Bellhorn at bat

I'm Back, Part Deux

2006-01-11T09:52:00.000-05:00

And I'm a genius! Ok, so I haven't yet worked out whether I'll keep up this blog, or start a new one. Somehow, writing on Bellhorn At Bat, when I've moved to the Washington, D.C. area and Bellhorn has moved into obscurity, seems a little odd. But, in the meantime, I just want to point out this prescient little posting of mine -- if I may pat myself on the back a little:

Thursday, May 12, 2005
Oh no, all the lobbyists are turning Republican!
In his New Republic article (you may need to be a subscriber) critiquing the advent of "big government conservatism", Jonathan Chait makes the case that this apparent oxymoron is not the accidental result of myriad unrelated policies (like the No Child Left Behind Act or politically-motivated subsidies), but is in fact the new Republican philosophy. He cites, as one piece of evidence, the "K Street strategy" masterminded by Tom DeLay. This is the campaign to force Washington lobbying firms to hire only Republicans, unlike in the past when lobbying firms tried to remain bi-partisan, knowing that either party could be in power at any given time.

The K Street strategy is one of the many things that Democrats hold against Tom DeLay, but personally, I think the Democrats should really take a "briar patch" approach to this idea: Oh no, whatever you do, please don't turn all the lobbyists into Republicans, that will be awful for us! There can't be many more despised professions than that of Washington lobbyist. I'd wager they rank up there with used car salesman or trial lawyers in the minds of most Americans: sleazy, opportunistic, dishonest.

So frankly, I'm delighted by the K Street Strategy. When the inevitable backlash against Washington excesses comes -- and it's looking like it might be happening soon -- it'll be nice to have all the bad guys be Republicans. Plus, as long as the lobbying groups are bi-partisan, you're not going to see either political party really go after them. But if Democrats are already being excluded from the public trough profession, they have no reason to defend it (although they'll gladly re-join when given a chance).

So, no, please, Tom DeLay, don't turn all those lobbyists into Republicans, please!

I'm back!

2005-11-11T10:08:00.000-05:00

A huge news story this morning has prompted Bellhorn at Bat to return after my extended sabbatical. (In the interim, Mark Bellhorn finished out the season in Yankee pinstripes and I'm moving out of Boston, so this blog name may have to change soon..). What great news could finally rouse me to post again? The Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq have reconciled and agreed to live together in peace? George Bush and Dick Cheney held a press conference finally admitting that they "really dropped the ball" on the whole Iraqi war reconstruction plan? Katie Holmes announces she's broken up with Tom Cruise in a press release entitled "What Was I Smoking?" No, sadly, none of these, but, in blockbuster news today, scientists have named a newly-discovered lemur species after John Cleese! Five years ago, I watched the documentary where John Cleese was sent to Madagascar to learn about lemurs -- and pass along this information to us in his inimitable way. It was great: lemurs are fascinating and John Cleese is quite possibly the funniest human on the planet. So I'm pleased to find out that he's been honored this way.

You can visit Cleese's website here. There's some fun stuff there, including lemur-related material.

Welcome to RepublicanLand

2005-09-06T12:15:00.000-04:00

Been reading responses to Katrina in blogworld, and thought this was particularly amusing:

The Republicans have spent the last three or four decades telling us the government can't help us, then put Dubya in the White House, took over all branches of government and proved it.

Evolving Iraq

2005-09-02T13:14:00.000-04:00

Two interesting articles about Iraq. I've been having another adjustment in thinking about Iraq, as things continue to, well, not get better, that's for sure. Christopher Hitchens received some attention for his well-written and impassioned defense of the war in the Weekly Standard, entitled A War to Be Proud Of. It's a good read, and he makes many excellent points, as always, about how bad the other options were for dealing with Saddam Hussein, and about how much better it will be for Iraq to be even a highly-imperfect free country than a country controlled by a tyrant. But I must say, to declare that my primary feeling about the war, at this point, is pride, would require a level of shamelessness that I don't possess. I still desperately hope that the end result will be a good one, and it's the only thing we can plan for because the alternative would be terrible, but to say that I feel "proud"? No. Just hopeful that we make sure to turn it into something that America can feel was the right thing.

I'm also frustrated that Hitchens continues to focus his best intellectual firepower on gunning down the likes of Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore, but when he has a chance to publish an article in the Weekly Standard, a publication read by many Washington conservatives, he mostly re-affirms the rightness of the war, instead of blasting the people responsible for making a positive outcome of this war a question mark: the Bush Administration. Seems like an opportunity wasted, as the effect I think is mainly to reassure conservatives who might be feeling a bit uneasy about how things are going that they shouldn't worry, it's still the right thing.

A better reflection of how an idealistic liberal hawk should respond to Iraq is this article by Jonathan Chait called Defending the War: Dove Tale in today's New Republic. This paragraph pretty well sums things up:

Given that things have not gone terribly well to date, a certain degree of humility is in order here. (In 2002 and 2003, I wrote a TNR cover story and a couple of editorials defending the war in fairly strident terms.) I'm tempted to accept the chastening and slink away. The trouble is that things aren't quite as clear-cut as the doves would have it. And more is at stake here than pundit bragging rights. The clear implication of this dressing-down is the view that the Democratic Party needs to nominate a war opponent in 2008 in particular and to stop listening to its hawkish foreign policy intellectuals in general.

One of the bad outcomes of the poor execution of this war is the fact that I look like a jackass to many of the liberals to whom I defended the Bush Administration. Well, ok, that's not really a very important bad outcome, but more broadly, the Bush Administration seems intent on making people like Michael Moore and MoveOn.org look like foreign policy geniuses. And this is very bad for the Democrats. Even though things have clearly not gone as I would have hoped in Iraq, I'm still in the "idealistic interventionist" foreign policy camp. And I still hate the "anti-war, anti-US military" attitude that continues to hold much of the Democratic base in thrall. I think this idea that the U.S. is the primary cause of war and violence around the world, and that the world would be a more peaceful place if the U.S. were no longer the biggest military power and willing to exercise that power, is morally bankrupt and based on a leftist fantasy. Prior to the Vietam War, Democratic politiicians were proud to have a forceful miitary and an assertively anti-totalitarian foreign policy. Coincidentally, since the Democrats abandoned this hawkish stance in 1972 with McGovern's campaign, they've gone on to win just three out of the next nine presidential elections. So, not only is the, shall we call it, McGovernite foreign policy wrong, but it's also politically suicidal.

Which is why looking at all the things Bush has done that I really hate does not make me reconsider my support for the Iraq war, it just makes me more ticked off that Democrats have continued to ensure that the likes of George W. Bush will be elected president by refusing to re-vamp their foreign policy and their image as, at best, being uncomfortable with the exercise of military power. Used to be, Americans who wanted a strong military could choose between a Repubican or a Democrat. Now, if they want a strong military, they have to vote for the Republian, and our reward is having the country run by the pro-tax cuts for the rich, anti-people welfare, pro-corporate welfare, anti-science, anti-environmental, pro-oil, pro-nuclear, pro-Christian wackos party.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next presidential election.

Aftermath of Katrina

2005-09-02T10:21:00.000-04:00

When the United States responds to a natural disaster as though we were a Third World backwater country, something is seriously screwed up. The total incompetence of the response is mind-boggling. Of course, I'm not a Bush fan to begin with, but I think it's perfectly reasonable for people to be pointing fingers at the federal government and Bush in particular. I'm sure some of the incompetence is at the level of state and local officials who aren't necessarily affected by the feds, but I think over the next few weeks we'll see more and more evidence of how the federal government, and yes Bush, screwed up. In a sad way, it's useful as a demonstration to Americans of what happens when the government is run by people who deeply despise government or, at best, are uninterested in basic government functions.

More specifically, this is the result when the country is being run by a Republican party that holds the following (internally contradictory) belief system:

1. The federal government should be shrunk -- in Grover Norquist's famous quote, they've been trying to shrink it until it can be drowned in the bathtub. Specifically, this belief manifests itself in cuts to funding to state governments and cuts to basic social and infrastructure programs.

2. Massive tax cuts. This is, of course, the major goal of shrinking the federal government -- so you can cut taxes. To be fair to Bush, tax cuts were a useful spur to the economy which was starting to go into recession in 2001 and took a huge hit after September 11th. However, I have always objected to the focus of the cuts, much of which went to the already-wealthy. (For what's it's worth, I got next to nothing.) And the wisdom of continuing to make tax cuts a major focus of your domestic policy when you're in the midst of a huge war effort is dubious.

3. Enormous and expanding military power and an interventionist foreign policy. We have the most powerful and technologically advanced military in the world. By far. No one even comes close. This doesn't happen by accident; it happens because we've made a public policy decision to do whatever it takes to make our military the best. If we wanted to have the best, most advanced infrastructure system, we would. It's just not been a policy priority. What has been a policy priority is to undertake a massively expensive war effort while cutting taxes. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I supported the Iraq war, but you can't conduct that type of operation and continue to push for major tax cuts. Unless, of course, you're planning on taking the money from other government spending -- on, say, infrastructure, emergency management programs etc. There is also a tendency in Congress to fund incredibly expensive new gadgets for the military -- some of which have little value.

4. a) Government should be a friend to business; b) pork is politically useful so we will look the other way while it happens (even though our public position is that we oppose federal government spending). Today's Republicans have no qualms about funneling large amounts of public money to various business interests, as well as to stupid projects in their districts. Take a look through the recent Energy Policy and transportation authorization bills and you'll see massive giveaways to conventional energy interests, and funding for ludicrous infrastructure projects that, coincidentally, will occur in the home states of powerful Congressmen (and really, it's mostly men). So what little money is left over after you've lowered taxes while expanding military needs is being funneled toward useless projects and influential corporations.

Not to sound callous, but I'm just pleased it actually happened while the people responsible for this delightful new Frankenstein government philosophy are still in charge and can be blamed for it.

Whew, I'm Still Not a Conservative!

2005-09-01T14:22:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I was watching the footage of looters in the hurricane-stricken areas, and, without warning, this thought crept into my head: Geez, there's a major crisis and these people decide it's an invitation to start stealing? What has happened to our morals? I was a little surprised, and thinking what a conservative old goat I had indeed turned into. Until I saw some of the right-wing bloggers' responses, and was reminded yet again that American conservatism has been redefined so far right as to be nuzzling up to, say, Mussolini. Here's some sample commentary brought to you by Ankle-Biting Pundits, the kind of folks who made it necessary for Bush to pretend to create a "compassionate" form of conservatism:

Anyone caught looting (and I don't mean the folks getting food or water or other survival items) should get a bullet between their eyes. Once word gets around that they're being shot on sight, you won't see these human scum going down the flooded street with new Air Jordans or big screen TV's.

How charming. Yes, indeed, we should institute the death penalty for stealing. No really, that's what one of the other posters really thinks:

We have Marshall Law there. I would have no problem with the classic 'shoot looters on sight' kind of Marshall Law.

Marshall Law? Is that like the Marshall Plan?

"The Bell Curve" Revisited

2005-08-29T17:39:00.000-04:00

Andrew Sullivan thinks this new article by Charles Murray, one of the authors of The Bell Curve, is a must read. The Bell Curve, for those who don't recall, was the extremely controversial 1994 book that claimed to prove that blacks have lower IQs than whites. At least, that's what I read about the book at the time, and I well recall how the authors were excoriated in the media. I never actually read the book, but have a pretty clearly bad impression of it.

Apparently, Murray was inspired to write this article by the recent contretemps over Larry Summers' remarks that some evidence suggests there are more men than women who score at the top level in science aptitude tests. Since I thought Summers' comments were not particularly outrageous, and witnessed the frequently hysterical response to his comments, and the many ways they were inaccurately portrayed in the media, I thought it would be worthwhile to check out Murray's article. Perhaps he had been similarly slimed and maligned.

Well, first, yes, he really is saying that scientific evidence shows that blacks score lower on IQ tests than whites, and that they perform less well on tests that purportedly test not for academic achievement, which would clearly be more susceptible to environmental factors, but for certain types of mental acuity which are not altered by environmental factors.

Not hard to see why this is controversial. Unfortunately, I'm not particularly qualified to assess the science. While certainly anyone should be allowed to pursue this kind of scientific inquiry, it is not totally clear what one would do with such information. Indeed, Murray himself seems a bit cagey in his article, simply saying that this knowledge would help change social policies designed to overcome black/white inequalities. Does he think we shouldn't bother, as blacks are just stupider? Andrew Sullivan doesn't say either, even though he says that the book "still holds up as one of the most insightful and careful of the last decade." He also says that

the fact of human inequality and the subtle and complex differences between various manifestations of being human - gay, straight, male, female, black, Asian - is a subject worth exploring, period.

I agree, but I am curious as to whether there are any non-white, non-male scientists championing the view that science tells us that non-white non-males are intellectually inferior. Not claiming that Murray or Sullivan are racist or sexist, but it does seem like an awfully conve-e-enient theory for them.

I'd be curious to find out what the scientific arguments against the Bell Curve were. Something I'll have to look into.

These are the dog days of summer?

2005-08-23T12:55:00.000-04:00

I've been completely immersed in the intricacies of hybrid-electric transit buses for the past few weeks -- yeah, that's as exciting as it sounds. Actually, it is pretty interesting, even if I have to wade through talk about steady state vs. transient engine operation, auxiliary power units, and Mean Distance Between Failures. But the point is, I haven't had time to blog, so thoughts have been building up. Add that to the fact that I'm grouchy about all this work, and I'm one pent-up, irritable blogger.

So let's just review some of the things that have been annoying me over the last two weeks:

1. Americans whining about gas prices: "Hey, we want the free market to allow us to purchase any oversized and ludicrously inefficient vehicle possible, but we don't want to pay free market prices." If these people who oppose fuel economy laws since they "have the right" to buy any car they want...well then, they also "have the right" to pay 80 bucks when they fill up their gas tanks. Suck it up.

2. Pat Robertson, that good Christian, thinks we should kill Hugo Chavez because he doesn't do what we want. Can you believe this fruitcake ran for president? Andrew Sullivan (who's back, thank goodness) says Robertson was on the list of people consulted by the Administration on the Supreme Court nomination. Can you imagine Democrats consulting Noam Chomsky or Michael Moore? How is this hateful, increasingly paranoid person any better?

3. Speaking of double standards, there is no doubt in my mind that if a Democrat were in the White House right now, that the Republican response to how things are going in Iraq and Afghanistan would be absolutely brutal. Remember how respectful they were toward Clinton's military efforts?

4. This blog's namesake was made available for any team to pick up, possibly marking the end of his time in a Red Sox uniform. I'm not mad about that -- he was having all kinds of offensive struggles this season -- but about the disgraceful way he was treated by the Fenway faithless.

That's about it for now. I'll be back for more later! I hope the rest of you are having a better week. :-)

The Huffington Post

2005-08-18T15:02:00.000-04:00

I haven't paid much attention the The Huffington Post, that new website for liberal/lefty commentary and blogging, I popped over there today and found two disturbing things.

First, this headline, featured prominently a la Drudge Report (that is, oversized font apparently intended to be visible from the space station):

Pat Buchanan: "Cindy Sheehan May Be The Catalyst Of Crisis For The Bush Presidency"

Ok, listen up fellow liberals. When Pat "Coming Culture War" Buchanan is on the same side as you, it should be seen as a red flag. It's not a sure sign that you're on the wrong side; he is probably pro-breathing, for example. But it's...not good. It's also a bit weird when David Duke is one of your supporters.

Second, they feature this important announcement: Sean Penn's Iran Dispatches To Run Monday... Wow. Sean Penn is going to share his extensive knowledge of the Iranian political situation? I've already made my views on celebrities spouting their political views, so no need to say more on this subject.

Dan Savage's Guest-Blogging Stint

2005-08-12T13:30:00.000-04:00

Dan Savage has been guest-blogging over at andrewsullivan.com this week. I love Dan Savage. His sex column Savage Love is funny, opinionated and graphic. He doesn't pigeonhole himself into a standard lefty (or righty) stance on all positions. Did I mention he's hilarious?

His stint at andrewsullivan.com has been enjoyable, although I personally could have done with fewer references to dildos and whatnot, but that's just quibbling. (Oh, and he also revealed that he has a good editor for his other writing jobs, as he's made several proofreading errors. I know how easy that can be...)

But what I was really waiting for was his take on the Iraq war. As Dan noted on Monday, he was possibly "the only professional sex advice columnist in the United States, if not the world, to come out in favor of the invasion of Iraq." On Monday, he promised to blog about his current view of things, and then waited until today to give it a try. I sense hesitation due to the difficulty for a lefty to explain a lefty stance on the Iraq as it is today. Clearly, unlike Christopher Hitchens, Dan is not just pretending that everything has gone as hoped.

He reprints a column he wrote for the Stranger (the Seattle weekly he edits) in March 2003, shortly before the U.S. invaded Iraq, which gives a great LEFTIST argument for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and other Middle Eastern tyrants as well. It's well worth checking out (at the top of today's entry.)

But the point of the article is actually to explain why he stopped supporting going to war because of the dismal failure of the Bush Administration to sell the war to NATO and the U.N.

This is almost the exact same view that I had at that time, except that I still supported the war, in part because I thought we would find lots of ugly WMD there. Yeah, that worked out well.

Anyway, reading Dan's stuff today reminded me of something else I was thinking today, while listening to an NPR show about Cindy Sheehan, that mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, who is protesting the war. During this hour-long show, no one called in to say they supported keeping the troops in Iraq. One person even called in to sing a protest song -- ugh. This is one of my major gripes with the left by the way. The continuing obsession with 60's style protests with sappy, limp protest songs. And large puppets, for some reason that I cannot comprehend.

But the point is, that while I continue to think, as Paul Berman has said that "the position of the antiwar movement and of liberals should be that the United States fulfill entirely its obligation to replace Saddam with a decent or even admirable system," it's hard to feel sympathy for the Bush Administration since they basically brought this on themselves by selling Americans a product that is vastly different than what Bush et al have actually provided. This is always a recipe for disaster, even if the actual product delivered is not a bad one. Bush basically sold a war:

1. that would remove nasty WMD from the hands of an unstable dictator -- whoops
2. that would overthrow said dictator, and bring about a democracy that would make life better for Iraqis -- check on overthrow, jury still way out on democracy
3. with no defined price tag (remember how Bush refused to give a figure for fighting the Iraq war during that fiscal year's budget process?) -- no effort to prepare Americans for the very high pricetag of this war
4. with no set timetable for removal of troops -- Bush was, at best, cagey about how long and bloody the occupation would be, and at worst, let people who were clearly speaking for him (Cheney, Richard Perle, Rumsfeld) portray the whole undertaking as relatively easy.

Needless to say, this is not the war that has been delivered. Bush failed to produce anything close to the specs he provided, so of course, people are, shall we say, surprised by the product performance thus far.

"Sweet Neocon"?! Sweet Jesus.

2005-08-11T12:44:00.000-04:00

Mick Jagger has written a new song criticizing the Bush Administration's foreign policy. It's called "Sweet Neocon." <\hack hack> Sorry, got a bit of a cough.

Steven Vincent

2005-08-10T17:16:00.000-04:00

I didn't know much about Steven Vincent, the freelance journalist and blogger who was recently murdered in Basra. Possibly in retaliation for his tough reporting on Shia hardliners in Basra. The WBUR show On Point had a great "radio diary" bit "on him today by one of his friends. They also pointed to his blog from Iraq, "In the Red Zone", which is a fascinating read. You get more details about real life in Iraq than you would from the latest suicide bomber story. He was also able to criticize both mindlessly patriotic Americans and mindlessly anti-American Americans.

This is one of my favorite entries -- it's long but worthwhile. He's talking about bringing his translator, Layla, to meet an American air force captain involved in developing the bidding process for construction projects. Sadly, Layla was also shot in the attack on Vincent, and is still in the hospital in critical condition.

I'd wanted to introduce Layla to the Gary Cooper side of America, and I felt I'd succeeded. Instead of the evasive, over-subtle, windy Iraqi, fond of theory and abstraction, here was a to-the-point Yank, rolling up his sleeves with a can-do spirit of fair play and doing good. "I want to have a positive effect on this country's future," the Captain averred. "For example, whenever I learn of a contracting firm run by women, I put it at the top of my list for businesses I want to consider for future projects." I felt proud of my countryman; you couldn't ask for a more sincere guy.

Layla, however, flashed a tight, cynical smile. "How do you know," she began, "that the religious parties haven't put a woman's name on a company letterhead to win a bid? Maybe you are just funneling money to extremists posing as contractors." Pause. The Captain looked confused. "Religious parties? Extremists?"

Oh boy. Maa salaama Gary Cooper, as Layla and I gave our man a quick tutorial about the militant Shiites who have transformed once free-wheeling Basra into something resembling Savonarola's Florence. The Captain seemed taken aback, having, as most Westerners--especially the troops stationed here--little idea of what goes on in the city. "I'll have to take this into consideration..." scratching his head, "I certainly hope none of these contracts are going to the wrong people." Not for the first time, I felt I was living in a Graham Greene novel, this about about a U.S. soldier--call it The Naive American--who finds what works so well in Power Point presentations has unpredictable results when applied to realities of Iraq. Or is that the story of our whole attempt to liberate this nation?

Collecting himself, "But should we really get involved in choosing one political group over another?" the Captain countered. "I mean, I've always believed that we shouldn't project American values onto other cultures--that we should let them be. Who is to say we are right and they are wrong?"

And there it was, the familiar Cultural-Values-Are-Relative argument, surprising though it was to hear it from a military man. But that, too, I realized, was part of American Naiveté: the belief, evidently filtering down from ivy-league academia to Main Street, U.S.A., that our values are no better (and usually worse) than those of foreign nations; that we have no right to judge "the Other;" and that imposing our way of life on the world is the sure path to the bleak morality of Empire (cue the Darth Vader theme).

But Layla would have none of it. "No, believe me!" she exclaimed, sitting forward on her stool. "These religious parties are wrong! Look at them, their corruption, their incompetence, their stupidity! Look at the way they treat women! How can you say you cannot judge them? Why shouldn't your apply your own cultural values?"

It was a moment I wish every muddle-headed college kid and Western-civilization-hating leftist could have witnessed: an Air Force Captain quoting chapter and verse from the new American Gospel of Multiculturalism, only to have a flesh and blood representative of "the Other" declare that he was incorrect, that discriminations and judgment between cultures are possible--necessary--especially when it comes to the absolutely unacceptable way Middle Eastern Arabs treat women. And though Layla would not have pushed the point this far, I couldn't resist. "You know, Captain," I said, "sometimes American values are just--better."

It's Official: Yankee fans really are dumber than Red Sox fans

2005-08-10T12:38:00.000-04:00

It's a close call, what with the Red Sox fans who think it's more fun to catch a ball than to have your home team get an important out...but 18-year old Scott Harper of Westchester, NY has now provided the definitive proof that Yankees fans really are dumber than Red Sox fans. Yesterday, Harper jumped from the upper decks in Yankee Stadium onto the netting behind home plate. According to this NY1 News story,

"Witnesses say Harper just jumped over the railing during the bottom of the eighth inning after being overheard saying "you think the net will hold me"? "

Uh yeah.

Group Audition for "What Not to Wear"?

2005-08-10T12:19:00.000-04:00

No, just members of the Bush Cabinet in their casual weekend wear (accompanying WaPo story here, probably requiring sign in). Geez, have you ever seen a more unimaginatively and dumpily dressed bunch? Actually, this is pretty typical D.C.-wear, I'm sorry to say, as a native of the D.C. area.

More disturbingly, what's with the halo over Bush's head? I know conservatives think Bush is infallible, but this is ridiculous.

Funny headlines

2005-08-09T10:43:00.000-04:00

As I've been too busy to post lately, and still don't have time right now, I'll just put up a link passed along to me by the fiance: this is a real headline, apparently.

What's Going on with Karl Rove and Valerie Plame?

2005-08-04T09:11:00.000-04:00

I have been trying my darndest to follow the Valerie Plame/Robert Novak/Judith Miller/Karl Rove et al scandal -- and lord knows I'd love to find Rove exposed as the reborn Lee Atwater that he appears to be -- but I just can't make heads or tails of most of it. Who did what, was it illegal or improper, is it a government scandal or a press scandal or a .... I just don't know. Of course, I'm also unable to follow the complicated plots of those movie thrillers where people are double or triple-crossing each other, so maybe this scandal is totally clear to someone a bit smarter. I probably would have had trouble figuring out why the Washington Post was so obsessed with a minor break-in at a posh Washington, D.C. hotel... It does seem as though there are an awful lot of "Clintonian-style" defenses being used, which is strange since I thought Republicans were returning honor and integrity to the government...

No Rick Santorum?

2005-07-27T13:48:00.000-04:00

Boo! Rick Santorum has decided not to run for president. (Tip to "The Has-Been" over at Slate.) It's so much more fun when crazy people run for president. Like Alan Keyes, for example. He was easily the best debater of the Republican presidential candidates; he was seemingly the only one able to respond to questions extemporaneously, rather than just reciting canned answers. Of course, he was also completely insane.

Mitt Romney Forgets Which State He's Governing

2005-07-26T16:26:00.000-04:00

For those of you waiting for me to complain about Republicans, wait no more. Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney -- he of the strong white teeth and perfect hair-do -- just vetoed a bill passed by the state legislature that would expand access to the so-called morning after pill. I actually voted for this guy, because, at the time, I was tired of having to vote for uninspiring Democrats (see Al Gore) and because Romney didn't seem all that bad. Massachusetts was facing a major fiscal crisis with the downturn in the economy, tax revenues were way down, and having a reasonably competent business man as governor seemed like a good idea. He also made a good case for being pro-environment, a promise that he has actually done reasonably well in fulfilling. And, while I had no illusions that I would be likely to agree with a Mormon Republican on social issues, I figured he would be limited in his ability to do any real damage, partly because Massachusetts isn't Utah, and partly because a governor just doesn't do that much to set policy on major social issues.

That has proved basically true, as his completely ineffectual opposition to gay marriage demonstrated. However, in the past year, Romney has basically stopped governing Massachusetts in favor of running for president of a political party that likes to use Massachusetts as the poster child for all that's evil in the world (see Rick Santorum). So he decides to veto a bill that was passed by an overwhelming majority of the state legislators. It would be nice if he actually tried to look after the interests of Massachusetts, rather the interests of South Carolina's Republican primary voters.

I'll be keeping an eye for out for Romney's activities as he continues to operate as Shadow Governor.

Bringing some much needed credibility to the anti-war movement

2005-07-25T14:29:00.000-04:00

Jane Fonda is going to start a bus tour calling for the troops to come home from Iraq. Can you imagine a more ill-conceived idea than this? Personally, I don't get the continued animosity toward Jane Fonda. As far as I can tell, a silly actress did a very stupid thing a long time ago. I don't know why so many people are still so burned up about it. But they are, and she's particularly reviled among military veterans. This almost sounds like a joke -- maybe something a Republican would dream up to make the left look bad.

Hey, I Got Noticed!

2005-07-23T13:22:00.000-04:00

I don't know how it works, but somehow Technorati tracks blog links to Salon stories, and it picked up old Bellhorn at bat talking about that John Roberts story. Also mentions this "Compare and Contrast" post on a blog called Fagistan (good name). This guy also notices how unpleasant it is to have a Black Seat and Lady's Seat on the Supreme Court. Maybe he'll notice me now that I've linked to him; according to Technorati, he has 23 links while I have zero.

Do I sound desperate to be noticed? Ok. Because I am, you know.

Is John Roberts too white and male?

2005-07-22T17:41:00.000-04:00

In this Salon article "Not Another White Man!" Farhad Manjoo argues that Bush should have nominated a woman or minority candidate to replace Sandra Day O'Connor, to keep the Supreme Court from becoming too homogenous. I agree with his point that, sometimes, symbolism is important, and that it's disturbing when an "entire branch of federal government [is] ruled by a body composed of only one woman and just one member of a racial minority." However, he's being short-sighted here, and a little naive about the political climate. Bush is likely to have the chance to nominate another justice, quite possibly the Chief Justice. And, as Manjoo acknowledges, Bush has an excellent record of appointing women and minorities to high office. But Manjoo thinks that, for his first justice appointment, "diversity" should have been Bush's first priority. But this makes no sense. Bush's base has not been busily taking over the federal executive and legislative branches over the past decade so they can have more women and minorities on the court (although I don't think they object to that). They want a solid conservative like Scalia and Thomas. That's their reward, and that's clearly Bush's first priority.

And speaking of Thomas, I was annoyed when the first President Bush -- that's George H.W. -- nominated Clarence Thomas, a black man, to replace Thurgood Marshall, the coincidentally black Supreme Court justice. Particularly laughable was Bush Sr.'s assertion at the nomination announcement that Thomas was "the most qualified person in the country." Wow. Since Thurgood Marshall was made the first black Supreme Court justice, presidents had had a chance to nominate new justices nine times, without once nominating a black one. Yet, when the only black judge retired, the person at the top of this supposed List of People Most Qualified to Become Supreme Court Justice was...another black guy! Imagine the odds!

The problem I had with this was not with the intent to ensure that the Court continued to represent (sort of) the American population, but that the implication seemed to be, this is YOUR slot, black people. And you just get the one. What I'd like to see is serious consideration of all types of people -- minority, female, Jewish, whatever -- every time, not just when one of those "special spots" opens up.

So I have no problem with Bush choosing not to select a woman and send the message that "this is the chick judge slot." Assuming that the next time around he seriously considers candidates who are not white and male. And given his apparent love of Alberto Gonzales and desire to play to the Hispanic vote, there's a good chance he will.

It's Our Anniversary

2005-07-19T16:03:00.000-04:00

Not me and my fiance. Me and my dog, Holly. Two years ago I became a member of the quirky, and just plain weird, Club of Dog Owners.

Holly, who is a fun and cute West Highland terrier, is actually my mother's dog. My mom can no longer look after Holly, so, rather than give her away, I took her in. My fiance very kindly agreed to this arrangement, even though his idea of a proper dog is one that can leap into the air to catch Frisbees. If you throw a Frisbee at Holly, it'll just bounce off her nose while she gives you a puzzled look.

Anyway, it's been interesting to join this club, which is filled with an awful lot of people who seem to have too much time on their hands and an unhealthy obsession with their dogs. For example, check out this fun article by Emily Joffe in Slate on a weird new pet trend: canine freestyle, or dancing with your dog. Yes, people and their dogs, dancing together. According to the Canine Federation website:

Canine Freestyle is a choreographed performance with music, illustrating the training and joyful relationship of a dog and handler team. Watch for the dog to be moving to the beat of the music and look for the bond between the dog and handler.

Or take a recent Boston Globe society page story about a local foodie hot spot that now holds dog and owner cocktail events. They offer such dog treats as a dogmopolitan (lamb broth with beet juice) for $1.50. And people are actually going to these events. Me, I ain't paying $1.50 for a dog treat when Holly spends most of our walks truffling for dirt and wood chips and other mysterious detritus.

And yesterday, during the afternoon dog walk, I chatted with a woman is a dog massager. Yes, she goes to people's homes to massage their dogs, apparently to cleanse the dogs' lymphatic system and keep their joints limber.

I don't know, maybe city-dwelling dog owners are weirder than suburban or rural ones. It's a much bigger decision to have a dog in the city. It's not like you look outside and say, hey, we've got a big yard, let's buy a dog to put in it. No, for us city dwellers, owning a dog takes a bit more effort. Three times a day, my dog and I troop down the four flights of stairs in our building so that Holly can take care of her doggie business. And you can't just skip one of these walks when you're not in the mood. So, if you're going to make that kind of commitment to an animal, you have to be pretty darn committed. Or possibly, you just should be committed.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming

2005-07-18T16:11:00.000-04:00

More evidence of how disturbingly obtuse Hollywood liberals can be. Apparently, the screenwriter for Spielberg's remake of War of the Worlds thinks that the invading aliens can be seen as representing the U.S. military, while the besieged citizens of earth represent Iraqis. (Tip: This story comes via Libertas, a conservative website and Mickey Kaus.)

I don't share Libertas' outrage at the insult to the U.S. miliary -- in fact, I'm tired of this idea that anything anti-U.S. military policy should be taken as a direct insult to actual individuals in the military. But I am disturbed by the continuing moral obtuseness demonstrated by outspoken Hollywood liberals. Here's a guy who apparently feels strongly about opposing forces of evil and oppression, so he casts his eye about the world and sees...Iran's Islamic fundamentalists working to acquire nuclear weapons...moves along to terrorist-training camps sending young men to blow up civilians on subways and buses...ok, no sign of recognition yet...and then alights on the U.S. military overthrowing a dictator, and then struggling -- however badly -- to establish some kind of free, democratic, stable state. And he decides, aha, here is the force of evil I've been seeking to destroy.

It's bizarre. And deeply sad.

So please, ignorant Hollywood liberals, do us a favor and just be quiet. Please. I beg of you. We just can't take any more of the stupidity, wilful ignorance and moral blindness.

No, I am not a Republican

2005-07-18T10:36:00.000-04:00

I've been told recently that my blog entries suggest I'm turning Republican. Not true, and a news story today makes an excellent "exhibit number one" for why I'm not and won't become one. From the Associated Press:

A Colorado congressman told a radio show host that the U.S. could "take out" Islamic holy sites if Muslim fundamentalist terrorists attacked the country with nuclear weapons.

As soon as I saw this, I thought, hmm, bet that's a Republican. And indeed it was: Republican congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado (nope, never heard of him either). While not all Republicans are this offensive and stupid, people who are inclined to make these kind of dumb ass comments tend to identify as Republicans. And statements like these are what an awful lot of Republicans say behind closed doors. I've heard Republicans, when they think no "outsiders" are listening, refer to Muslims as towelheads. During the recent Rick Durbin flap, outraged Republicans writing on conservative blogs wittily dubbed the the senator "Turbin Durbin," revealing themselves to be not only racist but illiterate!

While obviously not all Republicans are like this, you can tell something about the differences between the two parties by the fact that belligerent and racist yahoos like this don't sign up to be Democrats. This is one major reason why I bang on so much about how liberals and Democrats need to toughen up on foreign policy. The fact is, as long as liberals refuse to regonize any legitimate use of American military power, there is no credible alternative for most Americans who do want a strong, forceful foreign policy. The only people offering them that are Republicans, who as we see when they inadvertantly reveal their true selves, are not going to uphold the kind of standards for decency and respect for other cultures (NOT for terrorists, for Muslims generally) that liberals rightly uphold.

The other shoe drops...

2005-07-16T11:06:00.000-04:00

It only took four years, but the other shoe finally dropped on flagship WBUR talk show "The Connection." It's being cancelled as of August 5th, its timeslot filled by moving "On Point" from its evening slot. The show never fully recovered from the loss of its founders, Chris Lydon and his producer Mary McGrath, in my opinion. Dick Gordon was a perfectly competent host -- a wide-ranging intellect and fine interviewer -- but, myself, I never warmed to him. His style was a little too, well, Canadian: a bit aloof and milquetoast-y and, at times, vaguely smug. He represents the worst side of NPR hosts in this respect. I used to argue with friends who said Chris Lydon drove them crazy...that this is part of what makes him good. He's opinionated and passionate about things, such that he sometimes gets on your nerves. But he's not dull. I wonder if Chris is pleased that he was finally vindicated?

You talking about Boston? Boston, Massachusetts?

2005-07-16T10:48:00.000-04:00

The outrage (real or manufactured) continues over Sen. Rick Santorum's column blaming liberal Bostonians for the Catholic Church pedophilia problem here. Apparently, Santorum said that the problem was partly caused by the city's "sexual license" and "sexual freedom," which nurtured an environment where sexual abuse would occur. Huh? Sexual license and sexual freedom? In Boston? Where, exactly? And, I mean, I'd like the senator to be specific. Give me addresses. And business hours, if he's got them.

Supreme Court nomination

2005-07-12T13:42:00.000-04:00

I know I'll be accused of rolling over for Bush, but I think that Democrats and liberals should just get used to the fact that Bush is going to nominate someone that he believes will be a reliable conservative voice on the court, and get over it. He is not going to pick a moderate, like Sandra Day O'Connor. He is not going to pick someone that is vague on Roe v Wade, because he really owes his Christian activist base and doesn't want to rile them up by picking someone like Alberto Gonzalez. I know, I could look stupid with this prediction, as Bush keeps talking about Gonzalez, but I don't think he'll pick him to replace O'Connor. Not as the first Supreme Court justice Bush has been able to nominate. Now, as a Rehnquist replacement...

But Bush isn't going to go all cautious or centrist on us, not with a Republican Senate -- why would he? And he hasn't shown any inclination to operate as a centrist to avoid media or public criticism. You have to give him credit for that: he doesn't hold back on pursuing bold policies for fear that some people won't like him.

So, look he's going to do, there's not a lot we can do to stop it, and frankly, I don't really know why we should. I don't understand interpreting the Senate's "advise and consent" role as giving the Senate power to stop the president nominating people to government posts or the judiciary who share his ideological perspective. I mean, the guy won the election; he gets to pick people who agree with him on Roe v Wade to sit on the Supreme Court, wouldn't you think? (And I won't even start with why I am not so sure it would be such a bad thing for him to pick an anti-Roe judge anyway....)

I admit, I am not basing this opinion on any knowledge of how the Senate historically has adopted its advisory role, or knowledge of what the founding fathers actually wrote about this. It just seems like common sense. Of course, the founding fathers originally had the loser of the presidential election becoming vice president, which totally defies common sense, so hey, what do I know?

"No" to Oliver Stone

2005-07-09T11:49:00.000-04:00

I agree with Mickey Kaus about some things occasionally -- including today's entry about the truly horrendous idea of having Oliver Stone direct a movie dealing with September 11th. Kaus rightly points out the likelihood that Stone will insert some lefty conspiracy-theory type element, given his history with the JFK movie. Kaus doesn't mention Stone's execrable stroking of fashionable communist dictator Fidel Castro in "Looking For Fidel." Check out this interview with Stone about his controversial documentary. Particularly despicable is his blase description of his interview with eight prisoners, arranged by Castro, where Stone asks them whether they're being treated well and seems satisfied that they are being honest in their reassurances of acceptable treatment. The interviewer, who is trying hard to get Stone to question what he experienced in Cuba, starts this exchange:

ALB: Did it strike you as interesting that at one point in the scene with the prisoners, Castro turned to the prisoners' defense lawyers, who just happened to be there, and he says, "I urge you to do your best to reduce the sentences"?

OS: I love that. I thought that was hilarious. Those guys just popped up.

ALB: Is there a show-trial element here?

OS: Yeah. I thought that was funny, I did--the prosecutor and Fidel admonishing them, to make sure they worked hard. There was that paternalism. I mean "father knows best," as opposed to totalitarianism. It's paternalism, that's what I meant. It's a Latin thing.

Replace "Castro" with, say, "Ceaucescu" and you can see how disgusting -- rather than funny -- this scene is.

Of course, Stone shares this inexcusable mythologizing of the Cuban revolution with many others in Hollywood. As a counter to the dreamy, picturesque portrait of Che Guevara painted by "The Motorcycle Diaries," a movie which was widely hailed in Hollywood, the New Republic has a fascinating article on Che ($$$), describing how he, not Castro, was the Stalinist of the Cuban revolution. Probably old news to people who know about this stuff, but I know little about Che, other than that he took a good picture and has become a popular revolutionary symbol.

I do remember the Hollywood folks swooning over "The Motorcycle Diaries" at the Academy Awards, undoubtedly because they loved the revolutionary spirit of Che Guevara -- who, it appears, would have had each and every one of these rich, pampered stars summarily executed or, if they were lucky, sent to concentration camps. This is one reason why I am so intolerant of celebrities lecturing the public about politics: Hollywood seems to be this little bubble which has no contact with the real world and yet encourages its residents to expound on how to solve the world's problems.

London bombing

2005-07-07T11:28:00.000-04:00

There's not much I can say about the London bombing other than the obvious: that it's horrible, and I express my solidarity with the English, as they expressed theirs with the U.S. on September 11th. There may be a few who will blame Bush and Blair for this attack, but I think that, for most, it's a reminder of the barbaric ideology that we are fighting against. It's also a reminder of how important it is not to indulge in lazy or self-indulgent characterizations of these Islamic fundamentalist terrorists as "freedom fighters" or advocates for some reasonable political cause. I believe that al-Qaeda has miscalculated yet again if they think the response to this incident will be a retreat from Iraq or from the broader fight against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.

London in 2012

2005-07-06T12:27:00.000-04:00

Quite a week for Tony Blair. First the G8, now London has been selected as the 2012 host of the Summer Olympics or, as I like to call them, porn for women. (Oops, I hope my English fiance isn't reading this.) My only question is, does it make sense to hold the Summer Olympics in a country that doesn't really have a summer? At least not as most of us understand it. You know, with sunshine and heat and all.

How Not to Fight World Poverty

2005-07-01T15:46:00.000-04:00

Live8 (LiveEight?) takes place tomorrow, and world leaders are gearing up for the G8 summit, so there's lots of discussion about how to end the terrible poverty that has gripped much of Africa for so long. Well, honestly, I don't know, but I do feel pretty certain that many of the simplistic solutions bandied about by idealistic activists are not the answer. You know, the sort of, for just the price of a daily cup of Starbucks coffee, we could feed someone in Africa. Or, for a fraction of what we spend on the military, we could eradicate world poverty. These are the sorts of conscience-tugging lines that impress you when you're young, but you really should know better once you're past 30.

A really good, and frankly depressing, article in the New Republic offers a brief analysis of some of the current anti-poverty campaigns. Particularly interesting is this assessment of the impact of LiveAid:

...one has only to consider Geldof's previous endeavor, Live Aid, which raised $100 million for relief of the Ethiopian famine in 1985. It's an open question whether Live Aid did more harm or good. As David Rieff explains in the British magazine Prospect, organizations involved in delivering relief became complicit in the Ethiopian government's Stalinist program of forced agricultural collectivization and relocation, which helped create the disaster. Today, Ethiopia is significantly poorer than it was 20 years ago, and, as David Plotz explained in this 2003 dispatch, perpetually dependent on charity. This is, sadly, the story of aid to sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. While the developed world has contributed more than $500 billion over the last 40 years, Africans have continued to fall farther behind.

What a bummer. I loved LiveAid (still think U2 was the best thing about it), and was into the whole idea.

Of course, talking about this stuff is what tends to get me labelled as a "conservative" by my old friends...but it's not "conservative" to want to be effective at solving problems. Anyway, ironically, this article says that the Bush Administration's Millennium Challenge Account is a really good idea, but that it has been woefully underfunded and inept at spending what money it does have.

Christopher Hitchens and I agree

2005-07-01T10:27:00.000-04:00

Perhaps I was a little rash in saying that I "used to like" Hitchens. Mostly I'm just frustrated with him because I hold him to a higher standard of moral and intellectual clarity, based on his willingness to call out rigid old lefties like Noam Chomsky or Katha Pollitt. But here is Hitchens explaining why it makes no sense to call Blair a poodle:

The commonest liberal and Tory jeer against Tony Blair—that he is George Bush's "poodle"—is self-evidently false. Far from being a ditto to Washington, it was Blair who leaned on Clinton and Albright to intervene in the Balkans, putting an end to the long and disgusting Tory appeasement of Slobodan Milosevic. Without asking for any American approval, Blair also decided to stand by Britain's treaty with Sierra Leone and to send troops to put down the barbaric invasion of the hand-loppers and diamond-dealers, based in Charles Taylor's Liberia, who were among other things the regional allies of al-Qaida. In 1999, when Bush was still an isolationist governor of Texas, Blair made a speech in Chicago pointing out that Saddam Hussein's defiance of international law made a future confrontation with him inevitable. After Sept. 11, 2001, Blair told Bush that he would send ground troops to Afghanistan even if the United States would not.

So there.

Tony Blair, Poodle?

2005-07-01T09:56:00.000-04:00

Is there any more boring and banal idea than the notion that Tony Blair is George Bush's poodle? So many Iraq war opponents enjoy repeating this dumb idea, which seems to strike them as witty and insightful. I think it actually reflects an absolute utter incomprehension that someone might look at the same facts and draw a different conclusion. I'll admit, I'm biased, as Blair's speech immediately following the September 11 attacks made a huge impression, and I'll always feel grateful to him for it. He demonstrated that he immediately and fully "got it," that this was not justified blowback for bad US policies or a cry for help from the oppressed, but rather a clear statement from an anti-liberal, anti-secular, and anti-democratic political movement. And, I might add, Blair gave this inspiring speech before Bush had managed to gather himself together (although Bush recovered with his excellent speech before Congress later that week).

It seems obvious to me that Blair really believes in the fight against Islamo-fascism (to use Christopher Hitchens' term). Now, whether he has been given sufficient reward from the Bush Administration for his support is unclear, but the idea that he went along with it all as Bush's lapdog is absurd. It should have been clear to anyone who paid attention to his response to September 11 that he was committing himself fully to the fight against the war on the West by Islamic fundamentalists.

I used to really like Christopher Hitchens

2005-06-30T13:20:00.000-04:00

Is Christopher Hitchens actually stupid or he is just faking it?

Shortly after September 11th, I became enamored of Hitchens, as he took it as his calling to fight the far left's reflexively anti-American response to the attack itself and the Bush Administration's response. He notably took up this cause through his "Contrarian" column for the Nation, until he quit because, as he memorably put it, "[The Nation] had become an echo chamber for those who were more afraid of John Ashcroft than Osama Bin Laden." An accusation, by the way, with which I agree. And, as that quote shows, when he's good, Hitchens has the ability to cut to a central point concisely, elegantly, and entertainingly. I even cornered the poor guy on an airplane going from D.C. to Boston, blabbering about how much I liked his writing and his public opposition to the Nation's mindlessly anti-war position.

But that was then. The Afghanistan war was a no-brainer, as far as I'm concerned, but Iraq really isn't, even though I did (and mostly still do) support it. But given how many things have gone wrong, even strong supporters of the war would have to look at aspects of how it's been carried out and question the Bush Administration's policies. But for some reason, not Hitchens, and it's been disappointing to see someone that smart debase his intellect by acting as though the discussion now is still as simple as it was immediately after September 11th. His on-going theme is that critics of the Iraq war are exactly the same as the Nation's -- nevermind that Iraq war critics (as opposed to war opponents) now include the likes of Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria and Andrew Sullivan.

Hitchens has picked a single theme for all discussions of the post-September 11th war on terror and he's holding onto it like a dog with a bone. No matter what the issue under discussion -- sufficient troop levels, Abu Ghraib -- he's got his theme and he'll force the facts into it. Unfortunately, he's also smart enough to realize that sometimes that just doesn't work -- explain again how the fight against Islamo-fascism is helped by publicly exposed prisoner torture by US interrogators? -- so he focuses with a laser-like intensity on a particular aspect of the issue which will still support his pre-existing theme. Of course, since most issues have some level of complexity -- for example, using torture is bad, but the US is clearly not the equivalent of the Nazis or Saddam Hussein -- this will work.

His latest work of pedantry? An attack on "anti-war" types (his description) who accuse the Republican architects and supporters of the Iraq war of hypocrisy for not sending their sons to Iraq. Hitchens argues that people don't "send" their sons to war; their children are adults who make these decisions for themselves. Well, yeah, but he's off on a tangent while ignoring the central point. While it's obviously true that parents can't force their children to enlist, parents do work hard to influence what choices their children make after high school. Particularly the upper classes, which is where the Republican politicians who create and support the war primarily reside. How many of their kids ended up at college, do you suppose? How many ended up at prestigious colleges? I'll bet most. Unless he's just impossibly stupid, Hitchens knows darn well that these parents would have used as much influence as possible to make sure their kids ended up at college -- which, by definition, also means they were not urging their kids to serve their country by enlisting. But so what? We've got a volunteer military, so who cares? It only matters because Republicans are constantly grandstanding on the issue of the military, making sure they always praise military service as the highest and greatest good, and then using this exaltation of US soldiers to deflect criticism of their actual record on the war. So it's reasonable to see if their private actions support their self promotion as the party that reveres the military, and one way to figure this out is to see whether they've urged their children to join up. And frankly, for most of them, their private actions don't support their public statements. But Hitchens surely realizes that, right? It just doesn't fit his pre-determined message.

Feedback

2005-06-29T11:13:00.000-04:00

First, I have to admit: I didn't actually watch the speech. I spent the evening at the local pub's trivia quiz and didn't get home until after 9:00. And we didn't even win (why don't we know where Boutros-Boutros Ghali is from and who the heck is Thomas Cromwell...).

I did read the the transcript, so am commenting on that -- and assuming Bush didn't stray from the script for some of his famous extemporaneous speech-making. Hee hee, just a little humor to break things up.

Anyway, not too surprisingly, the parts I liked best were the sections where he got a little specific about the next steps for establishing security and easing the responsiblilty for security from US to Iraqi troops.

I particularly liked his argument against timelines. I agree with it already, but I thought it was a good example of making an argument concretely and concisely, like you actually want to engage your audience, rather than talk at them with vague but high-flying rhetoric.

Otherwise, it seemed not very inspired, but I am missing out on the actual delivery. However, I'm not sure he was trying to convince the likes of me. On NPR yesterday, someone commented that a summer evening speech might not attract too many viewers, except for the true believers. Which suggests that perhaps Bush was only trying to buck up his base, not convince the wider public. And based on what some right-wing bloggers are saying, the speech may have done the trick. This blog entry from PoliPundit (as linked through Salon's Daou Report) was a good example of the kind of content-free twaddle that gets high marks among many in the Republican base. These folks may well have been thrilled by the speech, and that may mean it's achieved the Administration's goal.

Tonight's speech, continued

2005-06-28T12:41:00.000-04:00

What is really needed is an honest assessment by the President of where we are and a thoughtful, nuanced but well-argued case for staying the course. Unfortunately, I have no faith that Bush can do this. This Administration is simply allergic to admitting it's not all knowing and all powerful. And it seems to truly believe that the best way to assuage the public's fears is to pat us all the head and say, tut tut now, don't you worry your little heads about these grown-up matters, we'll take care of everything. Just go back to shopping or whatever it is you little people do. Daddy and Uncle Dick will take care of everything.

I'm tired of being talked down to by this Administation and frustrated at their inability to properly defend their own foreign policy. I don't think you'd see so much anxiety about Iraq if the Administration had been more upfront about what to expect. You know that cliche about how to perform at work: underpromise and overperform? The Administration has continued to overpromise and underperform (based on the expectations set by their promises) on Iraq, so no wonder people are frustrated.

What we really need from the President is strength, but strength supported and tempered by an honest evaluation of where we are and how difficult the path ahead may be. If we get that, though, it'll be a first. I predict more platitudes ("the insurgents hate freedom"), banalities ("I think about Iraq every day"), and unsupported assurances that everything will be all right.

But we'll see...maybe after this rant, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Tonight's speech

2005-06-28T12:40:00.000-04:00

Important speech tonight for Bush, as he tries to ease fears about how things are going in Iraq and convince the public that we need to keep our troops there. Unfortunately, the difficulties in Iraq -- the fact that the insurgency continues apace in spite of the January elections, efforts by newly-trained Iraqi forces to help quell the insurgency, and Dick Cheney's insulting predictions -- is leading some politicians to grandstand on Iraq. Calling to remove US troops at this point is both stupid and cowardly, and I wish Democrats would stop suggesting it. And the Republican "freedom fries" guy, who first mindlessly supported the war because the president said so, and who now mindlessly calls to abandon Iraq before we're done with our responsibilities there. For a better analysis than I can offer of the problems that would likely ensue if we left too soon, see here (hint: think Lebanon).

Wasting Time, Sitting Still

2005-06-28T11:32:00.000-04:00

Check out this Flash Mind Reader (tip from Andrew Sullivan). It worked for me three times. Why, why, why?! Anyone smarter than me care to figure it out? I did notice a few interesting features, but won't mention them so as not to influence anyone trying it out.

Good news from today's Supreme Court decision

2005-06-27T10:45:00.000-04:00

No Ten Commandments in Courthouses

Single displays of the Ten Commandments have no place on courthouse property. Unlike, say, the frieze of the ten commandments found in the Supreme Court building itself -- along with depictions of Hammurabi and Confucius. That display clearly is meant to depict the history of the law and legal systems. What baffles me is why Christian activists are so hot to put the ten commandments up in courthouses anyway. Perhaps I'll start a campaign to tack up the U.S. constitution in churches across the country...

A little love for Bellhorn, please

2005-06-26T19:00:00.000-04:00

No not me, the namesake of this blog. Mark Bellhorn just helped the Red Sox complete a sweep of the Philadelphia Phillies, with a homerun, three RBIs and four runs scored today. For a few who question Bellhorn's contribution to the Red Sox, Bill James, baseball stats guru and Boston Red Sox consultant, explains it in today's Boston Globe. And if you don't care about baseball or the Red Sox, why are you still reading this?!

Blogger myth: We Ousted Trent Lott

2005-06-24T16:16:00.000-04:00

Boy, you wait a day or two to publish a post and the news cycle has moved so fast, the topic is old news, and by a lot. Well, I'll publish this anyway, because I still feel like it, even if already no one can remember who Dick Durbin is, what he said, and why he apologized for it. During that little debacle -- remember that? it's so two days ago -- many bloggers wrote something to the effect of:

"If Trent Lott was forced to resign as Senate Majority Leader because of his offensive rhapsodizing on pre-desegregation days, why shouldn't Cong. Dick Durbin receive the same kind of treatment?" (See here, here, and here.)

Hey, people in blogland: Please stop promulgating this fantasy that Trent Lott was ousted because Republican senators were shocked, simply shocked by his comments about Strom Thurmond. I know that many bloggers were offended, and sincerely thought he should resign for that reason, but for Republicans in Congress, it was just a convenient excuse to get rid of someone they had been itching to get rid of for a while (and look like civil rights advocates in the process). Why? In spite of Lott's reputation in the general public as one of the most troglodytic senators, he was disliked by other Republicans for being too soft on the Democrats. Republicans wanted to see the Senate work more like the House -- that is, highly partisan, hardball political warfare, with the controlling party trampling the minority party. That's what Bill Frist's mission was, which is why we've seen Frist attempt to behave more like Tom "the Hammer" Delay, and why Republicans are so mad at Frist for not being that good at it. (Never mind that Senate rules simply make it impossible for the Senate to operate like the House...but then, that's why the Republicans wanted to change the rules on filibusters, isn't it?)

Kelo vs. City of New London

2005-06-23T17:25:00.000-04:00

It's Supreme Court season, which I think is lots of fun -- fun in a policy-wonkish sort of way, that is. I mean, it's rare for any government action to happen so quickly and have such a dramatic, and clearly understood, effect on American life. Congress has been haggling over its "energy policy" since 2001, and still hasn't passed it, and lord knows when Iraq will ever be a stable, democratic state, but by god, from this day forward, governments can take private property and "redistribute" it to another private party if that private party's use of the property would provide greater economic benefit to the public. As I understand it. Which is to say, not much at all at this point. Still, on the face of it, this idea sounds crazy. Of course, you always have to be careful to react to the LEGAL reasoning, not the POLICY implications, in Supreme Court decisions. So I have no idea yet whether I agree with the majority's reasoning in deciding this case. Still, the decision seems most curious, if you think about what it will mean in practice.

"Romney Exploring Run for President"

2005-06-21T12:47:00.000-04:00

In other news, water is wet.

A Modern Renaissance in Somerville

2005-06-21T09:52:00.000-04:00

Two Russian artists living in Somerville (that's a Massachusetts suburb outside Boston for those that don't know it) have turned a Masonic Lodge into a spectacular living art museum. The museum is actually their home, and sadly, is not open to visitors, but the pictures of it are gorgeous. They've called it a Museum of Modern Renaissance and say they want to help bring about a modern renaissance to "bring beauty and humanity back to society." This sounds like a good idea, and since the world appears to be passing through a phase of religious extremism, perhaps we will see a new renaissance develop as a reaction against this phase of narrow-minded, fanatical religiosity.

2005-06-20T14:05:00.000-04:00

Is there a more over-rated political commentator than Mickey Kaus? Today he offers a jaw-droppingly contorted interpretation of the Bolton nomination fight on the Hill. Here's the set up: An article in yesterday's Washington Post says that the State Department is moving forward with several policies that had suffered during John Bolton's tenure there -- policies that would be favored by Bolton foes, such as a deal to prevent Russian nuclear material from getting into the hands of terrorists. The article suggests that Bolton was the stopper on this and other arms control efforts, some of which were even supported by the president, and his absence is allowing the State Department to make progress. Obvious conclusion: Bolton was not always a force for good at State. But this is not what Kaus, mental contortionist extraordinaire, sees. No, he sees another chance to blast Democrats, this time for being hypocrites because they are focused on opposing Bolton's nomination to the U.N., rather than admitting that his nomination has had a positive effect on arms control policies that many Dems favor. Yes, that's right, according to Kaus, those lousy Democrats should be praising the Bush Administration's policy of solving a problem at the State Department by making him the U.N.'s problem. What brilliance! If only the Democrats were unpartisan enough to admit this!

Fox News

2005-06-15T10:07:00.000-04:00

On his site, Andrew Sullivan is having a discussion with some readers about Fox News - specifically, an appalling fawning interview that Sean Hannity conducted with Dick Cheney. One reader commented that he/she was not so much surprised that Hannity was blatantly partisan, which is his avowed purpose, but that he didn't even "ask ... the questions to which conservatives would like some answers." Which begs the question: Based on what Fox News is actually like, who says conservatives are interested in having questions answered by their news and information sources?

Ok, but more seriously, I'm well aware of US conservatives' confirmed belief that the mainstream media is unrepentantly liberal, and I think there is some validity to some of these arguments some of the time. For example, I do think that newspaper journalists are more likely to be socially liberal, but middle-of-the-road on economic issues (I'm sure I've seen studies indicating this). And NPR, to which I am ridiculously addicted, features reporters, hosts and analysts that tend the same way, I believe (this is based more on my observation and instinct than any objective studies).

But the thing that amazes me about Fox News is just how flat out BAD it is. If I were a conservative, I'd be embarrassed to have Fox presented as the conservatives' ideal news outlet. I'll pit my local NPR station, WBUR, against Fox, and WBUR will kick Fox's ass any day of the week and twice on Sundays. NPR is far from perfect - for example, the standard announcer style is too WASPY and bland - but at least it tries to delve deeply into issues and ideas, exploring things beyond just the surface. Contrary to what my conservative friends seem to think, if you're a reasonably intelligent, skeptical consumer of NPR news and information shows, you can come away with an independent opinion about world events. Fox is about nothing more than telling people what they already think and what they want to hear. And doing so in the most embarrassingly pandering way.

Andrew and his conservative reader seem shocked, simply shocked at how bad the Hannity interview is, and wonder if it portends a lowering of standards for conservative journalism. But frankly, it's obvious after watching Fox for 2.5 seconds that it's got nothing to do with serious journalism.

Good Red Sox vs Bad Red Sox

2005-06-08T12:24:00.000-04:00

Yesterday we saw the Red Sox being good and the Red Sox being very bad. In the realm of their actual jobs -- playing and winning baseball games -- they were an embarrassment, playing some of the worst baseball ever seen since, well, since the previous night's game against St. Louis. (Maybe Edgar Renteria convinced his new teammates to lay down and roll over for Renteria's old teammates, to assuage any bad feelings that the Cardinals might have about their role as the minor speed bump on the 2004 Red Sox's road to glory.)

On the other hand, in their secondary role as media stars (and possibly as role models for kids), they were very good. Their appearance on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was actually a little tame and boring in parts, but it was great to see major sports stars sending the message that being gay is not evil or "anti-family". Johnny Damon, easily the most metrosexual Red Sox player, was actually quoted in a San Fransciso paper saying, "If there's a gay guy in baseball, we have to help him out." It was fun to see Jason Varitek, the straightest of straight guys, good-humoredly (is that a word?) submitting to a back waxing by a couple of swishy gay guys.

Since professional sports are one of the strongest hold outs against "out of the closet" homosexuality, it's pretty cool to see macho World Series champions sending the message that, while they're not gay, of course, that doesn't mean they can't have fun hanging around with guys who are.

Update on freedom fries

2005-06-07T15:16:00.000-04:00

A propos of an earlier entry about stupid uses of meaningful words:

Apparently one of the instigators behind the renaming of french fries to freedom fries in the U.S. House cafeteria now says that he wishes it had never happened. His turnaround comes because he now thinks we went to war with no justification, not because calling calling french fries "freedom fries" is asinine, but still.

Is Gitmo a Gulag?

2005-06-03T11:08:00.000-04:00

An excellent article in the New Republic comparing the Guantanamo Bay detention center to the Soviet gulags, to determine whether Amnesty International is correct to label Gitmo the "gulag of our time." Not surprisingly, a direct comparison makes it clear how ridiculous it was for Amnesty to use that word. That doesn't mean that the Gitmo center is okay, merely that the gulags were really, really horrible, and set a very high bar for desecration of human rights.

It's a shame Amnesty used such an incendiary term, because it distracts everyone from the substance of the report, gives Administration apologists something else to focus on besides the substance, and truthfully, makes the report somewhat suspect. I think there are legitimate concerns about Gitmo -- particularly the dubious legality of holding people indefinitely without actually accusing them of a crime (which is what the Administration did until the Supreme Court told them to stop it) -- but it does no good to say it's as bad as the gulag when it obviously is not.

Amnesty is indulging in what I'll call, in reference to the New Republic article, the "equivalency fallacy", which is something that drives me crazy. The thinking behind it goes like this:

"Y" is a really bad thing. It is important for me to make others realize how bad "Y" is. "YYY" (usually the holocaust, genocide, gulags) is an unequivocally terrible thing that everyone immediately understands is wrong. Therefore, I will call "Y" this really terrible thing, to make sure everyone understands how bad it is.

Unfortunately, all that usually achieves is that a legitimate concern is made suspect. It also, in my view, undermines language, as suddenly all sorts of things are seen to reach level of holocausts or gulags. So, not only is the equivalency fallacy unhelpful (as Donald Rumsfeld would say), but it serves to trivialize words that should be not be trivialized.

The Iraqi insurgency

2005-06-02T09:26:00.000-04:00

Andrew Sullivan prints an "oopsie" quote from Dick Cheney aka Nostradamus:

They will do everything they can to disrupt the process up to those elections in January because they know that once you've got a democratically elected government in place that has legitimacy in the eyes of the people of Iraq, they're out of business. That will be the end of the insurgency." - vice president Dick Cheney, October 28, 2004.

One of the more bizarre, and frustrating, characteristics of this administration is this practice of confidently asserting as fact something that is, on the face of it, either unknowable or patently false. Of course, almost all politicians do this to varying degrees, but the Bush Administration is remarkable for having made this one of its main strategies for addressing unpleasant issues with the American public, particularly the Iraq war. And I do think that clearly false "spinning" with regard to something as serious as war is rather different than doing it over, say, tax cuts. It strikes me that there ought to be a higher standard for dealing with the public when the country is at war -- in part because the executive branch is almost exclusively responsible for conducting foreign policy, and so its spin cannot be as easily countered by Congress or opposition parties.

But what's more disturbing than the Administration's dissembling on Iraq is that it seems to be working. Partisan conservatives, except for a minority of independent-minded, conscience-driven ones, just don't care; they're commited to backing the party on the Iraq war no matter what. This forum discussion of the Iraqi and Afghan prisoner torture allegations is truly dispiriting if it represents what the more politically-aware conservative public thinks. And much of the rest of the American public, who are not especially political or partisan, seemingly just can't be bothered with the whole thing. So Dick Cheney claims we'll definitely find WMD, and then we don't. So he claims the insurgency will end following the January elections, and then it doesn't. What's next? We seem to be lacking an effective "negative feedback mechanism" here.

It was worth it.

2005-05-25T16:36:00.000-04:00

I got a laugh out of this Red Sox fan's explanation for the exceptionally bad weather we've been having in Boston.

Why I'm grumpy.

2005-05-25T09:53:00.000-04:00

Weather report says it's 45 degrees, but feels like 27. 20 effin' 7!! Welcome to summer in Boston?

Of course, this might be a factor also....

2005-05-23T14:50:00.000-04:00

Today's Boston weather report.

Urban decay

2005-05-23T13:40:00.000-04:00

Interesting article in today's New Republic about the state of urban America (you may have to pay for it). This writer thinks that reports of American cities' improving health are greatly exaggerated, and cites four areas where urban dysfunction is driving people to the suburbs and exurbs: housing, infrastructure, jobs, and public education. The article mentions cities like Boston, San Fran, New York, and Portland that have had a reputation for attracting the hip and well-educated as suffering from problems in these areas. As a resident of Boston, this seems fairly obvious -- and if some of these think tanks want to pay me, I could pretty easily come up with the same conclusions it seems to take people who get paid lots of money to conduct research to figure out. Housing prices in Boston -- and indeed all of Massachusetts -- are spectacularly high. People like me and my fiance, who, I flatter myself, are the sort of people cities might want to retain, simply cannot afford to buy a home in the city (unless we fancy paying $400,000 for 600 square feet).

As to whether public education is a problem, you just have to observe my neighborhood for a while to figure that one out. There are two types of children around where I live. First, babies and toddlers, many of them white. Indeed, when walking the dog in the afternoon I see lots of hip young white couples pushing strollers. Then, you see older children and teenagers -- but all black. If I go home early on a weekday afternoon, I can see lots of black teenagers heading home from school for the day. Basically no white ones. At about, oh say, school age, all the white kids are mysteriously sucked out of the city. My guess? They've been taken away by the suburban school fairy, who promises parents a public education without all the metal detectors.

That may sound kind of, um, unpleasant, but I think it's safe to conclude that this is happening because these young, educated couples have the resources to leave the city, buy a home in the burbs, and put their kids into better quality public schools.

Republican talking points

2005-05-23T13:02:00.000-04:00

Alright, alright, we get it -- the Republicans want Bush's nominees to get an "up or down vote" on the floor. Maybe their strategy is to drive the country insane but repeating the same words over and over again: up or down vote, up or down vote, up or down vote. I'd like to know who thought of that little talking point phrase and smack him/her.

The Senate

2005-05-18T13:46:00.000-04:00

I've been on travel for the last week, so haven't been able to blog. I'm now sitting at a computer in the convention center java bar (yeah, it's called that) to comment on the latest effort by radical Republicans (and I do not use that term lightly) to change the rules of the political game midway, for their own immediate benefit. CNN did a live broadcast of Bill Frist on the Senate floor this morning, explaining why he wants to get rid of the judicial filibuster, just this once. He repeatedly makes the argument as one of "opposition to a Senate minority preventing judicial nominees from getting a vote on the Senate floor." Why does he specifically refer to the injustice of the minority party doing this? Because the Republicans did exactly the same thing during Clinton's second term when they had control of the Senate. They bottled up his nominees in committee, so they wouldn't reach the floor for a vote; Senate rules say any nominees not acted upon during a session will be dropped, and must be re-submitted by the president.

So, to repeat, during the Clinton Administration, the Republicans used a parliamentary procedure to prevent the president's nominees from getting an "up or down" vote. Which is exactly what Democrats are doing. Filibusters are a legitimate parliamentary procedure. They may be bad or annoying, but they're legitimate.

Since they can't make the argument, then, that they're against this practice on principle, they make the claim that it's somehow wrong when the minority party does it. This is, of course, nonsense. The Senate is nothing if not a body that elevates minority power over the majority. After all, it's in the Senate that the state of Montana, which has roughly half a million residents, has exactly the same power as California. The Republicans have 55 Senate seats to the Democrats' 45, but these 55 senators represent a minority of the U.S. population.

There is nothing in the Senate rules, or even Senate precedent, that suggests the minority party's job is to roll over for the majority; that's for the House of Representatives.

One last point -- to me, this issue is really not about judicial nominees or the pros and cons of the filibuster. I don't feel strongly about using the filibuster for nominees, and am inclined to think a president really should be able to nominate whoever he wants, and the Senate should only withhold consent if the nominee is patently unqualified.

The real issue is respect: respect for the American system of government and for 200 years of tradition in the Senate. The current Republicans have shown that they have no respect for American system if it stands in the way of getting what they want, and what they know will be good for all of us. This is what happens when fundamentalists take over. Right now, we're seeing Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the fundamentalists have invaded and inhabited the Republican party. It will be interesting if the conservatives eventually realize they want their bodies back.

Oh no, all the lobbyists are turning Republican!

2005-05-12T09:50:00.000-04:00

In his New Republic article (you may need to be a subscriber) critiquing the advent of "big government conservatism", Jonathan Chait makes the case that this apparent oxymoron is not the accidental result of myriad unrelated policies (like the No Child Left Behind Act or politically-motivated subsidies), but is in fact the new Republican philosophy. He cites, as one piece of evidence, the "K Street strategy" masterminded by Tom DeLay. This is the campaign to force Washington lobbying firms to hire only Republicans, unlike in the past when lobbying firms tried to remain bi-partisan, knowing that either party could be in power at any given time.

The K Street strategy is one of the many things that Democrats hold against Tom DeLay, but personally, I think the Democrats should really take a "briar patch" approach to this idea: Oh no, whatever you do, please don't turn all the lobbyists into Republicans, that will be awful for us! There can't be many more despised professions than that of Washington lobbyist. I'd wager they rank up there with used car salesman or trial lawyers in the minds of most Americans: sleazy, opportunistic, dishonest.

So frankly, I'm delighted by the K Street Strategy. When the inevitable backlash against Washington excesses comes -- and it's looking like it might be happening soon -- it'll be nice to have all the bad guys be Republicans. Plus, as long as the lobbying groups are bi-partisan, you're not going to see either political party really go after them. But if Democrats are already being excluded from the public trough profession, they have no reason to defend it (although they'll gladly re-join when given a chance).

So, no, please, Tom DeLay, don't turn all those lobbyists into Republicans, please!

Displays of patriotism

2005-05-09T13:01:00.000-04:00

In my post about dopey displays of patriotism, my Anonymous commenter described the opposite problem in England: any open display -- dopey or not -- is discouraged because it may be considered provocative or threatening to (presumably) somebody who is not white or not a citizen. So this item in Andrew Sullivan's blog today caught my eye (scroll down past the cute doggie picture). A conservative commentator wrote Andrew about the increasing tensions in the Netherlands between the native Dutch population and the large Muslim immigrant population:

In January, two schoolboys in IJsselstein were ordered to remove Dutch flag patches from their backpacks because Moroccan students might consider them provocative. It turned out this flag ban is officially in force at many schools.

I know something about the England's colonial history, which could explain why some would view patriotic displays as insults -- although I disagree with this view. But I am unaware of any history between the Dutch and the Muslim world that would create such an underlying menace to displays of the Dutch flag. Is there something I am missing here? The Netherlands, and Amsterdam in particular, is reknowned for being one of the most liberal and tolerant societies in the world; presumably it is this openness which led to so many Muslim immigrants finding a home there.

That story becomes even more troubling by this sentence:

Meanwhile Muslim kids have pictures of van Gogh's murderer on their lunchboxes because they consider him a hero, and nobody dares tell them to remove those pictures.

Van Gogh refers, of course, not to the dead painter, but to the dead film-maker and provacateur, who made films decrying the ugly aspects of Islamic fundamentalist and was killed in retribution.

Things like this do make the U.S. problem of too much (banal) patriotism seem preferable to ridiculously pc fears of patriotism. If citizens of liberal, pluralist countries are not allowed to display pride for their countries, it may be easy to forget how important it is to defend them.

Fun ways to waste time

2005-05-06T15:48:00.000-04:00

The Social Security Administration website has a database of popular baby names in the U.S. for every year from 1880 to 2004. You can search it by year or name or decade. It's incredibly addictive!

This blog's namesake

2005-05-05T14:42:00.000-04:00

I haven't actually posted about the man in whose honor this blog is named. I'm listening to the Red Sox play the Detroit Tigers (having figured out how to listen and work), and, as Mark Bellhorn walked to the plate, the announcer said: So far, Bellhorn has walked and fanned [struck out, for you non-baseball people]. Very nicely summarizing Mark Bellhorn at bat.

I was sorry for a while that I chose to name this blog something so pointless and obscure, but perhaps the connection is that Mark Bellhorn is a non-flashy, but valuable team player? Or that he whiffs a lot, but occasionally hits one out of the ballpark. Or maybe it's just that he always looks vaguely disheveled.

Defining federalism, or, Why I am wrong sometimes

2005-05-05T14:30:00.000-04:00

One of the fun and disturbing things about blogging is, you get to see all those thoughts that sound so great in your head, on the computer screen. Where they can be judged with an objective eye. And sometimes the harsh light of my computer monitor is unkind.

Re-reading some past entries (is that as narcissistic as it sounds?), I've noticed that I throw the word "federalism" around, sometimes using it in ways that are completely contradictory. So what does this word mean?

According to my very old Oxford American dictionary, it means:

Of a system of government in which several states unite under a central authority but remain independent in internal affairs.

So, that's cleared up. And I'll try to stick to just the one definition in future posts.

More of the same

2005-05-05T10:04:00.000-04:00

Also, I love this bit:

Britons Mark Newby and Colin Fallows already have accelerated their car to 146 mph in just 1,000 yards -- the longest, safest distance available to them in England.

Headline: "Team goes for electric car speed record"

2005-05-05T09:55:00.000-04:00

Fill in your own joke here.

Bill Frist

2005-05-04T15:14:00.000-04:00

Not too surprisingly, the New Republic doesn't like him either.

Not only have Republicans embraced big expansions of government that would make Tip O'Neill proud and abandoned their commitment to federalism, but they also have adopted -- without apparent irony or shame -- the "identity politics" for which they have long criticized Democrats. Now we must be subjected to whining and moaning about the "war on religion" being conducted by those atheists on the Democratic side of the Senate. I'm glad that Bush isn't buying that one, but is this really going to make Frist a viable presidential candidate?

Jangly guitars and Misunderstood Morrissey

2005-05-01T12:03:00.000-04:00

As I'm growing old and increasingly sentimental and nostalgic, thought I'd pull out some of the old "alternative" records I loved in the 80's. Remember jangly guitars? Not really? Those lovely Byrds/Television influenced records of the mid-80's have been mostly forgotten now, especially since Nirvana was the band that finally brought the alternative college music scene to the masses, and they were all about a grungy, heavy-guitar sound (not that there's anything wrong with that).

First played the Feelies: the Good Earth, a very nice record that's a perfect example of the melodic, non-guitar-hero sound of jangly guitar music.

Also listened to the Smiths' The Queen is Dead, one of the greatest rock/pop records ever. Besides featuring the peerless Johnny Marr's gorgeous multi-layered guitar effects, it also has some of Morrissey's best writing. I've always thought Morrissey is rather misunderstood as being about nothing but misery. Which is there, to be sure, but I think there's a lot of humor in his writing that people overlook, especially on The Queen Is Dead:

So I broke into the Palace, with a sponge and rusty spanner
She said, "Eh, I know you and you cannot sing."
I said, "That's nothing you should hear me play piano."

Anyway, if you like beautiful, melodic pop songs, the Smiths made some of the best ever. The combination of Johnny Marr's musical gifts and Morrisey's unique, slightly bent sensibilities made for some great rock/pop recordings. Too bad neither of them has done anything as great on their own.

Bush's press conference

2005-04-29T12:45:00.000-04:00

Much as I would like to harsh on Bush, I thought his performance last night was...not bad. It was good to hear him distance himself from the "Justice Sunday" atrocity of last week, where key Republicans (including alleged presidential candidate Bill Frist, who just plain gives me the creeps) claimed that Democratic opposition to certain Bush judicial nominees is a form of religious persecution. Uh huh. I thought the Republicans were against the whole "victim" culture and special interest group reductiveness [ok, is that a word?] promoted by the Democrats. Guess not when they think THEY'RE the ones being oppressed.

Anyhow, Bush clearly didn't want to associate himself with them, although he didn't condemn them either. But that's hardly to be expected. The question is, will he kowtow to them behind the scenes, while distancing himself in public?

new look

2005-04-27T14:02:00.000-04:00

So, what do you think of the new format? I think it's easier to read.

Freedom's just another word?

2005-04-26T10:18:00.000-04:00

Bush's chief of staff Andrew Card was featured in a short, light-hearted Q&A in Sunday's Boston Globe magazine (can't find a link). Each Sunday, the Globe interviews a Massachusetts native, revealing non-controversial information like their favorite restaurant in Boston. Card describes his favorite dessert made by the White House chefs, called "chocolate freedom." Gag. Not the dessert, which sounded chocolate-y and tasty, but the stupid name. I hate the way Republicans today, and the Bush Administration particularly, feel the need to insert their patriotic feelings into absolutely everything, no matter how trivial and irrelevant. Chocolate freedom? Freedom fries? Please. What's next, Constitution coasters? Founding Father floor wax? Concepts like freedom are important and meaningful, and when you attach them to trivial things...well, you trivialize them.

And don't get me started on the enforced singing of God Bless America in the 7th inning stretch of every baseball game since September 11th...

Seriously, I think it's a bad idea to make patriotic expressions so commonplace that they become routine. I don't think this helps reinforce patriotism in a meaningful way; it's just one more thoughtless routine.

The anti-moderns

2005-04-21T14:04:00.000-04:00

It's good to see the right wing feeling more free to express its inherent dislike of modern Western culture. Today's National Review has an article about the new Pope; in it, the writer states:

In this regard, the consumerism and relativism of the West can be just as
dangerous as the totalitarianism of the East: It's just as easy to forget about God while dancing to an iPod as while marching in a Hitler Youth rally. There's a difference, to be sure, but hardly anyone would contest the observation that in elite Western society, as in totalitarian Germany, the moral vocabulary has been purged of the idea of sin. And if there's no sense of sin, then there's no need for a Redeemer, or for the Church.

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan)

It's such an odd partnership, this Republican Party marriage of right-wing Christian activists and pro-business conservatives. The pro-business side opposes any interference with their right to make money, while the Christian conservatives despise Western consumerist (read: capitalist) culture.

Anyway, I like that Republicans are emboldened now to make these retro views more widely known, as there is a similar undercurrent to anti-globalization leftists that I find unsettling. I've been hearing about this new movie called Mondovino, which purports to expose the wine industry's capitulation to the forces of homogenization (read: global capitalism). There is probably a good point here, at least as it refers to the art and business of wine-making, but it's clear that the director is motivated by a general horror at big business and the spread of big business across the globe. This is a view held by certain leftists, who are convinced that the world's masses are being oppressed by the increasing availability of cheap goods. And, not say, pleased that their standard of living is improving. This view strikes me as unpleasantly condescending. If the "barking mad brigade" (as my English fiance deftly called them) of right-wing theocons make it clear that they too hate modern capitalist culture, maybe it'll take away this viewpoint's populist cache that some leftists find so attractive.

A long weekend in Boston

2005-04-17T11:16:00.000-04:00

In less than 24 hours the temperature in Boston has gone from "brr, where is spring?" to "everyone outside!" It's a long weekend here, as Monday is Patriot's Day -- and coincidentally also the day of the Boston marathon. Today is one of those warm, sunny spring days when everything in the world seems just fine. It's still early in the season here -- while the daffodils and dogwoods are blooming, most of the trees and shrubs are still struggling to break out of their winter browns. As I was walking back from the laundromat, along the park area that runs along the corridor behind my street, everyone was out: Little kids on bikes, one boy in a well-worn Garciaparra t-shirt; new parents pushing strollers; people walking their dogs -- golden retrievers, pugs, scotties, just about any dog breed you can think of can be found in this part of the city. This is what spring looks like around here. It may not be as spectacular yet as my old hometown but it's still pretty great. Time to check out the roofdeck and see how the plants survived the winter.

Yeah, I'm kinda sick of it too

2005-04-15T12:15:00.000-04:00

Over at Salon.com, King Kaufman writes about the latest Yankees-Red Sox series -- as all sports reporters and columnists are contractually obligated to do -- and declares he's "just about Yankee-Red Soxed out." Hmm, yeah, I was thinking the same thing last night, while watching the umpteenth at-bat of chinless-wonder Jorge Posada. I wonder when was the last time these two teams played 6 out of their first 9 games against each other? It's getting to be a bit much, even for me, and I milked the Red Sox "greatest comeback ever" and World Series victory for all it was worth in the off-season -- just ask my fiance.

You might have to pay to read the Kaufman column, but it's well worth it. He's funny, and brings a slightly skewed perspective to sports that's appropriate for a left-of-center publication like Salon. But, unlike, say, NPR's Bill Littlefield, he actually enjoys the "big four" American sports and doesn't feel the need to pander to his liberal audience by pretending to like soccer. Ok, actually, soccer's great, but wussy sports writers like Bill Littlefield will not help soccer in this country, as they only confirm the mainstream public's suspicion that soccer is for elitist suburban liberals who dislike sports like American football that embrace humanity's innate violent impulses.

There they go again

2005-04-15T10:04:00.000-04:00

Can we get through a Red Sox-Yankees series without there being some sort of altercation? Or having a team member ejected?

Some good news out of Iraq

2005-04-14T11:10:00.000-04:00

A story on NPR yesterday revealed some good signs coming out of Iraq, but it's the sort of story that won't make big headlines. Not because the media are conspiring to give only bad news, but just because negative events -- like today's car bombing -- are inherently more dramatic and, therefore, headline-grabbing. Both types of stories deserve attention.

NPR reported that some Sunnis in Iraq are regretting that they didn't participate in the January elections in an effort to show their disapproval of the American-organized process. The story featured quotes from two Sunni man saying, we should have voted in the election, we'll be sure to vote in the next one.

Think about that.

I couldn't help a quick laugh when I heard it because it's so deceptively simple, but is really a huge step forward. When you think of all the negative predictions from people who oppose Bush's policy in Iraq -- it'll never work, the country is splitting apart, they'll never accept a Western-style democracy, and so on. And here, in such a short time, you now have Iraqis saying, I want to have some influence in my country...I had better vote. And that is what democracy is all about, really. It's not about good government -- there's no guarantee that good people will run for office or, if they do, that they'll be elected. It's not about having a government that does what you want -- some groups will always be dissatisfied. Democracy happens when people who want to have an effect on their country don't say, I'd better grab a gun, or I'd better snitch on my neighbor to the secret police, or I'd better bribe the right person, or I'd better keep quiet. It's when they say, I want to have some say in my country, so I'd better...vote, organize, protest, write a letter, contribute to a campaign, whatever.

There are still many more difficult months and years ahead, certainly, and we certainly don't know that the effort to re-plant democracy in Iraq will work. But that was a pretty amazing story, and one that is just as newsworthy as the bad news.

They did it

2005-04-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, a friend left me a message asking if I knew why four fighter jets were streaking across the sky over Boston. He asked if there was something apocalyptic happening that he should know about. I informed him that, yes, there was: the Boston Red Sox were launching the new season at Fenway as the World Series champions*. (Maybe the four fighter jets instead of the four horsemen?)

Yes, yesterday was Opening Day at Fenway, apparently an unofficial holiday around here. So, my fiance and I took the afternoon off (he was a bit less enthusiastic about this than I was) to watch the world series ceremonies and the game against the Yankees (at a bar, unfortunately, not at Fenway). It was great to see now ex-Red Sox like Derek Lowe and Dave Roberts show up, and get the huge applause they deserved. The game was great too, with Tim Wakefield yet again stymie-ing the Yankees line-up, and securing a 8-1 victory for the Sox. Wakefield is much more of a Yankee killer than Pedro Martinez ever was, for some reason.

It's tough to complain about a day when the Red Sox receive their world series rings and beat the Yankees soundly...but I'll give it a try. I wish the unfurling of all the World Series banners over the years, leading up to the new one, had been a bit less portentous; playing the music used for the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey seemed a bit silly. It's not like they just defeated communism or something. To me, the celebration was really for the fans, last year's team, and all the past Red Sox teams that never won.

* Note the phrase "World Series" champions, not world champions, as, last time I checked, "the world" consists of more than the United States and two Canadian cities.

Scheduling nightmare

2005-04-08T09:40:00.000-04:00

As a friend of mine just noted, it's been a tough week for the rich and famous, scheduling-wise. The pope's funeral, a royal wedding, a royal funeral in Monaco... Not to mention the other slightly less famous people who died this week: prominant lawyers, writers and so forth. What a nightmare for personal schedulers everywhere.

Jumping on the bandwagon, as usual

2005-04-07T13:45:00.000-04:00

I have now read two commentaries, both unsurprisingly written by women, asserting that it's not so terrible that Prince Charles is marrying Camilla Parker-Bowles. Ellen Goodman wrote about this in the Globe last week, and today's Slate has a similar piece by June Thomas. To turn this into a trend, I will add my view on the subject: I find it rather sweet and charming that Charles wants to marry Camilla. It's obvious that he's not marrying her because she's some half-his-age hottie who will make him feel young again (although, to me, much younger trophy wives usually just emphasize how old and wrinkly the male partner is, but I'm not really the sort of person these guys are trying to impress). Clearly, he is marrying her because he loves her, finds her a suitable companion -- and, apparently, because they have great sex.

Of course, as an American, I have no stake in the royal family, and therefore don't much care whether Charles is upholding the royal family's dignity and honor. But frankly, things couldn't go much worse than that first, officially-sanctioned marriage, could they? And as the first marriage came about through a pretty offensive, sexist idea -- that the only appropriate mate for a prince is a nubile virgin -- what's wrong with Charles trying out the new-fangled concept of marrying for love? I think much of the public disapproval stems from another unpleasantly sexist idea: that no man in his right mind would marry a middle-aged woman (admittedly, not a terribly attractive one) if he had the choice. As a woman who fully intends to be middle-aged one day (since, as I understand modern science, we have yet to find any alternative to middle age other than death), I am all for ending this sad idea. So I'm sending my best wishes to the happy couple.

Work vs the Red Sox

2005-04-07T11:31:00.000-04:00

My two-day experiment with listening to Red Sox games while at work has been called off . I have NPR (local Boston station WBUR, actually; the best in the country as far as I know!) streaming all day at work, so thought the Red Sox game as background might work as well. But it's easy to have talk shows as background -- you can just listen with half an ear, and stop listening when you get a phone call, have a chat with the boss, whatever. But I kept finding myself putting off making phone calls "just until I find out if the Red Sox can get through this inning without hitting into an effing double play." Not conducive to getting my latest report written -- and banging my head on the keyboard doesn't count.

The season has begun...

2005-04-05T16:37:00.000-04:00

and the Red Sox are off to a crap-tacular start. Apparently, the "traditionalist" baseball analysts are predicting the Yankees will win this year, while the statheads/Moneyball types think the Red Sox will. Let's hope those eggheads are right!

Democrats on Bush's Middle East policy

2005-04-01T12:31:00.000-05:00

I have GOT to stop saying stuff that ends up in the New Republic. Martin Peretz has a piece today calling out Democrats, and Republican "realists," for their refusal to acknowledge that something good might be happening in the Middle East thanks to Bush's foreign policy. He starts by making a comparison I have been fond of using (really, I'm sure one of my friends would be willing to attest to this...), that if Bush cured cancer, liberals would carp that he did so without proper international consultations and in an arrogant, cowboy-like manner. As I posted earlier, I am really really mad at liberals for totally taking a pass on the Administration's mission to make America safer by, heaven forfend, spreading democracy in the terribly undemocratic Middle East. If the "Middle Eastern spring" continues, I think this failure of vision and courage will rank up there with the embarrassing apologist attitude taken by many -- though certainly not all -- American liberals about communism, starting in the 1960s. Of course, American conservatives have their own shameful "we got it all wrong" issues -- most notably their failure to support the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Still, I expect better from my fellow lefties. I am also unconcerned about how wrong the Republican realists might be about Bush, as I hardly expect to be on the same side as Pat Buchanan on just about anything. But I think the American left has dangerously held onto attitudes about the U.S. military and foreign policy that were formed by Vietnam, and which became mainstream Democratic foreign policy in 1968. This attitude holds that it is a given that the U.S. military must be seen as a force for bad, and that U.S. foreign policy must always be interpreted as trampling on the rights of poor, dark-skinned foreigners. The fact that some of these foreigners might actually be really bad people who should not be romanticized as "freedom fighting" insurgents is not worth considering. If it was asinine for Ronald Reagan to refer to the Contras as freedom fighters, as most liberals would assert, it surely must be equally asinine to ascribe such high-minded motives to people who seek to destroy Iraq's attempt to create a democratic government by blowing people up.

More on Leverett

2005-03-31T16:15:00.000-05:00

By the way, the fine people over at Harry's Place recently had a discussion about Leverett (why am I the last blogger to figure out who he is?) and his views on U.S. diplomacy toward Syria and Lebanon.

Fresh Air Getting a Little Stale (ouch, that was bad)

2005-03-31T15:33:00.000-05:00

I used to like listening to Terry Gross' interview show on NPR, Fresh Air. She's a truly inquisitive interviewer who asks probing questions that allow her guests to reveal themselves. She's not an attack dog, but that's ok, it just not her style. But over the last 2-3 years, her show has basically turned into the Why George Bush Is Really Really Wrong show. Her show has gone from an ostensibly objective interview show to a one-woman campaign to discredit the Bush Administration's foreign policy. She's put on just about every Bush foreign policy critic you can think of, and lets them go without seeking to question their convictions or provide a balance of opposing viewpoints. (Yes, she has some opposing viewpoints, but they're clearly in the minority.) And her questioning style now goes something like this: At what point did you realize that George Bush is completely wrong? And then the person explains why, and she mm hmms sagely in response.

Right now she's interviewing Flynt Leverett, former senior director for Middle Eastern affairs at the National Security Council, who has just written a book about Syria. I've actually never heard of this guy, although I pride myself somewhat nerdishly on keeping up with the cast of characters in the current foreign policy debates, but he is one of the Vets, as someone has tagged all the former Bush Administration officials who have left and turned to a life of commentary. Apparently he has been providing commentary on Middle East policy since leaving the Administration, and he doesn't like what he sees. For example, he thinks we should be more engaged with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, rather than seeking his overthrow. That's fine for him, except Terry lets him make statements of opinion as though they were fact, with no contest, and lets pass squishily non-factual statements without calling him on them. For example, she asks if Lebanon's anti-Syria rallies are the result of Bush's Iraq policy. Leverett unsurprisingly says no, and Terry moves on to the next question. Oh, ok, thanks for clearing that one up.

By contrast, she is often snarky with pro-Bush guests. After Leverett, she had on Elizabeth Dibble, Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, who is allowed all of about 4 minutes to talk and with whom Terry tries to play gotcha by asking her twice to state definitively that the Administration is not seeking regime change in Syria, and then allowing embarrassing dead air time to condemn Dibble's refusal to comply.

You can find it all here.

We Built It, They Came

2005-03-30T11:02:00.000-05:00

Good news for supporters of Title IX, the 1972 legislation barring sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funds. The Supreme Court ruled yesterday in favor of a high school coach who said he was fired after complaining of unequal treatment for his girls' basketball team. The coach wants to sue the school under Title IX, and the Court ruled 5-4 that he could do this. I have to caveat this entry by saying that I can't claim to fully understand the LEGAL issues in this case -- which, after all, should be the important ones, not the resulting POLICY outcome. Nevertheless, I was pleased to hear the Court's decision, from the policy point of view.

Title IX is primarily known as the law that helped spur the tremendous increase in girls' participation in school sports over the last 30 years. Of course, this coincided with the overall transformation of women's roles in American society; still, Title IX strikes me as one of the best rebukes for conservatives who claim that Big Government never solves anything. (Yes, there are still some who say that...) Basically, Congress said, gee it would be good to eliminate the sex disparities in school activities like sports, and then, poof, made it happen. And for the most part this has been viewed as a positive development.

Not with certain Republicans in Congress and the White House though. There have been hints that the Bush Administration and some in Congress would try to weaken Title IX. Why? Because Republicans oppose such government initiatives on the grounds that they're ineffective, of course. Oh, no, wait, Title IX has been enormously effective. Well, then, because Republicans oppose heavy-handed government attempts to legislate local and state activities, right? Oh, no, wait, that's so old-school Republican. Hmm, then, could it be, that these Republicans are just not terribly committed to ending sex discrimination, and are just a little bit retro in their view of the value and importance of girls' sports, especially in comparison to boys' sports?

Anti-states' rights conservatives and other oxymorons

2005-03-28T14:33:00.000-05:00

Mickey Kaus complains that conservative bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds are off-the-mark in accusing Congress of hypocrisy for violating states rights in the Terry Schiavo case. As he puts it,

"That's a fine argument if you're a states rights conservative. But what about those of us who aren't?"

Hmm, interesting from two points of view. One, Kaus officially outs himself as a conservative. After I was directed to his blog by others in blogland, I was befuddled to hear it said that he is actually a Democrat. If someone who constantly mocks Democrats and writes only of the many ways in which he disagrees with them could still be considered one...well, it's a mystery to me.

More importantly, he's blithely states that all the pro-federalist conservatives, like him, are being perfectly consistent. After all, he says, if it's ok for the federal government to overrule states on civil rights, then why not in the Terry Schiavo case. Huh? Who are all these conservatives who have been proudly declaring their preference for matters being resolved at the federal level? Mickey may well be one, but that doesn't mean he can pretend that he and his cohorts, whoever they are, were there all along, openly advertising the great conservative federalist way.

Conservatives, and their political manifestation, the Republican Party, were adamantly opposed to the 1960's federal civil rights legislation because, so they claimed, they opposed federal interference in matters properly left to the states. Republicans opposed the 1964 and 1965 civil rights bills, and then benefited from the disillusionment felt by pro-Jim Crow Southern Democrats by luring them into the Republican party. By claiming, not that the Republicans opposed equal rights for blacks, of course, but that they opposed the heavy hand of Washington legislating things that should be left to the states. Now personally, I've always thought that if you are pro-states-rights, the battle over Jim Crow laws has got to be one of the worst vessels to use for this idea: No, it's not that we're in favor of lynchings, we just support the principle of states rights. Mm hmm. Please, find another means of making your argument.

Nevertheless, use this argument they did. And while clearly, once mainstream opinion moved to accept these civil rights laws, the Republican Party did too, they continued to argue the principle of states' rights. And Republicans rode this horse all the way to the White House, and eventually to control of the Congress as well. So now that they've ridden that horse in, they're dismounting and getting on the pro-federalist one, and we're all not supposed to notice?

"Dr." Frist for President

2005-03-28T11:10:00.000-05:00

Is anyone else rubbing their hands together in malevolent anticipation of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's prospective run as a Republican presidential candidate? From the moment he came into the national spotlight -- during the scandal over Trent Lott's remarks at Strom Thurmond's birthday, where Republicans professed to be shocked, simply shocked at Lott's praise of the former segregationist -- I've found he gives me the creeps. He's the real face of the religious wing now ascendant in the Republican party, the one that George Bush masks so well. Bush has that aw shucks, back-patting, nickname-giving demeanor, which seems non-threatening. This allows him to be the friendly, non-scary face of the activist religious right. But Bill Frist is what that group really looks like, and he gives me the willies. The footage of his speech before Congress where he "diagnosed" Terry Schiavo as not being in a persistent vegetative state* is really bad. He looks prissy, dishonest, judgmental, hypocritical -- like a bad TV preacher. So if Republicans are thinking he's their next presidential candidate, I'm all for it.

* Just to reiterate what I've said before, I'm not claiming to know the exact nature of her condition, because I don't know, and neither does Bill Frist.

Mmmm....chocolate.....

2005-03-25T10:27:00.000-05:00

For some reason the boyfriend/fiance just sent me this link. Maybe I'll try this if I have a "bachelorette" party...

Thoughtful debate

2005-03-25T10:07:00.000-05:00

I found it frustrating to try to articulate my point yesterday -- surprisingly, it's difficult to write clearly about life, death and the meaning of it all. My opinion on this is really just focused on the political ramifications of Congress inserting itself into the process, and what this means about the Republican Party. As for the really important issue -- what should happen with this poor woman -- I am not sure. I do think it's a subject that deserves attention and some kind of national debate. I just don't think Congress was trying to encourage such a debate; they were trying to impose their determination of what should happen in a rather heavy-handed, and politically hypocritical, way.

Here are some other views that I think DO add to a thoughtful debate:

Harriet McBryde Johnson, an attorney who is disabled, wrote this article for Slate. She argues that the decision to end one's life is so momentous that it simply cannot be delegated to anyone. The practical implication, then, for situations like the Terry Schiavo case where someone is no longer able to make decisions, is that we default to keeping the person alive. I've never heard of McBryde Johnson, but she has a new book coming out with a great title: "Too Late to Die Young".

NPR's Here and Now interviewed Georgetown University law professor Jonathan Turley on Wednesday about the legal aspects of the case. What was a standard expert analysis piece turned suddenly personal when Turley told of his family's struggle this past winter over how to handle his father's decline due to Parkinson's disease. Turley is remarkably honest and revealing about what happened, and his view is that he, like Schiavo's parents, wanted to keep his father's feeding tube in, but that the law is clear that Congress has no place intervening in such a family dispute. You can listen to it here where it says "Latest on Terry Schiavo" (you have to listen to about 5 minutes of legal analysis before he gets to his own story) or read about it in USA Today.

Proofreading: what a concept

2005-03-25T09:57:00.000-05:00

I'll try it. Although the linking feature doesn't seem to work right with my Mac (I assume that's the issue, as it doesn't seem to be browser related). Nor do I get a spell-check icon in my "draft post" screen. Waah waah waah.

That was crap

2005-03-24T14:44:00.000-05:00

Well, that post below is really bad. This is a hard issue to write about, it seems so complicated. Perhaps I'll try again another time.

The "fetishization" of life

2005-03-24T10:28:00.000-05:00

Andrew Sullivan has a good post on the religious right's promotion of what they're now calling a "culture of life". I've been reluctant to write on this as I am not religious and therefore not really in a position to critique how religions define themselves and apply their beliefs to the world -- but Andrew is religious, so he's well qualified. I think he really nails it when he calls the absolutist stance on Terry Schiavo -- and I would add the absolutist stance on abortion -- as not respect for life but a "fetishization" of it.

It's terribly banal to point out that activist religious groups could be activists for other political issues, like health care or poverty issues, but I do think it's reasonable to ask why the activist religious right is so obsessed with influencing the political system with regard to these two issues, and framing them as defining a culture of life, while they show little interest in exerting their influence regarding issues that could affect life as it is actually lived by most people. It's not that these are unworthy issues, or even that the right's positions are completely unreasonable -- for example, I can respect that religiously-motivated people may think it's their duty to defend the interests of those who cannot defend themselves -- but I do find them strangely unable to see what I think are the obvious gray areas that abortion and the Schiavo case present. On abortion, for example, I think most people understand intuitively that a 1-month old fetus is not really quite as compellingly a baby as an 8-month old fetus (or unborn baby). Indeed, I think the right did implicitly acknowledge this in their arguments for banning late-term abortion. Frequently you would hear right-wing supporters of this legislation say, well, even abortion activists should realize that late-term abortions are repugnant. Why would they argue this, unless we can understand somehow that, while a 1-month fetus is not nothing, it isn't really as clearly a baby as an 8-month old fetus. But their absolutist stance, that clearly a 1-month old fetus has rights that are identical to that of the fully-developed mother, suggests a emphasis on defining life as simply a fact of existence, and nothing more.

Couple this with their notable lack of involvement in political issues that affect many more people's lives, and the lives of actual living people, not one-month old undeveloped fetuses, and it's hard not to conclude that they've fetishized life to mean literally, the existence of a living human form, and that this strikes them as the most compelling aspect of a "culture of life".

To put it more simply...

2005-03-22T14:12:00.000-05:00

One of the few concepts that I have been able to pick up from my efforts to understand how to select my retirement portfolio is diversify, diversify, diversify. Don't put too much of your retirement funds into one type of investment. Don't put it all into safe, low-risk investments like bond funds, don't put it all into large cap or small cap, don't put it all into high risk investments or a single sector -- spread it around, to spread the risk. Well, isn't that basically what Social Security does for us? I already have my 401(k) (actually 403b) account, where I invest primarily in medium- to high-risk funds as I'm 30 years from retirement. Social security is my "tortoise" option -- it's slow, it's plodding, it'll never make me rich, but it's dependable. (In case you're going to argue that it's less dependable because of the future social security deficit problems, I think the idea that the government of the United States of America will renege on its commitment to its senior citizens is preposterous. We may incur massive debts doing it, but the U.S. will not suddenly stop paying out social security -- I'm convinced of it.)

Mr. Burns on Social Security

2005-03-22T13:09:00.000-05:00

Harry Shearer is not only hilarious -- and a cultural icon for his work in "Spinal Tap" and the Simpsons -- but he's also a genius! Shearer has been guest-blogging over at Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, and recently wrote on the Social Security Crisis (have you noticed that never a moment passes without a "crisis" of some sort under the Bush Administration...), noting the weird similarity between the current GOP project to reduce the economic security net provided by the government and make Americans almost entirely economically self-reliant, and the 20th century project to create a "New Soviet Man". Shearer's point is that Republicans seem to be as self-delusional as the communists were about the behavior of actual, real humans. This insight makes Shearer a genius because it's an idea I've had for awhile...

Last month, Slate published an article called called "The Hassle Factor" where the author complained that private social security accounts would just be one more "thing to manage." Although the writer was somewhat off-base in his criticism of the privatization plan, as it won't really allow us to choose our own investments as we do for 401(k)s, it was a funny article, and echoed what I often feel about is the downside to living in a free-market economy: making choices is time-consuming and a nuisance at times. Plus I'm not always that expert on the various things that I have to make decisions about. Naturally, conservative commentators were outraged at the suggestion that people might not always be the best caretakers of their own finances. Republicans now believe as an article of faith -- not fact-based analysis -- that people always know best what to do with their own money, and if we just removed our money from the grasping, stupid Government, we would create an economic utopia. But really, people ARE sometimes stupid about their own money and make poor decisions for their financial future. If they didn't, why would we have needed that bankruptcy bill, which basically says that people who are too stupid not to spend money they don't have shouldn't be given a "Get Out of Debt Free" card? Why would we always read stories about Americans' dismal savings rate if we're all so disciplined and rational with our cash? Truthfully, we're not always, and that's not an insult, it's a clear-eyed view of human nature, which is varied and imperfect. We're often prone to immediate gratification over long-term planning; we're susceptible to the lure of bright, shiny objects; some personality types love financial analysis and are skilled at it, others (read: me) are bored witless by the fine print of prospectuses and talk of "expense ratios" or "loads." But the GOP is absolutely ideologically committed to an idealized version of human behavior, and are making policy based on this ideal. As Shearer points out, "if the twentieth century taught us anything, and it didn't, it was to be very cautious about large-scale social projects based on the way people "ought to" behave."

More on the Schiavo case

2005-03-21T10:44:00.000-05:00

I do find it curious that religious lobbying groups have taken the Terry Schiavo case as their cause. I'm not religious, so I'm agnostic, so to speak, on how religions define themselves, but it does seem odd that certain religious groups are taking the side of extraordinary medical interventions that prolong life, perhaps beyond the point where the life is meaningful. I would think this would be the more likely viewpoint of non-religious folks, who view life as being synapses connected, not religious believers who promote the concept of life being more than the physical, that it involves a spiritual dimension, a soul.

The transformation is complete

2005-03-21T10:15:00.000-05:00

I do not have an opinion on whether Terry Schiavo should be kept alive, as I know next-to-nothing about her and what kind of life she is leading now. But what is striking about yesterday's Congressional vote to allow federal courts to intervene in this case is that we are seeing the official end of the Republican party as the party of limited government and states' rights. This is not exactly a news flash, as this process has been underway since Bush came into office in 2000. Still, it's striking how the Republicans who have control in the party now have really abandoned the ideas that led them back to power from the dark days (for them, that is) of the 1960's. They are now the party that has significantly increased federal fiscal commitments through the Medicare prescription drug program; readily supercede states' rights regarding drug policy, assisted suicide, and now this Schiavo case; and, support military interventions in situations that are not clearly in the immediate American interest (i.e., spreading democracy). I'm not necessarily against these things, mind you, just find it noteworthy that Republicans have been so easily lured by the power of the federal government. I always thought that Republican claims to be more principled in the matter of small government to have a significant baloney factor, but even I have been surprised at how quickly they have abandoned so much of what they supposedly believed in.

McGwire = Van Doren

2005-03-18T14:37:00.000-05:00

Seeing Mark McGwire make his way to the witness table at yesterday's Congressional hearing, camera bulbs flashing, really reminded me of that scene in Quiz Show when Charles Van Doren comes to testify on the game show scandal. He's the prize, everyone wants to know whether or not he cheated, and he looks scared and overwhelmed as he approaches the witness table. Boy did McGwire have that same look yesterday.

What's Left? Shame

2005-03-18T11:18:00.000-05:00

That's the title of Charles Krauthammer's column in today's Washington Post -- and it is the sort of discussion of which we'll be seeing more and more, if the democratic stirrings in the Middle East continue. You can find it here (although you have to sign in). In the column, he makes this point:

"...the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability. "

I didn't vote for Bush, don't really much like him, but before the Iraq war, I had numerous arguments with my liberal friends about why I supported the war. Although I have been deeply disappointed -- no, excuse me, ticked off with how the Bush Administration handled "selling" the war and reconstructing the country, I haven't jumped off the train yet because I'd been holding out the hope that, in the end, we will end up with a free, reasonably democratic Iraq. Which would, in turn, help spread a greater Middle Eastern democratizing movement. And what has been an on-going frustration with me is why none of my liberal friends have felt the same way. It's like, overnight, the foreign policy fairy went around sprinkling conservative realist dust on American liberals. I thought we on the left were supposed to be the ones who supported a foreign policy driven by democratic values, who opposed cozying up to convenient dictators. And now that we have an example of just that concept, but implemented by the bad Bushies, liberals have suddenly found their inner Pat Buchanan. Suddenly, leftists love the idea of peace without justice: Horrible dictator? Ok, but at least we're not at war.

Look, there are plenty of reasonable arguments to be made against the Bush foreign policy: it's fraught with risk, the diplomacy is ham-handed, and the "marketing" to the American public has been cagey at best, downright dishonest at worst. But, at the end of it all, if these early signs of a Middle East thaw prove to be right, the Bush Administration will have done a good thing. And frankly, I'm cheesed off that the Republicans will take all the credit for it, and liberals will have sat on the sidelines, doing their best impression of the Glum, that 70's cartoon character: "it'll never work".

Congress is wasting your money

2005-03-17T12:41:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I know, a "dog bites man" headline. But usually Congressional hearings don't get much attention unless they actually mean something. Approximately 95% of Congressional hearings are just pointless "information-gathering" exercises. The few that are meaningful -- Senate confirmation hearings, for example -- are the ones that get attention. The hundreds of silly ones are only of interest to a few lobbyists, congressional reporters, and the witnesses.

Except today. Where we all get to see one of those silly hearings broadcast on ESPN and reported on by the mainstream media.

Now normally, I love to defend the federal government, and Congress in particular, against those who complain that they waste time and money and don't get enough done (hint: it's GOOD that Congress is not very efficient!), but this hearing is really a sad embarrassment. Why is this committee holding this hearing? What do they except to get out of it? I gotta tell ya, folks, Mark McGwire is not going to come up and say, yup, I did cheated, I was juiced on steroids, and my home run record is a joke. Ain't gonna happen. Instead we'll get a whole lotta nothing from the players that we suspect, intelligent comment from Curt Schilling, and posturing from congressmen (and women).

More springtime (sort of) in Boston

2005-03-15T12:04:00.000-05:00

Ah, it's springtime, when a young (right, I'm being generous) gal's thoughts turn to...performance-enhancing drugs, of course. Congress has been attracting more attention to the steriods and baseball issue by deciding to hold hearings on the subject. Now, I have no idea why they are doing this, except maybe that they want to meet Curt Schilling (and, if so, why not just hold a Republican fundraiser...). Schilling has quite rightly expressed his dismay at having to take time off from his (already compressed) pre-season training schedule to essentially just express his opinions on steroids (he's agin 'em).

I think the use of performance-enhancing drugs like steroids in baseball is an insult to the very idea of professional sports that makes them enjoyable and inspiration to watch. Why Congress should be involved is a mystery to me, but so is the view of some that this is just part of a general attack on person choice regarding drug use. Andrew Sullivan, the blogger I would most like to be when I grow up, has stated in the past that he thinks the steroid issue is just another way that society tries to limit individual choice regarding drug use. But pro sports aren't the real world, they're artificial worlds created for the express purpose of playing a specific sport. It's like the salary-cap issue. Whenever you bring that up, some genius calls a salary cap "socialism" as if the National Football League is comparable to the U.S. economy. But it's not. Pro sports leagues are entirely artifcial constructs. And sports are all about rules, rules that everyone has to follow and then compete. Why do you only get four downs in American football? Canadian football gives you three. Well, I don't know, but who cares? It's just the rule, everyone has to follow it, and then see who's clever or talented enough to succeed within the artificial constraints of the game.

In my view, steroids fall into the same category. The key here is that they are PERFORMANCE ENHANCING drugs. I agree that it's nobody's business if ball players smoke pot or snort cocain -- well, it's the business of law enforcement, since we have decided in the U.S. that the government knows best when it comes to enjoyment-enhancing drugs. But it should be no more the business of Major League Baseball if players smoke a little weed at home, than it would be the business of my boss. But steroids are different -- the key being that they give a player an advantage over a non-drug-taking player. That makes it an artifically-uneven playing field. If we have steroids, why not allow corked bats? Why not give one guy a bigger strike zone than another?

Steroids matter because they affect how the game is played.

Some Prius owners are Republicans

2005-03-11T09:33:00.000-05:00

I am mystified as to why Mickey Kaus is so incredulous that 21% of Prius owners might be Republican:

<<21.6 percent of Prius owners are Republicans? I deny it. ... Did they weight by party I.D.? Where is Ruy Teixeira when you need him? ... P.S.: According to the survey, only 34.6 percent of the Priusers are Democrats. What about the remaining 44 percent? Were they independents--or Greens and Naderites? Democrats attempting to copy Ken Mehlman's auto-centric voter-targeting operation want to know.>>

I don't find that particularly hard to believe. First, there's the "gadget factor": One of the first people I knew who bought a hybrid was an engineer, who was at best apolitical, and somewhat conservative. However, he was also a guy who loved cars and loved gadgets. He bought a Honda Insight

Second, the Prius is hugely popular in Northern Virginia -- it's the number one market for the Prius. While NoVa is certainly more Democrat than the rest of the state, it's hardly a hotbed for radical activitists. It's not, say, Tacoma Park. Given how many Prius owners there are, would it really beggar belief that some small percentage are actually Republicans who like the idea of a cool new car, with good mileage, that gets them into the HOV lane during rush hour? Oh, and that costs a few thousand more than a comparable car -- Republicans are more likely to have the extra cash laying around...

Now, as for the story that neocons are big on hybrids...that I'm skeptical about. There may be a few, but I doubt that buying a hybrid car is now de rigeur for the neocon set.

Dan Savage on NPR

2005-03-10T14:08:00.000-05:00

The most excellent Dan Savage in on NPR's Talk of the Nation right now. Should be a good show. He's talking about a memorable exchange over the last two "Savage Nation" columns, which proposed the idea of "drug support payments" for HIV-positive people who knowingly infect someone else. I thought it was a great column, and confirmed my impression of Dan as the most delightful sort of liberal -- one with a solid grasp on reality. He laid into a correspondent who called himself a HIV agency professional for this guy's claim that gay men shouldn't be blamed for not telling their partners they're HIV positive. It's well worth checking out:

http://www.thestranger.com/2005-03-03/savage.html

I'll try this thing you call "linking" again

2005-03-04T11:00:00.000-05:00

My job involves analyzing and promoting "clean electric transportation technologies" -- a fancy way of saying hybrid, fuel cell or battery-electric systems. I don't know if I'm more knowledgeable or overly cynical due to my job, but I often find that, when I read what smart commentators have to say about clean car technologies, they sound awfully naive and unaware to me. Thomas Friedman is one example; he's someone whose opinion on matters I am not expert on -- the Middle East, say -- I take seriously. But when he writes about how we should be switching to non-petroleum based transportation options, it's obvious to me that he's writing about something that he's not expert on.

Now Fareed Zakaria has written a piece called "Imagine: 500 Miles Per Gallon" on MSNBC (ok, here's goes with the link):

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7037844/site/newsweek/

Zakaria is another guy who, when he writes about the Middle East and democracy, I take note. I agree with his general ideological or philosophical approach, if you will, to these issues. And I assume he's much smarter than I am about what's really going on there. But his piece contains a few ideas that, to me, broadcast his naivete on clean car technologies. Mainly, the idea that plug-in hybrids would be a better solution than the current hybrids (which don't need to be plugged in to recharge the battery). While there's no doubt that plug-ins would be better environmentally, they would be enormously difficult to sell to the public. Remember pure battery-electric cars? Not really, huh? That's because they never took off commercially, in part because of the plug in issue. In truth, people do not want to have to run a cord from their car to an outlet -- it's an inconvenience. That's one reason why Toyota and Honda didn't go for that option, and why those cars have been so successful: the fueling process is transparent to the driver.

So am I just overly cynical? Or is Zakaria too naive? And is he naive just about an issue that is not his area of expertise, or should I now question some of his other writings as well? It's a question that troubles me somewhat.