The View from the Docks

Spartan Ethic Redux, Take Two

2009-06-16T08:54:00.003-04:00

In case you haven't encountered it yet, there's an unpleasant graphic that was emailed around from a staffperson to the Tennessee GOP chair / state senator for Gallatin, Diane Black. One Sherri Goforth was responsible for the distribution.

Nashville is Talking has probably the choices initial responses.

I spoke with Sherri Goforth minutes ago to confirm she sent this email. She confirmed she had sent it and also said she had received a letter of reprimand from her superiors but said she will stay on the job.

When I asked her if she understood the controversial nature of the photo, Goforth would only say she felt very bad about accidentally sending it to the wrong list. When I gave her a second chance to address the controversial nature of the email, she again repeated that she only felt bad about sending it to the wrong list of people.

“I went on the wrong email and I inadvertently hit the wrong button,” Goforth told NIT. “I’m very sick about it, and it’s one of those things I can’t change or take back.”

Note the total indifference to - or perhaps celebration of - the impropriety of the image inherent in Ms. Goforth's non-apology. Note also the fault she perceives: it wasn't that she sent an offensive, racist image - it was that she sent an offensive, racist image to the wrong distribution list, delivering it to hypersensitive people without a sense of humour who obviously don't get the joke instead of the GOP in-crowd who'd think the image hilarious.

One more thing struck me reading through the noise on this incident. One of the comments at Nashville is Talking included this gem from a commenter calling itself Slimey:

First of all, this is not racism. Racism is the belief that one race is superior over another. This is plain and simple being stupid. Please people, stop calling this racism. Grow up! How many of you laugh during Blazin Saddles? Yet it’s full of racial innuendos and language. I don’t oppose the guy cause he’s black, it’s because he’s a socialist liberal.

Deconstructing for Slimey:

First off, the image. "OOH! A SPOOK! Visible only by the whites of its eyes (as opposed to the whites of the skins of the previous 43 MEN in the progression), here to rape your women / steal your stuff / take over your government." NEWSFLASH: that's what racism looks like.

Second, the "socialist liberal" bit. The US has moved quite far to the right on the political scale in global terms, so it all depends on one's position. To a Fascist, everything looks Socialist.

H/T Shakesville, BBWW et al.

Solidarity

2009-06-15T09:04:00.004-04:00

... with the Moussawi voting bloc in Iran, against what the press that's interested in reporting on the election is calling a coup by Ahmadinejad in the elections there.

Pity about the US MSM. Today's leading story from TBO, for comparison, is here. I'm all for local news as a rule - but leading with a local story today is just irresponsible.

MB at BBWW has links to an interesting theory of the events here: well worth reading.

On Right-Wing Violence

2009-06-10T17:36:00.006-04:00

Yet another shooting spree makes the news: this time in DC, at the Holocaust Museum. It should surprise no-one that the suspected shooter is identified as someone who thinks the Holocaust was a good thing.

ThinkProgress and Washington Monthly both have posts on this latest event. In the latter, Steve Benen states:

There are key differences between violent right-wing radicals and mainstream Americans who happen to be conservative.

I have to take issue with his statement. The mainstream of US conservatism may not be ready to run out and create the kind of mayhem reported of late, but the tone of the rhetoric that has predominated conservative spheres of late has at least been of apologist tones for such incidents if not overtly supportive of such attacks. There has been no-one in the group Benen presumes to exist who has denounced the violence in any believable fashion, called for an end to such assaults on such targets or taken any truly meaningful action to end the cycle. The closest we have heard to date is the sort of "horrifically regrettable necessity" language used by the far right to subliminally defend a "by any means necessary" approach to achieving their goals.

If "mainstream Americans who happen to be conservative" expect to maintain any respectability in the wake of the Tiller murder and today, they need to be more obvious in their distancing themselves - in deed as well as in speech - from the advocates of the recent violence. Without such steps, the acquiescing silence of such individuals will only reinforce the fringe's impression that their actions are condoned, and will encourage more such lunatics to indulge in similar violent episodes.

The Inmates Take Charge Of The Asylum

2009-06-10T16:45:00.005-04:00

Musing on this post by Mustang Bobby over at Bark Bark Woof Woof brought me to this realisation.

It's becoming more apparent to me that today's GOP as an organisation is little more than a collection of extreme rightwing crazies with a veneer of passable politics over the mess. It's a bit like finding the "priceless antique table" you bought is really a paper-thin layer of mahogany glued over termite-ridden pine planks.

We all thought that ShrubCo was an aberration, a convenient ignoramus to cover the party machinery underneath. But the more recent actions indicate that the Bush presidency may have been more symptomatic than was previously apparent. The flurry of recent stories of recent GOP stupidity is far more telling than the worst of Shrub's candid comments - it spotlights a wilfully ignorant, cantankerous, consciously obstructive organisation totally unwilling to examine even its own counterproductive methods in its scramble back up to the top. I'm wondering whether the more recent efforts, more reminiscent of scorched-earth combat tactics than any real attempt at governance, is the work of a group with no interest in the national welfare at all or simply that of a group too collectively stupid to care.

No matter what the cause for the misbehaviour of the party, however, it is clear that any attempt to gloss over this bad behaviour doesn't adhere all that well. McCain was persuaded to select perhaps the least competent candidate for running mate not a year ago. The RNC chair, Steele, even with his gaffes presents a more articulate, informed image than the voices drowning him out. And even the voices of relative sanity within the GOP (Powell et al) are sidelined by the noisiest of the loons.

Fifteen years ago, Gingrich and his Congressional allies presented at least an intelligent front to the populace behind which to hatch their schemes. The cracks through to the rotten substance beneath were beginning, but far more difficult to penetrate. Today the equation is nearly reversed: the damage below the surface is readily apparent and popping up in ever more debates, and the attempts to find some respectable platform or spokesperson to make the nutsery seem rational are failing on an increasingly spectacular scale.

Shorter Richard Posner

2009-06-09T12:57:00.003-04:00

If Obama moves the Democrats further to the Left, then Republicans can return to Conservatism and stop playing Militant-Xtian-Fascists.

H/T Andrew Sullivan.

Quote of the Day

2009-06-08T13:54:00.003-04:00

Gee, I wonder what the (overwhelmingly Republican) surviving GM dealerships think about this?

From the comments on Steve Benen's delicious takedown of the wingnuts' calls to boycott General Motors.

Honourable mentions:

They're failures themselves, and failure is the only outcome they know how to produce.[1]

New Republican motto: If it's working, stop it![2]

1 - also from the boycott article comments
2 - from comments on Steve's shrewd take on the Republican insistence that, since the economy isn't collapsing as fast as it used to, things are going well enough to call off the recovery.

Perspective Fail

2009-06-08T07:07:00.004-04:00

Heard this morning on Bay News 9 (and paraphrased here because I don't TiVo):

dealerships may have a reprieve.

Host Erica Riggins describing the lawsuit to halt the Chrysler-Fiat deal as apparently good for Bay Area dealerships. The lawsuit is jeopardising the agreement between Chrysler and Fiat which was put together to save what's left of the weakest of the Big Three's business in the US: pension funds are ticked that they're not getting what they perceive as their fair shake and want the entire agreement renegotiated. Fiat has said they'll bow out by the end of this week if the agreement cannot be finalised, and the current push to the Supreme Court could push settling the debate past that window. Apparently to BN9 losing the entirety of Chrysler to legal wrangling is a good thing, though, since it means local Chrysler dealerships will remain open (at least for a couple more weeks).

It's a lot of money, but it's in line with private summer camps.

A summer camp counselor for Hillsborough County describing the county's new (far higher) tuition rates for summer camp. Someone really needs to teach this genius the difference between public service and private luxury.

Democrat Pagan Party*

2009-06-07T10:56:00.007-04:00

I suppose after years of the radical Left calling out the Republicans as God's Own Party - a moniker they have earned after decades of pandering to the Religious Right - it was inevitable. Former speaker Gingrich has branded any but God-fearing Republicans enemies of the United Christian States.

The headline for this post is not Gingrich's own. But the sentiment certainly is.

The sounds coming from the GOP - particularly the segment of the GOP still appealing to the XtianFundie set - are not new. We heard them in every philosophical debate that came to blows: the Christianity/Judaism split, the Catholic/Orthodox split, the Russian Orthodox on watching the fall of first Constantinople and then Kiev, the Cathars, the Papal Schism, the Reformation,... the list goes on. One of the reasons the Enlightenment was so powerful was that it ended the wars of the Reformation with the insistence that individual conscience was a private matter not worth warring over. It may not have stopped the Irish quite so quickly, but it certainly drowned the flames of religious conflict in Europe rather thoroughly.

Part of the Right's tactical playbook is Othering the opposition. If they can make otherwise reasonable policy proposals appear to be put forward by forces unlike the Good Americans they claim to represent, those proposals can be more easily dismissed. National health care? It's a wishy-washy quiche-eating European thing, not something a good red-blooded American would want. Environmental protection policies? They're a scam foisted on us by tree-huggers and foreign agents all out to destroy the US economy. Civil rights? They're a means for illegal immigrants and social deviants to overthrow American society. Every issue the Right sees comes complete in their eyes with an Other foisting it on the US.

Now Gingrich has given voice to a position the Xtian Right put forward some months back: Liberalism is not only UnAmerican, but UnChristian as well. The "Rediscovering God in America" tour is the means to the message.

I am not a citizen of the world. I am a citizen of the United States because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator. [...] I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history. We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism.

The only thing that saves Gingrich's bloviating from outright insanity is that, for many of the XtianFundie sects, only their particular flavor of Xtianity is "true," which conveniently disavows all of the mainstream Christian churches and effectively creates the impression of oppressed minority. But in holding that, these same sects relinquish any claim to spiritual community with the rest, and cannot claim "oppression of Christians" when those other denominations face adversity. Those not admitted by the Xtians in good times cannot be counted as in the fold in bad times.

Calling up paganism, however, as the demon for the new age, is simply preposterous. Paganism may be more visible today than fifty years ago, but most pagans are peaceful, live-and-let-live types disinterested in converting the planet, and resisting only the missionary zeal of the Xtians and not Xtianity itself. An organised pagan opposition to the other major faiths on the planet is a fantasy.

On the other hand, for a political philosophy that demands an organised intentional opponent, GOP-Xtianity is running out of forces to fight. Catholicism as an evil on a Protestant Earth went out the door ages ago, and Kennedy's election only nailed that coffin shut. The Eastern faiths - Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and the others - never presented much threat, as the early Asian American communities kept to themselves, and newer immigrants are as likely to be Christian as anything else. Shinto got spanked in World War II. Opposition to Judaism became nearly unspeakable after Nazi Germany. And Islam, long a favourite whipping boy of Christianity, has proved a poor choice of evils, as the resistance to US policies abroad have grown due to the prior [mal]administration's denunciation of Islam in the same breath as terrorism (as if the two were interchangeable), and as domestic flavours of Islam have proven to be far more mild-mannered than is necessary to brand them the Ultimate Evil. Even the no-faith-at-all Socialist label is failing to stick to the GOP's opponents as the ideals of a moderately socialist state become less unacceptable in the current economic climate.

So as the Xtian-Fundie subset of RightWingnuttia sets its sights on long-dead Druids or some other Great New Satan, the language it uses to incite the following shows just how its base has shrunk and how outdated its propaganda has become.

* H/T ThinkProgress and Washington Monthly, and to WM commenter Norwood Woman for the title.

General Motors Car(nage)

2009-06-06T13:40:00.002-04:00

The news from Detroit gets more confusing every day.

General Motors, now in bankruptcy and restructuring, seems to be following the least sensible strategy for its orphaned components.

First in line is Saab. Without Swedish assistance, the company looks to end its automaking days and concentrate on other revenue streams. Say g'bye to the 9-3 - not that the last few versions, little more than Opel Vectras in party frocks, were all that marvelous.

Then there's Hummer. Rumour has it a Chinese business is buying the uber-SUV maker.

Next comes Opel. A joint Canadian-Russian consortium is buying out the European arm of the company.

One would think that the same group that's buying Opel would get a shot at Saturn, since the latest models indicate that Saturn is becoming to the US market what Vauxhall has evolved into for the UK: a domestic rebranding of the Opel product line. The Aura and Astra both are basically Opel product, and the indications pre-restructuring were that Saturn would essentially be "Opel US" in the near future. Instead, however, GM is selling Saturn to Penske. How Penske expects to continue new model development without input from Magna and Sberbank - the new Opel owners - one cannot guess.

I can well understand GM shedding brands that have either lost their natural market (Oldsmobile, for instance), or which are finally admitting death-by-neglect (Pontiac). And somebody had to take on Hummer, which after the last gas-price spike is probably one of GM's least attractive properties either for GM itself or for any entity willing to take it off GM's hands. But the whole fragmentation of the one truly viable carmaking segment of the enterprise - Opel/Vauxhall/Saturn - just doesn't make sense to the casual observer, unless the goal is to punish those subdivisions for being better at making money than Chevrolet, Pontiac and Buick.

Whatever comes of restructuring, the survival of GM and the makes it's spinning off should at least be interesting to watch.

Klein on Healthcare

2009-06-06T13:17:00.004-04:00

Ezra Klein brings us this interesting thought on the costs of (private) healthcare in the US:

The mechanism here is simple enough. As the report says, "Since health insurance premiums are growing more rapidly than total compensation in percentage terms, an increasing share of total compensation that a worker receives goes to cover health insurance premiums."

But workers don't see it that way. That slumping line isn't normally called wages-minus-health-premiums. It's called wages. And most workers think stagnant wages mean their employer is paying them less. They don't know that the main reason for stagnant wages is that their wage increases are going to pay for their health insurance premiums. If they did -- if they realized that compensation is pretty much a zero-sum endeavor and their employers don't so much buy them health insurance as garnish their wages to pay for their health insurance -- you'd probably see a lot more general anger at rising health care costs.

The graph is illuminating in that very few studies of the last twenty years or so have factored in the costs of employer-sponsored health insurance in the compensation totals in this way: too many have focused on the direct wage component. By incorporating the expenditure on healthcare in the total compensation calculation, the study highlights both how US payrolls are at once over- and under- valued: overvalued in that total compensation has increased substantially over the observed period which makes a good case for the expense of the US worker, undervalued in that so much of the compensation is being consumed by the healthcare system.

I for one doubt strongly that anyone now making $50,000 thinks that his/her healthcare should cost $15,000 of that annually, nor would anyone making $35,000 be sanguine knowing roughly half again his/her salary goes toward healthcare, yet this is (roughly) the cost of those programmes camouflaged by the employer's contribution to the system. If the analysis is at all accurate then the trend needs to be stopped before healthcare costs equal the wage component of the compensation pie.

This is an arithmetic that merits far greater attention - particularly as the healthcare debate continues in the Capital.

H/T Andrew Sullivan.

Gotta Love Those Activist Judges

2009-06-06T11:15:00.003-04:00

South Carolina's state supreme court is holding Gov. Sanford's feet to the fire and making him take the stimulus funds he swore he would refuse.

The state’s top court ruled unanimously Thursday that Gov. Mark Sanford must apply for the disputed $700 million in federal stimulus money.

The S.C. Supreme Court also took the rare step of issuing a writ of mandamus, which orders the governor to apply for the money.

Chief Justice Jean Toal and three of the four other justices — Donald Beatty, John Kittredge and John Waller — said a state law passed last month requires Sanford to apply for the money and doesn’t conflict with the federal law providing the stimulus funds.

“Under the constitution and laws of this State, the General Assembly is the sole entity with the power to appropriate funds, including federal funds,” the four justices wrote. “Therefore, the General Assembly has the authority to mandate that the Governor apply for federal funds which it has appropriated.”

In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Costa Pleicones said state lawmakers complied with an amendment of the federal law — proposed by U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn in response to Sanford’s refusal to accept the money — by adopting a concurrent resolution accepting the funds and passing a law designating how the money will be spent.

I do not understand how Sanford can sleep at night refusing dollars targeted for education, when his own state's system is in such disrepair according even to students like Casey Edwards (a plaintiff in the recent case) that it merited a documentary on the terrible conditions.

And since this is a South Carolina court, and presumably the product of GOP appointments, it'll be interesting to see how the RWNM tries to spin the decision.

H/T ThinkProgress - who have a similarly scathing take.

Quiet Music for a Sleepy Saturday

2009-06-06T10:57:00.001-04:00

Quote of Two Days Ago The Day

2009-06-06T10:42:00.003-04:00

"Those people are different."

- a nurse in a Fresno hospital telling a patient why other patients' visitors were allowed where she was but her (same sex) partner was not.

Pam Spaulding has the horror story over at Pandagon. Well worth reading.

Sighting

2009-06-05T06:00:00.002-04:00

Yes, this is yet another Cunarder I've boarded in my time.

The QE2 is retired now, and lying in Dubai as a hotel and attraction similar to the Queen Mary. The Age posted an article last fall when she arrived. The two photos are of her arrival in Dubai, and sitting a few months later in port minus her orange "CUNARD" titles below her bridge.

No word yet from the press on how her new life is going so far; however, other stories from Dubai haven't been particularly rosy. Nakheel, her new owners, are apparently adamant that the ship will be retained and converted (the Times has an interesting PDF of the proposed alterations), but so far progress appears minimal.

Best wishes to a grand old lady.

Isn't It Too Cold For That?

2009-06-04T08:37:00.003-04:00

Dateline Augusta, Maine.

A topless coffee shop, the Grand View (I'm still chuckling over that) in Vassalboro (just outside Augusta, the state capital) burned on the night of 2 June.

The daring business was unpopular with its neighbors, but apparently did a brisk business with clientele from the capital and surrounding communities. It was not insured.

In today's Kennebec Journal is a report that the investigation has confirmed that the fire was deliberately set. It also highlights some very interesting timing:

The fire came just four-and-a-half hours after [Grand View owner Donald] Crabtree had finished a meeting Tuesday night with the Vassalboro Planning Board.

Crabtree outlined proposals to extend the shop's hours of operations to 1 a.m., expand the parking lot for employees and have its wait staff dancing to the music of a disc jockey. Crabtree had wanted to expand the business into a strip club, but he had scaled back those plans Tuesday night to avoid needing a new permit.

The timing of the fire has left Crabtree with troubling questions.

"What gets me is, why now? Why not when we opened? Why is the time now? I don't know," Crabtree said.

I'm at once surprised that straight-laced Maine would allow such a business anywhere (with the possible exception of Old Orchard Beach) and disturbed that anyone would think that burning down a business would solve the perceived problem.

And I'm stunned that anywhere in Maine is temperate enough for topless anything.

H/T Petulant at Shakesville.

Labour Intensive

2009-06-03T15:08:00.003-04:00

MSNBC's Morning Joe had quite the moment on camera today with Andrew Sorkin's challenge: "Name a successful unionized company. Think. You're going to go to [commercial] break before you come up with one. And that's the problem." Naturally, the panel couldn't come up with one. 'Cuz dem yoonyuns are wot's wrong wif Ahmurrcan bidness these days - it just goes without saying, right?

Maybe not.

Steve Benen and Jamison Foser took turns shredding their arguments, each with a particularly sharp cut to deliver:

Benen:

Now, my first response was to wonder whether the folks behind the cameras, filming the media personalities, are union members. And the employees who installed and operate the on-set lights. And the folks who built the "Morning Joe" set.

But perhaps those unions don't count, since Brzezinski and others are specifically interested in unionized companies that "work" and are "successful."

Foser:

GE is one of the world's largest companies; in 2006, its revenues were greater than the gross domestic products of 80 percent of UN nations. The company made more than $18 billion in 2008 -- again, billion with a b, and again, those are profits, not revenue. All that despite (or, perhaps, because of) the fact that 13 different unions represent GE workers.

Oh, and GE owns NBC-Universal, which owns MSNBC, which pays Joe Scarborough a handsome salary (and the unionized workers who help get his show on the air considerably less.)

Foser goes on, in addition, to point out a nasty little labor dispute between the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians-CWA and NBC as a possible reason for the morning crew's absentmindedness. Apparently the union and the network have been trying since September to negotiate renewal of a contract that expired two months ago, apparently without progress, and the union's become unhappy enough with NBC's efforts to start picketing.

I do hope that Scarborough isn't expecting his mic, or lighting, or any other of a thousand union-labor-supplied production items to work all that well on tomorrow's show.

On Why We Need To Fund Education, Part Two

2009-06-03T13:18:00.002-04:00

ThinkProgress has this little gem up for consideration:

Yesterday on the House floor, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) launched into a nonsensical tirade against legislation aimed at addressing global warming by reducing carbon emissions. Akin demonstrated his lack of understanding of climate issues by erroneously celebrating the seasonal change from winter to spring as “good climate change” and confused “weather” with “climate.” He dismissed the threat of global warming as a “comedy” and wondered who would “want to put politicians in charge of the weather anyways.”

Who, indeed, if they know this ~~much~~ little about the subject.

Owning the Hatred

2009-06-03T10:29:00.002-04:00

There are a lot of discussions out there about Scott Roeder, the man held in the murder of Dr. Tiller. Hilzoy, Friedersdorf, Balkin, MB and others bring up many good points about how to deal with a non-Muslim, domestic, Caucasian terrorist. Whether we deal with this incident within the sphere of the GWoT or as a matter of conventional criminal proceedings has become, thanks to the broad definitions applied to the former approach, a valid question.

My primary concern is less how to handle Roeder than how to handle those with whom he associated.

There is considerable evidence that Roeder was affiliated with at least one fairly militant fringe group with anti-choice sympathies (among other Conservatist positions). There is also some evidence that these groups did not entirely share Roeder's perspective, and may well have been less extreme as a whole. While they clearly were not active participants in Sunday's tragedy, they are clearly implicated as influences on Roeder's state of mind if not his precise actions.

Assuming the GWoT methodologies are appropriate, these groups with whom Roeder associated are implicated as condoning or supporting terrorism on US soil. They provided him with inflammatory literature, support - however conditional - for his views, and a forum for his extremism.

Naturally, the less-unhinged among the groups will instantly disavow Roeder and the worst of the militancy of their own group as outside the main of their organisations. That does not excuse them for failing to rein in Roeder and the others, failing to report Roeder to the authorities, or any of a hundred other steps they could have taken to prevent Tiller's murder. And those claims are already refuted by the leadership of larger organisations such as Operation Rescue - who, while denouncing the killing itself, are actively advocating nearly anything short of that to shut down clinics like the one where Dr. Tiller practised.

To those of us for whom the GWoT is an abomination of illegal, inhuman sadism, our chief difficulties have always been at once the Othering of the assailants and the perceived immediacy of the threat. Prior to September 11, 2001 there was only one successful attack by Muslim terrorists on US soil, and there have been none since, so regardless for the reasoning for such the potential of that threat is substantially reduced. Conversely, attacks on one segment of the US population by another, or on one organisation by members of another, are multiple: post-Katrina New Orleans is a prime example - and so is the murder of a physician in a church on a Sunday during worship. Consider that in each of the cases the community of victims goes far beyond the individuals directly impacted: the entire African American community of Louisiana has been effectively traumatised by the experience of New Orleans, and Dr. Tiller's entire parish was present to witness his killing and are equally affected. And in the cases of domestic activity in these cases, it is nearly impossible to Other the assailants: they look like Middle America, and the only thing differentiating them from the rest of the populace is their willingness - even eagerness - to use violence to achieve their ends.

Illustrating how the GWoT has been misused against innocent US citizens has been ineffective to date: the rage to vengeance of the early Noughties swept aside any arguments against the Great Misadventure. But these new events are hitting far closer to home: the mass killing of "liberals" at a Unitarian church, and now the "execution" of a physician at his church during Sunday services are beginning to resonate as beyond defensible to the point that GWoT-scale response may be justified.

This is how the scope of the GWoT broadens, and why it is dangerous to declare war on an intangible. I am not fond of the anti-choice movement in the least; but the fact that we can lump the violent fringe of the anti-choice community in the same "terrorist" bundle with the aparently intended targets of the GWoT shows just how dangerous the GWoT is both in concept and in execution. Tiller's murderer deserves the most thorough investigation, the most able prosecution - but also the most able defense; and the organisations that aided and abetted the party responsible for Tiller's death deserve careful scrutiny and sharp criticism, but no more than that if we even pretend to cherish the freedom of speech and assembly outlined in the Constitution. On the other hand, without a clearer illustration of just how excessive the GWoT is by definition, it may be instructive for those who advocate it to experience its application closer to home.

Of course there are threats to the peace and security of the US, both at home and abroad: these are the reasons we have law enforcement, intelligence agencies, alliances and treaties, Interpol and a host of other resources available to us. Those resources ought to be exhausted first. Failing to do so leaves us with the very real possibility that any one of us could be branded with the "threat to the Republic" language the GWoT employs and treated the same as GWoT detainees now in custody. We're supposed to be better than that.

The Governator Develops Davisemia

2009-06-02T09:59:00.003-04:00

In 2003, when California governor Gray Davis was ousted in the now-infamous recall, the chief argument for his ouster was his inability to manage energy pricing and availability which led to massive state budget deficits. Arnold Schwarzenegger, campaigning on a vague anti-tax platform, won the largest share of the votes for Davis' replacement.

The initial drive for the recall was the horrendous California state budget forecast Davis published in 2002, following years of energy fluctuations nearly bankrupting the state.

On December 18, 2002, just over a month after being reelected, Davis announced that California would face a record budget deficit possibly as high as $35 billion, a forecast $13.7 billion higher than one a month earlier. The number was finally estimated to be $38.2 billion, more than all 49 other states' deficits combined. Already suffering from low approval ratings, Davis's numbers hit historic lows in April 2003 with 24% approval and 65% disapproval according to the California Field Poll. Davis was almost universally disliked by both Republicans and Democrats in the state and a recall push was high. - Wikipedia

We now know that much of the energy crisis of 2000-02 that afflicted California was the direct result of Enron and other providers abusing the quasi-deregulated energy market in California, and that Davis was their sucker in Sacramento. That knowledge, however, came too late to offset the appearance of mismanagement, and following an ugly campaign in 2002 it made Davis an all-too-vulnerable target for the anti-tax GOP machinery.

Six years later, Davis' replacement is learning the hard way that budget numbers like Davis' aren't necessarily the consequence of poor management:

In a special election on May 19, voters rejected a batch of measures on increasing taxes, borrowing funds and reapportioning state money that were designed to close a multibillion-dollar budget gap. The cuts Mr. Schwarzenegger has proposed to make up the difference, if enacted by the Legislature, would turn California into a place that in some ways would be unrecognizable in modern America: poor children would have no health insurance, prisoners would be released by the thousands and state parks would be closed.

...

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, is threatening to eliminate the Healthy Family Program, the state’s health insurance program that covers over 900,000 children and is financed with state and federal money, as well as the state’s main welfare program, known as Cal-Works, which provides temporary financial assistance to poor families and a caregiver for the severely disabled.

The $1 billion in cuts to programs for the poor would be met with $680 million in new cuts to education and a 5 percent salary reduction for state employees, many of whom are already enduring furloughs.

These proposals, as well as those that would make cuts to state parks, the prison system and other state agencies, are winding their way through Sacramento now, where they will be voted on by committees and eventually the full Legislature.

Some of the proposed cuts are clearly saber rattling on the governor’s part, but there is a nervous acceptance among lawmakers, advocates for the poor and outside budget experts that the state is out of money and time.

...

The Democratic-controlled Legislature has been uncharacteristically silent on most of the cuts, most likely because lawmakers know that tax increases are not politically palatable, that huge cuts in some form are in the offing no matter what, and that any program they wish to spare will quite likely have advocates among their ranks.

California recovered from the energy market shenanigans and the dot-bomb only to be hit by the financial crisis and skyrocketing foreclosure rates. The situation has become bad enough that voters there are revisiting Proposition 13, the provision passed three decades ago that locks property tax rates in at purchase and prohibits increases.

So less than six years after ascending over the corpse of Davis's career, Schwarzenegger is facing the same dire budget figures that tipped the scales against his predecessor.

And Now For Something Completely Different...

2009-06-02T09:50:00.002-04:00

I never would have thought of doing this to Julie Andrews.

H/T Andrew Sullivan.

Borrow And Spend Hangover

2009-06-02T09:32:00.003-04:00

The New York Times has it right with this one: depressed asset values and reduced income are hitting domestic consumption hard in a trend that may be far more than just tightening our belts for the short term. - particularly when it comes to transportation. The graph (click to embiggen) shows the drastic drop in new car volumes and the median age of vehicles on the road over the last decade.

Baby boomers, the biggest group in the car market, are beginning to enter retirement, a stage of life when people typically buy fewer cars. Home values are down sharply, making consumers feel less wealthy, and also cutting off a handy source of money from home-equity loans for new cars.

...

Lifestyles have changed, too. As many people move back to cities from suburbs, they are swapping three-car garages for a single parking space. Public transit use is up.

...

Donald Grimes, an economist at the University of Michigan, is forecasting the lowest sales for the driving-age population this year since 1970.

From 1970 to 2001, there were 0.76 vehicles sold per driver in the United States. Now that figure has dropped to 0.4 vehicles per driver, and he does not see much of a rebound in coming years.

Coming just hours before the GM bankruptcy announcement, and hot on the heels of the Chrysler-Fiat agreement, this analysis is obviously worrying. What makes it worse is that we're looking at the last major domestic industry still producing tangible product for consumption. Were textiles and housewares still made in the US there might be a little more hope of producing our way out of the current mess; as it is, the best hope we may have had is falling flat because it has depended on the availability of capital - capital now denied the economy through a combination of consumer retrenchment and financial institution overcaution.

Quote of the Day

2009-06-02T06:29:00.002-04:00

[T]he fact that lives are at stake is not enough to justify giving up on democracy. And be clear: when you think that when you lose out in a political debate in which lives are at stake, that makes it OK to kill people to get your way, you have given up on democracy.

Hilzoy, taking on the anti-choice voices that claim killing doctors is justified because it saves [the] lives [of all the aborted foetuses].

Read the whole thing here.

"Our Most Effective Rhetoric And Actions"

2009-06-01T08:26:00.005-04:00

That's what Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, is looking to preserve in the wake of the Tiller murder: the ability to "peacefully protest" abortion providers. Terry fears that, following Dr. Tiller's shooting in his Church yesterday that the authorities will seek to curtail anti-abortion protest efforts.

Hilzoy looks into those so-called peaceful protests. She found a chilling example in a Rolling Stone review of (also from Operation Rescue) Troy Newman's campaign against Dr. Tiller - which targeted not only the MD but his entire staff and any service enterprise even loosely associated with the clinic. This includes mass protests at homes, shopping and entertainment venues, mass mailings to entire neighborhoods, mailings and protests at spouses' places of employment, harassment of businesses that clinic staff frequented, and other reprehensible tactics.

From Rolling Stone:

Operation Rescue's smear campaign against [clinic administrative assistant Sara] Phares is part of a new strategy to shut down abortion clinics by systematically harassing their employees into quitting. Banned by law from blockading clinics as it did in its early days, Operation Rescue has taken its offensive to the front lawns and mailboxes of clinic workers. In Wichita, members of the group rummage through employees' garbage in search of incriminating information. They tail them around town as they run errands. They picket clinic staffers at restaurants while they're inside having dinner and castigate them while they're standing in line at Starbucks. Operation Rescue is also visiting companies that do business with the clinic and threatening them with a boycott if they don't sever their ties with the facility. This is America's new abortion war, and the objective, in military terms, is to cut off the supply lines to abortion clinics and demoralize their troops.

Troy Newman, the head of Operation Rescue, calls it the Year of Rebuke -- and if it works in Wichita, he plans to unleash the campaign of intimidation on abortion clinics all across the country. "I want these employees to realize that their lives have changed," he says. "As long as they're embedded in the abortion industry receiving blood money, they can't live a normal life. They just can't."

Hilzoy:

If you read the whole story, you can find out how Newman threatened the Tillers' dry cleaner and a cab company that sometimes took patients to and from the clinic:
Newman then tells him, in the most courteous tone imaginable, that he might see a few people outside the company holding signs. Just to let everybody know what he's participating in. "It's not personal," Newman says gently.

They also go through employees' trash, and offer rewards for incriminating information. They stop children on sidewalks and tell them their neighbors kill little babies.

The point made is very clear: organisations like Operation Rescue employ the sort of aggressive, intimidating tactics that their opponents are (to put it mildly) reluctant to use against them. Those methods are met with charges "religious discrimination," "harassment," "assault" and other inflammatory descriptors by the anti-choice league when used against them. Yet somehow they are "legitimate, peaceful protest" methods when used by the anti-choice groups to intimidate and harass anyone working for, or doing business with, an abortion provider.

If anyone thinks this is acceptable, imagine taking these tactics and applying them to the treatment of, say, a religious minority or ethnic group. Suddenly the offensiveness of these activities becomes more apparent. And once the offensiveness of the methods is made apparent, it becomes clear that there is no justification for them. The claims of the anti-choice groups that they are saving lives ring hollow when it becomes clear how many lives they are destroying in the process.

H/T Bark Bark Woof Woof.

Barbarians At The Gates - Or Not

2009-05-31T15:47:00.003-04:00

Hilzoy points to an interesting little piece of opining by Rod Dreher, published in the American Conservative a couple weeks back, discussing the angst over the conservative soul and the possibility that, in pursuing "barbarism" the Right became barbarians themselves.

Dreher's work, while not nearly soul-searching enough, is certainly a good starting point for anyone on the Right who wonders why Conservatists no longer hold the high ground.

The barbarians of the Roman era wandered and marauded aimlessly. We accepted rootlessness as the modern condition. We defended our unrestrained consumer appetites by spiting those who would counsel limits as freedom’s enemies. Despisers of communism, we worshiped capitalism, naïve to its revolutionary power to dissolve bonds we ought to have cherished and things we ought to have conserved. Though we like to think of ourselves as apostles of excellence preaching against the depredations of Hollywood trash and academia’s political correctness, we have reduced ourselves to sneering at the concept of elitism and celebrating ignorance and vulgarity as signs of authenticity.

We cast aside the sense of temperamental modesty, of restraint and of fidelity to honorable traditions that have been conservatism’s philosophical patrimony, and exchanged it for a pot of ideological message.

The language Dreher uses, however, is vague and nebulous to the point that it can be used to defend virtually any "change" in Conservative thinking.

The political catastrophe the Republicans are living through, and the far more consequential cultural catastrophe we’re all enduring, obviously call for fresh political and economic thinking. But even more, they call for a renewal of our moral and spiritual vision.

This sort of general statement is what gave the Moral Majority, Christian Coalition and others with very narrow agendas, and very little in the way of fresh thought beyond their tactical planning, the impetus for their various efforts. Restating these generalisations is no great leap forward; the difficulty - the Devil, if you will - is in the details of how the generalisations are enacted.

Conservatism, defined in the absolute, is more or less a valuation of what is over what might be. It centers on: preservation of what is good in society; respect for tradition and historical legacy; the resistance to change for change's sake; and a certain skepticism toward policy, both public and private, to achieve a given objective. The GOP has stepped very far away from these principles. It no longer values what is unless what is is profitable. It sees nothing in society it finds valuable beyond ever-harder work, the unborn, and the continued health of Wall Street. The traditions it values are trimmed down to Church, self-defense, global power projection coupled with domestic isolationism, and the Puritans' obsession with repression of sex. Tradition has taken a back seat to the excesses of the entrepreneur and the adventurism of the conquistador. And the skepticism that marked earlier conservative thought has been turned into a biased political tool used to dismiss any suggestion the opposition might make; the party's own agenda is greeted with wide-eyed optimism, and any suggestion that there might be flaws in the programme is immediately shouted down.

The modern Conservatist would like the public to forget all that. Conservatism by their statements is eternal and unchanging. What we see now has always been. They would like us to forget that Conservatism once denied women the vote, denied slaves freedom, denied successive waves of immigrants the benefits of entry into a society that they themselves enjoyed as immigrants in their time, etc etc. The school of thought has evolved over time, embracing concepts once considered racically liberal. This is a virtue: had conservatism not evolved the world would not have known the myriad advances that brought us to a modern post-industrial democratic society.

Dreher is right to quote Claes Ryn in dissecting the response of the pundit to the cultural theorist:

I was behaving like the kind of conservative Claes G. Ryn once condemned in a TAC essay, disdaining poets and artists as “flaky” because they are unconcerned with politics and economics. Ryn criticized the failure of contemporary conservatives to grasp that
Traditional civilization is threatened with extinction because pleasing but destructive illusions have become part of the way in which most people view the world and their own lives. The hold on society of those who created and fed these illusions cannot be broken mainly through practical politics.

Ryn goes on:
What is most needed is a reorientation of mind and imagination. The great illusions of our age must be exposed for what they are so that they will start to lose their appeal. This can be done only through art and thought of a different quality.

Again, the nebulous nature of the guidance allows for almost anything from retellings of the Chronicles of Narnia right through a Riefenstahl film festival.

This is an interesting piece, particularly as it comes as one of a wave of articles that question what has happened to US Conservatism and where Conservatives ought to be headed. Most of the others I have read in this vein have covered the essentially anti-intellectual bent the Conservatists and the GOP have adopted over recent years: it does not appear that Dreher has reached that conclusion yet, though he does have an idea of why it would be so.

It is also clear that, while others such as Nate Silver and Richard Posner have lamented how the Conservatist machinery has shut out anyone but movement conservatist ideologues without delving into the cause, Dreher has a glimpse of why this is so. It takes a movement conservatist mindset to value safety over liberty, personal wealth over civic responsibility, imperial projection over common-sense conservation, and the fiction of the theological bases of the United States over the more sound strength through diversity recognised and celebrated by the Founding Fathers. Only movement conservatist thought could value the economic system over the family they tout as the moral salvation of the nation, or the "ignorance and vulgarity" Dreher denounces over the depth possible from an informed conservatism.

One thing, though, that none of these writers has addressed is the mindset driving the movement. Conservatism, in its purest iteration, is a skeptical, bordering on pessimistic, philosophy: it needs to have the benefit of change proven to it in clear terms before it will consider adopting the new in favor of the old, recognizable and functional. Movement Conservatist thought married all the reaction of classical conservatism with the Panglossian veneer of the "faith based society." All would be rosy, it claimed, and everyone would be happy, if only we didn't do anything those godless liberal demons asked. It opposed on principle anything outside its own tenets and held out a "feel-good" perspective of a nation saved from those "barbarians" Dreher mentions. The naivete involved in this approach is staggering: instead of holding to the old because it was proven effective with known consequences, movement conservatists did so out of doctrine and the promise of a bright sunny future if this were done. In the zeal of the movement, these people forgot that as much ill can be done by adherents to Conservatist doctrine as by followers of any other mindset, and in their willingness to believe in this bright, sunny illusion they actually enabled the likes of Lay, Skilling, Koslowski, Keating and the whole host of others who used Conservatist philosophy for their own self-aggrandisement and counted on the happy imagery the movement used to sell the philosophy to hide their intentions and misdeeds.

The 'blogosphere says much about the Bush maladministration in terms of the outright failures of conservatist policy. However, without the likes of the executives who gamed the philosophy, Bush would never have been able to achieve so much - either in policy-making or in the economic trainwreck that followed. And without the rose-tinted glow the movement conservatists used to light the new breed of right-wing thought, the movers in those worlds would never have been able to do as much damage as they did, nor fool the following as well as it is now known they were able. Without the image of the perfect nation, and the absolute demonisation of the opposition in the terms of those out to destroy every last shred of goodness and decency in the country, movement conservatism would never have been able to achieve as much as it has; conversely, without those illusions, those taking advantage of the movement would never have been able to do so much damage without being stopped. The willingness of the movement to believe its leadership and the fantasy they spun blinded one and all to the real activities behind the scenes. Those actions are being laid bare now, and gradually the thinking segment of the conservative school is waking up to that reality.

Silver, Posner, and their like look around themselves like someone rousing from a dream, seeing an unfamiliar, hostile landscape, and wondering where the calming, pastoral scene s/he remembers has gone. Dreher, for his part, sees the damage done and recognises the work of his own hand in part of the destruction. But none of them seem to have realised yet that the scene they all seem to remember was a projection of the movement, and that it never really existed in the first place outside movement propaganda.

Sighting

2009-05-29T07:23:00.002-04:00

In celebration of Carnival Cruise Line's announcement that they are resuming cruises to Mexico (I saw this on Bay News 9 this morning, but can only find the LA Times article online for the link), here's a shot of Tampa's own Carnival Inspiration.

At the moment she's still docked at the Port of Tampa, but next week she should resume her itinerary.

Less Is Something and More Is Nothing

2009-05-27T16:45:00.005-04:00

... OR: WTF is it with hiring managers and the "overqualified" label?

As the US economy continues to circle the drain, an (apparently) increasing number of people are running into the curse of actually being able to do their jobs. There are articles in the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and other publications discussing how skilled professionals are editing their resumes and discussions of their experience and training in order to appear more appropriate for the lower-paying jobs that are increasingly the best opportunities available.

I recall a similar trend, now a decade or so old, when the dot-com bubble burst and it seemed all of Silicon Valley got laid off at once. The same effect was visible at the time: former CIOs were dumbing down their resumes to get LAN admin jobs. This time around, though, the trend seems universal when discussing anyone with more than five years' history in the workplace, regardless of profession.

The articles all discuss editing one's resume or CV to minimise the appearance of experience and qualifications. More than a few sections, and several comments, discuss removing some dates and some durations to combat ageism as well.

Too much of a good thing is wonderful, said Mae West. But that's not how hiring managers see it. Relevant work experience, advanced degrees and credentials - while prerequisites for many finance jobs - can disqualify as well as qualify. If a candidate previously held a role at a higher level than the one she's seeking, or her education or certifications exceed a position's stated requirements, she's unlikely to pass the initial software-driven screen most employers apply before even looking at an incoming résumé.

Moreover, many employers blithely use the word "overqualified" as a barely concealed synonym for "too old." That's the evident meaning when a hiring manager or HR person says an opening is "too junior for you," when you know it pays four times what you made in your last job. (This happened to me a few times.)

Personally, this sort of rescaling one's experience seems at once dishonest and pointless. Dishonest in that if one is prepared to discount one's own experience and effort to achieve what one has achieved then the situations employers fear are more likely to be manifested than if one is honest about one's history and willing to take a perceived step backward. Pointless, in turn, in that so many of the current review processes require listing years of experience with particular tools or procedures as part of the screening process, and so many are willing to follow up with reference checks and other screening methods, that simplifying one's resume without conveniently "forgetting" about what one edits out will only exacerbate the hiring body's concerns - and may well show up the potential dishonesty in the resume by inadvertently referring to information edited out of the documents.

I'm also more than a little disappointed in the presumption that overqualification is a valid cause for disqualification. Unless there is a serious miscommunication between the candidate and the hiring/screening party at the outset, then the disparity between the job requirements and the offered experience and skill set is a known quantity well in advance of the point where overqualification even gets suggested. If it isn't an issue for the candidate by then, then it shouldn't be for the interviewer.

At the same time, there is the problem that one needs a paycheck in this society. And the discussions with recruiters and hiring managers on the subject tell a no-win tale:

In the past eight months, Jamaica Eilbes, an information-technology recruiter for Milwaukee employment agency Manpower, has had to weed out more overqualified résumés than usual from the stacks that cross her desk each day. "I'd never feel comfortable putting a really high-level candidate into a lower level position," says Ms. Eilbes, who recruits for Manpower and other clients. "We don't want to take you on if we think you are going to jump ship."

But in recent months, Ms. Eilbes has seen more master's and doctoral degrees at the bottom of résumés instead of at the top. She's also seen candidates omitting or trimming job descriptions that showed they had substantial years of work experience. Résumés on which job descriptions taper off as they progress down the page raise Ms. Eilbes's suspicions. "How do I know I can trust them later down the road if there's something on their résumé they decided to take off so they could have a better chance at getting that job?" she says.

And then there's this gem:

In some cases, job seekers are being told by hiring agencies to tone down their résumés if they want to get hired. When Bridget Lee, 29, moved to New York from Shanghai eight months ago and put her application in at three temporary agencies, she was told to play down her work experience before they would send her résumé to potential clients. The temp-agency version of her résumé changed titles like "manager" and "freelance trend researcher" to "staff" and "office support" and omitted entirely her title as partner of a small marketing agency. "It's been a lesson for how I present myself," Ms. Lee says.

So if you're overqualified, you'll be bored and unlikely to stay in the position. But if you edit your docs to sound less overqualified, then you're lying to the hiring party and can't be trusted. Oh, and by the way that distrust comes from your doing what we told you to do, or from our doing it ourselves on your behalf.

For me, though, the single most infuriating perspective on the matter comes from the Atlantic's own Daniel Indiviglio:

This is alarming news for the U.S. economy. If job seekers are accepting positions at lower levels than their experience should dictate, then their talent and experience is not being fully utilized. That, in turn, means economic growth will be stunted. For growth to be maximized, all workers should be making full use of their capabilities.

How much will this harm growth? It depends on how long it takes for the economy to begin to expand at a rapid pace. Once employment returns to the 95% threshold, these job seekers can begin trading up and returning to positions for which their experience is more suited. That is, of course, if their résumé is not tarnished permanently by spending several years in a position that is a step back on their career path.

Those of us currently looking for work aren't really all that concerned about how fast we can spring back: we're worried about making ends meet now. And we'd much rather be underutilized than unutilized, since as long as we can work, economic growth, however stunted, will still be greater for the US and for ourselves than if we all sit on our duffs (waiting for the job we aren't overqualified for) drawing unemployment and starving to death.

Notes On Car Shopping

2009-05-26T14:45:00.001-04:00

When you're looking for a convertible, and planning to pay with cash, please remember that open air and paper money don't mix.

Just sayin'.

The Gas Tax Will Encourage Us To Do What?

2009-05-26T12:46:00.003-04:00

I'm a cheerful proponent of public policy as behaviour modifier. You don't want people to drink to excess? Limit when the bars are open, where alcohol can be obtained, tax the beverage and crack down on DUIs. You want people to take public transportation? Put more buses/trains into service, cut the rates - and stop building garages and parking lots and raise the rates on the ones already in use. We may be uncomfortable with the shifts at first, but chances are efforts like this to modify how the citizenry handles undesirable behaviour will be successful in the long run.

However, public policy to change behaviour needs to be presented with rational goals which can actually be met without incurring more hardship than benefit. This is why the proposed gas tax, which I otherwise support, raises my hackles when its proponents talk about such things as "downsizing commutes" as if in the current economic situation downsizing one's commute were a viable option without other horrific impacts.

To be sure, Ryan Avent makes many good points about how energy demand brought us to this nasty place. And most certainly I agree with almost all his points about how we got here and how we can get back out again. But expecting the overextended commuter to relocate closer to work or find work closer to home, when the real estate market is in shambles and there are seemingly ten layoffs for every new hire, is remarkably shortsighted and ignores the hardships the consumer now faces even as it touts this idea as a solution to those hardships.

When The Daily Dish picked up this particular facet of the argument - that the gas tax might be worth reconsidering - I fired this off:

In this case, I must take issue with one point that keeps cropping up in the energy consumption debate: the idea that citizens of any country, particularly the US, can manage their commutes as described.

The Right's argument, that each citizen has the right to drive his/her H2 Hummer 100 miles each way to work if s/he feels like it, fails to distinguish affluence from waste. By elevating choice over practicality this argument panders to the same culture of decadent excess that other segments of Conservatist thinking denounce, and the philosophical disconnect seems invisible to the Conservatist theorists. Pop culture, when thinking of wealth, celebrates Larry Ellison and Donald Trump over Warren Buffett and Sam Walton, and made much of Lay, Skilling et al when Enron was in vogue. While FORBES may take notice of the distinction, the American Right as a movement does not, and pop Rightspeak continues to confuse excess with success.

The Left's argument seems to break down to some basic concepts. First, frugality is a virtue that ought to be encouraged. Second, wasteful habits can be successfully discouraged through public policy. Third, adjusting one's lifestyle in such drastic terms as shrinking one's commute is actually manageable in the short term. The first item is easily defended: the second, while less so, is still defensible. It's the third concept that really irks.

The current economic conditions in the US are savage: mushrooming unemployment, successive waves of commercial contractions, diminishing opportunity. Those of us left without employment by the recent turmoil are faced with difficult choices, and one of those is whether to remain in a given job market or relocate to better areas. Any commute in those circumstances is acceptable to the jobseeker. Conversely, however, employers are presented with a massive range of applicants for ever fewer openings, yet steadfastly holding on to the illusion that a given candidate from outside the immediate market is a risk due to the relocation or commute effort.

Were this any other economic crisis mobility wouldn't be such an issue. But as this one first exhibited as a real estate collapse, relocation for employment is a double-edged sword. Anyone lucky enough to be secure in his/her housing faces potentially catastrophic loss if s/he sells, and is forced to factor unemployment into that equation; this ugly arithmetic has to be weighed against the benefit of opportunity elsewhere. Anyone paying a substantial mortgage who becomes part of the newly unemployed faces foreclosure as a very real possibility if s/he remains in the local market and short sale at best if s/he moves. Anyone renting faces possible eviction and increased difficulty finding new housing in any market. In each case, prospective employers are increasingly disinclined to entertain candidacy from anyone not immediately available and within a very narrowly defined geographical radius.

Against this backdrop we have the argument that "downsizing commutes" is not only a worthwhile endeavour in the abstract but an achievable end of US energy policy within the next few years.

The electorate is beginning to understand that it is fortunate to HAVE a commute at all, and that making changes to it are beyond difficult: with the house worth too little to merit selling or the rental deposit too high to forfeit, and credit too tight to consider replacing the daily driver without angst, reengineering a commute on one's own makes little sense. For those without, employment is increasingly something to be found elsewhere: if that "elsewhere" is within an acceptable driving distance then it saves the personal disaster that moving has become in the current conditions.

For those still working, making ends meet with what they already have has become the order of the day: drastic changes are out of the question, and "downsizing" one's commute equates to either risking one's income in the ever-harsher job market or destroying one's net worth with a classically ill-timed residential move. For the unemployed, the net worth hit is a given at this point: the difficulty lies in convincing a prospective employer of that. Neither side is in any position to alter commute habits substantially without far more severe consequences.

I am tired of seeing US auto manufacturers obstruct energy efficiency in the name of short term profit. I am tired of civic bodies consistently failing to address public transport in a meaningful way. And I wholeheartedly support any practical means of encouraging energy efficiency. But suggesting that one's commute is a manageable part of that equation when housing values continue to gyrate and new employment opportunities are dwindling is ludicrous.

H/T Andrew Sullivan.

Amazing What One Word Can Do

2009-05-26T12:21:00.004-04:00

Sam Shulman at The Weekly Standard has an interesting little rant about how Same Sex Marriage advocates are hijacking "romantic marriage" to advance their cause, and how marriage as an institution is really all about extended families, fertility and ~~controlling~~ protecting women.

As Mustang Bobby says over at Bark Bark Woof Woof, Wow. Just wow.

For me, Shulman's money quote is this:

When, in spite of current enthusiasm, gay marriage turns out to disappoint or bore the couples now so eager for its creation, its failure will be utterly irrelevant for gay people.

Given that Shulman also says this:

The entity known as “gay marriage” only aspires to replicate a very limited, very modern, and very culture-bound version of marriage. Gay advocates... are replicating what we might call the “romantic marriage,” a kind of marriage that is chosen, determined, and defined by the couple that enters into it. Romantic marriage is now dominant in the West and is becoming slightly more frequent in other parts of the world.

... the chief issue he seems to have is that marriage for love - gay or straight - is a fad, foisted on us by the Romantic movement, and destructive of civilisation in the long run. The fun I have is what happens to the first quote if "gay" is removed from the line:

"When, in spite of current enthusiasm, marriage turns out to disappoint or bore the couples now so eager for its creation, its failure will be utterly irrelevant for people."

Read like that, it's much clearer how divorce became so prevalent in our society: if "romantic marriage" has failed, and those who entered into it have become disappointed or bored, naturally terminating the disappointing or boring endeavour becomes more attractive.

Yet somehow, despite an easy progression from society's boredom with "romantic marriage" to the current divorce statistics as a measure for how transient "traditional marriage" has become, it's not "romantic marriage" that is the problem for Shulman, it's that Teh Gay is trying to own the concept - when in his reality marriage is really all about The Clan, The Sex, The Ownership and The Babies and Love and Romance have nothing to do with it. That one word - "Gay" - has become so powerful to Shulman that it can rewrite all of the history of modern marriage, overwrite Shakespeare, Austen, Bronte, Shaw et al, and totally dismiss the simple fact that "romantic marriage" is far more a construct of the straight world than the gay one and that LGBT folks just want a piece of what hets have had a monopoly on for the last three hundred years at least.

Just one word. That's all it takes.

Wow. Just wow.

UPDATE: MJWS at The Reaction brings up this little gem to rebut Shulman.

On The Economy

2009-05-10T22:01:00.002-04:00

... and where I've been that I haven't been blogging.

As some of you may know, I'm currently "between jobs." I'm learning that means "laid off by a shrinking company, and competing with countless others just like me for the remaining scraps." For me, the econom y hasn't so much experienced a recession as outright imploded.

Tampa Bay was never a great leader in the technology sector, where I'm most at home. But now, with real estate and tourism (two of the largest moneymakers here) essentially gone, and finance (a third) in disarray, not only is there next to no opportunity but the resources necessary for independent VC-funded enterprises are mostly gone as well. In turn, the historically low compensation rates here make effective competition for employment elsewhere difficult: as one recruiter mentioned to me, it's difficult to present a candidate for a position that pays double that candidate's last one regardless of how well that person's skills match the vacancy.

At present, my job search is spanning the entire Atlantic seaboard. The best responses, in fact, have until the last week or so come from the Carolinas and the Northeast. I'm averaging 25-70 resumes a day, so far with just a handful of phone calls, and just four in-person interviews to date.

To add insult to injury, I'm learning just how false the impressions of Floridian economical living are. While researching residences elsewhere I found a lovely loft-style flat in a Northeastern state. This unit, marginally larger than my own and not substantially less expensive, is assessed roughly the same property taxes as my place - and mine is assessed half the usual value because of its particular status. The inevitable conclusion is that the tax rates in Florida are substantially higher than their equivalent in states denounced for their "high taxes." It's high time that those assumptions were revisited - and quite possibly refuted generally as my specific example leads me to think likely.

About The New Star Trek Film

2009-05-10T21:59:00.000-04:00

Paramount has shown me more than once already that they have no feeling for story continuity throughout ST. The new film merely carries on that unfeeling attitude.

Make no mistake: I thought it was a marvelous piece of cinema. The modelmakers should all be fired and that ugly excuse for NCC-1701 should be retired as soon as possible, but the film was very well done.

WITH THAT SAID:

The problem with each iteration of ST is that it is irredeemably a product of its time and the aspirations thereof. TOS was a truly 1960s creation: civil rights, the rights of women and minorities, and the questionable merits of war were all primary plot themes and drivers for the characters. The original 2 films drew on this as well with more than a little success. TNG was a product of the 1980s; plagues, epidemics, economics, rearrangements in the political sphere, unexpected upheavals and exploration of diverse cultural relationships and alien sexualities were the general replacements for the original emphases. It was, for example, much more interesting to have a ship's counselor (and a woman at that), and much less interesting to have a woman chief medical officer, in 1987 than it would have been in 1966. A Klingon security officer, though innovative, was perhaps predictable given Klingon militarism. ST6:TUC was an exploration of a post-cold-war galaxy only possible after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The list goes on.

With this new film, though, any chance of maintaining the continuity of the other series iterations and the prior films is now shot straight to hell.

To make matters worse, the technologies portrayed are equally disappointing. Not in their use on screen, which is actually very powerful, but in their application to a world not far removed from ST:FC and ENT when TNG onward did not exhibit such things. I will freely admit that neither real-world tech nor cinematography had progressed far enough to display any of that when the earlier versions were made, but that's not really the point. The Enterprise of TOS wasn't as technologically advanced - or designed to be as technologically advanced - as the Enterprise of the new film. The new film strikes me as The Matrix overlayed with ST symbols than a true original work standing on its own merits and on the shoulders of its ST predecessors.

The chief criticisms I have read of the film also conveniently forget one thing: TOS was a sixties creation at its core. The endearing womanizer Kirk, the irascible country-doc McCoy, and all the others were only truly possible in the time when the series was written: the seat-of-the-pants solutions that crew created are simply not possible in the more politically and culturally aware noughties: were this a completely new creature following ST ethics the characters would have been at least substantially different. By revisiting the sixties icons, without deeper analysis or more depth to the characters, what results is something of a might-have-been for characters who, for all their merits, are showing their age when viewed out of their context just as surely as Shakespeare's leading ladies so often do when viewed by a modern audience without an understanding of Elizabethan England. Paramount's pathetic attempt to cure these ills with snazzy special effects and a (dismally) redesigned ship only shows how lacking these characters are when transplanted from their native time to today.

I cannot fault the actors: the interpretations are remarkably true to the original characters, and give us a glimpse of what their younger years might have looked like without compromising the personas created forty years ago. But the studio should be ashamed for this poorly thought out tale. I cannot expect that they feel anything of the sort, since repeatedly they have shown as much feeling for a consistent storyline for ST as a vegan does for steak tartare. The less said about the Dominion War, the Cardassian War, the Suleiban and the Xindi, the better, in my opinion, and turning a genius on the inexplicably-human Alpha Centauri world into a drunken Terran in ST:FC was shockingly wrong no matter how well played. The new film carries on the studio's tradition of mythos-specific Alzheimer's when it comes to the franchise. And while I'm sure it will fill the seats, for those of us who watched ST looking for a better future, this surprisingly dark tale as the latest installation of the ST franchise is a severe disappointment.

iTicked

2009-04-30T13:26:00.002-04:00

The more I use iTunes, the more I miss WinAmp.

I'm on my second iPod, which I purchased to increase my portable capacity. My library is significant (I passed 500 CDs years ago), and laptops are not practical to store so many music files, so I've relocated my music to a NAS. Relocating those files means adjusting the defaults for iTunes so it can find the data.

This is very manageable - for each specific version of iTunes. Upgrading, though, produces all sorts of chaos.

For some reason, every time I upgrade iTunes, the new installation loses all the marker information, including album artwork. It isn't readily apparent until I start downloading new data: new purchases, new imported CDs, new podcasts. At that point, the upgraded software begins storing these new files in the application's default location, and loses track of the NAS-housed data.

I can reconfigure the software to find the files on the NAS with little difficulty. But peripheral data, specifically the album art, is a far different story. It's not clear how iTunes stores this data, but every upgrade has lost something, and the latest one (to v8.1) lost about half my album covers. There's no apparent pattern, and whether the data was found through iTunes and the store or uploaded manually seems to make no difference. Worse, some albums downloaded from iTunes itself lose artwork, again with no apparent explanation. This is true from (and here one gets a glimpse of my library) a-ha through Yes, and varies without predictability: some Asia albums retained their artwork and some did not, and artists as current as Amber and as esoteric as the Wien Volksoper lost artwork while others did not. Some - including some very popular artists - had the correct artwork actually replaced by iTunes with completely unrelated material: iTunes really ought to know the difference between Wilson Phillips and Nathan Phillips, but at least with this upgrade did not.

I've always respected Apple as a desktop platform, and the iPod and iPhone seem like highly effective gadgets as well. But this regular data loss, however insignificant to the actual music files, is disturbing. A software publisher such as Apple should be able to manage upgrades without data loss of any kind. Further, regardless of the current availability of a product through iTunes, items purchased through Apple should be able to be maintained without having to go through these gyrations with each software update.

I've spent a good portion of the morning on Amazon and Discogs digging up replacement artwork - much of it either already uploaded to iTunes or obtained from Apple with the particular albums. Resync has only been partially successful: despite specifying artwork for an entire album, in at least two instances only some of the tracks display properly.

I've researched this on Apple's Website and found nothing. Apparently Apple doesn't see a need to provide support for functionality it clearly considers as secondary (despite having made considerable noise when the 4G iPod was released about this particular function). I'm still looking in outside sources for more information.

It's true that other music file management applications have similar features. And it's true that iTunes wasn't tailored for the audiophile, and some of its controls are less than ideal. But it is a useful tool for managing an iPod, and once a version is configured properly it's pretty stable. But upgrading iTunes presents far more difficulty than others - and here I'm thinking of WinAmp in particular - whose functions, while not completely iPod-compatible, were at least carried over in whole from version to version and required very little in the way of reconstruction of the database to resume normal operations.

If anyone from Apple is reading this, I would say that anyone familiar with databases would be most unhappy with iTunes in this respect - and that the lack of thought put into the product regarding management of secondary data and file location specification calls into question Apple's other database applications.

Excuse me while I go dig up some more graphics for the other items still without pretty pictures.

Somehow Strangely Appropriate

2009-04-27T23:19:00.002-04:00

From ThinkProgress:

The AP reports that Fox has decided to stick with its regular line-up on Wednesday, meaning it won't air President Obama's prime-time news conference marking his 100th day in office. Instead, viewers will see an episode of "Lie to Me." ABC, CBS, and NBC will be airing the press conference.

Hmmm. Press conference or "Lie to Me." That's some choice. Thanks, Fox, for showing us both your position and your intention all in one place.

A Dream Deferred

2009-04-27T21:43:00.004-04:00

Carl over at The Reaction has put up a very thought-provoking piece about the steps the Obama administration and Congressional leaders are taking to advance a progressive agenda. He's concerned - and with reason.

It's a radical departure from congressional precedent, in which budget rules have been designed and used to reduce deficits, not expand the size of government. And it promises bitter divisiveness under an administration that has made repeated promises to reach across the partisan divide.

For my part, I see the move as something rather different, and dangerous in its own way.

One of my longest-held political principles is that a budget process that can be balanced over time is critical tot the stability of any government. Keynes spoke to this eloquently: when the economy is weak, the government must spend to stimulate production, but when the economy is strong, the government must recoup those expenditures as preparation for the next downturn. Economists following Keynes, and economic policymakers, have made ample use of the first half of the principle. They have, however, conveniently forgotten the second.

Congress has presented multiple pieces of legislation to require the federal budget be balanced as a matter of practice. The amendments offered, however, were to require a balanced budget every year. This, if Keynes is correct, is not only impossible but massively unwise as it prevents the federal government from taking action to stimulate a faltering economy even as it likewise prevents the same government from recouping those losses and posting a net gain during times of prosperity. Balanced budgets under these conditions would enshrine a certain amount of debt: any obligation outstanding would necessarily be retained as a sort of credit line that once paid off could never be incurred again, preventing its closure just as the interest paid on it would become - as has become the de facto case - merely the cost of governance.

The GOP showed its hand in the 90s, demanding a balanced budget. It was no doubt to their chagrin that the Clinton administration, buoyed by a thriving tech sector, was able to oblige. However, the taxation required to maintain the progression was successfully presented as an excessive burden. Whether this was an ideological position, or merely maneuvering to sabotage the economic success of the Clinton years, is not clear. What is clear is that the Bush administration lost no time revising the tax code, sabotaging the balanced budget effort even as they made the burden less on the higher economic echelons of society.

I will freely admit that I have never had a particularly high opinion of the Bush presidency. There are many reasons for this, the brutality of the GWoT and radical rewriting of public ethics being chief in my complaints. However, the effective nuking of the federal budget is not far behind. Bush's policies did little to diminish the size of government except in areas of particular interest to the most radical of the administration's supporters. Reduced taxes placed an excessive burden on the existing infrastructure. And the various efforts of the GWoT squandered what little was left, leaving the US massively in debt and all hope of a short path to a balanced budget and reduced federal obligation in the dust.

This is the fiscal mess that Obama has inherited along with the economic collapse. Abandoning the irresponsible tax cuts of the Bush administration would in ordinary times be a responsible measure aimed at balancing the budget. Under the present circumstances, however, a balanced budget is as realistic as flying to the moon on a contraption built of string and sealing wax. The shattered economy combined with the enormous costs of occupation of two foreign lands make any attempt to balance the federal budget in the near future suicidal at best.

In turn, the radically increasing costs of healthcare in the US present the most likely source of bankruptcy, both private and public. Healthcare costs are increasing at multiples of inflation just as the average salary is shrinking and as employment is falling faster than the GOP's polling numbers. Social Security may not be an issue for many years yet, but Medicare is fast approaching a critical point where, between the needs of an aging population and the skyrocketing costs of preserving that population's health, it will be unable to meet the need.

Indeed, the pressures of keeping healthy under the US system are becoming so bad that medical tourism is fast becoming the avenue of choice for anyone facing major medical procedures. Walking with Ghosts has a fascinating projection on how many US citizens are projected to seek medical care overseas, not merely for the sake of the novelty of travel involved but also to save considerable expense. Should this trend progress much further, as the costs of healthcare abroad present an increasingly small fraction of the costs of the same care in the US, the healthcare system will either fail utterly - a tragedy for any nation - or outsource such procedures as a matter of course - which would deprive the US of major healthcare talent and needed tax revenue, producing a like result.

Under these circumstances, substantial review of US healthcare policy is not just a necessity but a mandate.

The recent step taken by the Congress - to include a new healthcare bill in the current budget legislation as part of the reconciliation process - is therefore most necessary, particularly if the long-term health of the US economy and the federal budget are to be maintained along with the long-term health of the US citizenry.

Carl's suggestion, that this is a less-than-usual method of handling such legislation, and that this is a substantial effort on the part of the federal government, is well taken. And were there a rational opposition party in place to advocate for a more appropriate or effective solution it would have substantial weight.

Unfortunately, the current crop of GOP congresspeople seem committed to opposing the Obama administration, and the Democratic majority in Congress, on every initiative and proposition. The level of spite and malice involved in their unthinking nay-saying is palpable. One need look no further than the initial budget debate to see proof: in response to a dense, carefully calculated budget proposed by the Democrats, the Republicans produced a couple dozen pages of theoretical waffle with not one single quantifiable alternative proposal to present. The recent kerfluffle with Somali pirates is equally indicative: no action taken, deferred or prevented has been met with anything but derision, and many condemnations overtly contradict the others. The GOP has indeed become the Party of No, squealing like a small child who has just discovered its new favorite word and ignorant of the meaning or consequences of its use.

Faced with circumstances like these, and able to present a majority government in both branches tasked with enacting legislation, the Democratic party has little choice but to use the methods available to it. If that means bypassing the irrationality presented by the opposition, then that is obviously what must be done to achieve progress.

I know too little of the new healthcare initiative to comment intelligently on it at this time. However, I know more than enough of the current system to say with conviction that it is well and truly broken, perhaps irrevocably. If healthcare is to remain a resource available to the citizens of the US it must be rethought substantially, and rethought soon. Should this new programme be at all productive I believe it worth the risks. And swelling the federal bureaucracy to achieve that, after the lessons of the last twenty years, is far more easily remedied than might be thought: the only uncertainties are in how that reduction would be accomplished and whether the resultant costs are worth preserving the small-government ideal.

UPDATE: As to the "radical departure from congressional precedent" Carl mentions, ThinkProgress has an effective rebuttal.

I've Become A Reactionary

2009-04-26T11:06:00.002-04:00

The team at The Reaction have invited me to join their group as a co-'blogger.

I'm delighted to join their group of thoughtful, articulate writers.

Thanks, folks.

On Oil and The Recession

2009-04-26T10:12:00.004-04:00

Almost as footnote to my earlier post "Green or Not," The Atlantic dished this little item up a few days ago.

In it, Derek Thompson reviews a Brookings Institution paper written by James Hamilton forecasting a drastic market downturn should oil prices spike, and compares the forecast with the last two years when oil prices did spike.

Hamilton went back to 2003, when crude oil was around $30 a gallon and forecast what an oil shock like the one we experienced in 2007-08 (when oil peaked around $140) would do to GDP. He graphed the result through the end of 2008 and, lo and behold, it was damn close to actual GDP.

...

What about real estate, subprime mortgages and defaults? Hamilton says the housing industry had been tightening up long before the recession -- "subtracting 0.94% from the average annual GDP growth rate over 2006:Q4-2007:Q3." And housing is factored into Hamilton's analysis. It was just one of a handful of multipliers that always turn down during oil shocks.

The Real Time Economics Blog at WSJ moves the theory forward with a pretty interesting bit of revisionist history. The grand retelling goes something like this. Cheap gasoline from the 1990s into this decade encouraged families to set up their homes farther from the cities where they worked. But as the price of gas began to increase, it put a big strain of these families' commutes. With gas rising from $2 to $4, the price of these long drives doubled, straining those families' most expensive payments, namely: mortgages. When families realized they could not afford their exurban commutes, they sold their homes for a big loss. Voila: Their mortgage crisis became a bank crisis and the rest is our living history.

I find Thompson's closing comments particularly telling:

My head's still spinning a bit, but it's interesting to think about the political consequences of a report like this being mainstreamed. If the idea somehow stuck that an oil shock was responsible for the financial crisis, it could be a significant catalyzer for the push toward energy reform. Today we're seeing a great national movement to change Wall Street because the general consensus is that Wall Street caused this crisis. Whether Hamilton's theory is wacko or brilliant, just imagine what a national movement to revolutionize America's energy consumption would look like. What if we had oil parties instead of tea parties, demanding more government investment in alternative fuels and subsidies for green technologies. That would really be something.

Also of note are Hamilton's own words, on his own 'blog:

My paper uses a number of different models that had been fit to earlier historical episodes to see what they imply about the contribution that the oil shock of 2007-08 might have made to real GDP growth over the last year. The approaches surveyed include Edelstein and Kilian (2007), who examined the detailed response of various components of consumer spending, Blanchard and Gali (2007), who studied the extent to which the contribution of oil shocks has significantly decreased over time, my 2003 paper, which emphasized the role of nonlinearities, and a model-free data summary of the observed behavior of different economic magnitudes following this and previous oil shocks. Although the approaches are quite different, they all support a common conclusion: had there been no increase in oil prices between 2007:Q3 and 2008:Q2, the U.S. economy would not have been in a recession over the period 2007:Q4 through 2008:Q3. [emphasis added]

Progressives have long maintained that the US suburban/exurban lifestyle is inefficient to the point of waste, and encourages overexpenditure on energy and materiel. Hamilton now shows us that this may well be true, and adds on a layer of vast economic vulnerability incurred through energy dependency.

If Hamilton's theories are to be believed in whole, the US needs a far more radical rethinking of its preferred lifestyle for the long term than has been discussed to date. Interim solutions, such as alternative energy and hybrid vehicles, are just that: temporary solutions to what will likely become a permanent problem. Unless vast resources of cheap, non-polluting energy can be sourced and managed domestically, the exurb is ultimately finished, since it will become economically unfeasible to commute any substantial distance or to travel far for shopping. Commercial distribution channels will also need to be rethought in this light: the great centralised warehouse may also become a thing of the past.

Regardless of the long-term implications of the paper, the work is a clear demand for a new, more conscientious approach to energy policy and urban development. This should also include industrialised agriculture, as that behemoth is a voracious consumer of petroleum products yet, due to its nature, frequently left out of petroleum-based energy policy debates.

Doing so, it would necessarily distinguish between the rural - farming, ranching, etc - and the urban/exurban markets: rural communities should be supported even as the larger urban/exurban communities are revisited in light of this new information. Too little thought is given to the distinctions between the rural landscape, isolated from the major energy consuming markets and largely self-sufficient, and the ever more costly urban environments that drive most energy and civic planning policies, and most resistance to urban-centred efforts at energy efficiency stem from their unthinking application to the countryside where such concerns are measurably smaller and less immediate.

Regardless of the planning remaining to be done, the paper presents an excellent take on the correlation between the costs of sprawl and the economic health of the industrial West. The built-in inefficiencies of the suburb and exurb, coupled with the uncertainty of energy supply - particularly oil - to maintain that sprawl, can be seen to have substantial impact on market sectors not immediately connected to those inefficiencies and uncertainties. Whether or not Hamilton's paper spawns the movement for energy independence Thompson describes, the mumbers deserve the attention of policymakers, and the implications demand public dialogue on the correlations between imported resources and community development.

H/T Andrew Sullivan.

Buddies For Hire

2009-04-26T09:56:00.004-04:00

The scandals surrounding former Elections Supervisor Buddy Johnson continue to unravel.

Some members of a black advisory board created by former Elections Supervisor Buddy Johnson now say they witnessed firsthand the influence of paid consultants on the message being presented to voters.

...

The concern came over a discussion about whether Johnson's name or just his title should be used in public information distributed to black voters.

When a member of the African-American Advisory Board offered his opinion, he was overruled.

"There were times in which we would discuss things and how they should appear. There was a fine line," said Anddrikk Fraiser, vice president of the African-American Advisory Board. "I said, 'Maybe we should just go with Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections,' and the consultant would say, 'No, it should say Buddy Johnson.'

"Was it egregious? I would say yes."

Johnson and his office created the advisory board in August to be an independent panel that would identify issues of concern among minority voters.

It was a volunteer organization made up of black leaders from area churches, businesses and community organizations.

But Johnson used federal voter education money to pay two consultants, Thomas Huggins and Sherryl Cusseaux, who regularly attended board meetings. Huggins was in charge of Johnson's black outreach, and Cusseaux had been hired, in part, to establish the board.

...

Today, Johnson is out of a job and under federal investigation for how his office spent taxpayer money.

Phyllis Busansky, who defeated him in November, no longer employs the consultants who worked to craft his education outreach.

But the advisory board remains, trying to fulfill its mission.

...

Board members are still discovering how little they knew about Johnson's outreach effort.

It was only recently, Fraiser said, that he learned Johnson also paid $16,204 to a third consultant, Patty, to duplicate work the board was doing for free.

Fraiser said they were never told that Patty had been hired in early October to help defuse rumors about "No Match, No Vote." At the time of Patty's hiring, the board was scheduling two forums to discuss the issue and address concerns.

"I had no idea Michelle Patty had anything to do with Buddy Johnson, besides being an endorser, until those stories came out," he said.

"I do find it a little bit odd because of the efforts we went through to flame out the rumor of the 'No Match, No Vote.' That was one of the top things on our list, behind working with ex-felons to get their rights restored."

...

From its inception Aug. 21, there was much the board wasn't told.

The 17 members were not told how everyone was selected or why.

They were not told until mid-September that the board would not receive any money. Members had to pay for expenses out of pocket, Favorite said.

"No one on that committee got paid anything," Fraiser said. "We were meeting two, three hours every two weeks."

And they were not told that Cusseaux had been paid to create the board.

The investigations continue.

"I Believe" - In WHAT, Exactly?

2009-04-25T20:35:00.004-04:00

Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof discusses the new "I Believe" license plate the Florida legislature has given a tentative go-ahead to issue. His piece covers the basic arguments about separation of church and state, and an effective dissection of the key sponsors' (including Hillsborough County's resident Inquisitress, Rhonda Storms) histories and perspectives, quite well.

I was struck by some other items.

This piece of idiocy shows just how gullible the Xtian community really is.

The Faith In Teaching website is defunct: only cached copies remain. Domain.com shows the domain name as "taken" but the site is down.

Regardless of the state of the site, even the original site was remarkably short on detail. Only two pages seem to be available, each of which essentially repeats the other, and all the links posted on the Website lead off the site to other entities such as state legislators' pages and dot-gov resources. Any 501c3 entity to list only a vague mission statement and a PO box mailing address, with no more information, specific target programmes, board members or electronic contact information, simply screams "scam." And without more detail, there are no indications whatever that the effort is anything more than a means of screaming "State XX is Christian" rather than a meaningful effort to assist religious education institutions.

The cached pages and the related news stories hint that FIT is open to supporting both Christian and Jewish organisations with the funds received. However, I for one cannot imagine any self-respecting Jew that would put a Christian emblem on his/her bumper just to get $25 to his/her preferred school. There is, in turn, no plate offered with any Hebrew symbols (menorah, Star of David, etc) which would be equivalently meaningful to that faith. This, too, shouts out that the movement is deliberately misleading in its intents as well as in its presentation. Further, there is a noticeable absence of accommmodation for other faiths, both in illustrated plate samples or in the language used on the saved copies of the Website, which makes the interfaith claims spouted by FIT sound even more false.

There are already plenty of incentives for private donations like this. Income tax incentives alone yield more benefit for philanthropy. Likewise, there are plenty of other meaningful symbols that can already be applied without requiring state involvement as this particular effort obviously intends. Insisting that such a step is needed to save Florida's religious schools is worthy of the loudest ridicule: if the schools and teaching programmes are failing, it isn't because there hasn't been a license plate to bring them cash - it's because their primary sources of funding (philanthropy and donations) have dried up. Anyone who wanted to give to a faith-based school would already be doing so without the plate, and those too poor to do so before the plate are unlikely to be able to afford the surcharge for the plate now.

And last there is that sticky Separation of Church and State issue to consider.

One doesn't need to be anything other than Christian to see this transparent attempt at proselytizing for proselytizing's sake for anything but what it is. And one doesn't need a license plate to declare one's faith.

I'm far less incensed that Florida would debate such a clearly sectarian programme than that the state - any state - would be so willing to be duped by such an obviously dishonest effort.

Support Net Neutrality

2009-04-24T14:09:00.001-04:00

... and oppose AstroTurf like the American Consumer Institute:

Cable and phone companies, many of which are eyeing similar price structures, don’t want to see TWC fail. So enter the American Consumer Institute, the fake consumer group that is trying to convince us that excluding people from using the Internet is a good thing. Oh, and so is stifling online video innovation.

The ACI sent an open letter to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and other congressional members outlining the merits of pricing structures that limit Internet access.

Who is behind the bellowing? The Web site is actually registered to Stephen Pociask, a telecom consultant and former chief economist for Bell Atlantic. If he sounds familiar, it’s because we blogged about him before when ACI claimed Net Neutrality – the principle that all online content should be equally accessible – is dangerous for consumers.

Check out SaveTheInternet for the rest of this article, and more.

Contractors: Not Just for the DoD Any More

2009-04-24T13:25:00.004-04:00

Jeremy Scahill has a compelling article up on Alternet about how local law enforcement is embracing the contracting trend.

This privatization trend is hardly new, but it is accelerating. While events such as the Nisour Square massacre committed in September 2007 by Blackwater operatives in Baghdad show the lethal danger of unleashing mercenary forces on foreign soil, one area with the potential for extreme abuses resulting from this privatization is in domestic law enforcement in the U.S.

Many people may not be aware of this, but since the 1980s, private security guards have outnumbered police officers.

"The more than 1 million contract security officers, and an equal number of guards estimated to work directly for U.S. corporations, dwarf the nearly 700,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United States," according to the Washington Post. Some estimate that private security operate inside the U.S. at a 5-to-1 ratio with police.

In New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of the city, private security poured in. Armed operatives from companies like Blackwater, Wackenhut, Intercon and DynCorp spread out in the city. Within two weeks of the hurricane, the number of private security companies registered in Louisiana jumped from 185 to 235.

...

Now it seems that some cities think it is a great idea to expand the use of these private forces using taxpayer funds.

The Wall Street Journal this week reported, "Facing pressure to crack down on crime amid a record budget deficit, Oakland is joining other U.S. cities that are turning over more law-enforcement duties to private armed guards. The City Council recently voted to hire International Services Inc., a private security agency, to patrol crime-plagued districts. While a few Oakland retail districts previously have pooled cash to pay for unarmed security services, using public funds to pay for private armed guards would mark a first for the city."

In a stunning development revealed late Wednesday night, Oakland dropped its plan to hire International Services Inc. after the firm's founder and two other executives were arrested on charges of defrauding the state of California out of more than $9 million in workers compensation.

...

Why do some Oakland officials want this? On the one hand, the belief that it will bring security, but also to save money:
Hiring private guards is less expensive than hiring new officers. Oakland -- facing a record $80 million budget shortfall -- spends about 65 percent of its budget for police and fire services, including about $250,000 annually, including benefits and salary, on each police officer.

In contrast, for about $200,000 a year, the city can contract to hire four private guards to patrol the troubled East Oakland district where four on-duty police officers were killed in March. And the company, not the city, is responsible for insurance for the guards.
As in many cities, this is a contentious issue in Oakland, which has struggled to deal with substantial violence on the one hand and police brutality on the other. According to the San Francisco Chronicle:
The areas where the armed guards were supposed to have been deployed have a disproportionate share of homicides, assaults with deadly weapons and robberies. … The crime rate in the area, according to a 2003 blight study, is between 225 and 150 percent higher than the city as a whole.

Scahill's point is well taken, since as we have seen elsewhere private contractors are bound neither by their oaths as public servants nor law nor treaty when it comes to fulfilling their mission objectives. The antics of Blackwater, Custer Battles et al on the streets of Baghdad, Jalalabad, Masar-e-Sharif or Khabul have been bad enough: transplanted to US cities employing private security as law enforcement, those tendencies will have tragic effects for those communities just as has been seen in Louisiana and California to date.

I can recall, from my years out West, the "patrol specials" that local businesses put on the streets. These were either off-duty or out-of-work police officers, whose backgrounds had been inspected, working in their own communities and funded by business and local organisations as a supplement to the SFPD presence. They were also a small minority, functioning as an adjunct rather than a functional replacement for the beat cops. The new trend looks nothing like the patrol special concept. The programmes Scahill outlines are far larger, with personnel brought in from outside the community (including as far away as Israel as he points out): these people will have little if any feeling for the communities they are tasked to serve. The results are tragically predictable.

It is understandable, particularly in the current crisis, for a municipality to seek to save resources, and contractors offer on the surface an immediate economy over their police department peers. However, the point that they will be less restrained, more aggressive, and far less interested in the rights of the residents of the communities where they are deployed is valid. Those tendencies will almost certainly lead to more litigation for abuse, harassment, and wrongful death, which regardless of the pains suffered by the communities affected will result in the economies of their employment vaporised by the resulting judgments. Since any municipality will have less invested in defending a contractor than a comparable law enforcement officer, sworn to public service and on the municipality's payroll, the likelihood that that municipality will pay some sort of damages increases, making the cost/benefit calculus untenable in the long term. Even if the cost in lost liberties and lives were acceptable, any community choosing to contract with private security for law enforcement faces the likelihood that the fiscal costs will become unacceptable even if that is not the case immediately.

Maintaining a police force is not an inexpensive proposition. But it is something any US citizen has a right to expect of his/her government. Handing off that responsibility may seem like an effective solution to the budget constraints of the present, but the costs in dollars, public trust and individual lives are nearly certain to eclipse any short term gain any city choosing to sidestep its responsibility to its citizens would see.

Sighting

2009-04-24T08:55:00.002-04:00

Perini Navi's 177' Parsifal III. For a friend.

Privatising the GWoT

2009-04-23T16:19:00.002-04:00

FBI interrogator Ali Soufan has a remarkably illuminating piece in today's New York Times. In it, Soufan shreds the Conservatist arguments that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" were successful or that they produced meaningful intelligence that normal techniques could not.

Liss at Shakesville, on reading it, picked up something interesting in the narrative:

The debate after the release of these memos has centered on whether C.I.A. officials should be prosecuted for their role in harsh interrogation techniques. That would be a mistake. Almost all the agency officials I worked with on these issues were good people who felt as I did about the use of enhanced techniques: it is un-American, ineffective and harmful to our national security.

Fortunately for me, after I objected to the enhanced techniques, the message came through from Pat D’Amuro, an F.B.I. assistant director, that “we don’t do that,” and I was pulled out of the interrogations by the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller (this was documented in the report released last year by the Justice Department’s inspector general).

My C.I.A. colleagues who balked at the techniques, on the other hand, were instructed to continue. (It’s worth noting that when reading between the lines of the newly released memos, it seems clear that it was contractors, not C.I.A. officers, who requested the use of these techniques.) [emphasis added]

I share Liss' disgust at the transfer of military and intelligence operations to private entities, for much the same reason.

The Iraq conflict has employed at least as many "contractors" as it has servicepeople. Iraq needs a new base/barracks/school/whatever? Don't send in the Corps of Engineers: KBR can do that, and it'll only cost twice as much and need as much more in renovation of the electrical and plumbing systems. There's a new VIP coming to visit? Blackwater can cover the convoy (at 3x what it'd cost to bring in Rangers for the job), and they'll only shoot a few of the locals by mistake. The list is endless.

Now, through Soufan, we have an account that indicates the same busineses were among the first to "request" the interrogation tecniques Yoo, Bybee, Bradbury et al attempted to justify. Note that Soufan stipulates that it was the contractors, not the FBI nor the CIA, that made the initial requests.

It is becoming defensible that the GWoT, like the attempts to "reform" Social Security, was less a struggle against terrorism and more a means to outsource the Department of Defense. The advantages are clear: fewer "troops" would need to be deployed to a given theatre, reducing the visibility of the campaign at home; casualties would be the responsibility of the contractor, removing a burden from the Veterans' Administration; costly weapons programmes could be handed to the private sector which could write them off as business expenditures; shoddy workmanship in facilities and reconstruction efforts could be handed off to the private sector builders, who could at once claim benefit from the work perfomed and protection from litigation under the umbrella of the US government; and the private contractors could be far more free in their methods and tactics than US servicepeople constrained by law, duty and military codes of justice and conduct.

Disownership is perhaps the key item here: the US can at once contract with a private entity for a service performed, and distance itself from the success or failure of that service and the methods used to do the job. After all, it wasn't US soldiers/sailors that made such a mess, it was a contractor. But then again, the contractor can't be punished because it works for the US government. This gives the government a free hand to indulge its worst tendencies while still maintaining at least the pretense that those tendencies weren't its own.

Liss' perspective is quite clear:

At some point, I hope there's a reckoning for the influence private military contractors were allowed to have on our national policy during the Bush administration. I hope, but I suspect there won't be.

In fact, I suspect that outsourcing the really ugly stuff was the point all along.

Rereading Soufan's piece, and thinking back over the last eight years, I can't help but think she's right. But I think there's a larger problem: ShrubCo worked from the premise that that private anything was more cost-effective, and more efficient, than its public equivalent. I suspect that the interrogations and other "contract" work was an experiment in the effectiveness of a private defense entity, and that the eventual goal was to turn over all but the most basic command functions of the military and intelligence arms to private enterprise. If these "contractors" could be shown to be more effective, and less expensive, than their comparable DoD or intelligence branches, a case could be made to let them handle those tasks on an ongoing basis.

This vision is highly disturbing. Imagine, for a moment, a Blackwater or Custer Battles type of business possessing aircraft carriers and advanced attack aircraft leased long-term to the US Navy. Imagine a similar organisation tasked with the incarceration and interrogation of combatants - without DoD or CIA supervision or input. The materiel would present far less risk to the US' worth (the value would be covered by private insurance and neither protected nor guaranteed by the federal government, yet could still be defended as "US sovereign territory" should it be attacked or lost. The contractors would be responsible for their own out-of-theatre expenses such as healthcare, counseling and housing, saving countless millions in such expenses for the DoD, yet still be "our boys" when in harm's way. Conversely, the contracted businesses would be under extreme pressure - not to remain within any budget, but to produce satisfactory results: losing people or equipment, or performing atrocities, would become a cost of doing business, and only the success of a mission or campaign would be measure of the value of the contract. The simultaneous liberation to indulge the worst behaviours of wartime and freedom from the burdensome expenditures required to maintain a peacetime military would enable the administration to engage in some of the ugliest fighting imaginable without substantial risk to public resources. And if an individual contractor became sufficiently unpopular to risk public support its contract could always be cancelled and awarded elsewhere.

That scenario raises two major potential horrors. First, and most easily understood - particularly in light of Soufan's article - is how far and how fast a contractor with no oath, and only a W2 to demand loyalty, can sink into the quagmire. Second is the horrific scenario when a contractor as well equipped as the US government is cut loose: where will it go? who will pay its salaries? what will it be prepared to do to remain in business and pay its shareholders? Neither scenario is at all pretty.

There are sound reasons for maintaining standing armed forces and well trained intelligence professionals as public resources. There are equally sound reasons for keeping those resources public and not delegating their activities to private industry. In each case, one of the reasons is the controls placed on public service that private enterprise avoids. It's defensible that the Bush maladministration advocated the privatisation of these functions as they did precisely to bypass those controls.

As Bad As They Are, Part Two

2009-04-23T16:09:00.003-04:00

Andrew Sullivan has a pair of tales from World War Two, highlighting just how different the earlier - and highly successful - interrogation methods were, and why even the Nazis avoided the barbarity on display from the Bush years.

'Blogging Update

2009-04-22T17:08:00.004-04:00

"As Bad As They Are" and "Iraqi Liberation and (Un)Intended Consequences" are both now up at The Reaction.

Answering The Wrong Question

2009-04-22T15:12:00.004-04:00

Talking Points Memo has an illuminating clip on the perspective that let the US get to this point.

Pay special attention to the section from about 0:48.

Note that the Bush apologist makes much of the US government "doing everything possible to keep us safe."

The problem here is what is possible.

Waterboarding is possible. So are sleep deprivation, stress positions, sensory deprivation and a host of other documented practices employed by US intelligence and advocated and approved by the Bush Administration. They are demonstrably possible: their use is documented.

So too, however, are the use of thumbscrews, the Brazen Bull, the Iron Maiden, the rack, drawing and quartering, and a host of other methods and devices known to history. I doubt strongly that anyone would advocate reintroduction of those methods of coercion. Yet, as the tools exist, and have both a long and bloody record and precise documentation of their construction and application, the possibility of their use is demonstrable and the possibility that they could be used today is very real. Possible only means that the capacity for use is measurable; it has nothing to do with the propriety of that possibility.

The problem isn't what's possible. The problem is what's ethical and legal. Were the question only one of the possible, all manner of atrocities could be justified. Civilisation is not about the possible, nor even about the practical. It is a matter of the ethical, moral, and conscionable: without ethics and some semblance of morality civilisation is impossible.

None of the techniques described fit those constraints.

H/T Andrew Sullivan.

A Thought on the Torture Investigations

2009-04-22T14:36:00.000-04:00

The problem with this entire discussion is that, rather than requiring that the subsequent President pursue the illegalities of his/her predecessor, the obligation actually rests on the concurrent Congress to review, investigate and prosecute any illegal behaviour on the part of the sitting President at that time. The 108th through 110th Congresses had ample opportunity, and substantial grounds, to undertake such an investigation. That they did not is far more indicative than any action the 44th President could take to investigate the administration of the 43rd.

Not Shrill Enough

2009-04-22T12:29:00.002-04:00

Apparently John McCain isn't "conservative" enough for some of his constituents.

“John McCain has failed miserably in his duty to secure this nation’s borders and protect the people of Arizona from the escalating violence and lawlessness,” [newly-announced primary opponent, and Minuteman Civil Defense Corps founder, Chris] Simcox said in a statement according to MSNBC. “He has fought real efforts over the years at every turn, opting to hold our nation’s border security hostage to his amnesty schemes. Coupled with his votes for reckless bailout spending and big government solutions to our nation’s problems, John McCain is out of touch with everyday Arizonans. Enough is enough.”

I suppose it was inevitable.

Manufacturing Evidence

2009-04-22T11:25:00.003-04:00

Andrew Sullivan brings up a key point in the Armed Services Committee findings, highlighted by the McClatchy coverage of the story:

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," [an unnamed former senior US intelligence official] continued.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

It wasn't enough to learn about upcoming al-Qaida plots from those caught early in the GWoT: the maladministration needed evidence that al-Qaida was colluding with Iraq in a global anti-US conspiracy. And if the normal interrogations failed to produce that evidence (assuming normal interrogation methods were employed from the outset), then the maladministration explicitly encouraged more outrageous methods to elicit that information - even if it meant abusing detainees to the point where they'd say anything just to make the horror stop.

UPDATE: ThinkProgress has a point-by-point takedown on the programme here.

(Misplaced) Expectations of Decency and Honour

2009-04-22T08:17:00.003-04:00

A Senate Armed Services Committee report is expected today on inquiries into the origins of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used in the GWoT, made public some time ago and whose flimsy justifications have been recently made available through the memos the Obama administration released last week. Though the report has apparently not been released as of writing, both the Washington Post and New York Times have articles on the programme's origin, and my 'blogging peers are already starting to weigh in.

The evidence unearthed both damns the programme from its formation and spotlights the incredible ignorance, callousness and hubris of the GWoT as prosecuted. From the Post and Times items, the programme began perhaps eight full months before the first Justice Department memo affording its scope was delivered. Early questions from junior officers seeking clarification on the legality of the methods employed were brushed aside. And by the time the earliest memos were written, a de facto routine to employ those techniques, and a network of facilities in which to use them, was already well (if perhaps not fully) formed.

One of the most shocking things revealed is that the programme's origin in Department of Defense SERE training techniques, intended to assist US servicepeople captured and interrogated, was openly recognised and even approved. The logic that if we were trained to endure such treatment it couldn't really be all that bad drove both the programme itself and its general acceptance by the leadership; no recognition is indicated that the programme was designed to help soldiers survive treatment known to be illegal, immoral and inhumane meted out by governments and organisations whose own legitimacy would already be challenged and against whom the US was already engaged - presumably for reasons that included those very interrogation techniques.

Throughout the prosecution of the GWoT, we were told repeatedly that "the US doesn't torture." It is now clear that, though these techniques were clearly torture, the maladministration didn't believe it so - and held that belief simply because we employed a programme that meted out this same treatment as a training regimen. Some of the interrogators that employed these techniques first did so under the assumption that since SERE methods were part of their training they must be legal. The pattern that emerges follows that logic, conveniently ignoring the origins of SERE and the evil it was intended to combat.

The memos that followed adoption of these interrogation techniques at least recognize that justification for the interrogations required a radical reinterpretation of US law and international treaty. The parameters they list - denying the psychological effects even as those were depended upon, using US facilities on foreign soil to skirt the constraints imposed on the country by treaty - indicate a clear understanding of the ethics of the situation and a desperate effort to twist the letter of law and treaty to condone or overlook the interrogations. Now that it is obvious the "legal guidance" these memos provided ex post facto basis for methods already approved and in use their obscenity is compounded.

One striking item in the reports is the enthusiasm with which the interrogations were greeted by the entire administration in 2002. The intellectual laziness displayed in the near-total lack of curiosity about a programme whose origins were all readily available to those making these decisions is staggering. Had the programme had some totally alien origin it might be understood a little better; however, the SERE program was a long-standing training regimen designed to harden troops to interrogation techniques known to produce false intelligence and break its subjects and which had been encountered some forty to sixty years ago. One might be able to excuse a young recruit just subjected to SERE for not knowing why SERE training was necessary: the wars the US fought where it had faced the tactics the programme was designed to combat were over before most of them were born. One cannot excuse the leadership of the nation, being old enough to remember some of those conflicts personally.

Perhaps this is a predictable consequence of a "global war on terror" waged by a team that largely deferred its deployments to Vietnam past the duration of that conflict or found other means of avoiding service in that theatre. Disinclination to fighting is easily translated into intellectual incuriousity about how wars are fought. Certainly the offhand treatment of complex issues, and the naivete of the Bush administration were formative in other areas: that their treatment of the GWoT in general, and interrogation in particular, should be little surprise.

The initial reactions I have read to the announcement of this narrative has been one of shock and disgust. But there is another aspect that is highlighted in recent news. Some senators, including Patrick Leahy of Vermont, are calling on justice Jay Bybee, crafters of one of the now-infamous memos, to resign out of "decency and honor." From the Armed Services Committee's findings, those two virtues appear to have been nearly uniformly lacking in the Bush administration: no decent or honourable person would have agreed that SERE was an appropriate model for our intelligence services to use as an interrogation methodology, and no self-respecting legal professional would have gone through the legal gymnastics required to legitimize that decision and redefine SERE practices as anything other than torture in the manner Bybee and others are now irrefutably known to have done.

In 2000 then-Governor Bush campaigned for the Presidency on a platform of "Compassionate Conservatism," perhaps hoping to echo and expand on his father's "kinder, gentler" approach to politics. The US saw the results as systematic failures of management and execution in response to multiple natural disasters and acts of terrorism (those who shout about 9/11 conveniently forget the anthrax scares of following months) and as commonplace shredding of the social safety net and civic accountability as healthcare and Social Security were attacked and the GWoT was farmed out to private industry more interested in its bottom line than in providing meaningful services. The prosecution of the GWoT - and its treatment of those it captured - was the face of "Compassionate Conservatism" that the world saw: a petty, vengeful, amoral regime disinterested in human rights or the legitimacy of foreign powers and focused only on its own preeminence and revenge for its injuries.

The US understood Bush as something other than "Conservative" in the last years of his misgovernance. Now, at last, the US is learning something the world grasped some time ago: that the Bush maladministration was as alienated from compassion as it was from conservatism. Expectations that a self-described Christian would adhere to the standards of "honor and decency" that Leahy described and that the US as a presumably moral nation assumed were clearly misplaced. It is well past time the Bush administrative team was held to account for that failure.

Fascist As An Epithet

2009-04-21T18:29:00.007-04:00

Fox's FX network has (perhaps unsurprisingly) Sum of All Fears on tonight. Watching it, one gets a clearer idea why the Conservatists think "Fascist" is a useful insult to fling at the Left.

In the 1930s it was very difficult to make the US understand what a threat European Fascism truly was. Part of this was because there were and remain large German-American and Italian-American populations who have strong connections to the Fatherland. But part of it was cultural, and part a misreading of the national socialist economic engine as a revitalised capitalist instrument.

In 1933 the US was only sixty-odd years removed from the strife of the Civil War. Reconstruction was still fresh in the minds of Southerners, who had had to endure another two decades of a brutal recovery programme intended to keep the South defeated as much as the nation united. Successive waves of immigration had created communities of the recent arrivals easily targeted by earlier arrivals: Italian-American, Irish-American and other groups were only just achieving respectability after some very rough experiences in post-Civil-War US communities, and were still viewed negatively from the criminality spawned by Prohibition. The African American population, though legally free and guaranteed its rights, was still suppressed by Jim Crow legislation, and viewed by society as largely inferior. The makings of Fascist thought were very close to the US reality of the time: challenged nationalism, economic collapse, and populations of "undesirables" that made for easy scapegoats for the current set of ills offset by multiple northern European populations with strong ethnic identities.

Many US citizens had been supportive of Germany in the Great War. The US had only entered the conflict in response to to German U-boat warfare, which had claimed several US ships and many US lives in the years before US intervention. Sympathy ran high. When Hitler began Germany's industrial resurrection, many in the US cheered: Germany was "back on track." The Germans, for their part, while not making their activities truly secret, were very quiet about their less-savory activities, and the darkest exploits of the Nazi regime were years away from discovery. There were many in the West, including many major industrial figures, who were overtly supportive of the resurgent German industrial machine.

Ethnic identity, coupled with a revived apparently capitalist economy and a tacitly accepted faith in Caucasian superiority, blinded many to the threat Fascism presented the free world. It took six years of fighting, many lives, and the discovery of the concentration camps and the testimony of the incarcerated and their captors to bring to light the full horror. Part of the shock of the Nazi camps lay in the vivid, graphic proof that presumably civilized and humane Europeans could descend to such depths: the camps in Japan and China were more comprehinsible to the biased Western mind, but the Nazi facilities in Germany and Poland horrified on a cultural and ethnic level that layered onto the barbarism displayed there.

Fascism as a global threat perished with Nazi Germany. But that was in 1945, and the war crimes trials that followed were at once perceived as closure on the chapter and overshadowed by Soviet expansionism. Communism quickly replaced Fascism as the greatest global threat, and the details of the prior period were subsumed by the fears of the present.

Which brings us to today. We are now as many years removed from World War II as 1933 US was from the Civil War. The memories of that period are fading, and that fuzziness is compounded by the fact that, unlike the conflict in the 1860s, World War II was for the US a war fought on foreign soil. The daily reminders that face France, Germany, Italy and other nations directly affected by that war are absent here. The US has only the occasional WW2 memorial, which lists no name of any serviceperson lost in that conflict on US soil anywhere but plaques in DC and Hawaii.

Enter the storyteller and the studio. Clancy's thriller tells of a resurgent Fascist group that steals a nuclear weapon and sets it off in Baltimore, hoping to spark a conflict between the US and Russia from which a resurgent Fascism (centred in Germany and Austria from the plot's implications) could return to prominence. The problem with the film, however, is that none of the attendant horrors of a Fascist society are made clear. The only indicators of the origins of the plot are the accents of the major players. The villains never speak of the overall goals of Fascism: corporatist control of the state, systematic purging of "undesirable" or "racially impure" segments of society, the silencing of all dissent, and an oppressive state mechanism of surveillance and nearly-random arrest and "disappearance" of citizens.

Clancy, in his defense, probably assumes such things are common knowledge and sees no need to delve into any of that. Fascists are monsters out to destroy both East and West and remake both in their twisted image: this should be clear enough from the narrative. Fox, however, is far more nebulous in its treatment: the bad guys aren't all that distinct from the good ones: Dressler's, Fiore's and even Thorsen's characters aren't all that inhuman, and present remarkably "normal" faces to the world and to the audience, just as Schreiber's assasin Clark seems necessary and Cromwell's president Fowler doesn't seem especially liked or likable. It is easy, in the narrative, to confuse friend with foe, villain with deluded victim, hero with situational ally. Part of this is no doubt deliberate: it speaks to the difficulty in the modern world in identifying threats and makes for effective plot twists. But the net effect is the same as the rhetoric spinning now: simply screaming "Fascist" does not make the target Fascist - there needs to be substance to the charge to make it stick. Sum of All Fears fails to make the charge stick to any of the villains, depending solely on the symbology of the German accent and the swastika to make its points instead of delving into the political philosophy that made that particular combination so frightening.

The problem with Fascism is that even now there are schools of thought that, either through adherence to conviction in "Aryan" supremacy, through denial of the bases for the political philosophy, or through simple ethnic identification, play apologist for Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and the others that spawned that philosophy. The US, little affected by the worst aspects of the Third Reich, has a particularly poor frame of reference in this regard: the horrors were distant and perpetrated almost entirely on foreigners, removing them rather effectively from the consciousness of the US citizenry. Without that awareness or the reminders of those lost, the US lacks the immediacy of the knowledge that Europe sees on a near-daily basis: the bombed buildings preserved as symbols, the camps turned into park-like memorials, the fields of graves, and the plaques mounted on walls listing the names of those who lived there and were murdered by the Reich.

In turn, the US' ethnic diversity and continued immigration of new populations into the country give those who support Fascist thought fertile ground. The same vitriol Hitler aimed at Jews is used against Latinos, South and Southeast Asians - virtually any population perceived as taking jobs, damaging the economy and polluting the assumed ethnic homogeneity of the US population. The inhibitions on such thinking that Europe experiences today are largely absent because of the physical distance and the relative ignorance of the US populace.

Sum of All Fears plays on the fear the US is only now starting to shed. in 2002, when the film was produced, that fear was full-blown, and the film spoke to that. Whether the relative normality of the villains in the piece were intended to describe the facelessness of an unknown assailant, or a deliberate plot point to blur the distinctions between political philosophies, it definitely allows the Fascist to hide in plain sight, appearing as normal - and behaving as normally - as anyone around.

This is what the Conservatists are banking on when they accuse the Obama administration and its supporters of Fascism. The distance between the events of the '30s and '40s, the ethnic identification, and the lack of substance backing up the identification of Fascists with the full scope of that philosophy all enable those making the accusation to do so without having to back it up. The US does not recall the full horror of Nazism: the arrest and disappearance of whole population segments, the concentration camps used to dispose of them, the suppression of free speech – even free thought as Hitler Youth informed on its parents – and the other horrors are in full view of modern Europe every day, but notably absent from the Americas. Without those reminders, the US is left with the education system to teach each generation about the dangers of that philosophy, and after decades of public education policy more interested in basic arithmetic and reading skills than fuzzier subjects like History and Political Science, the knowledge the current US citizen has of that dark chapter in human history is at least questionable. The US understands that Fascism is somehow bad, but without direct exposure or careful study it has no clear understanding of why.

If the Conservatists are truly opposed to Fascism – which after the Bush maladministration is arguable – they may well be ignorant of the worst of its crimes, or that those crimes were a direct consequence of the teachings that spawned it. They are certainly counting on their audience's ignorance of those theories, yielding them the outrage against the bogeyman of the “Fascist” without comprehending the precise nature of the evil implied. Their ability to do so is facilitated both by this ignorance and such clever products as Sum of All Fears that paint their villains with the Fascist brush without bothering to layer on all the colours of that particular mindset or the fine strokes that made Fascism so different – and so horrific – from any other conservative nationalist school of thought.

Seeing Red

2009-04-21T13:08:00.002-04:00

Andrew Sullivan points to a Slate interactive map illustrating the employment patterns in the US over the last two years, describing job gains and (mostly) losses on a county-by-county basis. This is the best illustration I have seen of the employment haemmorhaging the US has experienced.

Iraqi Liberation and (Un)Intended Consequences

2009-04-21T12:42:00.004-04:00

One of the key principles we were given for the invasion of Iraq - at least after we were told repeatedly about Saddam Hussein's ties to terrorists and plans to attack the US - was that the freedom-loving, humane Iraqi people were just waiting to be liberated from their cruel oppressors. We were repeatedly spun yarns about the open and free society a post-Saddam Iraq (with US help) would look like.

It certainly didn't include this:

"A prominent Iraqi human rights activist says that Iraqi militia have deployed a painful form of torture against homosexuals by closing their anuses using 'Iranian gum.' ...Yina Mohammad told Alarabiya.net that, 'Iraqi militias have deployed an unprecedented form of torture against homosexuals by using a very strong glue that will close their anus.' According to her, the new substance 'is known as the American hum, which is an Iranian-manufactured glue that if applied to the skin, sticks to it and can only be removed by surgery. After they glue the anuses of homosexuals, they give them a drink that causes diarrhea. Since the anus is closed, the diarrhea causes death. Videos of this form of torture are being distributed on mobile cellphones in Iraq.'"

Towleroad has more.

Of course, the victims in the story are all Teh Gay, so it's possible pro-war Conservatists considered the potential for this sort of development acceptable.

Before anyone starts with "well, it's over there" arguments, consider that this is a fairly new phenomenon in Iraq - post-invasion, to be precise. Also, James Dobson, Michael Savage, Jerry Falwell and a host of other Conservatists have made statements that would encourage anti-LGBT violence here in the US. When challenged, they passed those statements off as "humour" and accused their challengers as "hypersensitive." This story certainly isn't humour, and factual. Try being hypersensitive to that.

Betty Brown Moves to Beijing

2009-04-21T12:33:00.002-04:00

It seems Texan bigots aren't the only ones having trouble with Chinese names. The People's Republic itself, to simplify its systems, is asking its citizens to change their names to something simpler.

Ma Cheng’s book-loving grandfather came up with an elegant solution to this common problem. Twenty-six years ago, when his granddaughter was born, he combed through his library of Chinese dictionaries and lighted upon a character pronounced “cheng.” Cheng, which means galloping steeds, looks just like the character for horse, except that it is condensed and written three times in a row.

The character is so rare that once people see it, Miss Ma said, they tend to remember both her and her name. That is one reason she likes it so much.

That is also why the government wants her to change it.

For Ma Cheng and millions of others, Chinese parents’ desire to give their children a spark of individuality is colliding head-on with the Chinese bureaucracy’s desire for order. Seeking to modernize its vast database on China’s 1.3 billion citizens, the government’s Public Security Bureau has been replacing the handwritten identity card that every Chinese must carry with a computer-readable one, complete with color photos and embedded microchips. The new cards are harder to forge and can be scanned at places like airports where security is a priority.

The bureau’s computers, however, are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, according to a 2006 government report. The result is that Miss Ma and at least some of the 60 million other Chinese with obscure characters in their names cannot get new cards — unless they change their names to something more common.

Moreover, the situation is about to get worse or, in the government’s view, better. Since at least 2003, China has been working on a standardized list of characters for people to use in everyday life, including when naming children.

One newspaper reported last week that the list would be issued later this year and would curb the use of obscure names. A government linguistics official told Xinhua, the state-run news agency, that the list would include more than 8,000 characters. Although that is far fewer than the database now supposedly includes, the official said it was more than enough “to convey any concept in any field.” About 3,500 characters are in everyday use.

Ms. Ma is managing so far to get around the restrictions. But many more are not. In their rush into the modern world, China runs the risk of oversimplification just to keep pace.

Beauty Is As Beauty Does

2009-04-20T17:16:00.002-04:00

... and Miss California's got some serious thinking to do if she believes she's as pretty on the inside as she is on the outside.

Backroom Deals

2009-04-20T17:00:00.004-04:00

There's a lot of noise today about this particular item.

I see two particular points of interest.

One, the investigation highlights just how much intelligence-gathering the NSA was doing within the US, and how much of it was truly targeted at US citizens. Had this merely been about foreign agents plotting harm to the US as the programme was originally presented, Rep. Harman would have gone essentially unnoticed. However, she was not, and only the intervention of (then) Attorney General Gonzalez prevented a full-blown and very embarrassing investigation. Of course, now that the deal that was struck has been exposed, the embarrassment is compounded, so any benefit Harman received was strictly temporary.

Two, it showcases how widespread foreign involvement in US policymaking could potentially be, and how diverse the prospective "foreign agents" would be by inference. If Harman, then a House Intelligence Committee member, was amenable to quid pro quo with foreign agents despite (or perhaps because of) her responsibilities, the AIPAC moment might be only one of many. Also, if AIPAC was the foreign agency snared by the wiretap, it certainly makes wiretapping to "catch foreign terrorists" harder to justify unless one is willing to label Israel a state sponsor of terrorism, which the Conservatists are loath to do and which even the US Left is hesitant to consider. And Gonzalez' intervention says much about what the Bush maladministration was prepared to overlook to achieve its aims.

Harmon's subsequent distancing from authority by House leadership is certainly appropriate. Unless charges are preferred, though, her continuing in office is best left between her and her constituents for the moment.

UPDATE: Re. Harman has issued an not-quite-rebuttal statement to the charges. It seems she's missing the larger point, though the point she does make is certainly troubling.

See No Evil

2009-04-20T16:42:00.003-04:00

The Conservatist punditocracy seems to prefer ignorance of its nation's methods so long as they produce the desired results. Peggy Noonan's quote is especially priceless in this regard:

"Some things in life need to be mysterious," said Noonan, adding, "Sometimes you need to just keep walking."

She also added:

"It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that."

This equivalence of anti-terror efforts with some sort of sausagemaking is remarkable. By that logic, any questionable action taken by the government should be acceptable so long as it's kept secret. Noonan's been especially good at honouring that concept.

Apparently, Noonan's morals are only as strong as the peace in which they're practised.

As Bad As They Are

2009-04-20T15:30:00.005-04:00

Christopher Buckley wants us to remember that terrorists still don't have our morals.

It is, yes, good that the U.S.A. is not doing this anymore, but let’s not get too sanctimonious about how awful it was that we indulged in these techniques after watching nearly 3000 innocent Americans endure god-awful deaths at the hands of religious fanatics who would happily have detonated a nuclear bomb if they had gotten their mitts on one. And let us move on. There is pressing business...

The operative question becomes: What do we do now with captive bad guys who possess information that could prevent another 9/11? We may have moved on. They, assuredly, have not.

I'll leave issues as to his arithmetic aside for the moment.

Buckley's article speaks loudly of two double standards: that of calling terrorists out as monsters whilst employing their own methods against them, and that of the assumption that torture of detainees is productive for US intelligence services but indoctrinating and corrupting for US citizens subjected to the same treatment. His attempt at levity, first at dismissing the severity of the treatment meted out to detainees at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other sites, then by spotlighting Monty Python ("bring out - the Comfy Chair!") and Mel Brooks for their deliberately light-hearted discussion of the Inquisition (exceedingly dark subject matter) as somehow comparative, then by proposing new alternate "enhanced interrogation" techniques such as subjecting detainees to four-hour commute conditions, touch-tone telephone exercises with a rotary phoneset, and exercises with frustrating television programming, are eerily tone-deaf to the current situation.

The problem is not that the US tortured people. The problem is that the US tortured people while insisting it did not, fabricated legal justifications for actions clearly illegal on the US' own books as well as in violation of multiple international treaties and conventions, and continued to claim the high moral ground in world affairs just as its own morality was being systematically destroyed by those same claimants. Were the US willing to admit that some people just need to be waterboarded on principle, disavowed the conventions, habeus corpus, reasonable search and seizure, trial by jury, and the countless other conventions of US, Parliamentary and Napoleonic law on which its modern jurisprudence is based, the outcry against that particular programme would be much smaller; however, doing so would invalidate whole sections of the Constitution, reams of legal precedent and a plurality of the concepts on which the nation was built and to which it claims to continue to cling. Minimising the treatment of detainees does not serve a nation founded on the principles outlined in the formative documents the US has long used, and frequently cited, as reason for the way it deals with foreign powers based on their accpetance of those ideals.

Buckley's counter-assumption, that non-coercive interrogation does not yield actionable intelligence, has equally been found false, and prominent figures within the military and intelligence communities have already made statements to precisely that effect.

Somehow, though, Buckley continues to cling to the assumption that pursuit of international criminals without the ability to employ their methods is unproductive; that recognising that those methods, if used by US questioners, as immoral and illegal is a pointless exercise; and that interrogation, as a practice, needs to be somehow offensive to the senses taken out of the context of intelligence gathering. His question "What do we do now with captive bad guys who possess information that could prevent another 9/11?" is deliberately misleading in that it assumes a need to do something unpleasant to obtain their cooperation. Information coerced from a detainee may well be of value, but assuming there is no other way to obtain such, and that we must needs behave in borderline inhuman ways towards those we capture, is both contrary to the history of Western law and ethics and the founding principles as elucidated in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and countless other documents that have shaped the US.

UPDATE: Wolfrum has his own take here.

Consolidations

2009-04-20T14:06:00.002-04:00

The New York Times reports that Oracle is buying Sun Micrososytems.

This should make the next generation of IT innovation interesting to say the least.

Short-Sightedness

2009-04-20T11:18:00.003-04:00

For some reason, Jackson Diehl at the Washington Post thinks that after a mere three months the White House should reexamine its foreign policy.

Obama is not the first president to discover that facile changes in U.S. policy don't crack long-standing problems. Some of his new strategies may produce results with time. Yet the real test of an administration is what it does once it realizes that the quick fixes aren't working.

There must be something in the water in DC that keeps the pundit class falling into the same short-term thinking that exacerbated the current economic situation. Diehl writes of the longevity of the foreign policy problems facing the US as if the discovery that they're old is somehow new.

North Korea has been a problem for 60 - count'em, sixty - years now. The current situation is merely one turn in a relationship never good, frequently very bad and once dissolved into open war. The behaviour pattern of that government has been unpleasant, but predictable. Showing surprise - genuine or not - that regime would immediately display bad behaviour on the world stage regardless of what tactic the US chose to deal with it is rather like reading a recipe for a Manwich and discovering that there aren't any humans listed as ingredients: this is North Korea's typical behaviour toward the outside and has been for decades. Assuming that a mere three months of less strident rhetoric would have instant effect is uninformed to say the least.

Likewise with Diehl's other examples in Russia, Iran and the Middle East. The mock surprise Diehl presents imply a belief in the near-magical capacity of the "newest President" to change world opinion and international dynamics, whether he ascribes to such or not. Each of those problems is at least generational in duration, and require patience and persistence to address.

Diehl, to his credit, doesn't overtly subscribe to the idea that all international issues can be addressed within 100 days. But the subtitle to his article - "What happens when the president can no longer blame Bush for international strife?" - clearly indicates an acceptance of that concept, and the fact that he feels he actually has to describe the foreign policy challenges facing the US in 2009 as predating 2000 is facile if not downright foolish.

The Korean question is at least generational. Relations with Russia span the entire history of the US and modern Europe, and can be traced back well over a millennium. As for the Middle East, regardless of any comparatively recent development, that region has been a hotbed of sectarianism, unrest and war as long as there has been recorded history, and archaeological evidence points to a similar pattern thousands of years previous to the first writing. None of these problems will be solved overnight.

Further, the US has two great additional problems on the global stage in 2009. We have eight years' recent history of ineffective if not downright counterproductive foreign and domestic policy, and we have an economic crisis which has diminshed the US' primary weapon - trade - in the diplomatic sphere. Neither of these problems is any more likely to have been solved by now than the foreign relations they complicate.

The the US the world saw from 2000 through 2008 was a nation little interested in its principles and more concerned with its reach. Human rights advocates overseas learned quick and bitter lessons about pointing to the United States as an example for their own nations as the US proceeded down a narrow, theologically-inspired and injury-driven "good v. evil" path to foreign and social policy. As the costs and consequences of that direction mounted the US lost global credibility: as a military giant through becoming bogged down in a war launched on questionable grounds with a third-rate military power; as a defender of human rights through its regressive domestic policies toward women and the poor, and most shockingly toward the fighters it captured; and as an economic giant as ever more production capacity was shunted elsewhere and as bubble after economic bubble popped and decimated the nation's wealth. The prestige and perceived might of the US shrank noticeably during those years, and foreign powers are learning that they can assert themselves on the global stage and not face the just wrath of a US-led West. That they can do this is partly a measure of their own strength relative to the US' position and partly because the US squandered whatever justification it had in wielding that strength.

The Japanese, when they considered war with the US at the beginning of World War Two, were hesitant - not because the US had a formidable military machine at the outset, but because the US had the capacity to build one, and build it quickly. As the war progressed they learned that this hesitation was well-founded. It was not the "strong military" the Conservatists tout so often that defeated Japan and Germany in 1945: it was the unmatched productivity the US could muster, coupled with the will to employ it.

As late perhaps as 1980 that productivity remained unaltered. But the last three decades have seen industry do everything in its power to eliminate the most basic foundation of the US economy in the name of Efficiency and short term profit. The steel industry has been savaged along with most commodity-based businesses, the semiconductor industry that powered so much of early high-tech growth has been farmed out to Asia, the intellectual capital associated with industry has been sent overseas or re-imported as foreign professionals working for US business, and the earning power - and therefore inherent wealth - of the average US citizen has declined. When the GWoT was announced, rather than suggest that the nation needed to put its shoulder to the wheel and get the job done, the then White House urged the nation to shop. Left with little means to prop up its standard of living, the nation bet its very homes on both the premise that we could buy our way (with cheap imported products) to victory and the concept that such capital would always be available to us. Now we are losing our homes from having overbought and undersaved, and the value we counted on is much more than gone.

Even if the US is capable of rebuilding its net worth, it will takes years or perhaps decades to resume its place at the pinnacle of industrial might and unspent potential. It is this potential that has given the US leverage over its adversaries through its history. Now, without it, it is hardly surprising that the US' position on the global stage is diminished, and that others are stepping into the void our implosion created.

In turn, the tendency of recent memory has been to view international affairs through the lens of the corporate executive. As US business increasingly focuses on the next fiscal quarter and year, the economic approach has become increasingly myopic. The industrial focus on the short-term should by now have been thoroughly discredited, as giants from Enron to Lehmann to GM have been brutally chastened for looking after their share prices and quarterly forecasts more than their product. Short-term efficiencies have robbed the US of a key engine of recovery: the ability to produce our way out of recession. Likewise, in the political sphere the assumption that our voice (having been based on this massive economic engine we have proceeded to dismantle) is loudest is running into the harsh reality that Europe is now as wealthy as the US and at least as egalitarian and supportive of human rights, that China produces more and has the capacity to produce much more than that, and that even the smallest regional power is becoming unafraid of us simply because we no longer have the moral high ground or industrial capacity to outmatch them. In addition we have a popular impression if not an outright foreign policy advocacy based on the idea that what the US does today will influence the world tomorrow: there is no short-term advance in international affairs, only the long slow application of influence and the ultimate gradual capitulation to demand. That there have been setbacks registered as quickly as they have does not mean that progress can be achieved anything like as quickly. Yet somehow the punditocracy fails to see that advantage cannot be achieved on the global stage according to the accountant's calendar.

Again, none of these issues are new. But the unhappy synergy of the timing and ferocity of current setbacks has robbed the US of key foreign policy tools just when they are needed.

Reading back, it's quite possible that some British or French journalist was writing something remarkably similar in 1919. The Great War had ended, but the victors' domestic economies were in shambles and their empires mortgaged to the hilt to pay for the struggle. The cause of nationalism had been suddenly and loudly challenged by the Bolsheviks, and the brutality of trench warfare and the outdated strategies employed in the war had discredited both the military leadership and the class-based promotion system it followed. Europe was poor, exhausted, and facing a long hard road to rebuilding for peacetime. For the leadership, there was a new problem: a newly-powerful United States, lately come to the global stage and now wielding substantial industrial might and a very modern set of ideals: standing in the way of that juggernaut would be something not unlike suicide. But the US, having "won the war" was already packing up and heading home, leaving Europe to itself, so whether US ethics were palatable or not having to face them in order to gain US support was fast becoming a tolerable cost of an ideal but impossible prop.

Diehl suggests that the problems we are facing are not new, and that new approaches will not immediately yield results. This was good advice for our last president, who needed such lessons but little heeded them. The current White House should be very aware of them: indeed, the domestic political action of the first quarter indicates the Obama administration has a firm understanding of the long game and is prepared to play it and play it well, which ought to translate into the foreign policy sphere as it has in that of domestic policy.

Diehl's article also implies that the same bad choices are on the table now as in 2001. Demonisation of North Korea and Iran, however, was no more appropriate than welcome of Russia into US good graces based on some nebulous warm fuzziness between the US leader and Russia's: both the harsh words and the soft ones proved unfounded. The prior administration was apparently willing to base policy on personal relations between the president and foreign leaders: already the current administration has consciously avoided doing such, so at least that mistake will likely not be repeated.

Diehl's presumption that the Obama administration is able to blame all these ills on its predecessor is also facile, for the reasons I have stated. Bush certainly didn't create the animosity between the US and North Korea, between Sunni and Shia, between Palestinian and Israeli, or any of the other conflicts where the US has been at least interested. But hyperbolic, oversimplified grandstanding on the global stage, coupled at once with military adventurism questionable in both its incitement and consequence, with multiple economic collapses left essentially untended and with the implementation of narrow partisan ideology as national policy has certainly diminished US effectiveness. Those failures can and should be laid at Bush's feet.

The great tragedy of the matter is that in no sphere will doing so produce immediate results beyond the shocked recognition, from any conservative with a conscience, of the Orwellian state they allowed to flourish. The US' influence on the environmental and humanitarian stages will take years if not a generation to rebuild. The industrial clout may be gone for good. The military cudgel the US once wielded has taken a body blow, and the nation is not in any position to spend more on a Defense Department bloated by questionable weapons systems and both fattened by special provisions funding its activities in Iraq and Afghanistan and sucked dry by the contractors required to support those activities. The various components that provided foundation and justification for US leadership on the global stage are in severe disrepair, and much blame for that can be attached to the policies - or lack thereof - of the last eight years. Merely announcing that those days are over, and that we now have a change of leadership, is not enough to alter either the frailty of the current US position on the global stage or the long-term policies and plans of other nations whose ideal results are still unknowable years or generations from now.

Yet once again, in Diehl we have a pundit writing what should be obvious: that history didn't start over with the the last election, that the short-term rarely produces gains on the international stage, and that not all the US' troubles are entirely the fault of the last president. In the last century or so there has been but one president who did not grasp that basic premise, and his term ended three months ago.

Quote of the Day

2009-04-18T21:27:00.003-04:00

What must it be like to show up for a protest, denounce your Country, bad mouth the President, threaten armed revolt, and have your very own media outlet brand you a patriot.

- a reader responding to Ross Douthat's less-than-admirable take on the Teabaggers, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan.

On a related note, Douthat says he's leaving The Atlantic. Sullivan wishes him "Good Luck." Based on what little of Douthat's work I have read I, too, have a two word remark for him beginning with "Good" - and Luck has nothing to do with it.

Quiet Music for a Sleepy Saturday

2009-04-18T14:43:00.001-04:00

Liane Foly, one of my favourite singers.

Of Law And Conscience

2009-04-17T21:08:00.000-04:00

Much of the Conservatist reaction to releasing what are being called the “torture memos” is making a lot of noise about how future interrogators will feel unsure of their methods even though the DOJ has approved them. This is a highly troublesome position.

First, it assumes that the interrogators themselves are at some sort of risk by default. This is not all that irrational: interrogation is a highly subjective process, and the methods used are continually revisited as standards of conduct change. One would expect that any guidance received on the matter is temporary and likely to be revised or replaced in some future set of guidelines. However, the instances where individual interrogators have actually faced substantial prosecution and/or recrimination are few, and nearly all of those cases are against interrogators who stepped far beyond the lines of decency. There were, for example, very few if any such prosecutions following World War One, and while there have been many following World War Two those were for unnecessary cruelty in the Stalags, concentration camps and other similar sites and compelled by the ideologies that drove the governments responsible for them. In contrast, there have been relatively few such trials of interrogators in Chile, El Salvador or Guatemala, where such practices were not uncommon: the key culprits such as Pinochet have been the primary targets of legal proceedings.

Second, it assumes that personal ethics and sense of humanity are subordinate to the rule of law. If an individual interrogator is sufficiently disturbed by a particular technique to inquire as to its legality, that should in itself be a clear warning that, whether legal or not, the technique is probably not moral. It is not reasonable that an interrogator posing such a question should, on the assurances of his/her superiors, proceed blithely and unthinkingly with the technique following any such assurance. “It's OK – the AG signed off on this” may be an assurance of support from the administration, but it does not necessarily carry the force necessary to proceed without at least some questioning of moral rectitude.

Third, by implying that it is the interrogator, rather than the policymaker, that is to blame for any consequences of a particular technique. This would be true if the interrogator proceeded with a particular technique without discussing it with superiors, but far less so if the interrogator requests and is given explicit approval, and far less so if that technique is explicitly permitted in guidance proactively forwarded to the interrogator by the leadership. The implication is disingenuous, and dishonest, since it suggests that interrogators operate in a legal and moral vacuum unless provided guidance. By that suggestion, the first two listed assumptions are mooted simply because they remove the instruction deemed so fearful in them and hold the interrogator apart from the agency responsible for the interrogation. Questioning of detainees is rarely done without a reasonable understanding of the procedures, and acceptable conduct, of the process by those doing the questioning: this implication denies both that sensibility and the specific education required to perform such questioning.

Fourth, it addresses as piecemeal what has been implemented as policy. If a particular interrogation technique is employed without specific guidance or without specific prohibition, there is of course a risk to the interrogator that his/her methods may be questioned. However, if he technique is specifically listed as “approved” by agency or government policy, substantial risk to the interrogator is removed, and instead obtains to the agency or government that advocated the procedure in the first place. The authors of most of the statements denouncing the memos' release either do not or will not see this distinction: the moment a procedure becomes policy it mitigates the risk to the individuals employing it, thereby shielding them at least somewhat from pursuit should that policy change. Conversely, an agency or government that advocates more severe interrogation techniques runs a greater risk for that advocacy than one that does not, and risks (at least) its reputation and legality; while one that does not, regardless of the success or failure of its intelligence gathering efforts, will be far less susceptible to censure or prosecution for that.

Fifth, there are additional constraints in the US on what is acceptable behaviour than the opinions of the Department of Justice. The UCMJ, federal laws, codes of conduct and international treaty all bear on the the prosecution of war, the collection of intelligence, and the treatment of detainees. The behaviour of gaolkeepers should fall inside the constraints of the sum of these various instruments, not step outside certain ones as convenient. However, awareness of all such items requires a substantial level of education. This is where the guidance factors, though it depends on the honesty and integrity of the entities interpreting the sum of these codes. Action taken in ignorance of the obligations outlined in the sum of this guidance can be somewhat excused on the grounds of that ignorance: guidance given to those ignorant of the various laws and treaties that knowingly contradicts the sum of jurisprudence cannot. This is true whether the guidance given was given in somewhat less ignorance, or whether the guidance is in deliberate attempt to circumvent the letter and/or spirit of that jurisprudence, though the latter case is more egregious than the former and should be viewed as a more serious breach.

Last, and most importantly, interrogation should never be a process with which one is comfortable. The critics imply broadly that there will be a level of uncertainty in the intelligence community as to what is or will remain acceptable: for some reason the critics see this as unwise. Interrogation is a dangerous, morally challenging thing. It should always contain a certain level of discomfort: anyone involved in it who loses that runs the very great risk of becoming the kind of monster illustrated in countless tales of incarceration in places like Vietnam, North Korea, Nazi Germany and the like. For the critics to imply as they do that an interrogator can cheerfully go back to whatever inmate s/he was interrogating with a completely clear conscience after being given approval for the techniques being used is the pinnacle of impropriety.

Critics of the memo release have not created a straw man to argue for continued secrecy in interrogation techniques. However, they have sought to misdirect the concern away from the government that designed, approved and advocated some of the most horrendous practices in recent memory and toward the footsoldiers of the interrogation community tasked with applying them. This is dishonest, misleading and counterproductive.

Quote of the Day

2009-04-17T09:13:00.001-04:00

Apparently Bush Republicans measure the security of this nation using an odd metric. Apparently the safety of this country can be determined by gauging how sadistically we brutalize prisoners in our care.

- John Cole, discussing the Conservatist reaction to the release of the DOJ memos concerning "enhanced interrogation."

Sighting

2009-04-17T08:40:00.004-04:00

Poverty stinks.

This is just one of Larry Ellison's yachts. Ellison, of Oracle fame, was a fairly avid yachtsman (if puttering around on something that size and letting the crew do all the work can be considered yachting), and comissioned this behemoth back in Oracle's heady days in the '90s.

Her name is Ronin, but it used to be Izanami. Izanami is a goddess in Japanese mythology, of which Ellison is said to be a fan. Rumour has it Ellison was very happy with the yacht's name until someone mentioned to him that her name, spelled backwards, was,... um...

These photos are not mine; however, I did tie up with my lady on the same dock with her in Sausalito some years back.

Misplaced Faith

2009-04-16T18:54:00.003-04:00

I've been trying to find words to refute Ross Douthat's recent column in The Atlantic about how "feel-good theology" can be seen as a cause for the ills of the prior maladministration: the GWoT, the financial crises, and the various catastrophic missteps that marked the past eight years. Today I found them - reading his colleague Andrew Sullivan's first take on the Bush memos just released.

Douthat's assertion that there are correlations between "the kind of self-centered, sentimental, and panglossian religion described [in the article he references] and the spirit of unwarranted optimism and metaphysical self-regard that animated some of Bush's worst hours as President" is now demonstrably false. The Bush presidency was none of the sappy pseudovirtues Douthat detests: it was cruel, cold, calculating and demonstrably offensive. It exhibits none of the positive aspects of "moralistic therapeutic deism," and instead embraces narrowly exceptional, obscenely messianic, militant fundamentalism: there are but a few "real Christians" who are not afraid to do anything - at all - in the name of the Faith, who believe the end justifies any and all means, and who are ready to perform the most obscenely cruel acts on any who disagree.

Those of us who grew up with believers in such a narrow, small Xtian philosophy have known this for some time. It can be said that we, who knew what these monsters were beneath the veneer of righteousness, did all we could to call out their false platitudes and deceptive jargon to any who would listen. Too often, however, too many were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt: they were, after all, Christian - they couldn't possibly be as malignant as we said.

Now we all know better.

The memos tell a clear and illuminating tale of how far supposedly righteous Christian leaders were prepared to go, not merely to defend their own, but to advance their agenda. If these documents are any indication whatever, they indicate a most narrow, dark, bitter and malignant theology, blind to its evil and convinced of its rectitude, and more than willing to extend its aims far beyond the GWoT. This is not the tale of a "watered-down, anemic, insipid" theology; this is a tale of the same kind of absolutist cruelty that sacked Jerusalem a thousand years ago, exterminated whole towns, tortured and murdered even its own followers for heresy, and refused - to the point of executing whole sects - to accept its own fallibility interpreting its own Scriptures and admit to any fault in their horrific application.

Douthat, however, is right in one sense. The acceptance of "feel-good Christianity" was harmful in one key way. It gave these monsters room to maneuver, and it inhibited its followers from standing up against those machinations out of respect for the "faith" espoused by those harming us. Too few called to task those advocating and prosecuting the obscenity that the GWoT has now been shown to have been. Too few called up the Commandments, the Beatitutes and Matthew 22:37-40:

"And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

If Christianity has any hope of excising this false, cruel and hypocritical Xtian philosophy from its ranks, it must learn to remain skeptical, and not to fall silent when evil works its will in the Lord's name.

A Preponderance Of Evidence

2009-04-16T18:32:00.007-04:00

The Bush memos are released, and the scale and scope of the maladministration's misdeeds is finally available to view.

I've never had much stomach for the details of this sorry chapter in US history, and I just don't have the words to describe my horror and disgust at the calculated destruction Bush et al wrought on US law, policies, ethics, reputation and national psyche. So I'll leave the commentary tosomeone who does:

I've only read the Bybee memo, as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil. To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any "ticking time bomb" scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years. It is all true. These memos form a coda to the Red Cross report, confirming its evidentiary conclusions, while finding exquisite, legalistic and preposterous ways to deny the obvious.

I do not believe that any American president has ever orchestrated, constructed or so closely monitored the torture of other human beings the way George W. Bush did. It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith... And through all this, Bush and Cheney had lawyers prepared to write elaborate memos saying that all of this was legal, constitutional, moral and not severe pain and suffering.

Bybee is not representing justice in this memo. He is representing the president. And the president is seeking to commit war crimes. And he succeeded. This much we now know beyond any reasonable doubt. It is a very dark day for this country, but less dark than every day since Cheney decided to turn the US into a torturing country until now.

There's Nothing More Forlorn Than A Closed Pub

2009-04-16T15:31:00.005-04:00

... unless, of course, it's hundreds of them.

"As the recession prompts U.K. pub crawlers to drink at home more often, two of the country's biggest pub owners are selling or closing hundreds of locations to pay the tab from a decade-long expansion.

Punch Taverns PLC and Enterprise Inns PLC together own nearly a third of the U.K.'s 56,000 public houses. The two emerged as leaders of the pub industry by borrowing heavily when credit was cheap, snapping up thousands of the cherished British drinking halls, which have long served as both an extension of the living room and the social nexus of neighborhoods here."

The WSJ article goes on to describe how the drinking Brit is now buying his brew at Sainsbury's and getting potted at home rather than going out to what used to be the neighborhood social centre and doing it there. A study they cite indicates that "pubs sell 6.7 million fewer pints per day than they did 10 years ago," which is pretty dire as the population has grown substantially since then.

As a footnote, the Bath Tap, pictured above, which happens to be an Enterprise property, was the sole LGBT-friendly pub in Bath when I visited last. It wasn't particularly exciting, but it was friendly and lively when I was there. It's sad to see it go.

UPDATE: it's curious that, just as these two firms are announcing sales and closures of existing pubs, Enterprise Inns is still touting its "Your Way Inn" franchise programme on its Website.

Visions of The Atomic Submarine

2009-04-16T13:25:00.004-04:00

I can recall from my younger days reading stories foretelling the use of nuclear propulsion for commercial purposes. One of the stars of such stories was the nuclear-powered submarine freighter, touted as more efficient and safer than its conventionally-powered surface equivalent. This beast first appeared in the 1959 B-movie The Atomic Submarine, as a normal transport (suddenly victimised by alien invaders, of course).

So it is with dismay, but little surprise, that I read that drug smugglers, tiring of having their trawlers and go-fast boats tracked and seized, should turn to submersible transports for their wares.

Today, smugglers are moving tons of drugs towards the United States in so-called “semi-submersibles,” homemade vessels that travel just below the ocean’s surface and cover distances of up to 2,000 miles.

Because they leave tiny wakes, the crude subs are extremely difficult to detect visually or by radar. Even when they are spotted, crew members quickly sink the vessels to get rid of the evidence and avoid being prosecuted for drug trafficking.

Authorities seized 14 semi-submersibles last year, and another six have been captured this year, according to Colombian Navy Capt. Mario Rodriguez.

...

Colombian authorities now believe that up to 70 percent of the cocaine leaving the country’s Pacific coast is packed aboard semi-submersibles. U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, estimated that the vessels this year would ship up to 480 metric tons of cocaine.

“They went from being an urban legend to some sporadic seizures to a flurry in the last two years,” said an official at the U.S. embassy in Bogota. “Semi-submersibles are the transportation of choice for maritime drug traffickers.”

The story goes on to describe the discovery of a diesel-electric-powered genuine submersible on the lines of the Kriegsmarine's milch cow supply U-boat and hints that this is the smugglers' next logical step.

I'm wondering how long it will take for the Coast Guard to request SSNs as special-purpose "cutters" for its fleet. Given this latest smuggling trend, they would certainly be useful - and would go a long way both to reinvigorating a useful defense industry.

Unfinished Work: A Footnote

2009-04-16T12:48:00.005-04:00

If James Kirchick thinks that the battle for LGBT legitimacy in the US is largely won, then he obviously hasn't read this.

Kudos to Jonathan Capehart for taking his fellow WaPo columnists to task on this one. And a loud HURRAH to Representative (and retired admiral) Joe Sestak for speaking out, as well.

The Immaturity of the Wardrobe

2009-04-16T11:38:00.003-04:00

George Will apparently thinks that the problem with America is that we all dress like kids.

Long ago, when James Dean and Marlon Brando wore it, denim was, Akst says, "a symbol of youthful defiance." Today, Silicon Valley billionaires are rebels without causes beyond poses, wearing jeans when introducing new products. Akst's summa contra denim is grand as far as it goes, but it only scratches the surface of this blight on Americans' surfaces. Denim is the infantile uniform of a nation in which entertainment frequently features childlike adults ("Seinfeld," "Two and a Half Men") and cartoons for adults ("King of the Hill"). Seventy-five percent of American "gamers" -- people who play video games -- are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote. In their undifferentiated dress, children and their childish parents become undifferentiated audiences for juvenilized movies (the six -- so far -- "Batman" adventures and "Indiana Jones and the Credit-Default Swaps," coming soon to a cineplex near you). Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy's catechism of leveling -- thou shalt not dress better than society's most slovenly. To do so would be to commit the sin of lookism -- of believing that appearance matters. That heresy leads to denying the universal appropriateness of everything, and then to the elitist assertion that there is good and bad taste.

Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.

Denim has waxed and waned repeatedly in my memory. In grade school it was merely an option. In high school one was judged not merely by whether one wore jeans but by the label they bore: Levis were egalitarian and eternal, Jordache and Calvin Klein were trendy, anything else smacked of poverty. At university the labels changed but the trend continued. Grunge and hip-hop gave baggies street cred. But in each instance denim was the default casual wear.

Part of this is cost-effectiveness. Jeans are perceived as more affordable than pants of other materials (frequently true), and more durable and forgiving than their counterparts. Levis jeans are comparably priced to their dressier Dockers, which require pressing to look their best, and far cheaper than even casual slacks from other makers (which also require more care). the US Bureau of Labor Statistics had an interesting breakdown of household expenses. For an average household pre-tax income around $60,000 (which assumes approximately $42,000 after tax), those surveyed spent less than $2,000 on "apparel and services," versus around $3,000 on healthcare, $8,000 on transportation, over $6,000 on food and roughly $5,500 on "personal insurance," and a 'blog post here (regardless of the methodologies for the rest of the item, which assumes a 3.5$ income tax rate) pegs housing costs at around $17K. Another study indicates that uniforms in the workplace actually lead to an increase in spending on apparel. Will is right in that it's a careful calculation, but not necessarily the one of taste that he suggests: with expenditure numbers such as these it's easy to understand why the US is dressing down. It's not that we're dressing down out of fashion; it's that we are increasingly unable to afford dressing up.

Another part is the ready distinction that denim affords a closet. As our free time has shrunk, and as the demands of work and life have increased over the years, it has become increasingly rational to minimize time spent deciding less important things. Sorting out one's healthcare, taxes, family decisions etc. should take priority over figuring out what to wear. Denim provides a clear dividing line between work and home. I will freely admit to owning several pairs of jeans, and wearing them regularly when out of the office. But my closet also holds three tailored suits and a dozen ties for businesswear, and several pairs of Dockers for less formal business and social events. Colour and texture are easy guides in choosing what to wear out Saturday morning to the coffee shop and what to put on for weekdays in the office. Taking the time required to sort through appropriate garb has been a luxury our society has grown unable to afford to all but the extremes of the employment and wealth scale: the supremely wealthy, because they either work fewer hours or employ staff to assist them with their choices, and the struggling because they can't afford the separate sets of clothes for work and play and lack the time required to choose between them.

Certainly if we all dressed better the nation would be a more attractive place. I've seen more than my share of folks in grubby t-shirts and ragged jeans in the shopping malls, people in ill-suited and ill-tailored attire out for an evening at restaurants and clubs, and business attire that suggests colour-blindness and dressing in the dark far more than any sense of style. But suggesting that sort of pride of place in the current environment smacks of privilege. Apparel is costly, time is scarce, and too few of us have enough resources and free hours and closet space to afford to make the kinds of distinctions Will clearly desires.

CUTVFTFWILSHIP

2009-04-15T17:14:00.000-04:00

GO HERE NOW for both the reason, and the definition.

How NOT To Win Friends And Influence People, Part Three*

2009-04-15T16:55:00.003-04:00

From The Atlantic, an excerpt of an item from someone who flew recently with a US Army sergeant on his way back to Iraq:

Gratifying to me was his saying that the troops really do feel appreciated and supported by the public, and can distinguish criticism of the war from criticism of the men and women in uniform (unlike in Vietnam days). None of the rest was gratifying at all:

• Surge has "worked" because Iraqis who just want to start killing one another again are biding their time. Après nous, le deluge.
• No one could comprehend the waste of money in US expenditures in Iraq.
• IEDs have become infinitely more sophisticated, very high tech now, and can penetrate all but one type of US vehicle. Suicide bombers can penetrate anything they want.
• When an IED blows up a vehicle in a convoy, and you are two vehicles away in the same convoy, the force of the explosion is so violent you are thrown against the interior of your vehicle, you are temporarily deafened, etc.
• Troop morale is high because they sense they are going home, most of them. But there is no way US can be out in five years or even ten without leaving too much equipment behind.
• Although troop morale is high, they universally hate George W. Bush now.

The Conservatists certainly know how to turn their core constituencies against them.

* I'm counting this post as Part Two.

This Is Priceless

2009-04-15T16:35:00.002-04:00

According to HuffPo, this is a publicity stunt for a reality show. Doesn't stop one from loving it, though.

On the other hand, I just can't help asking: does this mean the Nazis are coming this August?

Cause / Effect Misidentification

2009-04-15T12:08:00.002-04:00

Matt Taibbi has an insightful article on the recent faux populist movement being spurred by Fox and the Conservatists. In it, he cites the inclination of these groups to blame, not the culprits, but those reacting to wrongdoing, for the ills in society that the actual culprits have caused. In what he terms the “peasant mentality,” he describes clearly the inclination of the loyal worker to support his (corrupt) bosses while railing against a trumped-up phantom opponent from the same strata. The banks are failing because of idiotic investments and overeager lending? Blame the folks who took out mortgages without reading the reams of fine print. Bail out AIG, which squandered its financial base in the fund markets? It's the protesters against the bailout who are at fault for cramping capitalism. The list is endless.

Taibbi supports his arguments well. But there may be an additional facet to the argument: opponents of real politico-economic reforms tend to blame those reacting to the injustices rather than the injustices themselves. This is identification, not with peasantry, but with power.

Take, for example, the Abolitionist movement of the 19th century. The loudest pro-slavery complaints against Abolition weren't about the excessively narrow definition of human rights the pro-slavery community observed, nor about the skewed economic model slavery fostered. They were about the inconvenience of the Abolitionists to their way of life. Actually owning slaves wasn't required for this position: only identification with the slaveholders, and recognition that their rights and livelihood were threatened, was sufficient. Abolitionism interfered with slaveholders' property rights. Abolitionism hindered their ability to earn a living. Abolitionism threatened their way of life. All the pro-slavery adherents' problems would go away – if only those dratted Abolitionists kept their mouths shut.

The same could be said for the emergence of labour unions during the same time period. Unions, which at their inception were about workers' rights to a safe workplace, reasonable working hours and meaningful compensation, were to industry a blight and a threat. Again, owning a business was inconsequential to the position, while relating to the business owner rather than the employee was essential. Unions prevented industry from being effective. Unions prevented business from achieving profitability. Unions inhibited normal business. Industry would prosper and enrich the nation – again, if only those pesky organizers didn't keep mucking things up.

In each case, a movement sparked by injustice is derided by those in authority as contrary to the common weal, even though the common weal itself is harmed by the actions of those in authority and the movement against that harm is inspired by that condition. This is more complex than a “shoot-the-messenger” response: those opposed to such actions are genuinely – if misguidedly – convinced that the status quo is good for all (or at least, good for all worth considering) and that the changes sought are an imposition on (in their eyes) good, law-abiding people who have done no wrong. There is no recognition of harm done by the engines of exploitation themselves, only that done by those seeking to redress those injustices. Likewise, the law itself is not at fault - only those seeking to amend the law (to be more equitable) are to blame.

The chief problem occurs when those not part of that particular movement side with those who oppose it rather than those who support it out of identification with the opponents rather than the supporters. Abolitionism was rejected by the antebellum South as an infringement on individual and states' rights, even by the substantial percentage of the Southern populace that did not and never would own slaves themselves. Anti-labor sentiment is high in the Southeastern US, who see unionisation as an affliction of the industrialised North rather than a boon to all workers, and remain infatuated with the concept of entrepreneurship despite the predominance of wage labour in that area which would benefit from organisation. Likewise, the modern opposition to anti-corporatism, particularly the anti-corporatism spawned by the obscene levels of greed and mismanagement that characterised the financial industry of late, stems not from a philosophical difference with that opposition but with identification with the status quo and rejection of reform as detrimental to the current economic structures. Aspiration is more significant than status here: the detractors of the anti-banking clamour are as likely to see themselves in the mold of the banker rather than the borrower.

The false nature of a “populism” ginned up by Conservatists and a major broadcaster is nearly self-evident to those who disagree with the principles on which it is presumably based. However, the segment of the populace that follows along with that false populism continue to do so largely because they identify not with the justly aggrieved but with those they perceive as oppressed by demands for justice. The trick to their enlightenment is not to paint them as a small-minded underclass but to educate them on the detriment they are causing their own well-being and that the very same detriment is done to them largely by those they follow.

H/T Bark Bark Woof Woof.

'Blogging Forecast

2009-04-15T08:32:00.002-04:00

With today being Tax Day, I expect I'll be preoccupied with more immediate things than posting updates.

SSAD Becoming Epidemic

2009-04-14T20:54:00.002-04:00

Andrew Sullivan puts it very succinctly.

UPDATE: For those of you searching this in a vacuum, see "A Case Of SSAD" for detail.

Lipton v. G.I. Joe

2009-04-14T20:03:00.003-04:00

Some people just don't know how how not to make enemies.

Tomorrow, tea baggers in Pittsburg, KS, plan to hold their protest at the Pittsburg State University Veterans Memorial Amphitheater. Speaking at that event will be Rep. Lynne Jenkins (R-KS). Veterans are expressing concerns at having a partisan event on this “hallowed ground“:
– “It’s everybody’s right to have a protest, but our complaint is that it’s at the Veterans Memorial. Most people think of the Veterans Memorial as a sacred place. It’s a place to reflect, to remember why we’re here today and the people who have sacrificed for that.” [Bob Torbett, director of the American Legion Riders and a member of the Kansas Patriot Guard]

– “I’m not so sure the Veterans Memorial is the appropriate place for a tax protest.” [Charles Heath, Commander of American Legion Post 64]

– “This is something that really upset me. The Veterans Memorial, as far as I’m concerned, is hallowed ground. To have a partisan, political ‘tea party’ there really offends my sensibilities.” [Bob Torbett, veteran of the Korean War]

Veterans have been a staunch Conservative bloc: ticking them off is unlikely to help matters.

Froming the Lanunage of The Constissuetion

2009-04-14T18:19:00.003-04:00

The past few years have given us many priceless (if cringeworthy) moments from the Conservatists. It occurs to me that they don't really believe in representative democracy, are disinterested in the documents that created it no matter how often they cite them, and are enamoured of a totalitarian state so long as it does what they want.

In Iowa, for instance, we have a gubernatorial candidate who thinks that as governor he can override a state supreme court decision, and that doing so is right and proper. And related to the recent decision there, we have pundits that think that law is perpetual once written, and that judicial decisions that modify or reverse law are advisory and not compulsory.

We have the Conservatist pundit class, instead of "supporting the President" as they harped for the last eight years, doing their best to go for the jugular when the current administration is faced with its first international incident.

And we have multiple voices in the 'blogosphere that seem to think that DHS investigation and monitoring, while OK for Islamofascists, Liberals and other apparata of the New World Cryptomuslim Marxofascist Order, is horrifically unjust when directed at Far Right extremist groups.

At every point, the public policies the Conservatists embrace are produced by one particular governmental body - which, at that moment, the Conservatists demand be the only one listened to by lawmakers. Conversely, any governmental body that does something the Conservatists dislike is immediately proof of some vast effort to eliminate them - and therefore eligible for immediate and permanent dissolution.

The pattern evolving from this behaviour is one where the Conservatists display supreme unhappiness with representative democracy. The ideal they seek is one where any and all branches of government are staffed by strict adherents to their philosophy and advocates of its agenda. Agreement with this is, by their arguments, rational; disagreement is somehow worse than a lack of patriotism but not quite approaching outright blasphemy. A court decides a case not entirely in their favor? Oust those "activist judges." A legislature passes a law they don't like? Recall the legislators that voted for it, take the law to court, and protest about legislators "not doing the people's work." A referendum doesn't go the way they want? They failed - at "educating the people about the severity of the problem." In each case, it's not their cause that's the issue; it's that the various organs of civic authority don't act according to their very specific wishes, and that means that the system is somehow flawed.

The only system that would actually make these people happy, from these instances, is a totalitarian system tailored to their specific goals. A theocratic nation, created according to their precise ideals and run by strict adherents to their philosophy, is the only defensible political construct that would appease them.

There are two problems with this.

First, it's already been tried. In a place called Europe, a country coalesced that was called the Holy Roman Empire. It dictated acceptable behaviour, the beliefs of the populace, and held all accountable to a strict legal code based on the Teachings of the Church. The chief problem with this is that the Holy Roman Empire collapsed centuries ago, in no small part because the philosophical ancestors of the new Conservatists decided that the status quo was wrong, the Church was misleading people, and that the corruption inherent in the religiopolitical structure was intolerable. Somehow, though, they fail to see that the same cycle would be repeated - after much oppression of dissidents, suppression of the populace and erroneous philosophy inflicted on the people - in the governmental form that most accommodates their worldview.

Second, the only reason these people are able to spew this bile is because of a little thing called The Constitution. Freedom of speech, of assembly, and of worship are all guaranteed in that document. This was done precisely because their philosophical ancestors saw what had been done in other countries where the dissent the Conservatists now despise was suppressed, and sought to prevent such in the new government they were creating. Also, their own philosophy was once dissent in those very nations that influenced their predecessors, and was suppressed at least as ruthlessly as they would suppress dissent in their ideal nation. They would throw away the entire legacy of their nation in this misguided effort to "save" it.

The Conservatists insist, despite their behaviour, that they believe in the Constitution. But they treat it the same way they do Leviticus: they keep the Second Amendment the same way they tout Leviticus 18:22, and throw out all the rest since it doesn't suit their agenda.

H/T to The Phydeaux Speaks Experience for the title's inspiration.

It's Nothing But Pyramids And Sand*

2009-04-14T17:27:00.004-04:00

A while back I 'blogged about the economic downturn hitting Dubai. It seems that, as things continue to worsen globally, the veneer is coming off the emirate and the shaky ground it based its fortunes on is becoming apparent.

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats,... there are the Emiratis,... and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

...

Dubai is not just a city living beyond its financial means; it is living beyond its ecological means... The very earth is trying to repel Dubai, to dry it up and blow it away. The new Tiger Woods Golf Course needs four million gallons of water to be pumped on to its grounds every day, or it would simply shrivel and disappear on the winds. The city is regularly washed over with dust-storms that fog up the skies and turn the skyline into a blur. When the dust parts, heat burns through. It cooks anything that is not kept constantly, artificially wet.

Dr Mohammed Raouf, the environmental director of the Gulf Research Centre, sounds sombre as he sits in his Dubai office and warns: "This is a desert area, and we are trying to defy its environment. It is very unwise. If you take on the desert, you will lose."

Sheikh Maktoum built his showcase city in a place with no useable water. None. There is no surface water, very little acquifer, and among the lowest rainfall in the world. So Dubai drinks the sea. The Emirates' water is stripped of salt in vast desalination plants around the Gulf – making it the most expensive water on earth. It costs more than petrol to produce, and belches vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it goes. It's the main reason why a resident of Dubai has the biggest average carbon footprint of any human being – more than double that of an American.

...

On my final night in the Dubai Disneyland, I stop off on my way to the airport, at a Pizza Hut that sits at the side of one of the city's endless, wide, gaping roads. It is identical to the one near my apartment in London in every respect, even the vomit-coloured decor. My mind is whirring and distracted. Perhaps Dubai disturbed me so much, I am thinking, because here, the entire global supply chain is condensed. Many of my goods are made by semi-enslaved populations desperate for a chance 2,000 miles away; is the only difference that here, they are merely two miles away, and you sometimes get to glimpse their faces? Dubai is Market Fundamentalist Globalisation in One City.

I ask the Filipino girl behind the counter if she likes it here. "It's OK," she says cautiously. Really? I say. I can't stand it. She sighs with relief and says: "This is the most terrible place! I hate it! I was here for months before I realised – everything in Dubai is fake. Everything you see. The trees are fake, the workers' contracts are fake, the islands are fake, the smiles are fake – even the water is fake!" But she is trapped, she says. She got into debt to come here, and she is stuck for three years: an old story now. "I think Dubai is like an oasis. It is an illusion, not real. You think you have seen water in the distance, but you get close and you only get a mouthful of sand."

As the oil income drops, as foreign investment plummets, this jewel in the desert is fast becoming a worthless lump of sand. And the groups that live there, watching how the place works, find themselves either struggling to get by or politely ignoring those struggling among them. The gloss is falling off Dubai, and the ugly means by which this modern marvel was created are starting to show.

* from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Unfinished Work

2009-04-14T09:15:00.007-04:00

Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof put up a marvelous takedown of New Republic assistant editor James Kirchick's recent commentary in the Washington Post about the state of the LGBT movement.

Kirchick:

Just in time for spring wedding season, gay marriage activists are celebrating a triumphant few weeks. Last Tuesday, the Vermont legislature effectively legalized same-sex unions in that state. Days earlier, the Iowa Supreme Court had ruled that a statute barring gay marriage was unconstitutional. And here in the nation's capital, the D.C. Council voted unanimously to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.

But amid all the history being made, one gay rights organization did something really historic: It announced that it would shut its doors at the end of the year, because its mission was complete.

Formed in 1999 to lobby for the right of gay couples to adopt children in Connecticut, Love Makes a Family was the lead organization advocating for same-sex marriage in that state. It successfully lobbied lawmakers to pass a civil unions bill in 2005, but fell short of achieving its ultimate goal until last October, when the state supreme court ruled that the Connecticut constitution endows same-sex couples with the right to marry.

"Mission accomplished" is one of the most difficult things to say when your organization depends on working toward a cause, but Love Makes a Family did it. And other gay groups may soon need to follow suit. If the gay community truly wants to achieve equality, it will have to overcome a victim mindset that is slowly becoming obsolete.

[...]

Once the goals of an organization with a specific mission are achieved, as Love Makes a Family's were last October, it should relish its victory, cease operations and move on. This is the sign of communal maturity. The continued operation of a gay rights organization in the state that was the first to institute marriage equality and that has the most progressive gay rights laws in the country reflects a sense of eternal victimhood.

[...]

This is a realization that comes easier to younger gays like me (I'm 25) than to older ones. For people who grew up in a time when being open about one's homosexuality could result in being fired or thrown into prison, it's harder to move out of a mindset that sees the plight of gay people as one of perpetual struggle. This attitude is all the more pronounced in those who hold leadership positions in the gay rights movement, as their life's work depends upon the notion that we are always and everywhere oppressed.

It's in the culture of any institution to justify its existence. This is especially so with civil rights groups, which thrive on a sense of persecution, real or perceived.

BBWW:

In the first place, "the notion that we are always and everywhere oppressed" isn't just a notion. It's a fact, both in state, federal, and local laws and in large segments of the majority religious faith -- Christianity -- in this country. It's not just a notion when the state of Florida still bans adoption by gay couples for no other reason than they are gay. It's not just a notion when 46 states can still discriminate against same-sex couples getting married. It's not just a notion when members of Congress can still advocate amending the Constitution of the United States to specifically target a significant portion of the citizenry of the country based solely on an innate trait such as sexual orientation. And it sure wasn't a notion to Matthew Shepard or any of the other countless gays, lesbians, bisexual, transgender and others who have faced brutality, cruelty, demonization, and terrorism, sometimes at the hands of their own family. It's all too clear that oppression, real or perceived, is out there.

It's not as if passing laws or achieving a victory means the battles are over. Melissa McEwan of Shakesville and I were discussing this via e-mail today, and she noted that "the National Organization for Women was founded in founded in 1966 as a general women's advocacy organization, but, by virtue of the politics of the time period, had a heavy focus on Roe -- which they've STILL got to defend today, almost 40 years after its passage. Is there any reason to expect that same-sex marriage will just be a 'done deal,' given what's happened in California?!" Absolutely not.

Mr. Kirchick is correct in saying that some civil rights groups -- or at least elements of them -- tend to perpetuate their own existence and could conceivably outlive their usefulness, but that may be more a problem within the group, not the cause itself. And at the risk of taking a page from Benjamin H. Grumbles, this young whippersnapper wouldn't be able to come out with an article like this if it hadn't been for old farts like me and the people who stood up at Stonewall in 1969, or going back further, who literally risked life and fortune to form the Mattachine Society and advocate for gay rights in 1950, two years before I was born. At the tender age of 25, he has benefited from the work -- not to mention the pain and suffering -- of a lot of men and women, gay and straight, who worked to give him a world where he can sit there are blithely say, gee, thanks, you made your point, now shut up and go away.

I started to add my own thoughts on the matter at BBWW, but the posting ran into comment limitations, so I'm posting them here instead.

I hate to draw comparisons with the GWoT here, but NTodd's comment at BBWW ("Oh, Mission Accomplished? Awesome! [hangs up tiara]") reminded me that the struggle against terrorism, loudly proclaimed complete in May '03, is still going on. A key milestone does not a victory make, any more than a crushing defeat signals the end of a particular movement or philosophy.

The LGBT rights movement has had both a cyclical history and an expanding sphere of interest. Between Stonewall and the '80s it was all about the novelty of being gay, the demand for recognition that being gay shouldn't require imprisonment or therapy, and that respect as human beings should be universal. HIV knocked all that out of the argument as the Right used the disease as a cudgel against "immorality" and "sin" and the LGBT rights organisations became more concerned with (literal) survival than equality. I remember, for example, more protests against Burroughs Wellcome or Glaxo than against public policy from those days. Reagan and Thatcher certainly didn't help matters any, and popular support from other quarters kept them in power for most of that decade. Once the epidemic became manageable through the new drug regimens, and diagnosis was no longer an automatic death sentence, the movement relaxed a bit - just in time for the 1993 Hawai'i court decision which struck down that state's marriage law and fueled the SSM movement. The whole "defense of marriage" shtick is a product of backlash from opponents allowed traction at a time when the LGBT lobby grew complacent.

Likewise, the sphere has expanded from its roots. 1960s gay activism was about middle-class white men. The modern movement includes lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals and others with gender identity concerns, LGBT people of colour - virtually the entire range of non-hetero sexual identities and non-hetero non-missionary sexual practices (I'm thinking particularly of the SM community, but there are certainly others). As our understanding of gender identity and healthy variances in sexuality has grown the movement has expanded to include them. Those battles are certainly not over.

I'm glad that Love Makes A Family feels that its goals are achieved, and that its task is done. But the end for one civil rights organisation is not the end of a civil rights struggle. GLAAD, Lambda Legal, CT Civil Rights Defense Coalition, Queers Without Borders and a host of other organisations remain active in that state. Love Makes A Family may be no more, but that has as much to do with the luxury of other groups' continuing work as it does with the fulfillment of LMAF's advocacy.

The unfortunate part of all this is that active resistance to LGBT equality is fast becoming both a religious and regional phenomenon. The chief opponents are religious extremists (Christian and Muslim groups chiefly though there are more) and reactionary Conservatives - though those two groups are frequently indistinguishable. In the US there is good reason to claim that acceptance at least has been achieved outside two dividing lines: the Mason Dixon Line and the Continental Divide. North and West of those markers tolerance at least has been largely achieved, California's Prop 8 notwithstanding; South and East of that LGBT issues still face an uphill battle.

There's also the fact that the LGBT community, by its very definition, encompasses segments of other groups that have faced their own issues in society. Being Caucasian and gay is very different from being Latina and lesbian, or from being Southeast Asian and transgendered. The community has had to deal, in more than a few cases, not only with the external prejudices and resistance of the mainstream hetero Conservatism but with the prejudices within its ranks.

Mr. Kirchick's comments about his age say more about the naivete of the twentysomething than the liberation of the new generation. He certainly hasn't had to worry overmuch about being assaulted and then arrested on the street at midday; he hasn't been concerned about being knifed on his way home from a night out, then dismissed by the authorities as (as Kevin Spacey put it so succinctly in L.A. Confidential) "just another... homo-cide"; his being out at work wasn't the immediate and irretrievable end to his career; and the whole host of indignities foisted on his elders haven't really impacted his world all that much. But those indignities are less than a generation removed from the current debate, and have waxed and waned considerably over the last few decades as new voices of intolerance and narrow-mindedness have continued to surface and as Conservatism and Xtianity have continued to use the LGBT community as both punching bag and poster child for all that they consider wrong in society. LGBT people have been blamed by these groups for everything from youth delinquency rates, to the prevalence of divorce in society, to the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the disastrous hurricanes of 2004 and 2005 - and there is a measurable proportion of the population willing to accept those charges as valid. The National Organization for Marriage's otherwise laughable recent efforts are a clear indication that those sentiments persist. Claiming victory under those circumstances is premature at best.

His viewpoint - that the younger generations are more accepting, which will make the battles easier - also conveniently forgets two other things. First, the nation's leaders are of at least the age of most of those who survived the tumult of the HIV pandemic and the earlier SSM debates, and they will be part of the group shaping public policy for some time. Growing support for LGBT issues from their younger constituents will not change their rhetoric any more than the 19th Amendment automatically made women's voices in government unique and powerful. Also, the same youthful voices were heard in the 1960s denouncing war, greed and inequality: many of the generation we now know fondly as "flower children" became some of the most intolerant, greedy, militant people in our society, supporting the policies of those they had denounced so loudly in their youth. Assuming that the latest generation's perspective will remain constant on any issue is remarkably shortsighted.

I would view the LGBT movement's history, not in comparison with NOW (whose history has encompassed a relatively fixed set of ideals and goals under regular assault) but with NAACP (whose goals have evolved as the movement has made progress on the basic issues). The right to vote may never have been an issue for all, but safety of life and limb, freedom to associate and organise, and rights to employment, housing and equal medical care have all been under attack at some time or other and remain not entirely certain today.

If Mr. Kirchick thinks the battle is won, and that LGBT rights are essentially achieved and oppression has ended, I suggest he take a long stroll hand in hand with his SO down the streets of Odessa, TX, Bakersfield, CA, Pensacola, FL, Valdosta, GA, or any of a hundred other small Conservative towns and see just how far he gets.

War As A First Resort

2009-04-13T16:10:00.002-04:00

Not that it's particularly surprising, but John "We Will Nuke You" Bolton thinks invading Somalia (with a new "Coalition of the Willing," no less) is a good idea.

Unless we go in and really end this problem once and for all, we will simply see it grow over time.

Maybe it's just me, but I recall this sort of rhetoric used before, and the resulting involvements didn't work out so well.

More Small Tent Politicking

2009-04-13T15:09:00.003-04:00

Last week Andrew Sullivan put up this razor-sharp dissection of why the New Right - particularly the Fundie set - isn't interested in anything remotely LGBT-friendly.

National Review clearly believes that gays exist beyond the boundaries of civilized life, or even social life, let alone the purview of social policy. But, of course, a total absence of social policy is still a social policy.

...

As far as National Review is concerned, homosexuals can go to hell. Their interests and views cannot even be accorded respect. They are non-persons to National Review: means, not ends.

Flip this around and you see what the theocon right actually believes: that society has no interest in the welfare of its gay citizens, and an abiding interest in ensuring that they remain unequal, feel unequal and suffer the consequences of a culture where family and commitment and fidelity are non-existent.

Recently, the RNC Chairman himself has given yet more evidence that LGBT citizens - even LGBT citizens who are (mystifyingly) Republican - aren't of any importance.

Humph.

Green Or Not

2009-04-13T12:39:00.004-04:00

Two recent stories highlight how difficult it is to promote responsible energy policy in the US.

The first is from the Los Angeles Times, describing how the hybrid car market more or less collapsed in the first quarter of 2009.

I'm curious why there is no mention of how the entire automobile market crashed at about the same time, that the hybrid market was hindered by dealer markup of perhaps $10,000 on the vehicles (the Prius I looked last year at had an MSRP of $24,000 and a sticker of $33,000), that the "hybrid" market includes such laughable examples as the Lexus RX400H and Cadillac Escalade Hybrid which aren't all that attractive economically in the first place, or that nobody's buying anything right now due at least in part to the fact that credit for autos is almost harder to find than a decent mortgage. According to the LAT, it's all about the price of gas, which admittedly has dropped from the $4/gal mark it hit in 08 and has only recently started climbing again.

On the other hand, this item from Washington Monthly gives one hope. It seems there's a growing market for solar power, centred in Gainesville, FL, and poised to be one of the next great growth industries. ECS Solar, one of the vendors listed in the article, has a fairly extensive Website, and lists that the local power utility has agreed to a Feed In Tariff of $0.32/kwh. A Feed In Tariff, as the Washington Monthly article states, is a premium paid to alternate energy producers that feed the utility's power grid, and is scaled to create an incentive for wind and solar projects.

I'm struck by the two entirely different flavors of the articles. On the one hand, what's essentially a household consumer durable good - the automobile - while experiencing the same catastrophic drop in demand as has all its peers (refrigerators, plasma TVs, etc), is treated as a special case just because "consumers refuse to pay a premium for a fuel-efficient vehicle now that the average price of a gallon of gasoline nationally has slipped below $2." On the other, we have major property owners - condo associations, businesses and apartment complexes - either ponying up wads of cash themselves or making sweetheart arrangements with solar proprietors to get panels on their roofs, because unlike the here-and-gone-again income tax credit for the hybrid car the FITs being touted are perhaps double the actual cost of the energy if those installing solar were to purchase it instead of producing it.

There's a great deal to be said for cost-effectiveness. It's true that for a hybrid vehicle to match the cost per mile values for its conventional counterpart it has to be kept and used for a substantial amount of time (something like five years or 75,000 or so miles). The up-front expenditure is substantial, and in the current market climate a working vehicle that is either owned outright or on manageable terms is considerably more attractive than the headaches and additional burdens of purchasing something newer and more fuel-efficient - assuming you're approved for the purchase at all. But if upfront costs were such a hurdle, then the solar industry would be in deep trouble.

I investigated a solar array for my building a year ago. We learned that our building could support a 1Mw array, but it would cost about $2.2 million to purchase and install. TECO, our electric provider, as of today does not offer a FIT, though it does buy back at retail rates and accepts inputs up to 2Mw (the previous limit was 25kw). One vendor offered to lease the equipment to us, taking our lease payments in terms of our electric consumption. Essentially, the building could lock in its electrical rate for the duration of the lease. So far, though, I cannot persuade the board to go further with this than additional study. However, each member I have spoken to has been intensely interested in the project: the hesitation comes from each's assumption that it will be difficult to persuade the others.

It boils down to costs, and to the understanding of costs incurred. The solar initiatives are gaining traction because they have a clear and measurable payback schedule; the hybrid car does not, and MPGs can be misleading. There is a growing respect for the Gallons Per Mile computation as a more accurate indicator of efficiency: you can read a fairly clear analysis here.

It also boils down to costs incurred by whom. Mid-sized industries (those large enough to own their own premises), housing complexes and the like are better placed to make large-scale leases or purchases of this sort than the average household. Indeed, the average household isn't in much of a position these days to lease or purchase anything not absolutely necessary.

The bottom line is that there remains a solid and growing market for energy-efficient and energy-alternate products. The trick is making them attractive - in any economic environment - for their respective consumers. It also helps if we can avoid bewailing how the US isn't interested in being efficient in a cheap-energy environment without considering other factors at all seriously.

Compassionate Conservatism At Work

2009-04-13T12:32:00.003-04:00

If only this story were available nine years ago, we might have seen Compassionate Conservatism for the Big Lie it was.

The Bushes plan to install a permanent gate outside the cul-de-sac later this year.

Until then, some neighbors have decided to treat 10141 Daria Place as just another house in Preston Hollow, despite all indications otherwise. The day after the Bushes arrived, the local Cub Scout troop visited their cul-de-sac as part of its annual drive to collect canned food. The troop's supervising parent, Nancy Burke, drove over to Daria Place a few days in advance to ask the Secret Service for clearance.

Sorry, the agents said.

Burke stopped by twice more and received the same answer before finally winning approval from a scheduling aide in Bush's office. An hour before she took the boys to Bush's house, Burke met with them to discuss logistics. Only 30 people could enter the cul-de-sac. The Scouts, ages 7 to 11, needed to wear their full uniforms. A raffle determined which two children would receive Bush's cans. Burke taught them how to talk to the media: "Think about their question before you speak." She demonstrated how to shake a president's hand. "Look him in the eye and shake firmly." [emphasis added]

H/T to Mock Paper Scissors.

About The Healthcare Debate

2009-04-12T10:33:00.005-04:00

The Atlantic has an interesting commentary on US healthcare, and why it's so expensive. The author(s) list(s) three reasons for the costs:

1) We pay more for our medical services. But though the pharma industry is important, the real action is in wages. Our medical personnel cost vastly more than their counterparts abroad in almost every category.

2) We consume more services. Americans get shiny new facilities--my British colleagues once derisively commented that American hospitals are "like hotels". American hospitals don't have open wards for almost anyone. They staff at very high levels. Doctors conduct an inordinate amount of tests. We use an expensive machine rather than watchful waiting. And often, those expensive machines catch conditions that never would have turned into anything, which we then treat. Natasha Richardson probably would have lived if she'd had an accident here, because doctors would have done a cat scan, and there would have been a Medevac helicopter available. That's tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars to save a single life.

3) There are inefficiencies. I don't mean "compared to other systems"--every system has some screwed-up illogicality that costs it money and makes patients worse off. But compared to what we could have. For example, Medicare pays for procedures, not wellness, which means that there's a chronic undersupply of geriatricians, because the specialty isn't particularly well paid even though the nation's largest healthcare provider is specifically designed for old people. This is madness. But every real-world system that has attempted to pay physicians for wellness has ended up giving up in disgust.

I can't disagree with the reasoning within the scope of the argument, but I do think there are factors the article does not consider.

1) External cost factors are not considered. Part of the reason healthcare professionals earn more in the US than elsewhere is that, in comparable economies, there is a stronger social safety net which affords a shield against catastrophe to the worker and more comfortable retirement for those who reach that point. Without that, the uncertainty of living in the US demands of the healthcare professionals (as it does of us all) higher compensation in order to protect themrselves against the unforeseen while in the workforce and poverty once out of it. This in itself is not a bad thing; however, the increasing inability for public sources to keep pace with the costs of living makes that demand all the more imperative.

2) Healthcare professionals in the US face substantially higher insurance rates, particularly for malpractice coverage, than their peers in other industrialised nations. This is anecdotal to those not in the profession or in academia, since resources on specific rates is difficult to find. However, the evidence that is available is staggering: there are multiple reports like this one of physicians leaving the country to find more affordable coverage, for example. And two studies, one by Dartmouth College and one by the advocacy group Americans for Insurance Reform, indicate that premiums in the US have continued to skyrocket in spite of the fact that payouts have either remained constant or declined, and in spite of the fact that state after state has enacted so-called "tort reform" designed to make those premiums lower by reducing the payouts. A telling quote appears here:

"Going into 2007 you're going to see very aggressive pricing as these companies have boatloads of cash. They're going to go out and spend it. That spurs the cyclical market of 'we're back to competition,'" [Richard "Rick" W.] Mortimer [vice president of HealthCare Professionals' Insurance Services] said.

Yet instead of pricing more affordably, the carriers seem to have increased their rates instead. As recently as 2004, those increases were somewhere near 100% as this item shows.

3) The insurance market in the US is a for-profit sector, and those companies offering coverage are doing so to make money for themselves and their shareholders. This is not to say that private, for-profit insurance is a strictly US phenomenon; however, the remainder of the industrialised world relies on public programmes first and retains a for-profit sector as a niche market, while the US takes a nearly inverted approach. As both the AIR and Dartmouth studies indicate, the industry profits from premiums have improved dramatically of late. Both studies imply that the increased premiums are intended to offset bad investments by the companies.

Briefly: a private insurer essentially charges a fee to guarantee that a related loss by the covered will be honoured, and invests that fee speculatively to provide the means with which to honour a claim; as the investments intended to fund claims shrink, premiums should rise proportionally. This is both a strength and weakness of the private model: the private insurer is more likely to have the resources to honour a more substantial claims, but is vulnerable to the markets in which it invests and is more inclined to aggressive pricing than a public or non-profit alternative which would only seek to break even rather than show a profit - a profit that, in the recent Wall Street mindset, should not only remain stable but regularly and predictably increase.

The problems that arise from articles like the one in the Atlantic stem from analysis of the subject in a vacuum. Without the related factors, such as overall costs of living, retirement and safety net investments, and analysis not only of the healthcare industry's own behaviour but that of the individuals and industries that (presumably) serve that industry, and then of the motivations and impediments placed on them, the question cannot be accurately answered, or even truly effectively addressed. The Atlantic article highlights some very valid points about US healthcare - but it misses enough to make its argument far less than convincing overall.

Fox, Meet Hounds

2009-04-11T13:06:00.006-04:00

From The Daily Dish, a British take on the news, with extra-special treatment of Fox. It's well worth watching - just make sure your coffee and your keyboard are well separated.

UPDATE: In case, after that, anyone needs to understand why the rest of the world has such a dim view of the US "news" machine in general, and Fox in particular, 'Liss at Shakesville has a concise example.

Alexandrian Bonfire Redux

2009-04-11T12:51:00.003-04:00

Andrew Sullivan has a telling transcript from a Teabagging event:

Woman: [Shouts] “Burn the books!” [applause]
Man: “I don’t think you were serious about that, were you?”
Woman: “I am too.”
Man: “Burn all the books?!”
Woman: “The ones in college, those, those brainwashing books.”
Man: “[laughs] Brainwashing books?”
Woman: “Yes.”
Man: “Which ones are those?”
Woman: “Like, the evolution crap, and, yeah...”

Wow. Just like all those anti-knowledge folks were supposed to have done.

See Boatboy Blush

2009-04-11T12:24:00.001-04:00

"C'mon Over, My Wife's Away" not only made it to The Reaction - it made the week's summary.

Aw, shucks, folks...

Hell Froze Over Last Week

2009-04-11T12:05:00.004-04:00

Creative Loafing has two stories that made my head spin this morning.

Item one: the Hillsborough County Council is beginning work on a light rail system.

Item two: a reprint of an item - from Think Progress no less - about a CSPAN call-in show which featured a caller from Tampa busting CSPAN's chops for paying attention to failed Conservative policy points and continuing to emphasise Conservative speakers.

Who'd'a'thunkit: Tampa Bay's Rightward lean may finally be reversing.

On Faith, Sexuality, Privilege and Projection

2009-04-11T11:59:00.002-04:00

The great argument between the Far Right Xtians and the LGBT community has heated up of late, as public bodies give more latitude to LGBT needs and less to Xtian dogma in the public sphere. The Xtians are increasingly crying that the recognition of LGBT issues is an infringement on their freedom of religion and an imposition on their way of life.

Much of the differences between these two camps springs from fundamental misunderstandings on each side of the other, and of projection of each side's perspective on the other's goals.

The LGBT community is largely a “live-and-let-live” group, disinterested in enforcing its own lifestyle and preferences on the rest of the population but concerned when society at large denies it basic human dignity. It is neither expansionist nor authoritarian, and seeks only the respect and consideration it feels all humans deserve.

The Xtian community is by definition a messianic, missionary community who sees its role as saviour of Humanity. Xtians hold themselves apart even from most other Christian sects, believing them misled or “straying” from the True Faith, and driven to correct this “mistake” at any cost. They seek to correct the failures in civil society, and hold high standards for personal conduct according to a very precise, specific code. That they do this for the benefit of all and for the eventual salvation of Humanity is relevant: their cause has merit in their eyes, and in the eyes of many outside their realm.

The problem arises from each side of this argument's unconscious projection of its goals and methodologies on the other. The Xtians are recruitment-based: their membership is either indoctrinated in their youth or converted from some other belief (or from lack of belief altogether), and their aim is to project their “True Discipline” globally. Any impediment to this approach is perceived by them as persecution. The LGBT community is a passively created group: there is no “recruitment” to sexual identity, though any who define themselves as non-hetero are de facto members of the group and are perceived as deserving of the same respect and ability to live their lives without oppression. They are, however, adamant about the intrusive nature of any group's efforts to “convert,” “change” or "save” them since they believe it unnecessary – whether through faith that their Creator built them the way they are or through faith or lack of it that does not admit such direct Divine involvement in their existence.

Take for example the same-sex marriage issue. Marriage has had many functions over the ages beyond basic procreation: political and business alliances have been made, status established, power consolidated or conferred, and governments augmented or replaced all through marriages. Polygamy and polyandry both have a long history, and are still accepted in multiple cultures; the binary “one man, one woman” approach to heterosexual marriage is but one variant on the practice. The concept of marrying for love is fairly new: the far older tale is of a marriage for some other purpose wherein love is afterward found. Shakespeare first bridged the gap, though the Romantic movement made a good deal more of the concept. For the LGBT this is a civil right, divorced from religious overtones as described as early as the Deist writings of the 18th Century and as promised in the Constitution. Xtians see marriage as a key component of their Code and Law, and dismiss other positions outright as the product of “false” or “misled” beliefs which must be opposed for the good both of their own (for their protection) and for those thus led astray (for their eventual salvation).

Take also the claims of the Xtians that the LGBT community “recruits” young people and seeks to “infiltrate” schools and youth organisations to bring new “members” into the group. Xtians, of course, use such methods to spread The Word, and expect this approach from their members as a natural facet of practicing The Faith. LGBT persons, in contrast, recognise only that sexuality begins to be exhibited at a fairly young age, and regardless of one's faith needs to be handled with care, love and respect: the idea of “recruitment” is ridiculous, since the determining factors are more biological and familial than doctrinaire, and since there is no goal inherent in LGBT identification to “convert” any but rather to uphold and support those who think and feel as they do. Recruitment is alien to LBGT life; it is not, however, to Xtianity. Thus, the Xtians see in LGBT teachers a conscious effort to “pervert” the young people in their care, while the LGBT community sees only professionals dedicated to the improvement of all young people with no agenda beyond educating the young.

Take also how each group deals with its leadership. LGBT groups run the gamut of liberal to conservative, Christian to Xtian to Jewish to Muslim to agnostic to atheist, and are judged according to their adherence to these from an LGBT perspective. Log Cabin Republicans, for example, are often denounced by Progressives for their willingness to accommodate those who oppose them (thus diminishing chances of achieving true equality for their LGBT constituents), but they are not ostracized, excluded from the community or otherwise shunned. It is, after all, their right to speak and act as they do, though their goals and methods can rightly be questioned. Xtian leadership, in contrast, is often held to strict standards dictated by Xtian Law; breach of this Law is often met with removal from positions of power (either forced or voluntary, though voluntary vacations of position are often attempts to save face and avoid impending removal), and though forgiveness is a key component of The Law's philosophy it is usually only granted after much penance. LGBT leadership is measured by results and by adherence to civil law and decency; Xtian leadership is measured by the stricter standard of Xtian Law, which in those circles takes precedence over the civil law it frequently seeks to supersede.

In each case, the conflict stems from fundamental misunderstanding of each group's aims and methods. The Xtians, themselves seeking to convert all to their True Faith and holding steadfast to a particular Code of Conduct, see in any other group (including LGBT) a like-minded philosophy and agenda, and see in those groups' activities signs of the other's diabolical assault on The Faithful. Opposition to other philosophies is not only right, but virtuous, and demanded by The Divine in order to save all Humanity. LGBT people, desiring only to be respected for themselves and seeking inhibitions on those who would constrain or outlaw their own lifestyle and seeking only respect and forbearance from those around them: belief is irrelevant to them in this context, and the only truth that obtains in context is that different people are prone to different inclinations and behaviours which, practiced as free adult citizens in a nation presumably devoted to personal liberties and rights, ought to be respected. The LGBT position is not morally relativist, but merely the recognition that a belief system cannot dictate more basic portions of an individual's makeup deserving of respect from civil society.

Herein lies the rub: Xtian philosophy considers its Law superior to that of the State. Further, the Xtian missionary bent encourages – if not demands – its adherents to implement its Law in the public sphere as an obligation of The Faith. Xtians tend to see other groups with different understanding of the place of civil government in the same light. The precedence civil law takes in a pluralist society is viewed as a failure both of society and of The Faith, since civil law is the work of the public and presumed to be without the Divine inspiration Xtian Law claims. Imposition of civil law on the Xtian Faithful is perceived as a diminution both of their rights and of their stated goals, as it dilutes the code by which the Faithful are expected to live.

In contrast, the LGBT community, being drawn from a larger philosophical circle, see the imposition of any Divinely-inspired law as an encroachment by those intent on remaking society according to that one philosophy's precepts, to the detriment of their rights as citizens. Opposition to such efforts is not based on the Rightness of their opposition, but on the Wrongness of imposing a single philosophy's narrow interpretation of its own code on a society that does not universally share that philosophy.
What makes this friction of perspective pertinent is that the US was founded as, and still remains, a civil government founded on pluralist philosophy. In circumstance after circumstance, civil law trumps the tenets of Faith with regard to LGBT issues. Four states now allow same sex marriage, all states now recognize same sex affiliations as legal and its practices immune from prosecution, and workplace and housing protection is broadening. The LGBT community – like most US citizens – perceive this as the natural evolution of civil society under the framework of the Constitution. The Xtians, however, recognizing no law above Their Own, and seeking to implement that (for the benefit of all in both this life and the next), perceive such changes not only as challenges to their own tenets but outright offenses against them. In their zeal to remake the US as the Xtian nation they desire, they see the imposition of common law in the public sphere as an affront to their beliefs, not conceiving that their certainty of Rightness is not shared nor could be persuasive to those who disagree. The requirements of accommodation in such circumstances is anathema to a philosophy that denies the primacy of the civil sphere and demands that such be superseded by Divinely-inspired legal code.

In the end, much of the friction is a function of the fundamental misunderstanding of each group by the other. The LGBT community does not see the separation of church and state in a civil forum as an impediment to Faith, and see attempts to legislate according to a particular faith an imposition on civil rights. The Xtians, seeing the same civil forum as subordinate to the Divine, and who seek conversion of all within it (for their own good), see any constraint on their efforts as restriction of religious practice as it interferes with one of their key religious principles.

PWNing 2 Million 4 Marriage

2009-04-11T11:39:00.004-04:00

In my last post, I discussed the cluelessness and/or outright cynicism of an anti-marriage effort that labels itself 2M4M. Seems cluelessness was more appropriate after all.

From the website for the just-registered domain 2M4M.org:

It's surprising how quickly things can get started. Just this morning I was looking forward to a relaxing weekend and then the news hit about the 2M4M campaign that opponents of marriage rights were mounting. As many were scratching their heads at the choice of name, it occured to me that the obvious Internet presence, 2M4M.org was sitting unused.

Well, it is unused no longer. Welcome to 2M4M.org, or Two Men For Marriage. This site will present the facts about marriage equality as a counter to the fear, uncertainty and doubt being sown by the opponents of equal rights.

I first saw the site go up last night, and already there's a fairly thorough skeleton put up.

WOO-HOO!

This Goes Right Up There With Republican Twittering

2009-04-10T14:50:00.004-04:00

Box Turtle Bulletin has unearthed another NOM item - one that illustrates just how out of touch these wingnuts are, or how cynical they must be.

Right on the heels of their much-mocked zombie ad sponsoring their Opus Dei buddy, NOM brings us their latest:
In just a few minutes, NOM President Maggie Gallagher and I will hold a press conference in Trenton, NJ, announcing an ambitious new nationwide “2 Million for Marriage” (2M4M) initiative.
C’mon. You’ve got to be kidding.

Surely her PR people are having a laugh at her expense. Can anyone really be in PR and not have at least done a quick google to see if your new acronym is going to engender giggles?

Although…. if I saw, “Hi, we’re 2M4M and we are against marriage”, it might make some weird sense.

Either these volk don't know the popular connotations of "M4M," or they're hoping to delude some uninformed LGBT and LGBT-supporting people into backing their bigoted cause. Either way this is just priceless.

What You Get For Your Law Enforcement Tax Dollar

2009-04-09T23:48:00.002-04:00

First, comes the story of an ISP raided by the FBI - with, so far, no indication given as to cause or consequence (outside shutting down the provider's datacenter for the time being).

Second, there's an interesting article on how Utah is funding a programme to help its officers sweat out their crystal meth habits.

Third is an item on how two drunk sheriffs here in Tampa Bay who were let go after what would have been a DUI traffic stop.

And last is the tale of a Texas police chief who tasered his wife.

I have the greatest respect for law enforcement in general. But I've had less than pleasant encounters with them in the past, most notably an assault I witnessed in California where the PD arrested the victim instead of the assailant. So while I'm willing to give them the benefit of at least some doubt, these stories taken together tell a tale of presumed privilege and police-state practices that make one shudder. And while these are taken from a variety of US national sources, their relative immediacy - all in the last six months, and three of them in the last week - is alarming.

H/T Wolfrum.

How NOT To Win Friends And Influence People

2009-04-09T23:17:00.004-04:00

PETA is becoming increasingly annoying.

Seems that dissing women and slagging anyone who's not a Vegan isn't enough anymore. Now they have to bother pop icons about their choice of names.

"Dear Neil and Chris,

"You have many loyal fans of the Pet Shop Boys here at PETA. We have a request that may at first seem bizarre, but we hope that after considering the following facts, you will understand why we are asking this of you: will you please consider changing your name from the Pet Shop Boys to the Rescue Shelter Boys?"

Never mind that Pet Shop Boys have been using that name for over twenty years, and have some associations from their beginnings that have meaning and value (Wikipedia says it's about friends of theirs that worked in a pet shop, though I've heard other stories). Never mind that the name is now a known brand. Never mind that any pop band that reinvents itself with a new name essentially has to start over. And never mind that PETA is as old as the Pet Shop Boys, and could have said something decades ago, so the timing of this one is just wrong. Somehow these ethicists-cum-publicity-junkies have the losing idea that making noise about something that's been part of the popular culture for more years than I like to count now, after all this time, is somehow productive.

To their credit, Pet Shop Boys have put up a polite but firm reply to the PETA demand on their Website. I've read it: it's the nicest "go to hell" response I've encountered in a while. Good for them.

I'd like to think that, after this latest exhibition of exquisitely poor taste and timing, PETA might actually do something that doesn't involve grandstanding or valuing animals over people. Given their history, though, I fully expect them to live down to their recent history.

H/T Petulant at Shakesville.

Welcome to Port Royal, Mr. Smith*

2009-04-09T14:07:00.004-04:00

It seems some Texans have issues with "foreign-sounding" names.

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

There's a lot of noise on this item about The Entitlement, The WASPishness and The Ignorance associated with Ms. Brown's perspective. I think it goes deeper than that.

The problem Brown sees, though, seems to me less culturally significant and more intellectually lazy. It's not merely the Hsus and Chens and Huangs that are affected, but a far larger swath of the population with names more complex than one syllable or six characters. Ms. Brown merely adds a cultural and racial component to this laziness.

The problem Ms. Brown seems to see is the difficulty with the "foreign-ness" of the names. This, coming from someone obviously part of that "nation of immigrants" the US keeps touting as a badge of honour, whose people have been here at most four hundred years themselves (most likely much less), is galling until one recalls how each particular wave of immigration has been viewed by each preceding one. The Irish and Italian immigrants were despised by their English, French, German and Spanish hosts; the Poles, Czechs and Slavs despised by the Irish and Italians who preceded them; and so on. In each case, for each wave, there are countless stories of immigrants whose "unpronouncable" names were replaced with something like "Smith" or "Jones" by immigration officials who were unable or unwilling to attempt to sort out the names the immigrants gave them on entry.

There is, of course, a certain Othering at work in Ms. Brown's statements: Chinese immigrants would, by her logic, do so much better if they were only more like us. The presumption, however, that abandoning one's name (a supremely personal item) is appropriate to becoming part of the culture is something I find personally offensive - particularly since my own name, which should be far less difficult, is no less frequently butchered by the same sorts making claims like hers.

I have a very, VERY English name. My last name is of Norman origin (my people arrived in England with William I), and can be traced back to 10th century Normandy. My first is equally English, and fairly recognizable. However, for whatever reason no-one in the US seems to get it right, either in pronunciation or spelling. Correcting people has become almost second nature. And all this for a name Ms. Brown's logic would skip due to its origins.

I suspect that there are many like myself, whose names while not everyday are certainly recognizable as of a familiar origin, yet who face the same sort of troubles that Ms. Brown seems to have with Asians. Adding a racist tone to the sort of change Ms. Brown suggests layers on a new level of offensiveness, but the larger issue - that the US has a long and storied history of such resistance to every group of more recent arrivals, and has been equally unkind to them all - is an example more of long-practiced intellectual laziness than the bias implied in her single statement.

* from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

On Educating People Who Don't Want To Think

2009-04-09T12:00:00.005-04:00

Two recent stories circling the 'blogosphere achieved synchronicity in my mind this morning.

The first is the brouhaha over the "Gathering Storm" ad campaign from National Organization for Marriage. Petulant at Shakesville eviscerated the ad, but there have been others who have torn it apart - sometimes with hilarity. Much of the criticism of the campaign - the part that actually checks the campaign's "facts" rather than simply denounce the outright bigotry or question why the campaign had to hire actors rather than produce the actual people cited - tears into the hyperbole and outright falsehood of the claims. Unfortunately, it takes research skills to actually identify the "oppressed" produced in the ad, since the ad doesn't name names or give the slightest specific for its test cases.

The second is a disturbing report on the uninformed nature of the US electorate. A recent study for the California Academy of Sciences highlights the relative ignorance of the populace on basic scientific knowledge. Relating to this, Space Cowboy (again at Shakesville) retells an anecdote from Southern California that, due to budget constraints, science education may actually be reduced.

There is something in the US psyche that encourages certainty. The US doesn't like ambiguity: it prefers the conviction of fact or belief. As a result, the complexity of the modern world is often suppressed in the public sphere and replaced with platitudes and simplistic statements which are frequently incorrect in part or in whole simply to assuage public angst. It is possible for an authority on a given subject to make an assertion that is demonstrably false and have it accepted simply from the certainty with which it is delivered.

Part of the CAA survey results can be explained by the pervasiveness of "young earth" philosophy in Conservative Xtianity. If, for example, one believes the Earth is 6,000 years old, then man and dinosaur would naturally exist at the same time - which would explain the 59% correct response rate for that question. The rest of the questions, however, point to an almost wilful ignorance of established science.

At the same time, the education system is increasingly focused on what policy defines as "essentials" - basic reading and mathematics. Such a narrow approach, dealing in essentially right/wrong dichotomies of calculation and syntax, while easily scored for evaluation, completely ignores the "gray area" fields of the social sciences and more complex natural sciences (chemistry, physics and biology), all of which are essential to a sound education.

I cannot posit a causality for the decreasing literacy in the US from these items. But the "Gathering Storm" campaign shines a bright spotlight on both the mindset that encourages it and the results of allowing that mindset to dictate education policy and public discourse. The more narrowly the US focuses its efforts to educate the populace, the more necessary disciplines become ignored, particularly disciplines where right and wrong are displaced by provable versus unprovable and where interpretation based on the observable becomes more integral to the subject. Equally, as the disciplines that do not encourage right/wrong dichotomies in their studied material are diminished in the education system, the notion that there are such absolutes in the natural world becomes more prevalent and acceptable.

A cultural artifact of the deemphasis on such modes of thinking is the increase in acceptance of unproven - even brazenly indefensible - positions making their way through public discourse. The "Gathering Storm" campaign is one such.

The problem with such phenomena in the scholastically challenged world of 21st century US culture is that debunking such patterns of thought require the kind of critical thinking that the US education system is increasingly unable to teach and that the US populace is seemingly increasingly disinclined to practice. Given this trend, the capacity of education to encourage critical thinking in any sense is diminished, and this decrease may be attributable in no small part to the disinclination of the public to think for itself.

Education is at once an obligation of any society and the specific privilege of the individual. Society, particularly democratic society, needs an informed populace to remain productive and functional. However, the level of education obtained is largely the choice of the individual citizen: how much or how little education an individual obtains is that individual's own option. These two conditions are largely at odds in modern US society and leave us with results such as are illustrated here.

The same society that values science in the abstract is woefully uneducated on scientific specifics as the CAA study shows, which implies that many more advanced disciplines of less perceived value are at least equally outside the grasp of those surveyed. At the same time, those disciplines, whose spheres encompass the realms of what is provable or defensible, are being held increasinly out of reach by an education system apparently unable or unwilling to present more than the absolutely but hardly exclusive essentials of basic arithmetic and everyday language. In turn, there is a predominance of public speech on increasingly complex subjects that is oversimplified to a point that it becomes substantially inaccurate, which is absorbed as accurate by a public increasinly discouraged from, and disinclined to, its own critical thinking and research.

The net result of these convergences is a populace uninformed on matters of vital import to the republic and the planet, who are unable or unwilling to expend the effort to explore beneath the surface of complex issues and sufficiently complacent with their condition to accept baldly inaccurate positions based solely on the conviction with which they are made. This might be curable with a more comprehensive approach to education, and a more rigorous and expansive curriculum at both the elementary and secondary levels, but again as indicated in the current discourse the US education system is in such dire economic straits and in such low domestic repute that the very coursework that could alleviate the problem is being sacrificed to the immediate budgetary constraints without apparent thought for the long-term consequences.

Yet Another Reason The Right Hates Rail Transit

2009-04-08T16:51:00.001-04:00

Because too many of their supporters misstake the railroad facilities for FEMA concentration camps for Conservatives.

Sighting

2009-04-08T14:13:00.002-04:00

Today's special sighting is of the container ship Maersk Alabama, recently attacked by Somali pirates as it was bringing relief supplies to drought-stricken Kenya. Recent reports indicate that the crew has retaken the ship, though none of the reports are definitive.

H/T Steve Benen.

"you like me, right now, you like me!"

2009-04-08T14:00:00.004-04:00

It seems I'm getting read, and that's leading to getting published elsewhere.

The Reaction has invited me to post there occasionally, and I've accepted. My first post went up last week, and the second is submitted and awaiting approval. Have a look.

FYI the title for this post is Sally Field's actual remark on winning the Oscar for Places in the Heart.

UPDATE: I've just been informed that "C’mon Over, My Wife’s Away" will be in tomorrow's The Reaction posts.

THANKS FOLKS!

C’mon Over, My Wife’s Away

2009-04-08T10:40:00.003-04:00

There's been a lot of noise about the recent events in Iowa and Vermont, particularly from the Chicken Little School of Conservative Thinking. Steve Benen, Shakesville, BBWW, Box Turtle Bulletin and others have all covered it rather nicely.

It occurs to me, though, that there's a reason for the marriage issue is so big for the RWNM that's not being discussed all that much.

Living in SW Florida, I run into all sorts. One of the types I try to avoid is the "married but playful" kind: the ones that are stepping out on their spouses to indulge their preferences on the down-low. It's messy for them, it's uncomfortable for me and it's dishonest on both parts to carry on anything more than a one-night stand under those conditions. Quite frankly, I won't knowingly have anything to do with it. However, the number of folks I meet who do or will is startling.

The RWNM has long presented civil rights issues as a zero-sum game: more for you is less for me. The idea of an expanding set of civil rights - indeed, of rights in any sense - seems alien to them. They did this with civil rights based on race and sex, and they've done it more than a few times based on sexual identity.

In the SSM case, my hypothesis is this: many of the naysayers are acquainted with more than a few married couples who aren't straight, and legalisation of SSM would drive them to divorce their spouses and marry their partners.

This is offensive on a number of levels. I'll hit the chief ones that bother me: feel free to add your own in comments.

First, their position assumes that there are a lot of couples who married for convenience, respectability, and tax and insurance benefits. This perspective reduces those marriages to pure business contract: there's nothing "sacred" about getting married just to be added to your spouse's health insurance or to file joint tax returns. If SSM is legalised, these marriages will be shown up for the transactional relationships they are, and the arguments about the "sanctity of marriage" will instantly evaporate.

Second, the assumption that there are substantial numbers of couples who married for convenience and respectability undermines the arguments about "special rights" for a "small minority." There is an unstated assumption in the position that the actual number of people who would self-identify as LGBT if SSM were legalised is substantially higher than is either reflected in accepted sociological statistics or claimed by the naysayers - perhaps as high as 30-40%. The RWNM doesn't want to be seen as hostile to proportions that high - just look with the GOP has done to court the Hispanic vote in recent years - so numbers like that can't be allowed to see the light of day. So long as they can talk about a small number of "deviants" rather than a substantial minority of law-abiding LGBT citizens they can continue to whinge about the "special" and "excessive" demands of those LGBT citizens willing to make noise on behalf of the rest. If the numbers they fear become public, prior statements denouncing the LGBT movement as a tiny fringe of society seeking preferential treatment will be meaningless.

Third, the naysayers are expecting legalisation of SSM to produce an immediate uptick in the divorce rate as all those marriages of convenience adjust. Their assumption seems to be that this will be an immediate phenomenon. Again, they are failing to take into account that divorce is a messy business not undertaken lightly, that many of the marriages they think are jeopardised by the new laws are prone to dissolution not just because the new alternative is available, and that said marriages are taken so lightly that they are at risk in the first place. This puts yet another torpedo into the "sacred institution" meme simply because it implies that marriage is so fragile that it won't withstand expansion.

Fourth, there is the unspoken awareness that marriages of convenience are loveless, unhappy things foisted on these people in the name of respectability and social harmony. The numbers the anti-SSM voices fear, should they manifest, would spotlight their commitment to a cruel, oppressive social policy that demanded those in MOCs live lies just to be accepted. It might even be enough to cause a resounding backlash, and it would certainly encourage opposition to their other platform planks. The idea that marrying the person one prefers to have sex with produces happiness is no more true than marrying a person one prefers not to have sex with produces unhappiness: however, these people apparently fail to recognize that point.

Searching through my memory, I can recall perhaps three couples I have known who tied the knot for legal benefit, social respectability or camouflage for non-hetero behaviour. That's three (maybe) out of some hundreds of married people. I have, however, met many who cling to this "sanctity of marriage" argument - all the while indulging in extramarital recreations (and sometimes more serious involvements) and keeping it quiet. LGBT personal ads and Website profiles that demand "discretion" abound in the South and particularly in SW FL, which term I am learning is codespeak for "I'm hitched and playing on the side, but I don't want my spouse/employer/church to find out." I hardly think these same people would run to the courts to annul those marriages simply because they don't have to stay in them to claim the attendant legal or financial benefits. There may be a readjustment of sorts over time, but there won't be crowds beating down the divorce courts' doors the moment these laws are signed.

This, though, seems to be the likely calamity the anti-SSM lobbies fear: that all those people they know personally who are in some marriage of some sort of convenience would immediately ditch their present arrangements and swap them for the SSM they really desire. Should that happen, all the RWNM's rants about the Sanctity of the Institution of Marriage, the Needs of Teh Childern, the Special Rights Teh Gay Demands and other such memes would suddenly and forcefully ring hollow as all those people their positions drove to these MOCs were allowed to choose a more desirable legal alternative.

H/T to Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof for the title.