[posted by charles dodgson at 10:08 AM]:

It's April Fools' Day. So, any hint of a connection between WBUR's talk show hour on erasing traumatic memories and a certain current Hollywood film would, of course, be folly...

[posted by charles dodgson at 9:00 AM]:

A bit of news from Boston -- security precautions for the Democratic convention are starting to seriously worry people. North Station -- a major commuter-rail hub right underneath the convention venue -- will be closed; that had been announced for months, though it's now being portrayed as a response to the Madrid bombings. Additionally, subway service to North Station will be shut down (even though the subway station is at least a hundred feet away from the walls of the convention venue), and the major highway artery, a/k/a the Big Dig, will be shut down during rush hour for the duration of the convention.

Needless to say, this is resulting in a certain amount of bad publicity.

Similar measures for the Republican convention in New York at Madison Square Garden would involve shutting down Penn Station, and possibly the two subway lines beneath it, paralysing New York. Yet, remarkably, the Secret Service has not yet seen fit to order that.

Don't expect them to explain the discrepancy. Their spokesman in Boston is on the radio saying that he will not explain what threats he's trying to respond to, or justify anything.

Of course, we could avoid a great deal of this here if the Convention weren't held at the FleetCenter, right over a major commuter-rail hub, but instead at the massive new convention center now being finished in an asphalt jungle between the financial district and Southie; there's no rail nearby, just access roads for the newest of three harbor tunnels, and we got by for decades with the first two. But instead, it's downtown -- for what? Better hotel access, if the attendees can fight their way through the traffic? And the new center itself is chronically underbooked, and could certainly use the publicity. Why not? It's almost as if Mayor Menino were embarassed by the thing...

More on that: it turns out that there is a reason -- convention organizers want good TV angles, and the FleetCenter, designed as a sports arena, makes it easier to give the networks good shots. As if the amount of network coverage will be determined by camera placement. Perhaps these folks should give half a thought to what "respected Boston media figures" like radio troglodyte Howie Carr and lying ex-Globe columnist Mike Barnicle will be saying on national air about "Democratic arrogrance" shutting down businesses in the area for a week. And perhaps not be so quick to brush off the prospect of police picket lines in front of the building as Mayor Menino's problem, elsewhere in the same story...

[posted by charles dodgson at 8:38 AM]:

Just listened to a report on liberal NPR on "rapid-response" campaign tactics, featuring the Kerry and Bush campaigns trading jabs. Except that the substance of the Bush attack (that Kerry was going to raise the gas tax) was presented repeatedly, and the substance of Kerry's response hardly at all. The reporter? Juan Williams...

[posted by charles dodgson at 8:36 AM]:

I don't suppose anyone reading this might have some suggestions for a would-be tourist in New York on family business on Monday, when the museums are all closed?

[posted by charles dodgson at 3:27 PM]:

George W. Bush, November 20, 2003:

We believe that the Iraqi citizens want to be free. We know that they are willing to work for their own freedom, and the more people working for their own freedom, the more we can put that into our calculation as to troop levels.

Reuters, March 31, 2004:

FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) - A crowd of cheering Iraqis dragged charred and mutilated bodies through the streets of the town of Falluja Wednesday after an ambush on two vehicles that witnesses said killed at least three foreigners. ...

Television pictures showed one incinerated body being kicked and stamped on by a member of the jubilant crowd, while others dragged a blackened body down the road by its feet.

The footage showed at least three people lying dead, while some witnesses said that four were killed. It was not clear how many people were in the vehicles.

As one body lay burning on the ground, an Iraqi came and doused it with petrol, sending flames soaring. At least two bodies were tied to cars and pulled through the streets, witnesses said.

"This is the fate of all Americans who come to Falluja," said Mohammad Nafik, one of the crowd surrounding the bodies.

In homage to the master of the quote log, Billmon, who's got his own take on this story here...

[posted by charles dodgson at 12:16 PM]:

Dubya's crew has been trying to discredit Richard Clarke by quoting from, for instance, his letter of resignation, which contained warm praise for the Dubya's leadership, and said how pleasant it was to work together.

There's been a problem with that -- Clarke has been able to show them up, by for instance, pointing out that he was talking about his service as cybersecurity "czar", after trying and failing to get a responsible role in the antiterror efforts. But, reports Josh Marshall, they're dealing with that problem -- they're going to be excerpting classified testimony, which he can't legally quote in context...

[posted by charles dodgson at 9:34 AM]:

The jury in the trial of Dennis Kozlowski and a few associates, accused of looting the company they ran, Tyco, for millions of dollars, has been hung since March 18th. From all indications, there's one juror holding out for acquittal, because she doesn't believe the prosecutors have established criminal intent -- she thinks the defendants may not have known that their actions were wrong. Which is to say, she finds it plausible that people could get into the position of running a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, without ever learning that spending its money to rent a Sardinian villa for a private birthday party, or to have the company buy their own unwanted second homes from them for millions of dollars above the market price, would be wrong.

The woman is a lawyer herself, and other legal experts seem to think she may have a point.

[posted by charles dodgson at 2:42 PM]:

On Friday, Billmon found himself compelled to give up on parody for a while. He had posted over-the-top parody of Republican attack-dog politics, accusing Richard Clarke of racism for criticizing Condi Rice, only to find Darth Novak using the same line in all seriousness on CNN.

This presented an opportunity for folks like Tom Friedman to shield themselves from all future parody by merely spouting off lines that no parodist could hope to top. Like this:

I have a confession to make: I am the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times and I didn't listen to one second of the 9/11 hearings and I didn't read one story in the paper about them. Not one second. Not one story.

Lord knows, it's not out of indifference to 9/11. It's because I made up my mind about that event a long time ago: It was not a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination. We could have had perfect intelligence on all the key pieces of 9/11, but the fact is we lacked — for the very best of reasons — people with evil enough imaginations to put those pieces together and realize that 19 young men were going to hijack four airplanes for suicide attacks against our national symbols and...

So, he believes our national security authority is too blinkered too even imagine how we might be attacked. And that's a good thing. Fortunately he's wrong -- while Clarke was getting support, in the Clinton administration, he specifically planned for 9/11 style attacks against the Olympics and other events, which Clarke was trying to upgrade into a full-time capability. But Friedman was talking about the suicide attacks against our national symbols (while Dubya had Clarke sidelined) when al-Qaeda tried to ...

... kill as many innocent civilians as they could, for no stated reason at all.

Yo, Tom. Bin Laden. Fatwa. 1998. Look into it. But hey, our double-Pulitzer-prizewinner is not ashamed of showing his ignorance. He just finished bragging about it.

He goes on to recite a long list of things he wishes he could read about in the morning news. (He reads it on AOL). You know what I wish I could read? Op-ed columns from people who give a damn about getting their facts straight.

Oh, great. I've gone Dennis Miller on him. In ten years, I am doomed to be a burned-out knee-jerk conservative husk of my already insubstantial former self. Kill me now...

[posted by charles dodgson at 9:56 AM]:

So, we already know from Richard Clarke's testimony, and the White House responses to it, that Dubya's crew were, to say the least, slow off the mark combatting terrorism. (The response from their side is kind of a mess; it may be worth looking into once they get their story straight). And we've long since heard that this bunch made a point of deemphasizing ongoing investigations in al-Qaeda, as soon as they came into office.

Now, that all clearly contrasts with the policy in the Clinton White House, where dealing with the terrorist threat from al-Qaeda specifically was front and center -- with regular meetings chaired by Clarke, reviewing evidence as it became available and willing to take strong action. Had such a policy been in place in Dubya's White House, what did it have to review?

Well, there's the case of Zac Moussaoui, who was actually arrested by an FBI field office who suspected him of wanting mount an attack involving airplanes. And now there's this, from a former FBI translator:

Edmonds testified before 9/11 commission staffers in February for more than three hours, providing detailed information about FBI investigations, documents and dates. This week Edmonds attended the commission hearings and plans to return in April when FBI Director Robert Mueller is scheduled to testify. "I'm hoping the commission asks him real questions -- like, in April 2001, did an FBI field office receive legitimate information indicating the use of airplanes for an attack on major cities? And is it true that through an FBI informant, who'd been used [by the Bureau] for 10 years, did you get information about specific terrorist plans and specific cells in this country? He couldn't say no," she insists.

It is, at this point, well within the realm of possibility that had Al Gore been elected, and retained Clinton's national security priorities, strategy, and tactics, we might have gotten a few headlines about oddball arrests in late August, 2001, and September 11th would have been just a glorious sunny day in New York. And Republicans like John Ashcroft, if not Ashcroft himself (who, remember, lost his Senate seat to the dead guy), would even now be painting Gore administration anti-terrorist plans and priorities as a sinister plot to undermine the rights of citizens -- just like Ashcroft himself did incessantly while Democrats were nominally in charge of federal law enforcement.

[posted by charles dodgson at 10:03 AM]:

Tom Friedman today tries out a historical analogy:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to the war on terrorism what the Spanish Civil War was to World War II. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is where airline hijacking, suicide bombing and assassinations with helicopter-mounted guided missiles were all perfected and made ready for export.

But it's not only types of violence that were perfected there. It was also there where Palestinian terrorists regularly attempted to hijack democratic elections on the eve of the vote. Liberal Labor Party candidates in Israel, throughout the 1980's and 1990's, always had to hold their breath that there would not be a big terrorist attack on the eve of an election. Because if there was, swing voters would usually move to the right and the Likud candidate would benefit. The Palestinian terrorists always "voted" Likud, not Labor. They wanted hard-liners at the helm in Israel because they would build more settlements and further radicalize and destabilize the situation.

And he cascades that, in turn, to a second analogy -- between those Israeli elections, and the recent elections in Spain, which currently has troops occupying Iraq, and was just subject to a massive terrorist attack. This is a powerful and lofty argument -- no matter that the Spaniards, in their own election, voted their own hawks out.

Friedman, you see, is focused on his grand vision of a long-term occupation, building a perfect, Western, free-trading secular democracy in Iraq. An early end to the occupation, no matter for what reason, would imperil that vision. But take heart, Tom. The Spanish contingent just isn't that big; most of the troops are American, and it's American policy that will tell the tale of what kind of occupation we get.

Right now, American policy seems to be to get the hell out by June 30th, and devil take the hindmost.

I'm not nearly as optimistic about Friedman about what the continuing occupation could bring -- but if a continued occupation is what he wants, he should write about the real problems with sustaining one. The fall of Aznar's reign in Spain has nothing to do with that. But this column does show us what makes Friedman unique: how many other columnists would greet a new Spanish government by publicly lecturing them on the lessons of the Spanish civil war?

[posted by charles dodgson at 10:28 AM]:

A bit more on Microsoft -- Brad Delong's account of why he has been harmed by their anticompetitive behavior:

Remember the days when there was not one single dominant browser that came preinstalled on 95% of PCs sold? Back then there was ferocious competition in the browser market, as first a number of competitors and then Netscape and Microsoft worked furiously to upgrade their browsers and add new features to them. Most of these new features turned out to be idiotic. Some turned out to be very useful. Progress in making better browsers was rapid, because browser-makers wanted to make a better product and any new idea about what a browser should be was rapidly deployed to a large enough user base to make it worthwhile for web designers to try to use the new feature.

And now? There is no progress in browsers at all. Why should anyone (besides crazed open sourcies) write a new browser? Why should Microsoft spend any money improving its browser? The point of giving Internet Explorer away for free is to protect Windows's market, after all.

So, the open source folks are crazies -- and so sure is Brad that he doesn't even bother to check whether they have in fact produced a superior browser. For he knows, with the certainty that only economists can have about any human behavior, that doing skilled work for the sheer joy of the craft is a form of insanity.

I wonder how much his salary as an economics professor compares to what he could get on Wall Street?

[posted by charles dodgson at 9:31 AM]:

Microsoft has been fined $613 million by the European Union for antitrust violations. And now, the tech world waits with bated breath to find out if the company, with cash reserves above $50 billion, will actually care...

[posted by charles dodgson at 9:29 AM]:

So, why didn't anybody tell me that Mission of Burma has a couple of tracks from their new album available for download? I can't get "Wounded World" out of my head...

[posted by charles dodgson at 10:31 AM]:

The interesting question about Clinton's reforms in welfare -- formally, Aid to Families with Dependant Children -- was not what would happen immediately after they were passed, but what would happen in the next recession, after the five-year limits had run out for some recipients. Would they still be able to get the help they would need? What would occur? And now we have the answer:

In a trend that has surprised many experts, the federal welfare rolls have declined over the last three years, even as unemployment, poverty and the number of food stamp recipients have surged in a weak economy.

Success! Even in the midst of a recession, with total jobs stagnant and the size of the labor force actually declining, the poor are being saved from the degrading experience of taking welfare payments.

And don't suggest that the right thing for government to do would be to give those people education. What would training do for them? College graduates in Dubya's economy have a higher unemployment rate than high-school dropouts.

Because compassionate conservatism is all about saving people from degrading attitudes and conditions -- like saving the undeserving kids of poor families with dependant children from the degradation of eating government handouts. Starvation builds character.

(College link via Tristero).

[posted by charles dodgson at 9:08 AM]:

Some of Dubya's supporters don't much like demonstrations against him. And they're taking action, as at a recent demonstration in Fresno:

At Large returned to his work of disrupting the crowd. He told one peace activist that he was there to monitor and photograph the criminals and anti-American scum that attend these events.

And, in the spirit of civility championed by such lions of the right as George Will and Bill Bennett, they have some kindly meant advice for their respected, loyal opposition:

If I see you or any of your comrades from Dem Underground I will kick the living shit out of you you filthy faggotcunt traitor

DO NOT IDENTIFY YOURSELF AS LEFTIST OUT ON THE STREET YOU PIECE OF SHIT OR YOU WILL BE BEATEN UNCONSCIOUS YOU GODDAM ENEMY OF AMERICA!!!!!

These folks are, of course, completely committed to American values, and it would be surely libelous to suggest otherwise. They've even named the web site that they use to organize their activities "Free Republic".

[posted by charles dodgson at 9:41 AM]:

Well, Anthony Raimondo is no longer Dubya's choice for "manufacturing czar", after John Kerry claimed that his company had shifted jobs to China. But, says the New York Times ...

... it's not that simple. What Mr. Raimondo's company did, experts of all stripes say, has become standard business practice in response to domestic and international pressures.

So, ummm... does that mean that he wasn't shifting jobs overseas? Let's examine further:

The company got its start in China by exporting from Nebraska prefabricated steel framing for commercial buildings, particularly factories.

Its biggest Chinese customer was a company that made automotive glass. "We shipped all the steel framing for four 250,000-square-foot factories," Mr. Raimondo said.

In 2000, however, his big Chinese customer shifted to one of [Raimondo]'s competitors, Butler Manufacturing of Kansas City, Mo., which offered a lower price from a factory it had opened in China in 1996 to manufacture the heavy steel products closer to where they would be used. [Raimondo's company] responded to this competition by shifting from exports to production in China, at a new plant that opened last year in Beijing.

Ah. So in the late '90s, Raimondo had workers in Nebraska producing steel products for the Chinese market. Now, he has workers in Beijing producing steel products for the Chinese market. So, does this not count as shifting jobs overseas? Raimondo further explains:

"We think ours is the ideal dynamic model for American manufacturers," Mr. Raimondo said in a telephone interview. "I talked at length with the Department of Commerce and the White House, and they agreed that [my company]'s competitive response is a tremendous message for all manufacturing. We do not outsource in the sense of bringing product back to the United States."

Ah... the mystery vanishes! Jobs may have been shifted overseas, but the buzzword associated with the current controversy is outsourcing, and since the jobs weren't outsourced "in the sense of bringing product back to the United States", nothing he did should be controversial. Brilliant!

But then, he's missing a better argument. The actual definition of outsourcing is hiring a contractor, domestic or foreign, to do work that a company (or government) formerly did in house. And since Raimondo's outfit owns its plant in Beijing, the jobs there can't have been outsourced no matter where the product goes. Doubly brilliant!

Remember, it's not about whether Americans can find good jobs. It's about which clamshell is covering the pea...

Further note: Part of what passes for "free-trade advocacy" these days is to point to all the jobs that we have in America for producing exports. There's, perhaps, a certain tension between this notion, and having the commerce department encouraging American firms to open factories overseas when selling into markets there...

[posted by charles dodgson at 9:40 AM]:

Before we invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein repeated claimed that he had no weapons of mass destruction. Dubya's crew denounced this as a campaign of lies, invaded, and found no weapons.

Donald Rumsfeld is on the op-ed page of the New York Times today, continuing to claim that we had to invade because Hussein had rejected Dubya's invitation to disarm and -- weasel word alert -- "prove he had done so". It's a short piece, so he doesn't have time to explain what, beyond the thousands of pages of documentation he submitted and allowing UN inspectors free run of the country for months, would have constituted an acceptable standard of proof.

[posted by charles dodgson at 8:11 PM]:

David Brooks believes the Spanish were irresponsible to hold an election just after a terrorist attack.

How much more irresponsible must Lincoln have been to hold an election in the middle of a frigging civil war?

[posted by charles dodgson at 9:49 AM]:

The Fed isn't raising interest rates for now, but

Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman, has warned that interest rates are too low to be sustainable indefinitely. At its last meeting on Jan. 28, the Fed's policy committee retreated from an open-ended commitment to keep rates low for "a considerable period."

So, sometime in the next few years, Greenspan expects that interest rates will be going up.

But he was also recently, in his usual somewhat oblique way, touting the benefits of adjustable-rate mortgages, observing that holders of fixed-rate mortgages "might have saved tens of thousands of dollars had they held adjustable-rate mortgages" instead. The reason the homeowners would have saved that money, of course, is that interest rates were dropping, and their adjustable rates would have dropped along with them.

Yet he makes his speech touting adjustable rate mortgages at a time when he clearly expects interest rates to be going up over the next few years -- raising the payments of anyone foolish enough to get an ARM now. It seems that Greenspan, the erstwhile disciple of Ayn Rand, has at long last discovered the value of charity. Toward the banks.

[posted by charles dodgson at 9:49 AM]:

Conditions of the War on Terror may, at some points, necessitate easing some of our formerly accustomed standards of due process. As in the case of the four British citizens recently released from Guantanamo after being held there for four years. They have now been released by the British police, who are quite convinced that there's nothing to try them for, and don't even want them back for questions. But, while at Guantanamo, they were subjected to treatment so severe -- they all allege torture -- that three at least made false confessions of terrorist acts.

Well hey, you can't be too sure. They were accused terrorists.

But this strict standard of justice isn't practical to apply everywhere. In Iraq, for example, there are enough civilian victims of unjustified force that we've set up an office to distribute blood money to them, or their surviving relatives -- but we haven't investigated many incidents at all far enough to give the thugs disgracing the uniform of our good troops a proper court martial.

There just isn't time to do every nice thing in the world...

(British police link via Atrios).