Vacation. Sort of.

I'll have limited internet access, and limited access to publications like The Nation or The New Republic or pretty much any magazine with a title that refers to The United States of America.

I'll add the occasional "I'm not dead yet" post, but I'm afraid my incisive brand of reporting will be sadly absent from our national debate for the next few weeks. Don't read anything Andrew Sullivan writes without my help, kids. But the rest of my links are okay.

Blinding Flash of the Obvious©

This administration considers the national interest to be largely synonymous with President Bush's political interest--and will fight to keep information damaging to the president out of public view.

I suggest, that when the 9/11 Commission (imminently) hits it's deadline for releasing it's report and is (inevitably) having problems negotiating with the White House over what parts of the report to declassify, the commission simply say, "Well, we've hit our deadline and must disband. Since we can't come to a consensus with the administration over what to release, we are, regrettably, obligated to simply release the entire thing to the media. That really sucks, but we're all bound by the law after all."

Democracy in the Middle East, Almost

[L]ast week as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell met with Kuwaiti and Saudi officials ... Powell told reporters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Friday that the push for greater freedoms in the Middle East was "not a matter of satisfying the United States; it's a matter of satisfying the aspirations of the people in the Arab world."

But wait! Our allies the Saudis might be having a bit of a problem with that whole "democracy" thing. Just as Powell was praising their upcoming elections, TNR was reporting:

Saudi authorities rounded up and imprisoned several democracy activists who had formed a human rights group. The arrests, however, did not make much of an impression on Powell, who at a press conference praised America's relationship with the Saudi autocracy as "quite strong" while, beside him, Prince Saud Al Faisal dismissed the arrests as "an internal issue."

[S]hortly before Powell arrived, Saudi officials arrested 10 reformist figures, including a university professor, after they had called for the monarchy to move toward a more constitutional model. ... Saud, the foreign minister, said, "These people sowed dissension when the whole country was looking for unity and a clear vision, especially at a time when it is facing a terrorist threat."

The U.S. has a long history of supporting the Saudi monarchy even as it stifles dissent. The liberals who complain about our questionable support for Israel don't complain as often as I'd like about this; Israel is only a shadow of this hypocrisy. TNR quotes one Saudi: "The authorities want to teach the liberals a lesson that they do not care what America thinks and that they can put them in jail at any time."

The problem isn't that the Saudi's don't care what America thinks. The problem is that America doesn't care what the Saudi's do.

Jeering the Republic

The editors seem to have fallen into the same 'a victory for the socialists is a victory for the terrorists' trap that their writer Andrew Sullivan has been infected with. I doubt it's contagious.

The Spanish election was obviously a referendum on terrorism; and if the American election will not also be such an exercise, it will be because the Democrats will have persuaded Americans of their deadly seriousness in foreign affairs, which they have not yet done. To be sure, it is possible to oppose Al Qaeda and to oppose the war in Iraq. But about one thing we should be clear: It is not possible to oppose Al Qaeda and to oppose the United States. Such a view is not coherent and not serious. In the world as it actually exists, the most effective enemy of Al Qaeda is the United States.

The United States is not the most effective enemy of Al Qaeda in the world. Our operations in Afghanistan were a tremendous impediment to Al Qaeda operations around the world, a significant accomplishment; the best shot at ending Al Qaeda outright, however, comes from the Islamic reformist movement that is emerging in the most ironic of places: Iran. There is also Turkey as a model of how Islam can coexist with democracy. These forces offer less of a fireworks display than occupying Afghanistan or Iraq, but when the enemy is a broad ideological movement, such as militant Islamic anti-Americanism, the best opposition comes from the same place: a broad ideological movement personified by people like Shohreh Aghdashloo.

It is difficult to oppose Al Qaeda and to oppose the United States, but a few people do manage it. Gore Vidal, most notably. It is certainly possible to oppose militant fundamentalist Islam and oppose American imperialism. It is even, I would contend, logical.

Last one: did you notice the bit about the American election offering advice to the Democrats? I did, and I wonder when the presidential election became an election between the Democrats and the Republicans? Last time I checked, we had a couple of people or at least politicians running for office. John Kerry must "convince the American people of [his] deadly seriousness in foreign affairs," not the Democrats. The Democratic Party is an organization to which John Kerry belongs, which he gets money and support from; sensible people much prefer a president who will put the party's interests behind the countries and even behind his own. Most people prefer this, at a gut level. I certainly prefer it, and I'd be comforted if I knew The New Republic preferred it too.

Cheering the Republic

Here's an exercpt from last week's Notebook feature:

On "Face the Nation" this Sunday ... [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfield said:

You and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase 'immediate threat.' I didn't. The president didn't. ... If you have any citations, I'd like to see 'em.

Then, like a gift from the Gods of Nexis, Friedman produced such a citation:

Friedman: We have one here. It says "some have argued that the nu"--this is you speaking--"that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain."

Rumsfeld: And--and--

Friedman: It was close to imminent.

Rumsfeld: Well, I've--I've tried to be precise, and I've tried to be accurate. I'm s--suppose I've--

Friedman: "No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq."

Rumsfeld: Mm-hmm. It--my view of--of the situation was that he--he had--we--we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that--that we believed and we still do not know--we will know.

Perhaps that will put the "imminence" debate to rest--once and for all.

Missing the Point

Oh, and in the back, on page A6 is a three-column inch AP story. Here it is, in it's entirety:

     The Homeland Security Department said yesterday that it was putting a hold on new hires at two bureaus for a few weeks while it analyzed whether they were spending more than their budgets allow.
    Department spokesman Dennis Murphy said budget analysts were reviewing the payroll systems of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection and of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The analysts are trying to determine the accuracy of initial projections for their spending for the whole year.
    Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the House Democratic Task Force on Homeland Security, said the action would hamper efforts to prevent terrorists from entering the country.
    "This administration has spared no expense to open new firehouses in Iraq but won't even keep our Department of Homeland Security solvent," Maloney said in a statement.
    The hold on hiring does not affect the Transportation Security Administration, Murphy said.
    The move was first reported yesterday by the Wall Street Journal.

I didn't think so.

Fetus-tacular!

Under the Senate-passed bill [H.R. 1997], violence against a pregnant woman would be regarded as two crimes: one against the woman, the other against her unborn child, defined as "a member of the species Homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb." An assailant would not have to know a woman was pregnant to be prosecuted.

H.R. 1997's mostly Republican backers denied that this definition was intended to erode abortion rights and embryonic stem-cell research by suggesting that life begins at conception.

Because this bill is an attempt to chip away at abortion rights. National Right to Life called the Feinstien version a "killer amendment." (They also took a moment to assail John Kerry for voting for the Feinstein bill and against H.R. 1997. I can't wait for the ads: "John Kerry doesn't kiss babies. He kills them!") They are laying the groundwork for a new constitutional challenge to Roe v. Wade. Anti-abortion activists know they will not get enough senators and congressmen to vote outright to end abortion rights. It's an old hot-button, and any politician still dicking around with that is seen as stodgy and old: everyone knows gay marriage is this season's threat to our civilization.

But with a Supreme Court that is very close to overturning Roe as it is, and the chance that Bush will get the chance to appoint a new justice, there's chance to mount a new court challenge. All that's needed is a legal basis for it.

This bill will create that legal basis. This also opens up the chance for a rightist federal attorney somewhere to try and charge some abortion clinic with murder one. It also creates legal challenges for stem cell research, something conservatives need as President Bush's compromise is exposed as bad science.

Anti-choicers have decided to gradually chip away at abortion rights, rather than get them all in one blow. It's a long term strategy. And it's working.

Hickville Dispatch©

When she first took office, a small group within the Utah legislature argued that Walker shouldn't be called "Governor Walker," but rather "Acting Governor Walker." The majority of the Utah legislature is much better at hiding their latent sexism. It's pervasive sexism as well; when the feminists were burning bras, Olene Walker was taking time off to be a housewife, and only returned to her career as a professor when her children were grown. She is now a veteran great-grandmother and, oh yeah, Governor of the State of Utah.

Now that an election looms, it's quite clear that the Republican establishment will not tolerate a female governor. Rather than unify behind walker, as they did several times for Leavitt, the Utah Legislature has offered up eight separate primary challengers to attack Walker. Salt Lake City Weekly has a good report on the many, many Utah politicos arranging themselves against walker. When I say Utah politicos, I'm referring to the uber-conservatives that dominate: they consider the Utah teacher's union to be Satan-spawned, and some have accused Orrin Hatch of caving to the liberals. One, Frank Pignaelli, wrote that Walker was "Utah's first Democratic Female Governor."

The politicos aren't pulling any punches. So much for chivalry. Walker vetoed a school-voucher bill earlier this year because of it appeared to violate the Utah constitution and had an inadequate funding mechanism. To the Utah Legislature, who pass several unconstitutional "message bills" each year, this translated into support of the teacher's union and that means she doesn't support education. The politicos also love freeways, whereas Walker isn't so fond of turning Salt Lake into L.A.:

The governor and speaker exchanged another round of verbal blows over transportation issues, focusing on the aging stretch of Interstate 15 through Utah County.

Criticizing Walker for proposing to shift money from roads to schools, Stephens said: "We cannot continue to have this type of leadership in the state."

• She doesn't fund school vouchers.
• She wants to spend more on schools and less on roads.

One quality of this sort of thinking is that you can direct it in favor or against anyone; it operates on a purely emotional level, without regard for facts. The fact that they are employing it against one of their own instead of Utah's Official Democratic Punching Bag©, Rocky Anderson, means they don't like Walker. And the only reason they don't? Well, she's a woman. What's she doing out of the kitchen?

I don't know if the people of Utah feel that way, but The Trib's article was less than encouraging:

The 400-plus crowd that packed into the Provo City Library for the first debate following Tuesday's neighborhood caucuses cheered the criticisms of Walker.

Damned if They Do...

Whereas the conventional wisdom up to this point more or less held that another attack would aide Bush's reelection (though that CW took a bit of a hit after the attacks in Spain), wouldn't the practical effect of the Clarke book and the 9/11 commission hearings be to make Bush extremely vulnerable politically in that scenario? It would very quickly connect the current abstract criticism [Richard Clarke's book, the 9/11 commission] to first-hand experience ...

The flip side of this is the assumption that Kerry has a chance if there are no more terrorist attacks and the economy continues to spiral. That is disputed--The L.A. Times's Ron Brownstien has argued against this. But the general wisdom that in case of a terrorist attack Bush wins has remained relatively unchallenged.

Until now.

Listen: Scheiber is arguing in his blog, and people can get in trouble for things on your blog, as Greg Easterbrook did earlier this year. Unlike Easterbrook, Scheiber isn't going to have to apologize to the ADL or beg Michael Eisner not to destroy his career. But this is one of those half baked ideas that seem to make their way into the blogosphere; similar to when I suggested that we should make Jack Welch president last month.

Bottom line, the conventional wisdom is right on this one. We now have some distance from 9/11, and people are ready to consider what might have gone wrong. If there is another attack, it will prompt some people to accuse Bush (accurately) of not doing enough to beef up homeland security; but the majority of people out there will knee-jerk to his side. Bush is very good at looking presidential, at talking about how great America is, and implying that there will be divine vengeance for those who cause us to suffer. It's not an argument that makes much sense; but it's a comforting one. And after something terrible happens, people are happy with what Kurt Vonnegut used to call "comforting lies."

Al Jazeera/CNN Merger

Colin "I Haven't Quit Yet" Powell

In his testimony, Powell confirmed one claim by Clarke that Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary who strongly supported U.S. military action against Iraq, suggested an attack on the government of Saddam Hussein during a meeting at Camp David just four days after the 2001 attacks. President Bush "said first things first," Powell said. "He decided on Afghanistan." Wolfowitz, who appeared alongside Rumsfeld later, did not directly address the issue.

It's well known that Powell has been frustrated by Wolfowitz, his boss Rumsfield and Defense many times since he took over the State Department. Bush depends on the advice of the Pentagon in a way he seems to have learned from Tom Clancy novels. This has to be dragging on the Secretary of State, and I wonder if this buried-in-the-fine-print blow to Defense is a momentary lapse, or if he might be getting closer to the breaking point.

First the Secretary of the Treasury resigned and then wrote a book bashing Bush. Then the NSC's counterterrorism chief did the same. If the Secretary of State resigns -- well, that's to pat a pattern. It won't happen. My prediction: Colin Powell will find a quiet way to resign. The cabinet is required to resign at if a President wins a second term, so he can let them go without a fuss if he'd like to replace any of them. Colin Powell won't try to influence the election one way or the other, because no matter who wins, he won't have a second term.

Witty & Insightful©

Thinking the guy up ahead knows what he's doing is the most dangerous religion there is.

Frank
Brief Encounters on the Inland Waterway
By Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

From the Bar©

He is like one of David Weber's 'citizen captains' who will go down fighting for Rob Pierre and the Committee for Public Safety. There is a poetry to his speech, a tragedy fit only for the grand melodramas of Shakespeare and Science Fiction.

Godspeed, Mr. Powell; Godspeed.

Er, now _that_ is out of my system ... what do we think will be the result of the 9/11 commission? A whitewash on behalf of the administration? An election-year broadside victor for the democrats? Not a balanced look at the facts, surely.

THE GUARDIAN's initial report on the commission

The preliminary report said the U.S. government had determined bin Laden was a key terrorist financier as early as 1995, but that efforts to expel him from Sudan stalled after Clinton officials determined he couldn't be brought to the United States without an indictment. A year later, bin Laden left Sudan and set up his base in Afghanistan without resistance.

The 9/11 Commission’s official website is here. At first glance, not much there, just schedules and opening statements. Seating, it seems, is on a first come first serve basis for the media and members of the public. The commission's general counsel was for many years a partner in the Washington law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering.

Eight more months of this folks, and then either John Kerry is president-elect, or I move to Canada.

*TDNAC Scale: Tricky Dick's Not A Crook Scale of Bullshit.

The Shiek

However, I wonder what anyone thinks they are accomplishing here. Kill Shiek Ahmed Yassin, let him live - either way, there are a lot of people out there like Muhammad Abu Hussa, a seventeen year old Palestinian quoted in THE NEW YORK TIMES:

"The fingernail of Sheik Yassin is worth all the Jewish people ... the Jews should be annihilated." He made chopping gestures at his throat, hands and legs. "They should be turned into parts."

So - what are we accomplishing by killing him? The Palestinians are angry, but they are always angry. The Egyptians are angry and finally forgetting Sadat. The Europeans are angry because Israel was their parents idea, and therefor bad. The Americans are preoccupied, but still find time to sign the checks.

So - what are we accomplishing by killing Shiek Ahmed Yassin? Well, to be fair to the people of the war-torn former Roman province, it's not easy to accomplish anything in a city so irrational it has a psychiatric disorder named after it.

Fedralism v. Sovereignity

How many of you have heard of John Hanson? Believe it or not, he was the first American President, almost a decade before George Washington.

So, why haven't we been taught about him in school. Because poor old Hanson had the misfortune of being president under the Articles of Confederation, the first attempt after the Revolution to create a government. It didn't work.

Why,you ask? Therein lies the crux of of this topic, and something I've been thinking about for sometime. I've had the pleasure of participating in many a lively debate here at the Bar, and I have been impressed time and again with the caliber of minds that reside here. This seemed the perfect place to get some other perspectives on the subject.

Anyway, back to the Articles of Confederation. The Articles, as a form of government, didn't even last a decade. There were many problems from the start, some of the largest being the problems they ran into with taxes and tarriffs.

Let's say for example that you are a farmer in Vermont, and your biggest cash crop is maple syrup. You want to sell it down south, knowing that you will be able to charge more in Georgia than you would in Vermont, because they don't make maple syrup in Georgia. So you load up your wagons and start heading south.

And run right into the tarriff problem. As you cross into New York, a border guard stops you and demands that you pay a rather healthy fee for the privledge of using New York's roads on your way to Georgia. The same thing happens at the Pennsylvania border. And Maryland. And Virginia. By time you get to Georgia, you've priced yourself right out of the market.

The military, or lack thereof, was another problem. There was no one militia, there was 13 seperate armies, often working at cross purposes with each other. If the Constitution had not been drafted in 1789 to address these and other problems, America would have been extremely vulnerable when the War of 1812 rolled around. We might have ended up as British colonies again, although England's problems with Napolean at the time makes that unlikely.

So, where am I going with this?

If you were to ask most people what it was they really and truly wanted in this life, I think that most of them would say that all they want is to have the opportunity to live in peace, raise their families, and have the possibility of bettering their situation, all with a minimal amount of hassle from the government. These are the ideas that America was founded on, and in my humble opinion we've done fairly well in maintaining those ideals over the last 200 years. Certainly we've done better than most of the other nations in the world.

The ironic thing is that the Constitution of the United States, which has given us those two centuries of the good life, was bitterly opposed by many of the founding fathers, who feared a repressive central government. Well, that is certainly understandable, especially coming on the heels of the Revolution. Spending the better part of a decade fighting against just such a regime is bound to leave a bitter taste in anyones mouth. There were many people that wanted to keep the government small and local, so as to make sure they would never have to worry about "Big Brother". Hence the Articles of Confederation.

The problem was, and still is for that matter, is that it doesn't work. When I was stationed in Germany in the mid '80s, one of my buddies took a vaction in one of the neighboring European countries. He came back saying what a great time he'd had, how friendly everybody was, how beautiful the towns and countryside were, and how much he wanted to visit the capitol again someday.

What was this place, you ask? Sarajevo, Yugoslavia.

Yes, that Sarajevo. Marshal Tito realized back during WWII that his nation was filled with a lot of cantakerous people that couldn't stand each other, with ethnic and cultural feuds that spanned a thousand years. So he clamped down, hard. But he also created a rule of law that was fairly equitable, at least for a Communist country, and created economic opportunities that made Yugoslavia second only to East Germany in quality goods and service amongst the Warsaw Pact Nations.

Ask anybody in the former nation of Yugoslavia whether they were better off in 1985 or 1995, and see what they say. I'm reasonably sure I can guess their answer.

Hold on, I'm almost there.

Historically speaking, small autonomous nations or tribes don't work, not in the long run. Sure, you get to preserve your "cultural identity", whatever the hell that means, but at what cost? More often than not, you're subject to the petty whims of the local warlord or chief, fighting constantly with the neighboring clans or countries to maintain your position. Ask the individual how much his daily life resembles the ideal I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. Pretty much, it doesn't.

Now, I relaize that bigger is not always better; the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the PRC all leap to mind. And there are tons of other examples of brutal empires from history to point at as well. But it seems to me that if you really and truly want peace, then the only way is to unite everyone under the same banner, much as Tito did.

The UN, I hear someone say? Please, let's be serious. The UN is a noble idea, that was fatally flawed from the start. You can't get 191 nations to agree on anything, and the UN has no power to enforce any of it's resolutions, even if you could get everyone to agree.

And finally, isn't it ironic that the 2 times in history that are generally considered to be the most peaceful, comparitively speaking, were created by stong, centrally governed empires. I refer of course to the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannica.

OK, I'm done.

Defenders of the Republic

It's a very short bill that reads, in part,

The Congress may, if two thirds of each House agree, reverse a judgment of the United States Supreme Court.

All right, I hereby apologize for bothering to call attention to yet another nut-ball bill with 11 sponsors in the house and about as much chance of becoming the law of the land as I have of bedding Eleanor Roosevelt.

I am concerned, however, by a growing trend in the right to view not just liberal judges with contempt, but the judicial system as a whole. D.J. Connolly argues that judicial activism causes crime. He posits that judicial decisions in the '60's and '70's affirming the rights of criminals set off a "judicially created crime wave." Robert Bork's new book argues against the growing internationalization of law - American judges considering the decisions of foreign courts when ruling. Cause those dirty foreigners have nothing of value except for oil and cheap labor. Right up to President Bush, conservatives are arguing against the tendancy of the courts to overturn laws they deem unconstitutional. They are fighting a plauge of 'judicial activism.' Where exactly is this movement against 'judicial activism' coming from? I can only think of three court cases that have penetrated the national consciousness in the new millennium, and only one of those was a SCOTUS case.

The Mass Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage of course, but we've been over and over than one decision again and again and again. The 9th Circuit may have ruled against 'under God,' but that case hasn't been reviewed by SCOTUS yet, and the majority of American's no longer care. That leaves only Larwence v. Texas as a recent major SCOTUS case, and the ruling their was hardly out of line with the constitution or most American's values.

So, where is this plague of leftist activist judges? So far this year, the Supremes have heard the following cases:

• CONNECTICUT DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY v. DOE; upheld the constitutionality of Megan's Law and the sex offender registry; this was a centrist-right ruling.
• BLACK & DECKER DISABILITY PLAN v. NORD; overturned a 9th Circuit decision that B&D's insurance must defer to treating physicians when granting or denying workers comp claims. This was a victory for the corporations and a right-of-center ruling.
• INYO COUNTY v. PAIUTE-SHOSHONE INDIANS OF THE BISHOP COMMUNITY; ruled that an Indian casino must turn over payroll records of employees being investigated by the federal government. A blow to the sovereignty of Indian tribes (and we thought that went out of style a hundred and fifty years ago) this decision also overturned a 9th circuit ruling. This was a centrist-right ruling.

From the Bar©

Scheiber is discussing the classic criticisms of the Bushies tax cuts.

Liberals in Congress and at think tanks like the Economic Policy Institute offer three basic critiques: that the Bushies should have targeted the bulk of their tax cuts toward the working poor and middle class, who would have been more likely to spend their tax savings than more affluent beneficiaries ... [but] there is increasing evidence that affluent people spend a higher proportion of their income than economic models have traditionally predicted.

Or maybe not. The Association of Travel Marketing Executives has a report about how heavily they depend on the affluent, and specifically on business travel. In the American households earning $70,000 or more a year (17% of households), 96% travels. High-school janitors and cabbies don't take quite as many vacations. So perhaps the upper-class (as opposed to the rich) is very important to our consumer economy.

But that argument just emphasises the class system in America. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a book by Barbara Ehrenreich, chronicles live among those getting by on $6-8 an hour. I recommend Ehrenreich's book above a more 'scholarly' work because the economic facts are deceptively simple: the working poor comprise one in three Americans, and it's not easy for them to make ends meet. But Nickel and Dimed is a good way to get the fundamental truth behind that statistic.

And it changes the debate. The temporary economic problems imposed by the Bush administration, while bad (even in Scheiber's opinion), still ignore the existence of a significant class division in America. Liberals seem to be arguing that the tax cuts need to be targeted at the lower class in order to stimulate the economy. I would say that the economy is fundamentally flawed (or at least fundamentally unfair). There doesn't seem to be much point in arguing who should get the larger tax cut: the CEO of Citigroup or the woman who cleans his apartment. Either way, the CEO still earns more than three hundred million dollars a year, the maid still earns less than thirty thousand.

A Polish Joke

• Polish President says he was misled on Iraq The Kansas City Star
• Polish President Assures Bush His Troops Will Stay in Iraq The New York Times

"I personally think that today, Iraq without Saddam Hussein is a truly better Iraq than with Saddam Hussein. But naturally I also feel uncomfortable due to the fact that we were misled with the information on weapons of mass destruction."

The Passion of the Maccabees

"The Maccabee family stood up, and they made war, they stuck by their guns, and they came out winning," he said. "It's like a western."

Oh, well. He's made bad movies set in the 1970's (We Were Soldiers), the 1870's (Maverick), the 1770's (The Patriot), the 1670's (Hamlet) and the 1570's (the aformentioned Pocahontas). So, leaving aside the Passion debate, and the fact that Maverick was actually kinda alright, and had some cool stuff but that was usually in scenes with James Garner, this whole Jewish history as a John Wayne movie thing ... well, it keeps giving me flashbacks to that scene in the HBO movie about Pancho Villa where Alan Arkin wields a jeep-mounted machine gun so like Mad Max's ...

I need to lie down now, or at least go back to talking about politics.

Special Rights

[Rhea County, TN] County Attorney Gary Fritts also was asked by [county Commissioner J.C.] Fugate to find the best way to enact a local law banning homosexuals from living in Rhea County.

A Sack With a Dollar Sign

In cash alone, [Sanford] Weill, who turned 71 yesterday, earned $30 million, or about $111,000 for every day before he stepped down as chief executive [of Citigroup] on Oct. 1, while remaining the company's chairman. ... Last October, he sold 5.57 million shares back to the company for $262.4 million. He also realized $23 million from exercising options, the proxy shows.

It's not just that Sandy's earning more money than anyone in this country except Mel Gibson and George Bush. The really bothersome bit is that Sandy isn't very good at his job. Last year, Citigroup was hit with $400 million in fines for "conflict of interest," which is code for screwing over your customers. Then Sandy had to withdraw his application to be a director of the NYSE after someone pointed out that his company had just been fined four hundred mil for screwing over it's customers and maybe he shouldn't be in charge of keeping companies on the NYSE ethical.

Greg Easterbrook does a good job tearing into how overpaid Sandy and other CEO's are. But look closely at those numbers. The majority of Sandy's money comes from stock options. That makes Sanford Weill a bona fide member of "the Investment Class." Bush economic policy revolves around tax cuts for precisely this class, counting on them to create more jobs by creating new businesses. But as he is already earning $400 million a year with his existing business, what incentive does Sandy have to go start a new firm and take such a high risk of failure?

Maybe he could hire some new maids or something. Trickle, trickle.

The bin Laden video...

The MSNBC article, by Lisa Myers, continues:

There was a larger issue: The Clinton administration treated bin Laden as a law enforcement problem.

There are a lot of people in this country who refuse to treat terrorism as a criminal matter. Like drugs they want a War with a capital 'W.' Missing the blindingly obvious, Andrew Sullivan blogs:

Starting with Spain, and wrecking the anti-terror alliance of New Europe, was a master-stroke. But it has an added effect of demoralizing the others - especially Italy. That's why Romano Prodi's astonishing disavowal of any force in response to terrorism was so devastating.

Blinding Flash of the Obvious©

A CNN poll shows 84% of Americans think Iraq is better off without Saddam.

Books and Libraries

Funding has been under assault for some time. In March 2003, the Pennsylvania Statehouse cut library aid by half. They lost $37 million dollars, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Library director David Belanger is still thinking about "cutting a little bit of everything." And this is hardly the only problem the library employees are facing. An eight-year old girl was raped and beaten in a restroom at a branch in the Old City area of Philadelphia recently. The library staff has been focusing on security concerns, and also dealing, like library staffs everywhere, with a lot of people who come simply because they want free internet access.

Being one of the people who uses the computers at the library a lot, I can't complain too much about that. But I have a half dozen books checked out right now (a couple of them good). I grew up in the library. First the Sweet Branch of the Salt Lake City Public Library, on 9th avenue. The employees there remember me before I remember me; I was listening to story-time there before I could walk. Later, when Salt Lake opened a brand-new downtown library, the third-largest and most modern library in the nation, I spent most of my free time there. I read, I used the computers, I purchased Neil Gaiman's comic books in the comic book story, I got coffee in the cafè, I met old friends who had transferred from the Sweet Branch to work in the new one, I met new friends, a couple of tricks ... it was awesome. When I got to Philadelphia, the first place I found was the Philadelphia Free Library. When I get to Charleston, the first place I go will be the Charleston library.

Things aren't looking up for the library. Pennsylvania used virtually it's entire rainy-day fund in the 2002-2003 fiscal year, leading to the cuts in 2003-04; they aren't likely to be reversed anytime soon. The 2004 budget overviewis has a whole lot of reminders of how bad the economy is. Maybe, compared to jobs and schools and roads and cops, the library isn't number one in the priority list for a responsible state governor. But whenever I move to a new city, the first place I go will always be the library.

From the Bar©

It's a wrap-up of everything going on with the Department of Homeland Security since it's inception last year.

There's about a page of various DHS officials complaining about the way Customs efficient services have been taken over by the inefficient, bureocratic politicos that used to staff the INS. One of the reasons the INS and Customs were both folded into DHS was to get the INS to follow Customs' better policies and procedures. Now the opposite is happening.

Another of the key justifications for creating the DHS was to create a clearing house that would share info gathered by various police forces. Well, DHS has absolutely _nothing_ on that. They have taken so long that this particular function was sent over to the FBI. And then Rumsfield created a similar group at the Pentagon. So instead of a single, efficient buerocratic structure, we now have three separate departments with overlapping missions. Three.

We don't need to replace Bush with Kerry. We need to replace him with Jack Welsch or Micheal Eisner.

How to Lie

There is a better way. We don't have to be subjected to thinly veiled accusations from a third-party that, for tax reasons, is unaffiliated with the candidate their commercial wants you to vote for. We have seen quite enough of the Omniscient Narrator, of the menacing black & white still of The Other Guy, of the Big Bold Bullet Point showing just how many times The Other Guy voted to cut senior citizens and give money to evildoers; we do not ever want to hear the question posed, "Do you really want to vote for a man like John Kerry/Al Gore/John McCain?" Never again.

I am not old enough to remember Ronald Reagan's campaign commercials. I have heard a story, though, that the Gipper would sit down in front of a camera, look into the lens (and our souls) and talk about things. Why we should vote for him, I imagine, he probably lied a lot. As politicians do. It sounds wonderful. Maybe I'm reading things into what I've only heard of as a legend, but I can imagine a better way:

FADE IN:

FADE OUT.

The Rain in Spain

It's a spectacular result for Islamist terrorism, and a chilling portent of Europe's future. A close election campaign, with Aznar's party slightly ahead, ended with the Popular Party's defeat and the socialist opposition winning. It might be argued that the Aznar government's dogged refusal to admit the obvious quickly enough led people to blame it for a cover-up. But why did they seek to delay assigning the blame on al Qaeda? Because they knew that if al Qaeda were seen to be responsible, the Spanish public would blame Aznar not bin Laden!

Of course there are. But that was just the obligatory libertarian isolationist rant. There is a deeper logical disconnect in condemning the socialists victory as a victory for the terrorists. This is something that even some Spanish politicians are blind to. The Washington Post quotes Gustavo de Arustegui, a Popular Party MP: "[the terrorists] have achieved all their objectives." De Arustegui, Sullivan, and the Establish shed Wisdom see the rise of the socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and his party as a weakening in policy; they see Zapatero's promise to remove Spain's 1200 troops in Iraq as a victory for the terrorists.

No.

If Zapatero is planning on appeasing al Qaeda, someone needs to tell him that. The Post:

"My immediate priority will be to combat all kinds of terrorism," Zapatero said. "The terrorists must know that they will confront all of us together. We will win."

This is hardly Neville Chamberlain. What the Spaniards are calling for is, in Zapatero's words, "a government of change." They are opposed to fighting oil wars in Iraq, they are opposed to the way Bush is fighting the war on terror.

Maybe they're wrong. Maybe invading Iraq is the way to stop al Qaeda. But what happened in Spain was an election, a change in government that will result in different policy and different leaders. It is, in a word, democracy. Isn't the war on terror a war to protect freedom? Not just our own, but the democratic freedoms of the entire world. If that's so, I'm not going to call people exercising the freedoms we're fighting for a defeat.

NCAA Basketball

Pity they're not worked up about the fact that St. Joseph's will graduate less than half it's black players this year. Greg Easterbrook talks about the failure of the NCAA to graduate the black players on basketball scholarships:

How about plucky Saint Joseph's, this year's sentimental favorite and much-hyped in the media as a school that's winning games and yet still cares about education? Here are St. Joseph's page graduation rates. One column for men's basketball gives an African American graduation rate of 43 percent, well below the school's overall graduation rate of 73 percent. Most other figures about St. Joe's basketball are blank, just those asterisks that lead to the word "suppressed."

Do black athletes have a right not to get an education? Of course. If my white friend Paul has the right to skip classes at Amherst to pick up chicks, so do basketball players, no matter how much Paul dislikes the competition. But the NCAA has long faced controversy of giving scholarships to athletes and then, once the tickets have been sold, not giving a damn about the athletes' education. Even Sports Illustrated has published an article on the subject.

It's exploitative for the NCAA to give some big black kid a scholarship as long as he sells tickets. It's also unbecoming of a public institution; colleges are schools, and schools can't be slaves to the whims of the free market.

But we also need to recognize the personal responsibility of the athletes involved. Some to graduate; the ones that really want an education get it. So, let me say something to all the basketball players in the NCAA: If you're going to go to college, it's about more than just a basketball game, about more than just picking up chicks. You should really go to class once in a while.

From the Bar©

But by trying to focus on their opponent's obvious weaknesses, [Dems] are missing the chance to neutralize their own. Democrats in general--and Kerry in particular--face an uphill struggle in convincing voters that they can be tough on national security. They ought to be running ads that let voters know that if a terrorist attack occurs on President Kerry's watch, he will respond confidently and with military force. Democrats should be reminding voters--most of whom view homeland security as a Bush strength--that it was actually Democrats who proposed the idea for a homeland security department, and that it was Bush who blocked the proposal for months."

For the necessary negative ads, no more half-veiled insinuations. John Kerry, candidate for president, should sit down and say, "I believe my opponent is corrupt, and I am going to stand behind that, and not back down or use anyone else to attack him for me. I am going to tell you exactly what I think for the next thirty seconds, and why."

Perhaps it's the insulating effect of the beltway. Perhaps its the fact that both sides use the same P.R. companies. Maybe it's cheaper to just change the name on a commercial every two years.

Election ads rely, from a storytelling perspective, far too much on the ominiscent narrator and the still of important national events and the portrait of a candidate riding a horse. I think the intelligence of the half of the American people who bother to vote has been greatly underestimated. At the very least, the audience has grown used to the conventions. We need to shake things up. We need an ad for a presidential candidate narrated by the actual presidential candidate.

Monday Morning

I'm sitting at my Internet Cafe, writing and half-listening to CNN. I don't like CNN. In addition to repeatedly being subjected to the oxymoronic phrase "in depth coverage on CNN" I have also had to listen to the followng assertions made by anchors who have no doubt had cosmetic surgery allowing them to keep a straight face.

1. The Spanish elections represent "the overthrow of a government." Because elections are the same thing as an armed uprising.
2. The U.S. had "access to intelligence from U.N. inspectors on the ground" back when Iraq was kicking out the U.N. inspectors.
3. Areil Sharon canceled a meeting with Palestinian officials because Israeli helicopter gunships struck Palestinian targets. Because, like, he wouldn't have any control over that.
4. Said with extreme puzzlement: "Congress, which is Republican, is not really making [the budget] easy for the President."

Still Hickville, Again

• 1. The pictures are stolen from SLCC.
• 2. The woman is charged with murder.
• 3. A Magna man is charged with illegally breeding Piranha; a DWR officer called the meat-eating fish "kind of a hazard."
• 4. A state senator refers to the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah (HEAL) as "Helping Educate Anal Liberals."
• 5. Two teenage boys are charged with beating their counselor at a "youth camp" to death with a baseball bat.
• 6. Gubernatorial canididate Jon Huntsman Jr. brags about being concieved in a town named "beaver."
• 7. Governor Olene Walker's husband, Myron Walker, finally has his E-mail address changed from firstlady@utah.gov.

Still hickville.

Witty and Insightful©

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

Gore Vidal

Madrid

With time, all causes cease, and all terrorist groups disband or wither away.

Still Hickville

So, to sum up, Salt Lake City is still hickville. I've heard a theory that the people in New York & L.A. who most despise "the midwest" and "the flyovers" are the ones who grew up in said wasteland. I can believe that. I'm going to try and avoide using the words 'the midwest' as code for everywhere between the Potomac and the San Andreas Fault, but I'm not going to hide my own bias against them.

Meet God, Mister Idaho 2004

They say here "all roads lead to Mishnory." To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.

A Marriage of Convience

There's no possible reason to give gay couples something that walks, talks and squawks like a marriage but is called something else - except to maintain a purely semantic distinction, whose purpose is to reaffirm the inferiority of homosexual couples. Since many of these couples will get married in a religious ceremony as well, they may well describe themselves simply as married anyway. In time, common parlance will simply refer to all of the above as married. The only real difference may be that a civil union will be less transportable to other states. But that will also surely change, as some states will agree to recognize such civil unions, just as New York state has said it will agree to recognize Massachusetts' civil marriages.

But what Sullivan and so many others seem to be losing track of in this sound bite farcas is the timeline involved here. The Presidential election may be in November, but the Massachusetts Amendment has to be approved by their legislature again in 2005 and has to pass as a referendum in 2006; the San Fransisco case will take at least two years to wind its way through to the California Surpreme Court and longer than that if the US Supremes agree to hear it.

All that time does two things. First, it gives a lot of gay couples the chance to marry in Boston (and the unimportant areas of the Commonwealth). It is harder to take someone's marriage away than it is to prevent them from getting married in the first place. Especially with the children that will be involved by that time.

Second, it gives people time to get used to the idea. We may be in for a vicious bloodbath of base, emotionally manipulative attacks this year, but it's hard to keep that up. And after the years it takes an Amendment to get to ballots (or the states, if the federal amendment passes Congress) people will have realized how, in the end, who marries who doesn't matter.

Not even a little.

Witty and Insightful©

But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Thomas Jefferson
Notes on Virginia, 1782

Kerryphilia

He won't have it long. The interests of Europe and America have been moving apart for the past decade. Communism fell, and now what do we have to pull us together? Europeans distrust Israel, we distrust the Palestinians. We're obsessed with the Greater Middle East, we think the EU should take Turkey and continue to expand. Europe, not so much. There are signifigant structural diffrences in Imperial and Continental priorities.

Kerry may be able to bring a veneer of commonality to the problem; he may even address it in French. There will be a temporary peace, and a great relief from Bush's casual dismissing of the EU's concerns. But Europe will still secretly long for someone to stand up to the Americans, a British PM like Hugh Grant's in Love Actually.

We need to elect Kerry to save our short-term interests in Europe. But we also need to think about our where our long-term interests lead.

*You have to pay to get access to the article. Capitalism sucks.

From the Bar©

In the fall of 1992 Kerry released a report on the BCCI affair. It blasted everyone: Justice, Treasury, US Customs, the Federal Reserve ... high-level lobbyists and fixers, and the CIA. The report noted that after the CIA knew the bank was "a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it continued to use both BCCI and First American...for CIA operations."

Free Beer for Democracy

Witty and Insightful©

The first real Texan I ever saw on TV was King of the Hill's Boomhauer, the guy who's always drunk and you can't understand a word he says.

Molly Ivins