More on WMD

The Christian Science Monitor is really good. They're the only paper I see today looking further into the WMD bidness. Interesting points: maybe this WMD inquiry will never go far because the war went so well. So even if Bush had convinced the US to go into war because Saddam had kidnapped Laura Bush, it doesn't matter it was bullshit because we won and hey, who cares. The Monitor quotes some guy who says that these war-related probes usually happen after the war ends, but the Tonkin probe began in 1966, obviously way before the war was over, so I don't know what the hell he's talking about.

The truth is out there

...And it's not really that hard to find. Tapped points out that conservative activists are pretty up-front about what they are trying to do with their tax-cut strategies of phase-ins and sunset provisions -- make it politically infeasible for Democrats to oppose tax cuts, by making it look like opposing cuts is actually supporting tax hikes. Got that? It's hardball, and the Democrats better figure out how to hit back. Oo, bad mixed metaphor. Okay, the Democrats better start corking their bats, a la Mr Sosa.

Incidentally, if you have followed the Sosa thing, I can almost definitely say he's lying when he claims he didn't realize he was using the corked bat during the game. Baseball players obsess over their bats and know exactly what they feel like. There is no chance Sosa wouldn't have realized he was swinging ol' corky while in the on-deck circle. Just so ya know.

Feelin' peachy?

Former Nixon legal advisor John Dean says the WMD debacle may be an impeachable offense: "This is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison." I think he may be breathing a little too hard on this one [as did Paul Krugman last week], but the article is a good explication of the situation, and also a good recap of some of the more incriminating falsehoods that came crom Dubya's mouth and those of his minions.

[P.S. -- Just saw the Village Voice's question of the day:"Is the WMD scandal worse than Watergate?" I'll dissect and analyze tomorrow. Not that the opinion of a few thousand NY lefties is the be-all end-all...]

New thought on thinkness

I am going to be including more scientificky stuff on thinkness from now on for some reasons of personal interest. I'm going to try to steer toward 'what-does-it-mean' kinds of analysis/observations about science and technology.

This article in Metropolis Magazine is about a dope effort to make architectural components that are influenced by the natural physical properties of building materials, and the way they bend. The guy behind this idea, Haresh Lalvani, says, "By crushing structures we reveal what they want to become." I think it's an amazing idea.

Metropolis points out the similarity between this new naturalistic design idea and some of Gehry's work, like the Bilbao Guggenheim. In Gehry's work, the metal is almost cosmetic, or incidental to the building, whereas for Lalvani the metal skin provides the structure and strength.

The concept reminds me of this tunnel I went through this weekend on the way up to Yosemite National Park. Some of the tunnel was fashioned of your average smooth, flat concrete blocks. The other part was made from rough, chunky, idiosyncratic stone. So pleasing to see the stone, especially compared with the concrete. And that brings to mind the Getty museum in LA. They did a great job to bring in some natural stone, and even though it is but a facade it's still pleasing.

Two-way street

I know I post a lot of stuff from Slate. I know. Truth be told, I really like Slate. Kinsley might be my favorite political columnist. Now Slate has started ganking my stuff, too, so I'm starting to feel better about the relationship.

First War Stories posted a hostage metaphor, clearly lifted from my Die Hard-based Parable of the Hostage. Now Bushisms is taking cues from thinkness. Next stop: world domination.

Get ready for 'bulls---'

This is what I think is going to happen with the WMD hunt in Iraq: The US will eventually find a little bit of something that is almost definitely part of a no-no weapon system. They'll say See, there are weapons. The thing is that it will be something pretty small, but it will have at least proven that there were WMDs in Iraq at the outbreak of the war.

I think it's critical for people to keep their eye on the ball in this situation and remember what is the really important question: not whether there were any WMDs in Iraq in March, but whether it posed a significant threat to the US or its critical interests. Two milk jugs full of mustard gas that -- worst-case scenario -- could have sickened three GIs don't mean shit. Nothing less than the existence of a very large, very dangerous WMD stash will be acceptable as proof that this was a legit casus belli. Talkingpointsmemo did a good little bit on this, explaining that chemical weapons would've been almost useless against the US and that nukes were really the only W that deserved the MD label [end of this post].

I hope the media don't believe the hype and let the administration get off the hook for its deceit when weapons inspectors find the evil milk jugs.

[The title of this post is referring to Powell's calling some 'intelligence' about Iraq 'bullshit'. And for some reason Salon was the only publication I saw that actually wrote 'bullshit' -- most just wrote 'bull****' or 'bulls***'. This is annoying. Just write the fucking word. Maureen Dowd actually wrote '$%&*#' without including any of the word's real letters. Dowdy is more like it. In any case, it's thinknesses job to protect you from bullshit so I figured I should let you know.]

A shocking display of self-awareness

'"I'm the master of low expectations" and "we accomplished what I hoped we'd accomplish."'

-Dubya in the NYTimes on Middle East peace process

Color -- ain't that the truth

Finally I'm getting a Texan into my color chronic section: 'Error runs around the world before the truth can get its boots on.'

I should probably just troll Ivins and Hightower columns to get color bits. Or I could just trot out one from Dan Rather's bizarro Election2000 performance every once in a while. [Rather also mentioned the horseshoes and hand grenades bit, as I did earlier.]

Color -- processed programming

FCC Commish Jonathan Adelstein on the new, more permissive ownership rules: 'If this is the toaster with pictures, soon only Wonder Bread will pop out.'

By the way, if you read the comments from the five commissioners [available at FCC homepage] the disparity between libertarian and communitarian is quite apparent: All three libs stress their duty to uphold the law adopted by Congress, both coms lean on their duty to help the public interest. It's an interesting split and would for me be a difficult one to maneuver -- how do you balance the competing tasks that come with this nebulous job.

Best story ever

Oh, this is just too cool. Salam Pax is real, and Slate has a dope story on the guy.

If you weren't obsessing over the news, Salam Pax [I would call it a nom de plume de guerre] runs a stellar blog from Baghdad that covered the run-up to the war, the war itself, and the aftermath. [Looks like Salam posted a short response to the Slate story and admits it is correct. Also has a good piece on Internet service in the anarchy zone.]

Salam seems so cool from the article. The Guardian was pretty sharp to sign him up for a column, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised about that any more.

Communitarians unite!

Didn't take long before I came across another textbook example of conservatives and liberals unified by their communitarian leanings. Steven Pinker writes in the Globe ideas section:

'In his book ''Our Posthuman Future'' (just released in paperback), the conservative thinker Francis Fukuyama warns that genetic enhancement will change human nature itself and corrode the notion of a common humanity that undergirds the social order. Bill McKibben, writing from the political left, raises similar concerns in his new jeremiad ''Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age.'''

This reminded me about one other aspect of communitarians: They are generally traditionalists, as opposed to the more futurist libertarians. This isn't inherent to the definition of communitarian or libertarian, but is rather a psychological connection in those types of minds. People who are communitarians are more likely to be good-ol-day-ers who like power in social groups and are more likely to be a bit skittish about designer babies.

Interesting article, by the way. It includes another...

Color -- moon monkeys?

'Why are technological predictions usually wrong? Many futurologists write as if current progress can be extrapolated indefinitely-committing the fallacy of climbing trees to get to the moon.'

All the bases

There is bad news afoot. The FCC voted to scrap some of the rules limiting concentration of media ownership. This story has lots of interesting points.

Point the first -- Color -- he's back already

After the US hit its stride in Iraq II: The Reckoning and started routing the Iraqi forces, lots of folks became big fans of the Iraqi [dis]information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf [or however you want to transliterate it -- more possibilities than Chanukah, or however you want to spell that]. 'Baghdad Bob' managed to decry the puny forces of the invading infidel even as there were laser scopes trained on his beret. Innummerable fansites popped up in his honor. It was only a matter of time before someone referred to him in an attempt to make a serious political putdown: 'If Saddam Hussein had stayed in business, [FCC Chairman Michael] Powell might have made a great minister of information.'

Point the second -- argue, don't kvetch

Overall, I certainly think this move is bad. But I also see a wee bit too much liberal hand-wringing on this issue about blah blah so-and-so, this is all terrible, the world's going to blow up, torch the corporations, etc ad nauseum. I generally agree, but I think there's room for a little better argumentation about what exactly is going on with these policies.

I think that some of the rules are arbitrary, outmoded, and not very effective guardians of the public interest. For instance, the rule limiting one company to owning stations that only reach 35% of US households. There should be no limit at all [the new rule limits one owner to 45% of households]; it doesn't really matter if NBC buys up every NBC affiliate station in the country.

What is far more important is that NBC not own very many stations in any market. Viacom, for example, has undue, monopolistic, and public-interest-shafting control of communication through its ownership of CBS, MTV, VH1, and lots of other cable channels. If I were more liberal about using my G-d power I would smack Viacom down and prevent this kind of concentration of voices.

The overall point is just that yes, there is too much concentration of media power, voices, and money, but that doesn't mean that any limitation on media ownership is bad. We need some better rules, but some of the existing ones are just relics from the broadcast era that don't work and, unfortunately, make all rules regarding media concentration look ridiculous.

Point the third -- hung up in 1D

This media debate also shows the limitation in the common view of the political spectrum as a simple line. Political beliefs, the conventional wisdom says, can be plotted at one point on a line, from communist to fascist, continuing on to the Bush administration. This ignores the next political axis: communitarian/libertarian. Essentially, communitarians believe that government has more of a right and obligation to sculpt policies in the public interest, while libertarians believe the government must do as little as possible as a referee while private actors do everything.

Sometimes, a person's location on the communitarian/libertarian axis is more important than along the liberal/conservative one. And in those cases, you sometimes get liberals agreeing with conservatives. It happens not all that infrequently if you follow the news, but media folks always insist on branding this agreement 'unusual' or 'odd' or something. The media debate is one of these cases: The NRA and NOW are both arguing against changing the media-ownership rules. One is a liberal group, one is conservative, but they are both more communitarian than Michael Powell, which brings me to...

Point the fourth -- praying for the switcheroo

The Post's Shales suspects that Michael Powell might have his eyes on the attorney general spot if Bush is reelected [I was thinking of putting in the two dots above the second e in reelected, all snobby like how the New Yorker does it]. I don't know if he has any information on this, but I say bring it on. From everything I've heard about Powell, he's not such a bad guy. People say he's an 'ideologue', but is that really so bad? Yah, he's an ideologue: He's a real libertarian that thinks that deregulation is good. It's not that crazy, though I happen to disagree. That's just what he believes.

And from what I've seen I'd waay rather have him as AG than Asscock. He probably wouldn't do too much damage there. Libertarian perspectives on crime'n'punishment are pretty normal; administering justice is one of the few things that libertarians think the government should do [as opposed to, say, regulating media companies].

Meanwhile, Asscock is an absolute fucking nightmare as AG. With the Bible in his hand, he speaketh the truth from on high and will punisheth any heretics [i.e. evildoers]. Asscock is a real conservative, as opposed to a libertarian, and would probably have more interventionist ideas about the FCC than Powell. Lots of conservatives oppose the rule changes because they like local control and diversity of voices.

Right now we've got the worst of all possible worlds: the Bible-thumper flaying suspected criminals via divine decree and the libertarian ripping away all the government limits on media concentration. I say switch 'em -- set the Bible-thumper on defending communities and charge the hyper-rational libertarian with fairly prosecuting criminals.

Longest post ever. Thanks for reading. Get to work.

Colour -- which Brit's which?

Oh, this is the best thing I've seen in hours. An English thinktank guy, talking about how British intelligence came out with all these reports that Iraq had oh-so-many tonnes of WMD: "The British public would like to believe that the information they were given was dictated by James Bond to Miss Moneypenny. In fact, it is more likely it was cooked up by Mike Myers and Rowan Atkinson."

This is actually a really interesting article, in addition to this aforementioned masterstroke. As Paul Wolfowitz comes out with the admission that the administration was full of horseshit on going to war, the Brits are now saying that they didn't cook the books to make the 'intelligence' on Iraq look scarier than it really was. A Downing Street spokesman said [in true British fashion], "Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies." This is the same nation that propogated another 'top-secret' 'intelligence' report that was cobbled together from verbatim grabs from a PhD student's papers and public media reports, among other things.

I think the biggest question that this raises is not just whether the British government concocted made-up facts but how they edited those reports so as to make the situation look worse than it may have been. Selective editing is plenty powerful enough to tell whopping untruths without making up facts out of whole cloth.

Maybe Taranto has SARS

Tapped, thankfully, put the bitchsmack down on James Taranto, the editor of the idiotic OpinionJournal.com. Taranto said that liberals have cooked up some delusion about conservatives wanting to starve the government way down by cutting taxes and precipitating a fiscal crisis, only to be solved by shrinking government way down. The problem with Taranto's claim is that it's obvious to everyone that that is the strategy for much of the right, and they admit as much. Tapped catalogs it well.

Shocktopus II

I'm so on the ball that this is actually a shocktopus sighting from today: 'Despite many Dems' protestations that they are shocked--shocked!--that Bush refuses to adequately fund...' blah blah blah. Then there's some other stuff about politics or something. I think this blog used to cover politics. Now it seems that I'm really interested in how Saddam decorates his house. Maybe this way there's less risk of falling into the Jayson Blair trap -- young, talented journalist, throwing his life away to drugs, booze, Hungarian girlfriends, the NYTimes... Man, I'm jealous of that Jayson Blair. Doesn't he sound happy in that Observer article? At least one baptist preacher thinks [and there are probably billions more who agree] that the Jayson Blair episode is amoral postmodernism rearing its ugly, perverted, miscegenating head. Rrrroooowwwwwrrrr.

Shocktopus I

For your benefit, good reader, I am crawling the web and with my numerous tentacles gathering up every use one horrendously hackneyed phrase that just keeps popping up in various snarky articles no matter how much I wish it would stop: 'shocked, shocked'. I don't know why people are so damn into this but it's really common. It comes from the gambling scene in Casablanca [am I so haughty that I would dare include 'of course' here, showing my almost preternatural knowledge of this silver-screen classic? I must confess, dear reader, that I contemplated it].

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Renault: Oh. Thank you very much. Everybody out at once.

I first came across the shocked, shocked phenomenon in high school when one of my teachers said it. I didn't catch the reference [duh, I was 15] and then it came up again with another teacher around and they had quite a larf talking about Casablanca. [That happened again with the same teachers and the term 'usual suspects', when I was identified as one of the frequent causes of trouble in my European history class. Usual Suspects took its title from that line.]

I don't know if the phrase was so overused back then, but god damn it is now.

So overused that my first example is already a meta one -- Mickey Kaus saying he's 'genuinely shocked--not for-show shocked and not "shocked, shocked"'. Perhaps I'm a little late to the game if it's already reached the meta state. Perhaps I'm a friggin' genius. In any case, dear reader, I assure you you will be surprised how many columnists think they are clever but are wrong.

Onion or nonion -- Adolf, that's soo last fall

I guess this is sort of a follow-on to my previous post. Does the Onion do lifestyle stories? They should. And if they do, this should be one.

'Home Despot: From Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler, history's most evil tyrants are also the tackiest interior designers'

That pretty much says it all.

Thinkness: keeping you safe with nigh-daily discoveries about Saddam's taste.

Saddam the fetishist

Saddam filled 'Shagdad', his love-shack, with some cheezee romance-novel paintings of scantily clad women. This is what happens when you don't work through a dungeons and dragons phase as a kid.

Color -- what's close?

Adam Clymer [the famous 'major-league asshole' from the 2000 presidential campaign] today wrote the second part of his Democrats-are-up-shit-creek-wif-no-paddle. And in one swift stroke explained the sourcing for one of my brother's favorite phrases:

'As George C. Wallace once said, "Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades." So the Democrats' glass is not half full, but half empty, and it appears to be leaking.'

I give Clymer a demerit for busting in with his glass metaphor so soon after this other colorful explanation. Can't he give us some time to let it sit on the tongue? I think Orwell would be most upset with this 'asshole'.

Deep regret -- strong dollar or bullshit market?

This past week there was a big financial furor over whether the US still supported a 'strong dollar policy' as implemented first by Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Current T-boss John Snow said the US still did advocate a strong dollar policy -- sort of.

Snow basically changed the meaning of 'strong dollar', a term that usually means that the dollar is worth more in foreign currency than it has recently or historically been. Now Snow says, "What you want to be strong is (that) you want people to have confidence in your currency, you want them to see a currency as a good medium of exchange. You want the currency to be a good store of value. You want it to be something people are willing to hold. You want it to be hard to counterfeit."

I'm not criticizing his policy perspective; in fact, it's hard to pin down what a 'strong dollar policy' is, let alone whether there has been a shift for the worse. But during the 90s, when the dollar was rising in value and everyone liked that, the treasury secretaries said they supported the increasing-value dollar. Now the economy sucks, the dollar is falling in value, the government's letting it, and people generally say that's a good thing. But Snow will redefine 'strong', because a male American leader isn't allowed to project anything but strength, right? Doesn't he just radiate strength?

Could Santorum be [gasp] right??

That reminds me about something I meant to post a while ago. Santorum said that homosexuality is depraved, basically, on the level of lots of other kinds of sexual practices that are generally frowned upon.

"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery."

I think he's mostly right! What's wrong with bigamy or polygamy or incest? If you have some marriage worked out with 1 husband and 4 wives, who am I to say that's wrong? I think it's wrong to watch teevee all day, but I'm not going to blow them all up or something. [That gives me an idea...] Incest is definitely bad if it abuses a power relationship, e.g., father-daughter sex is not acceptable, because I would question whether a daughter's consent would ever be bona fide. But what about a brother and sister, if the man gets his tubes tied? What am I to stop that? Is it ironic that adultery is the only type that's really bad, but the only one that's not illegal?

The libertarian perspective should say that there's no problem with incest or polygamy. Some communitarian-type thinkers instead argue that homosexuality should be legal not because of privacy, but because gay people are good for society.

Regarding Santorum, my brother says that Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh in the west, Philadelphia in the east, and Alabama in the middle. You can guess where Mr Sacrosanct is from. [Perhaps 'Mr Scarotum' is better?]

Onion or nonion -- It comes out [the truth, that is]

I'm beginning a new chronic. Right now. It's called onion or nonion. News stories that could just as well be in the Onion. Today's entry: Poll: Gay remarks don't hurt Santorum.

'Gay' as an insult having nothing to do with homosexuality has made a recent resurgence, recalling its early-80s heyday. As in, 'I won't be seen in public with you if you're wearing those pants -- they're so gay.'

I'm sure Rick Santorum would like nothing less than to be construed in public as gay. I mean, that's as bad as being a polygamist, pedorast, philanderer, incestoid [?]...

Speak softly and cut secret deals, pt ii

Another prime example of combining secret deals with a bluff of unassailable power is the Iran-Contra deal, in which the Reagan adminstration sold missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages, and then gave some of the money to Nicaraguan contra rebels. Reagan had promised through his campaign and presidency that he would never negotiate with terrorists. It turned out that Reagan would happily do that as long as it was a secret, much like the way Kennedy gladly negotiated a diplomatic end to the Cuban missile crisis, but only behind closed doors.

Speak softly and cut secret deals

This Slate piece is an interesting look at whether Kennedy would've gone full-bore into Vietnam had he been president for two full terms.

Some of the central themes discussed in this would seem to have a pretty universal quality about them. The nut is that Kennedy made a secret deal with Kruschev that the US would remove missiles from Turkey and the USSR would remove missiles from Cuba, on the condition that it would remain a secret. Slate's Kaplan says the fact that this horsetrading remained secret could've influenced further Cold War hardheadedness, particularly in Vietnam. KennedyTheHero succeeded by showing strength, never flinching, at a time of adversity.

Kaplan says that Kennedy -- unlike Johnson -- had started to lose faith in these all-out confrontational advisers and policies, and consequently would have dealt differently with Vietnam.

Interesting lessons from today, when countries like the US and Israel argue that limitless strength is the only route to security.

Expendable Muslims?

One point my brother makes about Islamic terrorists is that you can really see their depravity in how they kill so many people who have nothing to do with their goals. In the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, all the US media focused on how many Americanos died really pointing out that most people who died were just local Africans who were in the wrong place. Even if you accept al Qaeda's goal of killing Westerners, shouldn't they be more respectful of innocent Muslims?

Fareed Zakaria says in Newsweek that Arab countries may be finding out that they, too, really dislike terrorists. I'm not sure how true this conjecture is; I'm not all that convinced by two quotes he has from an English-language Arab publication, frankly. But it would be interesting to see if Muslims around the world get pissed off at the way terrorists seem to think they are expendable in the jihad against the West.

Slated for destruction

I like Slate, but this is the stupidest article I've read in a really long time. Mock trials to distribute money to smart jurors? Fining jurors who are proven wrong? Can we just fine bad columnists instead?

Maybe I should start a new part of the chronic, this one talking about how annoying it is when economists confuse people with robots.

My second-biggest-wigged reader: Fred Kaplan

In a recent Slate War Stories column, Kaplan referred obliquely [ahem] to my apparently now-famous parable of the hostage, and says Bush has flipped the script [almost literally]:

"Now, though, Bush is telling Kim: You want to build nukes? Fine. As long as you don't sell them, we don't care, we're not scared. It's as if a gunman takes a hostage and the cop responds by shooting the hostage; the gunman is suddenly vulnerable. Kim's the gunman, his nuclear program is the hostage, Bush is the cop."

So what's he saying? We don't have John McClane running the country; we have Kaiser Soze? Isn't he supposed to disappear sometime soon?

Like a hole in the head

Geraldo, as he's preparing to marry for the fourth time, says he's "making a conscious decision to take this whole Judaism thing seriously. I think the Jews need me right now."

Hm, that calls to mind an Eminem line from The Business: "Can't leave rap alone, the game needs me." Except Geraldo is about 1billion times as offensive as Eminem.

Call in the pros

It seems that Saudi security forces suck -- they conducted a raid to try to catch the terrorists who eventually launched this latest attack in Riyadh, but all 19 of them escaped. Perhaps they will ask Mossad for some help?

Bush indeed

I woke up really early this morning. I think it may have been due to an unquenchable desire to read about how hot George W Bush is. I must have been dreaming about him in that flight suit after he bravely landed that plane on the aircraft carrier. [That'll show communism, or Islamism, or Chineseism, or whatever other evil force threatens G-d's own USofA!] What a hottie! I mean really hot. A man who can make such forceful decisions and protect us from evil forces.

So you can understand how elated I was to find that the WSJ's esteemed editorial page also picked up on these sensual vibrations and printed a whole column about it!

Dubya has really picked up on the classic, time-honored sexiness of upright puritanical America [thanks to Poppy, no doubt] and updated it with the swagger and inbred aggressiveness you can only get in Texas. If he can tell all of the Arab world how to live, he can certainly do the same for a few soccer moms stuck in marriages to wishy-washy, emasculated NY liberals, right?

GRRRRR...

I'm sooo pissed at blogger right now. Just had a massive battle against this frickin' program trying to get everything posted right. You might notice that there are tons of posts from today. They weren't all really from today, of course. The first time I posted the previous post [about Stephen Glass] I messed up some html and blogger wouldn't let me edit the post -- at all. I had to fool the program into opening the edit page up in a new window and then sneak in the post number. And then I had to repost all my previous posts [I did remember to save all the text].

Blogger is free and I'm beginning to think it's worth every penny.

The dirtiest way to come clean

So Stephen Glass' fictionalized account of his plagiaristic journalism career is coming out soon. Glass was a young journalist who made up a whole bunch of elements to a number of stories he published a few years ago in The New Republic and other mags. His stories were exquisitvely crafted and very appealing, but often loads of utter bullshit. He was fired soon after TNR found out that his story about hi-tech companies hiring hackers was pure hoonanny.

The weird thing is that his book is a novel about this whole escapade, but the main character is named Stephen. It's fictional, yet it's real. It his magnum apologia, yet it's fiction. Has Glass actually learned anything from this ordeal? Why is it that he feels he can just paper over his misdeeds with another piece of bullshit? Is he trying to use some kind of postmodern fiction/reality questioning as cover for his mendacity? To me, this reeks of amorality and a total lack of honor. I have a friend that's writing her grad thesis on novels that center around characters whose names are the same as the authors. I'll read her thesis and see what she says about this Glass affair.

Romanesko's Media News published a memo Glass wrote to his friends asking them to buy his book. He says he knows it's 'crass' to ask them to do that, but does it anyway. This guy is a total schmuck without the cajones to face up to himself or the truth.

The NYTimes acquired a copy of the not-yet-released book from a bookstore that failed to keep it under wraps, per its agreement with the publisher. Not a very positive review.

My biggest-wig reader: Karl Rove

Bush said during the 2000 campaign that he would extend the ban on assault weapons which is set to expire soon. Now, the president says he maintains that position. And he feels confident in doing so because he's read the recent thinkness post on gun control and [Rove] knows this stance won't hurt him.

The reason is that Bush has already proven to be such a good ol' buddy of the gun lobby that they know he's not going to really become a long-term opponent. Bush has put a de facto end to the slippery slope argument that gun supporters might otherwise use against him -- they have no reason to believe he'll try to take away their guns, even if he supports this one bill. So by showing his hard-line stance on this issue in general, he can go soft in this particular.

The problem is that not every Republican in Congress already has such a cozy relationship with the NRA. If they vote for extending the ban, they might get tarred with the anti-gun label and would acquire a big enemy. That is part of the reason why congressional Republicans are not so eager to cross the NRA. In addition, most congressional Republicans don't have advisers as smart as Rove, who understands how to painlessly add compassionate window-dressings to hard-line conservatism.

Deep regret -- Drug news at 11

Ohmigod this is ridiculous. Melody Peterson of the NYTimes exposes two extremely dodgy companies that exploit newscasters' celebrity and credibility to hawk their pharmaceuticals. Of course, these companies take money from their big drug clients. Isn't there a slight chance that they might be biased toward these companies and their drugs?

One company, WJMK, gets big national talking heads [Morley Safer, Aaron Brown, Walter Cronkite] to host 'educational' 'news breaks' about certain legal drugs, and then distributes those spots to public teevee stations, some of which stupidly play the spots without checking to see who footed the bill.

The other, Healthology, hires local teevee and radio journalists to make similar 'informative' videos for big drug companies. Some of the shills are actually local health reporters who, apparently, aren't happy with their newscaster salaries [or ethical codes].

Money shot: "Mark Kielar, the president of WJMK, said the videos were educational, not promotional." Yeah, and they're doing this as a free service to the world. How sweet.

Money shot, part ii: "Susan J. Yarin, a spokeswoman for Pfizer, which bought Pharmacia, said the company had no control over that video's content." But obviously, these advertising companies know what the drug companies want them to say, so they don't have to ask. Like the mob boss who doesn't have to descend to order a hit because his soldiers know when he wants it.

As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get people to understand something when their salary depends upon them not understanding it."

Blind in the USA

Aha! I'm glad to see someone comment on this after I'd noticed it a while ago. I was ticked off when I read the lyrics to Born in the USA a couple months ago. I suddenly realized that it's not this big happy jingoistic jingle, but a lamentation from a Vietnam vet for whom life in America is screwed up. All I had remembered from the 80s was people yelling it, waving their stars and stripes [metaphorically, if not literally] as though it were the national anthem.

Breuse Hickman from Florida Today gives a little window into why this might be: Ronald Reagan used it as a theme song. Bastardo! Never underestimate the power of people to misinterpret comments into whatever they want to hear.

Little sample of the lyrics:

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

Guns v torts, pt ii

One other thought on the gun control/tort issue from yesterday: what the situation needs is a clearheaded, fairly concrete, fairly permanent compromise. There is a very reasonable middle position that one can find in the gun-control debate that basically centers on tighter controls of legal guns -- keep better safeguards on where they're getting -- in exchange for a guarantee that people who are responsible with guns will never get them taken away.

Gun owners are afraid that anti-gun activists want to take away all guns. They see gun control as a slippery slope that will lead to their guns disappearing and then a totalitarian state where the populace would have no physical clout against the government, if it came down to that. So gun types will fight all gun control, no matter how wise, because they're afraid of the slippery slope. But if you put a real guarantee on that right, there would be much less force against making sure criminals didn't get guns.

Ultimately, I think the libertarian-informed position on this issue is right. You're going to have much better results by defending a reasonable level of rights of access to firearms. Prohibitions are, by and large, not a good way to deal with humanity. In addition, you can largely avert the political problem that many Democrats in pro-gun states now face. Get normal gun owners involved with the effort to define their rights, register all guns [like cars], and stop criminals from them. If I were a politico, I would try to get a constitutional amendment on the issue. Sure it's hard, but if you can get the sane 3/4 of the pro-gun and pro-gun control folks, you've got it made.

Next issue.

Haven't posted longtime. Oops. Will return to more frequent postings now that I'm back home.

Seems Congress is about to pass a bill granting gun owners immunity from lawsuits. This is an interesting big societal issue where a couple of big themes come together -- the tort system as a force for good, and liberty vs restrictions for social benefit.

I've had a couple discussions with pro-business types where they advocate 'tort reform' for medical malpractice suits, gun-control suits, and whole variety of other suits that can harm businesses. For instance, people want to put a cap on the amount of money that can be distributed in a class-action suit. But this fails to take into account the way the tort system acts like a market to correct business' mistakes -- if you cap the potential winnings, this quasi-market won't be able to correct massive industry misdeeds that cost millions of dollars in legal fees to fight.

Lawsuits aren't exactly a market force in the strict sense, but the point remains that they are a countervailing push that the system needs. There are, of course, frivolous lawsuits, but how much of a problem are they? Tort-reform groups and conservative politicians throw around anecdotes showing how bad frivolous lawsuits are, but you can just as easily point out instances where industry takes advantage of individuals.

Seems to me it would be better to fix the tort system across the board than to just give exemptions to really powerful industries. Of course, it's hard to fix the tort system. But it's better than this approach. A potential improvement on the system: make expert boards composed of people from different industries who can set general guidelines for business behavior. For instance, a bunch of doctors who can set expections for doctors' behaviors. All too often, doctors get sued for patients' negative outcomes, whether the docs erred or not. Put a sad, hurting patient in front of a jury, the logic goes, and they will always give them some money out of compassion. Then malpractice-insurance rates go through the roof.

This gun thing has the same problem. There could very well be dealers who are criminally negligent in their dealing, but we won't hear too much about it after this law passes.

More on the gun-control angle of this story tomorrow. [Posting two days in a row? Too much to ask of myself?]

Okay, now I really understand the archiving. Sweet.

Ah. I finally figured out my troubles with the archiving function and all of that. Soon, I'll fix the chronic and update it. [Joy.]