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Howell Raines is the perfect representative of everything that is wrong with the SCLM. They aren't really liberal and they aren't really conservative. They are shallow, bitchy elitists. Suffice to say, any advice from this guy should be taken as a sign to do the opposite. Compared to pompous ass Howell Raines, John Kerry is Elvis Presley.
One pathology of the elite guardians of our discourse is their tendency to focus on the inane and superficial and then pretend that they're standins for Joe and Jane America. They cover politics like Joan Rivers covering fashion at the Oscars, and then pretend that they're just reflecting the opinion of "the American people." They'll attack candidates (well, Democratic candidates) for not being "serious" about issues and then wonder aloud about the fact that they're boring the people with all those Big Incomprehensible Numbers.
Most of these people are well educated and many are from elite schools. I don't know if they're posing or lazy, but I don't beleive they're as illiterate and innumerate as they claim. Ted Koppel, who had no trouble counting down the days we had hostages in Iran, professed during the 2000 election that all those numbers Bush and Gore were throwing around were just soooo confusing. Koppel is one of the nation's premiere journalists and he's been hosting one of journalism's premiere TV shows for 20 years. He can't add up a few numbers? Someone on his staff can't?
A few times I've declared the "age of wonk" is over. Aside from a bit of education, there isn't really much point in really discussing many policy issues in-depth. This administration obviously isn't interested. And, nor is the 4th estate.
They talk hair cuts and sighs, pretending this is what really matters to the Amurcans they have nothing but contempt for. The truth is, policy issues don't matter to them at all. The elite media - the blow-dried pancake makeup wearing ones on the nets and the Pravdas on the Hudson and Potomoc - are almost entirely insulated from the economic policies of any administration. Hair cuts and sighs matter to them, the rest of it doesn't. That would be fine if they didn't pretend that people struggling to stay out of bankruptcy gave a shit about this stuff. That people going to court to squeeze out owed child support so they could put food on their families gave a shit about the latest Heatherism of the day.
It's all ceased to matter to them. It isn't cynicism or apathy, it's just disconnect and lack of empathy. It disgusts me when these people pander to "the Heartland" or the "Red States" or to people with "good American values." Most of them only know the comfy suburban America they were reared in, having no understanding or concern for the despair which comes from economic hardship which one finds in spades both in urban and rural America.
And, the worst of these - the Howell Raines and the Margaret Carlsons - perpetuate the myth of their own "liberalism," shitting on everyone who truly can be described as liberal.
The new jobs report comes out on Friday. Let's hope for good news - I'm not going to wish for bad news to further my personal political agenda - I'm not a supporter of "hope for short term pain to get us long term gain" either on Iraq or the economy. But, what I do want is the truth, about both those things for better or for worse, to be understood by the people in this country.
So, even as we hope for good job news (a soft labor market is of no benefit to me, either) let's prepare for the inevitable spin in which bad numbers are made good and average numbers are made great.
It's a bit premature, but let's just remind ourselves. 140K+ net new jobs or so are necessary just to keep up with the growth in the working age population. And, while a second [now third] month of good numbers will indeed be an encouraging sign, there's almost no chance that the jobs numbers will return to their pre-Bush levels by the election.
There are some discouraging trends. The rise in the adoption of adjustable rate mortgages at a time when interest rates will inevitably rise is cause for concern. Rising long term rates could destroy the housing market. The declining share of output going to labor is also of concern. (Short version - wages are flat, productivity has been going up, therefore all that extra productivity is going to profits). Whether this is just a temporary trend in a weak labor market, or whether it's a sign of structural changes in the economy (decreasing competition due to tech. changes, poor anti-trust enforcement, a rise in crony capitalism, etc...) is unclear.
And, as always, it'll be important to look at the numbers behind the numbers. A booming low wage service sector is nothing to get excited about.
JEFFERSON CITY – The Missouri Supreme Court ruled today that a vote on a proposed gay marriage ban should be placed on the August ballot – handing Democrats a victory that could carry over to political contests this election season.
In a 6-1 decision, the court said Secretary of State Matt Blunt should begin steps immediately for such a vote. Blunt and other Republicans had wanted the issue placed on ballots in November.
"The secretary of state has a duty to take such actions as are necessary, in an expedited manner, to prepare (the amendment) for submission to the people of Missouri at the August 3, 2004, election in accordance with the governor's proclamation," the court said.
Shortly after the ruling, a Blunt spokesman said he would follow the court's wishes.
"We will put it on the August ballot," said Blunt's spokesman, Spence Jackson.
Sometimes I'm glad so many Republicans are dumb as rocks.
A dentist who claims he met three of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Shreveport one year before the attacks has mysteriously fallen ill and is on life support.
Dr. David Graham was driving back to Shreveport from Houston on Saturday night when he became sick. A friend said Graham began suffering organ failure and medical tests show possible poisoning. He is hospitalized in Houston.
Graham is trying to publish a book that claims meetings with the hijackers and another Middle Eastern man who is a federal fugitive here.
Mike Sledge, a friend of Graham, has a manuscript of Graham's book, "The Graham Report: The true story of three 9-11 hijackers who were reported to the FBI 10 months before 9-11." In it, Graham claims he met the hijackers at a home in Shreveport in September 2000 and thought they were plotting an attack on Barksdale Air Force Base. He said he reported them to the FBI.
Just the occasional plug. It's a good way to help the cause on a low budget, and you get to go have a night out in the process. A couple events are pricey, but most are very affordable. All ticket sales go to Big John.
Kevin Drum has a post up about the likely future of oil prices. Short version - they're probably going to go up.
The thing about oil production is that any given moment there's some overall production capacity. Once we hit that level of production, then nothing more can be pumped out. Now, over time new reserves can be discovered, new wells dug, and capacity can be increased. I'll leave it to others to determine just how much extra potential capacity exists, but the point I'm trying to make is that even if a lot of it exists it takes some time to find it and bring it online.
So, what does this mean? Well, to answer that let's have a little Econ 101 lesson. The diagram below represents supply and demand in the oil market.
The downward sloping demand curve reflects the fact that as the price of oil falls, the quantity people wish to buy increases. At least in the short term, the demand for oil is thought to be pretty inelastic - that is, pretty insensitive to changes in the price.
The other curve is the supply curve. The horizontal portion of the curve reflects the fact that over some range, oil companies are basically willing to provide as much as customers want at some minimum price. At some point, however, in order to encourage more production the price must rise. The problem is that this upward sloping segment of the supply cuve is fairly "small." That is, it is only over a fairly narrow range of output that price increases actually encourage more production. After that, we run into capacity limit - the vertical range of the curve. Further price increases are not accompanied by any more oil production.
So, what happens if the demand for oil starts increasing? As, say, China and India start increasing their oil consumption. Well, that demand curve starts shifting to the right and the equilibrium price of oil begins to rise. Higher price, but not higher actual consumption. Oil producers happy, as prices will rise above marginal cost. Big profits result.
What happens? Higher prices will, over the longer run, encourage companies to extract oil from areas which may not have been profitable at lower prices. This is the Dick Cheney vision of oil independence -- if the price gets high enough then oil companies will find their oil in more costly domestic locations, and by producing more oil at home we won't rely on foreign oil imports. Then we may get some outward shift of the supply curve, but we'll still be paying higher prices.
So, in a world where the demand curve is probably going to continue to shift outwards, in the short term it's quite possible oil prices could skyrocket. In the longer term, new capacity may be brought online, but as long as demand is increasing faster than capacity...
With Bush consulting with a lawyer it's a good time to consider what possible legal difficulties he could be confronted with. Now, obviously if as Capitol Hill Blue claims (they aren't a trustworthy source, BTW), one of the grand jury witnesses has claimed Bush had prior knowledge of the leak then he would be in seriously deep doodoo.
But, let's assume for now that isn't the case (or, at least that there isn't actually such a witness). If after the fact he knew who did it, then he would be likely be guilty of being an accessory after the fact for actively covering it up, depending on how his public statements, etc... diverge from the facts.
And, even if not guilty of being an accessory, he could still face charges of "misprision of a felony" - of knowing about it and not coming forward.
So, the point is -- if at any time, before or after, the president knew the identity of the leakers then, to quote Michael Kinsley, "Ha. Ha. Ha."
You know what to do. And, special this week - if anyone wants to attend a big money fundraising event at a discounted (though still not cheap) rate, here are a couple offers in California:
TERESA HEINZ KERRY EVENTS
MARIN WITH TERESA HEINZ KERRY JUNE 6 in Northern California June 6th, 1:00-3:00 p.m; Mill Valley Community Center, 180 Camino Alto, Mill Valley, CA. June 6th, 4:30-7:00 p.m.; private home in Hillsborough, CA. Levels up to $2,000. Atrios Blog special admission - $250. Contribute and then RSVP to danderson@johnkerry.com
JOHN KERRY EVENTS
June 23rd; SAN JOSE at Tech Museum Parkside Hall with JOHN KERRY and ENTERTAINMENT ; 6pm Levels up to $2,000. Atrios Blog special admission for tomorrow’s blog-athon - $500. Contribute and then RSVP to svrsvp@johnkerry.com
President Bush's re-election campaign is trying to recruit supporters from 1,600 religious congregations in Pennsylvania -- a political push that critics said Wednesday could cost churches their tax breaks.
An e-mail from the campaign's Pennsylvania office, obtained by The Associated Press, urges churchgoers to help organize "Friendly Congregations" where supporters can meet regularly to sign up voters and spread the Bush word.
"I'd like to ask if you would like to serve as a coordinator in your place of worship," says the e-mail, adorned with the Bush-Cheney logo, from Luke Bernstein, who runs the state campaign's coalitions operation and is a former staffer to Sen. Rick Santorum, the president's Pennsylvania chairman.
"We plan to undertake activities such as distributing general information/updates or voter registration materials in a place accessible to the congregation," the e-mail says.
The Internal Revenue Service prohibits political campaign activity, for or against any candidate, from taking place at all organizations that receive tax exempt status under a section of the federal tax code -- including most churches and religious groups. Violators could lose their tax breaks and face excise taxes.
George W. Bush last Feburary, on Meet The Press (emphasis added):
Russert: If the Iraqis choose, however, an Islamic extremist regime, would you accept that, and would that be better for the United States than Saddam Hussein?
President Bush: They're not going to develop that. And the reason I can say that is because I'm very aware of this basic law they're writing. They're not going to develop that because right here in the Oval Office I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al-Hakim, people from different parts of the country that have made the firm commitment, that they want a constitution eventually written that recognizes minority rights and freedom of religion.
George W. Bush yesterday , Rose Garden press conference:
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. Chalabi is an Iraqi leader that's fallen out of favor within your administration. I'm wondering if you feel that he provided any false information, or are you particularly --
THE PRESIDENT: Chalabi?
Q Yes, with Chalabi.
THE PRESIDENT: My meetings with him were very brief. I mean, I think I met with him at the State of the Union and just kind of working through the rope line, and he might have come with a group of leaders. But I haven't had any extensive conversations with him. ...
Q I guess I'm asking, do you feel like he misled your administration, in terms of what the expectations were going to be going into Iraq?
THE PRESIDENT: I don't remember anybody walking into my office saying, Chalabi says this is the way it's going to be in Iraq.
President Bush says he had a "good talk" for about 30 minutes November 27 with four members of Iraq's Governing Council at Baghdad International Airport, following his surprise meeting with U.S. troops there.
Briefing the White House press pool accompanying him on Air Force One as he returned to the United States after the two-and-one-half-hour stop in Baghdad, Bush said he and L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, met with Jalal Talibani, the current president of the council, Raja Habib Khuzaii, Ahmed Chalabi, and Mowaffak Rubaie.
In comments, reader Andrew led me to track down this Michael Kinsley column from the December 13, 1986 Times of London.
Washington British political scandals are about lust, the old saw has it, while American political scandals are about greed. This one is about power. Perhaps that's why it is being treated with such high seriousness. Indeed the only irritating aspect of the otherwise delightful collapse of the Reagan administration is the widespread insistence that we must all be poker-faced about it.
The approved attitude is to don the mask of tragedy: oh, woe is us, another failed administration, policymaking in disarray, etc. The Washington Post is second to none in moral dudgeon but nevertheless declares that anyone who finds the spectacle entertaining is 'reprehensible'.
Dear me. Am I really the only one here who is having a great time? Would I like to share the joke with the rest of the class? Or should any right-thinking person succumb to the fever of solemnity? No, upon tortured reflection, I've concluded that the case for glee remains compelling.
First, Washington types live for this kind of episode. The adrenaline is flowing like Perriers. Everyone, Reagan supporters no less than his opponents, is wandering around in a happy buzz induced by those oft-denounced but rarely eschewed twin intoxicants, gossip and speculation.
Secondly, 'disarray' is the essence of farce, and a banana skin tumble is just as funny when it happens to the National Security Council as to the Three Stooges. The arms-for-Iran episode has not lacked for pies in faces, missing trousers, stubbed toes, confused identities, mistaken embraces, role reversals, strange noises and other classic elements of lowbrow comedy. It's only human to laugh.
Thirdly, it's a healthy democratic instinct to enjoy seeing the mighty fall, and no one was acting mightier, especially since the 1984 election, than the Reagan administration. Democrats and liberals, beaten down after six years of Reaganism, have every right to wallow in schadenfreude.
Politics is not just a game, but it is a game. And if people are going to be scolded for cheering whenever their side scores or the other side fumbles, they will quite rightly confine their attention to professional football.
There are subtler pleasures to be had as well. It's delicious that contempt for democracy should have done Reagan in. For six years, democracy has been the biggest frustration of the president's opponents. It seemed to us, the carping critics, that this man was not terribly bright, not terribly thoughtful or well informed, not terribly honest, and in most other ways not up to the most important job in the world. But a large majority of people seemed not to mind. And so a consensus grew that if he lacked conventional mental and moral assets, he had some special magic.
Even Reagan's critics became superstitious about this alleged magic. They became afraid to say, or even to remember, that he's just an old movie actor. They came to believe that to criticize Reagan personally was to cut themselves off from the democratic life-force and condemn their souls to that circle of hell 'inside the Beltway' (Washington's ring road and a common metaphor for political insularity). Like knocking on wood or whistling past the graveyard, superstitious critics would preface any dissent from Reagan's policies with expressions of respect for him personally. One reason the president's political opponents are nervous about chuckling over his present predicament is fear that the magic monster is only asleep and the laughter will reawaken him.
So, democracy used to be Reagan's opponents' problem, but now it's his problem. As his standing plummets in the polls, he waves his magic wand in bewilderment, puzzled that the magic doesn't work. 'This is a Beltway bloodletting,' the told time magazine. What this pathetic remark reveals is that it is Reagan who is now trapped 'inside the Beltway,' isolated in a cocoon of advisers, cut off from the democractic life-force. And in fact the Contra war in Nicaragua has always been an inside-the-Beltway enthusiasm, which is what led to Reagan's difficulties in the first place.
'The Salvadoran guerrillas or the Sandinistis don't have to worry about all this when they deal with the Cubans and the Russians', a Contra leader complained to the New York Times. 'All this' refers to Congress, public opinion, the press, the law, and suchlike impedimenta. The Reagan administration, on whom democracy had lavished its greatest blessings, could not be bothered with democracy's inconveniences either.
So there's no need for gloom. Liberals and others who feared for their own faith in democracy can breath easy. Reagan's come-uppanace is democracy's salvation. It turns out that Lincoln was right: you can't fool all the people al the time after all. Dry those tears and repeat after me: Ha, ha, ha.
. If it's possible to imagine anything more damaging to DOD [than the Iran/Chalabi revelations], and perhaps also to White House staff, it is the CIA's conclusion that some information Chalabi turned over to Iran was available to only "a handful" of senior U.S. officials. That would be Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney, and Cheney's consigleiri, Scooter Libby, our sources helpfully explain. -- perhaps not entirely by coincidence, the Vice President's office is already on extra orders of TUMS, as it awaits the promised Grand Jury indictments of those responsible for leaking the name of a secret CIA officer to newspaper columnist Bob Novak, allegedly to "punish" the agent's husband, Amb. Joe Wilson, for revealing that President Bush used faulty intelligence about Iraq and Niger in the State of the Union Address two years ago. From our own days as a police and court reporter, we can tell you that Grand Juries often grind exceeding slow, but that if they report, not much gets left out.
Jeff Greenfield just did a report on the Polier/Kerry thing. He concluded the piece by saying that news outlets could learn a lot from the incident, but they probably won't. Indeed. Let's go back to my favorite Jeff Greenfield moment:
Even more damning was a "Nightline" report broadcast that same evening. The segment came very close to branding Hillary Clinton a perjurer. In his introduction, host Ted Koppel spoke pointedly about "the reluctance of the Clinton White House to be as forthcoming with documents as it promised to be." He then turned to correspondent Jeff Greenfield, who posed a rhetorical question: "Hillary Clinton did some legal work for Madison Guaranty at the Rose Law Firm, at a time when her husband was governor of Arkansas. How much work? Not much at all, she has said."
Up came a video clip from Hillary's April 22, 1994, Whitewater press conference. "The young attorney, the young bank officer, did all the work," she said. "It was not an area that I practiced in. It was not an area that I know anything, to speak of, about." Next the screen filled with handwritten notes taken by White House aide Susan Thomases during the 1992 campaign. "She [Hillary] did all the billing," the notes said. Greenfield quipped that it was no wonder "the White House was so worried about what was in Vince Foster's office when he killed himself."
What the audience didn't know was that the ABC videotape had been edited so as to create an inaccurate impression. At that press conference, Mrs. Clinton had been asked not how much work she had done for Madison Guaranty, but how her signature came to be on a letter dealing with Madison Guaranty's 1985 proposal to issue preferred stock. ABC News had seamlessly omitted thirty-nine words from her actual answer, as well as the cut, by interposing a cutaway shot of reporters taking notes. The press conference transcript shows that she actually answered as follows: "The young attorney [and] the young bank officer did all the work and the letter was sent. But because I was what we called the billing attorney -- in other words, I had to send the bill to get the payment sent -- my name was put on the bottom of the letter. It was not an area that I practiced in. It was not an area that I know anything, to speak of, about."
ABC News had taken a video clip out of context, and then accused the first lady of prevaricating about the very material it had removed. Within days, the doctored quotation popped up elsewhere. ABC used the identical clip on its evening news broadcast; so did CNN. The New York Times editorial page used it to scold Mrs. Clinton, as did columnist Maureen Dowd. Her colleague William Safire weighed in with an accusatory column of his own: "When you're a lawyer who needs a cover story to conceal close connections to a crooked client," he began, "you find some kid in your office willing to say he brought in the business and handled the client all by himself." Safire predicted the first lady's imminent indictment.
Note to journalists -- when you're writing a story about advertising on blogs, the story shouldn't be "wow! people set up their own pages on that interweb thingy and some other people pay to put ads there!"
The story, really, is that there are some websites that get sufficient traffic to attract advertisers. Those websites, like many others, reach a targeted demographic. That isn't actually much of a story if you've been awake since 1997.
Information we could use - how do blogad rates compare to advertising elsewhere on the internet on a per-view or per-clickthru rate?
Last night I had a dream that I got an 'FYI' email from Byron York of the National Review informing me that according to his sources Don Rumsfeld was the one who told Chalabi about the Iranian codes and that Rumsfeld had been declared an enemy combatant and was currently sitting in a cell in Gitmo.
The pistol wielded by Saddam Hussein when he was captured in his spider hole last year isn't the only war relic President Bush is fond of showing visitors to the White House. Recent guests tell us that Bush proudly displays two other iconic items in a study off the Oval Office: a brick from Taliban leader Mohammad Omar's home in Kandahar, and a roughly two-foot-high cross made of steel recovered from the World Trade Center wreckage.
It's really quite incredible that a drunk senior Bush official babbled to Our Man in Iraq Chalabi that we had busted the codes of the Iranians who, last I checked, was a part of the 'Axis of Evil.'
WASHINGTON, June 1 — Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader and former ally of the Bush administration, disclosed to an Iranian official that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran's intelligence service, betraying one of Washington's most valuable sources of information about Iran, according to United States intelligence officials.
The general charge that Mr. Chalabi provided Iran with critical American intelligence secrets was widely reported last month after the Bush administration cut off financial aid to Mr. Chalabi's organization, the Iraqi National Congress, and American and Iraqi security forces raided his Baghdad headquarters.
The Bush administration, citing national security concerns, asked The New York Times and other news organizations not to publish details of the case. The Times agreed to hold off publication of some specific information that top intelligence officials said would compromise a vital, continuing intelligence operation. The administration withdrew its request on Tuesday, saying information about the code-breaking was starting to appear in news accounts.
Mr. Chalabi and his aides have said he knew of no secret information related to Iran and therefore could not have communicated any intelligence to Tehran.
American officials said that about six weeks ago, Mr. Chalabi told the Baghdad station chief of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security that the United States was reading the communications traffic of the Iranian spy service, one of the most sophisticated in the Middle East.
According to American officials, the Iranian official in Baghdad, possibly not believing Mr. Chalabi's account, sent a cable to Tehran detailing his conversation with Mr. Chalabi, using the broken code. That encrypted cable, intercepted and read by the United States, tipped off American officials to the fact that Mr. Chalabi had betrayed the code-breaking operation, the American officials said.
American officials reported that in the cable to Tehran, the Iranian official recounted how Mr. Chalabi had said that one of "them" — a reference to an American — had revealed the code-breaking operation, the officials said. The Iranian reported that Mr. Chalabi said the American was drunk.
Actually, what's really quite incredible is that the story on CNN right now is... Ice cream headaches.
It's quite troubling that outspoken bigots can get prominent play in our nation's newspapers - as long as that bigotry is directed at Arabs/Muslims and homosexuals. From Kos, we have Paul Weyrich saying this:
A leading conservative said Tuesday that President Bush needs to change the subject from Iraq to his stated goal of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages if the Republican wants to win in November. "If he wishes to be re-elected, then he better be upfront on this issue, because if the election is solely on Iraq, we'll be talking about President Kerry," said Paul M. Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative think tank, and national chairman of an amalgam of conservative organizations known as Coalitions for America.
You should definitely read this post here for the backstory, but here's Paul Weyrich a little while back:
Statement by Paul M. Weyrich, President of the Free Congress Foundation, following his visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. on Friday April 26th, 2002
The visit to the Holocaust Museum was very moving. Once you see what the Jews went through at the time of Nazi Germany, it is so much easier to comprehend why the Jewish people feel they have to fight for their nation the way they do. And it is also more understandable why they are so sensitive to anything they feel is anti-Semitic.
In an unusual irony, the writer Evan Gahr, who once believed I was an anti-Semite, has helped to reconcile me with some in the Jewish community who believed the same of me. They now realize that we are in the vanguard of those who understand the threat that true believing Moslems represent to both Christians and Jews and that all of us who believe in our Judeo-Christian civilization must fight together to preserve it. I am grateful to Mr. Gahr for taking the initiative to enable us to take a special tour of the museum. And I can assure my Jewish friends that I will forever be more sensitive in my own writings to how they think and feel.
I'm so glad the scourge of political correctness has at long last been banished.
