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The Lincoln Plawg |
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Politics and law from a British perspective (hence
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Wednesday, January 28, 2004
RSS - no solution, but a workaroundIt's happened before, and, no doubt, it'll happen again: the old short cut, going north to go south, round the houses: as I've pointed out before, we're still very much in the get out and get under era of the internet. My apologies for testing the patience of RSS readers - but I can at least now offer a return to normalcy. Pretty much. The new RSS/XML link you see to your left (as the tour guides say) is the Blogstreet link. Which works in my AmphetaDesk, so I suspect should work in most newsreaders. There is a slight problem with the Blogstreet feeds: they don't update automatically - you [1] have to go over to the Blogstreet site and give the thing a kick. Metaphorically speaking. This time, it's not just me, and has nothing to do with Atom. That I can see. So that's what I'll have to do. Annoyance, yes; but a couple of minutes a go, so doable. However, if I forget, the RSS copy and HTML copy will be different. I thought I should explain. As for the not so mighty Atom, I suspect it's probably at the same stage of development as the helicopter - in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci...
Inherit The Wind - another for the It Ain't Necessarily So pileThe URL comes to hand of a 1997 piece (by one Carol Inannone, then of New York Univerity's Gallatin School of Individualized Study - it's in regular English, not MLA-speak, though) comparing the story of the play and film with what actually happened in Dayton, TN in 1925 to John Scopes, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan (in the fiction, Bertram Cates, Henry Drummond and Matthew Harrison Brady). One of many cases where fact, with all its complexity, is more interesting than fantasy. Not so much a case of debunking history, more like bunking with history... Tuesday, January 27, 2004
A Bill Clinton Mystery. Really.Well it is to me. It's all a question of a gap in the narrative. Clinton, my information is, resigned as Governor of Arkansas on December 12 1992. He was, it says, succeeded in that office by Lieutenant-Governor Jim Guy Tucker, who apparently faced re-election only once - in 1994. The Political Graveyard page for Arkansas Governors indicates the losing candidates in the general elections in 1990 and 1994, but not 1992. So, the quick question is, Was there an election for Arkansas Governor in 1992 at all? Article 6 §1 of the Arkansas Constitution says that The executive department of this State shall consist of a Governor...all of whom shall keep their offices in person at the seat of government and hold their offices for the term of two years and until their successors are elected and qualified... Art 6 §3 says The Governor...shall be elected by the qualified electors of the State at large at the time and places of voting for members of the General Assembly Which according to the annotation to Art 3 §8 is the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November in every even-numbered year.` No provision not to have an election where the incumbent just happens to be in a US presidential election on the same day! It gets more puzzling. According to Art 6 §12, In case of the...resignation...of the Governor, the powers, duties and emoluments of the office for the remainder of the term..., or a Governor elected and qualified, shall devolve upon and accrue to the President of the Senate. And (§14) Whenever the office of Governor shall have become vacant by...resignation..., provided such vacancy shall not happen within twelve months next before the expiration of the term of office for which the late Governor shall have been elected, the President of the Senate or Speaker of the House of Representatives, as the case may be, exercising the powers of Governor for the time being, shall immediately cause an election to be held to fill such vacancy, giving by proclamation sixty days' previous notice thereof, which election shall be governed by the same rules prescribed for general elections of Governor as far as applicable... According to what I read, therefore, Jim Bob Tucker should, ex officio, have come nowhere near the Governorship: the President of the Senate (whoever he was) would have taken over; and then called an election for early 1993 to fill the vacancy left by the resigned Clinton. So what gives? This should be a political geek's trivia question par excellence - discussed all over the net. So far as I can see, nada. Clinton impeachment, when Mark Steyn was funny...Via Samizdata, some Steyn pieces that may not be long on his site. A sample, dated January 25th 1999: Finding myself under siege at Castle Monica, I decided to stay in and watch a film available on the hotel's adult video channel: White House Interns...I was gripped from start to finish. White House Interns is a minor masterpiece. The President is played superbly by Vince Voyeur (possibly not his real name), a dead ringer for Mr Clinton except in respect of his nipple ring and his distinguishing characteristics. When first we see him, the President is quizzing an intern immersed in paperwork. `It's budget fluctuations for the past three years,' she says. A flash or two of gold amongst the ombud drossIf the will and effectiveness of the media's effort to be accountable are to be judged by the ombud pieces (as rounded up by Romenesko each week), there's not much of either. This week's crop include endless obsessing about getting names right [1] - and, from Daniel Okrent, the ombud most in the spotlight, post-Jayson Blair, an abject piece (of all of 240 words) on his misquoting a Times hack in an earlier piece. Michael Getler at least puts his head above the parapet in a parenthetical comment on the Bush imminent threat controversy - in any otherwise uninspiring piece. Some joy, though, in the Toronto Star in the form of anecdotage used to illustrate the fact that most stuff in quotation marks is not direct quotation. Early this week, the Star recalled former U.S. vice-president Dan Quayle visited Nicaragua in 1990 after "telling reporters he was boning up on his Latin in order to talk to the locals." And there's the tale of British hack Max Hastings and a supposed quote from Conrad Black (the Hollinger incubus) about his ability to drown kittens...
MORE Quality control not always an aid to understanding - spell-checking the piece as I do (pause for ribaldry...) I find an instance of ombdud. My bequest to the (media) nation... The RSS problem......continues. I've decided to treat it, not as a snafu but as a challenge: hopefully thereby postponing the onset of cardiac arrest and dementia long enough to sort matters out for patient RSS customers. (Who, as an interim measure, might like to try this RSS URL, courtesy of Blogstreet - as mentioned before.) There's a book by mathematician George Polya, How To Solve It, that suggests, amongst other things, [1] If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem. I can't figure how switching on Atom should have turned the product of the blog from XML-compatible to the reverse. But suppose - this may be true - that this change means that the XML conversion device [2] expects a simple character set like UTF-8 (which, so far as I can tell, is the simplest charset going), rather than the Windows 1252, in which the blog is actually produced. That should mean that a blog originated in UTF-8 should have no problems with Atom. And UTF-8 has no problem in rendering Western European language accents. I've tried it on a test blog; and it doesn't work [3]. The puzzle persists.
MORE The more I read - and I so do not want to have to do so! - the more I find that Atom is still in the geek stage, for those who speak XML more fluently than their mother-tongue. In the hands of rank amateur, such as your humble blogger, it is unsafe at any speed. Take this BBS-type piece from a nerd hangout: it's headed Does Atom work? Uh oh! If the geeks can't get the fucking thing to work, what hope is there for the rest of us? Atom, it seems, is not RSS. It's even, maybe, anti-RSS. Newsreaders that read RSS with no difficulties need a translator to understand Atom. And, just in that piece, I find the dread expression UTF-8: I did leave in one slight modification, added "encoding="UTF-8", as that seems to be mandatory, according to the start of this sample, minimal entry from the specs site... Needless to say, the geniuses at Blogger do not give the civilian the option of any such tweaking. Such civilian might suppose that that was because the interface they are given is foolproof. Quite clearly, it isn't. The problem is, you learn a sort of protocol of what you can do with assurance (get up most websites, for instance) and what you must never do (open email attachments you're not extra sure of). I never knew the morons at Blogger would invite the Great Unwashed to play around with something so dangerous that looks so innocuous. More fool me. Monday, January 26, 2004
Passing, spooks, fake Americans, etcIt just so happens that The Human Stain has just opened in the UK. Which movie concerns an academic who happened to be passing (a question last touched on here on January 25). His thought-crime, which kicks the plot off, I gather, is to refer to two of his students in their absence - because of their absence - as spooks. The whole grievance pantomime ensues, as to be expected. But the word put me in mind of a BBC series of that name that apparently aired in the US under the title MI-5. The Globe & Mail suggests the change was made for PC reasons - rather than for divided by a common language ones. (In fact, Webster notices the spy meaning and not the derogatory reference to those of African descent.) The cream of the jest is, of course, that the guy playing the academic who passes is Anthony Hopkins, a Welshman passing as American. And not doing so terribly convincingly, from snippets I've heard! The Dean enigma - as alive as he isNow, I don't the horse-race here (others have it covered); but I note that the Diane Sawyer Frankenstein treatment on Howard Dean seems to be working in New Hampshire [1]. Which keeps alive, for practical purposes, the various question-marks over the man. As well as The Yell [2], there was the question brought up here (discussed most recently on January 17) of Dean's strange account of his Damascene racial awakening as a Yale freshman. And the Dr Judy question(s). Now, I've read the transcript, and seen the first ten minutes of the Sawyer interview streamed. Which is not enough to be anything but tentative on the matters arising. But I'm left more puzzled than before. I need (I'm not suggesting that this stuff is not already in the public domain) to be walked through exactly how the pair functioned in Burlington whilst Dean was Governor. For instance, being a local doctor would surely make Judy something of a personage in Burlington, regardless of her husband's job. Wouldn't she naturally be expected to take part in community life? Yet the impression I get is that, her medical work aside, she was an invisible Trappist all that time. So far that the Sawyer interview was the first TV interview she'd ever given. There are, I see, several TV stations based in Burlington. And other media too, of course. And that makes a whole lot of dead air to fill with local stuff that isn't high state politics (if Vermont even has such a thing). Flower shows, school events, theatrical performances - all that small town stuff. And Dr Judy never got to be interviewed. And the relationship between them is a puzzle. There was their January 8 People interview (reprinted here), which, no doubt, was meant to be humanising but, even on a second reading, made me wince on several occasions; for instance, : What drew your eye? And Q: Could you see yourself presiding as hostess over a state dinner with world leaders and celebrities? I assume she's playing dumb here [3] - and, with the lack of practice, overdoing it. (Dean, who has had practice, is no slouch when it comes to overdoing it either, be it said.) There's (mildy) embarrassing personal stuff which comes over as (perhaps a tad more than) mildly embarrassing. But that was evidently all part of the reason for the piece. But - if you're a doctor, practising on your own in a small town (population 39,000 in 2000), you surely need, quietly and methodically, to take command of situations. And, even these days, the fact of being a woman makes the authority question even trickier. A wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie, even if married to the Governor, wouldn't last five minutes in the job. On the personal side, the Sawyer interview was much of the same. Now, all couples are different and this is stuff about their private life that the average American doctor, say, would not put out on network TV in a million years. But the Deans are inviting us to judge them in this bizarre way, and it's somehow hard to resist the invitation. Most puzzling, perhaps, is Judy's views on Dean running for President. I haven't followed the soap-opera, and I'm sure the story is out there, but... She so obviously (to me) hates the very idea of him becoming President with a ferocious passion. I suppose that becoming Governor wasn't that much of a family wrench at all: they kept living in Burlington, Howard would do the 40 miles down the road to Montpelier as necessary. But the Presidency is obviously completely different. All the talk in the Sawyer interview about her having a medical practice in the White House - bet the Secret Service are just loving that prospect! - suggests that either she is in serious denial about the whole thing, or thinks he's a racing certainty to fail, or she's making the pretence to avoid looking like the little woman following her man in the baggage-train. It's like a Mr Smith Goes To Washington where the Smith character is dragged kicking and screaming to the capital. There's a TV movie quality to the dilemma: she loves him, he wants it, she can't stand it: should she take four (eight?) years of misery to give him what he wants? As if Aaron Sorkin's writing the script (medical First Lady connection oblige). I don't get it. But if Dean wins in New Hampshire, perhaps I'll have another try at the puzzle.
Defensive school-boarding, againMost recently seen here in the case of the white African-American (January 23). This time, it's schools (AP January 24 - link via Joanne Jacobs) asking permission from students' parents before publishing an honor roll. Or, as in the case of Nashville, scrapping honor rolls altogether. That other fine American institution, the spelling bee [1] is also under threat. And Principal Steven Baum of Julia Green Elementary in Nashville sounds like a Communist to me: I discourage competitive games at school. They just don't fit my world view of what a school should be. Where's HUAC where you need it? Meanwhile, there's an outside chance that the Trial Lawyers of America may have their boy in the White House this time next year. (Regular viewers of South Park will need no reminding of the tale of Sexual Harassment Panda and the splendid work done by one notable trial lawyer (Kyle's Dad) in nearly bankrupting the local school board. Not so much a comedy, more a business plan. Do Trey Parker and Matt Stone get a cut of the lawyers' cut? D'you know, I reckon those boys need to see a trial lawyer, stat!)
And, mentioning editing on Big Media...Via Atrios, an op-ed of mind-numbing triviality from Thomas Friedman. If - as claimed (see January 11 piece) - the guy is really fluent in Arabic, he should be using these rare talents [1] for producing worthwhile analysis, not sophomoric druther-fests. (Query: perhaps his NYT editors tell him, Write Messianic stuff, but go steady on the detail: give them the stirring stuff, but not too many als and els.) My eye then drifts to the bottom of the page, which links a piece entitled When a Kleptocratic, Megalomanûacal Dictator Goes Bad. It's behind the pay wall, but I go to the summary: same spelling. Is this an allusion (it's not one I get)? Or a prank? Or a product of a can't be arsed culture than disdains the very idea of having a fact-checking department [2], even after the depredations of Jayson Blair? There was apparently a lot of talk at the World Economic Forum at Davos about the threat that blogging poses for Big Media. Bloviation, most of it, I suspect. But the combination of regular [3] pisspoor performance and finger-in-the-eye arrogance will have a corrosive, rather than an explosive, effect on Big Media standing. The damage may not be apparent for a good long while.
MORE Atrios quotes a commenter's 'haiku' on Friedman: If we had some ham What he said... The radio blog-fest - commentsBefore dozing off, I caught the first half an hour or so of the Minnesota Public Radio [1] show on The Blogging of the President. Firstly, it struck me how essentially low-octane radio is; a serial medium, like magnetic tape, with the corresponding need to go through the whole thing to get all the goodness. Which is fine if you're doing something else (driving, cooking), only have half a mind to give to the programme, and therefore need the content to come out slow, and repeated, so you don't miss anything. Whereas with net content in text form, it often takes barely a second to get enough information to decide whether to read or zap. Judging a book by its cover - by looking at the title page, flipping through - is such an essential quality control tool for print product, that, to a large extent, is mimicked with net text. Second, of radio styles, the one used for the MPR show is usually one of the lowest-octane of all: the barely structured chat with guests plus phone-in. Occasionally, by some good chance, you'll strike gold. But not last night. The title was - I hadn't picked it - a play on Theodore White's The Making of a President. And the first guest was some guy who'd written JFK and Nixon bios, who was there to compare and contrast political communication then and now. It sort of got started but pretty much trickled away into the sand. Which is a pity, because I think there's a genuine history to be done on the subject in which I, for one, would be seriously interested. The problem is, a genuine history takes time to put together. And a lot of moolah. And radio is done the way of the MPR show because it doesn't take much moolah. (These built programmes are under threat at the BBC, too. Anything which avoids time in the editing suite is at a premium.) Third, Joshua Micah Marshall, of Talking Points Memo fame, replying to complaints about the quality control of blogs, said something to the effect that his blog was edited: he edited it himself! Of course, there may have been a Rummy smirk there - but I got the feeling he was being serious. A lawyer who represents himself, they say, has a fool for a client. And self-editing is just as precarious an activity - speaking from considerable experience! The fact that the general standard of editing in the Big Media is, on the whole, so bad gives the amateur a modicum of comfort. But let's not pretend that good editing adds vastly to the quality of any text.
The RSS is fried - again (a moral here...)Just recently, RSS for this blog has been appearing nice as pie, whenever I've checked. Now, I happen upon the fact that the good people - check, people - at Blogger have brought out their own RSS - Atom - with (need one ask) oodles of development possibilities. It's there, it's free, and I was tempted. As a result - I know not how - I can get neither the old RSS nor Atom to work. It seems that, in activating Atom, the Blogger people arranged so that UTF-8 characters are the only ones that can be read; and - the killer - that the feed grinds to halt at the first non-UTF-8 character it comes across (rather than merely reproducing it as garbage). Unfortunately, my stuff is jam-packed with such characters - which the nice Mr Gates' Windows 1252 is happy to accommodate. And, of course, any blogger who has the temerity to blog in any language other than English needs those extra characters. (It's the Randy Newman foreign policy in digital form: Perle must be pleased.) Until I can find out what the fuck is going on, RSS is off the menu, I'm afraid. That, I think, is what they call progress. MORE Just for the sheer fun of it, I went over to BlogStreet to see if it could produce one of its DIY RSS feeds for the Plawg. Two shakes of a lamb's tale, and there it was! No error message: just the blog contents. (I have no idea whether the link will work in your newsreader - no harm in trying, though). I am well beyond my (highly limited) technical competence here: here be more hippogriffs than you can shake a stick at. Regrouping necessary... Sunday, January 25, 2004
Cot death caper: biggest miscarriage of justice factory in the world?I last touched on the matter on December 11, in the light of the English Court of Appeal decision [1] in the case of Angela Cannings. It now appears (Observer today) that British ministers were warned as early as 1996 that the voodoo science of Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy (MSBP) was creating miscarriages of justice. There is not merely the problem (bad enough, in all conscience) of women convicted of murder on account of the mumbo-jumbo of witch-doctor extraordinaire, Sir Roy Meadow [2]. But also of thousands of children snatched away from their parents on his say-so and fostered - adopted, some of them - in other families. And the credulity in this charlatan is not limited, it seems, to Britain: in many parts of the world, his mantra - Meadow's Law [3] - was the object of ridiculous genuflection, as by a rabble of blacked-up extras rolling their eyes before some cheap native's magic trick in a 1930s Tarzan movie. In the total sum of human misery he has inflicted, directly and indirectly, Meadow is certainly in the class of recent suicide Harold Shipman. Perhaps approaching that of other medical men whose mention would tend to infringe Godwin's Law...
Harvey Weinstein loves his speech at 273 below...The last time, it was Gregg Easterbrook and his Kill Bill review [1]. From memory, on that occasion, Weinstein was more of a bit player - the role of the lead villain being taken by Mickey Mouse's boy, Michael Eisner, on account of Eisner's hacks canning Easterbrook from his ESPN gig. Anticipating the Great Man's wishes, rather than on his orders, I think is the better view. Now, we get some speech-chilling news on Weinstein, courtesy of (of all places?) Women's Wear Daily: When Vanity Fair contributor Peter Biskind was working on "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film," Weinstein first tried to bribe him. Evidently, Biskind didn't. So, WWD continues, a worried Weinstein did a couple of things. First, according to two sources who spoke with Biskind about the matter, a person close to Weinstein masqueraded as a source for Biskind, took copious notes on the book’s contents and brought them back to the Miramax boss. Then, according to another source, Weinstein turned to David Boies, the famous attorney who won the Microsoft anti-trust suit and repped Al Gore in the Florida presidential recount, and they appealed all the way up to Viacom boss Sumner Redstone and had a less-than-successful mogul-to-mogul talk. One gets a warm glow to think of the owners of CBS [2] declining to yield before the blandishments of private interests. (Remember the Reagan miniseries farrago?) And Weinstein doesn't seem to have done more than ask nicely (or, perhaps, not so nicely) for the book to be pulped. A necessary element to the speech-chilling crime would be the use of some means of extortion. Like threatening to fire someone. Or cancel contracts. Or dump stock. Or tell tales to regulators. Or squeeze advertisers. Or hijack talent. Harvey wouldn't do anything like that, would he?
For want of a radio, six squaddies copped it...A very long time ago - actually, on November 19 2002, to be precise - I flagged the serious problem of British Army procurement of communications systems. I had in mind mainly friendly fire incidents - blue on blue or fratricide - but mentioned the general problem with Army radio equipment. Now, it seems, the six British soldiers can be attributable to radio failure - according to the London Observer today: An army inquiry into the deaths of six British military policemen in Iraq last year has found that the men were unable to send a single radio message requesting assistance. It points out that Soldiers in the Gulf last year were using 25-year-old 'Clansman' radios because of delays in the introduction of new communication technology. Clansman radios are known as bulky, insecure and prone to failing because of their poor batteries. Saint Tony Blair loves the one-handed ecstasy of starting these crusades - not so keen on paying for his crusaders to be properly equipped! (What's puzzling me is: they had no radios, but presumably they had their weapons: why didn't they take a couple of dozen of the Arabushes with them?) Education news - try the GadflyFrom Joanne Jacobs, a new one on me: the Education Gadfly with what it calls A Weekly Bulletin of News and Analysis on education matters. Looks good to me, speaking as a pure layman. Its top article is on the latest study on urban districts in selected locations by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It walks the reader through the numbers - and in regular English, not MLA-speak - and explains plausibly the difficulties in explaining the differences between the performance in the various cities. The American Dilemma on passingI pondered yesterday why the author Charles W Chesnutt - who, from his photo, could certainly have passed for white - had not done so. Having fished out Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma [1] for enlightenment, I find it not to be lacking! There are a couple of pages on passing starting on p129 (Ch 5 Sect 7), mentioning the difficulties of quantifying the extent to which passing had taken place; and a longer section (p683ff - Ch 31 Sect 4), looking at the practice in more detail. He considers what is needed for a Negro to be able to pass; and suggests that physiognomy alone is not determinative: he quotes the example (p683n) of his Negro assistant who travelled with him in the Deep South. Naturally, on the road, the assistant lodged in the Negro quarter of the town; but he would come to Myrdal's hotel room to work with him. Myrdal says that his assistant, though he had some unmistakeable Negro featureswas able to enter the hotel and go up to Myrdal's room without being stopped: Myrdal surmises this is because the white hotel staff do not believe their own eyes. The cognitive dissonance [2] between the actions and the race of the actor left them stunned. He points (p685) to a group of Negroes who pass professionally - but stay within the Negro world socially. (Passing, he says, is much less likely in the South than in Northern and Border states, on account of the consequences of discovery.) Even in the North, lots of desirable jobs were effectively closed to Negroes. The logic is clear. He says that Professional passing often seems to be a transitional stage of life.Given the quantification difficulties noted above, this is clearly more or less of a personal impression. However, it's sometimes a stepping stone to full passing. He then (p686) turns to the question of why not all Negroes able (by their faces, abilities and circumstances) to pass actually do so. He cites a Negro who passed to get into a white college, graduated but went to teach as a Negro [3]. The man cites four reasons for returning to the Negro world:
Following through on the notion that Negroes preferred to be the big fish in the small pond, Myrdal says (p687) that Light-skinned and "good-featured" Negro women are preferred as marriage partners by Negro men, while their chances on the white marriage market as lonely [4] women without a known or presentable family must be slight. He suggests that there is often a sort of conspiracy of silence between Negroes who have passed and their Negro friends and acquaintances, with the latter taking pleasure in the deception of the white man. Others, envious, have a compensatory feeling of race pride To finish the section, he touches on the tragic mulatto myth, and suggests that there might be some truth in it; though, given the lack of information on the whole business, the picture of their difficulty is hard to define. Finally, in Ch 31 note 26 (p1380), he touches on the question of whites passing as Negro. He says he came across two examples of white women who passed to enable them to marry Negroes. In Research Memorandum on Minority People in the Depression by Donald Young, it's suggested whites might pass because of a preference for Negro associations and for employment opportunities, as in a colored orchestra. And Myrdal mentions white orphans, brought up in Negro households (dealt with in Wirth and Goldhammer's piece in Characteristics of the American Negro.) Thus spake Myrdal. I'm not clear how the state of knowledge about passing has progressed in the last sixty years. As the Sharfstein piece noted on January 20 made clear, there was a conscious attempt in the South at communal amnesia on racial origins over the period (the couple of decades either side of 1900) during which passing was liable to be at its height. And, in the North, there was no general public legal imperative to take cognizance of racial status. The Negro student's reasons for not passing made sense to Myrdal - and seem reasonable to me. The option, for a Negro who could, of refusing to pass is not - in the game theory sense - a dominated strategy. There were significant pros and cons either way. One thing that the matter does highlight is the peculiar loss suffered by the Negro community when Jim Crow was dismantled. The big fish in the small pond was (though scarcely suddenly) netted and placed in the big pond with all the other fish. And, next to them, he wasn't quite so big. Another complicated topic for another time...
MORE A couple of pieces that might be worth following up, whilst the URLs are to hand: a 1944 review by Ralph Ellison gives a contemporary Negro perspective; and a 2000 piece by Paul Craig Roberts (Who he? Ed) blaming Gunnar Myrdal for putting the idea in his mate Felix Frankfurter's head that lead to Brown v Board of Education (of Topeka, natch) being a second Dred Scott, rather than something more judicially becoming. (I have a counterfactual simmering on the back-burner to the effect that Brown was the equivalent, in the 1950s, to the Fugitive Slave Act - as a sine qua non of the minor race war that ensued over Jim Crow. Needs a lot more meat before it's advanced to the front-burner, though...) STILL MORE The full US Supreme Court opinions in the Dred Scott case available here - the dissents of Justices McLean and Curtis (oops, I feel another trivia treasure-hunt coming on...) as well as the opinion of the court from the Founder of the Feast Chief Justice Roger Taney (pronounced tawny - as I learnt first watching Ken Burns' Civil War series - Commager's Documents of American History had left that embarrassment-avoiding detail out). Saturday, January 24, 2004
Prisons and corruption - not just the unions, of courseThanks to Mike Jimenez and his CCPOA goons in the Golden State (most recently, yesterday), the issue has dropped onto the table here. In fact, it was in the context of the CCPOA stranglehold on California prisons and (it seems) California pols that I mentioned (January 17) the fallacy that payments made for political campaign expenses were less corrupt that payments to politicians. The labor unions, like the CCPOA, do their bit. But the corrections industry also makes its presence felt. Again, this is something of a self-education exercise. Some material coming to hand: a page headed Do prison companies influence criminal justice policy? on a pressure group site Not With Our Money that looks like it's died, unfortunately; from thence to ALECWATCH, a site dedicated to tracking the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a lobby group with corrections clients (more on ALEC here). (Leave it there: it's proving a tougher proposition that I'd thought to milk the Google cow on the subject. On the other hand, CCPOA stuff crawls out of the woodwork entirely of its own accord [1]. Funny, that.) The upshot is that, whether it's lobbying or contributions that's twisting the legislators' arms, it's been 1920s Florida for prisons for the last decade and more. Not only on swapping private for public prisons, but on measures, like three strikes, calculated to increase the prison population, and thus corrections industry revenues. There's a WaPo piece today which teases with the opening sentence After 25 years of explosive growth in the U.S. prison system, is this country finally ending its love affair with incarceration? And follows with a tour d'horizon suggesting the answer to the question is likely to be, No. Like other cancerous growths, America's prison disease has secondaries: for example, the piece says, According to the Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, 245 prisons sprouted in 212 rural counties during the 1990s. In West Texas, where oil and farming both collapsed, 11 rural counties acquired prisons in that decade. The Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest regions in the country, got seven new prisons. Appalachian counties of Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky built nine, partially replacing the collapsing coal-mining industry. If the prisons closed, these communities would quickly collapse again. So, once the prison companies have lobbied and contributed, they indirectly recruit a whole army of voters to stand guard over their investment, lest pols have buyer's remorse. And [2], In Mississippi in 2001, Gov. Ronnie Musgrove vetoed the state's corrections budget so he could spend more money on schools. The legislature, lobbied by Wackenhut, overrode the veto. The Mississippi teachers' union, I surmise, is not such a force [3]. The prisons industry also, I suspect, had something to do with the specific exclusions for ex-prisoners from the sort of benefits they need to stay on the straight and narrow once they leave prison: recidivism equals repeat customers. Thus, the WaPo piece says, Welfare reform legislation in 1996 banned anyone convicted of buying or selling drugs from receiving cash assistance or food stamps for life. Legislation in 1996 and 1998 also excluded ex-felons and their families from federal housing. For the prisons companies, inmates are like the cash they stuff in the politicians' pockets: they both have elastic attached.
Those US incarceration rates...Everything's bigger in America may be at its truest in relation to estimates of national self-worth [1]. But here's a stat where it's right on the money (and this). (Nothing new here: just some self-education.) I get up this table (PDF) of state incarceration rates [2] in 2001 from casual interest. The average for that year was 422 per 100,000: the range was 127-800. Of the top ten (range 800-492), the Confederacy accounts for six (LA, MS, TX, AL, GA, SC); other slave states two (MO, DE); with the rest having had legal segregation, to some extent, during the Jim Crow era (OK, AZ). Of the bottom ten (range 243-127), five are New England states (MA, VT, NH, RI, ME) - Connecticut ranks 22nd (387); the rest from the Mid-West (NE, MN and ND) and West (UT), together with Union slave state West Virginia [3]. It's a puzzle (that no doubt employs armies of socio- and other ologists) how these differences might be accounted for. Why, for instance, Mississippi and Arkansas (motto: Thank God for Mississippi) should have rates so different: 715 vs 447. And (with current events in mind) why, after ten years or so of Governor Howard Dean, Vermont should need a rate of 213 whilst nearby Maine could keep order with just 127.
Most egregious Grievance Guff to date? Judge for yourselves...A woman (apparently of part Japanese parentage) is bellyaching about Lost in Translation, the latest offering from Sofia Coppola. It's pretty much a standard whine. But notable, I thought, was this graf: The caricatures play to longstanding American prejudice about Japan. The US forced Japan to open up for trade with other countries in 1864, ending 400 years of isolationist policy by the Tokugawa regime. The US interned thousands of Japanese during the second world war and dropped two nuclear bombs on the country. After Japan's defeat, America became more influential in East Asia; Japan was occupied, not only by the US forces but, more important, politically and culturally. Love it. Fifteen years of rapacious Japanese military expansion, Rape of Nanking, Pearl Harbor, Burma Road - airbrushed as neatly as Stalin's best efforts. For all one could glean from the piece, it was the US that attacked Japan! All the points one could make - the I bought the bank I cried all the way to $4 trillion GDP, the Japanese stereotypes of Americans (take a look at those Jap World War 2 posters, why don't you?) - kindly take as read. And the Oprah psychobabble - guilt of a half-caste and all that jazz - I pass over. Marvel and move on, I should... Charles W Chesnutt - the pass not takenChesnutt cropped up in the course of the piece (January 20) on Jim Crow, race and sex. I'd barely looked at the home page of the site devoted to the guy's work. Going back to check the site out, I am - surprised - to find out that Chesnutt was, in fact, a Negro. (Or, perhaps one should say, of partial African descent.) The photo of him as an old man which appears top left did not for a second raise the possibility that he was other than white. The site supplies a bio explaining something of his ancestry. Born in 1858, his parents were free Negroes, previously from North Carolina, who had moved to Cleveland. The page includes photos of both: both look white to me. The family went to North Carolina after the Civil War, Chesnutt later married, and went back to Cleveland. But there is no suggestion that any of them tried to pass at any stage! Now, my understanding - no evidence I can cite, so treat as a hypothesis - is that, over a couple of generations following the War, more or less all those who conveniently could, started to pass [1]. No doubt there were plausible reasons why the South should have appealed to the Chesnutts; but why not return as white to some place where they were unknown? In the earlier piece, Chesnutt crops up as having a conversation with a train conductor about the new Jim Crow law on trains: was Chesnutt passing then, I wonder? I suspect that there is information on the point in Chesnutt's own writings (which are on the site). More to follow, perhaps.
Friday, January 23, 2004
Now, California's prison goons are shmoozing Arnie...Last time we visited with the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (January 17), it concerned enquiries into allegations of brutality by its members that were apparently disappeared by California Department of Corrections hack Edward S. Alameida. This time (via Kevin Drum and Nathan Newman) - it's a variation on the theme. According to the Orange County Register [1] (January 23), The state's powerful prison guards' union, considered nearly untouchable by some lawmakers, has agreed to discuss possible salary reductions with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, potentially saving the state millions at a time of fiscal crisis. (I think considered nearly untouchable by some lawmakersis journo code for crooked.) The upcoming meeting with Arnie was arranged in a meeting between union President Mike Jimenez [2] and Schwarzenegger's chief of staff, Pat Clarey. The piece notes Schwarzenegger's refusal so far to take contributions from the 31,000-member union- so far. And says that Schwarzenegger's legal-affairs secretary, Peter Siggins, said the governor is open to reinstatement of an independent prison-oversight department that was gutted by budget cuts last year. Why would Gray Davis have gutted the prison-oversight department? Recall from the earlier piece that the CCPOA gave $1.4 million in direct and indirect contributions to former Gov. Gray Davis in his first term. Now there's a new Governor, and the CCPOA's contribution budget has to go somewhere. And we hear from CCPOA wiseguy Lance Corcoran that his members will only consider salary concessions if they are accompanied by widespread cost reductions throughout the prison system.... I think we can spot the horse's head in that lot! Looks to me as if any money Arnie saves from talks with the CCPOA will be the most damned expensive money outside of the loan-sharking industry. Now, there's a thought: perhaps Mike knows a guy...
MORE The OCR piece says that the CCPOA contract is $420m for 31,000 members. That comes to around $13,500 each. I suspect the paper's number is wrong. STILL MORE Just to open up the issue for my own education, let me table [1] the John Grisham 101 question: why isn't the CCPOA the subject of a criminal RICO investigation by the FBI [2]? There do seem to be some resources online dealing with this area of the law. A 1991 introduction to RICO; various RICO articles from the late 1990s on the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers site (most material members only!); various pieces on union rackets from a pressure group Laborers.org; pieces, including a report on the Teamsters, from the House Education Committee; Illinois Police & Sheriff's News looks to have plenty of goodies on labour racketeering. That lot from the most cursory search: no sign of a recommendable RICO 101, though; and most of the material is not exactly up to date. But one has to start somewhere.
YET MORE An October 2003 paper (PDF) Organized Crime and Organized Labor is also interesting. It's what I surmised from its general feel - the guy refers to sections of the paper as chapters - to be from a student seminar at NYU Law School - but turns out to be faculty! Various papers on disparate topics available here - no descriptions, take pot luck. And what looks like a good source of material from the National Legal and Policy Center Organized Labor Accountability Project page. A CCPOA MISCELLANY Noted because the URLs have come to hand (and, once discarded, URLs have a nasty habit of disappearing out of pure spite!): A 2003 (I think) piece which says, The guards union has a history of buying the loyalty of California lawmakers. The union secured their budget by inviting several key lawmakers to a conference it sponsored in Hawaii in December. Last year, as the state budget was sinking into deficit, Davis signed a new contract with the guard's union giving the guards large raises, which will result in annual salaries of $73,000 within five years. A few weeks later Davis received the largest donation check he has ever received from any group: $251,000.(1) A 2002 piece (reprinted from the San Diego Union-Tribune, it seems) reports that Gov. Gray Davis has made an election-year gift to the union representing state prison guards - the shutdown of five of California's nine privately run prisons in June and the phasing-out of the rest when their operating contracts expire. The piece says that When prison construction costs are factored into the overall equation, private correctional facilities are far less costly to California taxpayers than state-run institutions. The lesser of two corruptions, perhaps. There's a 1999 Salon piece which reminds us of other essential CCPOA activities: The acquittal earlier this month of four California corrections officers charged with arranging for a young inmate to be raped by Corcoran State Prison's notorious "Booty Bandit" was the result of a massive legal and political show of force on the part of the state's prison guards union, prisoners' advocates say... From the LA Times of November 2003, an op-ed [1] on CCPOA hospitality: Teppan-yaki feasts, cliff-diving ceremonies at historic Black Rock and mai tais served at a 142-yard swimming pool are some of the festivities awaiting the more than two dozen California state legislators who began arriving today at a Kaanapali Beach resort in Maui for a junket sponsored by California's powerful prison guards union. Another on Davis' CCPOA payoffs. A page from the Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice on the CCPOA, with stats on membership, salaries and the like: the site looks worth a delve.
MORE GENERAL CALIFORNIA PRISON STUFF A CJCJ page on the growth in California prisons. And a page from California Connected looking at ways of cutting the CA corrections budget - which has links and stats. And also the information that just one legislator is in favour of reforming the three strikes law. Let's hear it for Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg! And now for journalism's hypocrisy on campaign coverage...Jay Rosen, the J-man at NYU, has a sort of upsum on the game as played (expanded on muchly in his blog PressThink) in a piece (January 22) in TomPaine. Rosen and I are pretty much on the same page here. He's not quite so rude about the hacks, though... Foreign policy is double standards: Haass (almost)You take what you can get with this sort of admission. According to Reuter (January 23), in a piece on the Davos World Economic Forum [1], Former senior U.S. State Department official Richard Haass, one of the architects of the campaign for democracy in the Middle East, said that campaign was an attempt to break with decades of hypocrisy in which it had treated Arab rulers as friends while turning a blind eye to their authoritarian nature. It's like Clinton saying, sax in hand, after the Monica thing broke, Hey, what can I say? I like girls. Get over it - I have...Yeah, honey, just right...Ooo, baby... This should be the theme for the upcoming presidential campaign: getting candidates to embrace their inner hypocrite. And their outer one, natch...
MORE A Time piece on last year's Davos: how was it for Haass? Don't ask... Bolivia: US sitting the seacoast issue outAccording to an AP piece, quoting Phil Chicola of the State Department. Another name for the list: officially, Chicola is Director of the Office of Andean Affairs in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. He generates 12 hits on the State search engine, most of which are phone lists. A couple of hundred on Google: mostly in relation to Colombia and other War on Drugs matters, by the look of it. Vemos éste como un tema que Bolivia y Chile necesitan tratar, por lo menos en la concepción de un entendimiento sobre cómo desean resolverlo. He's no fan of refighting old wars: Indicó que Chile sostiene que "lo que ha ganado en la guerra, esos tres territorios le pertenecen". And he shows a certain Rummyesque sense of humour: "Comprendemos el problema boliviano", dijo Chicola. Pero indicó que ello no significaba endosar la vieja afirmación boliviana de que el país está en la pobreza debido a que no tiene salida al mar. Apart from the gag, entirely predictable. (An AP piece on Chicola's chat to CSIS on Andean matters generally.) Meanwhile, the trades unions are apparently getting frisky - the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) are planning a general strike and blockades on the October pattern for just after carnival season (ie February 21-24), if their demands aren't met; and the planned referendum on the gas issue, due at the end of March, will be postponed till the end of April [1]. If the Revolution hasn't made it moot by then. Will February 25 be Der Tag for the masses to make their move? I haven't the faintest clue.
Nedra Pickler and the battle for the agendaNedra who? Matthew Yglesias' piece in American Prospect (January 20) explains. Ms Pickler [1] is one of a growing list of journo hate figures for one group or other. Her shtick, as will be seen, is to give a pol's statement on an issue, and mention some other thing that he fails to mention. The suggestion from Pickler's detractors is that these nitpicks have a partisan motivation, with the aim of implying a tendency to dishonesty amongst Democratic presidential candidates. The problem is, of course, that no politician would want - or would have the time, even in an hour-long speech - fairly to cover every angle of a particular subject, or caveat his words as if he were giving a legal opinion. And, in many cases, the omission of qualifications or context may make a statement utterly misleading, if not downright false. Such that any hack would want to nitpick. In other cases, the comment may simply be irrelevant to the point the pol is making. The examples Yglesias gives illustrate the fact: they are very far from being all of a piece. Opening graf: A Dec. 10 wire story took a look at a recent Democratic debate and concluded that Democrats "sometimes leave out the facts" in their critiques of the Bush administration. For example: "[S]everal of the nine candidates criticized the tax cuts George W. Bush pushed through Congress. But none mentioned that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan . . . has cited those cuts as a reason for the recent economic growth." Shocking! Sources indicate that the candidates also failed to mention the Tuesday-evening chicken wings special at the Lucky Bar and my little brother's late guinea pig, creatively named Guinea. Up to a point, Lord Copper! I'm no economics expert; but I am fairly sure than one effect commonly seen when a government cuts taxes is an increase in growth. I believe I may even once or twice have seen growth suggested as a reason to cut taxes. Tax cuts can also lead to inflation, and higher interest rates and an increase in trade deficits and other bad stuff. There's a balance to be struck. And if a pol mentions all the negative features of a tax cut, but none of the positive features (of which growth would be a major one), that would be misleading. Politics as usual, but misleading. So Pickler pointing out the growth effect would be germane to the issue. (Deceased livestock - not so much.) Further down, he has Pickler charging that "when he criticizes Bush's links to [former Enron CEO Ken] Lay, [former Gov. Howard] Dean [D-Vt.] never mentions that Enron's mismanagement was not a result of the president's tax-cut package." Similarly, Dean never mentions that the No Child Left Behind Act was not responsible for the Iraq War. On the face of it, an example of a nitpick that wasn't germane. Then, Pickler made her distaste for Dean pretty clear with an Oct. 25 story castigating the former governor's inability to correctly spell "spondylolysis" (Microsoft Word's spell checker doesn't know it, either!), a type of vertebrae stress fracture from which Dean has suffered since his days as a high-school runner, and which rendered him ineligible for military service. She then noted that "Dean said he decided not to correct the problem because it would require an extensive operation with a long recovery time. But when he got his draft lottery number . . . he took his X-rays and a letter from his orthopedic surgeon to Fort Hamilton, an Army installation in Brooklyn, N.Y." -- thus winning the 2003 award for Creative Use of the Word "But" in Political Reporting. By inserting a single word, an innocuous fact was magically transformed into an insinuation of draft dodging. Ta-da! Again, a couple of things that are not on all fours: the spelling thing: irrelevant. Give you that. But the draft-dodging. If the facts stated (in particular, the timings, obviously) are true, I think that but is justified: the receipt of the lottery, followed by changing his mind on the op: I'd say that was probative. If the facts stated are true (I'm making an assumption, like on summary judgement). What politicians face is a Filter problem - as Bush kindly spelt out, so that we were all on the same page. He wants to say what he wants to say - nothing more, nothing less. And the damned Filter is reporting something different. All pols have the problem. They supply the rushes, but the hacks edit the movie, and they film some extra scenes to cut in, too. But compare now with the old days, the hey-day of objective journalism: when a Senator could get his words reported as he said them in the news pages of the newspapers, without interleaved comments or sidebars from smartass hacks. Any chi-iking would be penned way off in the op-ed pages, out of harm's way. In those days, the words of a Senator were treated with the respect they deserved. Weren't they? And the organisation largely responsible for passing on the good Senator Joseph McCarthy's wise words free from journalistic interference was Associated Press - who just happen to be Nedra Pickler's employers. Yglesias rightly points to the continuing position of AP as the supplier of news to a whole army of small and medium-sized papers, who, I suspect, often use AP stuff edited only for space. If hacks are using AP to spin for their own agendas, turning in misleading stories which they know will not be queried by AP members in the sticks, that would be a quality control issue for AP. But AP hacks - or any other, for that matter - are surely under no obligation merely to report without comment the words that fall from pols' lips. And the place to balance otherwise misleading statements is in, or close to, the text being qualified - not in some other section of the paper. (The small paper point cuts both ways: if Pickler reports just the facts, and leaves it to members, or other AP journos, to supply the comment in op-ed pieces, chances are that the necessary qualification of the pols' statements will never appear in many outlets.) Without wanting to overstate the issue, there is a possibly of speech-chilling here. Journos holding back for fear of being vilified - or, more likely, risk-averse proprietors not wanting scandal attaching to their product. The agenda wars between Tony Blair's spin team (until recently under Alastair Campbell) and the BBC have been laid open to scrutiny in the Hutton Inquiry. Speech-chilling was the name of the game; and, though resistance was offered, the freedom that journalists felt seems to have been due more to organisational incompetence and laxness than any particular policy of defying Campbell and his rottweilers. Similar campaigns were regularly waged by the Campbell mob against other UK news outlets. My impression is that the US media is not completely immune from similar pressures - no doubt exerted in different ways. In fact, journalism's effectiveness in holding pols to account is questionable, for all the talk of a culture of contempt, and informal media styles. A piece in the Columbia Journalism Review was bemoaning the lack of cutting edge in interviews with pols on TV - the medium where most voters get their political information from. Rarely does the journo get to set the agenda; for all the heat sometimes generated, only very rarely does a hack lay a glove on the pol in a way as to do significant damage. The days when the facts are sacred - and the words spoken by a pol were facts - are surely over. (For one thing, we're rather more sophisticated about what exactly a fact is.) To quote Justice Brandeis's well-known statement from Whitney v California: If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Clearly, with Pickler, we're not talking about Palmer Raids: it's self-censorship that's liable to be the main problem with the media if the Filter idea gains bipartisan support amongst the pols. If the public can be persuaded - and this is a public around half of which believe in Creationism and a JFK assassination conspiracy (December 10) - that the media, in their riding the pols, questioning their every nod and pause, are being anti-democratic - un-American, even - a climate more hostile to journalistic enquiry might result. That sounds unlikely. More likely, there's a marginal shift in public attitudes and journalistic behaviour. But even a marginal shift would be undesirable.
MORE Nedra Pickler now has her very own watcher blog at What A Pickler. Apartheid rules on Martin Luther King DayThe immigrant's eternal cry of joy: Only in America!... Via Kimberley Swygert, a story that should, if there were any justice, find its way to the US Supreme Court. (There isn't, of course; but, even if there were, justice would lead to Justice O'Connor, the Walking Oxymoron. So what's the diff?): Omaha, NE is, notoriously, the home of Boys Town [1], and, therefore, indirect begetter of that cinematic abortion starring Spencer Tracy. Things are a little more cosmopolitan these days, and the city hosts, amongst others, refugees from the 'New' South Africa, Karen Richards and her son Trevor, student at Westside High School. According to a story (January 21) in the Omaha World-Herald, the school apparently offers a Distinguished African American Student Award,voted for by the students. And Trevor and his buds decided - 'tis the season - to get him some publicity for his campaign to win that award: he's from Africa, and he's American [2] - with a postering operation all over the school on Monday. The authorities were not amused: The posters were removed by administrators because they were "inappropriate and insensitive," Westside spokeswoman Peggy Rupprecht said Tuesday. Why? The piece says The posters...included a picture of the junior student smiling and giving a thumbs up. The posters encouraged votes for him. No burning crosses, then. So why inappropriate and insensitive? Trevor had crossed the color line! He had sat down at the black lunch-counter. Because, in today's world of reverse Jim Crow, ...the award always has been given to black students. Note always has been: not part of the rules, just custom and practice. That any dumb white boy should have known, or guessed. Trevor and two others were disciplined for the poster-sticking; and A fourth student...was punished for circulating a petition Tuesday morning in support of the boys. The petition criticized the practice of recognizing only black student achievement with the award. Trevor and his friends, in a word, were uppity. Quite how much grievancing went on, I'm not clear: the piece says that Westside has fewer than 70 blacks out of 1,843 students this year. But my impression is that the authorities' action was pre-emptive. Perhaps they feared the reaction of their colleagues elsewhere in the city. Perhaps they were jealous that a mere boy had dared to challenge where they did not. Perhaps they suspected it was some kind of test of litigation risk awareness from the school board [3]. Well, good luck with that! Because the suggestion from Eugene Volokh (linked by Kimberley) is that a First Amendment challenge is very much possible, citing Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Comm. School Dist, the black arm-bands case. Now, I've seen one or two TV movies, so I've a fair idea at the grief Trev and his mates would be in for if they decided to vindicate their First Amendment rights. It's a small(ish) city. Do any of their parents rely on public contracts for their livelihood's, for instance? Or do they have businesses with customers that might get put off by NAACP pickets? Are their city taxes in order? (I think you see where I'm going here.) On the other hand, to do the stunt in the first place - and the petition afterwards - shows fighting spirit. (There's a piece in Atlantic Monthly on the achievement gap in schools between boys and girls. One theory is the boys need a contest with winners and loser to excite their interest - they need to be told to kick the girls' asses! Whereas today's feminised education is all about cooperation and sensitivity. Now these fine young Nebraskans have the opportunity for the right sort of fight - with words and laws, rather than guns and knives - and GA Henty and Horatio Alger collaborating on the script!) And - on second thoughts - O'Connor will have gone West (one way or the other) by the time the case got to Washington...
MORE On the journalistic side, there are one or two puzzling points in the World-Herald piece: The first graf talks about the kids wanting Trevor to get the award next year Now, that presumably means next calendar year, or next school year - rather a long time away. Then, it says that the posters The posters encouraged voteswhich would logically support the idea that the award was voted for by the students - a sort of May Queen thing. But in the sixth graf down, it says Westside Assistant Principal Pat Hutchings said the award has been given for eight years on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to a senior selected by teachers. Which contradicts both points: that the award is by student choice, and was to be awarded next year. A Poor Man's Nexis dump produces one AP story . This says that The award has been given the last eight years to an outstanding black student as part of the school's Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration, she said. Nothing about whether it's students or the administration who choose who wins. And According to 2002-2003 state statistics, 56 Of Westside's 1,632 students are black. Why couldn't the World-Herald hack have got that? And there's a piece on KCCI site, with a screencap of the poster. Yay, progress! The poster consists of, in the top half, a dreadful, photobooth photo of Trev, thumb up; in the bottom half, the following legend (more or less):
My guess is: there is no vote. The guys saw something about the award, and one of them said, Hey, Trev, you're from Africa, why shouldn't you be in the running? Whereupon mischief and righteous indignation combined to produce what occurred: a massive over-reaction on the part of the authorities, and Trev getting his fifteen minutes. Whereas a wise and confident administration would have taken them to one side and explained the facts of life under reverse Jim Crow, and even sought politic ways they might subvert it. A little. And again with the Apartheid race classification nonsense! Who said an African had to be black? The World-Herald piece quoted Trevor's mother as saying that Trevor had friends from Egypt: that, last time I looked, was in Africa. And folks from Egypt come in all shades. Quite a few could pass, most, I suspect, could not. Where does the Race Classification Board at Westside High draw the line between Africans who are African, and those who are not? Perhaps there is a chart such as one uses to choose shades of paint that can be provided. If they're properly advised, and don't overplay their hand, I reckon those boys have a lot of fun to had with bozos as dumb as the Westside High bosses. The Lawrence Summers-Eliza New airbrushing: I'm the last to be eliminated!Search engines are notoriously prone to producing artefacts: caveat maxime lector! That said, there definitely seems to be something up here. Harvard President Lawrence Summers first burst onto the blog with his infamous antisemitic in intent speech back in October 2002. Some while later, there erupted the hoo-ha about the on-off invitation from the Harvard English Department to pro-Palestinian hate figure, Tom Paulin, to give a lecture at the College. Following which - we're up to November 22 2002 - we learnt that the head of English (at the undergraduate end, at least) Eliza New, was arranging some kind of Oprah session for multi-culti indoctrination. And that Summers just happened to be shtupping New. Or perhaps, in such socially aware purlieus, vice versa. To be fair, a lot of the material on the entire farrago came from the Harvard Crimson, the house rag. A couple of days later, however, references to the pair in Google seemed distinctly thinner on the ground than they had been. Now I chance upon a piece about student hacks to watch, which includes [1] one Beccah Watson, who writes for the Crimson. Which reminded me of the Summers-New thing. It turns out that, for "lawrence summers" "eliza new", I am the only site cited on Google. (Same on MSN and AllTheWeb.) The original Crimson piece mentioning the (allegation of a) Summers-New liaison is still on the Crimson site; there seems no sort of robots.txt thing affecting it, but the piece is not cached on Google. (New's online presence is negligible: 17 items on Google for harvard "eliza new", most of them apparently not relevant.) It's a puzzle...
CORRECTION Daniel Sharfstein, author of the paper on the history of US law about race and sex that I looked at on Tuesday, has kindly pointed out that New's Christian name is spelt Elisa! Oh dear! Was the whole thing an artefact of a careless spelling mistake? As it turns out, not entirely. In earlier pieces on the subject, I find I managed to spell the woman's name right - most of the time. (Yay me! Or perhaps, not.) Coming up to date, Mr Google, furnished with the correct names of the two lovebirds, precisely doubles its tally: there is not only me but a long 2003 New Yorker piece from Jeffrey Toobin entitled Speechless: Free expression and civility clash at Harvard which looks at the Tom Paulin farrago, and seems, from a glance, to be well worth a read. But of the Crimson piece that started the Summers-New thing off - still nada. Dr New [1], correctly spelt, rates (for "elisa new" harvard, to try to filter out the irrelevant) just 60 of 202. Seems a little niggardly (to coin a phrase) for one of her position, but I wouldn't make anything of it. (There is, as I cast my eyes down the page, an August 2003 piece in AtlanticBlog on Summers looking at a NYT Magazine article on the guy - now behind the pay-wall - which says that he is currently dating a Harvard English professor, Elisa NewWhich would make it, by then, getting on for a year.) The phone list says she's on leave for the Fall Term. (The accompanying photo shows her to be OK-looking - but, like Jill Lawrence, the hair seems rather in need of attention. A comb, at least.) I am now thoroughly New-ed out!
Media ethics cornerA couple of pieces to put behind the ear [1], via Romenesko, natch. A Salon piece on journalists protecting sources who have turned out to be liars or otherwise undesirable. And an Editor & Publisher piece on dubious practices in relation to movie reviews [2].
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Romenesko produces headline classicJust for the record. There's an item under the head Teacher praises teen reporters for passing on Rose story What did those reporters do? I was puzzled, because I vaguely remembered the story that Pete Rose told some high school kids about his gambling on baseball, and they didn't pass it on! (Their Trappism on the point was the story, kinda.) Then I look again. Oh. That's passing on, rather than passing on. Don't they cover ambiguity in j-school? Or have I failed to spot the gag? (Wouldn't be the first time...) The culture that dare not speak its name...The so-called Good Friday Agreement was based on a lie. What, in a masterpiece of euphemising comparable [1] to Final Solution, was called constructive ambiguity. The exquisitely placed missing link in the whole thing was that, although the Agreement was sold on the basis of terrorist 'decommissioning' of their arms, the Provisional IRA (aka PIRA) was not required to decommission a pea-shooter. Because it wasn't a party to the agreement. Its political wing, Sinn Fein, was; but what the text of the Agreement [2] says, under the heading DECOMMISSIONING, is (emphasis mine) 3. All participants accordingly reaffirm their commitment to the total disarmament of all paramilitary organisations. They also confirm their intention to continue to work constructively and in good faith with the Independent Commission, and to use any influence they may have, to achieve the decommissioning of all paramilitary arms within two years following endorsement in referendums North and South of the agreement and in the context of the implementation of the overall settlement. Critical in the whole arrangement was a letter (referred to here by Irish pol Garret Fitzgerald) from Tony Blair (he of the hand of history) to the Ulster Unionists, saying that he interpreted the Agreement to mean that decommissioning 'should' begin straightaway. This was, however, a unilateral statement that could not by definition vary the written terms of the Agreement. Moreover, the use of the word 'should' rather than 'must' involved one more crucial ambiguity. This 'deception' was, I believe, entirely understood on both sides to be a lie. What was proposed was a truce, nothing more. And, at that stage, a truce was worth having. No one rocked the boat, especially not David Trimble's Unionists. Now, following Trimble's defeat in the recent Northern Ireland Assembly election, Unionists (amongst others) are (to quote Lionel Bart) reviewing the situation. In which context arrives last Sunday (January 18) a piece in what was the Unionist house magazine [3], the Belfast Telegraph by one David Montgomery - a former News of the World editor that the Guardian (January 21) call famously combativewhich, in context, is code for obnoxious scrote. On the article [4], it says On Sunday he went even further, penning a hard-hitting leader in which he set out his agenda for the newspaper and claimed Protestants had "been expected to feel shame and to experience a loss of dignity; to be relegated in status to second-class citizens". Now, it's fair to say that, PR-wise, Ulster's Protestants are in the dustbin next to Osama Bin Laden. A hundred and fifty years of chiselling by the original Democratic grievance-meisters, spared by the coffin-ships (perhaps to the regret of some), in the Land of the Free (pass that Noraid bucket, will you, Pete?) have placed them on around the same level of esteem as their Scots-Irish [5] cousins in the Ku Klux Klan. There have always been the Angry Men of Ulster (most recently, the long-lasting Rev Ian Paisley). But the Quiet Men (think Gordon Wilson of Enniskillen) are, perhaps, more typical of the breed. With, perhaps, a rather English lack of insistence on their own culture: just as England (Great Britain, in fact) is the only country entitled to issue postage stamps without the name of the country on the face, so the English tend to think of those (like, most particularly, the (Catholic) Irish) who exert themselves mightily on their culture as protesting too much. English culture is the default. (Plus, the feeling that, somehow, being Top Nation (in the Sellars and Yeatman sense) was culture enough.) Perhaps no longer [6]. The self-righteous Catholics of Ulster whine incessantly about equality of esteem - now, in the unpleasant form of D Montgomery, it seems that their Protestant neighbours might be demanding the same. I think there might be some fun here: the bloated egos of the Catholic bloviators have assumed moral superiority for too long [7]. A scrote like Montgomery is just what they need!
ResourceShelf Presidential Election - resourcesFor those not yet motivated to fill your Favorites list with the myriad goodies on offer, an excellent place to start is the ResourceShelf compilations. The third of these is supposed to be found here. But, since the site uses Blogger, the permalinks are prone not to work (ha!) - so Find [1] on #3 and, as if by magic, you will arrive at the item. The two earlier compilations (first and second) from November and December work (or don't) in the same way. #3 has stuff on Iowa (including the Delegate Selection Plan) and New Hampshire, amongst other things. The whole site is a treasure trove of goodies of all sorts. But it underlines the tendency that mooching around and stumbling across goodies by pure serendipity is going with the grain of the net; know exactly what you want and trying to find is - Mr Google notwithstanding - very much going against the grain. It's still a rambling second-hand bookshop, rather than a well-ordered library.
Swedes, facing underwhelming odds, capitulate on Israeli vandalismSweden has taken a dive over the hooligan diplomat Zvi Mazel (whose activities, and the immediate response to them, I discussed on January 19). An AP piece (January 21) says that Swedish Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds called her Israeli counterpart Silvan Shalom to express her regret over "the situation that has been created." Israel vandalises, Sweden apologises! The old Italian two-handed salute. Why? The ostensible reason is the Israeli concession that they will not, after all, carry out their threat to boycott an upcoming conference on genocide to be hosted by the Swedes. Just to minimise the reduction in Swedish humiliation this concession might cause, instead of the Israeli President, Moshe Katzav, the Jewish State would be represented at the conference by diplomat Nimrod Barkan- who, to be fair, does appear to be a real person. No sign of any form of apology for the conduct of Mazel. Sweden accepts by this silence that his conduct does not call for one [1]. Moreover. another AP piece says that
Interesting. So, why the dive? The deliberately devalued participation of Israel in a two day gabfest is not a sufficient consideration. So there must have been something else. Were the Swedes leaned on by the US? And with what leverage? Did they consult with fellow EU members, and with what result? How was the matter handled within the Swedish government - in particular, what role did Prime Minister Göran Persson play? To what extent did the GOI campaign (gladly, and non-conspiratorially, joined in by others) to characterise the European Union as (in some way, the more undefined the better, to suit the propaganda purpose) anti-semitic play a part in the decision to roll over? And where is the journalistic effort to track down the facts of the case? (I can't read Swedish, so am critically handicapped to know what is the Swedish media response has been.) Of course, diplomacy being the profession that it is, Mazel will have set a precedent for actions which may be undertaking with impunity by an Ambassador - unless the diplomatic community comes together to condemn him and his government for their actions in the case. On the Israeli side, the burning question is: is Mazel going to get his medal, as suggested by Likud Public Security Minister Tzachi Hanegbi? Perhaps to top off Mazel's coup, they might like to invite Prime Minister Persson to present it...
MORE I note that, despite the salience of Israel in US foreign policy, no hacks were curious enough to to ask Adam Ereli about the Mazel affair - and possible US involvement therein - at the January 21 briefing at State. Wednesday, January 21, 2004
Now NBC compromised on Michael Jackson?First it was CBS, of course, accused of trading an interview with the prospective felon for a special featuring his musical talents (WaPo December 27). Now NBC is in the firing-line (NY Times January 21) for, supposedly, offering to can a critical Dateline programme in exchange for an interview with the primate-lover. (A deal that was never consummated, one might point out.) From a brief scan, it looks as if we're in he said, she said territory. But - memo to self - bear in mind, just in case. MORE CBS had a spot of bother with the Reagan miniseries towards the back-end of last year, putatively linked with the question of FCC rulings on maximum audience shares, and Congressional reactions thereto - the November 26 piece has links, and links to links. Sad, sad tales from Iowa: #3Having earnestly opined on the state of the candidates' organisations, it seems the media's assembled political hacks had none of their own. Logistics, schlogistics! Who knew everyone would want to fly out of Nowheresville - oops! Des Moines - on the same day, and might have difficulty getting a flight? "Half the state is trying to leave and we can't get out," USA Today reporter Jill Lawrence said as she waited in line. Lawrence is a regular on the The Note dramedy: yet seems not to have the sense she was born with. Hire a coupla planes? Drive to Chicago? Too easy... (Register scribe Bill Reiter, you just feel, is loving it just a little too much.) MORE Lawrence - my curiosity whetted - has a USA Today bio. She's mid to late 40s, married with kids - just like pin-up of the blog, Dana Priest. But, whereas Priest's WaPo photo is great, Lawrence's is dismal: the hair is - Robinson Crusoe just picked up from his island. And a bit of rabbit in the headlights about the eyes. I think - properly coiffed - she might not look too bad. As it is, She may very well pass for forty-three (Any excuse for a little of the WS...) Romenesko misses media scoop of the day!!!I don't believe it! The guy links a NY Observer piece (screwy URL) for its animadversions on Howard Dean's TV performances. (Who? Ed.) And fails to pick the real news: J Fred Muggs is still alive! That's like finding Lucille Ball is alive. And still treading grapes. Sad, sad tales from Iowa: #2What's so very wrong about Schadenfreude? (As Bernard Bresslaw would have put it, I only arsked...) You can scarcely move for why, oh why, oh why pieces on the punditry's folly in plumping for Mr Angry with so little caveating. (But take Howard Kurtz as representative [1].) I'm not expert in these matters. But I do get the impression that it's not the first time in such contests that a favourite has come unstuck down the home stretch. Perhaps the commentariat are paid telephone numbers to overlook such annoyances and give the downright, one-handed forecasts that Joe Blow wants to read over his waffles of a morning. (What is the demo for this sort of op-ed? Is it pundit talking to pundit, with Joe Blow sticking with the sports section and keeping the op-eds for when he runs out of Angel Soft?) From the media outlet's viewpoint, surely snafus like Iowa are entirely predictable. After all, if the racing [1] tipsters a paper runs got their tips even 50% right - well, they'd be backing them themselves, and not struggling on a journo's wage. The fact that predictions might have been on the op-ed pages, and the (so-called) straight journalists stuck to just the facts, doesn't affect the matter much: it's a division of labour I'd suspect to be not universally recognised by the readership, and much less respected than recognised. After all, it's the same newspaper, regardless of the page on which the words of unwisdom appear. (The fallacious notion of objective journalism no doubt informs media thinking: that factual reporting can be kept hermetically sealed from the taint of the necessarily cowboy hackery involved in punting on election results.)
Sad, sad tales from Iowa: #1As in the Des Moines Register today. For four weeks every four years, the tundra of Iowa is Studio 54: fat, bald, ugly guys get their fifteen minutes, boosters boost into the stratosphere, and the whole place seems as if it actually matters. The guys that jetted in with their fancy suits are spending the company's money like it's Confederate dollars the day before Appomattox. And - boom! - they're all hurrying for the exits: Goodbye, thermal underwear, hallo Civilization! As Barbra once sang, almost
For one short moment, Iowa had those people. And now they're gone. Bastards! free website counter |
