August 26, 2004
Check It To Wreck It And Let's Begin
Now, not to step all over their meticulously presented case that since it shows employment growth, the household survey must be the right one, but the conservative Heritage Foundation's (just throwing in the adjective that USA Today's editors somehow missed) op-ed piece is, well, kinda crap.
The argument is the same thing you've heard every time the job numbers come out. Well, every time they're bad. When they're good, of course the establishment/payroll survey is doing its job. But when they're bad, like in July, the survey is deeply flawed to the point of uselessness. Instead, we have to turn around and embrace the household survey, because, well, it shows employment growth. Anyone who defends the payroll survey is just a partisan hack who wants to pretend that George Bush is failing. In other words, the same argument the Heritage Foundation makes about anything Democrats say, just with the specific referents changed.
What's interesting, though, is that they never define the household survey. Using the BLS study to which the writers refer, how does the household survey work?
The CPS classifies people as employed if, during the calendar week that includes the 12 th of the month, they did any work at all (at least 1 hour) as paid employees, worked in their own business, profession, or on their own farm for profit, or worked without pay at least 15 hours in a family business or farm.
So, if you go in to work a couple of hours a week at your uncle's store for fifteen bucks, that's a job. If you work 15 hours and don't get paid at all, that's a job. Might we now be getting an inkling of why the household survey isn't used as the official measure of employment?
Another interesting bit from the same study is that household data was actually well behind the payroll data from 1994-2000. If you go the the charts, the CPS consistently lagged behind the CES during the entire period, and it was only in the Bush "recovery" that the CPS, which defines terms of employment much more loosely and includes people who don't get paid for the work they do, jumped ahead of the CES.
The argument that the CPS better reflects the condition of employment growth presumes that the conditions it cover reflect where employment is growing - and the unique conditions that it measures don't bode well for Bush's "boom".
Is The Media...Is Not The Media...
Well, given that the RNC invited one nonpartisan and a bunch of Republicans - and Roger L. Simon - to their convention, are we going to start hearing that the Democratic convention was just as ideologically diverse as the Republican one, if not more so?
What I find the most interesting, however, is that Hugh Hewitt is included as one of the bloggers. Now, he does run a weblog - an unremarkable one, but one nonetheless. But the guy has a nationally syndicated radio show. He is a part of the mainstream media. He's not an alternative or new voice - he's about as much a genuine outgrowth of the blogosphere as the "Hardblog" on MSNBC's site was.
And is it just me, or do many of them seem kind of...dickish? First, it was that all bloggers did was push gossip and innuendo. Now, it's all about how all we did in Boston was provide coverage of who we saw and the celebrities we ran into. Both were (and are) grossly unfair overgeneralizations. But, hey, as long as we're playing the game, can I decide that the Republican blogs did little but parrot the same coverage I could sit at home and read from any number of conservative sources over the past decade, only with the name and location changed?
Hold on, though...that might be true. Damnation.
Thanks For Joining The 1980s
Your snap bracelets and leg warmers are on the table at right.
In delivering the report to Congress yesterday, an administration official, Dr. James R Mahoney, said it reflected "the best possible scientific information" on climate change. Previously, President Bush and other officials had emphasized uncertainties in understanding the causes and consequences of warming as a reason for rejecting binding restrictions on heat-trapping gases.
The report is among those submitted regularly to Congress as a summary of recent and planned federal research on shifting global conditions of all sorts. It also says the accumulating emissions pose newly identified risks to farmers, citing studies showing that carbon dioxide promotes the growth of invasive weeds far more than it stimulates crops and that it reduces the nutritional value of some rangeland grasses.
American and international panels of experts concluded as early as 2001 that smokestack and tailpipe discharges of heat-trapping gases were the most likely cause of recent global warming. But the White House had disputed those conclusions.
It's good that, at least in one regard, they've dropped their attachment to "good science"...and started paying attention to good science.
Now, if only they'd do the same thing with social science, abstinence education, other environmental science, and medical research.
Range Rover
What do you do to stop a Karl Rove? What do you do? What...do you do?
Stop imitating Dennis Hopper, for one.
Tim Grieve writes about the Rove machine, and explains how it works - getting at, I think, the reason why responses to Rove tend to fail.
The Real Issues
In case the constant polls and SwiftVets back-and-forth has obscured the reality of this election:
It was the third straight annual increase for both categories. While not unexpected, it was a double dose of bad economic news during a tight re-election campaign for President Bush.
Approximately 35.8 million people lived below the poverty line in 2003, or about 12.5 percent of the population, according to the bureau. That was up from 34.5 million, or 12.1 percent in 2002.
The rise was more dramatic for children. There were 12.9 million living in poverty last year, or 17.6 percent of the under-18 population. That was an increase of about 800,000 from 2002, when 17.6 percent of all children were in poverty.
Kill the Moderates, Long Live the Moderates!
Joshuah Bearman's got a dispach from the decidedly preordained battle between the telegenic side of the Republican party and the governing group. The former keep attending conventions, certain that prime time confers legitimization and secure in the knowledge that they're valued; just don't follow them afterwards.
It’s also an insult to the voters. Because it looks like the stage at Madison Square Garden is being set for another three-card monte, a repeat of that cynical game of Presidential bait and switch from four years ago that takes the electorate as the rube. Recall 2000, how Bush the candidate — newly minted as a compassionate conservative, a uniter, a man who would leave no child behind — transformed into Bush the President, barely (if at all) elected, and who then launched an armada of aggressively conservative moves from the get go.
Morning Poll Analysis
This morning is not a good morning at the Kerry campaign. Every advisor worth his salt is scurrying around, trying to decide if Kerry either hasn't sold himself to the electorate or they've rejected his bill of goods. The reason is a new, bipartisan poll showing Kerry beating Bush by two points in the battlegrounds (49:47%), but 60% saying they wouldn't vote to reelect Bush regardless of his opponent. That's at least 11% of an anti-Bush vote Kerry's missing out on, either because he's unknown or considered ill-prepared for the role of President.
Follow the jump for more in-depth analysis of the crosstabs:
Continue reading "Morning Poll Analysis"Agoniste
In an article on the partisan split between married vs. single women, reference is made to the least explicable campaign statement of this election cycle:
One of the TV ads the Bush campaign is airing is aimed straight at them: "I can't imagine the great agony of a mom or a dad having to make the decision about which child to pick up first on September the 11th," the president says.
I've talked to an unscientific sample of married couples with multiple children around the area, and they all have the same response: what agony?
Here was the standard pattern of events:
1.) Figure out whether or not your child's school was staying open.
2.) If they got out of school at the same time, figure out which kid was closer.
3.) If they got out at different times, figure out which one got out first.
4.) Pick up either the closer kid or the one who got out first, then pick up the other kid(s) in order.
Amazingly, it was just like every other day. I sure wish John Kerry had the same deft touch with the common person, and a wholehearted lack of an idea what "agony" meant.
They Keep On Pullin' Me In...
Glenn Reynolds? Big hack. John O'Neill? Titanic hack. When they meet? GOJIRA HACK!
After writing a novella on Cambodia the past few days, he addresses John O'Neill's story about being, but then not being in Vietnam.
Here's what O'Neill said on Hannity and Colmes:
Later, Kerry went, and I went, to a place called Bernique's Creek — that was our nickname for it — at Ha Tien. That was a canal system that ran close to the border, but that wasn't at Christmas for Kerry. That was later for him.
Notice anything about his speech pattern? He keeps talking as if he and Kerry went places together. However, O'Neill never served with John Kerry. Ever. His testimony as to what he did and what Kerry did is based on his experiences months and months later when Kerry wasn't there. Which is kind of weird "testimony", to be honest. It also doesn't make sense when he said he was in Cambodia then says he was never in Cambodia, but expecting O'Neill to be clear at this point is like asking Bush to condemn him - never, ever gonna happen.
And yes, the Mekong River does go into Cambodia.
August 25, 2004
Not Just A Lie
As it turns out, a Vietnam vet named John keeps changing his story about when and where he was in Cambodia. He's not running for President, however.
In 1971, John O'Neill told the president that he was in Cambodia.
O'NEILL: I was in Cambodia, sir. I worked along the border on the water.
NIXON: In a swift boat?
O'NEILL: Yes, sir.
But the story doesn't stop there. O'Neill's been trying to explain why he told the president that he did something that supposedly couldn't have been done.
Well, it's because he wasn't actually in the country, obviously. Where was he?
"I think I made it very clear that I was on the border, which is exactly where I was for three months. I was about 100 yards from Cambodia," O'Neill said in clarifying the June 16, 1971, conversation with Nixon.
Oh, well that makes it perfe-
Huh? Maybe he was talking about metric yards?
The only place you should get that close to and not know where the hell you are is Amsterdam, and I'm pretty sure that nobody ever claimed to have gotten a swift boat there.
Garden State
Garden State is, I think, an enormously tough movie to review. That's because its parts are cliche -- a coming of age story, a romance, wild n' crazy friends, a night with too many drugs -- yet the whole is anything but hackneyed. It's likely because the many cliches are actual ingredients in the lives of most twenty-somethings, I know they are in mine, but the form they take in most films couldn't be further from the undramatic and understated shapes they have they have in lives. That's why the many movies that insist on rendering these events with a Steve Martinesque insanity thump into the tree, not the bullseye. Yes they've latched onto a common ground, but they dramatize it till it no longer connects with its target audience, for whom life's events are important but not painted in cinematic strokes.
Garden State assumes no such posture, drawing a story that you feel you could live. Yes it's random and, in its way, exciting, but no more so than the nights that you retell with your friends. By embracing the oddities and eccentricities of the path many twenty-somethings travel, the movie entertains on a much more visceral level. By connecting to the gut, it's simply more affecting and gripping than the legions of movies that aspire towards the same messages. I can barely remember what I had for dinner last night, but I'm still talking about the film four days later.
Anyway, I'm little good at movie reviews. Suffice to say I'm pretty demanding in what I like, and not only did I like Garden State, I damn well loved it, want to see it again, and am picking up the (incredible) soundtrack after work.
Oh, and the writer-director-star of the film, Zack Braff, has a pretty good blog, if you're interested.
No Mas! No Mas!
I've got to admit -- I'm burnt out on all this. I know we need to keep up the pressure but I'm tired of talking about the Swift Boaters, tired of talking about the horserace, tired of fact-checking disengenuous Republicans. No more politics for me today. You might get a post on the glorious film that was Garden State, but nothing more on the mudbath that is this election.
Update: This, however, is very cool. Okay, no more politics now.
How Could You Suck So Much?
Dana Stevens writes about how terribly much she thought John Kerry sucked on the Daily Show last night.
Continue reading "How Could You Suck So Much?"Declaring Victory Over Cambodia
The problem with blogs isn't gossip and innuendo. The problem with blogs is the goddamned triumphalism that pervades many of them on a roughly biweekly basis every time they find a story that they think isn't being covered enough and pound the hell out of it. Sometimes it's deserved; much more often, it's not.
And, to be quite frank, much of that comes from the right, largely because they've build up an entire separate media sphere which prides itself on not being the mainstream media. Of course, they provide a much worse product than the mainstream media (who's counting?), but it's a viable, functioning series of organs that put out tons of propoganda for each media cycle.
Stand Up And Be Counted
I, for one, am glad that John Kerry is standing up and defending his opposition to the Vietnam War.
Although I'd vastly prefer if we could talk about what's wrong in Iraq II: The Quickening, where soldiers are still being sent, it's important for Kerry to let people know that he did an honorable thing in speaking out against the war, that what he consistently did what he felt was right and that his allegations were not saying all soldiers were criminals (which he wasn't) but that it was a gross and unfair situation those soldiers were put in, and out of those situations arose the well-documented abuses and atrocities of the Vietnam War. Kerry did something that took both courage and conviction, and he shouldn't be ashamed of it - he shouldn't run from it.
I do, however, want to break the embargo I posted about just below and point out what awful news writing this is:
He said he served in Vietnam for two tours -- longer than opponents allege -- and the Navy "thought enough of my service that they made me an aide to an admiral".
"Many Democrats"? Is there some secret PAC called Many Democrats that's making itself available for secret interviews with reporters?
"He said" he served in Vietnam for two tours? Well...he did. It's not a debate. If Michael Jordan "says" he won six NBA championships, and I "allege" that he didn't, it's not really a "debate", you "know"?
Getting back to his anti-war activism, my roommate makes a good point - in the Swift Boat ad, they never accuse John Kerry of lying. They accuse him of hurting their feelings. They accuse him of doing what the Vietcong were trying to do. But the interesting thing is that nowhere in the ad do the words "lie", "dishonest" or "untrue" appear - nor any variants thereof.
I can't decide if it's because they're lying sacks, huge lying sacks, or gargantuan lying sacks. I attack, you decide.
"I Stood Up And Was Counted"
Good. I'm glad to see Kerry embracing both sides of his heroism -- the love of country that led him to risk his life in the Mekong Delta, and the courage that forced him to risk his future by leading protests at home. With the benefit of hindsight, many now look back and condemn Kerry for opportunism, forgetting that the war's inevitable close and America's guilt and repudiation of it were not seen as givens then. Kerry put himself on the line to create change; that his righteous stand threw his career forward is as perfectly meritocratic as you can get.
Your Day In Swiftie Coverage
I'm honestly no longer interested in the Swift Boat Vets. At this point, there's more than enough evidence to show that they're liars, and it's more a matter of saying it long and loud enough that nothing these guys says stands up to investigation.
As such, here's your meta Swift Boat coverage of the day:
[Swift Boat Vet] made an appearance on [well-known show] contradicting [point of supposed fact that's in the Swift Boat book]. Liar!
Various conservative hacks are mad at the media for not investigating the Swift Boat Vets' stories. More accurately, they're mad because they're investigating what happened rather than seeking out evidence that reinforces the Swifties.
At least one of the Swift Boat Vets claimed to have been in Vietnam during the war despite his being 26 years old.
Look at this news story! It treats it as a he said/they said issue when it shouldn't!
I think that's about it for the day.
Leadership For A New Era
So far, here's what I can tell about the "detailed" platform Bush will be laying out at the convention, given the policy ideas he and his party have discussed the past few weeks.
- Gay people shouldn't get married.
- Moderates should be quiet except when the party needs to pretend they matter.
- Uh...get rid of 527s.
- Terror's bad, m'kay?
- A 60% national sales tax sounds interesting.
- Ownership! Of...things!
This had better be one hell of a nomination acceptance speech - as far as I can tell, the most pressing issue in the party isn't Bush's record or the next four years, but instead how to convince moderate swing voters that when they don't care about their opinions, it doesn't mean they don't hear them.
Do They Even Give A Shit Anymore?
Want to know how much the base is listening to what George Bush says?
He doesn't want any 527s in the race...despite signing a law which allowed them. However, he has a firm, unyielding stance that's exactly the opposite of what it was two years ago, and that's because he's a leader, dammit.
And now, one of the largest conservative 527s is ramping up fundraising to run more and more ads.
Others may be poised to follow.
"We don't disagree with the president's take," the president of the group, Brian McCabe, said. "But we can't unilaterally disarm. There is extensive activity by the liberals, and we still need to counter them and level the playing field."
On Wednesday, the organization will begin commercials in Iowa and Wisconsin that attack Senator John Kerry's record on national security. Mr. McCabe said his group hoped to keep the spots running in the two states through the election and to add states as it raised money.
Luckily for the group, if Bush is asked about conservative 527s ramping up activities to benefit him, he'll never address them specifically, which means that they can continue on as mere responses to a liberal advantage. As we know from Bush's strong, consistent morality, which is one of the major reasons we should vote for him for President, doing a "bad" thing because your opposition does it is simply a matter of principle.
It's going to be interesting to see if Bush can actually succed in changing the media scope from lying about John Kerry to anyone besides candidates having the venue to weigh in on politics, policy and politicians. That, however, is because it will be one of the most stunning failures of the media's responsibility to the public interest in recent memory.
The Weight Of The World
Matt Yglesias discusses the epistemology of Republican truth, which, to borrow from the Corner's interminable ongoing discussion of qualitative conservative ownership of everything good, is a distinctly conservative brand of relativism.
Stereotypical relativism privileges relative truths. The construction of a relative truth for a person, group, culture or society is just as "true" for them as a countervailing relative truth is for another society. The way that conservative relativism works, however, is that if a relative "truth" is accepted by enough people, it becomes absolutely true. The number of people required to declare something relatively absolutely true isn't constant, but instead instutional - the Iraq War, for instance, was justified by Hillary and Bill Clinton and Al Gore, with a subsequent assist from "the U.N." if necessary - the liberal "establishment", if you will. With the Swift Boat ads, it took 239 veterans and the subsequent argumentative weight of the entire American military - to oppose them is, by implication to not support the troops.
That John Kerry is himself a veteran and the historical records matches up with virtually everything he said during and after the war simply does not matter. Respect for institutional credibility overrides all other considerations...and Republicans are trying, however nonsensically, to argue that the repetition of an untruth by a "trusted" source subsequently garners that statement truth.
And you can't dispute this, because 1,480 bloggers back me up.
Bin Laden: The Infidel's Wound Was Self-Inflicted
In the ongoing debate over whether or not John Kerry having been in Cambodia as much as two to three weeks after he said he was or the night he said he was makes him unfit for the presidency or totally undeserving of it, there seems to have been a dearth of coverage on a very, very important story - the investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.
Imagine that - an irrelevant "scandal" overshadows actual news of import, which in turn through its overexposure disgusts people with politics altogether, resulting in their not paying attention to anything that happens. It's enough to chafe your bits, friends. Well, it would be if they weren't already chafed to high heaven.
Continue reading "Bin Laden: The Infidel's Wound Was Self-Inflicted"Those Pants Are Smokin'!
It's unbelievable. These stories are just fallin apart:
The Task Force report twice mentions the incident five days earlier and both times calls it "an enemy initiated firefight" that included automatic weapons fire and underwater mines used against a group of five boats that included Kerry's.
Task Force 115 was commanded at the time by retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, the founder of the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which has been running ads challenging Kerry's account of the episode.
Freudian Slip
Don't beat yourself up, I often make the same mistake. Why, just the other day I was talking about the SwiftVet's lawyer Benjamin Ginsburg and I accidentally referred to him as George W. Bush's lawyer -- hoo boy was my face red! Luckily, he's on payroll for both, so the mistake didn't matter. So, as I was saying, it's pretty easy to get the two mixed up, but it rarely matters, they're like a political palindrome.
August 24, 2004
And I Was Like Whatevs =)
Oh, this is rich:
"We are asking you to get involved with this campaign not only because it is the most critical election of our lifetime, but also because we have the ability to positively change our future," said the 22-year-old twins.
GOP <3s Hollywood
Why is it that Republicans in Hollywood stay so quiet while those annoying Democratic liberal socialists broadcast it everywhere?
Maybe it's because some of the Republicans aren't Republican.
Well...technically, she still is silent about her support of the president.
Never Give Up, Never Surrender!
I should clarify the below post and say I know we can't let up on the counterattack, I know we can't loosen our grip on the truth -- in times past when Democrats have taken the high road, they've ended with the low count in the election. We've got to challenge every untruth and keep swinging till we've taken the head off of these guys. But what I wrote below should, in its way, be part of the assault.
The swiftvets have engaged in smears so vile that they've inadvertently spilled the political sphere's worst traits, tendencies and failings into one shameful concoction, creating the perfect characterization of the media regime we, and most Americans, want smashed. They went so far that they left a hanging target, that's why we've got to spend our time looking into Bush's connection with them -- the counterattack has to be larger than about this election, it must be a broadside against the unholy alliance that renders the media unwitting allies of politicians determined to win and unable to do so honestly. If these smears are awful, they're simply a reflection of the candidate they're designed to help and an example of the sort of politics bipartisan uniter George has brought to the table. By holding the media to a higher standard and amplifying the backlash to the swiftvets, we have an opportunity to change the media and begin hoisting George on his own venomous petard.
Luckily, they really did take a step too far this time. The outrage from unlikely pundits and generally neutral editorial boards marks a crack in the media's inhuman ability to reconcile their conscience and their coverage. Now we've got to complete the break that'll destroy Bush, and every politicians, ability to twist the media into a blind attack dog.
Enough
Enough. Fucking enough. I am so goddamn tired of talking about the Swiftvets. This last week has been the Dean scream or Dole fall for our body politic -- it has shone light on everything corrosive, everything vile, everything that turns off Americans not just from voting but from civic participation. It has ripped our veneer of idealism and high-mindedness and exposed many of us as bottom-feeding predators whose primary political instinct is to dash towards the blood, skirting and evading the actual hurdles and obstacles holding back our society.
Our media has led the way with its rendition of A Beautiful Mind, schizophrenically fighting its better instincts and leaving the editorialists and truth-finders to snipe and attack the stenographers for mindlessly pounding their keys in the newsroom. We've seen Chris Matthews turn to virtue and O'Reilly come to the rescue. We've watched the Dionnes and the Krugmans of the world lower their anti-media cannons while the Malkens and Barones have desperately clung to the inaccuracies, begging Americans to believe the discrepancy equates with deviancy. In short, we've watched the election dig up an old war, some partisans spin it, and significant portions of the media realize that business-as-usual reporting will render a disservice to the republic. And so they, like everyone else, have gone to war against their misguided colleagues and brethren, lining up on the side of common sense just as many in politics have lined up on the side of elevated discourse. But such company also highlights the size of the forces arrayed on the sides of ignorant stenography and political mud, those who continue to do wrong because they're not sure what'll happen to them if the game changes.
Continue reading "Enough""These charges against John Kerry are false"
It was about time some media spanked the Bushies for the cloud of beyond-the-pale advertising that seems to follow their every move. I'm just glad it was my hometown paper who stepped up to the plate:
Then sit back and let the media do your work for you. Journalists have to report the charges, usually feel obliged to report the rebuttal, and often even attempt an analysis or assessment. But the canons of the profession prevent most journalists from saying outright: These charges are false.
...
Not limited by the conventions of our colleagues in the newsroom, we can say it outright: These charges against John Kerry are false. Or at least, there is no good evidence that they are true. George Bush, if he were a man of principle, would say the same thing.
I'll Be Gone Til November...Or 3 This Afternoon
Headed down to Dayton for lunch with my family. I'll be back around 3 with lots of commentary on stuff. It's what I do, after all.
Not Just Now, But Always
I received a rather lengthy chain letter about John Kerry's "treason" after Vietnam - culled largely from this Google search. Rather than respond to the e-mail list, which has about as much chance of changing minds as trying to debate at a Bush rally, I just wanted to pose this question here:
If not only conservative columnists (many of whom would accuse their mailman of treason if their Bush/Cheney stickers didn't arrive on time) but, in fact, Kerry's fellow soldiers actually believe that he committed treason through acts that were incredibly public at the time and of which a complete record exists to this very day...why didn't any of them ever push it?
If you seriously think that a fellow soldier is committing acts of treason, is it or is it not your duty as a soldier to attempt to bring that person to justice? The deadly serious criminal accusation of treason against one's country shouldn't be met by grumbling and complaining - it should be met by the pursuit of justice for the acts. If these soldiers, if anyone thinks that a man in the Armed Forces betrayed his country...don't bitch about it 30 years later. If you couldn't find the courage (or the facts) to do it then, don't smear Kerry now.
That's what keeps getting to me - in nearly 30 years of public service, none of the Swifties could stand up and charge any of this while Kerry was representing the people of Massachusetts (apparently, it was okay for a liar and a traitor to represent a state, just not the whole country). This is what's gotten to me about the whole thing - apparently, these were deeply held convictions that only popped up when it became convenient and they could hide behind the shield of sheer mass of people rather than the veracity of their stories.
Van Odelay
Okay, so, there's a story in the Birmingham News that the members of the 877th Engineer Batallion want to re-up. Conservative bloggers are pulling off virtually perfect Van Odells, which are technically defined as such:
Example - When Katie said that nobody liked the brand of athletic shoes because she disliked them, she committed an egregious Van Odell.
You see, since there is a unit that wants to go back to Iraq/Afghanistan, it, of course, means that none of the soldiers who don't want to be there count. It's disrespectful to say that a large number of soldiers are demoralized because they say they're demoralized and there's a group of soldiers that aren't. It's totally respectful to take a batallion of 500 soldiers and say they represent the entire military, even the people who don't view the war or their service the same way the batallion might.
Again, if you don't like being in Iraq, you just don't count. Why must men and women in uniform who disagree with the hawkish perspective have their voices so disrespected? Sad.