Disorderly Content

Please be warned: what follows is a political rant, and one that uses bad words. Okay, it uses one particular bad word. It just uses it a bunch of times.

When exactly did Republicans get the idea that they could demean their opponents by controlling what they were called? And how exactly did those opponents not see what was happening, and not move to keep it from happening? I refer not to the demonizing of the word liberal, but to the way Republicans have in recent years taken to calling the Democratic Party the Democrat Party. It may seem like a small thing, but I am convinced it is not.

Why do they do it? And why does it so offend me and, I hear, plenty of other Democrats who have noticed? First, I imagine, they don't like their opponents being called Democratic, perhaps in the belief that it makes them by definition undemocratic. (Well, if it quacks like a duck...) Second, I find the phrase Democrat Party hard on the ears. Maybe it's those particular consonants right next to each other, but it's just unpleasant sounding. As for why I'm offended, well, I still want to know how the other guys get to decide what my guys are called. It violates my sense of fair play, and right and wrong, in much the same way the last six years of Washington politics tend to do.

Even now, with the Democrats in possession, loose though it may be and only until people like Joe Lieberman get a better offer from the other guys, of the reins of power, with the president looking to sound conciliatory, like he gives a damn about what people who don't agree with him think, he can't avoid doing the one thing pretty much guaranteed to set Democrats off. At the State of the Union, he couldn't resist making reference to the Democrat Party. Demonstrating, at least to me, that his willingness to be a uniter is as nothing compared to his instinct to be a dick.

So what can we Democrats do? Well, I know it goes against our belief system, but we could always try fighting fire with fire. How about if we decided to start calling Republicans by a name they didn't choose? Think it'd upset them? We'd have to choose wisely, but yeah, I think it might work. I even have A Modest Proposal, with apologies to Jonathan Swift. It even has historical precedent, back to the halcyon days of Watergate. Think Donald Segretti and those dirty tricksters working for Richard Nixon. Yes, I propose we start calling Republicans the Ratfucker Party. Say it with me: George Bush is a Ratfucker. Cheney's a Ratfucker too. (Be sure to capitalize it. Otherwise it's just rude.) And Tom Delay, although in his case it may work with or without the capital letter. (The man was an exterminator before he got into politics, after all.) We could even abbreviate it: the GOP becomes the RFP.

So that's my proposal. Think it'll catch on?

How rich is this? As the YouTube Video below points out, the White House is trying to deny that Dubya claimed Mission Accomplished back in 2003. Too bad they're so technologically inept at it. Black bars? Really.

I've already voted, so the current run of campaign excesses kind of wash over me like a PBS viewer who's pledged and then realized that won't make them stop asking. Still, I'm hoping for some good news come Election Day. Like that the country will wake up and stop accepting the president's latest lies about the lies he's ready to stop telling and now denies he's ever told. When he says he's never talked about "staying the course", does he think we all have Alzheimer's? Fortunately, video is forever...

I don't often get accused of subtlety, but at least my intentions are rarely subject to misinterpretation. Not so a Mr. JD Rhoades, whose blog entry on right-thinking Republicanism and the Mark Foley coverup was too much for a commenter calling him- or herself Maezeppa. Read the post and then read the comment. Then ask yourself if maybe Mr. Rhoades was just being too subtle for some people.

On Saturday I flew from New York to Fort Lauderdale to visit my parents. I'll avoid a rant on my feelings about southern Florida, at least for the moment. Instead I want to focus on the experience of flying a couple of days after the latest terror threat. What was remarkable about it was how largely unremarkable it was, at least for me. Granted, I didn't suffer from the inability to bring baby food or medications on board, and I have nothing but sympathy for those who did or do. And my flight was short enough that any inability to reapply deodorant mid-way wasn't going to cause a crisis of olifaction, which I hope is a word. No, what strikes me now, two days after that flight and a few hours before my next, is how easy it is to see the cynical hand of government at work in all this.

I'm not dismissing the possibility of a real attack, or even that these attackers in London were serious, determined and possibly even capable of pulling it off. But how am I to read the news that British authorities had the perpetrators under surveillance for months, that they wouldn't be ready to attack for months more, and that the arrests and announcement of the plot (and subsequent draconian security restrictions around Britain and lesser ones here) were because the Bush Administration insisted on haste? Could it be that there was more than concern for its citizens on the mind of the people in power? Could the announcement coming mere days after another stinging rebuke at the polls be more than coincidence? It wouldn't, after all, be the first time an elevated terror threat came conveniently after a report that made the Bush team look like incompetents, opportunists or outright criminals. Or even the tenth time, for that matter.

And of course the plea for more powers to wiretap every American sound strange after you learn that it wasn't anything like that that caught these would-be terrorists. No, it was old fashioned police work, helped along by a neighbor who noticed something suspicious and reported it. But of course how much easier would it be if we could have no secrets at all from our government? And how much easier to handle airport security if they just made us all fly naked? Wait, let's think about that one a while longer. Especially if included those Virgin Atlantic flight attendents...

(I was gonna classify this under travel, but now I think it really belongs under politics.)

Talking Points Memo links to a rant at Media Matters that puts the lie to the idea of a Liberal bias in the media. He reminds us of all the time, energy and money spent on Whitewater, the First Family scandal that never was a scandal, and how little of any of those things is spent on Conservative activity that really is scandalous. Worth a read.

Professor Lawrence Lessig has a blog post about the ads the Competitive Enterprise Institute is running in opposition to Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth. In case you aren't aware, the CEI is a shill for the oil industry. And one with a well developed sense of the ridiculous. To quote from the ad: "CO2: They call it pollution. We call it life." Yeah, carbon dioxide is natural. So is arsenic.

It reminds me of a routine Robert Klein did on one of his albums. (Yes, the vinyl kind.) He was riffing on a much earlier oil company ad, I think from Amoco. "What can one man do, my friend?" asks the workshirted folk singer. "To fight pollution in the air that's comin' in from everywhere." To which Klein replies, "I'd like to see the president of Amoco put his mouth on the exhaust of a new car with Amoco chugging in it. Then we'd see what one man can do, my friend."

Still, I'm glad to see the oil companies aren't using their profits wastefully. Then again, how many $400 million severance packages do they need?

Yesterday afternoon I had the great pleasure of hearing Tom Friedman of The New York Times speak at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park. Even better, I got to bypass a Standing Room Only crowd to take a front row seat, thanks to my friend Barry. When attending events at bookstores, it's good to know a successful author.

Mr. Friedman was articulate on the subjects of globalization, education and energy, all of which he covers in the 2.0 version of his book The World Is Flat. He was also warm and funny, two charactistics I appreciate in any presenter. I was particularly impressed by the way he discussed how his views had changed since writing the first version of the book; Mr. Friedman was rather more upbeat about our ability to compete on the world stage with India and China. He pointed out that the US has more advanced degree students in Sanskrit than does India, which may not do much for the economy but shows the breadth and flexibility of the skill sets we continue to develop. On China, he quoted an old aphorism from his Minnesota childhood: "Never bet on a country that censors Google." Okay, maybe that's not really from his childhood. But the thought is still an important one.

According to reports, President Bush described the selection of new leadership in Iraq as "a turning point". There certainly have been a lot of turning points in the three years since that Mission Accomplished banner. Could it be because we've been going in circles all this time?

One reader likened it to SETI@HOME, where computer users all over the world donate their spare cycles to analyzing radio signals in hope of finding extraterrestrial intelligence. And there's a definite similarity, even if intelligence isn't exactly what they were looking for.

I refer to a picture that San Diego Congressional candidate Howard Kaloogian posted to his website, a picture of a quiet and peaceful scene in Baghdad that he took on a recent visit and which demonstrates clearly and well that the chaos and disaster reported by the media is nothing near the truth.

Except... Eagle-eyed bloggers began immediately to question the photo's credentials. Baghdad? Then how come there's no Arabic anywhere? And would the woman at left really be dressed quite so provocatively in today's Iraq? And aren't signs like 2.NOTER and Edo indications that the picture was taken in Turkey (where a Noter is a Notary Public and Edo is a brand of ice cream), rather than Iraq? It's fun to read the back and forth between those who are convinced that Kaloogian, who hopes to replace convicted lying weasel Duke Cunningham, may be just as much of a lying weasel, only without the Duke's convictions; and those who are determined to stick with their party right to the bitter end, or at least not to believe until the evidence is irrefutable.

Which it has now become. Talking Points Memo has another picture, this one identifiably from an Istanbul suburb called Bakirkoy, that matches the one in question in way too many places to be mere coincidence. So it really was Turkey. Which of course raises new questions. And as a firm believer in the old adage that one should never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity, I'm left wondering if Kaloogian actually knew where he was when he was there. Assuming of course that he was there. And that he took the picture. And that he knows how to use a camera. Or even owns one. See, lots o' questions.

No, not me; not this time anyway. I refer to a blogger named Ben Domenech, who was hired by the Washington Post as a conservative antidote to the extreme liberal views (in somebody's opinion, I guess) that were polluting their website. So they hired Domenech, whose major credential is his creation of something called RedState.com, and whose blog began appearing this past Tuesday. And ended today, with the announcement of his resignation. It seems that the beloved technique of stealing story ideas from other blogs (while always giving them credit -- well, almost always) wasn't good enough for Mr. Domenech; he preferred to, in the words of the great Tom Lehrer:

Plagiarize.
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize...
Only be sure always to call it, please, research.

And so we have a small victory for the liberal press imbalance, as one more conservative commentator is shown to be the dirtbag he is. Now, I'm not saying that being conservative automatically makes you a crook. (Although it may very well make you a loon.) But it's getting harder and harder to find good counterexamples.

I used to watch Inside Washington on PBS, back when I watched anything that wasn't prescreened by my ReplayTV. (Which will get replaced eventually by a TiVo, now that Replay is effectively no more. But I digress.) Inside is more balanced than the usual politics panel show, any of which demonstrate that the bias in TV news is anything but liberal. It does (or did; as I say, it's been a while since I've seen it) have its house Conservative in the fire-breathing Krauthammer, who can always be counted upon to take the Republican consensus view of any issue. That's what started to make me suspicious of Krauthammer in particular and Conservative columnists in general: that I knew their take on the topic at hand even before I started reading. Which to me means they're shoehorning the facts into their prefab position, never reconsidering their positions in the light of new facts.

Which is why I so enjoyed Jim Emerson's film blog, which was linked from Roger Ebert's website. Jim writes about a recent Krauthammer column in which he sees support for Osama bin Laden and the terrorists in the films that have received Oscar attention. What I enjoyed is not that Jim sees the column as errant nonsense, which he does, but that his dissection of the column demonstrates pretty clearly that Krauthammer is condemning films for positions they don't actually hold, which he might have known if he wasn't more concerned with his viewpoint than the films', or if he had actually seen the work in question. Jim's evidence suggests that, like many a good censorship advocate before him, Krauthammer has not experienced Paradise Now, Munich or Syriana, the films he decries.

In a spirit of full disclosure, I haven't seen them either. Then again, I'm not making any claims for what the filmmakers did or didn't attempt to portray. Which is a pretty important distinction, I'd say. I wonder if I'd be so meticulous if I were being paid for my opinions.

Former Murky News columnist Dan Gillmor on right wing hypocracy concerning Dick Cheney's little shooting incident. I couldn't agree more.

From a column by Molly Ivins entitled Six Degrees of Osama bin Laden:

[President Bush:] "I can say that if somebody from al-Qaida's calling you, we'd like to know why. In the meantime, this program is conscious of people's civil liberties, as am I. This is a limited I repeat, limited. And it's limited to calls from outside the United States, to calls within the United States."

So then the White House had to go back and explain that, well, no, actually, the National Security Agency's domestic spying program is not limited to calls from outside the United States, or to calls from people known or even suspected of being with al-Qaida.

Which reminds me of a favorite joke:

What's the difference between a computer salesman and a car salesman?
A car salesman knows he's lying.

Or, if you prefer, a car salesman probably knows how to drive.

This is really cool. Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has been keeping tabs on the case of now former Congresscritter Duke Cunningham, who has pled guilty to bribery in getting defense contracts for various sleazebuckets. At the top of the list of beneficiaries is Brent Wilkes' firm, ADCS. Earlier today Josh had the story about ADCS selling its corporate headquarters. But now he notes that The ADCS company website is an empty shell; it's just a homepage with no links to any content whatsoever. Better look quick; who knows how long even this much will be available on the web...

Here are some words I never expected to say: Arianna Huffington, I love you! I love the way you point out that Bob Woodward is an empty suit in your article on AlterNet. I remember reading The Final Days, the Woodward & Bernstein book about the end of the Nixon administration, and how you made me almost sorry for Tricky Dick. But I also remember a couple of reviewers taking you to task for all the things you didn't say, about how Nixon's staff were saying one thing to each other (and to you), while they were saying something very different to the public. That charge didn't penetrate with me then, when I was young and naive and wanted to believe that the heroes of Watergate were beyond reproach. But now, reproach is all we have.

Woodward is an object lesson: Spend too much time with sleaze and it'll rub off. Assuming of course you were better than this, once upon a time. Now I'm not so sure.

Update 12/02: Apologies to any and all blondes, natural or otherwise, who are offended at being compared to Bob Woodward. The phrase was Ms. Huffington's. Me, I have nothing but respect for blondes. Especially my blogger friends Silvia and Elke. (You can stop pummeling me any time.)

Happy post-election day! Aside from the good news here in California about all of the Governator/Gropenfuhrer's ballot propositions going down to defeat, I am cheered by news from Dover, Pennsylvania. According to the New York Times, every one of the Dover school board members who ran for reelection was defeated. Why is that such a big deal? This was the school board that is being sued for introducing intelligent design into biology classes as an alternative to evolution. Guess the voters didn't think that was such a hot idea after all. Heck, when even the Vatican thinks evolution is good science, you have to recognize that something interesting is going on. Like sanity, at least in small portions.

The always on the ball Talking Points Memo tells of a new job finding service for the well connected. Think HotJobs, only with fewer of those annoying questions about skills or relevant experience.

Back in the Nixon years, before Watergate and before Spiro Agnew brought nolo contendre into the popular lexicon, National Lampoon had a monthly feature called Mrs. Agnew's Diary. Purporting to be the private musings of the veep's wife, it was both funny and insulting at one and the same time. And now we have proof that history repeats itself, or at least joke versions of history do. Bloggers everywhere are reporting that Harriet Miers, Bush's nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor among The Supremes, has a blog. And what a blog it is! Who needs Senate hearings when we're presented with all the insight we need, right from the horse's mouth as it were. Way to bypass the process and go straight to the people, Harriet!

There was an article in Sunday's paper (the Miami Herald?) that got me thinking, which is always a dubious proposition. The subject was casinos in Mississippi and Florida and the way politicians try to balance their desire to enrich state coffers against the appearance of encouraging sin, how they try to have it both ways, and how they sometimes end up with nothing at all.

Mississippi had floating casinos, which I guess they saw as a way to permit gambling without actually having to admit that's what they were doing. A riverboat casino sounds so romantic and retro, with mint julips and high stakes card games by shady characters with immaculate white suits and syrupy accents. But the reality was that the riverboats were only technically boats; they were really just buildings mounted on barges in the river. At least until Katrina came along and turned them into (wet) kindling. But the point is that by giving cover to the politicians, by letting them tax the casinos while claiming they'd kept the sinful enterprise (just barely) out of the state, they put all that revenue and all those jobs at risk when the big wind arrived.

What's funny is the contrast with Florida. There, the politicians won't sully themselves with the sin of gambling or the embarrassment of hypocracy. So while they can't prevent Native American tribes from operating casinos, they don't have to be in the uncomfortable position of benefiting from their presence. Florida collects not a dime of the billion or so dollars that flow through the casinos.

So which is worse? Is it better to accept the existence of such enterprises and make them pay their way? Is a high moral stance worth missing out on some badly needed funds? Does pretending to a morality you don't actually practice lead to anything but tears?

No answers here. Just questions.

But if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, I'd bet my money on it being a duck.

What am I talking about? Take a look at this piece at Talking Points Memo, which tells the tale of a defense contractor who bought the home of a San Diego congresscritter for more than a million and a half bucks, and then later selling the same abode for $700,000 less than he paid for it. But not to worry; said contractor has been doing very well on contracts he received courtesy of that very same congressbeing. What an amazingly fortuitous coincidence, don't you agree?

Sadly, not from one of ours. Crooks and Liars has a four minute video clip of British MP George Galloway giving Senator Norm Coleman a verbal whipping over accusations related to the Iraqi old for food program. Galloway is articulate and forthright. He may even be telling the truth, which makes a nice change.

Too good to pass up: a remix of the president's speeches that has him doing a Shatner on Imagine and Take a Walk on The Wild Side. Where in the world does Boing Boing find stuff like this?

In all the noise over the Terry Schiavo case, one aspect has mostly been ignored: polls that show that most Americans agree with the husband's decision and believe that Congress and the President were wrong to try to overrule him and the Florida courts. But even when those polls are reported, they are distorted beyond recognition.

Take the poll at right, which appeared on CNN's website. (Click to see a higher resolution version.) Although factually accurate, a cursory glance would give the impression that Democrats are nine times as likely to agree with the state courts as Republicans and Independents. (Note the difference in bar sizes.) But in reality, the difference is only eight percentage points. And even that is suspect, since poll has a margin of error of +/- 7%.

I've always liked this saying: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." But in this case I have to wonder. Is this stupidity at work? Or is CNN trying to further the impression that Democrats and Republicans are worlds apart, even when they're not?

"CNN; we're like Fox, only less honest about it."

Update 03/22: Interesting. CNN has updated its graph. Maybe it was stupidity after all.

I remember some trashy book I read in elementary school where a policeman arrested our hero despite the lack of any justification. The public servant in question defended his actions by invoking Freedom of the Press. Which, he explained, included his right to press charges whenever he felt the need.

Comical nonsense, right? Maybe not. Dan Gillmor, formerly of the San Jose Murky News, quotes an article in the Raleigh News & Observer about the government wanting the right to sue those who invoke sunshine laws to find out what their public servants are doing. You'll still have the right to ask. They just want the power to threaten you into not trying.

What a world of difference between the world of "legitimate news" and the blogosphere! If you get your news from blogs, you're likely familiar with the story of Jeff Gannon, the phony reporter who somehow managed to get into White House briefings where he could ask softball questions and insult Democrats. But if you rely on mainstream media, you might not have heard more than a few rumblings. That's a shame, since it's a story of politics in our time that has all the elements of a proper Watergate-style scandal.

Joe Conason has a good writeup of the story, including Gannon's connections to conservative Republican activists and his rather more (or less, depending on your point of view) shady past as a homosexual prostitute and website builder for others in the same profession. But he raises an important question: where the hell is the supposedly liberal media when such a vital story, with connections right to the top of the government, all the juicy details you could want and a chance to show the conservatives in question as the anti-democracy (and not just anti-Democrat) slime they are, is waiting to be told? Can we just can the "liberal media" crap for the lie it is? Like "elite Republican Guard" of Gulf War I or "stately Wayne Manor" of Batman, it's a linguistic shorthand that keeps us from even considering its truth. Or in this case, its utter absurdity.

Update 02/17: Frank Rich has written a comprehensive piece for The New York Times, covering both the phony news and the minimal reporting of it by real news organizations, such as they are. But c'mon, people! Where's the outrage?

Salon reports that a third columnist has been caught taking money from the White House to promote its agenda. This time it's Michael McManus, who writes a syndicated column called Ethics & Religion. One can only hope that he's better acquainted with religion than he is with ethics.

In most parts of the country, banks, government offices and some businesses were closed in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King. Things were quiet in Mississippi too, although as this recording from the State Tax Commission demonstrates, not entirely for the same reason. Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

There's a wonderful dissection of the Wall Street Journal's piece on two bloggers who worked on the Dean campaign at the blue lemur, a site that subtitles itself "Progressive Politics and Media News". In brief, the WSJ's chief editorial writer, who attacked the bloggers over a conflict of interest because (he claims inaccurately) they didn't report being paid by the campaign, himself serves on President Bush's fellowship board (Armstrong Williams is another member) and is in the process of being hired as chief speechwriter for the administration. So I guess it's only a conflict of interest when progressives do it.

It's a paradox I've been trying to understand for years: that the American separation of church and state has led Americans to be more, not less, religious. Americans attend church far more often than citizens of other First World countries. Especially those countries with state-sponsored religions, where the locals treat religious institutions with the same reverence as we do the Library of Congress: cool and all, but nothing to do with my day to day life.

What brought this to mind is the recent election, the culture gap between red states and blue states and debates about morality. Oh, and some statistics that have been written about by folks on the blue side of the divide. Including a piece from the New York Times that was reprinted in my local paper. Because it seems that that part of America that's so concerned with morality, and with defending marriage from those who would cheapen and destroy it, has the biggest reason to worry.

A few numbers to make the case: The 2003 divorce rate in Massachusetts, bluest of blue states, was 5.7 per thousand married people. Kentucky, Misssissippi and Arkansas had twice that, at 10.8, 11.1 and 12.7, respectively.

There's more to the studies, including analyses debunking any idea that being "born again" decreases the likelihood for divorce. But in the final analysis, what it suggests is that red staters should look deep into their own hearts to understand why their marriages fail so often. And they should stop blaming the other guy; all three of these states voted this year to ban gay marriage, when maybe they should consider making it harder for straights to get hitched.