MikeWDC

2006-02-24T14:18:00.000-08:00

"Land of Lego, We Love You!"

I submitted this to Wonkette and they printed it! Which means it will actually be read.

I just left the Hitch-Sully Denmark solidarity anti-protest. A perfect counterpoint, in tone, to the violent anti-Denmark demonstrations: about 75 men and women in black coats, milling listlessly at the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac, holding little flags or homemade Danish paraphanalia, making small talk with each other awkwardly for an hour in the cold wind. Sully didn't show up until 12:50, but Hitch was there the whole time. You're right that he ignored his readers, and instead devoted his attention to the print and television media reporters present. Who were desperate for something to report on.

There were several HItch-followers attempting to step into the breech and rally the crowd, though preparation seemed lacking. "Show us your pastries!" one exhorted, holding up a cream-filled plastic-wrapped Danish (get it?). Several other people held up other convience-store pastries, "in solidarity for Denmark!" followed by a half-hearted hurrah.

Also illustrated was the importance of deciding what to chant in advance. Initally the organizors tried "Denmark! Denmark!" "Free Speech! Free Speech!" "We're Danes Now! We're Danes Now!" and We're all Danes Now!" This last one came out rather sing-songy. These didn't last more than six or seven chants among a dozen people, but at east they punctured the monotony. I tried to speak to some of the crowd. One woman said she came from North Carolina; I didn't have the heart to ask "why?" Another rapid Hitch fan said he flew in from California to see him.

By the time 12:35 rolled around things got more desperate. Hitch had moved on to the print reporters, and the quasi-organizers had apparently brainstormed longer chants. They tried (I'm not kidding) "Ho Ho He He / Freedom of speech has got to stay!" Then back to "We're all Danes now!" and "We Love Denmark!" followed by "We elska Denmark!" (We love Denmark in Danish, I was told. Apparently there were some Danes in attendance.) Then there was "No Dhimmis in Denmark!" Dhimmis, I was told, are non-Muslims who are restricted by Islamic law in Muslim counties; I didn't get it either, and it didn't last. Finally someone tried leading a chant of (again no kidding) "Land of Lego, We love you!"

That was the last attempt. At 1 p.m. Hitch got up on a rock, addressed us as "Comrades, brothers and sisters," made some pro-forma remarks about protecting freedom of expression in all places, and told us he'd promised the Danish embassy we'd disburse at 1. He also said he would like to lead a march to the Iraqi embassy to show solidarity with that country, but there wasn't time. And so our mob politely disbursed, back down Whitehaven Street to Massachusetts Ave. Who says the best lack all conviction?

UPDATE: UPDATE: Why wasn't there time to march to the Iraqi Embassy, as Hitch said he wanted to? Because after the rally, he, Sully, and others were going out to lunch: see http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/02/standing_with_d.html.

2006-02-10T14:32:00.000-08:00

Artios notes this plausable, if optimistic, Bush future:

There will come a moment - fairly soon - when Bush will cease to be the standard bearer of the Republican party. Various competing factions will be going for the presidential nomination and while Bush's implicit or explicit endorsement might be helpful in the primaries I highly doubt that Bush will be a big help to whoever his potential successor is in the general election campaign.

The fascinating thing will be watching how the Republican Party unwinds itself from the George Bush personality cult it's become. The truth is, no matter what they pretend to think, they don't really like him. While the obedience and deference to Bush has far exceeded that which Reagan got during his time in office, it's impossible to imagine that Bush will replace Reagan as the patron saint of the party.

So we'll be watching Republicans as they slowly abandon their hero at which point he'll basically be forgotten.

One thing would disrupt this storyline - Jeb.

Jeb has said he won't run in '08, and longtime Jeb watchers in FL believe him. He's going bck to the life of a rich Miami condo developer, which is always where his heart has been. Also, the analysis Atrios lays out probably had something to do with it--aside from dynasticism, Jeb '08 (even as VP nom) would be forced into a non-stop defense of W.'s indefensible policies. Also, there is Jeb's embarassing family, mainly his daughter, who has a real, sad drug problem. The Flordia media have cut him a break on them (out of sympathy) that the national media would not honor.

Now, as for the post-'08 storyline, Jeb is smart enoguh to not take a wait-and-see attitude towards that.

2006-01-31T22:19:00.000-08:00

Looks like somebody had a post about HSAs ready to roll out for the SOTU, the subject of much hype, only to see Bush skip over that to talk about "national security."

Needling aside, I think "health care reform" could be the "social security reform" of 2006. Why did Bush's Social Security reform fail? Well, there are alot of reasons, obviously, but I think one is most Americans don't trust Bush on this one. Sort of the way people instinctively trust the "we're goin' get 'em" approach on national security. People don't trust a Republican who owned a baseball team and has his own vacation ranch to deal with retirement for middle-to-working-class folks. They might not be inclined to trust him to provide a new health care plan. Especially one that's nightmarishly complicated. Especially in the wake of Medicare Part D.

Just suggestin'.

2006-01-23T00:34:00.000-08:00

"Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society-the farmers, mechanics, and laborers-who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. " -- President Jackson's Veto Message Regarding the Bank of the United States; July 10, 1832

"Benton said that Cicero only did for Rome what Jackson did for us when he destroyed the bank conspiracy and saved America.... My friends, in this land of the free you need not fear that a tyrant will spring up from among the people. What we need is an Andrew Jackson to stand, as Jackson stood, against the encroachments of organized wealth." -- William Jennings Bryan, "Cross of Gold," 9 July 1896

SO, interestingly, William Jennings Bryan says a tyrant isn't to be feared if it produces a Jackson-like figure to stand up to "the encroachments of organized wealth."

Karl Rove, according to a report in the Washington Post, remarked in September 2002 that he was convinced that President Bush is a lot like Andrew Jackson. According to Dana Milbank, "Jackson clashed with Congress and the judiciary as he sought to build the president's power. Opponents accused him of eliminating civil liberties and cartoonists portrayed him as King Andrew. The Bush administration has battled with Congress over intelligence sharing and war powers, and with the judiciary over the rights of the accused.

"Jackson was a frontiersman who spoke of the "idiots" in Washington. The cowboy-boot wearing Bush often ridicules Washington in speeches. Jackson had a fierce temper and was ruthless against his enemies. Bush, too, is known for his hot temper and for dividing his world into friends and enemies. Bush keeps a scorecard with photos of wanted terrorists and checks them off as they are killed."

2006-01-22T11:59:00.000-08:00

Being a AAA member (the automobile club, not the American Anthropological Association, which existed first by the way) I decided to avail myself of the membership benefit of free maps. The Washington, D.C.--Beltway map then went on my wall, where I enjoy looking at where I enjoy looking at where I've gone. Looking at it has revealed how utterly full of errors this map is. I mean, it's not as if there are alot of tourists in DC, or anything. This map is dated 2004/2005 edition (I got it in late 2005.) Here's what I've found so far:

1. New York AVenue metro stop, which opened in early 2005 and has been under construction since 2002, is absent. It is also absent from the metro mini-map

2. Similarly, the blue line extention to Largo Town Center is not on either map, despite the fact it opened in 2001.

3. Missing are the roads that leave the National Zoo onto Harvard Street and Rock Creek Parkway. There is no indication you can leave the Zoo to the east.

4. Oddly enough, it indicates there are onramps from Indian Head Highway directly to the outer loop of the beltway. This ramp exists, but was opened only in the last few months; it was not open in 2004-2005.

I'll blog more when I find them. Keeping a map up to date must be hard but not impossible; ADC map "Metro Washington, DC" which is the 14"x10" map ssold in many gas stations and supermarkets. (I bought it in Silver Spring when I was terrribly lost.) Not only is it amazingly detailed and up to date, it contains a street index and other neat ffetures like MARC and VRE maps, and a map of where metro tunnels actually go, as opposed to the abstracted lines we're used to.

2006-01-17T10:27:00.000-08:00

A commenter at Kevin Drum's, in response to a post on the supreme's assisted suicide ruling, quoted me as saying in a comment

MikeS: But the point is, you only need to look as far as the Volokh Conspiracy--where they tend towards genuine libertarianism--to see this opportunistic abandonment of federalism denounced.

Then responded:

Advocate for God: Funny, but I thought that the Volokh conspirators supported the Thomas, Scalia, Roberts and Alito nominations.

That's the funny thing about judicial nominees, especially for the Supreme Court: Very often after getting on the bench, your guy does something to infuriate you. This happens to the right about 20 times more often than to the left, because justices have a tendency to veer leftward after sitting down, although in the medical marijuana case of Raich, Scalia embracing one rightward principle (drugs are bad) against another (federalism, the movement). Rhenquist and Thomas may hate marijuana--Rhenquist especially is known to--but correctly sensed a trap for the movement that would be his legacy, assuming it survived.

But apparently Lopez Federalism didn't live longer than Rhenquist did. Raich was intended not to bring down federalism but to ride it to quasi-legalization of medical marijuana under federal law. Scalia, though not the deciding vote, wrote a concurring opinion that can be summarized as "I may seem like a total hypocrite for this vote, and while I have vainly proclaimed my intellectual consistency as my highest virtue, but here are some unconvincing reasons why federalism doesn't apply.

What's so interesting about these most recent hearings is that Roberts and Alito, while conservative, are not strongly associated with "Federalism" as a movement. Strongly associated with Rhenquist and Scalia, with Thomas as a follower, federalism was long accused of being an intellectual rationalization for conservative/Repubican ends. (This whole discussion extends to some degree to originalism.) Now that cases are coming down the pike that frame conservative stances as being anti-federalist, Scalia (and in this most recent case, Thomas) are bending over backwards to accommodate their preferences, and basically fooling no one. Especially not those academic lawyers outside the court system who praise intellectual consistency over results. But when it is so easily abandoned for the sake of results, it reflects very poorly indeed.

2005-12-29T20:55:00.000-08:00

Over at the Washington Monthly, guestblogger Steve Benen questions the (quite ridiculous) suggestion that illegal immigrants want their children to be born in the United States so the citizen-children can sponsor their parents for residency. Children can't sponsor their parents until they are themselves adults, meaning this strategy for residency has a lag time of 18 years. (18.75 years, to be complete.) "I can appreciate long-term thinking, but realistically, how many families are sneaking into the country to give birth in 2005 as part of a residency plan for 2023?"

Although I'm no expert, growing up in Miami I was under the impression that immigrants, illegal and not, did consider it great when their children were born as United States citizens. The issue is not to get residency for the parents, or for that matter to have anything to do with the parents. It was so that the children would be United States citizens, and would be able to have a future in the United States. For the same reason that many immigrants move to the U.S.--to create a better life for their children. And having citizenship secures that future for them.

And this is probably why anti-immigrant Anglo-Americans despise that these children get citizenship. It imposes on the U.S. the obligation to include the children of illegal immigrants in future generations of Americans. And it is the children, infants born in U.S. hospitals, who the immigrant bashers object to, as much as the parents.

2005-12-22T08:37:00.000-08:00

In a letter to Romenesko (via Atrios) the unidentied person George Zachar wrote:

We learned in January that New York City newspaper hawkers earning $9 an hour were making more than Guild members at the Youngstown Ohio Vindicator.

Now, thanks to David Cay Johnston's research, we know that the average Wall Street Journal reporter makes about as much the average (striking) New York City bus driver, roughly $55,000 a year.

No doubt the various benefit and pension plans differ greatly, but it is still a sobering statistic.

How dumb is George Zachar? Did anyone else notice he makes his point by comparing a wage in NEW YORK CITY with a wage in YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO.

Who in America doesn't know that even unskilled workers in cities WHERE COST OF LIVING IS HIGH get seemingly high pay because they have to live there? If you've every worked for an hourly wage, particularly for a chain, you've probably been shocked to hear what the company pays people in NYC for the same work. You think, "If I could just work there and live here in bumfuck, I'd be set." Then you realize you'd rather live in New York City. Then you move to New York City, work for the same chain, and live in a deep urban poverty that makes a dead-end job in bumfuck seem appealing. But I digress.

And it only requires rudimentary economic knowledge to know that it's supply and demand in the labor market for journalists that keeps their pay low, which is a genuine issue. Most journalists, outside the media elite, are just working people.

2005-12-16T16:17:00.000-08:00

Promotional photo via IMDB.

John Spencer, who played the White House Chief of Staff in the Hollywood Democrat fantasy universe The West Wing, died today of a heart attack in his home in Los Angeles. He had a career before the West Wing, and his mortality was an aspect of his character. Now, it's another sign that the show has gone on too long.

2005-12-16T16:03:00.000-08:00

File under: Design, Architecture

Did anyone else notice that when TV news covers the NSA, they cut to huge satellite dishes and geodesic domes? The NSA is this mysterious, quasi-futuristic Agency. Way to look the part, architecturally.

Check out this site, which is low-rent, but ABC & NBC news both used similar graphics.

2005-12-16T13:55:00.000-08:00

I don't mean to beat up on The New York Times, but the newspaper apparently has held the story of warrantless NSA spying on U.S. citizens for about a year. As is now a weary procedure, the newspaper has withheld the names of those it is protecting. As it refers to itself in the third person in the article, "After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting." Good God, this is an important story, but if the whistleblowers working on the project didn't think it would jeopardize national security, then why were political aides allowed to veto the story? Those whistleblowers in the NSA, who took a big risk by leaking this information at all, deserve the confidentiality that the newspaper has extended to them.

Particularly since you can bet the NSA has turned into a hunt for the leakers, or as it's described in the biz, "counterintellegence." We must root out the spies in our spy agency! The individuals who came forward out of concern we supposed to leak about the warrantless NSA spying on U.S. citizens again?

Now getting back to the subject of timing. Did all this happen before the 2004 election. A year would put this to about December 2004, after the election. Is that when this Times-administration went down? Actually, the article answers that flat-out. The Times wrote (in this same story on Friday):

Before the 2004 election, the official said, some NSA personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president.

So these individuals leaked the information about the program because they feared prosecution if Kerry was elected? President Kerry seemed like a reasonable possibility for certain periods of 2004. Around mid-2004. These professionals had read the Foreign intelligence Surveillance Act. They knew that what they were doing was illegal, and that they were "criminally libel," and that future political appointees were more likely to take a dim view of defenses such as "we were only following orders." So what does the Times do? It leaves them to twist in the wind.

Ad Atrios is exactly on target: How about telling us who they were? I mean, who are you protecting this time?

Atrios could also mean, how about telling us who the individuals at "the newspaper" are? Who made the call to not go to press with the warrantless NSA spying on U.S. citizens.

2005-11-28T14:31:00.000-08:00

Atrios mentioned:

I think some of the reason we don't talk about this enough is that in these days of baby and family fetishizing it's somehow taboo to acknowledge that it is, as our great president is fond of saying, hard work.

Taboo, perhaps but then taboo on acknowledging does not extend to Desperete Housewives. Specifically Lynette Scavo, whose character (is described as) having given up a high-powered career to raise children, only to be overwelmed by the job of being a mother:

Later, with the boys being their usual noisy selves, a sleep-deprived Lynette loses it and throws a tantrum of her own. Then she looks out the window and sees an angelic-looking Mary Alice, who hands her a gun! Lynette puts the gun to her head -- and then wakes up. It was all a dream. But she realizes she's dangerously close to snapping for real and unceremoniously dumps her children on Susan and drives off.

Lynette's character is funny because she was a sucessful, high-powered career woman (and in Season Two, returns to being one) who left her career to raise children, only to find she couldn't do it.