Across the Great Divide

WE'VE MOVED

2006-03-27T19:23:00.000-08:00

Across the Great Divide has moved. Please visit the new location.

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Archives will reside here temporarily. They will be moved when I can straighten out issues with the old site.

Thank you.

Tenting and Blogging Don't Mix

2006-03-26T16:16:00.000-08:00

Sometime contributor Gustave Axelson describes a trip to Denali in today's Strib. His story on sharp-tailed grouse appears in the current issue of Minnesota Conservation Volunteer.

Now I know why his posts are so few and far between.

My Day at the Convention

2006-03-25T15:38:00.000-08:00

I've just returned from my Senate District 45 DFL Convention, and few things have been made clear. Here's the short version for skimmers:

1. Despite the crowded field vying to replace Martin Sabo, it wasn't hard to pick a candidate. Keith Ellison is mine.

2. I'm no closer on the governor's race, though wasn't it interesting I avoided making eye contact with Mike Hatch as he worked the room?

3. I love Ford Bell, but I really want to retire Mark Kennedy, and I think Amy Klobuchar is more likely to do it.

5th Congressional District Race
The DFL nominee in the 5th is a lock on going to Washington, so hopefuls are coming out of the woodwork. Looking at the line of candidates waiting to speak today, you'd have thought this was a convenience store and the Powerball had surpassed $200 million.

Most of the candidates showed up, plus former Hennepin County Board Chair Mark Andrew, who is still exploring and hasn't formally declared. (Presumably Polinaut's list which was updated yesterday and is at least two candidates short, will be current on Monday.)

I didn't see big differences on the issues among the candidates, so this was more a swimsuit and talent competition...

No shows: Jon Olson, Anne Knapp. Therefore, no comment.

The City Council Krewe: Paul Ostrow and Gary Schiff should plan on keeping their Minneapolis jobs. Schiff's energy program has us lessening our dependence on "foil oreign." Oy.

Sabo Lite: Mike Erlandson not only has his boss's blessing, he has his boss's charisma.

Personal stories: Gail Dorfman and Rebecca Yanisch both shared personal stories to underscore their passion for office. Dorfman's son is gay and Yanisch told of a nephew who signed up for the National Guard so he could pay for school and was immediately shipped to Iraq. It may not be original, but I liked her line about how kids shouldn't have to risk dying to go to college.

Hometown team: Ember Reichgott Junge and Jorge Saavedra. Junge was stumping in her old junior high and had solid support. She's a tad too Up with People for me. I'm told she'll go to primary with or without the endorsement. Chilean immigrant Saavedra will be an attractive candidate somewhere, sometime, but this isn't the time.

Surprising firebrand: Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer declared himself a candidate when Sabo was still presumed to run, and this is all the thanks he gets. After hearing him speak, I consider him the Ford Bell of the Fifth. I'd take off points for the notecards in his hand, but his words and passion ranked right at the top.

Across the Great Divide Candidate: Keith Ellison had started to speak when I was in the hallway being buttonholed by a J N-P supporter. The ringing strains coming from the cafeteria pulled me in. Other candidates had programmed pauses in which to insert applause; Ellison was the only one to consistently receive it. Yes, he was the first to speak, but discounting hometowner Junge, he was the only Congressional candidate to win his own delegate.

In general, I'm not a big fan of the "I will fight for..." campaign rhetoric Ellison employed. But that's because it often turns out to be just rhetoric. And real fighters aren't very effective on the everyday work of governing.

But the party needs fighters with a clue. I think Ellison qualifies. We don't need a safe candidate to attract swing voters in this district. We need someone who can make us glad we're progressive. I won't belabor this. Just say I knew Paul Wellstone. Paul Wellstone was a friend of mine. And Keith Ellison did a passable Paul Wellstone.

Governor's race
I was most undecided about this race and wanted to hear from Steve Kelly, because he's the indistinct choice for me. We got his wife as proxy instead. By the accounts of people who know him, he's a nice, smart, decent, hard-working man. I want all those things, but I also want someone who will free Tim Pawlenty to take a full-time position with the Taxpayers League or the Minnesota Family Council. I still don't know whether Kelly is the man.

I do know Becky Lourey isn't the woman — though if she had a snowball's chance, I'd stand with her. But the voters didn't buy her once and Republicans have gotten even nastier since. Their campaign ads would have Lourey standing with Cindy Sheehan and Sheehan with Michael Moore and Moore with Osama, and before you know it, too many voters will think she exploited her son's death in Iraq so she could be Governor.

Mike Hatch did show and gave a stemwinder speech largely focused on health care. This may be a good strategy, since health care polls highly with voters. He has a clear record advocating for the consumer and making health care more affordable and accessible. Hatch has the perfect makeup for Attorney General, and he may have what it takes to beat Pawlenty. But then he has to govern, and unless his health care plan covers personality transplants, in a few years we might be looking back fondly on the Ventura administration.

Senate race
Klobuchar sent her daughter and husband. Bell came in person. He got off a good line about Bush wanting to fix Social Security. "Well, I'm a veterinarian, and 'fix' has a very specific meaning."

Ford, if you can help sharpen Amy's positions on the war and health care, you'll have done a good thing.

WE'VE MOVED

2006-03-25T15:00:00.000-08:00

Across the Great Divide has moved. Visit our new location now at http://greatdivide.typepad.com.

Remember to re-bookmark the new site, http://greatdivide.typepad.com/.
If you subscribe via an aggregator such as Bloglines, resubscribe with my new feed.
If you want new posts emailed, you can subscribe via Feedblitz. See the SUBSCRIBE box on the new home page. You'll receive one email of any posts for the day.
If you're away from your bookmarks, just remember www.greatdiv.com. It will redirect you to the new location.

Archives will remain here until I can resolve problems with this site.

More on Minvolved

2006-03-24T09:00:00.000-08:00

Wege has an update on the Minvolved demise.

Say It Ain't So, Sponge!

2006-03-24T06:12:00.000-08:00

Whenever I checked my Bloglines feeds, Minvolved was the first place I looked. This morning, I may have clicked in for the last time:

We have always done blogging as a hobby. Each morning, we get up at 5:00, blog until the kids get up and then call it a day on the internets. We have always been pretty aware of the fact that we’re a made-up sponge so we try not to take ourselves too seriously.

That being said, there have always been one or two lines in the sand that, if crossed, would cause us to quit blogging. One of them has just been crossed. We won’t go into detail, but when the sponge family gets brought into the mix by an email or two, we’re done. We have plenty of other ways to get our kicks out and this is no longer one of them.

There were a lot of reasons Minvolved was a worthy blog, and more reasons to expect it to get even better. Creator Sponge brought an interesting mix of perspectives to his progressive political views: Veteran, family man, Okie immigrant, music and poster art lover, comedian and watchdog. He was also broadly read, prolific and generous, capable of a pithy shot one time and well-documented extended critique the next.

Now, we see his principles and discipline at play in the decision to suspend what he calls a hobby, but what looked to this reader more like a calling.

Minvolved had recently sharpened its focus to Minnesota and launched a new publishing platform and format. It had reined in some of Sponge's previous acerbity without losing its backbone. It was more than another progressive voice, it was becoming a community resource.

His decision is totally his business and we should leave it be, but what happens to Minvolved concerns all of us. If we just wave good-bye, we'll have lost more than a blog.

The Grenade in the Tent

2006-03-23T14:36:00.000-08:00

Here's a classic cinematic moment: An armed grenade rolls into the tent and a ragtag bunch of antagonists momentarily freezes as they simultaneously realize it's too late to toss it back.

Who will cover it and sacrifice himself? The young lieutenant with the family back home? The alcoholic corporal? The clown and general f*ck-up? The quiet black private? The hardened sergeant who's due to ship out in a week? You can play the variations yourself.

Tuesday at the state capitol, a grenade rolled into House Tax Committee tent, and if legislators don't come to their senses about "gay marriage," everything is going to get blown to hell.

The Heritage Amendment, or so-called 3/16ths bill, started as a movement to dedicate a portion of the state sales tax to environmental and wildlife preservation. It has since has added arts and culture to the mix — and, importantly, asks the monies be drawn from new revenue, aka, a tax increase.

Enter the grenade in the form of the "Marriage Amendment." Checks & Balances (free subscription required) has the story, and the explanation of what occurred gets a bit wonky:

It appears Rep. Ron Erhardt (R-41A, Edina), the author of the Motor Vehicle Excise Tax amendment, attempted to insert a poison pill into the bill when he moved to include the Gay Marriage Amendment in the bill. Even though he did not vote for the Gay marriage Amendment he has created a major situation for the Republicans. If the 3/16th bill, with the Gay Marriage Amendment tacked onto it, makes its way to the floor, Republicans will be forced to vote for a tax increase in order to get another vote on Gay Marriage. If anyone tried to remove Gay Marriage from the 3/16th bill it will again force a vote on Gay Marriage. And if the bill dies of its own weight then this will mean Republicans decided that Gay Marriage was more important then concerns of the Hook and Bullet community.

It is true the social conservatives vote in large numbers, but so do the hunters and fishermen and women and the later is larger constituency group. Usually Republicans try to satisfy both rather than alienate one over the other.

It looks to me like anyone who wants to gum up legislation they don't like can roll that old grenade on the table and leave only two choices: Run or be blown to bits.

The War on Easter

2006-03-23T04:59:00.000-08:00

The St. Paul City Council has taken down an Easter display in its offices, allowing the War on Christmas crowd a fresh complaint to work over until Thanksgiving.

Heck, even Eminem celebrates Easter.

Two-Hearted

2006-03-22T21:19:00.000-08:00

Funny that I should start Drinking Liberally after finally starting to drink conservatively. And after two weeks and two candidates, maybe it's significant that my beverage of choice is Two Hearted Ale.

Tonight was Amy Klobuchar and last week was Ford Bell, subjecting themselves to a nouveau Nordeast bar and a pack 'o libruls, plus one conservative blogger. (Boy, am I glad I'm not still trying to wear my too-tight blue oxford dress shirts to bars.)

Both candidates charmingly played the kinder card. Bell came after a child's concert. Klobuchar stayed late, but exercised the daughter-reading-Sense and Sensibility-together escape clause.

Either would be a distinct improvement over Mark (I'm 3% Independent of the President) Kennedy.

Bell seemed a bit gawky when he arrived, the teetotaler at the orgy. But he requested a Bell's Best Brown off the chalk board, and when it came time to discuss issues, he changed personas — no longer the ill-at-ease socializer, but a man with fire in his heart and facts at his disposal. A man who, like Mark Dayton, could have coasted through life, but chose to give something back. I'm not entirely sure what drove Ford Bell to run for Senator, but it was not a career move.

Amy Klobuchar's fire is evident from the start. She is practiced at seeming comfortable, and I don't mean that in a bad way. She acknowledged people and identified bloggers like Norwegianity's Wege and Centrisity's Flash and Power Liberal's Smarty as easily as if they'd been Torii and KG and Dante. (And believe me, all these guys are much harder to pick out of a crowd.) This was not that phony pointing to people in the crowd and winking crap that politicians do. Maybe Bush couldn't pick Abramoff out of a line up, but I sincerely believe Klobuchar has book marked Power Liberal.

So what does it all mean? Am I gonna analyze personalities or issues here?

Well, we were in a bar, folks, and it was loud. We were drinking beer. (Klobuchar made a valiant stab at downing her Miller Lite. The rest of us had no such trouble.)

I asked Bell about correcting income disparities in America, and he responded with invest in alternative energy as if it were the Apollo program. I asked Klobuchar if she could put her name on one bill next year what would it be, and she said, reform health care and make sure kids are covered. Plus, she slipped in a second priority — a 20/20% national standard for ethanol content in gasoline/energy from renewables.

Let's not kid ourselves. Freshman Senators aren't going to be transforming much of anything. All we want now is for the river to change direction, and I would get in boat with either of these two.

Michele and Katherine, Please Listen

2006-03-22T14:28:00.000-08:00

It's a rerun, but then so is the attempt to get a marriage amendment on the state ballot. MPR interviewed three church-going heterosexual couples and three same-sex couples from Duluth. It's worth a listen.

Report in Black and White

2006-03-21T21:52:00.000-08:00

On the morning of July 22nd, Jean Charles de Menezes left his flat to repair a broken fire alarm. The electrician never made it to his job. He was stopped by men who thought they were doing theirs.

de Menezes holds tenaciously to my consciousness. His death — of all last year's pointless deaths both farther and nearer to me — has inspired two book works. The vaporizing heads temporarily added to this blog's banner started as his. And I've assembled other images for a mock police report on the incident I've yet to write.

Soon after he died on the floor of that train, I saw the world divided anew: Those who believe we are all Brazilian electricians, and those who find the very notion insulting and ridiculous.
The previous day's shocking bombings had put all London on high alert, but de Menezes headed off to work as normal on public transit. Everything that happened afterward unfolded from a sad compounding of coincidences. He lived in the same block of flats as one suspect in the bombings. The policeman watching his building stepped away to take a leak just before de Menezes left, making identification uncertain. His route to the underground station, via connecting bus, may have heightened suspicions and anxiety, and forced surveillance to be handed off to different teams, further confusing communications.

Although life for de Menezes was proceeding as normal, events sped up for those following him. Those who thought he may be on his way to another attack.

As he moved toward the station, he was transformed from a man going to work to a terrorist, and though later accounts tried to cast suspicion on his actions, this transformation actually occurred in the minds of witnesses and the people pursuing him.

You can read some of the concurrent conjecture here and here, as people post-dated recollections to make them fit a slowed-down reality.

In any crisis, real or perceived, we are programmed to see the world's greys in black and white. We can't change this wiring, and why should we? Survival demands it.

Yet if we see the world this way all the time, we are reacting, not learning. We are quick sorting people and things, preparing to fight or flee, neither of which allows community to take shape.

Perhaps de Menezes was doomed the moment the phone rang in his building where immigrants lived, when he walked unknowing into a world of black and white. Perhaps his ghost stays with me, to remind me to speak up for the greys. Because otherwise, someday, somewhere, each of us will walk a street where we are the Belgian electrician.

The Disappeared

2006-03-20T19:26:00.000-08:00

The official report on the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician mistaken as a terror bombing suspect, was first due at the end of 2005. Turns out a report was due, but not to the public. The Independent Police Complaints Commission completed its inquiry as scheduled on 2/24/06, but isn't talking because there could be legal action against some of the police officers. Yet another inquiry into a complaint from de Menezes' family should be complete by the end of April.

As you may remember, a great deal of conjecture and misinformation accompanied the attack. If you don't remember, here are posts immediately following the event (how not to get shot, then staying cool and seeing no evil).

Yet these non-public reports from Britain represent an avalanche of information compared to what we've heard about the death of Rigoberto Alpizar.

Who?

You remember, the Costa Rica-born American citizen who was shot at Miami International Airport by federal air marshals. He had flown from Quito, Ecuador, and was on his way to Orlando before he ran off the plane, shouting. He made it as far as the jetway.

This appears to be the first time a federal air marshal aboard a plane has fired a weapon, and an innocent American was killed. The man was apparently bipolar and distressed, but had no bomb. There were conflicting witness accounts about whether he made any claim to have a bomb, but the media quickly accepted the official version: He was innocent; he claimed to have bomb; let that be a lesson to everybody.

You can look in vain for any news accounts since Alpizar was buried back in December. It's eerie. It's not even a cover up. He just disappeared.

American Theocracy

2006-03-20T14:01:00.000-08:00

In his new book, American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips continues his critique of the Bush administration's policies. I haven't read it yet, but here's a flavor from Alan Brinkley's review:

[Phillips] identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.

What else could a house full of oilmen and friends of oilmen be expected to do?

The United States has embraced a kind of "petro-imperialism," Phillips writes, "the key aspect of which is the U.S. military's transformation into a global oil-protection force," and which "puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs."

Considering a Switch

2006-03-20T09:38:00.000-08:00

After a week of sporadic service from Blogger, I've set up a trial blog account with TypePad. I'm still maintaining this Blogger account, and will be cross-posting at TypePad under the same name, but a new URL. If I decide to switch over permanently, there'll be a redirect set up at here Blogger, and you can always find me at www.greatdiv.com.

UPDATE: www.greatdiv.com works as a redirect. But it goes haywire if I try to embed a link here. One more reason to move, I think. Thanks, Wege.

Archive Mischief

2006-03-18T15:47:00.000-08:00

Blogger problems late in the week have wreaked havoc with my recent archives, so you may get blank pages if you click on some recent posts. I'm trying to fix it.

Are Liberty and Equality Parting Ways?

2006-03-17T10:37:00.000-08:00

Joel Rogers gave a presentation this week arguing that despite globalization, most of the economy is still locally based, and states should take the lead in creating a more progressive economic future. But first, candidates and thinkers must develop a clear, concise description of what a progressive economic program would look like.

Rogers is founder and head of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS), a UW-Madison professor of law, political science and sociology, and is listed as a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). (His bed-hair photo on the COWS site makes him look like a 30-something web consultant, but in person he looks more like he could play the President on 24.) He received a 1995 MacArthur Fellowship for his activism and scholarly work in the area of labor, the American workplace and democracy, which makes him a “genius” in some minds.

His wide-ranging talk was both dense and accessible. I’ll share my notes and reflection here and in subsequent posts…

Contrary to Thomas Friedman’s flat world vision, “the economy is not sliding on its way to Bangladore. Geography matters.” Most of the economy is organized in space, and so is politics. Therefore state-level action focused on the economy can still have an impact, through measures that focus on growing value, reducing waste and “grounding capital,” i.e., encouraging investment in infrastructure and new businesses that address local needs.

Rogers believes the left has drifted from politics and economics to issues advocacy; to prevail, they must return to providing “deep, ongoing benefit to vast numbers of the working class,” which is a core tenet of progressivism. For now, there’s no clear strategy or consistent set of ideas being advanced.

In contrast, the right has a clear objective — “end all social constraints on capital” — that calls for deregulating business, starving government, crushing unions and redistributing wealth upward. The basic message: “You’re on our own (YOYO!), and anybody who tells you different is a liar!” And, it has built the infrastructure to advance its agenda politically.

For many Americans, each advance increases their material insecurity, and reduces the social capacity to relieve it. Today, 45 million people — far more than on welfare — in the active labor force are in dead-end jobs, with little or no healthcare insurance or retirement plans. And no one, including progressive candidates, is effectively talking about this.

They get distracted by the war in Iraq and gayabortion, or get caught in the health care muddle. Progressives focus too much on redistribution of wealth through taxes — which turns off the business world — when talking out growing an economy that benefits everyone could lead to a productive discussion. Nor have we been effective in defining democratic government and its worth to the economy. Unless we spell it out, attempts at reforms will be met with “Don’t touch my money, because I don’t believe government can help solve the real problems I see.”

We are at an exceptional moment, Rogers said, in the evolution of progressive politics and are “transitioning out of the unification of liberty and equality” that took hold in the last century. As an illustration, he showed the nation’s productivity index, which has grown steadily since post-WWII. Until the mid-70s, the median wage and median family income closely tracked this rise.

U.S. Productivity Index vs. Median Wages and Income

But since then, wages and income have flattened. And where has the wealth produced by these gains gone? To the upper 10%, even more to the upper 1%, still more to the upper 0.1% and so on. And where's the argument to support this redistribution? That investment by the wealthy results in more jobs?

In fact, this chart portrays a "power curve of inequality" leading to the end of shared prosperity in America, where more and more Americans are mired in sub-minimum-wage jobs. If the minimum wage had continued to track productivity growth, it would be $18.50.

This is an unsustainable path. Rogers said that at present rates of deficit spending, our foreign debt will equal 50% of the GDP by 2008. As if to underscore the point, the next day, Congress raised the debt ceiling again.

Candidates Mark Ritchie and Earl Netwal were in the audience, as well as DFL eminence Don Fraser. Rogers was brought to town by Growth and Justice, and his presentation slides are available there.

More later.

New Feature

2006-03-17T10:01:00.000-08:00

Blogger has been down, so I took the opportunity to add a few features. If you want notification of new posts, you can now subscribe to receive an email with a top-line summary of the day's content (see the sidebar at right).

Renewable Nukes?

2006-03-16T18:49:00.000-08:00

The first time, I thought it was a misstatement, but there he went again at a staged meeting with seniors in Silver Springs, MD: Talking about nuclear power as if it's the new wind power.

Q: I'm one of the scientists who believes that — and many of us do — the greenhouse gases have been caused by us, and that it's about time that the United States took serious actions on the prevention of further greenhouse gases.

THE PRESIDENT: I exactly agree with you, sir, and that's exactly what we're doing. (Applause.) I think you're right. I thought the prescription to the Kyoto plan was the wrong way to go. On the other hand, I do know we can use technologies to achieve exactly that objective.

For example, second-generation nuclear power. It's a renewable resource. It doesn't emit, as you know, greenhouse gases. It's one of the reasons why I work with India and trying to help China, as well, to be able to develop a civilian nuclear power industry without — with guarantees against proliferation, in order to protect the environment.

A bit tangled, but unmistakable. Nuclear power is a renewable resource.

I thought I'd better see what others were saying. Near the top of the google pile was this at something called 21st Century Science:

The spent fuel produced by a single 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant over its 40-year lifetime, is equal to the energy in 130 million barrels of oil, or 37 million tons of coal, plus strategic metals and other valuable isotopes that could be retrieved from the high-level waste.
...
Technologically speaking, we can safely store nuclear waste in a repository like that of Yucca Mountain. But why should we spend billions of dollars to bury what is actually billions of dollars’ worth of nuclear fuel, which could be supplying electricity in the years to come?

The publication was very skimpy on sponsor information, but I noticed Lyndon Larouche's name in a number of places. Mother Jones gives a rundown on the roots of Laroucheian connections to pseudoenvironmentalism.

So is the president on a quiet kick to start reprocessing nuclear fuels? Yep. It turns out his budget proposal has funding to restart research stopped back in the Carter days. How respectable is the science and who's behind this?

I don't automatically reject the notion of nuclear energy, or of reprocessing "spent" fuel as a partial solution to future energy shortages. But given all that's going on with nukes for obtaining electrical and global power these days, the national discussion should be a lot more coherent and in the open than it's been so far.

Please, Save Me

2006-03-16T17:47:00.000-08:00

I played cowboys and football, shot a gun and wrestled, watched the 3 Stooges and Vincent Price movies, but have managed to live a nonviolent life.

I came of age during the summer of love, yet never have had an STD.

I played rock & roll and hung with all kinds of hippies and disreputable characters, yet never snorted coke, dropped acid or stuck a needle in my vein.

I performed in theater, studied modern dance, sang falsetto and have numerous gay and lesbian friends, yet have never had a homosexual encounter.

I worked in the military industrial complex for a decade, yet never accepted war as the solution to problems.

I owned a capitalist enterprise in the era between "Greed is Good" and the Enron meltdown, yet didn't chase dotcom money, cheat the government or exploit my employees.

But now I am petrified that my 31-year marriage is doomed. I am being crushed by societal pressures that nothing, not even deep religious faith, can withstand. I cannot hope to live up to moral standards without Constitutional protection.

Please, please, save me and others like me. The police won't do it. The courts won't do it. The churches are powerless, and God is... well, God is doing whatever it is he does. Only the Constitution can save me from polygamy.

An amendment is my last and only hope!

Caucus Reflections

2006-03-16T06:07:00.000-08:00

Jan in SanFran, who makes her living as an organizer, reports on her visit to a DFL precinct caucus in St. Paul:

So, what's an outsider to make of the DFL caucus I saw? My DFL friends are pretty cynical about the process. They see a bunch of bleeding heart liberals (like themselves) who vote for feel good resolutions and can't even fill up a slate of delegates to carry their positions forward to the next level.

I came away rather more impressed. I organize in elections. I am impressed by any party system that can attract 85 people from a precinct to a meeting on a rainy March evening, not to cheer candidates, but to express their political hopes and ensure they have some representation at more influential levels of the endorsement process. There are not many corners of U.S. democracy where you get that kind of participation at the grassroots. Sure, these were the experienced and the comfortable, but they do show up and nearly all of them do some work in electoral battles in a highly contested state. That's terrific.

My precinct had fewer show, with less fire than she describes, but the lesson is the same, and we need to take it to heart: Democracy is not for those who whine or opine. It's for those who show up, especially at the local level.

Yesterday, I heard a speaker (more later) describe the critical detour taken by progressive activists a generation ago. The left moved away from basic politics and economics to focus on issue advocacy — the environment, equal rights, hemp legalization, etc. The right set about building a political infrastructure focused on winning elections. And here we are today, cynical, while the true believers march on the state houses with their torches blazing.

Reading Oldspeak

2006-03-15T04:27:00.001-08:00

Political language - - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
- George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

With all that is written in the world, I rarely read something again. But memory fades, some words bear repeating, and others assume fresh meaning with time.

This essay may send me back to reread all four volumes of Orwell's journalism. Find it here.

Gaining God's Favor

2006-03-14T06:52:00.000-08:00

When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward gaining God's favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look at myself in the mirror. A moral deed is by definition its own reward. David Hume, a believer, made this point in a very poignant way, when he wrote that the only way to show true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's existence.
– From Defenders of the Faith, Slavoj Zizek, NY Times

Coda for Crisis Pictures?

2006-03-13T20:23:00.000-08:00

Last year, I tried to rouse support for Crisis Pictures when it was struggling. Alerted more widely read blogs. Sent some money. Some of you did, too.

Crisis Pictures looked substantial, but it was just one guy, giving the world his all.

Today I went looking for some pictures from Iraq. I found this, posted just a week ago:

Crisis Pictures started by accident in November of 2004.
It was during the election. By the time the results rolled in, I was sick of "sides", sick of Fox News and Air America. Sick of red and blue.
When I found that the chaos in Fallujah was so much worse than the tough guy with the cigarette on the cover of Time, I was sickened, truly. I posted the pictures on a blogspot blog, and left a note to the effect of "This is What You're Paying For".
I posted a bunch of pictures from Fallujah on a blog. That's it. I didn't expect a few million people to show up. I didn't seek the attention for myself, or for anything. It was outrage, a yelp of shock and outrage at a world that could produce such a horror.

...[snip]...

I had no idea what I was getting into. I had never done any programming or design in my life, and I tried, really, tried to rise to the occasion. I made the site you see now, and I have spent the last six months programming this elaborate content manager to manage thousands of pictures to tell stories in a way that goes beyond "another bad day in the third world."
I learned PHP, MySQL, XML, XSLT, Javascript. I learned about IPTC and XMP and EXIF. I incorporated a 501c3 nonprofit.
I tried, I swear, I really tried.
I have to be honest now, I don't think I can do this anymore without some significant help. No one asked me to do this, but I still truly believe it can do something important. I hate to let it die, but it's at the point where it's Crisis Pictures or me. I am out of money and out of energy.
Please understand, I really did my best. If I can find a way to keep going, I will. Otherwise, I'm sorry. Truly.

Trevor Davis
trevorhughdavis@gmail.com

Trevor, you rose. Be proud.

Pharmacy Counter Compromise

2006-03-13T19:19:00.000-08:00

I have written at length on the issue of pharmacists taking a principled stand against dispensing prescriptions that go against their personal beliefs, so go here for the in-depth discussion.

But now that Minnesota is considering compromise legislation that would allow such pharmacists to keep practicing and theoretically not limit consumers' access to full pharmacy services, I feel bound to reprise the central point. I am all for courageous expressions of conscience, but if we are to exempt them from fulfilling their professional responsibilities, who’s next?

Doctors who deny treatment to patients using illicit drugs?

Police who let murderers go because they object to the death penalty?

Engineers at defense companies who don’t want to make bombs?

Bankers who will only write interest-free loans?

NFL quarterbacks who won’t work on the Sabbath?

Diplomats who decline to dissemble?

Marines who insist on embracing their inner Quaker?

Why legislate special protection for any such acts of conscience?

Those pharmacists who don’t want to perform a profession’s normal duties already have options: Quit in protest, take a job behind the cosmetics counter, or not enter the field in the first place. If a compromise gives them one more choice, let's make sure not to limit the patient's, which could happen in a one-pharmacy town served by a refusenik pharmacist.

Let protestors make their stand, but don't make others pay the consequences.

Life of the Mother: Framed into a Corner

2006-03-12T19:33:00.001-08:00

This is a red-letter day for the pre-born children and their mothers.
- Troy Newman, Operation Rescue

The other night, it finally hit me. Exceptions to preserve the health of the mother. To save the life of the mother. Pre-born children and their mothers.

A good frame is one you don't even notice. It just sneaks right up and makes you wet between the ears, no questions asked.

What is a Mother? How does a woman become one?

A mother is a woman who has given birth to a child. A female parent in the animal kingdom. Earth Mother. Mother of all battles. To mother.

In the Roman Catholic Church, a mother superior is a woman who holds a position of nurturing authority similar to a mother's. Her title derives not from conception or even giving birth, but from the mother-like role she plays in the lives of others.

Birth mother is a term used to distinguish between a female who gave birth and the woman who is regarded as the real mother, the one who raised the child.

But to Troy Newman and his cohorts, a woman achieves motherhood the moment she conceives, and the united ovum and sperm becomes a child. In an instant, she loses her independent personhood, and all rights of individual determination pass to the cells in her womb. Unlike a real mother.

By adopting language such as "health of the mother," we buy into the pro-life frame, even when we think we are making a pro-choice exception. In effect, the fetal formation is anointed a child the moment we call the pregnant woman a mother. And the life of child should be sacred.

From now on, if I'm discussing those compromises in restrictive legislation, I'll be careful to say, "life of the woman."

Abortion Crimes: Death Penalty or Probation?

2006-03-11T19:30:00.000-08:00

What should the punishment for an illegal abortion be?

Pro-lifers haven't given it much thought, at least at this demonstration. (Via Cup O' Joe)

Meanwhile, Quiddity asks whether Native American tribal lands could choose to offer abortion services alongside casino gambling - - and be exempt from state laws prohibiting abortion. According to one commenter: Maybe. But probably not in South Dakota. (Via Sideshow)

And finally, from my wife, the should-be-commentator-except-she-has-better-things-to-do - - on this article praising Target Corporation for loaning its state-of-the-art forensics lab to help police solve tough crimes:

The lab, which opened two years ago at corporate headquarters in downtown Minneapolis, has already helped more than 125 police departments nationwide solve murders, arsons, bank robberies and other violent crimes.

"They have some impressive equipment in there," said local FBI spokesman Paul McCabe, whose agency has turned to Target for help. "Many small departments do not have labs like theirs."

Target built the state-of-the-art lab to handle security at the company's 1,400-plus stores. Its in-house caseload has grown so much that it opened a second lab in Las Vegas late last year.

Good for corporate citizen Target. But shame on a society that first devotes its best technology to protecting property, not lives.

So-Chi's Choice

2006-03-10T19:37:00.000-08:00

My wife noticed this sweet little item about an article in Foreign Policy this morning. The summary is the Strib's:

Sexual frustration predicted for Asian men
...The problem [a shortage of Asian men] began 20 years ago, when ultrasound technology gave Asian women a cheap way to determine the sex of their unborn babies, writes Martin Walker, editor of United Press International. In China and other Asian nations, millions of women chose to abort female fetuses so they could instead give birth to boys.

Now we know da bitches always be wreckin' da cars, but to lay this "choice" on women in China seems quite a stretch, given that its culture places a higher value on males, and Chinese policy mandates only one child per couple.

Next, are we going to hear that women were behind the changes in the abortion laws refusing to make an exception for rape, incest and health of the mother? Surely men have nothing to with it.

First Day of the Lamb

2006-03-10T13:04:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was one of those first lamb days. When warm winter weather blows in and doesn't feel like a mistake. When it's possible to forget that March is our snowiest month. When you can't help but hope.

Yesterday afternoon some vaguely defined errands, plus guilt about not getting on the bike, got me out the door. Then the 50-degree day steered me west toward Medicine Lake instead of east toward the office.

Instead of east toward murder.

Melvin D. Paul Jr. survived the storm and resulting flood, two days at the crowded Superdome and a bus trip to the Twin Cities with three of his children in tow. But the New Orleans native was shot to death Thursday afternoon while riding in a car that later crashed in north Minneapolis.
- "Shooting of Katrina survivor in Minneapolis not random crime, police say," StarTribune

Paul was shot at 16th and Emerson, a crossroads on my way into the city, at 2:20 p.m., about the time I would have passed by had the day been cooler or my errand more urgent.

It's the third murder over the past year within a block of my regular route. I rode there today. I am not afraid.

We share this world, but it is not the same place for all of us, even on a beautiful day like yesterday.

On Toleration

2006-03-09T07:03:00.000-08:00

The crucial thing is not tolerance but toleration. Tolerance is a mental attitude but toleration is a set of arrangements. I think that the attitudes matter less and will come in time if you get the politics right -– if you find the right regime of toleration.

This reminds me of a Puritan sermon (from the 1630s or '40s) against divorce. It said simply: if you hold the estranged couple together long enough, something will happen that makes the marriage possible. I don’t believe that about marriage, but it may be true for the less intimate coexistence of groups. If you force Greeks and Turks to live together for 200 years, there is going to be commerce and friendship and even intermarriage across the borders -– if the political regime is successful and imposes peace.

My stress is not on mutual respect but on peaceful coexistence. Start there. In today’s world, it would be a huge gain.
— Michael Walzer, interview in UNESCO Courier

I just finished Michael Walzer's book, On Toleration, which presents a framework for understanding how different groups coexist (or not) under different types of political regimes.

It was published in 1997. I bought it more than a year ago based on the title, but the moment to read it never seemed right. Now, it is, with a sectarian meltdown looming in Iraq, U.S. fundamentalists waging a counter-attack in "the War on Christians", and state battles shaping up over same-sex unions and abortion.

Walzer argues that toleration is a foundation of the liberal thought that made the American republic possible.

I'll dig into this in subsequent posts.

Remorse, Congressional Style

2006-03-07T22:38:00.000-08:00

Over at Cafe Hayek Russell Roberts writes about Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham's new-found sense of remorse.

This is one conservative-leaning blog I can read without fuming. Written (and read) by economists, it'll take informed but unexpected tangents on the day's news and events. Why get mad when you can get smart?

Tomorrow is Not Promised to Any of Us

2006-03-07T04:00:00.000-08:00

Most tributes to Kirby Puckett will skip from Chicago's projects and a Ford assembly line directly to his sudden, transformational appearance with the Minnesota Twins. But some fans know he played ball at Triton (Ill.) College, and in my hometown more than a few remember his earlier heroics.

At the Junior College World Series, Puckett hit a record .688 for the 1982 tournament. That's a slow-pitch softball average, not baseball, and the locals figured they might see more of this kid with the fireplug body. No one imagined he'd be starring for the Twins just two years later.

I like to think my dad was one of those fans who enjoyed Puck's performance. He must've been in the stadium for those games, because one of his great labors of love was helping establish a permanent home for the JUCO baseball tourney, qualifying Grand Junction, Colorado, as a sort of warm Omaha. (Omaha is the site of the College Baseball World Series.)

But he never saw the rest. The spring Puckett broke through in the majors, my father died. He was the same age I turned just last week.

Kirby Puckett gave fans a lot of joy, but maybe nothing greater than his farewell to baseball when glaucoma took his sight and his career.

"Tomorrow is not promised to any of us," he said.

So enjoy the game today.

Unintended 9/11 Fallout

2006-03-06T17:52:00.000-08:00

America hasn't caught many terrorists we can actually tie to 9/11 — at least as far as we can see in the U.S. courts. But in recent months, the Feds have begun to round up and indict suspects in a string of fires dating back to the late 1990's, the most famous of which was the $12-million firebombing of a resort at Vail Montain.

It may be that 9/11 helped investigators crack these cases.

One agent involved in eco-terror cases recently told me some of the fringe conspirators looked at their activities differently after 9/11. Before, they saw their actions as principled resistance, and their model The Monkey Wrench Gang. After, the lines had shifted, and their new counterparts were the 9/11 hijackers.

Some, at least, didn't want to be on that team. They began to distance themselves from their old affiliations and eventually became ready to talk.

It's possible to argue that "eco-terrorism" isn't really terrorism because it doesn't target people. In fact, the firebombers took pains to avoid causing human casualties. But for at least some participants, the comparison to the WTC attackers as too close for conscience.

Flat and Flatter

2006-03-02T20:24:00.000-08:00

The Dubai Ports World deal is waking Americans up to a painful reality: So-called "conservatives" and "flat world" globalists have bankrupted our nation for their own bag of silver, and in the process are selling off America.

At Common Dreams, Thom Hartmann takes off on When Americans No Longer Own America. He thinks Americans are awakening, but I wonder whether the issue will get anywhere near this year's campaign. Aren't we supposed to be in love with a flat world?

He cites research by Economy in Crisis that draws on US Government statistics indicating the following percentages of foreign ownership of American industry:

· Sound recording industries - 97%
· Commodity contracts dealing and brokerage - 79%
· Motion picture and sound recording industries - 75%
· Metal ore mining - 65%
· Motion picture and video industries - 64%
· Wineries and distilleries - 64%
· Database, directory, and other publishers - 63%
· Book publishers - 63%
· Cement, concrete, lime, and gypsum product - 62%
· Engine, turbine and power transmission equipment - 57%
· Rubber product - 53%
· Nonmetallic mineral product manufacturing - 53%
· Plastics and rubber products manufacturing - 52%
· Plastics product - 51%
· Other insurance related activities - 51%
· Boiler, tank, and shipping container - 50%

And those are just the foreign-majority-owned industries.

Should we be worried? I'm not sure. But we should be talking about it.

(via sideshow.)

It Can't Happen Here 2

2006-03-02T08:23:00.000-08:00

Across more than a dozen years, I can still hear that early warning: Fundamentalist Christians are organizing to win low-profile local elections. But their ultimate goal is to build a political power base from which to transform society in their image.

And I remember my reaction: Okay, they might pick up a few school board seats or even win a majority on some small town council. But power at the state level in prosperous, progressive Minnesota? Or a national majority based on the Bible, patriotism and intolerance? Come on, the country was getting ready to throw out Bush 1.

If you've found your way here, you don't need a litany of how things have changed for the worse. If you care about free speech, about the working poor, about public education, about the environment, about how your kids will pay off our debts, about rights to privacy and your gay and lesbian and immigrant friends, it's not enough to read warnings and then stare out the window and say: Naaahh.

That's what I did when I heard the first warning. The drums are so much louder today.

No way I'm looking back in shame again.

Jobs Growth Not What It Seems

2006-03-02T05:12:00.001-08:00

Mike Mulcahy, who covers the state capitol for Minnesota Public Radio, has this to say about the governor's agenda for this legislative session (and election cycle) -- first quoting from the state revenue forecast:

"... in the last two years, employment growth in Minnesota has fallen further behind the national averages. During the second half of 2005 Minnesota payroll employment grew at an annual rate of just 0.4 percent. U.S. payroll employment, even with the disruptions from the hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, grew nearly twice as fast."

So how concerned is the current governor about this? Not very. I asked him about it on Midday yesterday and he said basically the job growth lag is not a big deal for a number of reasons. First, he said there's not enough data to indicate a trend. Secondly, he said, the defense industry is leading the national economy, and Minnesota doesn't have many defense companies. And he said the numbers are lower because he's cut government jobs, and because the state's population is aging and the numbers reflect people leaving the workforce.

Mulcahy implies that jobs growth is an important measure of the economy, and Pawlenty says slower growth is not a big deal, but then gives some lame explanations why.

Joel Kramer of Growth & Justice will tell you that jobs growth comparison doesn't provide a good barometer of economic well being -- especially for Minnesota. Here's why:

1. Minnesota will never outstrip jobs growth in the Sunbelt, because that's where population is growing fastest. The problem isn't Minnesota's aging population (which Sunbelt states are getting younger?) or lack of defense jobs. It's the shortage of 70 degree days between November and April.

2. If jobs are growing at a higher rate, the growth is typically accompanied by an influx of people, which creates a greater demand for government services, from schools and roads to public health and safety. (See also: controversy over immigration.) That means government must spend more to provide the same level of services.

3. But new jobs are generated disproportionately at the lower end of the pay scale -- in retail services, small businesses and cleaning up after hurricanes, for example. The lower income earned by these workers (and by extension, their ability to pay taxes) means the state collects less per capita to provide services.

Kramer argues that a better measure is growth in average personal income, because it indicates an improving standard of living plus an increased capacity to invest in the community. Without necessarily raising taxes or fees.

You'd think the current governor would be all over that one.

People, Get Ready

2006-03-01T22:00:00.000-08:00

This also via minvolved. (His morning read is becoming my morning read, since he gets up first.) He notes the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library has added some new issues to its resource section on topics of interest to Minnesota legislators.

Not that new topics necessarily indicate where the legislature will be spending its time in an election year, but...

The Spyware Party Turns Goes Domestic

2006-03-01T20:40:00.000-08:00

Polinaut, MPR's blog, reports on a Minnesota Republican Party stunt that manages to stir support for an anti-gay union amendment and violate the privacy of the very people they expect to support their initiative. (Via minvolved)

On Monday, the Minnesota Republican Party announced that it will send out CD videos on Friday to inform voters about the importance of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. It turns out the CD is also being used to add to the GOP voter database. Officials with the Republican Party say certain voter data is being collected by the party. Internet privacy experts say they're concerned that the party isn't telling the viewer that it's collecting the data and worry where the information will end up.

Don't just stop here. Read the associated links on the page, including this one. And for more on the fallout.

Watch for continuing coverage on this one.

No, You're Not Lost

2006-02-27T18:47:00.000-08:00

This look may be temporary. Or maybe not. I got tired of seeing so many blogger templates that looked just like mine, so figured out how to change my header.

Find Your Caucus

2006-02-27T14:37:00.000-08:00

Minnesota DFL caucuses are Tuesday, March 7th, starting at 7pm.

Find yours.

Fun With Science

2006-02-27T11:39:00.000-08:00

My last science fair exhibit was a bit of a botch that won me a personal audience with the middle school principal.

I mocked up a still, wrote something about prohibition, and finished it off with a barrel of booze represented by a baby food jar full of Schlitz. (For you young folks, that's an old brand of beer. My research had not taken me quite so far as to learn that beer was the product of fermentation, not distillation.) Now that I think about it, mine was actually more of a social science fair project.

So what should we call the science fair for the home schooled sponsored by the Twin Cities Creation Science Association? The TCCSA proclaims: "Unlike Many Secular Educators We Teach The Scientific Method!"

P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula visited this year's fair and provides a great report. For example, are a few suggested research topics:

12. Trilobites prove Noah's flood because they are curled up or not?
58. Why did God create the moon to control the tides?
72. What is God made of?
92. Why do some animals lay eggs and others bare [sic] babies alive? Why did God do it this way?
97. Why did God make birds to fly?
05.What are aliens and are there really any in our world? see Lamentations 5:2, Eph 2:12, Heb 11:34.

(via after school snack)

Why Dubai Ports Deal Should Be Reviewed

2006-02-25T16:26:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post, I noted why the Dubai Ports management contract might be in the U.S. interest. Here's a reason why we might look askance at it: Vox Verax: U.A.E. - Osama Bin Laden Connection.

The problem with dealing with other nations' leaders is precisely this: We are picking one form of sleaze over the other. We're not happy with someone the country elected. Imagine what the entrenched royal families are like...

Before the Golden Mosque

2006-02-24T07:54:00.000-08:00

Oh, I know this will sound to Ann Coulter that I want to restore Saddam Hussein to power, but Ann doesn't read ATGD.

After generations of U.S. foreign policy that played Pick Your Despot, some bright boys decided we could just remove one we didn't like and Give Iraqis Freedom. Now the Sunnis and Shiites are showing us that our Red State/Blue State politics is just pattycake. And exporting democracy to a tribal society that measures grievances in centuries is not a task, it turns out, for a C student who got his first real job just over a decade ago.

Instead of leaving Saddam to murder Kurds and Shiites, we eliminated the middle man. With an assist from al-Qaeda and rigid sectarianism, there's now equal-opportunity madness. Saddam was a bad critter, but al-Qaeda set up shop in Afghanistan, not Iraq, and all the mosques were still standing.

Trying to fix something you've wrecked is an admirable trait, but this calls for the mother of all insurance adjusters to tell us whether this one is totaled.

What's happening in Iraq today is profoundly sad, and it didn't start with the Golden Mosque.

Oh, Now I Get It!

2006-02-24T06:36:00.000-08:00

Maybe there's a very simple and reasonable explanation for why the Bush administration is hot to approve the Dubai World Ports deal — beyond the fact that the company can do the job. But of course, obscuring the real reasons for doing something is so ingrained, they just can't tell us.

Jane at Firedoglake cites digby noting Sen. John Warner's comment that the Dubai ports deal is about preserving the Fifth Fleet's access to Dubai's deep water port. And she adds this quote from Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies:

The Defense Department agreed to our request to station an additional aircraft carrier battle group in the waters off Iran temporarily, as a deterrent signal to Tehran. The Navy was growing increasingly concerned with anti-ship missiles that Iran was placing on islands in the Persian Gulf and on its coastline, particularly at the narrow point in the Gulf leading to the Indian Ocean, the Straits of Hormuz. In early May [1996], DOD announced that Iran had acquired long-range missiles from North Korea and was engaged in a program to protect its missiles in hardened bunkers.

The Navy relied on two ports in the Persian Gulf. Only one, in the United Arab Emirates, could handle an aircraft carrier. That port, near Dubai, saw more U.S. Navy ships anchored and more U.S. sailors ashore than any harbor outside the United States during the 1990s.

A Short Hop from Subways to Propaganda

2006-02-23T23:24:00.000-08:00

Ain't the Web great? I bounced around tonight from overheard subway conversations, to Philip Johnson's Bobst Library, to how Spiro Agnew got the VP nomination and generic drugs got the shaft, to the conjunction of PR, propaganda and corporate America.

I got waylaid by these quotes from Propaganda by Edward Bernays, the guy whose real last name seems to be "the father of American public relations."

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
...
It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. The American government and numerous patriotic agencies developed a technique which, to most persons accustomed to bidding for public acceptance, was new. They not only appealed to the individual by means of every approach—visual, graphic, and auditory—to support the national endeavor, but they also secured the cooperation of the key men in every group—persons whose mere word carried authority to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousand of followers. They thus automatically gained the support of fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social and local groups whose members took their opinions from the accustomed leaders and spokesmen, or from the periodical publications which they were accustomed to read and believe.

At the same time, the manipulators of patriotic opinion made use of the mental clichés and the emotional habits of the public to produce mass reactions against the alleged atrocities, the terror, and the tyranny of the enemy. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace… The important thing is that it is universal and continuous; and in its sum total it is regimenting the public mind every bit as much as any army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.
— Via American Idealism.

There's much more about Bernays, smoking and the American Cancer Society here:

Bernays had a gift for cooking up extravagant public relations campaigns and one of his most famous ones was when he was hired by the American Tobacco Company. The head of the company, George Washington Hill, want to make Lucky Strikes the most smoked cigarette in America by opening up a whole new market of prospective smokers — women. At the time, people thought women who smoked were of low character and those in the better classes who did smoke, did so in secret.

The first part of the campaign was to launch the slogan “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet.” Arthur Murray, the famous dancing school founder was then engaged to claim that his dance instructors smoked to keep their slim figures instead of overeating the food and punch offered at public gatherings.

This propaganda pitch was quickly followed by finding a doctor to endorse the idea that smoking after a meal had several health benefits including being able “to disinfect the mouth and sooth the nerves.” Hotels were then urged to add cigarettes to their dessert menus! Menus prepared by House and Garden were circulated that recommended smoking instead of eating dessert as part of a healthful diet.

No venue was missed by Bernays. Homemakers were told to be sure to stock up on cigarettes as they were now household kitchen staples like salt, sugar and the like.

And now it's past even my bedtime.

Searching for Cheney in the Muslim World

2006-02-22T21:41:00.000-08:00

I was totally going to lay off Cheney, because I don't want to sound like a conservative columnist. (The Strib has run two syndicated conservative women columnists in a row this week, and they managed to make no new points whatsoever. Sad what's happening to the liberal media.)

But then I was reading some foreign press stories on a new site called Watching America, and came across an item from Israel excoriating Cheney. Most of it was a predictable and brief rehash, but a couple lines struck me:

No one is expecting inspiration from a Persian punk at the gate of Tehran, but many people on the planet, hundreds of millions, still expect some moral direction from those sitting on high in Washington.
...
Even the head of Israel's Shin Bet was secretly recorded as saying that "as Israelis, we actually long for Saddam Hussein."

And what really got my attention was the photo running with the column. Nothing we haven't seen before — a so-called tough guy grimace that might just as well be from passing angina or permanent stroke damage. But suddenly, I thought: Albert Brooks. Brooks has to play Cheney in the movie. Oliver Stone will write and direct, of course, but we can't let him cast Anthony Hopkins. Sure, he'd be scary in that scene where he's hunting for John Kerry in the cornfield. But Albert Brooks will bring a lovable haplessness to the role.

Fred Gwynne would make a perfect Kerry, and since Gwynne is dead, he'd lend about the right amount of pathos and animation. But it's probably too much to ask, even of special effects.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Watching America pulls together views of the U.S. from other nations' media. The usual, mainstream suspects like The Times, Der Spiegel and Le Monde, but it also translates stories from sources like El Tiempo (Venezuela), Alwatan (Kuwait), Pak Tribune (Pakistan), Guangzhou Daily (China) and Al Riyadh (Saudi Arabia). As if we don't feel badly enough already.

Oil is Thicker Than Water

2006-02-22T07:18:00.000-08:00

The Dubai firm that won Bush administration backing to run six U.S. ports has at least two ties to the White House.

One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World - giving it control of Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark's container port.

Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush's cabinet.

The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World's European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.
— White House Has Ties to Dubai Firm
By Michael McAuliff
The New York Daily News (via)

Should a foreign-owned company be managing U.S. ports? Sorry, but the ports and shipping business is already dominated by foreign companies. And as long as we keep buying cheap foreign products, China and Middle Eastern countries are going to be buying in to other businesses here.

Don't like the Arab-government affiliation? How about going with another big player, AP Moller-Maersk, a Danish company, to show that we Americans won't cave in to censorship. That'll show them Arabs.

I'm not going to engage in paranoid speculation about Bush family connections to Middle East Oil, the Carlyle Group, etc. Others will be running than stuff down, and there's plenty enough to worry about right in front of our noses.

The management team that gave us the social security privatization plan (John Snow was the guy selling that one, too), the Medicare drug benefit plan, the Iraq rebuilding contracting scandals and the bungled Katrina response wants us to trust them that they've done their due diligence on the ports deal? And a President who's simply ignored the intent of legislation he didn't like will now exercise his first veto on any attempt by Congress to modify his decision?

The biggest worry for me here is that the Administration's hubris, secrecy and power mania have gotten so far out of control that it isn't even bothering to spin any more. And the Republicans are finally starting to notice. In a year, Bush & Co. may be looking back with nostalgia on the good old quail hunt flap.

I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly

2006-02-20T19:37:00.000-08:00

When we deny another’s reality, we invite them to deny our reality.

When we deny each other’s reality, we may begin to deny each other’s humanity.

When we deny each other’s humanity, we find it easier to kill each other.

When we kill each other, we make more enemies.

When we make more enemies, we feel less free.

When we feel less free, we keep more secrets.

When we keep more secrets, we stop telling the truth others.

When we stop telling the truth to others, we stop telling the truth to ourselves.

When we stop telling the truth to ourselves, we deny reality.

It Can't Happen Here?

2006-02-20T19:24:00.000-08:00

Housecleaning... William Rivers Pitt breaks down this quote by Umberto Eco describing the core elements of fascist states:

"Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten, because it does not represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader. Doctrine outstrips reason, and science is always suspect. The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies. Argument is tantamount to treason. Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear. Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of 'the people' in the grand opera that is the state."

The Tax Man's Burden

2006-02-20T19:22:00.000-08:00

Whether it's gambling, smokes or booze, Minnesotans have a lighter "sin tax" burden than the national average, according to data just released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The 2004 data, the most recent available, show that Minnesotans pay more in state taxes per capita than residents of most other states — we rank fourth. That's mostly because Minnesotans have higher incomes than residents of many states and because Minnesota relies more heavily on a state progressive income tax than on local taxes.
— "Minnesota's tax burden is ranked 4th in U.S.," StarTribune

Note: I started this post 10 days ago, but was getting too wonkish. This a summary of a too-dense draft.

The article gives a reasonably balanced view of what a state "tax burden" ranking means, but with the focus on sin taxes and the state ranking, most readers are likely to remember just the headline and conclude: Our taxes are too high.

Whether you live in Minnesota or another state, here are some things to keep in mind when you hear candidate rhetoric about high taxation levels.

State taxes are only part of the tax picture. States typically rely on a mix of taxes on personal income, corporate income, property, and sales, along with special taxes on consumption of items like gas, liquor, cigarettes, and gambling. County, municipality, school district and other special district assessments that fund public services may not be included in "state tax" comparisons. Neither are fees and other charges for services.

The Tax Foundation says, "some states accomplish at the local level what other states accomplish at the state level, so a degree of comparability is lost as a result. For example, New York's state sales tax rate is 4 percent, and its counties have local sales tax rates that range from 3 percent to 5.75 percent. Connecticut, on the other had, has a 6 percent state-level sales tax with no local add-ons. In a ranking that includes only state-level taxes, New York appears less taxed than it actually is, and Connecticut appears more taxed."

Tax dollars per capita is a poor basis for comparison. For example, a state with a $20k average income and 12% tax rate would collect $2,400 per capita; a state with a $17k income and 14% tax rate would collect $2,380 per capita. Yet the state taking a higher percentage of income would still earn a better ranking. Minnesota's number four per capita ranking seems reasonable, given our number five ranking for median average income.

What are taxpayers getting for their investment? Comparing tax levels is also meaningless without comparing the level and quality of government services. The kind of life we want should be part of the discussion about what's a fair price for government services.

Politicians will pick numbers that support their ideology. Tax foes will use the Census Bureau because of Minnesota's misleading high ranking. Business advocates will cite Minnesota's top five ranking for its corporate income tax rate, even though few businesses in the state pay the corporate tax (accounting for $700 million of $28.8 billion in state revenues). Progressives may push for taxes on business, overlooking that these taxes are typically passed through to consumers.

When candidates start talking about "tax burden," press them to talk instead about the total funding picture. The “Price of Government” index is a better measure of the cost of all general government services statewide. It includes nearly all revenues generated by state and local units of government through state taxes, property taxes, special assessments, fees and charges for services such as licenses, bus fare or tuition.

Hypocrisy-Affiliated

2006-02-17T07:32:00.000-08:00

Considering 28 of the 31 Democrats have received Abramoff-affiliated funds themselves, it appears their hypocrisy has exceeded even their partisanship.
— Tracey Schmitt, Republican National Committee

Why are newspapers still letting this bilge get by without comment? To break it down once more, "Abramoff-affiliated funds" means:

• Money which did not come directly from confessed corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff. It came from some of his clients. Actual Abramoff funds were reserved for Republicans.

• Money from Indian tribes that were Abramoff clients. These tribes had contributed to Democrats before Abramoff got his hooks into them. After they became his clients, they did not increase these contributions, but did substantially increase contributions to Republicans.

Hearing these folks complain about hypocrisy is like listening to Sadaam Hussein complain about not getting a fair trial.

The Longest Two Seconds

2006-02-16T12:40:00.000-08:00

The man soars past like a daredevil shot from a cannon, but there is no net to snatch him back from the sky.

Bodies do not rise and fall in slow motion, so the real time must have gone like this... He launches when his Norton motorcycle meets my front wheel. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Impact head-first, a helmet-tipped missile striking the pavement.

The longest two seconds of my life.

We men carry around images of ourselves — fast ball hitter, great lover, excellent driver — so easily borne past their expiration date because they are so rarely tested. Then someone goes flying through the air because we sent him, and we find out who we really are.

To admirers and detractors alike, Dick Cheney was a man in control. A man handy with a gun, even if his bird hunting more closely resembled skeet shooting. And then Harry Whittington dropped bloodied in a south Texas field.

Now Dick Cheney says, "The image of him falling is something I'll never be able to get out of my mind. It was, I'd have to say, one of the worst days of my life."

Though I sometimes find the vice president's words suspect, I believe him on this point. The fact Whittington survived will not erase the memory of those first horrible seconds.

Miraculously, the flying motorcyclist walked away intact. He accepted my apology with grace, and I promised to dig into my meager bank account to fix his bike. It took months before I got behind the wheel again, and more than 30 years later, I still look for the next stranger riding in my blind spot.

Dick Cheney the tough guy may never again take a gun in his hands without thinking of that man on the ground. But on one of the worst days of his life, Dick Cheney went to dinner instead of the hospital.

I've Got Nothing Against Gays, But...

2006-02-14T12:35:00.000-08:00

To treat same-sex relationships in every respect as if they were marriages will open a Pandora's Box of mischievous consequences. For example, in jurisdictions where same-sex unions are treated as marriages, aggressive efforts have begun to repeal laws against polygamous or polyamorous marriages.
— Robert G. Kennedy, Star Tribune

The anti-gay drumbeat is quickening in Minnesota, and we should not let their claims pass unchallenged. For ongoing coverage, see minvolved.

In the quote above, Mr. Kennedy is deliberately indistinct on the actual whereabouts of these plural jurisdictions where "aggressive efforts" are under way. It's true Canada recently approved same-sex unions, and then Prime Minister Paul Martin commissioned a study to show the polygamy argument was nonsense. Instead, the panel recommended that Canada repeal its anti-polygamy law since the country wasn't enforcing it. And then the Conservatives spanked the Liberals in the election.

As for other aggressive efforts in the Canadian jurisdiction, there's a small enclave of radical polygamists already established well before same-sex marriage was approved — fundamentalists up in Bountiful, British Columbia, who left their forebears in the Mormon badlands along the Utah/Arizona border.

According to Minnesota State Senator Michelle Bachmann, "group marriage is now legal" in the Netherlands. In actuality, the country legalized same-sex marriage in 2001 after approving civil unions in 1998, but marriages involving more than two people are still illegal. Last September, a man and two women signed a cohabitation contract, a civil union registered before a notary. Friends of traditional marriage are flipping, of course, but this is apparently the first such test of Dutch registered partnerships in the seven-plus years since they were permitted.

That's it. That's the extent of the big polygamy campaign.

Law Professor Marci Hamilton took a look at some prosecutions of polygamists in Utah, and concluded that constitutional appeals weren't likely to prevail. The state does have a legitimate interest in banning polygamy, she writes:

History shows that polygamous marriage — at least as it has been practiced in the United States by multiple religious sects —raises a significant danger that underage girls will be married to much older men. In other words, it has fostered and condoned statutory rape. There is also disturbing evidence that underage girls are being trafficked across state and international lines for purposes of polygamy, a practice that violates the federal Mann Act. ...

History shows that polygamy raises a danger of incest as well. Polygamous husbands have married their own daughters or nieces.

In other words, the state has clear grounds for continuing to ban it.

This doesn't convince traditional marriage advocates like Bachmann, who argues: If the law defines marriage or its legal equivalent as something other than man-woman, then the basis for marriage becomes adult consent, which means marriage means anything — which means marriage means "essentially nothing."

This is "Christmas just isn't Christmas if the Target clerk tells me Happy Holidays" all over again. I understand Bachmann's feelings. It's just not a legal argument.

Then there's the complementary biology rationale, which goes like this. Marriage recognizes the unique relationship between male and female, yin/yang, the old in and out. It's not about romantic love; it's about science. As uniter-not-a-divider Bachmann says, "Biology teaches us that marriage is between a man and a woman because of the way our bodies are designed, the way a man and a woman complement each other."

Read Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, and it's not hard to conclude the trip from dominant male/submissive female to polygamy is a lot shorter and straighter than from two men or two women. The rich, powerful and/or crazy men rule the roost. Same-sex unions confound that order every which way. Who gets to be the man in the relationship when there are two men — or none? And if the man isn't the one on top, then... chaos!

When they aren't appealing to biology or slippery slope toward the Rubicon legal arguments, supporters of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex unions couch their opposition in love, god and family. They profess to have nothing against gays, might even let them live next door.

So let's call them on it. Let's stand side-by-side with them to oppose polygamy, bigamy, sex slavery, pedophilia, and unholy group matrimony involving any possible combinations of men, women, children, dogs, horses, rabbits and vibrators. We'll support appointment of anti-polygamy judges. But somehow, I think they're still going to want their marriage amendment.

Quail Hunting in America

2006-02-14T08:49:00.000-08:00

The anticipation builds as you ease up behind the dogs, rock solid on point in front of you. Muscles tighten, the gun quivers, and you ask yourself, "Is this going to be a bobwhite quail, or chukar partridge, or maybe the big cock pheasant you've been looking for all morning?" Now you're even with the dog and still no birds have broke. About that time you start to think that maybe the bird has moved on. You relax just a little, and turn your head to the guide for instructions. That's when they catch you off guard, as the air around you explodes with the whirring of wings and clucking of a half dozen escaping Chukar. The guide yells out, "Bird up!", and you try to regain your composure enough to snap off a couple of shots before they get completely out of range. Maybe this time you connect, maybe you don't, but it really doesn't matter, when you're hunting in Texas with us. There's plenty more birds!
— Texas quail hunting with the Hunting in Texas guide service

At last, "Cheney" dislodges "Mohammed Cartoon" from its run as the top search on Technorati. It's hard to make light of the Vice President's hunting mishap after watching Vice Presidential Firearms Mishap Analyst Rob Corddry break it down on The Daily Show, so I'll leave it to the experts. Crooks and Liars has the video.

Defenders of the Vice President say Whittington should have announced himself if he didn't want to get shot, sort of like Cool Hand Luke getting permission from the boss to come up out of the ditch after taking a leak. No one has yet raised the difficulty of identifying a quail with muscles tightening, gun quivering and diseased heart palpitating. It's not as easy as you think.

Lies Like Truth

2006-02-12T19:12:00.000-08:00

Caught longer than expected between flights, I finished Tobias Wolff's excellent Old School before I landed, and luggage containing my other books didn't land with me, so I went looking in a used bookstore for some other travel reading. Along with a Margaret Atwood and William Kennedy, I bought The Devil Wears Prada, a certified beach book which I imagined to be similar to the best-selling (and surprisingly funny social satire) The Nanny Diaries.

Guess which I read first?

Reading these books so soon after James Frey's A Million Little Pieces illuminated what disbeliefs we willingly suspend when reading fiction created from life experience. In both Old School and Devil, the narrators are aspiring writers who encounter celebrities and dishonestly attempt to use this connection to advance themselves. Wolff writes about the overheated world of an all-boys prep school, where students compete for the honor of a private audience with a visiting luminary, who selects the winning story. Lauren Weisberger's novel is about high fashion as seen by a young woman who dreams of writing for The New Yorker and hopes that serving as personal assistant of an extremely influential and abusive magazine editor — not actually writing anything — will somehow give her the inside track.

Right out of college, Weisberger spent a year as a personal assistant to Anna Wintour, editor in chief at Vogue, and turned the experience into a first novel. It gained readers — and a movie deal — entirely on the basis of the unrelenting portrait of the character widely presumed to be based closely on Wintour.

Wolff himself gained entry to an eastern prep school through deceptive means. He presents Robert Frost, Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway as characters. He uses personal experience, elements from real people and actual events, readings remembered and forgotten, and throws them all in a tumbler of imagination. Because he is an artist, he creates a deep and layered story that we know is fiction, but we accept as showing us a kind of truth — about deception, including self-deception. Ultimately, it matters not whether Rand made such an appearance at a school or whether Wolff did either.

For all I know, Weisberger approached her first novel the same way — but we don't read it the same way. We read in hopes of discovering the reality behind the powerful Wintour's carefully crafted persona. Is she really such a bitch goddess on wheels? What indignity will she demand next? Is the villainess a comic invention or does she closely follow the real life editor? Doesn't matter. Neither the book, nor the movie starring Meryl Streep, would have gotten made without Weisberger's association with Wintour — and without our complicity in believing we're reading a true story masked as a novel. The other characters hold no interest at all.

Ironically, that's why Frey's book had no luck when it made the rounds as a novel. If you are going to make up a story, predictable plotting, cheesy melodrama and hollow characters won't cut it. Unless you know somebody. But the ex-frat boy didn't have even the semi-celebrity of a Lewis Libby or a Lynne Cheney, or the inside track of, say, Robert Downey, Junior's dealer. Even Jose Canseco's ex can land a book deal if it purports to give us the real dirt on the rich and famous.

Frey's life story, which had no market as non-fiction, got amped up into fiction and still couldn't sell — until he re-appropriated it as his own true story. Weisberger took a juicy story that was possibly true, but couldn't sell as non-fiction, because she had no standing as an author — and Wintour would've rained lawyers and intimidation all over her butt. But as a fiction writer, she could deny what she wrote was based on Wintour and wink all the way to Hollywood.

Long ago, I wrote a story about trying to make sense of an old photograph of a girl and her father, found in a house just before it's demolished to make way for a freeway exit. The photograph was real. The house was really taken. The man in the photo did die as I said. It was true and not true and true.

It said, in a search for hidden meaning, hidden meaning will be found.

Found Art

2006-02-11T15:06:00.000-08:00

I was staring at a photo of a Chinese lead plant that I wrote about back in November, thinking about walls I'll soon be painting. Aging Chinese walls often looked like abstract paintings, and the wall around the plant certainly had acquired an interesting patina composed of crumbling plaster, smoke and fading slogans.

Suddenly, there in a section of the wall, I saw a clown-like Mao bowing his head, too late for the poisoned children.

All You Need to Know

2006-02-10T09:05:00.000-08:00

Usually, the pervasive incompetence of our current administration is so horrifying as to defy description. It rises up from the depths of current events like a leviathan of ineptitude, born on waves of willful ignorance and shameless mendacity. When you try to describe what you just saw, words fail. It's impossible to capture the size, the scope, and the downright ugliness.

Other times, a single sentence tells you everything you need to know. It's as if that fateful fisherman had a digital camera at the ready, and this time the snapshot isn't blurry at all. You can see the teeth and the scales. You can practically smell the thing.

From today's Washington Post, in an article about Paul R. Pillar, the former national intelligence director who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year:

"'It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized,' Pillar wrote."

And for good measure:

"Pillar wrote that the first request he received from a Bush policymaker for an assessment of post-invasion Iraq was 'not until a year into the war.'"

Bingo Tom

2006-02-09T06:08:00.000-08:00

When a politically weakened Jeb Bartlett was forced to accept a bland, undistinguished Vice Presidential appointee, the writers of The West Wing went to my hometown Colorado Congressional district for the character:

Will: Who is Robert Russell?
Josh: He's the Congressman from Western Colorado, and I don't mean the state, I mean the mining company.
Toby: Bob Russell is not presidential.
C.J.:...Is he Bingo Bob?

Though The West Wing and Bingo Bob are fading from the scene, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) appears ready to fill in as the state's representative buffoon in real life. Tancredo didn't let a silly movie by a couple Colorado boys stop him from calling his anti-immigration PAC Team America. And yesterday, between legs of his "Secure America Now" tour, he joined a Minuteman Project rally at the Capitol to call on Pres. Bush to commit the U.S. military to the U.S./Mexico border.

A pair of swastika-wearing brown shirts showed up, asking the rally-goers to leave the Republicans and join the Nazi party. I thought they might be clever counter-demonstrators, but it turns out they may have been legit. No confirmation whether counterfeit demonstrators or "iliterate" supporters carried the "ilegal" placards (Photo Credit: By Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post). That's the trouble with trying to follow Tancredo. Stuff that looks like parody turns out to be real.

He sounds quite rabid in the NPR report from the scene, crying: "We have a war! We are facing a military on the other side of the border — an armed military — who periodically come into the United States of America... armed, threatening our people, threatening the border patrol."

He's referring apparently to a border incident in which a county sheriff chasing drug dealers watched an olive colored Humvee come from the Mexican side bearing men wearing military-style uniforms who evacuated one of drug runners' SUVs when it got stuck in the river. (One more strike against SUVs!) The U.S. State Dept. says these were not members of the military, but known members of a narco-trafficking ring that employs military-style uniforms, equipment and tactics.

This would not be the first time the State Department and Republican officials disagreed on a pretext for war.
No, not that Team America!

The Only Thing They Understand

2006-02-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

I'm not convinced that adding these audios has been a big hit, but since song is one of my modes of political expression, I'll continue to toss one in now and then.

This song I knocked out in one sitting based on a simple tenor guitar groove. It was written after the Koran-in-the-toilet accusations and before the Mohammed cartoon protests. Like the song "Local Boys," it adopts an extreme point of view in order to criticize extremism of all kinds. Of course, the danger of that approach is both the lefties and the rightines will think that's the writer's point of view — a song that Toby Keith would do with a straight face.

Thanks to Al VanArdsal for the arrangement that makes it sound more like a serious song. It could use a bridge and more dynamics in the recording; the performance needs more Steve Earle and less Mark Knopfler later in the vocal, but hell, it was one take.

Seem like someone should do somethin'
Don't we gotta take a stand
Can't go running out the back door
That's no way to be a man
That's no way to be a winner
Gotta show we're in command
Gotta grind 'em down to nothin'
The only thing they understand

They want a fight, they're gonna get one
They want a war, they'll get a war
We'll eye for eye and tooth for tooth 'em
Til they can't take it anymore
They can see there's no tomorrow
And there's no hope throughout the land
Except to die and get it over
The only thing they understand

I don't know why they hate our freedom
But it doesn't matter now
Cause we're rollin on our mission
To knock their cities to the ground
Knock some sense into their people
Pour their blood upon the sand
Til their women beg for mercy
The only thing they understand

In the name of all that's holy
We are marching off to war
They will hear our rolling thunder
Fear our terrible swift sword
Feel the vengeance of the righteous
Wipe our ass with their Koran
And defile their holiest places
The only thing they understand

MP3 File

Get Minvolved

2006-02-08T08:04:00.000-08:00

We generally don't spend much time here with inside blogball because that's a full-time job, but we do enjoy the work of others in exposing rantings and distortions of outfits like Powerline.

Because of its Minnesota base, Powerline falls under the withering gaze of Minvolved, which focuses on Minnesota politics from a progressive point of view. If your interest is getting more involved in state and local matters, it's worth a look.

Damn, I'm Rich!

2006-02-07T19:26:00.000-08:00

Keep in mind that, above a certain level of subsistence, much of your welfare springs from your inner stories and narratives, not from concrete goods and services. Your real advantage in life, if you are born sufficiently wealthy, is your ability to tell yourself beneficial stories.
— Tyler Cowen

What Kind of Contract Did She Sign?

2006-02-07T14:53:00.000-08:00

Sideshow alerts us to a Colorado music teacher who's in hot water for exposing elementary kids to the opera Faust.

I'm not surprised that parents in the town of 2000 would demand the teacher be fired for showing their kids a "satanic video." What I find shocking is there are still public elementary schools in America that still haven't laid off their music teachers.

More Than a 72-Hour Grace Period

2006-02-07T13:55:00.000-08:00

Crooks and Liars catches Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales giving the Senate Judiciary Committee a history lesson, saying his earlier testimony had given examples of how "President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale."

Even if Washington did authorize wiretaps, the impact on civil liberties would have been minimal, since he'd have to wait about 175 years for the transcripts.

Minutes from the Family Budget Discussion

2006-02-07T09:09:00.000-08:00

This sets off the sitting around the table, just as any family would, to discuss what are our priorities and how do we balance those priorities with the need to be fiscally responsible.”
— Rep. Mark Kennedy, R-Minn., on President Bush’s budget plan

The family budget meeting was called to order by Father.

“You’ve all had a chance to review the budget,” he said, looking at his watch. “Speak now or forever hold your piece.”

“Umm, Father, we only saw it at dinner and had to share a copy,” said Ben. “It’s hard to put it all together.”

“You never were good at math,” Father harrumphed. “I’ll break it down for you. We have limited resources and potentially unlimited ways to spend them. Therefore, we must set priorities — where we will increase spending, where we will cut expenses and what we will eliminate altogether.”

“What about how we will increase resources?” Jenny piped. She still didn’t get it.

“Don’t interrupt! Are you saying I’m not a good provider? That I don’t love my family? That I don’t work hard?” He looked at her fiercely. “Being Father is hard work. If you want more in the budget, you are welcome to contribute.”

“But I’m only 12,” Jenny squeaked, “and I already gave up my allowance.”

“Precisely,” said Father. “Entitlements were draining the budget. Where do you think the money comes from?”

The question was rhetorical, but Jenny answered anyway. “Well, from your business, of course, and mother’s taking in day care and Ben’s lawn mowing and my baby sitting.”

“From my business… and you know how difficult running a business can be, the risks I take, the long hours, the ruthless competition, the problem employees, the government interference….” He paused to sweep Ben’s piece of pie onto his own plate. “This runaway family spending can’t go on.”

Mother finally spoke. “But honey, you are making more now than ever, and each year your income goes up, you say we have to spend less. All of what we earn goes into the family budget, but less than half your pay does. I have to put groceries on the credit card. You never want to make more than the minimum payment, so the balance keeps growing. This year, just the interest we pay is more than our gas, insurance and car payments. It’s insane to keep building up this kind of debt when we have the cash in your bank account.”

“Honey, you know you don’t understand finance,” Father said smoothly. “A little deficit is good for the family. Keeps us vigorous and on our toes. Besides, Ben will be out of high school in 2009, and he can start paying it off.”

Ben and Jenny spoke at once: “But I planned to go to college!” “We didn’t have a deficit when Mom managed the checkbook.”

“Be civil or this discussion is over!” Father thundered. “We discussed your college plans last year, Ben, and agreed that you will be an adult when you turn 18, and therefore, responsible for financing your own education.”

Father’s father paid for his college, of course, even getting him into an expensive school despite his bad grades, but Ben knew better than to throw that on the table. “But you said you’d loan me the money to supplement my college savings.”

“I did, and I will,” Father said. “Just not as much as I said before. Education is a thing that is important. Its importance is important to me. However, we have to face reality. Competition is intense, and I need to invest more in my business. Placing advertising and paying PR staff. Gathering competitive intelligence. Beefing up security in the stores. The money has to come from somewhere.”

“I wish you had given more thought to how you reacted when Sadomco bought one of your suppliers, honey. You really should’ve filed a complaint with the trade association instead of torching his offices.”

“And appear weak to all my competitors? To have them opening up stores across the street and taking the food off this table? Do you hate the life I’ve given you? Is that it?”

“Of course not, dear, but…”

“Then why dredge up the past? It’s easy to criticize, but I don’t see anyone offering any solutions. What’s done is done. It’s time to look to the future.”

“Father, speaking of the future, I don’t see all the costs for fortifying our house. Armoring the Hummers and the bars for the windows are in there, but not the full construction costs for the wall and the moat. Shouldn’t there be more than excavation in the budget?”

“Ben, Ben, Ben. It will take the entire year to remove the woods, excavate the moat and dig the foundation. That’s why we only have those costs in the budget.”

“But what about design and labor and materials and security guards? How will we pay for all that?”

“Those are out-year expenses. We can pay for them out of increased profits as my business improves. Or borrow. Or maybe we’ll crush the competition and won’t need to finish the project. Trust me.”

“Like Aunt Betty trusted you?” said Jenny.

“What does my sister have to do with this discussion?”

“She’s living in her car.”

“She made bad choices.”

“She got laid off when her company moved the plant overseas and then lost medical coverage for her lupus. You said you’d be there for her.”

“I am here. I’m praying for her, every night.”

“And Gramma.”

“Is it my fault she didn’t remarry after Dad left her?”

“No, but she’s your mother.”

“I don’t expect you kids to take care of me when I’m old. I’m taking responsibility for myself right now, by being fiscally responsible. I hope you learn the lesson from me instead of your grandmother.”

There being no more discussion, the family meeting closed with a prayer.

Iraqi Artists: Free At Last?

2006-02-05T18:05:00.000-08:00

Mohammed Al Shammarey played in the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra until a hand injury ended his musical career and he turned to the visual arts for creative expression. The earliest works shown on his website are sculptural — many based on forlorn musical instruments suspended or bound to stone.

During six years in the Iraqi Army, he says, he lived in a hole two meters square. It was then he turned to book arts. The smaller scale of book work fit better with life in a foxhole. Here's his gallery. You can page through the books by clicking on the image.

Along with artist Hana Malallah, Al Shammarey visited Minnesota Center for Book Arts yesterday to show work and preview the touring exhibit of Iraqi Book Artists, Dafatir, currently at Carleton College. Selections of the exhibit will be at MCBA February 17 to March 11.

The looting of the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art after the bombing in 2003 was a sad day for all Iraqis. Baghdad was still one of the premier arts cities in the Arab world, and both artists had work in the permanent collection of the museum.

Al-Shammarey left Iraq after the U.S. invasion. One of his pieces in the show is entitled, "My Retreat from Basra," and many of the books allude to material, cultural and spiritual loss. When asked how the invasion and its aftermath had affected his work, he declined to say that his themes were political.

"My life is miserable," he said," and my art reflects my life."

Likewise, Malallah, who had encountered visa problems and was not expected to make it into the U.S. for the lecture, seemed to reject even the premise that artists should try to make political statements. If you are thinking about politics, you cannot make art. Because you are not focused on formalistic concerns, the work will not be beautiful, she seemed to say through her translator.

Nevertheless, it was difficult not to infer references to war and destruction from their beautiful work.

The very concept of books as art first developed in the Islamic culture, and Malallah has been quoted as calling Iraq's art more precious and important to the world than its oil. Once before, with the 1285 invasion by the Mongols, Baghdad was sacked, its libraries emptied and Islam's flourishing cultural and intellectual traditions forever stunted. So many priceless books from the Grand Library of Baghdad were flung in the Tigris that the river ran blue-black with ink.

Al Shammarey's book, "The Key of Baghdad," makes reference to a story of an official who surrendered the key that allowed the Mongols to rape the city. But the work, produced in 1999, has clear contemporary overtones. On one page a key seems to transmute into an automatic weapon. Other work salvages materials from post-invasion streets, uses weapons cartons as enclosures and features scorches and holes.

And Malallah's painting, not part of the book show, but being exhibited in another touring show, is entitled simply, "The Looting of the Museum of Art."

Although hack artwork was certainly produced under Sadaam and it was prudent to declare themselves as non-political, these artists say they were not censored or told what to produce by the government. Monied Iraqi families supported their work and galleries and museums exhibited them. Now, with corrupt and fundamentalist elements on the ascent in Iraq, these artists must seek new audiences for their work. Another unintended consequence of "liberating" the Iraqis.

Although they are still doing beautiful work and may receive wider recognition, these artists gave no indication that their art was flourishing thanks to Operation Enduring Freedom.

Works, from top:
The Key of Baghdad, MAS
The Looting of the Museum of Art, HM
Script, MAS
Circular, MAS. The first line reads: One day, I shall become what I want.

That's How Real Democracy Works

2006-02-05T14:12:00.000-08:00

Iraqi and American officials report that members of the insurgency have infiltrated senior management and administrative posts in the Iraqi oil ministry. The so-called "oil-smuggling mafia" is disrupting efforts to restore Iraq's economy and is siphoning oil money and other government funds to the insurgency.

At least the guys responsible for undermining our nation's energy policy are appointed.

Where's Mohammed?

2006-02-04T08:27:00.000-08:00

I share the distress of the Muslim friends, who feel that the cartoon offends their religion. I also respect the right of freedom of speech. But of course freedom of speech is never absolute. It entails responsibility and judgment.
—United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, on the publication of the cartoons representing Allah

I totally get why Islam doesn't want images of Mohammed floating around, cartoons or otherwise. Heading off idolatry and commercial exploitation and all that — although I might suggest that severing the heads of those responsible, as one preacher in Gaza advocated, as somehow lacking in responsibility and judgment, too.

Now, I'm pretty confident most of us could pick Jesus out of a lineup, but how — after millennia of being deprived of Mohammed likenesses — can Muslims be sure the offending images were really the prophet?

And if a newspaper cartoon qualifies, what about other images that look even less like the original, whatever that was? A Mr. Potatohead Mohammed, for example. Or bad Indentikit composites based on very, very sketchy eyewitness testimony? Or publicity shots from a movie in which Felicity Huffman plays a guy who thinks he's Mohammed, but he's too self-conscious to wear the turban?

You see how it can get complicated pretty fast. Hard to know where to find the balance, respect-for-religion-and-freedom-of-speech-wise. So I'm not saying whether Mohammed's image is here. Maybe, maybe not. Use your judgment.

Swing and a Miss

2006-02-03T12:30:00.000-08:00

My earlier post on the SOTU speech addressed how President Bush wants us to fight our energy dependence one-handed. Addiction metaphor aside, he had a chance to hit that one out of the park. [Metaphor adjustment: Instead, he was like a baseball coach hitting fungoes and missing his own toss... Three times in row.] Whiffing on energy conservation, the environment and their connection to our future economic security wasn’t the only strikeout, as my friend vented immediately after the speech:

It might be important to note some things George Bush did not mention in his speech tonight: New Orleans and remedies needed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as well as prevention of future disasters, which seem to have been abandoned by Bush and his administration; avian influenza, or bird flu; and the tax-cut-depleted public health and safety infrastructure of our country. Domestic public health and safety are not on his radar screen, except as they intersect with terrorism issues.

He's not just some disaffected liberal looking for additional places he can take potshots. He's an epidemiologist at a major university who's reached a point in his career where he can worry about the country more than about his job. So if he's concerned, I'm concerned.

Although my friend didn’t say so, pollution, hurricanes and bird flu have a greater probable impact on our nation than will terrorist attacks. Just look at the Katrina clean-up progress versus the Twin Towers, the dispersal of the population and the future value of the real estate in both places. But as the president has already shown us, there’s far more political hay to be made from being tough on terror than for taking on Mother Nature.

There’s another reason for this oversight, perhaps. The environment, weather and disease, of course, are viewed as the purview of God, not man, by Mr. Bush. So why shouldn't he address them with faith, hope and prayer, rather than planning, taxpayer investment and scientific problem-solving?

[Note: The second post for yesterday is from Lars. We're working to fix the code so one writer doesn't override another's byline.]

The Old Bait and Switchgrass

2006-02-02T19:20:00.000-08:00

Energy independence — breaking our dependence on imported oil — is as heroic and challenging a goal as any we have fought for in the past.
—Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colorado)

I've already questioned the president's sincerity for making us fight for this heroic goal with the right hand of energy conservation tied behind our back. Now, it's time to ask how deep his commitment to investment in renewable energy technology really goes.

The Colorado Springs Gazette reminds us that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which conducts a lot of the government research in the technologies hyped in the State of the Union, just had its budget cut by Congress.

Research into fuel efficiency and other strategies will be slowed at the Golden lab because its budget was slashed by 13 percent this year, prompting the layoff of 30 to 40 of its 900 employees in the next week or two and canceling some subcontractor work.

Bob Noun, the lab’s deputy associate director, said the cuts won’t eliminate projects but will delay some by up to a year. The cuts also could affect long-term operations.

“We have had to eliminate or cut back some very talented research collaborators that we have under subcontract,” he said. “If we lose key people or research partners, it’s very hard to get that expertise back once it’s gone.”

Also, the yo-yo effect of rising and falling budgets discourages the best talent from signing on, he said.

We're not exactly kickstarting critical research, at least at our most experienced and broadly reaching lab. And — although stronger, leadership truly committed reducing consumption as well as developing alternatives would help — Bush isn't the only culprit here.

“Should the funding for those (Bush) initiatives make it through Congress this year, any benefits to the lab will not be felt until the next fiscal year, which begins in October,” Noun said. “Because of that, we still have to absorb this $28 million budget reduction from last year, and that reduction, by the way, is due almost entirely to earmarks made to the Department of Energy programs from which NREL draws funding.”

Notably, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., earmarked about $33 million for projects in his home state. Such projects can be handed to agencies or companies without scientifically proven research methods.

President Bush on Tuesday called for limiting such earmarks, a move that would benefit the lab, Noun said.

It will be worth watching. Does new money support established labs and research already under way, allowing it to accelerate? Or does it flow to various Congressional districts based on the usual principles of pork? Or worse, is the same money shuffled from one place to another, disrupting relationships and slowing progress while giving the appearance of action?

Road to Recovery

2006-02-02T14:34:00.000-08:00

Bush's comments about oil in the State of the Union were less like an addict admitting a drug problem and more like an addict resolving to find a dealer who lives in a better neighborhood.

Predictably, even this vacuous and patently dishonest appraisal of our energy problems was too much for the oil industry to take. The administration has already backed off the statement.

As with every grand political pronouncement, don't listen to the words -- focus on the actions. In addition to refusing to promote tighter fuel efficiency standards or higher gasoline taxes or an alternative energy Apollo Program, this administration pushes hard to drill in ANWR, crafts energy policy to benefit large oil companies and scoffs at conservation.

And today we learn the Energy Department will begin laying off researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory because of budget cuts. According to an item at daily kos, a veteran researcher said the cuts will be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol.

Not Getting Myself in a State

2006-02-01T07:58:00.000-08:00

I promised myself I wouldn't get in a state about the State of the Union. I expected to be disappointed by last night's speech and didn't plan to write about it. A year ago, I took a crack at what Pres. Bush should say in his inauguration address, and missed big time. Last week, Thomas Friedman helpfully provided a draft of the State of the Union. Read it, to see just how short the real speech fell.

Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. Here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.

The best way to break this addiction is through technology.

George Bush didn't use any formal treatment to help him address his acknowledged alcohol abuse. Instead, he went straight for the Higher Power option, and maybe that worked for him. But his State of the Union address shows he doesn't understand addiction.

America is addicted to oil, but addicts are good at getting the words right, without getting to their truth. And without brutal and complete honesty, recovery isn't going to happen.

Not by 2025. Not ever. Because when the U.S. finally hits bottom and is ready to admit it is powerless over its addiction to oil, it will be too late.

Tellingly, the president frames the issue as one of competitiveness and national security. A problem to be solved by technology, not fundamental behavior change. His only mention of the environment occurs just after he poses his big goal: "to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment … move beyond a petroleum-based economy … and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past."

The words "conserve" and "conservation" do not appear even once in the speech of this conservative.

In the 2003 State of the Union address by this former oilman — which I mistakenly googled first looking for his addiction quote — the word "oil" does not appear once. But addiction did:

Our nation is blessed with recovery programs that do amazing work. One of them is found at the Healing Place Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A man in the program said, "God does miracles in people's lives, and you never think it could be you." Tonight, let us bring to all Americans who struggle with drug addiction this message of hope: The miracle of recovery is possible, and it could be you. (Applause.)

Unfortunately, our president believes in miracles.

Flaw in the Argument

2006-01-28T11:51:00.000-08:00

Silly me. I made a rookie mistake in my argument that Bush's advisors have no reason to fear disclosure of their advice to the president.

After sleeping on it, I realized my error. I assumed that standing up for the truth is more admirable than self-dealing and intellectual dishonesty. But to kinda paraphrase the president, that's just not the way it works.

Agin It Before He Was Fer It

2006-01-28T11:45:00.000-08:00

The Carpetbagger reminds us that Bush's latest plan for dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions is the one he and Condi Rice ridiculed when John Kerry proposed it during the 2004 campaign.

Yikes! I've Been Exposed for Telling the Truth!

2006-01-27T15:02:00.001-08:00

If people give me advice and they're forced to disclose that advice, it means the next time an issue comes up I might not be able to get unvarnished advice from my advisers. And that's just the way it works."
—Pres. George W. Bush, White House News Conference, Jan. 26, 2006

That's not the way it works. As we've written again and again, the problem in the Bush White House is not whether he receives unvarnished advice. It's whether he listens to anyone whose advice violates his narrow world view.

Assume that by "unvarnished advice," he means counsel that is blunt and without any decoration applied to obscure the truth. Now let's consider the possible scenarios implied by his statement. (I didn't include scenarios in which the outcomes are ambiguous because I think extremes are more likely to test Bush's statement.)

1. I give the President truthful advice. He follows it. We achieve an outcome that is good for the country.
2. I give the President truthful advice. He disregards it. We still achieve the desired outcome.
3. I give the President truthful advice. He disregards it. We have a disaster on our hands.
4. I give the President truthful advice. He follows it. We have a disaster on our hands.

Under which scenarios would I be discouraged from being truthful in the future?

1. Praise all around. Glad to have the credit if my advice comes out.
2. Good for the president, because it shows him as being able to sort through conflicting advice and still able to make a decision that's good for the country. My reputation should survive because I told the truth. I'd be more worried about whether the president will listen to me next time, and that has nothing to do with public disclosure.
3. This is problematical because it makes the president look bad. I would rightly not want my advice disclosed for that reason, perhaps. I would personally come out looking good, and that might make me a leak suspect. Still, I'd be even more resolved to tell the truth the next time.
4. This is actually the Iraq scenario, as spun by the administration. In a disaster, the best defense is to say, I listened to what we believed to be the truth but it turned out to be wrong or incomplete. Under this scenario, the truth tellers might come in for criticism, and it is possible my future advice will be more nuanced or ambiguous. It may also be more carefully researched.

To recap, three scenarios for the truth-telling advisor look positive to me. The fourth, while painful, isn't an argument against giving the president unvarnished advice in the future. It's an argument for being more rigorous in my analysis.

Now, let's assume I am already not giving the president unvarnished advice. Instead, I am feeding him what he wants to hear or what a narrow, self-interested group wants him to hear. Guided by ideology, I am ignoring or minimizing important facts. Let's call this self-serving advice.

A. I give the President self-serving advice. He follows it. We achieve an outcome that is good for the country.
B. I give the President self-serving advice. He disregards it. We still achieve the desired outcome.
C. I give the President self-serving advice. He disregards it. We have a disaster on our hands.
D. I give the President self-serving advice. He follows it. We have a disaster on our hands.

Are there scenarios under which exposure of my self-serving may cause a problem?

A. No problem here. We just proclaim ideology and self-dealing as the way the solve the country's problems.
B. The president looks good here, but I look bad. If I am not fired and am capable of changing my ways, I might consider giving truthful advice in the future.
C. We'd all agree that to disclose details of internal meetings would compound the damage to the country.
D. Ditto.

Looks to me like disclosure is unlikely to make honest, straight-forward advisers clam up. But bad outcomes coupled with self-serving advice could be lethal. Which is really where the president needs protection — from pesky disclosure about Iraq, outed CIA agents, Hurricane Katrina, rendition and torture policy, warrantless monitoring, meetings with indicted fund raisers or energy policy meetings that only include oil companies,

But you probably already knew that.

A Thousand Warts

2006-01-27T12:37:00.000-08:00

I've expended a lot of words on the not-tax-and-spend policies of the Republican-dominated federal government, but here I'm adding just a couple colored boxes. This picture is worth a thousand warts.

The lines that go up: good. The lines that go down: bad.

Oprah's Rapture

2006-01-27T08:04:00.000-08:00

Photo: George Burns/Associated Press
[Note: This post is by Gustave. My latest post obliterated his credit. — CQ]
My wife, like millions of other women, likes to watch Oprah. We had an engagement after I got home from work, so she taped yesterday's show (on good ol' fashioned VHS) and we watched it together after putting our kid to bed. Yesterday's feature: a public flogging.

"Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of [Oprah]." Ephesians 5:6 (except for last word)

As Charlie discussed previously, James Frey lied in his book "A Million Little Pieces." After viewing the show, I grabbed a few of the magazine articles I've written in the last year to see if I—perhaps subconsciously—was guilty of the same embellishments for the sake of good storytelling. Nope, the events happened when, where, and how I told them. I suppose someone could dispute whether Lake Superior's waters really looked like liquid mercury on a blustery November day, but that's not akin to Frey’s exaggeration of his jail time: his book says three months, now he says a few hours.

Still, I'm not as incensed at the fudging and fictionalization in his book (which I admittedly have not read—I'm currently re-reading a Rick Bass book of essays about art and activism, and I'm not in the mood for drug addiction) as Oprah and her gaggle of self-righteous journalism experts were yesterday.

Perhaps it's because, for starters, I think the third-person, omniscient tone I was taught in journalism school is fraught with inaccuracies anyway. I prefer first-person narratives, because I believe it’s more truthful to tell readers “this is how I perceived things to be" rather than "this is absolutely, positively, how they were." If you've ever been at a dinner party, and you're telling a story, and then your spouse interrupts you several times to correct you along the way, then you know what I'm talking about.

Again, does this excuse Frey's fabrications? Nope, but it does mean that—contrary to the Poynter Institute stiff who denied that there exists a spectrum of facts—there are varying degrees of truth, all susceptible to the vagaries of human perception.

As for Frey’s style of storytelling, I find this passage from a Salon.com interview with William Least Heat-Moon to be relevant:

Interviewer: Is there any room for fudging with the facts, whether chronological or otherwise, in travel writing?

Least Heat-Moon: Are we going to call it nonfiction?

Interviewer: Yes.

Least Heat-Moon: Then, according to my ethics, no -- unless the reader knows what you're doing. I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you're taking liberties with. In "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," for instance, the reader arrives at the last page of the book to discover that some of the characters were invented by the author. I think it's all right to do that, but you have to put it on the first page of the book -- not the last.

Maybe Frey could have been pardoned for his embellishments had he or his publisher put a disclaimer on the front of his book. It seems to me that being guilty of not admitting to your literary device is a bit different from being publicly gutted because you’re a “liar.”

Maybe we’re getting too caught up in actual truths versus “essential truths” (as Oprah stated in her phone call to Larry King, which I respected). Again, I haven’t read Frey’s book, so I can’t speak to how readers of his book feel after learning the truth. But I know that after reading William Least Heat-Moon’s “Blue Highways”—where every diner waitress, bar drunk, and road tramp talks like a philosopher—I had some questions about whether the actual characters said the actual words attributed to them. But you know what? I didn’t care. Because it was a story well told. And because there was a bigger truth behind the book, and behind the author’s tale of self-discovery.

Did Frey deserve the vengeful wrath of Oprah and her bonafide experts (not one dissenter among them, by the way...seems a bit like stacking the jury)? It seemed to me an exercise of power—a flexing of her media muscles on a guy who’s on very vulnerable and shaky footing. A more benevolent god might have opted for absolution.

And it’s a little too convenient that news of Oprah’s confrontation with Frey was on the Web yesterday morning, which caused me to mention it to my wife, which caused us to tune in to the show. I wonder how Oprah’s ratings were yesterday. I wonder how her advertisers feel about Oprah taking a stand for the truth. Maybe I’m the one who feels duped.

History Majors Need Not Apply

2006-01-26T19:35:00.000-08:00

(via Truthout)Sidney Blumenthal writes in Salon.com that:

[Prior to invading Iraq] elder statesmen of the foreign policy establishment and the Republican Party repeatedly warned President Bush to his face of precisely the consequences of his planned actions. Former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and former Secretaries of State James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger, among others, "never thought the war would come off right," one of those who spoke to Bush told me. "We all felt that strongly. It was going to end with an Islamic republic dominated by Shia and influenced by Iran. There was no question they would have Iranian connections. If you know history, you don't have to be a genius." But Bush would not listen. "It's a sad story."

And Bush surrounds himself with team players who also will not listen... except, perhaps, to international phone calls.

Hope for Harsh Places

2006-01-26T15:43:00.001-08:00

I’m freshly back from the Mountain West where the struggle over values and conflicting freedoms tends to play out across the landscape rather than in the bedroom.

Each afternoon I hiked through a rugged wedge of public land just north of Colorado National Monument. One day I meet two trail runners and watch a mountain biker snake along another path I’d explored in solitude the day before. Another time, I encounter only a dog with his couple trotting behind. There are bike tracks in the wisps of snow that cling in the shade, but I doubt I’ll ever find the stamina or the nerve to ride in these high places.

It is sunny and pleasant, mountain freezing — a temperature in the low 30s that feels like 60.

Up on Eagle’s Nest, I can see our new house taking shape a thousand feet below. It’s a 12-minute bike ride to the center of town, but houses are sparse here. Nothing but an arroyo stands between us and the harsh, arid lands of Bang’s Canyon and the Monument.

So far.

This week the local paper showed a homeowner standing on the deck of his under-construction dream home, overlooking an area where about 100 new oil and gas wells, a pipeline and a compressor station are planned for 2006. More public land in the area is scheduled to be opened for oil and gas development in a February through a federal lease sale, which could add hundreds of more wells to the resort area.

A couple hundred more miles to the east, people in the historic mountain town of Idaho Springs may find themselves squeezed out by a widened Interstate 70. The highway and its Eisenhower Tunnel have dramatically shortened the trip from Denver to Grand Junction, but they've also stimulated the development of faux towns like Vail and their conversion from resorts to year-round bedroom communities for Denver commuters.

As our president just reminded us, we used to think the oceans would keep our country safe from foreign enemies. Before long, we'll have to give up thinking we can always move farther out. We try to get away from it all, and we just bring it all with us — Lowes, Wal-Mart, Circuit City and Chick-fil-A following our cars like tin cans tied to a newlywed's tailpipe.

There is almost no such thing any more as local color, and the few human-built environments that still qualify are ringed by identical wastelands. Only nature still has enough power to truly distinguish a place, and it, too, is losing out at the fringes. Grasslands once plowed to farmland can be just as easily dozened into cookie cutter malls and industrial parks. Woodlands get trimmed back into amenities that give name to McMansion subdivisions. Lakes become too valuable to leave to the ma and pa resorts, and ocean waves can't beat back the beachfront highrises and casinos forever.

There is still hope for harsh places. They don't take easily to civilization, but as an acquired taste, they naturally attract those who like to own things other people don't have.

Up here, actors, fashion designers and media moguls buy up the old ranches and create their own fantasy lands, but

The fierce escalation of land values they trigger drives real ranchers out of business and prevents working families from ever owning their own home.

Meanwhile, the nostalgia ranchers take advantage of agricultural tax breaks designed to help real ranchers survive.

Westerners now must live with, in the language of real estate ads, "unique lifestyles" of "quiet luxury," which workers can't afford any more than they can afford the $740 cowboy hats in Telluride's "Bounty Hunter" shop.
San Juan Suburbia, Bruce Finley, Denver Post

What a choice. Designer ranch vistas with picturesque tipi tableaus, drilling sites with throbbing compressors or mall sprawl. I'm building a tasteful, energy efficient, low-impact house in country where my roots go back for generations, but I look around and wonder if I'm still part of the problem.

Abramoff-related Monies?

2006-01-20T09:25:00.000-08:00

WCCO reporter Pat Kessler coins "Abramoff-related monies" to tie Indian tribe donations to Democrats into the Republican lobbyist's sleaze. Cleversponge breaks it down nicely and shows that local political reporting on the Jack Abramoff story is just as lazy and unbalanced as Republicans could ask for.

How to Write-Off Your Pay-Offs

2006-01-20T09:10:00.002-08:00

The trouble with blogging in Minnesota is we have to go out-of-state for the really good examples of greed, corruption and hubris.

Thank goodness for guys like Richard Scrushy, the HealthSouth CEO who got off from charges of manipulating corporate earnings.

Scrushy's PR blitz was transparent at the time, and now there are new revelations of his payments to influence the local black religious leaders — and thereby the predominantly black Christian jury pool. BusinessWeek Online has the best summary of allegations that Scrushy funneled money to a writer, Audry Lewis, and a local PR firm affiliated by family ownership with Birmingham's black newpaper — in addition to making donations to local churches that seemed timed to turn the ministers out to sit in courtroom during his trial:

In 2003, Internal Revenue Service records show that Scrushy's charitable foundation gave Guiding Light $1 million. The next year, as his trial date approached, the records show that the foundation donated more than $700,000 to religious groups, some of whose leaders joined the courthouse Amen Corner. The foundation's 2005 IRS records are not yet available.

Scrushy, of course, denies there was any connection between his tax-deductible donations to the churches and their pastors showing up in his defense. He even went so far as to record his conversations with the writer and her minister who now say Scrushy has reneged on $150,000 in payments for their PR work. This is curious, given that one of Scrushy's HealthSouth staff tried to get him on tape when he raised his concerns with Scrushy that earnings statements were being falsified.

On the tapes provided to the Associated Press, Scrushy repeatedly tells Henderson the two had no contract for money. (BusinessWeek says the tapes were muffled and inconclusive.) It looks like Scrushy was carefully ambiguous except when he knew he was on tape.

In addition to the Lewis Group PR firm, Scrushy hired a Colorado PR guy, Charlie Russell, who specializes in corporate train wrecks. According to the Denver Post, Russell was "introduced to Scrushy by former Cherry Creek financial adviser Will Hoover, who was convicted in 2004 in a $13 million fraud case and sentenced to 100 years in prison." While Hoover was free on bail, he started a company called Executive Recovery Partners, presumably offering his personal expertise to help other swindlers with expert witnesses, public relations and psychological counseling.

Russell paid Audry Lewis $2,500 during the trial, but took care to have a contract calling it advance payment for possible work after the verdict. He said he gave Audry Lewis money so she could go to the funeral of a Detroit relative — a classic kindhearted gesture familiar to alumni football boosters everywhere.

Well, He Was Asking For It

2006-01-19T21:14:00.000-08:00

Janinsanfran notes that Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the latest Axis of Evil leader being groomed as a madman, really didn't say that Iran has the right to build nuclear weapons. We all heard the first Ahmadinejad quote, but how many heard about the correction?

CNN has admitted a mistranslation of the leader's remarks: "In fact, he said that Iran has the right to nuclear energy. He added that 'a nation that has civilization does not need nuclear weapons and our nation does not need them.'"

Bradblog found CNN also has had trouble keeping Iranian and Korean nuclear facilities straight. The real question is whether Bush & Co. can keep this bit of WMD intelligence straight — and out of the yellowcake column.

A year ago, I wrote about Graham Allison's book, Nuclear Terrorism, which argues that our antiterror policy has lost sight of the original and achievable goal of preventing further catastrophic terror attacks on U.S. soil. He says the most workable strategy is to denying access to nuclear weapons, secure nuclear material that could be used in making bombs, and not adding any new nuclear weapons states.

I'm not crazy about nuclear anything in Iran because I'm not sure this regime — or any other they're likely to come up with — can be trusted not to try to develop weapons or to deal with terrorists. But please, let's focus on controling the material and not let mistrust, misunderstanding and mistranslation get us into another dumb ass military conflict.

Now You Tell Us!

2006-01-19T20:02:00.000-08:00

Six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency showed up to celebrate the EPA's 35th year on Wednesday. All of them — five Republicans and one Democrat — agreed the Bush administration is neglecting global warming and other environmental problems.

Search no further for evidence of the sinking state of environmental protection in the U.S.

This was an EPA-sponsored event. There have only been nine prior EPA administrators appointed. One is currently Bush's Health and Human Services Secretary; one appointed by Pres. Carter didn't attend; and one is dead. They're essentially unanimous in condemning the leadership coming from the top.

Watch... the environment is so low on our leader's priority list, this won't make him made enough to get even with the organizers.

Letting Go of Pieces

2006-01-17T22:20:00.000-08:00

One thing I re-learned in the Family Program at Hazelden was the necessity of letting go of things I can't control. Especially the behavior of an addict.

Reading James Frey's A Million Little Pieces made it tough to just let it go, because the book seemed so fraudulent and even harmful.

It wasn't just his self-portrait — I am so fucking bad and so fucking tough and so fucking fucked up and irredeemable and wounded and being the most stubborn and intelligent and desirable and totally fucked worst addict ever in detox who only cares about the truth and not this God bullshit and is the only one who can save myself such a lost fucking cause and even though the odds are a million to one still I will try. Will. Try. Alone. — but also, his portrait of recovery.

I can't speak for what Frey truly experienced, but he made up more than his criminal record. This new spokesperson for sobriety clearly wasted his time at Hazelden, refusing to listen, ridiculing what he did hear, and supposedly subverting every rule and protocol of treatment. He came out less intoxicated by substances, but still intoxicated with himself. (Page 394, for example, boasts 62 "I"s and 14 other first person pronouns.)

I'm not supposed to be judgmental, either.

Working the 12 Steps has helped, but it's thanks to Heather King, a memoirist and Hazelden alum, that I no longer feel the obligation to speak out or detail my long list of the inventions and contradictions and inanities in the book. Her piece in Publisher's Weekly does the job:

Drama is the movement from narcissism to humility, but Frey is exactly the same at the end of his story—minus the drugs—as he is at the beginning: an insecure braggart without a spark of vitality, gratitude or fun. "A ballsy, bone-deep memoir," Salon.com called it, but for any alcoholic worth his or her salt, throwing up blood, puking on oneself, and committing petty-ass crimes in and of themselves couldn't be bigger yawns. What's gritty is the moment, knowing you're dying, when the world turns on its axis and you realize My way doesn't work. What's ballsy isn't just egomaniacally recounting your misdeeds; it's taking the trouble to find the people you've screwed over, looking them in the eye, and saying you're sorry. What's bone-deep—or might have been if Frey had done it—is figuring out that other people suffer, too, and developing some compassion for them. Oprah speaks of "the redemption of James Frey"—but redeemed from what, and by whom? Sobriety, in my experience, isn't the staged melodrama of sitting in a bar and staring down a drink to prove you've "won"—as Frey does upon leaving rehab. It's the ongoing attempt, knowing in advance you'll fall woefully short, to order your life around honesty, integrity, faith.

So, in fact, is writing. It's every writer's sacred honor to "get it right," but perhaps the burden falls heaviest on the memoirist. As a memoirist, it seems to me, something has to have happened to you that you're burning to tell. You've undergone some kind of transformation that matters not because it says something about you, but because it says something about the world; because it touches on the mysteries of suffering and meaning.

(via and the family buick)

Why Alito's Nomination is Not About Abortion

2006-01-17T12:55:00.000-08:00

In "Bush Has Crossed the Rubicon," Paul Craig Roberts writes lucidly about why Alito's nomination truly matters.

Despite seven decades of an imperial presidency that has risen from the New Deal’s breach of the separation of powers, Republican attorneys, who constitute the membership of the quarter-century-old Federalist Society, the candidate group for Republican nominees to federal judgeships, write tracts about the Imperial Congress and the Imperial Judiciary that are briefs for concentrating more power in the executive. Federalist Society members pretend that Congress and the Judiciary have stolen all the power and run away with it.

The Republican interest in strengthening executive power has its origin in frustration from the constraints placed on Republican administrations by Democratic congresses. The thrust to enlarge the President’s powers predates the Bush administration but is being furthered to a dangerous extent during Bush’s second term. The confirmation of Bush’s nominee, Samuel Alito, a member of the Federalist Society, to the Supreme Court will provide five votes in favor of enlarged presidential powers.

What's really interesting about this is that economist Roberts is not your garden-variety Bush whacker. Among other things, he's a former fellow of the Cato Institute and Reagan Administration Treasury Department staffer.

Pecking Order

2006-01-17T07:06:00.000-08:00

Photo: Richard Sennott, Star Tribune
What does it take to get to be the white dude helping carry the banner on MLK Day?

Norm Coleman is a US Senator (R) and St. Paul resident, which must trump Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar (slightly obscured at right in the next row), who is a Democratic candidate for Minnesota's other Senate seat.

Showing up and jockeying for a camera position at these bi-partisan events must be very stressful for politicians. Will someone allocate the spots or is it time to sharpen the elbows?

Years ago when Mikhail Gorbachev visited Minnesota, a great group standup routine was broadcast prior to a Governor's reception for the Soviet leader. Gorby's limo was running late — and so was the reporter following him. Meanwhile, a live feed ran from a fixed camera at the Governor's mansion set up to carry the formalities, while voice over was provided from the studio.

As local politicos of both parties arrived, they all gravitated immediately to the camera and tried to look casual. The area had been cleared of furniture, food and people. The men were visibly uncomfortable feigning informality standing in a place at a party that made no sense — unless you needed to stake out a position before the guest of honor arrived.

It was like watching a court full of post players all trying to establish themselves on the block without getting called for a foul.

Are We Safer Today Than in 1814?

2006-01-16T18:44:00.000-08:00

Former Senator and VP Al Gore today reminded a Washington D.C. audience at Constitution Hall that Dr. Martin Luther King had once been the subject of illegal, secret surveillance by the government. Its discovery, he said, "helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping" that became the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which our present chief executive finds inconvenient.

The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment's notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.

Technically, the Bill of Rights came about because opponents of the Constitution as drafted argued it would leave the country vulnerable to violations of civil rights by the central government, just as the British had done.

But the point is taken. Is there really a greater danger today that justifies executive power skirting civil liberties?

Full text of the hour-long speech is here.

Body English and the Body Politic

2006-01-16T10:42:00.000-08:00

It's a truism of community activism that you're mistaken if you go into the meeting where a vote will be taken thinking you can change the outcome. That's not necessarily because decision-makers' minds are closed. It's because most of the real opportunities for change have been missed or exhausted.

Smarts sports teams know this, too. A game is not won or lost on the last play. It's the team's fault for letting a football game come down to a 50-yard field goal as the clock runs out.

Observing the commentary and advocacy ads regarding Sam Alito's Supreme Court nomination is like watching fans trying to put body English on that desperation kick as it sails wide-to-the-right of the uprights.

Way too little, much too late.

We can't fault those out-of-shape Senators for running out of gas and fumbling. After all, we put them on the field and kept them there.

We continue to let ourselves get suckered into last-minute battles over nominations and abortion and gay marriage, while the right shovels through its real agenda of low wages, low taxes and low regulation to benefit the richest people in the world. Yes, the Supreme Court is important, but the President and representatives we elect are where the game has to be played — and won.

Gut Reaction

2006-01-14T19:50:00.000-08:00

Attack kills 17 near Mosul

Every now and then I read a story with a headline like that and I catch myself. I'm thinking it's 17 of our troops and then discover it's Iraqis. I'm relieved.

Thank goodness it wasn't any of ours.

I don't know the Americans any more than the Iraqis, but I'm relieved.

Then I read this from Baghdad Burning, and I feel ashamed of my gut reaction. (via Sideshow)

Outsource Senate Hearings

2006-01-14T14:39:00.000-08:00

This week we watched James Frey adopt the Alito "dissemble with dignity" defense with Larry King, while Sam Alito copped the Frey Plea before the Senate Judiciary Committee: "There's a piece of paper that says I did it, but I have no recollection of it."

The entrenched, self-regarding fossils across the table couldn't crack either of them.

Last summer, in a sudden flush of bipartisanship, I supported a Bush nominee for the Supreme Court. Here's another swerve across the divide — to support outsourcing government services.

Specifically, outsource advising and consenting on Supreme Court nominees to the editors of the Pony Express, the newspaper of Stillwater (MN) High School. The young journalists exposeda registered sex offender who was hanging around their school posing as British Royalty.

I'll bet the kids would've made quick work of Alito's Concerned Alumni of Princeton phantom membership. A man lists only two organizations on the application for the highest profile job in his life and later can't remember belonging to one of them? What kind of school spirit is that?

New Orleans is Reminding Me...

2006-01-13T09:50:00.000-08:00

–David Grunfeld, Times-Picayune

Is it too early in the year to nominate photos for the Pulitzer?

Nice Place to Visit, But...

2006-01-13T09:48:00.000-08:00

It may be hard for you to see, but from when I first came here to today, New Orleans is reminding me of the city I used to come to visit. It's a heck of a place to bring your family. It's a great place to find some of the greatest food in the world and some wonderful fun. And I'm glad you got your infrastructure back on its feet. I know you're beginning to welcome citizens from all around the country here to New Orleans.
—Pres. Bush

Except maybe for welcoming citizens from New Orleans...

Rude Pundit has already jumped on this one, so read his post, and be sure to visit his 5-part report of photos and interviews from New Orleans that started on January 2nd.

A sobering antidote to these delusional Chamber-of-Commerce-isms.

I have no problem with Bush trying to drum up a little tourist business for a desperate city, but not when he's ignoring what's really behind the scenes.

This is his idea of bold action. Show up and give a speech, as he did back in September.

Within the Gulf region are some of the most beautiful and historic places in America. As all of us saw on television, there's also some deep, persistent poverty in this region, as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality. When the streets are rebuilt, there should be many new businesses, including minority-owned businesses, along those streets. When the houses are rebuilt, more families should own, not rent, those houses. When the regional economy revives, local people should be prepared for the jobs being created...

I know that when you sit on the steps of a porch where a home once stood, or sleep on a cot in a crowded shelter, it is hard to imagine a bright future. But that future will come.

He knows. Like all of us, he's seen it on television.

Minnesota Warming

2006-01-13T07:53:00.000-08:00

The StarTribune reports that the Twin Cities is enjoying its warmest winter to date. Only one day since December 21 has posted an average daily temperature below the 30-year average — and the cumulative average is 15.9 degrees above normal and 2.4 above the warmest January on record.

Now, Minnesota warming is certainly not proof of global warming, and I like biking in January without shoe covers and a face mask.

But what about hurricane Katrina and the high ferocity and incidence of tropical storms that forced meteorologists to cycle back through the alphabet last year to name them all? A prominent scientist who has been a moderate on the global warming questions says:

My answer is, Not so fast. That may have been a contributor. But the fact we had such a bad season was mostly a matter of chance. On the other hand, though the number of storms globally remained nearly constant, the frequency of Atlantic storms has been rising in concert with tropical ocean temperature, probably because of global warming.

There is no doubt that in the last 20 years, the earth has been warming up. And it's warming up much too fast to ascribe to any natural process we know about.

The scientist is Kerry Emanuel, MIT meteorologist and hurricane specialist, author of Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes. He continues:

I predicted years ago that if you warmed the tropical oceans by a degree Centigrade, you should see something on the order of a 5 percent increase in the wind speed during hurricanes. We've seen a larger increase, more like 10 percent, for an ocean temperature increase of only one-half degree Centigrade.

Still, nothin to worry about. Got no proof that power plants, automobile emissions or brush burnin cause global warm-ing. No smokin gun (heh, heh).

Conservation should be voluntary. That's why they call it conservation. Because it's voluntary. Bible doesn't mention global warm-ing. We should be teaching both sides and not hurting the economy.

Time to go for a bike ride.

A Million Little Pieces of BS

2006-01-12T11:57:00.000-08:00

I find I'm still not done with James Frey after his performance last night on Larry King Live. It was creepy, right down to the similarities between King's studio backdrop and Frey's bookcover.

Frey presented a persona that perhaps was supposed to convey serenity, but he looked near-catatonic as he repeated, with the discipline of a Republican functionary, his evasive reponses to King's puffball questions. And then hauled out his mother to reiterate the talking points.

If King were a real journalist (they still do call his channel CNN) or had even read The Smoking Gun article about how the author of A Million Little Piecesfictionalized his redemptive tale, King would have easily been able to slice through the BS and sidestepping. (He seemed scarcely to be listening, repeating questions and even asking if Frey was an only child after Frey had made references to his brother.) But he let Frey equate percentage of pages in one book with the magnitude of the actual falsehoods he had put forth over his two recovery "memoirs." Had King been up to speed on investigative report, he might have asked actual questions that conveyed its substance.

But that's not what his show is about. It's pillow talk for celebrities needed to do PR repair.

Fortunately for Frey, his stay at Hazelden is cloaked in confidentiality, so that part of his account — the majority of the book, as he kept reminding us — is not subject to the examination accorded his so-called criminal records.

The little drama at the end, with Oprah calling in to express her support, was also pretty transparent. Frey made numerous references to his work with Oprah's producers post his appearance on her show that relaunched his book. King kept asking, Have you heard from Oprah? What does Oprah think?

Does anyone really believe that someone who manages her image so carefully as Winfrey was just sitting home eating Oreos and watching the tube and decided on whim to phone in just before King signed off?

It was all a Frey commercial: Can you believe me now?

Where Did I Put My Spear?

2006-01-11T12:38:00.000-08:00

Ever since the war we have been the battleground of mighty reform movements. Consider the ideals of each group, and contrast them with the practical results...
• Women's suffrage, designed to clean up politics, shot the Ohio Gang into power and presented us with the Teapot Dome.
• Prohibition, enacted to eliminate the drunkard, made dipsomaniacs of our children, festered our cities with speakeasies, sponsored the rise of the most vicious criminal class in the history of the world.
• The schools, successfully raiding the state treasuries upon the assurance that education was the best defense against crime, filled the penitentiaries with their students.
• The great up-surge of luncheon clubs, professing to purify business ethics and to exalt the principle of service, swung into power on a wave of commercial dishonesty unparalleled in any country that ever existed.

I just finished Dalton Trumbo's Eclipse, his first novel, of interest mainly to students of American Realism and residents of Grand Junction, whose history and citizens the story closely follows. But the sentiments of Trumbo's character, created in 1933-34, ring with clarity today. [Punctuation of the quoted passage is mine.]

We gave them their heads — all these fine reformers of morals, business, politics, appetites. They sat firmly in the saddle, riding through a sea of gold... Our self-appointed leaders plunged headlong into a latrine — and, which is worse, they forced us to wallow there with them.

And what happened to the fellow who dared question them? What if a man said, 'I doubt this prosperity', or 'I doubt this morality', or 'I doubt this church', or 'I doubt this government'? He was impaled on a cross, and all the slobbering sensualists they could muster thrust spears in his side. Well... they have taught us a lesson. They have given us a great historical demonstration of the fact that a man cannot believe in anything with his whole heart and his whole soul without becoming an intolerable bigot, and hence a menace to his fellow citizens.

Signing Statements and Alito

2006-01-10T22:58:00.000-08:00

If you haven't read about "signing statements" as a way the president winks as he signs legislation, read this story. In his 5 years, he's vetoed no bills but has put spin on the signing at least 500 times.

The roots of Bush's approach go back to the Ford administration, when Dick Cheney, then serving as White House chief of staff, chafed at legislative limits placed on the executive branch in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and other abuses of power by President Nixon. Now the vice president and his top aide, David Addington, are taking the lead in trying to tip the balance of power away from Congress and back to the president.

They may soon have an ally on the Supreme Court. As a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito wrote a 1986 memo outlining plans for expanded use of presidential signing statements.

Why bother to veto a bill when you don't plan to follow it anyway?

My Name is James, and I'm a Writer

2006-01-09T22:15:00.000-08:00

So why would a man who spends 430 pages chronicling every grimy and repulsive detail of his formerly debased life (and then goes on to talk about it nonstop for 2-1/2 years in interviews with everybody from bloggers to Oprah herself) need to wall off the details of a decade-old arrest?

The Smoking Gun takes apart best-selling memoirist James Frey's A Million Little Pieces and finds it severely wanting in the honest disclosure department. Read the piece (it's long) and if you are one of the few who haven't yet read Frey, you'll have saved some money and perhaps some wasted empathy.

Aspects of Frey's tale have been questioned before, but not to this extent, or with this amount of documentation.

While the book is brimming with improbable characters — like the colorful mafioso Leonard and the tragic crack whore Lilly, with whom Frey takes up in Hazelden — and equally implausible scenes, we chose to focus on the crime and justice aspect of "A Million Little Pieces." Which wasn't much of a decision since almost every character in Frey's book that could address the remaining topics has either committed suicide, been murdered, died of AIDS, been sentenced to life in prison, gone missing, landed in an institution for the criminally insane, or fell off a fishing boat never to be seen again.

While we do not doubt Frey spent time in rehab, there really isn't anyone left (besides the author himself) to vouch for many of the book's outlandish stories.

Frey's latest book, My Friend Leonard, extends the "I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal" confessional franchise that made Frey a millionaire.

Addicts, of course, are liars. Writers make things up for a living. Why should anyone be surprised?

When recalling criminal activities, looming prison sentences, and jailhouse rituals, Frey writes with a swaggering machismo and bravado that absolutely crackles. Which is truly impressive considering that, as TSG discovered, he made much of it up. The closest Frey has ever come to a jail cell was the few unshackled hours he once spent in a small Ohio police headquarters waiting for a buddy to post $733 cash bond.

Listening to other addicts tell their stories is a staple of treatment at Hazelden, where Frey spent time. Whether or not he ever spent another hour in AA or read a single text on recovery, he no doubt was treated to a large dose of stories that were far better than his.

And he probably saw the mainstream potential of telling similar stories, using his embellished self as the central character. Why do it for a few dozen guys in lousy AA meeting when he could peddle it as a redemptive memoir? Getting it picked up by Oprah was an unexpected bonus.

"I know that, like many of us who have read this book, I kept turning to the back of the book to remind myself, 'He's alive. He's okay," Winfrey said. In essence, that is part of the book's narrative power and a primary marketing tool. All this terrible stuff actually happened to a guy named James Frey, a former degenerate who survived drug and alcohol addiction, escaped his criminal past, and somehow avoided a relapse in the decade-plus since leaving Hazelden.

Frey was openly scornful of the Twelve Steps approach and holds himself up as an example of an addict who went his own way and made a miraculous recovery. Treatment programs are full of those guys.

His book draws credibility from the pretense of having taken the Fourth Step — "Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves." But as The Smoking Gun shows, he has no intention of embracing Step Ten — "Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it."

"Lying became part of my life," Frey wrote in at least one truthful moment. "I lied if I needed to lie to get something or get out of something."

Somewhere along the way, he no doubt learned the technique of disclosing unflattering personal details in order to gain enough credibility to continue lying. Cops, treatment professionals and many recovering addicts are adept at seeing through such manipulation. The rest of us are more gullible... and hopeful.

For some readers, his lies may only add up to entertainment — what in our popular culture isn't lies? But to others who were deluded or given false hope by Frey's "I did it my way" tale, the author might consider making amends before he turns himself over full-time to writing fiction.

Polygamy, Pederasty and Group Marriage

2006-01-09T07:04:00.000-08:00

Charles H. Darrell of the Minnesota for Marriage/Minnesota Family Council forgot to include bestiality in his litany of legalized horrors that will some day be thrust upon America's families should any form of civil union or marriage be approved for other than heterosexuals.

He writes:

The reality is that a civil union is just marriage by another name; and leaving the "marriage business" and getting into the "civil partnerships business" is just a bait-and-switch scheme designed to force one form of morality upon another. The only business the state should "get into" is representing the will of the people by allowing them to vote on the definition of marriage.

In the spirit of a kinder, gentler ATGD, I am not reflexively rejecting Mr. Darrell's position. In fact, I will heartily agree with him that it is wrong to force one form of morality upon another. As he ably illustrates, the real heart of the divide is that Americans can't vote on definitions.

What we have here is a failure to define our terms.

My "tolerate" is his "force upon." His "morality" is my "force upon." You see why we need a vote to settle this.

I don't think we should stop at voting on the definition of marriage. After all, as I'm sure Darrell would agree, public voting on definitions is a slippery slope, and soon we will be expected to vote on other terms. I know our governor in Minnesota would like to clear up once and for all that a fee is not a tax. Let's vote on it!

Zygote or human being? Insurgent or terrorist? Evolution or intelligent design? Torture or interrogation? Lobbying or bribe? Self-defense or nation-building? Legal monitoring or illegal eavesdropping? Compliment or sexual harrassment? We want the people's definitions and we want them now.

So let's try to get the entire list out of the way at once.

That way citizens can prepare for the quiz all year. We can drill on a list of definitions, like kids studying for a spelling bee.

There will be a few details to work out. Will definitions get an up or down vote? If so, who gets to put forward the definition? And if a definition is rejected, what will we do next? Or, will the test be multiple choice with the definition getting the most votes prevailing?

Never mind, let's just hate each other.

The Other Side of the Coin

2006-01-07T13:47:00.000-08:00

Of course, there is another side to the tales of wealthy expenditures. There is always another side.

The rich in my last post were creating jobs, not slathering extravagances upon themselves. They were providing gainful employment for private pilots and upscale retail clerks and brochure writers and chauffers and woodwork varnishers and manufacturers of embossing equipment who might otherwise have been thrown back upon the mercies of the taxpayer.

But not all rich people feel they must first spend money on themselves in order to benefit others.

For some, true wealth is measured by how much you give away, not how much you accumulate.

Some know this all along. Kevin Garnett is building 24 homes in 24 months for poor families. Some, like Bill Gates using his wealth to help eradicate childhood diseases, figure it out in midlife. And others must first verify they truly can't take it with them before endowing museums or building hospital wings.

Minnesota has been blessed with generations of generous families and individuals. But these do not seem to be the families and the values shaping policy in the state or the nation these days.

Rich Company

2006-01-07T07:59:00.000-08:00

The story about the gated community within the gated community set me thinking. I am fortunate to be wealthier than 99+ percent of the people who have ever lived, and yet I keep getting these reminders that I don't know anything about truly rich company.

The celebrity profiles, big numbers (Bill Gates, $51 billion net worth) and statistics (the net worth of the Forbes 400 climbed $125 billion, to $1.13 trillion last year) don't properly convey how the rich are very different from you and me.

It's the small details of wealth that bring it home to me. Like the way a former girl friend described the lifestyle in her circle back in Texas. You all hopped in daddy's plane for a shopping trip to Dallas, then returned for dinner to find a place set with a pack of your brand of cigarettes and matches embossed with your name.

Or the man who told of an AA meeting he attended in LA where the chauffers came in first and put business cards on the chairs to reserve seats for their bosses.

Another friend noted his business once bid on varnishing the wood in a closet for a super-rich household. Not to build the closet or install the fixtures — just to finish the surface. The bid: $100,000. The closet: 4,000 square feet.

I once interviewed a writer who showed me a sample of a beautiful brochure describing a luxury yacht. ("Brochure" understates the opulence of the photography, paper and printing. And "yacht" makes it sound like a boat. Think instead floating Park Avenue mansion.)

Were they renting it out, I asked? No, this was for guests, so they could appreciate ahead of time where they were going. And, presumably, to realize they could leave their foul weather slickers at home.

My comfortable life is as far from them as a mildewed trailer park is from me. To a family in Darfur, the trailer might be a palace.

And to a Congressman in America, it's still time to stimulate the economy by cutting taxes on the rich and programs for the poor.

Why Domestic Surveillance Matters

2006-01-04T17:33:00.001-08:00

I'm near completion of Mao: The Unknown Story, which describes his incessant quest for power — not just for political control, but domination of every human being he encountered. Although he fell far short of his dream of leading the Communist bloc and eventually the world, Mao was very likely the most complete monster of the century that gave us Hitler and Stalin.

And given the size of the population under his control, there's a strong case he was the worst tyrant who ever lived.

He thoroughly and cynically betrayed family, subordinates, allies and supporters; sent his own troops to needless deaths, starved many millions, countenanced the torture and killing of many millions more; squandered his nation's culture and its resources; pretended to be a great military leader but was a terrible coward and incompetent tactician; pretended to be a humble revolutionary but lived a life of opulence, self-aggrandizement and licentiousness.

Nevertheless, he was a master manipulator and brilliant exploiter of human weakness. Because he possessed no scruples, he could take both sides of an issue or no side at all, whatever suited his immediate purpose.

After 600 pages of Mao, George W. Bush doesn't look so bad at all.

Still, it's worth referring back to an earlier post made before revelations surfaced about NSA surveillance of domestic calls. Mao understood that one key to controlling the population was dampening the ability to have private conversations or express private thoughts. His methods were crude and brutish, but they worked. He nearly succeeded in stamping out independent thought in the world's largest country.

Surveillance and data mining technologies may seem less intimidating than public indoctrination, interrogations, forced confessions, torture at mass rallies and ubiquitous informants. But the ability to mine our phone calls, keystrokes, emails and credit card transactions may ultimately be even more intrusive and powerful. In the hands of unscrupulous leaders who also control the courts, these tools become very real threats to freedom.

I don't believe the President and our government have any such designs in mind. But then, millions of Chinese once believed Mao was their liberator.

Commander-in-Chief-Without-End, Amen

2006-01-04T17:17:00.000-08:00

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, explains why our concern about the Bush presidency ought never to be just about Iraq, torture or any other single issue:

For these cultists [Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, David Addington, et al] of an all-powerful presidency, the holy war, the "crusade" to be embarked upon was, above all, aimed at creating a President accountable to no one, overseen by no one, and restricted by no other force or power in his will to act as he saw fit. And so, in this White House, all roads have led back to one issue: How to press ever harder at the weakening boundaries of presidential power. This is why, when critics concentrate on any specific issue or set of administration acts, no matter how egregious or significant, they invariably miss the point. The issue, it turns out, is never primarily — to take just two areas of potentially illegal administration activity — torture or warrantless surveillance. Though each of them had value and importance to top administration officials, they were nonetheless primarily the means to an end.

This is why the announcement of (and definition of) the "global war on terror" almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks was so important. It was to be a "war" without end. No one ever attempted to define what "victory" might actually consist of, though we were assured that the war itself would, like the Cold War, last generations. Even the recent sudden presidential announcement that we will now settle only for "complete victory" in Iraq is, in this context, a distinctly limited goal because Iraq has already been defined as but a single "theater" (though a "central" one) in a larger war on terror. A war without end, of course, left the President as a commander-in-chief-without-end and it was in such a guise that the acolytes of that "obscure philosophy" of total presidential power planned to claim their "inherent" constitutional right to do essentially anything. (Imagine what might have happened if their invasion of Iraq had been a success!)