Wampum

Not funny

Seems Zvi Greismann, attorney for the Montgomery County Public Schools has been taking stand-up comedy lessons from George W. Bush. Or perhaps vice versa. Bush's performance at the Correspondents' Dinner last week, where he jokingly searched under Oval Office furniture for missing WMDs, incited strong criticism from family members of soldiers killed or injured in Iraq. Greismann's own brand of comedy indicated a similar lack of conscience, as he mocked the school systems' purported opponants, families of special needs children seeking the system's compliance with federal disability law.

According to the WaPo, here are a few examples of Greismann's brand of humor, fully funded by state and local tax dollars:

[J]oked that Cuisinart has come up with the Due Processor, which "shreds, dices, cuts, blends, frappes and otherwise destroys" unwanted applications for due process hearings, where schooling disputes are resolved.

Showing a photo of elated children, he said, "In Boulder, Colorado, a group of students took to the streets in celebration of their due process victory, where the judges awarded them new sets of parents."

With a John Madden display of arrows and circles, he gave a play-by-play of how a school system used its skill to deny a family the placement sought for a child.

...

[G]oals for special-ed students derived by the "National Association of Underachieving Smartypants Educators and Administrators," or NAUSEA: "You will complete the entire homework assignment without your parents' help" and "You will sit in your seat with your big fat mouth shut for at least five minutes without attacking anyone."

Parents who later learned of Greismann's satire at the expense of disabled children and their families were understandably angry:

"I was horrified," said Marcie Roth of Rockville. "It made me feel awful that a roomful of people were having a good laugh at something that my family and I have found so difficult."

Seeing a meeting for a student's individualized education plan (IEP) portrayed as a sports play-by-play riled Selene Robinson of Rockville. "It just confirmed my feeling of what we went through in Montgomery County," she said. "You always felt after an IEP meeting they must be laughing their tushes off."

I tend to be the kind of person who tries to approach adversity with at least a semblance of humor, and will often joke about life as a POA. Dwight does as well.

But this crosses the line of laughing "with" to laughing "at"; The glee is derived from denying the most basic of American rights, to a free and appropriate education, to our most vulnerable children. If the parents of special needs kids in Montgomery County have their way, they'll have the last laugh, with the firing of attorney Greismann.

[note: Thanks to Emily for the WaPo head's up]

Reading the tea leaves...

The Commerce Department's "Factory Orders" report was released this morning, showing rather a rather anemic 0.3% increase in February orders. This was good news after January's 0.9% decline in orders (previously reported as -0.5%), but not nearly as robust as the 1.5% the market had predicted.

A closer look at the actual Commerce release (versus the positive AP spin) isn't so rosy. Take out defense orders and commerical aircraft, and factory orders failed to make it into positive territory.

However, what I personally found most interesting was the dramatic drop in non-durable factory orders, such as food and clothing, which fell a whopping 2% in February.

In light of our recent focus on gas prices, it had me wondering: While price hikes at the the pump might not particularly effect consumers purchases of large durable goods, such as cars, washing machines, etc., as people tend to finance those items, might they not impact the purchase of goods such as food and clothing? If you have less in your wallet/checking account/credit card limit due to the money you're pouring into your tank, how will it effect your consumer behavior? And are retail outlets which place these orders now reacting to a decrease in sales, or merely predicting a slow summer as gas prices creep higher?

Just something to thing about as you fill up with $2/gal regular this week.

Smoking out the real culprit behind rising oil prices...

As Dwight mentioned below, OPEC met today, in part to determine whether the previously proposed cuts in production would in fact be instituted. With gas prices soaring to record levels, and consumers grumbling, Washington has purportedly ratcheted up the rhetoric, calling for OPEC nations to forgo the production cuts.

So much for sending an oilman to talk to other oilmen. OPEC members agreed today to decrease production.

As I read the NYTime analysis of the decision, I was struck most by one of the trailing paragraphs, which seemed to be almost an afterthought on the part of reporter Simon Romero:

Few analysts believe, however, that OPEC will actually implement production cuts even if it announces such measures. For instance, it would be almost impossible for OPEC to immediately implement any cuts in April since its members have already committed to shipping oil to customers around the world next month.

So if "those in the know" believe that OPEC is actually just bluffing, that they can't in fact decrease production due to production contracts, then why has the price of oil increased substantially since OPEC first announced the proposed cuts two months ago?

OPEC members argue that it's not even their fault. According to AP's reporting of today's meeting,

Although demand for oil in Asia and the United States has been unexpectedly strong, Naimi of Saudi Arabia blamed investors and speculators for pushing crude prices up to their highest levels since the 1991 Gulf War. Current prices "have absolutely nothing to do with supply and demand" for crude, he told reporters.

Libyan Oil Minister Fahti bin Shatwan sought to deflect criticism of OPEC by claiming that the recent plunge in the value of the U.S. dollar has inflated crude prices by about 30 percent. He claimed that the real value of barrel of oil is around $20.

Taking a gander at the recently released quarterly reports of various oil companies, high OPEC prices don't appear to have put a dent in their profit margins, some of which surpassed previous records.

So if Saudi Arabia and Kuwait don't give a fig whether production cuts might spell the end of Bush's re-election plans, what about Bush's oilman buddies? Are they willing to reduce their own profit in order to throw a sop to the increasingly irate masses, looking to fix blame for the pain they feel every time they fill up at the gas pump? It seems to me that Ted Kennedy and others needs to rethink their own target when urging Bush to "jawbone" OPEC. Americans are more than willing to blame "feriners" for our economic distress, even when the true culprits are much closer to home. Bush and his cronies are plenty happy to play this game of bait and switch; Democrats are foolish if they don't understand that by simply enabling this ploy, and are in fact throwing away an immense opportunity, if they allow OPEC to become the bulls eye for US consumer ire.

Jawbone OPEC?

MB has often written about the recent rise in oil prices. Oil is currently trading at $35.80 per barrel for US light crude. Gas prices are also hitting record highs:

Gas prices crept to another record high Tuesday, a day before OPEC meets to discuss its planned oil production cuts in April.

The AAA's survey of gas prices hit a new record of $1.753 a gallon on Tuesday, up 3/10th of a cent from Monday's average. It marks the sixth straight record for the survey, which is updated every weekday.

John Kerry thinks that the administration should be doing something to reduce gas prices:

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for U.S president, plans to call on President George W. Bush to pressure oil-producing nations to pump more petroleum …

Is jawboning OPEC to increase production a useful suggestion?

Even before the recent spike in oil prices, one presidential candidate thought jawboning OPEC was the right idea:

“What I think the president ought to do,'' he said while campaigning in New Hampshire where heating oil prices were soaring, “is he ought to get on the phone with the OPEC cartel and say, `We expect you to open your spigots!'''

Just because we expect OPEC to open the spigots, it seems unlikely that they will do so unless they perceive it to be in their interest. Is it in their interest? One presidential candidate, at a New Hampshire debate, thought so:

Q: What pressures should be brought on OPEC nations to lift oil production?

A: It’s important for the president to explain in clear terms what high energy prices will not only do to our economy, but what high energy prices will do to the world economy. It is in the Saudis’ best interests for the price of oil to mellow out. It’s not only in our country’s best interest; It needs to be explained to them it’s in their best interests. And I will do so.

Do we have any special leverage over the Middle East oil producing countries to induce them to increase production, thereby reducing prices? One presidential candidate thinks so. He suggested that as president:

He would use his “political capital'' with Mideast producers. “These are countries where it wasn't all that long ago that a President Bush helped Kuwait,'' he reminded voters, alluding to … the Gulf War.

”I think Americans ought to be asking where's all the capital we earned overseas after defending some of our OPEC nation friends?''

In each of those cases, the presidential candidate was, of course, George W. Bush.

The OPEC oil ministers are to begin meeting in Vienna on Wednesday where they are expected to discuss a cut as opposed to an increase in production. Perhaps President George W. Bush should listen to advice from candidate George W. Bush.

Shadows Of Moral Confusion

USA Today reports:

Pope John Paul says Sunday should be a day for God, not for secular diversions such as sports and entertainment.

"When Sunday loses its fundamental meaning and becomes subordinate to a secular concept of 'weekend' dominated by such things as entertainment and sport, people stay locked within a horizon so narrow that they can no longer see the heavens," the 83-year-old told Australian bishops visiting the Vatican.

He criticized the "culture of the 'here and now,' " urging church leaders to "lead men and women from the shadows of moral confusion and ambiguous thinking."

NASCAR races are held on Sunday. George Bush recently attended a Sunday race. The NFL plays on Sunday. George Bush watched the first half of the Super Bowl on a Sunday until he fell asleep. When George W. Bush was a part owner of the Texas Rangers, they rarely if ever had an off day on Sunday.

Has George W. Bush contributed to the “culture of here and now” while leading Americans, particularly the children, towards the “shadows of moral confusion and ambiguous thinking?”

Nah, instead John Kerry will just be accused of not being a good Catholic.

It Is All Atrios’ Fault

Coming home today, my wife “asked” me to come into the office where my computer is located. The tone of her request made clear that “right now” was the appropriate time. Upon arriving, I saw Bobby playing with my computer (which is not at all unusual) and my wife standing with her hand on her hip, her body language making clear that I had some ‘splaining to do. “Listen to this”, she said. I listened and decided to chose the best option open to me.

“It’s not my fault” I quickly began. “Well, exactly whose fault is it?” she asked. I thought for a moment and said, “It’s Laura Ingraham’s fault.” “We don’t listen to the GOP Fembots” she said. “Well, well, it’s really Atrios’ fault,” I stammered. “Is that your story?” she asked. “And I am sticking to it,” I concluded.

As she left the room, Bobby in tow, I sat down to write this post to prove that it really wasn’t my fault. It really, really was all Atrios’ doing.

Before I tell of Atrios’ dastardly deed, I need to explain a few things about full spectrum autistics and communication. Bobby is almost nine and has very limited speech. He will say a few words with intent to communicate, such as “please” when he wants something. He will occasionally identify numbers or letters by their name. He has a few other things he will say with intent but not many. His verbal communication is really very limited.

Bobby, of course, has other ways to communicate. He uses gestures and pointing a lot. He has a talking device that allows him to turn a knob and press a button to have the machine say any of 160 different words or phrases. He will use the machine to “say” multiple word sentences like “May I have some more juice, please?” He will use the machine when highly motivated but not yet for everyday communication.

Bobby also has a lot of cards that contain both the word for and a picture of an object. He will select the card and hand it to an adult to request the item. He knows what a large number of such cards mean, and will use them when motivated. All in all, we got along pretty well but we very much want Bobby to learn to communicate verbally.

That is not to say that Bobby does not “talk.” He is constantly saying things. We can understand a fair amount of what he says. It is just that such “talk” is not really an effort to communicate.

Bobby loves to play audio tapes, video tapes, and computer games. He does not play the tapes straight through but will select a small portion, and listen to that portion over and over, hundreds of times. Over time, he learns to reproduce the sounds he has heard. His reproductions include the background noises, the sound of the tape player rewinding and any other sounds repeated in the selected portion. The professionals call that “echoalia” and distinguish it from speech.

Bobby’s reproduction of the sounds comforts him and is part of his self stim routines. He also delights in having other people understand what he is saying and repeat it back to him. For instance, currently Bobby likes to say “take your second right past Mars, on the Magic School Bus.” He is also fond of “We’re a crackerjack brigade, on a pachyderm parade” from the Disney movie “The Jungle Book.” Once he learns to reproduce the sound of a tape segment, he likes to say the phrase and repeat the sound over and over, sometimes for hours at a time.

What does any of that have to do with Atrios?

Atrios is always on the alert for hypocrisy. As a result of the Janet Jackson incident, some TV and radio personalities have been feeling some heat from the culture cops. In particular, Clear Channel has dropped Howard Stern in some areas allegedly for using some offensive language on the radio. Others have noted that Stern did not get the boot until he began criticizing the current administration. An example of a right wing radio personality getting by with behavior that resulted in punishment for a Bush critic would lend credibility to the idea that Stern was dropped more for his Bush criticisms than for bad language.

Atrios, of course, found just such an example. That is why he is the Beatles of blogging.

On her radio show, Laura Ingraham was talking about Tucker Carlson interviewing Brittany Spears. Another voice chimes in asking “Did Tucker get to **** her?” If you can’t fill in the blank, and I know you can, you can click through to hear it yourself.

That exchange, apparently, went out over the air. I am not aware of any action taken against Ingraham or her show by the FCC or the culture cops. When Atrios posted the link, I bookmarked it as I was thinking about blogging the issue if no FCC investigation occurred.

When I entered the office, Bobby was playing the Ingraham segment over and over and had been doing so for a couple of hours. Deb knew that he was playing on the computer but had no idea what he was playing, and replaying and replaying as he learned to repeat it. Not the entire segment, of course. He was only interested in the part that rhymed.

We expect a call from his school by mid-day tomorrow after he shows off his new skill.

Now, it seems clear that the bulk of the blame should fall on Atrios for two reasons. First it was at his site where I originally found the link. Sure, I bookmarked it and left the link in an unprotected file on a computer that I knew Bobby used. Nonetheless, my fault is miniscule when one considers the second reason that it must be Atrios’ fault.

He is anonymous and I am not.

Something’s Missing

Fareed Zakaria, writing in Newsweek argues that it is a mistake to conclude that terrorism requires a state sponsor:

Stepping away from the partisan screaming going on these days, the 9/11 commission hearings and—far more revealing—the panel's staff reports paint a fascinating picture of the rise of a new phenomenon in global politics: terrorism that is not state-sponsored but society-sponsored…

I asked an American official closely involved with counterterrorism about state sponsorship. He replied, "Well, all that's left is Iran and to a lesser extent Syria, and it's mostly directed against Israel. States have been getting out of the terror business since the late 1980s. We have kept many governments on the list of state sponsors for political reasons. The reality is that the terror we face is mostly unconnected to states." Today's terrorists are harbored in countries like Spain and Germany—entirely unintentionally. They draw on support not from states but private individuals—Saudi millionaires, Egyptian radicals, Yemenite preachers.

This is the new face of terror: dozens of local groups across the world connected by a global ideology.

That sounds right to me but David Frum, writing in NRO thinks it is all wrong:

Without the indulgence and complaisance of governments worldwide, al Qaeda could never have taken form. If the Saudis had cut off the flow of funds to al Qaeda, if Afghanistan had denied al Qaeda its territory, if Pakistan had not formed a tacit alliance with al Qaeda and the Taliban, if radical governments like Arab had not incited anti-American and anti-Western extremism, and if moderate governments like Egypt had not appeased it – minus all these ifs, al Qaeda would never have become the menace it has become.

Let’s see, Frum argues that Al Qaeda would not have thrived without state support in the form of money from Saudi Arabia, territory from Afghanistan, the alliance with Pakistan and the appeasement of Egypt.

There seems to be one country very conspicuous by its absence from that list. You know the one. It beings with an “I” and ends with a “q”.

Which Country?

If, as we keep being told, the fight against terrorism must not be approached from a law enforcement perspective but rather must be combated militarily, one question remains. Which country should Spain invade?

Update on the Petty Tyrant of Kennebunkport

Last December, I posted on the plight of a teenage boy from southern Maine, incarcerated in federal prison for the crime of incinerating the engine of Poppa Bush's yacht, while attempting to coverup his break-in to a local boatyard. The boy, previously identified only as Patrick (the NYTimes has now published the minor's full name) was sent to a federal facility in Pennsylvania, hundreds of miles from his family. A federal court judge in Portland has now reopened the case, to determine if the original sentencing justice acted illegally in shipping the juvenile arsonist off to the wilds of Penn's Woods.

Locally, the case has stirred some resentment, in a region which has generally given the former President a pass for siring the current miscreant to occupy the Oval Office. Even the conservative Portland Press Herald, which ignored the story when the boatyard fire first occurred, reported on the apparent injustice of Patrick's placement, and the link to Bush Sr.'s beloved boat. Not a good sign for the first family of Kennebunkport.

While I'm very pleased to see a possible light at the end of the tunnel for young Patrick, the press has missed another important aspect of this story. Patrick may have been the only New Englander housed in the federal juvenile facility, now known for its lack of appropriate educational and rehabilitative services, but he wasn't the only teenager kept hundreds of miles from community and family. The majority of Patrick's prison-mates are Indians, having committed their crimes on "federal" property, i.e., reservation lands. They too are lost in what the New York Times deemed a "legal black hole".

But while Patrick has the benefit of being a middle-class white kid from Kennebunkport who torched Bush property, thus conveying some media "sex appeal" to the story, the teenagers from the rez have no such luck. They remain trapped in a system which was never meant to exist, not even registering on the media's radar.

Convergences and Divergences

Would the U-boats bring Britain to its knees before American power could make itself felt on the battlefronts? That was the question to Generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg, in February, 1917, and the production/interdiction/consumption curves came within six weeks of famine for the UK, and then the curves diverged.

By July 1943, the Americans were building ships far faster than the Germans could sink them. The point of closest approach of the production/interdiction/consumption curves was Spring, 1943. "The Battle of the Atlantic was the only thing that really frightened me" - Winston Churchill.

The visual most often cited to convey the sense of strategic blunder is this.

At some point, Napoleon knew. At some point Donitz knew. At some point Hindenburg knew. The other side was winning the race. The other side had solved the logistics problem. The other side was producing lowest cost counter-force, and nothing could change the outcome.

RAC just pointed out on MtP that 90% of the population of Morocco and Algeria, who's governments are allies of the United States ... now hate the US. He mentioned Hosni Mubark's comments to the Egyptian Army at Suez, "Instead of having one (Osama) bin Laden, we will have 100 bin Ladens."

It is left as an exercise to the reader the percentage of the populations of the rest of North Africa, the Middle East, Arabia, Western and South Asia, (India excluded), that share this view.

At an approximate cost of $1,000,000 per unit, whether cruise missle delivered (targeting overhead and supporting forces costs not included), or a SOCOM op with force depletion of one or more, we can't possibly loose, neh?

At some point the light must have gone on in the Kremlin. At some point on the trajectory between K's "we will bury you" speach, which was intended as a production curve remark, not as it was spun by its intended audience, as a would-be gravedigger's hollow promise, and the spent-into-the-ground collapse of the Soviet economy under the last of the Commie Tsars, the intended by-product of which was dimminished command and control over strategic and tactical theater weapons, or at least the parts that make an impression when used as intended, at some point before it all augered in and rotors and parts went random happy directions, Red Players knew they'd lost, that the curves were diverging, not converging.

Set your watches. Slightly before 10am today, and Tweety and the Gang seem to have missed it, today, the Racoon, the only person at this point known to have reasonably clean hands, observed that OBL will be caught or killed soon, and that the curves are diverging, not converging. We are not winning. We're not likely to either.

The Weapon Shops of Isher

Dom-V? No Thanks.

Dear Larry, and the rest of the nice folks at Gun Owners of America and the 2004 Candidate Questionaire Maine team,

Thanks for the questionaire. I was going to blow it off as yet-another-exercise-by-pompous-airheads, except for three questions. They gave me pause. And then of course there was the how-wrong-can-you-be question about domestic violence and access to defensive arms. So, you're right on the clip question (#6), clips are just well-formed cowboy coffee cups with springs on their bottoms. You're right on the cosmetics too (#5), the "military" appearance issue is really just a sumptuary law, can the commons wear crimson and velvet, in hardware drag. You're right on the Sharps question too (#15). Its downright funny that anyone is trying to regulate a tube type that last committed a street crime when Abe Lincoln was still in the White House. Of course, if you've any buffalo on staff I could see your point.

However, you appear to be seriously out to lunch on just about everything else.

Look, Berkeley, Cambridge, Moscow, and the rest of the latte-loving portions of the Republic have passed local laws attempting to keep the Feds from moving nuclear waste, nuclear fuel rods, nuclear weapons components, nuclear weapons, and so forth through their little burgs. You go the preemption route and claim the locals can't force you to check your hardware when in Dodge and you're running with the big dogs, who'd be just as happy dumping glow-in-mid-day-slurry into your backyard pool as they would be dumping it in the water supply of some Gawd-forsaken tribe of Indians out in Upper Nowhere. I can't believe there is a collection of gun nuts stupid enough to want the Feds to tractor-trailor up a double-wide full of leaky 1960s-era 55 gallon drums, go jacks-down, and leave the little darlings to age out in the open under a theory of Federal supremacy and no local preemption. That takes care of questions #2 and #3.

Questions #1 and #8 are at odds with each other, but I expect you knew that when you put them on the same push-poll and seperated them respectably. Look, either American arms are crap, more likely to fail after a month of normal use than the average arms on the Central Asian grey markets, and you busta caps on any buy-side limitation, question #1, and the executive staffs of Colt et al do perp walks on the strict liability issue, question #8, or the executive staffs of Colt et al, and their shareholders all sleep soundly, and you eat some sort of buyer's limit.

You have to pick one row and hoe it. You definitely do not want to claim both busta caps and non-liability on the part of the manufacturers, cause if you do, as compulsive buyers of weapons (you're not replacing worn out guns, neh?), you're looking at the wrong end of an addiction arguement. Putting gun owners on the same level as the miserable, dog food eating, paycheck-squandered-on-Powerball-tickets loosers, that isn't the best line an advocacy organization could take, neh?

Besides, to be realistic about this, campaign contributions from Colt outweigh those from the arms-rich, dollars-poor splinter sect of the armed population. I'll make you a bet. Donald Zakhlis will send my client money just because I'm taking a piss all over you and your margin of wingnuts, because he doesn't want the liability in exchange for the marginal sales the gun-a-month-club make on the low end of the product/price curve. Besides, you guys don't actually buy new, so you're just after-market churn and nobody's bottom-line.

Let's see, that leaves #4, #7, #9-11, #12, #13, and #14. Look, questions #4 (registration), #7 (age), #9 (buyer check), #10 (licensing), and #11 (quickie buyer check) are all the same question, and an utter waste of time for serious people. Question #12 (locks) is a no-brainer. A three year old can point, aim, and fire a standard handgun. You don't want to go into question #7 as a champion of the rights of draft-age teens to win fire-fights with your starting point being the rights of pre-schoolers to pump a round through Barney, or the baby-sitter.

The only serious question left is #13, lucky 13. The domestic violence question. Unfortunately you have this one upside down. The issue isn't taking a firearm, statistically a piece of crap that hasn't seen Hoppe's or brush longer than the lifetime of the relationship-at-risk, and only marginally more likely to kill, maime or simply frighten the snot out of the potential intended toe-taggee than the potential intended toe-tagger. The issue is the prompt delivery of an effective arm to the battered spouse. A call to 9-11 should yeild, not just a peace officer intent on re-establishment of peace, until he hops back in his rig and heads back to the doughtnut shop, but an assortment of ladies arms, and a helpful assistant, who can match shades of makeup appropriate for recent bruising, and a tastefull assortment of sub-9mm accessories.

If "gun rights" mean anything, other than too much beer and testosterone and some socially useful slaughterhouse not visited, and Nam does come to mind, if it has a Constitutional meaning, then it has to mean the protection of the weak from the strong. That, in a nutshell, is where you blow it. You're on the side of the armed batterer, the dom-v perp, piously praying to prevent partial patriarchal pacification. You should get out of the line of fire. The gun goes to the dom-v vic, and self-defense is self-defense.

Basically, the Avon Lady is higher up on the food chain, and she could be working a side-line with Colt products, and that's where public policy and the public purse should be. Loaner weapons for as long as the risk exists, like white bicycles in Amsterdam. Good weapons at reasonable prices, with reasonable rates of fire and reasonable return terms. With good engineering and mass production, the cost point on a single-use defensive weapon can be less than a pair of off-brand shoes, with the interesting side-effect that advanced materials construction could make women's defensive arms invisible to the existing metal detection regime that screens out men's offensive arms in some social circumstances. Lipstick with attitude, available in several shades of dissuasion. That takes care of your #14 (Vermont-style concealment) as well.

That leaves rate-of-fire, question #6, and cosmetics, question #5.

The whole semi-auto and mag question really is just auto-sear in disguise. Look, I've friends who import IMI (Uzi) for ... European governmentally licensed buyers. There are few legit uses for high-rate-of-fire or sustained-fire weapons, and to be blunt, most users of auto- or near-auto- projectile weapons would be better served by rethinking their problem, or using shaped- or omni-directional charges. On average, a kilo of Semtex or C4 has fewer unintended killed and wounded than an excited first-time gunner with a MAC-10 and a couple of back-to-back bannana clips in similar target environments. The whole semi- thing is simply non-hunter, non-marksman, and non-sense.

I suppose I should point out that shooting cement-filled Coor cans a mile down range and dusting pre-killed automobiles is pretty fun, and I hear that recreational machinegunning, like recreational artillery, is a lot of fun, but the safty requiremnts, not to mention the cost of the ammo, make both about as exotic as polo. It is sort of daft to hang an every-man-must-have-a-polo-pony arguement out in a transportation policy foodfight, and fixating on the near-fully-auto when working the arms and domestic tranquility policy areas is, well, as wierd as fixating on polo ponies.

Cosmetics. You don't actually contest the right of goverment to require that military-style weapons, the AR-15 say, be finnished in happy colors rather than gun-metal gray or camo? You agree that funtion, not style, is the issue to retain, and if government chooses to make civilian market weapons conform more to the frilly girl's bike model of engendered tools than the BMX boy's bike model, that is not an infringement on gun rights, neh? A bike is a bike after all. Pedals, wheels, seat, frame. Brakes optional.

Well, responding to your push-poll has been a lot more fun than I thought it would be, and I'm damn sure that a lot more Mainiacs are happy with the three-round limit on smooth bore weapons, and wouldn't notice if held to five for rifled weapons, and don't have much use for pistols, and could live comfortably with the laws of Quebec or New Brunswick, than not. Your guys are probably the same ones that do bear over doughnut and whiskied-apple baits. I guess there's no real harm in firehosing small dead bears, its just something I can't imagine doing. There are cultural differences between Indians and Euro-Americans, and that's one of them.

I enjoy shooting. Cutting paper at distance with a nicely balanced .22 target pistol is relaxing, and the smell of cordite, well, it is one of those things. Put my client down for a grade of "F", and if you ever manage to write a non-push-poll, send it, the price of a decent dinner for two, and we'll look at it. I want to see a concealed weapons question, a DU question, with a lead question on the side, to flush out those anti-waterfowlers, a projectile coating question, and a prior act or state of mind question.

It is probably too much to hope that my client's primary, or general election opponants are going to debate the set of social uses of firearms issues. We probably won't run into a Second Amendment Simpleton until we get to Augusta, so doing standup comedy with of one of your folk heros will have to wait until then. As a shooter, it simply amazes me that sport shooting has been taken over by political droolers, but then again, the Republicans got run out of their party by religious droolers, so I guess it is just one of those things.

You know y'all can still emigrate to Idaho and Paraguay, right?

Sincerely, etc.

This is where the GOA 2004 Candidate Questionaire Maine will go. It is far too long, and poorly written, to type out for them.

Let Me At ‘Em

I know that this dates me, but I was a big fan of the Portland Trailblazers in the Bill Walton era.

One Portland player, Maurice Lucas, was an enforcer. He was about 6’9” and 250 pounds of muscle. He also had a mean streak developed growing up in a very tough section of Pittsburgh. He could and did intimidate players, referees, reporters and even his own coaches. Whenever the game got overly physical, particularly if other teams were trying to muscle Bill Walton, Lucas would quickly put an end to it, with an elbow if possible and with his fists if necessary.

In one playoff game, an opposing player drove to the basket only to be leveled by Lucas. The opposing player, not knowing that it was Lucas who had fouled him, jumped up, cursing, looking for a fight. Lucas puffed out his chest and took one step forward. The opposing player saw, for the first time, that it was big, mean Maurice Lucas who had fouled him. He quickly began having second thoughts about the wisdom of fisticuffs. He clearly was scared.

At about the same time, referees and other players had surrounded and restrained both players. Once Lucas was firmly held by two or three other players and the danger had passed, the opposing player’s attitude changed again. He began pointing at Lucas and yelling “I want a piece of you.” Once he was in no danger, it was easy to pretend to be brave to try to save face. No one watching the game was fooled in the least.

Who was the opposing player? I do not wish to say but for the purpose of this post, let’s think of him as Condi Rice.

Dr. Rice says she would be “delighted” to testify before the 9/11 commission.

The Times reports:

Ms. Rice has said repeatedly that if she had her way, she would testify, and late on Thursday she offered to be interviewed in private, as she was for four hours on Feb. 7. But President Bush, her close confidante, has been adamant, White House officials say, that any public appearance would violate longstanding precedent against incumbent national security advisers testifying before a legislative body.

Ms. Rice is described by administration officials as being frustrated at having to remain publicly silent before the commission and as being eager to make her arguments against the case that Richard A. Clarke, her former subordinate, has marshaled against her.

Dr. Rice says she really, really wants to testify but Mr. Bush just won't let her. The president is “adamant” in refusing to allow her to testify publicly and under oath.

What the basis for the refusal? The White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, wrote a letter to the 9/11 commission Chair and Vice Chair setting forth the reasons for the refusal to turn Condi loose. He wrote:

More important than the legal precedents are the principles underlying the Constitutional separation of powers at stake here. In order for President Bush and future Presidents to continue to receive the best and most candid possible advice from their White House staff on counterterrorism and other national security issues, it is important that these advisers not be compelled to testify publicly before congressional bodies such as the Commission.

That argument has a degree of plausibility but is, in fact, unmitigated garbage. The key word is “compelled.”

The 9/11 Commission has not issued a subpoena to to compel Rice to testify. It is perfectly clear that Dr. Rice could voluntarily (with White House consent) agree to appear before the committee and testify in public and under oath.

The protections for the National Security Advisor can not be greater than those of the President at whose pleasure she serves. If the President could voluntarily testify before the commission there is no reason why Dr. Rice could not.

The precedent of a sitting President testifying voluntarily before a congressional body is clear and indisputable.

A month after becoming President as a result of the resignation of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford issued a pardon to the former president. A firestorm of criticism erupted over allegations that a deal of resignation for a pardon had been made.

PBS describes how Gerald Ford handled the controversy:

The pardon, coming only one month after Nixon's resignation and Ford's inaugural, also provoked a new suspicion to imperil Ford's fledgling presidency:

Was there a deal between Nixon and Ford?

Responsible voices in Congress raised the question... To make a truthful response, Ford knew that he would have to disclose that Al Haig, Nixon's chief of staff, had proposed a pardon as a condition for Nixon to resign. With his usual directness, Ford decided the best way to handle the problem was for him to go up to the House, testify, and spell it out...

Ford did testify before Congress, as no president had ever done before. Before the House Judiciary Committee, Ford gave his account of what happened in his meeting with Haig. Was there a deal? one representative asked.

Ford's reply was blunt: "There was no deal. Period. Under no circumstances." .....

If a sitting President can voluntarily testify before a Congressional Committee without the Republic falling, there is no constitutional reason that the National Security Advisor can not voluntarily testify in public and under oath.

What stopped the basketball player from instigating a fight was his abject fear of Maurice Lucas. Once that fear passed, he tried to save face with a show of bravado.

The only thing stopping Dr. Rice from testifying, publicly and under oath, is her and the President's abject fear of the facts becoming known to the American people.

The rest is just a show of bravado to save face.

Despicable Tactic

One of the more despicable tactics of the right is to accuse liberals of wanting bad things to happen to the country so as to reap political gain. I have often heard conservatives claim that liberals are hoping that the economy will tank so that Bush can be defeated. I have rarely heard Republicans criticized for making such claims.

One example will suffice. In 2002 when the Enron, WorldCom and other corporate scandals were in the news, then House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt reportedly commented that:

The party could pick up as many as 40 House seats if the continuously unfolding corporate scandals can be kept on the political radar screen until November.

SpinSanity described the comment as “basic political strategizing.” Nonetheless, the Republicans were quick to allege that Gephardt wanted to harm the American people. Spinsanity quotes Rush Limbaugh as saying:

They're talking down the economy, which is up, and they're making a big deal out of these corporate scandals, and they're gonna keep doing it until November. They want you to get hurt, folks, so that you'll vote for them to fix it ... These guys are praying for mass economic failure.

It was not just radio blowhards making that argument. Tom Delay, appearing on CNN said:

The Democrats are working to extend America's misery for their own political gain, and we just think that's just outrageous.

What makes the GOP’s tactic so despicable is that it presumes that Democrats do not simply have policy disputes with Republicans but rather that Democrats are evil. It is part and parcel of the GOP charge that Democrats lack patriotism.
Where was the firestorm of criticism of Republicans for making those outrageous charges?

One rarely hears the flip side of the argument. For instance, Ron Brownstein in the Los Angles Times notes that:

The president's strongest asset in the 2004 campaign has been the unwavering sense among most Americans that he is providing resolute leadership against terrorism.

Dick Morris argues that anything that increases the saliency of the terrorism issue helps Bush. Morris then goes on to say:

The Madrid bombing, by indicating that al Qaeda is alive and well and still capable of striking, would seem to help Kerry. But it actually benefits Bush because it demonstrates the importance of terrorism as an issue.

Can you imagine the firestorm that would be created if Democrats charged that Bush wanted additional terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda so as to improve his reelection prospects? When Republicans argue that Democrats want us to fail in Iraq or want the economy to tank so as to increase the chances of defeating President Bush in November, no firestorm of criticism erupts.

Why is that?

Robert Novak And the Race Card

Conservatives often accuse others of “playing the race card.” Those accusations are, in essence, that others assert that racial animus is the motivation for actions when no proof of such motivation exists.

One person who is fond of suggesting that others are playing the “race card” is Robert Novak. When Al Gore and Jesse Jackson called for Trent Lott to step down as Senate Majority Leader after his comments regarding Strom Thurmond and segregation, Robert Novak was quick to accuse Jackson and Gore of “demagoguing and playing the race card.”

When then Vice president Gore chastised Republicans for their treatment of Judge Ronnie White, Novak called it “Gore’s Race Card.”

When Jesse Helms was criticized by Democrats, Novak came to his defense claiming that Helms' critics had been “reduced to ad hominem assaults and playing the race card.”

Via Elton Beard, by way of Julia, it appears that conservative columnist Robert Novak is now doing exactly what he professes to abhor.

From a Crossfire transcript:

NOVAK: Congressman, do you believe, you're a sophisticated guy, do you believe watching these hearings that Dick Clarke has a problem with this African-American woman Condoleezza Rice?

EMANUEL: Say that again?

NOVAK: Do you believe that Dick Clarke has a problem with this African-American woman Condoleezza Rice?

EMANUEL: No, no. Bob, give me a break. No. No.

If Novak has evidence to suggest that the race or gender of Dr. Rice animates Richard Clarke’s position, he needs to produce it. If he has no such evidence, he needs to apologize to Clarke. He also needs to keep his mouth shut about others playing the race card.

And speaking of bullets...

I received my first "candidate survey" in the mail. This one, from the Gun Owners of America. Even as a supporter of the rights of local turkey and deer hunters, I knew I was in trouble.

Question 1:

Do you oppose "one-gun-a-month" laws that limit purchases by law abiding citizens?

While I can't see any reason for needing to buy more than one gun a year, I gave them the benefit of the doubt. But it got worse.

Do you oppose legislation banning the manufacture, sale or possession of semi-automatic firearms?

Do you oppose legislation banning the manufacture, sale or possession of large-capacity magazines?

Do you oppose laws that would ban the sale of a privately owned firearm at a gun show unless the buyer submits to a background check?

Do you oppose computerized "instant" background check systems?

Do you oppose government mandated use of trigger locks or other locked storage requirements?

Of course, what's missing from this list I posted was the "push" comments added by the surveyors. This one gained considerable meaning when I misread it slightly,

Recently, there has been proposed legislation to ban firearms possession for mere misdemeanors that may be no more serious than spanking your child or shooting at your spouse. This legislation specifically targets gun owners, as it does not restrict other rights."

Would you oppose legislation that bans firearms ownership due to simple misdemeanors?"

Now, the truth of the matter is I misread "shouting at" for "shooting at", but let's be realistic. If anyone has been arrested, charged and convicted of "shouting at" their spouse, there obviously was something a little more serious going on.

The survey goes back to the GOA via post on Monday. Fifteen questions, and I failed them all miserably, at least I imagine the Gun Owners of America will determine such. Oh well.

Will tomorrow's mail bring a survey from the Right To Lifers, asking whether I support the use of contraceptives which may conceivably (pun intended) prevent a fertilized human egg from implanting? Or from the Christian Civic League, inquiring on my support for the "preservation" of marriage? (Preserve marriage? Allow everyone to marry, and ban divorce.)

The lesser known joys of running for public office. It's scary to think that individuals who answered "Yes" to all fifteen GOA survey questions may be elected this November. Or perhaps already were, in elections past.

Reality sinks in....

I thought with the purchase of the new laptop, blogging would pick up considerably. What I realized, however, was that I now had to deal with all the campaign-related tasks which I had put off due to the lack of dependable hardware. And it's amazing just how many things there are to do when beginning even a relatively small campaign, such as my run for the Maine House.

The "Message":

If my pursuit of this office should somehow fall short (i.e., I lose), I now know a sure-fire way of making my first million. Develop software which allows a candidate to throw in some sundry information about her personal strengths, her opponent's weaknesses, district demographic, pressing local hot-buttons, etc., etc. and, viola, out pops the campaign "message". Candidates will line up for miles, willing to pay exorbitant fees for those few precious sentences which "define" the candidate, and the race, up until the election.

For, to be honest, unless you're Machiavelli, establishing the campaign message is not particularly fun; in fact, it ranks slightly above having a root canal. But only slightly.

It sounds like it should be a cakewalk; Highlight your strengths, which, in a perfect world, are hopefully mirror-opposites of your opponent's Achilles' heel. Of course, unless you're Martin Luther King running against Tom Delay, it never is that easy.

And then there are the hidden strengths, the ones you're not supposed to mention, except perhaps in a sideways manner. For example, in my district, women comprise 62% of the Democratic electorate. And seeing that I'm the only Democratic woman running in the entire city (let's not mention Portland is the only major New England city without female representation in the state legislature), this should be one of those "mirror opposite" strengths, as my opponent is obviously male. But according to members of the local "Old Boy Network", it would be inappropriate for me to publicly focus attention on this detail. Affirmative action is "officially" a plank in the Democratic platform, but somehow, grassroots Democrats have subconsciously rejected it as inherently "unfair". Go figure.

So instead, I'm left with less tangibles to flesh out. But I did it. Took me over a week of ripping out my own, and my deputy campaign manager's, hair, and practically led to a dissolution of my marriage, but it's done.

Which then led to the first piece of...

Campaign Literature

I honestly convinced myself that I'd put this off due to the lack of adequate publishing software (which I refused to install on the previous machine-in-meltdown.) So once I had the laptop humming, I had no excuse.

Except, I hadn't a clue as to where to start.

See, like campaign messages, there is no "Campaign Literature for Dummies" manual out there. Not only that, there are very few websites which even give examples of good, or bad for that matter, literature. And how many of us pay attention to, let alone hold onto, the reams of paper which make their way into our mailboxes come June and November? My beloved printer could only come up with a few examples (turns out that every other candidate is also looking for a clue, and scooped up the goods before my appointment.)

So novice candidates are on their own. For the past few days, I've sat at the laptop, message in hand, pages of notes, attempting to get my past, present and future hopes and dreams onto the back and front of an 8.5" by 14" piece of 100lb glossy paper. It's truly amazing how the seminal turning points of one's life are deemed irrelevant when it comes to campaign lit. Terms like "white space" take on new meaning, and the shape of bullets can make one lose sleep.

The good news is, the first lit piece is done. With the bulk mail permit I picked up yesterday, we go live with our first mailing within the next few weeks (I'd tell you when, but then my campaign manager would have to kill you...or me...?)

So for all you budding entrepreneurs wondering how to survive in the new economy? Message software and compilations of past campaign literature. Sure to top the list at Amazon...though probably not until 2006, if you can starve that long.

They Should Be Doing Stand Up

The New York Daily News has an article about how the Clarke testimony and book have knocked the President’s reelection campaign off stride:

President Bush's best campaign week of 2004 came to an abrupt end when explosive charges that he was snoozing at the wheel before 9/11 knocked the White House back on the defensive.

"This guy popped up at the wrong time for us," one Bush counselor complained. "We had [John] Kerry on the run, and now we have to deal with this distraction."

The Bushies didn't see it coming because the frosty-haired terror czar's testimony to the 9/11 commission was relatively benign.

There was one other reason that the Bush campaign was caught off guard:

One aide said the White House was further blindsided because they never expected 9/11 to be politicized.

Hahahaha. Robin Williams has nothing on those guys.

Elsewhere in Blog-i-stan

Over on Atrios, Tena has a piece on the latest alleged al-Zawahri tape. In it, the speaker is calling on the citizens of Pakistan to rise up and overthrow their pro-American government link.

Owing to my Return of the ... One True King series, I now get press releases from Naveed Butt, spokesman (in Pakistan) for the Hizb ut-Tahrir, see also link. See Alisher Khamidov's piece from last Fall in Eurasianet for slightly dated background on this particular central asian underground radical Islamic organization.

The press release is entitled "Musharraf is transforming Pak Army into Colonial American Army", and in two longish, but not unstylishly so, paragraphs, argues that case, and inter alia, for the replacement of Americans-by-proxy (Generals) by Mullahs.

Folks needing to see the original drop me a note.

Pledge Problems

The Supreme Court heard oral argument in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow , the Pledge of Allegiance case yesterday. I, for one, hope that the Court will resolve all issues surrounding the Pledge as it has caused me nothing but confusion for more than forty years.

Like many of my generation, I encountered the Pledge as an elementary school student. Unlike some, as we recited the Pledge each morning at the start of the school day, I thought about what we were saying and became hopelessly confused.

My first problem was with the last phrase, “with liberty and justice for all.” Now growing up is a small southern city in the early 1960s, it was as obvious to all that we did not provide “liberty and justice for all.” A large group of residents of our town, mostly on the east side, were not free to do many things and could not expect anything resembling justice. I was confused as to why we would keep claiming “liberty and justice for all” each morning and then forget all about it for the rest of the day.

I asked my mom about it. She patiently explained that “liberty and justice for all” was an aspiration and not a description. We hoped to provide liberty and justice for all and, when we fell short, as we did every day, we could always hope to improve in the future.

That made sense and even though only a very few people seemed to be trying hard to live up to the ideal, I thought I understood the Pledge. The more I thought about it, though, the less sense it made. Do we really aspire to provide liberty and justice for all? It seemed obvious that we did not. The whole purpose of the criminal courts was to provide justice by denying someone his liberty. If we provided liberty to people who broke the law, how could be we providing justice? It seemed to me that our goal was to provide “liberty or justice for all”. If you obeyed the law, you got liberty. If you did not, you got justice.

I started saying the Pledge the way that made sense until Ms. Keys, my third grade teacher, made me stop.

Pledging our allegiance to the flag also struck me as very dangerous. If Hitler had captured our flag and, brandishing it, ordered our soldiers to put down their arms, would they have to do it? If Lex Luthor stole the flag and ordered me to help with one of his nefarious plots, would it be my patriotic duty to help lure Superman into the room with the kryptonite? I actually worried about such things. Such is life when you are ten.

Now, with the appearance of Newdow before the Court I am again confused. When the 9th Circuit ruled the inclusion of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge unconstitutional, a firestorm broke out among conservatives.

According to some, removing the phrase would “would produce a public outrage … greater than any we’ve ever seen.” Why is that?

Alternet notes the reason for the firestorm:

Fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics oppose Newdow because they want this godly Pledge affirmed as constitutional, but the truth is that they also believe it favors religion – and should. They are confident that America functions "under God," that the Founders believed this and that we should say so out loud.

In other words, removing the phrase from the Pledge would be dissing God and religion. Alternet continues:

Take the Roman Catholic Justice Antonin Scalia... he claims "that government – however you want to limit that concept – derives its moral authority from God," that this was "the consensus of Western thought until very recent times… That consensus has been upset, I think, by the emergence of democracy." His bizarre argument appeals to "people of faith" not to resign themselves to this deplorable "tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government" but "to combat it as effectively as possible."

Americans have already done this, he claims, "by preserving in our public life many visible reminders that – in the words of a Supreme Court opinion from the 1940s – 'we are a religious people, whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.'"

Religious people want “under God” in the Pledge because it affirms religion. I can understand that even if it poses some constitutional problems. Where I get confused is when the proponents of keeping the phrase in the Pledge deny that it has anything to do with religion.

As one report puts it:

Lawyers for the Elk Grove school district and the Bush administration countered that the pledge is a ceremonial, patriotic exercise and not religious, so it doesn't violate the Constitution's prohibition against state-sponsored religious activity.

In Slate, Dahlia Lithwick writes:

One of the thorns in this case is that supporters of the pledge say the words "under God" are political, historical, ceremonial—anything but religious.

Indeed, Solicitor Olson argues in his brief that:

The government, arguing to uphold the present language, argued in its brief that the pledge is a patriotic expression, not a religious testimonial. Theodore Olson, the administration's top attorney, said that the pledge's reference to God simply acknowledges the role that religion had played in the founding of the country.

"The purpose of reciting the Pledge is to promote patriotism and national unity, not a religious belief," he wrote.

If that is true then it is hard to see how removing the phrase disses God or religion. Perhaps it disses our history (all the way back to 1954 when the phrase was added to the Pledge) but if the Pledge is not a religious statement, then removing the phrase can have no effect on religion.

If removing the phrase is not harmful to religion, then it is hard to see what all the controversy is about.

No matter how old I get, I just can not seem to understand the Pledge.

Optional Reading

WEST VIRGINIA STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION v. BARNETTE, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)

Facts of the Case:

As part of instituting a required curriculum teaching American values, the state of West Virginia forced students and teachers to participate in saluting the flag. Failure to comply with this resulted in expulsion and the student was considered illegally absent until readmitted. A group of Jehovah's Witnesses refused to salute the flag because it represented a graven image that was not to be recognized.

Decision:

In an 8-1 decision, the Court ruled that the school district violated the rights of students by forcing them to salute the American flag.

There are some gems in this. I'm rather fond of this one.

Free public education, if faithful to the ideal of secular instruction and political neutrality, will not be partisan or enemy of any class, creed, party, or faction. If it is to impose any ideological discipline, however, each party or denomination must seek to control, or failing that, to weaken the influence of the educational system.

Trivial Pursuits

The ICANN social event was a buffet in the hospital of S. Spirito in Sassia. The Ospedale di S.Spirito in Sassia was presented as the oldest hospital in Europe, constructed at the end of the 13th and beginning of the 14th century, a long hall with an incomprehensibly high ceiling. Jeff Neuman (NeuStar) and I (ex-NeuStar) sat together and kibbitzed, along with Javier Sáenez and Marwen Radwan, responsible for the the Spanish and Palestinian ccTLD registries, respectively. A few days later I returned to S.Spirito to find the hall being used for the regional congress of the Forza Italia, the party founded by Berlusconi, which reminded me of our caucus in Portland. I'll write more on ICANN later.

Then succeeded Ina to the kingdom of the West-Saxons, whose kin goeth to Cerdic, and reigned thirty-seven winters.

Offa Sighering ... Seaxa Sledding ðonan forð is a near miss.

Ina succeeded Ceadwalla in 688 to become King of the West Saxons. In 728 he went on pilgrimage to Rome and founded the Saxon school. The school was endowed by a tax of a penny from each householder, the romescot (later "Peterspence") by Offa, King of Mercia. Ina's laws, Offa's laws, and Aethelbert's laws were incorporated into the laws of Alfred, and that brings us into the current term of the Supreme Court of the United States in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow. Sorry about the nosebleeds.

I've written about the problem Oliphant presents, the sudden, absurd fiction that a pushing match between two men in 1977 was sui generis, utterly without precident, because it took place within tribal jurisdiction, and one of the men was not an Indian, and one was, and therefore this Constitutional Question required an inquisition by the Rehnquist Court -- a work of simply staggering fiction and non-scholarship that lives on in series of mindnumbingly stupid cases. What if the two men were both Indians, but not members of the same tribe? What it if wasn't a pushing match, but a dispute over a dog? What if ... How fine can the territorial jurisdiction of an occupied territory be shaved with mere pieces of paper?

The Rehnquist Court will hear arguement, assuming it does not first decide that a parent's standing in case or controversy arising from the First Ammendment is conditional and completely determined by "custody", on the general question: Is Christianity part of English Common Law?

Thomas Jefferson wrote that the doctrine [that Christianity was part of the Common Law] was a sort of judicial "forgery", that judges had "stole this law upon us," He described the doctrine as "the most remarkable instance of Judicial legislation, that has ever occurred in English jurisprudence, or perhaps in any other." In this letter he cited the long road back ... to Ina, and the room an Indian, a Jew, a Spaniard, and a Palastinian politely dined and discussed technology over wine and bottled water.

The laws of England, in their progress from the earliest to the present times, may be likened to the road of a traveller, divided into distinct stages or resting places, at each of which a review. is taken of the road passed over so far. The first of these was Bracton's De legibus Angliae; the second, Coke's Institutes; the third, the Abridgment of the law by Matthew Bacon; and the fourth, Blackstone's Commentaries. Doubtless there were others before Bracton which have not reached us. Alfred, in the preface to his laws, says they were compiled from those of Ina, Offa, and Aethelbert ...

We do not simply live in the present. Rob Williams (no relation) wrote on the origins of Federal Indian Law. He traced the roots of current law to the correspondence between Innocent IV and Guyak Khan in the middle of the 13th century, to the origins of the doctrine of "Natural Law", and of necessity, of Objectivism, necessary to observer correctly the workings of that Natural Law in human affairs. It is from this thin slice of lemon, the untested claim of Innocent IV that Guyak Khan and the Golden Horde would be destroyed by a Diety intent upon the preservation of "Natural Law" if they continued towards Rome, that we know that Christian Europeans are the better interpreters of the natural order of things.

This session the Bill and his Gang will decide if Ina was a Christian, or a King, and supply their own supporting evidence, carelessly overthowing the change-of-life of pilgrimage to Rome and establishment of the Schola Saxonum, and the great chain of reason from Ina to Offa to Aethelbert to Alfred to Bracton to Coke to Bacon and finally to Blackstone. The history of the Kings of England will be sacrificed to a vision of Christian Integralism as fierce and bloodyminded as any, Reform or Counter-Reform, that framed the Wars of Religion in Europe. We do not live simply in the present.

The Logic of the Defense

The logic of the White House’s defense of its pre 9/11 counterterrorism policy escapes me.

Critics have charged that the administration’s pre 9/11 policy was slipshod. The White House contends that its pre 9/11 policy was excellent. To prove its point, the White House (see here, here and here) discusses Richard Clarke, the man the White House put in charge of counterterrorism policy.

According to the administration, the person they charged with keeping America safe from terrorism is a grandstanding liar who is concerned only with which meetings he was permitted to attend. The person in charge of the administration’s pre 9/11 counterterrorism policy was out of the loop, just makes things up and is an irresponsible partisan who would “suck around” for a job.

The person the administration turned to lead the fight against terrorism did not want to eliminate Al Qaeda and just presented a bunch of tired old policy ideas. Of course, the administration also argues that it adopted most of those tired, inadequate policies.

Apparently, the administration believes that if it proves that the person in charge of its counterterrorism policy was incompetent, somehow that will show that the policy was good.

I find that argument completely convincing. After all, the White House has similar views of Paul O’Neill, the man it chose to run economic policy as the Secretary of the Treasury and we see the results of the administration’ economic policy.

Perhaps the White House can write a book about management entitled “The Key to Good Decision Making: Hire Bad People.”

The penny drops on Wall Street...

I was relatively surprised to hear of the market's slide as I half-listened to Marketplace while preparing lamb curry for dinner. There, analysts asserted "terrorism fears" were the dominant reason for the slide, a conclusion the NYTimes supported as well. My interest, however, increased exponentially when I read the second half of the Times brief para on the subject in today's report:

The turbulence in the Middle East discouraged equity investors already uneasy about a slow economic recovery and tepid job growth. Wall Street was also worried about decreased consumer spending due to rising oil prices. [emphasis mine]

So I've only been blathering on about this very possibility for nigh over a year now, about every time we've seen a serious spike in prices. $40/barrel has generally been what more analysts regard as the potential tipping point back into recession, and prices have bounded above $38/barrel in recent weeks.

But that it took this long for Wall Street to put 2 and 2 together is remarkably surprising...or maybe just plain worrisome. If consumers are pouring $30 bucks or more into their gas tanks every time they fill up, it's likely they won't be spenting that money elsewhere, like at the Gap or Home Depot.

It's not rocket science. But then, how long before Bush cancels the space program due to high fuel prices?

Anti-Terrorism Strategies

Vice President Cheney recently gave a speech in which he described the administration’s multi-faceted approach to fighting terror. According to Mr. Cheney, anti-terror strategies include efforts to:

1) protect the homeland;

2) dismantle financial networks of the terrorists;

3) go after terrorists wherever they are located;

4) work with intelligence agencies from around the world;

5) enhance our intelligence capabilities;

6) halt proliferation of WMD and WMD technologies;

7) apply the Bush doctrine (any person or government that supports, protects, or harbors terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent, and will be held to account).

After laying out the strategies for fighting the war on terror, Cheney segues to a discussion of the Iraq war:

In Iraq, we took another essential step in the war on terror. Before using force, we tried every possible option to address the threat from Saddam Hussein. Despite 12 years of diplomacy, more than a dozen U.N. Security Council resolutions, hundreds of U.N. weapons inspectors, thousands of flights to enforce the no-fly zones, and even strikes against military targets in Iraq--Saddam Hussein refused to comply with the terms of the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire. All of these measures failed. In October of 2002, the United States Congress voted overwhelmingly to authorize the use of force in Iraq. The next month, the U.N. Security Council passed a unanimous resolution finding Iraq in material breach of its obligations, and vowing serious consequences in the event Saddam Hussein did not fully and immediately comply. When Saddam failed even then to comply, President Bush gave an ultimatum to the dictator--to leave Iraq or be forcibly removed from power.

That ultimatum came one year ago today--twelve months in which Saddam went from palace, to bunker, to spider hole, to jail. A year ago, he was the all-powerful dictator of Iraq, controlling the lives and the future of almost 25 million people. Today, the people of Iraq know that the dictator and his sons will never torment them again. And we can be certain that they will never again threaten Iraq's neighbors or the United States of America.

What is interesting about that segment of Cheney’s speech is that although he describes the Iraq war as “another essential step in the war on terror,” he does not identify a single one of the seven “War on Terror” strategies as underpinning the war in Iraq.

There is a disconnect between what Cheney says are the strategies for winning the war on terror and his description of the war in Iraq. Let’s look at each of the strategies and try to determine whether or not the Iraq war has moved the ball down the field in the war on terror.

It seems clear that the war in Iraq has done nothing to help protect the US homeland. Not only did Iraq pose no threat to our shores but the $150+ billion spent in Iraq could have been used to upgrade our homeland defense systems.

The war in Iraq has had only a peripheral effect on dismantling the financial networks of the terrorists. It is true that Saddam paid money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers but there is no evidence that Iraq was providing significant funding to Al Qaeda or other terrorists networks. Saudi Arabia and Iran have been far more generous in funding international terrorism than Iraq.

With regard to going after terrorists wherever they may be, the war in Iraq has been an abject failure. First, resources were diverted from the hunt for Al Qaeda in order to pursue the Iraq war. Secondly, when the administration had the option to go after one particularly bad terrorist group at the expense of possibly undercutting its rationale for the war, it chose to support the war over the destruction of a terrorist group. Third, having cried wolf about terrorists in Iraq, our credibility is damaged when we seek to locate and destroy other terrorists assets.

It is difficult to see how the war in Iraq has helped us work with intelligence gathering groups from other countries given the way the run up to the war was handled.

The fifth strategy is to upgrade our intelligence capabilities. We may have done so but the Iraq war did not help. Indeed, regardless of the quality of the intelligence we now gather, the administration’s deceit in using intelligence to promote the war in Iraq has harmed the credibility of our intelligence.

The sixth strategy is to contain the proliferation of WMD and WMD technologies. The war in Iraq may have helped push Libya to a decision to renounce WMD and if so, that is a good thing. The war does not seem to have prevented WMD development programs in North Korea or Iran. In addition, the credibility of our intelligence agencies has been seriously eroded as a result of the WMD claims in the run up to the Iraq war. The next time we call for action against a country and cite its WMD programs as the reason, the response may be less than overwhelming.

The seventh strategy is implementation of the Bush doctrine of holding those who harbor or aide terrorists accountable. Afghanistan is a good example of the Bush Doctrine at work and it won near unanimous support. The Iraq war is not a good example as Iraq had few significant ties to Al Qaeda or other groups of global terror.

The war in Iraq may end up having a number of benefits (permanent links having trouble) including those mentioned by Cheney. Prosecution of the war on terror just is not one of them.

A Firing Offense

I am generally very supportive of public school teachers. For the most part, I have found such teachers to be smart, hard working people of integrity. There are exceptions to every rule as this Atlanta Journal Constitution article shows:

A state investigation found Friday that 10 Georgia educators — six from Gwinnett and four from other counties — have bought bogus advanced degrees from an online university based in Liberia.

Officials with the Professional Standards Commission said the educators obtained doctorates and master's degrees from St. Regis University, a school that state investigators have learned sells degrees without requiring any course work…

Postgraduate degrees can boost pay for teachers by thousands of dollars a year. A Georgia teacher with 10 years of experience, a bachelor's degree and a salary of $36,864 would earn $42,393 after earning a master's and $53,173 after earning a doctorate, Toth said.

Georgia recognized degrees from St. Regis, because it was affiliated with the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admission Officers, a nonprofit voluntary organization that includes a foreign education credential service.

But officials with the American Association of College Registrars and Admission Officers, said they offer membership to anyone who pays…

I think the teachers using the fake “degrees” to increase their pay should be fired for two reasons. First, by requesting and then accepting increased pay based on having a fake "advanced degree" the teachers have committed fraud. Any teacher found defrauding the public school system should be fired.

Secondly, academic integrity is a core value for teachers to instill in students. The teachers who purchased meaningless advanced “degrees” from diploma mills so as to cheat the school system out of money have demonstrated the absence of the very integrity they are supposed to teach.

Fire them.

Mail failure

Turns out that on top of my computer freezing and crashing, I seem to have a problem with my ISP losing my mail. Two campaign staff have inquired about emails they sent to me, neither of which I seemed to have received. Arg.

So, if you've sent me mail in the past few weeks, and I haven't responded, please send a test email to see if it's getting through. In the meantime, I'll put in a call to Time Warner to see what's up.

A reason for my pseudo-absence...

While many may have concluded that with campaign, kids, work, Portland Dems, et al., I've just been too busy to post much, the truth of it is that I've been limping along for months now with a 1998 Vaio which has been slowly dying. Between it freezing up 4-5 times a day and/or running at a snail's pace, I spent more time cursing it than I do Faux News. So with our ISP finally taking off (more on that in days to come, including our agreement with dotCoop to begin a bloggers cooperative, blog.coop), I could feel comfy enough to put down the cash for some new hardware.

Voila - here I am typing my first post from my brand-spanking-new HP 7020 laptop, with its amazing 17" screen. Didn't know Wampum was so poorly colorized, as I've been working off a very dark medium, having been "adjusted" way too many times by little inquisitive fingers. Guess I'll have to darken it up, and center a few things as well.

I still can't get my wireless to work, and I have no clue as to how to get my old files over to this computer, but at least I can compose without losing 7/8ths of my posts (I'm serious, that's how bad it got - actually "disabled" one keyboard after losing a particularly long piece to a "freeze event".) My mailboxes were constantly getting corrupted, and files lost. So glad to have that all in the past.

While I have events in the near future (tomorrow is selling Girl Scout cookies in the afternoon, and staffing the Maine Lesbian/Gay Political Alliance gala in the evening, and work on Sunday,) I should be much more prolific in the not-to-distant future. Yay.

Media Primer

Okay, we have some journalists in class today, so will take this nice and slow so that everyone can understand. This will be on the test so please pay attention.

To find out what a political debate is all about, look to see where the various parties disagree. The debate is about the disagreement, not the part on which everyone agrees.

When Congressional Democrats wanted to create a Homeland Security Department but the White House did not, the debate wass over whether or not we should have a Homeland Security Department.

When the White House flip flopped and agreed that we needed a Homeland Security Department, everyone was in agreement on that issue and it was no longer one of the terms of the debate. If Congressional Democrats wanted Civil Service protection for Homeland Security employees but the President did not, then the debate wass over whether or not Civil Service protections were appropriate.

Does everyone understand? Okay, let’s try a different example.

President Bush wanted $87 billion appropriated for Iraq and Afghanistan. He wanted to pay for it by borrowing the money and paying the loan off later. John Kerry was for appropriating the $87 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan but wanted to repeal the tax cuts for the wealthy to pay for it.

What was the debate about?

The debate was not over whether or not it was a good idea to appropriate the money. Everyone agreed that it was a good idea. The debate was over whether we should pay for it now or borrow the money and pay for it later.

Is that clear? Okay, class dismissed.

The Turing Test, Senate Version

Brad Delong recently gave House Speaker Dennis Hastert the Turing test.

The Turing test checks for signs of intelligence:

How can we tell if something is intelligent? Alan Turing's answer was that something is intelligent if it can pass the Turing Test--if it can carry out an appropriate conversation with a human being, responding appropriately, maintaining the thread of meaning, et cetera.

DeLong finds that Hastert flunks the test.

Perhaps, then we should check for signs of intelligence on the other side of the Capital, in the Senate. I propose that we give a Turing test to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist with the subject of the test being the budget deficit.

Dr. Frist has an interesting set of ideas about budget deficits. He, of course, is against deficits. In fact, Dr. Frist is so set against budget deficits that he thinks that a balanced budget should be enshrined into the Constitution.

Dr. Frist is also a strong supporter of tax cuts. Not only has he supported all of President Bush’s proposed tax cuts, he favors making those cuts permanent.

Max recently posted a chart showing that if Mr. Bush’s tax cuts are made permanent, five programs will consume all of the revenue of the federal government. The chart shows:

projected spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, and interest against the revenue we could expect if the Bush tax cuts were made permanent. The adjustments to spending and revenues result in lines that cross in 2012. This means that under a balanced budget, there is no room left in the budget for anything but the five items listed above. No homeland security outside of defense, no unemployment compensation, no EPA, no FBI (hmm), no domestic discretionary spending.

Now we come to the Turing test. Given Dr. Frist’s positions on tax cuts and balanced budgets, he can pass the test (“maintaining the thread of meaning”) with regard to the budget in one of two ways. First, he could advocate cuts in the five programs listed above. Alternatively, he could advocate elimination the remainder of government. Let’s see if we can discover signs of intelligent Republican life in the Senate.

Let’s first look at Dr. Frist’s position on funding for defense, interest, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Does Dr. Frist wish to cut defense spending? No, he wishes to increase it by $20 billion this year.

I presume that Dr. Frist does not want to default on interest payments on the national debt. We are looking for signs of intelligent life and the consequences of a default are so grave that advocating such a position would disprove the existence of intelligence.

What about Social Security? Does Dr. Frist wish to cut benefits? He does not. On his web page, Dr. Frist notes:

Above all, I am dedicated to preserving the very important commitment that the federal government had made to the American people to protect older Americans and the disabled against poverty and the loss of income.

He goes on to list six “guiding principles for Social Security Reform." Among those six are:

Modernization must not change Social Security benefits for retirees or near-retirees.

How about Medicare? It seems unlikely that Senator Frist would want to cut Medicare given that he was the point man on expanding Medicare to include a $500+ billion prescription drug benefit. He described the passage of that bill as a “truly historic advance for America”.

Now it is true that Dr. Frist argues that so called litigation reform will save money for Medicare. Frist claims that comprehensive medical litigation reform will save the government $14 billion over ten years. Even if that claim is true, it is small potatoes when compared with the numbers we are discussing.

That leaves only Medicaid. Does Dr. Frist wish to cut Medicaid? I find no reference to cutting Medicaid on Dr. Frist’s web page. I do find, however, a press release bragging about Dr. Frist helping provide additional Medicaid funding for Tennessee.

So, it seems that Dr. Frist is for balanced budgets and tax cuts but does not advocate cutting spending for any of the five programs that will consume all Federal revenue by 2012. To pass the Turing Test, he must favor elimination of all other Federal programs. Can he pass the test? He is not even close.

Dr. Frist is for a $4 billion increase in spending on Homeland Security.

He is also for increased funding for education, Veterans' health benefits, and AIDS.

There will be no money for a Justice Department but Dr. Frist is proud to have secured funding to build a new Federal Courthouse in Nashville.

Dr. Frist is for agriculture spending in Tennessee.

He is for spending on transportation infrastructure.

He is for HHS spending on medical research and for doubling the funding for trauma care systems.

Dr. Frist wants to spend on other things as well. He wants more than $10 billion to increase airport capacity. He wants to build a visitor’s center at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He wants to increase the rates of Veterans disability compensation. He wants money to “increase access to and cooperation among our nation’s museums and libraries.” He wants to spend on child nutrition programs. He wants $25 million for residential academies to encourage the teaching of American History. He wants $3 billion to help farmers and ranchers. He wants to fund an increased number of AmeriCorps volunteers. He wants to pay states to increase foster care. He wants to fund space exploration and he wants to fund many, many other programs. In fact, Dr. Frist is proud of maintaining current levels of discretionary domestic spending. That is a long way from wanting to eliminate all of those programs aas well as the rest of the goverment outside the big 5.

Dr. Frist wants increased spending and tax cuts to result in a balanced budget. I want an ice cream diet and a lack of exercise to result in weight loss. Neither of our plans pass the Turing test. Our search for intelligent GOP life in the Senate has come up empty.

Reading and Writing (2)

You might think that being 72 hours ahead of the best newspapers in North America would make me feel, well, full of myself. Up to the gills with oh-the-importance-of-blog, etc. It doesn't. There's not a lot of joy in reading the un-American presses and watching the wave of verified reporting work through Reuters and the AP and finally momentarily displace the onanistic self-referential projections that characterize the American presses -- top, middle, and minor, daily, weekly and monthly. Some, like the wild disparity of the Kurds-find-Saddam vs Osama-in-box stories and their trajectories, are in fact, interesting. Reading the Persian election news this winter was not. Reading the Spanish news the past 10 days was not.

What this country needs is not a good 5¢ cigar, it is someone worth reading. Janet Flanner used to fill that niche. If Janet Flanner were writing today for the New Yorker, there is the possibility that she, and not Ari Fleisher or Scott McClellan or some other lackwit would be the fixed point in the rotating sky to which ordinary journalists preparing their copy for their outlets from their upstream sources would measure from and steer by.

The Kerry campaign should find someone who can write, and who "gets it" at least as well as the average reader of Le Monde Diplo (scope) and at least as fast as the average reader of daily edition of Le Monde (timliness), or who is at least interesting to read when wrong, and have her write "Letters from Paris" on a campaign asset blog. There's not a lot of hope breaking through the mindnumbingness of Tom Brokaw et al, before Fall, but if blogging is an effective means to an end, and ending Perle's monopoly on the American vision of the world is on-message, then it should be done. We're going to get another 216 days of the Iraqi Collectors Edition of Trivial Pursuits no matter what we do anyway.

Or we could all go on reading the WaPo and NYT and LAT and ... together, and periodically reading a meta-piece like Eric Alterman's WLM, until the restoration of the Republic takes place, no doubt accomplished by LitCrit means in some J-school.

In case I'm too obscure, I'm soliciting suggestions. Who is worth reading? From Europe? From Asia? From the other 2/3rds of this hemisphere? If we gave a Janet Flanner prize, who would be the nominees?

Reading and writing

The day it happened we opined to each other "Not ETA". Not like Action Direct. Not like Brigades Rouge. Not like Red Army Faction. Not like Cellules Communistes Combattantes. Not like ... If anything, closer to the depravity of the Italian Para-Statial Right. Its been in Le Monde since Monday that the attempt by the Spanish government to spin the bombings to its advantage, and the detection and rejection of the spin by the Spanish opposition party, the Spanish press and Spanish electorate is the root cause for the surprising win, and margin of win, by the PSOE (gauche) over the PP (droit).

Yesterday I went to see a partner about things Roman and Catelan and ICANN and ... things ending in "an". He was ticked that Spain was showing that terrorism worked. I mentioned that pull-out was on the PSOE's agenda (and the electorate's) prior to to the bombing, but didn't dot-the-i by pointing out that if the PSOE reversed itself because of the bombing -- that would be showing that terrorism "worked".

With today's WaPo story and Atrios' post, well, things may improve. He is a WaPo reader (regulatory telecommunications business section).

There was another casualty from the Madrid bombings that hasn't made the US press yet. In ten days there will be a summit in Bruxelles, and this time Spain will be "in", leaving only Poland "out". It wasn't that the US didn't join Europe in carefully observing the 3 minutes of silence for the victims of M-11, it was the that Europe did. Constitutional ink will hit constitutional parchment in the Commune of Bruxelles in 10 days time. It won't be the same kind of ink supplied for staged cerimonies in Iraq either.

You've got to hand it to the Bush gang, to their enduring credit they've managed a foreign policy accomplishment bigger than anything since the late '40s, except perhaps the deconstruction of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. I wonder what Colin Powell will go on record with from Bruxelles. Something deliciously funny. He has a gift, and this whole government is simply a long playing version of Les Vacances de M. Hulôt, dubbed.

Update: Now that today's Note has come out ...

The Washington Post's John Harris writes: "In an interview with a local radio station, Kerry said he disagrees with the decision of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Spain's newly elected prime minister, to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq after terrorist attacks that killed more than 200 people. 'In my judgment, the new prime minister should not have decided that he was going to pull out of Iraq,' Kerry said. 'He should have said this increases our determination to get the job done.'"

Oh well, my partner is a Kerry delegate, and business isn't politics. I think Zapatero shouldn't ignore the electorate, or his campaign promise either.

When one story more is one too many...

A few minutes ago, while cooking chicken wings for the kids, and bœuf bourguignon for the adults (well, Kezzie will eat anything) and listening to Marketplace, I was surprised to hear an amazingly familiar story. The LA Times was reporting that EPA had proposed a policy change, now reported in the Federal Register, which not only favored energy producers, but actually took chunks of text from industry reports and incorporated them verbatim in their proposed regulations. I knew I had heard this story before, in fact, was sure I'd posted on such insidious behavior on the part of federal EPA.

So I Googled. And I Googled some more. I found this post on Blogspot Wampum on the EPA withholding the Childhood Environmental Risk Assessment, and this one on the Christian's Right's opposition to former EPA head Carol Browner's call for Bush to step up to the plate on mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants. I found this one opining that Christine Whitman's abrupt departure from EPA was in fact tied to a cover-up on mercury-emissions policy, and even one where Eric offered what I thought a very funny riddle: How does a Mainer check the temperature? With a trout! (You know, our fish are so full of mercury, yadda, yadda.)

However, my search on Wampum proved fruitless. It appears that I've either mistaken my recollection of the details of today's Times story for any number of previous ones, or I heard the story, but had posted on so many similar, that one more would really make no significant difference.

In any case, read the LA Times piece. It is just one more brick in the wall, or straw on the camel's back, but it is significant. And taken with another Marketplace feature this evening, where the FDA proposes to get even further into bed with BigPharma, is enough to make many parents of thimerosal or environmental mercury-damaged cry... again.

That sinking feeling...

Over the past year, I've heard many a right-wing pundit claim that Democrats and Progressives are cheering for economic hard times. Their argument? That we can only make electoral gains if the economy tanks, since Republicans are oh-so-good at "everything else", meaning mostly, the "war on terrah".

Well, although I've been a pretty successful econoblogging Cassandra over the past year, I can't say it brings me any glee. My own state has lost tens of thousands of jobs, mostly in manufacturing, as well as millions in lost revenue due to federal tax cuts, prompting a budget crisis and possible property tax rebellion. We here lived through over a year of unemployment after the dot.bomb crash, landing precipitously close to the edge of financial disaster. Don't let anyone try and convince you lefties like recessions - we're more often as not on the receiving end of the downturn, and frankly, it bites.

Over the past few months, I've kept a close eye on the details of Bush's purported booming economic recovery. And while there are many positive signs which should not be dismissed by any stretch, there are more than a few indicators which portend that all is not well with the US economy. Employment and job creation, which has received the lion's share of attention over the past few months, for good reason, is just one factor, however. Much of the "recovery" was built on the foundation of consumer spending, which in turn was fueled by home refinancing and purchasing, spurred by low interest rate. While interest rates are still at historically low levels, consumer spending, particularly on new homes and things with which to fill them, has dropped off dramatically. This morning's Building Permits and Housing Starts numbers continued the downward trend which has been developing for months.

Housing starts fall again
New home construction cools off further in February, defying expectations of a slight gain
March 16, 2004: 8:48 AM EST

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The pace of new home construction slowed in the United States in February, the government said Tuesday, defying Wall Street forecasts of a slight gain.

The Commerce Department said housing starts fell 4 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.86 million units, after falling a revised 6.3 percent in January. Economists, on average, had expected housing starts to rise to a 1.94-million-unit pace, according to Briefing.com.

...

Building permits, a forward-looking indicator of housing demand, fell by 1.5 percent to an annual rate of 1.9 million units after falling a revised 1.1 percent in January. The reading was about in line with economists' forecasts, on average.

While CNN analysis focuses on, and then mostly dismisses, the dangers of a "housing bubble", I believe the more realistic danger here is the drying up of consumer cash and credit which previously floated the economy. Hourly wages are not only stagnant, but last month's figures indicated that, due to increases in CPI, have lost ground in "constant" dollars. With so many people out of work, or in fear of losing their jobs, many more may begin to be more frugal with that which they have, and refrain from buying those big ticket items, a trend recently supported by the Durable Goods reports. If consumer confidence continues its downward spiral, I believe it only compounds this problem, particularly as the media tunes into such concerns.

So, contrary to the pronouncements of those snarky neo-cons, opening the Briefing Report every morning more often than not these days leads to a knot in my stomach over the increasing number of negative housing and sales reports. Even the corresponding sinking poll numbers for George Bush do nothing to alleviate that feeling.

Pulling the [DSL] plug on Interior

Yesterday, the increasingly ticked-off, Reagan-appointed, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, ordered the Interior Department shut off...from the Internet. Lamberth concluded that in the three years since the court was first made aware of massive security flaws which could allow easy access to tribal trust accounts, little had been done by the department to fix the problem. Thus, he ordered that most employee internet access and department websites be shut down until the issues are resolved. Only the Parks Service, US Geological Service and Interior budget offices are exempt, as Lambert determined last summer that they had resolved their outstanding security issues.

The WaPo gives an adequate mini-summary of the roots of the increasingly nasty dispute between Lamberth and Interior:

Since 1996, Lamberth has presided over a lawsuit [Cobell v. Secretary of the Interior] in which a group of Indians sued to force Interior to produce an accounting of all the grazing, energy and mineral royalties from Indian lands that the department had been managing since 1879. The judge has criticized the agency for ignoring its responsibility to Native Americans and found government officials in contempt of his orders.

Interior, for its part, has decided upon a new tactic in this war; having pushed Lamberth to the point of slapping contempt charges on various Interior leaders, including current Secretary Gail Norton, by using every stalling and misdirection ploy available, Interior lawyers now claim that Lamberth is no longer "objective" and should be replaced by a new judge. Failing that, Interior is also lobbying Congress to legislate a solution, claiming they don't have the ability to "find" the billions of dollars missing from Indian Trust Fund accounts.

The irony of much of this is that Judge Lamberth was widely viewed as supportive of a more conservative judicial agenda, having ruled against a number of Clinton appointees during the '90s. However, the Bush II administration may be succeeding in transforming Lamberth into an "activist" judge, one with his sites trained on their misdeeds instead. Even if removed from Cobell v. Interior, Lamberth will remain on the DC Court, which hears most cases involving federal offices. Definitely not a place to have enemies.

In the meantime, however, there will be no websurfing for Interior worker bees.

We're ... er ... "Happy"

Grace and I had a two-fer this weekend. For some reason IFC's Samuri Saturday spread over into Sunday, so we were able to catch one work of Toho in the morning, and via TMC one work of Howard Hawkes in the afternoon -- Bringing up Baby -- with the famous scene where Cary was sporting a frilly pink dressing gown and used the word 'gay' in a homosexual context for the first time on film. Grace got a lot of giggles out of the film.

Last week the Christian Civic League's Director Mike Heath started solliciting "tips" on the sexual orientation of members of the Maine legislature. Not being a terribly bright man he set on a sub-optimal method -- 3rd-party reporting -- which is both slow and error-prone, or kneeling, or writhing wildly in joie. First-party reporting is a far better method.

I'm gay. So's the wife. The kids too, all four of them, boys and girls. So is the dog, the four cats, and the fish. If I knew anything about botany I'd get vulgar about the sex lives of the trees, bushes, over-wintering veggies in the garden and the grasses and lichens that might, or might not be under the snow.

I was pleased to see this in yesterday's Lewiston paper, the one that didn't do 500 words on the grand theme "Mullahs bad, elections good" a few weeks ago:

PORTLAND -- Fallout continues from Mike Heath's threat to "out" gay legislators on the Christian Civic League's website.

Outraged members of the House planned to jump up and announce that they were gay, regardless of whether they are, in a sort of "mass outing" to show solidarity. But they called it off when party leaders began giving speeches condemning Heath's actions.

The Sun-Journal reports that one state lawmaker missed that hand signal. And so Portland representative John Eder jumped out of his seat and announced that he's gay.

Not quite in the same league as the Texas Killer D's that MB's written about, but I am pleased to see that I'm not the only one putting on a pink triangle. Most of the Portland delegation was prepared to do the same.

Campaign 101: Chapter 2

Perhaps this segment should be entitled: "Free at last, free at last...Thank God...I'm free...." or maybe more appropriately, "Oh, God, what have I gotten myself into?"

Today, at 5pm, Maine Standard Time, candidate nominating papers were due. Although I had my signatures a few weeks ago, with Eric in Rome earlier in March, I only had the chance this week to have the signatures certified by the Portland City Clerk's office. On Thursday, I received the call that they were done; then the major dilemma began. Do I drive them myself to Augusta on Friday, just in case there's some unforeseen problem, or do I entrust them to the USPS or the Men in Brown, to be delivered "express mail" sometime today? For hours on Friday I waffled, until Eric finally threw me out of the house, bidding me not to return until I had the receipt from the Secretary of State's office in hand. His concern? Living with me for the three days not knowing the final fate of my signatures.

I drove the hour with a knot in my stomach, but for no good reason. Turning my papers in was such a non-event. It took no more than 30 seconds; check, stamp, receipt. A truly underwhelming experience. But the relief I experienced as I drove home was quite heady. No turning back now. I was truly a candidate.

The days following have been a bit of a blur; with the nominating process over, it's been all about nuts and bolts. Tom Elko (remember, the one you're supposed to email with complaints, hint, hint) has been truly amazing, scouring the district for meet-up sites, senior housing and USM interns. We've begun to get all the campaign basics together; message, strategy, budget, calendar. The staff is beginning to fall into place as well. Rather than draw from the "good ole boy network", we made the conscious decision to reach out to young people who are relatively new to politics, particularly from the local Dean, Edwards and Kucinich camps. A number of older hands have agreed to take on the task of helping to guide and train this highly energetic corps, so I hold great hope for our success. Thus, I hope this campaign becomes more than sending one person to the legislature.

My first post-filing event was last evening; Portland Dem City committee monthly meeting (I'm also the treasurer of the committee.) The response of attendees to the campaign was truly heartening, with lots of volunteers signing up. While I haven't asked for endorsements from any state or local officials (that's just not how I intend to run my campaign - I want people to vote for me because of my issues/experience/etc., not due to my "endorsements") a number of such offered their help, with my favorite pol committing to going door to door with me this spring. I also had a great chat with the head of the Maine GLBT, and we agreed we were definitely on the same page on issues of concern in Maine.

Of course, not everything is glamor. Today was spent researching yard sign prices and a meeting with the local printer. Somehow, though I'd utilized the same shop for over a year, I failed to connect the proprietor as the spouse of the last woman state legislator elected from Portland, back in 2000. We certainly commiserated over that, with hopes that things would soon turn around. Goes to show you even the largest city in Maine is still just a small town.

This week is more of the same, though we'll be getting our next round of fundraising started. I'm about half-way to where I need to be, according to my finance gurus, which is very heartening. Please feel free to throw some pennies my way, if you haven't given them all to Senator Kerry or Stephanie Herseth or any of the zillion deserving Dems running this year. And my many thanks to those who have supported me this far, both with moral support and spare lunch money.

The next challenge? Deciding on a logo/color scheme for our yard signs. Decisions, decisions...

plaintext plainsong

Jonah sat hard against the table, pressed comfortably between the back of the chair and the edge of the table, moving letter blocks into strings, picking up six-packs bringing one up into his close visual field, inches from his nose, then putting it down and forming a five-string, the middle block held only by compression, and bringing that up into his close visual field. I sat down directly behind him. Martha chatted briefly, standing up and stretching, and she, Mia, and Megan and I rattled off his last-week and today words, and the watch changed. Universal, feature, Tarzan, ... directionless. Left-to-right, right-to-left, middle-to-ends. Jonah kept working his letter blocks. Mia described how she'd filled in the hollow-form letters to match, in form, though not the surrounding boarders, on the sides of the blocks, to make enough "e" letters, and that the yellow full-form letters and their boarders where now either red or blue, colors that Jonah will work with. Then she pointed out something surprising.

Jonah knows that on the other side of an "x" is a "k". When he reaches for a letter block, he reaches for a block showing the letter, or for the block which has that letter on its reverse. Jonah knows rot13, the oldest cypher technique used on the net.

a - b - c - d - e - f - g - h - i - j - k - l - m
n - o - p - q - r - s - t - u - v - w - x - y - z

As we get up to leave one of his teachers remarks on his pants. I hadn't noticed being above and close to him. They were on perfectly ... backwards. My son put on his pants himself today.

Heyoka. Contrary-wise. Reaching though cyphertext to write directionlessly. Jonah quietly amazes me. The melody of meaning is just there, lightly, between the assemblies of letters and the transposition and rotation of blocks, and the sound and feeling of it all, in the close visual field.

“Nobody Should Have To Make This Decision”

“Nobody should have to make this decision” said Kathi Chandler. Please read this heartbreaking Atlanta Journal Constitution story about the POAs deciding to give up their son to the state in order for him to get needed therpay and care.

Kathi Chandler and her husband, Jim, are college educated professionals. They live in a quiet, middle class suburb of Atlanta. Kathi is an information technology manager while Jim is an inventory accounting manager. The Chandlers have five kids aged 13 to 2.

Among those children are eight year old twin boys, Jeff and Tim. The twins were born premature and have cerebral palsy. Today, Tim is doing well, at grade level in school and able to walk a little bit on his own. His brother Jeff, however, began showing autistic behavior at around age three.

Jeff’s autism worsened. As the AJC reports:

At 3 he began showing signs of autism. "He'd put his hand in his mouth and bang repeatedly on his wrist," Kathi said. "He'd echo back whatever you'd say."

Gradually Jeff's behavior got worse. By the time he was 7, he could no longer tolerate crowds. At a baseball game, he repeatedly bit himself and ripped the skin on his arm. He moaned and screamed. At a Cub Scout picnic where Tim was to receive an award, Kathi had to sit in the car with Jeff after his moaning disrupted the ceremony.

The Chandlers eventually stopped going out as a family…

In the past year, her son Jeff's behavior had become uncontrollable because of his autism. The 8-year-old had started to bite and scratch himself until he bled. He was biting and knocking down his 2-year-old sister, hitting and biting his brothers or anyone else within reach. Then there was the bookcase incident when he fell in the middle of the night, cutting his head open…

The Chandlers needed help caring for Jeff as he poses a danger both to himself and to his two year old sister. They went looking for that help.

A large box of blue file folders documents the Chandlers' yearlong odyssey seeking help --- the letters Kathi wrote, the names and numbers of organizations she called, the rejections.

First they became excited about a state-of-the-art treatment program for autism. But they couldn't afford the cost --- $1,800 a week --- and insurance wouldn't cover it.

A few months later they heard about the Georgia Academy for the Blind in Macon, where Jeff could board during the week and autism and special needs experts could work with him day and night. "I said, 'How do we get our son here?' " Kathi said.

But school officials in Fulton County, where Jeff had been attending special education classes, refused to allow him to transfer to Macon, saying they were meeting his needs, at least his educational ones, school records show.
"I said, 'But there's more to it than that,' " Kathi said. " 'He comes home, and we don't know what we're doing.' "

They also had heard about another program, funded through the state, that might pay for nursing care so the Chandlers could keep Jeff at home. Kathi's hopes rose when staff at the Fulton mental health board contacted her and, after a two-hour interview, told her they would recommend the Chandlers for funding under the Mental Retardation Waiver Program.

"I was excited to think I'd finally found the key to unlock the door," she said.
After several weeks, she began leaving messages for people who never called back.

Eventually a woman from the mental health board told Kathi that her son had been placed on a waiting list.

What she didn't tell Kathi was that nearly 4,000 others were waiting, too.

One incident convinced the Chandlers that they had to do something:

The breaking point came last spring. While his family slept, Jeff climbed the bookcase in his room and fell backward. They found him the next morning in a pool of blood.

"We finally said, we're not doing what he needs," Kathi said. "We're not doing anything for the family. We've got to do something."

The Chandlers became aware of one other State program that would provide help for Jeff. There was a problem qualifying for the program:

The only way the state of Georgia could help her and her husband, Jim, was for them to participate in a legal charade. They would have to agree to be declared unfit parents, then watch their son be turned over to the child welfare system as if he were an abused child rather than a beloved one.

If declared to be unfit parents, the Chandlers would have no further legal rights with regard to their son. They would no longer be permitted to participate in decisions regarding Jeff. They could visit him only if, when, and under the conditions the state allowed. Once declared unfit as parents by a court, that label would follow them forever. If they were unfit parents for Jeff, what about their other four kids? If they moved to a different state, they could not take Jeff with them.

The Chandlers decided to give Jeff up in order to help him. The decision to accept a court designation that they were unfit parents and to give up the legal relationship of parent to their son was hard:

Inside the courtroom, the 38-year-old mother rose from the defense table and, standing alone, faced the judge. Her voice trembling, Kathi explained they had nowhere else to turn.

The judge sympathized. But Georgia law does not allow Juvenile Court judges to order specific care for a child in need. They can only find a child "deprived" or "delinquent" and order him into the child welfare or juvenile justice system.
So the judge declared the Chandlers --- successful professionals and the loving parents of five --- unfit parents. Like a modern-day King Solomon, she severed the parents' ties to their child. They were no longer his parents. The state was...

Kathi broke down in court that day, but the judge could see the resolve in the mother's face. "It was devastating," said the judge..

Kathi drove herself home that day, crying most of the way.

Agreeing to be labeled as “unfit parents” and agreeing to the termination of their parental rights with regard to Jeff was an act of courage, love and desperation. It was a decision that no fit parent should ever have to face. It may also have been a terrible mistake.

Today she wonders how they could have been so naive. "My husband always felt that because we initiated it, we could go in and change it," she said.

But once they got that train moving, there was no stopping it. What was initially a legal fiction would become their reality. Within days, the child protection agency took steps to remove Jeff from his home, sending Kathi a form letter used to open child abuse investigations. "I am writing to inform you that our agency has received a complaint regarding you and your family," the letter said…
She still has a hard time grasping what they did.

"Our choice was to keep him home and give him our love, or give him what he needs," she recently said. "We basically chose his needs over our love."

People have quit asking her where Jeff is, but she sometimes wonders what they think.

"I don't know how people could understand," she said. "Because they haven't lived it, they don't know what we went through on a day-to-day basis, the roller coaster of trying to get help and thinking we would and our hopes being dashed."

Lately she has begun to worry they may never be able to undo what they've done. Her employer of 17 years has talked about moving her back to Ohio.
She asked the child welfare agency what would happen if they had to move. Could they get Jeff back? "They said, 'We don't know. You've been found unfit,' "Kathi said.

Not everyone down the line had been clued into the charade. The first caseworker assigned by the agency had been sympathetic. But the second was used to dealing with child abusers. When she heard the family had visited their son at the foster home, she told them that would have to stop. Child welfare policy prohibits it.

Rather, she said, they'd be restricted to a one-hour supervised visit each month at the agency's office, just like everyone else on her caseload.

"I don't consider myself a child abuser," Kathi said. "I guess I was pretty stupid to think that because we'd chosen this route, that we wouldn't be held to the same rules."

The state pays $170 per day for Jeff to be in therapeutic foster care. That money would have gone a long way towards providing the type of in-home assitance that Jeff and his family needed and which would have kept a family together. The decision the Chandlers faced was imposed by a set of laws that were not designed for the situation. There was no need to force that choice. The state should have had the option to allow the Chandler family to remain together while still providing the same monetary support. The choice the Chandlers were forced to made is far too common:

No one tracks how many parents in Georgia have given up their children. But nationwide, parents handed over an estimated 3,680 children to child welfare agencies in 2001 for the sole purpose of getting them mental health treatment, according to the General Accounting Office, the research arm of Congress.

Rigid rules designed to protect deprived or abused children simply are not appropriate for families desperately trying to cope with a child’s autism. What is needed is for law makers to enact legislation that permits flexibility for families with autistic children. No family should ever be forced into a choice between providing a child with a loving family or appropriate care and therapy.

Georgia law does not allow Juvenile Court judges to order specific care for a child in need. They can only find a child "deprived" or "delinquent" and order him into the child welfare or juvenile justice system…

The real commentary in this state is the terrible condition of mental health services for children," said Fulton Juvenile Court Judge Sanford Jones…

Fulton Juvenile Court Judge Nina Hickson said she would prefer not to have had to make that ruling (that the Chandler’s were unfit parents and that Jeff was a deprived child). "It is like this concept of legal fiction," Hickson said. "In this instance, you have parents who, because of their great love and concern for this child, are having to give up their legal rights to this child because it's the only way for him to get the care he needs."

The legal fiction was necessary only because the the Georgia General Assembly failed to enact laws to address the Chandler's plight. The truth is that Jeff needs both love and therapy. Forcing parents to choose between the two is an outrage. A law forcing such a choice benefits no one. It is not in Jeff’s interests to be separated from his family. It is cruel to force Kathi and Jim Chandler to be labeled as “unfit parents” in order to secure the help their son needs. If the state is going to pay the $170 per day for therapeutic foster care anyway, it is no greater burden for that money to be spent to keep the family together rather than forcing it apart.

Requiring a rigid application of laws designed to protect children from neglect and abuse to force the breakup of a loving family is senseless. That story just breaks my heart.

Tipping Point

Earlier this week, I posted on the shock many Americans have felt recently when pulling up to the gas pump. Prices in some parts of the country are now over $2/gallon (California is closing in on $3/gallon). Analysts and other talking heads have attributed this rise to an array of causes, from reduced supplies due to aging refineries, to OPEC tightening it's output quotas, to the switch to cleaner-burning "summer" formulations.

But no matter who or what we blame, the price is still climbing and has been for nigh over a month now. Not surprisingly, this increase manifested itself in the Commerce Department's latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) figures. While "core" CPI (everything minus food and energy) ticked up only 0.2%, add both back into the mix, and overall CPI increased 0.5%. However, food prices declined slightly (0.1%) in January. Thus, the culprit was energy, which jumped 4.7%, the sub-index for gasoline up a whopping 8.1%.

While the February CPI report won't be released until next week, a quick check of the headlines, where it's clear even the media has picked up on the price spike, there's no reason to believe the upward trend will have abated.

That's why I was in fact quite surprised by this week's Retail Sales report.

One thing to remember about this Commerce Dept. report is that it doesn't record the number of sales, e.g. consumers bought a thousand more pairs of shoes this month; no, it tracks sales receipt figures, e.g., how much extra money was gained or lost by retailers, as a whole, and in various key areas. Thus, with sharp increases in prices in gasoline over the past couple of months, one would understandably expect to see a similar increase in the sales figures for gas stations. Not loss or profit, just the volume of actual sales.

Hence, my surprise when saw the actual retail sale figure for gas stations actually fell slightly (-0.1%) in February. The price increased, but obviously fewer Americans were filling their tanks. Consumers had reached the "tipping point", where the cost for an item, in this case gasoline, influenced their desire, or ability, to purchase said item.

Since the use of gasoline is so intertwined with daily life in America, the ramifications of this kind of consumer behavior can be huge. People decide going on vacation is too expensive, tourism falls, whole economies based on tourism, such as here in Maine, suffer. And it's clear that consumers are in fact getting more frustrated:

When Rotten Robbie dropped a few pennies to below the $2 mark earlier this week, Shontay Morgan of Union City turned her Mustang convertible around and zipped in for a tank.

``I purposely gas up here,'' said the 29-year mortgage loan officer. ``Those people who go to Shell may have excess money to burn. I don't.

``These prices are crazy. We need gas control just like we have rent control.''

There's a theme here. Many motorists shopping at the discount station are outraged by the cost of fuel. Anger, skepticism and cuss words pour out.

When Ed Artega drove to Morgan Hill on Monday, his Nissan Maxima was running low on gas. He spotted a Shell station selling gas for $2.20 a gallon and said to heck with that. When he got back to Campbell and spotted the Rotten Robbie price, he turned into the station.

``I have one favorite swear word that I quit using when going to Catholic schools,'' said Artega, 54. ``Somebody is making a lot of money off this and we're getting screwed.''

The domino effect of higher gas prices impact far more than gas stations:

Some small businesses are worried that the increases will affect their profits. "I hate [gas prices] going up, and there's no end in sight," said Charles Holmes, owner of Edwin Holmes Florist in Fort Worth.

Delivery prices at the floral shop start at $2, which Holmes said doesn't reap any profit.

"There's only so much someone is willing to pay for floral delivery," he said.

While the Bush Administration has yet to even address the brewing crisis, a few in Congress, including Maine's often clueless senator, Susan Collins, understand the import of the growing consumer angst. Collins and Michigan Democrat Carl Levin introduced legislation this week calling to temporarily suspend the purchase of oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), hoping that doing such would reduce supply pressures pushing up prices. While the measure passed (barely) in the Senate (obviously, Collins catching-a-clue-itis hasn't spread to most of her Republican colleagues), it faces stiff opposition from House Republicans. Apparently, they, like Bush, don't understand that voters and consumers are more often than not, one and the same.

I write such small things

I write such small things, responses to the æether actually, the little things, odd ripples wandering over and between and unpreturbedly across the faces of busy waves rushing on their way to somewhere else.

I spent a pleasent hour in O'Hare one morning after an over-night flight from Montevideo. My seat-mate was a civil servant in the diplomatic corps of the PRC, and we had time for breakfast before our flights, one east to Portland, one west to Beijing, departed in their respective directions. We talked at length about the change in how the US Consulate in Beijing treated PRC nationals seeking visas from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration, and how the crash of a US intelligence aircraft and a PRC interceptor aircraft (the pilot was lost) had played out. He had to use his diplomatic passport, not his personal passport, to take classes in goverment and management and get a Master's. Chinese students pursuing degree programs without diplomatic status were simply left to find other programs to enter, or finish from, in Canada or Europe. The US was closed to China. We parted, amicably, as we had a common purpose in being in Montevideo that week, and in a few weeks I would return to Beijing, again as a guest of the Chinese Academy of Science and the Ministry of Communications, who share responsibility for the oversight of the China Network Information Center, CNNIC.

The next day the policy of provocation, daring-do, and all the high-minded rhetoric about reform and labor conditions and non-entry into the WTO were put on hold, when Jim Roux and many, many others were incinerated, asphixiated, or crushed in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and the Bush administration went from attempting to start a pleasant little war, to being on the wrong end of someone else's pleasant little war. Jim was going to represent Jonah, my constant companion at all hours of the day, except when he is at theraputic nursery school, or I'm on very reluctant travel, in a toxic tort case -- lead.

The confluence of Dwight's piece on the non-appointment of Anthony Raimondo, which had its own off-shore-to-PRC nuance, and a piece in today's Le Monde, and my prior piece on Richard Perle's detachment from the shared reality of children that ice cream may be bought most anywhere in Europe with a € and his vision that France is pursuing a policy hostile to the United States, all sort of slide into each other, like the collisions of ghosts.

France, and Germany, and now Denmark and Holland, seek to remove the embargo on military sales, and dual-use sales, to the PRC. The US wants the embargo to remain in place. France published a four page paper entitled "Réflexions sur l'avenir des relations entre l'Union européenne et la Chine", which advocates the "développement harmonieux des relations euro-chinoises". The US intends to introduce a resolution of condemnation of China before the Human Rights Commission of the UN, and keep the sino-american relationship on cold-war footing.

Richard Perle, blind and vain as he is, is the seeing-eye dog for the current administration in all things hostile -- Iraq, France, China, and points in between. I don't know what his views on Africa, South America, or the Polar regions are, but he's pretty clear that Eurasia needs fixing, except that Europe is good, except that France is bad. He may have it in for penguins too, I simply don't care.

What makes me sigh at this point in this little essay is that we don't really know that Richard Perle isn't also selling light bulbs to the only competitor the current administration has. Is John Kerry's "B" Gaming of the Raimondo non-appointment just local to the target and the opportunity? Is his China policy closer to Paris or to Washington? Will we get a choice between cold-war brinksmanship and cold-war brinksmanship as the policy of the US towards the PRC, and Europe, for the rest of this decade, or a choice between cold-war brinksmanship and "développement harmonieux des relations euro-chinoises et amero-chinoises", and consequently, "développement harmonieux des relations euro-american"?

And that is why Dwight's comment in passing, on the toughness of John Kerry, to lead a electoral campaign that would cause an unelected, divisive, predatory, and above all, "war-time" administration to surrender power still has me troubled. Can we win if we lose Gay Marriage? If we lose France and Europe? If we lose India and China?

I don't care that Raimondo out-sourced 75 jobs to some free-trade zone in the PRC, it isn't a black-and-white issue. Microsoft is wiping out the potential for open source software developed in China and India, just as completely as it has been wiped out, by M$ and by shrinkwrap worshiping policy wonks here in the US. What M$ is doing in sofware, other intellectual property pirates are doing for film and music and ... Monopolies here and v-sweatshops there -- the holy call-centers, is mutually assured de-industrialization. This shouldn't be a litmus test issue, it is complex. Fertilizer production followed natual gas and production is now in ... Germany. Raimondo may or may not be an idiot, and neither possibility matters greatly.

What is important, or should be to Dems, is whether or not the US is going to be pursuing a policy that fits into the general framework of international development, as we knew it before the WTO made policy irrelevant, or a policy that fits into the general framework of international distruction, the "axis of evil" rhetoric of GW Bush, expanded to include the PRC, and bits of Europe, or the "illegal immigrants" rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, inverted to include off-shore manufacturing -- the tedious nonsense of another decinal or longer round of crypto-aggression.

How can we win in November, if before then our party does not choose Paris over Washington? If it does not, shouldn't Richard Perle have a title that corresponds to his actual role in policy making?

This isn't a criticism, or at least I'm not aware of being critical about Dwight's piece on the message management and timing the Kerry Campaign exercised this week w.r.t. Raimondo as a "Manufacturing Czar". I'm simply concerned that Perle's vision is mirrored in both houses here in fair Verona.

The only appology that needs making is to France, not to our frail and foolish King and his salons of wigged and powdered grandious fops, and it would be prudent to think about Beijing, and Dehli, as something other than rhetorical targets of opportunity.

Bring Your “A” Game

Atrios links to this AP story:

A Nebraska business executive withdrew from consideration to be President Bush’s point man on manufacturing Thursday after presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry raised questions about his stance on shifting U.S. jobs to foreign countries.

The Bush administration said Anthony Raimondo's withdrawal was related to Nebraska political issues and not the flap raised by the Kerry campaign.

But the nomination had appeared in doubt after Kerry's campaign had raised questions of why the Bush administration was picking someone to guide government efforts to halt the hemorrhage of American manufacturing jobs who had laid off 75 of his own workers in 2002 after announcing he was constructing a $3 million plant in China…

The Kerry campaign had no immediate reaction to Raimondo's withdrawal, but earlier Kerry had criticized the appointment of a so-called manufacturing czar "too little, too late" to deal with the current crisis in American manufacturing.

Atrios approves of the Kerry campaign’s handling of the nomination remarking that “the Bush gang is always horrible playing defense. The Kerry gang appears to recognize this.” I strongly disapprove of Kerry’s handling of the matter.

John Kerry was not my first choice for the Democratic nomination. Among my reasons was that I did not perceive Kerry as being tough enough to beat Bush. The last couple of months have changed my mind on that score. As Atrios says, the Kerry campaign is putting Bush on the defensive. That is a good thing and this incident is only one of a number that have convinced me that Kerry is in fact tough enough to win.

Nonetheless, this is going to be a very close election and if Kerry is going to win, he need to bring his “A” game every day. His handling of the nomination of Raimondo was at best a “C+” effort. It was a lost opportunity. If he wants to win, he has to eliminate such mistakes.

The proper way to handle the nomination was to do the research necessary to develop a line of attack on Raimondo and then be silent until Bush had his press conference and announced Raimondo as his choice. At that point, Bush would be committed to Raimondo. Kerry then could open fire with both barrels putting Bush into a much worse position.

Once Bush had announced the nomination, he would either have to back down, thereby looking weak, or absorb the damage of the Kerry attack. By firing too soon, Kerry allowed Bush to have Raimondo withdraw his own nomination and argue that the reason was unrelated to the Kerry attacks.

Before the press conference, the Kerry campaign should have merely said that the hiring of a manufacturing czar was too little, too late. Only after Bush made the announcement should the trap be sprung.

John Kerry is playing in the big leagues now. It is crucial to make the most of the opponent’s mistakes. Patience is hard when you have a good point to make. Nonetheless, part of bringing your “A” game is having the patience to maximize the opportunities created by your opponent's errors.

It is a small thing ... (2)

There are between 3,000 and 3,500 public research laboratories in France. As of today, two thirds of the laboratory directors have resigned, nearly 2,000, up from the 976 figure of Tuesday. Apparently, the confirmations of resignation are pouring into the Sauvons la recherche collective by fax and email. At this rate no public research facility in France will have an executive by Monday, though of course there are always holdouts, and people too busy being on vacation, or in hospital, to formally resign. The numbers for the group heads, a number larger than the number of independent labs, is running similarly.

The root cause is the continuous under-funding of research. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.

Here in the land of ARPA, a fresh Ph. D. from {Berkeley|UCLA|Stanford|CMU|MIT} has a non-negative number of job offers from the national laboratories and green-stamp quasi-public research outfits. Unfortunately, the number also tends to be non-positive. Source: Craig Partridge.

Of course, computer science and networking aren't really as important to the American economy as other things are, so its not like its a wasted opportunity or anything, neh?

October comes early

Towards the end of a call this morning from Geneva my caller reminded me of something nagging. The legislatives in Spain are on the 14th (and suddenly I know much, much more about Catelan variations from the Latin 1code set, and about Catelan cultural institutions and political parties than I did a week ago). I check Le Monde throughout the day, from the 5am wake-up to shock, to the evolving count, now 13 bombs, 190 dead, and 1,250 1,400 wounded, and still growing, and the side-bar that this was, or wasn't, the work of the ETA.

The reminder, the seed stuck between the teeth, was not OBL as an alternative to ETA, but something older. The August 2nd, 1980 bombing of a second class waiting room at the Bologna railway station. Eighty-five people were killed and over two hundred wounded. Bologna was a Communist Party electoral stronghold and had been targeted previously, by the Italian right.

Ten years later a number of S.I.S.M.I. officers were tried for the crime. The defendants included a General Secretary, a General and a Colonel. They were convicted. Their convictions were later quashed, but convicted they were.

It is too early to guess, and guesses are always just that, guesses, but it is worth remembering that the right in Europe is armed, and the function of "bourgois mobs" of the Tom DeLay form, or other acts of terrorism, are elections outcomes management.

We're all grieving the dead, the wounded, and the frightened.

Bush Flip Flop Watch - Part VI

Let’s do four more quick Bush flip flops.

First up is the Bush position on tax credits for fuel efficient vehicles. The AP reports:

It was just two years ago that Bush mocked such a tax credit proposal when it was part of then-Vice President Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign platform. The tax credit is now part of Bush's energy plan, which is stalled in the Senate.

Next is Mr. Bush’s widely reported flip flop on the issues of same sex marriage and states rights. CNN reports that during an appearance on Larry King Live during the 2000 campaign, King asked Bush “"If a state were voting on gay marriage, you would suggest to that state not to approve it?" Bush responded “the state can do what they want to do.” Now, of course, Mr. Bush wants a constitutional amendment to make sure that states can not do anything they want.

The third flip flop concerns Mr. Bush’s position on a Texas version of a Patient’s Bill of Rights. As Governor of Texas, George W. Bush opposed such a law. Salon reports:

Bush fought such a bill tooth and nail as Texas governor, vetoing a bill coauthored by Republican state Rep. John Smithee in 1995. He had his insurance commissioner draft into law some of the less controversial bits of the bill -- like letting women choose gynecologists as their primary-care doctors -- but constantly opposed a patient's right to sue an HMO over coverage denied that resulted in adverse health effects. Faced with a vetoproof majority in 1997, he had his legislative aide, Vance McMahan, do everything he could to sabotage the bill, to the point that Republican legislators complained on the floor of the Texas Senate. Then, faced with a vetoproof majority, Bush let the bill become law without his signature.

During the 2000 Presidential campaign, Mr. Bush flip flopped, saying:

I do support a national patient's bill of rights. As a matter of fact, I brought Republicans and Democrats together to do just that in the State of Texas to get a patient's bill of rights through."

Mr. Bush really is shameless.

Today’s final flip flop has to do with the funding of the Sarbanes-Oakley bill providing for enhanced SEC oversight of corporate misdeeds. I first reported on this flip flop here.

When signing the bill, Mr. Bush said:

My administration pressed for greater corporate integrity. A united Congress has written it into law. And today I sign the most far-reaching reforms of American business practices since the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This new law sends very clear messages that all concerned must heed. This law says to every dishonest corporate leader: you will be exposed and punished; the era of low standards and false profits is over; no boardroom in America is above or beyond the law…

Corporate misdeeds will be found and will be punished. This law authorizes new funding for investigators and technology at the Securities and Exchange Commission to uncover wrongdoing. The SEC will now have the administrative authority to bar dishonest directors and officers from ever again serving in positions of corporate responsibility …

This law gives my administration new tools for enforcement. We will use them to the fullest…

It is now my honor to sign the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Once Mr. Bush had reaped the political benefit of the signing ceremony, he quickly reversed course on actually funding the measure. As I previously wrote:

The New York Times reports that the White House now opposes the increased funding of the SEC called for under Sarbanes-Oxley. That funding is necessary to accomplish the goals Mr. Bush lauded at the signing ceremony (the Times story is now behind the $ wall, the abstract of the story is here).

Even Harvey Pitt, Bush’s handpicked Chairman of the SEC, has acknowledged that the level of funding now supported by the White House would not allow for the proposed new enforcement provisions. The level of funding supported by the White House ... does not allow for new initiatives according to Mr. Pitt’s spokesman.

Matthew Yglesias, writing at Tapped also notes the change in Mr. Bush’s position. He links to this (PDF) report on the under funding of the SEC.

Today’s entry brings our total of flip flops to 24. The well has not yet even begun to run dry so I will be back tomorrow with a few more.

Two Education Outrages

Two stories related to public schools caused my blood pressure to rise.

When John Edwards gave his “Two Americas” stump speech, he often noted that there were two public school systems, one for affluent areas and one for poor areas. A story in the New York Times provides an example of the latter:

February was Black History Month, and all students big and small at Edward Williams Elementary - which is 97 percent black - were assigned reports on a famous black American. Francis Powell, a sixth grader, wanted to do Langston Hughes, but when Francis visited the school library, there were no books about the great poet, nor any of his poems.

Fahtemah Callands, another sixth grader, planned to do Whoopi Goldberg, but there was nothing in the school library about the actress. Nothing on Oprah Winfrey either. Nothing on Josephine Baker, Cicely Tyson, Leontyne Price, Ossie Davis. Nothing on Spike Lee. There was one book on Duke Ellington. Students went looking for Benjamin Banneker, the mathematician; Granville T. Woods, the inventor; Alex Haley, the author; but there was nothing. Nothing on Rosa Parks.

One book on Frederick Douglass, but it was checked out fast. Indeed, the best collection available was a coloring book series, "Negro Pioneers," published in 1967.

At a poor school, the library is often the last priority, and at Williams, it has been neglected for decades. Much of the collection is from the 1950's and 1960's, when this was a white school.

The story notes that the library does not even have a complete set of up to date encyclopedias.

There is really no excuse for an elementary school not to have a decent library. By far the most important thing for elementary students to learn is that learning is fun. The easiest way to teach that is through interesting books. If kids learn that reading and learning are fun, and learn it early, the mastering of various subjects becomes much easier.

It is really hard to teach a child that reading is fun if there are no fun books to read.

The second story, from the Washington Post reports that a sixth grade class at a public school was shown large segments of an apparently bootlegged copy of “The Passion of the Christ.”

As a teacher showed sixth-graders at the District's Malcolm X Elementary School parts of the movie "The Passion of the Christ," 11-year-old Cutairra Ransom was growing upset by the violence unfolding in front of her.

"I saw Jesus getting beaten," Cutairra said yesterday. "Needles were going in his arms. It was scary the way they was beating him."

She added: "It made me feel really bad, terrible."

After about 15 minutes of watching the R-rated film about the final hours of Jesus's life, Cutairra said she walked out of the room.

She was one of the 16 to 20 students who were shown the movie Tuesday at the public school, which is in the Congress Park neighborhood of Southeast Washington. D.C. school officials, who said sixth-graders should not be shown R-rated movies at school, have placed the teacher, Ronald Anthony, on leave with pay pending an investigation.

I have not seen the movie and have not followed the ins and outs of the Gibson marketing plan. I, therefore, have no opinion on any of the controversies surrounding the movie.

I do know that it the movie earned an R rating for its graphic depiction of violence. What in the world is a public school teacher doing showing an R rated movie to a bunch of 12 year olds without consulting with their parents?

My oldest is a fourth grader. I can not imagine that in two years, I would permit him to see any movie containing a lot of graphic violence and I would be extremely unhappy if he was shown such a movie at school. I think that is a firing offense.

Bush Flip Flop Watch – Part V

It is 9/11 Commission day here at the Bush Flip Flop Watch. Mr. Bush’s relationship to the Commission investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks is a poignant example of Mr. Bush’s “steady leadership.” Just about the only issue concerning the 9/11 Commission on which Mr. Bush has not flip flopped is his constant desire that the commission simply go away. Mr. Bush’s positions with regard to the Commission have been steady only in the sense that they have constantly shifted as the political winds have changed.

Mr. Bush has flipped flopped on no fewer than six separate issues with regard to the commission. Yesterday’s post brought our documented list of Mr. Bush’s flip flops to fourteen. The six identified below raise the total to twenty.

Mr. Bush’s first flip flop with regard to the 9/11 Commission concerns the commission’s very existence. Initially Mr. Bush opposed the formation of the Commission but eventually caved into political pressure and supported the investigation. As CNN put it:

In a move applauded by Democrats, President Bush Friday reversed himself and endorsed the formation of an independent commission to conduct a "focused inquiry" of the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States that goes beyond intelligence failures already being probed by Congress.

Mr. Bush’s second flip flop involves reneging on a promise to the families of the 9/11 victims to allow them to select one Republican appointee to the commission.

Mr. Bush agreed to the formation of the Commission but insisted on certain restrictions. Mr. Bush insisted that the Commission have a limited time to perform its investigation (more on that later), that the commission have a severely limited budget (see here for the gory details) and limited subpoena power.

In particular, Mr. Bush wanted to make sure that Democrats on the Commission did not have the power to issue subpoenas. To achieve that objective, the Commission was set up to have ten members, five appointed by Mr. Bush and five appointed by Democrats. The President selected the Chairman and the Democrats selected the Vice Chair. The Commission ground rules required agreement of the Chair and Vice Chair or, alternatively, six commissioners to issue a subpoena. Thus, Democrats, acting without the support of at least one Republican appointed Commissioner, could not issue subpoenas.

The trouble with that arrangement was that the families of the 9/11 victims smelled a whitewash and objected. As I have previously written:

The families of the victims were concerned that the Republican appointees would simply refuse to issue subpoenas concerning matters that might be embarrassing to the administration. Without the vote of at least one Republican appointee, no subpoena could be issued.

To win the support of the families, a deal was reached. The proposal would be accepted but the families would have veto power over one of the Republican appointees to the Commission. The families would exercise that power through the two Senators they trusted, Republicans John McCain and Richard Shelby.

That deal gave the families the assurance that the five Democratic appointees and the one Republican appointee they controlled could issue subpoenas even if the investigation began to be uncomfortable for the White House.

The families selected former Senator Warren Rudman.

Once the families selected Warren Rudman, the White House reneged on the deal and refused to appoint him to the Commission.

The Cincinnati Post notes:

Rudman, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire, is a respected thinker on public policy issues and co-author of a remarkably prescient and prescriptive report on terrorism and national security published prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. Further, he is known for both his bluntness and independence, qualities that might have led the White House to intervene.

The third flip flop has to do with the duration of the Commission. The Commission was set to expire at the end of May. The Commissioners determined that they needed additional time to fulfill the Commission’s mandate. The White House opposed the extension of time.

As Newsday reported:

President George W. Bush and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) have decided to oppose granting more time to an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, virtually guaranteeing that the panel will have to complete its work by the end of May, officials said last week.

Once again, in the face of political pressure, the White House flip flopped. The Star Ledger reports:

In an abrupt reversal, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) yesterday dropped his opposition to giving the 9/11 commission two additional months to issue its final investigative report…

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said aides to President Bush had been in contact with Hastert's office throughout the week to make the president's support for an extension clear.

"We are pleased that everybody seems to support an extension," McClellan said.

The fourth flip flop involves whether or not President Bush will answer all of the Commission’s questions or will insist that his appearance be limited to one hour.

Originally, the White House insisted on the one hour restriction. After John Kerry started attacking the President for having time to visit a rodeo but not enough time to answer all the questions about 9/11, the White House flip flopped. The Washington Post reports:

President Bush will answer privately all questions raised by a federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the White House said Tuesday, softening its insistence that Bush's testimony be limited to an hour…

It was the administration's latest change of heart about the commission. Bush originally had opposed the panel's creation. Then he had opposed its request for a two-month extension of its work but eventually relented. Bush is intent on protecting his standing with Americans on the war on terror, which in polls is his best issue with voters.

Be sure to stay tuned to the issue of Bush's appearance before the Commission. The White House still insists that only select Commissioners be allowed to participate. My guess is that George W. Bush wants no part of having to answer all of the questions Richard Ben-Veniste, a very skilled lawyer, may want to ask.

The fifth flip flop surrounding the 9/11 Commission relates to the production of Presidential Daily Briefings to the Commissioners. Those briefings detail what the President knew about terror warnings and when he knew it.

The Commission says that it needs to see those Presidential Daily Briefings but the White House initially refused to provide them. MSNBC reports:

The documents at the heart of the dispute are the so-called presidential daily briefs, or PDBs—the daily intelligence brief given to Bush by a senior intelligence official, usually the CIA director or his deputy. White House lawyers have guarded the documents as the "crown jewels" of executive privilege.

When the Commission threatened a subpoena, the White House changed its position and negotiated a compromise. The compromise permits three Commissioners and one staffer to see the PDBs, create summaries and provide the summaries to the other Commissioners.

The PDBs also provide us with our sixth flip flop. The White House has not always been so protective of the PDBs. While they are very reluctant to share them with the Commission (under the compromise, seven of the ten Commissioners will not get to see them), they were happy to show them to a friendly journalist.

The MSNBC report continues:

The restrictions are especially infuriating, one source notes, because at least some of the PDBs appear to have been selectively shared by the White House two years ago with author Bob Woodward for his book "Bush at War." White House officials insist they are protecting the principle of confidential advice for the president ...

How does sharing the PDB's with a journalist protect the principle of confidential advice for the president?

It is just fine to let a friendly journalist with no security clearance see the “crown jewels of executive privilege” but the a majority of Commissioners, with security clearances, will not be permitted to see them despite the need to do so in order to report to the nation on the 9/11 attacks. That is a scandal far worse than a flip flop.

With the listing of those six flip flops, our tally is now twenty. I have quite a few more ready to list and others to for which I have not yet found links, so I will be posting about 3-4 per day for a while. In the meantime, here is a list (alas, without links) posted at Kos (the comments have some good examples as well). Greg at the Talent Show has a top fifteen list in pdf ready for easy printing. TR at Compassiongate has a very extensive list complete with links.

A Frivolous Claim

Eric Peters, a columnist for National Review Online and the Washington Times has an Op-Ed arguing against John Edwards for Vice President. Peters opposes Edwards because Edwards represented personal injury plaintiffs when in private practice and because Edwards was very, very good at his job.

The part that caught my eye was:

Personal injury lawyers … often win hundreds of millions of dollars in contingency fees in what any reasonable American would describe as frivolous lawsuits -- pocketing up to 50 percent of damage awards plus expenses…

Is that true? Mr. Peters offers no evidence that it is. In fact, he offers substantial evidence to support an inference that it is false. For instance, Mr. Peters writes of John Edwards:

His "poor boy" rhetoric belies the fact, however, that he is one of the wealthiest trial lawyers in the southeastern United States, and perhaps the entire nation.

During his courtroom career, he managed to sweet-talk juries into contingency fees that have given him a personal wealth estimated at more than $50 million.

Now if John Edwards is one of the “wealthiest trial lawyers in the southeastern United States, and perhaps the entire nation” with a personal fortune of $50 million, who is “often” winning “hundred of millions of dollars in contingency fees?”

According to Mr. Peters, plaintiff’s lawyers “often” win such fees. Even one case with a contingency fee of $200 million would double Edwards’ net worth after taxes are paid. How can Edwards be one of the richest trial lawyers with a net worth of $50 million if contingency fees of “hundreds of millions of dollars” are common?

Even more ridiculous is Peters’ notion that hundreds of millions of dollars are handed out in suits that “any reasonable American would describe as frivolous.”

Does Mr. Peters think that law suits are decided when the magical verdict fairy drops in to put a few hundred mill under the pillow? Who exactly does he think sits on juries if not “reasonable Americans”?

In civil cases in Georgia, we usually have a jury pool of 24-48 citizens. Often, each side has six preemptory strikes. Thus, out of the entire pool, the best that the plaintiff’s attorney can do is strike the six most defense-oriented potential jurors. Of course, the six most plaintiff-oriented potential jurors are struck by the defense. The actual jury is made up of the first twelve citizens remaining after those strikes. Usually, the verdict must be unanimous.

Given that procedure, how can a jury not include a single “reasonable American?” Does Mr. Peters think that the plaintiff can eliminate all the “reasonable Americans” by striking six potential jurors out of a pool of 24-48 citizens? Mr. Peters must not think there are very many reasonable Americans.

Mr. Peters is an elitist. He thinks himself so smart and perceptive that he can identify a frivolous suit from a brief newspaper account. He thinks that the people who actually sit on juries and hear the evidence are just too stupid to understand what he is smart enough to know even without the benefit of actually hearing any evidence or seeing any witnesses.

I wonder what a jury would think of Mr. Peters’ claims if held up to the scrutiny of an adversarial proceeding.

Mr. Peters offers no evidence to support his claim that hundreds of millions of dollars in contingency fees are won in frivolous cases. Juries tend to be critical of claims that are not supported by evidence. Mr. Peters then introduces evidence that one of the richest plaintiff’s attorneys has a net worth of $50 million. That fact tends to cast doubt on his previous claim. When a lawyer proves the opposite of what he or she intended, juries tend to take a skeptical view of the case.

In the case of Mr. Peters’ claims, I expect that a jury of “reasonable Americans” would find it frivolous. How much do you expect he was paid for writing a frivolous column?

It is a small thing

I've been watching this develop, and yesterday's papers on AF322 (which I understand is where my laundry is at this very moment), on the left, in the center, and on the right, put this one story above the fold. And today it has happened. The MoveOn.Org-esque Sauvons la recherche has organized the mass resignation of 976 unit directors and 1,110 heads of staff, about 50% of all major scientific labs in France, from all administrative functions.

The researcher's policy goal is 3% of the French GNP devoted to research. The current funding level in the US is 0.5%.

Anyone suppose that NASA, the NIH, the NSF, DARPA ... would pull the plug on the Bush Scientific Program life support system and pronounce the time of death?

It sneaks up on one in the small things. The Air France gate staff announcing that the flight from Paris to Rome would be delayed for an indeterminate period "due to industrial action." Sixty minutes of delay, a signal from labor to management. The little things that define a free country.

Incidently, the regional electorial campaigns in France are using ... le blogosphere.

Oh. Has anyone ever gotten anyone at MoveOn.Org to actually correspond with them? I've even asked people who's FEC Compliance (recent past campaigns) has been screwed up by MO.O not being responsive. I'm dead out of tricks. Help!

Roman Holiday

Just before going off to Rome I caught Richard Perle doing a sit-down on CBC. He was flogging some Clansey-esque Sum-of-all-Beards book, and managed to opine that France was pursuing a hostile policy, the details of which were sort of droll. I don't think anyone should actually give Perle money, let alone pay for the potboiler hash of mumble and muddle he's riding the publisher's circuit with this cycle, but someone should let the idiot know what a € looks like.

I spent my first day in English, pushing a "straw vote" by the ICANN registrars present at the Rome meeting, with a civil evening spent by all dining at the oldest extant hospital in Europe, a few hundred meters from St. Peters. I spent the next four days working (or socializing) in French, and it was as the three of us -- an Italian formerly living in Paris, now in Vienna, a Frenchman living in Tokyo, and myself -- were walking past some random monument that the Frenchman (en-exile) pointed out that the halo over the head of some Saint Amie des Pigeons or another was a circle of stars ... and casually made the throw-away reference.

It hit me like the seagull that whacked Tippi Hedren motoring across Bodega Bay. What used to be Christian Europe is now European Europe, and Richard Perle is planning for a future that was close to its sell-by date when I lived in Bruxelles (and London and Munich) in the mid-1980s. Every Indian breathing wants tribal license plates. The new European license plates with the circle of stars are as numerous as the old, pre-Europe plates. Its not just diplos and the jet-set now, its the Vespa Audry Hepburn scooted about on. Its on the money. Its on the publicity. Its on the tele. Its on the heads of Saints and Angles.

To round out my week I spent my last day working in German with Germans, Swiss, and Austrians.

For those that care about such things, ICANN decided to let Verisign Registry run the Internet, which is about as surprising as ... the directionality of time. It also decided that it need not disclose to curious me and my What I Know about the .IQ delegation project, or anyone else for that matter, what it plans to do with the .iq ccTLD.

I'll be chatting next with the UN network weenies. ICANN has reached its sell-by date as a regulator of the domain name industry, and endorsing the idea that one nation state may properly deny another nation state of its namespace is as silly as walking away from the international law system. Oddly, that is where Richard Perle came in. He described the North Atlantic as a region of the earth governed by law, and the rest, not, and the task of our time ©, to extend the gift of law to the lawless.

Postscript: Richard Perle is the architect of the Anglo-American militarized adventures in South West Asia. The driver of the bus is ... blind. On the bright-side, a first-grade class at Riverton school has passed an excellent session of show-and-tell, and now know all about the € coinage of European Europe.

Bush Flip Flop Watch – Part IV

This is the fourth installment of our series on Bush flip flops. We began with a song parody. Our second installment listed eight flip flops. Those eight involved:

Mr. Bush's broken promise to retire $2 trillion of the national debt;

Mr. Bush’s broken promise not to spend the Social Security surplus;

Mr. Bush’s violation of his alleged free trade principles by imposing tariffs on imported steel and then his lifting of those same tariffs;

Mr. Bush’s inconsistent position on stem cells and the destruction of human embryos;

Mr. Bush’s opposition to and then support of a cabinet level Homeland Security Department;

Mr. Bush’s broken promise on control of carbon dioxide emissions;

Mr. Bush’s ever changing position of negotiations with North Korea; and

Mr. Bush’s waffling between a policy of disarmament and a policy of regime change in Iraq.

Yesterday, we added three more to the list including:

Mr. Bush’s reneging on a promise to fully fund the Low Income Home Energy Assistance program (LIHEAP);

Mr. Bush’s flip flop on apologizing to China when China forced a US spy plane to land without permission; and

Mr. Bush’s flip flop on the abortion issue. Mr. Bush once said that the abortion issue should be left up to the woman and her doctor. Now, of course, Mr. Bush claims to be pro-life.

That brings our total to eleven. Today we add three more. First up is campaign finance reform.

During the campaign, Mr. Bush appeared on ABC’s This Week. As reported by Rich Lowry of the National Review, George Will asked Mr. Bush a direct question:

WILL: In which case, would you veto the McCain-Feingold bill, or the Shays-Meehan bill?

BUSH: That's an interesting question. I — I — yes I would…

Once in office, Mr. Bush flipped flopped and signed the McCain-Feingold bill into law. Mr. Lowry, before the fact, noted that if Mr. Bush signed the bill:

he will be committing his first bona fide, no-doubt-about-it, can't-be-spun flip-flop and broken campaign promise.

Our second flip flop involves same sex marriage. During the 2000 campaign, Then Governor Bush appeared on Larry King Live. King asked Mr. Bush, "If a state were voting on gay marriage, you would suggest to that state not to approve it?"

Bush took the states right approach, responding “the state can do what they want to do.” Now, of course, Mr. Bush wants a constitutional amendment to make sure that states can not do anything they want.

Our third flip flop involves affirmative action. When the University of Michigan affirmative action cases were before the Supreme Court, the Bush administration filed a brief opposing the programs. Mr. Bush said that the “method used by the University of Michigan …is fundamentally flawed."

After the Supreme Court upheld the law school admissions program and reaffirmed that race can be one criterion in such decisions, CNN reported that Mr. Bush said he was “happy the nation's highest court recognized the value of diversity.”

That brings our list of Bush flip flops to a total of 14. I will be back tomorrow with three more.

Economics of Fuel Efficiency

MB’s post on the rising price of gasoline made me wonder about the economics of improving fuel efficiency. A little bit of Googling turned up this Christian Science Monitor story.

According to the story, current technology could substantially increase fuel efficiency:

The average car on America's roads could be 30 percent more fuel efficient using today's technology. Instead of getting 27.5 miles per gallon of gasoline, it could hit 40 m.p.g….

The technology itself is hardly exotic. In a 2001 report, the National Academy of Sciences listed several types of technologies available today that could improve fuel economy, including hybrid drivetrains, more efficient engines and transmissions, lightweight materials, and improved aerodynamics.

It also seems unlikely that the use of such technology would harm performance. The Christian Science Monitor notes that car companies plan on installing such technology on high priced luxury models. For instance:

In January, Lexus debuted its 400H hybrid version of the all-wheel-drive RX330 sport utility vehicle. The 400H will offer 40 more horsepower than the RX330 and a continuously variable transmission.

The problem is that inclusion of the fuel efficiency technology costs about $4,000 per vehicle. Does it make sense from an economic perspective to spend $4,000 to improve fuel efficiency from 27.5 m.p.g. to 40 m.p.g.? The answer, of course, depends on a number of factors including the number of miles driven, the price of gas and interest rates.

MB’s post notes that the average price per gallon for gas is now $1.74 and she expects that price to go to $2.00. One article linked by MB predicts $2.50 per gallon this summer.

How many miles would you have to drive to break even after spending $4,000 on fuel efficiency? Lets ignore the time value of money issue and assume that the car could be financed over its useful life at 0% interest. That is an unreasonable assumption but it has the benefit of making my calculations easier.

If I have done the numbers right, if gas is $1.74 per gallon, to break even on an increased purchase price of $4000, you would have to drive about 203,000 miles (at 27.5 m.pg. for 203,000 miles you would consume 7381 gallons; at 40 m.p.g. you would consume 5075 gallon; the difference of 2306 gallons, at $1.74 per gallon is about $4,000).

At a gas price of $2.00 per gallon, the break even point is at 176,000 miles. At $2.50 per gallon, the break even point is 140,000 miles.

Looked at a different way, the price of gas would have to go to about $3.50 per gallon for the break even point to be reached at 100,000 miles.

Given those numbers, I suspect that use of the fuel efficiency technologies will become widespread only when the price of gas skyrockets, the price of the technology drops significantly or when consumer preferences change.

196 words...

Does this win the prize for the shortest Paul Krugman op/ed ever?

Then again, who needs words when you have a graph like this:

Attributes to add to the Bush list (after flip-flopping, of course): Exaggerator.

Money poured down the drain (or into the gas tank)

For consumers, the (missing) penny begins to drop:

"The high prices hurt everyone,'' said Rosemary Daly as she purchased $18 of gas Friday for her Ford Taurus station wagon at a Valero gas station in Yucaipa.

"So many people can't afford to pay these high prices,'' said Daly, 60, a nurse at Riverside Community Hospital. ``Many people have to take money away from other things to buy gas.''

The price for a gallon of self-serve regular Friday at the Valero station at 32749 Yucaipa Blvd. was $2.219.

That was 51 cents higher than the national average of $1.709, the Auto Club said.

Michael Coffey, a nurse at Redlands Community Hospital, spent $20 on Friday to pump gas into his Nissan Xterra at a Shell station in Redlands … and his tank still wasn't full.

"I used to buy premium gasoline, but to save money I'm buying regular,'' Coffey said.

The 37-year-old Redlands resident said he has cut back on fast food in order to have more money for gas.

Our Googling Monkey found the source of that meddlesome penny:

U.S. Gas Prices a Penny Short of Record
Updated: Monday, Mar. 8, 2004 - 5:14 PM
By The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - The average retail price of gasoline climbed 2 cents last week to $1.74 per gallon, the Energy Department said Monday, about a penny shy of the highest price since the department began collecting data.

Together, the high prices for crude oil, strong demand and low commercial inventories made gasoline expensive this winter. Analysts expect those same trends to be in place this summer, the peak driving season.

(emphasis mine)

Gannett explains further:

Experts say that unless Americans drive less or the economy flags, gas prices will spike in the spring and late summer, perhaps reaching $2.50 a gallon in August.

I predicted a few weeks back that Bush's ultimate undoing with the American electorate would be gas prices in the Heartland topping $2/gallon. The pocketbook trumps everything in election politics, despite the Bush spin doctors prognosticating on the overarching importance of national security and the "war on terrah".

As I packed lunchboxes this morning, Secretary Don Evans on NPR blamed falling consumer confidence number on the Democratic presidential candidates beating up on Bush; obviously, his driver still fills the gas tank of the Commerce Department's SUV assigned to Evans.

[Note: the impetus for this story was putting $15 into the tank of our Honda this morning, and finding when I started the engine, the gas gauge barely hit the midpoint.)

A Sign The Law Is Working

I like counterintuitive arguments as much as the next guy. They are interesting and thought provoking. The problem with such arguments is that they are usually wrong.

Remember the “flypaper strategy?” Some people made the argument that having terrorists enter Iraq after the war was a good thing because we could get them all in one place to destroy them.

That argument had a nice counter intuitive ring to it. Every news story of death, destruction or havoc in Iraq could then be spun as a sign of victory. Does anyone still believe in the “flypaper strategy?” The intuitive position that death, destruction and havoc are bad proved correct.

I was reminded of the flypaper strategy today when reading about the political firestorm caused by No Child Left Behind.

The New York Times reports:

Democratic legislators in Oklahoma were so unhappy with President Bush's No Child Left Behind school improvement law that they drafted a resolution calling on Congress to overhaul it. But at the last minute one of the state's most conservative Republicans, State Representative Bill Graves, stepped up with his own suggestion: Tell Congress to repeal it entirely.

The resolution passed, and Mr. Graves got a standing ovation…

[T]he unusual alliance in the Oklahoma Legislature reflected the widespread outcry that the president's signature education initiative has provoked. Like similar measures being debated in legislatures across the country, the Oklahoma resolution brought together liberal Democrats and states' rights Republicans, angry over what they see as a cumbersome federal intrusion on local schools.

Legislation or resolutions that call on Congress to amend or repeal the law, prohibit spending state money to carry it out, or otherwise criticize the law have been passed by one or both legislative chambers in at least 12 states. And the actions reflect broader public discontent.

"The pot is definitely boiling on this law," Senator Arlen Specter, the powerful Republican chairman of an education subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said on Friday, noting that 138 Pennsylvania superintendents protested provisions of the law in a meeting Monday…

Mr. Bush is portraying the law as one of his major domestic achievements. At a fund-raiser on Thursday in Santa Clara, Calif., he called it "a really good piece of legislation."

Yet the outpouring of objections from state legislatures has forced the White House and Department of Education officials to travel the country, putting out brush fires.

In Utah, the White House won a hard-fought victory. Last month the Republican-controlled Utah House embarrassed the administration by passing a bill to prohibit Utah authorities from spending state money to carry out the federal law. But after three visits to the state by Bush administration officials, the Utah Senate consigned the bill to a committee, where Senator David L. Gladwell, a Republican sponsor of the bill, said it would be studied for the foreseeable future.

But criticism of the federal law appears to be continuing elsewhere. The Idaho Legislature last week approved a resolution praising the law's objective of raising student achievement, but urging major changes. On Wednesday, the Connecticut Senate unanimously approved a resolution asking Congress to grant waivers from the law's provisions to states like Connecticut that have high education standards.

How does the Bush administration react to the unpopularity of NCLB? It invokes the functional equivalent of the flypaper strategy:

Susan Aspey, a Department of Education spokeswoman, said that the responses of the legislatures and protests by some superintendents were to be expected as provisions of the 2002 law, which seeks to shake up public education, are put into place… "No one should be surprised, and we certainly aren't, that there is some anxiety about change. It's a sign the law is working."

Yeah, right.

Bush Flip Flop Watch

Slate has an article by Michael Grunwald which it attempts to document some of John Kerry’s alleged flip flops. As Josh Marshall demonstrates, Grunwald’s argument is sloppy and tendentious.

In a separate post, Josh suggests that Slate run a similar article listing the flip flops of George W. Bush. He remarks that “a Bush flipflop scorecard is really in order, so long as Microsoft has the bandwidth to serve up a very long file.”

I think we should help by providing a list of flip flops by George W. Bush and his administration.

Matthew Yglesias has begun the list here. Matt’s commenters are also on the case. I discussed some other Bush flip flops here.

Today's installment includes three flip flops. First up is abortion.

Mr. Bush now describes himself as “pro life.” When he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in the 1970s, however, he told a reporter for the Lubbock-Avalanche-Journal that he favored leaving the abortion question “up to a woman and her doctor.” That sounds pro choice to me.

Second is funding for LIHEAP, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

When Mr. Bush was asked about energy policy in the 2000 Presidential debates, he said:

First and foremost, we've got to make sure we fully fund LIHEAP, which is a way to help low-income folks, particularly here in the East, pay for their high fuel bills.

Once Mr. Bush got into office, we find that:

The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) will face a cut of over $500 million if the budget for FY2002 released today by President George W. Bush becomes law.

The last example in today's installment of the Bush flip flop watch involves the 2001 incident when an American spy plane was forced to land in China. China demanded that the United States apologize. According to CNN:

But White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters that the United States was declining China's request for an apology.

"The United States doesn't understand the reasons for an apology," Fleischer said. "Our airplanes were operating in international air space and the United States did nothing wrong."

A bit later, according to the News Hour:

A carefully worded apology from the U.S. is bringing home 24 members of the U.S. Navy who have been held in China for 11 days… The U.S. ambassador to China said in a letter that the U.S. was "very sorry" the Chinese pilot died and apologized for landing on Chinese soil without permission.

I have collected more than twenty such flip flops. I will be updating this series periodically. If you know of a Bush flip flop, please relay it to me by comment or email complete with a link. Maybe we can help make the media's work a little easier if we do their research for them.

A Busy Man

Some people are complaining that Mr. Bush is unwilling to spend more than one hour answering questions posed by the 9/11 commission. Don’t those people know that Mr. Bush is a busy man? Where would he find the time to spend more than an hour meeting with the commission? Mr. Bush has things to do. For instance, the New York Times reports today:

Mr. Bush was remarkably acquiescent, they added, during the two to three hours of camera work it took to get his lead campaign commercial ready to broadcast; the 60-second spot, shot about three weeks ago, features Mr. Bush talking about his presidency as he sits next to his wife, Laura, at the White House.

You can’t really expect a man to take time out of a tight schedule filming commercials to help explain a national tragedy, can you?

If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck...

It still might not, in fact, be a duck.

For over a year now, I've pointed out the striking similarities, at least utilizing the lens of print media, between the first and second Bush Administrations. While everything from the players (Bush, Cheney, Card, Bolton, etc.) to the issues (Iraq, recession, the deficit) feel amazing like we're in fact living in a "do over", a closer look at some of the specifics may predict a somewhat different outcome for Bush Jr. This in particularly true of the economy.

The administration of George Herbert Walker Bush also saw a widespread recession take hold in the midst of his first term as president; nearly 1.4 million jobs, primarily in manufacturing, were lost, as unemployment climbed to 7.8% in June of 1992. Present-day analysts will often point to the poor economy, as evidenced by the high jobless rate, as the reason why Bush Sr. lost his re-election bid to Gov. Bill Clinton. Many of those same talking heads now insist that with a purported economic recovery in full bloom, Bush Jr. may well be able to avoid the same fate as his father. However, a couple of headlines I ran across during Friday's trip into deja-vu-land piqued my curiosity:

TWO MORE REPORTS SIGNAL RECOVERY
Dave Skidmore, Associated Press
March 5, 1992

WASHINGTON -- Orders to US factories rose for the third time in four months and the percentage of homeowners behind on their mortgages fell, according to two reports yesterday that observers said signaled a slowly emerging economic recovery. Automakers, meanwhile, said February sales of North American-made cars and trucks rose modestly from a year ago.

Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady said the January gain in factory orders should be followed by an "increasing number of...

ECONOMIC REPORTS PROVIDE A HINT THAT RECOVERY IS COMING
Charles Stein, Boston Globe
March 4, 1992

A fresh round of national economic reports released yesterday showed signs of an economy on the mend and hinted that a real recovery could begin within the next few months. The government's chief economic forecasting gauge showed its biggest jump in six months while new home sales recorded their largest rise in 13 months. The nation's purchasing managers said on Monday that the economy expanded sharply in February.

"As we look ahead there are a few hopeful signs," Alan...

In both cases, the headlines rang true - an economic upturn was in fact on the horizon, gaining steam throughout much of the summer and fall of 1992. The housing sector, manufacturing and retail sales all saw substantial gains as Bush Sr. moved towards re-election. Even employment, always a "lagging" indicator, showed improvement; from March until November, 1992, the economy added over 800K jobs, pushing Bush's track record for job creation back into positive numbers.

So why do present day analysts focus on the climbing unemployment rate as a factor in Bush Sr.'s defeat? And what are the implications for Bush the Younger tying his re-election hopes on American's paying more attention to the unemployment rate than the number of jobs actually created? The charts below tell an interesting story:

Under George H. W. Bush's watch, the unemployment rate shot up as more people entered the workforce after the recession. This most likely occurred as public confidence in the recovery buoyed the unemployed to start pounding the pavement in hopes that companies were hiring again. Such is the argument the current Bush Administration attempted to make back in November, 2003, but it's now clear that it was merely a slight uptick in an otherwise downward trend.

Unfortunately for Bush Jr., he's stuck between a rock and a hard place; should public confidence turn positive again, the large numbers of workers currently labelled as "discouraged" and thus not counted in the labor force could move back into the job seeking category, pushing the unemployment rate up, unless companies start hiring en masse. However, with productivity at record highs (along with the cost of hiring new workers, particularly health benefits) there is little chance of that happening anytime soon. Thus, the combination of long-term unemployment creeping further into the "middle class" and no new job prospects on the horizon may cause consumers to clamp down on their spending, choking off the recovery. Add to that stagnant wages for average workers and climbing energy costs, and an unemployment rate of 4% might not cheer the increasingly disgruntled electorate.

It's obvious that this Administration only has a very short period of time to turn things around. Probably a month or two at the most.

Flasback Friday returns

Now that the headline-grabbing primary season is now essentially complete, we can get back to the future of the Bush Years - of course, I or II is still the question.

A DEAL'S UNDOING STIRS DEFICIT FEARS;
BUSH'S BUDGET PACT RETREAT DISMAYS ECONOMISTS, AND SOME ADVISERS
Steven Mufson, Washington Post
March 6, 1992

Today, with another election at hand, Bush seems willing to borrow a little more from young people's futures to protect his own. This week he gave three interviews in which he called that once "essential" budget compromise with Congress a "mistake." Smarting from rival Republican Pat Buchanan's attacks on the modest tax increases in the 1990 budget deal, Bush told a columnist from the Atlanta ...

DETOURING THE RECOVERY
Boston Globe Editorial
Published on March 5, 1992

It would be unfortunate if the mildly optimistic appraisal of the economy presented by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan worked as a drag on the recovery rather than as a form of encouragement. Congress and the Bush administration are in a position to avoid that hazard. Greenspan's hopefulness on two major issues lies at the heart of the problem. His statement that inflation will not be a problem for the time being was particularly impressive, coming from someone whose public career...

2 ECONOMIC INDICATORS SHOW SIGNS OF RECOVERY
Martin Crutsinger, Associated Press
March 3, 1992

WASHINGTON -- Two hard-hit sectors of the economy got good news yesterday. A key manufacturing barometer climbed out of recession territory in February and the construction industry enjoyed its best showing since last spring. The Commerce Department, however, reported that consumers increased their spending a lackluster 0.2 percent in January while their incomes actually fell by 0.1 percent.

Private economists said the mixed reports were typical of an economy at a turning point with some...

GOP MOVE PUTS SENATE IN MIDDLE OF CRIME WAR
Helen Dewar and Kenneth J. Cooper, Washington Post
March 4, 1992

It excluded a waiting period for handgun purchases, approved by both chambers and included in the House-Senate compromise. [Bush] had agreed to support the waiting period as part of a comprehensive bill but criticized the compromise as insufficiently tough on criminals.

"I'm tickled to death to jump right in in a good old election year," said Minority Whip Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), characterizing the compromise ...

HEAD START'S LEAN-TIMES BACKLOG MIDDLE-CLASS NOSES PRESSED TO WINDOW OF PROGRAM FOR POOR

Aaron Zitner, Boston Globe
March 5, 1992

At the Head Start office run by Ann Linehan, a sad letter arrived last month on behalf of a Newton man facing bankruptcy. ''He remains financially insolvent, and most likely all assets will be liquidated,'' wrote the man's lawyer, who then asked: Could his client's two young children get into Head Start? The request was a striking sign of the times. These days, people who once had well-paying jobs and children in private day care are seeking help from a program...

BANKRUPTCIES SET RECORD; NEW ENGLAND HARDEST HIT
Dave Skidmore, Associated Press
March 3, 1992

WASHINGTON -- A record 944,000 American individuals and businesses filed for bankruptcy in 1991 -- a 21 percent increase from the year before -- as the economy struggled to emerge from recession, a nonprofit group said yesterday. Many of the biggest increases came in economically shellshocked New England. Filings rose 51 percent in New Hampshire, 47 percent in Rhode Island, 45 percent in New Jersey, 43 percent in Massachusetts, 43 percent in Maryland, 41 percent in Connecticut, 37 percent in...

ERNST & YOUNG ORDERED TO TURN OVER DOCUMENTS
Boston Globe
March 4, 1992

A DISTRICT COURT judge yesterday ordered Ernst & Young to turn over what could total 1 million documents to federal regulators probing the accounting firm's work for 23 troubled savings and loan institutions. ''Accounting firms may have been responsible for many of the abuses which have led to this country's savings and loan crisis,'' Judge Royce C. Lamberth wrote in the decision compelling the firm to comply with the Office of Thrift Supervision's...

FLIP, FLOP. . . FLIP?
The Washington Post Editorial
March 5, 1992. pg. a.20

Mr. Bush doesn't quite say of the broken promise that the devil made him do it. He says Congress did. "But, yes, I, you see, I'm very disappointed with Congress," he explained in one of several recantations this week. "I thought this one compromise, and it was a compromise, would result in no more tax increases. I thought it would result in total control of ...

PENDULUM SWINGS TOWARD STOCKS -- AGAIN
Thomas Watterson, Boston Globe
March 5, 1992

At least once a week, it seems, the stock market sets a record. This week is no exception. Investors have been buying in reaction to positive economic news on production, consumer spending and construction. But with records in the Dow Jones industrial average coming so often that they aren't even reported as records any more, ordinary folks may wonder if it's too late for them, if stocks will start to fall as soon as they buy in.

Not according to a number of investment...

THE GULF GLOW FADES
Mark Shields, Washington Post
March 6, 1992

President Bush's reelection strategy of focusing on his victory in the Persian Gulf War has at least one major problem: The Persian Gulf War does not loom quite so historic in Americans' minds when the battle now is here at home, and the stakes are nothing less than our children's future.

BIPARTISAN SENATE PANEL ASSAILS BUSH'S HEALTH CARE PLAN
Elizabeth Neuffer, Bsoton Globe
March 5, 1992

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans and Democrats yesterday sharply criticized President Bush's proposed health care reforms for failing to provide coverage for all Americans and to contain surging health care costs.

But Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan defended the plan before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee as ''built on choice, not central control.''

"The president's plan addresses the health care worries expressed...

TARGETING PBS CONSERVATIVES REVIVE LIBERAL BIAS CHARGE
Patti Hartigan, Boston Globe
March 4, 1992

Conservatives who have been challenging the National Endowment for the Arts for issuing controversial grants to artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe are now holding public broadcasting stations to the same watchdog scrutiny. In a debate likened to ''an attempt to hold 'Sesame Street' hostage,'' the Senate yesterday began a preliminary discussion of a bill to authorize $1.1 billion in federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which channels money...

COLLEGES ASSAIL BID TO REVISE AID RULES BUSH'S PLAN WOULD BAN RACE-BASED SCHOLARSHIPS
Tamara Henry, Associated Press
March 5, 1992

WASHINGTON -- Groups representing virtually every college and university in the United States issued a denunciation yesterday of a Bush administration proposal to ban race-specific scholarships. ''The proposed policy is based on faulty legal reasoning . . . and . . . has the potential of doing significant harm'' to recruitment and fund- raising, said Robert Atwell, president of the American Council on Education.

"We are urging the department to withdraw its...

VOTERS' ANGER MAY TAKE ITS TOLL ON CAPITOL HILL:
MARYLAND UPSET SEEN AS A HARBINGER
John W. Mashek, Globe Staff
March 5, 1992

WASHINGTON -- The anti-incumbent sentiment that defeated a veteran Democrat in Maryland's primary on Tuesday, combined with retirements and redistricting, is likely to bring about 100 new members to Congress this fall. That would be the biggest turnover since the post-Watergate election of 1974. Rep. Beverly Byron, a seven-term incumbent, lost by 12 percentage points to Tom Hattery, a 38-year-old farmer who spoke of ''business as usual in Washington.''...

SHIPMENTS TO PAKISTAN QUESTIONED: COMMERICAL SALES OF WAR MATERIEL MAY BREAK U.S. LAW
Steve Coll and David Hoffman, Washington Post
March 7, 1992

A senior Bush administration official said today that the United States issued licenses for more than $100 million in commercial sales of military equipment to Pakistan in 1990 and 1991, actions that some in Congress charge may violate a law blocking aid to Pakistan as long as that country continues its nuclear weapons program.

WHY VIETNAM WON'T GO AWAY
H.D.S. Greenway, Boston Globe
March 5, 1992

When Desert Storm was over, President Bush said that, at last, the Vietnam syndrome had been put behind us. How wrong he was.

It seems astonishing to think that a war that the United States pulled out of in 1973 should still remain a factor in an election 19 years later. What the candidates did or did not do in World War II was no longer discussed in the presidential elections of 1964. Korea was, to my knowledge, never even mentioned in the campaigns of 1972.

Yet Vietnam rolls on...

FROM FUMES TO WATER, BUSH IS FLEXING REGULATORY RULES
Michael Weisskopf and Thomas W. Lippman, Washington Post
March 7, 1992

Now a presidential primary in Michigan on March 17 has created the art of the possible. In a few days, President [Bush]'s EPA is expected to free the Detroit-based auto industry from the need to install small canisters in cars to capture the fumes. The responsibility for pollution controls would shift to gas stations.

In the decision on gasoline vapors, the White House was also ...

EDGING TOWARD THE ENERGY FUTURE
Boston Globe Editorial
Published on March 6, 1992

The energy bill passed recently by the Senate represents a step forward, but only a modest one. As Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont said: ''The bill falls short because we still will become increasingly dependent on oil from the Middle East. We still don't have a national energy strategy.'' The United States depends on foreign oil for 45 percent of its petroleum needs. If present trends continue, that dependency will climb to 80 percent by 2010. Domestic oil production...

GOP MOVE PUTS SENATE IN MIDDLE OF CRIME WAR
Helen Dewar and Kenneth J. Cooper, Washington Post
March 4, 1992

It excluded a waiting period for handgun purchases, approved by both chambers and included in the House-Senate compromise. [Bush] had agreed to support the waiting period as part of a comprehensive bill but criticized the compromise as insufficiently tough on criminals.

"I'm tickled to death to jump right in in a good old election year," said Minority Whip Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), characterizing the compromise ...

HEART OF GOP DARKNESS
Richard Cohen, Washington Post
March 3, 1992

President Bush, paddling up the GOP's fetid river of either passive or active racism, has finally met his Kurtz: "The horror, the horror." Those famous lines spoken by Joseph Conrad's equally famous character turn out to describe Patrick J. Buchanan and what he represents. Racism is the GOP's "Heart of Darkness."

The tragedy of George Bush, besides a wasted presidency, is that on a given ...

The “Don’t Blame Me” Era

In the 2000 Presidential campaign, then Governor Bush liked to talk about responsibility. He used the theme of the Responsibility Era to great effect. For instance, he said the following:

From the first day of this campaign I have talked about the goal of a responsibility era for America. And even before that, it was one of my priorities as governor. For too long our culture has sent this message: if it feels good, do it. And if you've got a problem, just go ahead and blame somebody else. Each of us must understand that's not right. Each of us must understand that we're responsible for the decisions and choices we make in life.

Will Mr. Bush be talking about taking responsibility in his reelection campaign? Josh Marshall does not think so:

If you look at the TV ads the president just unveiled today, you quickly see a main -- probably the main -- theme of his reelection campaign: it's not my fault.

Yes, there are all sort of bad things going on. The economy's been rough. The deficit is deepening. Job growth is barely registering. There's all sorts of chaos on the international stage. But it's not my fault. When I got here there was a recession already, which I didn't have anything to do with. That's was Clinton's fault. And the same with all the corporate scandals. And then Osama bin Laden got involved and that wasn't my fault either. And that Iraq thing didn't completely work out. But that's the CIA's fault. So if there's anything that's bad now it's not because of anything I did. It's because of 9/11. And if it's not because of 9/11 then it was already broken when I got here. So don't blame me.

It took less than four years for the Responsibility Era to morph into the Don’t Blame Me Era.

Reasonably Questioned, The Prequel

When we last checked in on Justice Antonin Scalia, we discussed his hunting trip with Dick Cheney. Mr. Scalia, along with his daughter, accepted transportation from Mr. Cheney (a flight on Air Force II) paid for with tax payer dollars. Cheney and Scalia were guests at a hunting resort owned by an energy company executive. All told, we figured the gifts to Mr. Scalia could be reasonably estimated at around $10,000.

That trip occurred at a time when Mr. Cheney was (and is) a party to a suit pending before the Supreme Court. That case involves whether or not Mr. Cheney must produce information and documents about the development of energy policy by his Energy Task Force.

Thus, Mr. Cheney used tax payer dollars to create energy policy but does not wish the public to have access to the details of how that policy was made. When the case seeking to force such disclosure is pending before the Supreme Court, Mr. Cheney uses tax payer dollars to fly one of the judges, and the judge’s daughter, to Louisiana for a hunting trip at a hunting refuge owned by an energy executive.

Justice Scalia sees nothing wrong in any of that. He does not think that his socializing with a party to a pending case, his potential ex parte communications with such a party or his acceptance of gifts from the party and an energy executive could reasonably call his impartiality into question.

Mr. Scalia will now have a chance to rethink that position. One plaintiff in the Cheney Energy Task Force case, The Sierra Club, has filed a motion asking that Scalia recuse himself from the case (link via Lambert at Corrente).

Federal judges are to recuse themselves in situations in which their impartiality “can reasonably be questioned.” There is no mechanism to enforce that requirement for Supreme Court Justices. Recusal motions are referred to the individual Justice for consideration by that Justice only. His or her decision about the reasonableness of questions of their own impartiality can not be challenged in any forum. Thus, Justice Scalia will decide whether or not his duck hunting trip with Mr. Cheney has impacted on his own impartiality and neither the Sierra Club nor anyone else can challenge Scalia’s view of his own propriety.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the duck hunting trip to Louisiana was not the first questionable hunting trip Scalia has taken:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was the guest of a Kansas law school two years ago and went pheasant hunting on a trip arranged by the school's dean, all within weeks of hearing two cases in which the dean was a lead attorney.

The cases involved issues of public policy important to Kansas officials. Accompanying Scalia on the November 2001 hunting trip were the Kansas governor and the recently retired state Senate president, who flew with Scalia to the hunting camp aboard a state plane…

Specialists in legal ethics differed on whether the Kansas trip presented a conflict of interest for Scalia.

"When a case is on the docket before a judge, the coziness of meeting privately with a lawyer is questionable," said Chicago lawyer Robert P. Cummins, who headed an Illinois board on judicial ethics. "It would seem the better part of judgment to avoid those situations."

Added Monroe Freedman, who teaches legal ethics at Hofstra University: "A reasonable person might question this, and that's the problem." He said Scalia "should have rescheduled the trip until after" the cases were over.

Other experts noted, however, that no one who met Scalia in Kansas was a named litigant in the two cases, in contrast to the trip with Cheney, who is the appealing party in the upcoming energy task force case.

"I'm not troubled by this because of the law school setting," said Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor. He said he saw no problems with the hunting trip. "The dean was an advocate, not the litigant."…

McAllister said Scalia responded that he would come as scheduled, and that he would not accept a speaking fee and would pay for his own hunting…

The University of Kansas, a state school, paid for Scalia's flight, meals and lodging, according to Scalia's financial disclosure statement.

The next day, the dean dropped the justice off at the airport in Lawrence, Kan., where he met the governor and the former state Senate leader.

Bond, a 14-year state senator who retired at the end of 2000 as president of the Kansas Senate, said he spoke with McAllister before Scalia came to Kansas. "He was bringing out Scalia and he said Scalia really wanted to go pheasant hunting," Bond recalled.

"He said he [McAllister] couldn't go because he was going to have a case before the court and it would be inappropriate. He said he had no problem with bringing him in and having him speak to students, but that he could not go out and socialize with him."

Bond spoke to Graves. The former governor, in a separate interview, said he was honored to have the chance to go hunting with a Supreme Court justice.

Graves said he and Bond decided to take Scalia to the Ringneck Ranch near Beloit, Kan., which was owned by Keith Houghton, a friend of the governor.

Graves said they flew from Lawrence on the governor's official plane, which he described as a King air prop, and returned on the same plane after hunting. Scalia reimbursed the state $121.87 for the round trip…

Justice Scalia provided a written response to the L.A. Times article:

I was not the guest of Stephen McAllister, but of the University of Kansas Law School. The invitation, in fact, had come not from Stephen McAllister but from his predecessor as dean of the law school, Michael Hoeflich. That invitation was issued in December of 1999 and accepted (by phone) some time before October of 2000 — long before the October and November, 2001, cases you refer to were on our docket. My travel expenses to Lawrence were reimbursed by the University of Kansas, not by the state. I flew with the governor and others on the governor's plane from Lawrence to Beloit and back, and promptly reimbursed the state of Kansas for the cost.

I do not think that spending time at a law school in which the counsel in pending cases was the dean could reasonably cause my impartiality to be questioned. Nor could spending time with the governor of a state that had matters before the court. Indeed, if the latter were so, Supreme Court justices would be permanently barred from social contact with all governors, since at any given point in time virtually all states have matters pending before us, either in accepted cases or in petitions for certiorari …

The Kansas episode and Scalia’s response raise a number of issues. First, Scalia should simply stop his insipid whining. Other than playing center field in a World Series, he has one of the best jobs in the world. He has life tenure with a constitutional provision providing that his pay can not be cut. He gets to help shape the law for generations to come. He even gets to decide Presidential elections. Scalia’s whining that he would not be able to socialize with governors is pathetic.

The comments to Cannon 2a of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges states that:

Public confidence in the judiciary is eroded by irresponsible or improper conduct by judges. A judge must avoid all impropriety and appearance of impropriety. A judge must expect to be the subject of constant public scrutiny. A judge must therefore accept restrictions that might be viewed as burdensome by the ordinary citizen and should do so freely and willingly.

Scalia should willingly accept the restriction that he not take hunting trips with governors whose states have matters pending before him. It is true that he might have to shoot birds with riff raff like Federalist Society members or CEOs of major corporations or even other Federal Judges instead of governors, but Poor Tony will just have to get over it. There are more than 275 million Americans. For Scalia to whine that he can not go hunting with 50 of them who happen to be Governors is unseemly.

The second issue involves reimbursement for the cost of the flight from the law school to the hunting grounds. Scalia writes:

I flew with the governor and others on the governor's plane from Lawrence to Beloit and back, and promptly reimbursed the state of Kansas for the cost.

Why did he reimburse the cost? It can only be that he thought it improper to accept a gift from the tax payers of Kansas for a flight on the governor’s airplane while Kansas had a case pending before him.

If that is the standard, should not Scalia then reimburse the American taxpayers for the cost of the flight he and his daughter took on Air Force II with Dick Cheney? Scalia has defended his hunting trip with Cheney on the grounds that Cheney has not been sued in his individual capacity. The governor of Kansas was not a named party to the suit either in an individual or official capacity.

Cheney was named as a defendant. If Scalia felt that reimbursement was necessary for the Kansas trip, reimbursement is even more necessary for the Cheney/Louisiana trip.

Third, Dean McAllister of the University of Kansas set up the hunting trip but did not accompany Scalia on that trip. Why not? According to the Times:

He said he [McAllister] couldn't go because he was going to have a case before the court and it would be inappropriate. He said he had no problem with bringing him in and having him speak to students, but that he could not go out and socialize with him."

If it was inappropriate for Dean McAllister, as a lawyer to socialize with Scalia how can it possibly be appropriate for Dick Cheney, as a named defendant, to socialize with Scalia? Please note that the one and only legal ethics expert quoted by the Times to the effect that the Kansas trip was not troublesome said the following:

"I'm not troubled by this because of the law school setting," said Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor. He said he saw no problems with the hunting trip. "The dean was an advocate, not the litigant."

Dick Cheney is the litigant.

Finally, how many people must perceive a problem before it is clear that Justice Scalia’s impartiality could reasonably be questioned? Academics are questioning Justice Scalia's impartiality. Law Professor Stephen Gillers sees a problem with the Cheney trip but not the Kansas trip.

It seems that Dean McAllister would see a problem in the Cheney situation because he felt that socialization would be inappropriate for an advocate and socialization with a party is worse.

The Times quotes experts Robert P. Cummins, who headed an Illinois board on judicial ethics and Monroe Freedman, who teaches legal ethics at Hofstra University as seeing a problem with the Kansas episode when Scalia reimbursed the costs. Once again, the Cheney situation is worse.

Newspapers see a problem. The Los Angeles Times editorial board sees a problem. Indeed, according to Newsday, “Twenty of the country's 30 largest newspapers have called on Scalia to recuse himself because of the vacation Scalia and Cheney took, the Sierra Club told the court in a filing earlier this week that included a sampling of editorials.”

Apparently, Scalia believes all of those critics are being unreasonable. There is a story about two proud parents watching a parade in which their son is a member of the marching band. As the band goes by, the mother asks the father, “Why is everyone out of step except Tommy?”

Why is everyone unreasonable except Poor Tony?

Move over Primary Colors...

After I announced my candidacy for a seat in the Maine House of Representatives a few weeks back, a number of readers requested that I write about the process as I go along; I guess one could call it a "blogumentary".

Well, I've just completed the initial steps necessary for all Maine candidates to get their name on the ballot, for the June primary and/or the November general. Step one is the paper work; every candidate has to fill out the prerequisite forms: Campaign ethics pledge; agreement to abide by Clean Elections or other spending limits; and registration, providing name, address, phone, etc., of the candidate and the campaign treasurer. Quick segue on the importance of selecting a good treasurer. This person really performs two positions; one, besides being your general "accountant", your treasurer keeps you out of hot water with the state Ethics Commission, making sure all campaign reports are filed correctly and on-time; secondly, since your treasurer's name is on all campaign-related materials, it's generally a good idea to select someone well-respected in the community, to show you have support beyond your immediate family. [Note: I asked Burt Wartell, editor of the Maine Labor News to take the job - he also formerly held my position as treasurer of the Portland Dems, so I'm confident he's knows his way around campaign finance reporting.]

The next step in the campaign we completed just yesterday, getting the appropriate number of signatures on my nominating papers. This is essentially a case of going door-to-door, asking your neighbors to help put you on the ballot. They don't have to vote for you or hand you money. All you want is their John Hancock. Make sure, however, you ask if they're Democrats. Didn't think about that one when I first started gathering signatures at the polls on election day (special city council election.) Not only I did a get an unenrolled to two, even got a couple of Republicans.

After I appointed my treasurer, I could also begin to raise money. As I'll be explaining in depth tomorrow over on the campaign blog, I chose not to run as a Clean Elections candidate due in part to Maine's fiscal crisis, and in part as an attempt to draw attend to some serious, but fixable, flaws in very important legislation - both for Maine and the nation, as Maine was the first state to adopt public financing of certain elections. However, I do think that the phenomenon we've witnessed this year in Internet fundraising in small donations does lend credence to the argument that not all private financing leads to a candidate being beholdened to large contributors. Maine has helped by lower the campaign contribution limit to $250/individual. I've been personally thrilled with all the $5, $10 and $20 donations I've received. They do add up quickly.

Tomorrow, I'll have the signatures I gathered notarized (my spouse did his today, before he got on a plane to Rome for a week), and turn them into the city registrar for verification.

I did interview my first staff person last week, who came to this site when comrade Atrios announced my candidacy. Tom will have access to the campaign blog from time to time, and is an old Wellstone hand. My readers can now address all complaints to him. {grin}

Since I'm on 24-hour single-parent detail for the next week (see above re: spouse skipping off to Rome), I'll spend the time getting the voter list in shape, setting up town hall meetings, and taking the baby out during the day walking the district. And I need to find myself a press secretary.

[Update: Corrected a typo and clunky language.]