, the radio station at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Brockport broadcast its daily "Dismality Index" - temperature and precipitation and cloud-cover and humidity and snow-cover and what not all balanced against each other. That was amusing, and made us all laugh as we looked out the window at the crap in the sky.

Maybe the economic "Misery Index" is okay.

Posted by Alan at 21:59 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
home


Topic: For policy wonks...

Is This the Problem?


"The Bush administration went into Iraq with a series of prejudices about Iraq, rogue states, nation-building, the Clinton administration, multilateralism and the U.N. It believed Iraq was going to vindicate these ideological positions. As events unfolded the administration proved stubbornly unwilling to look at facts on the ground, new evidence and the need for shifts in its basic approach. It was more important to prove that it was right than to get Iraq right."

From Our Last Real Chance
Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, April 19, 2004 issue

The emphasis is mine. Seems so. Moral clarity turns out to be just pride and stubbornness.

Posted by Alan at 21:55 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
home


Topic: The Law

Fat Tony and his Goon Squad

Dahlia Lithwick, the resident attorney and legal theorist over at SLATE.COM has some amusing thoughts today.

See Marshal, Marshal, Marshal - Scalia's goon squad
By Dahlia Lithwick - Posted Monday, April 12, 2004, at 1:38 PM PT - SLATE.COM

After a discussion of events in Hattiesburg, Mississippi last week - see You don't mess with Fat Tony in Just Above Sunset - where a deputy federal marshal at an Antonin Scalia speech forced two reporters to erase their recordings of Scalia's remarks, which was most likely unconstitutional and illegal - Lithwick notes the particular marshal involved now claims she was only following Scalia's orders, and even if those orders were unconstitutional or illegal, she really doesn't believe she or her boss believe did anything wrong.

Say what?

Then Lithwick trots out her stories:
... the most interesting question of all, is who are these marshals, and who do they think they answer to?

Some of the oddest conversations ever to be had in the United States of America are the ones between the reporters and marshals in the U.S. Supreme Court building. They resemble nothing so much as those bizarre discussions you'd have with your mother about waiting half an hour between a hot dog and a swim--the ones that ended in, "Because I said so." I have had marshals in the court confiscate newspapers and books (including, once, Franz Kafka's The Trial) for no articulable or articulated reason. I've seen them order the removal of neck scarves from some reporters, and head scarves from others, and I've seen them remove sketch artists in T-shirts. I have seen them remove handicapped protesters crawling up the front steps of the court building, while refusing to cite any rule that prohibits such conduct. These same marshals who demand a press badge to enter the courtroom, then march up during oral argument and ask that you not display it on your jacket. Query them as to why you cannot display the same badge needed to enter the proceedings, and they tell you that 3-inch plastic badges distract the justices.

I once watched a marshal confiscate a rather substantial piece of penis-shaped headgear from an appellant in a 9th Circuit appeal, in a case about unconstitutional censorship by local authorities who denied him the right to campaign for public office in his very large penis costume. He was running under the name Dick Head. At least one judge later wondered under what authority his costume had been ... "apprehended" to quote the marshal. But by then it was too late.

The point here isn't that federal marshals are bad people. Most of them are quite nice. The point is that, unlike most federal and state officials, they simply don't believe they answer to any body of law--they are pretty certain that they answer only to the justices. Imagine a police force answerable only to the mayor or federal prosecutors answerable only to John Ashcroft. The marshals have gone from providing security to the justices to being the court's own private militia.

The real problem highlighted by events in Hattiesburg isn't just that Scalia is paranoid or that he'd oddly prefer shaky handwritten notes of his speeches to accurate recordings. The real problem is that there is a small army of state officials who don't seem to be playing by a rulebook. They simply act at the caprice of our judges, and this should not be tolerated.
Really? What would be the fun in that?
_________

Update at noon Pacific Time, Tuesday, April 13, 2004:

Scalia Apologizes for Erasure of Reporters' Tapes of Speech
Justice Vows to Permit Recordings by Print Journalists
Charles Lane, The Washington Post, Tuesday, April 13, 2004; Page A17
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has issued written apologies for the destruction of two reporters' audiotapes by a deputy U.S. marshal in guarding him last week, and has promised to permit print journalists to record his public speeches in the future, according to a letter by the justice made public yesterday.

In an April 9 letter to Lucy A. Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which had protested the incident, Scalia said he had written to the two reporters, Antoinette Konz of the Hattiesburg American and Denise Grones of the Associated Press, "extending my apology and undertaking to revise my policy so as to permit recording for use of the print media."

Scalia called Dalglish's concern "well justified" and said he had been "as upset as you were" to learn of the deputy marshal's action, which, he said, "was not taken at my direction."

His letter was posted on the Internet yesterday by the Reporters Committee. It was his first known response to the incident, which occurred April 7.
The remainder of the item is a review of events.

There is this, however:
It was unclear yesterday whether Scalia's apology and change in policy would satisfy his critics. Though he indicated a willingness to let print reporters record his remarks for the sake of accurately quoting him, he rejected suggestions that he permit radio and television reporters to record his remarks for broadcast.

"We greatly appreciate Justice Scalia's prompt response to our letter," Dalglish said in a written statement. "However, we remain disappointed with his policy regarding electronic media coverage of his speeches, and hope he will reconsider."

Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, sent Scalia an open letter saying that his policy "discriminates against television and radio journalists, fosters less accurate reporting and undermines the principle at the very core of the First Amendment."

Frank Fisher, the Associated Press's Jackson, Miss., bureau chief, and Jon Broadbooks, executive editor of the Hattiesburg American, said their reporters had not received the letters from Scalia.

Fisher and Broadbooks both used the word "gratified" to sum up their feelings about Scalia's apologies, but said the issue of the deputy U.S. marshal's conduct remained unresolved. Both news organizations have protested to federal authorities.

"There is still the lingering question of why the marshal seized the recordings," Broadbooks said. "We feel it was illegal."
Well, yeah.

Posted by Alan at 17:48 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Tuesday, 13 April 2004 12:59 PDT home

Sunday, 11 April 2004

Topic: For policy wonks...

The policy of preemption discussed here....

Over at the Washington Times see Political fusillades by Walter Williams....

His point?
Fighting terrorism as well as rogue dictators requires a policy of pre-emption. During the 1930s, there should have been a pre-emptive strike on Nazi Germany. If Britain and France had the guts to do that, 60 million lives lost in World War II might have been spared. After World War II, when we held a monopoly on nuclear weapons, we should have told the Soviet Union that if it started making nuclear weapons we'd bomb its facilities. We would have avoided Soviet adventurism and trillions of dollars fighting a Cold War. Today, we should give axis-of-evil member North Korea notice to destroy its nuclear weapons or we'll do it for them.
And a riposte from the irreverent Digby over at Hullabaloo:
Well, it would be nice if our intelligence services could find their way out of a paper bag and provide us with, you know, real information about threats before we go around blowing shit up, but why sweat the small stuff?

I do like this new crystal ball theory of history, though. Just think, if France and Britain had pre-emptively "struck" Germany they could have prevented WWII. If we had pre-emptively "struck" the Soviets we could have prevented the Cold War. And presumably if the British had pre-emptively invaded France they could have prevented the Napoleonic Wars, too. But, I have to suppose that by "strike" he means some kind of magical incantation that paralyzes the population, because otherwise he's talking about starting wars and that usually means that those who are "struck," strike back. Which also means that unless you are willing to nuke the population or occupy it with an iron hand indefinitely, a war is going to result when somebody strikes. He apparently thinks that's fine it's just best if we do the starting.

But, not to worry. I think he also believes that the world will be so impressed by our ability to accurately foretell who is and isn't a threat that they'll just take our word for it and capitulate before we are forced to get really ugly. America is omnipotent and the sooner everybody gets with the program the safer they'll all be. That's what our great success in Iraq is all about. And it's working beautifully.
No one is playing nice these days....

Posted by Alan at 10:19 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Sunday, 11 April 2004 10:27 PDT home

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