Criminal Visitor

Thought I’d break my illness-induced blogging break by recounting an incident that occurred last night.

A knock came on our apartment door well after dark. Since it’s our policy to verify who’s at the door before opening, we asked that the knocker identify himself. He claimed to represent Comcast and said he was doing an audit to determine whether people were stealing cable. Visibility through the peep hole wasn’t too good, but the guy wore a fairly scruffy looking baseball hat and looked unprofessional. Obviously, Comcast knows who we are and what we’ve got with them, so a rep wouldn’t have to ask. He said he had ID and offered to show it to me. He also accused us of being rude for not opening the door.

Our response was to tell him to hit the road, after which we called the police and Comcast. The latter said that the knocker most certainly did not represent them, and that, ID or not, no one making such an approach was to be believed.

We suspect the guy was fishing (or phishing) for credit card or other information that could be useful for criminal purposes subsequent to his visit.

What really irks me is that this scumbag preyed on people’s honesty (with regard to the legality of the ir relationship with the cable company and eagerness to prove it) and hospitality. This is just another example of how criminals make life worse for everybody by making it necessary to treat strangers with defensiveness and inhospitality, if not worse. I’d be happy to see a guy like this flogged. Is that “cruel and unusual”?

Ediblurb: On the Subject of Lameness

Some things changed in the ol' schedule; details aren't important, but it's screwing up the blogging works. Soooo.....

At this point, I'm only promising to get to the Year in Review stuff by the end of the year. So much for the hiatus...

My guess is they'll get buried generally; I think I'll sidebar them once I post both of them to see if I can't somehow draw attention to the things.

Given that I've had only 18 visits this morning - and the majority of those are random - I was half-tempted to just delay the posting figuring that no one would notice. Still, that wouldn't have been honest, now would it.

Anyway, have a nice Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Eid Al-Fitr, etc. Regular service will resume on January 2.

- The Big Forehead

Ediblurb: The Big Push...And...

Despite some interesting goings-on in this morning's paper, I'm going to focus entirely on producing the city/state Year in Review today. That'll be out by the end of the (working) day. The state of the nation....well, that'll come some time during my so-called hiatus - probably toward New Years. And, as noted in an earlier post, The Big Forehead will knock off posting at the end of the day; I'll return to full-time activity on January 2, 2006.

In my absence, this will be the Idler's playground. I know I'll check and comment, but that'll be about it.

I will post today, but it's not likely to be news-related. With some low-brow television from last night as inspiration, I think I'll troll the Web for news of the weird. If and when I post anything besides the "state of the state," it'll likely involve something mildly sick.

As I work my way to the present from January 2005, I can certainly say it's been an interesting year - both for the world and for me as a blogger. I'll get to the "world" stuff with the reviews, but there are some things to mention about blogging. For instance, the current project revealed that 2005 marks the first year that I paid serious attention to local news - and I'm talking in my life and across a dozen cities. Another notable first this year: I joined Blue Oregon contributor stable in late April with a post on payday loans (LINK). On this site, I jiggered and re-jiggered the format to this site a dozen times or so, adding and dropping features as if that was the purpose of the whole project. Even if I talk about this now less than I have in the past, that thinking continues; I won't flatter myself in saying I found my feet, but I've got some idea at this point as to which room they're in (next to my wife's keys, no doubt).

It's not all sweetness and light. I need to organize some things better - especially the Kick-Around stuff, the "weekly feature" that appears in bursts before disappearing. Some other things I hope to work on in 2006 include producing a reliable weekly mailer, installing some paypal stuff to see if I can't make any headway on that. More than anything else, however, I want to return to something I managed only in fits and starts last year: deep, background analysis of issues, stories, trends, etc. By now, that concept has gone through two, maybe three, incarnations; I haven't got it right yet, but doing so will be the focus for next year.

It's been a good year overall (I just eliminated the word "Anyway." I think cutting back on that will be a New Year's resolution). I'm beginning to enjoy what I do more and stress about it less...and that's a good thing. Talk at you later today...and then next year.

Stunted PATRIOT Extension

I had intended to stop for the day, but just saw that the U.S. House passed a far shorter extension to the PATRIOT Act - about five of six months shorter - by voice vote late today (Thursday, December 22).

Well, that's going to make for an interesting night/early morning....

The Internal Logic of Leaking

LA Times columnist Max Boot dredges up once more the debate over leaks, not surprising in light of recent revelations (or, rather, old revelations recently reported) on the NSA 'taps. Twisting the knife into the folks who freaked out when Valerie Plame's name leaked, Boot points to the differences he sees between the cases:

"So I eagerly await the righteous indignation from the Plame Platoon about the spilling of secrets in wartime and its impassioned calls for an independent counsel to prosecute the leakers. And wait … And wait …"

"I suspect it'll be a long wait because the rule of thumb seems to be that although it's treasonous for pro-Bush partisans to spill secrets that might embarrass an administration critic, it's a public service for anti-Bush partisans to spill secrets that might embarrass the administration. The determination of which secrets are OK to reveal is, of course, to be made not by officials charged with protecting our nation but by journalists charged with selling newspapers."

I disagree with Boot on the internal logic of what prevents a sordid leak from becoming a noble whistle-blowing, but it's something of a late revelation - and, who knows, it may not wash. Still, to give it a shot, here it is:

While I used to chalk the sympathy Plame got from her leak to the motives that produced it, I think that's inadequate; I think it's more to do with what she was doing in her capacity as a spy. Near as I can tell, she was fairly quietly plugging away on counter-proliferation, something everyone agrees is a good thing - hence, she's exposed for doing something entirely non-controversial and using methods of the same kind. All the other stuff - the CIA detention centers (assuming they exist (yes, I believe they do); the rendition flights, the NSA stuff - all these are contoversial, which helped them pass a kind of smell test.

At the same time, it would also be dishonest to pretend that there aren't hundreds of thousands of people in this country - some of them, no doubt, in media - who wouldn't simply grab on to something, anything to make Bush hurt.

Still, I think there's something to my theory. It's part of my ongoing ruminations on the subject. Your thoughts?

By the way, Boot's column isn't a bad one. Like Robert Kagan, he's one of those people with whom I can disagree comfortably; I take his consistent acknowledements where Bush & Co. haven't done so well as signs of intellectual honesty. Maybe it speaks well of me, maybe it doesn't, but I'm a sucker for people who acknowledge the counter-arguments when they write or speak.

FISA Judges Pipe Up

In what looks to be the most interesting looming development in the whole National Security Agency (NSA) wire-taps flap, the FISA Court judges are preparing for a briefing by NSA and Justice Department officials.

Some details (ominous for the administration):

"Several members of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said in interviews that they want to know why the administration believed secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails of U.S. citizens without court authorization was legal. Some of the judges said they are particularly concerned that information gleaned from the president's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to gain authorized wiretaps from their court."

[SNIP]

"The judges could, depending on their level of satisfaction with the answers, demand that the Justice Department produce proof that previous wiretaps were not tainted, according to government officials knowledgeable about the FISA court. Warrants obtained through secret surveillance could be thrown into question. One judge, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also said members could suggest disbanding the court in light of the president's suggestion that he has the power to bypass the court."

But the part that most interests me comes here:

"One government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the administration complained bitterly that the FISA process demanded too much: to name a target and give a reason to spy on it."

"'For FISA, they had to put down a written justification for the wiretap,' said the official. 'They couldn't dream one up.'"

When I talk about fixing this system, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about.

In any case, I'm thinking that what comes out of these meetings will be the most interesting - and, possibly, the most meaningful - information we get...at least until the Congressional hearings (oh, the theater that's going to make); then again, I'm also thinking that the content of those briefings will provide grist for the hearings.

Homeland Prevent Defense

(sorry for the potentially baffling/non-sensical reference to football...I got stumped for a title...)

If you haven't seen it already, I recommend the first installment of the Washington Post's series on the formation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It's larded with wonderful, on-the-record quotes, but the main point of interest comes with the troubled intersection where executive indifference (or perceptions thereof) collided with the hyper-daunting complexity of the task of building so massive a bureaucracy. Based on the report, it suffices to say that, whatever screwed up its birth, the founding of DHS wasn't done well - and there's blame upon blame to go around.

If I had to pick a nut graph, it's this one:

"Born out of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, DHS was initially expected to synthesize intelligence, secure borders, protect infrastructure and prepare for the next catastrophe. For most of those missions, the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission recently gave the Bush administration D's or F's. To some extent, the department was set up to fail. It was assigned the awesome responsibility of defending the homeland without the investigative, intelligence and military powers of the FBI, CIA and the Pentagon; it was also repeatedly undermined by the White House that initially opposed its creation. But the department has also struggled to execute even seemingly basic tasks, such as prioritizing America's most critical infrastructure."

Over the past 24 hours, I've done a lot of genuflecting before the ideal of process and working through the system. The establishment of DHS - and the motives for doing so weren't necessarily pretty (agreeing with Dick Cheney here...disturbing) - demonstrates that wisdom isn't necessarily one of the system's virtues. Then again, wisdom is less the goal there than maximizing the "stakeholder" - e.g. citizens, legislators, bureaucrats - buy-in.

Some other interesting bits to note:

"Most corporate mergers fail, and even the successful ones often take years to produce dividends. DHS can point to some results, including hardened cockpit doors on commercial airliners, background checks for truckers and radiation detectors at ports. DHS has consolidated eight payroll providers into one system, and 22 human resources offices into seven. And there has not been another terrorist attack."

What troubles me there is that the individual, pre-9/11 agencies would seem to have been adequate to make similar decisions - at least on everything but the payroll...then again, that's just meshing the bureaucracy, not defending the homeland.

Next, just to make us all feel better:

"In February 2002, Michael A. Wermuth, a homeland security expert at the Rand Corp., handed Ridge a two-page list of government entities that could be folded into a new department. It was the fourth of four options he offered, and Wermuth warned Ridge it was a horrible idea. He spoke 'of train wrecks coming, a clash of cultures.' It would take at least five years, probably 10, for the department to function smoothly. And without the proper resources, Wermuth said, 'you're going to strangle yourself in bureaucracy for years.'"

There's your silver lining: we're only three years in on a, potentially, 10 year project. Huzzah!

Seriously, this is a pretty interesting article.

The Padilla Ruling...Daaammmmn!

The Christian Science Monitor's Daily Terror Update focused on the ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals - by my observation, a law-and-order rubber stamp - on the jurisdictional status of Jose "Dirty Bomber" (or was it that?) Padilla. Not only did that court deny the Bush administration's request to move Jose "Dirty Bomber" Padilla from military custody to a civilian court, they ripped the request in terms only Democrats could love.

There are plenty of links in there, but two things should jump out. One, the bluntness of the court's observations bears noting (from this article):

Judge Luttig, a strong conservative judicial voice who has been considered by Mr. Bush for the Supreme Court, said the panel would not agree to government's requests because that would compound what is 'at least an appearance that the government may be attempting to avoid consideration of our decision by the Supreme Court, and also because we believe that this case presents an issue of such especial national importance as to warrant final consideration by that court.'"

The second thing appears in the quote: Judge Michael Luttig wrote this one. Maybe I would have liked him better than Alito...

Ediblurb: Progress Report

Hey. I'm just now to July 2005 in the archives of My Very Brain. This is slower going than I thought...

I'm still committed to a 2005 Year in Review, or a pair of them. I'm just wondering whether I'll be taking advantage of my hiatus to produce the "national" edition. Even so, I'm kinda geekily excited about the year-end thing: 2005 was frickin' busy dude.

The Off-Putting Work of Ann Geddes

While Christmas shopping last night I came across calendars featuring the photograpy of Ann Geddes. She is a gifted artist capable of creating charming pictures of children, as well as compelling still life. The problem is that Geddes applies her talent for the latter in service of the former and it doesn’t work. Not for me, anyway. In fact, I find many of her efforts distasteful, even repugnant, if subtly so.

It took me a while to put my finger on what bothered me, but I knew it had to do with a certain objectification of the little people she photographed. That set me thinking on one of Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative:

“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never as a means.”

Looking at the babies in most of Geddes’ pictures I never got a sense of them as persons or ends-in-themselves, rather only as means to an aesthetic impression. This isn’t true of all of Geddes’ work, as a visit to this site will attest. But it is nevertheless characteristic: the bodies, not the souls, of babies populate her work. One imagines the artist manipulating them like any other prop, if not in their handling, at least in their placement and treatment.

Her excellence in sensing and portraying the texture, mass and other inert qualities of her subjects makes them appear as mere lumps of flesh, not lively little humans. In this respect, they reveal something essential about the differing conceptual approaches of portraiture and still life. And they capture the adroitness of French term for the latter: “nature morte.” Indeed, many of her babies appear as inanimate and impersonal as a brace of freshly shot game or a coil of sausage links.

Payday Loan Letters

I found an interesting block of letters to the editor regarding the payday loan industry on today's op-ed page. The letters run unanimously against the industry, but the most interesting letter among them comes from a former insider, who explains how these play out. He offered a pretty concise scenario, so I'll copy/paste nearly all of it:

"Assume you get paid once a week, on Friday. You come in on Thursday to get a loan. I can loan you up to one week's gross pay. Assume you gross $300 per week. I can loan you $300. The fee is $20 per $100 borrowed. You must pay me back on your next payday, which would be tomorrow. So, you owe me $360."

"Problem is, you gross only $300, so how can you pay $360?"

"Here's what I can do for you: You can bring me $60 cash. That is the loan fee. And I will carry your loan until the following payday. You still have to pay me $360 on the next payday. The $60 you gave me only carries your loan for another week."

"I can do this three times. The fourth time, you must pay me in full. So, the fourth payday comes, and you have paid me $540 to borrow $300 for one month. Now, you're broke."

"That's OK. Since you have paid off your loan, I can instantly give you a new loan, and we can do this whole thing again. This is not an imaginary or worst-case scenario. This happened all of the time."

The whole payday loan industry thrives off people making bad/desperate decisions. There's only so much government can do to stop that; if it's not payday loans, it's not unreasonable to assume that it could be something equally irresponsible. Still, there's an uncomfortably predatory logic to all this - really, to everything to do with credit. I hope to visit this again in the New Year, because it's a hell of a fascinating subject.

PDX Lobbyists Sign the Registry

The Oregonian reports this morning that a "split" Portland City Council passed a rule yesterday that requires lobbyists to state some of their business when they chat up city hall.

The noises over this one have muted since last week's grumbling about "horse-trading" for votes - charges that one wouldn't think would evaporate with a vote (keep your eyes peeled for signs of slights and informal alliances, I suppose). Still, City Commissioner Randy Leonard's comments..."

"'I have absolutely no question about Commissioner Adams' goals here. They are for the right reason,' Leonard said. 'My problem is with the ordinance itself. I think it's flawed.'"

...opens the door for tinkering, which City Commissioner Erik Sten, who voted for the requirements, seems willing to entertain.

Not the most exciting piece of public business, no, but it's accords with this site's position that transparency is good (again, fire bad).

Roots of Lib/Prog Rage

Last night, I bumped into an article by Slate's Dahlia Lithwick that 1) happened to reference some of the points I made in the third comment on this post regarding the sense of distrust that Democrats, liberals and progressives feel with the current administration; 2) it also happened to offer a look at the roots of the sense of frustrated rage.

A relevant snippet:

"The Bush administration is forever quick to point out the flaws in all these bargains we have struck. The Patriot Act didn't go far enough, so the administration pushed for Patriot II. The Geneva Conventions afforded prisoners too many rights, so those rights were suspended. The statutory definition of torture precluded intelligence-gathering, so new definitions were invented. FISA was too cumbersome in a crisis, so it doesn't bind the president. Perhaps it's naive to think we had these negotiations in public because this delicate allocation of rights and powers is fundamental to a democracy. It's not shocking that the Bush administration sought to expand its powers. It's shocking that the president unfailingly refuses to ask."

"There are two explanations for the Bush administration's failure to stay within the boundaries of the legal structures for which it's bargained: One is that the administration believes it is fighting this war on its own; the courts, the Congress, and the American people are all standing in its way. The other is that the administration is convinced that none of our statutes or policies or systems will actually work in a pinch. Our laws aren't just broken. They are unfixable."

The issue here, for a lot of liberals, is the lack of sincere effort to acknowledge and address concerns that they (OK...we) believe can be acknowledged and adddressed without crippling the war on terror. Put another way, nothing drives a liberal crazy like the feeling that everyone's not being consulted (OK, low-blow characterization, but I think there's something to it). Seriously, it's the sense of being ignored and stiffed over issues that seem both vitally important and central to our democracy that drive the Dems crazy - and not just on terrorism.

UPDATE: I think the fight over the PATRIOT Act reminded me of something significant that I had forgotten in all the hub-bub. Even as I'm no great fan of the act (though, admittedly, the more I read about it, the more I think I need to sit down and give it another long look), it came to be law through the proper channels. As a result, even as I'm not a fan of it, I always accepted that it was the law and never questioned its essential legitimacy. The same doesn't apply for the host of other terror-fighting methods that grew from executive - though arguably war-time - fiat.

That's not to say that fighting the PATRIOT Act isn't legitimate either. That's also part of the process. But, with a measure of calm restored, there's time for process...not an eternity, mind you, but time all the same.

The issue with the president's approach, as Lithwick argues, is that he started from the assumption that working through legal, regular channels was fruitless at best, impossible at worst. I think we're in a place where he's obliged to try at the very least.

PATRIOT Act Extension

Appropos of the comments I added tonight on the whole "wire-tapping fiasco," I see they're still hammering out the PATRIOT Act; this time they've allowed the law to remain operative for an additional six months while they work through some details. As I said in my comments, this give and take is how the process should work; I may not love everything about the PATRIOT Act, I may believe some parts of it are better than others, but it's being hashed out in Congress where we can see it.

While I acknowledge that not every bit of legislation, or legal mechanism can go through this same process, I do believe that, barring genuine life-or-death emergencies (or, honestly, the perception thereof) process matters.

Ediblurb: Paring Back (Typical)

Some things came up blog-wise/work-wise, just generally. Turns out I posted a hell of a lot of copy in 2005, so, if I'm to meet the beginning of my one week hiatus, I need to adjust my goals.

I'm now gunning for two posts: a state of Oregon/Portland and a state of the union.

I've actually made some progress on the Oregon one; you wouldn't believe how earlier some of the big stories of 2005 got started. For instance, the Texas Power bid for Portland General Electric, that was rejected on March 10! Crap. Seems like yesterday...

Some Progress on 'Taps

"...the rule of law is more fundamental to our national success than democracy or freedom, since without it, neither could exist. You can't have democracy if the president, once elected, can change the rules. You can't have freedom if some people are allowed to break the law while others are not."

[SNIP]

"Like the Cold War, the war on terrorism is not merely a military conflict but a battle of ideas. And just as the Cold War was won when Eastern Europeans abandoned communism and joined the West, the war on terrorism will be over when moderate Muslims have transformed the Arab world -- abandoning the radicals to their tents and their caves -- and joined the global mainstream...Before they get there, they'll probably be subjected to a lot of State Department speeches about why it's important to abandon such practices as arbitrary arrest, torture and secret electronic surveillance. They'll probably be told over and over again why it's important for political leaders to subject themselves to the same laws as their citizens. They'll probably hear lectures about due process, and other rights available to people in civilized societies. But as things are going now -- why on earth should they listen?
- Anne Applebaum, Washington Post, 12.21.05

Those excerpts come from an excellent column by the Applebaum. In it, she gets at what keeps me up at night as I watch the president arrogate to himself one "war-time power" after another. Between that, and an item posted on The National Review's (NRO) The Corner, I'm finally getting the debate I want - and I think the country needs. A response of sorts to Applebaum's column starts with the lead to this post The Corner by Mark Levin (you're looking for the one bearing the title "Leadership," which shows up in the middle of the page on my browser):

"I think we've been looking at this NSA thing the wrong way. I have a question for Specter, Snowe, Hagel, Boxer, Kerry, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, and Vixen: Other than declaring war (which it did in two joint resolutions) and raising money to fund an army (which it also has done), what is the role of CONGRESS or the JUDICIARY in making decisions about the prosecution of a war?"[tbf - emphasis added]

To address the gap between these points, it's vital that I start with a key assumption: we are not at war. Never mind that Congress never remotely declared war (something that has stopped virtually no past president). Now, I know we've got troops overseas and that Americans are dying for a cause - or, rather, causes; no two Americans seem to agree on what said causes are or the extent to which they apply to the endeavor. But, to a degree disturbing to consider, a majority of Americans have not signed on to, or have since fallen away from, the belief that the effort in Iraq connects directly to the effort against Al Qaeda. Think what you like about Iraq, but it's clear that all these ad hoc legalistic reactions - whether it's "detainee/detainer relations" or the current National Security Agency wire-taps - we're not directing those efforts against Iraqi nationals...and we never have.

That leaves Al Qaeda and a bit of a puzzle in terms of calling this a war. When we confront Al Qaeda, we cannot do so on terms of regular warfare. Put another way, he do we get at these guys? I've never once received a satisfactory response to that question that didn't boil down to acknowledging that this is, in essence, an aggressive police action; again, from that, I'd argue that we are not at war.

I think this has acted as an unacknowledged backdrop to my thoughts for a couple months now; it's only dredged up to the surface with this latest example of executive over-reach (one of the scarier end-goals of the Bush/Cheney administration; for these guys, a strong executive should be the norm). I think this for reasons that go well beyond what I've got above. Some of those, though, appear in an article written by Reason's Matt Welch (and it's a good article; I'd encourage people to read the rest 'cause it makes a good point). The key comes with the second of three bullet points in that piece:

"The opponent in the Cold War represented an ideology that governed dozens of countries, produced some material "successes" (Sputnik, Olympic gold medals, etc.), and held significant sway in the democratic West. Islamic fundamentalism has produced basically nothing of value, and is only present in the West as an isolated if sporadically explosive strain within immigrant communities."

That's not to argue that for something to meet my definition of war, it's got to have an enemy of Soviet proportions. For me, the key differences boil down to, 1) our options in coping with the threat; and, 2) how quickly and totally the enemy can harm us. I've covered the first one above (to some extent), but it's the second one that matters to the rest. We are living the time-line with Al Qaeda. As often as we're reminded that no attacks have occurred on American soil, there's virtually nothing out there to demonstrate that we've been saved from a credible, fully-formed plot to kill Americans - indeed, all the plots I've read about seemed closer to half-baked than anything else. In other words, the evidence suggests that Al Qaeda cannot easily attack the American homeland; that translates into to time - not limitless time, but real time - to actually address the deficiencies in our intelligence/spying apparatus (I'd also add that it's curious what we're not doing - think improving proficiency in Arabic).

It's possible, of course, that the Bushies have foiled one plot after another beneath the radar. On that subject, one of NRO's other contributors, James Robbins (who replied very politely to one of my notes, as, in my experience, all NRO columnists have), offered a suggestion to the president, in a wider defense of his actions:

"It would also help if the White House released some information on how the surveillance has helped keep the country safe. What attacks were disrupted, what terrorists were taken down, how many people saved? A few declassified examples would be very useful to ground the discussion in reality rather than rhetoric."

Given the state of trust between the partisans - in the country in general - I think that's a great idea. I'm only assuming that someone, somewhere among the Democrats can independently verify the specific incidents, because, given the times, I also suspect that's a minimum requirement. Whether conservatives like it or not, the president has a MASSIVE credibility problem - and that's not just with the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic Party; look at the polls and count the number of confessed liberals for an idea of the divide. Given that we are not "at war" - I would argue not at all, but I think most people would agree that even if one accepts we're at war, we're not at war in a way that looks familiar to most Americans - the burden to justify his various power grabs resides squarely with the president.

What I'm getting at here is, so long as you assume - as the NRO crowd clearly does - that we are not only at war, but an active, "any-minute-now" kind of war, yielding these powers to the president makes sense. The problem comes when one does not; that's when Applebaum's caveats about the rule of law trump pretty well everything the president is arguing.

Gordo's Even Bigger Anti-Climax

So, the vote is in the defense appropriations bill and it remains hung up somewhere round about the Arctic; yep, ANWR drilling scuttled this bill...so far. In truth, they only defeated a vote for cloture; word the Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist ended up voting with the minority suggests that this will head down the pike again in one incarnation or another.

I only hope that ANWR's out of there when it does.

Given that Senator Gordon Smith's (R- OR) vote was a source of suspense, for me anyway, I should note that I read over on Blue Oregon (LINK) that the senator stuck to his word from this morning - though curiously, not from the 2002 campaign trail - and voted for the appropriations bill, ANWR and all. I don't get this vote. With the filibuster holding, Smith was free to vote the "other part" of his conscience: e.g. he could have voted against ANWR drilling as he said he believes is correct. I suppose one could argue that this position was made inoperative by his statement today that he would "support the troops."

This was a false choice. The Senate vote serves notice to Alaska Senator Ted Stevens that he's an insufferable asshole, who doesn't respect the culture of the Senate or the spirit of our democracy, which runs on compromise. He also really needs to stop playing politics with the troops and yank this provision from the bill. I can't believe I'm quoting Joe Lieberman (D...sometimes - CT), but he framed his position on this vote to my liking:

"Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) said that even though the bill provides vital defense funding, he was joining the filibuster on principle to prevent attachments such as the drilling provision. 'If we yield to this tactic on ANWR,' he said, 'next year it will be someone else's pet project attached to the defense spending bill.'"

In the end, Gordo's only made his flip-flop permanent. I don't know; maybe he didn't know where the vote stood going in and cast his vote in the heat of it all. Still, he's going to have a hell of a time convincing Oregon voters on his environmental bona fides.

More Multiculturalism: Media Bias in Australia

A week or so ago there was some public disorder in Australia that got billed as “race riots.” While there clearly are racist yahoos in Australia, the disorder seems to have been driven more by cultural and even religious factors than racism. Nevertheless, the media has tended to characterize the events in knee-jerk fashion according to a white-racism template, ignoring factors crucial to understanding what took place.

Since the news broke, I relied on Tim Blair’s blog as a local clearinghouse of accounts and interpretations. What emerges is a picture of Muslim immigrants having pushed so far in their hostility to the locals that the locals pushed back. The conduct of some white Australians was reprehensible in many respects, and as I suggested above, there’s good reason to see racism as a factor. However, the media consistently overplayed the locals’ bad behavior and ignored genuine grievances, all the while suppressing elements of the story that identify immigrant elements as agents provocateurs.

The media’s biased approach to the story was perhaps best exemplified by their falsely reporting that white Australians perpetrated ran amok with baseball bats. A CNN headline read “Anti-Arab rioters smash cars, windows in Sydney.” In fact, that particular incident was perpetrated by a group of Muslim youths, but that apparently clashed with the media’s deductive assumption that white racism was the primary culprit. CNN later changed the headline.

In the Chicago Sun Times, John O’Sullivan offers context that has been widely ignored:

“But what exactly did happen? First reports were that several hundred people had ranged over the Cronulla beach, attacking men ‘of Middle Eastern appearance.’ It seemed like a ‘race riot’ in the most straightforward sense: People were attacked because they looked ‘Middle Eastern.’ Neo-nazis shipped in some of the rioters, and many others undoubtedly came to Cronulla that day spoiling for a fight.

“They were apparently responding to an incident the previous Sunday when a gang of Middle Easterners had badly beaten up two Australian beach lifeguards. This attack followed a series of lesser incidents on the beaches in which Middle Eastern youths had threatened families and directed racial and sexual slurs at sunbathing Australian girls. In the background were several recent gang-rapes in which the rapists had told their victims that they were being raped specifically because they were Australian. Cronulla's white rioters came prepared to exact revenge primarily for the lifeguards but for these other outrages, too. "

By all means also see Tim Blair’s “RIOT ROUNDUP” on the events. It’s worth scrolling down to these headings too: “ISLAM LIKED”, “IT JUST DON’T ADD UP”, and “BATS BEAT STICKS.” If you're really interested, you can go several pages back on Blair's site for exhaustive commentary and links to all perspectives.

Whatever you call this bias—multiculturalism, political correctness—it is undoubtedly informed by a characteristic liberal intellectual vice: a combination of primitivism with a sense of moral superiority, the result of which is favoring cultures other than one’s own, while finding fault with the members within one’s own society held to be less virtuous and sophisticated. Thus one’s social inferiors are used as whipping boys, one’s ideological opponents are regarded as obscurantist and non-Western cultures and non-white people are seen as noble savages who act from authentic motives, and whose transgressions can always be explained away by the actions of atavistic Western elements.

Mark Steyn chronicles in less abstract fashion how this kind of thinking blinds reporters and many who read their work from both understanding the unrest in Australia and seeing a bigger picture that is crucial to an understanding of world events.

"Multifaceted Culture" versus Multiculturalism

Interesting article on the question of multiculturalism in the Times of London, written by Salman Rushdie. The author seems to accept the more common and radical definition of the term and says that it’s “important to distinguish between multifaceted culture and multiculturalism.” We must realize, he counsels, that

“In the age of mass migration and the Internet, cultural plurality is an irreversible fact like it or dislike it, it’s where we live, and the dream of a pure monoculture is at best an unattainable, nostalgic fantasy and at worst a life-threatening menace.”

However, he goes on to lament that multiculturalism “has all too often become mere cultural relativism…under cover of which much that is reactionary and oppressive—of women, for example—can be justified.”

Rushdie criticizes alternatives that seek “full assimilation” but says that “societies…must retain the ability to discriminate, to reject as well as accept, to value some things above others and insist on the acceptance of those values by all their members.” The question of our time, Rushdie asserts, is “how does a fractured community of multiple cultures decide what values it must share in order to cohere, an dhow an it insist on those values even when they clash with some citizens’ traditions and beliefs.”

I’m in favor of most of what Rushdie says, including his conclusion that “No society, no matter how tolerant, can expect to thrive if its citizens don’t prize what their citizenship means—if, when asked what they stand for as Frenchmen, as Indians, as Britons, they cannot give clear replies.” And yet I think Rushdie avoids talking about an equally pressing question: How can a society avoid becoming culturally riven in the first place?

I think the United States succeeded in avoiding serious cultural dislocations by being somewhat selective about the origins of immigrants and insisting that new Americans get with the program once they got here. Multiculturalist policies have undermined the effects of this approach, though far more in Europe than here. Perhaps the ill effects of those policies will now encourage the return of more assimilationist policies, or at least expectations.

Gordo's Big Anti-Climax

It looks like the voting is already over at least on the budget bill, with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the tie-breaking vote. The latest I'm seeing shows the defense appropriations bill still tied up somewhere in ANWR - I'll note what happens with that later today (or whenever the vote goes down). So, for good or ill that's that (no, I'm no fan of the budget bill).

What wasn't surprising, in the end, was how Oregon Senator Gordon Smith (R) came down on both votes. The Oregonian reported this morning that he intended to stand firm against the Medicaid cuts - though, judging by the vote, not nearly tall enough - while letting ANWR drilling go forward through the sleazy back door Alaska Senator Ted Stevens (R, of course) opened into the defense appropriations bill.

I can't say whether or not Smith had a chance in hell of stopping either of these, but I'm not sensing much in the way of sincere frustration on either score. Today, Gordo's straddle looks more like talk and ass-covering than anything; I'll credit a lot of my lib/prog colleagues cynicism with getting this one more right than I did. I'd only defend my position by saying you encourage the other side when they go where you want them to and leave it there.

Think what you will on any of these bills and policies. But I think every last American voter ought to share in some disgust at how Ted Stevens sleazed the drilling through the backdoor. That kind of shit has no business in seeing to the public good.

Police/Fire Pension Fight

While The Oregonian's write-up on this is, frankly, a bit of a mess, the early skirmishes in the large and long fight over who manages the pension and disability fund for Portland's police and firefighters - along with how they manage it - counts as a big one.

It may be that I'm just having trouble getting my head around the issues, but this is a vague article. Still, you walk away knowing a few things: 1) one projection sees the fund, if left alone, will produce at $9.8 billion unfunded liability by 2045 - and that's in a city budget; 2) Dan Saltzman seems to be the prime mover for reform on the City Council; everyone else seems on, or near, the fence; 3) as the headline warns, the police union intends to fight reform recommendations.

That's all for now (at least for me); I susect we'll hear plenty on this through next May when a specific reform proposal may appear on our ballots.

New Brain for Timbers

The Oregonian reports that the Portland Timbers (soccer, in case you don't know) have hired a new head coach to guide the franchise into the 2006 season. His name is Chris Agnello and it sounds like he's done some good things down in Utah - with the unfortunate exception of either naming, or endorsing the name, Utah Blitzz(zzzzzz).

He served as assistant coach for Major League Soccer's Real Salt Lake and he's saying the right things about community outreach. There is something scary in The O's piece:

"Agnello inherits a team with just two players under contract -- backup goalkeeper Sam Reynolds and defender Scot Thompson, who could be playing in Europe next season."

"Agnello said he planned to contact Timbers players over the next few weeks to begin contract negotiations, and had begun discussions with Real Salt Lake and the Galaxy about possibly signing some young players from the MLS squads."

Two players under contract?? One with one foot out the door?

Ediblurb: The Year in Review

Ahead of the one-week, one-man hiatus (for The Big Forehead) on My Very Brain I've decided to do something different with the last three posting days of the year....though I'd be lying if I didn't confess to feeling somewhat overloaded between the holidays and the recent warp-drive in the news cycle.

Over the next three days, I'm going (or, rather, I intend to) crank out three "mega-posts" recapping 2005 on My Very Brain. Each of the three will focus on different areas: today's I've already set aside for Oregon/Portland news; another day (I'm thinking Friday) will be on the state of national security; while I'm not totally sure as to what the third will feature, I'm leaning toward something about economics. Whatever the subject, I'll combine "best of" approach, noting what I counted the biggest stories of the year in each area, with some reasonably short observations on "what it all means" and where I see things going.

I still intend to follow the news of the day, albeit a bit differently. For once in my blogging life, I'll just chuck up links to stories that interest me, both nationally and locally, and add a (literally) a comment or two....we'll see how that goes.

Given the effort involved (I "talk" a lot when I write), the posts may not appear till night. In any case, I'll play that part by ear. Anyway, I hope you enjoy them. Hell, I hope I enjoy them.

Streetcar Loathing + 12.21.05 = Open Thread

While I did read some really fascinating stuff on the 13th-century intra-European Crusade against a heretical sect called the Albigensians - a weird half-cult that dabbled heavily in Manicheanism - I'm going to pass over that because there's something else on my mind this morning.

(OK, not pass over entirely, as there were some points of interest I can get to pretty quickly. If nothing else, this historical argument is interesting and it's something I've never thought of before: "[With the acquisition of Toulouse] Central France now had free commercial outlets on the Mediterranean, and France had taken a great step toward unity. This, and the Inquisition, were the chief results of the Albigensian crusades." Hmmm...)

No, I'm jumping on here today to make stern opposition the Portland Streetcar the official position of My Very Brain. What prompts this?

Several times in the past, I have mentioned that I can beat the streetcar on my bike - even with my advancing age and obeying all traffic rules, I can do so comfortably.

Yesterday, however, marked a new low. Even allowing for the 15 minutes (a conservative estimate, by the way) I spent stewing onboard between stops on NW 16th and Lovejoy to NW 13th and Lovejoy, I was still able to beat the Streetcar ON FOOT. In other words, I was able to walk from NW 13th and Lovejoy to a downtown stop for MAX's Blue Line ahead of this piece-of-shit public transportation gimmick. I'm a fast walker, but not that fast.

During the 20 minutes (again, conservative estimate) I spent on board, I heard the car's conductor talking with a colleague noting that Lovejoy was like this every weekday afternoon for two hours. So, one possible defense of the streetcar would be that it's slow during rush hour. But given that rush hour is the time when the most people want to get from one place to another, what frickin' good is a public transportation vehicle that fails so completely when people want it most?

So, to the big brains responsible for purchasing and operating what amounts to a really, really expensive bus (hey, without the flexibility 'cause it's on tracks!) get bent, you morons.

If anyone wants to circulate a petition to scrap the streetcar, or to sell tickets to a public demolition of the thing, I'll be the first in line for either of them.

Wiretapping - I'm Done Now (Honestly)

OK, after this one, I think I can finally leave this alone for the day - a day that taught me, as much as anything, that I shouldn't hop over to conservative blogs while I'm so long as the basic information of a given story remains in flux. I just get flustered and pissy (see here), which doesn't necessarily preclude decent posts, but it definitely ups the ante in terms of tone.

Curiously, I'm back about to where I started on all this: I think Bush's initial reaction made sense, but now, it's time to establish a mechanism whereby independent oversight is possible and not completely at the president's, or the executive branch's, sole discretion.

So far as I'm concerned that's the next trick. The extent to which I freak out on Bush boils down to how he responds to this event - if he reacts by digging in his heels, as he is wont to do, we've got a long road ahead; but, if he focuses instead on making FISA warrants effective while maintaining their independence, I'm all for it.

Since I dumped on conservatives all day today, I'll close by recommending a pair of semi-able defenses of Bush's decisions; the first, a column by the San Francisco Chronicle's Debra Saunders, defends the president's position well without somehow pissing me off - it may be that she's showed sufficient independence in the past that I trust her to be fair; track records matter in my world.

The second amounts to a collection of items pulled together by Jim Geraghty over his TKS blog for The National Review. While he simply cites a bunch of work by other NRO contributors, each of them contain some things to think about.

Between those two, I think someone can get a decent impression of the conservative/pro-Bush position - so take that for what it's worth.

Now...here's to hoping the entirety of cyber-space lets this sit before building more speculation into the system tomorrow....

Senate Vote...Well....We're Waiting....

As we continue to twiddle our thumbs - while Dick Cheney hurries back from creeping out the troops in order to stand as the tie-breaking vote and both sides (the Dems especially) count their votes on both the budget and defense bill - I bumped into an interesting item over on Washington Monthly's Political Animal. Kevin Drum, the site's author, notes a report out of The Hill that talks of a "mini-nuclear option," some kind of targeted jigger to Senate rules - a one time only change, of course (ahem...BULLSHIT...cough, cough...oh, excuse me) - to ensure that the vital issue of ANWR drilling goes forward under the leverage of the Big Picture Arm Twist of the defense budget bill (horrible sentence, my bad).

As sleazy as I find this whole intellectually dishonest business of treating something as controversial as ANWR as just some minor quibble over pork, something to be quietly tucked into the bowels of other legislation, Drum tops his post with something more insidious still. From a copy of Drum's excerpt of a copy of a Roll Call article, here's that:

"Shortly before midnight on Sunday, the leaders agreed — after House and Senate negotiators had already signed the report and announced its details to the public — to insert controversial language that protects vaccine manufacturers from product liability claims in the event of a viral pandemic, such as one caused by avian flu."

"Observers familiar with the procedural history of conference reports said that they were unaware of any precedent for inserting language after conferees had signed off on the report. A review of several Congressional Research Service guides to conference proceedings make no reference to any prior example."

Drum wonders whether conservatives are proud of these corner-cutting accomplishments. Personally, I'm too busy being pissed off at the American public for not caring about all this monkeying with the rules. The GOP is crooked as hell to indulge in this, but the American public bears the responsibility for ignoring it; at the very least, they need to be debating questions of Senate rules openly and on the plane of principle, not to jam through something they know won't fly as a stand-alone bill.

Anyway, it's hard to tell if this remained in the current post-conference bills. This item suggests that it hasn't. I just remain troubled that this was ever considered...

Pushback - to the Point of Nausea

OK, one more, then I'll leave this alone for today.

While I still think Idler (along with Bull Moose's Marshall Wittman) made a decent point about the dynamic in play with the wire-tapping scandal as politics (see comments on this one), there's a point where this can be taken miles too far - as I'd argue it does over on the RCP Blog with this post by John McIntyre.

An excerpt:

"But to someone like Alter, the late 60’s and 70’s were the penultimate halcyon days for the press and politics. It was when the 'good guys' in the liberal press took out the 'bad guys' in the Republican party. The mindset survives among many to this day who constantly see the ghost of Nixon around every corner."

"Alter is clueless when it comes to the political ramifications of this story. Politically, the White House loves this story. As I mentioned in my column yesterday, it dovetails nicely with the debate over the Patriot Act, Iraq and works to reinforce the existing image of the Democratic party as just not serious when it comes to the nation’s security."

The "Alter" referred to in the above is Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, whose article on all this gave it a name: "Snoopgate." But if there's an item out there today that seems to have totally unhinged the Right, it's this one. If you look at the trackbacks at the bottom of McIntyre's post, you'll see six posts that cover the same ground. Over on NRO's The Corner, a few posts are equally dedicated to shit-losing (LINK, LINK), but another part of that pushback decries the "disturbing trend" of Democratic party hacks shifting to the MSM.

Jonah Goldberg, author of that last one, makes a somewhat fair point that he finds it most disturbing that these "activists" end up offering "non-partisan analysis," while conservatives migrate over as conservative pundits. Unbunch your undies Goldberg: who's got more influence on the political culture: Bill O'Reilly (or Anne Coulter) or James Fallows?

Two things vaguely sicken me in all this:

1) One the "instant analysis" in McIntyre's post claiming to know what the public thinks, which leads to...
2) the fact that the analysis I'm seeing on right-leaning sites seem more dedicated to framing the coming debate than looking at what just (fucking) happened. After that, it's reflexive fear-mongering, claims that, again, it's Bush's methods, Bush's way or nothing; the inevitability of attacks with the PATRIOT Act "magic shield" down even for a split second! (That's a paraphrase of the silly passage of the president's defense from last night.)

This is about the executive arrogating authority to itself outside the system of checks and balances: doesnt' that merit, y'know, some brain cells before rallying around W? Read Alter's piece - I just did again - and try to figure whether it warrants the rage it's receiving. I try - I mean I really try - to take trips through right-leaning sites; not only that, I view those trips as a serious endeavor to see what the "other side" thinks. While I do find stuff of value (I was pleased to see the Clinton stuff, even as I recognized it as half-silly point scoring), I also waste a hell of a lot of time on this framing horse shit.

A lovely example of this appeared in another article by NRO's Byron York, a piece where I first encountered the pushback on this. While I see the use in his quoting of the 9/11 Commission's thoughts on FISA, what to make of "source," the person bearing no more identification, but who rips apart the FISA process toward the top of his piece? Then again, what about Alter's "I learned this week..." about the meeting between NY Times execs and the president; he doesn't even name "source." So much heat, so little light...

Somewhere, there's a very serious discussion to be had about how we spy. It's not going to happen on this planet of the Permanent Silly Season. There are solutions: I would have given Bush an even greater pass had I heard he was working on a process to improve FISA speed. Instead, we have a power-grab. It would be one thing if the people at NRO or McIntyre discussed that in anything other than terms designed to defend the president first; I simply can't escape the feeling, however, that because W's their boy, they don't give a rats ass.

Pushing Back to Clinton

To answer a question that's popped up now and again on the conservative side of the Web, no it wasn't OK when former President Bill Clinton claimed the authority for warrantless searches. For samples of this part of the pushback, check here and here.

Personally, I remembered the crap about random drug searches of high school kids - hated that one - but didn't catch any of the stuff about surveilling for foreign terrorists. All this talk - particularly in the former piece - associating Clinton with "inherent authority" arguments drops him a bit further in my estimation. Some things I just won't compromise on. If you want to build a better eavesdropping mouse-trap, fine. But that cannot be contained within the executive branch and subject solely to the review of political appointees. There has to be a check somewhere.

Am I the only one who thinks our imperial policies recall the "end of republic" days of Ancient Rome? A big chunk of time in a pair of my courses in Roman history raised the question of inevitability regarding Rome's evolution into an imperial state. Is there something about running an empire - the military and attendant security needs - that makes slower-moving, liberty-philic government incompatible with said imperial mission?

UPDATE: Given the nature of the blogosphere and the rapid-fire capacity of the competing spin machines, I figured I'd bump into a corrective on the material offered by Byron York (first of two links). And, sure enough, Think Progress cranked one out. It's not full as I'd like to see - and that has more to do with a desire to not see two consecutive presidents pushing for policy I don't like.

Dammit, Bull (that's me for the initiatied). My fault for jumping into the spin cycle. You don't learn much in there; you just get frickin' dizzy.

(Legal) Pushback on Wiretapping

I was up (again, too late) last night and bumped into some really interesting legal analyses of President Bush's wire-tapping escapades. The three I'm passing on seem credible enough - then again, I'm no legal scholar, so my ability to judge these things ain't the best. Interestingly, they reach moderately different conclusions, which I'll try to capture in a short, excerpted passage ahead of each link.

First, from the Volokh Conspiracy written by Orin Kerr (LINK):

"Although it hinges somewhat on technical details we don't know, it seems that the program was probably constitutional but probably violated the federal law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. My answer is extra-cautious for two reasons. First, there is some wiggle room in FISA, depending on technical details we don't know of how the surveillance was done. Second, there is at least a colorable argument — if, I think in the end, an unpersuasive one — that the surveillance was authorized by the Authorization to Use Miltary Force as construed in the Hamdi opinion."

A guy named Daniel J. Solove over on a site called Concurring Opinions reached conclusions very similar to Kerr's (LINK). Solove offers the following suggestion to top his post...

"I noticed that Orin Kerr beat me to the punch, and I find that we've identified the same issues and are in substantial agreement. His post is a lot longer and more detailed than mine (which is quite long itself), so read mine for a broader overview and Orin's for the treatise-length account."

...but I think his title, "Beyond His Power: Bush's Authorization of Warrantless NSA Surveillance," sums up his position nicely.

Finally, there's one guy (at least) over on QandO by the name of Dale Franks who believes the president is just fine on this one (LINK). His post doesn't offer a tidy lead but I think this passage captures the attitude and assumptions of his view:

"In the absence of explicit congressional authority to engage in the surveillance of American citizens who have contact with Al Qaeda overseas—or forbidding it—the worst that can be said is that the president is in a gray area, as Justice Jackson outlines in number 2, above. Moreover, since there is no case law that is on point, as far as I know, anywhere in the history of American jurisprudence, blanket statements that the president's actions are dangerously unconstitutional seem...ungrounded in reality."

So, there you have it. Even with the latter, as much as he's clear that he thinks the president acted reasonably, I'd also say that he relies on arguments that are debatable - for instance, he leans heavily on this kind of logic: "The constitution does not say that people will be free from all warrantless searches. They shall be free from unreasonable searches." Where you come down on that distinction matters enormously to how you view the quality of his arguments.

In sum, I'm still plenty comfortable charging that the president got a little power-mad on this one; as I argued earlier, I'm willing to give him a pass for days and months immediately after 9/11 - we were all a little freaked-out - but would strongly suggest at this point that snooping on the unilateral authority of the executive branch cease forthwith - and that's only more true when, on my way to other stuff, I see word that someone's spying on PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - in case you don't know). He doesn't seem to want to go that way...surprise, surprise. But, for me, we need another set of eyes on these wiretaps at a minimum - and those should be eyes not gazing ever-admiringly at the president (or at least not beholden to him for their position) to boot.

There's a lot of talk about impeachment surrounding this business. For instance, an op-ed by Marie Cocco run in today's Oregonian closes with these thoughts (sorry, no link):

"The Constitution [ed. - I assume that's a typo and that it should read "The Congress"] might consider impeachment - I have never before uttered the word - but it will not be brought by a Republican Congress that has mostly put partisan loyalty ahead of duty."

Middle Earth Journal comments on the op-ed piece that ran side-by-side with Cocco's, written by George Will who is, once again, wondering about the balance between executive arrogance and restraint.

All in all, the president just took another shot at his foot - kind of a theme for 2005. Everyone's welcome to gripe about the media and half the country having it in for Bush, but, at some point, you've got to wonder why he continues to lead with his chin. So, to all the conservatives who pop by: if you want your boy off the canvas, you might want to pass him some advice about his own nods toward "abetting the enemy." So many self-inflicted wounds....

PGE, Pacificorp in the Classroom

The Oregonian continuing its long, hard slog through Portland General Electric's (PGE) books this morning with an article on how PGE arrived at the figures it used to charge rate-payers for municipal taxes it never paid. The passages on how it approached all this is quite interesting, moving from the basic...

"The company says it did its best to deal with a tax issue that had multiple possible answers. But city commissioners note that the utility had the opposite incentive of most taxpayers. The more it reported in revenue, they argue, the more it could collect from Portland's ratepayers and send to Enron."

...to the specific:

"As markets roiled [in the spring of 2000], PGE traders worked furiously to meet the demand of its 765,000 customers. Among the types of trades PGE conducted were so-called 'bookouts,' in which the utility's purchases and sales of power took place with the same company. PGE might sell a chunk of power to Avista in the morning, for example, then buy a similar amount back later in the day."

"Often the deals canceled each other out and no power actually moved across power lines. Nevertheless, PGE considered the sale part of its gross revenue number in its county tax calculation."

"In 1999, the company logged a modest $350 million in power sales. The figure surged to $1.17 billion in 2000 -- $776 million or about 66 percent of which involved the back-and-forth deals."

The interesting thing comes with the contrast between PGE's and (indirect - part of the problem) rival Pacificorp's accounting methods:

"PacifiCorp has used trading hubs to define the location of its power sales for more than 10 years, said Kevin Lynch, the utility's regional vice president. Bookouts aren't that common for PacifiCorp, he said, and when they occur, the buy-sell orders generally cancel each other out so that the sales never show up in the gross revenue calculation for taxes, Lynch said."[ed. - you'll have to check the article to see what "trading hubs" are and how they work - didn't seem central to this layman]

Throughout the whole fight/freak-out over PGE, it's hard not to notice that not nearly as much bad press has hovered over Pacificorp as has over Enron's PGE. In a sense, PGE's like the kid sitting at the back of the class, doodling malignant variations to the lesson plan into his notebook while Pacificorp sits up front and plays it straight (well, more straighter). It's very, very difficult not to conclude that Enron's "aggressive accounting" culture - which seems to have filtered down into PGE - doesn't play some role in the comparative reputations.

While I'm hear, I'm going to hop on a soapbox for a second. Given all the furor we all endured over a split second glimpse of Janet Jackson's full tit, I'm absolutely dumbfounded at how little we seem to care about more persistent and pernicious ethical slips that happen everyday. Call me a prude, but I've always figured that providing an accurate picture of a companies assets, liabilities and hopes for the future stood as a chief goal of accounting. Over the past decade or so, it seems that accuracy has taken a backseat - and on a hell of a long stretch limo at that - to cynically naked schemes with no higher purpose than maximizing profit. As I've said before, I've got nothing against profit, but I've got real issues with double-entry ledger chicanery and obsession over short-term benchmarks. As the culture watchdogs always howl at the site of a tit, someone smoking a cigarette, or seeing to homosexuals kiss on television, is this what we want to be teaching our kids?

And don't get me started on our president's relationship with the truth. I'm open to arguments that he's been no more or less truthful than his predecessors (I don't buy it either, but that's a different thing), but I think it's hard to square his "he means what he says" reputation with his increasingly lawyerly evasions. It's not hard to tell when someone stretches the truth to serve their purposes and, to be honest, using damn near any presdient or politician as the role model for honesty poses real risk to the youth in my mind.

Again, is all of this what we want to be teaching my kids?

Returning to PGE, someone, somewhere in that organization knows the whys of these tax charges. I'm guessing that the answer to that question, whatever it is, is a hell of a lot simpler than "we followed the law." Where's the line between following the law and exploiting it? And shouldn't it be the former that we, as a culture, teach our kids?

Gordon Smith (Intra-Party) Suicide Watch

Oregon Senator Gordon Smith is very much in the news this morning. Between an article reporting that he intends to hold firm against a budget bill in order to fight off cuts to Medicaid (or, as he frames it, "we should take up Medicaid reform in a more thoughtful process.") to an editorial plea from The Oregonian to hold firm on ANWR drilling as well, I figure Gordo's got plenty on his mind this morning.

I'll keep an eye on both votes today and as long as they're in play.

For the record, I think Smith would do well to scuttle both. As I argued earlier, the cuts to Medicaid come at the expense of more sensible steps that could be taken for even greater savings. And today I'm arguing that ANWR drilling just ain't worth any potential, unforeseen costs that may occur; as The O's editorial puts it:

"Polls show that people here strongly oppose Arctic drilling and understand it will not reduce fuel prices or lead the nation any closer to energy independence."

Moreover, opting for drilling only means going back to the same draining oil well. Rather than cling to this past, why not dedicate half the energy we've committed so far to getting into ANWR toward moving away from a general dependence on oil?

Anyway, I chose the title because I don't doubt there's an element of his political future in Gordo's calculations on this. In terms of Oregon politics, I'm guessing a show of political independence would help Smith with re-election to the Senate, or even potential gubernatorial aspirations down the road. Within his party, however, I'm thinking the leadership might view a pair of "obstructionist" votes as cause to yank him off some committees the next time a chance arises...just some speculation...

Ediblurb: The Coming Hiatus

With this week under way and some late posts today, it seems appropriate to mention that I'll (The Big Forehead) be taking next week off - that is during the week of December 26th to the 30th I won't be posting.

Service will continue through the rest of this week (i.e. until Friday, December 23), but, after that, My Very Brain will be the Idler's playground if he chooses to use it.

Will I be able to resist the temptation? On my own, probably not. But I'm going to make those around me keep me away from the thing. It's for my own good, dammit.

Media Tilts Left, UCLA Study Finds

Bit of a "Dog Bites Man" story, but a political science professor at UCLA and an economist and public policy scholar at the University of Missouri have arrived at amazing discoveries, such as that the Wall Street Journal's reporters are liberal, despite the paper's conservative editorial page.

An article from UCLA presents the following quote:

"I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are."

No doubt the authors' methodology will come under fevered scrutiny, but I think overall this is like one of those scientific studies that determine after exhaustive observations that breathing is an important component of a healthy lifestyle.

The Speech - An Olive Branch with Fingers Crossed

I'll start with a confession: I've so completely lost faith in this president's words and attitudes, that I essentially watched last night's speech with an eye to critique rather than an ear to listen. There. Now, let's continue with biases announced and acknowledged....

As Slate's Today's Papers notes, well, today, the Washington Post, at least, saw something new in the president's speech - namely, a sense of contrition never before heard in his defense of the war. The Post's analysis suggests that "such a concession amounts to a stark political change of course," which is all well and good, I suppose. On the other hand, the emphasis there belongs on the word "political": the man's heart is, and I believe remains, with the "you're either with us or with the terrorists" mentality; put another way, you're on board with Bush's vision of foreign policy, or you're just some weak-kneed, defeatist son-of-a-bitch whom the president only placates at this point with one eye on the polls. (Since I read it, I may as well pass on the lazy op-ed run in this morning's Oregonian by The National Review's Rich Lowry captures this half-bitter mentality pretty well.)

But the most interesting aspect in the Post's analysis appears further down in this passage:

"The domestic political climate has changed so dramatically since Bush first sent troops to Iraq -- approval ratings that once topped 70 percent now hover around 40 percent -- that his whole approach to terrorism has come under fire. Perhaps emboldened by the falling support for the Iraq war, congressional critics are questioning secret overseas CIA prisons, moving to bar cruel and inhuman treatment of detainees, blocking for the moment reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act and threatening to investigate his order authorizing domestic surveillance of Americans without court warrants."

Whether the president likes it or not, this is what the current fight is about: very real and endlessly expanding questions about the specific decisions he has made in the GWOT. And the big one for me concerns a habit of mind that underlies nearly every aspect of the current administration's approach to the larger struggle of which Iraq serves as an unfortunate focus; some excerpts from a piece on Congressional calls for an inquiry into the eavesdropping "scandal" names this elephant in the room:

"'They talk about constitutional authority,' [Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA)] said. 'There are limits as to what the president can do.'"

That's the whole ballgame right there, the question percolating beneath damn near everything we as a divided nation are shouting about about - from detainee abuse, to wire-tapping, to how we go to war - and Bush & Co., in my mind, haven't come anywhere near to justifying the several Constitutional stretches they've made (and the wonderful irony in all this is it's the conservatives who claim to hold the Constitution, and the strict interpretation thereof, in near sacred regard...where is that mentality now?). There's a "cute" line at the bottom of that article where Bush notes that his actions have been justified by his attorney general and the White House legal counsel; 'scuse my French here, but "Oh Boy" 'Berto Gonzales and White House lawyers would explain the constitutionality a pig sodomy as a public spectacle if Bush asked them to. That can no longer wash.

The Oregonian ran one of the best editorials I've read on this subject, which gets at something larger than the political/policy moment we're now in. I'd encourage anyone to read the whole thing, but the key passages appear here:

"While this case did not grow directly from the Patriot Act, Friday's Senate decision to block the law's renewal underlines the serious implications of this debate. Security is of prime importance to the nation, but we cannot achieve it by leaving executive power unfettered by constitutional checks and balances."

But the most crucial argument, the one for which the president has never, never answered:

"The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, did not leave the United States so weakened and threatened that it became necessary for the government to take away some of Americans' cherished rights.

Until the president, or anyone else for that matter, can convince me that this statement is not true, they're not going to get anywhere with the rest of the arguments. We are a constitutional democracy with checks and balances. 9/11 changed plenty, but I'll be damned if it changes that - at least on its own. The president, and to an even greater extent the vice president, who still cherishes the Nixon/LBJ conception of an imperial presidency, does not seem to accept this; that's why he went around the FISA courts when doing so would have cost him little in terms of time or political exertion; that's why he's got people stuffed in Guantanamo Bay with no legal mechanism to get them out. He's making it up as he goes and chafes at the restraints placed on his office by the rule of law. And, unless I'm very much mistaken, we're fighting now to preserve that same rule of law.

More Latins Give U.S. Thumbs-Down

Latin Americans have less favorable attitudes to the United States and the Catholic Church, according to researcher Latinobarómetro. Author and columnist Alvaro Vargas Llosa sees a connection, while making some interesting observations.

One observation is that Latins’ increasing rejection of the Church doesn’t equate to rejection of religion. On the contrary, it is a measure of the success of Protestant denominations. As Vargas Llosa reports,

“…this signifies the consolidation of a phenomenon that has been quietly taking place for some years: the rise of evangelical churches. An overwhelming 85 percent of the population of Latin America declares itself religious. The novelty is that 15 percent of the population now declares itself Protestant rather than Catholic.”

In case you’re wondering, Latins are not becoming High Church Episcopalians or Lutherans. Rather, reports Llosa:

“Unlike the Catholic Church, which has always been associated with the status quo, the various evangelical cults that have gained strength among the poor speak to a more flexible, decentralized and less hierarchic form of religion.”

I suspect this also has to do with a certain liberalization of the Church; the evangelical varieties of Christianity offer old-time religion with exuberant supernaturalism and an emphasis on personal spiritual renewal.

The Latinobarómetro survey also found that about “40 percent of Latin Americans have a favorable opinion of the U.S., a much smaller figure than 10 years ago,” despite the fact that “more Latin Americans than ever want to migrate to the U.S.,” Llosa reports.

While citing traditional kinds of anti-Yanqui sentiments exacerbated by current happenings, Llosa ties Latins’ disaffection with both the Church and the U.S. together, arguing that both represent centralized, elite power, both are associated with the status quo.

Llosa recommends that North Americans address this breach through

“…a massive increase in exchanges that do not pass through official institutions of any kind. In other words, a greater communication between civil societies rather than between governments or entities perceived as being part of the status quo.”

Contreras on Education

With each article written on the subject, CIM/CAM (Certificate of Initial Mastery/Certificate of Advanced Mastery) seems more and more doomed. Today's Oregonian write-up, however, does something interesting. A back-handed defense - at least of the inspiration and purpose for both - appears in the article, a kind of reminder that these are less acts of bureaucratic hostility than the kind of creativity to which group-think is ill-suited.

Here's a passage or two on that:

"The CIM and CAM are designed to signal that students have met state standards, developed a plan for the next step beyond high school and participated in career-related learning."

[SNIP]

"Even at Putnam, where it is required, not all students favor it, although most agree it pushes them to work harder and learn more.

Abby Richardson, 15, says the CIM makes it clear 'what we need to work on and how we need to get there. . . . Challenges make us better in life.'"

I guess the point there is that I don't quite understand sense of outrage these things generate. Yes, they cost money - a fair chunk, even if only a pittance to the overall education budget; moreover, if you read The O's piece see suggestive evidence on the extent to which adjusting to CIM/CAM has trifled with educating Oregon's kids. But the goal of the certificates itself is admirable.

The problem is they're a bit wrong-headed. For a good wrap-up of what I view as "right-headed" in education, I'd point to the op-ed Alan Contreras, an administrator of the Oregon Office of Degree Authorization, slipped into Sunday's Oregonian celebrating the end of CIM/CAM. Rather than copy/paste specific, directed excerpts, I'll just throw out some concepts I like:

"What can be done to make public schools better? Nothing that's politically and socially possible. Schools work with the product of homes, they glaze the clay they're given. What happens in those homes is mostly what determines what a student will likely do in school. So stop blaming the teachers. "

Yep. But the crucial part comes here:

"What do students need from our K-12 education system to prepare them for college? A better understanding of science, the capacity to distinguish science from non-science, an appreciation of arts and humanities and a far better grounding in what our society is and where it came from. They also need to learn to read, write and to do a modest level of mathematics."

[SNIP]

"First, recognize college is not for everyone. This heresy needs to be spoken aloud and discussed in public despite the hissing. The notion that all high school graduates belong in college is untrue; an everyday political lie."

"Don't give up on the idea of high school by sluicing low-performance graduates into underfunded community colleges where their educational asphyxiation will be lost in the slurry of meaningless retention figures...The problems aren't in technical fields but in such basic skills as reading, writing, reasoning and mathematics. If K-12 did nothing else but improve those areas at the expense of others, it would do society a huge service."

Amen. Between employers and colleges, I don't know who bears the most blame for requiring bachelors degrees for too many jobs, but it's a rotten trend. Colleges are nearing a point where they're more cash cow than relevant to work-place realities. High school needs to be sufficient to teaching the basic, functioning skills that citizens need to function in the working world. Save college for those going into the professions, academia, etc.

Bonus History - 12.19.05

Yeah, I'm double-dipping, but, you see, I've got this fascination with Hell and descriptions of it:

"The monk Tundale, in the twelfth century, reported exquisite details. In the center of Hell, he said, the Devil was bound to a burning gridiron by red-hot chains; his screams of agony never ended; his hands were free to, and reached out and seized the damned; his teeth crushed them like grapes; his fiery breath drew them down his burning throat. Assistant demons with hooks of iron plunged the bodies of the damned alternately into fire or icy water, or hung them up by the tongue, or sliced them with a saw, or beat them flat on an anvil, or bioled them or strained them through a cloth."

Really, I never get tired of that...

Open Thread -12.19.05

(NOTE: Not sure why I call this the open thread any more - especially when I'm postin the thing damn near noon. Still, I figure I ought to retain the few traditions I've got...by the way, typing from home today; kind of a neat thing to be doing with the kids playing and laughing in the background...a lot of weather we've been having lately.)

If you ever thought that religion only met huckster's sleaze with the advent of television, think again:

"With so many saints there had to be many relics - their bones, hair, cothing, and anything they had used...A church in St. Omer claimed to have bits of the True Cross, of the lance that had pierced Christ, of His cradle and His tomb, of the manna that had rained from heaven, of Aaron's rod, of the altar on which St. Peter had said Mass, of the hair, cowl, hair shirt, and tonsure shaving of Thomas a Becket, and of the original stone tablets upon which the Tend Commandments had been traced by the very finger of God...[ed. - though, hopefully not all at once] Each of three scattered churches in France professed to have a complete corpse of Mary Magdalene; and five churches vowed that they held the one authentic relic of Christ's circumcision."

There's more, of course, much more.

Sao Paulo Bests Reds, Boca Beats Pumas

Home teams won major International victories in South America over the weekend.

Sao Paulo won its third Club World Championship edging out a superior Liverpool 1-0, with a goal scored in the 27th minute. It was a bad day for the Reds, who dominated statistics and had three conversions disallowed. You can read about it here and here.

A little further south, in Buenos Aires, Boca Juniors squeezed out a victory over Mexico's Pumas on penalties. Our condolences to reader Mextremist, Pumas supporter (Mala suerte, cuate). Pumas get credit for achieving a tie during regular time on Boca’s home ground.

While Boca didn't demonstrate clear superiority--the first round ended in a 1-1 tie in Mexico City--the victory meant a lot, as Sports Illustrated reports:

"The title crowned a fantastic year for Boca in the storied club's centennial. Boca became the second Argentine team after River Plate to win two titles in one semester and the fourth in the world to win 15 international trophies. The other three are Argentina's Independiente, Spain's Real Madrid and Italy's Milan.

"Earlier in the week Boca won its 21st national championship, and in July it won the Recopa Sudamericana."

Land of the Unfree: Opinion Crimes

Forget about whether a crèche or an image of the Ten Commandments is permitted on government property, imagine a country where the influence of religious leaders and their followers was so great, you could be prosecuted and possibly jailed for criticizing religion. This description may conjure up images of Iran or Saudi Arabia but it actually corresponds to several countries in Europe.

American writer Bruce Bawer (who lives in Norway) reports on the decline of free speech in Europe. On one level, what Bawer reports is more of the same in terms of the European cultural environment: political correctness is taken to the next level where people are punished for what they think and say. But it has been taken to a new level in that people are punished for criticizing religion. The ridicule of religion has a long pedigree in Europe, going back to Voltaire and beyond. Old school anti-clericalism is alive and well in Europe, and ridiculing Christianity in the most contemptuous language is practically a sport. But in the cases Bawer relates it’s not about Christianity, it’s about Islam. And the European response religious believers who might react violently is a combination of appeasement and multiculturalist coercion.

For example, Italian journalist Oriana Falacci has been ordered to stand trial in her home country for "vilifying Islam." (Falacci, who is dying of cancer in Manhattan greets the court's demands with the scorn it deserves.) And in supposedly open-minded Scandinavia, Bawer writes:

"In April, after virtually no public discussion, Norway's Parliament passed a law that punishes offensive remarks about any religion with up to three years' imprisonment—and places the burden of proof on the accused."

Happily there are Europeans who have the courage to express themselves despite threats of violence from Islamic fundamentalists, and who stand up to the new Inquisitors. One perhaps unlikely hero is Rowan Atkinson, famous for his “Mr. Bean” character. Says Atkinson of a bill to criminalize "words or behavior" that might "stir up racial or religious hatred,” approved in Britain’s House of Commons (and later defeated in the House of Lords):

: "For telling a good and incisive religious joke, you should be praised. For telling a bad one, you should be ridiculed and reviled. The idea that you could be prosecuted for the telling of either is quite fantastic."

The idea that disagreeable expression should be met not with censorship but with more expression was upheld by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which published artists’ representations of the Islamic prophet, against the wishes of some Muslim authorities.

Not surprisingly, death threats ensued. The embassies of several Muslim countries also protested to the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who refused to even meet with them. Bawer reports that the P.M. said such a meeting was pointless because,

“it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so."

Fogh Rasmussen’s defiance was met with a Muslim protest in the streets of Copenhagen. The editors of Jyllands-Posten voicing their own protest and showing the same spine as the P.M. said:

"Our right to say, write, photograph and draw what we want to within the framework of the law exists and must endure—unconditionally!"

One hopes that Europe will wake up and see the force of these editors’, Atkinsons’ and Fogh Rasmussen’s arguments. But that will require Europeans renewing a sense of love and respect for their own culture, which seems like a lot to hope for at this point. In the meantime, indigenous European reproduction rates are outpaced by those of Muslim immigrants. That may be a matter of indifference in a society that affirms liberal conceptions of civil rights and fosters the assimilation of immigrants. But a society that is hostile to the concept of assimilation or simply incompetent in effecting it, the prognosis must be less optimistic.

Roy Keane Joins Celtic

In case anyone cares, former Manchester United captain and renowned midfielder Roy Keane has joined Glasgow Celtic. Obviously he's in the latter part of his career, but it's still an exciting signing.

McCain's Bill & NSA Taps

I've been playing over on The Corner over on National Review Online's site and I'm seeing a pretty common refrain regarding the passage of Senator John McCain's anti-torture legislation. A post by Rich Lowry sums this as tastefully as anyone over there does (from this post):

"...all the moral preening might come at the cost of the blood of Americans. I think it was worth re-affirming the illegality of torture and tightening up our practices, but that could have been done without erasing all distinctions and all common-sense, as McCain did. I hope David Igantius and others have the courage of their convictions and are willing, if it comes to that, to write columns telling American families that the loss of their loved ones was worth it, so we could make a very clear statement about our values to the 'international community.'”

The assumption underlying this argument is that it will somehow be possible to point at this one Al Qaeda operative locked in some future jail and say, "had we tortured that SOB, we would have thwarted that attack on San Francisco" (an attack of which Bill O'Reilly would approve). Believing in the number of assumptions that have to hold together to make that a remotely true statement amounts to an article of faith, as opposed to an exercise in logic. (EDIT*) Put another way, this line of thinking comes perilously close to assuming that the failure to retain our "flexibility" in interrogations will demonstrably lead to a terror attack, that it's somehow made it inevitable. On the level of reality, that's just kinda silly.

A specific case may arise in which it's clear that torturing some guy may have played a role, but what are the odds that the line of casaulity will be anything like clear? I put them past very, very, very low.

They're equally pissed (surprise, surprise) about the PATRIOT Act rejection (mellow out, dudes, it's probably temporary) and the New York Times' big piece today. (LINK, LINK, LINK, LINK (I more or less agree with this one) and, to the site as a whole, LINK)

Our "Guantanamo Problem"

I bumped into this article on the policies that filled the Guantanamo detention facility and the perverse thinking that keeps prisoners there past reasonable time. It does as good a job as anything I've seen explaining the problems with those policies as now constituted.

An excerpt:

"The Guantánamo problem is the sum of these errors. Imagine if the United States had strictly observed the Geneva Conventions in the Afghan conflict, capturing only Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, providing status hearings and allowing the International Red Cross unlimited access to detention facilities. It’s hard to believe international opprobrium would be great. The administration’s distrust and disregard of law led it along an unwise path, leaving America to be seen as a human rights pariah.

Regarding "these errors" there are three - and it's worth reading the authors deconstruction of them because it does very well to get at why access to the courts matters so much.

I also think this makes fantastic reading given today's revelations about domestic spying (LINK to my previous post). If you look at the means employed to sweep up "enemy combatants" in becomes immediately obvious why we swept up many duds; those errors resulted from panicked reactions to 9/11, much as I would suggest the NSA wiretaps did. But the sin in these policies (and that assumes you accept that they are indeed sins) is less in their establishment, than in the perpetuation. In my mind, that's where Guantanamo meets the NSA business.

Bush allows spying on citizens

When you see a headline like that topping your morning paper, you just kinda know that it's going to be talked that day. That headline will take you to the New York Times article, which leads with this:

"Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials."

"Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible 'dirty numbers' linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications."

So, what to think about that? What do all y'all think about that? If you need more information, here's the Christian Science Monitor's Daily Terror Update, which, not surprisingly, featured the Times report. Are you ready for your quiz yet?

As for me, my first reaction - which was to the headline and the lead as much as anything - was a simultaneous one of shock and scant surprise...if such a sensation is possible. I say shocked because I'm amazed that we've reached a place where the United States government is doing such a thing; I also can't say I was surprised - after all, these are "law-and-order" Republicans we're dealing with here; such impulses come naturally to them.

This is still sinking in and, disturbing as I find it all, I also have to say that there's pretty rational explanation for the whole exercise:

"What the agency calls a 'special collection program' began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said."

"In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said."

Like I said, that's a fairly rational process - as in the steps they're taking make a certain kind of sense given the circumstances. At the same time, rational doesn't necessarily equal good. And that's where the questions begin.

Here's one big question, which came out of the CSM's Daily Terror Update:

"Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies at George Washington University, said the secret order may amount to the president authorizing criminal activity:"

"'This is as shocking a revelation as we have ever seen from the Bush administration,' said Martin, who has been sharply critical of the administration's surveillance and detention policies. 'It is, I believe, the first time a president has authorized government agencies to violate a specific criminal prohibition and eavesdrop on Americans.'"

It sounds like she's been off the fence on this for some time, but this undeniably makes for one hell of a backdrop to the PATRIOT Act negotiations. And there are more questions in all this than I can shake a stick at: beginning, again, with one about the wisdom of leaking such things. Thinking logically about this, I don't think this tips off terrorists to the fact that we're watching them: I assume that they'd take that as a given. Wouldn't you. In other words, the relevant consumers of this news ought to be American citizens. That leaves Question A #1: what are we, collectively, going to make of this?

That's the thing I don't know. But I think we'll hear a hell of a lot of chatter on the Sunday talkies and thereafter.

Here are the few things I think about this: I don't think steps like these, along with all the PATRIOT Act arrests celebrated down the years, are the reason why there have been no attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11; in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I think the sense of urgency excuses this program - that's just another way of saying I don't view this as impeachable, or criminal like that Martin person; given where we are now, however, and the general pace of things, it should be ended and FISA warrants should be sufficient - if the Bushies dissent from this way, I would argue that its down to them to demonstrate, as opposed to just tell us, why; Bush & Co. have made basic paranoia a fact of American life and for more reasons and to less good effect than I can get to here.

All for now.

City Council Fun & Reporting

The Oregonian's Metro section carried an interesting look at the politicking inside city hall today. The article in question reports on some "horse-trading" between Commissioners Dan Saltzman and Sam Adams - basically they're swapping votes on one another's legislation.

I found a couple interesting things here. First, the discussion of what constitutes "fair game" methods of building support for legislation:

"There is, however, a difference between actively swapping votes and the more subtle and accepted sort of legislative compromise in which a lawmaker agrees to make changes to a proposal for support."

It's the former that gets repeatedly dubbed "horse-trading." I have to confess that I've never thought of such things on those terms; put another way, I thought "horse-trading" was politics as usual. I may not be alone, as this quote from Sam Adams suggests:

"Saltzman and Adams say there's no backroom bargaining going on, or no more than usual."

"'For one thing, it didn't happen the way they say,' Adams said. 'For another, I'm shocked, shocked to think there's politics going on in City Hall.'"

Saltman's response to the whole question appears elsewhere and is worth noting (not here....need to keep this brief).

The "they" mentioned in the quote are Mayor Tom Potter and Commissioner Randy Leonard, which takes me to the next interesting point. Toward the bottom of the piece, this intriguing passage comes out of the reporter (Anna Griffin):

"The dispute illustrates two things: First, the mayor, who has spent much of his first year talking about making the City Council more collaborative, is determined to stop Adams' lobbyist ordinance. He says it is too complicated and contains too many loopholes to truly help explain how City Hall decisions get made."

"Second, next year's debate over the fire and pension plan is going to get ugly."

Personally, I count that as analysis - a supposed no-no in a straight news article. I also count it a good thing. Making statements of that sort without quoting someone or otherwise referring it back to some kind of "expert" shouldn't be necessary. For one, I'm fairly sure that Anna Griffin is one of The Oregonian's beat reporters for City Hall; as such, she's a bit of an expert herself and I think there's value in her perspective - even in a straight news story.

Taking it a step further, I'd like to see more of this. For one, a reporter, through the simple act of reporting, becomes a player in their stories; the current media model seeks to quash or deny that reality, but I don't believe it can be avoided. This gets back to the media model I mentioned the other day, one that accepts reporters as players. I see real value in giving reporters more freedom to tell us all that they see; there are dangers inherent in that - bad guesses, not to mention expanding their role as a player in an event through advocacy and "hit-jobs" on people they don't like - but even that information provides more insight into the quality and reliability of a given reporter.

Anyway, that's some interesting stuff in city hall, all those shifting little alliances....

Sleazy Riders

The Oregonian penned a pair of editorials today, both of them describing the subtle sleaze of how Congress sneaks too many laws on the books.

The first, a piece praising Senator Ron Wyden (D - OR) for holding firm against the PATRIOT Act in spite of the delays this may cause in getting an anti-meth bill he co-sponsored through Congress, describes one approach: adding "sweeteners" to a bill in an attempt to trawl for support that wouldn't otherwise come.

The second editorial speaks to the truly sleazy approach: tying unpopular legislation onto "must-pass" bills. The GOP leadership is pulling this stunt with ANWR drilling. I'd recommend reading the rest of the The O's editorial because it does a pretty fair job of putting ANWR drilling in context - e.g. what we'll get out of it and what that will mean to our dependence on foreign oil (close to nothing) - but the interesting stuff comes with its comments on this legislative tactic:

"[Senator Ted] Stevens[(R - AK)] is inviting a political brawl about the issue, perhaps even a filibuster among lawmakers willing to risk being attacked by the Alaska Republican and his merry band of oil-drilling enthusiasts for failing to support the troops."

"For the record, the only people here who should have to answer to American troops and their families are Stevens and the GOP leaders willing to attach a completely unrelated and controversial rider to a defense appropriations bill -- and putting it at risk of delay or defeat."

Riders do have a place in the process: Congress deals with so much business - for good or ill - that bundling all the trivial crap makes sense. While the "pork" the legislators bring home to their district is hardly a good thing - and that's a likely outcome of this business of attaching riders - it's this practice of attaching controversial or significant legislation that corrodes the process. Such under-handed "hardball" doesn't so much accomplish the people's business as undermine trust, poison the politics and, as often as not, hide major policy decisions from view.

The O gets it right: these things simply must be debated.

Ah, It's a Propaganda Program

Super. Just dandy.

Do y'all remember the Office of Strategic Influence, that brainchild of Donald Rumsfeld that sought to plant favorable stories in world media? This unfortunate idea supposedly died circa 2002....except, of course, that it didn't. From yesterday's USA Today (LINK):

"A $300 million Pentagon psychological warfare operation includes plans for placing pro-American messages in foreign media outlets without disclosing the U.S. government as the source, one of the military officials in charge of the program says."

Naturally, this continues on the tail of word of the U.S. military paying Iraqi journalists for propaganda and so on. I think my favorite part comes here:

"'While the product may not carry the label, "Made in the USA," we will respond truthfully if asked' by journalists, Furlong told USA TODAY in a videoconference interview."

Can we all admit at this point that we're dealing with an administration all too ready to roll out the party-line BS for any cause it sees fit? Before we get into the idea of this being somehow vital to the war effort, put it together with the fake Medicare news feeds, the manufactured clips for the Department of Education, etc. I think we've reached the point of a pattern here - and it's nothing to do with the frickin' war.

It's worse here, however, this apparent war on information. Just knowing that these assholes are loose and willing to do this makes me wonder about damn near everything I'm reading. This undermines all of our ability to interpret what's happening in the world and, as such, I cannot see any justification for it.

A nice backdrop, wouldn't you say, to the Iraqi elections? Was the turnout really 80%? How would you know if it wasn't? Does Zarqawi wreak half the havoc for which he's accused?

To Rummy & Co. Congratulations. You've inched embracing conspiracies toward being a rational manner in which to view the world. Way to go, guys; fucking brilliant.

(Again, I'm very, very tired. I regret any errors and would welcome any corrections.)

Wha? Quakers? Well, I'll be....

Since reading a post by b!x on Blue Oregon about some domestic snooping by various federal agencies (a post on on which contributor Idler, um, contributed mightily), I've seen similar items pop up all over the place. The latest came out of the Washington Post this morning, which reported:

"Pentagon officials said yesterday they had ordered a review of a program aimed at countering terrorist attacks that had compiled information about U.S. citizens, after reports that the database included information on peace protesters and others whose activities posed no threat and should not have been kept on file."

"The move followed an NBC News report Tuesday disclosing that a sample of about 1,500 'suspicious incidents' listed in the database included four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, some aimed at military recruiting."

It wasn't until I ambled (by way of a ridiculously long and random source freak-out) into a post on QandO that I even caught the fact that we're looking at what seems to be a Pentagon-based spy operation. Moreover, it wasn't till I got to this passage...

"OK, question 1: why is the Pentagon collecting such information in the first place? Isn't that what we have the FBI doing?"

...that the totality of this whole bizarre episode sunk in.

In a word - or rather a noted online abbreviation - here's what I think of all this: WTF??

As irked as I am by spying of this nature, my bigger objection here is practical. To review again, what was the biggest intelligence failure of 9/11? The inability among our myriad spying agencies to share information; is producing more spy outfits and having them examine the same areas going to repair this problem? Put me down as highly skeptical.

By way of raw speculation, does anyone else get the feeling that the Bushies are, once again, "Plan B-ing" their way around agencies that they view as hostile (by "hostile" they of course mean ideologically impure)? Think Dougie "The Dumbest Fucking Man Alive" Feith's Office of Special Plans. Hell, think of Justice's political appointees overruling staff on the Texas re-districting. The habit of mind on display here points less to a desire to get good information than to rig the bureaucracy to confirm your suspicions and beliefs.

Anyway, I'm tired and disoriented at this point, so forgive me if that makes no sense. What I'm getting at here is this: arguably needless domestic spying is bad enough, but sprawling intelligence responsibilities among new and different agencies is just stupidly counter-productive. Think what you want about spying, but you'll have a hell of a row to hoe to convince me that the clowns running this show are up to it.

Iraq's Elections: All You Need to Know

ABC's The Note offered an exit-poll reporting schedule for today's Iraqi elections that will/does look like this (NOTE: if you visit that link after today, it'll take you to the current edition of The Note):

"The data will come in three waves, as usual."

"As always, first wave data (11:30 am ET) is completely unreliable and is no predictor of the outcome. Luckily, we will have it in time for subscribers to take it with them to lunch at the Palm or the Senate Dining Room to talk knowingly about how the election is going."

"By the second wave (3:30 pm ET), you will be able to start pontificating about who will be in the Iraqi cabinet and 'what it means' for President Bush."

"And when the third wave numbers come in (6:00 pm ET), it will be crystal clear if Republicans will lose control of the House and/or the Senate in 2006, and what President Bush's approval rating will be next October 1st."

As neat-o as that all is, and noting the sarcasm, I'd recommend (as The Note did by dubbing it a "must-read") the election analysis pulled together by the New York Times' David Sanger. Noting the essential gloom of the piece, here's the key 'graph:

"But it is the longer term - the next year - that worries many of Mr. Bush's advisers and the United States military. Amid insurgent attacks and warnings of civil war, the government may take months to form, and many officials wonder whether that lag will distract the Iraqis from leaping the hurdles that Mr. Bush wants them to clear before he will begin withdrawing American forces next year.

To use far fewer words than Sanger, the idea is today's election mean something close to dick (dic?): it's what happens after that will determine their meaning. While it's true that the individual members elected to the parliament will have some role to play, the key thing is less this list of individuals than the political dynamic they create over the next year.

Something The Note gets right: the primer produced by the Council on Foreign Relations is pretty swell. It also suggests that the Iraqis concocted a pretty sound electoral system. So that's good news. As is (possibly) the high turnout (for what it's worth, I'm not so sure that high turnout represents an unalloyed good).

Who's Kept in Mult Co.'s Catch & Release?

The Oregonian reports this morning that, with the recent opening of 114 additional beds in Multnomah County's Inverness Jail (here's my backgrounder on the deal that opened them), there are now enough beds to keep the county's perps "all snug" in the various jails.

It's good news, I suppose; and The O clearly views it as such. But this got me wondering about Multnomah County's Matrix system, the database that tells sheriff's office (maybe this guy) which of said perps they ought to release. Given that it's easy enough to figure out who they've let go - the Sheriff's Office maintains a web-site where you can see the ladies and gents who got out early, mugshots, crimes (both alleged and proven), and all - I'm now wondering about who they keep in.

While I didn't find much on that particular question, I've found some items here and there that provide some indirect answers. While there's not much value in, say, this explanation/defense of the county's matrix system, a report issued by the Bernie Giusto's Sheriff's Office, which contains interesting data on who got out, suggests that I'd agree with at least some (if not more) of the assumptions used in the Matrix. If you click on this link, you can get the report; if you want the graphs and charts to actually appear, I'd strongly recommend hitting the other link near the top of the page.

Anyway, here's the data that makes me feel more comfortable that they rank their (alleged) criminals as I would:

"During this period [March 2004 to March 2005], offenders charged with property or drug related crimes constituted nearly two thirds of all releases. Traffic and behavioral crimes made up nearly a third, while those charged with person crimes on made up only 2 % of all releases.

While I'm not thrilled to see the property crimes folks walk, I'm more content to see the drug-related folks (spefically, the 726 released for possession) get early release over the other categories. Possession is the least of my worries. On the other hand, this passage...

"Thus, special efforts made by the enforcement community, such as drug sweeps or sting operations, are rendered less effective in preventing similar criminal activity in the future..."

...raises an interesting sub-question. If we're just going to let them go (and for most possession cases I can think of, I'd prefer they did), why not nix those drug sweeps?

Double-Dipping on Blue

I cranked out another post for Blue Oregon, mainly because I had questions for which I hoped to receive an answer and didn't think I'd get them here. Anyway, it's about this week's action with PGE and deals mainly with the question of how and why the Portland City Council approached this issue the way they did.

Here's the link.

Now that it's up - and given my general reluctance to tinker with already posted material - I'm a little iffy on my decision to name specific people as likely candidates to provide answers; by naming Commissioners Randy Leonard or Erik Sten, for instance, I wonder whether that gives the impression that I'm "calling them out." To some extent, I suppose I am. On the other hand, I'd also suggest that, given their leadership (and how you feel about said leadership relies heavily on where you think they're headed), they're the ones most likely to know the answers I most want.

Anyway, it's up. I hope it generates decent responses because I'm genuinely curious about the questions I've got. For the record, I made two attempts to find answers yesterday and got nowhere with both.

Open Thread - 12.15.05

I won't get into the reasons why, but don't expect a lot from my forehead today. Suffice to say I'm burning the candle at both ends this week.

Have at it.

What To Do About Iran....

...and how hard it is to get an answer to the question I want answered: namely, what would follow, say, American or Israeli air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities?

On Monday, I read an article from a British paper (looks to be the Times of London) that reported on Israel's preparing military strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities if things don't shape up out that way. Israel subsequently denied having concrete plans to do so, but I'm pretty confident that such plans exist; the real question that concerns us is whether they're serious about that March 2006 deadline mentioned in the Times piece.

In my wanderings for an answer, I came across some interesting things as to why we must take this seriously, but somewhere in the back of mind, I thought I once read about something like Armageddon coming on the heels of any attempted bombing. That prompted me to kick countless search engines into gear, but I could only find this semi-hinged analysis from an outfit called GlobalResearch.com (generally, I'm put off passages like, "Targeting Iran is a bipartisan project, which broadly serves the interests of the Anglo-American oil conglomerates, the Wall Street financial establishment and the military-industrial complex." I'm not saying this can't be true, only that it's too big an assumption to just hang out there as they did.)

Even that didn't quite get at the question I most wanted answered: how big a can of worms would we open if we went with strikes? I figure I was asking the wrong question.

Turns out I was...sort of. Just as I started writing this post, I remembered where I read of Iran's payback playbook. It came in an old Seymour Hersh article. Jesus, that was harder than it needed to be. Anyway, here's the passage that stuck with me:

"“You can’t be sure after an attack that you’ll get away with it. The U.S. and Israel would not be certain whether all the sites had been hit, or how quickly they’d be rebuilt. Meanwhile, they’d be waiting for an Iranian counter-attack that could be military or terrorist or diplomatic. Iran has long-range missiles and ties to Hezbollah, which has drones—you can’t begin to think of what they’d do in response.”

One passage that Globalresearch.com cribbed from Hersh's piece (no, I didn't figure this out 'til just now) points to another potential danger:

"'The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising [against the current regime] is extremely illinformed,' said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. 'You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated.' Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, 'will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime.'"

At this point, I'm only skimming, but I remember someone somewhere - not necessarily Hersh and possibly not in this article - explaining that the Iranians could also react to an attack by turning the heat inside Iraq to well-past boiling. Anyway, those are the downsides.

The question before us as the voting public (HA! sorry, cynical outburst) is whether the risks inherent in any attack on Iran's nuclear facilities is worth these potential - and I would argue, plausible - costs. Any thoughts?

Media Dysfunction (Cribbing from Froomkin - again)

The opening topic of today's White House Briefing (yes, I'm outsourcing all my work on this blog this week) contrasts the coverage provided by various media outlets in approaching the White House Conference on Aging and "associated events." Froomkin did so well in framing his lead, I'll just copy/paste here:

"Reporting that President Bush steered clear of the White House's own Conference on Aging yesterday -- making him the first president ever to do so -- fell to the regional newspapers and NPR, not the big guys."

"It turns out that had Bush attended, he would have been facing a very hostile audience."

"So instead, Bush held a photo-op with a hand-picked group of seniors at a swanky retirement home -- and it was well covered by the usual suspects."

I read the LA Times' account (I think) in yesterday's Oregonian and it was definitely one of the "usual suspects" Froomkin cites. But it's definitely worth reading the snippets he lifts from the regional articles (I'd push further on this, but that's all I read; just know they're selected for a reason). Why? Because it discusses something that seems more significant than what the president said or didn't say: it looks at how a sampling of seniors - and seniors not handpicked by the White House (by AARP? Maybe) - are taking Bush's Medicare benefit, as well as his Social Security proposals.

A sub-point here: am I alone in being embarrassed to have a president who lacks the won-tons (that's balls to you and me) to articulate his policies before anything but a friendly audience? To be blunt about it, this marks the man as a coward and an empty suit in my book.

As for the media's reaction: more than a little embarrassing. That's damn-near phoned in. We can find out what the president said by visiting whitehouse.gov; your job is to tell us what we don't know.

What Is a "Blogger?"

I've mentioned the ado over Daniel Froomkin's White House Briefing here and there in posts below. I see that there's some interesting back-story to this one; the best one I've seen so far comes in this post from TAPPED, but it crops up here and there in some other spots (LINK and LINK - this last one is very revealing for how poorly Big Media copes with charges).

In basic terms, it appears that one person making the stink in all this is a political operative named Patrick Ruffini whose close ties to the White House raise big questions about his independence.

Bloggers need labels and transparency no less than the mainstream media - especially with so many of them hiding behind on-line handles. Frankly, people who exploit these discrepancies should be shot (OK, censured loudly); those who allow themselves to get played also have some things for which to answer. Full disclosure, people. If someone's paying your bills and it's relevant to your content, you've got an obligation to make note of it.

Tookie's Defenders

I can't say that I followed reporting on the Tookie Williams execution question very closely, but I did see one or two reports about the demonstration without ever getting a sense of the composition of the crowd.

This illustrated account shows that in addition to the usual suspects--do-gooder dopes like Mike Farrell, race huckster Jesse Jackson--there was a strong hard-core commie presence. I think it's interesting to know when these folks show up, and at which events they choose to show up, but somehow reporters never seem to identify them, even when they do show up and are spoken to. This has been the case at events run by A.N.S.W.E.R., and it's certainly the case here.

That makes the account interesting in terms of The Big Forehead's excellent post discussing the issue of media bias. I'm with Big in general terms on that issue. I would add some observations about the deliberate suppression of critical information, such as media staging photos that give the impression spontaneity (there appears to be an example of that here), which seems to be a staple in the coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The author of this account criticizes a news anchor's reporting of "the usual bland whitewash," avoiding mention of the large element of profoundly anti-American, socialist support.

The account also shows more uncivil behavior on the part of the left, in this case clearly the far left.

Check it out, and by all means, read all the captions. Some are quite amusing.

Land of the Unfree: Britain

Coming across an article last night I thought it could be the first of many examples of how other countries in the West enjoy less civil liberties than those of us lucky enough to live in the United States.

We hear a lot of condescension from our cousins in Europe, but they are far more likely to run afoul of the authorities not just for arming and defending themselves, but even for expressing their opinions. Examples of this abound, and I'll make a point of posting them as they come up.

This example comes from the Telegraph in London. Mark Steyn chronicles the adventures of an author in violent crime-ridden Britain who incautiously expressed herself in a way the police associated with a "priority crime." He writes:

So what is a "priority crime"? Well, the other day, the author Lynette Burrows went on a BBC Five Live show to talk about the government's new "civil partnerships" and expressed her opinion - politely, no intemperate words - that the adoption of children by homosexuals was "a risk". The following day, Fulham police contacted her to discuss the "homophobic incident".

Read the whole thing.

Media Bias: First Contact with Oregon Catalyst

A guy named Kevin Curry pulled together a post over on "red Oregon's" new blog, Oregon Catalyst, puzzling over the question of media bias. He's basically arguing the "unreality" of the media objectivity; from there, he takes it a step further by suggesting that this disconnect from reality means the "objectivity model" should be scrapped.

Overall, it's a decent post, typos and all (not a jab, I get at least one into every post) - moreover, the model he's describing is one I support in its basic contours (see the second half of my mission statement). The substance of Curry's model, or more, accurately, his critique, appear in this passage:

"I'm as capitalist as they come, papers should maximize profits, sell more advertising and make as much money as they can. But perhaps a return to the good old days of the partisan press wouldn't be so bad. Then at least media outlets could admit their bias and let the market decide who succeeds and who fails. Don't you think it would be freeing for CNN to finally say 'Yes, we are a liberal media outlet'? I think admitted liberal Ted Turner might sleep better at night. And Fox News could avoid having to answer criticism that it is 'conservative' if it were simply able to say 'Yep, we lean right.' That sigh of relief you hear is from Roger Ailes."

Before trudging on, one thing to note: gven our political differences, I had to giggle a bit at Curry's choice of words in describing the intellectual freedom his model would provide the networks: CNN would be free to admit "we are a liberal outlet" while FOX News would admit ony to "[leaning] right." Curious.

To get back into it, the implications of Curry's critique inch toward the point of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I agree that human agency essentially means that objectivity is a myth - more to my point here, it's a poorly chosen word. In my mind, being "objective" isn't the goal, nor should it be: to borrow a phrase abused by FOX News, I view the intention of being "fair and balanced" as the approach to which the media, specifically, a mainstream media, should aspire.

This is a big point for me. The more I mull the future of media, the less eager I am for a world in which two (or more) partisan presses compete for eyeballs. Absent a forum in which to build the "first draft of history," we would instead create competing narratives; in that scenario you're not only accepting that people see the world differently, but you're institutionalizing the process. By encouraging people to occupy ideological niches, you're denying them information and perspective that could deepen their understanding of a given issue.

After fairness and balance, a secondary goal for the media should be transparency. The thing to keep in mind here is that reporters are human beings first and foremost; when they tell a story, they can't help but interpret it in some manner; editors, the layout team, headline writers and so on add layers of interpretation as well. Knowing who these reporters are for each given story (the editors etc. should be generally acknowledged, though not individually identified for each piece; the reporter should bear ultimate responsibility), as well as linking to past articles (as the Portland Tribune already does - see this article search for, say, Jacob Quinn Sanders) gives the reader some context on the person doing the scribbling. A reporter doesn't have to bare all for this system to function - they don't need to share the date and circumstance of their first wet dream in order to make sense to readers. But having some knowledge of what makes them tick and what they value (for instance, it's defensive, but knowing what preoccupies the Washington Post's Daniel Froomkin as he watches the White House lessened my impression of any personal hostility to Bush) offers a reader some frame of reference.

Anyway, that's a quick version of where I think it should go. The main thing, there's still value in continuing and encouraging "objectivity" in the mainstream media, just not as the term currently exists. The ideal is that they'll be conscientious about weighing both sides of an issue and being conscious of questions of equal time, or balance. At the same time, a reporter is just a human being, one whose job entails going to a given event, talking to this or that public official, weighing the evidence and telling us what they see. Given that they, as a human being, will find things important that some of their readers won't, and given that even the most skeptical editor can only think of so many caveats and additional angles for them to pursue, there's always going to be a perspective of some kind on the work. Provided one knows what they're reading, or rather who they're reading, I count that as sufficient to acknowledge the biases that exist.

But the notion of a middle ground, the attempt to build a bare bones narrative from which we can all view and judge events, that's simply too important to abandon.

Enforcing the "Public" in Public Schools

Somewhere 'round about the middle of the article in today's Oregonian reporting the approval of two new charter schools in the Portland area a curious concept appears:

"The Leadership proposal drew objections from some Madison and Marshall high school teachers who feared it would siphon their students and torpedo recent reforms. Some Madison teachers spoke against the proposal Monday, including speech teacher Patrick Gonzales."

"'I'm looking for a little confidence,' Gonzales said. 'Our federal government won't give it to us, and our state . . . won't give it to us. I'm just wondering if our board will give it to us.'"

The idea that the public is somehow obliged to sustain the enrollments of public high schools pops up a few more times in the article; this even goes down to the kinds of youths - "mostly drop-outs, home-schooled teens and those enrolled in alternative programs and private schools" - the new charters are seemingly restricted to recruiting.

To be blunt, I'm not quite getting this. I'm aware that they'll be competing with generic public schools for district resources, but if someone creates a better facility and instruction model why is it the public's obligation to prop up any given school that parents and/or students perceive as failing? Why not expand the charter's mandate instead?

NOTE: Those are real questions. Pass on answers if you have 'em.

Sung Koo Kim & News Judgment

Given that he's little more than an over-enthusiastic and deeply creepy one-man panty-raid, Sung Koo Kim's ongoing march through the legal system continues to garner crazy amounts of attention. He tops The Oregonian's Metro section (with this article) and features in some other, farther-afield Oregon dailies (link, link); the local televised media's all over this as well - no shock here (and hence no links either) given the essential prurience of the story.

Now, I know this guy prowled pretty far afield in his day and I acknowledge that he rounded up a whole heap of panties; nor will I deny that I read these articles because they do fascinate my weird ol' brain. Still...I guess I'm only registering some surprise that the papers are playing this up so much; the TV media is a different story because I expect it there.

Unless I'm mistaken, the guy wasn't involved in the Brooke Wilburger thing, which means we're back to acknowledging that this guy is just a panty sniffer. So let's get this whole story back down to mid-section blurbs guys.

Open Thread - 12.14.05

I read a bit about the formation of modern France today - hell of a story, by the way. But I also come across something of a sweet anecdote, the kind of thing that Will Durant really enjoys sprinkling throughout his books. (Returning to the kings of France, here, quickly, are the three that so excited Mr. Durant: Philip II Augustus - he pushed French borders nearly to their current extent, and that was in 1214; Louis XII, so-called St. Louis - beyond fame (or infamy) in the 8th (that's right, the 8th) Crusade, his overall piety and competence places him in the top 3 at worst among France's Kings; Philip IV, called the Fair - favored the town over the country, "rebuilt the legal structure of France," and, in one of the great political manuevers in history, dragged the papacy to Avignon. Those are three big ones.) It comes from Portugal's history books and concerns one of their earliest kings:

When this son [named Diniz] rebelled and raised an army to unseat his father [Alphonso II], St. Isabel, who had lived apart from the merry court of the King, rode between the hostile forces, propsoed to be the first victim of their violence, and shamed her husband and her son to peace (1323).

The idea that the hang-ups and other behaviors of a single family can form so great a part of a nation's narrative still blows me away...and I'm getting old.

The "Third Way" in the Middle East

One of the great, as well as useful, parlor games in foreign policy thought today is the question of what is really pushing the changes forward - whether it's the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon or the sudden (alarming? you be the judge) presence of 80+ legislators from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt's half-toothless parliament.

I bumped an interesting post on this subject (on a new site, which I've already bookmarked it; the site is titled QandO and it looks to be a good one). The basic argument looks at the ways in which we can change the political/social dynamics in the Middle East; it mentions war, bribery, and negotiation and compromise as the traditional methods. It moves from there to examine another choice:

"This assumes a third option [short of war] for coping with inimical national interests: if you can't change the regime, change their interests."

It goes on to site this article from the UK's Guardian as an example of the push for change. But it's the inspiration for that change that bears noting. Now, for a guy like Norman Podhoretz, it's all Bush doctrine all the time.

Personally, I've long leaned toward a different view - and it's one that QandO's post (link above) explores in some length: namely, the rulers of the Middle East are fully aware that they're falling behind socially and economically, but it took the shock of 9/11 to drive home the fact that their societies' stagnation can prove lethal on the grand scale. In part, this is simple self-preservation and, as this argument has it, the threat from the Islamist extremists looms larger here than the threat of a U.S. invasion; if you look at post-9/11 relationships with, say, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, I think this explains the reactions pretty well.

The article concludes with something else, though. An LA Times op-ed on how those same extremists serve as "useful idiots" in driving home the stakes of the GWOT to the Muslim masses.

Now, is any of this definitive, or final proof? Of course not. It's no more definitive than claims from Iraq hawks that Iraqi elections inspire the Middle East to reform. It's just something else to consider...

My Take on Tookie

I'm a bit behind on the whole Stanley Tookie Williams saga - woefully, one might say now that he's given up the ghost. Given all that I've read and seen in the news about Williams' crimes and his attitude toward them, I'd start by noting that some really nutty things are now being said (a sampling from the above):

"After Williams was pronounced dead, [Barbara] Becnel and two other supporters of Williams turned toward the media in the witness room and yelled in unison, 'The state of California just killed an innocent man!'...Angry shouts broke out. A woman sobbed on someone’s shoulder, and a man burned an American flag...Becnel, who is taking possession of Williams’ body, called Schwarzenegger a "cold-blooded murderer" and vowed to work for his defeat in the next election."

I was also surprised by the LA Times' oddly picky editorial on the execution.

Overall, I'm perfectly comfortable with people objecting to the death penalty; if I woke up tomorrow and America now longer had the death penalty, I'd be fine with it. But, in their search to find someone to highlight ills and abuses in the system, I'd encourage them to look past Tookie Williams; there doesn't seem to be much doubt regarding his essential guilt in four fairly brutal and pointless murders and despite all his work on children's books, there's his unwillingness to repent of the crimes themselves to consider.

An argument along these lines appears on Washington Monthly's site (LINK). And, while I'm at it, I ought to do a hat tip for some of the locals, who look at this differently. There's Low on the Hog (and again), whose author is strongly opposed to the death penalty on principle; from the other side, there's Isaac Laquedem, who seems to think justice was served.

Quick Shot on WMDs

Noting something Bush said yesterday about "knowing what I know today," Matthew Yglesias argues over on TAPPED that this "gives up the game" on the whole WMD-rationale for the war. Or, as Yglesias puts it:

"But if the case for war was so solid, whether or not all that stuff about looming mushroom clouds was true, then how come the argument he made in public leaned so heavily on the WMD threat? If Bush really thinks it makes sense to launch 'pre-emptive' attacks on countries that even in retrospect lacked the capacity to harm us, then exactly how crazy is he?"

Yglesias misses something big here - though probably not what one would think. The GOP plays the "gotcha" game to perfection - i.e. throwing old quotes, often out of context, back in the face of the speaker in order to embarrass them into admitting a contradiction, or to nail them a second time. NBC's Tim Russert also loves that crap. On some level, then, I'm guessing Yglesias thinks it's fair to play "gotcha" with W.

Trouble is, it can't work on W. No one expects verbal clarity or consistency from the president; hell, his verbal gaffes inspired a feature over on Slate.

Mannix Running (From This?)

Also in today's Salem Statesman-Journal is word that highly likely (if not already declared) GOP gubernatorial candidate Kevin Mannix may have a campaign finance skeleton coming out of his closet:

"[Injured-worker advocate Ernie] Delmazzo filed a complaint late Thursday with the Elections Division, citing 16 alleged 'deficiencies' in Mannix's September campaign-finance report. Delmazzo asked state elections regulators to conduct an audit of Mannix's campaign-finance reports. The most serious allegation is that Mannix filed one report citing a $45,000 loan from himself to his campaign, then filed another report listing the money not as a loan but as a direct contribution."

I don't know that these will stick, or ultimately mean anything. Mannix's chief political advisor, Jack Kane, figures counts any mistakes made as honest ones and figures they'll get straightened out. Fred Neal, the campaign-finance manager for [Oregon's] Elections Division, offered a different, though still cautious take:

"If true, there's some potential, substantive violations of Oregon campaign-finance reporting requirements."

So, a file is now open on this case. Let's see if it's true.

Hey...Check out Oregon's Economy...

The Corvallis Gazette-Times reports that our economy is doing swell:

"The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate fell to 5.8 percent in November to mark the second straight month the rate has been below 6 percent — a level not seen since 2001. For the past 12 months, nonfarm payroll employment in Oregon has risen 3.1 percent — double the national average."

So, the good news is, we've got jobs! The question is, what kind of jobs?

From there, of course, one moves on to politics. Will this be enough to help the struggling Governor Teddy K? Is this part of the "Bush boom?"

Have fun with it.

Pete Sorensen Makes It Official

Both of my favorite Oregon dailies report that, yesterday, Lane County Commissioner Pete Sorensen made official his candidacy for the Democratic gubernatorial race. (Oregonian and Salem Statesman-Journal)

Between the two of them, The Oregonian finds the better quote to explain what I believe Sorenson's all about:

"Sorenson, 53, said Oregon's corporations pay a declining share of the income tax, which he argued has made it harder for the state to provide education, health care and other services. He said the state should raise the corporate minimum tax of $10 a year and also abolish the "corporate kicker" that provides refunds to companies if overall corporate taxes are higher than estimated."

Make of that what you will. I don't think he's got a shot in hell, but figure we could do worse.

Today's Local Opus...

I chucked today's "local news opus" up on Blue Oregon, as I often do when I want a lot of comments. This one's about the policy priorities of the GOP-controlled House, the darkest part of the GOP's black heart (yes, that's intentionally over the top).

On a related subject, I had an irksome revelation:

"If one begins with birth, it would seem that only the rich get to be spontaneous; the rest of us have to spend years regulating our lives, postponing our real desires - anyway, somehow mortgaging our futures in one way or another - to reach a point where we can afford to be spontaneous. For the permanently poor - and they do exist and in large numbers - spontaneity simply isn't a real option."

And folks wonder why drug use is so prevalent toward the bottom of the economic ladder. I don't know what to do about it necessarily, but know that this state of affairs really pisses me off.

Anyway, here's a link to the Blue Oregon post (LINK); enjoy.

Open Thread - 12.13.05

From the (semi-famous?) quarrel between England's Henry II and Thomas a Becket, an interesting caveat on being careful about what you say:

"Back in Canterbury, Thomas repeated his excommunication of the the bishops who had opposed him [in his efforts to keep the clergy exempt from secular courts]. Some of these went to Henry in Normandy and roused him to fury with perhaps exaggerated accounts of Becket's behavior. 'What!' exclaimed Henry, 'shall a man who has eaten my bread...insult the King and all the kingdom, and not one of my lazy servants whom I nourish at my table does me right for such an affront?' Four nights who heard him went to England, apparently without the knowledge of the King. On December 30, 1170, they found the Archbishop at the altar of the Cathedral of Canterbury; and there they cut him down with their swords."

That, of course, wasn't the end of it all; Becket was, after all, the Archbishop of Canterbury and, hence, the big priest of England.

"Meanwhile the people canonized Becket, and proclaimed many miracles were worked at his tomb; the Church officially pronounced him a saint (1172) [ed. - that's quick turn-around, huh?]; and soon thousands were making pilgrimage to his shrine. Finally Henry, too, came to Canterbury as a penitent pilgrim; all the last three miles he walked with bare and bleeding feet on the flinty road; he prostrated himself before the tomb of his dead foe, begged the monks to scourge him, and submitted to their blows."

The "Global Thingy" Theory of Foreign Policy

Readers with small children may be familiar with the PBS cartoon “Global Thingy.” The show’s eponymous character is just what the name suggests: a spherical entity resembling the terrestrial globe, though with the addition of little arms and legs and a face given to kindly and concerned expressions. Global Thingy is a sort of super hero of niceness who breaches the divisions between creatures of different appearances. He (perhaps she) intervenes in their quarrels and removes the ignorance that gives rise to their frustration and anger. I’m not making this up.

Surely one of the most transparent attempts ever undertaken by soft-headed, sanctimonious progressives to brainwash our children, Global Thingy inculcates an obvious lesson: Conflict is invariably caused by misunderstanding, which can magically be cured through the mediation of a global perspective, or appreciation of “diversity”; those who lack such a perspective are condemned to be benighted, violent and miserable.

Global Thingy has been around for quite a while but there’s a new spot on PBS that teaches a similarly shallow, foolish multicultural message--though it seems calculated to influence childish adults perhaps even more than children. It begins with an acrimonious discussion at the United Nations. In the midst of all the ill feeling, a cute, freckly little girl interrupts politely and offers advice by way of aphorism: “The more we get together, the happier we’ll be,” she declares without elaboration. Immediately upon hearing her, the assembled delegates--as if they’d thought of everything but this--have a sort of “I could have had a V8!” epiphany, and the room melts into warmth and harmony.

It’s bad enough that adults are feeding these idiotic messages to our children but what’s really troubling is that they believe it themselves: Whatever suspicions or misgivings might interpose themselves between oneself and the cultural or political “other” are magically dissipated by belief in the equality of cultures and the existence of an “international community,” where peoples’ earnest efforts to understand each other will lead to peace and harmony.

One can clothe this folly in fine intellectual language—as Zbigniew Brzezinski and so many others have—but folly it remains. Preventable, corrigible misunderstandings between peoples do indeed occur, but in many cases conflicts endure precisely because the parties to the conflict understand each other so well. The Serbs and the Kosovars come to mind.

If anyone argues that the desideratum isn’t “understanding as much as “acceptance,” I would just ask them how either understanding or acceptance should be applied to a conflict with the KKK. Better yet, I could suggest that the more they get together with Ivan the Terrible, Jack the Ripper or—if I want to go really creepy on them—Dick Cheney, the happier they’ll be.

Adults un-stupefied by multiculturalism—non-believers in Global Thingy—understand that nations are not all the same and shouldn’t be thought of or treated as if they were. Countries have differing forms of government, customs and beliefs that are often fundamentally incompatible. A great deal of understanding and interest can be shared by similar countries—like the democracies that proverbially never wage war on each other. But the world—especially as organized into members of the U.N.—contains countries that are radically dissimilar in their political institutions and practices. Diplomacy can be useful in managing or avoiding conflict between fundamentally antagonistic systems but it requires a certain agnosticism, even repression or denial, rather than understanding. When dealing diplomatically with countries whose systems we find disagreeable, we do best not to dwell on a clear understanding of its nature, but to suppress our distaste so we can deal with the courtesy necessary to accomplish the desired business.
...

P.S. To see clips of Global Thingy, click here, wait for the page to load, click on “Projects New & Past” in the upper left corner. Then look for the Global Thingy icon in the little television at upper right. After the page loads, you’ll see a link saying “video clips” at the bottom right.

Our Alternate Universes in Iraq

I finally sat down and read Norman Podhoretz' essay, "The Panic Over Iraq," which bears the sub-title, "What they're really afraid of is American success." It's possible folks have seen this one: I first saw reference to it late last week. And, if you sift through it all (fairly long, by the way), you'll figure out what Podhoretz means by the sub-title:

"Like the mainstream media and the theorists in the academy and the think tanks, the Democratic Party--fearing that it might be frozen out of power for a very long time to come--is also in a panic over the signs that George W. Bush's new approach to the greater Middle East is on the verge of passing the test of Iraq. Hence the veritable hysteria with which the Democrats have recently tried to delegitimize the war: first by claiming (three years after the fact!) that it had begun with a lie, and then by declaring that it was ending in a defeat."

I don't have time to dwell too much on the particulars of Podhoretz' argument, which are fairly detailed (and, as you may see from the excerpt alone, skewed to assumptions of success that not everyone shares - and for better reason than Podhoretz would like to admit), but the crucial thing is the idea that, in his world at least, there's simply no question worth asking that we're winning.

In defense of this notion, Podhoretz points to a fairly familiar ream of statistics...

"Moving on to the economy, [Max] Boot (relying on a Brookings Institution report) tells us that 'for all the insurgents' attempts to sabotage the Iraqi economy,' per capita income has doubled since 2003 and is now 30% higher than it was before the war; that the Iraqi economy is projected to grow at a whopping 16.8% in 2006; and that there are five times as many cars on the streets than in Saddam Hussein's day, five as many more telephone subscribers, and 32 times as many Internet users."

"Finally, Mr. Boot points out that whereas not a single independent media outlet existed in Iraq before 2003, there are now 44 commercial TV stations, 72 radio stations, and more than 100 newspapers."

"To all of this we can add the 3,404 public schools, 304 water and sewage projects, 257 fire and police stations, and 149 public-health facilities that had been built as of September 2005, with another 921 such projects currently under construction..."

All of which are interesting and encouraging to different degrees. After that, he cites the past two successful elections and warms his hands over the cheery coals of the one that will come at the end of the week. Podhoretz is entitled to his interpretations and his version of history (I take pretty serious issue with his description of Middle Eastern past).

The question left unanswered in all this is what all those projects mean if the security situation means they'll be blown up in a week? But even more than that, there's the HUGE question that should follow the last sentence in this paragraph that appears near his conclusion:

"On the other hand, if (as the president intended all along [ed. - is this really undisputed? Sorry...the thing is litered with these], as he reiterated in his great speech of Nov. 30 at Annapolis, and as is prescribed in the recently declassified "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq") American forces are drawn down only at the rate and to the extent that they can be replaced with similar numbers of Iraqi soldiers and policemen fully capable of taking over, the joy now being felt by the Islamofascists will commensurately be replaced by dread. For no one knows better than they that, once up to snuff and on their own, the new Iraqi forces will be less inhibited than the Americans by moral considerations and accordingly much more ruthless in the way they fight."

What Podhoretz and war cheerleaders don't grok is that for all the complaints about the pre-war intelligence, at least as much of Democratic/liberal/progressive concerns center around questions of the future - and none of these are more important than the nature of the regime that grows when we leave. After all, Saddam's Baathists rose from a comparatively Democratic past; the question is whether that will happen again. What's to guarantee that the ruthlessness of New Iraq's police forces, however justified in the near term, won't establish themselves permanently into the new security state? Or that they won't make common cause with fundamentalist of their choosing, who share no great love for Uncle Sam?

One of the great problems in the entire conversation about Iraq is the extent to which there are two debates (at least) now underway and there's no problem greater than the fact that these conversations are occurring in entirely separate rooms. Worse, there's little sign that anyone's going to open the door any time soon.

I'm not going to into the question here of which side is views Iraq through fantasy lenses, or to what extent. But the simple fact that we've got two narratives (again, at least), and that both are so diametrically opposed, poses serious problems for what this war will mean to the country in its aftermath.

I do know one thing: for all Podhoretz' confidence about Bush winning the war and what that will mean, I'd be absolutely delighted to see him put the relevance of his belief to the test. If he seriously thinks that the U.S. public will sit by quietly while Bush and Cheney invade, say, Iran - a place where there's a casus belli no less real, if not more real, than what took us into Iraq - let him try. So, c'mon, "Stormin'" Norman: what's the next stop on the libertation tour?

Inviting Gamblor to Portland

Today's Monday Profile in The Oregonian looks at two Lake Oswego regular Joes - Bruce Studer and Matthew Rossman - and the thing that makes them unique: their the two fellas trying to talk Oregon voters into letting them build a non-tribal casino on the grounds of the former greyhound park.

The whole profile makes for a mildly interesting read, but the one truly intriguing part comes here:

"They say they are going to file two proposed initiatives later this month that seek to lift the state's constitutional ban on casinos just enough to let them under the tent. If they succeed at the ballot box next November, Oregon will become the first state to grant a single, exclusive commercial casino license."

I'm short on time today, thanks in part to some behind the scenes spazzing. If that weren't the case - and if I thought I had a shot in hell at running down the answer - I'd try to figure out how these guys could possibly swing that one-time, "exclusive" casino license. Wouldn't that violate some kind of equal protection rights? I mean, there's got to be something wrong with that, right?

As the article mentions and one would expect, Oregon tribes are going to fight this one like hell....assuming, of course, they're not too busy fighting one another.

OR Legislature Pay - YIKES!

I say "yikes!" in the title because, according to this excerpt...

"Oregon lawmakers earn a salary of $1,437 a month plus $99 a day when they're in session or attending meetings. That's lower than in most midsize states."

....that's not only lower than in most midsize states, that's less than what I make. HA! Take that Karen Minnis!

Seriously, I don't view this as cause for celebration. Oregonians may save a buck or two on compensation, but I'd rather see them paid something they can live on. I know how distracting life can be when one frets about money all the dang time. So, I'd be happy to see them earn more - even Representative Karen Minnis (R - Wood Village).

Personally, I'd like to see the Oregon Legislature fully professionalized. By that I mean, not only would I like to see our public officials earn more, I'd also like to see the sessions go annual and full-time. I want our officials to be able to focus on the people's business - or even just their interpretation of it, for good or ill.

If there's somewhere to vote between the "citizen-legislator" model and the professional statesman model, my vote goes for the latter.

Good Trends for PERS

The Salem Statesman-Journal's "state news" section ran a pair of interesting pieces on PERS today, mainly discussing how the reforms are affecting the change in pension pay-off (LINK and, this second LINK is where I'll be pulling what little I pull below).

For me, the "money" passage between the two came with this one:

"No other U.S. public pension system routinely grants pensions that surpass salaries, as PERS was doing during the peak of the bubble. Only a few public pension systems rival the 79 percent of salary granted by PERS to career employees last year."

As both articles note, there was a time when the average payout for PERS retirees was 106% of salary at retirement. Another part of the article notes, "in the first four years of the 2000s, more than one in seven new PERS retirees topped their salaries."

That just seems a bit nutty to me - generous, sure, but a bit nutty all the same. For all the talk about 79% payouts, it sounds like this won't be the end of the reduction:

"When the 2003 Legislature created the Oregon Public Service Retirement Plan for new public employees, it guaranteed pensions equalling 45 percent of salary after 30 years. That, combined with the new individual investment accounts, should yield pensions projected at 65 percent to 67 percent of salary, [Rep. Greg Macpherson, (D-Lake Oswego)] said."

For the record, I'm perfectly comfortable with the figures I'm seeing here.

Ediblurb: Source Freakouts, One Retraction and Some Thoughts...

...and not necessarily in that order.

Whoa, nelly, do I need a catheter. Every morning, in the short time I've got to get myself and the kids ready, I throw down two to three cups of ambros...er, coffee. After a one-hour trip into town from the 'burbs, I'm almost dizzy with the need to piss as I finish the last bit of my commute on foot. Seriously. I think I actually cried on this morning's walk. If anyone has any ideas or advice - such as the location of spots in Northwest Portland where a fella can sneak off for a quick pee - please pass them on.

For what it's worth, I'm still in the middle of a source freakout. I'm not quite content with how I'm gathering information, but don't quite know how to rectify it. On some level, this is my problem. On another, I'd like an assist with solutions. I've done this many times before, but will try once more: Could anyone and everyone who visits this site share their favorite sources of news and information?

Finally, that whole "three-post-a-day" proposal? Already chucked, at least in my head. I've got another plan, though one that I won't share because that will no doubt change within the next hour as well.

Oh, the fun I have in my own little head.

Open Thread - 12.12.05 (+ Ediblurb)

Once again, I didn't so much as crack a book this weekend. Still, I got (old-) new couches out of deal, so no complaints on this end.

And one more thing: I'm going to try to scale back the posting - down to something like three posts a day. Seriously. I'm having another one of those moments when I think I'm posting too much to post well.

And, yes, I'm betting against myself on this...we'll see how it goes.

Soccer Satur/Sunday

For now, I'll leave this as a floating feature and use whichever weekend day doesn't have too many chores and kids to produce it. This week, it's Sunday. Here goes:

Still Obsessing Over the Draw
Again, I stayed up way to late - this time on a Friday watching Fox Soccer Channel's half-painful "Fox Football Friday." Between stunned pauses in which one host seemed on the verge of smacking the other - maybe it's just me, but these guys seem to actively hate one another - they did discuss the U.S.'s World Cup draw a bit more; sadly, they shared my impression that we got boned in the draw, which sent me bed at 1 a.m. in a cross mood.

As much as I don't think those two are all that bright, there's a worrying pile of opinion (LINK, LINK, LINK) that seems to point in the same direction: assuming it's even possible, getting out of the first stages will take some doing.

Along with U.S. Head Coach Bruce Arena, the U.S. players sing a different tune - to begin, they sound totally undaunted. Then again, they're jocks, so I hardly expect them to respond to questions about their future with a "We got who?! Ah, shit. We'll never get out of that group."

The most interesting thing I've read on this subject came off of the U.S. soccer players web-site, one that notes the similarity between this tournament's draw and the draw we faced in the 1990 Cup. The crucial difference between now and then - when we lost 5-1 to the Czechs and 1-0 to the Italians - in the words of Bruce Arena:

"...not to disrespect the performance of our [1990] players, but it was so obvious to me at that point in time that we had a long way to go, and 16 years later we get to replay these matches. So it will be interesting to see where we are."

Yes, indeedy. No matter how daunting it all looks, our boys are correct in pointing out that what happens on the field next June is the only thing that matters. And, here, the order in which we meet our opponents bears noting: we begin with the Czechs, move to the Italians, then wrap up the first round against Ghana's "Black Stars." The idea that we've got to come up with a win in either or first or second game, against the 2nd-in-the-world Czechs, or the steady (and 12th-ranked) Italians, hardly lessens my sense of doom.

Some Interesting Departures
As mentioned on Friday, U.S. defender Jeff Agoos finally hung up his boots last week. As frustrated as I got with the guy during the 2002 World Cup, when his lack of speed and occasionally-patchy composure led to some alarming lapses at the back, I'm pretty sad to see Goose go. With regard to the 2002 Cup, here was a player who had paid his dues plus pay-day loan rates of interest, a time line that ended up sending him to the World Cup a bit past his playing prime. Still, his record in Major League Soccer (MLS) is unparalleled: he won five MLS Cups, three times with D.C. United and twice with the San Jose Earthquakes, anchoring his side's defense in every victory.

For all his gaffes, and they were many (see Nov. 2, 1997), Goose was always one of my favorites. Whatever his limitations, he just fought like hell and wanted it (see reaction to being left off the World Cup 1994 roster) - whatever "it" happened to be - five times more than the next player. As such, I can think of no more apt person to stand as a symbol for American soccer in the world. I don't know that we'll ever be the best, but we'll make the rest of the world work like hell for every win against us so long as we've got guys like Agoos on our rosters.

The second departure, interesting for different reasons, is word that San Jose's Danny Califf is now en route to Denmark, where he will join AaB (Aalborg BK). From what I gather, he's moving straight into a starter's role, which strikes me as a good thing. No, name aside, Denmark's Superliga isn't England's Premiership or Italy's Serie A, but it's a sign of U.S. soccer's growing profile...and the fact that our guys are comparative bargains in the world market. With a guy like Califf, a pretty consistent player by my observation, they're probably getting great value for money; and Califf's getting valuable exposure.

Finally, MLS' 2005 in Review
Now, I had considered doing a team by team review of MLS' 2005 season - and that's despite the very real disappointment of New England losing the final. (CONFESSION: And I mean shockingly real disappointment; I've never taken a loss in a game in which I was directly involved this badly.) But, given that an obsessive like me couldn't get through all the team-by-team retrospectives posted on MLS's site (you can reach all of them via this page and many others like it), I didn't quite see the point. So, instead, I'm going to pass on my quick impressions and thoughts for 2005 and call it a day. Here goes:

That the LA Galaxy won the title highlights two of the league's biggest, and related, shortcomings: too many teams make the playoffs, thereby making the regular season too long and barely relevant. I cannot deny that LA played the best soccer in the league once the playoffs started and I can't argue that they didn't deserve to beat New England in the final - unless, of course, you move the discussion to the notion that they're mediocre season should have precluded them from making the playoffs. In reality, the two teams who made the final had two very different seasons: New England fans enjoyed a pretty solid season in which their team alternated between playing some of the best and some of the gutsiest soccer the league has ever seen - a great season in all, albeit one capped by a massive disappointment; LA fans, by contrast, suffered through a season of misery, doubt, boredom, and winless road games - only to have their team wake up in October to win it all. Rewarding LA with the title amounts to the league condoning the idea that players can sleep-walk through seven months of an eight month season.

Maybe that's the bitterness talking. All in all, though, I love the league and its oddly mom-and-pop feel. There aren't all that many players and they all seem to know one another and they all seem to share the same goal: namely, growing soccer in this country. Not a few of them are earning chump change to pursue this dream and they do so with remarkable poise off the field and grit on it.

Anyway, once we get closer to the season, the excitement will kick in and I'll start talking up teams and individual players once more. With the Superdraft already scheduled and the player combine that feeds it coming together as well, it feels like it's just around the corner.

U.K. Police Reform & Civil Rights

A couple of days ago in a post called “The Ephemeral Family?” I cited an essay by Charles Murray. I quoted some comments about the institution of marriage, but the essay’s topic is the expansion of a so-called “underclass” in Britain, and an associated rise in violent crime. Murray pointed out what for many would be counter-intuitive: That Britain had far more violent crime than the United States.

Things got worse since Murray wrote the essay, which would not surprise readers of Theodore Dalrymple, an inner-city psychiatrist who has written extensively about the decline of social standards in Britain, especially at the lower end of the socio-economic scale.

Last night I came across an essay by British PM Tony Blair that makes me think he’s been reading Dalrymple and Murray. Blair writes in anticipation of criticism of “new proposals on anti-social behavior and organized crime":

“Family ties were weakened. Communities were more fractured, sometimes as a result of desirable objectives like social mobility or diversity, sometimes as the consequence of mass unemployment and failed economic policies. Civil institutions such as the church declined in importance. At the start of the 20th century, communities shared a strong moral code. By the end of the century this was no longer as true.

“As society changed, so do did the nature of crime. There was an explosion in crime and, in particular, violence fuelled by drug abuse. There were far more guns in circulation and far less reluctance to use them. We saw the growth of new crimes such as people trafficking, computer fraud and mobile phone theft. Organised crime became a major international operation.

“Anti-social behaviour was becoming a very serious problem on some estates but the courts were too cumbersome a process to deal with it expeditiously. The system was failing."

Blair also focused on a theoretical point made by one of my points in my "Mini Manifesto.” He quotes R.H.Tawney:

"what we have been witnessing ... is the breakdown of society on the basis of rights divorced from obligations."

But before even getting to the above points, he makes clear the purpose of his essay, namely to make a defense of policy, because as a result of its promulgation,

“we will once again, as a government, be under attack for eroding essential civil liberties.”

There’s evidence of that in the BBC article linked on “anti-social behavior” above, and a quick search yielded a critic who said that,

“The latest proposals are a continuation of Labour’s efforts to significantly increase state powers and further denude civil liberties.”

Such criticisms are inevitable, and I think all citizens should be grateful that there are people keeping a sharp eye on governments’ encroachments upon individuals’ civil liberties. But Blair puts a serious question to his critics:

“If the criminal justice system was failing people, as it clearly was, what ought to be done about it? To do nothing is one option. But surely it is to do better by the British people to devise relevant powers, limited by the right of appeal, to ensure that communities do not have to live with unacceptable levels of fear and intimidation.”

Advocacy for the rights of the accused is important, but it’s irresponsible to not simultaneously pay close attention to the results of policy upon victims of crime. National Review’s John Derbyshire wrote a powerful essay called "The Law's Delay", arguing that the guardians of the law flatter themselves of their fine consideration of the question while abandoning the very people they ought to be protecting.

Blair concludes in his essay that, “The basic liberties of the law-abiding person should come first.”

The danger is that the civil liberties of the law-abiding citizen will simultaneously be eroded. But perhaps that's unavoidable, however regrettable.

Since I mentioned Murray as in some sense providing food-for-thought for the current (British) government, I should emphasize that Murray warned against the down side of focusing on law enforcement as a solution. He only refers to increased policing as a consequence of an expanding underclass, not as a ready-made response to it:

"The cost of prison cells is the least of the many prices we as Americans pay. Others are seen in the growing enmity between the underclass and the overclass. They are seen in the generations of children growing up in environments where they will never have a fair chance of becoming the adults they might have been. They are seen in the growth of authoritarian methods of surveillance and social control. These, not general chaos, are the prices of a large underclass. In the United States, they are on the verge of amounting to no less than the repudiation of some of the core ideals on which the nation is based. I see no reason to assume that the underclass will be less costly to England."

A Mini Manifesto

The other day I wondered to myself how I would respond if someone asked me to state my political philosophy in one sentence; and not a long, complex, elaborate sentence but a simple maxims or aphorisms. Here’s what I came up with:

“The species is wiser than the individual.”

This is not original, of course (and students of political theory could easily trace its origins) but I can’t think of anything simultaneously so fundamental and comprehensive. Given more space I would follow it up with some others:

“The cultured is superior to the primitive.”

“The virtue of individual citizens is the basis of liberty.”

“In formulating policy, the force of individual will should be emphasized over that of environment.”

No doubt all of these maxims could stand some elaboration. My thinking behind formulating them was that all too often arguments that take place on a superficial level can’t possibly succeed because they don’t touch an opponent’s philosophical assumptions. Many of my arguments will come down to these foundations (though I’m not saying the list is exhaustive), so your best shot at converting me is by dissuading me of their rectitude. Not that undermining anyone’s root convictions is likely to be an easy task.

Another motive for coming up with these statements was that I thought it would be interesting to see others’ criticisms of them or formulations of their own antagonistic or simply alternative maxims.

Iraq and When Means Harm Ends

In the comments to an idler post on the importance of morale (see, Prerequisite of Victory), jonb (who I hope doesn't mind my appropriating his words to kick off a separate post) laid down some grumbles with how the Bush "Team" reacts to the dissent to its war plan. Here's that passage:

"Enjoy the feeling of toughness you get from watching the latest round of attack ads. Don't spend too much time thinking about why the GOP is running campaign ads against someone who is not running for anything during a non election year. "

This was in my head when I read a Howard Fineman article from Newsweek over lunch; toward the bottom, he sees a PR/pushback campaign very similar to the one jonb describes, even if his description is more elaborate:

"After months of distraction and lassitude, [the White House is] back in attack mode.

"The first salvo came the other week, when Bush and Cheney asserted that the war in Iraq was in fact being won (just read the bullet points). And now they have the Democrats in their gun sights, as the Mommy Party of 'cut and run,' confusion and weakness in the face of global evil."

Rove’s plan is to divide the Democrats even if his Boss can’t unify the country. The White House will not attack Rep. Jack Murtha, the antiwar war hero. Rather, Bush & Co., will focus their fire on Howard Dean, John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi—even as the president and vice president embrace the “good Democrat” Joe Lieberman."

What makes all this framing/posturing so perverse is what I consider consensus that an American withdraw will begin next year, whether Bush likes it or not. And Slate's Fred Kaplan makes a fairly strong case (here) that a planned, phased withdrawal is nothing like "cutting and running":

"The serious withdrawal plans are not 'cut-and-run' jobs. They're designed, on their own, to promote security and stability. None of them—not even Murtha's—call for a total U.S. pullout. This isn't a point in the debate, and the White House shouldn't be allowed to get away with pretending that it is."

Between what I'm talking about here and the stuff on propaganda in the previous post, one gets to the ugliest of possibilities about the Bush presidency and the GOP majority: namely, that protecting and perpetuating the GOP always matters more than accountability, or even sound policy. With the Bushies talking seriously of withdraw when it suits them, this impression only deepens; is the identity of the party that gets credit or blame for all this their only consideration? Loyalty to party cannot be an excuse for wrecking the other party and undermining the system.

Rethinking Weisberg on Propaganda

I attached what amounted to a throw-away link to an article Jacob Weisberg wrote for Slate, which didn't really give that one the think it deserves. While that's not to dub Weisberg's piece a "must-read," or to necessarily state that this is reality, Weisberg raises issues about the Bushies and how they use information that loom very, very large in American politics - or at least they ought to.

Titled Beyond Spin, Weisberg cites the many ways in which the Bush team, and the GOP as a whole, hovers perilously close treating his presidency and, really, the government as a whole, like a giant corporation. There's nothing wrong with that mentality...until one moves into how it affects the way the executive communicates with its customers...I mean, citizens.

Here's the chunk of Weisberg that set me thinking the dark thoughts:

"...it's more a matter of freezing out and anathematizing organs, such as the New York Times, that are deemed unfriendly, while promulgating his own, dubious version of reality. The familiar litany of the administration's domestic disinformation efforts includes the Department of Education paying Armstrong Williams to defend the No Child Left Behind Act, HHS hiring Maggie Gallagher to promote its "marriage initiative," and both agencies sending local TV stations prepackaged pseudo-news videos advocating administration policies. Any of these incidents might be excused as an episode of poor judgment by an underling. In combination and accompanied by various presidential comments about not reading the newspaper, preferring to get his news from aides, and so on, they suggest a propaganda ethic."

"For the Bush team, rolling-your-own news has the further advantage of supporting the revolving-door conservative welfare state that has flourished in five years of expanding, undivided government. The administration's need to outsource its propaganda work—for reasons of deniability, not efficiency—has promoted the emergence of a new kind of PR-industrial complex in the nation's capital. Outfits like the Ketchum's Washington Group, the shadowy Lincoln Group, and the even more flourishing, even more shadowy Rendon Group are the parasitic fruit not just of unchecked self-puffery but of a lucrative new patronage network."

Howard Kurtz, who led today's Media Notes with Weisberg's story, chucked some important rhetorical questions in his reporting:

"But is this substantially different from the self-serving reality peddled by previous administrations or different only in degree? Does it seem worse because of the passions surrounding the war and the polarization over Bush? Or will the anti-Bush partisans have a more tolerant view if a future Democratic president engages in factual flimflammery?"

It's the "propaganda ethic" to which Weisberg refers that literally keeps me up at night. We are the voting public, not consumers weighing Coke versus Pepsi. We are entrusted, via the ballot box, to make decisions about who will govern us and they, in turn, decide when we fight wars and where, who gets help from the government and in what form, etc. Bush and his companions, due perhaps to their immersion in corporate culture - or just as likely, courtesy of time-in with the Young Republicans - don't seem to view these as significant details.

They seem to begin with the idea that they know what's important to and right for the American public. The only problem they see comes with making us believe as much.

Ediblurb: Personal Problems

I'm going to chuck out a few throw-aways and call it a day. I'm having another one of my "source freak-outs." In this case, I feel like I've got too many sources and too many of those aren't sufficiently worth reading every day as I am now.

For what it's worth, I'm finally comfortable with how I'm approaching the local stuff. That's a pretty happy development, anyway.

So, yeah, look for some short shots - ones that I suspect will include some decent points of controversy - and, after that, have a good weekend.

By the way, I'm hoping to post Saturday...don't know what it will be yet, but I'm gunning for a soccer post if nothing else. After all, how else would y'all know that Jeff Agoos finally retired?

World Cup Draw- NNNNOOOOOOOOO!!!!

By the time the Czech Republic's name appeared in Group E I figured that, with Italy being in the same group, this was one to avoid. Naturally, this is where the U.S. ended up.

Son of a bitch.

Here's the Group in which the United States will compete for the 2006 World Cup in Germany (dammit).

Italy
Ghana
United States
Czech Republic

Again, son of a bitch.

There will be ample time for dubbing one group or the other as the official "Group of Death," the perennial "hell" group that any team would struggle to escape. Based on my declining knowledge of the world soccer scene - I mean, 5 years ago, I could have whipped something out, but I had no wife and family then; hell, I didn't have a girlfriend - the U.S.'s group comes perilously close to earning that damnable title.

Our head coach, Bruce Arena, set the second round as a reasonable goal for the American squad. Did this just become less reasonable? My answer is a bitterly disappointed "yes."

World Cup Draw - Sources

If you head over the ESPN's site, you can follow the World Cup Draw live (LINK). Despite the ceremony officially getting underway at 12:20, I'm not seeing any action as yet (12:45 p.m.), perhaps due to the "the opening show and speeches" referred to on ESPN's front page.

Again, you'll know who we've got when I do.

WORLD CUP DRAW (Holy Crap!!)

Until I caught the headline on yahoo's news aggregator, I totally forgot that the draw for the 2006 World Cup in Germany happens today. Holy crap! (Again, holy crap!) Head Coach Bruce Arena may not be worried about the draw, but I'm in full-time obsession mode until I hear who we've got.

When is the draw you bastards?! When will I know this vitally important information about events over which I have no control?

Anyway, I'll pass on word when I see who the U.S. men got.

Prerequisite of Victory

Napoleon is reported to have said that moral considerations make up three quarters of the game in warfare, and the maxim has often been borne out in practice. Inferior forces have, on occasion, defeated opponents with many more troops, and teams that ought to have lost for a variety of reasons other than simple numbers have often won.

I believe it was someone in the 101st Airborne who said “they have us outnumbered and surrounded on all sides—poor bastards!” It was the 101st that expressed indignation at General George Patton’s boasting of having relieved them at Bastogne, during the Battle of the Bulge. The Screaming Eagles' attitude was, “Who said we needed to be relieved?” Forces with this kind of attitude are a lot harder to beat than those convinced that they’re going to lose.

The attitude one takes affects one’s enemy as well. If the enemy takes a more discretionary approach to its campaign, it might think again when facing a determined opponent, and in any event, no good strategist fails to weigh his chances. If the enemy believes he has the means to break his opponent’s will, he’ll try. If the enemy has inferior numbers and equipment and faces a resolute opponent, he’s more likely to look for a way out himself.

Winston Churchill believed that in 1939 the British had finally stood up to Hitler “at the worst possible time.” But facing likely invasion by the Nazis his message to the British people and the world was:

“We shall go on to the end… we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…”

The British went on to defeat the Germans’ numerically superior air fighter force, and the Germans ended up canceling their planned tour of the British Isles.

On the eve of the campaign to retake the Falkland Islands, Margaret Thatcher said, “The possibilities for failure do not exist,” even though they most assuredly did. In the event, the British forces succeeded.

Belief in, let alone obsession with, the idea that one might fail tends to metamorphose into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Dwelling on the means of retreat is only likely to discourage the kind of resolution necessary for victory—which is the theory behind the myth of Cortes burning his ships to motivate his troops.

The Republicans are pushing that theory with a new ad spot designed to paint the Democratic leadership as defeatist. An article at the Drudge Report quotes a “democratic strategist” saying:

“This is way over the top but we have no one to blame but Dean, Kerry and others who continue to pander to the anti-war activists within our party.”

I’ll leave it to others to comment as to whether the ad is “over the top,” but I think it's fair ask: Would an enemy prefer to fight the likes of a Churchill or someone who speaks like this:

"The idea that we are going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong."

Some Notes on Extending Benefits

If I say so myself, The Oregonian produced a pretty good piece on the Portland City Council's proposal, under the leadership of Commissioner Sam Adams, to require that contractors who work with the city extend employment benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of their employees. Two things come to me when I read this, but the more significant of the two boils down to the perceptual, and hence political, issue of what our city commissioners get up to all day.

I'll start with the basics of how the law would work:

"Adams' idea would not require companies that offer no benefits to extend them to domestic partners or spouses. But it would require contractors who offer benefits to their employees' spouses to offer the same benefits to their domestic partners."

There's some interesting counters to the wisdom of this proposal that appear all the way at the bottom of the article; to summarize those points, the fear is that this rule will compel the city, especially when times are tough, to go with benefit-shy, and therefore cheaper, contractors. Given their push to retain "fair wages" for PGE "Piggy" Park employees, at a cost of adding $350,000 to the already expenses debt maintenance for that stadium, I don't count this as a huge threat. Still, so long as city money is, or seems, tight, this does remain a risk.

The bigger problem, though, is political. Along with the ongoing squabble with PGE (some primers I can easily find: LINK and LINK) and the publicly-funded campaigns, one has to wonder how much this will feed the perception that Portland's City Council obsesses over projects either quixotic or irrelevant? And given the small number of contractors likely to be affected Adams' proposal, this arguably falls under the latter category.

In fact, a quote plopped fairly early in The O's article only adds to that impression:

"'It pales in comparison to the rights gays or lesbians could achieve with gay marriage and civil unions,' said Adams, the city's first openly gay city commissioner. 'But given our limited powers, it's what we can do.'"

Based on that idea, we're approaching the dubious ground of gesture as policy. Even with that, I don't have problem with this proposal in terms of equal treatment for the people who do business with Portland, as well as their families; one could even argue that this brings the rules for contractors in line with the rules for public employees. But this a question of priorities and, to be frank, how "in touch" with the city our commissioners seem to be. How connected is this proposal - as well as the other ones - with what Portlanders want to see their city doing?

The End of FLIM/FLAM....er, CIM/CAM

According to the lead article to The Oregonian's print edition, Oregon Schools Superintendent Susan Castillo has given an effective coup de grace to the Certificates of Initial and Advanced Mastery (CIM and CAM, respectively). The article notes that the certificates nearly died in the last session of the Oregon legislature, when it took the Oregon Senate to save them from Oregon House. But with Castillo turning against them, it's hard to see a similar, future escape.

Upon seeing the headline in this morning's paper, I immediately thought to Rob Kremer, the education reform advocate, and figured he'd pull together some kind of comment on this. Yep. And, sure enough, he's happy to see CIM/CAM go and I don't think he'll be alone at the end of the day.

Way back in May, I pulled together a post that introduced me (and anyone who happened to read it) to the basic concept of the certificates. I'd use the word "dubious" to describe the mood of that one, but I did find at least this modest silver lining:

"A second wrinkle I see in all this arises from the question, what are public expectations about public schools: CIM encourages students to meet higher standards and, even if a college board doesn't throw a party for applicants who passed, what's wrong with promoting academic rigor? As much as I thought (hell, think) high school is largely bullshit and busy-work, I'm all for promoting learning for learning's sake – even if it costs a buck or two? (ed. - Between $4.6 and $6.2 million per year, according to what I read back then.)"

To answer my own question, there's nothing in principle wrong with promoting learning for learning's sake. But doing so under a structure that has meaning only to those inside and deeply familiar with Oregon's education bureaucracy hardly seems a smart way to do it; that's neither a big group, nor do those folks do the hiring to future jobs or admitting to colleges, not only in the region (where you'd think it has a better shot - I found otherwise in May), but nationally. In short, it's hard to defend a system that required translation to have even the barest of relevance.

All in all, it does seem smarter to pull the plug. Given what appear to be his persistent efforts, I'll leave the final word to Rob Kremer, whose concise argument against the CIM/CAM flim-flam was well paraphrased by The O's reporter:

"Reform critic Rob Kremer, who ran against Castillo in 2002, said the state should adopt a nationally recognized test of student achievement, tweaked if necessary to reflect Oregon's academic standards. Current assessments have no currency outside Oregon, he said."

Downtown Holiday Revelry

Blogging's going to be tough for the next few days, but I thought I ought to put one or two posts up before getting back to the grindstone. First, some brief impressions from a trip into Portland last night.

For all the benefits of working from home, it's nice to get the carcass out among other working humans from time to time. For me this happens mostly on business trips, but last night I got to rub shoulders with some locals at The University Club.

The occasion was an annual party a local law firm puts on for clients, one of whom invited me along. Such events sometimes have a feel of measured generosity, as if the host is only too aware of the practical rationale for the event and gives little more than is necessary, both in material and moral terms. That wasn't the case at this event. The warm, panelled interior, bedecked in Victorian Christmas trimmings set the tone as one walked through the door. The greeting staff reinforced the feeling, and all the hosts sustained it throughout the night. Food and drink were aimed at maximum satisfaction and one felt one had the liberty of the place. In short, one got the feeling of being on the receiving end of genuine, felt hospitality; that whatever the practical motives of the event, the hosts enjoyed having it.

Apparently this particular event has grown over the years, resulting in the place being packed. Two things impressed me as I settled in to my first single malt: the incredible noise, owing in part to the acoustics of the place, and the appearance of the guests: I'd never seen so many well-dressed people in Oregon before.

I had a couple of small-world encounters. The first people I was in a position to chat with turned out to be from Morris County, N.J., which is where I lived before moving to Oregon 15 months ago. The wife of the couple was from Morristown, the county seat, which I know very well and where my son was born three years ago. The husband was from Dover, N.J., where I spent a large portion of my young adulthood hanging out. We reminisced about many an obscure corner of that obscure place.

Later I talked to a young-ish attorney from Lancaster, Pa. Very pleasant, self-effacing guy with whom I shared my recollections of his home town, where I used to visit a friend who had a teaching job at Franklin & Marshall College. We also affirmed the gustatory respectability of oft-maligned scrapple.

Speaking of oft-maligned, visiting the University Club's website I learned they have a Burn's Night, complete with haggis. I noted with approval the microsite's unapologetic description:

"Chef Joe D'Angelo’s whisky-splashed version of the traditional Scottish speciality has received high marks at previous years' Burns dinners, and not simply because of the presentation. Burns’ 'To A Haggis' is read in ringing tones as the stuffed sheep’s stomach is paraded out into the Club’s dining room, ceremonially slashed and drenched with Scotch whisky..."

One other unexpected occurence was finding myself sitting between a Portland born-and-bred Republican and the Democrat activist who brought me. We managed not to let partisan crossfire ruin the evening.

Open Thread - 12.9.05

Just a quick one today:

John Comnenus (1118-43) [a Byzantine emperor] astonished Europe by a reign of private virtue, administrative competence, and victorious campaigns against pagan, Moslem, and Christian fores; for a time it seemed he would restore the Empire to is former scope and glory; but a scratch from a poisoned arrow in his own quiver ended his life and his dream."

That passage just got me thinking about the crap-shoot that was the monarchy. Given the right king or emperor, you can pull together a few, fair years; get a full-blown psychopath and you've got a year or two, maybe even a decade of pure hell. The most remarkable thing, to me anyway, is how long it lasted as a meaningful system of governance.

Bloody Hell!! Rice's Hell in Europe

Christ. I hate Macs. Toward the end of a wonderfully long post on Condi Rice's ongoing misadventures in Europe, my piece of shit Mac crashed. Very angry...

Here's the short version.

As Rice wends her way through Europe, dogged by sniping criticism at every step, out comes a little gem from the New York Sun, which reveals that the CIA, through outright Clouseau-esque boneheaded-ness, basically betrayed their own covert rendition program. Here's some details:

"The CIA's legendary capacity for stealth, celebrated in so many cloak-and-dagger books and films, seems to have been all but absent as hooded prisoners were zipped from one airport to another by agency airplanes, a journalist who helped prepare one of the first detailed reports on the air transfer program said...the Swedish show reported on the CIA's involvement with the expulsion of two men from Sweden to Egypt in December 2001. The tail number of an aircraft involved in the transfer led quickly to information about at least six other occasions on which the same small Gulfstream V jet was used to move prisoners from various locations to countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. 'Once we had the identity of the plane, which we were able to find out in many ways - a plane leaves a lot of traces - it was obvious the plane was fishy,' Mr. Laurin [the relevant journalist] said."

There's more of course, but the upshot is, these guys were operating without cover. Yes, let's give these geniuses more unchecked and covert power (my original argument was more nuanced, but...).

So, Condi's there on the firing line, but, tempting as it is to suggest that she's only cleaning up the CIA's mess, there's no reason to let her off easy either. After all, no one is compelling her to throw out a series of whoppers about the rendition program. Toward the bottom of this a Washington Post report, they quote the basics of the administration response to the revelations:

"Rice also asserted that the United States does not transport terrorism suspects 'for the purpose of interrogation using torture' and 'will not transport anyone to a country when we believe he will be tortured.' She added that 'where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured.'"

"'The United States government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees,' she said."

Obviously, you don't need me to point out the wide-load semi-sized escape clauses in that statement. In any case, Slate's Eric Umansky put it as well as anyone in Tuesday's edition of Today's Papers:

"Rice's insistence that the U.S. does not "condone torture" is...only accurate if you accept the administration's narrow definition of torture."

(Umansky reinforces the point here.)

As I said up top, this was once a big sprawler, but I'll keep it simple for now. We've had some nice, fairly high-brow discussions on the question of good leaks versus bad on this site and, cynical as it is, I get a massive laugh out of knowing that it took only CIA blunders to compromise these woefully dubious and, arguably unneccessary practices (I'll leave it to Reason's Cathy Young to handle that take-down). And as much as CIA bumbling put Rice on the firing line, she's hardly using her time to our advantage. Here we sit, our hands deep in the cookie jar - and seemingly stuck to boot - and she's doing everything she can to add evidence of duplicity to our reputation, one already shaken by the suggestion that we're ends-over-means sadists. Good one, guys.

On Fact-Checking the President

"Some American journalists intent on fact-checking President Bush's vision of Iraq are finding it too dangerous to inspect the areas Bush yesterday cited as models of success. Which sort of tells you the story right there."
- Dan Froomkin, White House Briefing, Washington Post, 12.8.05

I'll begin by noting that the Post's Dan Froomkin is anything but a neutral observer of the Bush presidency. It could be that he's now spent at least two years (I think longer?) talking about the Bush presidency every, single day and the exercise has fostered a kind of contemptuous burn-out, or it could be that Froomkin's just an asshole. Whatever the case, in response to the President's speech before the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday, Froomkin led today's White House Briefing with all the MSM articles fact-checking the president's talking points.

While a number of outlets made something of the fact that Bush noted some setbacks (did he admit to a mistake?! gasp!!), I spent the day more interested in the fact-checking pieces. That this has become something of a required exercise after nearly every "major policy address" doesn't reflect well on the health of veracity in the Bush presidency. Some of these - or rather, one of these - was quite good. Of all the "debunks" I read today, none surpassed the Washington Post's, which looked at the two cities Bush marked out as making solid progress. Here's the lead to that:

"...last Friday, Iraq's government imposed emergency law and a curfew in Sunni-dominated Mosul and throughout Ninevah province, and a senior U.S. official in Baghdad yesterday referred to the city of about 1.7 million as 'nasty Mosul.'"

"In Najaf, militia fighters of the two rival religious parties that control the Shiite holy city recently clashed in street battles. A few days ago, former prime minister Ayad Allawi was attacked during a visit by an angry, rock-throwing mob that some Iraqis charge was backed by a militia -- and that Allawi called an assassination attempt."

I count that good reporting. But the reduction of fact-checking to something like a reflex can lead to really bad pieces of journalism, such as the New York Times' fact-check by James Glanz. From the Washington byline (which this Newsday piece shares), to relying on months-old information, to the truly shoddy quotes (including this absolute groaner: "I bet if we could get around and see these places that they would not be the story that he's telling,"; WTF? He "bets" and you quote him??), the Times would have done better to not write this one at all.

In any case, both of the latter pieces feel ever-so-slightly pulled out of the ass. They rely on U.S.-based experts for quote-fodder and while these are admittedly folks who follow events in Iraq closely, this is nothing like the same as eyewitness accounts. In some ways, the same goes for Froomkin, but he can at least get away with saying, "Hey, I just compile the stuff."

I suspect this makes me cranky because, given the Bushies' relationship with the "truth" (with which Slate's Jacob Weisberg had his field-day), fact-checking is seriously vital. To half-ass it in this regard simply seems inexcusable. Maybe Froomkin's to blame - but he was pulling the same stuff as ABC's The Note. I assume, therefore, that these were the pick of the litter? On the other hand, I know that the Times has one of their best reporters on the ground in Iraq in John Burns. Where was he on this?

The larger point is this: we need the media - bloggers, the public, everyone. The last thing they need to be doing - and this is regardless of party - is handing the powers that be a club with which to beat them. It bears noting, though, that the Bushies employ that club with preternatural relish.

Talking Points on Israel and Terrorism

The beginnings of a debate on the question of legitimate resistance appeared down in the comments to yesterday's post on the acquittal of Sami Al-Arian in a Florida court. If I pointed anywhere, I'd say that idea started kicking around my head when I read this comment from my collaborator, idler:

"What are we to make of war crimes as an integral part of a 'war of national liberation'?

Some other decent chatter follows from there, including a useful point about the Geneva Conventions. But this line of thinking drew me back to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Specifically, this got me thinking about the position on violent resistance taken by former "young-Fatah" leader Marwan Barghouti. If memory serves, Barghouti favored limiting the targets of Palestinian resistance to soldiers and settlers - the latter category was arguably extended to include any Israelis roaming around the "Palestinian side" of the 1967 borders.

My question for anyone wanting to answer it is this: Would you count Barghouti's position with the restrictions I mentioned as war crimes? Naturally, I'm waiting the question toward the specific case of the civilian settlers.

For me, I'm willing to count the settlers as combatants. I view the occupation of disputed land - especially that disputed land - as an act of belligerence. Soldiers, I believe, are more straight forward. But, as a matter of routine, I think there is wisdom in bringing to justice individuals and organizations who make killing civilians part of their standard M.O.

That, of course, takes us to the question of enforcement. For instance, what the Geneva Conventions say and what that means in the real world are two different things (ask Alberto "Speedy" Gonzales). My question there is, who gets to enforce, in a real crime-and-punishment sense, violations of the Geneva Conventions. Why not, for instance, the World Criminal Court? If not them, then whom should we use?

My point here is that it's all well and good what the conventions say, but it's a bit meaningless absent a mechanism, and preferably a permanent one, for enforcement.

Discuss.

Ediblurb: Subtle shift in Linking

For the record, I'm going to start coding my links so that they don't open up another browser. Even as I've gotten used to that format, it's more tedious when I'm typing and often requires that I make multiple corrections to the html before I get out my post. And given the existence of the "History" feature on every browser I've ever used, it's not too hard to get back to it.

So, for those who liked the old way, you have my sympathy.

Where the PGE Fight Lays Today

There's all kinds of stuff in today's paper about the battle between Portland General Electric (PGE) and Portland's City Council, the latter personified in reports by Commissioners Erik Sten and Randy Leonard. Beyond the straight-up news report topping the Business section, there's a (to be blunt, vague, defensive) op-ed from Carol Dillin, PGE's vice president for public policy, as well as an editorial from The O chiding Portland's city commissioners for, as the headline puts it, "Shooting first and asking questions later."

Of all these, it's The O's editorial that contains the chunk of information on which, I believe, all of this will turn:

"It's more likely that the commissioners don't know what they're talking about. PGE executives insist that the company never improperly kept a dime of income taxes it collected from ratepayers. "The number is zero," PGE attorney Bill Robertson told the council Wednesday."

"PGE contends that the city simply does not understand its use of accelerated tax depreciation on major capital assets, whereby resources remain on a company's balance sheet for a time as "deferred taxes," even when there is no retained cash."

As I see it, The O can gripe all they want on this - as can PGE. The basic problem: we've got two city commissioners who, even with the help of an outside auditor (Philip Gildan, of Greenberg Traurig, about whose credentials I know and have heard nothing), still cannot get their heads around the accounting magic of "deferred taxes." Given that, where does PGE think the layman will come down on this?

In a sense, this gets at the disappointment I feel upon reading Carol Dillin's op-ed. PGE also has this fairly lame statement on their site, which takes issues with some of the city's figures; this is also a comparative waste of time, especially given that they're talking tens of millions as the city goes on about hundreds of millions. I found another tidy little Q & A off PGE's Newsroom archive (I'll have to mine this for more later), one that explains how the utility calculates its tax liabilities. That contained two interesting little passages. The first, explained the basic process of calculating taxes, which uses a "test year" - a generic set of assumptions based on taxes, the number of customers being served, power rates, etc. - by which the utility creates cost/expense projections:

"PGE’s 'test year' tax obligation, calculated as though it were a stand-alone company, also is factored into rates."

A bit further down, however, there's this passage the references the 2004 tax year:

"Recently, PGE has paid income taxes to our parent company, which then consolidated PGE’s taxable income with those of its other subsidiaries. Since the losses of other Enron subsidiaries offset PGE’s income, the consolidated group ultimately reduced its income tax liability. Throughout this process, PGE followed all state and federal tax laws."

So, let me get this straight: they calculate their tax obligation is if they were a stand-alone company - which they are not - and then pay taxes as if they are not? Does PGE not see the problem? Does the Public Utility Commission, whom The O points to as the proper authority to sort this all out, not see the problem?

What PGE has, even if they don't recognize it, is a failure to communicate. Even given the microphone of their own newsroom, the make a lousy, semi-defensive case. If they want the heat shut off, they've got to open up their site and explain how "deferred taxation" works; they can put up a short version for the lazy and a great big one for the geeks. They've got to defend this mechanism in the court of public opinion - and not, it must be emphasized, by repeatedly saying that they're following the law. That defense is the surest way to provoke a change in the law...think the recently-passed Senate Bill 408.

I don't know who's right here, but I sure as hell know who looks worse...and it isn't the city.

Duin Wraps on Guzek

Since I noted the beginning of Oregonian columnist Steve Duin's series on the horrible Randy Guzek drama, I figure I ought to mention its end; he wrapped up the series in today's paper with the fifth, and final, installment.

In terms of a read, it's fair to call this series good, but painful - very painful even. If you're into true crime, or just fascinated by tales of human misery and perserverance, I recommend it. For those interested, you can get to the rest of the series here.

The series was occasioned, at least in part, by the Supreme Court's hearing of Guzek's case. The Oregonian also reported on that hearing this morning (LINK). Naturally, there's no ruling yet (not that I've seen anyway), but the case does turn on a peculiar technicality. Here's that:

"In the third instance, in 2004, the Oregon court ruled that Guzek should have been allowed to let his mother and grandfather testify that they were with Guzek when the Housers were murdered. The court cited a state sentencing law and the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution prohibiting cruel or unusual punishment."

"Mary Williams, the Oregon solicitor general, argued that allowing Guzek to offer an alibi during his sentencing hearing in effect would force prosecutors to prove guilt a second time and meet a higher standard."

For the record, The Oregonian describes the justices as dubious on this line of reasoning and, interestingly, puzzled by Oregon's law. The curious thing, though, is why Guzek, or Guzek's lawyers, sat on the alibi during the "guilt" trial. It's not that his alibi isn't relevant to the case, but there's the matter of time and place. Presuming that establishing guilt and determining sentence to be separate events/moments in Oregon law, it would appear Guzek and his team simply screwed up. But, as Duin noted in yesterday's piece (mysteriously, this isn't on the site yet), even with this being the third trial for Guzek, it's all part of his first step in a nine-step process in appealing the ruling.

18 years later and this not only still isn't done, but it's only just beginning.

Mult. Co. Jail Bed Resolution

The Oregonian reports some good news this morning: Multnomah County Commissioners and Multnomah County Sheriff Bernie Giusto resolved the budget dispute that had heretofore idled 114 jail beds in the Inverness Jail. Here are the details on the deal:

"The board members promised to vote in favor of the sheriff's request for an additional $710,770 to pay to staff the last remaining beds at Inverness Jail in Northeast Portland. That vote is scheduled for next Thursday."

"In return, Giusto agreed to rein in his agency's overtime spending, which has risen from $2.7 million in fiscal year 2002-2003 to nearly $5 million last year. Overtime costs were projected to reach $6 million this fiscal year, which ends June 30. But that was before the deal struck Wednesday, which calls for the sheriff to spend $1 million less than he did in 2004-2005."

In a funny coincidence, I floated something similar in a post last week:

"Given that the cost of opening those beds came in at just over $710,000, it seems entirely reasonable to question whether Giusto can spare, say, a million in overtime expenses."

That sound you hear is the sound of my arm breaking as I pat myself on the back. Even so, I'll leave it to you to judge what that says about this deal.

So, they've got their jail beds; I count the whole resolution a good thing, if for no other reason than it ends so unsightly a squabble. Now, let's see if they make the most of them by, say, declining to chuck some poor guy holding an eighth of pot in jail...

Open Thread - 12.8.05

I didn't so much as look at a book yesterday. No history today.

Uncivil Liberties: Coulter Heckled

I don't care what you think about Ann Coulter; shouting down a speaker you don't like is not an example of civil discourse. That's what happened to Coulter at an event held at the University of Connecticut, as reported by the AP. I saw the same thing happen to conservatives at my school, and have read about it all too often.

I remember with great fondness those liberal professors that encouraged me to speak up in class and enjoyed engaging me in mutually respectful debate. One of those professors remains a good friend, and I regard the kind of open-mindedness he showed as characteristic of a classic kind of liberalism (as in JFK, not Adam Smith). Would that those kinds of liberals would take a stand against the yahoos that shouted down Coulter, and those whose uncivil tendencies are documented in Michelle Malkin's new book. These yahoos are yet another example of how the far left has harmed liberals and the Democratic party.

Man Killed By Federal Marshalls

Pajamas Media reports that a man who claimed to have a bomb was shot by federal marshalls at Miami International Airport. The plane apparently was on a stopover from Medellin Colombia to Orlando, Florida. It's not clear exactly when the guy began acting in a threatening manner.

He was described by his wife as suffering from a bi-polar condition; she said he hadn't taken his medicine, according to the story.

Very sad. It's gotten more dangerous to be insane.

The Al-Arian Acquittal

The Washington Post reported late last night (trust me - I was up late) that a Florida jury acquitted Sami Al-Arian, a Kuwait-born Palestinian, "conspiring to aid a Palestinian group in killing Israelis through suicide bombings."

Some points of interest from the Post report:

"Then-U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft hailed al-Arian's 2003 indictment as an early victory for the Patriot Act. Prosecutors alleged that al-Arian was a de facto U.S.-based leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, coordinating attacks, providing advice and moving money for the group, which has killed hundreds of civilians in suicide attacks. The United States declared it a terrorist organization in 1995."

And:

"Al-Arian attorney William Moffitt rested his defense without presenting evidence. In court, he argued that the government sought to muzzle his client's avowed antipathy to Israel."

"'The government itself has said you are free to praise groups that engage in terrorism as a means of achieving their ends,' Moffitt said during the case. 'This case concerns Dr. al-Arian's right to speak, our right to hear what he has to say and the attempt of the powerful to silence him.'"

And (this one is important):

"The accusations were based on 20,000 hours of phone conversations and hundreds of faxes secretly monitored beginning in 1993...The case was the first criminal terrorism prosecution to rely mainly on vast amounts of materials gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), whose standards for searches and surveillance are less restrictive than those set by criminal courts."

The thing to note here is the date: the evidence here was gathered in the pre-PATRIOT pass, which, to my mind, raises issues about the need for some of those additional powers.

Needless to say, the ruling hasn't been well-received in all quarters. A guy named Joe Kaufman, writing for FrontPageMag.com, opined that "on this day, terrorism prevailed." Kaufman also appears to have attended the trial, which allowed him to offer some interesting details, this one among them:

"The judge in the trial, James S. Moody, had stipulated to the jury that the prosecution needed to prove that the money allegedly going from Tampa to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) was sent for the purpose of violence. Is it possible that anything related to PIJ can be disassociated with violence? It is a terrorist organization. Did the defense convince the jurors that this was all one big political demonstration against the “Zionists” based on the Israeli-Palestinian situation?"

He's got several other bits of anecdotal evidence - mainly some heated rhetoric from Al-Arian and his co-conspirators (who were also acquitted) - but they don't change the fundamental dispute in the case. Along with Kaufman, I'm skeptical of the notion that PIJ somehow keeps the pots of money used for their "military activities" versus their humanitarian activities scrupulously separate. At the same time, near as I can tell, this case breaks on the old logic that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Whether we like it or not, it's simply not against the law to advocate for the end, or even the destruction, of Israel. If I had to guess at some underlying reason as to why Al-Arian walked, it would come back to the idea that, unsavory tactics aside, what he's supporting is ultimately a national-liberation movement. Still, that's just speculation.

The Post piece notes an interesting point from one unnamed juror:

"A male juror told the Associated Press he perceived al-Arian's acquittal not as a First Amendment issue but as a failure of the government to prove its case. 'I didn't see the evidence,' said the man, who declined to give his name."

Oh, and if you're looking for a silver lining, here's that:

"'It will not only restore faith in the justice system by American Muslims but also by Muslims all over the world who doubted justice in America,' [Ahmed Bedier, regional director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil rights group]said. 'This sends a very positive message that Muslims can receive a fair trial in America.'"

I'll drink to that today and worry about the consequences, if there are any, tomorrow. Honestly, as much as I think their tactics - think the deliberate selection of civilian targets - are (or is it were?) self-defeating, I'm pretty comfortable calling the majority of Palestinian terrorism nationalist in nature. As such, I view them as part of a war of national liberation.

The Ephemeral Family?

A post at Gayrightswatch.com (linked at this site a couple of days ago) set me thinking. Its headline was “Hypo-Christians Have ‘Leave It To Beaver’ Mentality,” and beneath it was an article featuring an interview with “The Way We Never Were,” author Stephanie Coontz.

Coontz’s message is that conservatives have a romanticized and ahistorical understanding of marriage. While conservatives look to some 1950s view of marriage and family life, in her view, life never was like that and it came close to resembling it only for a very short period. The article is not very precise about Coontz’s position, but it says she has spent years trying to help people “get past our ‘Leave it to Beaver’ mythology about what the traditional family was.”

I’ve heard this idea expressed in a variety of ways, the most common formulation being “the nuclear family is an invention of the 1950s,” or something along those lines. I think some people put the popular conception of the family as early as the Victorian Age.

This idea is used in the service of aguments meant to undermine claims that the disintegration of the family is a problem. If our notion of family as some kind of eternal reality actually refers to a very recent and ephemeral phenomenon, then we should just understand present changes in historical context and take a deep breath.

But what’s wrong with these arguments is that they depend on a restrictive definition of the entity in question. Thus they may be right that the 1950s family came and went, but they're wrong about the durability of the “nuclear” family more broadly understood. The nuclear family in that view would simply be a family whose center is parents and child, whatever links it may have to kin beyond that nucleus. I think a better term for the 1950s version would be the "insular" family.

I’ve seen the technique Coontz uses--probably unconsciously--in other books I've read. For example, a guy named Tom Flynn, whom I know from my days of associating with affiliates of the Council for Secular Humanism, wrote a book called “The Trouble With Christmas.” Tom tried to prove (if I may simplify somewhat) that Charles Dickens and Thomas Nast created Christmas. He then provided a lot of documentation about Christmas preceding the Scrooge-Ghost-of-Christmas-Past-Tiny-Tim-Santa-in-a-red-suit era, which tended to confirm that the joyous holiday of Christmas existed in recognizable form deep into the past.

Before the 1950s, and in places other than the United States, families have far and away been built on the model of father, mother and child. Clearly, even recently, in America that nucleus often fell within extended families in one way or another. But whereas you’ll find a great deal of variation in the shape of extended families, the absence of an intact family nucleus of father, mother and child has been seen as abnormal, whether as a result of death, separation or illegitimate birth.

As Charles Murray wrote in “The British Underclass: Ten Years Later” (The Public Interest, Fall 2001):

“No human institution has roots deeper than marriage, which appears to be a universal law, or what the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski called a “principle of legitimacy.” Biologically, there is no reason that the human male cannot behave as males behave in many other species—impregnate and disappear. And yet humans have never been known to construct societies on that basis. 'The most important moral and legal rule concerning the physiological side of kinship is that no child should be brought into the world without a man—and one man at that—assuming the role of sociological father,' Malinowski wrote in ‘Sex, Culture and Myth.’ The specific variations are many, he wrote, and 'yet through all these variations there runs the rule that the father is indispensable for the full sociological status of the child as well as its mother, that the group consisting of a mother and her offspring is sociologically incomplete and illegitimate.'”

One might argue whether this is a good thing, but it certainly undermines the idea that the nuclear family (i.e., one consisting essentially of mother, father, child) is of recent invention. One only has to bear in mind (since we’re speaking of Christmas) that the Holy Family—a myth of the first century—is a nuclear family and one, moreover, formed to address a problem of legitimacy.

The author of the Coontz piece has no such concerns. He or she segues from mention of Coontz’s efforts to “get past” traditional conceptions to these encouraging words:

“And there are plenty of new models to pick from - couples who choose not to have children, couples who choose cohabitation over marriage, unwed mothers, stepfamilies, and gay couples who want to marry and have children.”

Murray takes a dimmer view. To continue his comments:

“…England at the dawn of the new millenium, along with the United States and most European countries, is saying that this ancient and universal social law may be dispensed with. That is what an illegitimacy ratio of 38 percent [Which England had at time of writing] means.

"What leads us to believe that this leap in the dark is an acceptable risk? What is the source of our breathtaking hubris?....We are acting as if all those millenia of human experience, across civilizations and races and cultures, are irrelevant; that our particular generation just happens to have been blessed with the insight to see that everybody else has been wrong; that our generation alone has perceived the truth…”

Is This Why They Call it "Piggy Park?"

The Oregonian's Business section leads with the latest on negotiations between the city of Portland and the Pacific Coast League (baseball) regarding the latter running PGE "Piggy" Park. Talks that seemed to be going well enough have, apparently, hit a snag, this time over the desire among some members of the city council to pay a "fair wage" to park employees.

As to the particulars of that dispute, I confess myself to be neutral; I just want my friggin' soccer team. The important thing, though, comes with acknowledging that paying a "fair wage" comes at a cost; The Oregonian's article does a good job of tallying those:

"Adding a city subsidy to ensure fair wages for perhaps 350 part-time workers could cost another $350,000 each year, said Dave Logsdon, who manages the city's spectator facilities."

But wait! There's more:

"The city's new deal, which includes a 6 percent cut in regular-season ticket revenues and a base rent that starts at $700,000 and increases annually, is better than previous contracts. Still, operating revenue won't come close to covering the city's debt service on the ballpark, which amounts to $3 million annually."

In the end, I suppose I'd be happier knowing that the fella bringing me beer makes enough to buy himself one after work. And, deep down, I also have the odd belief that professional sports should be something a city half-drunkenly subsidizes; it's about giving folks something to do. So, yes, "Piggy Park" eats money, but, under this deal it will eat less...and we'll all have something to do on summer nights.

Early Word on DHS Budget

An interesting article appears on the front of The Oregonian's Metro section. Carrying the headline "DHS facing another big budget shortfall," it reports on what amounts to a public statement by Bruce Goldberg, the director of the Department of Human Services, about coming up short on funds. Based on the language used - Goldberg "confirmed" this information, as opposed to announcing it - I'm left with the curious question of where this piece came from.

Still, that's more to do with curiosity than anything. Given all that DHS does (judging from their site, these are the folks holding Oregon's social safety net), talk of a shortfall hardly counts as good news. The scope of the crisis, as well as a timeline for when we should all know more, goes something like this:

"...the budget gap will be larger than the $55 million deficit the agency reported when it closed the books on its 2003-05 budget year, he said...The Department of Human Services is the state's largest agency, offering assistance to 1 million Oregonians each year through its health and welfare programs. The agency's budget for 2005-07 is $9.8 billion, with state taxes accounting for about $2.5 billion."

And when we'll know more:

"A full picture of the agency's financial problems and potential service cuts is expected to emerge in the coming weeks. The Department of Human Services is expected to present its budget plan and potential cuts to the Legislature's Emergency Board in January."

So maybe this is just a heads-up from The Oregonian. If nothing else, that's what it is for this site. More in January, I guess...

Mayor Jim West and Inevitability

Spokane Mayor Jim West is now former Spokane Mayor Jim West. West was recalled by Spokane voters, if for no better reason than his inability to see the wisdom in resigning once it was revealed that he was offering young men opportunities in his offices in Internet chat rooms.

The thing that killed him was the perception that he was offering jobs in order to impress them into his bed; seen even in the best light - one could argue, for instance, that West wanted to "mentor" (and I mean that in the classic Greek sense) wayward young, gay men by giving them a professional leg-up - there's simply no way to view these overtures as remotely appropriate. Whichever interpretation one chooses to accept, West was politically dead the minute these stories appeared in the Spokesman Review (I pulled together a bunch of them in this backgrounder post back in October) and only he didn't seem to understand this - hence the recall election.

On the subject of those Spokesman Review articles, if you go through them you'll read of earlier allegations of child molestation against West, allegations suggesting that West used positions of authority to prey on teenage men. While none of these ever went to trial, thereby leaving in place the presumption of innocence, the appearance of a pattern is hardly comforting.

All in all, good riddance to bad rubbish.

(Late) Open Thread - 12.7.05

I nearly skipped this today with the idea of noting a simply fantastic headline on the front page of this morning's Oregonian ("Better pay in U.S. lures illegal workers." Um....), but, no, I'm going to stick with Plan A...for once.

One of the great stories of Western European Civilization was the rise of the cities and the merchant class; the dynamic between that group and the landed feudal nobility acts as a centuries-long backdrop to all the wars, crusades and the rise and fall of countless dynasties that get more play in popular history. Will Durant, in his Age of Faith, spends all of 30 pages on two and a half centuries that saw the rise of commerce, the establishment of interest, insurance, stable currencies and so on. Somewhere between the merchant and craft guilds, the easing of feudal rights over cities - often purchased, sometimes ripped from the clenched hands of barons and bishops - something else happened as well:

"Nevertheless the communes (read: city governments) were a magnificent assertion of human liberty. at the call of the bell from the town campanile, the citizens flocked to assemble and chose their municipal officers....Though the administrative councils soon narrowed their membership to a mercantile aristocracy, the municipal assemblies were the first representative government since [the second Roman Emperor] Tiberius; they, rather than the Magna Carta, were the chief parent of modern democracy."

In case you're wondering, the dates Durant assigns to these developments ranges from 1066-1300. Sure, we'd have to wait for universal sufferage - nearly six centuries in most places - but, y'know, a step is step.

Wal*Mart: A Crack in the Orthodoxy?

Being at least a part-time contrarian, I couldn't resist posting this one (even as I'm running late). So pardon the skimpy commentary and rely on the links to figure out what I'm talking about.

On one of my quests for balance (read: I was over playing on the National Review's The Corner), I was directed to Daniel Drezner's blog, one of the places I used to haunt (and may again), where I bumped into an intriguing post about Wal*Mart. Given that Drezner is (if memory serves; don't quote me on this) a long-time defender of Wal*Mart, I wasn't surprised to find something favorable about the "mega-chain" on his blog.

What surprised me, though, was where the key source of his post ran: the site of the Center for American Progress (right here, actually). Written by a guy named Jason Furman and titled "Wal*Mart: A Progressive Success Story," it's a long argument essentially against the progressive vilification of America's least and most favorite mega-chain.

To begin, I applaud the CfAP for running an article that runs so counter to one of the most permanent of liberal orthodoxies:namely, the presumption of a direct correlation between evil and Wal*Mart. As to Furman's article, I'd only say that it makes for a highly interesting read. But, since I'm pressed for time, I'll let you know where he's coming from by excerpting the cleanest summary paragraph he's got:

"Well-intentioned Wal-Mart critics are sincerely interested in an America where workers are better off. They understandably want higher wages and higher benefits for everyone. WalMart’s low prices help to increase real wages for the 120 million Americans employed in other sectors of the economy. And the company itself does not appear to pay lower wages or benefits than similar companies, or to cause substantially lower wages in the retail sector. Although there may be a dispute about the magnitude of the cost savings for consumers, no one disputes that they are large. In contrast, the effect on workers is relatively smaller and far from obviously negative."

"There is relatively little scope to pressure Wal-Mart – and almost no scope to pressure other smaller and less visible companies – into paying higher compensation. Even if the campaign resulted in, say, some expansion of health benefits to placate one of Wal-Mart’s most visible public relations problems, the result could well be lower wages."

"At worst, to the degree the anti-Wal-Mart campaign slows or halts the spread of WalMart to new areas, it will lead to higher prices that disproportionately harm lower-income families."

It also bears noting that Furman hardly believes Wal*Mart to be perfectly devoted to the interest of America's workers; for instance, he encourages them to champion some progressive causes - things like an expansion of healthcare coverage (universal?), a higher minimum wage, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit - all steps the company could take without hurting its bottom line. (side NOTE: The most curious thing Furman tackles - and something that never occurred to me before - the anger of Wal*Mart's efforts to point their employees toward Medicaid; Furman argues that this is less corporate welfare than a curious first step toward state-subsidized healthcare for the poor.)

Anyway, this wasn't the only thing I read today on Wal*Mart. This morning's Oregonian ran a piece defending Wal*Mart written by the National Review's Rich Lowry that owed a considerable debt to Furman's piece and articles he cites. The second, which came to me through Tompaine.com went the other way, describing the menace of Wal*Mart in, I hate to say this, decidedly mushy terms.

Seriously, read these side by side - and read Furman's while you're at it - and tell me which one seems the best supported.

I'm not arguing that Wal*Mart is totally innocent. Somewhere among the numerous lawsuits about exploiting illegal labor and abusing overtime, I'm sure there's some fire to all that smoke. But, unless I wake up tomorrow to reports the Furman pulled this stuff out of his butt, his article makes a pretty compelling case in Wal*Mart's defense. Yikes.

Why Antsy on Alito?

Let me get this out of the way up-front: I'm not worried about a sudden over-ruling to Roe v. Wade. I can see it getting chipped away piece by piece across large chunks of the country, but count that as inevitable and even a bit depressing. But, along with Froma Harrop, I believe an outright end to abortion would count as political suicide for the GOP - and these guys may do a lot of things, but political suicide isn't one of them.

Still, I find plenty to worry about with Samuel Alito Jr., nearly all of it surrounding his views on criminal justice and the rights of the executive. A few folks from Slate's stable have been pounding this line since the nomination. The latest installment appears to do, under the incomparable Dahlia Lithwick's byline; there are to more items contained in Lithwick's post (all right: here and here), that look at other particular and troubling parts of Alito's judicial inclinations, but I think her piece suffices for me.

The highlights:

"My fear is that we are all snoozing through an elaborate plan to pack the court for the Bush administration's war on terror."

Then there's this:

"Think about it: Roberts, Miers, and Alito each have a long track record of endorsing executive power. Each seems highly likely to strongly support the president's claims to virtually limitless executive authority in wartime. The Bush administration saw that claim repudiated by a margin of 8-1 in Hamdi. And the president won't let that happen again."

And this:

"Which brings us to Alito's record on the rights of immigrants and foreigners...In one memo, Alito signed off on an FBI plan to collect fingerprint cards of Iranian and Afghan refugees living in Canada. He suggested that the program was constitutional because these refugees were nonresident immigrants of another country, thus freeing the FBI from abiding by court decisions that barred the agency from spreading "stigmatizing'' information about U.S. citizens. Alito simply feels that nonresident immigrants of other countries have no due process rights under the Constitution."

Yup, yup and yup.

This is what keeps me up at night. If the GOP's farthest right got their wish and Roe was overturned, I'd wager that they'd get the "political solution" to that problem that they've always wanted - and it wouldn't break their way, either. But there is real support for "law and order" style thinking - especially in this age of terrorist plots and war. I say we focus on the problem at hand. With everyone obessing about Roe we may still end up with a "stealth candidate" - just not the kind of stealth candidate we expected...

Conservative Oregonians Get Theirs!

My apologies for failing to find a decent title, or at least one that's not vaguely misleading, but Jack Bogdanski beat me to the punch not only in posting on this, but in coming up with the obvious and pithy title "Red Oregon." (that SOB....)

Oregon conservatives have established a place for their kvetching. They titled it the Oregon Catalyst. I've already bookmarked it. Now, I only look forward to wonderful (hopefully) enlightening blog spats with the Blue Oregonians.

All right, fellas. You've got your space, now make it worth the read. I expect a lot...though your sub-title - "A patriotic corner of Oregon" (that's tired, guys; and lazy) - isn't encouraging.

PGE - Quickly as I Can...

I've been pretty long-winded this morning, so I'll treat this one quickly. The crucial portion in The Oregonian's write-up on the battle between Portland General Electric (PGE) and the Portland City Council - under the "generalship" of Commissioner Randy Leonard - comes in these paragraphs:

"The city analysis shows that PGE collected a total of $670.47 million for income tax expenses from ratepayers between 1997 and the third quarter of this year, most of which was never paid to any taxing authority. The figure includes the $658.77 million tagged by the city analysis as suspect and another $11 million that Enron actually paid to the Internal Revenue Service."

"Leonard's biggest gripe zeroes in on $95 million he maintains that PGE collected for taxes but never transferred to its parent company or paid to any government, despite repeated claims by the utility that it did no such thing."

"PGE disputes charges that it kept even a dime. 'The important number to focus on is zero,' said Carol Dillin, PGE's vice president for public policy. 'PGE has not retained any taxes for profit that were collected through rates.'"

In so many words, if PGE wants to win this fight, they've got to show where that money went. If I may pass on some free advice to them, stating that this money - especially the $95 million Leonard cites here - went, or will go, to to anything like "deferred taxes" as he claims they explained to him, they will lose in the court of public opinion - and lose soundly. And I mean lose to the extent that they'll be coping with some legal fees at the very least - almost as likely, the city may enjoy the public support to set rates on PGE's behalf.

According to The Oregonian's article, they'll have a chance to defend themselves during hearings Leonard intends to schedule for February. That's their chance, so let's see how they use it. I think they'd do pretty well to open their books...not that I can see them doing it.

(Dang it. Now that's a good post. Nice and short - I'll leave it to you to judge the content. Why, oh why, can't I do that more often?)

The Best Word on Multnomah Co. Jails

It's another day where I'm entirely pleased to be living in a multi-paper town. I have to give very real props to the Portland Tribune's Jacob Quinn Sanders, who did the service of filling in some numbers and, more crucially, some context in the entire Multnomah County jail-bed squabble.

If you look back at my previous posts (LINK and LINK) on this debate, you'll see one detail, and an accompanying mystery, floats over everything: Multnomah County Sheriff Bernie Giusto's overtime budget. Because the reports I read mentioned only dollar amounts while treating the larger budget picture as a mystery, it remained one in my copy. For instance, here's how I discussed the question of overtime in the later of the two posts:

"With regard to the overtime, it's worth specifying the numbers involved because they are considerable. According to The Oregonian's own reporting, overtime went from $2.7 million annually in 2003 to $5 million in 2005. Given that the cost of opening those beds came in at just over $710,000, it seems entirely reasonable to question whether Giusto can spare, say, a million in overtime expenses. He says he can't, but The Oregonian implies [in this editorial] that there's not enough information at hand (they're waiting, as I am, for County Auditor Susan Flynn's assessment as well) to judge Giusto's position."

Those same numbers appear in Sanders piece, but that's not what makes it entirely worth the read. What also appears is an explanation - finally! - from Giusto that goes past dollars and sense and speaks to management issues; specifically, the article explains Giusto chooses to ride up the overtime budget with each passing year:

"Giusto has left deputy positions unfilled, underspending his budget for salaries each year, he said, because commissioners and the state Legislature continually threaten to cut corrections funding. In the meantime, deputies get pay increases, which then increase the cost of overtime."

"Overtime is cheaper than hiring, he said, because the money spent pays only for work, not vacation time, retirement benefits or medical benefits. He said he delegates because he cannot teach his people leadership if they have no authority, and that deputies did not receive enough training in the past."

Ah. Do you feel the sunshine? By the time he's through, Sanders argues that "both sides appear to be right" in the dispute. If you look at the figures, though, I still have some questions. Among the half-dozen-plus sets of figures contained in the article, there's this set that appears near the bottom; by the way, and this matters, the "Noelle" referred to is former Multnomah County Sheriff Dan Noelle, who conducted an independent (and free) audit of Giusto's budget for the three commissioners:

"Yet even as Noelle spent less on overtime in 2001-02, he still overspent on personnel overall by more than $400,000. And though Giusto overspent his $2.84 million corrections overtime budget by $951,857 in fiscal 2003-04, he still spent $120,000 less on overall personnel costs than his budget allotted."

The thrust of that paragraph seems pretty obvious: while the current sheriff is blowing his overtime budget, his predecessor failed to manage his personnel budget. Even so, how does one avoid directly comparing Noelle's $400,000, thought out of a budget of unknown size, with Giusto's $951,857 out of a $2.84 million budget (whoa...that's dang near 33%!)? In his defense, though, Sanders notes near the top that Giusto has never overspent his overall budget - and that's even when revenues took a dip.

The question before Giusto's constituency is this: is keeping within that larger budget all that matters? Or is he obligated to do as the commissioners suggest and find more money within that budget in order to open those beds?

Angry Over "The Holidays"

I got my first inkling that we'd have to endure another painfully silly round on the, yes, political-correctness of saying "Merry Christmas," as opposed to the more neutral "Happy Holidays" some time last week when Jack Bogdanski posted a very clever send-up of Lars "Gigantic Tool" Larson's annual griping in defense of the allegedly beleaguered Christmas tree and holiday.

My profound hope that the whole asinine dialogue would end there itself ended when The Oregonian ran a smarmy op-ed in yesterday's paper. That was followed today with a feature-box in today's Letters to the Editor where the two opposing camps have at it again - instead of doing all of us the greater service of simply going away.

Sigh. (Whoops. Got to stop doing that....look what it did to Al Gore.) Since people feel compelled to put this bug up my butt, here's how I feel about the whole thing:

To the Christians Hyping this debate:: You are not a persecuted minority; stop being silly. The more you push that line, the less seriously I take anything you say. Look, I'm not offended by your wish to celebrate Christmas and to acknowledge the Lord your God. But why do you require the validation of the entire community to feel secure about this? Is your faith that completely brittle? And while you worry about encroaching secularism, try this on for size: as an atheist, I'm effectively barred from elective office; now who's being discriminated against?

To the People Pushing from the Other Side: It's a fucking Christmas tree; get over it. Call it what you like, but the word running through everyone's mind when they look at the damn thing is "Christmas Tree." Just walk past that nativity creche and know that, whatever any die-hard Christians might think, for the majority of Americans - especially the kids - the Christmas season is about consumerism first, second, third...all the way up to last.

The point is, make of the Christmas/Holiday/Kwanzaa/Hanukkah season what you will and do it in your own goddam head. If you need validiation, find some like-minded people and have a blast. If you need a nativity scene, put it up on your church's property. If the city, God forbid, listens to the crank down the street and refuses to put up that nativity scene for which you agitated, drive down to the local church and stare at theirs. A privately-owned store should be free to do whatever the hell they want with their space; you can either bully them into treating you like some special group, or you can behave like a normal goddam grown-up and shop where you find the best deals. Or, hell, don't shop at all. Why not take this chance to ween the retail sector off its annual, half-artificial cash cow?

Once you're done with them, let's take down Hallmark and all their bullshit holidays....

Open Thread - 12.6.05

There's a lot of self-congratulation in the Western world these days (see this interview, which I posted earlier, and it's references to "how important the Judeo-Christian inheritance is to the success of Western democracies."), which makes it important to remember really reflect on the totality of our cultural heritage. For instance, there's the Crusaders sacking of Jerusalem during the culmination of the First Crusade, July 15, 1099:

"Then, reports the priestly eyewitness Raymond of Agiles,

"wonderful things were to be seen. Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded....others were shot with arrows, or forced to jump from the towers; others were tortured for several days and then burned in the flames. In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet. One rode about everywhere amid the corpses of men and horses."

"Other comtemporaries contribute details: women were stabbed to death, suckling babies were snatched by the leg from their mothers' breasts and flung over the walls, or had their necks broken by being dashed against posts; and 70,000 Moslems remaining in the city were slaughtered. The surviving Jews were herded into a synagogue and burned alive. The victors flocked to the church of the Holy Sepulcher...There, embracing one another, they wept with joy and release, and thanked God of Mercies for their victory."

Anyway, I'm not trying to claim some kind of moral equivalence here; I'm not arguing that the barbarities of our past somehow justify the barbarities of our militant jihadist adversaries. I'm only saying that we should all chase fulsome praise of our glorious Western tradition with a salt-lick chaser. Glorious traditions come and go.

And Karl Zinmeister is a total ass. That interview reads like an ahistoric joke given what I'm presently reviewing in Will Durant's Age of Faith.

Mysteries of the Economy

I've always thought of San Diego, California, as a sunny place. And, based on this editorial out of the San Diego Union Tribune on the economy - which sees only bright, blue skies - that reputation is well earned. So, what's with the gloom of Americans, 61% of whom are decidedly dour on the economy? The Union-Tribune points toward grumbling in the media:

"We would guess that too many Americans are being swayed by the relentlessly negative coverage given the economy in much of the press and broadcast media."

"Bush's pro-growth policies and especially his tax cuts are major factors in building this strong, steadily growing economy that benefits nearly all Americans. Bush and his administration deserve a lot more of the credit than they're getting."[Emphasis added]

If you check out the Union-Tribune's editorial, you'll get a raft of numbers talking up the good times. And all of them are no doubt accurate. The problem is, they're not very detailed. For example, check out this passage:

"Personal income for American families is up by $750 billion since early 2004. Productivity gains, the key to rising incomes and wage rates, continue to surge. Productivity growth averaged about 3.8 percent from 2001 through 2004. A good share of that rising productivity is attributable to the retail revolution being driven by the liberals' corporate bogyman, Wal-Mart."

Yup, that's all great news, but....why show a lump sum for the growth in "personal income?" Couldn't be anything to do with wages stagnating, could it? Sure, that comes from a liberal outfit - the Center for American Progress - but, through that, I got to a good article from Bloomberg that gave the best, single big-picture wrap on the health of the American economy. For me, the best passage in that piece - which prominently quotes a Reagan administration official - comes here:

"Yet a closer read of some of the numbers shows the economy's recovery is uneven. While the plant Bush is visiting today has tripled its workforce to 1,000 over four years, North Carolina has lost 173,000, or 23 percent, of its factory jobs since he took office in 2001."

"Consumer prices in the 12 months that ended in September were up 4.7 percent, the biggest year-over-year increase since June 1991. In the same period, hourly wages adjusted for inflation fell 2.7 percent, the biggest yearly drop since March 1991."

"The number of Americans living in poverty rose last year by 1.1 million to 37 million, a six-year high, the U.S. Census Bureau said. For those who can afford it, workers' health-care costs have almost doubled since 2002 to about $3,136 a year, according to a survey released last month by Hewitt Associates, an employee-benefits consulting firm."

Other passages from that article look at rising household debt, rising healthcare costs and on and on. If you read that along side of rising fraud in the housing bubble, an interesting piece from Slate's Daniel Gross about a predicted rise in U.S. business failures for 2006, a New York Sun article wringing its hands about the dollar-to-gold ratio...look, I could go on and find stuff about the trade imbalance, the federal budget deficit, layoffs...hell, there are all kinds of troubling signs out there, but I found these without digging, without a lick of effort. In other words, it's out there and it's everywhere. On that score, the Union-Tribune has a point.

But the pessimism isn't so mysterious. Given this backdrop, even accounting for all the growth, can you really blame folks for wondering if they're climbing a ladder that leads nowhere...and, worse, that someone's sawing off the legs as we climb? The further down that ladder you are, the more you get to thinking that you hear the saws at work.

Cooling on Memeorandum

On a good day, Memeorandum provides useful perspective by pulling items from across the blogosphere onto one site for easy reading of multiple points of view. On a bad day - like today - it demonstrates what a deeply silly place the blogosphere can be. Here's today's page, but, as the content appears to roll over on a daily basis, I doubt it will hold past today. As such, I'm going to point to the two stories that top the page today.

Part one comes from a site called Two Babes and a Brain. It tells the tale of these bloggers being at Walter Reed Memorial Hospital when a soldier received what looked like an innocent card from a kid. Instead it was filled with liberal hate crimes!!! Here's the only-slightly overwrought post on it. Michelle Malkin's site, never second in scenting blood, offers a picture of the offending card.

Now admittedly, the text of the card is beyond crass; you can see it here (again, this is Two Babes and a Brain). I'm no soldier and won't pretend to be, but I think I would laugh if I got this card. Seriously. It's just a stupid, stupid card to send.

The thing is it's only slightly less stupid and depressing that word of this tops the talk of the blogosphere.

Then again, that pales next to Part II. Captain Ed, of Captain's Quarter's fame, get some traction by highlighting comments, given on live national television no less, which he claims shows Senator John Kerry (D-MA) calling American soldiers "terrorists." Kerry's offending passage?

"SCHIEFFER: All right. Let me shift to another point of view, and it comes from another Democrat, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. He takes a very different view. He says basically we should stay the course because, he says, real progress is being made. He said this is a war between 27 million Iraqis who want freedom and 10,000 terrorists. He says we're in a watershed transformation. What about that?"

"Sen. KERRY: Let me--I--first of all, there is so much more that unites Democrats than divides us. And Democrats have much more in common with each other than they do with George Bush's policy right now. Now Joe Lieberman, I believe, also voted for the resolution which said the president needs to make more clear what he's doing and set out benchmarks, and that the policy hasn't been working. We all believe him when you say, `Stay the course.' That's the president's policy, which hasn't been changing, which is a policy of failure. I don't agree with that. But I think what we need to do is recognize what we all agree on, which is you've got to begin to set benchmarks for accomplishment. You've got to begin to transfer authority to the Iraqis. And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the--of--the historical customs, religious customs. Whether you like it or not..."[Emphasis added by Capt. Ed]

I mean, holy shit. That's just a willfully stupid reading of that statement. Just flat-out fucking stubbornly stupid and devoted to nothing more than a cheap shot...the ensuing cheerleading in the comments section is what knocks this into deeper reaches of idiocy.

It's days like this that blogs bother me. Here we sit, all of us in front of computers that put us in touch with the entire frickin' world and what it's thinking about and talking about....and it's this...this crap? We've got the most powerful communications mechanism in the history of mankind, open to all who can swing a computer and a modem (a moderately undemocratic reality in itself) - and, more than that, we've got this groovy site that pulls it together for us so we don't have to go to all these sites at once - and this is what it's telling us?

Sigh.

The urge to change the subject is a powerful thing. Sorry for that diversion, but I simply found that entire sliver of reality to depressing not to mention. I'll try to find something worthwhile by day's end.

The Military As a Weapon

I received another one of those "junk emails" in my inbox last Friday, this one about the comparative records of service between Democratic and Rebpublican lawmakers. Such list aren't new, of course; they're as old, really, as the "chickenhawk" debate. As such, I wasn't going to chuck it out there on its own, figuring that those who put stock in such things already knew about it and those who didn't would dismiss it as irrelevant.

Before going any further, I want to state upfront that I have not independently verified this list; even so, that's not totally relevant to the point I'm making.

This morning (from the looks of it), Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech before the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in which he took the media to task for failing to provide a full picture about what's going on in Iraq. Rummy's words are sufficiently watered down that I found them pretty innocuous - apart, at least, from the implication that begins his comments regarding the divide in opinion over Iraq's future hopes between the "so-called elite" in academia and the media versus the Iraqis on the ground and American troops.

Tom Bevan, who writes for RealClearPolitics' blog, saw a lot more to applaud in this "classic Rumsfeldian rebuke." With Rumsfeld's comments in his mind, Bevan goes on to cite a year-plus-old interview he had with Karl Zinmeister of the American Enterprise Institute, who wrote a book back in 2004 titled, Dawn over Baghdad. In the course of that interview, the subject turned to why the press and the military see the world so differently. Bevan excerpts this passage from the interview:

"Part of this impression is a reflection of the fact that so few reporters have any contact with military people or military life anymore. It didn’t used to be the case. It used to be that there was a lot of back-and-forth between the elite colleges that produce our reporters today our top rank reporters and the military. For example, seven hundred Harvard graduates died in World War II. There was not a Chinese wall that separated the world reporters came out of from the world soldiers came out of."

"Today, unfortunately, that’s no longer the case. Most of the reporters I met in Iraq don’t have any friends at all who were in the military. They don’t have any Uncle Louie who served. They have no contact with the military whatever. They have very little knowledge of who military people are or what military responsibilities are, and that often leads them to unreasonable expectations and bad reporting."

I find that a bit rich. If direct contact with the military and coming from Ivy institutions somehow makes one tin-eared to military concerns, it's worth taking another look at that list of GOP public officials and power-brokers, their many deferments, and so on. This is just a silly line of attack and a shallow reason to question why the reporting seems so hostile. For one, have they never considered the possibility that the negative reporting 1) makes sense, and 2) that the picture it painted better accorded to reality than anything put out by the Pentagon civilians and the Bush administration?

That's that, but, before going I want to pass on one part of Rumsfeld's speech with which I actually agree; it's the part in bold I like:

"We have arrived at a strange time in this country where the worst about America and our military seems to be so quickly taken as truth by the press and reported and spread around the world -- with little or no context or scrutiny -- let alone correction or accountability -- even after the fact. Speed it appears is often the first goal, not accuracy, not context."

That last bit I count a very serious problem. The first part, however, especially with Rummy holding up the weird tale about Iraqis being caged with lions in which no one I'd read put any stock (he also cites Newsweek's Koran flushing story, which turned out to have some foundation in reality), that's barely worth the breath Rummy used to give it. But that second bit, the part I bolded, absolutely spot on.

Hitchens on Iraq's Plants

Today's essay by Christopher Hitchens regarding reports that the U.S. military/government/contractors planted stories in Iraqi media explains why I continue to read his work. While I don't often agree with Hitchens, I find that, when I do, he possesses a wonderul talent for striking at the heart of a problem.

For instance, on the planted stories, which really pisses him off by the way, Hitchens both echoes and improves upon what I had to say earlier:

"It helps discredit free media in Iraq at a time when that profession is very new and very hazardous (and one of the unarguable moral gains of the original intervention). In a situation already dominated by rumor and conspiracy-mongering, and in a country rife with death squads, it exposes every honest Iraqi reporter to the charge that he or she is an agent of a foreign power. Who at the Pentagon could possibly have needed to have this explained to them?

Hitchens also opens with a wonderful sentence:

"This time, someone really does have to be fired."

After five years of Bush, this sentiment is almost touchingly naive coming as it does from so staunch a supporter of the war. As another article points out (and one that raises a subtly different point on the planted stories, namely, the damage they do to Undersecretary of State for Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes' public diplomacy campaign):

"Appearing on ABC's 'This Week' yesterday, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley joined Iraqi journalists in the view that, if the DOD investigation supports the allegations, the Pentagon’s latest caper was bad policy and should be stopped."

"But based on past performance, we’ll never know who was responsible for this brainstorm, and no one will ever be held accountable."

I alluded to the possibility that the Lincoln Group, the contractor involved, will hang for this Saturday's post; Hadley's comments only deepen that suspicion (Then there's this report from the New York Times to top it all off; well, I'll be damned....they found more bad apples...) It's not surprising, really; Bush's code of loyalty seems to preclude necessary, or even prudent, firings. And meanwhile, we'll carry on talking about accountability...

Ediblurb: CONTRIBUTORS

I'm resisting the urge to create a link to this post to put it up on the masthead, but you'll see their names in the sidebar so what's the big whoop, yeah?

You'll be seeing some posts here on My Very Brain from folks other than me (Jeff Bull) very shortly. Over the weekend, I invited a pair of fairly regular commenters to make their participation somewhat official. For the record, both are free to type in whatever they want and on any subject they want; my only point of intolerance would come with the discovery of genuine intolerance in either of them (e.g. posts about "jews running the world" would wear out their welcome fairly quickly). And, now, my introductions:

jonb, whose name is already up, was my original collaborator on smokefilleddoom; truth be told, he set up that site and invited me on board. I'll let jonb's profile and content speak for him, but will only note here that he's a fairly consistent and proud liberal/Democrat (and, no, those aren't strictly speaking synonymous).

By whatever name he chooses to identify himself, Anthony, a frequent commenter to this site, will serve as the other contributor; he's already popped by this morning with an item on the Open Thread. I don't think he'd mind being described as a conservative, even as I hesitate to use the term for fear of pigeon-holing him. Suffice to say that he approaches a lot of these issues from a different perspective than I will.

In fact, that's the point of having both of these gents contributing. I view fostering discussion as a very real part of My Very Brain's basic mission; that's part of the process of finding what's going on (the more fundamental mission of the site LINK and LINK, though it should be noted that neither jonb nor Anthony is bound by either statement). Visitors to this site will learn a hell of a lot more from three different and unique perspectives than they'll learn from me alone.

In any case, here's to welcoming both jonb and Anthony (or whatever name he chooses to go by) to the site as regular contributors.

USUAL DISCLAIMER: jonb and Anthony are solely responsible for the content they produce; I'm not going to edit, alter or otherwise change anything they produce.

Duin on Guzek

The Oregonian ran the second installment of columnist Steve Duin's five part series looking into the sordid life and vile deeds of Randy Guzek. The first installment ran in Sunday's Oregonian.

Duin's motivation to produce the series appears early in the first piece; I'll copy-paste that here because it not only saves me from going back and forth to insure that I've got my stuff straight, but it will also likely give you a more accurate description:

"Author's note: On Wednesday, the case of Randy Lee Guzek -- the youngest person ever to take a seat on Oregon's Death Row -- will reach the Supreme Court of the United States. The justices will consider whether a jury pondering death is obligated to re-evaluate any lingering doubts about the defendant's guilt. But the court will focus on law, cases, precedent. It will hear too much about the killer and too little about his painful legacy."

It's also worth copy-pasting Duin's lead paragraph because he frames his entire project pretty well:

"This is the story of an infamous crime -- the 1987 murders of two innocents, Rod and Lois Houser -- and an infamous family, the Guzek clan. It is a story framed by random violence, strange coincidences and such a dramatic juxtaposition of good and evil that almost no one who was touched by the case has ever forgotten it."

So, that's that.

Having read as much true crime as I have, I'd merely suggest that against the gruesome backdrop of strange and brutal homicides Guzek's case isn't nearly as unique or macabre as Duin implies. The specifics of the Guzek family, though, are bizarre and sad in the extreme, even within that context.

Overall, this case and where it's headed evokes the potential for Guzek to escape death on the proverbial technicality. More than that, though, the way it's written - there's lots of talk in Duin's work of "the abyss" - speaks pretty directly to the reasons why the death penalty remains part of American legal culture. Insofar as I'm very, highly dubious on the death penalty - and that's dubious leaning outright opposed - I also believe that part of the reason I'm drawn to true crime is to face one question pretty squarely: do the particular horrors of a given crime, or the sickening lack of remorse a defendent may display, justify what I believe to be the "real" reason for maintaining and employing the death penalty - e.g. vengeance, eye-for-an-eye?

In any case, I believe that's the issue Duin's getting at by writing this series. He's trying to move this discussion away from dry, detached legalities by filling in the horrific particulars of the crime. And, for what it's worth, it's a pretty horrible read, especially when the stuff about the Guzek family patriarch.

Rise of Oregon's Independents

From the Bend Bulletin:

The rank of independent voters has swelled over the past 15 years and now accounts for 22 percent of the electorate, according to the state elections division."

"In 1990, the percentage of unaffiliated voters was 11 percent."

That's just one interesting detail contained in the Bulletin's big article on political independents and their relevance and viability in Oregon's political culture. There's some good stuff in there about Brian Westlund (R (for now) - Tumalo) and the essential stability of the two-party system, even here in "maverick" Oregon.

More likely than not, I'll shortly be joining that 22 percent. I just hope that open primary law comes together in 2006....

Leonard Translates for PGE

The little war between Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard and Portland General Electric (PGE) continued over the weekend. Randy Leonard put up a post on Blue Oregon, where he's an occasional contributor, shining a light where he believes PGE might have stretched beyond the ethically dubious; as I said last week, he's using the word "crime." Here's the passage from his post that stands out:

"The element that could make this particular transaction criminal in nature is whether or not the increase of wholesale profits attributed to Multnomah County from 26% to 55% was in fact appropriately earned within Multnomah County. If it is in fact not appropriate, I suspect possible criminal conduct as a result of PGE officials fraudulently increasing profits for the sole purpose of levying a tax that PGE officials knew would not be paid but would, rather, be kept by PGE as profits."

I keep resisting assuming a crime took place, less out of love for PGE than with an eye to how hard fraud seems to prove. Part of me hopes that something in all this thinly ethical behavior constitutes an actual crime because that will make ending the behavior more straight forward.

Leonard seems aware of this challenge and he addresses it before ending his post:

"It should also be noted that even if there is no criminal misconduct in any of these transactions, those same transactions may well be the basis for the City of Portland adjusting the rates downward if the total rate of return earned by PGE was inappropriately based on the collection of taxes and other improper PGE financial transactions."

That's that, I suppose. Even as I read that, with dire warnings about such manuevers scaring Corporate America away from Oregon, I still think there's merit in what Leonard's talking about doing. I've got nothing against profit, but still believe that PGE should somehow feel an ethical obligation, given that everyone needs power/electricity and their near-monopoly rights to providing it, to consider rate-payers as equal to shareholders at the very least. If they don't "feel" this, maybe they ought to be made to do so.

Open Thread - 12.5.05

If you've never heard the song "In Spite of Ourselves" - and I've never seen it without John Prine involved - you should dig it up. Great song.

What David Brooks Doesn't Say

I didn't intend to post today, but, after reading NY Times columnist David Brooks' latest effort, I'm reminded of something remarkable that I used to see in his work...that is before the Times hid all their columnists behind that silly "Times Select" subscription wall. In any case, it's still there and I want to mention it because I only read Brooks every so often. Consider these excerpts:

"[Americans'] trust in government has fallen to about half of what it was in 2001."

[SNIP]

"Americans are increasingly cyncial about politics and their parties. Only 24 percent of Americans say the Republicans represent their priorities, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, and only 26 percent say the Democrats do."

[SNIP]

"The chief cultural effect of the Iraq war is that we are now entering a period of skepticism. Many Americans are going to be skeptical that their government can know enough to accomplish large tasks or is competent enough to execute ambitious policies."

[SNIP]

"What's at stake in Iraq is not only the future of that nation, but the future of American self-confidence. We may have to endure another cycle of skepticism before we can enjoy another cycle of hope."

The remarkable thing about all this, especially given the date on which he notes the start of the decline, is that Brooks never once mentions President Bush, nor does he remind his readers that the GOP has enjoyed enjoyed control of both the political branches of government since the 2002 mid-terms. In other words, beyond this comment -

"The hammer of disapproval has fallen hardest on the Republicans, of course, but the public is just as eager to think the worst of the Democrats."

- he never gets around to directly connecting that end of belief in government - something that he clearly laments - with the party in power. And that doesn't even get into forwarding the implication that the Democrats - so far out of power that Republicans once joked about their irrelevance when times were better - bear equal blame for the state of things.

This all reminds me of a joke in Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs where he jokes about how families in his neighborhood discuss death. They'd only whisper the cause of death - as in "cancer" - as if speaking it aloud makes it somehow more contagious. Something similar is, no doubt, at work here.

We're the Champs (But...)

So, the University of Portland Pilots won the NCAA national championship in a walk. I'm not sure when the game ended as a contest - somewhere between Christie (or is it Christine?) Sinclair's first and second goal, I suppose, which also happened to put them up first 2-0, then 3-0.

In the end, this one finished 4-0. The UCLA Bruins just never showed up for this one; I think they had all of two solid snafus by the Portland defense and could exploit neither. When the ball bounces like that, it just ain'g gonna be your day.

I included the "But..." in the title for one reason: one of the things I've always quietly cherished about women's athletics is the total spontaneity and unaffected, hyper enthusiasm with which they tend to celebrate a win; most times it's a total, uninhibited freak-out. I love that.

It may have just been me, but I wonder if this kind of spazzing has ended with the arrival of the spotlight, even a small one.

Still, I'm happy with the win. The Pilots won and they deserve every last bit of the glory. What a team, what a win.