Hronkomatic

2005-02-06T13:37:00.000-08:00

Remember how Bloomberg's smoking ban was going to lead to the death of the NYC bar scene?

Funny, doesn't seem to have worked out that way.

By many predictions, the smoking ban, which went into effect on March 30, 2003, was to be the beginning of the end of the city's reputation as the capital of grit. Its famed nightlife would wither, critics warned, bar and restaurant businesses would sink, tourists would go elsewhere, and the mayor who wrought it all would pay a hefty price in the polls. And then there were those who said that city smokers, a rebellious class if ever there was one, simply would not abide.

But a review of city statistics, as well as interviews last week with dozens of bar patrons, workers and owners, found that the ban has not had the crushing effect on New York's economic, cultural and political landscapes predicted by many of its opponents.

Employment in restaurants and bars, one indicator of the city's service economy, has risen slightly since the ban went into effect, as has the number of restaurant permits requested and held, according to city records, although those increases could be attributed in part to several factors, including a general improvement in the city's economy.

City health inspectors report that 98 percent of bars and restaurants are in compliance with the rules, though some critics question those statistics. Wrath at Mr. Bloomberg, at least pertaining to the smoking ban, seems to be abating.

There are still those cursing the ban as an affront to their civil liberties, and some bar and restaurant owners say that it has undoubtedly caused a decline in business. City officials say they doubt that contention, pointing to data from the first year of the ban showing that restaurant and bar tax receipts were up 8.7 percent over the previous year's. They said they were still waiting for more detailed and current data from the state.

2005-01-04T03:02:00.000-08:00

Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas is the definitive book on post-60s politics in the United States, detailing the roots, strategies, and history of the working class cultural backlash.

It's an amazing, funny, breezy read. But as you flip through the pages, seeing the bricks of his argument thud into the dirt, you come to realize what the future has in store. If the Democrats continue their policy of "hey, at least we're not the GOP!" giveaways to the rich, acceptance of union-busting, well-meaning but badly-framed givewaways to the non-working poor, and totally unrestrained cultural liberalism framed in aggrieved-minority spoils terms, they will lose elections for the indefinite future. They will see the destruction of everything they care about. They will see the United States of America turn into "Brazil with a big military" - an insanely rich plutocracy ruling sway over a seething, manipulated underclass. Frank doesn't go into it in too much detail on solutions - he mostly diagnoses - but I think this book points the way towards a policy of value-framed, working-class centered money policies - smart trade, regulation of the heavy hand of big business, helping those who actually work, who don't live on inherited money. More on solutions below the review.

In the 2000 presidential election, the poorest county in the entire United States - McPherson County, Nebraska - voted for George Bush over Al Gore by a margin of 60 points.

Read that again, and reflect on the cosmic insanity of that sentence. All liberals know that the Republicans are the party that screws workers and crushes the poor. What's happening here?

Thomas Frank knows. The modern narrative of politics in the United States is this:

My friend's dad was a teacher in the local public schools, a loyal member of the teachers' union, and a more dedicated liberal than most; not only had he been a staunch supporter of Geroge McGovern, but in the 1980 Democratic primary he had voted for Barbara Jordan, the black U.S. Representative from Texas. My friend, meanwhile, was in those days a high school Republican, a Reagan youth who fancied Adam Smith ties and savored the writing of William F. Buckley. The dad would listen to the son spout off about Milton Friedman and the godliness of free-market capitalism, and he would just shake his head. Someday, kid, you'll know what a jerk you are.

It was the dad, though, that eventually converted. These days he votes for the farthest right Republicans he can find on the ballot. The particular issue that brought him over was abortion. A devout Catholic, my friend's dad was persuaded in the early inineties that the sanctity of the fetus outweighed all of his other concerns, and from there he gradually accepted the whole pantheon of conservative devil-figures; the elite media and the American Civil Liberties Union, contemptuous of our values; the la-di-da feminists; the idea that Christians are vilely persecuted - right here in the U.S. of A. It doesn't even bother him, really, when his new hero Bill O' Reilly blasts the teachers' union as a group "that does not love America."

His superaverage midwestern town, meanwhile has followed the same trajectory. Even as Republican economic policy has laid waste to the city's industries, unions, and neighborhoods, the townsfolk responded by lashing out on cultural issues, eventually winding up with a hard-right Republican congressman, a born-again Christian who campaigned largely on an anti-abortion platform. Today the city looks like a minature Detroit. And with every bit of economic bad news it seems to get more bitter, more cynical, and more conservative still.

This sentence is probably the best summary of the last 40 years in politics:

Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the enter planet must remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U.S.A.

This would be strange enough, but it becomes downright loony when you reflect that the exact same people using the exact same rhetoric gave us all of the liberal reforms of the late 19th and early 20th century. Unions, the minimum wage, a shorter workweek, bringing corporations to heel - railroads in those days - worker safety, social security, the progressive income tax - all of it. Remember that line about "raise less corn, and more hell?" From a Kansas mass meeting. The midwest had socialist newspapers, socialist mayors, Eugene Debs won counties there, it was convulsed with bloody working class strikes. Now, they're willing to give it all away, if that's the price they have to pay to get rid of those damned treasonous liberals at the colleges, get the girls kissing each other off tv, stop your kids from getting pregnant and cursing at you - the Republicans promise to fix it, and Kansas votes for it knowing exactly the cost. That the Republicans never deliver, instead turning the country into an economic Brazil isn't that big of a deal; everyone knows the death of christian culture is insolvable - after all, we're probably in the end of days. What's important is we fight, and stick it to those damned Hollywood liberals with their save the whales and hatred of God.

Tell this to sort of thing to your average upper-middle class liberal today - Atlantic Monthly reader, New Yorker lover - and he'll tell you these voters are one of three things:

"They're uneducated hicks." Ok, but what about the rural roots of the progressive movement?

"Well then, they're racists." What about white-bread Kansas, with its history of bloody fighting against the forces of slavery? Kansas was the site of open warfare over slavery in the mid-19th century and they're damned proud of fighting against it.

"Ah, they're crazy religious nuts!" Ok, what about the history of the evangelical movement, especially in the midwest, on progressive economic reforms and fighting slavery?

In short, those stock answers are a dodge that comes from the growing separation between the rich and poor in our country, especially in culture, *especially* in the war around our modern consumer culture's desire for authenticity. They say we don't understand them, and they're goddamn right. So they sneer at our pretensions, write hundred page fantasy screeds about the coming war against urban intellectuals, and always with the hatred of our precious, precious lattes. You see, the one thing they have over their new overlords - us, the upper classes, whether it's the charlatan Republicans promising to fix their problems or the clueless liberals - is their cultural authenticity. Man of the people, clarity, appeals to common sense - those are what everyone in modern consumer culture is fighting for to define their jobs and their lives. The upper class movement for "simplicity" has the same damned roots as the lower middle class buying cowboy hats, after all.

Abortion is the issue in this story. As Frank details, there was an evangelical uprising during the 1990s in Kansas over abortion which threw out the Democratic governor, control of both houses, and knocked off half the Republican moderates. Just like the previous populist movements, there were mass meetings, spontaneous mass demonstration, reinforcing disapproval from the establishment - all the ingredients of a political firestorm to blow through the state, cleansing everything more complicated than earthy bedrock, leaving a flat divide over abortion as the single decision you *must* make, that is unavoidable, that is the new dividing line between Us and Them. The Republican establishment of old there is barely hanging on; a few have started defecting to the Democrats out of absolute terror that their upper middle-class cultural niceties will be threatened . Which only reinforces the stereotype, of course.

Those in the GOP who've decided to ride the wave of rage have done far better - take Senator Brownback. He's famous for wanting to hold congressional investigations into "cultural decline", insisting cultural coarseness can be measured objectively, and once washed the feet of a former aid leaving his service. Funny - he was actually a boring Republican pro-choice moderate before abortion got big. He's just found a new gig, being careful to focus on issues that are extremely remote and almost by definition cannot be solved - international human trafficking, cultural decline, abortion. That it's all a possibly-not-conscious sham can be seen in his opposition to loosening media concentration rules in the late 1990s; he favored getting rid of the rules because hey, that's what companies do! How dare you try to get in their way! He's the absolute toast of the local Koch rich people money, of course, with all the trappings of power that go along with it.

That's the current situtation. Now how the hell did something this batshit crazy come to pass? Frank's theory is that the business world has slowly faded out of the worldview of the working class, both due to organized propaganda campaigns from the right and massive mistakes on the left; and once that's gone, well the backlash is an appealling theory. On the right: there was an actual organized campaign by the advertising industry to get people to identify themselves as "consumers" instead of workers. I'm serious. Ever notice how strange that word is, or wonder where the hell it came from? There you go. Then there's the story of a tiny set of very rich conservatives - British-style aristocrat conservative, that is - buying themselves the trappings of a social movement. Olin, Scaife, Koch, and so on, as detailed by David Brock and Sidney Bluementhal. On the left: reacting to the racial convlusions that killed the FDR coalition by intentionally turning into the party of the social mores of the upper middle-class, jettisoning ever more of the working class, culminating in the collective decision to become the party of socially liberal bond traders in the 1990s.

When business & economics is something that just happens, that might as well be on the astral plane for all you think about it, the backlash makes sense. All the things the working class doesn't like about where our culture is going - saucy stick-it-to-the-man rebellion by teenagers, sex on television, the dissolution of the nuclear family into teenage pregnancy and living together outside of marriage, casual sex, gangster rap - it's all because of those damned hollywood & college liberals poisoning their minds through flee-floating insiduous ideas.

That this theory is manifestly at odds with the real world - is there a more powerless political group than college english professors or Hollywood stars? - doesn't matter; you can't beat a bad theory with no theory. That all the things in crass popular culture are there because corporations get very, very rich putting them there is so off the wall and against the conventional wisdom people literally don't understand what you're talking about. Here's Frank discussing the obsession with Hollywood:

But the backlash offers more than this ready-made class identity. It also gives people a general way of understanding the buzzing mass-cultural world we inhabit. Consider, for example, the stereotype of liberals that comes up so often in the backlash oeuvre: arrogant, rich, tasteful, fashionable, and all-powerful. In my real-world experience liberals are nothing of the kind. They are an assortment of complainers - for the most part impoverished complainers - who wield about as much influence over American politics as the cashier at Home Depot does over the business strategy. This is not a secret, either; read any issue of The Nation or In These Times or the magazine sent to members of the United Steelworkers, and you figure out pretty quickly that liberals don't speak for the powerful or wealthy.

But when you flip through People magazine, you come away with a very different impression of what liberals are like. Here you read about movie stars who go to charity balls for causes like charity rights and the "underpriviledged." Singers who were big in the seventies express their concern with neatly folded ribbons for this set of victims of that. Minor TV personalities instruct the world to stop saying mean things about the overweight or the handicapped. And beautiful people of every description don expensive transgressive fashions, buy expensive transgressive art, eat at expensive transgressive restaurants, and get edgy with an expensive punk sensibility or an expensive earth-friendly look.

Here liberalism is a matter of shallow appearances, of fatuous self-righteousness; it is arrogant and condescending, a politics in which the beautiful and wellborn tell the unwashed and the beaten-down and the funny-looking how they ought to behave, how they should stop being a racist or homophobic, how they should be better people. In America, where the chief sources of one's ideas about life's possibilities are TV and the movies, it's not hard to be convinced that we inhabit a liberal-dominated world: feminist cartoons for ten-year-olds are followed by commercials for nonconformist deodorants; entire families of movies are organized around some transcendent dick joke; even shows for toddlers have theme songs about keeping it real.

Frank talks to the workers responsible for organizing and running the 1990s Kansas revolution. They're line workers at the bottling plant, they live in the tract homes that the local upper middle class establishment sneers at, they dress unpretentiously like their parents used to, they shop at the very Wal-Mart that picks their pockets. But - this is an important but - they use the revolutionary rhetoric and plans of action developed in the 1960s by the New Left. Kids wear anti-evolution t-shirts, imploring us to "Subvert the Dominant Paradigm." The commodification of dissent, as Frank has discused in his previous books, is here in full force - express your disapproval of popular culture by buying Christian music and clothing! When Frank tries to ask them what they think of the idea that big business is the root of all their problems, they basically give him blank stares. The capitalists have won. The question of their power is way off the map, an unthought.

I'm leaving out a lot - how the very American focus on the power of positive thinking leads to the creation of a certain type of guy who is incredibly bitter aggrieved and bitter, in spite of having it all; the hilarious bits of doublethink David Brooks and his ilk go through to explain the backlash without using any economics; the many ways in which the Red State/Blue State divide is wrong; the almost-governor of Kansas in the 1920s who promised to restore male virility through goat testicle transplants; the dead-serious perfectly nice guy who declared himself Pope a few years back and is a perfect example of the backlash mindset. Not to mention Frank's truly amazing grasp of rhetorical power. Watch the master at work:

Let us pause for a moment to ponder this all-American dysfunction. A state is spectacularly ill served by the Reagan-Bush stampede of deregulation, privatization, and laissez-faire. It sees its countryside depopulated, its towns disintegrate, its cities stagnate - and its wealthy enclaves sparkle, behind their remote-controlled security gates. The state erupts in revolt, making headlines around the world with its bold defiance of convention. But what do its rebels demand? More of the very measure that have brought ruination on them and their neighbors in the first place.

This is not just the mystery of Kansas; this is the mystery of America, the historical shift that has made it all possible.

In Kansas the shift is more staggering than elsewhere, simply because it has been so decisive, so extreme. The people who were once radical are now reactionary. Though they speak today in the same aggrieved language of victimization, and though they face the same array of economics forces as their hard-bitten ancestors, today's populists make demands that are precisely the opposite. Tear down the federal farm programs, they cry. Privatize the utilities. Repeal the progressive taxes. All that Kansas asks today is a little help nailing itself to that cross of gold.

In its implacable bitterness Kansas holds up a mirror to the rest of us. If this is the place where America goes looking for its national soul, then this is where American finds that its soul, after stewing in the primal resentment of the backlash, has gone all sour and wrong. If Kansas is the concentrated essence of normality, then here is where we can see the deranged gradaully become normal, where we look into that handsome, confident, reassuring, all-American face - class president, quarterback, Rhodes scholar, bond trader, builder of industry - and realize that we are staring into the eyes of a lunatic.

From the air-conditioned heights of a suburban office complex this may look like a new age of reason, with the Web sites singing each to each, with a mall down the way that every week has miraculously anticipated our subtly shifting tastes, with a global economy whose rich rewards just keep flowing, and with a long parade of rust-free Infinitis purring down the streets of beautifully manicured planned communities. But on closer inspection the country seems more like a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of Hieronymous Bosch: of sturdy blue-collar patriots reciting the Pledge while they strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford college or proper health care; of working-class guys in midwestern cities cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life, will transform their region into a "rust belt," will strike people like them blows from which they will never recover.

It's all enough to make you go soak in the tub holding your head.

This is the question for 2005: where is liberalism? Where is a real, honest-to-god left that focuses on the value of work, not the value of money? Don't believe me on "economic populism is the solution?" Read this.

In Vermont, Representative Bernie Sanders, the House’s only independent and a self-described socialist, racks up big wins in the “Northeast Kingdom,” the rock-ribbed Republican region along the New Hampshire border. Far from the Birkenstock-wearing, liberal caricature of Vermont, the Kingdom is one of the most culturally conservative hotbeds in New England, the place that helped fuel the “Take Back Vermont” movement against gay civil unions.

Yet the pro-choice, pro–gay-rights Sanders’ economic stances help him bridge the cultural divide. In the 1990s, he was one of the most energetic opponents of the trade deals with China and Mexico that destroyed the local economy. In the Bush era, he highlighted the inequity of the White House's soak-the-rich tax-cut plan by proposing to instead provide $300 tax-rebate checks to every man, woman, and child regardless of income (a version of Sanders’ rebate eventually became law). For his efforts, Sanders has been rewarded in GOP strongholds like Newport Town.

While voters there backed George W. Bush and Republican Governor Jim Douglas in 2004, they also gave Sanders 68 percent of the vote.

Sanders' strength among rural conservatives is not just a cult of personality; it is economic populism’s broader triumph over divisive social issues. In culturally conservative Derby, for instance, a first-time third-party candidate used a populist message to defeat a longtime Republican state representative who had become an icon of Vermont’s anti-gay movement.

There's more examples in there of Democrats standing up on economics and beating the shit of the GOP in places where they "shouldn't" be doing so - Montana, North Dakota, North Carolina.

Unlike the unrestricted free-trade, moderate upper-class Democrats who normally run against culture backlash Republicans - kind of the average swing election nowdays - they win.

The interesting thing about the left-aligned people on the blogs seems to be that we're all upper-middle class, at the very least in outlook if not income. As such, there's kind of this economic sorta-libertarian plus culturally liberal thing, which is the accurate stereotype of why we lose. It's hilarious. Myself, only recently have I done the reading and found out the econ 101 nostrums about "free trade" are ridiculous; before that I was a trade absolutist, like a large part of the educated professional left. Little thing called reality doesn't match up, apparently - only a handful of first-world countries have industrialized through neoliberal trade policies, and they're not very good models for anyone else - Singapore. By contrast, the United States, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea all had amazingly sheltered domestic industries until after they got rich, and things have been liberalized since then less than you realize, and almost always only in areas that benefit the rich of the United States.

So I've got to ask: would you vote for FDR's policies? This is not an rhetorical question anymore. They're all on the chopping block: social security, the income tax, probably the minimum wage at some point (who would have thought of a 2005 push for social security's elimination in 1980?) - if there is not a serious return to the progressive tradition in the Democratic party, we will lose them all.

A closing thought: do you know what they called the socially liberal upper middle class of the 1920s?

Republicans.

2004-10-10T18:13:00.000-07:00

Everyone seems to be totally misinterpreting Kerry's quotes in today's NYT magazine article covering Kerry's framework for thinking about terrorism. For example:

But what remarkable analogies Kerry started with: prostitution and illegal gambling. The way law enforcement has dealt with prostitution and illegal gambling is by occasionally trying to shut down the most visible and obvious instances, tolerating what is likely millions of violations of the law per year, de jure legalizing many sorts of gambling, and de jure legalizing one sort of prostitution in Nevada, and de facto legalizing many sorts of prostitution almost everywhere; as best I can tell, "escort services" are very rarely prosecuted, to the point that they are listed in the Yellow Pages.

The problem with this? *No where in the article* does Kerry suggest we should fight terrorism the way we fight prostitution and illegal gambling. Those crimes are examples of things that we can't eliminate entirely - Kerry's point was that we can't eliminate them entirely.

How does he say we should fight terrorism?

Kerry turned his work on the committee into a book on global crime, titled ''The New War,'' published in 1997. He readily admitted to me that the book ''wasn't exclusively on Al Qaeda''; in fact, it barely mentioned the rise of Islamic extremism. But when I spoke to Kerry in August, he said that many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror.

When you combine this with the rest of his quotes, it's pretty clear:

''I think we can do a better job,'' Kerry said, ''of cutting off financing, of exposing groups, of working cooperatively across the globe, of improving our intelligence capabilities nationally and internationally, of training our military and deploying them differently, of specializing in special forces and special ops, of working with allies, and most importantly -- and I mean most importantly -- of restoring America's reputation as a country that listens, is sensitive, brings people to our side, is the seeker of peace, not war, and that uses our high moral ground and high-level values to augment us in the war on terror, not to diminish us.''

Plus the followup by Holbrooke, Kerry's probably secretary of state, & related commentary:

Even Democrats who stress that combating terrorism should include a strong military option argue that the ''war on terror'' is a flawed construct. ''We're not in a war on terror, in the literal sense,'' says Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton-era diplomat who could well become Kerry's secretary of state. ''The war on terror is like saying 'the war on poverty.' It's just a metaphor. What we're really talking about is winning the ideological struggle so that people stop turning themselves into suicide bombers.''

These competing philosophies, neo-conservative and liberal, aren't mutually exclusive, of course. Neo-cons will agree that military operations are just one facet, albeit the main one, of their response to terrorism. And liberals are almost unanimous in their support for military force when the nation or its allies face an imminent and preventable threat; not only did the vast majority of liberal policy makers support the invasion of Afghanistan, but many also thought it should have been pursued more aggressively. Still, the philosophical difference between the two camps, applied to a conflict that may well last a generation, is both deep and distinct. Fundamentally, Bush sees the war on terror as a military campaign, not simply to protect American lives but also to preserve and spread American values around the world; his liberal critics see it more as an ideological campaign, one that will turn back a tide of resentment toward Americans and thus limit the peril they face at home.

Does anyone actually read the whole thing?

2004-08-09T02:44:00.000-07:00

Boy, that was a long hiatus.

So I'm reading tomorrow's Seattle PI when I come across this interesting article. A college organization apparently got CostCo to deliver them some wine by mail without checking their ids.

Bear with me, this gets interesting. Here's my thought process as I'm flipping through it:

Ok, that's not good.

Then again, underage college students willing to wait a week for booze to show up in the mail are a ridiculously penne-ante thing to worry about. I can't imagine why'd they bother, when it's so much easier to just have an older friend buy it for them.

Who the hell are the college students worried about this? This seems remarkably out of character, to put it mildly.

CostCo says they require id and adult signature and use special delivery people. It seems unlikely that they would deliver to someone underage, considering the process they set up for this.

Wait a minute - the name of the college student organization claiming this smells like conservative astroturf. "Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow?" Extremely vague, ludicrously aspirational title? Check.

Hey, here's their webpage. Will you look at that, they talk like a Four Sisters think tank. Some headlines from their page:

"What the world needs now is DDT:
"Mad Cow is a bovine disease - link to humans is unproven"
"Greens cause death of millions in the world"

Oh, and they're using this article to attack Christine Gregory, one of the Democratic primary candidates for Governor here in Washington.
"Armed with full bottles and delivery receipts, the students are demanding that state Attorney General Christine Gregoire investigate several online companies selling and delivering alcohol to minors.

I do a bit more digging and guess what - they’re the college offshoot of CFACT, a libertarian think tank funded by Richard Mellon Scaife.

The penetration of the media by the propaganda organs of the right is starting to scare me.

2004-04-08T09:42:00.000-07:00

Why review Clarke's book when this one already includes everything I'd say?

2004-03-29T23:36:00.000-08:00

There's this story bouncing around the blogs about an innocent person in CA having their house searched for pot based on electric bills. I have some issues with Eugene Volokh's explanation.

Under the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment cases, the police may get such information just through a subpoena to a utility company (or perhaps even just by asking the utility company), with no need for a warrant or probable cause. The utility company is treated like any other witness who may have relevant information in his possession: The government may subpoena the witness to get this information whenever there's some reason to think that the subpoena will yield relevant (even indirectly relevant) information; it may also ask the witness to voluntarily turn over this information. Probable cause is not required.

Except that in this case the cops have no idea a crime is committed unless they ask the witness, and the witness doesn't care until the cops ask. It's all screwy; it's like the cops walking down the street asking everyone they see if they know of anyone who's done X, Y, or Z, which while not illegal, are correlated with pot growing. It's kind of analagous to community street policing, but it's all strange.

For one thing, the power company is a monopoly, and that doesn't give a lot of leeway for people to complain about having their bills handed over to the police; there's no way for a company to pop up that's more concerned with privacy than helping the cops go after marijuana growers. I rather doubt the cops could get a blanket warrant for the electric bills of every single customer of a company that refused to comply. Or could they?

Update: Volokh, by email, says yes. Well, that's just dandy.

2004-03-24T00:04:00.000-08:00

I'll put a review in here later, but I'd like to point out the mind-blowing stuff I've gotten from Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies. A lot of this hasn't made its way around yet.

To start off, here's a "so absurd it can't be made up" one. Clarke is giving a briefing about Al Qaeda, trying to convince the new administration how big of a threat they are. Wolfowitz brings up his conspiracy theories about Iraq actually being behind everything terrorism-related. Everyone tells him he's wrong and continues. Clarke tries to paint a broader picture of bin Laden's goals, describing how, just like Hitler, he's already told us his terrifying and ambitous goals, and we shouldn't assume he's not going to try to enact them. In response, Wolfowitz gets all offended that Clarke compared bin Laden to Hitler. It's pricelessly stupid on so many levels.

Page 232:

It was getting a little too heated for the kind of meeting Steve Hadley liked to chair, but I thought it was important to get the extent of the disagreement out on the table: "Al Qaeda plans major acts of terrorism against the U.S. It plans to overthrow Islamic governments and set up a radical multination Caliphate, and then go to war with non-Muslim states." Then I said something I regretted as soon as I said it: "They have published all of this and sometimes, as with Hitler in Mein Kampf, you have to believe that these people will actually do what they will do."

Immediatelly Wolfowitz seized on the Hitler reference. "I resent any comparision between the Holocaust and this little terrorist in Afghanistan."

"I wasn't comparing the Holocaust to anything." I spoke slowly. "I was saying that like Hitler, bin Laden has told us in advance what he plans to do and we would make a big mistake to ignore it."

To my surprise, Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage came to my rescue. "We agree with Dick. We see Al Qaeda as a major threat and countering it as an urgent priority." The briefings of Colin Powell had worked.

Wolfowitz comes off as a total moron throughout the book. A well-meaning one, but useless. Anyway, the highlights:

These all start in chronological order on the morning of 9/11.

Page 12: People continue working as they're informed of hostile aircraft eight minutes out. None of them will leave; Frank writes everyone's name down and emails it out in case they need a body count for when the White House is hit.

Page 13: FBI tells Clarke they've identified names from the flight manifest as Al Qaeda. This sounds like it was before *10 AM*. It was that fast; the towers hadn't even come down yet.

Page 15: Mentions that the USSR had nuclear weapons en route to Egypt when the 1973 Arab-Israeli war stopped. Talk about terrifying things I didn't know.

Page 21: Two F-15s blast across the South Lawn of the White House at 300 feet; staffers start praying.

Page 23: Richard Armitage: "Look, we told the Taliban in no uncertain terms that if this happened, it's their ass." This is a total political bombshell. Edit: later in the book Clarke mentions he exceeded his authority by stating this in a national television interview. Interesting little sideshow here.

Page 24: Clarke mentions the President was confident, focused when he arrived at the White House, unlike his speeches.

Page 24: Bush responding to Rumsfeld, who had noted interional law allows the use of force only to prevent future strikes, not for retribution: "No," the President yelled in the narrow conference room, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."

Page 25: Clarke is discussing getting the stock market back up with Verizon, who lost one of their main switching centers when the WTC collapsed. The Verizon CEO, dazed, asks for 5 miles of fiber optic cable.

Page 25: CEOs from AT&T, Cisco, and the like have been calling up offering all the manpower and material the government wants, no questions asked.

Page 26: Clarke says he hasn't eaten since last night, when he dined with Richard Bonin of 60 minutes, who was also obsessed with Al Qaeda; he was working on a story about them, interviewing Clarke. "The night before, Bonin had asked if it was true that I wanted a transfer. As of October 1st, I would be starting a new national program on cyber security. Bonin wanted to run the story that I was quitting the terrorism job in frustration with the new administration's lack of focus on Al Qaeda. I asked him not to, but admitted that I had asked for the transfer. So here's a source verifying that Clarke really was pissed off about the non-focus at the time.

Page 26: The President had never seen the plan Clarke & the principals (NSC, etc.) had been working on to roll up Al Qaeda; showing it to him was the next step. Had not been allowed to brief the President on terrorism at all up to 9/11. "It had taken since January to get the Cabinet-level meeting that I had requested 'urgently' within days of the inauguration to approve an aggresive plan to go after Al Qaeda. The meeting had finally happened one week earlier on September 4. Now, as I was telling Cressey, I thought the aggressive plan would be implemented. "Well, that's fuckin' great. Sounds like they're finally going to do everything we wanted. Where the hell were they for the last eight months?" Cressey asked. "Debating the finer points of the ABM Treaty?" I asked, looking up at the sky for fighter cover.

Page 27: Clarke says killing bin Laden in the few months before 9/11 wouldn't have stopped it.

Page 30: Clarke heads back to the White House on the first night. "I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq."

From here on out, Clarke steps back to provide a historical overview of counter-terrorism during his career.

Page 49: Clarke praises Richard Perle for helping him get the Stinger missiles to Afghanistan in the 1980s. Clarke makes a rather good argument that turned the war against the USSR.

Chapter 5, total bombshell: The US very *very* nearly went to war with Iran in 1996 in reaction to Iranian terrorism. A full-scale invasion was on the table.

Chapter 7: Following the Aum Shinrikyo sarin nerve gas attack in Tokyo, the FBI discovers that they have a division listed in the frickin' NYC phone book.

Chapter 8: The Pentagon fucked up the cruise missile strike to kill Osama in 1999 by not using submarines, which they said they would use, but cruisers. The cruisers were detectable on radar, and the Pakistani ISI warned Osama in time.

Page 127: One really really really interesting bit - there's a theory that Ramzi Yousof taught Terry Nichols how to build bombs. Both of them were in the same city in the Phillipines for a while. Maybe he got known around time as the American who hated his country. His bombs sucked before he went there, but worked after he came back.

Page 224. Clarke has just finished detailing how CIA & the Pentagon had to be dragged kicking and screaming into using a Predator drone to spy on Afghanistan, and now they're refusing to agree to either bomb the hell out of every camp in the country, regularly, disrupting the jihadist training and killing bin Laden if they get lucky, or using armed Predator drones there. Clarke says the CIA bitched because they had to take the 200k to replace one crashed Predator out of their own budget; the book is crammed full of the CIA and FBI whining about budgets.

Clarke then describes how CIA & the Pentagon don't want to do anything about the Cole bombing until they could conclusively prove that either Al Qaeda or Islamic Jihad did it, even though everyone knew it was one of them, and they'd recently united operations anyway. "On a brisk October day in 2000, Sheehan stood with me on West Executive Avenue and watch as the limousines left the White House meeting on the Cole attack to go back to the Pentagon. 'What's it gonna take, Dick?' Sheehan demanded, 'Who the shit do they think attacked the Cole, fuckin' Martians? The Pnetagon brass won't let Delta go get bin Laden. Hell, they won't even let the Air Force carpet bomb the place. Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?"

Page 232: Wolfowitz says bin Laden had to have state backing to pull off all the stuff he does, says it's Iraq doing it. Talks about "Iraqi terrorism" and is flatly contradicted by all the career people involved.

Page 233: The Indonesian ambassador, Gelbard, was heavily pressuring the government there on Al Qaeda. Wolfowitz, hearing complaints from his Indonesian connections(?!) got him removed. The 2002 attack in Indonesian was done by Al Qaeda, and the same people Gelbard was after.

2004-02-09T14:23:00.000-08:00

Am I hallucinating, or did *Bruce Barlett* just call for tax increases?

The addition of an expensive new unfunded benefit to Medicare for prescription drugs means that future spending will be much, much greater than projected. When people are given something that is heavily subsidized, they use a lot more of it. Consequently, we can expect drug spending by the elderly to rise very rapidly, especially since drug prices are also likely to rise as demand outstrips supply.

The budget itself admits that these trends are "unsustainable." Since Congress will never reduce benefits to retirees, the only way to make the trends sustainable is by raising taxes significantly.

Sure, he soft pedals it, but what the fuck.

2004-01-10T19:19:00.000-08:00

In the what-the-fuck department, Stephen Moore has his belly button pierced.

Stephen Moore, the president of the Club for Growth, said the commercial was not based on market research about Times readers. In fact, the original script had "NPR-listening" instead, he said, but he changed it to Times-reading to appeal to Iowans angered by a Times editorial suggesting the presidential campaign would improve if candidates skipped the Iowa's caucuses.

"We're trying to present an image of Northeast liberals," Mr. Moore said. But as a resident of Washington, doesn't he fit some of the stereotypes himself? What about sushi?

"I don't eat sushi," Mr. Moore said. "I don't drive a Volvo. I don't read The Times — except for the Political Points column, of course. I don't drink latte. I do have my navel pierced, though."

2003-12-18T01:06:00.000-08:00

A proposal

I got in another argument with a libertarian today about bringing back the draft. I won't bother to recount the details, as it was the same old same old.

I did hit on an idea, though. Forget the draft - why not raise military pay really high? Like, say, $100k to start or so, or roughly about what the most high-paid college graduates get to start. It'd achieve the liberal goal of broadening the responsiblity of defending the nation across a broad, representative cross-section of the population, instead of imposing it strictly on the lower middle class and poor.

According to this PDF, the 1.2 million enlisted soldiers get about $37,000 right now, so it'd cost about $100 billion a year to give them all a $100k raise, or a one-time increase of about 20% in the Pentagon budget. Not sure about officer salries, but there's no where near as many of them, so it'd wouldn't be much.

Sounds like a good deal to me.

2003-11-06T21:27:00.000-08:00

Another personal note about Krugman that's probably going to lead to unpleasant rhetoric from the right in the near future: his wife is black.

Edit: Never did. Ok, I take it back.

2003-10-26T20:23:00.000-08:00

Does anyone else suspect that Paul Krugman mentioning that he's Jewish is going to lead to some very, very ugly rhetoric from the right in the near future?

Edit: Never did. Ok, I take it back.

2003-10-08T11:27:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else think it's funny that John Lott doesn't specify, at all, how he got "black quarterbacks are 27% more likely to be praised after adjusting for media outlet and performance"? He puts up the raw data here on his website, but good luck figuring out how he got that 27% number.

Explaining your methodology is for wussies!

Update: Ah ha, it's up now.

Update: Tim Lambert finds evidence Lott was cherry picking stories to get the result he wanted. I'm stunned!

2003-09-16T18:29:00.000-07:00

An interesting bit from Krugman's NPR interview:

Gross asked if he stands by that column where he claimed the Enron scandal would be a bigger turning point in America's perception of itself than 9/11:

"No, but not for the reason you'd think. The story about September 11th that people were telling at that time was that it was going to be the moment when an angered America took up arms and we really showed the world. I don't think that's the way we will remember it. What I did not understand at that point was the extent to which - I'm going to say something fairly stiff here - the depth of the cynicism in our leadership. I didn't understand the extent to which they'd exploit September 11th for political goals. The extent to which they would use it for partisan advantage, in the elections, and the extent to which they would use it to rationalize projects that had nothing to do with terrorism.

Now, having done all that, I think we will look back at September 11th as a turning point, but as a turning point that we'll be ashamed of in future generations. We'll look at the way in which patriotism and fear were abused, and we'll say 'my god, this is the point where America really took a very serious wrong turn.'"

2003-09-16T01:10:00.000-07:00

I just realized what bothers me so much about discussing Social Security after reading some comments over on Brad Delong's website.

Namely: can you recall privitization proponents *ever* talking about raising taxes, which absolutely must be done to fund a privitization program? I'm not talking about in obscure journals where they discuss it in technical terms, I'm talking about in public. It simply doesn't happen - can you recall a public conservative ever, ever admitting we'll need to raise taxes to privitize Social Security? By contrast, raising taxes to fix Social Security is pretty much all liberals talk about when the subject comes up.

If conservatives want to argue "we're going to have to raise taxes anyway by about as much, so we might as well privitize; there's benefits," fine, go for it. It's an honest debate. That's not what happens, though; what happens is Bush trots out and insists that $1 put into private accounts today *won't* have to be made up by equivalent tax increases elsewhere. Hey look, kids, free money! Conservatives know we'll have to pay just about as much to transition to a privatized system, but that's a cost you can reveal after tricking the voters into approving it by lying about the costs.

This goes back to something revealed back in the 2000 election; the right has a real distrust for the messy concept of democracy. The conservative position on deficits is pretty much "they won't vote to cut spending like they should, so we'll just cut taxes, run deficits, and then use that to trick them into cutting spending", for example. The vein cuts across a bunch of issues; the 2000 election, Bush's tax cuts, Social Security, Iraq - it's disturbing.

2003-09-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

Conservatives claim Scrooge McDuck as their own. I know liberals sure don't want him.

The only relevent match from google for "Scrooge McDuck Allende" says he has his history on the Allende/McDuck connection wrong, too.

2003-08-22T23:46:00.000-07:00

Summers came up recently; here's a neat NYT magazine article on him.

2003-08-17T00:34:00.000-07:00

The Sunday NYT has some seriously bad economics this week. This article says the US's declining proportion of manufacturing employment will somehow impoverish us. This article insists that jobs going overseas will leave us with no good jobs at all.

Yuck. And to think Krugman's usually just a few pages over.

2003-08-15T10:11:00.000-07:00

A bit from an MSNBC article on the blackout:

About 3,170 electric utilities are connected into the U.S. power grid, grouped into three smaller groups. Thursday’s outages occurred in the Eastern Interconnected System, which extends throughout the Northeast and into the Midwest and Canada.
When one utility has a shortage, it can buy electricity from regional transmission organizations (RTOs) or an independent power generator, which essentially produces energy on a free-lance basis.

Like a river’s tributaries, their contributions spill into immense regional power grids, where they become anonymous and untraceable. Managers at dozens of control sites monitor intricate crosscurrents of supply and demand, watching over their delicate balance.

Uh, so there's no central authority tracking who's sticking load on the lines? That can't be good.

2003-08-04T16:01:00.000-07:00

Landsburg has another pain-inducing nonsense "economics" article up at Slate. The highlight:

As a matter of fact, childless households (whether gay or straight) spend, on average, 56 percent more on cigarettes and alcohol than their childbearing neighbors. (Among households where the parents have some education, the discrepancy is even larger.) Nor is there anything mysterious about why. First, parents have extra reasons to live long and stay healthy, both so they can be there when their kids need them and so they can enjoy the company of their grandchildren.

Uh, yeah. The connection between child-bearing and risk avoidance could run the other way.....

2003-07-24T16:25:00.000-07:00

What is it with people? Every time a new technology comes along, there's a panicky mis-informed crowd that immediately declares permanent mass unemployment will be the result.

Factories will replace everyone at the factory!
Industrial farming will replace all the farmers!
Desktop computers will replace everyone at the office!

Sheesh.

2003-07-23T21:07:00.000-07:00

Bush Country is an extremely funny website. Mind you, its unintentional; check this out:

Modern Feminism Is Not Feminine

Little did I realize how subtly the unisex trend had infiltrated our culture. Then it dawned on me as I was watching a Billy Graham Classic Crusade from the late '60s or early '70s. How did I guess when the crusade took place? I only assumed because the fashion styles dated the program. Wow, the ladies looked like ladies! Why? Because they dressed like ladies and their hair was styled differently from the men's. And this was the late '60s or early '70s--when women's lib had begun to emerge but hadn't yet caught on with mainstream society.

.....

Surprisingly, it now seems that the elderly women have adopted the short, boy-cut hair more than the younger girls have. You see an older couple together and try to figure out which is the husband and which is the wife. And you wonder whatever attracted the guy to a masculine-looking woman in the first place. Unless, of course, they're both gay. Hmmm. . . that might be another part of the feminists' agenda. Could it be the unisex trend in hairstyles that has slowly been creeping into our society is another in the movement toward acceptance of the gay and lesbian lifestyle as being "normal"? Or worse yet, is the radical feminists' motive so shocking that the only way they want us to be able to distinguish male from female is by--good grief--no fashion at all?!

2003-07-22T00:02:00.000-07:00

Reading shit like this royally pisses me off. God forbid we let the Vietnamese make money, or have free markets! Grr.

First world agricultural protectionism is just inexplicable.

2003-07-18T09:40:00.000-07:00

Let's make fun of the National Review, shall we? Check this David Frum column:

JUL. 17, 2003: GIRLS & PIRATES
Is there some contemporary equivalent of the Hay’s Office in Hollywood to enforce the rule that the heroine must never, ever be rescued by the hero? Took the kids last night to see Disney’s latest piece of fluff, Pirates of the Caribbean, and it happened again! Evil ghost-pirates kidnap our heroine, the delicately raised daughter of the governor of the British Caribbean island of Port Royal. Our hero sails to save her. But, as if this is all too much for the writers to bear, half an hour later, they have to plunge him into jeopardy so she can save the day: suddenly taking command of 18th-century sailing vessels, leading boarding parties, and clouting pirates – all while wearing a (very fetching actually) soldier’s red coat. (It should have been the blue of the Royal Marines, but we’ll let that pass.)

It always happens: not sometimes, not generally, but always. I think I know where it started – in Raiders of the Lost Ark, back in the early 1980s: Spielberg has his heroine throw punches with the boys. Now it has become an iron law: no matter how sheltered and virginal the heroine, at the moment of crisis, it turns out that she has all along been an expert kick-boxer.

But how is it enforced? Is there some in-house equal-opportunity enforcer who reads scripts to ensure that women are always shown rescuing themselves? Is it spontaneous conformity on the part of writers and directors? Is it market research? Or what?

Hollywood is poisoning our children's minds! Or something.

2003-07-11T14:29:00.000-07:00

Remember the case of the disabled NJ high school student who sued for 2.7 million when her school tried to give a co-valedictorian award to another student with a lower GPA? The justification was that the disabled student had a GPA advantage based on her being able to take more AP classes; she could take more of them because her disability, under the ADA, let her take them at home.

Well surprise, surprise, it turns out this was all 100% incorrect, according to the district judge. KM is the lower-GPA student they wanted to also give the award to:

With respect to Kadri's allegation that plaintiff withdrew from in-school classes in order to protect her high G.P.A., plaintiff notes that she withdrew from two classes, with the school's permission and, in both cases, withdrawing actually lowered her G.P.A.
.....
Despite Kadri's implication that plaintiff's father hand-picked her home instructors, Mr. Hornstine responds that the only teacher he referred was Mr. O'Neill, plaintiff's Latin teacher, because no Latin teacher at the school was willing to teach home-bound students.
.....
Moreover, a comparison of plaintiff's transcript with that of K.M. reveals that he had a mathematical advantage over plaintiff.Statistically, he took more weighted courses than plaintiff. In the four years at Moorestown High School, plaintiff took 8 AP courses whereas K.M. took 10, and plaintiff took 15 Honors courses while K.M. took 12. AP courses are weighted more heavily than Honors courses. An AP class is worth one grade point more than a standard class, and an Honors class is worth one-half grade point more than a standard class. For example, an A+ in standard Latin is a 4.3; an A+ in Honors Latin is a 4.8, and an A+ in AP Latin is a 5.3. Since K.M. completed 2 more AP courses than plaintiff, and she completed only 3 more Honors classes than he, compared to him, plaintiff was at a weighted course disadvantage.

So media reports were just regurgitating the school boards' defense, which the judge declared to be factually incorrect. Funny, that. No doubt we'll see corrections to all those articles about the out-of-control American legal system any day now.

On a final discordant note, Harvard rescinded her acceptance when they found out she'd blatantly plagarized in some newspaper columns she'd written. Oops.

Edit: Another thing is that she apparently wasn't very popular. Hmm.